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
5 practicesA long stretch at home is never neutral time. It teaches two things at once: staying away stops the dread, and staying away is pleasant.
That double lesson is why a few months out is so much harder to undo than a few days. First comes relief, then the slow morning, the screen, the…
If a child is at home, run the day as though it were a school day. Same wake time, same breakfast, bag packed, work starting when lessons would have started.
Ten hours of sleep followed by a slow morning turns home into somewhere far nicer than school, and a body clock that drifts later makes the next…
Nobody puts a child who cannot swim into the shallow end and calls it teaching. Before anyone goes near the thing they dread, they need something to do with their body and their head when the fear arrives.
It takes only one overwhelming attempt to teach the opposite of what was intended: that it really was too much, and that the adults will push anyway.…
If attention and planning are already hard work for you, then the very tools for handling anxiety are the things you find difficult. That is not a failure to try. It means the plan needs more scaffolding and more repetition.
Expect to need things that sit outside your head: written steps, alarms, someone who checks in, a shorter ladder with smaller rungs. Go slower than a…
Short sessions spread over days beat one long night. The settling of what you learned happens after you stop, and a short night undoes a good deal of the day's work.
A perfectionist will not cut their hours to be kinder to themselves, but they will cut them to get a better mark. So argue it on those terms.…