I Know "Future Tripping" Is Bad... But How Do We Not Right Now?

It feels like every minute of every day now comes with a new and worrisome possibility. Headlines about layoffs. News reports about how grocery prices continue to go up. It just gets worse from there. Are we headed for a recession? How long until gas hits $5 a gallon everywhere? Will the war in Iran ever actually end? It’s almost impossible not to crash out thinking about what could happen, and before you know it, you’re imagining a near future where you’ve lost your job or your house or had to pull your kids out of the school they’re in.

It doesn’t matter that those things haven’t taken place; you’ve been sucked into the maelstrom of doom-spiraling.

That’s “future tripping” for you: getting stuck in a loop of anxious what-ifs about things that haven’t happened yet. (It’s relatable enough that Hilary Duff put a song by that name on her comeback album this year.) Most of us know this behavior isn’t helpful. But between the news cycle, the economy, and the general state of the world, it also feels kind of… justified. And because it feels justified, it’s really hard to shake.

I asked therapists what’s actually going on when we spiral and how to interrupt the loop without pretending everything is fine.

What exactly is future tripping?

“Future tripping is the repetitive mental simulation of catastrophic ‘what-if’ scenarios in an attempt to manufacture safety or certainty in an uncertain world,” says Ksenia Ustinova, a therapist, certified Brainspotter, and founder of Root & Return Therapy. In other words, you take something that could happen tomorrow, next week, or months from now and play it out over and over, typically focusing on what might go wrong.

Why is it so hard to stop?

Well, for starters, it works… at first. “One of the biggest reasons it’s so hard to stop is that it can actually create a sense of (very short-lived) relief,” says Nicole Ivelevitch, licensed clinical social worker and founder of Temperance Psychotherapy. “For at least a few seconds, our brain feels like it solved a problem… until the next ‘what if’ comes up.”

Then there’s the fact that your brain isn’t always great at telling a scary thought from a scary situation. “Our brain can’t tell the difference between thinking about it and being in danger, so we can’t let it go,” Aveen Hallissey, an associate psychotherapist at Gateway to Solutions in New York City, says. “Our brains care more about keeping us alive than happy, so we have to go against what they tell us.”

And, you know, it’s not like we all don’t have some very valid things to worry about at the moment.

“The concerns may be real,” says licensed professional counselor Felicia Brown, “but repeatedly imagining them doesn’t necessarily leave you more prepared.”

That’s a hard juxtaposition to wrap your head around: a worry can be valid, and yet worrying about it can also be useless. As Phil Smyth, a licensed professional counselor and executive director at Milestone Treatment Center, puts it, “The goal isn’t to find an answer to every possible future problem; it’s learning to tolerate some uncertainty and remind ourselves that we can handle things as they actually happen.”

Why are moms especially prone to future tripping?

Long story short: Looking ahead is the job. We’re constantly considering future outcomes because we're the ones taking care of everyone. “Women are naturally future-oriented problem-solvers,” says Dr. Azita Sayan, a licensed marriage and family therapist with more than 40 years of experience and the CEO of Embrace Growth.

“Think about it: Throughout history, women have been gatherers, nurturers, and the ones anticipating the needs of their families ... and that’s an extraordinary ability!” Sayan says. “A mother isn’t just thinking about what her child needs today. She’s thinking about next week, next year, their education, their friendships, their future. She’s constantly looking ahead, anticipating needs and figuring out solutions.”

And when your brain is always already three steps ahead, you don’t really have an off switch.

“How does a mom tell her brain to apply that skill and habit only to her family?” asks Alli Spotts-De Lazzer, a licensed marriage and family therapist, psychotherapist, and author. “Of course world woes and other perceived threats sneak in!”

Brown sees a common undercurrent in a lot of her clients’ fears: “If I stop worrying, I’ll drop the ball.” And as moms know, dropping the ball only compounds everything.

“There’s the task itself, and then there’s everything a mom may be afraid that task says about her,” she says. In reality, a forgotten permission slip might mean an email to the school and probably a kid who’s a little disappointed. “But her mind can turn it into: ‘I’m a failure as a mom. I’m not good enough.’ Now she’s worrying about much more than a permission slip.”

What if the usual anxiety advice doesn’t do the trick?

For some moms, the spiral signals more than anxiety. Ustinova says she assumed her own intense future tripping was classic anxiety… until she got diagnosed with ADHD. The diagnosis explained why the advice to “reframe her thoughts” had never helped.

When an ADHD brain is overloaded (hello, motherhood), working memory gets swamped by open loops, Ustinova explains. “The brain tries to solve every future variable simultaneously at once because it lacks the executive bandwidth to organize or compartmentalize them. It isn’t just worrying; it’s an overstimulated nervous system trying to mentally prepare for every conceivable emergency.”

