Welcome to THE WORRY HABIT Resource Page
This page began with a talk at the Glia Faculty Uplift Summit in July, I spoke about the worry habit — how anxiety becomes automatic, why willpower keeps losing to it, and what the neuroscience suggests actually works instead.
I created this page to post resources and practices in a form participants could keep and use. Everything here is free, and I'll keep adding to it — guides, practices, recordings, and occasional invitations to work through this material together.
If someone forwarded you this link: Welcome! You're just as welcome here as the people who attended the talk. Link to video and sign up for future emails is below if you’re interested.
Workbooks/References
NEW Out of Autopilot Starter Guide
Anxiety and the habits that ride along with it — the worrying, the over-preparing, the replaying, the evening scroll — aren't character flaws. They're loops your brain learned because, once, they worked. And a loop you can see is a loop you can work with.
The guide contains worksheets for mapping your own patterns using the three-step method, journal prompts built to help you recognize yourself in real situations rather than abstractions, four practices that each take under two minutes, and the Pleasant Events practice from the MBSR tradition — a week-long experiment in letting the good register, in a brain built to scan for problems.
There's room to write throughout. Print it and fill it in by hand, or type into it with your PDF app — whichever one you'll actually do.
A Practical Guide for The Worry Habit
This is a companion to The Worry Habit session at The Faculty Uplift Event— a place to revisit the ideas and, more importantly, to practice them. Here is the one idea it all rests on: you are not fighting your brain — you are learning to work with it.
Most of us have tried to push worry away, reason it into submission, or out-discipline it. This is a different approach: understand how the pattern actually runs, then work with that machinery instead of against it. What follows is what I have found to be true. Try it, and notice what proves true for you.
Meditations
NEW Body Scan (9 min.)
In this brief meditation you’ll guide your awareness through the body to just notice sensations exactly as they are, without judgement or needing to fix or change anything. This practice helps familiarize us with our habitual patterns of stress and tension in the body. It can also help train the mind to drop into sensations during times of stress and uncertainty — the moment where choice becomes possible. With regular practice we can become more resilient and reduce reactivity.
A Mindful Moment for a Busy Day (7 min.)
This brief meditation is an invitation to slow down and get curious about the breath on a busy day. Giving ourselves a brief pause to center, ground, release tension and take refuge in the breath can be a valuable nervous system reset. You may find that some part of it really resonates and can develop your own 60-90 second check in when you need it.
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If you'd like to be on the list, I send occasional notes like the one that brought you here — a piece of the science, a practice to try, and now and then an invitation to something live. Nothing frequent, and you can leave whenever you like.