CATASTROPHIZING & ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING

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Hey, do you think of yourself as an all or nothing thinker? Or perhaps you find yourself imagining the worst case scenarios. You're afraid that things won't work out, and if they don't, your brain is already jumping 15 conclusions in the future about what that all means. Meanwhile, people wonder, why are you so stressed, or what's making you anxious? And you're actually caught in a cycle of all or nothing thinking and catastrophizing. It's this type of thinking when we blow things out of proportion, we expect the worst. We're waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it's a byproduct of an all or nothing thinking brain. Now I thought that that's just how I was gonna think, because that's how I'm wired. And I have good news, if you are wired like me, in the all or nothing world, there can be a healthy expression of that personality, of how you think, and you don't have to get stuck in the anxiety and the pattern that catastrophizing does. It scoops us up and spins us around and we're always afraid that things aren't going to go well, that it's either going to be perfect or disastrous. And want to teach you today you don't have to see the extremes in everything, that there's a way to find the neutral ground and when your brain does offer you patterns of catastrophizing. There are some simple ways. I'm gonna give you simple tools today to neutralize the catastrophizing, to get out of the all or nothing, thinking, what I like to call the black and white, thinking, we're gonna get into the land of gray together, y'all and so this episode is for you. No longer do you have to feel that pressure that if this doesn't work out, everything will fall apart that living on edge and thinking, gosh, if, like, everything will fall apart at any moment. Or if this doesn't happen, they're gonna think this, this, this, this, and we often catastrophize in our own mind about things that aren't even gonna happen, or things people are thinking about us that aren't even happening. If any of this resonates with you, you're in good company. Today's coaching session is going to give you the tools you need to neutralize catastrophizing, to find the land of gray in black and white thinking and to be encouraged along the way. You're listening to the confidence podcast, the go to coaching podcast, oozing with motivation and easy to implement steps that help you to be bold and confident in life. I'm your host. Trish Blackwell, internationally recognized confidence coach, Best Selling Author and founder of the College of confidence. I teach go getters in life, how to master their self talk, turn down the volume of self doubt and get more results in life so that you can be the difference maker and world changer. God created you to be you were made for more. And today's episode will help you tap into it. Let's go. Hey guys. My name is Trish Blackwell. Welcome to the confidence podcast. This

