Sarah Kanowski

And it was extraordinarily difficult to do that initial Good Weekend article.

And on the Friday afternoon in the newsroom...

And I was such an anxious mess as I knew it was getting close to the publication.

And someone said it's on the website.

It's gone up on that because often the Herald will put stories from the Saturday paper up on this Friday.

And I think I nearly fainted on the newsroom floor.

And that's a combination of fear of what's going to happen, what the outcome of this decision to write this story will be, and a sense I'm embarrassed.

I was fooled.

Has that eased though now as the time has gone by and you can see?

but also other people that have been in the same situation.

We've been in this together in a sense.

And also, finally, the most important thing probably is the research I did for the book because it's not just my memoir I've used.

I've woven in research from anthropologists and psychiatrists and cognitive scientists and other people's stories.

I've understood what our brain does to contribute to us making decisions that might not always be in our best interests.

When Anna Ferguson was 10 years old, she went with her family to the Melbourne Royal Show and went on a roller coaster ride there with her sister and her dad.

There was an accident and after that, everything was different for Anna.

For many years, she didn't understand why it was still so hard for her.

Physically, she was okay, but emotionally, she was trapped feeling either angry or numb.

But then, Anna chanced upon Muay Thai fighting, which had an amazing impact on her well-being and led to her studying psychology.

That's how Anna got interested in what happens to our nervous systems during trauma and stress, understanding the science behind how we shut down or go into overdrive and what we can do about it.