How to Stop Catastrophising When the Worst-Case Feels Inevitable

Resisting authoritarianism without falling into panic, paralysis, or worst-case thinking.

📌There’s a practical action guide in this piece. When you get to it, take your time with it. And if it’s useful, please pass it on — share it, restack it, and help it reach the people who need it.

What we’ll cover here:

• Stabilising Your Base

• Reclaiming Agency

• Countering Hypervigilance

• Playing The Long Game

  

Dear friends

As a psychotherapist, I've been thinking about “catastrophising” — a thinking style that automatically assumes the worst — in the context of what's currently unfolding in the US.

Usually, catastrophising is what happens when fear takes the wheel. Your mind imagines something bad happening, then fills in all the gaps between now and that imagined future with worst-case logic. One thing goes wrong, and suddenly you’re five steps down the line, convinced disaster is inevitable.

It’s a stress response. It feels like being realistic, but it’s usually not.

But what happens when the worst isn’t imaginary? What happens when a sitting president is actively dismantling checks and balances, defying court rulings, and laying legal groundwork to consolidate power? What happens when other people around you are seeing it too—when commentators, historians, neighbours, and even former political allies are sounding the alarm?

That’s not a spiral, it's the real-life situation.

And still — what we do with that recognition matters. Because when the threat is real, but so is our tendency to overshoot, we’re left with a more complicated question: Am I catastrophising, or am I actually seeing things clearly?

This is where it gets messy. Because once we realise catastrophising is something our brains do, we have to admit: we don’t actually know the answer to those questions. Not for sure.

The truth is, no matter how bad things might appear, the story can still change.

What feels like a straight line to authoritarian rule might stall out. What looks like a slide into collapse might just be a very loud, very bumpy transition to — something different.

It’s uncomfortable to hold that possibility when your nervous system is saying: No, this is it. This is happening. Prepare for impact.

It's like holding two conflicting truths at the same time. The threat is real. But so is your mind’s tendency to race ahead.

If you don’t stay aware of that tendency — if you don’t keep checking whether you’re responding to what’s actually happening, or to a story your nervous system is spinning— you risk losing our grip on the present moment altogether. You stop seeing clearly. You start reacting to what hasn’t yet happened, and might not.

That’s why I wrote this. As a way of walking through this moment with your eyes open.
Of noticing what’s real — both in the world around you, and in your own mind — and staying in relationship with both.

Because if you want to resist what’s happening without losing yourself to it, that’s where you begin.

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Stabilising Your Base

Before you act, you need to be steady. Not because action isn’t urgent, but because action driven by panic rarely does what we hope it will. Authoritarian systems feed on reactivity. They rely on people being too overwhelmed, too scattered, or too panicked to think clearly. So this first section is not about tactics, but about anchoring.

This is the groundwork. Not a pause before the real work begins, but part of it.

1. Stay in relationship with uncertainty

You don’t need to try to force clarity where none exists. It’s OK to admit that you don't know what's going to happen next — that’s not weakness, it’s honesty. And it creates space for you to stay flexible.

Authoritarian movements thrive on predictable patterns: fear, retreat, overreaction. But when you're able to sit with uncertainty, it disrupts that cycle.

So instead of rushing to conclusions— Nothing's going to help. It's over! We’re doomed!— practice staying open. Ask yourself: What else might be possible? What haven’t we tried yet?

2. Shift from predicting to preparing

Rather than spiralling into a future that exists only in your imagination, anchor yourself in real conditions. Ask: What’s already happening around me? What’s already changing? Then act from there.

For example:

• If surveillance is on the rise, you don’t need to wait for mass arrests to start practicing digital hygiene.

• If courts are being ignored, you don’t need to predict lawlessness and anarchy to start strengthening local networks.

Preparation is not panic. It’s the opposite. It’s what lets you respond with agency instead of reactivity.

3. Focus on people, not headlines

The news is designed to keep your attention moving—from one crisis to the next, one outrage to another. It creates a kind of urgency that feels like motion, but often leaves you directionless. And the more your attention is pulled toward the churn, the harder it is to stay anchored in what actually builds power: trust, relationships, shared work.

That’s where resistance begins. Not in commentary, but in connection. Not in reaction, but in relationship. The kind that grows close to home, between people who know each other, who can organise together, support each other, and hold a line when it matters.

So you pull focus.

What’s happening in your town? Who’s organising in your district? Can you join a mutual aid group, attend a council meeting, support a local journalist or librarian under pressure?

These things don’t trend, but they build capacity. And that’s what slows the downward spiral.

4. Keep your nervous system in range

None of this works if you’re overwhelmed. So you need to purposefully build habits to regulate your nervous system. Not to escape reality, but to stay in touch with it.

That might mean:

• Alternate nostril breathing before a difficult conversation

• Going offline after reading emotionally charged news

• Taking regular meals, walks, contact with nature or animals

I cannot say this enough: this is not self-care as a luxury. It’s maintenance. Mental clarity isn’t a mindset — it’s a physiological state.

