The road to recovery from anxiety related illness isn’t a straight one. It’s littered with bumps.
One of the most difficult things to deal with when working towards recovery is that sometimes – you can wake up and feel like you’re back to square one. Like you’ve made no progress at all.
It’s important to remember that this is normal. It’s part of the process.
It takes a long time to gradually become unwell and to train the brain to become more hyper-alert and always on the lookout for danger – so of course it also takes a long time to recover and to enable our amygdala to stop releasing our stress hormones when they aren’t needed.
But, little by little, day by day, the changes do happen. By following the steps to recovery:
1. Taking the fear out of our symptoms to reduce the ‘I’m in danger’ messages we send to the brain; and
2. Taking the hyperactivity out of our amygdala to enable it to return to normal
we slowly become the person we once where before anxiety stripped the joy from life.
On the bad days, it helps to remember what’s actually going on in the brain and the body to make us feel so bad. While it might feel like you’re caught in a hurricane, it’s just an overactive amygdala releasing too much cortisol into the body and causing a whole range of awful anxiety symptoms.
Feel free to contact me if you have questions or need some advice. I always respond.
David www.iamanxiety.net
