CHAPTER 5

Future Think to Regain Your Optimism

Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.

—Leo F. Buscaglia

How we think determines how we live. When we perceive the world through an optimistic lens and approach new circumstances and situations without fear or cynicism, we tend to be pretty satisfied with our life. Things are never perfect, of course, yet all but the most catastrophic incidents generally seem manageable. But when we take a pessimistic view of the world and approach it with fear, fretting over all the negative things that could happen, negative things often seem to follow. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Of course, there are those who will say that worrying over what could happen is pragmatic, not pessimistic. Preparing for the worst and being pleasantly surprised when it doesn’t happen are a lot better than being thrown totally off guard when things go wrong, isn’t it? No, it really isn’t, because all that time and energy and brain space you’re using to worry is time and energy and brain space you could be using to chart a brighter future. This chapter will help you redirect your thinking to stimulate the brain’s GPS for the future by using visualization, future-oriented questions, and an action plan that ensures you take a positive focus.

When we visualize a negative future, we stimulate high Beta brain waves and increase our worry. While reviewing your worstcase scenarios is the brain’s way of keeping you safe, when done too often it also serves to condition the worry habit. Future Thinking, on the other hand, stimulates Alpha waves and dopamine, which renders your mind worry-free. Unlike Mind Wandering, where you let your mind visit places and scenarios from your past that make you relaxed and happy, Future Thinking asks you to actively imagine scenarios that you want to see happen. By deliberately considering the best possible future, you put in place a process that propels you in that direction. Future Thinking also builds intention and motivation, which allows you to more easily achieve goals and overcome difficulties.

Consider Marina. She was facing the biggest challenge in her life: In just a few weeks, she would move to Paris to pursue a wonderful career opportunity as an IT project manager. But she was intensely worried. She had a boyfriend and she was close to her parents, and she couldn’t stop ruminating on how her move could affect her relationships. She had also never lived outside her native Houston, much less the country, and she was scared of what could happen in a city that had recently weathered terrible terrorist attacks and seemed to be struggling with political unrest. She thought about backing out, but she couldn’t bear to lose such a great opportunity to advance her IT career and learn new skills, especially in such a lovely place. On one hand, she’d get excited envisioning herself walking along the Seine, enjoying evenings at the bistro speaking French with new friends, visiting museums and immersing herself in French culture. On the other hand, she imagined her terror should she find herself sitting at a bistro or riding the metro if someone walked in with a bomb. Her imagination was so strong she could send herself into a panic imagining the chaos and fear. In addition, she was afraid of not doing well on the job. The internal conflict she felt between following a path toward something she wanted to do and avoiding her worst fear was almost physically painful. Her chest frequently ached and she had a constant headache. Her dark fears began to cast deep shadows on all aspects of her life, including her relationship with her steady boyfriend and parents. Though she knew her days to enjoy their company were waning, she found herself snapping at the people most precious to her, and she was unable to sleep at night.

Marina decided to make an appointment with her primary physician, who diagnosed her with an anxiety disorder and prescribed anti-anxiety medication plus an antidepressant. The medicines made her feel dissociated, nauseated, and shaky. Her physician reassured her that if the symptoms didn’t lessen in three weeks, he’d prescribe another drug to counteract the side effects. Her body finally adjusted, but she noticed a peculiar numbness, as though her emotions and feelings were being smothered in a feather comforter. Her thoughts seemed to come more slowly, too.

Eager to find an alternative to pills, Marina sought us out. We acknowledged her emotional pain, but assured her that her brain could be her ally as she prepared for a prolonged separation from the people she loved. All she had to do was retrain it to help her see the future in a positive light instead of a fearful one.

Marina’s fears of living in a city plagued by violence were not unfounded. The October 2015 terrorist attacks had occurred only months earlier, and the group responsible for it had struck again in Belgium, only because investigators thwarted their next attack on France. However, ruminating about potential danger could actually put her in more danger. If she perceived everything as equally dangerous, she wouldn’t notice if her intuition ever told her that something in particular looked unsafe. We needed to give her brain a chance to recalibrate so that it could alert her to danger without obsessing over everything that could go wrong.

