MM_Sept2026 - E4 Dreading What Hasn't Happened Yet How anticipating a decision can be more draining than making it_AUDIO
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[00:00:00] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Here's the strangest part. Research backs this up. People consistently feel more distress waiting to find out about an uncertain outcome than they do once they actually know it, even when the outcome turns out to be bad. The waiting is often harder than the knowing
[00:00:28] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Hi there. I'm Dr. Julia Bowlin, and you are listening to Mindset Medicine, your weekly dose of personal awareness. So I ask you to take one deep breath, and let's let this episode meet you where you are. This month, I have been spending time with decisions, the ones we make, the ones we avoid, and the ones that quietly wear us down before we even realize it, because decision-making can get exhausting when we stop trusting ourselves.
[00:00:55] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And this month, we are focusing on choices that feel grounded [00:01:00] instead of draining. And last time, I looked at why being wrong isn't the opposite of being wise and how a decision can be a genuinely good one, even when the outcome doesn't turn out the way we'd hope. This time, I'm looking at something that happens a little bit earlier before a decision resolves at all.
[00:01:21] Dr. Julia Bowlin: The bracing, the dread, the weight of a future that hasn't happened yet. Because some of the heaviest weight we carry has nothing to do with something that's already happened. It comes from something that hasn't happened yet, a future we're imagining, bracing for, possibly rehearsing in our minds long before we actually know how it's going to turn out.
[00:01:47] Dr. Julia Bowlin: I lived inside of a version of that for many years. My daughter was a phenomenal student in high school, strong across the board, especially in sciences, the kind of GPA that really truly [00:02:00] opens doors. And then she told us she wanted to go to art school. And I want to be honest about where my mind went because I'd seen it before.
[00:02:09] Dr. Julia Bowlin: People who have invested years into their education, a great deal of money into the education, and a path that didn't lead to anywhere close to what someone actually was trained for. And I was afraid for her, quietly, that she might be selling herself a little short. We actually had real conversations about it, but I found it surprisingly hard to say out loud just how much that fear actually weighed on me.
[00:02:36] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And my husband, meanwhile, supported her fully without hesitation. So she went, and for years, I carried something in the background. Not a crisis, not any single bad moment, just a low, constant hum in my background, like, "What if this doesn't work out? What if all this potential, all that investment, gets [00:03:00] set aside for something that never quite finds its footing?"
[00:03:04] Dr. Julia Bowlin: That hum in the background for me, I was bracing for a future that hadn't happened yet. That's exactly where this episode is gonna live today. So here's what's strange about that particular kind of wait. I was worrying about a future that hasn't happened yet. Nothing was actually going wrong with her.
[00:03:24] Dr. Julia Bowlin: She was in school, doing the work, building a life, and still some part of me stayed braced, like I was waiting for the shoe to drop that hasn't even been thrown yet. It took years for her to find her footing. A real honest, winding path, but she got there. She's producing in the creative industry now, and she's thriving.
[00:03:48] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Along the way, she picked up something I didn't see coming, too. There were some genuinely lean years early on for her, and that scarcity taught her to be [00:04:00] really intentional with her money. So intentional, honesty, that it tipped into something a little obsessive for a while, but even that turned into a real lesson for her and for me.
[00:04:13] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Part of the same winding path that got her there and me here, and here's the part that's worth slowing down on, though. The weight I was carrying during those years was never really about anything my daughter had actually done. It was about everything that might happen to her, that could happen to her out of my fear.
[00:04:34] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And I can tell you exactly what was going on in my brain and my body because I lived it. When the future I imagined for her felt uncertain, my brain didn't wait around for something bad to actually happen before it started sounding the alarm. My brain reacted to the possibility of things that could happen, the not knowing, and here's the strangest part.
[00:04:59] Dr. Julia Bowlin: [00:05:00] Research backs this up. People consistently feel more distress waiting to find out about an uncertain outcome than they do once they actually know it, even when the outcome turns out to be bad. The waiting is often harder than the knowing. That's just true, physiologically in our body, and that's not a flaw in me or in her or in anyone.
[00:05:27] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's just what our brains do when there's a question it can't quite close or finish yet. Once we notice it in one place, it tends to show up in plenty of others, and maybe it's the space between sending an important email and hearing back, or maybe it's the week before test results come in, or a stretch between telling someone a hard truth and finding out how they're going to respond.
