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
2 practicesThere 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…
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…