Areas › Worry and anxiety
Worry and anxiety
Anxiety is not a character flaw and it is not weak faith. It is a body doing what it was built to do, at a moment when it is not needed. The practices here work on the loop itself: what worry promises and never delivers, what avoiding costs you, and how to let the body come down.
Narrowed down
26 practicesHow long you have
Approach · Medical and treatment
When · Any ordinary day
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…
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:…
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…
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…
The gentler alternatives are for avoiding a habit forming medicine in the first place. They cannot carry someone who is already dependent, and offering one as a straight swap mid crisis sets everybody up to fail.
Once a body has adapted to one of these medicines, only a careful reduction of that same medicine will get a person off it, and a different drug will…
Take a few photographs of your bedroom, then look at them later and circle whatever has to change or go. Seeing the room in a picture shows you things you stopped noticing years ago while standing in it.
The list is usually short and dull: the light on a charger, the pile of unfinished things on the chair, the television, the clock you keep checking.…