Practices

Instead of a diet, take one craving and stay with it: the food, the moment, the pull. Tap or breathe through it until the pull itself loosens.

Pick a single situation rather than a whole eating plan. Six in the evening, the cupboard, the third biscuit. Restriction tends to make the forbidden…

If tapping feels too jumpy, use the same face points differently. Feel for a tender spot inside the eyebrow, under the eye, or just below the cheekbone towards the nose, then make slow small circles there.

Vary it: lighter, then a little deeper, circling one way and then the other, and see which direction the tissue seems to prefer. Slow steady contact…

There comes a moment when the tissue under your fingers gives a little and allows more depth. Wait for that instead of pressing your way to it.

It sounds fanciful until you have felt it once, and then it is obvious. Rest your hand, keep the pressure steady, and let the softening decide the…

Pick one word for what is bothering you and let that word stand in for the whole thing while you do the soothing. You do not have to run the memory to work on it.

The word can be plain: the hospital, that message, Sunday. Bring it to mind once, then let it sit in the background while your hands and your…

Picture somewhere peaceful and then walk in it. Feel the ground under each foot, your legs moving, and count the steps up to twenty.

The counting keeps you there instead of drifting off, and the feet are the important part. A calm scene that stays a picture in your head does very…

Cross your hands to the opposite shoulders and stroke slowly down to your elbows and hands, like a hug you are giving yourself. Three to five strokes, unhurried.

Then, if you want the rest of it: from the middle of your forehead out to the temples and along the hairline to the ears, from the crown down towards…

Pain is rarely one thing. There is the raw sensation, the memory of every other time, how you feel about it now, whether you think you can cope, and what you conclude about yourself.

Pulling those apart is useful because they do not all move together. You may not be able to change the ache itself, and you can often change how…

Ordinary harmless sensation competes with pain on its way up. Rubbing, squeezing or stroking near a sore place gives the nerves plenty of other traffic to carry.

This is why everybody rubs a banged elbow without being taught to. The useful part is that you can do it deliberately: firm strokes along the limb, a…

If pain is the thing you live with, start the session with the stroking sequence rather than the conversation. Arms, forehead, crown, cheeks, slowly.

It does two jobs in one go: gentle wide contact takes some edge off the pain, and it brings a person out of guarded alertness into being able to…

Squeeze slowly down one arm with the opposite hand, then the other, and work over whatever muscles you can reach. No table, no appointment, nobody else in the room.

Firm and rhythmic beats fiddly. Give the forearms, upper arms, shoulders and thighs a proper squeeze and release, a few seconds each. Doing it…

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…

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…

Most people are a mixture rather than a clean example of one thing. If treatment has taken the edge off one part and left another standing, that is usually two problems, not one failure.

Someone whose panic has settled but who still spends every evening rehearsing tomorrow has had the fear part treated and the worry part left alone.…

Wanting it to stop right now is not a character flaw, it is what anxiety does to a person. Saying the hurry out loud, instead of acting on it quietly, keeps it from making the decisions.

That urgency is the reason people creep a dose up, hop between supplements, and abandon anything slow before it has had a chance. Treating the hurry…

When what is keeping you awake or on edge is your situation, a tablet can only do so much. That is not a failure of the medicine and it is certainly not a failure of you.

Noise, an unsafe home, night shifts, someone you are frightened of: none of these are altered by anything you swallow. The medicine may still be…

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…

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…

The first week or so on one of these can feel worse rather than better: jittery, restless, sleeping badly. For most people it settles within a fortnight, and it is a known part of starting rather than a sign of harm.

Untold, a person quite reasonably concludes the medicine is making them ill and stops. Told beforehand, the same week becomes something to sit out,…