Anxiety symptoms go away quite slowly at first – but recovery speeds up with time and continued treatment. Before you know it, your anxiety will be a distant memory.
People sometimes ask me when to see a doctor about anxiety – my recommendation is to always try the natural way, and give it time to work first.
Other factors to consider are – is your anxiety brought about by a short-term issue, or is it cyclical, such as premenstrual anxiety.
No matter what type of anxiety you have, I give one consistent answer about how long it takes for anxiety symptoms to go away.
Related: Grounding meditation
Watch the video or continue reading below…
The question is, “When do anxiety symptoms go away?”
So, I’m often asked this question when I’ve had a client who’s come to see me and they may have booked in several sessions, a week apart, say.
It’s usually around week four, week five, they’re starting to feel better within themselves and some of the anxiety symptoms are falling away but then these doubts to start to creep in about the longevity of the healing, what to do when anxiety symptoms come back and often, people report this feeling of two steps forward, one step back.
So they say, “I was feeling so great and I was doing so well and then something happened and I had a panic attack.”
Or, “I just woke up this morning feeling absolutely terrible and I don’t understand why when I was feeling so great.”
So, it’s that doubt and the impatience that people have.
They start to get a glimpse of what it’s like to feel well again and to have a life without anxiety and so it could feel really disconcerting when you’re doing great, you’re doing really well and then suddenly, your old enemy, anxiety, pops up again usually in the most inconvenient of times and places.
But I want to say: It’s so completely natural, completely normal.
Anxiety recovery hardly ever happens in a step by step, linear sequence and in fact, I’d go so far as to say that the two steps forward, one step back thing is an important part of the recovery and it’s a really good opportunity when the symptoms resurface again to putting to play what you’ve learned to manage those symptoms.
So, what have you learned to manage those symptoms?
It’s a simple three steps that I always teach at the very, very beginning to anyone who wants to learn to heal anxiety from their lives and the very first step is acceptance.
Step 1: Acceptance
Just accepting yourself as you are for now, accepting things as they are, accepting life as it is.
That’s not to say it will never to change but you need to stop this constant resistance and this constant fighting.
People always come to me – pretty much every single client that I’ve taken on – talks to me about fighting the anxiety.
They want to see their anxiety symptoms go away, but they say:
“I want to fight it, I want to beat it. I want to get the better of it. I want to win.”
And it’s that sort of language that indicates to me that they haven’t truly come into acceptance yet.
What acceptance involves is just the understanding that while you have decided that you will heal, you have a fair way to go as you are right now and just having faith that in the long term that the anxiety will be healed and it will heal itself in an almost miraculous way by the time that it’s done that it can take some time to get there.
Make your anxiety symptoms go away through acceptance.
So, accept yourself as you are for now, dropping all that resistance, purposefully relaxing every muscle in your body.
Relax the muscles in your neck, in your shoulders, in your arms, in your face, in your tummy… just relax everything and accept yourself as you are for now.
Step 2: Surrender
That brings me to step two which is very closely related to step one and that is surrender.
When I say surrender, I mean surrendering the need to have an outcome, which sounds like such a paradox but it’s really important.
If you want to see your anxiety symptoms go away, you need to learn how to surrender.
By surrendering, you allow yourself to live in the present.
You allow yourself to accept life as it comes to you.
You relinquish control and you give up that need to control everything that’s going on around you.
So, if acceptance is letting go of everything in your body and letting go of your muscles and releasing that resistance, surrender is the mentally letting go of the need to control the outcome.
Accepting and surrendering so that your anxiety symptoms go away can be hard.
I know how hard it is, I know how when you’re expecting to hold everything together, I know how hard it is to surrender that, that acceptance and surrender are very closely related.
I generally find, once you’ve done acceptance, you’re surrendering as well as the automatic next step.
So, just surrender to the process and surrender to the fact that yes, you have anxiety.
Yes, you are doing something about it.
Yes, you will heal.
Yes, you’ve accepted yourself as you are for now.
Yes, you’re accepting your life as it is for now, handing all of the need for control over to the universe who will gladly accept it because the universe is the only one that’s ever in control anyway.
That’s the biggest paradox of all.
Step 3: Time
Step three is pretty simple but it’s also pretty difficult for someone who’s used to having complete and utter control or trying to maintain complete and utter control to accept: and that is time.
Make your anxiety symptoms go away over time.
Time is the great unsung healer.
Time is what allows the energy healing to take.
Time is what gives you the space to be able to accept yourself as you are and surrender the need for control and to do that again and again and again until everything comes together in a way that moves you forward into long and lasting healing.
I also want to say that anxiety symptoms, at first start lessening and slowing down very, very slowly.
So, it will take a lot of acceptance and a lot of surrender and a lot of time to get to the first little glimpse of a happy and peaceful life.
And then, it might take a little bit shorter period of time to get the next glimpse and a shorter period of time to get the next glimpse.
And then you might get a little bit of a backsliding period where you feel like you’ve gone backwards a little bit in your anxiety recovery and it’s at that point that you really need to say, “No, no. I’m surrendering and accepting and I know that if I continue with this mindset and move forward with it that I will get the outcome of no more anxiety in my life.”
Continue to accept and surrender during that period and then you get your next glimpse of peaceful recovering, peaceful healing.
Then, gradually over time, the anxious periods become shorter and shorter and less and less and then your periods of peaceful happiness become longer and the peaceful happiness becomes the accepted norm more so than the anxious periods.
Time is the healer that’s needed.
Time is the one that will bring you to where you need to be.
I have a great grounding meditation for you that will help you get through this period of acceptance and surrender that’s really needed to bring you into peaceful happiness.
Use the grounding meditation to bring your energy together as you accept and surrender and allow time to carry you forward into a life that’s peaceful and free from anxiety.
Love + light
Eva xo