So you’ve completely screwed up this time, you’ll be demoted by tomorrow, fired the day after tomorrow, lose your license, renounced by friends, homeless, sentenced to debtors prison, without even a glimmer of a future in sight.

If or when you find yourself harboring this mindset, write about it in a “gloom and doom” journal. Yes, refer to it as this, for now. Just purchase a simple, blank, no frills notebook to record these “end of the world” thoughts and feelings, using the very same notebook for tracking and continuity purposes. Try to keep entries to a sentence or two.

Note the following:

  1. What you did or what happened that was so utterly terrible.
  2. The fallout you expect.

Important: Do this every time a “catastrophe” happens.

What you’ll all but certainly discover over time:

  • Your predictions of disaster don’t occur
  • As you regularly record the details, the pattern of embellishing them – making them worse and worse – will lessen and eventually cease, in time.

Give this exercise about a month, and I’ll bet you will be pleased with the results. You’ll break the back of catastrophizing, because it’s really not a catastrophe, it just feels that way.

One final thing: Acknowledge that gloom and doom is overrated.