The mince pies appear in September, which tells you something. By mid-December the Christmas aisle has become a wall of tins, selection boxes and glittery wrapping paper, and you’re standing in front of it holding a pack of gold baubles you don’t especially want, with your shoulders somewhere near your ears. That low-grade dread the kind that follows you from aisle to aisle is Christmas anxiety doing what it does best: arriving before you’ve even had a chance to decide how you feel. If you’ve ever wondered why certain situations set it off, understanding your anxiety triggers can help you see the pattern more clearly. Prefer to listen? Hit play below. Everyone else manages this bit. Just pick something. It’s tinsel. You put the box in the basket anyway. Leaving it on the shelf felt like admitting something. When Christmas Becomes a Performance Review Somewhere along the way, Christmas stopped being a few days in the calendar and turned into a performance review. Is the house festive enough? Is everyone getting along? Are you enjoying it? Are you enjoying it properly? We’ve turned it into one more thing we’re supposed to be good at. The adverts have been selling one version of December since before most of us could read glowing windows, a table full of people who actually like each other, a family that laughs at the same moment. Nobody ever shows the person hiding in the bathroom for five minutes of quiet. So, we measure our own December against a scene that never existed, and we come up short. The Double Layer of Christmas Anxiety Here’s the part I think gets overlooked. For people who live with anxiety, the pressure to enjoy Christmas can become its own source of anxiety, separate from whatever was making you anxious in the first place. You can walk into December reasonably steady about the money, the relatives and the changed routine and still find yourself bracing over whether you’re enjoying it enough. That’s a second worry, sitting on top of the first. And it’s a strange one, because what you’re worried about is a feeling you’re supposed to produce on demand. It’s also the one time of year when a whole country is expected to feel the same thing at the same moment. Anyone whose inner weather is different notices the gap straight away and tends to assume the gap is theirs alone. It isn’t. Plenty of people are standing in that aisle, or at that table, quietly doing the same arithmetic between what they feel and what they’re meant to feel. Mind has written about how Christmas affects mental health for exactly this reason because it’s far more common than the season lets on. Routine, Family and Money The first layer is real too, of course. Your routine is the first thing to go. The structure that quietly holds your weeks together, the same wake-up time, the same walk, the same dull Tuesday, gets swapped for days with no shape at all. For people who hold it together all year by staying structured and busy, that loss of routine can tip quickly into high-functioning burnout before they even notice it’s happening. Meals at odd hours. A bed that isn’t yours. Noise. People in your space, or you in theirs, for far longer than anyone planned. For an anxious mind, that isn’t a rest. It’s a great many unknowns arriving at once. Then there’s the family, everyone turning up with their history on. The question that gets asked every year. The relative who has opinions about your job, your plate, your relationship status. The old roles you slide back into without noticing, as if you’d never left. And money, underneath all of it, doing sums in the background while you smile through the unwrapping. The Dread That Arrives Before December The dread often arrives long before the day does. It starts in October, with the first advert, the first group chat about who’s hosting, the first mention of a gift list. By the time the twenty-fifth comes round, you’ve already rehearsed it in your head a dozen times, and in most of those rehearsals something goes wrong, or you don’t feel what you should. Now put an instruction on top of that: be happy. Be grateful. Make memories. I should be enjoying this. Look at everyone else. Why can’t I just be normal about it? It’s one day. Other people would love to have this. That second voice is the sneaky one. It sounds reasonable. It even sounds kind. But all it does is stack guilt on top of the anxiety, so now you’re anxious and ungrateful, and apparently you’re meant to sort out both before the pudding comes out. It isn’t a character flaw. It’s what happens when a feeling becomes a requirement. Feelings Don’t Follow Instructions One thing I learned from my own experience of anxiety is that feelings rarely respond well to being forced. You can’t order yourself to feel festive any more than you can order yourself to fall asleep. If you’re looking for a starting point beyond getting through the season, there’s more on how to overcome anxiety when the pressure lifts. The harder you try, the further away it gets. Good Is Enough Magic is a big word. It sets the bar very high, and it quietly suggests that anything less is a failed Christmas. Good is a much smaller word, and I think it might be enough. Good can be small. A cup of tea that’s actually hot, because for four minutes nobody needs anything from you. A film you’ve seen nine times. Ten minutes in the car with the engine off before you go in. A relative who says something unexpectedly kind in the middle of an otherwise ordinary afternoon. Nobody puts those on a card. They still count. And a good moment doesn’t cancel out a hard one and a hard one doesn’t cancel out a good one. You can be anxious
