Most men wouldn’t say they have anxiety, they’d say they’ve got a lot going on. In this article I write about why it turns up wearing the clothes of competence, and what helps it quieten.
When I first gave talks back in 2018, the talk itself wasn’t the problem; it was the days before it, the knotted stomach and the constant thinking about what was to come. That gap between now and the thing is where anticipatory anxiety lives, and it usually has very little to do with the event itself.
Most clients I see relating to health anxiety know exactly when it started; the week their daughter was born, or the night they ended up in A&E with nobody able to tell them what was wrong. Those experiences are usually triggers that intensify an underlying problem embedded a long time ago.
Have you ever wondered why you can know, completely and rationally, that a fear of flying makes no sense, and still find your body doing something entirely different the moment you think about boarding?
I find it fascinating that our minds and thoughts can be sources of either the wildest expression of freedom or the most repressive regime of control and a source of anxiety and depression. The difference often comes down to perspective and the way we relate to a single thought.
Most of us already know what needs to change. The problem isn’t the knowing. It’s the gap between understanding something clearly and actually doing something about it, and why insight alone is rarely enough to move us forward.
