A common struggle for anxiety sufferers during recovery is the seemingly constant cycle between what are felt as good and bad days. To add to the bewilderment, there is often no apparent reason for the change. After one, two or more good days you may wake up the next with tension, a headache, low mood or other symptoms you typically experience in anxious times.
You could view this as a mini-setback, though I consider a true setback to be longer in duration, and characterized by a significant loss of confidence in the method and your ability to recover. This may have some loss of confidence with it, but is typically just a lousy day or two when your symptoms have returned.
It is always hard to accept feeling poorly again after having had a period of feeling good. The key here is in the word “feeling”. Yes, there is the physical sensation or the emotion, but on top of that we tend to add a whole lot of judgment and labeling. You tell yourself: “I feel good” or “I feel terrible”, and this triggers a sequence of extra things that are not helpful.
What Happens
If you have a good day (i.e. a day you have judged to be “good” and labelled as “good”) then you generate additional feelings of happiness because you are feeling good, and because you like feeling good. You set up a feedback loop of feeling good. You feel good about feeling good. “What’s wrong with that?” you may ask. On the face of it, nothing. However, you are establishing a bad habit of non-acceptance, and this leads to problems.
How so? Let me explain further.
Good days and bad days are the opposite sides of the same coin. Whatever you do with respect to your good feelings, you will do the mirror image thing with your bad feelings. That is simply how it works. For example, if you have a habit of trying to hang on to your good feelings, you will also have the habit of trying to get rid of your bad feelings.
This means that whenever you have some unpleasant symptoms, you will assess how bad they are, compare them to other “bad” days, and decide whether this is a bad day or not. If you decide it is, then you start wishing it were better. But most of all, you feel bad about feeling bad.
So What Should We Do?
We have no control over feeling anxious (or not) – what you can call our first feeling, but we do have a say in how we feel about feeling anxious – our second feeling. We have the ability to not feel badly about feeling anxious. In other words we can choose to stop adding this “second feeling”. When we do this and become indifferent to our anxiety, then acceptance emerges in its place.
The easiest way to develop this indifference to our anxious feelings is to stop judging them, stop comparing them to when we feel well, and to stop labeling them “good” or “bad”. If we can do the following things, it will allow us to begin accepting however we feel in each moment:
- Experience the feelings without judging them, or labeling them as good or bad;
- Give up comparing how we feel right now to how we felt yesterday or last week, last month, or years ago;
- Stop looking at how we feel and wondering if we will feel “better” tomorrow, or when we will feel “better”;
- Stop thinking in terms of “good days and bad days”, and focus on the NOW.
Some typical thoughts around a symptom, for example a tension headache, might be:
“I have a headache. AGAIN!!! Ughhhh!”
“I have a headache. It’s awful. I can’t take it anymore”
“I have a headache. It’s worse than I felt yesterday”
“I have a headache. I wish it would just stop”
“I have a headache. I hope it goes away by tomorrow, I have an appointment”
“I have a headache. I always get these on my bad days”
“I have a headache. Why do I suffer like this? Nobody else does.”
“I have a headache. Why? I was feeling so good the last few days. What changed?”
As you may notice, everything in the thoughts after “I have a headache” is either: a judgment, a comparison, a labeling, a wishing it away, or a “poor me” attitude. Each of these immediately nullifies any acceptance you may have had. Each one is a refusal to accept how you feel in that moment, a refusal to accept you simply have a headache.
So when you have a thought that starts with “I have a headache…” stop the thought right there. Whatever comes afterwards is non-acceptance. Do this with whatever thoughts you have about any of your symptoms. And definitely don’t let the presence of an anxiety symptom cause you to label your day as “bad”.
A final change is to not judge and label your symptom-free days as “good”. Appreciate the lack of symptoms, but don’t rejoice in having a good day because this leads to subconsciously trying to hang on to that feeling. Then when it starts to fade, as it will at some point, you will resist any symptoms that come up. It is crucial to accept however you feel in any given moment, whether that be a moment with symptoms or one that is symptom-free.
Sports Psychology Can Teach Us Something
There is a piece of wisdom that you will hear sports stars say: “Don’t get too high or too low”. This has been repeated so many times that it can sound like a cliche. But the instruction is nevertheless very much true and important. As well as helping an athlete achieve peak performance, it is also a key to recovery from anxiety.
Another sports saying is: “Take it one game at a time”. This is a caution against looking into the future and worrying about things that haven’t happened yet or may never happen. All we can deal with is the here and now. The equivalent instruction to anxiety sufferers is: “Accept however you feel at any given time”. In mindfulness teaching this is referred to as: “Staying in the present moment”. While it is an important element in recovery from anxiety, it is also a very powerful life skill.
In Conclusion
I want to say here that I prefer not to even call symptoms and feelings “good” or “bad” because that labels them as either desirable (ones to be sought after), or despicable (ones to be avoided). This encourages chasing after or trying to hold onto so-called “good” feelings, and trying to prevent, avoid or get rid of so-called “bad” feelings. This is classic non-acceptance of how we feel, and is at the core of our anxiety condition. It must change. As stated earlier, if we are to recover from anxiety we have to learn to accept however we feel in any moment. But for the purpose of this article, I have used the terms “good” and “bad” feelings, and “good days” and “bad days”.
You will always have so-called good days and bad days. The key is to stop judging, comparing, and labeling them as such, and stop trying to hold onto feeling good, or wishing you weren’t feeling bad. Accept every day as it comes. Before long you will find that you appreciate them all, and are at peace with whatever comes along in life.
