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
5 practicesFacing a fear in steps works, and it works best with someone guiding the ladder. Read this as an explanation of how it works, and take the steps themselves to a therapist.
Rather than taking on someone else's routine, ask what actually makes you feel ready for a day, or better looked after. The answers tend to be specific and slightly odd, and they hold up better than anything prescribed.
For one person it is a shower before anything else. For another it is having the bag packed the night before, or eating something warm, or ten…
Say out loud, before you start, that there will be bad weeks. Then when one turns up it is a thing you expected rather than proof the whole plan was nonsense.
Setbacks get read catastrophically when nobody warned you: back to the beginning, all that for nothing. Agree in advance what happens instead. You…
Let the person facing it choose the first step, and let them choose an easy one. A rung somebody picked gets climbed. A rung assigned to them gets argued about.
Ask which one they would be willing to have a go at this week, not which one they ought to be able to manage. The answer usually sits somewhere in…
A ladder worth climbing has six things: real steps, built with you rather than for you, in your own words, a first rung that is genuinely easy, your hand on the pace throughout, and practice often enough to add up.
Most ladders come apart for dull reasons. The bottom rung was somebody else's idea of easy. The wording came out of a manual. Nobody said you were…
Years of avoiding people leave real gaps, not only fear. How to start small talk, how to join a group already talking, how to get out of a conversation. Those can be taught, and being taught them is not an insult.
Sending someone into a peer group without the ordinary moves risks a genuinely bad afternoon, which then teaches exactly the wrong lesson. Practise…