"An anxious person often lives in the world of "what-ifs." What if I say something weird and embarrass myself in front of people at the party? What if these heart palpitations are the beginning of a heart attack? What if I don't get that promotion because I was late yesterday? With this type of thinking, the possibilities are endless because anything can happen in one's mind."
"In cognitive therapy, we call this "catastrophizing." When we catastrophize, we take ordinary everyday life experiences and blow them out of proportion. If there are a thousand possible outcomes in a given situation, an anxious person will focus on the one or two negative possibilities and ignore the hundreds of neutral or positive ones."
"Research suggests that anxious people tend to overestimate risk and underestimate the ability to cope. Some call a fearful outlook "threat bias," "threat misappraisal," or a "risk-resource model of anxiety.""
Anxiety is fundamentally future-focused, characterized by excessive worry about what could happen rather than what is actually occurring. Anxious individuals engage in catastrophizing, a cognitive pattern where ordinary experiences are magnified into worst-case scenarios. This phenomenon, known as threat bias or threat misappraisal, causes people to fixate on the one or two negative outcomes among thousands of possibilities while ignoring neutral or positive ones. The anxious mind creates an imagined future world filled with continuous catastrophes, manifesting through endless "what-if" questions about social embarrassment, health crises, professional failures, and personal relationships. This exhausting mental pattern reflects a fundamental misappraisal of risk versus personal coping resources. Cognitive restructuring offers a therapeutic approach to reshape how anxious minds perceive situations.
Read at Psychology Today
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