The night before my 21st birthday last year, my hair was curled perfectly. My eyeliner looked just as I wanted it to, my outfit was tea, and my friends had decorated my living room perfectly. Yet I found myself sitting on my couch, paralyzed with a weird feeling.
I’m not the girl who cries on my birthday. It had nothing to do with my plunge into real adulthood or my anxiety over my hair appointment at noon the next day. This feeling had become my roommate the second I moved out of my childhood home, and her name was Impending Doom.
who is she and why does she haunt me?
Impending doom refers to the premonition that something bad is about to happen, instilling a weird sense of urgency or dread. I like to think of it as the same feeling I get when I do all of my homework, yet I feel like I forgot something. Then, instead of feeling accomplished, I feel anxious and on edge. That sense of impending doom cozies up to me at 3 A.M. when I’m trying to sleep, forcing me to re-read my calendars out of anxiety. Not fun.
While a sense of impending doom is a palpable feeling, it is not always grounded in truth. Our minds are always trying to find patterns and meaning in everything, which is undoubtedly a double-edged sword. Listening to our gut is a vital skill, but making predictions about the future can foster a sense of delusion. Alex Dimitriu MD, founder of Menlo Park Psychiatry and Sleep Medicine, discerns that “a sense of impending doom is, in many ways, a ‘micro’ delusion. It is a strongly held belief in an outcome that is quite removed from reality.” Evidently, once this belief settles, we still carry the tension in our bodies and our minds.
We then proceed to freak ourselves out. Being the “meaning-making machines” that we are, every heart palpitation, sense of detachment, and hot flash we will then experience will appear to us like a bad omen. We think our premonitions were right all along, and can almost feel the ground crumbling beneath us. These physical symptoms are not at all a confirmation that our premonitions were right, and yet we invest in the belief that they are. This, in turn, creates a cycle.
So… how do i kick her out?
There is no tried-and-true method to completely rid us of Impending Doom. As long as we are conscious beings, we can never escape our minds (unfortunately). However, we can learn not to invest in our every thought. When plagued with these feelings, we must ask ourselves to reflect on whether our feeling is actually rooted in fact. This requires introspection and a true investment in our own well-being.
Additionally, we must grow to understand the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we wake up on a rainy Monday morning and believe that today is going to suck, we will inadvertently make sure it does if something spectacular does not happen. If we predict something to happen, we will expect it to happen. Our behavior will then be influenced by our expectations, thus digging us into a deeper hole. We grow more irritable, withdrawn, and even self-conscious.
My experience with pushing Impending Doom out has been a shaky one, but I urge anyone who has experienced her to understand where she comes from. For me, educating myself and writing about it has helped tremendously. I ground myself in reality by scribbling down all of the things I feared would happen that did not, in fact, end up happening. And, when I feel I’m in a rut I can’t get out of on my own, I seek out my therapist and pour my heart out for an hour in her office. As much as I would like to think that writing and rationalizing solve everything, I can’t handle it all by myself – and that’s okay.
So, I urge you all to change the locks on your door to make Impending Doom think twice before coming in. Keep a baseball bat by the door, even, and know that she is by no means an oracle. Ground yourself, seek support from the people with the tools to help you, and don’t let her ruin your birthday.