Do you experience these thoughts and behaviors?
Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion and negative thinking pattern in which a person tends to magnify or exaggerate the potential consequences of a situation, problem, or event.
When someone is catastrophizing, they imagine the worst possible outcome to an extreme. They dwell on the idea that things will inevitably go badly wrong, regardless of how unlikely that may be.
Catastrophizing is a mental health concern that can cause severe problems.
This type of thinking can lead to increased anxiety, stress, and even panic attacks. People who catastrophize tend to jump to conclusions, ignore evidence that contradicts their catastrophic thoughts, and experience heightened emotional distress as a result. This negativity can easily lead to apprehension and dread about the future. And that is why you need to learn how to stop catastrophizing and reduce your anxiety to a more manageable level.
Effective management of catastrophizing can only begin if you are able to identify that you’re doing it, and when.
Here are 10 signs and indicators to look out for.
1. Overthinking and getting stuck in negative thought loops.
Overthinking refers to the mental process of dwelling on a thought, problem, or idea to such an extreme that it becomes difficult to reach a conclusion or find a solution. Often, the person will excessively analyze past events, worry about the future, or worry about the potential outcomes of a situation. Overthinking is often a cycle. Once a person starts overthinking, they get stuck in a loop of negative thoughts.
2. Racing thoughts that leave you feeling overwhelmed.
Racing thoughts are similar to overthinking but tend to be more intense and rapid. The thoughts are often an onslaught of repeated, uncontrollable thoughts without any real pattern or logic to them. They often cause the person to feel overwhelmed or shut down as they try to keep up with their thoughts.
3. Getting so stressed that you feel unable to cope.
Stress is a natural response to demanding, challenging situations. It can provide motivation to take action and deal with tough situations instead of avoiding them. However, excessive or chronic stress is unhealthy. The various processes that stress causes in a person, such as cortisol production, are not healthy in the long term. Catastrophizing tends to make stress worse and make it more difficult to cope.
4. Anxious feelings and fear even in benign situations.
Catastrophizing is a common cognitive distortion associated with anxiety. Due to the extreme nature of the thoughts associated with catastrophizing, it easily leads to amplified anxiety and fear. That amplified anxiety may cause exaggerated threat perception, avoidance, or excessive worrying. Exaggerated threat perception is finding threats in benign situations or creating threats out of thin air. You may even feel anxious when things are going well. Anxious feelings and fear may also impair one’s decision-making abilities.
5. Irrational anger.
Catastrophizing and anger may be connected when catastrophic thoughts trigger feelings of anger. Anger is often an extreme emotional response to injustices, frustrations, or threats. A person who is catastrophizing may be feeling frustrated, interpreting benign situations as threats, or severely self-critical. Self-critical catastrophizing typically leads to shame and anger.
6. Excessive pessimism that makes it hard to find hope or happiness.
Depressive thought patterns are closely linked with cognitive distortions like catastrophizing. Being that cognitive distortions are inherently negative, those thoughts often cause the person to make their own depression worse by dwelling on them. Pessimism is similar—the negative thought patterns are dominant and it’s difficult to find happiness, hope, or optimism when your brain is latched onto the worst that can happen.
7. Being so stuck in your head that you miss what is happening around you.
To be stuck in one’s head is to be so preoccupied with your thoughts that you aren’t engaged with the world around you. People often confuse it with dissociating because it looks similar. The difference, however, is that being stuck in your own head is a flood of thoughts and feelings rather than zoning out. Catastrophizing is responsible for an overload of negative thoughts and creating scenarios in your head that can be so overwhelming that one can get swept up in them.
8. Excessive internet searching to confirm your negative beliefs are true.
There are particular patterns and behaviors that link catastrophizing and internet searches. In many cases, the person will look up information related to their distorted thoughts to confirm to themselves that their thoughts are true.
The problem is that the internet is an echo chamber in many ways. Algorithms and communities tend to group like-minded people together. So, if you’re searching for information on how terrible the world is, that’s what it’s going to give you.
You may never see unbiased views or counterarguments unless you go looking for them directly. This may be a sign if you find yourself “researching” terrible things that you are afraid of or that you think will go wrong regularly.
9. Immediate jumping to negative conclusions, even when the supporting evidence is weak.
Catastrophizing magnifies the negative consequences of a situation to an extreme, regardless of how weak the evidence is to support the belief. As a result, the cognitive distortion takes you straight to the worst-case scenario without stopping to consider other, more rational explanations. Some examples include:
Example: Your friends cancel plans to hang out with you.
Thought: “I’m a terrible friend. Everyone must hate me to not want to hang out with me.”
Example: You make a mistake at work.
Thought: “My boss is going to think I’m incompetent. I bet they’ll fire me.”
Example: You receive a rejection email from a job you interviewed for.
Thought: “I’m never going to find a job. This is hopeless.”
Example: You have a persistent headache.
Thought: “I have a brain tumor. I just know it.”
Example: You face an unexpected expense.
Thought: “I can’t afford this. I’m going to wind up homeless.”
Finally…
Along with spotting the signs, understanding the root cause is another important step to reduce this cognitive distortion. Catastrophizing may be a symptom of a health condition or a learned behavior. For example:
Anxiety and stress: A person may catastrophize from chronic stress and anxiety. These mental health concerns distort your perception and interpretation of situations.
Past experiences: Trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, and negative experiences may cause hypersensitivity toward threats. This hypersensitivity creates a sense of vulnerability and that vulnerability may cause catastrophizing as a defense mechanism to avoid future negative outcomes.
Cognitive biases: A cognitive bias is the natural way one perceives and interprets information. A cognitive bias may cause someone to ignore neutral or positive aspects of a situation in addition to magnifying the negative.
Low self-esteem: Individuals with low self-esteem typically lack the confidence to handle future situations. They may believe they will experience negative outcomes because they are not good enough to cope with challenges.
Learned behavior: People who grew up around others who catastrophized may adopt it as learned behavior. They see other people doing it, so they learn the unhealthy behavior.
Lack of coping skills: A person with poor coping skills is more easily overwhelmed by stressors and uncertainty. A lack of skills may cause them to default to a worst-case scenario because they can’t handle the stress, anxiety, or depression.
Perfectionism: Perfectionists often fear failure. That fear of failure may cause the perfectionist to catastrophize because they often think in black and white; either success or failure. They tend to think that any setback or plan that doesn’t work out perfectly means that the whole effort was wasted. They may then personalize the failure.
Health conditions: Mental health conditions such as anxiety disorders and depression may increase the likelihood of catastrophizing. According to research and studies, catastrophizing can also be caused by physical illnesses like cancer and fibromyalgia. Pain catastrophizing may cause fears that the pain will never recede or get worse.
Environmental factors: Major life changes, financial difficulties, and challenging situations may all cause severe catastrophizing.
The best way to unpack the cause is to speak to a mental health professional to find the root of your negative thinking, and then ideally work towards more healthy thought processes.
