thinking the worst-case scenario: a coping mechanism?

One toxic habit that I’ve been recently trying to tame is how I think about the worst-case scenarios when making decisions or when looking forward to certain ends. Think about a fatalist’s approach to situations — a cold shrug; a what will be will be muttered under cold breath. I don’t know how much of this affects the way I assess people and control situations, but I know it has helped tremendously in how I react to disappointments, or how I allocate grace and make allowance for people.

I spoke about this with a friend sometimes ago and she said it could be as a result of recurring paranoia or being surrounded with toxic people or having face too much disappointments. Another friend said it is part of living as a Nigerian in Nigeria — the uncertainty of things & the higher possibility that the worst can happen anytime.

Google called it catastrophizing, sounds fancy to me. LOL. I have tried many times to analyse this and it has come back to me as a survival mechanism — how you dive into the wreck of things without letting whatever damage get to you. How we survive the fire, right? Someone said hoping for the best while expecting the worst. Wasn’t that HOV? Isn’t that Jay-Z?