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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Treatment and medication
The sudden bodily kind and the grinding thinking kind are handled by different systems, and a treatment that reaches one may have very little to grip in the other. Worth saying plainly to anyone who has concluded that nothing works for them. What they usually have is one thing that half worked, which is a much better place to start from than nothing.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
He who cures me when I am ill (Quran 26:80). Abraham says it of God rather than of any one remedy, which leaves room for a remedy to do only part of the work.
الشعراء
وَإِذَا مَرِضۡتُ فَهُوَ يَشۡفِينِ
He who cures me when I am ill
Qur’an 26:80read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
When cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety was tested against a genuine placebo rather than a waiting list, the benefit came out moderate rather than dramatic. That is an honest benchmark and a kind one, because it means partial improvement is the normal result rather than the disappointing one. Something that helped a bit was doing roughly what these treatments generally do.
Carpenter, J.; Andrews, L.; Witcraft, S.; Powers, M.; Smits, J.; Hofmann, S. (2018). Cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety and related disorders: A meta‐analysis of randomized placebo‐controlled trials. Depression and Anxiety doi
Placebo-controlled meta-analysis for anxiety disorders.
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A treatment can only work on the part of you it can actually reach.
The dose that lifts low mood is often not enough for anxiety, and for obsessive symptoms it is usually well short. Needing more of it is a feature of the problem rather than anything wrong with the person taking it.
Before choosing what to try, work out which kind of anxiety you are dealing with. What settles a sudden surge and what wears down months of low grade worry are rarely the same thing.
Wanting it to stop right now is not a character flaw, it is what anxiety does to a person. Saying the hurry out loud, instead of acting on it quietly, keeps it from making the decisions.