Trusting Future You

Do you trust yourself?

For each of us, there are many things we wouldn’t trust ourselves to do. Most of us wouldn’t trust ourselves to climb a mile-high cliff without a rope, for example.

But for each of us, there is also a practically endless number of things that we do routinely. For example, we choose what to wear today, what we’ll say to a friend, or what we’ll do on a day off.

We demonstrate over and over again that we can do these things successfully. So we can trust ourselves to do them.

Yet many of us still worry about whether we’ll do these things right in the future.

For instance, you might worry about what you’ll say to someone in a certain situation. Perhaps you anticipate that your boss will be unhappy with your work, so you think about what you might reply if your boss does tell you that he’s unhappy.

And such worries can cause a ton of stress.

But we all routinely respond effectively to people who aren’t super pleased with us. I know that because here we are, alive and well. There might have been some unpleasantness, but we survived and life moved on.

And when you worry about what you might say or do in a hypothetical future situation, you can create stress in the present—even though the situation remains hypothetical.

What if, instead, you trusted Future You to handle future problems?

Yours,

— Peter