Welcome to the Slayer sessions with Shannon Ananga. Our mission is to wipe out the fear and discomfort of anxiety.

We decided today to talk a little bit about anxiety, recovery, and relapse and what that

looks like. The importance of sharing with our audience that setbacks can happen on the pathway to recovery from anxiety and it's

always a bit frustrating when you feel like you take one step forward and two steps back or two steps forward and one step back.

So I guess what I'd like to ask you today is what causes someone to experience a relapse?

Firstly one thing I'd like to cover, which is in relation to your question,

is that when anxiety started getting diagnosed and dealt with as an illness,

in a sense it changes our expectation of recovery.

So on the one hand it's really good that people who are suffering from anxiety

are getting acknowledged and getting support that there's something very definite going on.

But anxiety is a slippery little illness and it's not like when you get a cold or a flu and you think,

okay I'm starting to feel better now and you expect to continue in a linear fashion to feel better.

Anxiety is much more tricky than that is much more sensitive than that and we're much more sensitive than that so just to say

that you know relapses and setbacks whatever you want to call it it's to be

expected and to more directly answer your question of what causes someone to experience a relapse, it can be practically anything.

It can be stress, it can be a change in our circumstances, our diet. It might just be a bump in the road where we've been doing really great and we're just having an off day. It might be hormones.

Maybe we felt that we were doing better and we started to get busy again and we weren't looking after our needs quite so well.

You know, sometimes when people are on a self-care program, it tends to slide when we start to feel better because we start

reprioritizing and the self-care doesn't seem quite so necessary if you're not

feeling quite so bad so maybe that just slipped a little bit and we're you know having a few off days but it's

really important to understand that it can come from practically anywhere and it can

happen to practically anyone and that that's just the nature of anxiety that's just the way it is so

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