Lots of people who have catastrophic thinking are seeking relief the wrong way. I know. I've
catastrophized like a champion, and I've made the same mistakes. In this video I want to share
three mistakes you may be making, and talk about the path that got me out of it. Catastrophizing,
or catastrophic thinking, is when we use our capacity to mentally simulate things to imagine
worst case scenarios that make us anxious, like if I get made redundant and I can't find another job,
I'll get broke, I'll lose my house, I'll lose my relationships, and I'll end up in the gutter.
Now the first mistake is to think that changing from somebody who catastrophizes a lot
to somebody who doesn't is a quick fix, and giving up because you tried one technique and it didn't
work straight away. Making this kind of change is a journey, and you need to be prepared for
it to take some time, and for it to take some repetition, and some tenacity, and have some
setbacks along the way. That's not to say that changes don't happen quickly. They do, it's just
that this journey might not just be one change, and those changes might not happen immediately.
The second mistake is to think that the solution is to treat our capacity to think as if it's the
enemy, and that what we must do is somehow arrest our thinking and control it. Look, our capacity to
mentally simulate future events and to comment on them with our internal voice is a gift. It's what
allows us to work things out, it's what allows us to plan things, solve problems, make choices,
and avoid danger. Plus we couldn't arrest the flow of thought anyway, even if we wanted to.
Not for any length of time anyway. Even if we did, some of that thinking would escape. Besides trying
to imprison our thinking imprisons us as much as we try to imprison it. It's not where emotional
freedom is. The third mistake is that we try to help ourselves at the wrong level. Catastrophizing
is a misuse of our capacity to think. Einstein is often quoted as saying you can't solve a problem
at the same level of thinking that created it. Now, I don't truthfully know if he really said
that. I mean, you know what the internet is like for falsely attributing quotes to people,
but it's true, and if catastrophizing is a problem created at the level of thought,
then we're unlikely to get very far by trying to solve it at the level of thought. In other words,
we're not likely to be successful by trying to think our way out of catastrophizing. We need to
go to a place that's before the thought. Now this is where I'd like to introduce you to a simple
three-tier model of three ways that we can work with thought. There's no implication that any of
these levels are inherently better or worse than each other but they do work differently. Level one
is to work with the content of thought. That means deliberately thinking about different things,
like if you're thinking about something scary then think of a kitten or something like that,
or if you're telling yourself with your internal voice that you're no good, telling yourself with
your internal voice that you are good. You can get some quick relief by deliberately
injecting different thoughts but it tends to be temporary. Level two is to work with the
structure of thought. This is where technologies like Neuro-Linguistic Programming play, or NLP,
because you can change the qualities of the thoughts that you have, for instance, to make
big bright pictures in your mind small and black and white, to change the kind
of feeling response that you get from them, and you can change the sequence of thoughts,
so instead of this thought branching off to that thought, it branches off to a different thought
instead, so you can break sequences of thought and design new sequences, sequences that feel better.
And level three is to change our relationship with thought. This is where the Three Principles of
Mind, Consciousness and Thought work. Now this is a, I don't really know what to call it, a school,
a philosophy, a field, but whatever we call it, it started with the teaching of a guy called
Syd Banks, who had the life-changing insight one day that what he was afraid of was his thoughts,
and his thoughts weren't real, so any emotional reaction he was having to those thoughts
was a reaction to the imaginary, and this led him on a journey of exploring the spiritual
principles involved. Now, working at this level is a journey, and a spiritual journey at that.
It's not a technique, it's not an intellectual understanding, but when you see what Syd saw,
what Syd taught his students to see, life changes, and it absolutely changes our relationship with
thought. Now, I realize that explaining that there is this journey doesn't necessarily help you in
this moment, but you can start that journey. For instance, you can start to look at your thinking,
to experience that your thinking isn't real, that it is something that you've made up using
the power of thought, is incredibly liberating. Seeing that is one of the things that got me
free from catastrophizing when I used to do that. And it's a journey I go on with my clients. Now,
if you're interested in exploring this understanding for yourself there are some
books like these that can help you. Now, seeing something differently as a way of changing might
seem odd, especially as we've learned that change requires a lot of work, but as one teacher put it,
having an anxious relationship with our thinking is a bit like being afraid of the monster under
the bed. I don't know about you but when I was a little boy I used to imagine sometimes that there
was a monster under the bed, and in my imagination that could seem very real. And for as long as the
monster under the bed seems real, it makes sense to do work to protect yourself from it. As soon
as you realize there isn't a monster on the bed, there's nothing you have to do. And I started to
see that my catastrophic thinking was just like the monster under the bed. And with that watch
this video next which explores how we can turn negative thinking round into positive thinking.