Therapy Stopped Working

I have been having CBT, which helped with my anxiety until now. It took four weeks for it to start working, but then for a while it worked to keep my anxiety down. However, after some time, there were times I felt so calm it didn't feel right. Instead of it feeling pleasant, I just felt apathetic or bored. I felt demotivated and forgetful and I let problems pile up.

Now I have an issue with the strategies I learned for managing anxiety not working. It is like my brain doesn't want me to feel calm. In fact, there was a time when I panicked and it somehow felt relieving that I was feeling stress again, like negative stress became better than no stress at all. But now I want to feel calm again, but it is difficult to calm myself down.

I want to be able to have just the right amount of anxiety, but it seems like I can only make it too high or too low for me to be functional.

Anxiety is not the remedy for boredom. Do something interesting.

Saigal wrote:Anxiety is not the remedy for boredom. Do something interesting.

When I was having an issue with too little anxiety, doing something that interested me relieved my boredom only short term. Once I stopped doing the activity, I was bored again, and even then, I was not getting much enjoyment from the activity.