Catastrophe-filled thoughts are common, especially for people prone to anxiety. You might find yourself imagining that your first day at a new job will be an excruciating disaster, that you’ll flunk an upcoming exam, or that your flight to New York will crash.
These thoughts are unpleasant, but they’re essentially your mind working overtime to keep you safe. If you start to act on these catastrophic thoughts, trying to avoid any risk in your life, that’s when this thinking style can start to become debilitating.
It’s easy to see why we evolved to experience anxiety. If our ancestors had rushed head-first into every situation, they probably wouldn’t have survived very long. Anxiety is your brain’s way of saying, “Hang on a minute, are you sure this is safe?”.
Most experts agree that a modest degree of anxiety and anticipation of potential negative consequences is normal and helpful. It can become problematic, however, when it gets out of hand, and when your predictions become overwhelmingly negative, which is what’s happening when you catastrophise habitually.
Instead of weighing up all the possible outcomes and settling on a realistic anticipation of what might happen, you’re jumping to the worst-case scenario. You might have learned to think this way because you grew up in an anxious family. Or perhaps bad things have happened to you in the past, which has led you to be highly fearful about the future.
Or maybe you’re just very anxious by nature and fearing the worst gives you a temporary sense of control – you might feel that, at the very least, you won’t be caught unprepared because you’ve already thought through all the most terrible potential outcomes.
Incidentally, research into this sort of ‘bracing for the worst’ approach shows that it makes people unhappy in the build-up to an event and doesn’t offer any protection if things really do go wrong.
If you feel like your catastrophising is getting out of hand, there are a few basic steps, based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, that you can try for yourself that might help.
1. Try to step away from your worries
Your catastrophic thoughts are fuelled by anxiety, so anything you can do to relax and cultivate calm should help (options include walking in nature, exercise classes and spending fun time with friends).
2. Make time to address your worries
Try scheduling a brief ‘worry window’ in your day – this will help you let the anxious thoughts go at other times because you’ll know you’re going to come back to them later.
3. Interrogate the evidence for your worries
Challenge your catastrophic thoughts by forcing yourself to be as objective as possible about them. For instance, think about other ‘first days’ that weren’t excruciating; remind yourself of the prep you’ve done for the exam; or read up on the safety stats for flying.
4. Try the ‘so what’ approach
To take the intensity out of your thoughts, you could try challenging the very notion that these things really would be as terrible as you fear. For example, even if the first day on a new job is a nightmare, you’ll get over it; you could re-take the exam; and people can and do survive plane crashes.
If none of this helps, it’s worth consulting a mental health professional who will be able to offer you a more comprehensive plan for overcoming your catastrophising habit.
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