You\u2019ve probably noticed that terms once used only within the confines of a therapist\u2019s office are now deployed unthinkingly to describe experiences that are merely uncomfortable. A car backfires and someone says it has \u2018given them anxiety\u2019. Spilling a round of drinks in front of others results in \u2018PTSD\u2019 \u2013 or \u2018OCD\u2019 until they are cleared up. On TikTok, I\u2019ve seen someone\u2019s \u2018ponytail era\u2019 or syrup stains on a hardwood floor being described as severely traumatic. Likewise, the everyday use of language that surrounds anxiety conditions \u2013 words like \u2018worry\u2019, \u2018fear\u2019, \u2018rumination\u2019, \u2018panic\u2019, and \u2018anxiety\u2019 itself \u2013 makes it easy to underestimate just how debilitating anxiety-related illnesses can be.<\/p>\n
As a journalist, I\u2019ve spent years interviewing experts and people living with anxiety for my book<\/a> How to Eat an Elephant (2026). I also have my own personal experience with anxiety. In 2019, I was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and chronic insomnia, which I have since rowed back from, over months and years. My hope is for more people to recognise just how serious anxiety can become, not least so they know when to get the help they need \u2013 but also to appreciate that it\u2019s an essential, unavoidable part of life.<\/p>\n It\u2019s normal to feel anxiety during challenging life moments or periods of intense change. To sweep mild and transient issues into the language of disorder helps no one<\/a>, and particularly not those who really are struggling with mental ill health. Nerves help us make decisions quickly, weigh up risk, and compete at the top of our game. The professional golfer Tiger Woods put it well in an interview in 2015: \u2018I care about what I do and when I\u2019m not nervous is the day I quit \u2026 I want to feel the rush, I want to feel the nerves.\u2019<\/p>\n So we need some anxiety in our lives, but we also need to know when it has outstayed its welcome or grown to unhelpful and life-altering proportions. Anxiety conditions<\/a> are the most common form of mental illness, affecting a third of us in our lifetime, according to best estimates. Data from the NHS in England suggest<\/a> that 7.5 per cent of adults are currently living with GAD, the most common anxiety disorder. Despite this, global data show<\/a> that only one in four people with an anxiety disorder will receive any form of treatment for it, which is particularly frustrating given how highly treatable anxiety is.<\/p>\n The consultant psychologist Elena Touroni says confusion around anxiety creeps in because we use it to describe such a wide spectrum of experience: \u2018It\u2019s used for both the nerves before a presentation, and the experience of someone whose anxiety is shaping every decision they make, narrowing their world and affecting their sleep, their relationships and their ability to function.\u2019<\/p>\n According to Touroni, it\u2019s not surprising that people struggle to locate themselves on that spectrum, or to recognise when what they are experiencing has crossed into something that warrants proper support. \u2018The line between normal and clinical is not obvious and can feel quite subjective to people who don\u2019t have specialist support,\u2019 she says. \u2018I regularly work with people who have been managing a significant level of anxiety for years without recognising it as anything other than just how they are. They have adapted to it and it has become their baseline.\u2019<\/p>\n Doctors typically look at how significantly symptoms interfere with your ability to function day to day<\/p>\n This resonates with me. Before I ended up in a psychiatric hospital in 2019, I had spent seven years struggling on and off with insomnia and anxiety to varying degrees. I sought concerted help only right at the end, when I was going multiple nights a week with just three or so hours of sleep \u2013 sometimes spending whole nights awake \u2013 utterly unable to switch off and, by then, having intrusive thoughts about suicide and self-harm. It sounds dramatic now \u2013 and it was \u2013 but it felt easier at the time to try to carry on and pretend nothing was wrong, hopeful things would get better on their own, particularly given I knew so little about anxiety.<\/p>\n So how do experts make a diagnosis of clinical anxiety? In the absence of a failsafe test, doctors typically look at how long you\u2019ve had symptoms, their severity, and how significantly they interfere with your ability to function day to day.