A man holding his head and trying not to catastrophize

Have you ever found yourself turning minor setbacks into major catastrophes? Do you wish you knew how to maintain perspective when facing life’s challenges?

Oliver Burkeman offers strategies on how to not catastrophize and presents a refreshing approach to managing anxiety and perfectionism. His insights can help you transform overwhelming situations into manageable challenges through simple mindset shifts and actionable steps.

Discover how to stop magnifying problems and free yourself from people-pleasing tendencies.

Stop Magnifying Situations

Burkeman explains that our anxiety and desire to achieve perfection often cause us to make our goals, problems, and barriers seem bigger than they are. This only exacerbates negative emotions like stress and discourages us from moving forward. To learn how to not catastrophize, Burkeman makes three recommendations:

First, rather than viewing your goals as big and requiring massive motivation to accomplish, pretend that they’re easy. Taking this perspective can help you feel less overwhelmed and make the goal feel more manageable—especially if you also break the goal down into smaller tasks, a strategy we discussed earlier. Further, imagining that your goals are easy will help you avoid making them unnecessarily complicated—for example, by thinking you need a laptop or a certain program to write your book when you could make do with your notes app or a pen and paper.

(Shortform note: To change your mindset and start believing your goals are easy, consider using transformational language to talk about them. In Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins explains that transformational language—positive and encouraging words and phrases—promotes empowering thoughts and behaviors. In other words, changing how you talk about your goals can change how you think about them, as Burkeman recommends. For example, don’t just pretend that your goals are easy, but verbally tell yourself that they are. Further, you can refer to difficult tasks as “ambitious” rather than “hard,” and when you face challenges, refer to them as “puzzles” rather than “setbacks.”)

Second, stop trying to control other people’s emotions. We often tailor our decisions to avoid causing negative feelings for others—even if the path they’d choose for us isn’t in our best interest. But Burkeman explains that you’ll never be able to control others’ feelings, so you shouldn’t use your desire to please them as a basis for decision-making. Instead, Burkeman recommends taking others’ feelings into account, but ultimately making decisions based on what’s best for you.

(Shortform note: Overcoming people-pleasing behaviors can be difficult, especially if it’s a long-standing habit. To help conquer this, psychologists offer a few tips. First, spend time alone and pay attention to your inner voice so you can pinpoint what you truly want and differentiate it from what others might be trying to influence you to do. Further, practice being assertive—if someone’s negative attitude or behavior is making it hard for you to do what’s best for you, express that to them.)

Finally, Burkeman says that rather than obsessing about creating perfect work, you should focus on consistently producing work—even if it’s flawed. If you wait to have a brilliant idea before getting to work, you’ll likely be waiting a while before you produce anything. In contrast, if you push through the desire for perfection and produce work anyway, you’ll make a lot more progress toward your goals.

(Shortform note: In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron reiterates that regularly producing work is more important than making that work perfect, adding that the more work you produce, the closer you’ll get to producing something brilliant. You can get more comfortable with this practice by identifying what’s “good enough” for you, and striving for that instead of for perfection. For example, a perfectionist might want to write the final draft of a chapter on the first try, but good enough might look like writing the chapter, even if it’s bad, and editing it later on.)

How to Not Catastrophize: Stop Magnifying Problems

Katie Doll

Somehow, Katie was able to pull off her childhood dream of creating a career around books after graduating with a degree in English and a concentration in Creative Writing. Her preferred genre of books has changed drastically over the years, from fantasy/dystopian young-adult to moving novels and non-fiction books on the human experience. Katie especially enjoys reading and writing about all things television, good and bad.

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