409. How to manage your anxiety about the future

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Speaker 1: Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here. I literally landed in London back from Australia like five hours ago, and the jet lag is really setting in right now, so bear with me, But I feel like this episode can't wait. I feel like this is the most pressing feeling of our generation, of our time that needs to be discussed before the next world disaster hits in probably the next few days. And the topic for today that is our anxiety about the future, our anxiety about the future of the world, the future of our lives, and how to manage it. I don't think that I've had a conversation, a single conversation in the past six months that hasn't included some mention of an ever present existential threat kind of lingering over our lives that combined with all of our personal worries and anxieties about the future. As twenty somethings meant that it kind of felt like the right time to do an episode on catastrophizing and how to stay grounded right now when our thoughts are probably going one thousand miles a minute. I'm a major catastrophier, and if you are like me, the thought spirals, the negativity spirals, are probably NonStop at the moment, and it's annoying. It's annoying, it's frustrating. It leaves little room to really think about anything else. It leaves little room to get stuff done, little room to enjoy the present for what it is. So today I want to give an explanation as to what is happening in your brain as these spirals are taking place. Why your anxiety about the future is probably so dominant right now, be the effect that that's having on us. So you can have a little bit of grace if you are finding it harder to focus, finding it harder to be present, and see, most importantly, the five things that you can do to recenter. I don't want to say recenter, I don't want to say relax. The recenter when you re establish some good routines and some good habits to let you kind of concentrate on what you can control, what you can do, the good that you can bring to the world. And I don't want to say be less focused, but not let the negative thoughts and the negative perspective be the primary ones. So, without further ado, let's get into manager anxiety about the future right now. So if you're in your twenties, I think most of you are, I would say the majority of us alf who are listening to this podcast. I think the world is kind of serving us two types of anxieties about the future. The first one is the broader, high level anxiety about the state that the world is in, which kind of just like dominates everything. You know. I could go into a long list. I could talk about AI, I could talk about war, I could talk about I don't know, fuel crisis. There's just too many things to list right and that it's a lot. That is really why we are so impacted by it, Like there's this sense of like what do I worry about? First? That is the first level of like mass uncertainty and mass anxiety that we're up against. Like it just feels like the world is going through more changes now than it ever has before. That is true or not? It definitely is the pressing and dominant feeling. The second type of anxiety that a lot of us are experiencing right now is just our anxiety about our own personal circumstances. Despite what's going on in the world. It's not selfish to still care about what we're up against, you know. For those of us just starting out an adult life, that's basically anyone under the age of thirty five, as far as I see it, like we are particularly faced with the sense of uncertainty about things that are more personal to us, about our careers, the state of our love lives, our friendships, our financial situation. Our twenties are defined by a lack of definition, which is deeply exciting because everything is possible, and also deeply stressful because we are literally staring at a blank slate and there's a lot of responsibility that comes with the beginning of something. The very fact that we are at the beginning of our adult lives is unsettling, but also it means that we're less established, such that those two levels of anxiety we're talking about combined forces. Right. Yes, we have that anxiety about our personal lives and what we want from our future, but it is more destabilized. We are more destabilized by what is going on in the world. We are more sensitive to what is changing because we probably don't have the savings of people who are older than us, we don't have the experiences of people who are older than us, we don't have the skill set that protects against some of the economic and sociopolitical and workplace uncertainties. So basically all that's just to validate what you're probably experiencing right now, which is a lot of fear. And to say it goes without saying that our generation, our age group, is more primed to be anxious than most and often that anxiety and that rumination is actually the only sense of control that we have. What I think a lot of us need to be more I don't know what kind to ourselves about it, is that our anxiety is the coping mechanism right now. You may have heard a specific word for this. It's called anticipatory anxiety, and it's essentially when we borrow stress, suffering fear from the future by attempting to problem solve a hypothetical situation that hasn't happened yet in the present. Basically a complicated way of saying we think that we can avoid future anxiety by making it a today problem. The issue is that that's entirely irrational. No level of thinking about something can change what is going to happen. But that doesn't matter. Like, that's the reason it is a form of anxiety because it is irrational. Let me break down for you why why despite this rationality, our brain likes to pursue this path of future fear even when it doesn't necessarily make sense or doesn't necessarily help us, Like why do we find ourselves worrying so continuous about things that we cannot change when that feels so impractical. There are a few reasons. Reason number one is just this illusion of certainty, essentially constantly thinking about all the potential horrible ways or the horrible futures we could face. At