To begin, we had her list the facts, as she knew them, about the possibility versus the probability of danger. She took a piece of paper and listed:

1. Paris has been attacked twice and most of the perpetrators have been caught or killed.

2. The city remains on alert and has increased security.

3. My place of business has excellent security, as does the area where I will live.

As she reviewed her list, Marina was comforted by the realization that her chances of being hurt were small.

Intention

Ruminating on things that may or may not happen is wearisome; fixating on a goal is empowering. The brain is uniquely built for setting an intention in place. For example, have you ever noticed that once you have decided to buy a particular car model, you start to see that car everywhere? It’s like your brain is trying to reassure you that you made a good choice by revealing all the other car owners who made it, too. Once you set an intention, your mind works the same way to support your decision. Marina decided she would relocate to Paris, and once she did, she became open to experiences that would reinforce the goal. For example, she met a colleague who had just returned from working in Paris and had nothing but wonderful things to say about the experience. Because her colleague had first-hand information about the safety precautions Paris was taking, this serendipitous meeting helped Marina think more positively about relocating to that beautiful city, which meant she approached her adventure in a positive frame of mind, which meant she left herself more open to experiences that would support her positive outlook than those that might dampen her enthusiasm. Positive thinking causes a snowball effect of positive events.

Motivation and Enthusiasm

The next step would be to activate Marina’s motivation and enthusiasm, which encourage our brains to produce a combination of Alpha and low Beta, which increases laser-like attention and consequently decreases worry. Neurobiologist Dr. Gerald Huther suggests that when we are excited or emotionally moved by something, our brain releases neuroplastic chemicals to help us harness the intense feeling of enthusiasm that allows us to solve problems, win a game of tennis, or create something amazing.¹

Negative Mental Rehearsal

To help Marina feel more secure and courageous, it was important to track down the moment when her excitement about her upcoming adventure turned to fear. She wasn’t really sure, but as we talked she mentioned that upon hearing her big announcement her mother blurted, “Enjoy your time with us before you take that new job! You never know if you’re coming back.” There it was! Her mother’s powerful suggestion had pierced her mind and stuck there like an invisible thorn that dug in deeper every time she envisioned the future.

It is not uncommon for a seemingly minor comment to have such a huge impact on a person. In fact, in tribal cultures, woe to you if your shaman decided to “point the bone” at you. The bone sometimes had a point at the end and the shaman would sing a curse of illness or death over it. Often, the person who wound up the target of the bone’s powerful voodoo would collapse. His blood pressure would drop, his heart would flutter, and death would occur in a short while. Why? Was the bone really cursed? Of course not, but our cultural expectations are formidable, and the person on the receiving end of the bone had probably been trained from a young age to believe that it was cursed. When someone close to us or in authority makes a negative declaration that rings with the power of “truth,” it can have a major influence on our imagination and make us hugely susceptible to a parasympathetic shutdown—a complete collapse of the body’s nervous system that can lower blood pressure and heart rate to such an extent that a person may faint and even die. The opposite is true as well; the shaman could deliver a healing spell or administer an herbal concoction that may have been utterly useless, yet have similarly powerful effects as his negative incantation due to his patient’s belief in the concoction’s efficacy.

Marina’s mother unintentionally acted like an ancient shaman pronouncing a curse.

Trying to be helpful, Marina’s physician may have unintentionally done the same thing.

By telling her she had an anxiety disorder and needed strong medication, he implied that she had no control over herself, and that negative states just happen and nothing but medication can alter them.

