Caroline Foran

I did not want to be that sensitive person who feels too much.

And it was it was a lot of different things, whether it's lifestyle changes that I had to make completely working on my relationship towards anxiety, my perception of what anxiety actually is, the psycho education of just understanding your nervous system, which makes it so much less about you and so much more manageable.

it's not a reflection of your personality it's it's your nervous system under strain and every single person's nervous system is capable of having that strain it's not even saying like one in five people experience it every human experiences it yeah but just for some people it becomes maladaptive where it's really impacting their life like you would not be alive if you didn't have the ability to experience anxiety it's a survival mechanism 100 but for me

Medication was a part of it.

It was a very long road to letting go of the shame that I needed a little bit of extra support to get my head above water.

It was...

a lot of trial and error and time and distance and understanding and growing up.

What medication were you on?

So there's, people kind of get a bit confused about medication having this addictive nature.

Only the fast acting ones, like if you're taking a Xanax or something, that's going to relieve some of the physical symptoms in the here and now, but that's not a long-term solution.

I do wish I could go back in time and just be gentle enough to myself to say, you can take one of those just to get through this moment when it was so bad because I thought that meant...

Like you've really lost it now.

Like if you need, this is, I mean, this was 2014.

Like this was not what we were talking about.

And our perceptions.

And we weren't talking about anxiety and medication.

Well, what we knew of medication was what we saw on movies and TV, which was a completely like cracked woman who ends up in an asylum.

Like no one wanted that for themselves.

And we had really warped perceptions of what that would say about us and mean.

So there was so much stigma and so much shame.