Catastrophising and anxiety: A feature of the mind, not a flaw
Catastrophising and Anxiety: A Feature of the Mind, Not a Flaw
People frequently talk about catastrophising as if it’s a deep and fundamental character flaw:
- “I catastrophise all the time. What’s wrong with me?!”
- “People are always telling me to stop catastrophising, but I can’t. Why can’t I stop?”
- “Why does nobody else do this? Why am I the only one always imagining the worst in every situation?”
These are familiar inner voices for many, and beneath them often lies a hidden set of assumptions:
- We shouldn’t catastrophise.
- We should be able to control it.
- We're the only ones who do it in such an extreme way.
- Catastrophising is pointless.
I want to suggest that not only are these assumptions unhelpful, but they also make easing the problem nearly impossible. Let’s explore.
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Catastrophising Is Not a Choice
It’s essential to understand that catastrophising is largely an unconscious process.
We don’t choose to start catastrophising, and we don’t choose when it stops. If we could simply switch it off, we would have done, and nobody would ever suffer with it again. Expecting someone to “just stop catastrophising” is a bit like telling someone who’s depressed to “cheer up.” It doesn’t help. It adds shame to struggle and assumes a conscious ability where there isn’t one.
You might do yourself a favour and stop treating catastrophising like it’s something you’re choosing to do. It’s not a moral failing. It’s a feature of consciousness, not a fault in your character. Saying we can’t control it, however, is not to say that we can’t influence it — primarily by learning about it and growing our awareness of it. I once heard a variation on a Buddhist idea: the only freedom from the mind is the awareness of it, and I think this is a very useful idea in this context. We can’t control catastrophising, but becoming aware of it may have its own inherent power.
That awareness can change how the whole phenomenon operates.
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Catastrophising Is a Function of Anxiety
Catastrophising is a core component of anxiety. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anxiety functioning without it.
Anxiety’s role, evolutionarily and psychologically, is to anticipate potential threats and prepare us ahead of time. In other words, it’s designed to project us into imagined futures filled with “what ifs.” That’s its job. Seen this way, catastrophising isn't irrational. It’s the mind doing its best (perhaps clumsily or excessively) to protect us by imagining a variety of threatening situations, which in turn allows us to prepare for them.
It might be intrusive, uncomfortable, or seemingly irrational, but it isn’t pointless. It has survival value. And very often, it has meaning.
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Catastrophising Is Meaningful and Signifies Something
When we catastrophise about something, we’re not just creating random horror stories, we’re touching on what matters to us most.
The fear of public humiliation after a talk might signify how much we value being respected, accepted, or maintaining our sense of competence. Imagining the devastation of a grave illness often reveals a deep attachment to our vitality, our independence, or the fear of becoming a burden to others. Fearing ending up alone speaks to our profound biological and emotional need for connection, belonging, and attachment.
Seen through this lens, catastrophising is a window into our deepest vulnerabilities and values. It’s the psyche's way of broadcasting, in a distorted but powerful signal: "This matters. Pay attention."
When we meet these fears with curiosity rather than shame, we can learn a great deal about ourselves, not to eliminate the fear entirely, but to live more wisely alongside it. For our ancestors, social rejection was potentially fatal, being ostracised from the group could mean death in the wild. Illness could easily wipe out an individual or a family group before the age of modern medicine. Isolation meant exposure to predators or starvation.
Catastrophising about these scenarios was not just a quirky mental habit; it was adaptive. It kept us vigilant about the threats that could end our lives or severely diminish our chances of survival. In that sense, your catastrophising isn’t merely an overreaction, it’s the echo of an ancient, survival-focused brain trying (sometimes too zealously) to keep you safe. It’s an outdated system in some ways, but it’s rooted in the real and ongoing human need for safety, health, and connection.
When we view catastrophising this way, as a meaningful evolutionary inheritance, it becomes easier to approach it with compassion and curiosity rather than hostility and self-contempt. The question becomes not "How do I eradicate this?" but rather "What is this trying to protect?" and "How can I respond to that need more skilfully?"
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You're Not Broken
We are descended from people who successfully catastrophised. People who paid attention to what might go wrong were more likely to survive and keep their children alive. We are wired to anticipate danger.
