There is a particular cruelty to social anxiety. The help exists, and reaching it means doing the exact thing you find hardest. Phoning a stranger. Sitting in a waiting room where someone might speak to you. Saying your name at … Read more

If your anxiety has changed, or arrived for the first time, and you are somewhere in your forties or early fifties, perimenopause may be the reason. Not the only possible reason, but a far more common one than most women … Read more

Grief and anxiety do not always arrive together, but they do more often than most people expect. The loss of someone significant can trigger fear, panic attacks, a new and persistent worry about death, or an intensification of anxiety that … Read more

Waking up shaking or trembling is an unsettling experience, and one that many people find difficult to explain. There are several possible reasons why this happens, and anxiety is one of them. Understanding what is behind the experience requires paying … Read more

Anxiety does not stay in the mind. For many people, the most alarming and confusing aspect of anxiety is what it does to the body — sensations that feel entirely physical, often frightening, and sometimes so unusual that the person … Read more

Trauma and anxiety are each, on their own, capable of creating significant difficulty in close relationships. Together, they create something more complex — a layered pattern of responses that can make intimacy feel simultaneously necessary and threatening, that can generate … Read more

You type a message, read it back four times, delete the last word, add an emoji, remove the emoji, and finally press send — then spend the next hour wondering whether it came across wrong. Or perhaps your phone buzzes … Read more

For many people with social anxiety, there is a cruel irony in the age of digital communication. The rise of messaging was supposed to make things easier — you can think before you reply, you do not have to perform … Read more

If messaging has become something you dread rather than something you simply do, you are not alone — and it does not have to stay this way. Texting anxiety is a genuine and well-recognised pattern of anxiety, and it responds … Read more

For many autistic people — particularly those with a PDA profile — the ordinary demands of daily life can generate a level of anxiety that neurotypical frameworks simply do not account for. Getting dressed, choosing what to eat, being asked … Read more

Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health conditions in the UK, and among the most misunderstood. People with anxiety disorders regularly describe feeling dismissed: told they just need to calm down, to stop worrying, to put things in … Read more

You’ve noticed the worry that won’t switch off. The stomach aches before school, the overthinking, the way ordinary things- a text left on read, a class presentation- seem to loom far larger than they should. Read more

Most of us use the word anxiety loosely, for nerves before a meeting, for the knot in your stomach before a difficult conversation. So when it starts to feel bigger than that, it can be hard to know what you … Read more

Someone asks what is wrong, and you have no words. There is nothing you can point to, no bad news, no clear problem, just a feeling that something is not right. Your chest is tight, your thoughts will not settle, … Read more

When anxiety is affecting your ability to work, get through the day, or simply function the way you would like to, a very practical question can start to surface: is anxiety a disability? Read more

There is a version of thinking about death that is part of being human — a background awareness of mortality that most people carry without it interfering significantly with their lives. And then there is death anxiety: the kind where … Read more

Liking someone should feel exciting. And sometimes it does — for about thirty seconds before the anxiety moves in and turns it into something else entirely. The replaying of conversations to check whether you said something wrong. The hyper-awareness of … Read more

You read a message back five times before sending it. You spend longer than you would like to admit composing a reply to something that should take thirty seconds. When someone leaves your message on read, you find yourself spiralling … Read more