Catastrophise? It's my middle name
Make worst-case-scenario-thinking work in your favour
If there's one thing you can rely on me to do it's to catastrophise. Here's an example (ever so slightly exaggerated but not really, for your reading pleasure) of the kind of monologue running through my mind on a given day. I was due to meet my friend for a cinema date at 12pm. I texted her at 10.30 to suss out getting there and if I'd pick her up. No word. 'Maybe she forgot.' At 11, I text again. No read receipts. 'She must have forgotten. This happens to me a lot. I must be forgettable. Does anyone even like me? Remember when the whole day went by before your girls' WhatsApp group realised it was your birthday? Yet nobody else's birthday has ever been forgotten in the annals of Whatsapp group time. And you're usually the first to realise it's someone else's birthday before 9am. Am I even important to my friends?' Another few minutes go by, and I'm unsure whether to just head in and hope she's there, but ran out of battery. I switch abruptly to 'What if she's lying in a ditch somewhere? OMG, she must be dead.' I don't know if I'm on my own here, but there have been countless times when I'll mentally begin stepping through what would happen if my husband died because he's later than he said he'd be and is unreachable by phone. My mind goes to a car crash in seconds. Seconds later, I'm making mental notes for the eulogy. And then he calls me, and everything's fine. I feel silly but know I'll never not jump to the worst-case scenario when my mind has the opportunity to wander while worried. I wonder how people avoided panic before the advent of smartphones. So, by this point, my friend is - to my mind - fully deceased. I consider doing a drive-by of her house on my way to the cinema to see if I can observe signs of something being wrong. A hearse, maybe. I try calling again. No answer. I WhatsApp the girls to see if anyone has heard from her. A few people see it and don't immediately reply. 'Do they know something I don't know?' I call my one friend, who usually knows the other friend's whereabouts. She doesn't answer. 'She must also be dead. DID THEY DIE TOGETHER?' Where were they? I don't remember getting an invite. Well, maybe don't be mad if they're dead.' I'm almost at the car park for the cinema, and I am contemplating going to see the film alone. Probably not a good idea if all my friends have just died. Then my friend - the one I'm due to meet - calls me. I got the weekend wrong. She's not even in Ireland this weekend. I tell her I must go because I have about seven people looped in on a search party that I can now call off. Everyone starts to reply. The other friend is also alive and well.
Nobody died. Nobody forgot me. I simply made the kind of mistake I make more often than I'd like to admit. I am a professional 'got the day wrong’-er. I drive back home, still enough of a journey left to catastrophise about my clearly decaying mind and how I get these kinds of things wrong a little too often. My friends all have a good LOL about how 'mad' I am and the leaps my mind can make in a calamitous direction.
But here's the thing. Though it's one of the main issues people want to resolve when it comes to their experience of anxiety and is known in psychology circles as a 'common mind trap' that needs to be addressed, I really don't mind my tendency to catastrophise. It doesn't give me that much anxiety (as long as said catastrophising turns out to have been needless, of course). And I don't feel the need to do anything about it, possibly because I cannot stop those kinds of thoughts from arising. They pop up as quickly as my chin hairs. What matters is how I respond to them. And I think I'm pretty good at saying, 'Oh, there you are, Armageddon-level thinking, how nice of you to stop by. I see you, I hear you, but I won't absorb you.' It's the same way I can calmly sit on a plane, confront the idea that the plane may go down, and this may be the end of the road for me, and not dissolve into panic. It's a passive consideration - and possibly even acceptance - of how wrong things could go.
There is an arguable upshot for tending towards the catastrophic. There's a few, actually. For one, it's a tool (albeit a fairly blunt one) with which we can experience gratitude. Having some awareness of what I don't want to happen - as long as it's not the background track running 24/7 - makes me appreciate the things I might otherwise take for granted, such as my husband walking in the door after work. Allowing our minds to occasionally run through a more negative course of events can also take the edge off the fear. Not to do with death, obviously. Nothing's going to make that easier. But if, for example, I'm catastrophising about making a total hames of a public speaking engagement, indulging in that kind of thinking enables me to then say, 'Okay, well, I suppose if that does happen, I can be okay with it? Or, at the very least, I'll survive.'
What's more, it then spurs me into troubleshooting mode. What is the likelihood of that happening? Can I take measures to ensure it doesn't? Do I need to tape down rogue wires in case I trip over them mid-monologue? It sharpens my senses towards what could go wrong and encourages me to prepare a little bit extra.
There's a huge wellness trend around positive visualisation, and studies show how powerful it can be. Athletes do it all the time, literally stepping through every motion and movement involved. Its power is indisputable, but I believe there's still room for a little bit of catastrophising in the mix—provided you do that bit first.
Here's how I use catastrophising to my advantage: you think of all the ways things could go wrong, indulging in your fears so they don't pop up later on at some inopportune time (such as right before you launch into your presentation at work). While most certainly exaggerated, your fears are still valid and probably there for a reason. The reason might be that what you stand to lose is important to you. Or something requires your focus or awareness - some key bit of information you'd do well to remember. You troubleshoot ways to give yourself the best chance of success, which is just smart. Then, because you haven't had positivity shoved down your throat (which alone is not effective) and your worries minimised in the process (bad idea), you can properly visualise things going right and consider the ways in which it might very well work out.
To me, whether it's a scary thought like what I described at the beginning of this post or a more routine tendency to assume things will go terribly, there's no harm in having an occasional flirt with the worst-case scenario. Don't try to change your brain to the point that you only have thoughts of rainbows and sunshine (good luck with that). But do choose to simply observe the negative thoughts that knock in unannounced and then harness your reaction to them.