Take our Generalized Anxiety Disorder Test

Find a therapist to combat fear and anxiety

Competing social selves or identities make some people feel torn all the time.

Forethought is the ability to meet competing demands and their effects.

Fearthought involves remote, distant, or overblown fears governing a person’s thoughts and actions.

Optimism is the antidote to fearthought.

What happens when someone feels torn by their own competing demands? We all have different social selves or identities: we may be parents, children, spouses, co-workers, friends, etc. Each of these selves or identities comes with a host of demands and expectations, not all of which can be met. Even though each demand may be legitimate and capable of being met in principle, they cannot all be met in practice.

Even as we understand the impossibility of meeting them all, some people will continue to try to do so. While others may place demands on us, we place them most heavily on ourselves.

Let’s imagine Ryan, who is a parent of young kids, a dutiful child to their own parents, a good friend, and a hardworking and loyal employee. They’ve always been an optimist, but they’re feeling more and more exhausted; their body aches every day. They can’t really engage in any of their interests anymore. Those interests seem more like luxuries. They feel their spiritual self shrinking a bit; they’re losing interest in a few of their hobbies and can’t justify putting the effort into them.

Their optimism might start to dim, which may feel utterly alien to them. Ryan’s the sort who will........

© Psychology Today