I want to tell you about something I almost shared with the world as the answer to anxiety recovery.
There was a period of time where I genuinely thought I’d cracked the code. I was functioning. Getting through my days.
And I was convinced I’d found a way to spread that to people struggling more than I was, even though, looking back, I wasn’t really living either.
Here’s what that “answer” actually looked like.
I didn’t go to restaurants. I didn’t go out much. No public transport. No coffee. A 90 minute morning routine, exercise, cold showers, a specific diet, a stack of calming supplements lined up like a science experiment.
And I almost wanted to tell the world this was the way out.
Imagine that. Imagine me showing up telling people “here’s how you beat anxiety”, and the actual advice being a 90 minute ritual and a list of foods you’re no longer allowed to eat for the rest of your life…
Thankfully I never did that. Because what I had wasn’t recovery. It was management dressed up as a system.
So let’s talk a little about the difference today.
Why I Was Wrong
Here’s the thing that always struck me as strange, even though I didn’t fully understand why back then.
I had to do all of that just to function. The routine, the diet, the supplements, the avoidance of basically anything spontaneous. And I still had anxiety underneath it all, every single day.
Meanwhile, other people just lived. Coffee. Restaurants. Trains. No 90 minute morning ritual required.
If my system was actually the answer, why did it take that much effort just to maintain a baseline?
Why were other people getting the same result, or better, doing none of it?
That question sat with me for a while before it really clicked.
Recovery isn’t a system you build and maintain forever. It’s getting to a place where you don’t need the system at all.
What Recovery Actually Means
Real recovery is you doing whatever the hell you want to, without anxiety dictating the shots.
That’s the whole definition I’d give you.
Not “I feel calm all the time now.”
Not “anxiety never shows up again.”
Because that’s not achievable for anyone, anxious or not. Life throws stress at everyone. Discomfort is part of walking around on this planet as a human being.
Fear is an emotion we’ll have – and at times can really appreciate.
The difference is whether that discomfort gets to decide what you do.
Mirka’s Flights
If you’ve been around Anxiety Wave for a while, you already know Mirka.
She’s one of our mentors and honestly one of the people our participants rely on most, the kind of person who’s been through every version of this herself and now helps others through it.
Mirka used to be agoraphobic. There were stretches where leaving the house at all felt completely out of reach.
On top of that, she had flying anxiety. Properly so.
A while back she travelled out to meet the team in Lisbon, flying from the Czech Republic.
Two flights and a fair bit of traveling involved. And here’s the part I love about her story. She didn’t get rid of the flying anxiety by working on the flying anxiety specifically.
It resolved itself almost as a side effect of her general anxiety recovery, because she gave herself permission to feel anxious while flying instead of needing to feel calm first.
Back when she just recovered and got on her first flight again, she allowed the fear to be there. Similar to what she’s learned to do for anxiety symptoms.
She sat in her seat, let the sensations come if they wanted to, and didn’t make it mean anything.
And these days, both of us, after enough time of the nervous system learning and properly desensitizing, we don’t even get the symptoms anymore.
The baseline has dropped – so where I’m now occasionally “nervous” about being on time for the flight (I’m always late) or if my passport is still there (I tend to lose stuff), I no longer spiral out of control with a lot of uncomfortable sensations.
And it’s not because we’re suppressing symptoms or managing them really well. They just stopped showing up, because the nervous system finally got the message there was nothing to prepare for.
That’s the whole shift.
Sarah and the Bagel
Here’s a smaller story, but I love it just as much, maybe more, because of how ordinary it is.
Sarah (one of the members of our program) avoided carbs for eight years because of anxiety.
Eight years of turning down bread, pasta, anything in that category, because somewhere along the way her nervous system had decided carbs were dangerous.
Then one regular Tuesday at the office, someone ordered bagels. And she decided to, “F, it!” and get one too.
And yes, her anxiety spiked. Exactly as you’d expect, because her nervous system had spent eight years treating this exact thing as a threat. It did its job. It sent the alarm.
But she responded to that alarm instead of running from it and confirming it.
She let the spike be there, didn’t fight it, didn’t spiral about what it meant, and just kept eating her bagel. And the next day, she had one again.
That’s retraining in real time. Not the absence of a reaction, the presence of a different response to it.
No big dramatic breakthrough. Just a bagel, in an office, on a Tuesday. And that’s exactly why this one sticks with me. Recovery shows up in the boring, tiny, everyday moments just as much as the big ones.
(Though let’s be honest, having a great bagel is freaking amazing!!)
It really reminds me of my IKEA story that I tell people in the program, where I wanted to get another coffee – and though I knew that may trigger another panic attack and I normally would’ve let that be a good reason not to – I decided to go for it and get a coffee. And if panic showed up, I’d respond.
If you want to check out that IKEA story, by the way, you can find that here on YouTube:
The Real Test
So here’s what I want you to actually measure your progress against, instead of how calm you feel.
Ask yourself: did anxiety get a vote in what I did today?
And ask: did I fight it, or did I leave it alone?
Because it’s not only about whether you skipped the restaurant or took the long way around the highway. It’s also about what you did the moment anxiety actually showed up.
Did you try to make yourself feel calm? Did you do something with the intention of getting rid of it? Or did you let it be there, refocus on whatever you were doing, and carry on regardless?
That second part matters just as much as the first. You can technically go to the restaurant and still be resisting the whole time you’re there, white-knuckling through it, secretly hoping the anxiety doesn’t show up. That’s not quite it either.
If anxiety didn’t get to decide your plans, and you didn’t fight it when it showed up anyway, that’s recovery. Whether or not you felt anxious while doing it.
When you’re properly “recovered”, you can do everything someone who never had anxiety can do.
Restaurants, planes, public transport, spontaneous plans, hard conversations, all of it. Discomfort might still show up here and there, because it does for everyone. But you respond to it instead of organizing your whole life around keeping it away.
Honestly, I’d argue you end up handling life’s stressors better than most people who never went through any of this, because you’ve actually learned how to respond to discomfort properly instead of pretending it doesn’t exist.
What It Actually Takes
If you’re chasing the feeling of calm as your finish line, I want to gently tell you that you’re aiming at the wrong target. You can’t control how you feel directly. Nobody can.
What you need is to understand the mechanics of anxiety, why it shows up and what your body is actually doing when it does. Then you need to learn how to respond to it properly.
And then you give it time, doing that consistently, over and over, until it becomes the default and your nervous system regulates.
And the good news is, you do all of that while still doing whatever the hell you want!!
Get on the plane. Have the bagel. Anxiety can come along for the ride if it wants to.
It just doesn’t get to drive anymore.
