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
16 practicesTwo weeks away is the point to stop waiting and ask for help. A year away is beyond what one appointment a week can carry.
Short absences often sort themselves out. Once a fortnight has gone, the pattern has usually begun to set, and the amount of practice needed to undo…
Somewhere between five and ten children in every hundred struggle to get to school at some point, and one or two of those need real help with it. Your family is not a strange case.
It feels rare because nobody mentions it at the school gate. In a school of a thousand that is a dozen or more children needing active support at any…
Avoiding something makes today easier and tomorrow harder. Say that plainly, to yourself and to whoever is in it with you.
Without that sentence, asking someone to face a frightening thing looks like cruelty, and every conversation about it goes badly. With it, the choice…
Anxiety is the most common mental health difficulty of childhood, with something like a third of young people meeting the threshold at some point and a smaller group badly held back by it. Both halves of that are worth saying.
The first half is for the shame: this is ordinary, and keeping it secret is its own kind of avoiding. The second half is so that nobody hears…
The target is getting through the door, not feeling calm about it. Calm tends to arrive afterwards, and mostly for people who went.
It is tempting to wait for a good week, a settled mood, a morning that feels different. Waiting hands the decision to the anxiety, and the anxiety…
Offer school again at ten, and at eleven, and after lunch. One refusal at half past seven should not be allowed to decide the whole day.
Morning dread usually peaks around the time they would be leaving and then drains away over a couple of hours. A child who could not face it at half…
Parents keeping a pattern going are almost never doing it knowingly. Say so out loud, before you explain any of the rest.
A parent who hears that their comfort has been part of the problem will either argue or quietly stop coming, and both of those cost the child far…
Nobody is asking you to go cold. Comfort your child properly, and watch where it lands: alongside them as they go, rather than waiting for them if they stay.
A hug at the door and a hand on the back on the way to the car sit on the side of going. A whole afternoon of being looked after because they did not…
Next rung: remark on something in the room. The plant, the noise outside, the length of the queue. Nothing about the person yet, just something out loud about where you both are.
It is the lowest stakes opening there is, because the subject is neutral and the other person can pick it up or leave it. Most of the time a small…
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…
Sleeping tablets, sedatives, antihistamines and alcohol all pull on the same brake. Whoever is prescribing needs the whole list, including the things that do not feel like medicine.
People rarely mention a nightly drink or a sleep aid bought off the shelf, because neither feels like part of the treatment. Together they can add up…
If you have been given a drug from one category for a problem in another, it is fair to ask which part of it is doing the work. Often the useful effect is a side effect that has been borrowed.
The common example is an antipsychotic given in a small dose for sleep, where the drowsiness comes from its antihistamine action rather than from…
Saying that you do not know, and then showing where you would look, beats an answer improvised on the spot. It also teaches the person asking how to check things for themselves.
Name the limit, name the source you would go to, and offer to come back with what you find. Systematic reviews and an ordinary scholarly search will…
These medicines work on a timescale of four to six weeks, not days. Say the number out loud at the start, because someone expecting relief this week will have decided by Friday that it failed.
Something does happen on the first day, but it is only the first step of a change that takes weeks to finish. The useful version of this is a date:…
Describe what the first fortnight might feel like before the first tablet, not after the first worried phone call. A warning given in advance turns a bad week into a milestone.
The wording can be plain. Some people feel more wound up for the first week or ten days, it usually passes, and nobody changes anything without…
Being told not to worry has never once stopped anybody worrying, including you. If a friend said it to you tomorrow you would carry straight on.
This is worth saying to a parent who feels they are failing at comforting their child. They are not bad at it. The words simply do not do that job…