5. Speak in ways that calm the field

When you talk to others about what’s happening, pay attention to the effect your words are having. Are you spreading awareness, or reinforcing despair? Are you offering something solid to stand on, or are you just projecting your own fear? That doesn’t mean sugar-coating anything — it means being a steadying voice, not just more noise.

Fear spreads fast, but calm's also contagious.

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Reclaiming Agency

It’s easy to feel like big moves are out of your reach — that the real decisions are happening elsewhere, and all that’s left for you is outrage or resignation. But that’s part of the design. Authoritarian systems rely on people disconnecting from their own power.

This section is about refusing that disconnection. It’s about noticing what’s still possible — and choosing to act from there.

6. Work toward conditions, not outcomes

When the future feels unstable, it’s tempting to fixate on specific outcomes: Will Trump be stopped? Will democracy survive? But each of us has more influence over conditions than outcomes.

Instead of chasing a win, we should be asking:

• What conditions make a just outcome more likely?

• What conditions make authoritarian escalation harder to sustain?

For instance, building trust within communities is a condition. Widespread civic education is a condition. Strategic nonviolence is a condition. Protecting libraries, funding local newsrooms, de-escalating conflict — doing any of these things help shape the terrain. They don’t guarantee a specific outcome, but they change what becomes possible.

This simple mindset shift can take you out of passivity and into making a contribution. And right now, that's one of the most psychologically protective places you can stand.

7. Refuse to collapse complexity into certainty

A huge part of catastrophising is simplification. This one event will tip everything. This one policy proves it’s over. This one moment means nothing else matters. But authoritarian dynamics are not linear. They lurch forward, stall, adapt, disguise themselves, lose steam, reappear somewhere else.

So you practice holding multiple truths at once. For example:

• Yes, the courts are being undermined — and — yes, some rulings still hold.

• Yes, authoritarian power is rising — and — yes, local resistance can still disrupt it.

• Yes, people are afraid — and — yes, fear is not the only emotional force at work.

This kind of thinking doesn’t feel tidy, but it’s honest. And under authoritarian conditions, honesty itself is a radical act.

8. Recognise that despair is useful — to them

Authoritarians don’t need every citizen to support them. They just need most people to believe resistance is pointless. That’s why the most dangerous shift isn’t just political — it’s psychological. Once people stop believing in the possibility of meaningful change, systems can decay in plain sight, unopposed.

So protect not just your institutions, but your sense of possibility. Not by denying what’s happening, but by refusing to hand over your belief in what’s possible. Even now, small acts of refusal, care, defiance, and solidarity shift the balance. Even now, people are finding each other, organising in new ways, holding lines they didn’t know they could hold.

This is not about believing in happy endings. It’s about choosing to believe that the ending is not yet written.

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Countering Hypervigilance

The next trap to watch for is hypervigilance. The urge to track every headline, every whisper, every possible threat can feel like being informed — but in practice, it wears down your nervous system and makes long-term resistance unsustainable.

So this next section is about how to stay aware of manipulation and disinformation without losing your grip on reality — or your capacity to live inside it.

9. Treat information like a substance, not a stream

In times of uncertainty, many of us start hoarding information the way others might hoard supplies. We scroll, refresh, chase updates, hoping that more knowledge will lead to greater safety.

But information, like food and medication, needs to be taken in the right form and dose. Too much, too fast, and it’s toxic — especially when it’s laced with speculation or fear.

So you build an information practice that’s deliberate. That might mean:

• Setting fixed times for checking updates, not being in a constant drip-feed of news

• Curating a small set of trusted sources rather than chasing every hot take

• Balancing exposure with integration — reading something, then stepping away to ask: What does this change for me? Does it require action? Or just awareness?

You are not obliged to consume every detail of a slow-moving collapse. Especially when that collapse is being actively engineered to exhaust you.

10. Learn the shape of the psychological game

Authoritarians don’t just grab power. They shape perception. They flood the zone with contradictions, distractions, and outrage — not to persuade you, but to wear you down. To make you so disoriented, so numbed, so fatigued that you stop trying to make sense of anything.

So you need to understand the strategy:

• Distraction: Keeping people chasing the latest scandal so they don’t notice structural changes.

• Desensitisation: Repeating something extreme until it feels normal.

• False equivalence: Blurring the line between truth and lies so that no one trusts anything.

• Moral confusion: Weaponising language — using positive words like freedom, safety, patriotism to cloak harm.

• Flooding and fragmentation: Overloading people with content, so attention fractures and nothing sticks.

• Humiliation theatre: Using public cruelty to signal dominance. Not just silencing opponents, but making an example of them.

• Normalisation through repetition: Making the unthinkable feel mundane — not just by repeating it, but by watching others stop reacting.

• Manufactured chaos: Creating disorder on purpose so that authoritarian control can be sold as the only available stability.

• Strategic victimhood: Framing power as persecution — so that protest looks like aggression, and crackdown looks like self-defence.

The better you understand what you’re looking at, the less you'll absorb unconsciously.

