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I am a planner…with a capital “P.”

When I was ten, I told my dad I wanted to be a psychologist, work part-time and be home with my kids part-time. Guess what I did when they were small and continue to do!

Not only did my plan stay the same over time, but I have remained a planner over time. I plan out dinners for the week to eliminate multiple trips to the grocery store. I plan my monthly schedule, weekly schedule and daily schedule. I even plan when I can have “unplanned time.”

There are a lot of advantages to my planning style. Since I plan for the future, I am typically prepared. I tend to think through a lot of options, break them down and start designing the route I need to take to fulfill my plan.

Planning can help reduce anxiety by increasing our sense of being in control. It can also add to anxiety by lending support to the idea that we need to be in control!

While I take a lot of comfort from my “planning style,” I am also increasingly aware of its drawbacks. The biggest one for me is that it takes me away from being fully present in the here and now! This became increasingly obvious to me on two occasions this week.

The first hint was when I spent some time during my vacation to research our next vacation. I am laughing at myself as I write that.

In my defense this does make practical sense. It is the time of year when we typically start thinking about booking a spring vacation and I had some “unplanned time” at my disposal. However, the glaring problem is that rather than being fully present in the vacation I was currently enjoying, I was future thinking! Perhaps I should take it one vacation at a time.

The version of planning I find most distressing and, that popped up last week, stems from conversations with our kids about college. Having inherited my planning style, my son is fairly focused on starting the search process. He is a rising tenth grader. However, since we were vacationing near a school of interest, we went to see it. Our visit highlighted that starting to plan early can both decrease and increase anxiety for both of us.

 I am torn between two competing needs. On the one hand, I love helping him plan for his future. At the same time, I hate the idea of rushing away his high school years by using them purely as a stepping stone for the next stage. Especially since that stage involves him moving away.

I can admit that I may spend as much time enjoying my kids in the present as I do feeling sad about their impending flight from the nest! In some ways, planning helps lessen my distress, but it also maintains it by encouraging my thoughts away from the present.

DBT, among many worldviews, encourages mindfulness, the act of being fully present in the moment. As a therapeutic approach, mindfulness of the present moment decreases the depression associated with an abundance of “past-thinking” and the anxiety associated with over-emphasizing “future-thinking.” By staying grounded in the present moment, we allow ourselves to fully enjoy and benefit from present joys.

We cannot be mindful of the present to the exclusion of past and future-thinking. Each of these contributes to our well-being in important ways. However, we benefit emotionally from spending the majority of our time in the present. There is so much to take in and so much we miss even when we focus on the present. Imagine how much we miss when our focus is elsewhere!

In learning and teaching DBT, I have benefitted immensely from increased mindfulness. I gain so much more happiness from simple pleasures and my anxiety about the future has definitely decreased.

My next step is to find a better balance between the aspects of my planning style that I like and those that take me away from cherishing the here and now. Writing about it is my first step!