least it gives our mind something to do. At least it gives our mind a sense that we're doing something productive about our fear because we are being cognitively mentally preventive. As is the case with all overthinking, we don't actually fear the situation. We fear that we won't be able to cope with the situation, and so to remove that primary fear in advance. We run through all of these scenarios because it gives us a sense that we are practicing what we would do if we were in that scenario mentally, like that's we're rehearsing things going wrong, going to be better at handling it when they obviously do go wrong. The problem is we're just thinking about the worst case scenario. We're not thinking about how we would survive it. We're not actually doing any of the coping when we're imagining the world falling apart. You know the quote, I don't know what it is like. The thing we fear the most is fear itself. I always thought that this is what I was talking about. Our fear of uncertainty is the ultimate fear because it's just revealing all the ways that we are weak all at once. You know, at our core, we hate uncertainty. Humans hate uncertainty, whether it's an exam result, whether it's waiting for a text back, wanting to know if you ever find love, if you ever find your place, wanting to know if what's going to happen in the world, the blank space ahead of us. We don't like it because ambiguity is where anxiety can be most imaginative and creative because it's whether the least constraints because there's nothing we can and predict. Studies have provided so much evidence from this, like I feel like you guys just know this from feeling it. But to give you some of the research, there was a twenty eleven study, for example, that tested seventy eight participants on their fear of uncertainty, and these participants were divided into three groups. Basically the experiments, the researcher said, we're going to show you some pictures. For one group, they said, we're going to show you some pictures of something neutral, like vegetables, whatever. The second group, they said, we're going to show you pictures of something that's really, really terrifying. We're going to show you pictures of violence, of snakes, of terrible things. In the third category, they didn't tell them what the picture would be. They said, there may be some pictures of some neutral things, there may be some pictures of some scary things. This group had the highest level of anxiety of any of the other groups. Even the group that knew one hundred percent of the time they were going to see the scary image. You would imagine that that group would be the most fearful, right because there was one hundred percent chance they were going to see something they didn't want to see. But what this study really revealed was that, again, it's not the fear, it's the uncertainty about whether what's going to happen will be good or bad. It's that fifty to fifty chance that means that we never feel fully prepared. Another interesting finding from this same study. In that round where there was a fifty to fIF fifty chance, you know, are you going to see the positive or neutral image? Are you're going to see the negative image? The participants always expected the negative every single round. Their body was showing signs that they were anticipating the worst case scenario, even though the outcome could just have easily have been neutral. We see this outside an experimental setting all the time. We never overthink that things could go well, Like when was the last time you expected not just a good outcome, but like a neutral outcome. Our mind never goes down that path. It always chooses the worst case scenario. So of course it's going to be all consuming. It's skewed towards everything terrible. Like again, your brain doesn't have to prepare for the best case scenario because it's the best and so anytime you're thinking about the future, of course, I would say the majority of the time, you're going to be thinking about the ways that it's not going to go well and all the terrible hypotheticals. It's just skewing your perception. And it's why when we actually arrive at the situations that we fear, it's often not all that bad. Like you kind of just breathe a sigh of relief at times. Maybe that's one of the I don't want to say the benefits. I don't want to go that far. But one of the weird side effects is that when we get to situations that we feared so often often there is a level of relief there that like, it's not as bad as we thought it was going to be, Like, does that make sense. There's been so many other studies that have, you know, repeated this finding again and again and again. We anticipate the worst case scenario. But what they also show is that when we anticipate the worst case scenario, being in a state of uncertainty makes our executive functioning worse. And this is one of those weird human evolutionary biology ironies. The evolutionary explanation would say, worrying about the future allows us to anticipate things that we need to survive, allows us to practice or rehearse how we're going to cope. But equally, the science tells us that being in that state of uncertainty and always imagining the worst case scenario actually harms our bodies biological ability to cope. So some evidence of this, there are studies that suggest that being in a state of uncertainty makes our executive functioning worse, makes our level of coping worse, makes out frontal lobe's ability to execute rational thought worse, makes our even our body less physically prepared. There was a study from twenty twenty that showed this. They got a bunch of participants and they said to them, you're going to do a speech. We're either going to tell you what you have to do the speech on or when not. Actually, I think it was like they might have to do a speech, they might not. They did know the topic. But those who were uncertain about whether they were going to have to do that, they were then presented with this other task at the same time where they had to compete, like I think they had to do some computer task or whatever, and that group did so poorly on that task. They made incorrect judgment errors, they couldn't operate properly, they