What is catastrophizing and what can I do about it? - Video transcript

Hey everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist, and today I'm going to be discussing another cognitive distortion called catastrophizing. If you missed the video last week, cognitive distortions are basically thinking errors. The word cognitive pertains to thinking, and if something is distorted, then there's an error, right? So we all have thinking errors.

Sometimes we misinterpret something someone said, but they become problematic when they are more habitual and pervasive. Usually, they show up as serving a purpose or a function in our lives. But at some point, we realize that they're starting to do more harm than good.

They're no longer protecting us from whatever emotions we feel we need protection from. Often, in adulthood, these thinking errors become so automatic that we don't even realize when we're doing them. But what happens is that they cause us to interpret events negatively, creating thought patterns that are inaccurate or irrational.

So we want to make sure that we develop an awareness of when we have these cognitive distortions so that we can start changing those thought patterns and rewiring our brains. The problem is that if these cognitive distortions become automatic and are constantly reinforced, they lead to things like anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues.

So today, I want to focus on catastrophizing, which can also be thought of as expecting the worst-case scenario. This is super common and often comes with a lot of anticipatory anxiety about an upcoming situation or event that maybe we're feeling a bit anxious about. An example would be if your spouse usually gets home from work at six and he's ten minutes late. You give him a call, but he doesn't answer his phone. Immediately, your mind goes to, "Oh my gosh, he got into a car accident. His car flipped over, he's in a ditch, he's dead. I need to start calling hospitals," and you spiral out, expecting the worst-case scenario.

In a situation like that, we want to look at two factors: the probability that that's actually what happened and how catastrophic it is. In this case, it's pretty catastrophic, right? It would be a life-and-death situation. However, what is the probability that that is actually what happened? Do you have any evidence that that's what happened, or is this just something that your mind is making up? So we want to look for alternative explanations. Maybe he got stuck in heavy traffic because there's always construction, or maybe he got tied up on a work call and couldn't get out of the office at a particular time.

We want to look for other plausible explanations for a situation before jumping to the worst-case scenario, and then we can bring down that anxiety, allowing us to think more rationally and logically. But if we're in this really heightened anxious state, thinking that our partner is dead on the side of the road, we're not able to access that logical and rational part of our brain.

So going forward, pay attention to see if catastrophizing shows up in your thought processes at all. And if it does, ask yourself what's the likelihood or probability that this thing will actually happen and how catastrophic it is really. 99.999% of the time, the odds will be very low, and it will not be a life-and-death, world-ending type of situation.

I hope this is helpful. Join me next week for another cognitive distortion, and I hope you all have a great weekend. Take care.