Chapter 1: 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.
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: 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.
It can be it can be there for a period of time in your life when it actually probably makes sense. And there's a reason for it. And it's communicating a message to you. But I actually don't live day to day now with anxiety. It's not I don't wake up in the morning with symptoms. It doesn't factor into my decisions. It doesn't hold me back.
But of course, I'm like a human being with a pulse and I have my child is he's autistic. And there's there's real stress there on my nervous system, very tangible stresses. So, of course, I'm still susceptible to having a moment of overwhelm. But I think there's a difference between, yeah, like, as you say, some people are really chronically suffering, like as though it is a condition.
But even for those people, I really want them to know that there is light at the end of the tunnel. You don't have to just say, right, this is it forever. This is who I am because it's It's not your personality.
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Chapter 4: What misconceptions do people have about anxiety?
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. You said your anxiety gave you anxiety. I mean, for me, it was never, oh, I'm anxious about this thing. It was the fear of the fear. Like I had a mental breakdown and I was so frightened that that could happen to me when there was no seemingly obvious trigger.
And so I was really, I was really brutal with myself about that because I would say, look how much worse off other people have it. And but... It was awful. I mean, I dug myself into such a deep hole. But self-compassion, and it sounds simple, and it actually is, but it just takes a while to start to trust it and believe it.
When you can turn to yourself and say, regardless of the situation, this is hard. I'm having a hard time.
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Chapter 5: What practical steps can individuals take to manage anxiety?
Today I'm feeling it. It's here for whatever reason. I don't need to like it. I don't need to change it. I just need to accept that this is who I am in this moment. And ask myself, what's the one thing I can do today? Or what's one less thing I can take off my plate? And when you start to really...
properly engage that self-compassionate muscle, you are interrupting that sequence of stress events in your body. 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? What are the other structures or milestones almost along your journey that helped you to get to where you are today? There was a few practical things. So I did go on medication and I remember feeling so much shame asking for that. But just with the stigma, I felt like that meant I was... taking the easy route.
By no means, it's not the easy route. It's just one thing that might help you lift your head above water. And medication allowed me to then just be at a slightly more functioning level to benefit from all of the things like, you know, going for walks and breath work and stuff. I found CBT massively helpful versus just talking therapy because it was very practical. It put me in the driving seat.
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