Practices

Anxiety turns up in the body, in thinking and in what you avoid, and almost nobody gets all three in equal measure. Knowing where yours mostly lands tells you where to put your effort.

For one person it is the flush and the hammering heart with barely a thought attached. For another the mind will not stop while the body is perfectly…

The worst symptom is not always the one that costs the most. Ask what actually stops you doing things, and start there.

Someone might rate their racing thoughts as the worst of it and still be turning down every meeting because they go red in the face. If you are…

When someone is genuinely distressed by what happens on their phone, treat it as a reading of their anxiety rather than as a complaint about screen time.

For a lot of people, younger ones especially, the phone is where most of the social risk now lives: being left out, compared, watched, judged.…

A long, low grade depression often shows up as irritation rather than tears. Someone who complains constantly and is never satisfied may have been low for so long that it now looks like their personality.

The sad and tearful picture is what everyone watches for, so the grumbling version gets read as character and goes untreated for years. If a young…

When a young person seems impossible to satisfy, the complaining is usually a symptom rather than ingratitude. Saying that plainly to a parent changes what they feel.

Parents worn down by years of grumbling often arrive carrying a resentment they are ashamed of. Naming the negativity as part of an illness gives…

With heavy phone use the telling thing is not the hours. It is what happens when the phone is out of reach, and whether the checking feels urgent rather than enjoyable.

Ask what an evening without it is like. Restlessness, dread, a pull to check with nothing pleasant in it: that is a different picture from someone…

Plenty of people carry a piece of a condition without ever having the whole of it, and the piece still costs them something. Not meeting the threshold is not the same as being fine.

Subclinical is a word about paperwork rather than about suffering. Someone who avoids half of what they would like to do, but not enough of it to…

Almost everyone says they are a bit addicted to their phone. What separates a heavy habit from a problem is whether it is damaging work, sleep, study or relationships, and whether that has gone on for a while.

Ask about the damage rather than the hours: missed deadlines, nights lost, people who have stopped hearing from them. If nothing is actually…

The pull you feel towards the screen was built on purpose by people paid to make it strong. That is not an excuse, but it does take some of the shame out of losing an hour to it.

Self blame usually ends in another late night rather than in any change. The steadier position is that the pull is real and engineered, and what you…

Strong feeling about injustice can look a lot like being argumentative. Do not file conviction as defiance without checking.

For many young people these commitments are not a phase but a large part of who they understand themselves to be. Treat them as beliefs to be…

Treat the whole of social media as poison and you will never hear anything true about it again. Some of what happens there is genuinely good for people.

Drawing, making things, finding others who share an unusual interest, keeping up with people who live far away: none of that needs fixing. What…

Some young people are behind their age emotionally and socially, and the growing up genuinely has not finished. It is a question of timing rather than of character.

This lands very differently in a family than the words immature or lazy do. If you expect the emotional handling of a twenty year old from someone…

Parents see an adult sized person and assume adult sized judgement. It helps to say out loud that the wiring is still being finished well past eighteen.

The look of the young person is doing the arguing, and it is very persuasive, so only a plain statement will counter it. Say that the parts used for…

The mind that runs ahead into everything that could go wrong is the same mind that plans well, sees round corners and has things ready in time. One trait, pointed in two directions.

If you have been told all your life that you overthink, it is worth saying plainly that this trait has served you. The aim is not to flatten it. It…

When you assess a young person, take a reading of the adults as well: what they understand about the world their child lives in, and how comfortable they are in it.

A good deal of what arrives as the presenting problem is really a mismatch. A parent reads something ordinary as alarming, or something serious as…

If attention and planning are already hard work for you, then the very tools for handling anxiety are the things you find difficult. That is not a failure to try. It means the plan needs more scaffolding and more repetition.

Expect to need things that sit outside your head: written steps, alarms, someone who checks in, a shorter ladder with smaller rungs. Go slower than a…

Respect comes from the Latin for looking, with the prefix meaning again. It is literally the second look, the head that turns as somebody important walks past.

Knowing that does something useful. A word that felt close to sacred turns into a plain social behaviour you can examine: who gets looked at twice,…

Your mind is always slightly behind what is happening. Reality moves and you are the response, which leaves you permanently a step late and permanently not quite sure.

Put that way, uncertainty is not a flaw in your thinking, it is the position you are standing in. You are flying into the next moment without having…

If you can see yourself, you need other people to do it far less. That is really the whole aim, and it is what takes the sting out of being misjudged.

Being seen properly by others is lovely, and it is also occasional, partial and outside your control. What you can do daily is notice what you did…

Try saying the word until it goes silly. Respect, respect, respect: a socially agreed comment on how tall you are supposed to be.

The point of the joke is not to demolish respect, which is fine and worth having. It is to shrink the fear of not getting it, because that is the…