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

4 practices

Narrow these down

There is a difference between being disappointed with how things are and having given up on how things will be. The second needs a different level of care.

Disappointment still has a future attached to it: this is bad, and later might not be. Hopelessness has closed that off. If you hear someone move…

Five minutesWhat worry doesCBTQur’an 39:53One line of research

The worst symptom is not always the one that costs the most. Ask what actually stops you doing things, and start there.

Someone might rate their racing thoughts as the worst of it and still be turning down every meeting because they go red in the face. If you are…

Five minutesWhat worry doesCBTQur’an 2:186One line of research

Once the surge is up it takes something like a quarter of an hour to drop, and nothing sensible said inside that window will land. Give it the time first.

This is the point where a parent, a partner or a friend reaches for reasons, and the reasons make it worse. Keep your words few, stay nearby, offer…

Twenty minutesWhat worry doesCBTQur’an 13:28One line of research

Pulling away from people sits upstream of a good deal: low mood, social fear, and the slow shrinking of where someone is willing to go. Whatever the eventual label, getting a person back into contact is rarely wasted work.

You do not need the diagnosis settled before you start. One regular arrangement with one person, at a fixed time, somewhere easy to reach, does work…

Twenty minutesWhat worry doesCBTQur’an 2:186One line of research

Learn this in order

Another course here · 40 minutesWhen doubt keeps coming backSix short lessons on the kind of doubt that will not settle. The wudu you are not sure counted. The intention you said four times. The thought that…Another question here · 6 minutesDoes anxiety mean my faith is weak?No. Anxiety is a false alarm in the body, it happens to devout and non devout people alike, and there is no text that makes fear a sin. The Qur'an…Everything in this areaAnxiety Another course here · 40 minutesWorry that will not switch offSix short lessons on worry that runs all day, on the surge that arrives out of nowhere, and on the fear of what people are thinking. It explains why…