Progress = fewer bad moments

Most of my clients start with a tiny misconception that can wreck their progress.

Whether they’re working on anxiety, insecurity, confidence, etc., they picture progress like this:

They expect progress to feel like getting over a cold: each day the discomfort eases a little more. Sure, there may be some dips, but it never snaps back to first-day intensity. You mostly just keep improving until, one morning, you barely remember being sick.

Not only is this picture wrong, but it can set back your growth. When you believe progress is a climb upward, then a rough day or rough week feels like proof that your efforts haven’t helped at all.

We need a better model of progress, one that looks like this:

Progress reduces the FREQUENCY of symptoms, NOT always their intensity

Normally I’d use self-loathing, social anxiety, etc. as an example, but I’m actually going to start with emotional chronic pain because the pattern is easier to see.

I had chronic neck/back pain for years. Eventually I noticed that my neck was tense in particular emotional situations. I worked on defusing those situations, and once I did it right, I experienced quick relief: “Turning my neck hasn’t been this smooth in years” reads that journal entry.

A few months later, I began to notice moments where my neck was painfully tense…again? I was immediately worried: Is all of my progress fake??? Is it regressing??? Is this all for nothing??? Should I give up????

But before I gave up, I began logging every moment of tension and quickly saw a new pattern. The original trigger—situations where I felt I wasn’t expressing myself socially—was mostly gone, but now I saw the tension triggered in other situations, such as when I thought I wasn’t being “productive enough”, when I was simply walking or talking, and in a few other scenarios. These were probably always triggers—but they were a lot less frequent than the ones I had already defused, so it made sense that I hadn’t noticed until now.

First lesson this showed me: Even though I had defused the most common triggers of my neck tension, that didn’t mean I had defused all of the triggers. The symptom had many triggers, each of which had to be unlearned separately.

The second, more important, lesson: Progress looked vastly differently than I expected. I expected my neck pain would roughly gradually improve over time. So once my neck had been relaxed for a few weeks, I was in the clear. Right?

Wrong. When my neck tension triggers, it often triggers just as painfully.

The progress was NOT that my neck tension became less intense at its peak.

The progress was that my neck tension became LESS FREQUENT.

To decrease the frequency of my neck tension further, I detected and defused additional triggers.

To this day, I continue to detect and defuse more situations that trigger my neck tension.

Does anxiety behave this way too?

It’s not just chronic pain that’s like this. Symptoms like anxiety, social insecurity, self-doubt, validation-seeking behavior, insecurity, etc. all follow this pattern.

For the first 1-2 years of working on my anxiety, it wasn’t that my anxiety became less intense… it’s that it became less common. But I’ve defused enough situations at this point—hundreds—that my anxiety hardly ever triggers anymore. I couldn’t tell you the last time I had it bad.

And it’s not just me: This pattern of decreasing symptom frequency rather than symptom intensity has been true for virtually every person I’ve helped.

In a post soon, I’ll share how I became significantly more secure by defusing ~500 triggers.

@ChrisChipMonk