[00:05:58] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Maybe it's watching someone we [00:06:00] love choose a path that we're not sure about and living for years inside the space between, "They chose this," and, "We'll find out if that actually works." Here's the pattern underneath it all. Our brains treat an open, unresolved future almost like an ongoing threat. Our brains quietly consume energy in the background, the same way a browser tab left open in the corner of a scream, screen, not scream.
[00:06:32] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Well, it might make us scream. Uh, the screen keeps using power even though we're focused on something else, but we keep seeing it, right? It's just that proverbial in our face waiting for us to attend to it. You see, this isn't a loud, unresolved future. It's just a slow un-announcement that we're seeing rooted in fear of something that hasn't happened yet, and that energy just sits there, humming, [00:07:00] pulling on our resources.
[00:07:02] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And it's easy to mistake that hum for evidence that something's actually wrong. It isn't. It's just evidence that something is unresolved, and our brains build this tension because it prefers things resolved. A question mark just doesn't sit well with us, even a perfectly reasonable one. And here's where the meaning actually shifts.
[00:07:26] Dr. Julia Bowlin: That year-long hum I carried, it wasn't proof that I'd made a wrong call in supporting her, and it wasn't proof that something bad was coming. It was just what an uncertain future feels like while it's still uncertain. The wait is real. It just wasn't information about the outcome. It was information about how our brains handle openness or uncertainty or open questions, right?
[00:07:55] Dr. Julia Bowlin: The wait is real. Doesn't mean the outcome is uncertain. We [00:08:00] just make the assumption it might be. And there's a real difference between bracing for something and actually deciding on something. Deciding is active. It's a single choice made and then finished. Bracing, however, it's passive. It just sits there running in the background for as long as uncertainty lasts.
[00:08:23] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And here's the part that matters the most. Bracing doesn't actually make the outcome any more predictable. It's wasted energy, and it doesn't protect us against a bad result, and it doesn't hurry along a good result. This bracing just costs us energy for however long the not knowing lasts. And I've always said that worrying is telling the universe what you want to happen.
[00:08:53] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And borrowing worry about an uncertain future unnecessarily, well, it's [00:09:00] just exhausting But our brains try to do it anyway. Our brains try to make sense of what the future could be, because an unresolved question is just uncomfortable for our brains to sit inside of, even when there's nothing to actually do about it.
[00:09:18] Dr. Julia Bowlin: You see, my daughter's story didn't resolve quickly. It took years, and for most of those years, I was spending energy on a future that didn't arrive instead of being fully present for the actual unfolding one right in front of me. Once I saw that clearly, the goal stopped being figure it out. How is this gonna end?
[00:09:43] Dr. Julia Bowlin: How am I gonna prepare for this? How am I gonna support her if it doesn't go well, right? Once I could see that clearly, the goal stopped being figure out how this ends, because I couldn't, and it started being something smaller and more honest. [00:10:00] I started noticing when I drifted into bracing and gently come back to what was actually presently true I want to slow down here for a moment because there's a name for what that hum in the background actually was.
[00:10:16] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Researchers call it anticipatory processing, the mental and physical rehearsal of a future that hasn't happened yet, and it's not actually a bad thing. In small doses, it helps us prepare, and when it runs unchecked, however, especially over months or years, it becomes its own drain separate from whatever is actually anticipating.
[00:10:42] Dr. Julia Bowlin: There is research on this from Emory University. A neuroscientist, Gregory Burns, and his team put people in a brain scanner, literally scanned their brains, and had them wait for a mild electric shock to the foot. Okay, imagine it. You're laying in a scanner [00:11:00] knowing you're gonna get shocked to your foot, right?
[00:11:02] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And so they were scanning their brains in the waiting part, and before each person, the people got to choose. Did they want a stronger shock right now or a mildly one after a long delay? Logically, most people would choose a milder shock. We thought it would win, but a striking number of people chose a stronger shock immediately to avoid the waiting part.
[00:11:30] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And when the researchers looked at the brain scans, the waiting itself was lighting up the brain circuitry as a shock. It hasn't even happened yet. The waiting lit up the brain as if there was a shock already. The dread wasn't just a feeling. It was registering in the brain almost like pain itself. That waiting was causing a pain response in the brain.
[00:11:57] Dr. Julia Bowlin: That's crazy, right? That's [00:12:00] what those years cost me. Not the outcome, which turned out fine, but the dread that I had stitched through years. The quiet cost of anticipating a future I had no way of actually controlling was registering my brain as a shock already. Think about that, folks. How many times do we worry about something that hasn't happened, or we dread something in the future that may or may not really actually happen?
