Coaching practices for When I Picture This One Thing Going Wrong it Swells Up to Fill My Whole Future Like Nothing Else Will Exist Afterward I Lose All Sight of the Fact That My Job My Friends My Ordinary Days Will Still Be Right There Around it
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For When I Picture This One Thing Going Wrong it Swells Up to Fill My Whole Future Like Nothing Else Will Exist Afterward I Lose All Sight of the Fact That My Job My Friends My Ordinary Days Will Still Be Right There Around it, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- When I picture this one thing going wrong it swells up to fill my whole future, like nothing else will exist afterward
- This thing has swallowed my whole field of view
- When I try to picture things going well, I get nothing
- This one problem has swallowed my whole field of vision
- This one problem has swelled up to fill my entire field of vision, like it’s the only thing in the world
Practices that may help
- Identify the other things that will also be true of your future life
Focalism makes future events seem bigger than they are by ignoring all the other things that will still be present.
Affect Forecasting: Why You Mispredicted How You’d Feel - Ask: how will this look in one year, five years?
Project forward to check whether the catastrophe still looks catastrophic from a temporal distance.
Decatastrophizing, Made Practical - The best-possible-self exercise
Regularly write a vivid picture of your life going as well as it realistically could.
Optimism Training: Building Realistic, Flexible Optimism - The view from above
Zoom out — picture your situation from high above, in the scale of the city, the world, and time.
Stoicism, as a Set of Practices - Place it in the scale of the whole
Set your problem against the size of the universe and the brevity of all human time.
Meditations, as Marcus Practiced It - The view from outside your life
Mentally zoom out until your current problem shrinks to its actual scale.
Zhuangzi and the Practice of Perspective Shift - Imagine losing your work or income
Briefly contemplate life without your current livelihood, to loosen financial anxiety and restore perspective.
Negative Visualization, the Stoic Practice - Zoom out from the single loss to the aggregate
A loss looks catastrophic in isolation and trivial across the whole portfolio of your life.
Loss Aversion, Made Practical - Catastrophizing (magnification and jumping to conclusions)
Assume the worst possible outcome is likely and that you couldn’t cope if it happened.
Cognitive Distortions: The Thinking Errors Behind Anxiety and Depression - Write a best-possible-life narrative
Write a detailed story of your life in 10 years if everything went as well as it possibly could.
The Life Crafting Intervention: Scripting Your Future Self
Related concerns
- When Meditations Marcus Aurelius Cosmic And Time Perspective
Zoom out — picture your situation from high above, in the scale of the city, the world, and time.
The view from above
- When Reappraisal Vs Suppression Distance Reappraisal
Step back from the situation and think about it as if you were an observer, or as if it were happening to someone else.
Distancing reappraisal
- When Decatastrophizing Time Perspective Shift
Project forward to check whether the catastrophe still looks catastrophic from a temporal distance.
Ask: how will this look in one year, five years?
- When Loss Aversion Zoom Out To Aggregate
A loss looks catastrophic in isolation and trivial across the whole portfolio of your life.
Zoom out from the single loss to the aggregate
- When The View From Above Spatial Zoom Out
Mentally lift yourself out of the room and rise until you see the whole world spread below you.
The spatial zoom-out
- Spatial Zoom Out Perspective
Mentally lift yourself out of the room and rise until you see the whole world spread below you.
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