Progress isn't gradual

Bad days become less frequent before they get better

This common misconception can wreck your progress.

Whether you’re working on anxiety, insecurity, confidence, etc., you may imagine progress looks like this:

You 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 single rough day or week feels like proof that your effort hasn’t helped at all.

We need a better model of progress…

Progress reduces the *frequency* of symptoms before it reduces their intensity

Normally I’d use anxiety or self-loathing as the example, but this point is easier to see with emotional chronic pain.

I had neck pain for years. Eventually I noticed that my neck was tense in particular emotional situations. Once those situations were successfully defused, 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 got 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 the moments where I felt tension and soon noticed a new pattern: My neck was triggering in situations I hadn’t noticed before: when I thought I wasn’t being “productive enough”, when I was simply walking or talking, and in a few others. The original trigger—situations where I felt I wasn’t expressing myself socially—was still mostly gone. So I realized these additional triggers were probably always present—but they had been much less frequent than the triggers I had already worked on. So it made sense I hadn’t noticed them until now.

First lesson: Even though I had defused the most common triggers of my neck tension, I hadn’t resolved every single trigger. 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 would be in the clear. Right?

Wrong. When any trigger is present, my neck often triggers just as painfully.

The progress wasn’t that my neck tension became less intense. 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…

I continue to detect and defuse addition triggers to this day.

Anxiety is like this too

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 bad anxiety. (And I haven’t gone numb.) I’ve seen this pattern consistently in others working on anxiety, social insecurity, self-doubt, validation-seeking behavior, insecurity, etc. as well