Category Archives: Anxiety

Why it’s time to stop pursuing happiness

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Positive thinking and visualising success can be counterproductive – happily, other strategies for fulfilment are available

Like many teenagers, I was once plagued with angst and dissatisfaction – feelings that my parents often met with bemusement rather than sympathy. They were already in their 50s, and, having grown up in postwar Britain, they struggled to understand the sources of my discontentment at the turn of the 21st century.

“The problem with your generation is that you always expect to be happy,” my mother once said. I was baffled. Surely happiness was the purpose of living, and we should strive to achieve it at every opportunity? I simply wasn’t prepared to accept my melancholy as something that was beyond my control.

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Doctor Who’s Sacha Dhawan on his battle with anxiety: ‘Getting help was scary’

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The young actor, who plays the timelord’s arch enemy The Master, talks about his meaty new role in The Great – and reveals how he overcame the fears that used to leave him traumatised in his trailer

When Sacha Dhawan learned that he had been chosen to play Doctor Who baddie The Master, it should have been one of the biggest moments of his career. “My agent was ecstatic,” he says. “The BBC was ecstatic.” But he wasn’t. “I put the phone down and I couldn’t have felt more sad,” he says. The reason, it turns out, is a hidden battle with anxiety that Dhawan had been waging for years.

The opportunity was too big to pass up, but at that moment its scale felt insurmountable. “I would be the first British South Asian actor to play The Master,” he says. “So I’m kind of representing not only the Whoniverse but my community. And if I fuck this up, they aren’t going to be casting another South Asian actor for this.”

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How should you deal with stress in 2020? First, ditch the meditation

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I thought I didn’t have a lot on, but working up disaster scenarios in my head – from the US election to the pandemic – is the closest I have come to a full-time job

The first Wednesday in November is national stress awareness day. This year, that was the day after the US elections – a sick joke that the organisers probably didn’t appreciate, being too busy taking a bath and exercising. It fell in the middle of a week dedicated internationally to stress awareness, which ends today, so you should feel free to go back to the way you were before: highly stressed, but oblivious to it. If you want to remain aware, the best way to measure cortisol, the primary stress hormone, is by analysing your earwax, according to a study from University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. Alternatively, you could count the unbelievably stupid things you have done over the week.

Stress is usually considered an internal state – something amiss in your mind that the outside world can perceive only by a slight squeak to your voice. (You might also get a stress headache, but only in an advert.) Really, though, it is where the internal meets the external that the problems start. Distraction, absent-mindedness: none of this would matter if you hadn’t also put your phone in the fridge and your wallet in the bin and set loose a cascade of errors to which catastrophic lateness for everything is the background music.

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Lockdown having ‘pernicious impact’ on LGBT community’s mental health

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UCL and Sussex University study finds younger people confined with bigoted relatives the most depressed

The coronavirus lockdown has provoked a mental health crisis among the LGBTQ community, with younger people confined with bigoted relatives the most depressed, researchers found.

A study of LGBTQ people’s experience during the pandemic, by University College London (UCL) and Sussex University, found 69% of respondents suffered depressive symptoms, rising to about 90% of those who had experienced homophobia or transphobia.

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Coronavirus: how to cope with anxiety and self-isolation – video explainer

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The coronavirus pandemic is causing increased stress and anxiety, particularly people with existing mental health problems, practitioners and campaigners have said. The behavioural psychologist Jo Hemmings has been talking through how to cope with these feelings and offering advice to those who have a fear of isolation

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‘My mother-in-law called me Walter White’: how magic mushrooms rescued me from grief

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After our daughter’s death I was overwhelmed by pain and anxiety. Microdosing home-grown mushrooms helped me cope

It was spring when my wife’s waters broke, three months early. We rushed to hospital, terrified. If our daughter arrived now, she might not survive. If she did, she would probably be plagued by lifelong health problems. Jo spent the next four days in hospital, while we prayed labour wouldn’t begin. But the night after we returned home, Jo’s contractions started and we raced back to hospital. Straight away, a foetal monitor was placed on her tummy. The brisk heartbeat we had been following so closely in the previous days was gone. Our daughter had died.

The train of our life was shunted on to a parallel track. We could see the train we were meant to be on pulling away, passing the milestones – the due date, introducing the baby to our family, the first smiles. But ahead of us now lay despair, guilt, a funeral, photos of our precious girl that some family members could barely bring themselves to look at, and support groups where every story would be more heart-rending than the last. There is no right way to deal with losing a baby, but I would call my coping strategy unusual: I became obsessed with growing magic mushrooms.

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Exercise helped with my anxiety – but I became obsessed. Therapy was the answer

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It wasn’t until I had a back injury that I realised how extreme my gym habit had become – and admitted that I needed help

The first time I went for a run as an adult, I was at university and had been deeply depressed for several months. I managed a minute before I had to walk, but, I told myself, a minute was a start. I went every day and, as the weeks passed, I ran further, for longer. The impact was immediate – even after that first jog I felt a rush of achievement, of hope. And it was cumulative: every run that followed made me feel stronger, physically and emotionally. Then, one day, many months later, I realised I was not depressed any more.

As the years passed, I gradually branched out from short jogs into runs of more than two hours. I went to circuit classes and step classes, interval training and personal training, core sessions and legs, bums and tums sessions. I dropped two dress sizes and developed stomach muscles.

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Crooked Hillary or Unhealthy Hillary?

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Donald Trump, shortly after securing the GOP nomination, attached a name to Hillary Clinton, just as he did to his opponents throughout the primary process. She was Crooked Hillary, based on a lifetime of playing fast and loose with finances, ethics, and honesty.