Our brain's ability to catastrophize is our own worst enemy.
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When Gatsby fell ill again, there wasn't time to catastrophize.
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No need to catastrophize and worry you'll never exercise again.
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Biali Haas also notes that the brain has a tendency to "catastrophize" at night.
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The results are what you see — loss of connection, a tendency to catastrophize, feelings of anger, isolation and powerlessness.
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Like a mantra, I repeated this over and over, determined that, for once, I was not going to catastrophize.
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But as a chronic pain patient who bounces from specialist to specialist seeking a diagnosis, it's hard not to catastrophize.
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When we catastrophize we leap to the conclusion that the bad thing that is currently happening is the absolute worst thing.
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They practiced deep breathing and worked on changing their self-talk so as not to catastrophize events and other known triggers.
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And the antidote, though it won't be easy to swallow, is learning, if you can, to embrace uncertainty and not to catastrophize.
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The more you catastrophize not getting a perfect night's sleep, the more intent you put into it, the harder sleep can become.
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But that's not always the case: "In my practice, I often see patients who have objectively very little acne and catastrophize it," Traube says.
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There is such a tendency to catastrophize teenage behavior that many parents and television writers have missed this revolution in the nature of adolescence.
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A person who is prone to anxiety, rumination, and a tendency to catastrophize about the future might find their anxiety levels have increased today.
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If you catastrophize a situation — or dwell on the worst-case scenarios that might happen — that's just going to make you feel more anxious and helpless, she added.
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According to Samantha Brooks, who has studied the psychological impact of quarantine at King's College London, people in a lockdown become extremely afraid of catching the disease and catastrophize any minor ailment that even resembles a symptom.
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"Kids do take cues from you, so it's important not to catastrophize the results" if you are upset about the outcome, said Dr. Gail Saltz, associate professor of psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell Medical College.
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"When people catastrophize, in many ways, it's a maladaptive way of trying to regain control," said Dr. David Rosmarin, the founder and director of the Center for Anxiety and an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
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When you find yourself putting things off to the detriment of productivity, these strategies can help: "One of the biggest reasons people procrastinate is because they catastrophize, or make a huge deal out of something," writes Elizabeth Lombardo, PhD, at Psychology Today.
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"She heard me out, let me rant for over two hours on our first intake appointment, and then basically said we needed to put things like my specific despair about the climate on the back burner and wrangle in my tendency to catastrophize everything... At first I was really annoyed," Roher told me.
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Anxious-Preoccupied People with anxious-preoccupied attachment tend to be hypervigilant to signs of danger and to worry or catastrophize about symptoms. In health care appointments, their narrative is full of intense negative emotion but relatively sparse in the specific detail desired by health care providers. This presentation can readily be perceived as “needy” or “dramatic”. If the healthcare provider pulls away in response it may reinforce the patient’s need to articulate their distress, creating a cycle of distress- withdrawal-distress.
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People who score highly on measures of catastrophization are likely to rate a pain experience as more intense than those who score low on such measures. It is often reasoned that the tendency to catastrophize causes the person to experience the pain as more intense. One suggestion is that catastrophizing influences pain perception through altering attention and anticipation, and heightening emotional responses to pain. However, at least some aspects of catastrophization may be the product of an intense pain experience, rather than its cause.
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Pain catastrophizing is the tendency to describe a pain experience in more exaggerated terms than the average person, to ruminate on it more (e.g., "I kept thinking 'this is terrible'"), and/or to feel more helpless about the experience ("I thought it was never going to get better"). People who report a large number of such thoughts during a pain experience are more likely to rate the pain as more intense than those who report fewer such thoughts. It is generally assumed that the tendency to catastrophize plays a causal role in the pain experience – that is, it causes the person to experience the pain as more intense.
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