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 practicesWhen a child digs in, try reading it as frightened rather than difficult. Most of them want to get this right and simply do not yet know how.
Refusal that looks like defiance is usually fear sitting on top of a missing skill, and those two call for different responses. Treat it as defiance…
Solve the problem without leaving the situation. Change where you sit in the canteen, who you sit with, what you bring with you, but stay in the canteen.
Otherwise a good problem solving session quietly becomes a plan for avoiding more skilfully. The test is simple. Does this option keep me in the…
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…
A car coming at you and a spider across the room set off the same alarm. Naming which one you are facing, before you act on it, is a skill worth practising.
Say it plainly to yourself: this is dangerous, or this is uncomfortable. Both are true of different things and the second does not require you to…