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
10 practicesBefore choosing a method, work out what the avoiding is doing for the person. Two children keeping away from the same building can need opposite things.
A technique that sounds right is not the same as one aimed at whatever is holding the problem in place. Ask what the hours at home actually contain,…
Build the ladder from what you do now, not from what you think you should be managing. If phone calls are currently impossible, the first rung sits somewhere below a phone call.
Have an honest look first. Which apps you talk on, whether you send voice notes or only type, whether you have ordered anything out loud in the past…
When something frightens you the mind offers one option: do not go. Force out two or three more before judging any of them, daft ones included. Choosing needs something to choose between.
There is an order that works. Say what the problem actually is, in one sentence. List some options without weighing them yet. Then go through what is…
Put a number on each step, nought to ten, and let it be your number. Two people facing the same school will not agree about which part is worst, and the ladder has to belong to the person climbing it.
One child dreads the bus and is fine once inside the building. Another would happily ride the bus all morning and cannot get through the front door.…
When obsessions start early and dig in deep, ask gently what anxiety looks like elsewhere in the family. Often there is an undiagnosed parent, and often that parent is helping in ways that keep the whole thing running.
None of this is about blame. A parent who checks the locks for their child, answers the same question fifteen times, or arranges the evening around a…
If the urge to arrange has to go somewhere, point it at something that can actually be finished. A kitchen drawer ends. A desk you keep re-sorting never does.
The ending is the part that matters. Finishing leaves you with something real to have done, which competes with the small relief that compulsive…
When something feels unbearable to risk, follow it downwards. If that did happen, what would it mean, and what would happen after that?
Keep asking gently, and stop when you reach something that is a statement about the person rather than about the situation, such as it would prove I…
The mind that runs ahead into everything that could go wrong is the same mind that plans well, sees round corners and has things ready in time. One trait, pointed in two directions.
If you have been told all your life that you overthink, it is worth saying plainly that this trait has served you. The aim is not to flatten it. It…
Ask one question about the worry: is there something to be done here that has not been done? If yes, make the plan. If the plan already exists, or there is nothing to plan, the worry gets no more of your time.
Making a study timetable is useful once. Making it for the fourth time is worry wearing the clothes of work. The test is not how serious the topic is…
Online you can edit, delete, mute and leave. People who have done most of their socialising that way often find ordinary company unbearable, because ordinary company cannot be controlled.
If that describes you, the answer is not to become a different sort of person. It is practice in rooms you cannot manage: a class, a job with shifts,…