This is one of the most common questions I get. And honestly, one of the hardest to answer well.
Because here’s the thing: anxiety recovery is unlike almost anything else you’ve ever worked toward.
When you’re learning a new skill, you can feel yourself getting better. When you’re getting fit, you can see it. When you’re building a business, the numbers tell you something.
But anxiety recovery? You’re doing the work, you’re responding properly, you’re trying your best to allow rather than fight. And then anxiety shows up again.
Maybe even harder than before. And your brain immediately goes:
“Is this even working?”
“Should I keep going?”
“Should I try something else?”
It’s a strange road. It’s tedious. Sometimes weeks go by without much that feels like change.
And then, almost out of nowhere, you realize things are different. You realize anxiety hasn’t ruled your day in a while. That the wave passed faster than it used to. That you’re just… getting on with things.
But in the meantime, how do you actually know you’re on the right track?
So let’s talk a little about that today.
The Signs People Look For
When most people ask “is this working?”, what they’re really asking is: do I feel better?
Are my symptoms decreasing? Am I getting triggered less often? Is the anticipatory anxiety quieting down?
And those things are completely logical to want. Of course you want symptoms to go away. Of course you want to feel calmer. That’s the whole point, right?
But here’s the problem.
Every one of those things is completely outside of your control.
You have no control over how fast your nervous system regulates. You have no control over when anxiety shows up, or how intense it feels, or whether it comes back after a good week.
Life keeps happening. Stress keeps appearing. You can’t bubble-wrap your nervous system and force it to calm down on a schedule.
So if those are the things you’re measuring, you’re basically playing a game of chance.
If you happen to have a ‘good week’, you feel like you’re doing it right. If you have a ‘hard week’, you feel like it’s not working. Even if you’re doing exactly the same thing both weeks.
And there’s an even bigger problem with checking for those signs. The act of checking is itself resistance.
When you wake up and scan yourself for whether anxiety is there, when you monitor your symptoms for signs of improvement, when you measure your progress by whether you feel calm, you’re behaving as if there’s still a problem that needs resolving.
And your nervous system is watching your behavior. It reads that monitoring as “still not okay.” And it responds accordingly. (Increasing anxiety to fight this problem)
It’s the paradox at the heart of this whole thing. Checking whether recovery is working can actually slow down the recovery itself.
What the Nervous System Actually Responds To
Your nervous system doesn’t care what you think. It doesn’t care what you’ve read, what you understand intellectually, or how motivated you are. It watches what you do.
And it lags behind.
This is the part people don’t realize, and it’s one of the most important things to understand.
Even when you start responding properly, even when you’re genuinely doing the right thing consistently, the nervous system doesn’t immediately go “great, all clear, standing down.”
It takes time. It needs repetition. It needs to see you behave as if you’re safe over and over again before it starts to believe it. It needs consistency.
If you behave like you’re OK once and then act like you’re in danger the next time, the nervous system is going to wanna be rather safe than sorry – and keep you on high alert.
So there will be a period (yup… sometimes a frustratingly long one) where you’re doing everything right and the symptoms are still coming.
Where you’re responding properly and anxiety is still showing up. And that’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. That’s just how nervous systems work.
The behavior has to come before the result. Always. There’s no shortcut around that.
Think of it like losing weight. If you’ve been eating the wrong way for ten years and you change your diet today, you don’t wake up different tomorrow. The body takes time to catch up with what you’re doing.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not working. And it definitely doesn’t mean you should stop and try a different diet. It means you keep going and you let time do what time does.
Recovery is the same. You do the right thing consistently, and eventually the nervous system catches up. It’s completely logical. It’s almost mathematical.
So What Should You Actually Measure?
Here’s what IS in your control. And this is where your focus needs to go.
Are you avoiding less than you were three months ago?
Are you doing things you weren’t doing before?
When anxiety shows up, are you catching yourself faster, spiraling for a shorter period, coming back to the right response sooner?
Are you noticing the patterns more clearly?
Those things are entirely in your control.
And those are the things that tell you whether you’re on the right track.
If you’re doing more than you were doing, that’s progress. If you’re responding better when anxiety hits, even imperfectly, even with some resistance still mixed in, that’s progress. If the waves are passing a little faster than they used to, if the gap between difficult periods is slowly getting longer, that’s progress.
None of that might feel like much in the moment. But it’s the only accurate data you have.
A Sign Most People Miss
There’s one particular sign that I want to call out specifically, because most people either miss it or mistake it for something bad.
When you start doing the right thing, and it starts working to some degree, something shifts in how anxiety feels. The fear around it starts to change.
Instead of this overwhelming, helpless, “I don’t know if I’ll ever get out of this” feeling, something closer to frustration shows up. Impatience. Mild irritation that anxiety is still here.
That shift could actually be a good sign.
When you were at your worst, anxiety felt like a life sentence. Now it feels annoying. That’s not nothing.
