Relapse Signature – anxiety, panic, agoraphobia and depression

What do you do before it all goes wrong?

Most people who have anxiety, panic, agoraphobia, depression, bipolar have good days and bad days. And often people find that they have good periods, weeks or months where things are going well and they feel better, or at least not so bad. However, instead of turning into prolonged recovery, these periods often end in either gradual or sudden decline back to a bad state that you know only to well from the past.

It often seems like this kind of relapse or setback happens without any reason, but in truth nothing in life happens for no reason at all. Everything is linked by cause and effect. That means that the cause of the relapse or setback can give you important clues on how to deal with or overcome your condition.

They key is to understand your “Relapse Signature”.

What is a “Relapse Signature”?

A relapse signature is the individual events, emotions or situations that lead you to relapse. I use the plural here deliberately as you may have several patterns of behaviour that lead you to relapse, or more than one.

The important thing is to watch yourself. When you feel worse examine what happened, how you felt, what was going on in your life, at work, home, with friends.

You may well then have to look at what caused that, and at what caused the cause! You are like a detective working backwards. It might be beneficial to see if a trusted friend can help you. Sometimes other people see things about us that we don’t know about ourselves.

My personal relapse signature.

Personally, I managed to trace my relapse signature to a point where I start to feel out of control in my life. Maybe people or work is invading my personal space, or I found myself going along with decisions that effected me that I didn’t like, for the sake of avoiding conflict.

Sometimes quite minor things can build up. Think of it as a mug which is being filled by drips. Eventually the mug will overflow, but as you can’t see through the sides of a mug you don’t know when that will be. That is why it is important to trace the causes back, possibly over several relapses, to get to the original cause.

So now I can be on the look out for situations where my locus of control is negatively impacted. Some I have to accept (taxes) and some I can change (pushy friends). What is important is that I take control of some, and learn to think rationally and consciously about the others, instead of letting them fester inside me. That way I can stop relapses before they start!

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