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Hello, thanks for joining me today. Welcome to the podcast. We're gonna talk today about a question that has helped a lot of my clients to break out of anxiety in all different aspects of their lives, and it's a question that you wouldn't necessarily think would work to help with anxiety. In fact, you might think that it would make anxiety worse. And the question is, if you knew that you had only one year to live, what would you do?
So I had a client who was dealing with incredible amount of stress from work, a really high stress job, from school, she was also in a school program. From family, She was in a, a difficult divorce. Anyway, so we were working through a lot of these different anxiety issues in her life. And she's someone who had a lot of difficulty in her marriage, partly because , she'd always been a people pleaser, she'd never been able to define what it was that she wanted for her life and who she was. Instead, she had organized her life around trying to do what other people expected or wanted of her and this is how she had behaved in her marriage. So I, I asked her this question and it was interesting. She had to think a while, and then she started to say things. Things started to come to her mind. She, She knew that she would want to get a dog and train it to be a therapy dog. She knew that she would want to go camping a lot in the summer and she would want to spend more time in nature. And she also said that she would travel to Japan. To see a particular art form that is disappearing, that's going extinct because she's really interested in it. She thinks it's really beautiful and she wants to be able to see it before it disappears.

Another client that I talked to who was dealing with a lot of different anxiety, when I asked her this question, she said that she would learn how to play the piano, that she would travel, and that she would do all kinds of new things.

So the question, while on the one hand, it might seem like it would trigger anxiety because it makes you think about limited time, on the other hand, it helped these clients to set some clear goals, to realize what kinds of goals they wanted to set. It helped them to, to realize what their passions were, to stop feeling so trapped and tied down and hemmed in by anxiety because they started to think less in terms of their fears and their anxieties and everything that was standing in their way and more in terms about doing things that were important to them before it was too late.

So in addition to giving you courage to take risks, to pursue your passions, this question can do another amazing thing in relation to our anxiety. And I'll tell you one more story from another client who I will call Sadie. Sadie came to me complaining about being in a constant state of stress about the future. Her mind was always looking toward the next stressor that was coming up and trying to solve it ahead of time. She had a lot of different things going on in her life. It was like juggling a lot of different balls and she was always looking ahead to the next ball. And she was exhausted because she felt like she could never relax and rest. Her life was just a constant race toward all of these stressors that were out there on her horizon that she needed to solve. From sunup to sundown. We uncovered that she really felt like this was just a result of her situation that she was in because she imagined that in the future, when she was making a lot of money 'cause she had her career established and she had her own house and she had her own marriage and her own children, and she was just more independent, that she would not feel this way because she thought that in tho in that situation, she wouldn't have as many stressors and she wouldn't be as concerned about what people think because she wouldn't be around as many people that she'd known all of her life and that she felt were judging her. But then I, I stopped and had her think through this question, if you only had one more year to live, what would you do? And she realized through thinking through this question, that in that one year, she wouldn't be able to reach that future scenario in which she had imagined that her situation would make everything easier. But she realized that she would want to, right now, in her present situation with all of her present complications in life and all of the demands and the insecurity that she had, and just the complexity of her present life, that she would want to start to, to be present right now. Instead of thinking constantly toward the future and future stresses, she would want to take a deep breath and savor the time that she had, savor the moments that she had, the simple pleasures that she had, even when this present right now was imperfect. So that's another thing that answering this question can do for you because it can help you to appreciate the now, the time that you have right now, the richness of this here and now. And being in the present is the antidote to anxiety, which is always in the future. So ironically, recognizing limited time can give us this increased gratitude and appreciation and ability to to be in the present and appreciate the present.

Now the third thing that, this question has done for my clients relates to anxiety in relationships. So I had a client, which I'll call Jim, who had a, a difficult relationship with his father. His dad was someone that, uh, they really didn't agree on a lot of things, and especially on some really big areas. They didn't agree on politics, they didn't agree on religion. And Jim was having to figure out how to walk this fine line in this relationship with his dad of being able to be true to what he felt and not just agree with his dad on everything, but at the same time, not create tension in their relationship and anger and distance between them. He was complaining to me on, on a particular coaching session about how a recent interaction with his dad had really just gone too far. And he had just felt like it had ended really with a sour note. And it had, it had damaged their relationship to some degree and he, he just didn't know how to manage the relationship going forward. He really wanted to find a different way to relate to his father. And so we started thinking through this question with a slight twist. I asked him to imagine that his dad only had one year left to live. And then think of himself after that year is over: his dad is gone and he's looking back on his time with his dad now. He can't be with his dad anymore. He can't talk to his dad. He can't disagree with his dad anymore. How would he want to have behaved with his dad during that time? We talked through it and he also spent a lot of time writing about it and thinking about it, and it was pretty amazing. This question really helped him to refine what it was that was important to him in his interactions with his dad. And he didn't stop stating his positions, but he found the ability to state his positions and state his opinions with greater security and less irritation. He stopped being reactive to his dad's arguments and opinions because he realized that his relationship with his dad was a higher priority to him than any of the ideas that they disagreed on. So the exercise alone seemed to allow him to figure out the answer to this question that was bothering him so much, how to walk this fine line, how to have the relationship that he wanted with his dad, and yet also be true to who he felt he was deep down. Another client that I had had a, a somewhat similar situation except that she was living with her parents. She was an, an adult, but she was living with her parents, and I'll call her Carrie. She was experiencing a lot of tension with them because she felt that they really wanted to be ultra involved in her life, to know everything that was going on, every time that she was leaving, every time that she was coming, exactly how she felt in the morning when she woke up. They were just wanting a lot of control in, in the relationship that she didn't feel was appropriate. But her efforts to talk to her parents about wanting a little bit more space, about wanting a little bit more separation and independence had not worked out. And it was not a situation where she could change the situation. She wasn't in a position to be able to move out. She was gonna have to stay with her parents. And she'd already tried to change their behavior and that hadn't worked. And so she wanted to just work on the stress and anxiety that she was feeling in the relationship and see if she couldn't find a new relationship with this same situation. And so we went through the same thought experiment that I did with Jim, where I asked her to imagine that her parents only had one more year to live, and that this was the last year. Not only the last year that she was gonna live with them, but the last year that she would be able to talk with them at all, and that she would be able to interact with them and, and have irritating interactions with them even. And so she thought through this question and it really helped her to, to define for herself how it is that she wanted to act with her parents. And it also made her feel less irritated by how controlling they were trying to be because she saw this, the interactions as precious, even though they contained some irritation. And then it turned out strangely enough, just a few months later, that her parents' situation completely changed. They had a new job and they ended up needing to move to another state. They were selling the house. She was gonna move into an apartment now, and they were gonna move far away. And so they were no longer going to be living together. And so all of a sudden she found herself almost in the realization of this thought experiment. Her parents weren't dying, but they were, they were moving far away, and they were not going to have the chance to see each other very often anymore. So when it became a reality, then she was really thinking in new terms, rather than being irritated with how closely they were living together, and how their interactions were feeling suffocating to her, instead, she was thinking about how much she wanted to prioritize these, these last weeks that she had with them, and have meaningful interactions and, and good times. So she was glad that she had already gone through this thought experiment with me and had already started down on that road of appreciating limited time with her parents, and how looking at the time as limited changed her very irritation with them, changed her priorities in the situation, and made it feel less aversive to her. And then when the reality came that her parents were actually leaving, she didn't have as many regrets looking back.

