Are you someone who actively looks out for the worst-case scenario, no matter how good things are going? April Shprintz calls this mindset “disasterizer.” She explains how she deals with such a habit and how she teaches herself to get rid of it.
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Are You A “Disasterizer”? How To Know And How To Change It!
The Habit Of Being A “Disasterizer”
This episode is in honor of a brilliant doctor that I know who happens to have a habit that I had for decades. I was what I’ve nicknamed and this is not a real word but you did see it in the title, a disasterizer. What I mean by that is when any situation would happen or even when things were just going well, I would think, “What is the worst-case scenario?” Blow it all the way out to be the most awful thing it could be just to see if I could handle it. Now, it probably doesn’t sound like you’re a mindset person, does it? It was something that I developed very early on.
If you are someone who does this, when something happens, you think of a worse-case scenario just to see if you can handle it. Not because you want to stay in the negative but just because you’re investigating that. You’re someone that even when things are going well, you’re looking for that other shooter drop. You might, like me, have experienced a different type of trauma in your childhood. I say a different type of trauma because sometimes when you’re a disasterizer, the trauma that you experience isn’t one that people call a trauma.
It could be something like mine, where people would say my childhood was dramatic because there was physical abuse. It could also be something where there was abuse that was much harder to identify because it was emotional abuse or there wasn’t abusive at all. When seen through the lens of a 2-year-old or 3-year-old or 4-year-old or 5-year-old child, it still had a tremendous impact on them to make them think, “I have to handle this on my own.” This can happen to anyone, whether you have good parents or you don’t have the best parents or you didn’t have parents at all.
If you recognize yourself as a disasterizer, you’re also going to see some traits that you get from it that are good traits. You might not see it as a bad thing because you’re the person who can handle anything. You’re the other person who quickly has a plan. You’re the one who doesn’t react when things are hard and when other people freak out. Those are the good sides of being a disasterizer, but the side of it that is not working for you is it’s exhausting because you are always on alert. You are always in a state of reaction, fight or flight, freeze or fawn. You are in that way more often than is healthy for any of us.
99% of what we worry about never happens. Do not work yourself up more often than you need to. Share on XYou also, believe it or not, make it more likely that the negative things will happen because you’re so focused on them because you’re drawing them to you. Remember, our unpaid assistant is listening to whatever we say. It doesn’t know what’s real and what’s true. It just knows what we’re talking about all the time in our head. What are we telling our unconscious mind to look for? Your unconscious mind is looking for disasters. You don’t want that. You get more of what you focus on. What you want your unconscious mind looking for is solutions.
How To Deal With A Disasterizer Mindset
The first thing that I suggest is you do some pattern interrupt. For me, it was an awareness that I was doing it. This is going to make you laugh. I also put a rubber band around my arm and snacked it when I was doing it just to increase my awareness, like, “You’re doing this now.” In the beginning, it may seem like, “I’m doing it more than ever.” You’re not. You’re just now aware that you’re doing it. That’s the first thing you do. You interrupt the pattern and then you ask yourself this question, what is the best thing that could happen? I want you to focus on that. What is the second-best thing that could happen? Focus on that for a second. What is the third best thing that could happen?
Instead of going to that disaster place, I want you to go to the top three best ways this particular thing could play out. What you’re doing is you are training your mind to automatically go for solutions instead of what’s wrong. It may feel like it takes a little bit for you to get used to this but I promise you it works. I trained myself out of ever doing this to the point that I am almost annoyed because I can always see all the best ways something can work out and I simply ignore the disaster. I simply ignore the bad way things could go. Why? Here’s the thing, 99% of what we worry about never happens.
If it’s never going to happen, why am I going to work myself up 99% more often than I need to? That 1% of the time, “I got this. I’ll figure it out.” If there’s an actual disaster, if zombies come or if the world ends, I know I can handle this and so can you. Your homework is to practice this. I want you to practice asking yourself, “Am I disasterizing? I am. Let’s switch my train of thought.” I want to know what are the three best ways this could work out? I’m telling you, your unpaid assistant is going to take notes and before it you will be doing this automatically. Here’s to your success.
