1267: Stop Checking Your Anxiety: Claire Weekes on Letting Time Pass
Key Takeaways
- To truly heal and stop checking your anxiety, you must embrace the final step in Claire Weekes' clearing protocol: letting time pass.
- There is a crucial difference between 'letting' time pass with acceptance and 'waiting' impatiently for anxiety to disappear.
- Constantly checking your symptoms and treating recovery as a test keeps anxiety at the center of your attention and delays healing.
- Recovery is never a straight line, and old alarms may temporarily return during times of stress, fatigue, or life changes without erasing your progress.
- By practicing acceptance rather than seeking a verdict on your mental state, you allow your brain to build new safety learning over time.
In today's episode, Gina continues her Claire Weekes series with an episode devoted to the often overlooked step in her core clearing protocol: letting time pass. Letting time pass connects importantly with acceptance and floating. The differences between "letting" time pass and "waiting for" time to pass are expanded on. Listen in and come to understand the final letting time pass step in Claire Weekes' anxiety clearing protocol and further your anxiety clearing journey today!
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Quote:
Let time pass: do not be impatient with time.
-Claire Weekes
Chapters
0:27 Welcome and Series Focus
4:13 The Meaning of Letting Time Pass
7:54 Recovery Doesn’t Move Straight
9:19 Safety Learning in the Brain
14:05 Stop Symptom Checking
15:11 Practice, Don’t Test
17:21 No Verdict Needed
19:46 Hidden Signs of Growth
22:06 A Gentle Weekly Practice
23:25 Modern Steps to Healing
Summary
In this episode we continue our series on Dr. Claire Weeks and focus on her direction to “let time pass.” We look at how this idea connects with acceptance, floating, and the difference between first fear and second fear, with an emphasis on patience as part of nervous system healing.
We explore what “letting time pass” means in practice and what it is not. It is not waiting for anxiety to disappear, putting life on hold, counting symptoms, or treating recovery as a test. Instead, we keep living ordinary life while allowing sensations and thoughts to come and go without turning each moment into a measurement.
We also discuss why checking symptoms so often can keep anxiety central. We contrast “practice” with “testing,” and we look at how measuring progress too closely can hide deeper change. Progress may show up as continuing with plans, staying in situations longer, returning to the day after a hard moment, and responding with more kindness.We connect Claire Weeks’ advice to modern ideas about threat learning and safety learning.
Repeated experiences of surviving anxiety without catastrophe give the nervous system new information over time. We note that old alarms can still return, especially when we are tired, stressed, sick, or facing change, but this does not erase what we have learned.We close with a gentle invitation to notice checking, soften the body, and continue with what we are doing. We emphasize that healing is gradual, not linear, and that we do not need to be impatient with time.
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Gina🌺
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I stop checking my anxiety?
You can stop checking your anxiety by recognizing the urge to monitor your symptoms, letting go of the need to test your progress, and continuing on with your ordinary daily life without demanding a verdict on how you feel.
What does 'letting time pass' mean in anxiety recovery?
Letting time pass means allowing sensations and thoughts to come and go naturally without putting your life on hold or impatiently counting down the minutes until you feel better.
Why is symptom monitoring bad for anxiety?
Symptom monitoring keeps anxiety central in your nervous system by constantly treating normal sensations as potential threats, which prevents true safety learning from taking place.
