If you’re lost in a sea of anxiety (who isn’t?) or battling your way through a storm of stress (same), you might do yourself a favour and pick up a copy of Caroline Foran’s (38) just-published 4th book, Everything I Wish I’d Known About Anxiety: A Roadmap Back To Yourself. It is, says the podcaster, author and anxiety guru, the book she wished she’d had when she was fighting her own anxious demons back in her late teens and twenties.
Part memoir, part roadmap, part conversation with her former self, this is for anyone worn down by anxiety and exhausted from taking the wrong turns. Using an ingenious roadmap structure with ten stops on it – from calming the nervous system to understanding triggers – it makes you feel like you’re on the road to somewhere, like there’s hope, like there’s light at the end of your long, anxious
tunnel. Whether you’re struggling yourself or looking to support someone else, this is as digestible and accessible as you’ll get – a real no-nonsense approach in a world swamped with wellness titles.
Wise and insightful, Caroline opens up after photos in The Fitzwilliam Hotel, about her own struggles with anxiety, the power of vulnerability and the challenges and lessons learned from parenting her son, Caelan, who has autism and a PDA (Pervasive Drive for Autonomy) profile diagnosis. Ready? Let’s go…
We love the roadmap idea, Caroline. Having 10 stops on the road out of anxiety gives us hope to think that there is a route through it, that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Yeah, I agree, I think the idea of taking action and moving through something satisfies the anxiety that’s in your brain. Because anxiety is always to do with this intolerance of uncertainty, and it spirals and gets worse when we don’t really know where we’re going or what we’re doing. I wanted this book to be very, start here, turn here, watch out for this dead end, don’t make these mistakes that I did and consider this. Really to take people through to a very possible understanding and show every reason to believe that you will come out the other side where anxiety no longer governs your life.
You say this is the book you wish you’d written for yourself when you were struggling quite badly back in your teens and twenties. Can you talk to us a little about that?
Yeah, I mean God I felt so isolated. Nobody was talking about it and I really needed a very confident voice not an expert. I needed to know that someone had felt just like I had felt, like really to the worst extent of the spiralling thoughts, the intrusive thoughts, the feeling like you would never come out of it, how physical the anxiety felt, how much it dominated. I needed someone to tell me, ‘I know this is absolutely horrific right now, but you will absolutely come through this’. And of course, I didn’t have that. So the anxiety became the fear of the fear. It grew arms and legs. It became so many other things with shame, self-criticism and stigma. Feeling like I had no right to feel how I was feeling and trying to justify it and over-explain it to people who maybe didn’t have a clue because we weren’t having those kinds of conversations yet. If I’d had a book like this, I would have suffered a whole lot less.
You say the brain is constantly changing, do you think you changed your own brain chemistry through the learnings you’ve acquired, through writing and podcasting about anxiety? Did your education on it help you climb out of it?
I’d say that’s the single most important factor. I had to get so familiar with understanding what anxiety is, how it moves in the body, and how unbelievably normal and necessary it is. Someone messaged me the other day saying, “Do you really believe that you can cure anxiety?” And I was like, that’s where you’re going wrong. It’s not like a rash to cure a virus. It’s a necessary human function. And if we didn’t have that threat response that springs into action when it’s needed, we wouldn’t have lasted this long. Like, we wouldn’t
be here. We wouldn’t survive. But of course, for some people, it can go into overdrive. It can tip over into a state where it’s kind of always hypervigilant. And that happens for many reasons. But when I started to really understand anxiety, it changed my relationship with it. So a huge amount of it was my perception and my relationship to it. I would say that did the most heavy lifting.
You mentioned earlier about anxiety being like the fear of the fear, and we get that.
People would often describe anxiety by saying, I really felt like I was about to have a heart attack or like I was going to die. I always knew that I was not dying. I knew I wasn’t having a heart attack. I was so much more afraid of it being in my mind or it being caused by my mind because that’s what we’re told. Like we’re constantly told, you know, you are what you think, and your thoughts are your reality. And for people who are really struggling, that is so unhelpful. And I also don’t think it’s true. Thoughts can come and go, and thoughts are influenced by the state of your body and your nervous system at that moment.
Through your books and your podcast, you’ve spoken to so many experts in the field. Obviously, there have been many takeaways that you’ve taken from those interviews, but is there any particular ones that you keep with you that you think would be useful to impart to our readers now?
The thing that I was missing before and the thing that defines this book, and carries you through, is the self-compassion piece. I think that’s why it took me so long to come out the other side. I really would have been so hard on myself. And I remember I did two different expert interviews, but one of them was with Dr. Kristin Neff. She is, like, the self-compassion woman. Like, she did all these studies on it. She’s written the book on self-compassion, basically. And then I interviewed Dr. Michael Keane, who features in the book. And I remember he said to me, Caroline, if self-compassion was a pill, each one of us would take it every single day. That is how powerful it is.
So are you very compassionate with yourself these days?
