Watch this when
Catastrophizing: How to Stop Making Yourself Depressed and Anxious: Cognitive Distortion Skill #6
Your brain wrote a disaster movie about a flat tyre. Notice it, pause, ask if it's true. 🎬
Who it's for
Catastrophizing feels like realism from the inside, so naming it as a cognitive distortion creates distance from it.
Anxious→Clear-Headed
Feelings it meets
What it is
A Therapy in a Nutshell video in which licensed marriage and family therapist Emma McAdam explains catastrophizing, the thinking error of reading a hard situation as terrible and unrecoverable. She opens with a story about a stranded motorist who imagines worse and worse outcomes while walking to a farmhouse to borrow a jack, then angrily turns down the farmer's help.
Where to find it
YouTube, Therapy in a Nutshell (free). Written summary at therapyinanutshell.com/catastrophizing.
Before you start
Heads up: Examples of panic and depression.
Age: Ages 14+
Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