So in a sense, this is just a mental experiment, right? Thinking, imagining I have one year to live, what would I do? But in reality, it's not hypothetical, it's real. We all have limited time. We just don't know how much. We don't know if we have one year or if we have 60 years, but we know that it's limited. So for example, the average lifespan in the United States is about 77 years. And if you're gonna put that in terms of weeks, that's about a little more than 4,000 weeks. A total lifespan of 4,000 weeks. If you're in your twenties, then that life expectancy is below 3000 weeks left. And if you're in your forties, then you have less than 2000 weeks left of that life expectancy. And this can sound kind of alarming when you put it into these finite terms, but thinking of life in this way can help us break out of thinking of time in terms of something cyclical: that we have spring and then we have summer, and then we have fall, and then we have winter, and then spring comes again and it starts all over again. It can be a real temptation for us to think of our lives in terms of an undetermined number of cycles that are just gonna go over and over and over and over again and repeat. But if we start to think of our lives in terms of total number of weeks that we have to live, then this bumps us out of cyclical time and into linear time. A time that has a distinct beginning and an end. But why would we wanna do that? Doesn't that make us feel more anxious?

Well, it can have the same effect that it has on children who are in summer vacation. So parents who have children and summer vacation know that at the beginning of the summer, the children are so happy, they're free. They can sleep in, they can do whatever they want. It's great. But then by the middle of the summer, if you don't have a lot of family trips planned and stuff, then the children are just terribly bored. They're not happy anymore. They're not enjoying their time, and they can't think of anything to do. But then as the summer approaches its end and they can see that school is starting to come back, then all of a sudden they have a different relationship with summer. I've, I've had kids, for example, who as soon as they see the summer ending, then all of a sudden then they want to plan all of these hikes with their friends and they wanna get up early in the morning and see the sunrise and they, they have all of these different activities that they wanna do, and they plan their time to maximize the summer that they have left, because it's almost over. And pretty soon they won't be able to have the freedom that they have in summertime anymore. So ironically, recognizing that our time is limited can help us to refine our priorities in our relationships, in our energy, in our time, it can help us to enjoy and savor the time that we have. Whereas otherwise, it can just feel unpleasant and unlimited. It can help us to go toward what's really important to us, to, despite our fears, and find that motivation to approach those things that are, that we really want to accomplish before our time is up, even though they might make us anxious on some level. So these are some of the benefits that can happen just from recognizing that your time is a limited precious quantity. So that's the idea I wanted to leave with you today.

Stay tuned now for our kindness narrative. If you haven't yet shared your narrative, please consider doing that because it'll help all of us, but most of all, it'll help you to enjoy your life right now. So thanks for considering that and have a great week. Well, I'm going to talk about, when I went through a, a four wheeler accident. This is how it happened. We were going to Island Park close to Yellowstone Park, and my husband had a sister that had a cabin, and so his brothers and his sisters, we were just gonna have a weekend up there together. And they had a four wheeler. They had two, four wheelers actually. And when we were gonna go together, we decided we'd have one each. I'd never driven one before, but seemed very simple. And so off we went. And as we turned to get off the main road, for some reason I was panicking and my husband had stopped and I put on the gas instead of the the brake, and I was panicking and I didn't know what was going on and I hit him. And the four wheeler went around and around and landed on me. And so I looked like I was dead. We got the ambulance, we got to the hospital. I had brain problems. They had to go in and had had surgery. My husband, he was there every day for a month in the hospital. But he had help and my family came and they would come during the day so he could sleep at night. At first, I didn't remember them. Then, I would remember them, didn't know their names, so on. But anyway, it lasted for a whole month. But my husband was so helpful and loving and positive, and my sister that lived in my area brought her motor home and brought me home. So loving. And when I got here, the people in the neighborhood would bring food and just be wonderful. And in our church, they were so thoughtful and would call or drop by. So many loving people in my life. And that's how it's been ever since. Loving people in my life.