The most common question I get is: how?
“You always talk about responding properly and acceptance – but what does it actually mean? How do we actually do it?”
Today I’m going to answer that. And I’m hoping it’s going to make a lot of sense.
By the end of this post, you’ll see that recovery is possible – and you can start practicing it today.
Resistance
At the core of the problem we find resistance.
We resist life events, emotions or symptoms – and unknowingly trigger our body’s stress response. Over time, our nervous system learns to recognize these patterns and becomes hyper vigilant and dysregulated.
Because it sees you fighting, it concludes: you must be in danger.
This is when you become sensitized. Throughout the day and night, your body preps you for potential threats by releasing stress hormones. All of a sudden you get a panic attack sitting on the sofa, or scary thoughts that don’t feel like you at all.
And then we start resisting the sensitization too.
It often starts mentally. A thought like “what if I panic again?” shows up, and we engage with it – arguing, agreeing, ignoring, building a story around it.
A pattern I see a lot is self-criticism. We feel like we “shouldn’t” have these thoughts. We feel weak, and beat ourselves up on top of everything else.
Then comes physical resistance. Uncomfortable, scary symptoms show up – and we naturally want to fight them off, analyze them, or avoid them.
The cycle looks like this:
FOCUS: we notice the symptom → STORY: we catastrophize (“am I having a heart attack?”) → RESIST: we try to make it stop
And by doing that, we validate the danger signal to the nervous system – so it releases more stress hormones. Which creates more symptoms.
SYMPTOMS → RESISTANCE → MORE SENSITIZATION → MORE SYMPTOMS
Examples of Resistance
Resistance isn’t always obvious. The key is this: it’s not what you do, it’s the intention behind it. If you’re doing something to make anxiety go away, that’s resistance.
Calming yourself down — breathing exercises, meditation, lying down, medication
Distraction — grounding techniques, apps, games
Reassurance — calling a friend, Googling, going to doctors, checking “is it gone yet?”
Physical control — exercising, cold showers, measuring your heart rate
Safety behaviors — not being alone, sitting near exits, carrying gum or mints
Avoidance — staying home, making excuses, skipping things on bad days
Focus — analyzing, Googling, needing to understand, thinking about it constantly
Sound familiar? When I was at my worst, I was doing almost all of these.
And here’s the painful paradox: some of them work short term. They can genuinely calm you down in the moment. But in the long run, they keep you sensitized. They keep the cycle going.
This is why anxiety recovery feels so confusing. You do everything you’re “supposed” to do – and you stay stuck. Or get worse.
“It must be me.”
It isn’t. You’re not using the wrong effort. You’re using the wrong strategy.
If this is landing for you right now – good. That realization is where recovery starts.
Acceptance
To recover, we need to shift focus from symptoms to response.
We cannot control our symptoms directly. Our nervous system is dysregulated – it will do what it does. Trying to reduce symptoms is exactly the problem.
What we can control is our response.
If we respond in a way that doesn’t signal danger to the nervous system, it has no reason to keep us on high alert. That’s what acceptance means. Not liking it. Not white-knuckling through it. Not sitting and waiting for it to pass while secretly hoping it hurries up.
Real acceptance means becoming genuinely indifferent to it. Treating it as boring. Unimportant. Something that can be there while you get on with your life.
That’s the new cycle:
SYMPTOMS → RESPONDING PROPERLY → LESS SENSITIZATION → LESS SYMPTOMS
What Acceptance Isn’t
Before we get into how – let’s clear up three common mistakes.
“Just sitting with it” — better than resisting, but still keeping anxiety as the main event. You’re still pausing your life for it. That still signals importance.
White-knuckling — still doing things, but with pressure on yourself. Hoping anxiety doesn’t show up. Resisting it when it does. Not acceptance.
Compliance — secretly doing what anxiety tells you. Avoiding things “just this once.” Engaging with the stories it feeds you.
Recovery happens when anxiety becomes so unimportant that you stop negotiating with it entirely.
How To Actually Respond Properly
This is a skill, not a technique. It’s not something you do once and feel better. It’s a new pattern that needs to replace a very old one – and that takes practice.
It’s not something you’ll ever feel ready or confident about, but you decide to do anyways.
Here’s how it works:
1. Understand anxiety first
You cannot respond properly to something you still believe is dangerous. If part of you thinks anxiety could kill you, control you, or send you crazy – you will revert to resistance the moment it shows up. That’s not weakness, it’s just how brains work.
