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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Treatment and medication
For the surging kind, the things that help act fast and work on the body. For the worrying kind, they are slower and work on how the days are built: movement, sleep, what you do with the thinking. Someone who has only ever been offered the first sort for the second sort will tell you that nothing works, and they will have decent grounds for saying it.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Satan has afflicted me with weariness and suffering (Quran 38:41). Job names two different things in one complaint, which is often what anxiety turns out to be.
ص
وَٱذۡكُرۡ عَبۡدَنَآ أَيُّوبَ إِذۡ نَادَىٰ رَبَّهُۥٓ أَنِّي مَسَّنِيَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنُ بِنُصۡبࣲ وَعَذَابٍ
Bring to mind Our servant Job who cried to his Lord, ‘Satan has afflicted me with weariness and suffering.’
Qur’an 38:41read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a small trial, thirty sedentary women with generalised anxiety disorder did six weeks of either aerobic or resistance training, and remission rates went up while worry came down. Thirty people makes this a feasibility finding rather than a recommendation. It is a fair example of the slower, body based route being worth trying for worry that has settled in.
Matthew P. Herring; Marni L. Jacob; Cynthia Suveg; Rodney K. Dishman; Patrick J. O’Connor (2011). Feasibility of Exercise Training for the Short-Term Treatment of Generalized Anxiety Disorder: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Help aimed at the wrong kind of anxiety looks like failure when it is really a mismatch.
Physical dependence on a sedative can build while you are taking it exactly as prescribed. Nothing has gone wrong with you and nobody has misused anything.
If something helped one part of your anxiety and did nothing for the rest, that is not proof it failed or that you are beyond help. Different parts of this run on different machinery.
A small dose that has not changed in years is not automatically something to fix. Stopping carries risks of its own, and they have to be weighed rather than assumed away.