made poor decisions, all because the uncertainty of this other situation they were in was taking away their cognitive resources without them knowing it. So this is so important to understand. If you are really like staring down the barrel of some like crazy anxiety about your future right now, you're like a precipice of like some major life changes. If you are feeling like you are not doing well in other areas of your life because of that, the science is telling me and is telling you that that is a very likely explanation. Essentially, don't be so hard on yourself being in the state of uncertainty about where your career is going to go, where you're going to live, how your relationships are going to turn out. That is like having twenty tabs open in the background, churning through all your cognitive resources, churning through like your battery power, whilst you're just trying to live your life. So that is the general human explanation. Right Our brain doesn't like uncertainty. Our brain tries to cope with uncertainty by overthinking. That overthinking actually makes it harder. But for some people, catastrophizing has much deeper roots, Like it's not just an instinctual thing, it's more entrenched. It's learned from an unpredictable childhood environment, an unpredictable relationship. Others might catastrophize because of trauma, like I think it's important to again have grace that there are situations that you may have been through that are going to put you in this state of like catastrophizing more than other people, often because it's not just about regaining control in a practicing manner, but not wanting to be blindsided if in the past, like somebody has come out and hurt you and you did not anticipate it, life has changed underneath like and in front of you rapidly. You are more likely to have anxiety about the future because you have past experiences that are showing you and have taught you more than other people or how quickly things can change. There's also this fascinating psychology and this fascinating research that says your level of anxiety about the future may also be a personality trait. There's this personality trait called tolerance for uncertainty, and essentially what this research found was that there are some people who for whom ambiguity not knowing what's going on in life, not knowing what the future is going to be. It is so much more painful than the average person. And it's not just because they're more sensitive. It's not just because they I don't know, are more politically engaged, or they're more anxious. Again, it's because of how their personality has been set up, how what their temperament is. They have this compulsive drive to want predictability, to want closure. It's part of how they are, it's part of who they are. This trait was first identified in the nineteen nineties by researchers at this Canadian university, and they found that people with this trait are often needed more reassurance about things being okay. They had a tendency towards excessive information seeking, so spending a lot of time researching, looking at the news, seeing what other people were doing. And again, it all came back to this fundamental need within these people for control and for answers. The problem for us though, and the problem especially for people who are high in this personality trait, is that no one can give you those answers, not about how the world is going to turn out, not about how your life is going to turn out. The issue is that people with this trait can't stop trying, though, and I think that's its own level of curse that goes beyond just the natural human desire for certainty. So we've talked about why this is. We've talked about the psychological impact of this on your rationality, on your executive functioning, on your mood, on your physical preparedness as well. I think it's now time that we move on and talk about what it can actually do about this anxiety. Because as much as it does seem very doom and gloom that this is just how your brain is set up, that is not accurate. There is a lot that you can contribute and you can add and you can deliberately control that is going to allow you to lean into this anxiety as much as humanly possible in this moment. So stay with us. We're going to talk about that and so much more after this short break. Okay, So we've talked about the negatives of warrying, which I feel like we shouldn't really linger on for much longer, and we know that like anxiety of this kind isn't good for us, or what are we going to do to actually address this? The quote I always try and come back to as like a touchstone in situations like this is that when we catastrophize, we suffer twice. We suffer once in response to an imagined reality, and then again maybe if that reality does come true. But we always suffer even if it doesn't come true, like we suffer as a form of insurance almost and again, it is about reiterating to yourself, like how often do the worst case scenarios actually happen? It's a good reminder not to borrow grief and sadness and stress from the future, because chances are it won't happen exactly the way you imagined anyways. Secondly, your level of coping is often something that you underestimate, just as much as you overestimate how terrible the situation is going to be. And like the success of worry doesn't actually leave you more prepared, so you can't keep listening to your brain as it tries to convince you that it will. So we need an alternative, And what I think the alternative is is this, if you can overthink the negatives of a situation, you are just as capable, if not more capable, than most of overthinking the positives as well. This is essentially a form of emotional replacement therapy, right. It's like replacing like I don't know, alcohol for a non alcoholic beverage, or like a cigarette for a nicotine gum. Replace your negative overthinking vice with positive overthinking. Take any terrible worst case scenario that your brain is currently cooking up for you about your future or the global future, and instead consciously, deliberately imagine all the ways that it could go right, even if it feels ridiculously optimistic and stupid, even if it feels delusional. Set