That means you’ve stopped being the victim of it and started seeing it as something in your way. You believe you’re going to get through it, you’re just not there yet.
Frustrated and impatient beats scared and hopeless every single time. Even if frustrated and impatient doesn’t feel great to live in – and we respond to those feelings the same way as we do to anxiety.
The Bounce Back Is Real
Here’s the other thing that trips people up, especially after a setback.
They make progress. Things get lighter. And then a hard period hits and suddenly it feels like all of it is gone. Like they’re back at the beginning. Like they have to do the whole journey over again.
They don’t.
Think about someone who’s been training at the gym for two years, builds real strength, then gets injured and is out for two months.
When they go back, they can’t lift what they were lifting before. And they could spiral about that. “Two years of work, gone.”
But any decent coach will tell them: get back to the basics, put the work in, and you’ll be back where you were in a fraction of the time.
Because the body remembers. The progress was real. You just took a few steps back, and the path back is much shorter than the original path was.
Anxiety recovery works the same way. The nervous system doesn’t forget what it learned. When you go back to responding properly after a setback, you’ll find you bounce back faster than you expect. Faster than last time. That’s how you know the work you did was real, even when it didn’t feel like it.
Why This Is Hard to See On Your Own
I want to be honest about something. All of what I’ve just described is very hard to track by yourself.
Not because you’re not smart enough. But because when you’re inside the experience, it’s almost impossible to be objective about it.
The brain has a negativity bias. It’s wired for survival, and it will always notice the bad days more than the good ones. It will convince you that the hard week erased the three good weeks before it. It will find evidence that you’re not progressing even when you are.
This is one of the genuinely underrated reasons why having a mentor or a coach around you during recovery makes such a difference, just like you would have one for losing weight or playing sports.
Not because they teach you something you couldn’t eventually figure out yourself. But because they can see what you can’t.
They’re on the outside. They’re quick to spot when you’re still doing resistance without realizing it, when you’re measuring the wrong things, when you’re closer than you think.
I’ve seen it so many times, someone in a live call describing their week and concluding they’re not making progress, and everyone on the outside of their experience can immediately see the progress they’re describing. They just can’t see it themselves because they’re in it.
Or recently, Susan came into a call worried about the program and whether or not she should continue or find something else. She still felt stressed, and her dermatologist told her she should stress less.
I told her that with a sensitized nervous system, there will be stress. Your body needs that to keep you safe.
You forcing yourself to stress less, cause otherwise XYZ happens, would cause you more stress. And the only path forward is to keep responding and allowing your nervous system to regulate itself.
She came back a week later, still in the program, without anxiety symptoms for a couple of days straight. She’s still going strong and told us yesterday she’s doing amazing.
Her husband didn’t even recognize her behavior at times. He was like “who are you?!” when she responded differently to something unexpected or uncertain happening.
Here, too, someone on the outside tends to see your progress quicker than you yourself.
And having someone who’s been through it, who knows exactly what the path looks like, who can say “that’s actually a sign it’s working, not a sign it isn’t” , that’s not a nice-to-have. It’s close to non-negotiable if you want to avoid getting stuck in the wrong conclusions for months at a time.
The difference between having a support group around you who knows exactly how anxiety recovery works (tediously, paradoxically, frustratingly…) and figuring it all out on your own is the difference between jumping into a pool knowing there’s water in it – or not.
It’s still scary to make the jump in both situations. But knowing there’s going to be water in the pool makes it 10x easier.
Recovery Is Exponential
Here’s the last thing I want to leave you with, because I think it’s the most important thing to understand when you’re in the middle of it and nothing seems to be changing.
The progress doesn’t feel linear because it isn’t linear.
It doesn’t happen in a straight line. It happens slowly, quietly, underneath the surface, while you’re doing the work. And then, often when you’re not even looking for it, something clicks.
You realize you haven’t had a hard day in a while. You realize you just did something you couldn’t have imagined doing six months ago and you didn’t even think twice about it.
That’s when the nervous system has finally caught up with your behavior.
It was always going to happen. It always does, when the behavior is right and the consistency is there. You just couldn’t see it coming.
If you’re new to all of this and what I’ve described here resonates, I want to invite you to something.
This Wednesday, July 15th 2026 at 4PM Eastern, I’m hosting a free live training on Zoom: Take Your Life Back From Anxiety (Permanently).
In it, I’m going to show you exactly how anxiety stays alive, why everything most people try to fix it accidentally makes it worse, and what actually breaks the cycle.
It’s the clearest explanation I’ve ever given of how this all works, and it’s free.
It doesn’t matter what type of anxiety you have, what you’ve tried before, or how long you’ve been dealing with this. The problem is always the same. And so is the solution.
Register here. It’s free and it’s live!
Hope this post was helpful again this week.
Keep on going, friends.
There’s water in the pool.
