All about Anxiety

Stopping the Noise in Your Head

Reid Wilson Ph.D.

Bad Days Are Excellent Days to Practice

What is it that you want badly enough that you’re willing to step up to the challenge?

Dear Anxiety, Please Drench My Armpits

We need to employ this absurd approach with Anxiety: to tell it what it doesn’t expect to hear. Ask for more worries, more symptoms, more discomfort… and we want it now!

Wrestling With Anxiety in the Canadian Rockies

Speak directly to your obsessions with a simple, paradoxical message. Whenever you can engage the symptom without fearing it or fighting it, you have the best chance of beating it.

Living With OCD During COVID-19

Cut yourself some slack. This isn’t easy. In fact, it can be downright scary. So if you experience some regression in your work to control worries, give yourself a pass. Tomorrow is a new day.

Finding Opportunities to Feel Intimidated and Insecure

For any of us to grow, we must learn to tolerate more than we think we can tolerate.

Finding Opportunities to Feel Intimidated and Insecure

Part 1: If you want to take your life back from anxiety, don’t wait until you are certain that everything is safe. Learn how to step toward the threat while a part of you feels insecure.

Lessons Learned in Trapeze School: Just Jump!

Anxiety needs you to feel intimidated and then back away. Your job is to feel intimidated and step forward into the action anyway.

Why Exposure Therapy Isn’t Enough

You must courageously step toward what scares you. But you don’t do it in order to habituate. You do it as a means to practice this shift in your point of view.

Your Game-Winning Strategy: Kick Content to the Curb

Anxiety picks a topic that has significance to you because it's a powerful means of hooking you. Don’t be surprised if it relates to something you value.

Surrender Your Security, Certainty, and Comfort

I surrender that I’ll never get rid of the desire for certainty. I suggest that you do too. We’re forever going to want to feel safely secure and comfortably in control.

Your Parental Worry Is Here to Stay

Trying to “curb” our parental worry is unfortunately a futile exercise. But we can adopt an effective, healthy approach to our worries.

How We Talk Ourselves into Worry

If you want to be less anxious on a plane, you don’t have to change anything about the flight. You have to change your interpretation.

Learn to Love Your Amygdala

Like all components of our minds and bodies that play a part in our anxiety, the amygdala is doing precisely what it’s supposed to do. And for that alone we should be thankful.

How to Drop Our Crutches and Dive into Discomfort

Too often we resolve the issue of threat by relying on safety crutches. Our top-choice? Avoidance. We want to get rid of the threat—and to avoid seems like the safest bet.

Use Absurd Talk to Take Control

OCD wants you to feel doubt and insecurity. You can take a power position over OCD by adopting a new point of view.

Let Worry Motivate Your Next Move

Worry motivates us to act on our plans, to stay on task, and to solve problems. It can trigger planning, preparation, and action—but worrying in itself is not acting.

How To Approach Anxiety with Cleverness, Part 2

We “act as though” all day long—that the coffee we purchased is uncontaminated, and that gravity will keep our feet planted to the ground. When stuck, let it help you take action.

How to Approach Anxiety With Cleverness, Part 1

Ali wasn’t victorious because he was stronger or more athletic. After all, Foreman was in his prime. He was a 3-to-1 favorite. Ali was victorious because he was cunning.

How You Can Use Self-Talk to Step Forward

“Whatever it takes, I’m going to finish this.” When you face a daunting task, that message doesn’t instruct you; it encourages you to push through resistance and continue on.

How to Approach Challenges with a Competitive Spirit

What is a ready-for-anything competitive spirit? It’s when we step forward with a point of view that says, “I have the skills to take on this challenge. I have a chance here.”

How to Reach Higher Goals by Lowering Your Expectations

Paul Hamm had been training for this specific competition for a decade; he was on the road to a gold medal. And after his fall, the way he gets back up is inspirational.

Learning to Love the Mat

You can expect to end up on the mat repeatedly. But the less you worry about being thrown to the mat, the less likely you are to end up there.

A Profound Experience With the Toilet

In any distressing situation, we have only two choices: Accept or resist. You have to find a way to willingly welcome your uncertainty and distress.

“The Noise in Your Head” Video Series

Follow a young woman who struggles with anxiety & applies treatment principles to her everyday life. She engages Anxiety in a competition to win her life back.

My Worry: Is It a Signal or Noise?

Worries take two forms: signals and noise. Signals prompt you to take action because signals come with solutions. Noise comes with no solutions. Simply put, noise is static.

Why Discomfort Can Be So Good for You

If we’re truly interested in living in the real world, we must train ourselves to cope with the insecurity of not knowing and the sensations that come with awkwardness.

Studying Anxiety, Our Toughest Challenger

What a poker champion can teach us about managing and overcoming anxiety

Winning the Battle Inside Your Mind

It’s 35 degrees this morning, and partway through a 3,000-meter race, I go into panic mode. I can’t breathe. Suddenly, the battle is not on the water but is inside my own mind.

The Surprising Usefulness of Worry

Worry serves the essential function of helping us solve legitimate problems, but anxious worrying serves the opposite function.

Learning From Chris Sharma

What a no-ropes rock climber can teach us about tackling our Anxiety.