Why is it so easy for us to be negative and pessimistic?
Pathologies related to anxiety and depression almost always occur with a significant degree of catastrophic thinking. In other words, patients tend to think, imagine and believe in the worst outcomes for their problems and doubts, often fantasizing about tragic scenarios of events that almost never happen to them, or to most people.
Let’s start with some examples that capture this characteristic well.
A person with panic disorder often thinks that their pounding heartbeat will lead to a heart attack or that their headaches are the beginning of a stroke.
A man with generalized anxiety disorder speaks on the phone with his wife who tells him that she is about to take a bus with her children; The man thinks that one of the children could fall under the wheels of the bus and die.
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A person with depression believes that his family does not love him, imagines that in a few years he will end up abandoned, alone and will die sick in some public asylum for the homeless.
The above are just some examples that represent the typical case of catastrophism, not only because of the tragic scenario that the patient has in his consciousness but also very importantly, because the feared event has never happened to him and because the chances of it happening to him are tiny. However, the person cannot stop thinking about it, with the consequent suffering that this causes.
reacting with fear implies learning
Let’s simply say that a person thinks, believes and fears a negative event that does not happen countless times; That is to say, countless times he is wrong, but for some reason he fails to incorporate the simple evidence that what he fears does not happen and therefore, he continues with the tragic thoughts in his head.
It is as if we wake up every day thinking and believing that when we look out the window, we will see a beautiful landscape of sea and mountains, but instead, we find a gloomy lung of a building. And even though today and every previous morning I have seen the same lung of a building, it doesn’t matter, I wake up tomorrow with the belief that the beautiful landscape will appear before me… absurd, right?
Well, this is how absurd it should sound to us that every day we experience fear of negative events that have never taken place. But of course, it is easier to notice the mistake with a positive fact than with a negative one, something that is related to the nature and origin of catastrophic thinking.
In the first instance, millions of years of evolution have left indelible marks on the human brain, among which stands out an increased facility to react with fear to ambiguity and uncertainty. Let’s think about an organism that, living in a primitive environment, in a natural environment such as a forest or jungle, hears an atypical sound among the trees.
Reacting with a defensive response such as fear would facilitate their survival in the possible presence of a predator; Conversely, an “optimistic” reaction such as continuing ahead without warning could lead to death. That is to say, in the archaic environment that has been present during the millions of years of evolution of life, fear turns out to be a critical adaptation without which we cannot survive, which is why today we show this increased facility to react defensively to the uncertain Now, it happens that the fear reaction involves several levels and response systems, among which is the cognitive one. That is the origin of catastrophism.
It is the cognitive expression of an evolutionarily facilitated tendency. In this way, thinking about the worst possible outcomes facilitates adaptation to an objectively more hostile environment, where dangers were indeed more frequent than in our modern environments; On the contrary, being positive and optimistic carried the risk of not reacting in a timely manner to a threat that, if real, would leave us outside the evolutionary chain.
Clearly, all this has changed in the modern and civilized environments in which most of us today move, however, primitive reactions continue in our deep brain, relics of our primitive past.
Now, the previous thesis partially explains the problem of catastrophizing as a cognitive style. While it is true that it gives us a solid clue to understand why we easily react with fear and catastrophic thinking in ambiguous situations and why being optimistic is not intuitive and natural to us, on the other hand it leaves open the question of why some people seem becoming entrenched in catastrophic thinking that leads to fear, suffering until the development of psychological disorders while others manage to domesticate the primitive being within us.
In other words, why does catastrophic thinking become frequent, intense and long-lasting in some, while it is sporadic, mild and temporary in others? As is often the case, there is no single answer to this question.
On the one hand, neuroscientific research has documented that individual differences exist due to hereditary factors. After all, all organs in the body carry their genetic factory seal, the brain has to be no exception. While this is very interesting, it is beyond the scope of this article.
Secondly, reacting with fear involves learning. Although the fear response is innate as an emotional pattern, what we do learn is what to react to and how. Particularly, early experiences of intense stress predispose to a lability of the emotional system. Thus, living through highly stressful childhood experiences, living in an emotionally unstable climate during the first years, leaves the system more predisposed to trigger, with more intensity and frequency.
The first years leave an imprint, if during them we have gone through stressful experiences, we are left with the general message that “our environment is dangerous
In some way, the first years leave an imprint, if during them we have gone through stressful experiences, we are left with the general message that “our environment is dangerous, hostile and therefore, we must always be prepared to defend ourselves”; and from there we derive an ease to think catastrophically, because somehow in the first years we have verified that “it is better to always be prepared.”
Another critical factor in maintaining catastrophic thinking relates to what we do when such thoughts appear. That is to say, once tragic thoughts have appeared in our mind and we feel anxious, what do we do? What do we tell ourselves? How do we deal with them? This topic has special relevance with the psychological clinic since it is one of the edges through which we can operate to reduce the phenomenon.
In some cases, the person who has a catastrophic thought not only reacts emotionally with anxiety, as an involuntary process, but also says or does behaviors aimed at reducing that anxiety without questioning the veracity of the catastrophic thought. In some way he acts under the influence that what he thinks is true, simply because he thinks it, as if cognitions had their own weight similar to that of facts. This is definitely a mistake.
Having a mental image frequently in my consciousness does not make the event described by that image objectively more probable. One of the most characteristic examples is found in patients who suffer from health anxiety; who, when faced with minimal abdominal discomfort, believe they have a malignant tumor.
Thinking about the tumor, imagining the diagnosis and treatment of a disease like cancer does not increase the probability of suffering from it. Generally, these patients, under the influence of an irrationally triggered fear, in the complete absence of evidence, repeatedly go to the doctor for reassurance. Which they easily achieve because they only suffer from simple indigestion, information that they already had since they had been through this situation many times.
In this way, unnecessary consultations with the doctor become reinsurance behaviors that prevent a simple verification process that in the long run would lead to the extinction of fear, that is, what was thought simply does not happen. The problem is aggravated by the fact that although ideas are not true, the frequency with which we think about them makes them seem subjectively more probable to us, a phenomenon known as subjective probability or heuristic probability.
Our brain subjectively estimates the probability of an event according to two types of analysis. One is the one that follows logical and rational guidelines, such as those deduced from a statistic about the airplane being the safest means of transportation of all.
However, there is also an estimate of probability based on how many times we have thought about a certain fact, the more we think about it, the more likely we feel it; regardless of the objective knowledge we have. And it is for this reason that those who suffer from a phobia of flying have the feeling that the plane will crash, because they have simply thought about it countless times. This also explains why the person in our previous example, who suffered from health anxiety, feels that it is very likely that he will get cancer; nothing more and nothing less than because he thinks about it frequently.
This is what we call heuristic or subjective probability, a process that we could summarize by saying that on some occasions, when we frequently think about something, we end up not distinguishing how much of it is objectively true and how much of it we have invented.
the more we think about it, the more likely we feel it; regardless of the objective knowledge we have
In some people, the aforementioned factors converge more than in others in the same direction, resulting in the fear reaction and its cognitive counterpart, catastrophic thinking, being expressed with more frequency, intensity and duration. If on the one hand we all share a biologically and evolutionarily facilitated tendency to react with anxiety, there are individual differences in what we have inherited, in what we learned during the critical years of childhood, and in how we deal with catastrophic cognitions once they are presented.
Particularly, in relation to the last topic, the procedures of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy teach us that we must discuss and combat catastrophic thoughts on the basis of their evidence, trying not to carry out reinsurance behaviors that calm us momentarily but that in the long term. ..