ICRAVE Not Catastrophizing

Catastrophizing is a common cognitive distortion or thinking error. It’s when we think of a current or future situation as a catastrophe.

• For example, you worry that you’re going to fail a test but then you imagine what would happen when you do fail.
  • You’re going to fail out of school end up working at McDonald’s, never have success in life, and die homeless on the street.

Catastrophizing often starts with genuine setbacks. It’s imagining the worst, taking a difficult situation and interpreting it as being horrible, terrible, and unrecoverable.

• Someone with anxiety goes to the mall on a weekend afternoon and imagines he’ll have a panic attack
• A woman with depression envisions herself being depressed forever and never feeling happy again.
• A teen equates some type of mild to moderate social rejection with being totally shunned by all desirable people.

We have all experienced some tragedies in our life including painful rejection or failure, and we trick ourselves into believing that if we expect the worst, we can prevent it.  

• But in reality usually the exact opposite happens.
• Seeing the worst often invites the worst. Not only do we cut ourselves off from opportunities but we invite the exact problems we’re hoping to avoid.
  • If we go into a conversation expecting the other to get defensive, we often lead off by being harsher or more rigid, inviting the other to get defensive.
  • If you expect that your crush will reject you if you ask him out and then you don’t ask him out, you end up alone on the weekend.

When these habits become part of a repeated pattern they lead to depression or anxiety, and people tend to imagine never being able to recover.

• Catastrophizing invites depression. When we imagine a future that is bleak, threatening, or hopeless, then our brain responds by putting out less serotonin and dopamine.
  • the happiness, pleasure, and motivation chemicals.
  • Why be happy or hopeful when the future is impossibly dreary?
  • This leads to a cycle of withdrawal from life a lack of motivation and a pattern of depression.
• Catastrophizing also invites anxiety. It forces our brain to see threats and failure everywhere, and our brain responds to perceived threats with a very real fear response
  • the fight, flight, freeze response.
  • This contributes to social anxiety, general anxiety, panic attacks, and more.
• Expecting the worst makes us hopeless and depressed about the future.
  • It makes us unmotivated.
    • “Why try if I’m just gonna fail?”
  • It enables us to wallow in self-pity.

Catastrophizing closes us off to opportunities and options that might work, and it leads to a sense of paralysis.

• Preparing for the worst is a coping strategy preventing us from feeling risk or uncertainty.
  • “If I expect myself to fail I won’t be disappointed if I do.”  
  • “If I reject myself first then I don’t have to worry that my crush will do it to me.”
• Catastrophizing is an attempt to avoid a feeling to protect ourselves from feeling sadness or worry.
  • But the crazy thing is that when we try not to feel, we often end up depressed and anxious.
• Expecting the worst also justifies us for not even trying.
  • attempts to excuse our failure before we put in an effort
  • No wonder it feels more comfortable than putting your heart out there.
• It’s comfortable in the short term but it crushes the joy out of life in the long run.
  • Sometimes we think that or we’ve been trained to believe that the best motivation is fear.
  • That in order to motivate ourselves to study or to go to work we have to predict doom and gloom.
  • Fear as motivation works briefly but in the long run it makes us anxious, depressed, overwhelmed, and less functional.

Re-Source: Review

examine or assess (something) with the possibility or intention of instituting change if necessary

“Courage is not the absence of fear but the judgment that something else is more important”

Do you try to give yourself a pep talk but it’s really more of a fear talk?

• We or our parents may have used fear in the past as a strong motivator but it’s just not a sustainable source of motivation.

Find something that’s more functional than our self justifying, self-defeating catastrophizing.

• Accept uncertainty as a natural and acceptable part of living a wholehearted life.
• This is a fundamental life skill that can be developed and practiced, it involves changing how you think about anxiety.
• Embrace acceptable risk and the anxiety that comes with it as normal, natural, and helpful. 
• Build up your emotional muscles to experience uncomfortable emotions by practicing mindfulness meditation, or doing something that scares you every day. 
• Motivate yourself by what you want, value, and hope for in life, instead of trying to use fear.
• Choose what you do want in life.  Break it down into small goals, and bravely work toward those little by little.
• Start by noticing when you are catastrophizing.  What are the words you use when catastrophizing. 
  • Commonly these are things like never, terrible, failure, rejected, awkward; or using exaggerations, making things out to be worse than they are. 
• Notice what are the situation’s you tend to catastrophize about.
  • write down what it looks like when you do it.

Challenge those thoughts. Just because you think it, doesn’t mean it’s true.

• Learn to notice and gently question your thoughts.  
• You don’t have to believe everything you think, but also don’t beat yourself up for thoughts saying things like,
  • “What’s the matter with me?”
  • “Why do I always think this way?” 
• Instead, notice your thoughts and let them pass.
  • Replace those thoughts with something more honest and helpful.
• Once you start to notice this type of thinking, you can bravely pick up your emotional sword and begin to combat it with more honest more rational thoughts.

As you come to wholeheartedly embrace life, your goals, and your values, you’ll get better and better at living with some risk.

• And you’ll be rewarded with good things happening to you all the time.
• Make good things come to you as you courageously face life and the risks, joys, and love that come with it.

craving and resource from “Catastrophizing – How to stop making yourself depressed and anxious” by Therapy in a Nutshell