From Spiraling to Soothing: Stop Catastrophizing

[00:00:00] Hey there and welcome to Heal with Grace. I'm your host Grace Secker
[00:00:04] and I'm a holistic licensed therapist and nervous system coach who believes that the chronic and often unseen symptoms
[00:00:10] you're living with are a sign of something deeper going on. A sign that your nervous system needs attention. In each episode
[00:00:17] I'll share the science behind the most common chronic health disorders plus holistic health tips using mental physical and spiritual practices.
[00:00:25] You'll hear what I've learned in my journey and the true stories from our trusted guests
[00:00:30] so you can feel less alone in your experience and give yourself grace no matter what you're going through.
[00:00:35] So without further ado, settle in and get cozy. It's time to heal with grace.
[00:00:41] Hello, hello friends. Welcome back to the Heal with Grace podcast.
[00:00:48] Today we are going to talking about and I'm gonna help you understand how to get out of those spiraling moments, those fear-based thoughts,
[00:00:56] the fear that induces and happens in your body that maybe even lands into a panic attack.
[00:01:03] And really what we're talking about is catastrophizing.
[00:01:07] It's that time, those moments where you get maybe a weird twinge in your body or you're afraid you might say the wrong thing
[00:01:14] and you think, oh my gosh, something's wrong. What did I say?
[00:01:19] What's happening? I'm afraid I'm going to say the wrong thing or ooh, what's happening in my body?
[00:01:24] I'm going to go Google these rare diseases and wonder if I'll ever get better.
[00:01:31] Sometimes feels rational, but oftentimes they're very irrational thoughts and feelings that happen when we get into this really deep fear response.
[00:01:42] It's actually one of the most common mental habits keeping people stuck and chronic symptoms in fear and panic and anxiety.
[00:01:50] And so I want to help you understand exactly what's going on and then how to move through it.
[00:01:55] Because this is honestly one of the biggest topics and oftentimes I share with people all the time around how it impacts your mental health,
[00:02:05] your physical health, your chronic symptoms.
[00:02:08] Because if you've been listening to this, you probably hope that you understand by now.
[00:02:13] And if not, you will understand that most of our chronic symptoms, when I mean that, I say things like pain, anxiety is actually a symptom.
[00:02:22] It is not an emotion. It's not a feeling. Anxiety is a symptom and that's actually a whole other episode.
[00:02:27] So that's coming. But what I mean by this is that I'm talking about any type of symptom illness pain that can't really be explained,
[00:02:39] does not have a true structural cause. And you've been trying things over and over and over again that aren't working.
[00:02:47] And when this happens, of course, we're going to catastrophize about it because it's scary.
[00:02:53] It's scary to have, even if you do have some sort of diagnoses, you can still land in the neuroplastic chronic symptom camp.
[00:03:02] And neuroplastic means a chronic symptom, like I just explained, that is not being treated, that can't find relief after around six months or so of treatment,
[00:03:13] depending again on what it is. And when we have these symptoms, we catastrophize, we get really fearful, we get worried, we go down the spiral of like, what ifs, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if.
[00:03:26] And even if you don't have chronic symptoms or, yeah, even if you do, there's plenty of other areas where this happens, right? Like, oh my gosh, what if my friend thinks bad of me or what if I ask for what I need and need and then they leave me or what if I don't push harder than I'll fail or if I slow down, everything will fall apart.
[00:03:47] All of these what if statements, what if or should or could lead us into this spiraling and catastrophizing.
[00:03:55] So, okay, let me back up for a second and explain what is catastrophizing. So really what's happening, that word means when your brain goes straight into the worst case scenario. It might sound like when you have a flare and you think, I was afraid of this happening, I can't trust my body, I'm never going to get better.
[00:04:18] All of these all or nothing statements, that means you're catastrophizing. I'm never going to get better. This always happens. I'm going to lose it all again. I just started feeling better. Why can't this go away? What if it never goes away? This pain means I'm going backwards. What if they don't like me? I'm going to fail. If I don't do this, blah, blah, blah, blah, all of those. Even if when I said all of those.
[00:04:45] Ah, that like, ugh, it means my body heavy. Literally, seriously, right now it felt very heavy to say all of those things. The weight of those words sit very heavy on our nervous system. They send alarm signals to our brain that sound off danger.
[00:05:07] And even when you were listening to those statements that I just said, when you hear someone else say that, you might even think like, oh, that's a little dramatic. It's not though, you're not being dramatic. You're trying to help yourself, actually.
[00:05:27] When those statements go off in your mind over and over and over again, what's happening is that you're trying to predict pain to protect yourself, but your brain doesn't know the difference between this is uncomfortable and we're in danger. So your nervous system hits the panic button again and again.
