Anxiety came into my life in my early forties. It was nothing to do with hitting middle age or having two young children. I was being bullied at work. And the consequence of that period of my life remains with me today in my experience of anxiety. Now I have never had a panic attack. It doesn’t affect in anyway how I live my life. It hasn’t stopped me doing anything that I wanted to do. But it does mean that every morning as I wake I am flooded with worry. These are often work related. What do I need to do? Will I have time to do it? But the worries can be trivial. Ridiculous even. And as soon as I get out of bed they evaporate never to be given a second thought. But they have done their worse. They have kicked me out of bed. The joy of a lie in and the gentle awaking to a new day is a distant memory.

It is a horrible feeling. And it doesn’t matter whether it is the start of the working week or the middle of an exotic holiday. The feelings still assault me every morning. The only time that they went away was when I was recovering from open heart surgery. It was as if my body and mind reached an agreement to suspend the morning terrors to give me time to repair the assault on my body. At the time I thought ‘great’. A silver lining. But as my heart and scar healed the entente cordial was dissolved.

I am able to rationalise my experience. It is all down to cortisol. We all need it to wake up. But whilst others experience it lapping gently round their ankles to ease them into the new day I’m hit by a tusami of emotions. Cortisol is essential to life. But too much of it can cause problems. Inflammation beng one of them. So I have to consider whether it may have caused the damage to my heart. It is a sobering thought that the actions of a despot could have caused me to require a lump of titanium in my heart and a lifetime of medication. 

There is nothing I can do to stop it happening. Whilst there is plenty that can be done to alleviate anxiety once it presents it cannot be stopped from invading those first waking moments. And occassionally, very occasionally, the feelings of dread stay with me beyond the first bathroom visit of  the day. It is a horrible feeling. I can understand how awful it is for those that live with chronic anxiety. It is a physical pain.

So why am I writing about this now? It is as a consequence of reading an article written by Susannnah Constantine, she of ‘What Not To Wear’ fame, describing how her life has  ‘been crippled by anxiety’. Susannah is an award  winning author so far more able to describe her experience which is as follows:

‘Every morning I wake consumed by fear. A totally irrational fear that assaults with the force of a sledge hammer. The snowball of anxiety in the pit of my stomach that melted over the course of the previous day begins to re-freeze. The cold permeates to all extremities, leaving me immobile. As my eyes open, I am racked with guilt. What have  I forgotten to do?  What did I do wrong?’

So I have something in common with a celebrity. I’d have preferred something more glamorous. But it is comforting to know that I am not alone.