How do you appreciate small victories?

[shy]

I got myself a propranolol prescription, since I struggle with social anxiety, that manifest in terrible tremors, high heart rates, stammering and so on. Propranolol actually works for me, in the sense that I'm able to mask the symptoms, thus feel less anxious overall. I even made it through verbal exams last week, without any major hiccups thanks to the propranolol.

Instead of appreciating this small victory, I just started feeling more depressed. I don't feel like I've won anything, just that I'm losing a little less (if that makes sense?). These steps are so small and the path towards recovery seems so monumental. How can I appreciate small improvements, instead of them demotivating me?

 

[timf]

Martin Luther King once said, "Keep your eyes on the prize". If your focus is on the ultimate goal (something like achieving seamless social savoir fare), small steps can seem insignificant. To better appreciate small steps the "prize" you should focus on is the next step.

Finding medication that helps is a huge step. The next step might be experimenting with various anxiety management skills that would allow you to decrease your dosage or even function without it. People used to smoke cigarettes to reduce anxiety. However, lung cancer in exchange for slightly lower anxiety is probably not a good exchange. Greek people used to use "worry beads" that they would run through their fingers that seemed to function in a similar way but without the health risk.

A good technique for experimenting is to find a situation that causes some slight but repeatable anxiety. This can give you something to measure different experiments with. For example if there is a particular store that you go in to browse, you might try different experiments to see what helps reduce the anxiety. If you were to try visiting with and without a tactile stimulation (like worry beads) you could measure if there was any difference.

Tactile stimulation can work sometimes because physical manipulation increases a sense of control and anxiety often increases when one feels out of control.