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Areas › Worry and anxiety › The cost of avoiding
Ten minutes, twice a day, with a return to lessons afterwards, is a support. Open ended visits from the first flutter of nerves onwards teach a very efficient lesson about how to end a difficult morning. Say the limits to the child as well, so it feels like an arrangement they are part of rather than something tightened behind their back.
The death you run away from will come to meet you (Quran 62:8). What we leave the room to avoid is usually still waiting when we come back in.
الجمعة
قُلۡ إِنَّ ٱلۡمَوۡتَ ٱلَّذِي تَفِرُّونَ مِنۡهُ فَإِنَّهُۥ مُلَٰقِيكُمۡۖ ثُمَّ تُرَدُّونَ إِلَىٰ عَٰلِمِ ٱلۡغَيۡبِ وَٱلشَّهَٰدَةِ فَيُنَبِّئُكُم بِمَا كُنتُمۡ تَعۡمَلُونَ
so say, ‘The death you run away from will come to meet you and you will be returned to the One who knows the unseen as well as the seen: He will tell you everything you have done.’
Qur’an 62:8read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a randomised experiment, 30 people asked to carry out health related precautions for a week became more anxious about their health than those who did not. It is small, brief and used volunteers, so the size of it should not be oversold. What it illustrates well is the shape of the thing: the protective move did not settle the worry, it fed it.
Olatunji BO, Etzel EN, Tomarken AJ, Ciesielski BG, Deacon B. (2011). The effects of safety behaviors on health anxiety: an experimental investigation.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
An exit with no limit gets used at the first spike of discomfort, before anything has had a chance to settle.
Somewhere between five and ten children in every hundred struggle to get to school at some point, and one or two of those need real help with it. Your family is not a strange case.
If escape is holding the pattern in place, the plan closes off the escape a step at a time. If what waits at home is holding it, the plan moves those good things to the other side of the effort.
A plan followed on some days and not others can be worse than no plan at all. Choose the smallest version you are sure you can keep to, and keep to that.