 Welcome to the Anxious Morning, where each weekday morning we take a look at ideas, concepts, and lessons designed to help you understand and overcome your anxiety. For more information, visit us at theanxiousmorning.com. As much as we want to, we do not recover in big leaps. Recovery is not a big project. Recovery is the agglomeration of thousands of tiny projects that all add up and get strung together into a meaningful change in the way you react and relate to anxiety and fear. Each of these tiny projects and activities originates with a choice. And like these projects and activities, these choices are often also tiny, but they are choices nonetheless and they matter. You may wonder how you will get through today feeling the way you do. You will get through it, as you always have, by making a series of small choices that lead to productive activities throughout the day. We're never solving the anxiety problem with a giant swipe or momentous mindset change. It never works that way. We solve it by accepting that we do have choice and therefore power. Then we practice the act of making good choices at the micro level each day whenever we need to, which in some cases is all day long. That's okay, everyone starts there. When you have a choice between picking your chin up and putting your head in your phone to distract yourself for another five minutes, pick your chin up and look at the world. When you have a choice between speaking your fear out loud again and remaining silent while you act toward what matters to you even while afraid, choose the latter. When you have a choice between laying in bed for another 30 minutes examining yourself or putting your feet on the floor to go brush your teeth, put your feet on the floor, then choose to walk toward your toothbrush rather than getting back under the covers. These are just a few small examples of small choices that confront us every day along the path to recovery. None of them is recovery by itself, but when we add them all up over time, we wake up one day and notice that life is starting to look more normal than it did five weeks ago. Then we use that to fuel more good choices and to continue on our march toward getting better. No, this is not perfect. Mistakes will happen. Bed choices will happen. This is okay. The overall trend is in the right direction when we can make recovery focused choices more than we make fear focused choices on a consistent basis. So if you ask me how I recovered, I would have to tell you that I made 100,000 tiny choices that got me there. I might also tell you that in this context, the idea of there was not at all what I was expecting it to be, but that's a story for another time. If you're enjoying the anxious morning and you'd like to get a copy of the podcast delivered into your email inbox every morning, visit the anxious morning dot email and subscribe to the newsletter. If you're listening on Apple or iTunes, take a second and leave a five star rating. Maybe write a small review. It really helps me out. And finally, if you find my work useful and you'd like to help keep it free of advertising and sponsorships, you can see all the ways to support the work at the anxious truth dot com slash support. Thanks so much.