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There are a lot of things to be anxious about these days: Constant news about climate change disasters, Covid-19 hotspots flaring up after summer holidays, the constant articles about will there or won’t there be a recession in the economy, the list goes on and on. For me, that anxiety can just add on to my natural inclination to catastrophize.
What Is Catastrophizing?
According to Psychology Today, catastrophizing is “a cognitive distortion that prompts people to jump to the worst possible conclusion, usually with very limited information or objective reason to despair.”
I had never really heard of this term in a psychological sense until I purchased The Anti-Anxiety Notebook. When I received it in the mail, this staid-looking, hard-bound journal contained nicely structured pages designed, according to the company, to utilize “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a rigorously-tested and widely-used treatment” to help you “develop the skills to identify, challenge, and change unhelpful thought patterns.”
Users are meant to outline specific feelings they are having when they are feeling particularly overwhelmed. To help guide those outlines, the book provides helpful definitions for various cognitive distortions. As I began using the journal, I found that I was quite often selecting “catastrophizing” as my distortion of the day.
Take my weekly life as a freelancer, for example. As a freelancer, I love having the ability to work on a variety of new and exciting projects. But that fun side also comes with the downside of sometimes doubting my ability to handle a new project. Now, logically, I know that I have more than 20 years of experience in the publishing industry. That experience covers writing, editing (book editing, article editing, proofreading, developmental editing), graphic design, team management, print producing, digital production, you name it—my experience runs the gamut.
But, despite decades of experience, I will almost always have moments where I will panic and really question if I will be able to complete a task or project that I have taken on. I suddenly will get images of me being fully unable to write an outline or understand a topic enough to edit it. I go even further and imagine completely failing the project and never getting another job again.
Catastrophizing.
Of course, I have to remind myself, given my experience, that is not the most likely outcome at all. In my ruminations that would run over and over again in my mind, I was actively disregarding information (like my experience and the great feedback I had gotten from clients) and imagining all manner of worst-case scenarios.
How To Deal with These Catastrophic Thoughts
So, I know that I’m prone to this type of thinking. What do I do about it? Both the Psychology Today article and my handy little anti-anxiety notebook recommend sitting with the thought and actually imagining what the realistic scenario would be. Let’s say that I’m about to go on a trip with my family to Europe. We’ve been planning the trip for weeks, and it’s now the evening before our flight. Of course, sitting awake in bed at night, my brain will start to catastrophize. What if the Uber we call doesn’t arrive on time? What if we miss our flight by minutes? What happens if our flight is delayed? What happens if the flight is canceled? I start thinking the worst of the worst, and I know that my night of sleep is gone for good.
However, what if I stopped for a moment and wrote in my journal about how bad any of those outcomes would actually be? Well, we’re going on a lovely vacation. I know that the weather is supposed to be good tomorrow, so there shouldn’t be any delays. And even if there are, maybe we’ll be a day or two late, but we’re still going on a trip of a lifetime that will be sure to have a ton of amazing experiences.
Asking yourself to think about how bad it could actually be can stop that spiraling thought process. I’ve taken to writing these thoughts down in that journal (and also on this blog post), and the process of sitting with that negative feeling and realizing that the realistic outcomes aren’t actually that bad has been tremendously helpful. Learning about this tactic made me remember when I was editing for a continuing education firm many, many years ago. I actually engaged in this tactic unconsciously when I accidentally let a stray “asses” instead of “assess” get through. I remembered telling myself, well, no one is going to die because of that error, so I should not spend my evening worrying about such a small mistake.
In general, life is pretty good. And looking back over my journal, I can see that stopping and writing about these situations has also allowed me to write about all of the good things that actually happened. Since I’ve been journaling, I now have a record of all those good things—the catastrophes never actually happened.
So my advice? Stop and take a breath. The small thing that you’re overly focused on is not actually that bad.
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