Imagine you have applied for your dream job, passed the first round of interviews and been selected for the second round. Will you celebrate your progress so far, or will you start preparing for a new challenge? Will you immediately begin to visualize your failure in the second round, and fear the effect on your self-confidence? Would you say to yourself, “If I fail at that, I am a failure”?
Or you may be waiting for a response to a message you sent to one of your friends. And when you don't get an immediate response, you start imagining all the ways you might have offended him without taking into account the possibility that he was simply busy with something else.
Or perhaps you were concerned with geopolitical events. You spend many hours each night ruminating about nuclear threats, the prospect of another deadly virus or an economic downturn. The problems that these things can cause for you and those close to you control your imagination.
If any of these situations sound familiar, you probably have a predisposition to dramatization: a mental habit that causes you to overestimate your chances of being hurt, and overstate the possible negative consequences of that scenario.
"It's a distorted way of thinking, which intensifies emotions to levels that are difficult to control, and sometimes they become possessive and obsessive," says Dr. Patrick Keelan, a licensed therapist specializing in psychiatry in the Canadian province of Alberta.
There is a lot of research that indicates that catastrophe can pose a serious threat to mental health, and can also amplify the malaise and unhappiness associated with conditions such as chronic pain. Intimidation may occur at any stage of our lives, but fears that have not yet dissipated from the Covid-19 epidemic, as well as the uncertainty of political and economic conditions may certainly exacerbate that tendency.