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Areas › Worry and anxiety › Facing it a step at a time
One child dreads the bus and is fine once inside the building. Another would happily ride the bus all morning and cannot get through the front door. A borrowed hierarchy gets this backwards. Rating each step yourself also leaves you something to compare against later, which is how you notice that the thing that was an eight has quietly become a four.
Facing a fear in steps works, and it works best with someone guiding the ladder. Read this as an explanation of how it works, and take the steps themselves to a therapist.
We do not burden any soul with more than it can bear (Quran 23:62). The verse adds that people will not be wronged, so a step sized honestly to you is not a trick being played on you.
المؤمنون
وَلَا نُكَلِّفُ نَفۡسًا إِلَّا وُسۡعَهَاۚ وَلَدَيۡنَا كِتَٰبࣱ يَنطِقُ بِٱلۡحَقِّ وَهُمۡ لَا يُظۡلَمُونَ
We do not burden any soul with more than it can bear- We have a Record that tells the truth- they will not be wronged
Qur’an 23:62read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Across one hundred and twenty four studies of panic disorder, cognitive and behavioural treatment outperformed no treatment and placebo, and the cognitive elements added little beyond the behavioural ones for anxiety outcomes. The doing is where the weight sits, which is a reason to spend your effort building a ladder you will actually climb. What the numbers you write beside each step measure is your expectation, and nothing more than that.
Mitte K. (2005). A meta-analysis of the efficacy of psycho- and pharmacotherapy in panic disorder with and without agoraphobia.. Journal of affective disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Only your own ratings put the steps in the order you will be able to climb them.
Coming back after a bad patch is quicker than getting there was the first time. Most people expect the opposite, which is why a setback feels so final.
Start with the body. Slow breathing, muscles let go one at a time, a piece of music, a familiar object in a pocket. Small levers, and they turn fear from something happening to you into something you are doing something about.
A ladder worth climbing has six things: real steps, built with you rather than for you, in your own words, a first rung that is genuinely easy, your hand on the pace throughout, and practice often enough to add up.