The Purpose of Catastrophizing

Those with anxiety know this well. We feel like any given experience will undo us, and if we could control it, we would be okay. What if I told you there is a purpose?

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The purpose

The purpose of catastrophizing is to keep you safe. It sounds like the opposite is happening, but according to your hippocampus and amygdala, which process your history of overwhelm, you must remain hypervigilant to remain safe from harm. The brain’s primary purpose is survival, not happiness. The latter occurs when your nervous system no longer feels threatened.

The trick is determining whether the threat is real. It was very real in the past, but you could not move past it. The energy of that fight/flight/freeze response stays within you until you can.

If you are in an unsafe situation presently, the work is finding a place to feel stable and secure. You cannot heal in traumatic places. However, you can learn to see if catastrophizing is about you or them. People often project their fears onto others because they cannot process them.

Exercise for Projection

Take a few calming breaths when alone and write down what happened. Writing with a pen and paper turns on the pre-frontal cortex, the processing part of your brain, and lowers the stress output from your primal brain acting out of need to stay safe. Moving your hands and touching paper tells your sensorimotor system to focus on the present instead of the incident.

While writing, you will notice if you were right to worry or if you were acting out of their projections. Your brain can learn to let it go and move on if it is the latter. It takes repetition and patience, but your nervous system will teach you to build boundaries from others’ energy.

Exercise for Healing the Past

Unfortunately, there isn’t a single quick fix for healing the pent-up experiences of past trauma to fix our catastrophizing.

There are many ways to undo it slowly and permanently.

There are two parts to working with catastrophizing: regulating the nervous system to handle the energy and working through the wounds from lack of safety.

Regulating the Nervous System

This is a practice of nourishment and removal. We feed ourselves what we need to be resilient in the face of stress and establish a baseline of peace and trust within ourselves. We learn to remove the fight/flight/freeze energy once it has served us so it no longer remains stuck in our body.

Nourishment comes in many forms, from good food to good people. This website is full of blogs discussing ways to do this. I will share one way you can start now.

Pause and Presence

Our instinct is to run from our rumination and fear or fight against it with self-criticism and shame. Pausing with it takes us into the chaotic energy but also brings us to the undisturbed place underneath it. It also allows us to build neural pathways to our catastrophizing with places, objects, and experiences that calm it down.

It is hard, and it works.

Think of catastrophizing and calm energy as two places across a broken bridge. When our psyche is overwhelmed, it fragments to help us function without collapse. The bridge must be rebuilt so our fearful parts return to our calm selves. We do it slowly, brick by brick, to ensure the quality of the bridge remains high.

Pausing and being present with each brick, rebuilding ourselves restores that bridge.

I have developed worksheets for this.

One of the exercises involves placing one hand on a part of our body that feels overwhelmed and another on something in our environment that grounds us. Then, we sit with the two energies and learn how to move them toward each other so the bridge between chaos and calm returns. When the two energies meet, we feel less fragmented and overwhelmed. The calm shows the catastrophizing what it could be like.

Check out the Pause and Presence Worksheet Here:

Trauma Peer Support

Through trauma peer support, we will create spaces of safety, belonging, and trust in yourself. Communication will occur in whatever form you are most comfortable with, from texting to in-person coaching. We will approach your most intense situations together to help you through them.

Click here to learn more about our coaching program for regulating the nervous system.

The Purpose of Catastrophizing