One of the seductive mistaken thoughts is that a situation is a catastrophe. In psychology this is called catastrophizing, a habit of thought and belief that causes chaos and drains your available energy. One misinterprets a set of circumstances, making it a large emergency, when maybe it’s just a happening or occurrence. If you tend to make everything a catastrophe, it helps to train yourself to respond differently.
One way to de-catastrophize your thinking is to consciously ask yourself in connection with each event, “Is this a situation, a challenge, or a crisis?” Maybe it’s only a situation, and not something to inflate into a giant, dramatic crisis.
Some techniques to try could include:
- Take a step back. Detach for a moment.
- Breathe deeply and talk to yourself in a rational way.
- If a friend experienced the same thing, what would you say to him?
- Consider the worst-case scenario, and then think of alternative possible
outcomes. - Force your mind and emotions to be in today in this particular moment.
Bad or Good?
It can be unproductive to instantly label events or situations as bad or good. Such thinking tends to be extremist, creating a stream of emotion, especially negative emotion when the thought deems something bad. Negative thoughts tend to create emotions that are negative, even shaping the personality, making it rather dark, pessimistic, and morose. This tendency is often not realized by the person, as each bad situation seems so real and important. It requires a tremendous amount of sell-awareness to realize that a thought, emotion, or opinion about the situation is self-generated.
It can be very interesting to take something you usually believe is bad or good and make a deliberate decision to view it as neutral. For example, you are out for a walk in a busy urban community, and you come upon a traffic accident. Sirens are blaring; paramedics are arriving; and police are setting up roadblocks. In your former thinking patterns, you might have viewed this as a bad situation. Instead, you might choose to say to yourself, “Help is on the way. The professionals know what they are doing. I’m not involved. I’m going to have a great afternoon.”
Judgment
The habit of being self-righteous and judgmental can be very tempting.
It gives one a little charge to be a bit better, smarter, more in-the-know than that other person. It is a mental habit to let that judgmental chatter go on and on, without realizing that this type of thinking taints your perspective. It does. When you allow this mental habit to occur, your worldview becomes one of feeling superior over others who are making all kinds of mistakes, mistakes that you would not make. One could surmise that such judgment does not hurt anyone if it is not voiced. It’s unlikely that you would be the recipient of a libel or slander lawsuit.
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