how to decatastrophize your life and your mind

a simple method for banishing anxiety and why creatives are more prone to it in the first place (part two of my two-part essay)

“When you find yourself inclined to brood on anything, no matter what, the best plan always is to think about it even more than you naturally would until at last its morbid fascination is worn off.”

— Betrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

In moments of fear and uncertainty, human beings tend to think and feel a lot. Introspection is a natural and healthy cognitive response to stress. It helps us to understand ourselves and our surrounding environment and to solve problems logically when and if they arise. Anxiety and neuroses occur when we become so deeply introspective that we begin to muddle our cognitive processes — mistaking our thoughts for feelings and vice-versa. This, in turn, messes up our sense of reality in a way that saps our energy and diminishes our ability to cope. This is called a lot of things but for the purposes of this essay, I will call it catatrophizing.

Here’s a helpful definition:

• Catastrophizing

• A cognitive distortion where someone automatically believes the worst possible outcome will happen, even if it's unlikely. This can lead to wasted energy and erode emotional well-being. 

When we catastrophize, we are allowing our conflated thought-feelings to lead us deeper and deeper into a psychological maze of overwhelm. The good news is, unless we are profoundly mentally ill, neurologically impaired and/or under the age of five, we all leave behind a handy cognitive bread crumb trail. By turning around, identifying the breadcrumbs and following the trail back, we can escape the maze of overwhelm and return ourselves to the sanity and safety of the present moment. To our bodies, our loved ones and our lives. This process is called decatastrophizing.

• Decatastrophizing

• The process of challenging and reducing the severity of distorted, irrational thoughts or dysfunctional beliefs that lead to catastrophic thinking.

I am going to explain how you can decatastrophize your mind and your life quickly and easily, but before I do, let’s talk about bit more about what it means to catastrophize and how to identify the trap of catastrophic thinking when you fall prey to it.

Here are some examples of catastrophic thinking cribbed from my own brain at various times in my life (including quite recently):

• Donald Trump has been re-elected President of the United States. All the social progress made in the post-war era will now be undone and the rules-based world order is over as we know it. Why bother recycling?

• If I flunk this exam I won’t get into university which means I won’t get a good job and I’ll end up poor and living on the street and probably die of a heroin overdose.

• He hasn’t texted me back, ergo this relationship won’t work out just like all the others and I’ll never meet the right person and end up alone and unloved for the rest of my life.

• This draft is terrible. I am incompetent. The person who hired me to do this is going to fire me and give my job to a better writer.

Notice the sloppiness of my thinking? The way I slide from from factual observation “Donald Trump has been re-elected President,” to wild assumption, “social progress will be undone,” then jump to a declaration of hopelessness that justifies a self-defeating behaviour, e.g. “the end is nigh, nothing matters (i.e. screw recycling)”?

If you’re human, you’ve probably experienced some version of catastrophic thinking yourself at some point. It’s extremely common, especially in people who read and write and think a lot. Especially on the social media. Especially among thoughtful and creative people, for instance, the kind of folks who hang around on Substack (bless each and every one of you).

The practical solution to this kind of sloppy unhelpful thinking is to teach ourselves to stand back and be mindful of of thoughts and feelings as they occur to us and, by extension, to experience them as psychological events rather than confusing them with our external reality. This practice has various names (distancing, detachment, thought diffusion, etc.) and there are various ways to get there, (e.g. meditation, hypnosis, talk therapy, journaling, a month beside an infinity pool in Bali), but the approach I’m recommending below is simple, effective, fast and pretty much idiot-proof. Plus it works like a charm.