Caroline Foran

You're pumping the brakes on the part of your brain that's saying, oh my God, sound the alarm, send in the troops.

And you're releasing soothing hormones that will help to counteract it.

So whatever about the ideology of it, or you don't need to be like, you know, have a complete personality transplant to do it.

It's very physiological difference that is so powerful.

And so therefore, I always like to say, you know,

It's one thing to go through all the things in this book, which you won't get anywhere with it meaningfully if you cannot meet yourself where you are to begin with and really start working on that compassion.

One of the other things that I picked up in your book was there's no quick fix here.

Is there actually learning to live alongside this and to live a healthy life with anxiety takes a good bit of time?

Yeah.

And I mean, if you think about like when I was really, really unwell with it, it had taken quite a while for my nervous system to wind itself up into such a bad state.

And then there was going to be a difference between cognitively realizing I was anxious and physically feeling better.

So there's a big difference there.

And just because you say, OK, I know it's anxiety and I know why it is, it doesn't mean that your body's immediately going to say, right, we're going to

We're going to let all this go.

It takes a while to unwind.

It takes so much patience.

Your system, even though your brain might rationally know that you're safe, your nervous system takes time to start to trust that there's real safety there.

And so what you have to do instead of trying to not feel anxious, you need to show your body signals of safety that can then communicate upward.

So a bottom up approach is something that I it was it was new to me and so important.

What else do you think helped you along your journey?