I try to be, I still can be quite hard on myself, like obviously if you’re ambitious, or even in my experience as a parent, thinking everything is my fault, but yeah it’s really much easier for me to access the self-compassion piece now. And it’s in your actions and it’s also how you speak to yourself, moment to moment. Like, on Thursday, I woke up, that was the day of the book launch, and I was quite stressed out with my son, and I had my family over, the house was just a bit chaotic, and I just took a moment to myself, and was telling myself, you know, today you’re going to feel it because you care a lot, you’re doing a lot, there’s adrenaline, and to feel that is to be human. So even those little moments of just sort of meeting myself there and saying, you’ve got this, and it’s okay, and to understand that little bit of anxiety in those moments is so to be expected and so normal.
Was there a turning point in your own experience with anxiety that led you to write and speak so openly about it?
Honestly, it was desperation. I really think part of me felt like I needed people to relate to, and I needed to know I wasn’t the only one. I remember when I was in the thick of it, and I had quit my job, and I was barely leaving the house, and I was barely functioning, I was so unwell, and I just felt compelled to go on Facebook at the time. Which was where everything happened! At the time, nobody was sharing anything vulnerable. Nobody was saying they were having a hard time. It was best foot forward. And I just felt I can’t show up online if I can’t be really honest about where I am and how I’m feeling. So I don’t know why, but I just wrote a post saying, you know, I’ve been quiet for a while, and this is why, I really have come face to face with some mental health challenges, and I’m really struggling. And that was a scary thing to do. But I’ve never felt scared since then because people were so receptive to it. It’s always been a coping mechanism of mine to share, probably to my detriment, like I can’t not! Even my husband will say to me, maybe you can go through a few things privately, I’m like, I can’t!
Sharing helps, and it has helped, because these days you are good, aren’t they?
Some interviews have asked me recently if I live with a chronic anxiety condition, and I don’t. I really, honestly don’t. Anxiety does not factor into my decisions anymore. Like, these days, if I experience any kind of struggles, it’s more just stress. It’s not an unknown anxiety. Like, I am having a hard time at home at the moment because my child was only very recently diagnosed with autism. And that has been so challenging. But to not feel stress in that situation would be bizarre. It’s so different to the anxiety that once dominated every day for me. And that’s what I want people to know, is that I was at a point where it was allconsuming, crippling and chronic, and now I am out the other side.
You mentioned you five-year-old son, Caelan who you dedicate this book to.
You say that he’s taught you more about self-compassion and accepting the moment than anyone else you know. Well, unbeknownst to himself, he has! Neurodivergence is all new to me, but it is not something that you come out the other side of. It really is something to manage. It really is something that’s there all the time. It’s not something to change or fix. So I’ve had to constantly learn again and again to be in the moment and just know that maybe today is a hard day or today is a good day, and that doesn’t mean that we’ve turned a corner and every other day is going to be a good day. Also, it doesn’t mean that a hard day means we’re only ever going to have hard days. So Caelan has taught me so much more than I could ever have learned because I cannot change the situation. I have to accept it. I have to meet my child where he is, which means meeting myself where I am again and again and again.
Is your experience isolating, or do you have good support mechanisms in place?
It’s PDA, so to be honest, it’s quite different to a more typical presentation of autism or what we think we know autism to look like or how it would appear behaviourally. PDA is the Pervasive Drive for Autonomy, and it’s a nervous system disability where he can very quickly go into fight or flight near a hint of a perceived lack of autonomy or a demand, or he just needs an awful lot of control. And I think that’s why the autism diagnosis was so long coming, and with PDA, the supports really are so much more thin on the ground
because a lot of what helps really just comes from what’s going on in your family home. It’s not really about me bringing in an outside therapist to help him, and then that improves things for us, it doesn’t really. PDA is quite different, so I still feel like things will emerge where it will become less isolating. But there is a PDA support group that I’ve joined on WhatsApp, and I will go into that every now and then, and I might share something, because it’s been really hard as a sharer not to share, and not have people understand.
With all that you have going on, how do you mind your own wellness today?
I wish I had known about this years ago, but when I sit down with my phone when I get a few minutes in the evening when my husband finishes work, I watch a bit of ASMR [Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response] on YouTube. That is one of my most valued self-care tools now because it brings me a state of such physical relaxation and calmness and everything in my body just turns off. It’s really small things like that, it’s not like, a spa break to recalibrate. Like, I still sleep with my son every night. The constraints are very real. So it’s the micro things within that. I’ve got a walking pad. And, sometimes it’s hard for me to leave the house with Caelan, so I will walk, like, a mile or two miles every morning on that, just to give my body what it needs, so then I feel like I’ve done a little something for myself, and then I can be fully present with my beautiful boy.
Before we leave you Caroline, let us just say thank you. It can be hard to be vulnerable, but isn’t there such a strength in it?
That was the kind of thesis of my third book, Naked, the power of vulnerability. And it’s so ironic really that we’re so afraid to be vulnerable, we’re so afraid to show our human side, but actually, when we do, it’s so effective, and it helps you create better connections, it helps you be more compassionate. Like, even from a professional or a business side of things, it helps people problem-solve faster when people can say, look, I’m finding this a bit hard, I need a little bit of extra support here. Being willing to be vulnerable has opened upso many doors for me.
Well, well done on it all. The book is really incredible.
Thank you. Do you know what? I’ve never been as confident about anything I’ve written as I am about this one. I really am – I know it’s really good. And if it gets into the hands of people who need it, I’ll be so thrilled.
