I'm in the future a lot of the time. I tend to plan it out all the time without being able to stop myself, and then comes the worrying. Whenever a sudden event of any sort strikes that has any chance of altering these plans for the worse, it makes me feel VERY uncomfortable. I do not adapt to any deviations well at all (unless they're good deviations), and even if there is no change I still tend to be anxious about something making these plans go astray. I just cannot stand all that uncertainty and instability, and people saying things like "what good will worrying do for you" and placing upon me the onus of explaining "why I worry" to them irks the crap out of me.
If I don't live in the future, I tend to daydream about the past. Especially when I'm unhappy, and that's pretty often I'd hate to admit. I go over a lot of happy memories from my past, just as though I was watching a video multiple times, constantly rewinding it. With my anxiety issues though, I always tend to find some sort of regret about my past, and with each set of happy memories comes a set of "what could I have done to make that even better?" and that just clouds the memories, making me daydream in a negative way. Banishing these regretful thoughts does work some of the time though - but only when I'm in a good mood.
Both future and past thoughts kind of create a bit of a catch 22 for me, which I'll go over in more detail now. I have an OCD aspect regarding first days of vacation periods where those days just HAVE to go by smoothly without any bad things happening, absolutely nothing that causes stress or frustration for me or my family. I have no answer as to why I experience this...I just do. I just can't be experiencing a vacation period that had a rough start. At the back of my mind I got zillions of intrusive thoughts that I may have temporarily managed in the past (now that I think of it, I did use my doc's method before I even learned of it for some types of intrusive thoughts, but not very efficiently since they do resurface a lot - but now that I know of it, I tend to use it for even more types of intrusive thoughts), and they resurface precisely whenever I get paranoid about bad things happening.
Anyway, these intrusive thoughts have a higher chance of coming out whenever I anticipate any upcoming "first day" because I'm obsessed about bad (or out-of-routine, with a few exceptions) things ABSOLUTELY NOT happening specifically on those days, so I tend to actively think about it. I might try to temporarily "banish" the thought before the day comes, but whenever the day does come...eh, chances are that the intrusive thought might come back, and I've experienced it resurface on and off during some of these "first days". Lucikly, I was able to make each resurfacing moment short-lived because I really care about these first days - but that ends up creating some doubts for me later on. Sure, nothing bad ACTUALLY happened on that day but there were these few moments during which I worried. So retrospectively I keep having these regrets about the past, about the fact that I did worry a little bit on that day and that I could have somehow prevented it. These regrets then end up creating new regrets about me spending some of my other vacation days experiencing all these older regrets. Or that the thing which caused these intrusive thoughts to occur was my fault - so even more regret about it all being preventable. I cannot stand feeling regret. I can understand why regret can be considered to be psychological cancer.
This is all very ironic - I worry about the future at one point, which (in the future) brings out worries from my past about the future, which actually creates new worries about the past simply because I exhibited these worries about the future in my past during those first days. When I'm in a good mood and not bored though, I tend to calm myself down by saying that these worries were all short lived, so that's insignificant...and that nothing bad ACTUALLY happened on that first day. God Forbid otherwise though, I'd have to just cancel it from being the first day by doing some work-related research at home (thus making myself think that I've been sort of working), and then start over...or in the worst case, just cancel the vacation and come back to work (well that would actually mean that all the days in the vacation would have been bad, and who wants to have a vacation like that?????? It's better to just work in this type of despicable situation.)
Hope this wasn't too confusing. This was just one example of how I live in the future and the past far more frequently than I live in the present, and probably the most prominent one of all. Like if I had a first day that went by without any of these worries (or maybe just a single brief 30-minute period of worrying, that's undoubtedly insignificant), I'd simply keep on thinking back about all the cool stuff that happened on it, thus also living in the past - but in a happy way without any regrets. I've experienced multiple vacation and holiday periods over the years to create all these memories of either happiness or regret. Regrets are intrusive thoughts about the past, and I still don't know how to apply my doc's method to those. "What's done is done" NEVER helps because so many of the things that caused these on and off worry thoughts are preventable by ME and that's what makes the difference between regret (psychological cancer) and no regret. I seemed to have inadvertently turned this thread into a post about regret...