yourself a challenge. Anytime you have a negative assessment of the future, anytime you find yourself catastrophizing, write down five alternatives that end with a positive what if you know your brain is again having this negativity bias by it's going to amplify the what if insert worst case scenario here, You are still allowed to have the what if Your brain is still allowed to have that preference for imagination, or that preference for hypotheticals, but make them positive hypotheticals, turn the what if into something that's a bit more positively imaginative and vibrant. It might not change your reality, right, but that is not the objective. The objective is again, not to suffer twice. The objective is to keep yourself more mentally prepared and physically prepared and emotionally prepared for if the worst case scenario does happen, because you haven't already exhausted yourself and exhausted or your mental resources as you were imagining it. Like, the only objective of this is not to change the reality. Again, it's just so that you don't suffer twice. This strategy was taken a step further by this research of this behavioral research scientist called Alison Wood, who suggested that a way of coping with our fears about the future is to relabel our anxiety as excitement. And we've spoken about this before, but in her work, Alison she investigated people's responses to tasks that made them really fearful, made them really scared nervous, things like public speaking, meeting with a boss, a first date, and what she found was that in most cases, as people were entering this situation, the most effective thing they thought they could do beforehand was to come down and was to intensely try and ignore the uncomfortable feelings that they were feeling when they faced the situation. When they faced this anxiety about the future, they really did believe the best thing I can do is ignore it. And what her research found was that actually that actually made us think about the anxious feeling more. It's like, I think, what is it called like the white bear the white elephant effect? When I tell you not to think about a white elephant, the first thing you're going to think about as a white elephant. When you tell yourself I shouldn't be anxious, I shouldn't be anxious, You're just going to be more anxious. So instead take the feeling, acknowledge it, feel it more deeply, but instead say this is excitement. I'm excited about the possibility. I'm excited about the future. This anxiety is activating. It always will and it always does like activate and uses the same neural and biological patterns as any type of arousal, including positive arousal and excitement. So it is up for interpretation. You are able to take this anxious feeling and if possible, and if you do it right, switch it into a feeling that indicates opportunity and a feeling that indicates that the best or that good things are coming, things that you cannot anticipate. Does that kind of make sense? Like, essentially, it's just a form of cognitive reappreaate, like just to use the psychology term for it. This is I think particularly powerful for anxiety about our personal futures, like am I going to make friends? Am I going to find a job? Am I going to survive the next chapter? I just think that viewing ambiguity as an opportunity for greatness and viewing the blank slate as an opportunity for possibility. It doesn't again, it doesn't change the reality, but it changes how you cope, It changes how you act, and it changes how you feel. And that is really what we're trying to target. I think it's equally valuable if you are having a lot of fear about your future to shrink down your timeline a little bit instead of asking, you know, what is my life going to look like in five years and being obsessively worried about controlling everything up until that five year mark, Instead of constantly asking what's my life going to look like in ten years? Am I ever going to be happy? Just zoom in a little bit, Zoom into what you could do in the next week, what you could do this weekend that would be meaningful or productive, What can you achieve in two months? Rather than projecting yourself further and further into the future, then your current abilities would actually allow you to control. And this isn't about lowering your ambition. It's about redirecting your attention to a time frame where your actions actually have power. This is the big thing about our anxiety about the future. Again, it actually makes us less capable of managing the future because it keeps us focused on things that are further and further out of our reach. There is very little that you can do right now that would all out guarantee how your life would look like in five or ten years, and getting to that point requires you to take action now. The thing is is that obsessively worrying about whether the action you're taking now is going to have the positive effect on your future that you want it to often counterintuitively means that we don't actually take that necessary action that we know is right because we are so cognitively overwhelmed and mentally overwhelmed with the possibilities of it going wrong. So condense your timeframe, try any possible strategy you have to just refocus on the present, Refocus on the next couple of weeks. And I would also say, if you're really dealing with some incredible personal anxiety about the future, use history as your compass. Really dig into your memory to provide relief. Essentially, remember the times in the past where you thought the worst case scenario was all but certain, and actually it didn't happen. Try and remember previous experiences where you entered a room and thought it was going to be terrible, when you got on a flight and you thought you were going to be scared, when you moved to a new city and you thought you'd never made friends, And how far removed you are from that negative situation now, how differently things turned out. The best antidote to my future anxieties is just calling out how they have never been accurate in the past. Never like my anxiety is such an unreliable narrator. It has never been right about a situation, So why do I keep believing it? Why do you keep believing it, and