Bite Size Comms

As a former diplomat, I have been deeply interested in world news and events for decades. I always start my day with an hour of online news. I’m both interested and worried about war and aggression by countries. I live 200 miles from the border with Russia in Latvia, a country that Russia threatens to invade. I have a crisis escape plan should that happen, but it is riddled with problems. I also worry about fuel and energy shortages resulting from the war in the Middle East. Will I run out of fuel as I drive back to the UK in two months’ time? I’m concerned about how these issues will affect other people. I worry. I think about the worst scenario. I’m talking about myself, but we’ve all probably been there. And if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve probably been on both sides of the catastrophe: the one catastrophising, and the one feeding it.

Catastrophic thinking, sometimes called catastrophising, is the tendency to fixate on the worst possible outcome of a situation and to treat it as the most likely. In cognitive behavioural therapy, it is classified as a cognitive distortion: a systematic error in thinking that skews our perception of reality.

The pattern is well documented. When someone catastrophises, they leap from a setback to an imagined disaster, telling themselves the situation is so terrible it cannot be managed or recovered from. A difficult situation with a client becomes the end of a career. A critical news story becomes a reputational disaster. An ambiguous government announcement leads to disorder or panic buying.

Is it a recognised mental health condition? Not exactly, and this distinction matters. Catastrophising on its own is not a diagnosable mental health condition, but it is strongly associated with anxiety disorders, depression, and PTSD. It can also heighten the experience of chronic pain and feelings of hopelessness. Think of it as a habit of mind, one that, under pressure, can become deeply entrenched, particularly in high-stakes environments, such as communications.

Here is where our profession sits uncomfortably. PR practitioners, crisis communicators, and journalists do not merely experience catastrophic thinking; in certain circumstances, they broadcast it.

Media reporting plays a critical role in shaping collective perception. Most of my worries stem from media reporting rather than from personal experience or contact with knowledgeable people. Responsible journalism informs; sensationalism alarms. When headlines are framed to shock rather than to educate, they activate the brain’s threat-detection systems. Words such as “terrifying”, “deadly”, or “nightmare” trigger an emotional response before readers reach the first paragraph. Crucially, this emotional transmission does not require factual accuracy. A rumour, an exaggerated claim, or an out-of-context statistic can produce the same psychological response as verified, proportionate information.

Research published after the Boston Marathon bombings found something striking: people who had consumed six or more hours of news coverage per day in the aftermath exhibited higher levels of acute stress than those who had been physically present at the event. The coverage, not the event itself, was the primary driver of psychological harm. That is a profound finding for anyone working in communications.

The consequences extend beyond individual anxiety. When organisations communicate in panic during a crisis, that anxiety is contagious: a phenomenon researchers at Berkeley’s California Management Review call “anxiety contagion”. A perceived anxious tone in communications measurably and predictably increases stakeholder anxiety, regardless of the message’s specific content. The same logic applies to media coverage. Fear spreads. Once it does, it shapes behaviour, sometimes creating the very outcome that was feared. As communicators witnessed during the Covid pandemic, the rumour of a fuel and food shortage triggered the panic-buying that caused the shortage. The fear of a catastrophe manufactured one.

It would be unfair to suggest that catastrophising is merely a matter of professional carelessness. The structural incentives pushing communicators towards worst-case framing are real and significant. Journalists operate in a competitive, attention-fragmented environment where alarming headlines generate more engagement than nuanced ones. Sensationalism has been shown to perpetuate misinformation, erode trust, and distort public perceptions of reality. Yet the commercial logic of digital media rewards it. PR practitioners face their own version of this pressure: the instinct in a crisis to prepare clients or management for the absolute worst, partly to manage expectations and partly out of genuine anxiety about outcomes they cannot control. Those covering global crises such as pandemics, conflicts, and environmental disasters also carry significant mental health burdens, with research showing alarming rates of anxiety, depression, and PTSD among communicators.

Understanding this context is not an excuse. It is the starting point for accountability. The CIPR’s Code of Conduct and the PRCA’s Professional Charter both require members to ensure the accuracy and truthfulness of the information they disseminate. That principle extends beyond avoiding outright falsehood. It requires us to be honest about probability, not just possibility. The worst case may be technically possible, but presenting it as the likely outcome, without evidence, context, or balance, is a form of distortion.

Research published in peer-reviewed journals on doomscrolling has linked compulsive exposure to negative news to existential anxiety, mistrust, despair, and a distorted sense that the world is more dangerous than it is. Much of that content was professionally produced. We helped create that information ecosystem. We have a responsibility to think critically about what we add to it.

The question to ask before hitting send on a crisis communication, drafting a press release, or framing a briefing document is not: “What is the worst thing that could happen?” It is: “Am I presenting this possibility as a probability?” We need to distinguish possibility from probability. We also need to consider whether the severity of the language is proportionate to the evidence available at this point. We should talk about plausible, relevant, and challenging scenarios rather than “most likely” ones. This matters because when you label something “most likely”, you stop planning for alternatives and start communicating that label to your stakeholders and audiences.

Scenario planning is a legitimate and essential tool in strategic communications. Used well, it prepares organisations for genuine uncertainty. Used poorly, it becomes a vehicle for catastrophic thinking, backed by institutional authority. The goal of ethical scenario planning is not to predict the future but to map plausible futures. We need to plan for the full range of scenarios, from best case to worst case. We need to ensure that we are mapping uncertainty, not predicting outcomes.

Catastrophic thinking is not a character flaw. It is a cognitive pattern, shaped by evolutionary threat-detection instincts, amplified by professional pressure, and enabled by an information environment that rewards alarm over accuracy. The first step in addressing it – in ourselves, our teams, and the content we produce – is to recognise it for what it is.

We are, by profession, architects of narrative. We choose which scenarios to highlight and whether uncertainty reads as manageable or terrifying. That is not a neutral act. It is one of the most consequential things we do. We need to ask, “How will I communicate this responsibly?”

[Image of a fire-lit red sky by Patrick Perkins at Unsplash]