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
4 practicesIf a child can go to the school office whenever they like and stay as long as they like, that is an exit rather than a support. Agree a length, and a gap between visits.
Ten minutes, twice a day, with a return to lessons afterwards, is a support. Open ended visits from the first flutter of nerves onwards teach a very…
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…
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…
You can take someone's fear entirely seriously without walking through the frightening story with them. Say you can see how frightening it feels, and leave the plot alone.
It reads colder written down than it lands in the room. What the person needs is to feel believed. What they do not need is a second person weighing…