if you can remember a time it has been right, and if you're wanting to use that as evidence that it might be right in the future, think about the fact that you are still here and that you still found a way to cope, because so often when we have these like negative assessments, again, we don't think about the coping. We just think about how terrible the feeling is going to be. We just remove and suddenly forget that we have agency and that will be able to ever do anything about it. This is where I really want to talk about the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, who used this strategy, I guess, use this idea called negative visualization. And essentially what he said was that or what he thought or believed was that to manage anxiety about the future, and to manage this catastrophizing anxiety spiral that a lot of us face every single day, much like that research from that doctor who talked about turning anxiety into excitement, let yourself think about those worst case scenarios, do the last thing that your brain expects you to do. Let yourself experience that anxiety more, picture all the terrible things, and then add in all the ways that you're going to cope with negative visualization. What he would do is that every single day, I think he would think of all the different things that could go wrong, all the different ways that his day could go terribly and then he would visualize all the ways that he was going to cope. He would visualize all the different ways that he was going to survive that. And we can do that for the larger scale things as well. We can do that for the situation I always think is a big fear for us, which is like, what if I lose my job? What if like AI takes my industry? What if this? What if that? What if I'm no longer needed? What if all this study was to waste? What if all my skills were to waste? And we get into the spiral of like, I'm gonna end up destitute, I'm going to end up homeless. What Marcus Aurelius would say would be take that situation, Imagine, yep, it all going terribly wrong. Now imagine five different ways that you could cope. The skills that you could regain, the soft skills that you could I don't know, fine tune, the new career path that you could pivot into the skill that you have that this technology doesn't, the way that you could go back to school, the way that you could start your own businesess like that is the part of this equation that we never spend time on and that our mind never spends time on. That's just one example, obviously, but again, recenter your agency rather than letting the fear be the only dominant feeling. Let's finish up this episode by turning our attention back to our larger anxieties about the world, the high level fear that everything is going to shit, everything is terrible, everything is a disaster, which honestly feels accurate sometimes. But how do we navigate those anxieties, especially because, yes, we've talked about recentering agency, but our agency is probably more limited in these cases, so some of those personal strategies are not going to be as effective. I have a couple of alternatives. I have three things for you to try in these situations where you're really spirally about the future of the world. The first is again a reminder that if you care, others must care well. When we feel anxious about large scale I don't even want to call them issues, disasters, emergencies, whatever it is. Part of what intensifies that anxiety is something called pluralistic ignorance. This is a cognitive bias where we assume that our private concerns aren't shared by anybody else, even when they are, because really we can only ever know and fully feel our own thoughts. What this means is that we look around and we're like, how come nobody else is worried about this? How come nobody is caring about this? And suddenly your level of concern feels very isolating. It feels much larger than you can cope with because you are just one tiny person. So it is important to keep focus, to keep in touch with to keep your attention on the ways that other people do care, to actively seek out communities, people pages that show and give evidence for the fact that other people are concerned. Other people are actively contributing, other people are helping, so that you don't only end up seeing the world as this negative place where you are the only good person. Remember, the world is good because you are in it and you are good people. Don't let yourself get buried under the sense that you are the only one who is living through these awful times and having the reactions you are. Most people are feeling this way. Most people are having the same worries as you are. Talk to them about it, join them in like how they are striving to make things better. Basically, more generally, like be the change. You know. You probably can't influence world politics, but you can carry, you know, the groceries up for your elderly neighbor. You can donate your time. You can spread seeds around your local community. You can be kind to the people that you know. And I do genuinely believe that that those small tangible acts do have big, larger repercussions. And psychologically it doesn't matter if it changes nothing. It matters in that it helps you. When we feel overwhelmed by global issues, by future uncertainty, we often fall into a state of learned helplessness, the belief that nothing we do will make a difference, and so we stop trying all together, not just about global things, but about personal things and personal goals and personal decisions. But small local action interrupts that pattern. It restores a sense of agency again, It restores a sense that, like, your behavior has an impact. And that doesn't just help for I don't know our global fears, but it helps in that It lets us make long term plans for the future because it makes us in it. It helps us believe that the future will be there. It stops us from doing things that are impulsive, like overspending, doing things that are dangerous. It lets us actually set goals. And again, this isn't about this isn't only about you, Like obviously, we're talking about a global or a community wide sense of despair, like a global sense of like that things are