Episode #39: How To Stop Being Dramatic

Who has time for drama? Apparently, most of us.

Many of our most toxic thought patterns are DRAMATIC AF. Only thing is we don’t realize how that’s hurting us and our relationships.

There are many overly dramatic thought patterns to be aware of. But today we’re talking about three of them, to illustrate why it’s so harmful to think this way.

Listen in now to get inspired enough to challenge those thoughts and leave the drama behind!

In This Episode:

Find out why dramatic thinking can HURT you & your relationships
Get three examples of dramatic toxic thoughts
Get inspired to detach and create more room for CALM thinking instead
Much more!

Listen Here:

How To Stop Being Dramatic | Episode #39 Transcript

I had a friend recently say something like, “Oh my gosh, the worst thing in the world just happened to me.”
And I’m like, “Oh my god, what is it?” And it turns out that the person that was going to rent their flat fell through for like a temporary thing,
and they had to go find somebody else. And when I heard that, I was like, “Okay, like, you know, that sucks.”
Like, whatever, like, the thing you thought was going to happen is not happening.
And you have to go do work to try to make it happen again. But that is hardly the worst thing in the world.
This scenario got me thinking about dramatic thinking and dramatic thoughts and dramatic behavior.
And today, that is what I want to talk to you about.
Today, we’re going to talk about how to stop being dramatic, which is a very big topic of conversation.
It actually will go far beyond the scope of this episode today.
But recently, I was thinking about dramatic thoughts and how dramatic thoughts drive drama within yourself.
Within your relationships. And how many of our patterns we don’t even really realize sometimes are maybe a bit overly dramatic.
And we don’t realize that they might actually be harming us.
So if you are harming yourself by accident with your own thinking, and you are looking in the world in a certain way,
which is causing you more pain than pleasure, why not learn how to change it?
dramatic behavior, of course, is something we can change in a multitude of ways.
But today, I wanted to go over three thought patterns in particular that can contribute to dramatic thinking
and therefore to drama in general.
The first dramatic thought pattern is catastrophizing.
I really love this word because it perfectly sums up something that I never really realized was a thing
until I got into the world of spirituality and personal growth.
But what catastrophizing means is thinking the very worst about something.
Like always going to that worst possible outcome, always thinking that the worst possible thing is going to happen
to you or in the situation or to somebody else.
It is a very scary way to live your life.
This is one of those toxic thought patterns that you might have inherited from your family.
I think it is a really common way of seeing the world especially in the baby boomer population,
like looking at things as being very scary.
Like the end is coming.
Like if you do this one thing, everything is going to mess up.
Everything will go wrong.
The world will end.
Well, maybe not the world, but some situation will end and it will all be very, very bad.
For me personally, I think that that kind of thinking was used on me as a child as a way to manipulate me.
A lot of the popular parenting advice at the time, I think was really emotional manipulation.
But that doesn’t matter when you’re a kid.
You don’t understand that.
That is just the way that the people and the adults around you think and behave.
And therefore, they very well might have passed it along to you.
So perhaps right now you are waiting for an outcome.
You have applied to a job.
You are waiting to find out if someone is going to text you back.
And your brain is going to that place of that person hates me and they’re never going to talk to me again.
What I said less than I was really stupid.
And now I’ve messed it up for you’re thinking that job interview,
they’re going to hire somebody more qualified than me.
And I’m going to never get this job, never get this promotion, never get to where I want to be in life.
It’s easy in the scope of this podcast listening to me talk about this to think like,
oh my gosh, like, of course, that sounds so silly.
So over the top, so dramatic.
But when we have thoughts in our head that we don’t challenge and we don’t dissect,
we just live with them as if they’re real and true.
And this is one way that you might be putting yourself into a whole world of emotional pain
without even realizing what you’re doing.
Because you do not have to go to that end scenario.
You don’t have to go to the dark place.
You don’t have to go to the worst place all the time, right?
Like, there’s a lot of room in the world for nuance.
And perhaps that means the person doesn’t text you back.
Them not text you back doesn’t mean you’re the worst person in the world or that they found somebody else
or that you said something really horrible.
It doesn’t mean any of that.
But I just want to put this out there first because catastrophizing is just so harmful,
so toxic.
It’s going to put you in that state of fight or flight inside of your body.
It’s going to make you feel like everything is really rushed.
It’s going to make you feel like you’re in a panic.
It’s probably going to make you do things that you would not normally do
because you are in that state of a brausel.
And really, the only thing that is making us do that is the way that we are thinking.
So of course, you might act out in certain ways,
do other things, say other things that you might not normally do.
But that is because you have worked yourself up into the state
that the worst possible outcome is coming.
And therefore, you’re having this physiological fear response.
