A shared universe › Blog › When you always expect the worst · Español
Your son doesn’t answer his phone and within two minutes you have imagined an accident. The doctor asks you to repeat a test and, before you have left the surgery, you are already thinking the worst. The mind races towards the darkest ending as if it were the only one possible.
Psychologists call this habit of the mind catastrophising: giving more weight to the worst outcome, even when it is unlikely, or experiencing as unbearable something that is merely uncomfortable. It isn’t exaggerating for fun or wanting attention. From the inside it feels like a certainty: if it hasn’t happened yet, it will.
These errors of thinking were described by the psychiatrist Aaron Beck at the University of Pennsylvania. In the early sixties, listening to his patients with depression, he noticed that they had thoughts that appeared on their own, very fast, and that twisted what happened to them in the same direction every time. In 1963 he published an article on these “cognitive distortions”, and cognitive therapy was born from that work. The term catastrophising had been coined earlier by the psychologist Albert Ellis, and cognitive therapy included it among those distortions. It appears in anxiety and in depression, but also in many people with no diagnosis at all who are simply going through a bad patch.
Imagining dangers has a purpose: getting ready. The trouble comes when the sum comes out crooked. The psychologist Paul Salkovskis explained it in 1996 as a kind of set of scales. In one pan are how serious we think what might happen is and how likely we think it is. In the other, how able we feel to cope with it and the help we might receive from outside.
When someone always expects the worst, the first pan is overfilled and the second emptied. The bad thing seems certain and huge, and you yourself small and with no one beside you. Lack of sleep, tiredness and stretches of heavy tension tip the scales even further.
In 2020, Lucas LaFreniere and Michelle Newman of Pennsylvania State University ran a simple test. For ten days, 29 university students with generalised anxiety (the problem of people who worry about almost everything and can’t stop) received four messages a day on their phones asking them to note down what they were worried about at that moment. Each night they went over what they had noted and, for thirty days, marked whether it had happened or not.
Some 91.4% of the worries did not come true. The most common result was that none of them did: seven of the participants didn’t experience a single one of the things they had feared. And of the few that did happen, around three in ten turned out better than they had expected.
The study has limits that its authors acknowledge: there were few people, almost all young women, and it isn’t known whether the figures would be the same in other groups. But it left another clue: those who found that more of their worries were false were the ones whose anxiety improved most by the end of treatment. For the authors, seeing from your own data that the alarm is usually wrong helps you believe it less.
Expecting the worst is not always a problem. In 1986 the psychologists Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor described what they called defensive pessimism: people who, before an exam or a speech, set their expectations low, go over everything that could go wrong and prepare for each thing. For many it works. In their studies they performed as well as the optimists, and when someone tried to cheer them up so that they would stop worrying, they did worse.
The difference lies in where the thought leads. If imagining the bad ends in a plan (bringing your notes, leaving in good time, jotting down your questions for the doctor), it is useful. If it goes round and round and leads nowhere, it is closer to rumination than to prudence. And even when it works, some later studies suggest that living permanently in that mode can take its toll in the form of more stress.
It isn’t about forcing yourself to think positively, but about looking at the thought the way you would look at a dubious piece of news before believing it. These questions are often used in cognitive therapy:
You can also do what the participants in the Pennsylvania study did: for a few days, note down what you fear and later write down what actually happened. That way it is experience, not fear, that has the last word. And if what weighs on you most is not knowing what is going to happen, it may help to read about uncertainty.
Worrying now and then is part of life. It is worth talking to your doctor if the worries take up a good part of the day for months, are very hard to stop and come with poor sleep, tiredness, tension or stomach trouble. The UK’s National Health Service, for example, speaks of generalised anxiety when this lasts at least six months, and the first thing it usually proposes is psychological therapy, above all the cognitive behavioural kind.
And if the worst you imagine has to do with harming yourself or not wanting to go on, talk to someone today. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free and answered 24 hours a day. If you are in another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.
Sometimes what we fear loses strength when we see it written down. Tell it on a star with “What weighs on me” and read it again in a few days: you will know what really happened with it. Meanwhile, someone will keep you company with a touch.