Andrés worked from home, which sounded ideal until his apartment became the only place he existed. Four years of freelancing, two of low-grade anxiety. What frustrated him most wasn’t the fear itself — it was that he couldn’t name it. There was nothing specific to be afraid of. Just a constant activation, like his nervous system hadn’t gotten the message that the threat was over.
Where he started
Day 1. Andrés described his situation in images, not abstractions — probably the designer in him. “It’s like a background app you can’t close.” The anxiety didn’t stop him from working entirely, but it made everything slower. He checked client messages two, three, four times. Re-read sent invoices to make sure the numbers were right. Woke at 3am convinced he’d forgotten something, checked his email, found nothing, and spent an hour getting back to sleep.
The first days
Diaphragmatic breathing was the first tool: four counts in, seven hold, eight out. The first two days it felt forced and slightly absurd. On day 3, in the middle of a difficult video call with a client, he used it without thinking. The call went fine. He wasn’t sure if the technique had helped or if he would have handled it the same way regardless. But continuing cost less than stopping.
Cognitive defusion took more effort. The exercise — observing a thought as an object, labeling it (“there’s the thought that I’m going to lose the client”) — felt artificial. Day 6, something shifted: deep in a mental spiral about a client who hadn’t responded, instead of elaborating the scenario further, he said out loud: “I’m having the thought that I lost them.” The thought didn’t disappear. It just got smaller.
The turning point
Day 10 brought the missing piece: behavioral activation. Andrés had stopped going for walks, stopped cooking — activities that used to decompress him. Anxiety had made him more sedentary, and the sedentariness fed the anxiety. A closed loop he’d been inside for months.
He started with twenty minutes walking in the morning. No headphones. No destination. Just walking. The first few times his mind kept running at full speed. By the fourth or fifth day, the physical rhythm started to compete with the mental noise.
Where he is now
By day 14: still checking emails, but once. Still waking at 3am occasionally, not every night. He’s still an anxious person — he doesn’t expect to stop being one. But he has named tools. When the spiral starts, there’s an instruction available, even if he doesn’t always follow it.
Techniques that worked
- Diaphragmatic breathing: regulating the autonomic nervous system in moments of activation
- Cognitive defusion: stepping back from a thought without trying to eliminate it
- Behavioral activation: recovering activities that regulate mood and reduce physical tension