And that is where the out of character behavior comes from.
So that is the first one to look out for.
The second thing to look out for is all or nothing thinking or black and white thinking.
So that is thinking that something is either good or is really bad.
Somebody likes us, somebody loves us, or they must hate our guts.
We think that if something doesn’t go our way,
that means we’re falling behind. We’re failing. That something has gone wrong, right?
It again is a very narrow way of looking at the world
and categorizing things as black or white.
This is something your lizard brain wants to do.
This is something that all humans are prone to doing, actually.
So you can have a little grace about this one,
but it’s still important to realize when you’re doing it.
Because once again, you might be causing yourself way more emotional harm
than is necessary.
I don’t know why it is such an easy thing to go from thinking something is good to thinking
something is immediately bad.
But we do this all the time, right?
Like, think about perhaps a breakup.
This person is with you, they love you, they like you,
and then when you break up suddenly you perceive them as hating you.
And maybe in some situations that is actually the case.
But sometimes that’s not the case.
Sometimes you have just shifted your relationship from one place to another.
And not to say that you have to be friends or that you have to keep them around in your life.
But it doesn’t necessarily mean that that person is against you
or trying to harm you in some way.
Yet that is exactly where your brain loves to go.
And again, this is all because your lizard brain is trying to stay time
and it is trying to protect you.
However, these little toxic thought patterns again
are going to make you feel threatened.
They’re going to heighten your fear response.
They’re going to put you in your trauma response.
And you might just be acting out doing or saying weird things
and just feeling overall stress in your body all of the time
because of this dramatic way of thinking.
Another way that we can be having dramatic thoughts
is through over-generalization.
This is something that comes up frequently in arguments.
So I see there’s a lot when people are having a disagreement
or something with their partner or maybe even with a friend.
But it is saying you always do this or you never do that.
Putting things into these very big categories.
Like whenever I ask you to go for coffee, you never respond.
So this is very noticeable in an argument
because it automatically puts the other person on the defensive.
However, again, this is just your brain.
Basically, what it’s doing is falling back in that black and white thinking
that all are nothing thinking.
And it’s thinking because you didn’t do this one thing two times
or whatever that you’re never going to do it.
So the person in the situation, if you’re having an argument about it,
is going to feel attacked.
They’re going to try to argue the right out of it
and say that no, that’s not true.
I have done it before.
And it just sets up both parties at this impasse
because the words always and never are almost never actually true.
We’re always exaggerating.
We are always seeing the very worst in a situation.
So over exaggerating what somebody does or how a situation is,
this is another very toxic and dramatic thought pattern.
That again, it can really harm the way you feel.
Like if you start to immediately think
like this person never texts me back,
that might put you in a state of anger
that might bring up your fear response.
And that might provoke you to, if your fight response is triggered,
provoke you to attack back to say something back to this person
that might not be the best possible thing, right?
So I mean, of course, there’s situations where you do need to stand up for yourself
so don’t take this one example that I’m giving you
as an example of how you need to behave.
That is not my point.
My point today is that I want you to start to see
how these very simple and common thought patterns
create problems.
They create problems with us.
They make more stress,
intention in our bodies.
When you are activated and in your fight or flight response,
you lose cognitive function.
You’re not thinking clearly, basically,
like your brain is literally shutting down
and trying to get you to a place of feeling safe again.
And if you’re in a relationship with somebody,
especially are more, more important relationships,
these things can create great strain, right?
Because when you are stuck in that black and white thought
or catastrophizing or overgeneralizations,
and you’re fighting against somebody else,
like that stuff might seem so real to you.
You might think you have all the evidence in the world about it,
but the other person is not going to see it that way.
Because reality is not black and white.
It is gray.
And people are rarely good or bad.
They’re usually a mixture of both.
I mean, think about how much you love your favorite pet.
But sometimes that pet is going to do things that aren’t your favorite, right?
And it’s the exact same thing with humans.
Only we tend to be a lot more forgiving
to order animals than we are to our favorite humans.
So this can stress you out.
It can cause you to create drama, to cause fights,
and just to create stress overall in your life.
And it really all begins in the way that you are thinking.
So finally, I want to talk about believing your feelings
and the result of not being able
to differentiate between your thoughts and reality.
So no one takes you aside in school
and tells you that you can’t believe everything you think.
We are so good at just letting the runaway train in our brain
take the reins, write us a story, and we are in it.
We are in the story like that.
We have no proof for things half of the time.