<\/p>\n \u2018What distinguishes a clinical anxiety disorder is not the presence of anxious thoughts, jitters or that horrible knot in the pit of your stomach,\u2019 says Touroni, \u2018but what happens to them over time. In clinical anxiety, the symptoms are more intense and persistent and, crucially, they do not lift once the perceived threat has gone. The nervous system either stays in a state of high alert long after the trigger has passed, or it begins firing in the absence of any clear trigger at all. Clinically, if someone has been experiencing this for six months or more, we would look seriously at whether they are dealing with an anxiety disorder.\u2019<\/p>\n I knew things were escalating when I kept getting ill (my immune system was having a hard time with the insomnia), my mood had plummeted, and I started having panic attacks at night. I was anxious about feeling anxious<\/a> and not sleeping. Everything was compounding and, as a result, I wanted to go out less.<\/p>\n Touroni explains that many people go for years carrying the physical and emotional toll of managing an anxiety disorder. This is a shame as \u2018anxiety disorders are among the most treatable conditions we see in psychological practice.\u2019 She adds: \u2018Getting the right name for something is not a small thing, as it changes what feels possible and can have a huge impact on a person\u2019s quality of life.\u2019<\/p>\n Now \u2013 seven years after being hospitalised \u2013 I\u2019m pleased to say anxiety is not a defining feature of my life, it\u2019s just another brick in the wall of my personality. What helped me most when I was in crisis was being taken out of my home environment for a couple of weeks, medication (sertraline, an SSRI antidepressant, in the mornings and amitriptyline, a tricyclic antidepressant that can help with sleep, in the evenings), cognitive behavioural therapy<\/a>, and learning how anxiety as a pathological illness functions in the mind and body.<\/p>\n I know I have a tendency towards anxiety, but I also now know what helps me steer away from it in pressing moments: prioritising sleep<\/a>, work-life balance, managing stress, eating well, saying \u2018no\u2019<\/a> and being self-compassionate<\/a>, among other things.<\/p>\n It\u2019s my tendency towards anxiety that makes me so enjoy life. I am quick to think and feel<\/p>\n The psychologist and researcher Nick Grey puts it like this: \u2018Can we cure anxiety? No, because it\u2019s part of the human condition. If someone\u2019s goal is I never want to feel anxious again, then no, that won\u2019t happen. But if the goal is about overcoming a chronic anxiety problem in which the person is stuck, then absolutely, that can happen. You can\u2019t get rid of anxiety, but you can absolutely overcome chronic anxiety problems.\u2019<\/p>\n The psychologist Rollo May was of a similar opinion. I like what he wrote in The Meaning of Anxiety (rev ed, 1977):<\/p>\n Anxiety cannot be avoided, but it can be reduced. The problem of the management of anxiety is that of reducing the anxiety to normal levels, and then to use this normal anxiety as stimulation to increase one\u2019s awareness, vigilance, zest for living. <\/p>\n True to his perspective, I\u2019ve come to see that it\u2019s my tendency towards anxiety that makes me so enjoy life. I am quick to think and feel. And while I now recognise the need to pay better attention to anxiety when I feel it \u2013 weighing up what my mind and body are trying to tell me rather than pretending it doesn\u2019t exist and pushing the sensation away \u2013 I wouldn\u2019t change my underlying sensitive nature for anything.<\/p>\n If reading this has made you reflect on whether you\u2019ve been living with problematic anxiety, it may help to have a sense of how long it could take to learn to manage it better. It could be months or years, depending on what the issue is and how long it has existed. Not days. In many cases, not even weeks. Too often, we put pressure on ourselves to \u2018get better\u2019 immediately once we realise we are sick or struggling. Grey says: \u2018People assume if things haven\u2019t changed quickly enough, then there\u2019s no hope. But recovery is an up and down rollercoaster route. There\u2019s always hope, even if you\u2019ve had an anxiety problem for decades.\u2019<\/p>\n Anxiety, then, is not always the enemy, but we should treat it with respect. That\u2019s why our relationship to it matters: so we can recognise and meet it when it spills into something pathological.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You\u2019ve probably noticed that terms once used only within the confines of a therapist\u2019s office are now deployed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":814450,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[102,1906,6623,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-814449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814449\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/814450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}