Feeling Down? You're Probably Verbing Your Nouns
When we’re feeling down, the reason is often that we’re verbing our nouns.
Catastrophizing, Disasterizing, and Troublizing.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy co-founder Albert Ellis warned that this sort of verbing of nouns — of applying negative judgments to objective situations — rarely ends well.
He said that an anxious/depressed person “should perceive his own tendency to catastrophize about inevitable unfortunate situations – to tell himself: ‘Oh, my Lord! How terrible this situation is; I positively cannot stand it!’”
Once we stop this verbing, and merely acknowledge what’s actually happening without labeling it as anything in particular, a weight is removed from us. We can merely deal with it as best we can, and accept what we can’t change.
In other words, as Epictetus said, “It is not things that upset us, but our judgments about those things.”