Sometimes when we think we’re alerting someone to danger or being “realistic,” we’re actually inadvertently creating a negative suggestion in that person’s mind, or offering him or her a nocebo—a negative suggestion. Here’s how you know the difference: The more there is a 1:1 correlation between a person’s actions and negative consequences, such as texting while driving, or eating junk, or playing with fire, the more important it is to alert that person to the potential negative consequences. But when situations do not correlate 1:1, telling someone emphatically that he or she is going to suffer a negative outcome puts the idea of that negative outcome in the person’s mind. It encourages people to look at their situation through a negative lens, and as we established earlier, negative thinking can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Our mind hears that negative pronouncement and, feeling protective, starts rehearsing a negative future, which then can lead us closer to behaviors that actually make that negative future come to pass. Of course physicians in particular are always walking a fine line. A patient with high blood pressure and high blood sugar might be a heart attack waiting to happen. A doctor would be derelict if she didn’t provide medical assistance and encourage her patient to make lifestyle changes. How the patient interprets that advice, however, is often all about the tone and language in which the advice is delivered. If he hears criticism and threats, he’s going to feel overwhelmed and helpless and his brain is likely to urge him to retreat into defensiveness and denial. If he hears encouragement and especially the message that he has control over the outcome of this situation, he’s much more likely to feel empowered, motivated, and enthusiastic about making changes in his life, which, with the right support, can become reality. The same thing goes for mental health doctors. We do our patients a disservice when we automatically reach for the prescription pad without explaining to our patients that the drugs are often there to support their own efforts, and that they have the power to help themselves. Language is powerful, especially when it comes from the mouths of health-care professionals. It’s something we all need to be aware of.

Indeed, the newest science indicates that many elements play a role in how or whether people develop mental problems. Besides the well-known culprits such as poor nutrition and sleep, the causes can also be our own negative internal states and thinking patterns, a dearth of fun and laughter, and a lack of education in how to turn down fear.

Kelly Brogan, physician and author of A Mind of Your Own, reports from her medical research that there are three main resolvable triggers that contribute to the kind of worry that can lead to depression. The first is inflammation, which can be caused by stress, a diet high in simple carbohydrates and sugars, insufficient exercise, or a microbial imbalance. The second is prescription drugs and their side effects, such as a fuzzy mind. The third influence may be the pathologizing of emotion by physicians and psychologists.²

Although the short-term use of some medications can be useful, without offering brain training to develop new mind habits, doctors are only addressing the symptoms of a worried mind, not the habitual mental states that cause the problems. And though they often make people feel better for the short term, psychotropic cocktails can eventually make patients feel worse.

Robert Whitaker, researcher and author of Anatomy of an Epidemic, wrote a chilling account of how the country’s drugbased care paradigm fuels an epidemic of mental disorders and ultimately makes symptoms such as worry and rumination worse.³ He asked: Are we running the risk of turning worryridden people into mental patients? For example, the use of benzodiazepines often rebounds to increase a patient’s worry and anxiety and can finally lead to depression. Getting off of this class of drugs is incredibly difficult. For some people, psychotherapy is equally effective for ridding them of worry as antidepressants, and the withdrawal, is a whole lot easier.

In fact, the newest research on anti-anxiety medications and antidepressants finds that 80 percent of the reduction in symptoms is due to a placebo effect.⁴ Just as negative suggestions or nocebos can influence us mentally and physically in dramatic ways and create a negative future orientation, placebos can inspire physical changes while creating a positive future orientation. Someone who responds positively to a placebo isn’t lying to himself; he really does feel better because the placebo prompted him to enter a mental state that allowed him to envision a positive future. Scientists don’t yet understand exactly how, but studies have shown over and over again that positive Future Thinking and visualization can literally trigger a healing response in the body, affecting chemistry, muscular changes, and gene expression. That’s not to say we shouldn’t accept medications; they can offer great relief and a supportive boost to our own healing efforts. But it’s important to respect the body’s amazing capacity for healing and restoring balance. It can become difficult to sort out how much of your healing is due to your own mind’s capacity versus the pill you popped into your mouth.

Your mind is more powerful than you know. If you want to change your life or even your health, often the first place to start is to change where you focus your attention. That was our next step with Marina.

We armed her with a tool that would help her direct her brain toward the most positive future she could imagine, even while still feeling fearful. The tool? Questions. Future-oriented questions, to be exact. Good questions are empowering. Bad questions create more pain. Because of the brain’s negative bias, most of the time the questions we ask ourselves are asked in the negative: “Why can’t I accomplish this goal?” “Why do I have to go through this?” They’re legitimate questions, but too often they position you as a victim. Sticking to a “Why me?” line of questions stimulates more negative thinking. Worry questions can never be answered in a satisfying way. Negative questions lay down a neural pathway that makes you an expert in negative thinking. Put simply, your brain does what you ask it to do.

