📖 5-minute read
Catastrophising jumps from a small event to the worst possible outcome. A twinge becomes a serious illness. A wobble at work becomes losing the job. A silence becomes the end of the relationship.
It often has trauma logic behind it — if you've lived through real catastrophes, your mind learned to scan for the next one. That's not a flaw. It's a nervous system doing its job on old settings.
The skill: ask 'what's the most likely outcome?' not 'what's the worst?'. Then ask 'and if the worst did happen, what would I actually do?' — most of the time, you'd cope.