8 Ways To Challenge Your Anxious Thoughts And Actually Feel Better

''If you’re obsessing about worst-case scenarios and feeling convinced that all hope is lost, you might be doing some catastrophic thinking.

Catastrophic thinking is ruminating on absolute worst-case scenarios that are not necessarily rational or likely to happen, like being convinced that flying across the country means certain death in a plane crash or that the pain in your side is definitely terminal cancer.

Of course your plane could crash and it could be terminal cancer. But you don’t know that now, and thinking and acting as if you do — “my life is over; after all I’m about to die!” — leads to more anxiety, panic, and sometimes total paralysis about what to do next, California-based clinical psychologist Ryan Howes, PhD, tells BuzzFeed Health...''

by Sally Tamarkin