From Catastrophic to Constructive: Techniques for Managing Unhelpful Thoughts
#TLDR
Catastrophic thinking, or catastrophizing, often leads to increased anxiety, stress and fatigue.
Catastrophizing is your brain’s attempt to anticipate and magnify the worst possible outcomes of a situation.
To combat these anxiety thoughts, you have to be able to recognize them in-the-moment.
Thought-Stopping, a technique taken from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, is an effective coping strategy for runaway anxiety thoughts.
If your brain is already deep in the rabbit hole with anxiety thoughts, mindfulness strategies are your best strategy.
Practice healthy coping skills when you don’t need them. Remember, “Wax on. Wax off” from The Karate Kid.
If you want help reducing unhelpful anxiety thoughts, counseling can help.
What is catastrophizing?
Catastrophic thinking, also known as catastrophizing, refers to a thinking error where your brain is working hard to anticipate and magnify the worst possible outcomes of a situation. It often involves irrational thoughts that something terrible is going to happen, and leads to heightened anxiety and stress. It’s exhausting.
How to never catastrophize again.
It would be wonderful if your brain would never experience worst-case scenario thoughts. But the reality is that your brain is hardwired to keep you safe. And, part of that mechanism is to anticipate ways you could get hurt (physically or emotionally).
While we have little to no control over those initial automatic thoughts, we can have control over whether or not we spiral into rabbits holes with those anxious thoughts.
The most difficult part of managing unhelpful anxiety thoughts is to recognize in-the-moment that we’re having them.
In general, we don’t think about what we’re thinking about. Therein begins the practice: to pay attention to individual thoughts, asking if that thought is helpful, and if it isn’t, replacing the thought with a more helpful thought.
I highly recommend taking the time to literally write down this process on a piece of paper: draw a line down the middle of the paper labeling the left side “unhelpful thoughts” and the right side “more helpful thoughts.” For each unhelpful thought, take the time to write down a more helpful alternative.
For example, if my boss sends me an email about having a face-to-face that afternoon, the automatic thought that pops into my head is, “Oh no, I’m getting fired.” A more helpful thought would be, “Well that’s curious and unnerving - guess I’ll have to wait and see what that’s about.”
Note: You can’t lie to yourself.
An important aspect to changing catastrophic anxiety thoughts into more helpful thoughts: you can’t lie to yourself. Meaning, the replacement thought needs to be realistic - something that you can believe is true. In the example above, it might be too far off to change the thought into, “I must be getting a promotion with a huge raise.”
What do to when it’s too late.
If your brain is already spiraling in the rabbit hole with catastrophizing anxiety thoughts, the mid-part of the brain is running the show. This means that the “smarter” prefrontal cortex isn’t able to logically identify and change unhelpful thoughts. So the strategy mentioned above is going to be less effective.
Mindfulness strategies help to calm down the mid-brain.
At this point, the best coping mechanisms are those which fall under the category of mindfulness. Mindfulness is being in the present moment without judgment. It’s a state of being grounded, noticing thoughts, feelings and your environment. These strategies physiologically calm down the mid-part of the brain, thereby granting you access to use the “smarter” prefrontal cortex and thinking-based coping skills.
There are many, many ways to practice mindfulness and most of them are quick and simple.
For example: pause what you’re doing right now and for just 20 seconds, sit up straight, take a deep breath and relax the muscles in your arms, shoulders and face; look around the room and really see and hear where you are.
More ways to practice: pop a super sour candy in your mouth and focus on the taste and sensation, belly breathe, use billboards to find letters to recite the alphabet, look around and notice all of the items that are red. For even more ways, check out this blog post.
Practice coping skills when you don’t need them.
A really important side note…
I cannot stress enough how important it is to practice healthy coping strategies when they are not needed. When that anxious mid-part of the brain takes over, we are less able to remember what ‘tools are in our toolboxes’ so to speak.
Remember the original Karate Kid movie? Specifically the scene when Mr. Miyagi requires Danial-san to wax the car in order to help him build muscle memory so he can more effectively block during Karate matches?
That’s what I’m talking about. Practicing coping skills when they aren’t needed helps to build “muscle memory” so the skills are more available to you when we need them.