[00:05:47] So when it thinks that you're in danger, it sounds the alarm and your brain starts to say those terms, those words, those fear statements, the all or nothing, the, oh my gosh, what's going to happen? What's wrong? I'm never going to get better. All of those.
[00:06:01] It's really just trying to protect you from even more danger, even more pain. But actually what's happening is it doesn't really protect you. It just continues to create more danger and pain.
[00:06:11] Let me say that again. So the thoughts, the catastrophizing thoughts are trying to protect you from more pain and really from more emotional pain, from more fear, from rejection, from disappointment, from anger.
[00:06:25] All of those things were not allowed, and I'm doing quotes, we're not quote unquote, allowed to feel your brain wants to protect you from those.
[00:06:33] So it's going to say all of those statements, all those all or nothing statements, it gets going to send you down a spiral and then it's going to send you physical symptoms.
[00:06:42] It's your brain's job to keep you safe.
[00:06:45] And when you've lived when pain or illness or anxiety for a while, it just becomes normal, becomes hyper vigilant.
[00:06:54] It's like a toddler with a plastic toy fire truck running around screaming fire, fire, fire every time the toast burns a little bit.
[00:07:03] It's cute in theory, kind of. You can get pretty annoying. It's exhausting in practice.
[00:07:09] So when you have a symptom, your brain thinks, oh no, we've been here before, better to assume the worst so we're prepared.
[00:07:19] But that hyper alert state actually amplifies symptoms. It tells your body we're not safe, which feeds the pain, anxiety loop.
[00:07:30] Catastrophizing is your brain's way from protecting you from more pain, but that's not actually what happens when you've been feeling better.
[00:07:39] But then what feels like all of a sudden you're back in your pain or sometimes you have a huge flare one day or two days or three days or a week or whatever.
[00:07:47] It's really easy to fall into the nothing will get better. I'm so tired. I'm so over this.
[00:07:53] And so what I'm going to help you do is see that pattern that happens and turn inward.
[00:08:01] Turn towards yourself instead of away from yourself.
[00:08:04] What I mean by that is that when we are catastrophizing, we're trying so hard to not be in our bodies, to not feel our pain,
[00:08:14] to not think about ourselves because being in our bodies and our life in our present moment is too scary.
[00:08:19] Because obviously we have pain. We don't know what to do. We're really uncomfortable.
[00:08:25] But when we turn towards ourself instead of away and try to disassociate and distract and like go to every different doctor and try every different protocol under the sun.
[00:08:38] We're trying everything outside of us and instead what I'm going to help you do is turn towards yourself.
[00:08:44] So I'm going to give you an example of this first and then I'll kind of I'll walk you through it.
[00:08:51] So if you've, yeah, if you've been here and you've heard some of my story and I'm going to share a little bit more.
[00:08:56] So I've had many different symptoms along my journey essentially.
[00:09:02] Like if I wrote out a script of a timeline, there would be different points on the timeline that my body gave me different types of symptoms.
[00:09:11] And it's interesting because there are some symptoms like a lot of pain, like physical pain in my body that was really helped by brain training, regulating my nervous system.
[00:09:22] And truly I don't experience those things ever anymore.
[00:09:25] Time and time again, I do a lot of the same brain training, nervous system regulation, some emotional work and and I've moved through that.
[00:09:32] Now there's been a few subset of symptoms and really this is more along my chronic fatigue, which if you've had chronic fatigue,
[00:09:40] those symptoms, if you have the brain fog, the shut down, the collapse in your nervous system, then you know where I'm what I'm saying probably.
[00:09:48] And also, I feel for you.
[00:09:50] So for me, it's been a little more complicated with those symptoms.
[00:09:54] It hasn't been as easy in terms of, well, okay, I don't want to use the word easy.
[00:10:00] None of this has been easy.
[00:10:01] I guess I'll just say some things were a little bit more simplistic than some others.
[00:10:10] And so for me, whenever I have the collapse, the freeze, the shutdown response, which is fatigue for me, it's really scary.
[00:10:20] It's scarier than a lot of other symptoms.
[00:10:22] Symptoms are scary, but this one is just on a whole other level.
[00:10:24] It is this like deep, deep fear, this darkness that I've dealt with a lot before, which really in previous times, like in my teenage years and maybe early 20s looked like depression.
[00:10:37] But now, or well, after that, maybe like late 20s anyway, it looked more like physical symptoms like fatigue shutdown.
[00:10:48] Now, yeah, some disappointment, some despair or some feeling sad and grief came with that, but a lot of the physical symptoms truly just took me down.
