Author and Podcaster Caroline Foran on her new book!
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance.
I am joined now in studio by author and podcaster Caroline Foran, who I think will be very familiar to lots of Newstalk listeners who no doubt have read your first book, Owning It, where you spoke about the condition of anxiety and what it had meant to you. And you have a new book now, Everything I Wish I'd Known About Anxiety. Why did you write it? So a good question. And I did have to ask myself that as well. Why did I need to revisit this topic? And I realised there was so much I had still left to say.
What inspired Caroline Foran to write her new book on anxiety?
There was so much I had learned since the first book. It was 10 years ago now that I was writing that first book when I was actually penning it. Yeah. And I was really just at the time still very much coming out the other side of very, very crippling anxiety where I was quite ill. So I was trying to get back on two feet. In that time, I've lived through, we've all lived through the pandemic, many different things going on. I became a mother. So there's a lot of lived experience there. And there was so much that I learned through doing my podcast, interviewing world-renowned experts across neuroscience, neurobiology, so many different things that I did not yet know that felt so important and such like missing pieces of the puzzle.
So I also, another big reason for it is I've noticed that people are still quite focused on trying to stop themselves from having anxious thoughts and get ahead of it. And I think we're kind of missing the point on how anxiety works and how it moves in the body. And we're putting a lot of pressure on ourselves to stop something from happening that's kind of automatic. And so I wanted to really help people understand the nuts and bolts of it again. And A question that I would have got asked all the time in my DMs is, OK, I know what anxiety is now. I know I'm suffering, but where do I start? Where do I go? So I wanted to create a very sort of prescriptive, sequential, chronological guide that people can really just take and start to get to work with.
And I remember speaking to you 10 years ago, actually, when you wrote that first book. And I remember thinking, oh, anxiety, I've heard about that. Do people have it? What is that like? Who lives with it? What impact does it have on your life? And now I feel I know so much more about it. I know people who are living with it, who are challenged by it. Do you think we've come to a point where we just have accepted that anxiety is a real condition that people actually do have to deal live with and suffer through and learn to manage. I find the word condition funny sometimes with anxiety because every single human person living and breathing is capable of having an anxious response. We've been wired and designed that way and it's very necessary to our survival.
And yes, anxiety, it's in the water now. We're so familiar. There's so much acceptance there. But people are suffering more and more. And there's so many pressures piling up on top of us with the world we live in. So there's still a real lack of knowing how to tease that apart and what to do. The reason I think I call it a condition is because, as you say, everybody lives with some level of anxiety. It's you can't go through life. There are hardships that are up and downs without having moments of anxiety and feeling anxious.
How has Caroline's personal experience with anxiety evolved over the years?
It's very normal. Apparently, it's very healthy. But if you're actually living with anxiety the way you are, it's completely different. It's pervasive. It affects every aspect of your life. It can be mental and it can be physical. So for me, when I wrote the first book, that was the sort of turning point where I was really ill with anxiety. That was a period of time in my life where anxiety took over and every thought I had was tinged with fear. Every feeling in my body was just defined by anxiety. It was so physical as it was mental. But then... But through everything that I did that's in the book, I actually managed to come out the other side of it. And I really want people to know that it's not doesn't have to be a life sentence.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:42
2
What inspired Caroline Foran to write her new book on anxiety?
0:42–3:08
3
How has Caroline's personal experience with anxiety evolved over the years?
3:08–4:26
4
What misconceptions do people have about anxiety?
4:26–6:44
5
What practical steps can individuals take to manage anxiety?
6:44–10:48