going terribly And I know it sounds like I keep bringing it back to what you need and what you can do to make yourself feel better, but genuinely, you cannot do anything for anybody else if you do not take care of yourself. And part of taking care of yourself is taking care of others, because again, there's this cycle of agency that makes you feel like you are not just one more person that all of the world's events are happening to you, are part of a broader community, are not alone in this, and you're experiencing this with other people by your side. I also think just having some good digital and online hygiene is incredibly important if you are having a lot of anxiety about the future. Not just limiting how much terrible negative news that you are consuming, but just limiting how much online content you are engaging with full stop about you. But I just feel like my algorithm is so angry and terrible at the moment, even when it's not about the global news. Like I just got into this stage with my algorithm. I don't know, like we're having this relationship, but like my algorithm got to this point where everything it was showing me was like people fighting or people having arguments on the street, or you know, some kind of controversy or hot take video. And genuinely I remember having this moment where I was scrolling and I was like, I have not seen a positive piece of content in ages, because this is the kind of stuff that gets engagement. You know, if you are sitting on your phone constantly and that is what's being fed to you, you are not, of course naturally going to feel good about the future because your entire mental environment is being consumed by negativity. So when we talk about digital resilience, when we talk about digital it's not just about avoiding the news, it's about actually having guardrails against just letting whatever is being said online, whatever is going on on the internet enter your life prominently and all the time. You know, at some point your desire to be informed could actually turn into over monitoring, could actually turn into an anxiety soothing mechanism, where again, we have this anxiety about our future and this anxiety about the world such that we like dig further in and we look for more information, and we look for more I don't know, more knowledge about what's happening, and it becomes counteractive, it becomes more harmful than it is good. So it is okay to step back. It is okay to be like I don't actually want to you know, Blair terrible world events into my eyes at all time, and to just choose to put boundaries around it. Choose to only look at the news for twenty minutes on your life break, Choose again to not have your phone in bed with you, to not be engaging with content online that is making you feel negative about the world, not listening to true crime, not always like engaging with the violent content. And I do actually think that that's going to make you feel better about not just the global future but your future as well. Just like balancing your need to be informed and your need for closure or predictability with also your human need to just like have some peace and just to exist and just to not feel guilty about experiencing some level of joy. I think, as I wrap up this episode, let me just say, if you're in your twenties, I think it would be abnormal to not have anxiety about the future. Right It is like the most normal feeling to have this feeling right now that you don't know and that you are unsure, and that you really could do with somebody in your life who had the crystal ball, who could just like tell you how it's gonna work out. So have some kindness for yourself, have some grace, like just give yourself a little bit of credit. You are building a life. You are building something that has never been built before. Right your life, the blueprint for your life is completely individual, completely up to you. There is no guide book, There is nobody who can tell you that it's going to be okay. And so facing up against all of those possibilities and the unpredictability of this moment is really emotionally taxing. And it is okay to sometimes feel like it is not going to work out as you would like it to. The thing is is that it so often does. And the thing to remind yourself is that those worst case scenarios that your brain is cooking up there trying to protect you, aren't always gonna come true. And in fact, most of the time it is better than you expected, or it is in fact just neutral and you end up coping anyways. So it's totally normal. You will make it through this. Do not let your anxiety dominate all the other good things that are happening in your life. And when it comes to your anxieties about the future, about political uncertainty, about global uncertainty, again keep saying, give yourself some grace, but just please do remind yourself, and please do remember that there is good in the world. That people are actively taking care of problems, looking out for problems, helping people in their community. You can be one of those people. And then additionally, you know, sometimes it is okay to take a break from that, and it is okay to not always be plugged into all the terrors of the world if it means that you can be a better community member, if it means that you can do more for the people around you. So that is me getting off my soapbox. We are done for the day. I hope that this has made you feel a little bit better about whatever is going on in your life and how you're feeling about the world around you. If you have made it this far, leave a little emoji down below that symbolizes hope to you, especially if you're listening on Spotify. Maybe share this episode with a friend who is also feeling a lot of anxiety about the future of their lives and the future of the world, who you think could really benefit from this episode. Make sure that you are following us on Instagram at that Psychology podcast. You can also follow us on substack. You can watch us on Netflix. There is so much that you can do. All of it will be in the description down below, but especially when it comes to this topic in this episode, be safe, be kind, and most certainly be gentle with yourself. We will talk very very soon.