[00:10:59] And I don't think I fully recognized how much I was catastrophizing in those states and how much I was just being like, oh my gosh, I can't do this anymore.
[00:11:08] I don't know what's going to happen.
[00:11:10] I'm over it.
[00:11:11] Like it's just like I go into that catastrophizing, hopeless state.
[00:11:17] And so what I have learned from that is that what I was doing was dismissing myself and actually turning away because that place was so scary to be with.
[00:11:33] It was this place of deep darkness that I never knew how to be with.
[00:11:38] It was never taught to me how to be with.
[00:11:40] I mean, I could go down, I could be a whole other episode.
[00:11:44] And actually, you know what, I'm going to share a little bit of this here because this might help you.
[00:11:47] For me, it was really scary to be with.
[00:11:49] And what I've realized is because those deeper darker years of depression were really scary.
[00:11:55] And I did have some help like I actually was in therapy, but to be honest, it was a lot of cognitive therapy.
[00:12:04] And I didn't really learn how to sit with and be with my body, with those emotions, with the darkness and allow it to be okay.
[00:12:12] Because all of the rhetoric around that time, around depression, around darkness was, oh, something's wrong with you.
[00:12:20] We need to give you a pill.
[00:12:22] We need to give you treatment.
[00:12:24] And think about this.
[00:12:27] The more that you say that to someone or that message is sent over and over, then we take that on as something's wrong with me.
[00:12:36] But that's not true.
[00:12:38] There's nothing wrong with me.
[00:12:40] There's nothing wrong with you.
[00:12:42] If you experience grief, sadness, pain, illness, there's absolutely nothing wrong with you.
[00:12:47] But if you've been in the mental health world, physical world and any kind of medical world,
[00:12:53] we have this idea that if you experience something, if you experience anxiety, depression, illness, pain, something is wrong with you.
[00:13:03] Man, just sit with that for a second.
[00:13:06] Like to your core, you take that on.
[00:13:12] And so when we have this idea or this feeling or belief that something's wrong with us,
[00:13:20] then it's going to be really hard to be with ourselves, to turn towards ourselves when we're feeling pain or illness or symptoms or whatever it is.
[00:13:31] I'm going to just say pain from now on, to be honest, and just know that that means all things, all symptoms.
[00:13:37] So when we feel pain, of course we want to run away.
[00:13:42] We don't want to feel it because we've been told that that's bad. That's wrong. There's something wrong.
[00:13:46] So my work and what I'm hoping will help you is that when we can turn towards it and be with that pain, even when it's so scary,
[00:14:00] then your brain doesn't have to go into protective mode.
[00:14:04] Your brain doesn't have to protect you from something because it's not actually bad. There's nothing wrong.
[00:14:10] And that means, one, that it doesn't have to send you danger signals, so it doesn't need to send you symptoms.
[00:14:16] And also two, it doesn't need all this catastrophizing and spiraling in your mind into panic and fear and anxiety.
[00:14:23] That's old programming. That is learned chaos.
[00:14:27] That is the learned chaos of I'm wrong, something's wrong, I have to neglect myself because people have neglected me.
[00:14:35] And there's a lot of uncertainty around being in pain and fear and doubt and despair and anger and rage.
[00:14:43] So when we can turn towards and be with and open to the experience and know that there's nothing wrong with us,
[00:14:49] then we don't have to have that danger.
[00:14:52] Furthermore, I want you to look at, think about it this way.
[00:14:56] Look at the people you grew up around. Look at your family.
[00:15:00] Now, I'm going to say this first, if you look back at your childhood and you think,
[00:15:06] I was fine. No big deal.
[00:15:09] Or I don't know, I had an okay, you know, normal quote unquote childhood.
[00:15:13] That might be true from context, from looking outwardly in, right?
[00:15:18] Maybe you had people that always showed up physically for you.
[00:15:21] Maybe you were never scared that you weren't going to eat or ran a food or were never abused.
[00:15:28] Those are wonderful. That's great. Happy for you.
[00:15:31] And sorry, I don't mean that to say, to mean sarcastically, I really don't.
[00:15:36] I'm saying that's great. You don't have those stories at the same time.
[00:15:40] At the same time, I bet if you're listening to this, you never learned how to respond to hardship,
[00:15:48] to paint, to deep emotion, to disappointment, to rejection.
[00:15:52] If you're caregivers, your family, the people around you never showed you how to feel disappointment,
[00:15:57] how to feel emotions, how to move through difficult experiences.
[00:16:01] What else were you going to do with those? You're going to respond like them.
