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
8 practicesWhen the fear is about being seen, being asked, being judged, you can build the steps out of real moments: the doorway, the corridor, the dining hall, answering once in a lesson.
Fear of a whole building cannot be practised. Fear of walking into the dining hall at half past twelve can. Make each step small enough to be boring…
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…
Take a few photographs of your bedroom, then look at them later and circle whatever has to change or go. Seeing the room in a picture shows you things you stopped noticing years ago while standing in it.
The list is usually short and dull: the light on a charger, the pile of unfinished things on the chair, the television, the clock you keep checking.…
The mind that runs ahead into everything that could go wrong is the same mind that plans well, sees round corners and has things ready in time. One trait, pointed in two directions.
If you have been told all your life that you overthink, it is worth saying plainly that this trait has served you. The aim is not to flatten it. It…
Ask one question about the worry: is there something to be done here that has not been done? If yes, make the plan. If the plan already exists, or there is nothing to plan, the worry gets no more of your time.
Making a study timetable is useful once. Making it for the fourth time is worry wearing the clothes of work. The test is not how serious the topic is…
Whatever approach the anxious person is learning, teach it to the people they live with. A skill that only one person in the house knows gets overridden by everyone else's habits.
Families have a settled way of responding to distress, usually built out of love, and it will win against anything learned in an hour once a week. So…
Online you can edit, delete, mute and leave. People who have done most of their socialising that way often find ordinary company unbearable, because ordinary company cannot be controlled.
If that describes you, the answer is not to become a different sort of person. It is practice in rooms you cannot manage: a class, a job with shifts,…
With a child, make it a job rather than a lesson. They are the detective, the worried thought is the claim, and the task is to collect what supports it and what does not before deciding anything.
Two columns on a page, in their handwriting, not yours. Ask what a friend would notice, what happened the last three times, what would have to be…