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 practicesThe 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…
When someone is genuinely distressed by what happens on their phone, treat it as a reading of their anxiety rather than as a complaint about screen time.
For a lot of people, younger ones especially, the phone is where most of the social risk now lives: being left out, compared, watched, judged.…
When a young person seems impossible to satisfy, the complaining is usually a symptom rather than ingratitude. Saying that plainly to a parent changes what they feel.
Parents worn down by years of grumbling often arrive carrying a resentment they are ashamed of. Naming the negativity as part of an illness gives…
Treat the whole of social media as poison and you will never hear anything true about it again. Some of what happens there is genuinely good for people.
Drawing, making things, finding others who share an unusual interest, keeping up with people who live far away: none of that needs fixing. What…
Parents see an adult sized person and assume adult sized judgement. It helps to say out loud that the wiring is still being finished well past eighteen.
The look of the young person is doing the arguing, and it is very persuasive, so only a plain statement will counter it. Say that the parts used for…
When you assess a young person, take a reading of the adults as well: what they understand about the world their child lives in, and how comfortable they are in it.
A good deal of what arrives as the presenting problem is really a mismatch. A parent reads something ordinary as alarming, or something serious as…