The benefits of catastrophising

According to me and no psychologist ever.

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It was my son’s birthday party at the weekend. In preparation for the big event, I did some light worrying. This included the fears that:

• My child will get ill and we won’t be able to have the party.

• All the guests will get ill and my child will be the only one at the party.

• The party venue has double booked us with someone else.

• The birthday cake candles won’t light.

But these were just the hors d'oeuvres to my plat principal concerns that:

• All the roads will be closed around the party because of an oil spillage so nobody will be able to get there.

• The knife will slip when I’m cutting the cake and injure a child.

• I’ll get locked out when transferring party stuff from my home to the car and try climbing through the bathroom window and get stuck.

• The pizza delivery guy will be mugged or hit a muntjac deer and there’ll be no party food.

As you can see, I am very prone to catastrophising. I imagine the worst possible outcomes when the evidence to suggest these things will ever happen is scant at best. And mostly non-existent. I have never had a knife slippage accident, for example, but this does not stop the thought from gatecrashing my mind as I pack the cake knife in my bag.

The term catastrophise was first coined by Albert Ellis in 1957 when developing an early version of cognitive behavioural therapy. (He also invented the term musterbation and let me tell you - don’t ever Google that. You will just get a lot of content mispelled. I’m curious to know whether this is some kind of deliberate pun. But he really doesn’t seem the type.)

According to Albert Ellis and every other person in the world with a job title starting with ‘psych’, catastrophising is a bad thing. It’s a form of toxic thinking which impacts your mental health and causes unnecessary anxiety.

And who am I to add a ‘but’ right now? But… I believe there are some benefits to it. Because I see these anxious thoughts as a rehearsal for if the worst does happen. I know exactly what I’ll do if I get the call that my partner has died at work. Even though it’s not like he’s a scaffolder or in the SAS or a high-rise window cleaner. And actually, 90% of his working life is spent editing on a computer at home.

But because I’ve worried about it, should the worst ever happen I know the exact steps I will take. I’m just following the advice of Benjamin Franklin, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

So that’s why I didn’t get locked out of my house before my son’s birthday party as I had this panicked thought and made sure I had my keys in my pocket AND the door was on the latch. (You can never be too careful.) I took two sets of birthday cake candles in case one was faulty. (Those famously faulty candles.) And I called the party venue the week before on the pretence of some trivial thing so that they’d realise then if they’d double booked us. (I’m sure they didn’t find me annoying.)

Of course, some things are beyond my control. Muntjac deer, I’m looking at you. But this brings me to the second reason I think catastrophising is helpful. I have a very unproven theory that if I think up an awful outcome in advance, it stops it from happening. It would be too much of a coincidence for this outlandish situation to be in my mind and then in reality. What are the chances of me imagining an oil spillage and then an oil tanker overturning and the container rupturing right by our party? I’m aware there are many, many arguments against this theory but I can’t hear them as I have my fingers in my ears.

I will admit that all this negative thinking can be quite exhausting but honestly, I think it’s better for me than thinking about Brad and Shona from Married at First Sight UK. What I’m saying is, if you are prone to this type of behaviour, there are worse things to think about.

Some believe that this form of neuroticism is genetic and others that it’s learned behaviour from parents. And my mum did once leave a voicemail warning me not to ever wear a very long scarf as it could get trapped in the door of an underground train while I’m on the platform and drag me along to my death.

If it is becoming too much, there are ways to control it. It’s often suggested that you view your thoughts more objectively and ask for firm evidence for the concerns. So why not create an alter ego called James Draggon QC, a powerful and terrifying lawyer who in cross-examination humiliatingly rips your evidence apart? Admittedly this is a device of my own invention and probably not one endorsed by anyone with any clinical training.

Another coping mechanism is to set aside half an hour of worry time a day. But I worry that I won’t remember them all and I’m wasting 10,950 minutes a year when I could be a fifth of the way towards becoming an expert in playing the clarinet even though that 10,000 hours thing has been debunked and I don’t want to play the clarinet anyway.

But I should probably try these things. As there’s one regular catastrophising thought that is a bit much. If I’m out with my son and he goes momentarily out of sight, I panic that I don’t actually have a son. That I’m in a psychotic state which everyone is playing along with as recommended by an eminent psychiatrist. He’s just a figment of my disturbed mind and when I go to pick him up from school, the teachers are just pretending to hand a child over to me. And that birthday party I had, everyone was just humouring me.

It’s a bit much, isn’t it? It really is. And it’s hard to think of a benefit to this. But I don’t even want to think what James Draggan QC would have to say about it.