Areas › Worry and anxiety
Worry and anxiety
Anxiety is not a character flaw and it is not weak faith. It is a body doing what it was built to do, at a moment when it is not needed. The practices here work on the loop itself: what worry promises and never delivers, what avoiding costs you, and how to let the body come down.
What works for this
Cognitive behavioural therapy
The treatment with the largest trial base for anxiety works on what you do about worry rather than on what you worry about. Catching it, postponing it, and testing a prediction instead of arguing with it.
One move, today
Pick one worry you had today. Write the exact thing you feared would happen, then write what actually happened. You are collecting evidence, not arguing.
What matches
3 practicesObsessive thoughts and compulsions respond well to a specific kind of therapy. What is here is for understanding them, not for treating them by yourself.
When the words for feelings are not there, ask for a number instead. How much did the handwashing take over this week, one to ten, is a question someone can answer on a bad day.
A number asks far less of a person than a description, which matters when putting feelings into language is hard for them, and you still end up with…
Offer choices rather than instructions. With a problem that runs on control, being told what to do gives that control somewhere to dig in.
Two or three real options, the trade-offs said plainly, and then the pick is genuinely theirs. That holds for the big decisions too, like moving to a…
If every step you try keeps not working, however small you make it, that is information rather than failure. A more intensive programme is the next thing to look at, and it should be put to you as an option.
The whole point of shrinking the steps is to find one that moves. When nothing moves at any size, staying in the same weekly arrangement out of…