Happy Friday, everybody. At least, I hope it's a happy Friday for you, rather than a grumpy Friday or an anxious Friday.

I mean, can a whole Friday be anything anyway? Isn't it always going to be a little bit of this, a little bit of that?

Yeah, probably. And so were we as humans a little bit happy, a little bit grumpy, maybe a little bit anxious.

But of course, you are not actually those things at all. They're not you. Anxiety is not who you are.

It's just something you experience. And that's where recovery from it really starts with a small

shift in our language. When we say, I am anxious, it sounds fixed. But if we say I feel anxious,

it becomes temporary. It's an emotion, not an identity, a pattern, not a personality trait.

I do a lot of amateur dramatics and in the days coming up to a performance, I'll admit I feel anxious about it.

I've learnt the lines and rehearsed the scenes and I love rehearsing.

It's fun, it's exciting.

But when I think about the audience, that doesn't

feel so exciting. That starts to feel scary. But that extra adrenaline, it's not a weakness. It's

biology. Anxiety isn't a thought process. It's an automatic process. Your unconscious mind believes it's keeping you

safe. Problem is, sometimes it overreacts, like an oversensitive smoke alarm going off because you've made

toast. But we don't throw the alarm away, do we? We just learn to manage it. That's recovery. Not a straight line of improvement,

but this messy, jagged process, it goes up and down. But overall, it moves forward. If you zoom out,

you'll see progress. And that's why I tell people to not measure their progress day

by day, but compare this month to last month, this year to last year, because expecting every

day to feel better than the one before just feeds disappointment. And disappointment can

feed anxiety. If you want to see proof that you're improving, write it down, even once a fortnight.

Moments when you coped better than before.

A situation that felt a little easier, a time when anxiety didn't stop you doing something.

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