You know the feeling. Pager goes off at 3am. Your heart slams. Your mind races: "This is going to cascade. The whole system is going down. I am going to get fired."
That is catastrophizing ??a named CBT cognitive distortion. Not a confidence problem. A thinking pattern.
It's a common trap for on-call engineers. Our jobs involve preventing and fixing the worst, so our brains get really good at imagining it. But when that imagination runs wild, it makes a tough situation even harder.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) offers a tool called a "thought record" to help break this cycle. It's a structured way to challenge those automatic, negative thoughts. Let's walk through one with a realistic on-call scenario:
The 7-Step Thought Record in Action
1. Situation:
PagerDuty alert at 3:14am, payment-service 5xx errors spiking.
2. Automatic Thought:
"This is going to take down checkout, we will lose all revenue, I will be fired."
3. Emotion:
Terror 90/100, Shame 70/100
4. Evidence FOR the automatic thought:
-
payment-serviceis critical path for revenue. - Checkout depends directly on it.
- 5xx errors are spiking rapidly, indicating a major issue.
5. Evidence AGAINST the automatic thought:
- We have circuit breakers in place to prevent cascade failures.
- There's a fallback to cached pricing for non-critical payment flows.
- The on-call runbook for
payment-serviceissues exists and is well-documented. - This exact issue (or similar) has happened 3 times before, and was resolved in 40 minutes each time.
- Nobody has been fired for an outage in 4 years at this company.
6. Balanced Thought:
"This is serious and needs focus, but the system has resilience built-in. I have a runbook to guide me. I have resolved similar issues before. My job is to follow the process and mitigate, not to prevent all outages from ever happening."
7. Re-rate Emotion:
Terror 45/100, Shame 20/100
Notice the difference? The terror and shame haven't vanished, but they're significantly reduced. Enough to allow you to think clearly, follow the runbook, and actually troubleshoot effectively instead of being paralyzed by dread.
The 3 Distortions Behind On-Call Anxiety
Beyond just catastrophizing, there are a few other common cognitive distortions that fuel on-call anxiety:
- Catastrophizing: (The cascade fantasy) "This small issue will absolutely bring down the entire system and lead to irreversible damage."
- Fortune-telling: (I will be fired) "Because of this outage, I know I will face severe professional consequences."
- Personalization: (This is MY fault) "Even though the deploy was reviewed by 3 people and passed all tests, this outage is my personal failing."
These distortions twist reality, making problems seem bigger, more personal, and more inevitable than they truly are.
Why This Beats "Just Stay Calm"
Telling yourself "just stay calm" is about as useful as telling a drowning person "just breathe." It doesn't address the underlying mechanism.
Catastrophizing, like imposter syndrome, thrives on selective evidence. It cherry-picks data points that confirm the worst-case scenario and ignores everything else.
The thought record, however, forces you to gather balanced evidence. It makes you actively look for facts that contradict the automatic negative thought. This process rewires your thinking, even if just for a moment, to see a more complete and realistic picture.
Free Tool Mention
I built a free browser tool that walks you through the 7 steps and auto-detects catastrophizing as you type. No signup, no backend, no data leaves your browser. Link: Free CBT Thought Record Tool. There is also a Telegram bot @trevor_pl_bot that guides you through a thought record in chat.
The Honest Part
This is not a replacement for therapy. If you're struggling with severe anxiety, burnout, or mental health challenges, please seek professional help. These tools are for the in-between. For when the pager just went off and you need to break the spiral before you can think clearly and effectively.
Try One Today
Next time your pager goes off, before you open Slack or jump into the terminal, take 5 minutes. Walk through the 7 steps. You will find the cascade fantasy is not as inevitable as it feels, and you'll be better equipped to handle the actual problem.
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