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You’ve been doing the work. You’ve been practicing the response, showing up to the situations that scare you, allowing the discomfort to be there instead of fighting it.
And then you wake up this morning, feel anxious, and immediately conclude: it’s not working.
Sound familiar?
This is one of the most common reasons people stall in their recovery. It’s also one of the most frustrating things to watch from the outside, because usually the person thinking “it’s not working” is actually making genuine progress.
They just have no idea, because they’re measuring the wrong thing.
So let’s talk a little about that today.
The Problem With Using Your Feelings as a Measuring Stick
When you’ve had anxiety for a long time, feeling anxious becomes the metric for everything.
Good day means low anxiety. Bad day means high anxiety.
Progress means feeling better. No progress means feeling the same or worse.
Which sounds completely logical, right? Of course you’d measure your recovery by how you feel. What else would you measure it by?
But here’s the thing. Anxiety recovery doesn’t work like that. And the moment you understand why, so much starts to make sense.
Your feelings (the physical sensations, the intensity of the panic, the heaviness of the dread) are outputs of a sensitized nervous system.
And a sensitized nervous system doesn’t desensitize on a clean, predictable schedule. It fluctuates.
Like it was before we had anxiety, we have good days and bad days. Anxiety spikes when you’re stressed, when you haven’t slept, when life throws something at you. And if you’re measuring your entire progress by how you feel on any given morning, you’re judging the whole recovery by your worst moments, not your actual trajectory.
Worse than that: the moment you decide “it’s not working” because you still feel anxious, you add a new layer of anxiety on top of the existing one.
Now you’re not just anxious. You’re anxious and hopeless. And that hopelessness, as anyone who’s been through this knows, is actually the heaviest part of the whole thing.
What Actually Shows Progress
So if feelings aren’t the right measure, what is?
Your response. That’s it. That’s the whole shift.
How well are you responding? How well are you mastering this skill?
Stop asking “how anxious do I feel today?” and start asking “how did I respond when anxiety showed up?”.
“How well was I able to disengage and refocus instead of fighting and catastrophizing?”
Because here’s what’s actually happening when you practice this method properly. Every time anxiety arrives and you respond differently than you used to (every time you allow the sensation instead of fighting it, every time you stay in the situation instead of leaving, every time you carry on without Googling your symptoms or asking someone if you’re okay) you are sending new information to your nervous system.
You are training it, rep by rep, that the ‘alarm’ is a false one.
That training is happening underneath the feelings. It’s happening even on the days when you still feel terrible. Even on the days when anxiety is high and you allow it to be there and it’s genuinely hard. The nervous system is still receiving the message. The work is still counting.
This is why a day that previously would have been classified as a “bad” day can now turn into a “good” day.
This is why people in our community share wins in which anxiety actually showed up, maybe worse than expected, maybe totally unexpected or in a new way, but they responded properly!
And the feelings catch up later. They do catch up. But feelings are a lagging indicator of the real work, not a real-time one. So if you’re using them as your primary measurement, you’re always going to feel like you’re behind.
Try To Do This
I want to give you a different way to look at where you are in your recovery, because I think it’s going to reframe a lot of things.
Instead of asking how anxious you feel, start asking yourself these questions at the end of each day:
Did I go somewhere I would have avoided six months ago?
Was I able to allow a sensation that I would have fled from before? Even just 10% more?
Did I catch myself starting to Google or overthink and choose not to?
Did I feel the urge to ask someone if I was okay and let it pass?
Did I do the thing I planned to do, even though anxiety was present while I did it?
Every yes is a rep. Every rep is building the skill.
And the skill is what recovers you, not the feelings.
This is one of the most liberating shifts in the whole process, because it means progress is always within your control.
You cannot control how you feel on a given morning. You cannot force the nervous system to produce less adrenaline through willpower. But you can absolutely control how you respond.
Every single time. And that response is where the real recovery lives.
And by the way, you responding the best of your ability is different per day too! Some days it’s easier to respond, whereas other days it’s harder. That still counts as progress though!
“But I Still Feel Just As Anxious As When I Started”
I hear this a lot. And I want to push back on it gently, because it’s almost never fully true when you look at the whole picture.
If you’ve been applying this method for a few weeks, think back honestly to where you were before.
Not just how intense the anxiety felt, but what you were doing. Were you avoiding certain places? Were you relying on a safety person, carrying something “just in case”? Were you scanning exits in every room you walked into? Were you cancelling plans, shrinking your world a little more each week?
And now? Even if the anxiety still feels intense sometimes, have any of those things changed?
Have you gone somewhere you wouldn’t have gone before? Have you dropped a safety behaviour, even a small one? Have you stayed in a situation that you previously would have left?
That’s progress. Real, measurable, structural progress, even if the feelings haven’t caught up yet.
The calm, the joy, the nice emotions… they come later. But they only come later if you decide to respond properly every time anxiety shows up, and start measuring that.
I’ve seen this pattern over and over. Someone tells me they feel exactly the same as when they started. And then when I ask what they’ve been doing, they casually mention they drove on the highway alone for the first time in two years….
They say it like it’s nothing. But it’s not nothing. It’s everything. Their behavior has completely changed (even though their emotional state may not have… yet!)
Their nervous system just hasn’t updated the feelings yet and because they’re only measuring feelings, they can’t see what’s actually happening.
Why This Matters for the Long Game
Here’s the other reason this reframe matters so much. When you measure progress by feelings, every difficult day feels like a failure.
And when enough days feel like failure, you start to wonder whether you should give up and look for something else. Something that works faster. Something that might finally be the answer.
This is shiny object syndrome in recovery, and it’s one of the biggest traps there is.
Because every time you abandon the method based on a bad feeling day and go looking for something new, you’re starting from zero again. And whatever new thing you find will also have bad feeling days. And then you’ll abandon that too.
The people who recover are not the people who feel the best along the way. They’re the people who stay consistent. The ones who keep responding properly regardless of how they feel. They measure by the response. They celebrate the rep. They trust that the feelings will follow.
And they always do.
Which reminds me of Josh, one of our graduates now, who really struggled with this initially.
Somehow he believed that myself or Mirka had this smooth sailing journey towards recovery. But when he found out that our journey was also a bumpy one – and everyone’s is – he gave himself the permission to have those ups and downs while measuring progress on his response.
He talks about this in an interview I did with him which I can highly recommend as it’ll give you a great insight in how the recovery journey can go and what to expect if you aren’t on it yet:
One Thing You Can Do Today
At the end of each day, instead of asking “how anxious was I today?”, ask yourself “what did I do today that I’m proud of in terms of how I responded?”
Maybe you felt the urge to seek reassurance and didn’t. Maybe you went to the supermarket, anxiety showed up, and you stayed anyway. Maybe you woke up with that familiar dread and got up and started the day regardless.
Maybe all you did was becoming aware of anxiety. It sounds simple, but it’s the first step. If you noticed that anxiety showed up today in the form of heart palpitations for example, that’s a huge win!
Then, write it down. Because on the difficult days, when your brain is telling you nothing is working, you’ll have actual evidence that it is.
Your feelings are not the finish line. Your response is the whole race.
And if you’re responding properly, you’re already winning even when it doesn’t feel like it.
The more you do, the less anxiety shows up.
And by the time you don’t care as much anyways (though calm and joy are very welcome!) because you’re doing anything you want anyways, despite anxiety joining you.
And that’s the journey, my dear friends.
This article is for education and is based on lived experience. It is not medical advice and does not replace a doctor or therapist. If you have new or changing symptoms, get them checked by a doctor. If you are in crisis, contact your local emergency number.
