Every day, clients describe a version of the same ritual. A text goes unanswered and they’ve already drafted the breakup. A scan gets scheduled and they’re mentally rearranging their family’s life around a diagnosis no one has given. A boss asks for “a quick chat,” and by the next day they’ve updated their résumé, rehearsed the conversation a dozen ways, and barely slept.
For most of my life, I would not have called myself someone prone to catastrophizing. In my mind, catastrophizing meant indulging in improbable worst-case scenarios. What I was doing was simply planning ahead. “It’s important to think things through so at least I won’t be blindsided,” I reasoned with myself.
That sentence is the key to understanding why this way of thinking is so hard to give up. Catastrophizing is a coping strategy, and it pays off just often enough to keep us coming back to it. Our minds also overestimate how often it pays off. Meanwhile, the costs add up slowly and stay mostly out of sight, which makes it hard to see how much this habit takes from us.
Why It Sticks: The Small Payoffs
Researchers who study chronic worry have spent decades asking why people keep doing something that makes them feel so bad. Their answers are surprisingly consistent. What keeps catastrophizing going is the way it changes how we feel in the present moment, far more than any disaster it prevents [1]. They have also found that our minds credit worry for things it never did, convincing us of payoffs that aren’t there.
When I look at where my clients’ hours of catastrophizing go, it’s almost never toward the things most obviously out of their hands, like a decision at work they have no say in, whether an asteroid might hit Earth, or whether the Yellowstone supervolcano might erupt in our lifetime. They spin hardest on situations where they have some control, or believe they do. Did I say something that made my friend pull away, and how do I fix it? Am I saving enough, or do I need to do more in case something unexpected happens? Are my symptoms a sign of something serious, and will they get worse if I don’t figure out exactly what’s wrong and address it correctly?
That sliver of control is what makes the payoff so convincing. When something is clearly out of our hands, thinking harder doesn’t feel like doing much of anything, and part of us eventually lets go, even if grudgingly. When something is fully in our hands, we take action and move on. The middle ground is what traps us, where the outcome seems to depend on our getting it exactly right. There, every scenario we run feels like real progress toward fixing the problem and closing the uncertainty, and stopping feels like walking away from the job before it’s done.
Imagining the future is one of the mind’s most useful abilities. We take what has happened in the past and use it to simulate what might happen next. It’s how we plan, rehearse, and spot problems before they arrive. Picturing a hard conversation before you have it, or thinking through what could go wrong on a trip, sometimes really does leave you better prepared. So some of the time, running the worst case pays off.
That “some of the time” is the problem. Behavioral research has long shown that intermittent reinforcement, a reward that comes unpredictably instead of every time, produces the most persistent habits. It’s the logic of a slot machine. Because worst-case thinking occasionally helps, and we can’t tell in advance which time will pay off, we keep pulling the lever. The occasional win is enough to keep the whole habit running, including the many times it only costs us.
Anxiety is also very good at dressing up hidden costs as payoffs. For example, worry convinces us that it will prepare us for painful losses down the road. People prone to chronic worry tend to be especially sensitive to sudden emotional shifts: feeling fine one moment and blindsided the next. Worrying in advance keeps us in a low, steady state of dread, so that if bad news does arrive, the fall is shorter. In one lab study, people with generalized anxiety rated worrying as more helpful for coping with upsetting material than relaxing beforehand, while non-anxious participants felt the opposite [2]. We end up living with the chronic dread of waiting for the other shoe to drop, in the hope that we won’t feel suddenly worse later.
We also overestimate the payoff because worry takes credit for preventing things that were never going to happen in the first place. In one study, people with generalized anxiety logged their worries and tracked what happened over the following month. Roughly 91 percent never came true, and in about a third of the ones that did, the outcome was better than expected [3]. But when the catastrophe doesn’t arrive, the mind credits the worrying with having somehow prevented it.
A prediction system learns by being wrong. When reality turns out differently than expected, that mismatch is what should update the model. When we catastrophize and the disaster doesn’t come, we credit our vigilance and leave the prediction untouched.
What’s Happening in the Brain
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett offers a useful way to understand why catastrophizing feels so convincing. In her account, the brain spends very little of its time reacting to the world. It is constantly predicting, using what it already knows [4]. She describes the brain’s central job as managing the “body budget”: anticipating what resources we’ll need and preparing in advance [5]. To do that, the brain draws on past experience, asking in effect, “The last time I was in a situation like this, what happened, what did I feel, and what did I do?” Those predictions shape what we perceive and feel before anything actually happens.
