Time Travel is Possible. It's Just Not Advisable

Or... Only an acting job could save me.

Have you ever had a panic attack? If you have, you’ll relate to the following story. If you haven’t, thank your lucky stars.

Picture this... I’m twenty-three years old and struggling to “make it” as an actress in New York City. The acting income barely funds a subway token (OMG. I’m old enough to remember subway tokens?), so I work full time for a toner-cartridge re-manufacturer (a what you say?). A company that collects old toner cartridges then installs a larger hopper (ink holder) with twice as much ink. This ingenious, trademarked hopper then proceeds to leak ink all over printers or, in most cases, falls off. After enough of them fell off, I’d lose the account, and the boss would tell me what a lousy salesperson I was. If you couldn’t guess, this product was a tough sell. But it paid well, and they let me schedule sales calls around my auditions.

This morning, I’m presenting to the procurement team of a law firm in Tower Two of the World Trade Center (don’t worry, this isn’t a 9-11 story). Three middle-aged men (women in that law firm in the 1990s? Haha - this was no Ally McBeal) sit at the scuffed Formica table before me. The room is lit by flickering fluorescent lights overhead. It smells slightly chemical, probably because of the stacks of brand-new paper, index cards, paper clips, white-out, and other 1990s-era supplies. I’m eloquent and prepared. They are unconvinced. However, they’ll indulge a young ingénue in a short skirt and silk blouse, especially because she has the expense budget to put a free meal in their bellies.

There are no windows. During the climax of my scintillating presentation about ink, I notice the room has no windows—the air thins. I don’t know what floor I’m on, but I’m absolutely convinced I am in the throes of altitude sickness. A rush of metallic saliva enters my mouth, and I stumble over my pitch. One procurer guy has a visible line of greasy neck dirt around his opened collar and one of those mustaches where they grease the edges and twirl it. That guy smirks. He caught my stumble and is looking for any reason to patronize me during his free lunch, during the expected speech entitled, “Why we won’t be purchasing your cartridges.” Wait…did that white-out bottle move? It sure looks like the storage shelves are sidling closer to my shaking elbows.

My heart pounds, my teeth knock against each other, and the “I am on the edge of death and having a massive heart attack” feeling arrives. I must get out of this building. Immediately. I make a lame excuse, grab my overstuffed briefcase (which doubles as a useful weapon on the subway), and race to the elevators. The ride seems to take forever, but finally, I am out on the street leaning against the tower, my bag dropped at my feet, panting and crying as if I’ve just lost an Olympic medal in the 800 meters. I want a cigarette. I don’t smoke. I’ve never smoked. But I crave something to steady my breath. A cigarette always looks so calming.

You see, at this moment, I’m convinced I will explode. I will spontaneously explode, and everything I’m holding tight inside me will burst through my chest and pour into the city like a deluge of sewage, leaving me a husk of a person on the sidewalk.

This is a panic attack.

I learned much later, through experience and maturity, why I kept having these panic attacks. You see, my brain was enjoying (in a sick way, but enjoying nonetheless) too much time traveling.

Does this sound familiar to you? Instead of focusing on the meeting where you sell cartridges, the dinner you cook for your family, or the traffic on your daily commute, your brain takes a trip into the past. So then, in the background of your current activity, often unnoticed by your conscious self, your brain is screaming...

“Heather laughed at you yesterday when you practiced your scene. She thinks you are such a loser.”

Or,

“You shouldn’t have bought that expensive shampoo on your credit card, stupid. You’ll never pay that off.”

Or,

“You should have said something to that guy who rubbed against you on the bus yesterday. Scaredy cat.”

Or maybe your brain decided to time-travel into the future today and is subliminally creating scenarios for you to look forward to, like...

“You know you’ll never get cast in anything right, and you’ll have to move back home in disgrace.”

Or,

“You don’t have enough money for rent this month, and you will lose the apartment.”

Or,

“No one likes you, and I see a future with no friends at all.”

You’ve experienced this, right? When your thoughts wander to a cringe-worthy moment in your past or spiral into a nagging worry about the future? Yeah, that’s your mind playing the time-travel game. Your brain is a constant time traveler. You may be past- or future-focused, but either is a problem. The past is a subjective, questionable recreation of our experiences. The future is fictional. Where does your brain need to be? The now. The right now. The present moment. It needs to be selling the hell out of those junky toner cartridges, and only that, so you don’t need to fly across the lobby of an office building crying your eyes out in three-inch heels.

That’s what meditation is for and why it is so good for you. You can let your brain time-travel its little heart out and simply acknowledge, but not feel, the thought before it floats away. But meditation isn’t for everyone. If you had told my twenty-three-year-old self to meditate, I would have either tried and exploded or cried more.

But there is another option, and it’s probably something you already do without knowing it. It’s called finding flow. You’ve felt the joy in that moment when you’re so engrossed in something that hours slip by unnoticed? That’s your brain finding its groove, its rhythm, its flow. Flow is a concept named by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and he describes it this way.

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times... The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)

For me, this activity is writing. When I’m writing, hours can fly by without my notice. I am completely one hundred percent in the present moment. Lad explains this feeling with the concept of temporal perception, or your inner experience of time.

“In general, rewarding or pleasant circumstances are associated with shortening (time compression) and aversive circumstances (e.g. threatening, painful, stressful, boring) are associated with lengthening (time dilation) of the perceived passage of time.” (Sagar S. Lad, 2020)

I also experience flow while acting, which makes total sense. In both acting and writing, you are entirely in the body and mind of a fictional character; you don’t have space to be in your own.

In his book Stealing Fire, Steven Kotler says of the flow state,

“Without the ability to separate past from present from future, we’re plunged into an elongated present, what researchers describe as ‘the deep now.’ Energy normally used for temporal processing gets reallocated for focus and attention. We take in more data per second, and process it more quickly. When we’re processing more information faster, the moment seems to last longer—which explains why the “now” often elongates in altered states.”

You need “the deep now.” Wouldn’t it be great to have a tool that teaches your brain to take all that energy it used to spend on time-traveling and use it to make extraordinary things happen in the present moment? Just think of what you could accomplish. For some, that tool is meditation; for me, it’s writing; for others, it could be soccer, coding, or needlepoint. What’s your flow?

Those procurement guys sure wish I’d found my flow at twenty-three. Maybe they would have gotten their free lunch.

Journal Prompt:

Find your flow. Think back over the past few months and identify an activity you engaged in where time flew by. It wasn’t necessarily fun. It may have challenged or occasionally frustrated you, but while you did that activity, your mind was present, clear, and engaged. No time traveling. Write about it. Put that experience on paper and then schedule it into your week as a daily practice.

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