[00:16:05] You're going to bottle it up. You might go into panic mode.
[00:16:07] You might think, oh my gosh, I don't know how to handle this.
[00:16:10] I need to spiral and think that if I'm not doing this, if I'm not, if I'm feeling pain that something's wrong,
[00:16:16] or if I don't push harder, I'm going to fail.
[00:16:19] Or if I ask for what I need from this relationship, then they'll leave me.
[00:16:24] Then maybe I'm too much if I feel a lot.
[00:16:26] If you never learned how to be with and feel, then your brain is going to think that there's something wrong when you do feel.
[00:16:37] And PSA, if you're human, you have feelings. You have emotions.
[00:16:43] We all do. You can't tell them to go away.
[00:16:46] You can't control them and push them away because guess what?
[00:16:49] That leads to all this fear and doubt and an overflow of repressed emotions,
[00:16:55] which leads to chronic symptoms.
[00:16:58] So that is what I mean by when I say old programming.
[00:17:03] We don't want that programming anymore.
[00:17:05] We want to help you turn towards yourself so that your mind doesn't have to take over and spiral into doubt and fear and pain and panic.
[00:17:13] Okay. I'm going to give a little synopsis here before I move into how do we catch it? How do we work with it?
[00:17:19] So the catastrophizing in your mind, the fear, the spiraling, really is a protective mechanism.
[00:17:27] Your brain wants to protect you from what it thinks is wrong, from what it thinks is dangerous.
[00:17:33] And what it thinks is dangerous, what it thinks is wrong is probably just what you've learned from society, from family, from growing up.
[00:17:41] That feelings are bad. That if you don't show up a certain way, you're going to be rejected.
[00:17:46] That if you don't show up a certain way, you're going to fail.
[00:17:49] If you don't present a certain way, you're not good enough.
[00:17:52] And then furthermore, when you're in the midst of pain and illness and you have pain again,
[00:17:59] you have a flare, something goes wrong, you have a new symptom that pops up,
[00:18:05] your brain goes danger, danger, danger, because you've never learned how to deal with it.
[00:18:10] And no one's ever helped you with it.
[00:18:13] So of course there's hopelessness.
[00:18:15] And so your brain goes danger, danger, danger, let's send all these thoughts to figure something out.
[00:18:21] We have to help this. We have to fix it.
[00:18:22] The thing is that again, you didn't really learn how to manage that fear, how to be with that fear and take care of yourself in it.
[00:18:33] And talk to yourself in a way of like, oh, hey, yeah, I know we're fearful right now.
[00:18:39] Oh, I know this is really scary.
[00:18:41] And also we're going to move through this.
[00:18:44] So how do we catch it in real time? Let's get practical.
[00:18:49] First and foremost, you're going to name it.
[00:18:52] Instead of shaming yourself, you're going to try, ah, this is my brain trying to protect me by imagining the worst.
[00:19:01] It's scared. It's not stupid.
[00:19:03] Then you're going to ride the wave.
[00:19:06] You know how we've talked about writing the wave of emotion.
[00:19:09] So technically, if you learn to ride the wave of emotion, and I'm going to explain this here for a second,
[00:19:18] we have learned that emotions in the body last 90 seconds.
[00:19:23] If you allow it to go there, if you allow it to be there.
[00:19:27] So emotions are raw, vulnerable.
[00:19:30] They are just true. They are truth, fear, rejection, pain, sadness, hopelessness.
[00:19:34] All of our emotions are true to us.
[00:19:40] What keeps them around for longer than 90 seconds is our fear and judgment and shame and criticism about the emotion.
[00:19:47] So when you're in a flare and you feel so hopeless and like, oh my gosh, what did I do wrong to be in this?
[00:19:55] That's the criticism about the symptom.
[00:19:58] That's the criticism about the emotion.
[00:19:59] And actually what I mean here is symptoms and emotions, actually we can see them as the same thing.
[00:20:05] We can treat them similarly.
[00:20:07] With emotions, we want to be with them and feel them.
[00:20:10] With symptoms, we want to be with them and feel them.
[00:20:13] I know that sounds scary and might sound kind of intuitive, but we allow them to be there, feel them, ride the wave of them.
[00:20:22] They don't have to be dangerous to our mind and our bodies anymore, which then reduces the catastrophic thinking.
[00:20:29] So once you ride that wave, I also then I want you to ask yourself, what's actually true here?
[00:20:36] Is the only possible outcome that I'm telling myself right now truly that I'm going to be in this forever and it's never going to end?
[00:20:43] Is that really true?
[00:20:45] Have I survived this before?