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is episode number 636

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we're coaching today on catastrophizing and all or nothing, thinking, as you've already heard, we're gonna this. Is this? What is catastrophizing? It's a cognitive distortion. It's a byproduct of the tendency to expect the worst or to blow things out of proportion. Now, I'm not saying that somebody that catastrophizes is negative. In fact, we're often the most positive people, but in our brain, we are very proactively doing, doing, doing, doing, over compensating, because our motivation is at the back of our mind. We're afraid. Well, if we're not perfect, then everything will fall apart. Or if it doesn't work out, well, then what would that mean? And then we come up with maybe five or 10 contingency plans. So it's not that you think it's all gonna fall apart, but it's that you kind of 10x the pressure on yourself to have all these other options versus trust that you'll be able to pivot as you go. This has been a lot of the deep inner work in my own life. I started with coaching and therapy on this and really learning how to it started with one of my conversations with my therapist 1012, years ago that she truly said something that blew my mind. I've already mentioned it, and I wanted to slow down, because I it's so valuable. It changed how I thought, and it changed the possibility of what I thought was possible for me, that as a black and white thinker, there are a lot of pros to that. There's a lot of benefit to being a very intense thinker, but there's there's cons, and we want to be the becoming the best version of ourself means becoming the healthiest expression of our God given personality, which means if I am identifying as a black and white thinker, and really I didn't identify it as, like, how I thought about other people really more about me, I'm either doing really well or I'm not doing well at all. Like I'm either pretty or catastrophically ugly, like I there was no in between in my measurement of myself. I. Um, it's either an A plus or you fail, right? So that black and white thinking so my my therapist, at the time, said, Hey, Trish, like, I just want to introduce you to the concept of a beautiful color that we like to call gray. And I was like, I don't, I mean, I don't want to be gray. That sounds boring. She goes, No, no healthy expression of gray, which means you can be a flexible thinker. Bet you can have this black and white intensity, which can be beautiful and a healthy expression of it also means that you could tap in to the land of gray. So today we're going to explore what the land of gray. We called it the land of gray, the in between, and finding beauty and practicing learning how to play in the gray. And one of the things, reasons we're doing this episode is we had a listener reach out. She said this, Hey, Trish, I love love, love your podcast. I just finished episode 629, which, by the way, I highly recommend it's on bullying, mean people and catastrophizing. Now we did start talking about catastrophizing in that episode, but as she points out, it was not in depth enough, and I'm wondering if you could do an episode more in depth on catastrophizing. I've done this for as long as I can remember, and I would love to break the cycle. It's exhausting. Thank you for your encouragement and love, I agree, it is exhausting. So what is it? You? Here's an example. It's this. You get a small criticism at work, and you think you're gonna lose your job. You gain one pound, and you convince yourself that your body wants you to be fat, and you think that you're you're on your way to gaining 50. It's the inability to take a setback and neutralize it and not think it's a big deal. So catastrophizing takes a tiny Hiccup and over either over personalizes it or over dramatizes it to be that, oh no, it's too much. No one likes me, right? So let's say you get one negative comment. One person talked about you behind your back. Catastrophizing is when you think, well, nobody actually likes me. One person, one person was catty and mean and gossipy. But we tell ourselves a story that we have no friends or no one likes us. Now, if you're in business, you get one negative review. Maybe you have an Amazon store, maybe an Etsy store, maybe a podcast, and you get a one star review, catastrophizing the all or nothing. Think here is shoot. I knew I'd be found out. No one likes my stuff. What am I doing? Why did i Who did I think I was whereas a confident thinker, a gray thinker says, okay, cool. If I'm getting one star reviews, that means I'm reaching more people I know. I have the emotional maturity to know not everyone is gonna like me. My product is not for everyone. My coaching is not for everyone. This podcast, I want it y'all. I want it to be for everyone. I want it to be the number one listen podcast in the world, but not everybody likes me. Oh, I'm so glad it is taking me a decade to be able to say that with confidence, and I'm okay with it. So catastrophizing is sort of really thinking about the worst possible cons outcome in any situation and then often exaggerating the potential consequences. So it's what happens is when your brain you're giving your brain free reign to imagine the most disastrous scenario, even when there's little to no evidence. Now we do this in a lot of micro ways and also macro ways. For me, I catastrophize when I have a small injury, and I'll give you an example, as you know, I'm maybe you don't, maybe that you're new to the show. I am absolutely obsessed with snowboarding, and also started picking up ice hockey as just for fun. So I'm in a hockey league as CO ed, and I had my first hockey game the other week. And in my aggression, by the way, I am pretty aggressive. After that puck, the pursuit of the puck. I tweaked my I tweaked my something, my wrist, and then I tweaked my shoulder, and my old all or nothing, thinking would be, Oh, great. Now you're gonna be injured for snowboarding, which is your true love, and you're gonna ruin your season, and you're gonna have to go, you're going to go to copper, and your big trip out to what I don't know, we haven't decided, maybe we're going to go to Japan. Your big one thing you really love the most of the whole year is going to be ruined because you hurt yourself doing something silly. And I started imagining being injured and and now running, and also you injured your ankle, and so now you're going to be able to run, and you're gonna be so miserable. Okay, so that's catastrophizing within yourself. It's taking a fear and imagining that fear getting worse, worse worse, and you start really attaching to what it takes from you. And so what we wanna do to neutralize that is to call ourselves out of, hey, I'm being dramatic, like I catastrophizing. Thing is your toddler brain coming out and going, but and sort of screaming and and throwing a tantrum and being very afraid. Now we can have compassion, because we can look at it and go, Oh, you're just afraid right now. And I'm able to talk to myself and say, babe, it's okay. People get injured all the time. You strange. Honestly, I just strained my forearm because my hockey stick got caught in somebody, right? And I don't need my forearm to snowboard, so I was able to talk myself off the ledge by talking myself through what it means and that, yeah, hey, that could be worse. Maybe this is bad. Maybe you do need your shoulder being replaced, or maybe it's just a small strain that if you rest it, everything will be fine. So it's our job to call ourselves out when we're blowing things out of proportion. As our listener said, The sought the cycle of mentally catastrophizing things is exhausting, and I think for me, it changed. I started leaning into the work of this when I realized catastrophizing is all about a mismanaged imagination, and it's allowing your life to be led by fear. I, as a person of faith, refuse to live by fear. My belief system requires that I live by faith, and so I want to live by faith, not by fear, which means it is it is my opportunity anytime my brain is being dramatic and I'm being catastrophic or all or nothing, to call myself out and go, Oh, hey, love like this is you're being dramatic. It's overreacting. And we're imagining from a place of fear. What if it's simpler? What if it's not that bad? What if you decide that your body will heal well? What if you remind yourself that it's okay for one person not to like you, because there's a lot of people who do like you and who do love you? Why do we? We gotta start talking back to this fear that the worst is going to happen. And I just want to remind you that your words are your power. The more you practice reframing, the more you get curious about the words that you say to yourself. The more you dive into what we talk about in my coaching practice, your narrative intelligence, the more powerful you will be, and you might. It might. It's going to feel awkward, it's going to feel hard at first. It's going to feel like your words are just pretend. But the more you practice, the more you will progress. The reason that my words are powerful now is because I've been working at it for 12 years. And I don't say that to to intimidate, but to encourage and say every single time you reframe, every single time you are conscious of your thoughts, every single time you choose a positive thought over a negative thought, or you identify an anxious thought, or you identify a self limiting belief, or you call yourself out for, hey, extreme thinking, and maybe this is not 100%

