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 practicesObsessive thoughts and compulsions respond well to a specific kind of therapy. What is here is for understanding them, not for treating them by yourself.
When the words for feelings are not there, ask for a number instead. How much did the handwashing take over this week, one to ten, is a question someone can answer on a bad day.
A number asks far less of a person than a description, which matters when putting feelings into language is hard for them, and you still end up with…
Agree a short phrase to use at home. Saying I am having OCD worries tells a parent what is going on without handing them the worry to solve.
Once a parent hears the details they will nearly always try to help by answering, and answering is the thing that feeds it. A label gives them…
You can take someone's fear entirely seriously without walking through the frightening story with them. Say you can see how frightening it feels, and leave the plot alone.
It reads colder written down than it lands in the room. What the person needs is to feel believed. What they do not need is a second person weighing…
It can help to give the parts of your brain jobs. The front of your head is the manager, the memory system is the librarian, and the alarm is a security guard who is good at his work and far too keen on it.
The point is not accuracy, it is having language you can reach for quickly. Saying the guard is overreacting again gets you further than trying to…
Offer choices rather than instructions. With a problem that runs on control, being told what to do gives that control somewhere to dig in.
Two or three real options, the trade-offs said plainly, and then the pick is genuinely theirs. That holds for the big decisions too, like moving to a…
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…