Hi, everyone. I'm Emma McAdam. I'm a licensed
marriage and family therapist. And in this video we're going to talk about catastrophizing,
which is expecting the worst. Catastrophizing is an excellent way to make yourself anxious and
depressed and completely ruin your life. Oh, yeah, and I'm going to teach you three things you can do
to stop catastrophizing. So let's talk about that. Late one night a man was driving along a dark
rural road. He was out far from any towns, and he was just trying to get home. All of
a sudden he hears a loud bang and the thump thump thump of a flat tire. He's irritated, but no
need to panic; he knows how to change a tire. So he gets out of the car, he gets into the trunk, he
pulls out the spare tire and the lug wrench. And then he realizes with a sinking feeling that his
jack is missing. You can't change a tire without a jack. Then he checks his phone and he doesn't have
reception. So now he's stuck. As he's wondering what to do, he looks down the road and he sees
a porch light a long ways away. It looks like a little farmhouse. And he decides to walk over and
ask the farmer if he could borrow a jack. The walk was long and dark. And at one point he trips over
a pothole and he falls and he tears a hole in his pants. And he just he keeps stumbling along in
the dark, worrying about what he's going to do. It's dark, it's late, and he starts to imagine
what will happen when he reaches the farmhouse. The farmer will probably already be in bed.
He'll probably be cranky about being woken up. But the man keeps walking. And as he walks through
the dark, other thoughts come to him. What if the farmer doesn't have a jack? Farmers have guns.
What if he pulls that out? The farmer's probably going to sic a huge dog on him. What if the farmer
realizes that the man's alone and he robs him? He thinks, "I don't deserve to be treated that
way. None of this is fair." And at this point the man is scared, but he's also getting angry.
He knows that this farmer is going to be a jerk, but he still needs his jack. So he walks up to
the front door and he knocks. And as he waits for a response, he imagines this angry farmer
screaming at him, threatening him, chasing him, shooting him. And he hears footsteps. The door
swings open, and a man says, "Can I help you?" And the stranded man, all red-faced and
angry, yells, "I don't want your dang jack anyway!" and he grabs the door and
he slams it shut and he storms away. Now, catastrophizing is a common cognitive distortion
or thinking error. It's when we think of a current or future situation as a catastrophe. So for
example, you worry that you're gonna fail a test, and then you imagine what would happen when you
do fail. You're gonna get kicked out of school. You're going to end up working a dead-end job,
fail at life, and die homeless on the street. And all of this because of a test at school.
Catastrophizing is imagining the worst. It's taking a difficult situation and
interpreting it as being horrible, terrible, and unrecoverable. We all know that person who if
they get a B on a test wails, "I'm failing math." Right? Many of us have had a parent who when
we didn't want to do our chores, they said something like, "Oh, if you don't do your chores,
your college roommates will hate you and no one will want to marry you." Right? Like in the story
about the jack, catastrophizing often starts with a genuine setback, like getting a flat tire in
the middle of nowhere. But then the thinking error turns that reality into a belief that something
horrible is likely to happen. "I'm gonna get shot or robbed and attacked." Right? At its root,
catastrophizing is about our habitual response to challenges or shortcomings. So take a second
pause, this video, and ask yourself how do you think about failure? When these habits, these
thinking habits become part of a repeated pattern, they lead to depression or anxiety, and people
tend to imagine that they'll never be able to recover. So here's some common examples.
Someone with anxiety imagines losing control of himself. So for example, a man with a panic
disorder predicts that if he goes to the mall on a weekend afternoon, he'll have a panic attack
,and then he predicts that having a panic attack would be a catastrophe rather than
just being really uncomfortable. Or a woman with depression envisions herself being
depressed forever and never feeling happy again. Or a 30-year-old man imagines himself never
finding love and imagining that if he doesn't, he will be plagued by intense feelings of
loneliness 24/7 from now until he dies. Right? Or a teen equates not being in a text
group with being totally rejected by everyone. So how does catastrophizing mess us up? We have
all experienced some tragedies in our life, including painful rejection or failure, and I
think that we trick ourselves into believing that if we can expect the worst we can prevent
it. But in reality, usually the exact opposite happens. So think about the man from the jack
story. Because he feared getting rejected, he slammed the door shut himself. He cut
himself off from the opportunity to get the solution he needed because he was thinking
about everything that could go wrong. 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. So if we go into a conversation expecting the other person to get defensive, we often lead
off by being harsher or more rigid, inviting the other to be more defensive. If you expect that
your crush will reject you if you ask her out, then you don't ask her out. You end up alone on
the weekend. 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. These are the happiness, pleasure, and motivation chemicals. So 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 physical fear response, the fight/flight/freeze response. And 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? And it also enables us to wallow in self-pity. Catastrophizing
closes us off to opportunities and options that might work, and it leads to this sense of
paralysis. So if catastrophizing is so harmful, why do we keep doing it? At this point I've
got to pause because some of you out there have started this super unhelpful thought process
of "Yeah, why am I such an idiot? I am so broken. See, I am defective because I do this stuff."