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absolutely true. That is a win and win after win, we become people who win with our words. So other scenarios of catastrophizing in real life would be so right? We already talked about, if you small Mystique at work and you think, Well, I'm gonna get fired. Or maybe you just don't feel, you don't get, you don't get affirmation or recognition for your boss at work, or, even worse, it gets allocated other people for the stuff that you did. And so your catastrophizing thought is, nobody appreciates me. I don't offer value. We have to go, that's not true. That is not we have to ask ourselves, is that true? Is it absolutely true? Maybe health scenario, I gave you my example of, Oh no, I'm injured. I won't be able to do anything I love. I had to call myself out and go, girl, calm down. You know, I think, as a parent now that I, if you don't know, I have two kids, seven and nine, I have grown in my own maturity, in my ability to talk to my own brain, because I've learned how to parent right a child who's being dramatic. And I love my kids, but you know, they're kids, and they're they offer these things. Of You never let me watch TV. I'm like, well, that's not true. I see, Oh, I see how your brain is when it's panicked or upset, goes extreme and exaggerates. And that made me more self reflective to my own thoughts. I exaggerate a lot in my own brain and I and now I have the maturity and through practice to call myself out on my own exaggerations. But maybe you feel a mild headache, and then you you think, oh my gosh, I like, what if it's a brain tumor, or if a friend doesn't respond to your text right away, you think, Oh, they must be mad at me. I've ruined our friendship, or they don't like me, or I'm bothering them, or I've overstepped. All of this is catastrophizing. Maybe your kid has a bad day at school, and you're like, Okay, well, they're gonna fail at life, or your kid throws a tantrum, or your kid says something rude, or steps out of line or something disappointing to you, and you're great. I failed at parenting. They are going to have a disastrous life, and it's all my fault. Catastrophizing, maybe you in a social situation still. Over your words, and maybe during a presentation or during an interview, and then you find yourself beating yourself up and go, I am completely embarrassed. Everyone must think I'm incompetent, and then I'm not qualified, or maybe you've got an unexpected bill, and you immediately think, oh my gosh, okay, great, just when I thought we were climbing out of debt, here we go again. I'm going to be debt forever. I'll never recover from this. We'll never get out. Or you in a performance scenario, you you miss a deadline, or you don't do well on something, and you go, Wait, great, I've blown it. No one will trust me again. I'll never be successful. So these are all small ways that catastrophizing is so extreme and exaggerated. And as you can see, like you can understand how much anxiety and fear this creates. This creates this internal suffering, that on the outside, other people are like, it's just a bill. You're like, Oh, I know, but I'm stressed about it. And then and you they can maybe say, but why are you stressed? Is that the amount? Well, no, it's sometimes hard to know that your brain is exaggerating and being dramatic on a larger scale. So in my coaching group, the College of confidence, which, if you want to take some of these concepts deeper, if you want to do live coaching with me, the most affordable way to coach with me is in the COC. You can find out more at College of confidence.com we have four workshops per month with workbooks. I coach you through new methods. This, actually, this upcoming month, I am I'm so excited on what we're coaching. We're coaching on words that transform how to write affirmations that actually work. And so we're gonna have four coaching, live coaching workshops on that. I'm walking people through it. But we also have four workshops every month that are open, Q and A coaching, meaning you come, you raise your hand, you get your questions asked. And I truly do get to know my students and support them. So come and go deeper with me in the College of confidence. But what I coach my students and members there on is we talk about like, let's de dramatize the brain we have to acknowledge and recognize when we're being catastrophic or we're thinking in all or nothing terms, and then ask ourselves, or worst case scenario, thinking or even jumping to conclusions without facts. She's not texting me back yet. She must be annoyed by me. Maybe she doesn't really want to be my friend anymore. Maybe they think. Maybe everybody's laughing at me. We're jumping to conclusions. We are making up stories again. It's just simply a misuse of your imagination. You have an incredibly powerful brain, and our imagination is one of our greatest tools. I want you to decide today that you're going to use your imagination to work for you in life instead of against you in life, and so in the in the process of de dramatizing, what we want to do. Step one is to call ourselves out on hey, I'm being dramatic, and we don't do it in a judgy way. I just say, hey, my brain is being dramatic. Okay, cool. How do I neutralize this? How do I talk back to it? And so here's how we do it. First, we have awareness. You catch yourself in the moment, just like I said, and you recognize this is catastrophic thinking or dramatic, and then you reality check, what is the evidence for or against this? Thought? Is this true? Could I be wrong? Would this maybe? Could this possibly not be a big deal? What if I'm What if this is just a little hiccup? What if it's not so bad, what if she's not texting me back because she forgot to charge her phone, or she's busy? Then we challenge the thought. I need you to challenge the thought. We do that with pen and paper. You write it down, you write the the dramatic thought, and then you challenge it the irrational thought with a and you and you say, what is another story I could say, What would Trish say to me? I would say, here's the situation. What would she, as a coach say to me back what would a good friend say to me? What would God say to me? And then we shift our focus. We start redirecting our attention to things we can control, focusing on the solutions. And then we and then we have compassion on ourselves, you guys, this catastrophic thinking, all or nothing. Thinking is exhausting. So can we have some self kindness and self compassion

