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
3 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.
If you are helping someone with their sleep and eating, ask rather than instruct. The moment you sound like their mother you have lost the part of you that was useful.
Young adults are busy becoming separate people, and any adult who picks up the parental voice gets folded into that argument whatever they were…
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…
Ask which step they are willing to try, and then go with their answer. A smaller step they chose themselves tends to get attempted, and a bigger one you chose for them often does not.
In practice this means holding the ladder loosely. You keep the shape of it, they pick the rung, and if they pick lower than you hoped you take the…