Marina was plagued by a neverending loop of negative thoughts about the future. She thought that by paying attention to them, she’d be able to control them, but instead her focus on them simply created more worry. We suggested that Marina stop analyzing the negative “Why me?” thoughts and try shifting her attention toward solutions by answering these future-oriented questions:

• What do I need in order to feel safe and secure going to Paris?

• What do I need to do to be successful at the new job?

• How can I feel better without medication?

Once she knew the answers to those questions, she could come up with solutions, such as video chats to help her cope with the separation from her loved ones, planning to book a visit home to the States every now and then, and inviting her family to visit her. Marina would smile as she daydreamed how much fun it would be to meander through the streets of the City of Light with her boyfriend.

Every time Marina started worrying, she’d interrupt her negative train of thought with a mantra: “I am capable. I am strong. I can keep myself safe.” She learned to keep a vision of a positive future in her mind, and it actually came true. She traveled to Paris and was immediately charmed by the beautiful city. Being there in person allowed her to witness all that was being done to protect the city from terrorists. By the time her boyfriend came to visit her three months later, she was ready to ask if he’d consider moving there with her so she could pursue a long-term position in the French office.

Future Orientation in Time

The next step in successful problem resolution is to use a powerful mental time travel visualization to imagine how the future will look once your goal has been achieved, and then become aware of the steps it would take to get there.

In the clinical hypnosis literature, Future Orientation in Time is sometimes called “pseudo orientation in time.” In this technique, you visualize yourself at a time in the future when you have successfully solved the problem that is currently bothering you. Imagine how you would look, sound, dress, and behave at that time. Then imagine stepping into that future person, seeing through her eyes, hearing through her ears, and thinking as she would. Your successful future self becomes a resource for instruction on how to accomplish the steps you need to take to that future success. List these steps and think about how to implement them. This future focus increases intention, motivation, and enthusiasm.

The process looks like this:

1. Activate your motivation to move toward a specific future with a morning ritual of reading something uplifting and specifically related to your goal. By reaching for inspiration, you access positive expectations and enthusiasm about the future. Write down what your specific future will do for you. By writing down your goal, you mentally rehearse the goal. Continue doing this over time. Feel the excitement of motivation and notice your enthusiasm when you contemplate a future where you have successfully achieved the goal. It is impossible to experience enthusiasm and worry at the same time.

2. Next, create an intention to do what it takes to accomplish your goal and visualize yourself taking the first step toward that future.

3. Trigger your persistence by committing to the process. You will probably grow bored with a long-term endeavor at some point, so think about how you will stretch through that feeling to the other side. Draft the rest of your plan in three to five steps to get from where you are now to the future you want. Include benchmarks and deadlines to keep yourself on track. Write down the potential obstacles to completing these steps. Answer the question: What has to happen to ensure you follow through with these steps?

4. Use mental rehearsal to explore the future you want. Don’t complain about what you don’t have or what you’ve failed to do. Instead, visualize every day having accomplished the end goal and hold some symbol of the goal in mind. If the goal is writing a book, imagine holding the book; if the goal is increasing your client load, imagine the inquiries or commissions coming in.

5. Go back and record the fulfillment dates of each action step as you complete it.

The Power of Delayed Gratification

You will improve your chances of achieving any goal if you increase your ability to delay gratification. You’ve likely heard of the famous marshmallow experiment conducted by Walter Mischel and his team at Stanford University in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Scientists sat a series of volunteer children between 4 and 5 years of age at a table. They placed a marshmallow in front of each child with instructions that he or she could eat the marshmallow right away. However, they added, if the child could wait 15 minutes while the researchers completed an errand, the youngster could have two marshmallows. Many of the children quickly ate the one marshmallow. Others tried to resist the temptation, but it grew harder and harder as they sat looking at it. The researchers later gave these children mental strategies to take their minds off their inner conflict, such as instructing them to imagine there was a picture frame around the marshmallow that made it look like a photograph instead of the real deal. The kid who used visualization to boost their resolve showed a greater ability to wait longer for the second marshmallow than kids who did not. The study showed that self-control could be learned.