Memory research helps explain how those predictions get built. Psychologists Daniel Schacter and Donna Rose Addis propose that we build imagined futures out of the past. The same brain network that supports memory, including the hippocampus, pulls fragments of past experience and recombines them into scenes that haven’t happened yet [6]. In this view, memory is a toolkit for simulating what might come as much as it is a record of what already happened.
Put these together and catastrophizing starts to look like a prediction system working too hard. When we face something uncertain, the brain reaches into memory for relevant material. If our history includes loss, shock, heartbreak, or being caught off guard, those are the fragments closest at hand, and the brain uses them to generate a worst-case prediction.
This is why an imagined future can feel so real. The pieces we’re building with carry emotional weight: the dread of a phone call bringing devastating news, the drop in the stomach from an old diagnosis, the heartache of a past rejection. When we assemble them into a new scene, the emotional weight comes along.
In a 2011 study, researchers asked people to imagine possible future events. Those with anxiety disorders generated more vivid images of negative future scenarios than people without anxiety, and less vivid images of positive ones [7]. The anxious mind renders the worst in high definition, while good outcomes stay blurry and hard to believe in. And because the brain’s job is to prepare the body for what it predicts, the body starts responding as well: tightening, bracing, spending energy on a threat that exists only as a simulation.
What Worry Actually Costs
The payoffs of worry are real, but smaller than our brains would like us to believe. Meanwhile, the bill is steep, and most of it is paid in installments we never fully add up.
We live the disaster many times instead of once, or not at all. Researchers call worry and rumination “perseverative cognition,” and there is good evidence that it keeps the body’s stress response switched on well before and well after any actual stressor [8]. To the nervous system, rehearsing a catastrophe and living through one look a lot alike.
We get worse at solving the real problem. All that planning seems like it should make us better problem-solvers. Research suggests the opposite: people who worry more tend to feel less confident in the solutions they come up with and are less likely to act on them [9].
Pain gets louder. In chronic pain research, catastrophizing is consistently linked to greater pain intensity, distress, and disability [10]. For those of us who work with neuroplastic pain, this makes sense: a brain busy scanning for danger is a brain primed to read sensation as danger.
We miss the life that’s actually happening. Worry adds negative emotion and dampens positive emotion along with it. The hours spent rehearsing what might go wrong are hours not spent noticing what’s going right.
It can strain our relationships. Catastrophizing often spills outward as reassurance-seeking, which brings short-term relief but tends to keep anxiety going, and can leave the people we love feeling like they’re never quite enough to settle us.
The Cost I Most Want You to See
We use catastrophizing to try to reduce uncertainty. Every scenario mapped, every contingency planned, is an attempt to make the unknown feel a little more known. And in the short term, it works. We get a flicker of control while we spin on this tiny blue dot hurtling through space.
But our capacity to tolerate uncertainty works like a muscle: it only grows when we use it. Researchers who study intolerance of uncertainty describe a self-perpetuating loop. The strategies we use to reduce uncertainty (catastrophizing, over-preparing, gathering more information, avoiding) also reduce our exposure to it, so we never get the chance to expand our tolerance for it [11]. Research on safety behaviors shows the same pattern: they calm anxiety in the moment while preventing us from learning that the feared situation was survivable after all [12].
When we’ve planned for every worst case and things turn out okay, we give the credit to the plan. We never get to discover and deepen a sense of trust in ourselves, the knowledge that we already have the inner resources to meet life however it unfolds. Over time, we lose chances to gather evidence of our own ability to meet life in all its unpredictability.
So when the next uncertain situation arises (and the one thing we can know about life is that it will give us endless opportunities to sit with uncertainty), it feels just as threatening as the last, because we’ve learned to trust our preparation and never had the chance to learn to trust ourselves.
This is the real hidden cost. Catastrophizing borrows trouble from the future, and it also wears down our confidence that we can handle life as it unfolds.
It is especially hard to let go of for overcontrolled people, the ones who lean hard on self-control, planning, and getting things right. For them, catastrophizing looks a lot like their strengths. Careful planning, attention to detail, anticipating problems, and enduring discomfort have often made them excellent at their work. Worst-case thinking feels like conscientiousness, so it rarely gets flagged as anxiety. Their persistence, the same capacity that lets them keep working on a hard problem long after others would quit, makes it especially hard to set down a problem that thinking can’t solve.
This is why the self-trust cost lands so hard. When the only evidence you’ve allowed yourself to collect is that preparation and always getting it “right” works, you never get to find out that you, without the plan, are enough, and that you can survive getting things “wrong.”
