Welcome to the Anxiety Slayer series. Our mission is to assist you with creating more peace and tranquility in your life

through anxiety release exercises and supportive tools created to slay your

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, it's 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

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 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's just the

nature of anxiety that's just the way it is so rather than thinking oh my god I thought

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