Self Talk & Catastrophizing

Notes:

• Notice catastrophizing self talk: what if this is terrible, what if I can never use my arm normally again? What if I’ll never be pain free again?
• The solution is not to force positive thinking.
• The simple truth is that I don’t know. I can delude myself with positive or negative thinking, but both are not useful.
• What about my objectively true worries? Like: the thing I planned to do tomorrow, I can now literally not do. It literally, objectively ruined some of my plans. That’s something to worry about! 
  • Sure, you can choose to worry about that, but why?
  • You can also simply accept it as a fact and perhaps do what needs to be done (e.g. contact people to let them know about changed plans). None of the worrying and negative thinking is doing anything useful.
• Come back to base reality. What do you truly know? And accept the not knowing about everything else. The not knowing does not need to be resolved.