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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
3 practicesTheme · What worry does
How long you have · A minute
When · Under stress
Your alarm learned from something real, then started answering to things that merely resemble it. A rustle in the grass gets the same jolt as the animal that first taught you to run.
It helps to say to yourself, that was the sound, not the thing. The response is not stupid. It was built from a real event and it spread to whatever…
When the alarm takes over, the reasoning part of you goes quiet for a while. That is not you losing your mind. It comes back on its own.
People often frighten themselves twice: once with whatever set them off, and again with the sense that they have lost control of their own head.…
A car coming at you and a spider across the room set off the same alarm. Naming which one you are facing, before you act on it, is a skill worth practising.
Say it plainly to yourself: this is dangerous, or this is uncomfortable. Both are true of different things and the second does not require you to…