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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Being seen and judged
One young woman asked a contact, in passing, whether a gallery owner needed any help. The question turned into an application and then an internship, and she described the whole thing as luck. The asking was not luck. If you hand your successes to circumstance and keep your failures for yourself, this is the habit worth interrupting, one instance at a time.
If you do good, openly or in secret (Quran 4:149). A quiet question nobody witnessed still counts as something you did.
النساء
إِن تُبۡدُواْ خَيۡرًا أَوۡ تُخۡفُوهُ أَوۡ تَعۡفُواْ عَن سُوٓءࣲ فَإِنَّ ٱللَّهَ كَانَ عَفُوࣰّ ا قَدِيرًا
If you do good, openly or in secret, or if you pardon something bad,then God is most forgiving and powerful
Qur’an 4:149read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Follow up studies of cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety related disorders find gains still present a year and more later, although the advantage over comparison conditions narrows with time. So the small approaches you make now are not one off events, they tend to keep paying out. What follow up data cannot say is how much of that comes from any single step you took.
Eva A.M. van Dis; Suzanne C. van Veen; Muriel A. Hagenaars; Neeltje M. Batelaan; Claudi Bockting; Rinske M. van den Heuvel (2019). Long-term Outcomes of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety-Related Disorders. JAMA Psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Crediting yourself with the step you did take is what makes the next one thinkable.
The right next step makes you uneasy to think about and still looks possible. If thinking about it turns your stomach it is too big, and if it bores you it is too small.
When people frighten you, it helps to ask which part is the trouble: not knowing what to do, or being sure you are being marked while you do it. From the inside they feel identical.
There is a moment worth waiting for: when you can say what your anxiety does in your own words, without borrowing anyone's phrasing. That is usually when it starts to loosen.