Making a mountain out of a molehill...

So let's talk about catastrophizing. That is our tendency to have something happen to us, extremely overreact/freak out, and create a huge crisis in our heads that has very little to do with reality. I believe that somehow our minds believe that they need to do this in order to save us. I can't think of why else as it seems to come so naturally to both myself, and the majority of the clients I have worked with. I heard a Tony Robbins(if you don't know who this is, he's a motivational speaker that I didn't really care too much for before I heard him say this one thing--I like when things/people can prove me wrong) talk that gave some validity to my theory. He said something along the lines of our brains being wired to the fight/flight/extremely overreact response because we used to get chased by sabertooth tigers and we never grew out of that. We used to have to worry about everything because we would literally be eaten if not.

I believe that we never evolved past this because this tendency to excessively worry, catastrophize, and engage in doom and gloom thinking keeps us warm at night. It offers us some sense of control and security over things that are 100% out of our control. It makes us feel like we are preparing.

In reality it's quite the opposite, and can be an incredible avoidance technique. When something bad happens to us rather than let ourselves feel that hurt and sadness, we get so caught up in what we need to do to deal with all these scenarios we are completely making up in her heads. It's our brains defense against feeling sad, and it's really clever because there's no time for sadness with all these catastrophes to tackle. We are looking for the truth/solution in the places it is easiest to search (imagined situations) rather than where it is likely to be (in the present moment).

Our mind is getting mixed information. It thinks that doom and gloom thinking works, protects us, or serves us some greater purpose that we may not even be aware of. When truly it holds us back from finding a solution that works, protects us, and serves a purpose--our own anxiety makes the very thing it fears come to life. We are so caught up in imagination world that we are unprepared for reality. So what can we do? We play tricks on our mind, we make it believe that it's protecting us. We do this by actually being productive and creating a plan based on what's actually happening--groundbreaking stuff here. Once we know why our mind wants to go to worst case scenario we can attack accordingly.

Say you tend to overreact because you once trusted a friend and they stabbed you in the back--now your brain is making you think you must be over-prepared for this possibility because you can't possibly deal with that hurt and betrayal again. Instead of excessively worrying you can make the choice to create boundaries for yourself, make a general plan of what you would do if you noticed someone not respecting your needs (avoid going into specifics because that's the essence of catastrophizing), and learn to love and value yourself, to name a few. Remind yourself of these things when it (I call it an it because our minds somehow get a mind of their own separate from our own desires/wants) starts to worry, basically telling your mind to "Chill out we got this, there's no tiger chasing us down for it's next meal"

I help my clients to expand the possibilities they have to intentionally respond and act. Once you have figured out what excessive worrying is trying to accomplish in each situation, you won't need to make up things in your head to deal with, because you'll be too busy productively dealing with real world situations. You will know that catastrophizing is a nasty trap and you will be able to talk yourself out of doing it. It will still come up, as it does for me, but it will last about 2 minutes before you catch on and refocus yourself to something you can actually do. Re-channelling that energy is going to save you from so many fake arguments in your head you won't even know what to do with all the free time.