What is Catastrophizing and why can’t I stop it?

Catastrophizing is a learned behavior, most present in “young adults” between the ages of 18-35. It can be linked to and affected by past experiences, anxiety, depression, or personality traits. While it exists for survival, it also contributes largely to chronic stress and negativity.

There is no one size fits all coping mechanism for catastrophizing, sometimes not worrying about what may happen down the line helps. Sometimes exploring your mind’s best and worst case scenarios can allow you to understand how childish and unrealistic they are, since as we know life is an ugly pool of grey, not black and white. The best found strategy is to just have more confidence, which comes from experience and data.

What happens though, when experience and data show that everything is in decline, that you can easily fall into an even worse case scenario than you could have imagined? How do we keep our confidence when life is proverbially kicking us in the teeth, and has been for some time?

I used to be an introvert, the most terrified, shy little kid who ever lived, lots of things went bad pretty regularly. But life has allowed me to become an extrovert who isn’t afraid to jump in the mix to make a situation better, safer, or at least kinda funny.

My brain has catastrophized for so long though, it is second nature. I look at a cliff and the first thing that happens is my brain imagining slipping, tripping, the whole cliff detaching and sliding off, and every possibly applicable variable, until the view almost seems paultry for the potential cost.

I live a lot of my life with a knot in my stomach and a lump in my throat, because the one thing you have to do while you’re alive is of course, live. I tried to surround myself with supportive people, and that number has been waning, which was and still is very unfortunate as well as being invasive and negatively impacting the parts of my life that have organic anxiety and stress for me to deal with, but enough bad things happen frequently enough it feels like a fool’s errand to write bad scenarios off, and to be unprepared and stuck in a bad situation is gut wrenching.

So to all of you out there, what helps you when your brain wants to warn you about the nonstop peril creeping in from all sides? How do you save room for the stress of your employer’s harassment? Or family turning on you? Or someone acting very much like they want to take your life with aggressive driving maneuvers on the freeway?