Caroline Foran

And it's not about, you don't want to get to a point where you don't feel anxiety about those things.

These are not supposed to be things that we accept at face value.

But we do need to have the awareness that it's not normal.

If you plucked someone from the 1950s and you plonked them in today's world, they would have a very, even if they had an amazing setup, they would have a very hard time from a nervous system perspective existing with that level of stimulation, of access, of abundance, of

of things that we were never primed for.

And as a result of all of that, we carry this collective anxiety that might just be a bit of a background noise.

It might just be a bit of an annoyance.

It might not be like where I was, where I was very ill with anxiety, but it's definitely there.

And that's a lot of why I wanted to write the book, because I think more people have arrived at it after Covid with what's going on in the world.

A lot of people who become parents suddenly experience it and context matters.

Where can people find your book?

So it's out now, I guess by the time you put this out in all good bookshops, it's called Everything I Wish I'd Known About Anxiety.

And it's a very prescriptive roadmap.

So the subtitle is A Roadmap Back to Yourself.

Because often with anxiety, I was just trying to get as far away from myself as possible and be someone different and actually coming back to myself.

connecting with myself and realising that the anxiety was not something that was out to get me.

It was not some sinister thing that I'd taken over.

It was the scared part of me that needed reassurance and needed to feel safe.

That's why it's about coming back to yourself.

But it's really, I think, quite refreshingly prescriptive in that it doesn't just sort of conceptualise anxiety or theorise about it.