[00:20:47] Maybe, and I know this is cliche, but it really works.
[00:20:51] What would I say to a friend in this exact situation?
[00:20:54] What would you tell someone?
[00:20:55] Then, if you didn't find it already when you rode the wave of the symptom, I want you to understand the emotion underneath.
[00:21:06] Catastrophizing often masks fear, grief, powerlessness, hopelessness, rage, anger.
[00:21:15] So I want you to ask yourself, what is this thought protecting me from feeling?
[00:21:20] Then breathe into it, feel it, journal it, talk about it.
[00:21:27] But I really want you to feel that emotion and know that it's completely okay to feel.
[00:21:33] Remind your body it's okay to feel because when you feel it, then you're signaling to your brain.
[00:21:38] Oh, it's okay to feel this even when it's scary.
[00:21:41] So when I can feel it, you don't need to send me signals of danger by means of pain or illness.
[00:21:47] Then to close this out, you can use a calming reframe.
[00:21:53] You can say something like this is uncomfortable, but it doesn't mean I'm in danger.
[00:21:58] It doesn't mean all is lost or all is wrong.
[00:22:00] I've moved through this before.
[00:22:02] Yeah, I'm tired of it.
[00:22:04] I'm tired of this.
[00:22:06] I'm here.
[00:22:08] I'm tired at the same time.
[00:22:10] I know I'm doing the work and I'm moving through this and I'm moving forward and I will heal.
[00:22:12] I am healing.
[00:22:13] You don't have to know the future to support yourself in this moment.
[00:22:18] Remind yourself of that.
[00:22:20] You don't have to know exactly what's going to happen in the future to help yourself right now.
[00:22:24] Maybe you say to yourself, my body is asking for presence, not panic.
[00:22:30] Maybe you place a hand on your heart, breathing deeply.
[00:22:36] Maybe you hug a pillow or punch a pillow, whatever you need, whatever emotion or feeling is there.
[00:22:45] And say to yourself, even though the symptom is here, I am okay in this moment and I choose to respond
[00:22:52] and be with myself with presence and compassion instead of fear.
[00:22:58] It is safe to feel all the fear, the disappointment, the sadness, et cetera.
[00:23:04] It's okay to be with this even if it's really scary.
[00:23:07] Remember that you are not dramatic.
[00:23:10] You're not overthinking.
[00:23:11] You're just trying to stay safe in a body and world that's felt unsafe for a very long time.
[00:23:17] Catastrophizing, spiraling, it's a habit and like all habits, it can be rewired.
[00:23:23] When you stop feeding the fear loop, you actually start building a new one.
[00:23:28] One where your brain learns, I can feel something without assuming the worst.
[00:23:34] I can have a bad moment, a bad day, a bad week without a bad life.
[00:23:38] And I can pause before or when I notice that I'm spiraling because that pause is power.
[00:23:48] Even if it's a second pause or it's an hour pause, it's powerful.
[00:23:53] This is one of the most important lessons that I can share with you.
[00:24:00] And there's a lot of lessons within this lesson.
[00:24:03] I probably talk about this every single week on our mind body healing method call.
[00:24:09] Every week, someone brings this up in some way, shape, or form, or they don't even realize they're bringing it up,
[00:24:14] but then I have to talk to them about it because how could you not spiral when you're in pain?
[00:24:20] That's what you've learned, but we're going to relearn.
[00:24:23] And every time I talk about this, I look at the screen and I see all these nods from everyone.
[00:24:28] Everyone's like, oh my gosh, you got me too.
[00:24:31] Oh, thank you for saying that.
[00:24:33] Yeah, it's really powerful to see the group realize it together and then move through that catastrophic thinking and that spiraling.
[00:24:41] If you want more tools like this and you want to be in that healing hub when we're all in it together
[00:24:49] and we're learning these tools and we're, you know, doing it together.
[00:24:54] And I get to give you this real time feedback.
[00:24:56] I would love, love, love to have you in the mind body healing method and you can find the link below to apply for a time to talk about it, to chat.
[00:25:06] We can figure out if it's the right fit for you.
[00:25:08] But this is really an important wonderful space to heal together, to be together and learn how to rewire your brain,
[00:25:18] get out of the habits and the patterns that you've been in and really understand how to be with and move through your symptoms
[00:25:26] and not have to run your life anymore and truly treat and heal them.
[00:25:31] And also, you are resilient, you are not broken and your brain is capable of change.
[00:25:37] Until next time, I'm Grace and keep healing with Grace.
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[00:26:04] So I can continue sharing episodes that help you as well as others.
[00:26:08] Thanks for listening and I hope this brings you hope on your journey.