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Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
Low mood makes school heavy rather than dangerous: no energy, no interest, everything asking too much. Staying away helps at first and then takes away the walk, the friend at break, the one lesson they liked, and the flatness deepens. With this pattern the work is less about facing fear and more about putting small good things back into the day on purpose, before the mood improves rather than after.
The moment you are freed of one task work on (Quran 94:7). It nudges towards the next small thing rather than towards waiting until you feel able.
الشرح
فَإِذَا فَرَغۡتَ فَٱنصَبۡ
The moment you are freed [of one task] work on
Qur’an 94:7read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In an observational study, people whose experiential avoidance fell after psychedelic experiences also showed lower depression severity and less suicidal thinking. The design cannot show that one caused the other, and the setting is a very long way from a school morning. It is cited only for the association it reports, that less turning away from inner experience tracks with less depression.
Zeifman RJ, Wagner AC, Watts R, Kettner H, Mertens LJ, Carhart-Harris RL. (2020). Post-Psychedelic Reductions in Experiential Avoidance Are Associated With Decreases in Depression Severity and Suicidal Ideation.. Frontiers in psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Withdrawing removes the ordinary rewards that hold mood up, so the further you withdraw the less there is to lift you.
If a young person is talking about not wanting to be here, that comes first and needs proper help now.
If staying home means an anxious child gets more of you, your comfort is quietly part of what keeps them there. That is not a failure of love.
Two weeks away is the point to stop waiting and ask for help. A year away is beyond what one appointment a week can carry.
The target is getting through the door, not feeling calm about it. Calm tends to arrive afterwards, and mostly for people who went.