[00:12:26] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's causing our brains to stay in that shock-type feeling. Here's the shift in the meaning. That hum I keep mentioning, that quiet background worry that never fully switches off while something is unresolved, it isn't a sign of being a worrier. It isn't proof that a decision that we have made can't be trusted once it's made either.
[00:12:51] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It's just what a normal brain does with an open loop it hasn't been able to close yet, and we're gonna learn that we can close those [00:13:00] loops. The brain doesn't know the difference between this is genuinely dangerous and this is just unresolved So it treats both the same way, with a low steady hum of alertness that runs in the background until the question finally closes.
[00:13:22] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And once that's visible, something small becomes possible. Noticing that hum for what it is, just a rehearsal for a future that hasn't happened, and just gently asking ourselves, "Is there anything right now that needs my attention?" And most of the time, in the present moment, there isn't. Now, I will say, I've got a wedding in my house in three weeks.
[00:13:46] Dr. Julia Bowlin: There's a lot of anticipatory stuff going on in my head. What if the weather is bad? What if the flowers turn bad? What if it's h- too hot and we swelter? What if the mosquitoes are out of control? What if the tent doesn't get up on time? [00:14:00] I'm going and going and going, and I'm stopping myself, and I'm noticing the hum, and I'm saying, "What can I do right now?"
[00:14:10] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And trying to let the universe handle the rest. So this isn't just all just out of my head talking. This episode's coming from where my brain's been sitting lately. So in the long run, it's not a failure to trust the people we love or the decisions that we've made alongside them. It's simply how our brains handle the space between a choice and its outcome, and it deserves a little grace.
[00:14:36] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Some grace we'd offer anyone quietly caring more than they needed to. And here's where our mindset gets to shift. It's not the behavior that we have first, it's the story we give ourselves underneath it all. Because most of us carry some version of an old script for years, like the one I just described.
[00:14:59] Dr. Julia Bowlin: [00:15:00] If I'm still worried about something that's taking up real space in my brain, that means I actually don't trust myself to make a good decision, right? If I can't stop bracing and preparing, if I can't stop preparing for some inevitable that's coming that might be bad, that means there's something genuinely wrong.
[00:15:21] Dr. Julia Bowlin: We have this weird need to prepare ourselves for instinct, right? For survival. But most of the time, these are small things and we don't need to prepare, and neither of those is true. Our worry can sometimes linger, and that doesn't mean it's proof that we have bad judgment or bad decision-making. It's just what an unresolved future that we can imagine feels like, even when it hasn't happened yet or may never happen at all.
[00:15:54] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And there's another way to think about those years, right? Those years of worrying about the future. It's not, [00:16:00] "I don't trust my decisions." It's I made a good decision, and I'm still human enough to feel uncomfortable not knowing how this is going to turn out, right? My daughter felt like she made a good decision, and she was fine allowing it to turn out, right?
[00:16:20] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Instead of, "I need to know how this is gonna turn out before I can relax," it can now become, "I can let some things stay unresolved and still be okay with it." This wedding up and coming, I can't predict how the weather's gonna be. I don't know how it's gonna unfold, but I can sit and tell myself, "You know what?
[00:16:39] Dr. Julia Bowlin: I can still be okay with this right now." And that's not resignation. It's simply just recognizing that most of what we're bracing for hasn't happened yet, and spending today's energy on that, well, I don't need to, instead of renting it out to a future that hasn't happened yet, right? [00:17:00] I mean, seriously, let's stop borrowing worry about unknown futures.
[00:17:06] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And none of this really erases about how that real worry was for me and my daughter for those years. It just changes what it means. It wasn't evidence of her doubting her decision. It was just the ordinary cost of me loving someone through an uncertain stretch and being human enough to feel that the not knowing is okay while it lasted.
[00:17:30] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Hope that makes sense. So before moving on to today's unicity moment, here's something worth sitting with for a beat. Somewhere right now, there might be a decision that you might have made that feels a little settled, done, or it might still feel like some part of your mind is bracing for how it might turn out.
[00:17:53] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And what would it be like to notice that hum just for a moment and ask it gently, [00:18:00] "Is there anything actually happening right now that needs my attention? Or is it just a future that hasn't arrived yet, asking for energy it doesn't actually need from me today?" And there's no need to answer that out loud or to even fully understand it right now.
[00:18:19] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Just let a question sit there for a second, doing what quiet work can do. As always, before we begin, I wanna offer a gentle note. What we are about to do is a guided experience, just an invitation for you to slow down and turn inward. You're always in control. You can open your eyes at any time, adjust your position, or simply listen without participating.
