What is catastrophizing? It is a cognitive distortion—an invented story of impending doom. This story is an over inflation of emotional/relational dangers, which activates a biologic threat response (panic, fear, terror, dysregulation) leading to internal physiologic states of heightened sympathetic activation (fight or flight) or parasympathetic shutdown (freeze).
COVID-19 is ripe for catastrophizing: the actual threat is both invisible and unknowable. Little predictability heightens it; information changing constantly deepens it. Safety is hard to find.
Below are a few catastrophizing responses to that lack of safety you might be experiencing internally:
- Your insides are frantically saying “this shouldn’t be happening”: you feel anger or numbing
- You’re feeling singled out and victimized by this situation—you feel resentment/victim anger or deep grief/abandonment depression
- You can’t stop reading and watching things about the virus; getting highly emotional if others who are not in your household don’t agree with you about social distancing—you feel relationally conflicted or abandoned
- You feel really down, low energy, and want to climb into bed and put the covers over your head—you feel depression
Catastrophizing can lead to despair, the abandonment depression, blind rage, and swirling confusion. It’s is a good time to learn how to manage it. Here are some helpful ways to do that:
- Catastrophizing confuses feelings with facts. Tell yourself often “feelings are not facts. Fear is a feeling, not a fact”. Help yourself differentiate a feeling and a fact.
- Catastrophizing leads to emotional flashbacks—suddenly you become extremely afraid, or enraged, or shut down. If you are experiencing those overwhelming emotional states, get to a place of safety and use your strategies (tapping, self-compassion, deep slow belly breathing) to self-regulate and to calm.
- Catastrophizing is an invented story of impending doom. Once you are calmer, see if you can find the story you were telling yourself. Ask yourself “what’s my data” to differentiate the threat inflation from the facts.
- Catastrophizing is a type of cognitive distortion. That distortion involves taking a bad situation and making it worse. We learned to do this as children, as part of hypervigilance. It is a skill we have practiced over many years for our survival.
- Say to yourself “I know it feels like the threat is everywhere, but I have taken precautions and I’ve done what I can. I’m safe in this moment.” This affirms safety in the present.
- Catastrophizing always takes place in the future. Right now the future is way too uncertain. Keep your mind focused as much as possible on the here and now: the present moment.
- REMIND YOURSELF TO FOCUS ON WHAT YOU CAN CONTROL: We do not catastrophize what we can control.