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
5 practicesEvery adjustment should arrive with the date you will start reducing it. Written down at the beginning, while everyone is still reasonable.
Supports meant as a bridge have a way of becoming the new normal, and by the spring nobody remembers they were temporary. Decide at the outset what…
A shortened day, a pass on presenting to the class, a modified deadline, a quiet place at lunch: worth asking for when they let a child stay in the building rather than leave it.
The test for any adjustment is simple. Does it get them into the room and keep them there, or does it save them from the room? A shortened day that…
A long stretch at home is never neutral time. It teaches two things at once: staying away stops the dread, and staying away is pleasant.
That double lesson is why a few months out is so much harder to undo than a few days. First comes relief, then the slow morning, the screen, the…
Going from talking online to talking in person is not one more step up the same ladder. It is a different ladder, and it deserves rungs of its own.
Those rungs might run from voice notes, to a phone call, to a video call with the camera on, to meeting one person you already know somewhere quiet,…
A group can help a great deal, and it is rarely the place to begin. Being in a room of people is a strong dose, and doses climb rather than start at the top.
Left too early it often ends with someone dropping out, and dropping out gets read as proof they were right about themselves all along. Once there is…