In follow-up studies through the children’s lives, the people who delayed gratification or who trained their brains to be more disciplined had higher SAT scores, lower levels of substance abuse, lower likelihood of obesity, better responses to stress, better social skills, and generally handled life without much worry and struggle. Brain scans revealed these subjects had more activity in the part of the brain responsible for problem-solving. Those subjects who could wait managed their reactions better—and worried little. By training their brains to be more disciplined, they became more successful adults.

Limiting Beliefs

Unfortunately, even people with the greatest self-control likely have a “limiting belief,” a belief about how the world works that can curtail their freedom, interfere with their confidence, persistence, and motivation, keep them in chronic worry, and hold them back from their greatest potential. These beliefs are usually unconscious, but they can impede your life unless you identify them and dissolve them. To be the best version of yourself most of the time, it is important to become aware of any limiting belief that interferes with your ideal self. How do you become consciously aware of that which is unconscious? Clues to these old ideas may come in the form of personal rules for living. For example, one rule you hold dear might be that you should never be late. Though it is useful to leave early and try to imagine things that could delay you like road construction, inevitably, you will sometimes encounter unforeseen obstacles that will occasionally make you late. It is important to realize there will be exceptions to your rules so that when they occur you don’t experience frantic worry and make up consequences that are unlikely to occur.

Belief Architecture

When you were younger than 6 years old, your unconscious mind absorbed family rules and models for living in the form of gestures, tones of voice, sounds of laughter and anger, and how Mom and Dad looked at and spoke to each other. The essentials that hold the family together—their values, ethics, methods for working out conflict, expressions of love and affection, trust and honesty—became part of your awareness. By the time you were a little older, between the ages of 6 and 13, you began to learn about the world beyond your family. Your family’s rules and perceptions and your understanding of these rules and perceptions determined how cheerful you were and your relationship to food, men, women, pets, work, and your own spirituality. You were highly influenced by all of these elements, and together they formed your architecture of beliefs. This scaffolding influences every decision you make and perception you construct, and is highly influential in whether you develop and activate worry.

Our limiting beliefs reveal themselves in a number of ways if we know where to look. Often they cause feelings of fear, worry, impatience, or frustration. They are often the source of our inner critic. If you write down your inner critic’s comments you’ll often realize that you’ve been carrying them around with you for a very long time, most likely since childhood.

One of the three pillars holding up the architecture of your limiting beliefs is your biological wiring. Children demonstrate early on a tendency toward extroversion or introversion. Extroverts recharge their batteries by being with other people. Introverts recharge by being alone. An extrovert’s limiting belief may be that it is not okay to be alone and be somewhat uncomfortable. An introvert could have the opposite limiting belief that it is too difficult to be with others to accomplish a goal.

The next pillar is your mindset, or your psychology. As we’ve established, how positive or negative you are and what you believe about yourself and the world shapes how events affect your life and can even influence what actually happens to you.

The third pillar in your architecture of beliefs is your default internal state and accompanying trains of emotions, thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. Believing in your ability to accomplish what you set your mind to is a huge driver toward success and lets you develop your horizon opening beliefs. Your internal state of confidence, certainty, and happiness promotes you forward to take risks.

Let’s say you realize that throughout your entire childhood you were told, “You can’t get what you want.” But if you practice Future Thinking and make sure you do those things that make you joyful, enthusiastic, and persistent, you’ll see very soon that that’s just not true, because the process will let you see how you can accomplish any goal with enough data, time, support, and resources. In order to live an extraordinary life, you may need to construct a new model of reality. The next story illustrates how one young man rejected the limited mindset someone tried to impose over him by upholding the pillars of a positive attitude, courage, and persistence.

