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
3 practicesAnxiety is the most common mental health difficulty of childhood, with something like a third of young people meeting the threshold at some point and a smaller group badly held back by it. Both halves of that are worth saying.
The first half is for the shame: this is ordinary, and keeping it secret is its own kind of avoiding. The second half is so that nobody hears…
There is a particular good feeling in getting out of something you were dreading. Give it a name at home, because it is exactly what makes tomorrow harder.
Children recognise this straight away when it is put plainly: the lovely feeling when you find out you do not have to go. Adults know it too, in the…
Whoever is standing in the hall at half past seven needs to understand the trap as well as the child does. A plan agreed on a Tuesday afternoon will not survive a Wednesday morning otherwise.
In the moment it is happening, a parent is not weighing up what gets learned over a term. They are trying to end the distress in front of them, and…