Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

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1296 practices

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Body based approaches have been linked with better physical and mental health, easier relationships, and in some settings lower use of painkillers and psychiatric medication.

That last one tends to interest the people holding the budget, so it is worth knowing if you are trying to get this kind of work taken seriously…

Twenty minutesTouch and bodyworkBody basedQur’an 16:69One line of research

People who are sure they could never lie still for an hour tend to be asleep within ten minutes of getting on the table. Being unable to fidget seems to do it.

Worth saying in advance to anyone who is putting off booking. It is the same effect as a car journey knocking out a child who has not stopped moving…

LongerTouch and bodyworkMedical and treatmentQur’an 8:11One line of research

The chapter a diagnosis sits in was decided by a committee, and the medicines did not rearrange themselves to match. When you are thinking about treatment, it helps to look past the name on the file to what the person is actually carrying.

Anxiety used to sit in one place in the manual and now sits in three, with trauma conditions and obsessive ones given rooms of their own. That…

A minuteTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 49:6One line of research

Nothing you take can act on something that is not there to be acted on. It is a plain limit, and it explains a good deal of the disappointment people carry about treatment.

A medicine travels everywhere in the body and only does something where there is something for it to work through. So the question is not whether a…

A minuteTreatment and medicationMedical and treatment

Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.

Food, caffeine and fuel

What worry does

Grounding and settling

Treatment and medication

The fear underneath anger

Knowing your partner

The cost of avoiding

Breathing

Shared spiritual life

Being seen and judged

Practising under provocation

Making it stick

Fondness and admiration

Breaking the worry loop

Remembering to do it

What you are actually defending

Shame and stigma

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Answering bids

Staying regulated in conflict

Emotions as signals

Listening and understanding

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Feeling from the inside

When you use something to cope

Gratitude

Rituals of connection

Use your strengths

Affection and touch

When anger turns to harm

Cool the body first

Self-compassion

Rebuilding trust

Anger, alcohol and the body

Obsessions and compulsions

Facing it a step at a time

Tolerate distress

Posture and how you carry yourself

Question the thought

Notice the pattern and flex

Your worth is not conditional

Get it out of your head

Find meaning

Face it gently

Work with your brain

Your window of tolerance

Care for yourself in loss

Shame

Safety and grounding

Listen to the body

Living with uncertainty

When you go numb

Qur’an 41:44

One line of research

Sleeping tablets, sedatives, antihistamines and alcohol all pull on the same brake. Whoever is prescribing needs the whole list, including the things that do not feel like medicine.

People rarely mention a nightly drink or a sleep aid bought off the shelf, because neither feels like part of the treatment. Together they can add up…

A minuteTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:286One line of research

If you do not know how much of something you are taking, you cannot tell whether it is helping you. That is the honest problem with most calming products bought off the shelf, quite apart from whether the ingredient works.

Testing of these products keeps turning up contents that do not match the label, sometimes including things the label never mentions. So a good week…

A minuteTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 17:36One line of research

With anything you use to take the edge off, note what you took and when, and how you felt a few hours later. Small changes in amount can turn the same substance from calming into the opposite.

Cannabis is the clearest example. Strength and make up vary enormously between products, a small amount often settles people, and a larger amount…

A minuteTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 16:69One line of research

If you have been given a drug from one category for a problem in another, it is fair to ask which part of it is doing the work. Often the useful effect is a side effect that has been borrowed.

The common example is an antipsychotic given in a small dose for sleep, where the drowsiness comes from its antihistamine action rather than from…

A minuteTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 21:7One line of research

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.

Coming off can bring withdrawal, a rebound of the original anxiety, and worse if it is done abruptly. Set against the risks of staying on, which are…

A minuteTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 39:53One line of research

Plenty of people carry a tablet for years and almost never take it. What it is mostly doing is reassurance, and that is worth knowing about it.

Being able to reach for it is what makes the shop or the motorway bearable, which is a real help and a quiet cost at the same time. The cost is that…

A minuteTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:186One line of research

Saying that you do not know, and then showing where you would look, beats an answer improvised on the spot. It also teaches the person asking how to check things for themselves.

Name the limit, name the source you would go to, and offer to come back with what you find. Systematic reviews and an ordinary scholarly search will…

A minuteTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 16:43One line of research

One medicine can reach both the surging kind of anxiety and the circling kind, while another really only touches the surging kind. That is why the slower and broader option is usually the one people are started on.

It explains a pattern that looks arbitrary from the outside. The broad option is unglamorous: nothing happens on the first day and it takes weeks to…

A minuteTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 17:82One line of research

Making someone calmer is not the same as treating what is making them anxious. Obsessive worry is the clearest case: something sedating can take the edge off the distress and leave whatever drives it completely untouched.

You can see it in the shape of the day. The person is quieter, slower, maybe sleeping better, and the same thought arrives just as often as it did.…

A minuteTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 10:57One line of research

Ask what symptom you are aiming at rather than what the diagnosis is called. Nothing anyone takes recognises a category; it acts on whatever is happening in the body.

In practice that means naming the target out loud before anything is started or changed: the surges that come from nowhere, the sleeplessness, the…

Five minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 39:9One line of research

Anxiety comes in two rough families. Fear is the sudden bodily kind that arrives in a rush, and worry is the slow kind that circles and will not settle.

The distinction earns its place because the two behave differently. Fear peaks and passes and shows up in the heart and the breath, while worry sits…

Five minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 20:114One line of research

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.

Regulators strengthened the warnings across this whole class of medicines to say so plainly, including that withdrawal can be drawn out. Knowing it…

Five minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 24:61One line of research

The number worth watching is not the dose but the direction. A dose that keeps creeping upward says something that a steady one does not.

You are often the person who sees this, because you hear about it in passing across months while the prescriber sees someone twice a year. Note it…

Five minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 42:38One line of research

Before choosing what to try, work out which kind of anxiety you are dealing with. What settles a sudden surge and what wears down months of low grade worry are rarely the same thing.

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:…

Five minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 38:41One line of research

The dose that lifts low mood is often not enough for anxiety, and for obsessive symptoms it is usually well short. Needing more of it is a feature of the problem rather than anything wrong with the person taking it.

This matters because a fair trial of something has to include a fair dose. A person can spend eight weeks on a starting amount, decide the medicine…

Five minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:185One line of research

Some anxiety medicines have no fast setting at all. They work on the receiving side of the system and take two to four weeks to show anything, so taking one in a bad moment does nothing and proves nothing.

For the right person the trade is a good one: nothing to become dependent on, no withdrawal, no dangerous mixing with alcohol, and nothing to reach…

Five minutesTreatment and medicationMedical and treatmentQur’an 16:69One line of research