Progress isn't gradual

Bad days get rarer before they get better

Most people I work with come with a 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 single rough day or week feels like proof that your efforts haven’t helped at all.

We need a better model of progress…

Progress reduces the FREQUENCY of symptoms, NOT always their intensity

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

I had neck pain for years. Eventually I noticed that my neck was tense in particular emotional situations. Once I successfully defused those situations, I experienced quick relief: “Turning my neck hasn’t been this smooth in years” says one 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 triggers. The symptom had many triggers, each of which had to be worked on 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.

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

I created muscle tension to avoid my feelings

What about anxiety?

Issues 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 bad anxiety.¹

This pattern has held true for ~every person I’ve helped.

In a post soon, I’ll share how I became significantly more secure by defusing hundreds of individual triggers.

1. And it’s not that I went numb either.