When do we stop catastrophizing ?

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During the pandemic, the rhetoric was that ''everyone'' would die if they caught the virus and now with a war raging in the Ukraine, the rhetoric by the press and media and so on is almost cold war-like, spouting out fears of a nuclear holocaust and world war 3. Sometimes I just think haven't we been through enough already ? It just feels talking about a crisis today is the new norm with other stuff not just Covid and the Ukraine-Russia war but also the cost-of-living and fuel crisis and global warming as well. I remember having a dream about something else terrible happening while covid and the war in Ukraine was going on. It seemed real even though it was a dream but I don't want to discuss that though because it just upset me.

Well, media + general population are very poor in assessing risks and preparing for dangers. They tend to either ignore them or panic, weighted assessments tend to stay in labs because they don't attract publicity enough.

However, for those who fight for their lives on ventilators, drown in floods or get shelled in their homes, it's not catastrophizing, it's actual catastrophes.

I think that's part of the issue, the media reports on potential worse case scenarios because they're worth being aware of and a portion of the general public prone to black and white thinking interprets that as a likely outcome, meanwhile other people prone to that type of thinking see those people and think everyone is overreacting.

There's a couple of ways that I see:

Learn about these things: how to survive nuclear war and about SARS-CoV-2 (the real severity and things that can ameliorate illness, like adequate Vitamin D levels)

or

Don't care, because what gets you is almost never what you're afraid of

I don't care for me (lost fear a long time ago). I learnt the first for my mother.

I'm more likely to have a heart attack just from getting out of bed, choking to death on my food, falling and breaking my neck as I go down the stairs and getting run over as soon as I try to cross the street. But that doesn't make me any less afraid of the billion and one catastrophes happening right now. It just makes me more afraid of getting out of bed, eating, going down the stairs, and crossing the street.

It appears that you're quite well attuned to the potential dangers of life. As am I, albeit I let go of most of it even though I see it. I don't know why I did to be honest, as experiences shouldn't have much of say other than making one maybe more fearful of these things. Maybe I just hit that point where I worried so much for so long that I became tolerant to it, much like you do with longstanding Panic Disorder. Maybe as time went on that self-loathing from PTSD stuff I have makes me feel like I deserve these things/don't care that it happens, and I kinda hope it'll happen naturally so I can finally have peace. Maybe I saw that it doesn't really matter, life and death, as it's all so fleeting and what happens, happens, as I don't have much control over it in the end; I can learn to survive as best I can and take sensible precautions to avoid things, and that's the most I can ask of myself. Maybe I burnt out. Maybe my high levels of anxiety got replaced by high levels of depression. Lots of maybes, but I don't fully know.

Hopefully your anxieties lessen, as it's not nice, and it's a lot of suffering. I can't offer much advice, sadly, as above, I don't know what helped me.

It seems to be even worse now, but the news has always been about catastrophes. Any news source that just reported on all the people who got up, ate breakfast, kissed the husband/wife, went to work, came home, kissed the husband/wife, had supper, read or watched TV or played with the kiddos for a while, and went to bed... who would watch that? They have to hook you with something terrible or at least unexpected. Yet the reasonably-pleasant ordinary world goes on.

I stopped most of my catastrophizing when I got rid of my Television. Most days, I can come home from work, and sit on my front porch for a bit or just go about the usual activities of daily living and NOTHING actually happens.

[thumbs up]!

Yep: I cut down my Ukraine/Russian invasion watching down to maybe 1-2 bouts a month, and that helped a lot!

I'm trying to cut down reading comments in news or advice articles.

Stop worrying about war and pandemics! They won't matter when the half mile wide asteroid hits Earth and wipes us all out!

I dont watch TV news, I just sometimes hear whats going on second hand if someone i know comments on it.

I love old resurrected threads like this one.

I've become immune to those stories because every time I hear something exciting, it always ends up being disappointing. Covid was a good example. An exciting beginning that turned into an anticlimax.

People love sensationalizing boring things because they don't like getting bored and they love tragic stories of other people. That's why those stories come out. Just don't take them too seriously because you are bound to be disappointed.