94. What to Do When Everything Looks Like a Catastrophe?
No Stupid Questions
Hosts Angela Duckworth and Stephen Dubner explore the psychological distinction between healthy anxiety and the cognitive distortion known a
Key takeaways
- Catastrophizing is defined as imagining the worst possible outcome when faced with uncertain news, often linked to 'maximizing' behaviors.
- Angela Duckworth distinguishes between anticipatory catastrophizing (anxiety about the future) and retrospective catastrophizing (dwelling on the past).
Main topics
- Catastrophizing vs. Anxiety
- Cognitive Distortions
Notable quotes
The whole point is to get to more accurate, non-distorted understandings of reality.
Conclusion
The episode provides a useful framework for distinguishing between nec
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:02) We had prepaid flights, and there's nothing that gets Americans to do anything more than just making good on their prepaid flights. I'm Angela Duckworth. Speaker 6 (0:10) I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Speaker 2 (0:14) Today on the show, how can you stop catastrophizing? I think you hate Speaker 3 (0:19) me. I think I'm a bad person. I think this is the end of our friendship and our working relationship. Speaker 6 (0:30) Angela, I think of all the people I know, you are the least likely person to catastrophize, which is a word I did not know until recently. I Speaker 3 (0:42) think, Stephen, by catastrophizing, you mean making a mountain out of a molehill. Is that what you mean? Speaker 6 (0:48) Correct. I'd read this article in The Guardian by a clinical psychologist named Linda Blair, not the Linda Blair of... From The Exorcist? I'm pretty sure it's not. the same Linda Blair. But according to this definition, catastrophizing is what happens when you hear some, as she puts it, uncertain news, and then you imagine the worst possible outcome. So I can imagine that if a person were to consistently do this, it would be really damaging. I could imagine that you are someone who does not do this. So I wanted to ask you today whether There's someone out there who does this all the time or even a little bit. I'm curious what your advice would be to manage this. And by the way, I'm not suggesting that it's the bad or the wrong way to go. You Speaker 3 (1:37) don't want to be judgy. I Speaker 6 (1:38) don't want to be judgy. Even Speaker 3 (1:40) though the word catastrophizing is a little judgy, but go on. Speaker 6 (1:44) Well, I will say mountain molehilling does sound a little bit less judgy. Speaker 3 (1:48) Not much, but still. Speaker 6 (1:50) Well, first of all, how many of us have ever actually encountered a molehill? I think it's the hill of a mole, is it not? You know, even I figured that part out. But like, is it a big bump in the dirt? Is it invisible to the naked eye? I don't know. We need to have more moles on the show, I think. I Speaker 3 (2:07) think that's an excellent suggestion. Speaker 6 (2:08) Excuse me, Sir Mole, when you build a hill. What would you say are the dimensions of said molehill and how does that compare to the dimensions of your local mountain? But that's not the question that I really wanted to know. I want to know if someone catastrophizes, what's the harm? What are the downsides? Maybe what are the upsides? But assuming there are downsides as a positive psychologist and someone who I assume does not catastrophize, what's your best advice to manage this? Speaker 3 (2:37) I want to start with a story, Stephen. Of my dad. So growing up, my dad, I remember, was in the front seat of the car driving. I was in the back seat. We were in a parking lot near Four Eyes or something. I must have been getting my annual eye exam. Speaker 6 (2:55) Wait, there's an eyeglass place called Four Eyes? Speaker 3 (2:57) Isn't that clever? Speaker 6 (2:59) That's embracing the epithet. Speaker 3 (3:01) You got the joke though, right? Four Eyes, like four eyes, but also four eyes. Speaker 6 (3:05) Oh, I didn't even need the double entendre. I just liked owning your own epithet. Yes. Speaker 3 (3:10) Well, it's a self-confident myopic population that perhaps frequents four eyes. And anyway, I do remember being in that parking lot and I remember that it had those little speed bumps built in to kind of slow you down. But my dad wasn't going, well, not particularly fast, but we hit a speed bump and he clearly