Recovery Process

When you’re experiencing anxiety, you have a million worries racing through your mind. Things like: “is my boss happy with my work? Will I be able to pay that bill next month? Did my teacher look at me funny today? Why did I say that?” Excessive worries like this don’t accumulate and develop into an anxiety disorder overnight and anxiety disorders don’t disappear overnight, either. Non-drug treatments for anxiety often involve developing new habits of thought and behavior and letting go of old ones. So for instance: if you’re having thoughts about people’s negative judgments about your work product, for instance, then over time you can develop a habit of noticing those thoughts as they arise and then testing them to see how true they are and developing new, healthier, more balanced ways of relating to situations in your life and then responding to them. Like any skill, this one requires practice, but it’s the kind of practice that can yield a sense of accomplishment as you do it. Similarly, with mindfulness meditation practice (something else I recommend) this is a practice that can yield more benefits over time. It can deepen and enrich your life over years of practice and at the same time produce immediate short term benefit in the form of stress reduction and relaxation and many other benefits. You should speak with your mental health care provider to determine what treatment approach might be best for you and how your treatment may progress over time. But the important thing is to get started and take that first step.