You may have heard of the term catastrophic thinking in regards to anxiety disorders and panic attacks, but what is this, how does it effect you, and how can you stop it most importantly?
Basically, catastrophic thinking is a term used to describe the downward spiral in anxiety sufferers minds as they approach a panic attack. This is a core part of all anxiety disorders and the main trigger for a full blown episode of panic, so should be understood well.
The way this usually works is that a person who is already anxious and nervous starts having thoughts about what could possibly go wrong. This could be as simple as worrying that someone is driving too close to you in the other lane and might hit you, or worrying that you might lose sight of your friend in the crowd and lose them.
These are thoughts that people without anxiety disorders do not take much further than this and can typically rationalise away to not be anxious anymore, or at least to reduce this anxiety to a very low level and keep on going.
Someone with an anxiety disorder however cannot control these sorts of thoughts and they start getting out of hand. Suddenly you might think that that car will hit you and drive you into oncoming traffic killing you, you might also think that if you brake the person behind you will hit you, then you might have vivid thoughts about being trapped in the wreckage of your burning car and so the spiral goes further and further down making you more and more panicky. Or for the other example you might then start to think about what would happen if you became lost, that you might be mugged, might be kidnapped, might be killed – or that your friend might.
These thoughts are of course extreme thinking – thoughts of catastrophic consequences that are so rare as to be unbelievable to most people. When you are caught in this cycle however it all seems so real, until later when you can rationally judge it. The end result of these things however is a panic attack on many occasions as the catastrophic thinking takes a hold til you cannot handle it anymore and you break down!
From this we can see that breaking the cycle of catastrophic thinking is going to be an important part of panic attack treatments that must be addressed to finally be free of panic and anxiety
