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
6 practicesSomewhere 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…
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…
A plan followed on some days and not others can be worse than no plan at all. Choose the smallest version you are sure you can keep to, and keep to that.
When staying home works on one morning in four, that occasional success makes the pleading more determined rather than less. Cut the plan back until…
Listen to the tone, not only the content. Sorrow and flat negativity about someone's online world can be the clearest reading of their mood you will get.
If most of a person's social life happens online, how they talk about it is a fair guide to how they are. Weariness, bleakness, no pleasure left in…
Asking again and again whether it will be alright, and being told yes, buys a few seconds of calm and guarantees the next round of asking. The kindness in the answer is what keeps it going.
You can hear it in the shape of the question: the same one, worded slightly differently, asked of the same person. If you are the one being asked,…
Sometimes there really is evidence for the fear. Say so. The balance comes from the other column being fuller, not from pretending the first column is empty.
Children are being bullied, are laughed at, do get things wrong in front of everyone. If you wave that away, they learn the exercise is fixed and…