Okay. You need to stop that. Take a deep breath. You are not defective. You might be doing
something that's not working well for you, but that doesn't mean you're bad or broken. It
means you can change and get feeling better. So if you need to, pause this video and take a
second to be kind to yourself and practice some courage. Changing how we think takes work, but you
can do hard things. Okay. So let's go back to the question, why do we catastrophize? Well, it serves
a function, albeit a dysfunctional one. We do it for one of two reasons. Number one: preparing
for the worst is a coping strategy, preventing us from feeling risk or uncertainty. So 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 feelings,
to protect ourselves from feeling sadness or worry. But the crazy thing is that when we try
not to feel, we often end up more depressed and anxious. So expecting the worst also justifies us
for not even trying, and it attempts to excuse our failure before we put in any effort. So 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. When you catastrophize, you're not risking
failure, but you can't have success. You're not getting rejected, but you're still alone on the
weekend. Okay. Dysfunctional function number two: sometimes we think 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 depressed and anxious and overwhelmed and less functional. Let me use a school anxiety
example. So a kid's not going to school because of anxiety. The parents also feel anxious about this,
so they go into a room and say, "You have to get up or else you are going to ruin your life. You
have to go to school or you'll never get a good job," etc., etc. And in the short term this gets
the kid out of bed and into school. But then she spends the rest of her day worrying about being
a failure, and the next day she has even more anxiety and it's even harder to get motivated
to go to school. So do you do this? 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. So let's find something that's more functional
than our self-justifying, self-defeating catastrophizing. So first off, try to start with
a good night's rest. When we're sleep-deprived, we're hypersensitive to threats and we're less
resilient in the face of challenges. When you're rested you'll have a greater ability to face
these challenges bravely. Okay. Number two: 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. So instead of labeling anxiety as bad or harmful
or terrible or "I can't handle it," you say, "Well, this is uncomfortable, but it won't
injure me." You say, "I can do hard things." Courage is not the absence of fear but the
judgment that something else is more important. So living life is about embracing acceptable risk
and the anxiety that comes with it as a normal and natural and helpful part of life. And as you do
this, you build up emotional muscles to experience uncomfortable emotions. And you can also practice
this by doing mindfulness and meditation or just doing something every day that scares you. Okay.
Number three: motivate yourself by what you want in life, by what you value and you hope instead of
trying to use fear. So these are called positive goals. So instead of saying, you know, "Oh, I have
to go to school so that I don't die homeless on the street," you say, "I choose to go to school
because I want to be a therapist when I grow up." Okay. I never said that as a kid, but you get
the idea. Right? Choose what you do want in life. Break it down into small goals, and then
just bravely work toward those little by little. Okay. So here's the classic CBT approach to ending
catastrophizing. So number one: just start by noticing when you are catastrophizing. What are
the words you use? Are they things like never, terrible, fail, rejected, awkward? Anything that's
an exaggeration, making things out to be worse than they are. And then getting better as well
at noticing what are the situations you tend to catastrophize about? And, you know, write down
what it looks like when you do it. Ask a family member or a friend to point it out to you. Right?
So this is the first step in emotion processing. It's observing, it's getting better at noticing
what's going on with your thought patterns and your behaviors. Then the second step in emotion
processing is to pause. Right? So just because you think something doesn't mean it's true. Just
because you feel something doesn't mean you have to believe it. So now is a great chance. Just
slow it down. Take a deep breath. Number three is explore. Right? Challenge those thoughts. Right?
Just because you think something doesn't mean it's true. Learn to notice and gently question your
thoughts. You don't have to believe everything you think, but you also don't need to beat yourself
up for having these thoughts, like saying things like, "Oh, what's the matter with me? Why do
I always think this way?" That's also not very helpful. So instead, like, get better at noticing
your thoughts and letting them pass through. This is another skill from acceptance and commitment
therapy. It's called cognitive diffusion, and you can practice it with activities like Leaves
on the Stream or the skills I teach in my video How to Stop Intrusive Thoughts and
Overthinking. So I'll link those below. Okay. Number four is choose. Right? Replace those
thoughts with something more honest and more helpful. So once you start to notice this type
of thinking, you pause and you explore it. You can bravely pick up your emotional sword, and
you can begin to combat this kind of thinking with more honest and more rational thoughts,
thoughts that line up more with who you want to be and your values. And some of the ways I like to
do this are to think things like this: "Okay, even if something bad did happen, I could learn from
it. It wouldn't be the end of the world," etc. So here's a couple of examples. Say someone
says something like, "Oh no, I am such an idiot. I already made a mistake on this report;
I'm never gonna finish it. Or if I do, it's gonna be so flawed that it won't matter.
I'm gonna get fired no matter what." Okay. Wait. Pause. That's not true. Okay. Let's explore some
alternatives here. "Everybody makes mistakes." Uh okay. "I'm only human." There's another one.
"I'll fix this mistake, and if I need to ask for help I can. But I'm just gonna keep working
hard and try to be more careful in the future." Or something more like, "Oh, nobody's gonna
fire me for a mistake or two in a report." Okay. See how we're replacing the catastrophizing
thoughts with thoughts that are a little bit more helpful? Okay. Here's another example: someone
says something like, "Oh, I can't believe I said that to my boyfriend. He's gonna leave me for
sure this time." Okay. Let's replace that with maybe like, "Oh, I shouldn't have said that to
my boyfriend. I really need to learn how to talk kindly when I'm upset. I'm gonna apologize and try
to make it right. Hopefully he'll understand and accept my apology and we'll both learn something
from this." Okay. So challenging catastrophizing, this approach, it requires us to stay engaged even
when there's a risk of things not going perfectly. And this is called vulnerability, the potential
for success and also for getting hurt. But the only alternative is to guarantee failure by
cutting yourself off before you even try. So I'm a big fan of acceptance and commitment
therapy. It's it's a process which basically trains you to get better at feeling, to
open yourself up to the emotions that come with living the life you value - love, joy
and sadness and worry and hope, excitement, anxiety. As you come to wholeheartedly
embrace life and your goals and your values, you'll get better and better at living with some
risk, and you'll be rewarded with lots of good things happening to you all the time. May good
things come to you as you courageously face life and the risks, joys, loves that come with it. For
those of you who are long-time followers, you may have noticed that this video is a remake of one
of my old videos, and that's because that video had a couple things that needed to be improved. So
I hope you don't mind me making a better version of my video on catastrophizing. So
thank you all for watching. Take care.
