Hannah Weinberger

It’s 1 a.m. on a Wednesday and you’re struggling with a thesis sentence under the fluorescent lights of Davis Library. You alternate between writing single words and deleting them, changing Pandora stations, and topping off your water bottle every five minutes at the fountain just to get out of your seat.
The 27th incarnation of your thesis statement is less coherent than a drunken frat boy’s pick-up lines. It will never make sense, and you will never be done with it. You will never be done with this paper. You will spend the rest of your life sitting at this table, elbow-deep in cracker crumbs and spilled soda, moving words around until the pads of your fingers bleed and your eyes roll back into your head. And you will become a stop on the campus tour, gnashing your teeth at wide-eyed applicants. Until one day when you finally bleed out through the 10 stubs on your hands that used to be your fingers and they donate your brain to the biology department so someone can figure out why you couldn’t. Write. One. Sentence.

Many psychologists would classify the thought process above as an instance of “catastrophizing.” Catastrophizing, one of dozens of thought-processing errors, is a way of thinking in which a person either makes a small error and immediately assumes that such will snowball into an apocalyptically terrifying outcome, or envisions making an error in the future and anticipates the End of Days without reason. Traveling down either of these catastrophizing paths puts thinkers in a bad place mentally, disabling them from managing their life in the present.