How to Stop Catastrophising

Catastrophic thinking is a distorted way of thinking that pushes us down and then gives us a kick: we do not just imagine the worst will happen. We also believe that when the worst does inevitably happen, the results will ruin us.

Say you have misplaced your credit card. Immediately you think someone has picked it up. They are using it. They are going to drain your bank account. What is more, you decide, they are going to steal your identity and your entire life is ruined.

Or you notice a pain in your side. It must be cancer, you decide. You are going to die, you tell yourself. Even worse, the treatment will be too expensive and your family will be plunged into poverty and they will end up homeless and the kids’ futures will be ruined.

It is not real. It is not rational. You are catastrophising.

What is catastrophising?

Catastrophising is sometimes called “worst case scenario thinking”. David Robson, author of The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life, calls catastrophising “a mental habit in which you overestimate the chances of something bad happening, and exaggerate the potential negative consequences of that scenario.”

As French philosopher, Michel De Montaigne, once described, “My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”

Why is it so damaging?

This kind of negative thinking can have intense psychological and physical consequences.

Not to catastrophise, but this kind of negative thinking can make you more vulnerable to other mental conditions, and can even increase your feelings of physical pain.

One of the reasons is that your body and nervous system cannot tell the difference between real danger or imagined danger. When you think catastrophic thoughts, your system has a stress response, which reduces your ability to think clearly.

“The catastrophic misinterpretation of the bodily signals fuels anxiety and fear, which then makes it more likely that you will interpret the situation catastrophically,” says Barnabas Ohst, a psychotherapist in Freiburg, Germany, and a co-author of a recent meta-analysis examining the role of catastrophic thinking in panic disorder.

Secondly, catastrophising can make your more vulnerable to other mental illness including phobias and obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can also make other anxiety conditions worse: you can imagine the impact of perfectionism mixed with catastrophising: every tiny mistake you make would mean your life is ruined.