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In 2004, I had a six-week fellowship at MacDowell, an artists’ residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire. A few weeks before heading there, I moved in with someone I shouldn’t have.

Now, after a blissful few days visiting me, he was driving back to Brooklyn from Peterborough.

The drive back was long—around six hours—but when I hadn’t heard from him after a few hours on the road, and my calls went straight to voicemail, I knew he was dead.

Of course, he was dead.

What other possible explanation was there?

That he was driving?

That he was getting gas?

That he was getting food, in a bathroom, at an outlet store because...WHO DOESN’T LOVE AN OUTLET STORE?!

You call those options?

He was dead.

I was inside the belief, already filled with grief and the sad ever-after that follows when a true love dies too young. Would I have it in me to speak at the funeral? Probably not. I’d also have to move. How would I afford a new place on my own? I would not survive this...

The frothy state I’d whipped myself into is called, in cognitive parlance, Catastrophizing or awfulizing (a term that didn’t catch on, but I love it so much).

Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion—an irrational or harmful thought pattern causing a misperception of reality—that leads a person to jump to the worst possible conclusion based on limited, often subjective, information. It’s a common symptom of anxiety disorders and clinical depression, typecast as the trusty antagonist that comes in to make things worse when things could go either way.

Later, after he called back to reassure me that he was not dead, I reflected on the moment. I recognized my impulse to skip the rational middle and jump straight into the disaster of the irrational. I’d been doing it my entire life.

The renowned psychologist Albert Ellis (1913–2007) believed irrational thinking patterns were at the root of most psychological problems—he coined the term catastrophizing.

In the 1950s, he pioneered a form of cognitive therapy, initially called Rational Therapy and later known as Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), to help his patients improve their emotional well-being more quickly. Ellis’ action-oriented approach to confronting and changing irrational beliefs laid the groundwork for Dr. Aaron Beck and what is now known as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

Catastrophizing is common among people with anxiety disorders—whether social, generalized, panic, agoraphobia, or OCD—and it’s also associated with anger-related problems and depression (lest you feel excluded).

However, you don’t need to have a mental health disorder to catastrophize. Anyone can be a catastrophizer—join us! (No, don’t.)

Anxiety is often described as the tendency to overestimate threats while underestimating one's ability to cope with them, resulting in increased worry. A fine loop, indeed.

Albert Ellis believed that catastrophizing arises from an underlying core of irrational beliefs, which become obstacles to achieving personal goals.

When a child predisposed to anxiety is exposed to an irrational, chaotic, or unstable environment, the environment, more often than not, will awaken their anxiety. In other words, the irrational environment gives rise to irrational belief. And when you grow up in an emotionally unstable environment, there’s no one around to guide you through managing that instability. The environment that caused the issue cannot be the one that solves it.

It makes sense then that irrational beliefs often occur in the space between a trigger and what’s triggered. Because it’s there, in that space, where one manages their emotions. When we don’t learn how to regulate emotions, we develop maladaptive methods that lead to emotional dysregulation, giving rise to negative emotional responses that prevent us from behaving appropriately.

Then we grow into adults with bad coping mechanisms. Lucky us!

Ellis believed irrational beliefs leads to catastrophizing—but does it?

What if that’s just a piece of it? What if catastrophizing stems not just from irrational beliefs but also from a person’s inability to find the rational view when it’s needed? What if catastrophizing stems from irrational beliefs + the inability to find a rational view + the discomfort of not knowing what to do?

Perhaps this triad triggers the cascade of catastrophic thinking.

Anxious people are on heightened alert to danger, and catastrophizing is calling the cops when someone knocks on the door, instead of looking to see who it is. We go straight to the worst case scenario. We do it so often, it becomes automatic.

We train our brains for it.

This automatic search for catastrophe becomes a reflexive response that will ensure no one ever visits you, lest they knock on your door. When a catastrophizer faces a problem, they struggle to solve it because they can’t consider multiple possibilities.

This inability to entertain more likely outcomes is an error of conditioning.

A catastrophizer believes their worst-case scenario-making is a system of preparation. If you practice, you’ll be ready.

But catastrophizing doesn’t help solve the problem because catastrophizing is the problem. It feels real, so we believe it. And believing perpetuates it.

So, how does one get out of this loop?

In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy terms, catastrophic thinking is known as “automatic thoughts.”

In Buddhism, it’s the first arrow.

What follows—our reaction to that thought—is the second arrow. The second arrow is what makes things worse for ourselves. It’s what automatic thoughts are made of. The second arrow is our resistance to accepting what has just occurred.

What I’ve learned about anxiety is that information is the antidote. Information is found in learning how to handle discomfort.

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Parents explain to their kids what to do if they get lost. They memorize their phone number. They’re told to go into the nearest store, find a police officer, or approach someone with children.

But what about the kid whose parents never told them what to do? This is how catastrophizers are born. It’s the not knowing what to do that gets filled in with irrational fears. Without information on how to cope, we go haywire. With information on how to cope, we have several options to try first.

Whenever I have a thought that triggers catastrophic feelings, I walk myself through every possible outcome. This is a different sort of preparation; it’s productive. It lays the groundwork for a more emotionally regulated mindset.

Everyone can learn to identify and reframe exaggerated conclusions. An especially helpful technique is to start small and use other people’s situations instead of your own. Someone tells you they got lost in an airport and missed their plane. Walk yourself through this scenario. What are the most helpful, reasonable steps you could take if you had missed your plane? 

Walk yourself through.

The more you get into the habit of solving problems this way, and figuring out all possible options, the more prepared you’ll be for when something goes wrong.

Try it and let me know how it goes in the comments!

Until next week I will remain…

Cover image: Dinosaurs by Jean-Michele Basquiat