So no, you’re not the only one who does this, and certainly not broken. You’re part of a long lineage of human nervous systems doing their best to stay safe in a complex, unpredictable world. Difficult feelings like fear, panic, dread may not be pleasant, but they are meaningful.They exist for a reason.
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How Can Counselling and Therapy Help with Catastrophising?
If catastrophising is an evolved, automatic feature of the mind, not a personal failing, then what is the role of therapy?
In short: not to "switch off" catastrophising, but to change our relationship to it. Therapy can help in several important ways:
1. Building Awareness Without Judgment
One of the first steps in therapy is helping you notice when catastrophising is happening without immediately believing it or condemning yourself for it. This capacity to observe your mind, sometimes called mentalisation or metacognition, creates a necessary space between thought and reaction.
Over time, therapy can strengthen this ability, allowing catastrophising thoughts to arise without automatically sweeping you away in panic or despair.
2. Understanding the Deeper Meaning Behind Catastrophic Thoughts
Rather than treating catastrophic scenarios as random or meaningless, therapy encourages exploration: What is this fear pointing to? What does it tell me about my vulnerabilities, needs, and values? In this way, catastrophising becomes a map rather than just a minefield, a map of where your wounds and longings live.
Understanding these emotional currents can lead to a profound shift in how you experience anxiety: not as an enemy to be crushed, but as an alarm system that can be recalibrated with attention and insight.
2.5. Discovering the Unconscious Roots of Catastrophising
Often, catastrophising is not simply an overactive imagination, it's the echo of earlier experiences that have not been fully processed or integrated. We catastrophise because, at some level, we are carrying unresolved emotional material: past traumas, failures, humiliations, abandonments, losses. The conscious mind may not connect today's fears with those old wounds. In fact, it often can’t because, in order to cope at the time, the mind repressed or split off these experiences.
Therapy provides a space to explore what lies beneath the surface of catastrophising. It is not just about noticing the thoughts themselves, but about becoming curious: Why does this particular catastrophic image have such emotional charge for me?
What old fear might it be touching? What buried loss or humiliation or helplessness might be stirring beneath it? Unconscious experience doesn't reveal itself through direct explanations, but through patterns, imagery, emotional resonances.
A good therapist helps you track the emotional 'threads' back to their origins, gently helping what was once too painful to be felt come into conscious awareness so that what was previously exiled can be digested,
When split-off experiences are allowed to come into consciousness and be worked through, the catastrophic imagination often begins to settle on its own.The mind no longer needs to throw up overwhelming scenarios, because the deeper unfinished business they were carrying has been, at least in part, faced and metabolised. In this sense, therapy is not just a process of learning to "tolerate" catastrophising — it is a profound process of discovering the unconscious life beneath it, integrating the exiled parts of yourself, and slowly reclaiming emotional ground that was once dominated by fear.
3. Strengthening Emotional Resilience
Through therapy, a broader, more stable emotional base can be nurtured. Instead of trying to eliminate fear or worry, therapy helps you develop the capacity to feel difficult emotions without collapsing under them. This emotional resilience means that when catastrophic thoughts arise as they inevitably will, you’re more able to weather them without being hijacked by them.
4. Updating the Mind’s Predictions
Catastrophising often persists because our nervous system has outdated or exaggerated threat predictions. Therapy offers corrective emotional experiences: moments where you confront fears, find you can survive them, and gradually update your brain’s expectations. Over time, this re-patterns your sense of what is truly dangerous versus what is merely uncomfortable or uncertain.
5. Reducing Shame and Isolation
Because catastrophising is so often misunderstood as a personal flaw, it can generate enormous shame.Therapy provides a relational space, a real, human connection, where you are seen not as broken, but as someone whose mind is doing something understandable. Being witnessed this way is not trivial: it can directly counteract the isolation and self-recrimination that make anxiety worse.
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In essence, therapy does not aim to silence the voice of catastrophising altogether.
It aims to help you hear it differently, respond to it differently, and where possible understand and heal the deeper emotional material that gives it its charge.
It is a process of building resilience, growing insight, and integrating the split-off parts of yourself that have long been trying to speak.
If any of this strikes a chord and you would like to discuss therapy please feel free to be in contact: sean@seanheneghan.com