[00:18:45] Dr. Julia Bowlin: There's nothing you have to do. Just receive what's useful and leave the rest. As always, if you're operating machinery or driving, don't close your eyes, folks. You're welcome to listen and stay present on the road or your busyness, and save [00:19:00] this part possibly for the future when you can be still. And whenever it feels right, just soften your gaze, soften your body, and possibly just let your eyes close.
[00:19:13] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And notice the texture of whatever you're touching right now. Maybe it's the fabric of your clothes, the arms of your chair, or your own hands just resting together Just notice it exactly as it feels under your fingertips
[00:19:37] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Now notice any scent in the air around you. Maybe it's faint or maybe it's potent, and the air, it has a temperature too, moving in and out as you breathe. Cool on the way in[00:20:00]
[00:20:00] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And a little warmer on the way out And let your attention rest there for a moment Just touch and scent and the air moving through you
[00:20:19] Dr. Julia Bowlin: And with your next exhale, let your shoulders soften. And whatever you're touching, whatever you're smelling right now, that's real. That's actually there There's nowhere else you need to be for just a few minutes And somewhere in your life, there might be a decision that you've already made that might feel a little settled, but yet part of you is bracing for how things might turn out You might imagine for a moment the [00:21:00] difference between two things, the actual present moment exactly as it is right now, and the imagined future your mind keeps rehearsing.
[00:21:12] Dr. Julia Bowlin: What of those is real? It's happening right now. It can be felt, the texture, the scent, the breath. The other story being told and retold about something else in the future that hasn't happened yet. Neither needs to be fixed right now, just noticed. Which one you're actually standing in, in this exact moment?
[00:21:42] Dr. Julia Bowlin: This return, this coming back to what's actually presently true is available any time our bracing starts to hum in the background out of fear Here's how to carry it. Place [00:22:00] one hand flat against your chest, right over your heart, and feel it there. Solid, present, real
[00:22:20] Dr. Julia Bowlin: The rest is a story that I might be telling myself about a future I cannot know. And that doesn't erase the uncertainty. It just interrupts the hum long enough to come back to what's actually here in the chest And whatever came up in the noticing of that, it doesn't need to be resolved right now. It can simply be known.
[00:22:48] Dr. Julia Bowlin: The difference between what's real and what's still being written for the future And gently bring your attention back to the room[00:23:00]
[00:23:03] Dr. Julia Bowlin: The sounds around you, the surface beneath you, and your own breath
[00:23:15] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Let your fingers and toes move a little, and if that feels good, let it. And whenever it feels right, you can gently let your eyes open That hand over your heart is available at any time, not just here, but the next time a future that hasn't happened yet, yet starts asking you for more energy than it actually needs, go back to the hand on your heart and ground yourself So maybe this episode was never really about art school or a career that took years to find its shape.
[00:23:57] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It was about the weight of everything that hasn't [00:24:00] happened yet. Our bracing, the hum, the energy that we spend on a future that cannot actually be controlled or by worrying about it. It doesn't change anything. Not a failure to trust the future, just what an uncertain brain does with open questions, doing its job.
[00:24:21] Dr. Julia Bowlin: If there's a decision that feels unsettled, maybe some part of you that's still bracing for how something might turn out, that's not evidence that you made a wrong call. It's just what waiting feels like. And while waiting while at lasts, our brain's trying to be busy, trying to predict a future that hasn't happened so we can be prepared.
[00:24:43] Dr. Julia Bowlin: We can honor it. We can place our hands on our heart and be grounded and say, "We're here now." Right? All right. Next episode, I'm gonna close out this series. We're gonna look at what it actually means to start trusting a [00:25:00] decision and why every choice we make is really just the brain's best guess. And if this episode landed with you, I'd genuinely love to hear about it.
[00:25:12] Dr. Julia Bowlin: Find me on Instagram or join the newsletter at juliabolenmd.com, where I share what's coming up next first. Thank you for spending time with me, and until next time, may you be happy, be healthy, and be fulfilled.
[00:25:33] Outro: Thank you for listening to Mindset Medicine with your host, Dr. Julia Bowlin. To learn more about Mindset Medicine, go to www.juliabowlinmd.com and connect with Dr. Julia to find out how our team can help you today. Join us again next week for more expert tips, tools, and strategies to become healthier, wealthier, and wiser in your personal and professional [00:26:00] life.
