When you find yourself thinking about the worst-case scenario, ask yourself, “What’s the best that could happen?”
It’s human nature to assume the worst. It makes sense from a survival perspective. Our brains would rather sound a thousand false alarms than risk missing something catastrophic. A fire alarm that occasionally overreacts to burnt toast is annoying, but it’s far better than the one that stays silent when an electrical spark ignites the curtains.
But the tendency to assume the worst — what psychologists refer to as catastrophizing — can take over our minds. We’re especially prone to it when we are anxious or depressed. And it can become a self-perpetuating cycle by increasing the stress that feeds those same anxious and depressive symptoms.
Challenging your brain to consider the opposite can help interrupt the spiral of catastrophic thinking. After all, if your brain can immediately come up with the most dramatic negative possibilities, why not let its creativity come up with something positive? The positive outcomes may be just as likely. But because our brains are hard-wired for survival, they are trained to immediately identify threats and ignore more realistic or even positive possibilities.
When you’re afraid of getting negative comments on a social media post, remind yourself that you may also get some really positive and encouraging comments. When you find yourself assuming that a phone call from an unknown number is someone calling to give you bad news, ask yourself whether it could be someone calling to tell you one of your biggest dreams has come true. When you feel your stomach drop opening a letter from the IRS, remind yourself that, yes, it’s possible you owe money. But it’s also possible that you’re getting a refund.
Usually reality ends up somewhere in between the two extremes: Your social media post doesn’t attract that much attention, negative or positive. The phone call ends up being a telemarketer. The letter from the IRS is just notifying you that your address change was successful.
But the goal isn’t that we get better at predicting the future; most of us will never be accurate fortune-tellers. But that’s okay. The point is to recognize and challenge our automatic doomsday predictions. Doing so gives us space to respond to what we are facing with clarity, rather than being frozen in fear by our thoughts.
