Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist Addresses Why We Catastrophize in Vox

If something hurts, you are inclined to avoid it. This is as true for physical pain as it is for emotional pain. When you are overwhelmed, you develop strategies to avoid feeling this. Catastrophizing, or assuming the worst-case scenario, is one of these attempts at avoidance. Our Founder and Clinical Director Matt Lundquist joins a group of experts on Vox to discuss what’s behind the impulse to catastrophize and how to face the uncertainty and pain head-on.

In “Are You Catastrophizing? Here’s How to Stop Assuming the Worst,” Matt explains, “Catastrophizing seems like an effort [toward] acceptance but it’s actually a strategy for avoidance.” Unfortunately, certain aspects of reality are simply unavoidably painful. Two prime examples are the risk of bad things happening and our own mortality. We’re bad at tolerating certain forms of ordinary human suffering wherein there is nothing we can do about it. There is a tendency to want to respond to things that are bad or distressing by “doing” something about it such as catastrophizing.

Catastrophizing—racing ahead to an idea that everything is going to go wrong—is a way of managing how scary it is to be alive in a world where bad things happen. It’s an attempt at imagining everything going completely wrong as a way of avoiding the fact that some things may go wrong. As Matt observes, “This may sound strange, but I talk with patients about the idea of getting better at suffering. It always elicits a joke: ‘Oh, I’m already great at that.’ But there’s a difference between obsessing about bad things versus accepting them.” There is a sense that if you prepare for “the worst” the difficult things that may come won’t hurt as much, which is never true.

So what is the cure for catastrophizing? Facing reality. “The work here,” Matt asserts, “is to move toward the very real sadness and stress of uncertainty rather than trying to bargain with it.” It’s important to remember that humans have an innate capacity to tolerate uncertainty, risk, and loss, even terrible loss. Of course, you want to manage risk and avoid terrible losses, but you also take risks all the time (For example, having children is taking a kind of risk. You’re bringing into the world someone you’ll love enormously, and bad things could happen). Facing mortality and the very real bad things that come when you choose to fall in love, invest in a business, and have children is hard work, but it’s also healthier.