We are jumping to conclusions all over the place.
But in our mind, we have already seen the truth
and we are reacting based on that.
So what I want you to think about now, I mean,
we talked about the thoughts already.
Thoughts are very important.
It’s important to keep that distance.
It’s important to realize when you’re falling
into cognitive distortion.
But it is also important to realize
that just because you are activated
or you’re having this feeling inside of you,
that doesn’t actually mean
that this thing that your brain is telling you is real
is actually real.
So that is something I really wish I could go back
and tell my teenage self.
Because for me, all of these years,
anytime I felt something and I had an angry reaction
or an irritated reaction,
I definitely believed my feelings were real.
I believed that because I had this anger
or this irritation or whatever,
that whatever had happened happened the way that I saw it in my brain
and the way my brain was telling me.
And now, even though I know that that still happens,
even though that I know that that is how my brain wants me to see the world,
I know that actually isn’t the truth.
I know that there is more to reality.
I know that there are two viewpoints.
I know that many times we perceive other people as being
tell us and uncaring or purposefully rude to us
and they are actually just not thinking about us at all,
which is maybe a different sort of uncomfortable truth
but it is not what our brain is reacting to.
I know now that being activated,
having your fight or flight come in,
wanting to talk back or wanting to run away
or wanting to shut down,
this is a sign that part of you is feeling threatened.
And I also know that because you are in that state,
your, again, your cognitive brain is offline.
And you are not thinking clearly.
So that is why it’s even more difficult
to come out of these distortions and to see the truth.
So I wanted to talk about all of that today,
just as a little reminder
that you cannot believe everything that your brain tells you.
Sometimes we’re going to overreact to things
that we really don’t need to.
I want to remind you that many times,
the stress and drama and intensity
of life that we are feeling is not because life is that crazy.
It is because we have let our brain tell us a story
and we have not challenged it.
We have not paused for a moment to see,
“Hey, what else could be true here?
Is it really black or white?
Is it really all or nothing?
Does this person really never do this and always do that?
How can we get ourselves out of those thought traps?
We just need to take a moment
when you’re in that moment.
I know it’s so hard, baby.
I know it’s so hard.
But to try to remember, to have space
and really learning how to detach
and to not go for your gut reaction,
it is such an important skill.
I know someone’s going to say,
“Oh, it’s not important.
Like, if you are feeling it, you should let it out.
You should lean into your emotions.”
Okay, no, that’s not what I’m talking about.
Feeling into your feelings is super important,
but the problem is that we think
that feeling into your feelings also means
reacting immediately,
saying that thing,
fighting back, doing something in the moment,
and that is the part that messes us up.
Because we’re usually not acting from our full conscious mind
and we are doing something petty or stupid or shortsighted.
So if we can learn how to just
let that feeling be there,
learn how to remember that we are not as smart as we think we are.
I mean, sometimes we are very, very smart,
but sometimes we need to have a little bit of space
to let the universe surprise us,
to let this situation not be so black and white.
This is a difficult skill to create,
but once you start to notice the cognitive distortions in your mind
and the dramatic ways you were thinking,
it will become so much easier for you to start to realize that in the moment.
You’ll start to be able to talk yourself down,
like, is this actually true?
Is it really black or white?
Is this person really hating me?
Did they really go out of their way to hurt me?
Or is this just part of my lizard brain jumping to conclusions?
And in turn, creating this pain inside of me
that actually does not need to be there?
Your lizard brain is your friend.
It keeps you out of trouble.
It keeps you alive.
But let’s be real.
It also causes a lot of chaos and pain.
And in turn, even bodily stress and over time, you know, stress can lead to disease.
So can you think you’re waiting to chronic disease the answer is yes.
And so the beginning to the solution,
the place where you can start to create space,
it’s not about wishing other people would do what you want them to do.
It is about learning how to detach
and to just let their be room for a different answer.
Other than the one, your lizard brain is feeding you.
So I hope that this gave you at least a little insight today
into the world of cognitive distortions,
into dramatic thinking,
and into just generally how thinking
drives our actions and ultimately our results.
And definitely your feelings.
And if you’re always feeling like the world is working against you
or things are going wrong or you can just never get life to go your way.
I challenge you to begin to look at the thoughts you were having
and see if you can create a little bit of space in there
for the unknown or for something neutral.
Instead of going immediately to the negative,
let’s leave a little bit of room for something.
Probably a lot more boring, but probably a lot more real.
So that is it for today’s episode.
Thank you so much for listening, my beautiful friend.
I am so excited to announce I have a new meditation program coming for you.
I’m not ready to put up the details yet on this podcast,
but stay tuned to my Instagram to find out more.
And I will catch you back here in next week’s episode.