How do I stop worrying about the future?

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Worry is a loan taken out against a day that may never be issued. I say it as a man who spent eight years on Corsica imagining worse than Corsica. You suffer twice: once in rehearsal, once in fact, and the first was optional. So give the dread its hearing. Tonight, write the worst outcome in one plain sentence, then beneath it what you would still do. Most fears collapse into a task.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Do not stop. Worry is the mind rehearsing a future in which you are already defeated, so ask what it is flattering. It lets you feel busy while you stand still. I wrote my best pages with no certainty of tomorrow, only of the next hour's walk, the next eyes-aching morning. Trade the rehearsal for a wager: choose one thing today you would gladly do again forever, and do it.

Marcus Aurelius

Night, camp, the Danube. I write this for myself. The future has no hold on you except through the picture you paint of it. Ask of each fear: is it here? No. Then it is not yet an event, only an opinion. When the hour arrives, meet it with the mind you have today, which is enough. For now, do the task in front of you. Do it well. That is all the future will ever ask.

Søren Kierkegaard

Worry is anxiety with its nerve cut: it counts the future's possibilities so that it need never step into one. I once called anxiety the dizziness of freedom; you look down into what you might do, and you grip the railing by imagining everything that might happen to you. You will not stop by reasoning. You stop worrying about tomorrow by choosing something today, and bearing its cost. Which choice have you been furnishing with worries?

Michel de Montaigne

I never managed it, so take this as a fellow sufferer's report. I have noticed that my worst evils, the ones I dreaded most, mostly never came, and those that did arrived dressed differently. The plague reached Bordeaux while I was mayor, and I feared it far more in the road than in the thick of it. Dread is a poor prophet. I do not stop; I only let it talk, then go to dinner.

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