Key work events make me anxious. They give me chest pain, a churning stomach and disrupted sleep; my thoughts run through all the mistakes I could make and replay every bad experience in my past. Why put myself through this, I reason, which inevitably means that when, say, a high-stakes meeting is on the horizon, those feelings are worse, more intense, more prolonged. It’s a vicious cycle and one I admit early on when interviewing the anxiety expert Owen O’Kane.
O’Kane doesn’t seem surprised and why should he be? I bet everyone tells him about their anxiety. My dread, avoidance and catastrophising interior monologue are bog-standard these days: research by the Mental Health Foundation in 2023 found that 60% of UK adults reported experiencing “anxiety that interfered with their daily lives in the past two weeks”. We’re anxious about global geopolitics, the climate and the cost of living; our health, jobs, relationships and what strangers think of us. It takes children out of school and adults out of work. It’s an uneasy background thrum everywhere, something I have assumed to be a product of our ill-adapted, threat-seeking brains being constantly confronted with every terrible thing in the world through the shiny rectangles clutched in our sweaty hands (US psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt recently characterised a whole demographic of smartphone natives as “the anxious generation”).
