Caroline Foran

Your body is reacting to something and it just needs a little bit of extra.

Well, it needs a lot of reassurance and you probably need to do a good bit of work on understanding it and changing your relationship to it and your perception of it.

So that is what this book is about.

You literally, in the opening pages, because I was reading it over the last couple of days, have a little road map.

It's a little picture about how you can sort of navigate this journey with anxiety so that you end up as you are now living a very healthy life, albeit acknowledging it was there.

And the first thing that I really loved about the story was you've got to learn to have self-compassion.

Yeah.

So I describe that as the fuel you'll need to go the distance.

There's lots of road driving analogies throughout it.

And that was the thing that I was missing before.

That's something I hadn't written about in the first book.

It's something I probably would have rolled my eyes at and thought, OK, well, if I just had to be nice to myself that, you know, I would have done that by now.

And really, for me, it didn't land for me until I understood the science of it, the neuroscience of it and how it actually impacts your life.

biology or physiology and back then when I was so ill with anxiety I was so unbelievably hard on myself and I think as humans we think it might be an Irish thing it might be a cultural thing as well where we feel you know tough love just get on with it and we all we think it'll motivate us out of the anxiety or out of the tough spot we're in.

Get up and get on with it you hear that in Ireland don't you?

Exactly.

But on a very physical level, when you launch an attack on yourself, in a weird way, you're satisfying the anxiety because it feels like it's doing something, it's taking action, but you're just perpetuating the cycle of anxiety, the sequence of events in your body.

So it's absolutely not helping you.

It's making things so much worse.

The shame, it's adding layers onto anxiety that do not need to be there.