Who is popular today?

Greek Chorus Leader : Don’t go any further. I know what you’re thinking, Lenny, and forget it! Lenny Weinrib : I can’t forget it; the thought’s been put in my head.
Chorus : Oh, cursed fate; certain thoughts are better left unthunk.
– From Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite, 1995

“It’s awful. It’s terrible. It’s the absolute worst thing that could happen. Nothing is ever going to get better,” said someone, about everything.
We’ve been around people who think like that, haven’t we? We may even be the people who think like that. For some it’s a sporadic thing; for others it’s all the time. The pervasive attitude that everything is going to hell in a handcart is the basic makeup of catastrophising.
Catastrophising is expecting the worst things to happen, even when there is scant evidence that a worst-case scenario is likely or even realistic. And these thoughts, once there, want to stay circling in your head.
And, as is appropriate for catastrophising, it gets worse. While it is not a mental disorder, catastrophising can be both the cause and effect of one. So, let’s say you suffer from anxiety or panic disorder, you’re more likely than the non-anxious person to fall into this way of thinking. From the other direction, if you tend to catastrophise, you put yourself in a good position to fall into depression.
Consider Chicken Little, one of the first popular environmental advocates and, surprisingly, the only one from the poultry community. Yes, Mr Little was a catastrophiser. There was a small incident at home and, because he couldn’t quite make out the “how” of the thing that happened, he came to the worst possible conclusion.
Maybe there would be cause for one of us to worry, but surely on farms in Storyville, acorns fall from trees all the time. But he doesn’t see the nut (I know, the irony is killing me too). He doesn’t ask anyone nearby if they thought something was amiss. Maybe if he’d led with: “I was minding my own business under the acorn tree when…,” maybe someone would have set him straight right away.
This is a completely different story from all the ones told by the humans in Lassie. In this canine cult classic, if someone says, “Uncle Bob’s in the barn and the barn’s on fire,” you can bet the farm that the barn is about to give up the ghost, taking Uncle Bob with it. Here, Lassie functions the way we wish all our alert devices would.
I’m worried about the word itself. “Catastrophise” has the potential to be abused and misused because it’s such a convenient handle. I can see it already. The people we used to call drama queens will now become catastrophists.
While it’s not set down as a mental disorder, it is recognised as cognitive distortion. That’s fancy for “wonky thinking.”
The most common non-fiction examples seem to revolve around cars and jobs. When we catastrophise, we go from the car won’t start, to the car cannot start, to the car is damaged beyond repair, to – at last – I cannot afford a new car.
Or, we can try: I spilled my coffee during the meeting with the client, to everyone will think I’m inept, to I’ll lose my job, to – at last – I will die in destitution.
Cars don’t start and then they do. People spill coffee with alarming frequency and suffer no ill fate. How can we get the catastrophiser to see that?
One suggestion is especially useful: stop and notice. Pay attention to the (to your mind) bad thing and try to put it into perspective. Are your fears rational, let alone likely?
Practising mindfulness, staying in touch with loved ones, journalling, and meditating are all also recommended. You’re looking for things that ground you and give you a sense of balance. If you keep a log of what happened and how you felt, you may begin to see where things get out of control.
This may all seem like a lot of fuss over not very much, but pain catastrophising feels a lot more serious. My guess is because most of us have skirted with it at some point. This is when we have a physical ailment or pain and we imagine only the worst possible outcomes.
Now we’re on dangerous ground. Pain catastrophisation is problematic in itself – how can we ever be sure what someone else is feeling? But saying a person is catastrophising their pain gets too close to pain-shaming.
Once again, we have a perfectly understandable problem only to have the whole thing undermined by language. Let’s focus on the problem. Let’s not weaponise this word.

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition.
The post On catastrophising: It’s terrible appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.