CHAPTER 1

Let me introduce myself

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

WAYNE DYER

I’ve been anxious for as long as I can remember. My parents tell me I was a seriously cautious kid, clinging to the banister as I gingerly made my way down stairs. At ballet classes I would cry in the corner, too inhibited to take part. Although I was confident with people I knew and trusted, talking to new people felt impossible. I feared being told off or making a mistake and dreaded that I would be found out for not being good enough. When something did go wrong – however trivial – I found it hard to cope. On what I thought was my first day at Brownies I discovered that in fact I’d gone on the wrong day and that I wasn’t expected. I remember feeling an overpowering sense of shame and embarrassment, as if I’d done something truly awful.

As a young child I had a lot of tantrums and meltdowns. I was a sensitive kid and not very good at handling my own feelings. I was very lucky to have wonderful parents but as the eldest child of three, I felt a lot of pressure to be a ‘good girl’. Increasingly, I kept my emotions hidden, so as not to upset Mum, but would then end up having huge, explosive tantrums (usually in public places like shopping centres!).

I first noticed the true signs of anxiety as a teenager. A combination of hormones, deep-seated self-esteem issues, repressed feelings, forays into drinking alcohol and late-night partying culminated in my first panic attack, at the age of fifteen.

During a panic attack your body reacts to what it perceives as a threat. More often than not it’s your nervous system overreacting to something that in fact is no threat at all. Triggers can range from giving a speech to too much caffeine, feeling hot and claustrophobic to being overwhelmingly stressed. Sometimes, though, attacks seem to happen for no reason at all. The horrible symptoms – tingling fingers, tight chest, a sensation of impending doom – that feel like a threat to your life, are really the result of your body pumping adrenaline into your muscles so that you can either run away or fight off the threat. In prehistoric times, when predators posed a real danger to mankind, this fight-or-flight response was what would have saved your ass. Nowadays, a journey on the tube or a looming work deadline can trigger the same response, except in these cases, there’s nowhere to run to, and no need.

My first attack took place at a friend’s house. Nothing in particular had triggered it so it was a total shock and I had no idea how to respond. It was the worst feeling of my life. My heart raced and my chest tightened. I literally thought I was dying. (I later discovered that everyone who’s experienced a panic attack has the same feeling of dread.) I prayed. I begged my friend to call an ambulance. I genuinely thought, ‘this is it’. The term ‘panic attack’ hadn’t even entered my vocabulary at that age. It wasn’t as if we’d learnt about them in school. The only explanation that made any sense to me in my worked up state was that I was having a heart attack and death was certain.

That first attack lasted for several hours and only subsided when my body became so exhausted that I was able to fall asleep.

Afterwards I couldn’t shake the feeling that my body and brain had let me down and that this uncontrollable thing could strike at any moment. I no longer felt safe in my own body. Like many people with anxiety, I became overly focused on how I felt physically, concluding that any changes or new sensations must be a serious problem. What followed was years of anxious feelings and obsessive worrying. I tried to self-medicate with alcohol and food and by attempting to control every detail of my life. Mum eventually suggested I see the college counsellor, whose condescending advice consisted of a chirpy ‘Don’t panic!’ and not a lot else. It took another ten years for me to realize I needed help and to seek professional counselling.

Bouts of anxiety continued when I went to university. It’s really hard to enjoy your life when you’re locked in a cycle of worry and feel unable to escape. I worried about money, my weight, and that there was something wrong with me. But I didn’t want to share my thoughts or feelings with anyone. I’d buried them so deep that it was hard for me to even connect with them, let alone really feel them. If someone had asked me at the time how I felt, I honestly wouldn’t have been able to answer – I was numb. And while, on the surface, I seemed to function well, bubbling beneath was a lot of tension, repressed emotion and almost constant overthinking.

Then there was the fact that I’d always felt incredibly uncomfortable and nervous around men, so I found relationships difficult. I’d put on a front and play it cool but inside I was desperately insecure and unable to let anyone in or open up to anybody. It wasn’t until I met my current boyfriend, when I was twenty-three, that I learnt to relax enough to be myself and enjoy a relationship.

