Living With Anxiety: Recovering To Live, Or Living To Recover? – Ep 283

Compartmentalizing Recovery and Life

Compartmentalizing ‘life’ and ‘recovery’ into distinct entities is a trap. A blended approach is really a better way to go. This means engaging in life  activities is not postponed until after recovery, but is incorporated as best we can manage as an essential component of the recovery process.  If we are to face our fears as part of accepting, tolerating, and surrendering, doing so while engaged in activities that are meaningful to us as part of life gives us a leg up in the process.

Not Everything Can Be Recovery All The Time

In our community there can be a tendency to obsess over the recovery process to the point where life is almost entirely overlooked. Are you trying to actively engage in the process and steps of recovery during every waking moment. Are you judging everything you do as good or bad for your recovery?  Are you trying really hard to “do recovery” or to do recovery “right”?  These are all signs that you might be accidentally ignoring life by trying to totally recover first before living.

What Matters To You In Life?

Embracing life rather than just trying to recover is not a distraction or a way to escape recovery and its challenges. It’s really a powerful part of the process. Bringing life into the process – mixing life and recovery – helps us to have more meaningful and varied recovery experiences that clinical data tells us can contribute to more lasting and durable recovery with less likelihood of relapse down the road.

But this means connecting to what matters to you in life. Recovery can often be defined as a move away from fear-based choices and toward values-based choices. What matters to you? What makes you who you are?  If you had only 7 days to live, what would you focus on in those 7 days?  Those are your values.  Working on identifying them can be helpful here.

A Natural Progression

Everyone early on in this process will spend most of the time doing recovery rather than life. That’s OK. That’s expected.  As you move down the road and start making progress, try to start re-incorporating life into your plans. The more progress you make, the more your recovery will start to look like life and less like a series of exposures and techniques for trying to feel better. The more you life, the more you recover, without necessarily trying to recover.  But be patient. This is not where we start.  This is where we wind up over time.

Even When You’re Not Ready

When you work toward mixing life and recovery, you will invariably run into situations where you must or want to “do life” but you don’t feel ready to do that. This is to be expected.  Even purely mechanical, planned, scripted recovery in the form of manufactured exposures is based on doing thing you don’t feel ready to do or capable of doing.  The same will hold true when you decide to use life itself as an exposure. If it feels like you’re not quite ready to do a life thing, its time to do it. This doesn’t mean going from housebound to hiking the Appalachian Trail alone in one leap, but its OK to engage in life that feels just beyond your comfort zone. There are lessons in the stretch and those lessons are even more valuable when they are life-centric rather than recovery-centric.

Related Links

• The Anxious Truth, my panic/agoraphobia recovery guide
• Anxious Thinking Isn’t The Only Thing Happening In The Universe
• You Not Just An Anxiety Disorder – You’re A Whole Person
• Follow me on Instagram
• My YouTube Channel
• Follow me on TikTok