When you’re recovering from pain or injury, you’d probably prefer to get better each day if you could.

However, recovery tends not to be smooth sailing back to where you were before.

Here are some key points to remember about recovery:

• Recovery isn’t always linear—you’ll almost certainly have days when you feel better, days when you feel the same, and days when you feel worse.
• You may recover different to other people.
• You may recover different to how you did previously.
• Flare-ups and setbacks are common but aren’t necessarily detrimental in the grand scheme of things—you might’ve had bad sleep, you might’ve had extra life stress, or it might’ve just been one of those days (shi-stuff happens).
• If you hit a bump in the road, you probably don’t have to drive back to the start—perhaps you just back off for a few days and then build back up gradually.
• While it’s tempting to fixate on the sharp peaks and troughs of recovery, it’s more helpful to look at the general trajectory.

You may not get better each day but that’s okay as long as you’re headed roughly in the right direction.