Drama Game: Catastrophising

Age: 10+

Players: 2 or more, up to 35

Time: 5 – 15 minutes

Space: enough for students to work in pairs

Skills: emotional regulation, resilience, coping strategies, communication skills, teamwork, creative thinking, critical thinking, empathy, emotional intelligence.

An exercise to demonstrate that catastrophising is not a healthy coping mechanism.

Ask the class to get into pairs. Each pair will create an improvisation where one of them catastrophises and the other calms them down. Spend a few minutes talking about catastrophising with the class. Catastrophising is when a person thinks the worst-case scenario will happen even when there's no evidence to suggest that it will and exaggerates the severity of a situation. For example, a person might make a small mistake at work and think, ‘I'm going to get fired and never get another job again’. Or they might imagine that a friend hates them because they haven't replied to a text message. Ask the group to share more examples.