Many people confuse the two types of anxiety - even the professionals, says Joshua Fletcher
. Not just those day-to-day worries about a big meeting or an exciting first date, but the type of all-encompassing world-ending fear that prevents you from leaving the house ; the sudden, debilitating surges of adrenaline ; or obsessive attempts to exorcise trauma from the body .
I remember when I was training to be a therapist, a lot of the tutors were obsessed with theories around trauma, and what it means, and being stuck in your body. As someone with OCD, that’s where one of my themes came from – an idea that there’s trauma ‘stuck’ in my body.
I also think it’s a mistake to treat anxiety as though it is something to fix, because that implies it’s caused by you doing something ‘wrong’. I’m very passionate about the notion that you’re not ‘broken’ in the first place. What really helped me was understanding that anxiety was causing me to produce loads of adrenaline, so I would see the worst case in everything, and view life through the lens of fear. I would wake up with a load of cortisol – the stress hormone – in my body which is why I feel like my heart is palpitating when I wake up – it’s trying to deal with this influx.