Stephen Briers - This is Brilliant: CBT, NLP, Confidence, Memory Training, Interview Answers, Negotiations, Selling, Presentation & Networking

I cant find my purse Oh no! I must have left it in the supermarket Someone is sure to have nicked it Maybe it was stolen by someone who was looking over my shoulder when I got the money out of the cash dispenser in which case they know my PIN number and will probably already have emptied my bank account or stolen my identity That means I wont be able to pay my bills this month What if the bank decides to repossess the house? Well be ruined. Were going to end up out on the street How could I have been so stupid?

We all know people who think like this. Catastrophising is the hallmark of an anxious person. It combines pessimism (i.e. assuming that in any situation a bad or distressing outcome is more likely than a good one) with a wildly exaggerated sense of threat. Things will not only be bad. They will be really bad.

Unfortunately people who catastrophise find it hard to appraise the significance of a situation realistically: they can end up becoming just as distressed by relatively trivial setbacks as a major misfortune. They constantly project themselves into a doom-laden future and allow their imaginations to run riot with frightening scenarios.

People who catastrophise seldom take into account any resources they might have to deal with the worst-case scenario. If this is you ask yourself:

• On the scale of all the bad things that have happened in the past or could happen to you in the future, how bad could this event be?
• If I had no choice but to deal with the very worst thing that could happen in this situation what would I actually do?
• Think about how you may have dealt with other past difficulties. What helped you then?

Human beings are drawn to patterns. We frequently use our experience as a template for our predictions about the future. However, people who are inclined to generalise require little evidence in order to deduce laws and assumptions about the way the world works and invariably their observations and deductions are pretty downbeat. A man loses a game of Scrabble and thinks to himself Typical! I never win at anything. A young girl gets teased at school and concludes, Everyone hates me! An elderly lady reads about a mugging in the local paper and ruefully concludes that No one is safe these days. All of these are examples of generalisation in which an individual draws some far-reaching, universal conclusion on the basis of a single unpleasant experience or discrete piece of information.

The language of people prone to generalisation is usually a reliable giveaway. If you hear yourself using absolute terms like never , always , everyone and no one a lot, then the chances are you may be vulnerable to this type of thinking.

In order to counter generalisation you need to train yourself to look for exceptions to your own rules. If you have one friend in the world then it is not the case that no one likes you and it is highly unlikely you have never won at anything even if your distorted thinking probably makes it hard for you to bring any past victories to mind. The danger with generalisations is that we tend to screen out anything that does not correspond with our ill-founded convictions, whereas we eagerly seize upon fresh evidence that appears to support our negative beliefs about ourselves and others.

Unfortunately, generalisations easily become self-fulfilling prophecies. For example, someone who believes she is universally unpopular will make little effort to make herself amenable to other people.