A Practice to Try: Flexible Mind DEFinitely
Radically Open DBT (RO-DBT), developed by Thomas Lynch for people whose struggles come from too much self-control, includes a simple three-step skill called Flexible Mind DEFinitely [13]. It wasn’t built specifically for catastrophizing, but it fits well, because it asks us to turn toward discomfort with curiosity before rushing to fix it. The next time you notice your mind sprinting toward the worst case, try this.
D: Acknowledge the Distress
Start by naming what’s happening: “I’m catastrophizing right now. I notice dread. My chest is tight.” You don’t need to argue with the thoughts or talk yourself out of them. Just notice that an unwanted emotion has shown up and that your mind has started planning in response.
E: Use Self-Enquiry to Learn
Hold off on solving the problem and get curious about your reaction to it. In RO-DBT, self-enquiry means asking ourselves questions without rushing to answer them, staying with a question long enough to learn something we didn’t already know. If an answer comes quickly, that’s often a sign to sit with the question even longer. A few you might try:
What am I afraid I’d feel if this happened without warning?
Is it possible that planning for this is a way of not having to sit with not knowing?
What would it mean about me if I didn’t prepare for this?
Is there a part of me that doubts I could handle this if it came?
Notice any resistance: the urge to brush the question aside or dive back into planning. That resistance is information, too.
F: Flexibly Respond With Humility
Then choose what’s actually needed right now. Sometimes that’s one reasonable, concrete step (make the appointment, send the email) and then deliberately setting the rest down. Sometimes it’s nothing at all except bringing your attention back to the room you’re in. And sometimes a little planning does help; RO-DBT encourages us to be flexible even about flexibility. A useful question to ask here: “What would someone who already knows they have the inner resources to meet life however it unfolds do right now?”
Each time you let a question stay open a little longer, you give yourself something catastrophizing can’t provide: evidence that you can tolerate not knowing, and that you can trust yourself to meet life as it arrives.
Why do I always assume the worst-case scenario?
What is catastrophizing?
Do most of the things we worry about actually happen?
What does catastrophizing cost you?
Why is catastrophizing so common in high achievers?
How do I stop catastrophizing?
References
Borkovec TD, Ray WJ, Stöber J. Worry: a cognitive phenomenon intimately linked to affective, physiological, and interpersonal behavioral processes. Cognitive Therapy and Research. 1998;22(6):561-576.
Llera SJ, Newman MG. Rethinking the role of worry in generalized anxiety disorder: evidence supporting a model of emotional contrast avoidance. Behavior Therapy. 2014;45(3):283-299.
LaFreniere LS, Newman MG. Exposing worry’s deceit: percentage of untrue worries in generalized anxiety disorder treatment. Behavior Therapy. 2020;51(3):413-423.
Barrett LF, Simmons WK. Interoceptive predictions in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2015;16(7):419-429.
Barrett LF. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 2017.
Schacter DL, Addis DR, Hassabis D, Martin VC, Spreng RN, Szpunar KK. The future of memory: remembering, imagining, and the brain. Neuron. 2012;76(4):677-694.
Morina N, Deeprose C, Pusowski C, Schmid M, Holmes EA. Prospective mental imagery in patients with major depressive disorder or anxiety disorders. Journal of Anxiety Disorders. 2011;25(8):1032-1037.
Brosschot JF, Gerin W, Thayer JF. The perseverative cognition hypothesis: a review of worry, prolonged stress-related physiological activation, and health. Journal of Psychosomatic Research. 2006;60(2):113-124.
Llera SJ, Newman MG. Contrast avoidance predicts and mediates the effect of trait worry on problem-solving impairment. Journal of Anxiety Disorders. 2023;94:102674.
Rogers AH, Farris SG. A meta-analysis of the associations of elements of the fear-avoidance model of chronic pain with negative affect, depression, anxiety, pain-related disability and pain intensity. European Journal of Pain. 2022;26(8):1611-1635.
Hebert EA, Dugas MJ. Behavioral experiments for intolerance of uncertainty: challenging the unknown in the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice. 2019;26(2):421-436.
Helbig-Lang S, Petermann F. Tolerate or eliminate? A systematic review on the effects of safety behavior across anxiety disorders. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice. 2010;17(3):218-233.
Lynch TR. The Skills Training Manual for Radically Open Dialectical Behavior Therapy: A Clinician’s Guide for Treating Disorders of Overcontrol. Context Press; 2018.
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