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
11 practicesFacing a fear in steps works, and it works best with someone guiding the ladder. Read this as an explanation of how it works, and take the steps themselves to a therapist.
If you are helping someone with their sleep and eating, ask rather than instruct. The moment you sound like their mother you have lost the part of you that was useful.
Young adults are busy becoming separate people, and any adult who picks up the parental voice gets folded into that argument whatever they were…
Say out loud, before you start, that there will be bad weeks. Then when one turns up it is a thing you expected rather than proof the whole plan was nonsense.
Setbacks get read catastrophically when nobody warned you: back to the beginning, all that for nothing. Agree in advance what happens instead. You…
Being pushed into something before you are ready does more than frighten you. It teaches you that the pacing you were promised cannot be trusted, and that is the harder thing to repair.
After a step that overwhelmed them, most people go straight back to avoiding, and they also start negotiating every later step defensively, which is…
Start with the body. Slow breathing, muscles let go one at a time, a piece of music, a familiar object in a pocket. Small levers, and they turn fear from something happening to you into something you are doing something about.
Children in particular notice the body first: the racing heart, the sick stomach, the tight chest. That is the part they are actually frightened of.…
Being shown a breathing technique is not the same as being able to use one. Practise it while nothing is wrong, often enough that it runs without you having to remember the order.
At the height of fear the only skills within reach are the overlearned ones. Something demonstrated once in a quiet room will not turn up in a school…
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…
Pick one picture and keep it. Shallow end, middle, deep end. Then the child, the parents and the school are all talking about the same thing without anybody needing the clinical words.
It makes the next step obvious instead of arbitrary. You are not being sent to the deep end, you are moving a bit further along the shallow end. It…
Let the person facing it choose the first step, and let them choose an easy one. A rung somebody picked gets climbed. A rung assigned to them gets argued about.
Ask which one they would be willing to have a go at this week, not which one they ought to be able to manage. The answer usually sits somewhere in…
Before a step, write down what you will do when the fear arrives. Which breathing, what you will say to yourself, who you will speak to. Nobody invents a plan in the moment, they only follow one.
Keep it short and specific enough to be followed while frightened. It also gives you something to go over afterwards: what you used, what you forgot,…
No step happens without the person agreeing to it. Not ordered, not dragged, not talked round in a bright voice. Agreement is a condition of the thing working, not a courtesy.
Coerced exposure teaches two lessons at once: that the situation is dangerous, and that you are not safe with the people who arranged it. After that…
Ask which step they are willing to try, and then go with their answer. A smaller step they chose themselves tends to get attempted, and a bigger one you chose for them often does not.
In practice this means holding the ladder loosely. You keep the shape of it, they pick the rung, and if they pick lower than you hoped you take the…