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
2 practicesAsking again and again whether it will be alright, and being told yes, buys a few seconds of calm and guarantees the next round of asking. The kindness in the answer is what keeps it going.
You can hear it in the shape of the question: the same one, worded slightly differently, asked of the same person. If you are the one being asked,…
Sometimes there really is evidence for the fear. Say so. The balance comes from the other column being fuller, not from pretending the first column is empty.
Children are being bullied, are laughed at, do get things wrong in front of everyone. If you wave that away, they learn the exercise is fixed and…