Overview
“Future tripping” is a popular casual term for the concept of anticipatory anxiety, which is a form of anxiety about potential negative outcomes from an event before it happens. This can manifest as constant rumination over “what-if” worst-case scenarios and the standard physical symptoms of anxiety like muscle tensions, elevated heart rate, tension headaches, stomach discomfort, and difficulty sleeping. The term was adopted heavily in recovery circles, particularly Alcoholics Anonymous literature in the 1970s and 1980s, to discuss the importance of taking life “one day at a time,” since future-tripping could become a trigger for drinking.
History and Etymology
The use of the word “trip” to describe the experience of substance use emerges out of the 1960s, alluding to substance use as a kind of journey. This led to “-tripping” as a suffix for all kinds of terms, like Maya Angelou’s use of “ego-tripping” and political journalism featuring “power-tripping.” In 1978, AA literature begins to use “future-tripping” to describe the escalating thought spirals that can lead someone to losing hope in their sobriety. It’s very easy to go from “what if I relapse in the future anyways?” to “might as well relapse now,” which becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Commentary
I have mixed feelings about this concept. Like with almost every term or concept that arises from folk psychology or pop psychology, there are some solid foundations that are very, very easily twisted into counterproductive uses. It’s just not easy or even possible to determine that a particular anxiety about the future is unjustified.
As humans, we generally try to create worldviews that minimize the risk of being caught by surprise. From Hermann von Helmholtz discussing the concept of “unconscious inference” in the 1860s to Richard Feynman popularizing variational free energy as a method to approximate intractable problems in the 1980s to Geoffrey Hinton applying variational free energy to neural networks in the 1990s to Karl Friston introducing the free energy principle of all biological systems, researchers have consistently approached the problems of biology and information science through an analysis of uncertainty. Simply put, our brains are actively making inferences about the world in order to reduce the chances of being surprised. It’s plainly not possible to live entirely in the moment without a thought about the future unless you’re experiencing severe executive dysfunction or possibly a manic episode.
At the same time, it’s also possible for someone’s projections or inferences about the future to be wildly dysfunctional themselves. Someone who thinks about whether a meteor will hit the Earth and cause a mass extinction event, similar to one that took out the dinosaurs, is not necessarily wrong to consider that possibility, but a chronic fixation on it is actually more paralyzing than it is helpful. We would hope to find some middle ground between “what if everyone dies tomorrow?” and “what if I get fired from my job and can’t pay rent?” One is commonly called catastrophizing as a cognitive distortion under Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy frameworks, while the other is a reasonable worry directly tied to survival needs that might have actionable pathways as a response. Mitigating risk is generally a good thing. This grey area between the two is where gaslighting and denial can creep in, especially since it’s extremely easy to parrot an adage like “one day at a time” when someone is trying to plan out their future in ways they can prepare for. After all, how can you know what you can do about the future until you actually allow yourself to brainstorm and process the emotions along with it? Making peace with the possibility of certain outcomes is healthy, and it’s not achievable without undergoing some of the distress of considering those possibilities. I’ve seen this play out just enough in real recovery circle conversations that I feel a warning is warranted. You’re not future-tripping if you’re just walking yourself through actions you can take in response to problems of the future or you’re trying to make peace with the worst-case scenario. You might be future-tripping if you find yourself unable to make peace with an outcome and ruminate over it to the detriment of the present.