Practices

Be careful with the language about growing a thicker skin. Before anyone is asked to mind less, someone has to check that what they are minding really is only a slight.

Where the insults are discrimination, bullying or the run up to abuse, telling a person to toughen up is telling them to distrust an accurate reading…

Treat these as experiments rather than instructions. You are not obeying a programme, you are finding out what happens, and that difference changes how it feels to do them.

People who are quick to anger are often also quick to bristle at being told what to do, and a challenge sits far better with that than a homework…

Some thoughts you could defend all day, and debating whether they are true only gives them more of your time. Try a different question: is this thought kind to me, and does it take me anywhere I want to go?

This one earns its place when you have already proved the case to yourself and feel worse for having done it. You are not conceding the thought is…

At the end of a stretch of thinking like this, ask yourself plainly what you believe about yourself now, and how that differs from an hour ago.

Shifts that go unnamed tend to have evaporated by the evening. Saying the new version aloud, or writing a single sentence of it, turns it into…

When you wave off what your child is into, they rarely hear a comment about gaming. They hear something about themselves.

At that age a good part of who someone is gets built out of what they love, so a shrug at the thing usually lands as a shrug at the person. You do…

If mindfulness is going to help with ADHD, the version with a chance is small and spread out. A few seconds of noticing, several times a day, rather than one long sitting you come to dread.

A forty five minute block asks you to get settled in one place and then somehow carry that into the afternoon, and the carrying is exactly what tends…

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.…

Watch for the moment a what if turns into a when. That small slide, from a possibility into something you can already picture in detail, is where worry does most of its damage.

The detail is what convinces you. Your mind supplies the phone call, the face, the exact words, and the body answers the picture as though it were…

Listen for the words I can't. When anxiety is doing the talking, that phrase turns up long before any evidence does. Let us try and see is the same situation with the door left open.

You do not have to argue yourself into confidence. Swap the verdict for a smaller sentence: I do not know yet. Then take one step that would actually…

There is a small gap between something happening and the story you tell yourself about it. That gap is the cheapest place to step in.

Once the story is running the body is already going and everything gets harder. So build one small habit at the front end: a slow breath out when the…

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…

The thought that nobody at the party will want to talk to you is chemistry, not a report about the world. You do not have to disprove it. You only have to notice where it came from.

Arguing with an anxious thought while the alarm is still ringing is heavy work and it rarely goes well. Reclassifying it is lighter: this is what my…

Being told not to worry has never once stopped anybody worrying, including you. If a friend said it to you tomorrow you would carry straight on.

This is worth saying to a parent who feels they are failing at comforting their child. They are not bad at it. The words simply do not do that job…