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to say, hey, it's you've put yourself

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through it, and it's okay. Everyone has moments of fear and doubt, and in fact, you've maybe spent the last decade or two decades of your life from the lens of fear. This is the process. This is simply the process of learning how to shift from having fear as our core coordinates and our internal GPS and substituting with faith. And you know, when you have a default setting in your phone, sometimes it's annoying because you're going, I don't want that, right? This is us just changing our default setting. So it's okay if I still my brain still catastrophizes. It's okay if my first inclination is to think in an all or nothing extreme. But what's what's progress, which shows me that I'm starting to live by faith, not by fears, that I catch it, I acknowledge it, I have awareness, and I'm not prisoner to it anymore. That's where I can gain my power back and never.

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Evolutionize the way you approach habits and make habits easy. Go check out Trish blackwell.com, forward slash habits. Here's our power phrase pyramid to close us out. I'm a powerful flexible thinker. I'm a powerful flexible thinker. You see, I did not think I was a powerful thinker. I did not think I was a flexible thinker, and so I had to start to believe that I could by saying this over myself, and I want to remind you that you the one of the most beautiful things about the brain is the brain is always changing. Neuroplasticity is the brain is is creating new neural pathways over and over and over and renewed every day just because you've thought one way your whole life does not destine you to stay stuck in that thought pattern. You can and I repeat. You can change the way you think I am a powerful, flexible thinker. Number two, power phrase number two, I operate from a place of faith, not a place of fear. Make that declaration over yourself. And then finally, I believe that everything works for me, not against me, right? I believe that God will turn anything that happens in my life, the worst case scenarios will work out for my good. As if you enjoyed today's episode, let me know. Leave a comment on Spotify or YouTube, or leave a review. This is the one of the most effective ways for us to share and show our reviews. In fact, I don't think we've gotten any new reviews in the last two or three weeks. So do me a favor. Love on me, please. And leave me a review. Let me know if you love the show, and if you do, please hit that follow and subscribe button and share this episode with a friend that you love. Sharing is caring. Go out there today. Go be more of who God created you to be. Be you. Be free. Thanks for listening to the confidence podcast and allowing me to be your coach today in your life. If you love the show, please let us know by leaving a review in iTunes. Are you encouraged by what you learned? Share this episode with a friend and let us know that the show is changing your life by saying hi to us on social media and Instagram. Trish, underscore Blackwell are on Facebook. Trish Blackwell coaching ready to take what I teach and really take it to the next level. Join us today in the College of confidence. It's my group coaching program that you can join, risk free and cancel anytime in the COC, you'll scale your confidence, your courage and the changes you make in your life, it's the coaching, support and community you've been looking for. Go to www.collegeofconfidence.com

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to get started. If you love the

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podcast, you will love the College of confidence even more and see even more transformation in your life, come and see you for yourself.

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I'm cheering you on, friend, see you soon. You.

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