In Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy we teach that there are four irrational beliefs. The primary irrational belief is known as demandingness. An example would be to think that a certain bad event must not exist. REBT theory teaches that once you make a demand you are also likely to engage in one of three additional irrational beliefs. These three derivative irrational beliefs are known as awfulizing, low discomfort tolerance (I can’t stand it…) and people downing. When fallible humans who are prone to faulty reasoning engage in demandingness and/or any of its derivative irrational beliefs emotional upset and self-defeating behavior generally follow. I would like to address awfulizing so that you have a better idea of why it is best to avoid.
When you awfulize about some adverse situation it may serve you well to think of this awfulizing as falsely catastrophic. It is bad that the adverse situation exists. There is no denying that. However, awful really means more than 100 on a 0-100% badness scale. You are defining a bad event, perhaps a very bad event as beyond 100%. You are defining it in a falsely catastrophic, magical, and illogical way. The upper limit is 100% bad. Nothing can be beyond 100% bad by valid definition.
Let us assume you lose your job. That is bad because it can lead to real inconveniences (bad things) like less disposable income, an inability to pay the rent, and a necessity to take an undesirable job for less pay than you were making just so you do not get evicted. All of these things are clearly bad but none of them are catastrophic unless you define them as so. The problem with awfulizing is that it is an illogical and emotionally self-defeating definition. A better definition is to define things on a bad, very bad, exceptionally bad continuum so that you remain on the 0-100 badness scale. Your problems in life maybe 75% bad today. Next year you may have another worse problem that is 90% bad. The year after you may have another problem which is even more complex and difficulty that you then define it as 99.999% bad. Unfortunately, in life things can keep getting incrementally worse but never reach awful as awful is like infinity. You can never reach infinity and reality never reaches awful. No matter how very bad reality is with a little creative thought you could imagine it still worse. If you stick with this reasoning you will soon see that awful does not have a real referent. Awful can only be validly defined as nothing could be worse but whatever adversity you now face with a little imagination you could imagine it getting worse still. Awful also means that something is so bad that it absolutely must not exist. But of course this so called “awful” event does exist and is real. Bad events exist, very bad events exist, and exceptionally bad events exist (e.g. people die, many people die, even more people die). Awful events only exist in our heads when we wrongly define them as so. Think about it.