Living In The Present

July 26, 2010

Interview with Donald Altman, author of the book The Mindfulness Code: Keys for Overcoming Stress, Anxiety, Fear, and Unhappiness

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Mike Carruthers:
In the last few moments have you been focused on the present or have you been worrying about what’s going to happen in the future?

Donald Altman:
If you’re too forward focused, and if that’s causing you anxiety and not allowing you to be present - then maybe you’re not really with the people that you’re with in that moment.
 

Donald Altman, author of the book The Mindfulness Code, says worrying about the future is a big problem for a lot of us.

A lot of people worry about things that are never going to happen. And the reason is that the brain is actually Velcro for negativity. That’s the way our brain is wired. It has a purpose but we’re no longer walking around in the jungle worried that a wild animal might jump out at us.

Worrying about the future may be human nature but it can also become a big roadblock.

I worked with a guy who was in his 50’s lost his job and he had a whole script running in his head that was, “I’m in my 50tys now, I’ll never get another job, nobody wants to hire anybody this age, I’m not any good in interviews”. And he had this whole litany of reasons why he was going to fail. I had him start to become aware of those thoughts. Not so that we dwell on that but so we can learn to transcend those thoughts.

This is all a way of saying that living in the present is a lot better than creating this horrible future in your mind that will likely never come true.

And it’s not that you’ll never think about the future, and we do need to plan for the future, but we need to have balance. We also need to learn how to come back to our senses so to speak.
 

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here