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
4 practicesListen for the condition you have attached to acting: I will apply once I know I will get it, I will go once I know I will like it. If that condition could never actually be met, it is not caution, it is a door you have quietly locked.
From the inside it rarely feels like avoidance. It feels sensible, even responsible, because who would go to all that trouble without knowing. The…
A no is usually information about fit rather than a report on your worth. Some of them have to happen before you can tell which places are right for you.
This is a real reframe rather than a comforting one, because a rejection does carry usable information: about what they were after, about what you…
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…
An exam is a task with requirements. It is not a ruling on whether you are capable, however much it feels like one while you are sitting inside it.
Saying that once changes very little. The person this comes from took a long time to arrive at it, and that is worth knowing so you do not expect it…