Catastrophizing is overestimating the importance of something that happens to us. Catastrophizations are exaggerations that don’t reflect the truth.
In the heat of the moment, it can be really easy to feel like this one bad thing is going to change the course of our lives forever – or that it really is “the end of the world.” But often this isn’t the case.
And when you make things out to be worse than they really are, it makes the experience that much more stressful and painful. Unnecessarily.
–
And to make matters worse, some people will talk to others about it and exaggerate it to make it seem much worse. They are not only “re-living” the stressful experience, but also intensifying their memory of it.
–
Work through the experience to bring it back to size.