The Art of Catastrophising

My Pisces Moon Has Entered the Chat

I’ve got a Taurus stellium. For the non-astrology people, this means I’m cosmically designed to be grounded, stable, and sensible in a way that occasionally makes me insufferable at brunch. I process things. I land on solid ground. I’m, genuinely, more emotionally resilient than most people expect from someone whose cat is a registered menace and whose tic decides to make itself known at the worst possible moments.

And then my Pisces moon looks up, clocks an unread text or a slightly weird vibe in a team meeting, and says hold my matcha, it’s time to Catastrophise!

My manager glanced at me with two percent less warmth than usual? I’m getting fired. The cute boy hasn’t texted and it’s already seven in the morning? He’s reconsidered everything. He’s probably met someone calmer, someone whose flat isn’t ruled by a fluffy black goblin who eats toes for sport.

The truly spectacular part is that I can see all of this happening in real time and still not stop it. I know it’s a spiral. I’m watching myself spiral. I’m narrating the spiral to myself with full awareness that it’s irrational, and the spiral genuinely doesn’t care. I’m probably curating the moment with song. And that, my darlings, is anxious attachment. That’s a water moon with opinions. That’s just Tuesday.

The One Area I Apparently Don’t Worry About

Here’s the funniest part – the one area of my life where I don’t catastrophise is my health. I could have a symptom that would send a reasonable person directly to their GP and I’d shrug, assume my body’s doing a thing, and make another cup of green tea. Something worth investigating? Probably nothing. I’ll get to it. Eventually*.

Everywhere else though, Pisces moon is thorough. It’s not just cute boys, though they do inspire some of her finest work. It’s friendships, work, a read receipt at an odd hour, an email that felt slightly clipped. If there’s a gap between what I know and what’s actually happening, my brain will fill it with the most dramatic plausible version and then present it as fact with the confidence of someone who’s done the research.

The painful thing about being self-aware is that you get a running commentary on your own irrationality without the ability to turn it off. I know the conclusion is ahead of the evidence. I know that. I know it while I’m three moves deep into a scenario that hasn’t happened and may never happen. Knowing doesn’t stop it. It just makes you feel slightly more ridiculous while it’s happening.

*Read never. This is, of course, the one area where a bit of reasonable concern might actually serve me well.

What Is Actually Going On

Simply put, catastrophising is just your nervous system trying to protect you from being blindsided. If you’ve already imagined the worst outcome, the logic goes, it can’t catch you off guard. It’s not irrational, per se. It’s a threat response that’s been applied to situations that aren’t actually threats. Your brain scanning for danger in a text message with the same energy it’d use to scan for danger in a dark car park.

For those of us with anxious attachment, the uncertainty is the problem. Not the actual situation. The not knowing. And because the not knowing is uncomfortable, the brain moves to resolve it, fast, by jumping to a conclusion. It’d rather be wrong about something terrible than sit quietly with not knowing. Sitting with not knowing feels dangerous. Having a story, even a catastrophic one, feels like control.

The other thing worth saying is that most of us learnt this somewhere. Catastrophising isn’t a personality flaw – it’s usually a very reasonable response to an environment where things did occasionally fall apart without warning. The nervous system got good at bracing. It’s still bracing, even when it doesn’t need to. And that’s worth being a bit gentle about.

What I Actually Do When It Starts

The window between something uncomfortable happening and full catastrophe is small, but it’s there. I’ve learned to do something physical in that window before the spiral gets settled. I make matcha. The whole ritual of it, the water temperature, the whisking, the fact that it takes both hands and a bit of attention, is enough to interrupt the pattern before it’s become a whole thing. It’s not a cure. It’s just buying time, which is sometimes all you need.

Once I’ve got the time, I cross-examine the evidence. My brain has presented a conclusion with a lot of confidence, so I start asking it to show its working. Has this exact situation happened before and resolved completely fine? Almost always yes. Is it seven in the morning and I’m assessing someone’s feelings about me based on texting hours? Also yes. The catastrophe rarely survives contact with its own logic. It needs the momentum of not being examined to keep going.

The other rule, the one that’s probably saved me the most embarrassment, is that I don’t send messages or make decisions from inside the spiral. The urge to act is strong when everything feels urgent, because action feels like control. But spiral-me doesn’t have the full picture. She’s working from incomplete information and a nervous system in threat mode, and she won’t produce her best work under those conditions. The message can wait twenty minutes. It almost always looks different after twenty minutes.

It Doesn’t Go Away, But You Get Faster

The catastrophising doesn’t stop once you understand it. That’s not how nervous systems work and it’s not how water moons work either. Understanding it just means you stop being surprised by it. You start to recognise the shape of it earlier, that specific feeling of your brain moving fast toward a conclusion it hasn’t actually earned yet. That recognition is more useful than it sounds.

What changes is the gap between the spiral and the recovery. You get faster at catching it. Quicker at the cross-examination. Better at sitting with the not knowing without immediately filling it with the worst version. The spiral still starts. It just doesn’t always get to finish. That’s not a small thing. That’s actually the whole thing.

So if your brain is currently presenting you with a catastrophe, ask it to show its working. Give it twenty minutes before you act on anything. Make something warm and do something with your hands. You don’t have to be calm. You just have to buy yourself enough time to let the evidence catch up with the conclusion. Most of the time, it will. And most of the time, things are considerably less on fire than they felt at seven in the morning.

We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity

In today's episode of Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity, we're unpacking why we need to stop clapping for basic decency. You know the script. A man texts back within twenty-four hours and we're screenshotting it to the group chat. A man plans a date more than three hours in advance and we call him a unicorn. A man manages to listen, pay attention, and behave like a fully formed adult, and our nervous systems short-circuit because we genuinely don't know how to receive it.Here's the truth nobody is saying out loud. The bar has been dragged so low that Satan himself needs a chiropractor after a competitive round of limbo. We've been culturally trained to be grateful for behaviour that should not require gratitude. We've been told these things are bonuses when they're actually the entry requirement. And in the meantime, women have been quietly doing the basic decency thing forever, without applause, while men get standing ovations for outputs we generated for them.Today we're talking about why a great man is genuinely just an average woman, who benefits when the bar stays low, the invisible labour women have been performing for free for centuries, and the friend-test that cuts straight through every excuse we've ever made for mediocre men. Let's get into it.For more visit BryJaimea.com or follow over on IG @BryJaimea

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