(read time: 4 minutes)

This might sound silly, but I think a lot of people are under the false impression that change is easy.  Clients routinely express to me things like, “I’ve meditated for two months now, and I still feel anxiety,” or, something like, “I’ve been doing this work on myself for several weeks now, why don’t I feel better?”

My answer typically includes something along the lines of, “If it were that quick and easy, everyone would be peaceful and happy already.”  I thought a better way to go about it would be to draw what a path out of an afflictive emotion might look like, so here’s a chart I drew showing a person slowly freeing themselves, from anxiety:

The blue bouncing line is the person’s daily experience of anxiety based on a self-reported scale from 0 to 10, the red line is the average, and the green lines show the minimum and maximum range of anxiety.  Time zero (0.0) is the point at which this person starts working on themselves a little bit every day to reduce their anxiety.

Notice that after a period of a year, their average anxiety level has decreased by less than a full point, and it still swims in a chaotic variability of +/- 3 points.  What does all that mean?  It means that the person may not even notice the decline that is occurring after only one year!  Can you imagine how demotivating that would that feel?

But don’t fret, there’s good news!  This chart is showing the arising of anxiety, but it says nothing about how the person is managing their anxiety, and that’s critical because those changes can happen much faster.  Let’s talk about an example.  Let’s say the person sends an email that has a decent chance of some bad reactions, thus triggering anxious thoughts.  Their brain, prone to anxiety, repeatedly attempts to think (aka worry) about the coming reactions.  But, now that the person has skills, they see the anxiety for what it is – an overreaction that they don’t necessarily have to care all that much about.  Their anxiety hasn’t dropped that much, but how they are experiencing it has changed dramatically.

In other words, they aren’t suffering over their suffering, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Please be patient with yourself, know that you are healing, and focus some efforts on developing skills that support short-term wins so that you can relax and settle in for the long-term effort of healing.