After university I worked as a nutritionist in the NHS and my primary method for managing anxiety was avoidance. I would stay firmly in my comfort zone with people I knew so that I felt safe. When my friends went on their annual skiing holidays I would stay at home. I was far too afraid to try something so dangerous. I knew things weren’t right but I didn’t know what to do. I spent three years on and off in counselling, which was invaluable for getting to know myself better, and I had periods when I felt better, but my anxiety never really went away.

Things came to a head when my workload dramatically increased. As well as working full time, I had been training as a hypnotherapist and was now pushing to set up my own therapy practice during the evenings. A cocktail of social media envy – comparing myself unfavourably to other women I felt had achieved so much more than I had – and pressure on myself to ‘be better’ and ‘be more productive’, fuelled my deep-seated fear that I would never be good enough. In short, I was burning out. For weeks at a time I would get home at 10 p.m., crawl into bed and cry, my brain and body still buzzing with thoughts about my endless to-do list. I developed Irritable Bowel Syndrome, a condition often associated with anxiety. I was completely miserable. I knew I needed to detox my mind and my life, but I didn’t know how.

Then, in 2013, I was at a yoga studio when my attention was drawn to a quote up on the wall. It read, ‘Set peace of mind as your highest priority and organize your life around it.’ It hit me immediately that this was what I needed to do. ‘Being productive’ and trying to feel worthy by working hard had been my priority, but it wasn’t making me happy. In fact, it was destroying my peace of mind.

Right then, I vowed to make changes. I quit my job in the NHS to focus on my own business. I made meditation and going for walks a non-negotiable part of every day and tried to be kinder to myself, rather than constantly pushing and pressurizing myself. Writing became another cathartic daily practice and I devoured every book I could find on anxiety and personal development. I used my skills as a hypnotherapist and nutritionist to work on my mind and detox my body by cutting out refined carbs and booze. With the space I’d created in my life, and my new kinder-to-me attitude, I began venturing out of my comfort zone to try all the things I had previously been scared to do, in the process teaching myself that I could cope.

Needless to say, I felt loads better. It took about six months but it was so worth it. Ironically, I thought that stepping back and being less busy so I could calm my mind would have a detrimental effect on my work. I imagined I would suffer financially, but it turned out that the opposite was true. My work life actually improved as my ability to calmly focus and offer the best of myself increased.

For years, I believed that fear and worry were ingrained in my psyche – a permanent part of who I was. Anxiety can amp us into such a fearful state that it’s impossible to see a way out. It’s exhausting, frustrating and terrifying, like being stuck in a suffocating glass box, feeling sick as you gaze at the world, wondering what it’s like to feel ‘normal’. I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be this way. The truth is, your natural state is one of calmness and confidence – and I’m going to teach you how to get there. We’ll explore why we’re so anxious in the first place and I’ll show you practical ways to detox the rubbish – I’m talking beliefs, behaviours and thought patterns – while adding in lots of positive stuff. I’m going to share all the techniques and insights I used on myself and now use with my clients. You can use them, too, to bring your brain and body back into balance and become your calmest, happiest self.

Throughout the book there are short exercises you can experiment with as you’re reading. They’re a great way to really understand the more theoretical stuff and begin to work out what works best for you. The final chapter contains the Anxiety Solution Toolkit. This is the in-depth guide to all my tried and trusted self-help techniques. There’s space for you to note your own anxiety triggers and a Q&A section covering some of the more common panic-making scenarios, along with suggestions for techniques that might be particularly helpful. The more you interact with this book – trying out the exercises, the meditations and affirmations – the more you will get out of it. It’s designed to be inspiring and informative but, above all, practical, so please do throw yourself into doing the work so you can discover for yourself just how powerful these tools really are.

I don’t believe in ‘curing’ anxiety completely. After all, it’s a normal human emotion that we all experience from time to time. But I do believe you can strip away the things that detract from your inner peace. You can create a life centred on your own values and goals rather than being swept up in a storm of social media madness, self-imposed pressure and unnecessary worry.

It’s time to alight from the anxiety train and begin your new journey towards contentment and clarity. I’m excited for you to get started. Let’s go!