The Brain’s Visualization Superpowers

The son of an itinerant horse trainer loved to help his father. Work was hard to come by but training the horses was fulfilling. The boy and his father had to be flexible to make an income, so they were frequently required to relocate to different cities. During the boy’s senior year of high school, he was asked to write a paper about what he wanted to become in the future. The young man wrote several pages. He wanted to own a 200-acre horse ranch, have a 4,000-square-foot ranch home, and all of the other buildings including the barn and horse track. He designed the ranch on paper and turned it in with the essay to the teacher. Two days later, he received the paper back with an F and a note that said, “See me after class.” When the boy asked what was wrong with the paper, the teacher replied that his dream was impossible; he came from such humble beginnings that he would never accomplish such a grand dream. If he wanted to rewrite the paper and focus on an achievable goal, the teacher would consider revising the grade. The young man was devastated and asked his father what he should do. The father said it was his son’s decision, but emphasized that it was a very important one that would definitely affect his future. The boy pondered a long time. He went back to school and told the teacher, “You keep your grade, and I will keep my dream.” The boy was Monty Roberts, who became an internationally successful “horse whisperer” and bestselling author. He built his 200-acre horse ranch, too.⁵

Monty Roberts challenged the authority and the limiting beliefs of his teacher by maintaining his confidence that he could create the future of his dreams.

Challenge Your Beliefs

When you have doubts or worries about the future, make a list of the things you think you can’t accomplish or what you’re afraid to try, and ask yourself what adventures you’ve kept yourself from having because of each of them. How many did you miss because of real obstacles, and how many because of unsubstantiated, self-imposed beliefs?

Now do this exercise:

1. Write the new belief you want to practice. Doing this will begin to upgrade your inner mental software.

2. Visualize the new future where these beliefs will carry you, such as “I can accomplish what I set my mind to,” or “All I need to reach my goal are several action steps and new data.”

3. Imagine blood flowing to your hands and feet by thinking about sitting in front of a fireplace. Repeat the following: warm hands, warm feet, warm heart. Do this until you can sense a change in your body temperature.

4. Focus on changing your physiology to change your brain state to Alpha. Breathing more deeply or focusing on a pleasant scene will produce Alpha. You might take two to three nice deep breaths. Allow any tension in the body to relax. Ask yourself: What are my priorities and what do I want to do? Is my goal really worthy of me? Am I willing to pay the price to accomplish this goal? What are the costs versus the rewards? Keep in mind that there are no right or wrong answers, and that there is risk in everything. The bottom line is, you want to pursue whatever it is you imagine that lights up your life. You can always change your mind later.

5. Now repeat these statements: I am calm and relaxed. I can imagine the future I desire without worry. I am moving in the direction of my most preferred future.

6. Imagine that anyone who has been unsupportive moves up and out of your mind and leaves the room. Now give yourself a hug while imagining your future self giving you a hug and telling you that what you can imagine, you can master.

Now that you have explored Future Thinking and ridding yourself of limiting beliefs, let’s take the final steps in putting worry at bay and creating the life you want.

Your Best Month

Write down what you want to accomplish in a month. You might want to include that you’re going to worry less now that you have several worry-removing tools at your disposal. Fully consider what a really great month would look like. Write down even those things you aren’t sure you can accomplish.

Your Dream Year

What do you want to accomplish this year and what needs to happen for you to have a dream year? Where do you want to go, whom do you want to go with, and are these business adventures or personal ones? Break it down into categories:

1. Personal.

2. Family.

3. Health and fitness.

4. Adventures.

We have discussed how the power of visualization and asking future-oriented questions can set your inner GPS. These are tools you can use every day to navigate toward your best future. When you use them intentionally, you shut down the worry mind, create enthusiasm and excitement, and gain certainty that you have the ability to accomplish your most cherished goals. Now instead of trying to do damage control against things that haven’t happened yet, you have a clear vision of what you want and a personal plan of action to get you there.

Power Thought: When you replace worry with positive expectation, you have the clarity to envision, plan, and execute your best possible future.

The next chapter will show you how to turn on and off certain emotional circuits at will and with practice, develop your own inner remote control device to stay on the right emotional channel.