hadn't anticipated it. And the car went up and it went down and it was like, boom. And my dad spontaneously emoted, as he often did, disaster. Speaker 6 (3:37) Was it his catchphrase, would you say? Well, Speaker 3 (3:39) he was a bit of a catastrophizer. This tendency in clinical... psychology is sometimes called maximizing. It is a feature of people who not only tend to be, as I think Linda Blair was hinting at, anxious, because anxiety is thinking about the worst possible outcome that has yet to happen, but is also a feature of depression. And in that case, it's more typically looking back at something that just happened, like you and I have a misunderstanding. And if I catastrophize about that past event, I blow. it all out of proportion. I think you hate me. I think I'm a bad person. I think this is the end of our friendship and our working relationship. So I think catastrophizing can be anticipatory or retrospective. And yeah, my dad was pretty good at both. Speaker 6 (4:28) You described anxiety as envisioning the worst possible outcome yet to happen, which sounds a lot like catastrophizing. Is that the case? Can there not be a healthy level of anxiety? Speaker 3 (4:40) Oh, yeah. I mean, anxiety is an emotion. We have emotions for survival purposes. But anxiety is an emotion doesn't have to be at its extreme, which is, for example, PTSD or generalized anxiety disorder. You know, this emotion, which comes from the anticipation of future bad things at its extreme can be debilitating and awful and paralyzing and dysfunctional. But I had anxiety this morning thinking that maybe I wouldn't get to the recording studio on time. So that's a helpful thing to experience that emotion, to think, wow, I might not get there and to pick up my step a little bit, which I did. Speaker 6 (5:16) Let me propose a scenario. I'm imagining now this spectrum of, let's say, zero to five. And let's say zero is blissed out. I have zero negative thoughts or anxious thoughts or catastrophic thoughts about anything. And then five is catastrophizing. If that were the spectrum. Would anxiety live somewhere on that spectrum? And how close is it to catastrophizing? Or are you saying that anxiety is the variable that brings us from blissed out to catastrophizing? Speaker 3 (5:48) I think it might be helpful just to think of it as a continuum, like you said, zero to five. You could ask me, like, how anxious, Angela, are you feeling right now on a scale from zero to five? I could say I'm maximally anxious or I'm minimally anxious. The word catastrophizing suggests that whatever number I give you, it's actually not a number that matches reality. Speaker 6 (6:06) Oh, OK. Let Speaker 3 (6:08) me just give you a specific example. When my mother was drowning next to me. On Christmas Eve, I was a five on a scale from zero to five. I don't think I could have been more anxious, more like heart rate racing, adrenaline coursing. That is not the same thing as catastrophizing because you could say, well, if you're in the middle of the ocean, 45 minutes by speedboat from shore, and your 86-year-old mother is drowning by your side, you better be a five, right? And the anxiety response, which is physiological, which is cognitive, which is motivational, like literally your body shifts gears into a different mode, is in that case incredibly appropriate. And also the key here is that when it's no longer appropriate, we're on. the shore, the EMTs are there, etc. It's the normal thing to actually go down from five to what was like a 4.5 and then eventually, you know, to be maybe a two. So the catastrophizing language here is really important. I think it's appropriate to think this person has blown out of proportion whatever reality is. Speaker 6 (7:15) So you just indirectly. told this story that is wild that you'd told me on the phone shortly after it happened. Did Speaker 3 (7:23) I never mention that before on No Stupid Questions? Speaker 6 (7:26) I think our listeners, this is the first time they're hearing this. So can you just describe you and your family went on a holiday recently to Florida and then... Speaker 3 (7:36) Yes, a quote unquote vacation. We went to Miami. This is a vacation that we had planned to do months before. Remember those golden days? The Speaker 6 (7:47) COVID window. The Speaker 3 (7:48) COVID window when the vaccine was announced and everybody anticipated the liberation of