Getting this foundation right is non-negotiable. Read, watch, learn until you genuinely understand what anxiety is, what it can and can’t do, and why it’s showing up.
2. Build awareness
Before you can respond properly, you need to recognize that what you’re experiencing is anxiety in the first place.
This sounds simple, but it’s often the missing piece. In the moment, it doesn’t feel like “just anxiety.” It feels like a heart attack, or a sign you’re going crazy, or proof that something is seriously wrong.
And if that story is what you believe in the moment, you won’t respond properly – you’ll go straight back to resistance. Automatically.
So the first job is just to notice it objectively:
“OK. My heart is racing, I feel dizzy and sweaty. I’m feeling uncertain and unsafe.”
Or even: “I feel like I’m dying and I want to call an ambulance.”
Just name what’s happening, factually. No story, no action. Just: this is anxiety. That recognition is what opens the door to everything else.
3. Challenge the story
This is where your understanding of anxiety does the work. Your job is to remind yourself of what’s actually true – and show your nervous system there’s no real threat.
Not: “Calm down, calm down, you’re fine” (that’s resistance)
But: “This is uncomfortable – and it’s not dangerous. It’s fight or flight. I don’t need to do anything.”
Or if the story is strong: “So what. This is just nervous energy with a story attached to it.”
What NOT to do here: don’t argue with the thought, don’t try to disprove it, don’t Google it. That feeds it. Just remind and move on.
4. Allow it
Once you’ve named it and challenged the story, choose to let it be there. Don’t fight it, don’t rush it, don’t check if it’s leaving.
This will feel completely unnatural at first. Every instinct will tell you to do something. That’s expected – you’ve been practicing resistance for years, possibly decades.
You will correct yourself 100 times a day at first. That’s not failure – that’s the skill being built.
5. Refocus
While anxiety is present – put your attention somewhere else. Not to distract yourself from it, but because anxiety doesn’t deserve your full attention.
What were you doing before it showed up? Go back to that. Let anxiety ride along in the background while you live your life. That’s the relationship you’re building with it.
Practice Like Swimming
The first time I tried this, it felt freeing just to understand it. But then I caught myself “accepting” anxiety specifically to make it go away.
Which was resistance.
The real shift happened when I stopped trying to use acceptance as a tool and started seeing it as just… the right way to relate to anxiety. Full stop.
And that’s what I want you to understand about recovery. It’s not about finding the right technique. It’s about building something internal. A certainty.
Think about swimming. When you first learn, you’re thinking about every movement. You’re unsure, you’re checking, you’re hoping you don’t sink. But at some point, something shifts.
You stop thinking about it and you just know you can swim. That knowing isn’t a technique – it’s a belief that’s been built through repetition until it became your own truth.
Nobody can talk you out of it after that. You know you can swim. And because you know it, you don’t think about pools or rivers when you walk past them. You don’t notice them. They’re irrelevant.
Anxiety recovery works the same way. The goal isn’t to manage anxiety better. It’s to reach the point where you know – internally, completely – that you can handle whatever anxiety throws at you.
And when you know that, you stop caring about it. When you stop caring about it, it stops showing up.
That’s not a technique. That’s freedom as a result of a different relationship with anxiety.
And that shift happens faster when you have a mentor. Someone who has been through it, fully recovered, and can hold up a mirror when you slip back into old patterns without realizing it.
Because the slipping back is subtle. The resistance hides. You think you’re accepting but you’re actually just waiting. You think you’re allowing but you’re still checking.
That was the case for me too. I saw it was working, but I kept on automatically reverting back to what I knew, until I found a mentor and was held accountable with support. That changed everything.
Having someone who can spot these things – and guide you through it – builds the skill 10x faster. Like learning to swim with an instructor rather than figuring it out alone in the deep end.
You can absolutely start practicing the steps above on your own today. Do that. The more you understand anxiety and practice this response, the more evidence you build that you can handle it.
And when you know you can handle it – you stop caring about it.
When you stop caring about it, it stops running your life.
Conclusion
Recovery is a skill. It’s learnable. It takes practice, patience and the willingness to do the opposite of everything your body is telling you to do.
You haven’t failed because you’re broken. You’ve been using one strategy – resistance – dressed up in a hundred different outfits.
Now you know.
Go and educate yourself. Check out my YouTube channel or other blog posts.
And practice the above response during your next moment of anxiety if you like.
If you’re interested to do this in a structured, supported way with people who’ve been through it, book a free call here.
