 Welcome to The Anxious Morning. Every weekday morning, we'll take a few minutes to go over some important lessons that you can use in your anxiety recovery journey. Away from the endless noisy scroll of social media, The Anxious Morning brings you support, education, inspiration, encouragement, and empowerment. For more, visit us at TheAnxiousMorning.com Yesterday, we examined the idea that while we think that we are protecting ourselves from anxiety, panic, and fear, we are likely unable to do that, and that we are really just hanging on. We adopt a strategy designed to keep anxiety and fear at bay. Then we delude ourselves into thinking that they are succeeding, when in reality, we are doing nothing more than holding on tightly because we are terrified of the consequences of letting go. To be certain, the idea of letting go is a difficult one for most people to cozy up with. We hear about letting go all the time. As general life advice designed to teach us to not sweat over details and small stuff, it makes sense. But when confronted with what you see as a real threat to your life or your sanity, letting go is not exactly going to be at the top of your to-do list. That's okay. Nobody starts the recovery journey intending to totally let go and let the chips fall where they may. That seems patently absurd at first glance. But it is not. Letting go and allowing the worst to happen is exactly how we take our first tenuous steps toward recovery. When we let go, we stop trying to hang on, and we resign ourselves to allowing the worst to happen. When reality shows us again that the worst never happens and that we are always capable of moving through that fear to wind up okay, things start to change. This is the essence of recovery. This is how we do it. If you could just decide to let go right now, we wouldn't have much to talk about, would we? If it were that easy, everyone would just stop fighting and recover six days later. Clearly, this does not happen, so we need a plan. We need a plan for how to let go. How can you learn to do this insanely scary thing? How can you learn to let go? I'll give you one word, practice. You cannot hang on for dear life all day long as a matter of standard operating procedure. Then expect that you will be able to let go when fear is at its peak during panic. You can't go from tightly wound with a death grip on everything to totally letting go when you fear that you are about to have a psychotic break. That will never work. Instead, you need to practice. You can practice letting go in small bits. You can exercise and strengthen your letting go muscles by experimenting in smaller situations where much less appears to be on the line. The odds are high that you rarely practice letting go, so you will likely suck at it when you start this, but that's okay. Practice makes progress. If you can work on letting go at a smaller level, the idea of fully letting go when in the grips of extreme panic and fear starts to sound less absurd over time. Tomorrow, we'll talk a bit more about the concept of letting go as a practice. If you're on iTunes or Spotify or someplace where you can leave us a rating or review, take a moment and rate the podcast and maybe write a small review. It really helps us out. Or just tell a friend about us. Thanks a lot.