11. Respond, don’t react

This is a like building a muscle over time. When you see something inflammatory or outrageous—whether it’s a headline, a clip, or a policy announcement — you pause. You ask:

• Is this designed to provoke me?

• What’s the strategic purpose behind it?

• What’s my wisest possible response?

Your wisest possible response might be silence. It might be to boost the signal of a grounded voice. It might be a local conversation. It might be rest. But it’s a response you chose to make, not a compulsive reaction. That’s what it means to stay in your own frame, rather than constantly being pulled into theirs.

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Playing The Long Game

What remains now is preparing for the long game. The slow, often unseen work of shaping the future while still living inside a broken present.

Authoritarianism isn’t a moment. It’s an environment. It works by exhausting you, isolating you, and narrowing your vision until survival feels like the only option. So yes, you prepare yourself for the weight, for the uncertainty, for the long road ahead. But you also prepare to play. Strategically. Intentionally. In a way that holds onto the possibility that what’s unfolding is not just something to survive, but something to outlive and outmanoeuvre.

This section is about building the kind of life, rhythms, and relationships that keep you grounded long enough to make your resistance count. Not just over the next few weeks, but for as long as it takes.

12. Build stamina, not adrenaline

Adrenaline is useful in a crisis — it gets you moving, and sharpens focus. But it burns fast, and if you try to survive on it, it will leave you depleted, cynical, and eventually disengaged.

So instead, you pace yourself. You start to think in terms of creating rhythm.

• Weekly patterns that include rest, reconnection, and review.

  • Mark the end of your day: close the laptop, go outside.

  • Do something every week that has nothing to do with survival or politics.

  • Schedule a standing call or check-in with a neighbour, friend, or local group.

  • Designate windows for catching up on news, and time to step away.

  • Read something thoughtful and slow — like one longform piece each Sunday instead of scrolling daily.

  • Write one line in a notebook. Take one photo. Create one small piece of beauty or meaning that didn’t exist yesterday.

• Seasonal check-ins: What’s working? What’s draining me? What needs adjusting?

Recognise that consistency — rhythm — matters more than intensity, especially when the news is designed to hijack both. Rhythm protects your capacity. It’s not just how you endure. It’s how you stay in the game.

Adrenaline makes heroes, rhythm builds movements.

13. Let meaningful action replace urgency

Authoritarian systems feed on urgency — everything is immediate, overwhelming, make-or-break. That pressure breaks down solidarity, fuels infighting, and encourages reckless or performative action.

But meaningful action moves differently.

You don’t have to be everywhere, doing everything, proving your commitment. What matters is doing something meaningful — consistently, with integrity, and ideally, in relationship with others.

That could mean:

• Hosting quiet conversations about what’s happening

• Writing letters to the editor in places where resistance feels invisible

• Training neighbours in digital safety

• Holding emotional space for those waking up late, but still wanting to help

You don’t need to be visible to be effective. Meaningful action rarely goes viral — but it lasts.

14. Stay rooted in what you’re for — not just what you’re against

Authoritarianism narrows our thoughts, restricting them to negatives: resist, oppose, block, undo. But resistance that lasts has to be animated by something deeper than simply opposition.

So ask yourself regularly — every day — What am I fighting to protect? What kind of world am I still trying to build?

That vision doesn’t need to be utopian. It can be local. Immediate. Tangible. But it has to exist — or over time, the struggle itself starts to hollow out. You find yourself pushing back against everything, but no longer moving toward anything.

Let your vision be bigger than your outrage.

15. Find others. Build trust. Share the weight.

This work is too heavy to carry alone. But you’re not meant to carry it alone. Whether it’s a neighbour, a reading group, a mutual aid network, a Substack comment thread — connection is resistance. So is laughter. So is care. So is allowing yourself to be witnessed in your fear without turning that fear into prophecy.

No one gets through this alone. That’s not a sign of weakness. It’s how we’re built to survive things like this — by pulling together.

16. Treat this as a practice, not a performance

There’s no finish line here. No gold star for “best informed” or “most prepared.” This isn’t a test you can ace. It’s a way of being in the world under pressure — and that means you’ll lose your footing sometimes. You will overreact. You will go numb. You will spiral into dread, or check out entirely, or say something you regret. And then you’ll come back.

The work is in the coming back. Again and again. Not with shame, but with curiosity. With gentleness. With that quiet voice inside that says, I still care. I still want to help. Even when you’re tired. Even when you’re unsure.

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This guide is not meant as a checklist, or a moral standard. It’s just a set of handholds for those days when the ground is shifting and the noise is loud and you start to wonder whether it’s already too late.

It’s not too late.

That doesn’t mean it will be easy. Or fair. Or safe. It means it’s still unfolding — and we still get to shape what comes next.

So come back to your breath. Come back to your people. Come back to whatever it is you do that makes you feel more like yourself and less like a spectator to collapse.

And then… begin again.

— Lori

© Lori Corbet Mann, 2025

If you find this guide useful, please pass it on — share it, restack it, and help it reach the people who need it.

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