It might be a convo worth flagging with your doctor if you've been trying to logic your way out of doom-spirals to no avail.

How can you interrupt a spiral in the moment?

Name it. Several of the experts who weighed in shared this advice, which Brown admits can take practice if you aren’t used to it. But step back, name it, and then ask yourself what you’re really afraid of and what it could say about you. “We need to separate the actual consequence from the judgment we’re making about ourselves,” she says.

Ask if there’s anything you can truly do. Smyth recommends asking yourself, “Is there something I actually need to do right now, or am I trying to solve a problem that hasn’t happened yet?” Ustinova doubles down, giving it a sense of urgency: Is there a step you can physically take in the next five minutes? If yes, take that tiny step. If no, it’s an unactionable future scenario that can wait.

“How does a mom tell her brain to apply that skill and habit only to her family? Of course world woes and other perceived threats sneak in!” — Alli Spotts-De Lazzer, LMFT

Separate facts from predictions. Ask yourself, “What do I know right now?” followed by, “What am I assuming might happen?” Smyth says. Anxiety tends to blur the two.

Get out of your head and into your body. “You cannot ‘think’ your way out of a body-level threat response,” says Ustinova, who recommends grounding activities like looking around the room and finding five blue objects or feeling your feet on the floor. Ivelevitch likes the 5-4-3-2-1 method: five things you can see, four you can feel, three you can hear, two you can smell, one you can taste.

Put it on paper. Write it all down. Every single what-if, says Ustinova. “Once the brain sees the thoughts externalized, it stops endlessly looping them to avoid forgetting.”

Cut yourself some slack. What you absolutely do not have to do is convince yourself that everything will be OK. Smyth says that can turn into its own form of reassurance-seeking. Instead, try repeating this: “I don’t know exactly how this will turn out, but I don’t have to solve it right now. If something happens, I can deal with it then.”

What are some longer-term habits that might help?

Put worrying on the itinerary. Hallissey has clients set a 15-minute “worry time” each day and save their what-ifs for that window. “It often feels safer to put it down when we know we’ll come back to it.”

Practice being comfortable with the unknown, in little ways. “Get comfortable with making decisions without certainty or reassurance,” Ivelevitch suggests. That might look like picking a nail polish color without polling your friends or saying “I don’t know” instead of Googling every answer.

Keep receipts. “We can spend so much time anticipating what might go wrong that we overlook the times we managed something difficult,” says Brown. So, make a habit out of writing down what you feared would happen, then revisiting it to catalog what actually happened and how you handled it.

Set it and forget it. As in, let planning be finished. Learn to put it down and walk away. “Make your lists, look at the calendar, prepare for the next day, and then give yourself permission to be finished,” says Smyth.

Offload what you can. If you’re the one shouldering the mental load in your home, you don’t need to become a better worrier. “Women don’t need another assignment to become better at handling an unreasonable amount of responsibility; they already do that every day,” reminds Brown. What can help is asking what can be shared and which expectations need to change.

How can we keep from passing this dread cycle to our kids?

For starters, you don’t have to fake being chill. “You don’t have to be a perfectly calm, anxiety-free parent,” says Brown. In fact, kids learn from how you respond to uncertainty, so the goal, as Smyth puts it, is to show them “that we can have a worried thought without automatically treating it as a prediction.”

One caveat from Ivelevitch? “It’s also important to seek adult supports for adult worries; our children shouldn’t feel responsible for reassuring us.”

“The concerns may be real, but repeatedly imagining them doesn’t necessarily leave you more prepared.” — licensed professional counselor Felicia Brown

And if your kid is the one holding down future tripping in your house, skip the “don’t worry; everything will be fine” speech. Every expert we spoke with said you should validate your child’s feelings first, then help them sort out what they know from what they’re imagining. Smyth suggests modeling language like, “That’s something we can think about when it gets closer” or “We don’t know what will happen yet, so let’s focus on what we know right now.”

You don’t need to promise an outcome you can’t guarantee, either. Ivelevitch offers this script: “I can’t say for sure if that will happen or not, but I can see that you’re worried, and I’ll be here to support you no matter what.”

When is it time to get more support?

With so much going on in the world, it’s very natural to have a lot on your mind. But if worrying about the future starts to mess with your sleep, concentration, relationships, or just your sheer ability to enjoy what’s in front of you, it’s probably time to talk to a mental health professional.

As for moms, who tend to hold it all together, Brown issues a firm reminder that “being able to keep everything running doesn’t mean you’re doing OK” and that you don’t have to wait until you’re completely overwhelmed to ask for help.

It goes without saying that none of this means you’ll stop thinking about the future altogether… and you shouldn’t. “We need to plan, prepare, and anticipate,” says Smyth. “The goal is to be able to plan for tomorrow without sacrificing today.”