Dating anxiety often starts the moment things go right. You are standing in your hallway with one shoe off, still smiling, the evening still warm on your skin. He kissed you at the door like he had been thinking about it all night. He laughed at the story you always tell badly. He said, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” and you believed him. Rather listen? Press play below. Then the smile slips. By the time the second shoe is off, your mind is somewhere else entirely. It is three weeks from now. His replies have become shorter. “I’m busy,” he says, and you are being so reasonable about it that you could cry. None of this has happened. The date was good. It was better than good, and that is when the dread arrives. It surfaces afterwards, in the quiet, when there is finally something to lose. It was too good. Don’t get used to this. Let him prove it. How Dating Anxiety Triggers the Brace That is what bracing for impact looks like. Nothing has gone wrong, yet your body takes up the defensive position anyway: shoulders raised, jaw set, attention narrowed to finding the exit before you need it. You check your phone twice before you have brushed your teeth. You reread his last message, searching for a negative tone that is not there. If your body goes on high alert without an actual threat, take a look at our guide on how anxiety triggers drive sudden emotional reactions to see why your nervous system reacts before your mind can catch up. Capable Everywhere Else, Anxious in Love Here is the part that feels confusing. In most areas of your life, you handle things well. You know your worth. You walk into meetings at work and command the room. You make hard decisions, pay your own way, and turn down opportunities without losing sleep. Friends bring you their problems because your life looks steady. Nobody who knows you would describe you as insecure. That gap between outer competence and private worry is common—read our practical strategies on navigating high-functioning anxiety to understand why holding everything together takes such a quiet toll. Then you meet someone you actually like, and a different person appears. She is hesitant and watchful. She wonders whether she is too much, or not enough, or whether he will spot the flaws she tries to hide. She overanalyzes the timing of every text. She delays her replies on purpose so he will not see how much she hopes this works out. She calls herself easy-going, using the phrase as a quiet plea. You barely recognize her because you rarely have to be her anywhere else. Why Insecurity Lives in the Wanting The pattern depends on one condition: attraction. Men you feel lukewarm about get the confident version of you, the one who can take or leave a second date. The men you truly want get the anxious version. This insecurity does not run through your entire personality. It lives in the wanting, staying quiet until there is an outcome you care about losing. That reaction is not a personal failure. Bracing feels like protection, much like an umbrella feels like shelter. But an umbrella keeps the rain off. Bracing lets the cold rain in early, then leaves you standing soaked in it. The Double Cost of Anticipating Heartbreak Consider the cost of that mental rehearsal. If things do end eventually, you will grieve. That is a natural part of loss. But when you brace, you also grieve the loss in advance, in small instalments, over weeks of imagined scenarios in the car, in the shower, and at 2 AM with your phone face up on the pillow. When an ending arrives, you pay for the pain twice. The hurt does not shrink because you saw it coming; the emotional bill is simply doubled. Holding that defensive posture also drains your physical energy. After a week of pleasant dates, your shoulders ache, and your sleep is thin. You might write off the exhaustion as the usual fatigue of modern dating. In reality, you have been sprinting a marathon in a room where nobody is chasing you. While you stay preoccupied with an imaginary future version of him, the real person in front of you goes unnoticed. You miss the man who sent a simple morning text, or the one who remembered your niece’s name. You spend your best energy planning a dignified exit from a connection that has barely started. Where the Habit Started Many women learned early that closeness must be tightly managed. Be careful. Be sensible. Keep your cards close, and never be the one who cares more. That guidance came from mothers, aunts, well-meaning friends, pop culture, and memories of watching other women get left behind. Some of it was sensible advice meant for genuine danger. Over time, that survival reflex gets applied to everyday situations, including a decent partner who simply asks about your family. You tell yourself: If I expect the worst, it cannot catch me off guard. Except it still can. You can spend months preparing for a breakup and still feel knocked sideways by something you did not anticipate. Being ready was never the same thing as being safe. Rejection happens. People lose interest, and messages occasionally go unanswered. Sometimes an ending happens on schedule and hurts as much as you feared. That pain is real whether you rehearsed it or not. What you can control is whether you put yourself through that distress once or twice. The Root Cause of Dating Anxiety An insecurity that appears in dating and nowhere else usually points to an older wound. At some point, you learned that wanting someone left you exposed, that affection was conditional, or that people leave easily. For a deeper look at where these protective instincts start, read our breakdown of how childhood trauma shapes adult anxiety and keeps past fears alive in present relationships. That wound existed
It’s 7 am and you’re checking your balance for the third time since you woke up. There’s no bill due today. No transfer waiting to bounce. The number is fine. It was fine when you checked it at 11 pm last night, too. You know this. You check it anyway. This one’s available as audio too. Press play below. Just to be sure. Sure, of what, exactly? That’s the part nobody asks. The Kind That Doesn’t Match the Numbers We talk about money anxiety like it’s always about debt. Overdrafts. Direct debits that don’t quite line up with payday. And sometimes it is exactly that, a real, present-tense problem with a number attached to it. But there’s a version of money anxiety that has nothing to do with the number. You can have enough. You can have more than enough. And still feel your chest tighten every time you open the banking app, like you’re bracing for bad news that isn’t there. That kind doesn’t get talked about, because it doesn’t make sense on paper. If the money’s fine, what’s the problem? The APA’s Stress in America survey has found year after year that money ranks as the top stressor for Americans across income levels, not just for those in financial difficulty. Where the Checking Actually Comes From The problem is that anxiety isn’t only responding to your current bank balance. It’s responding to something older. A body that learned, a long time ago, that money could disappear without warning. Through a job loss, a divorce, a parent who ran out before the month did. And never quite unlearned it. The checking isn’t about information. You already have the information. The checking is a ritual. Like going back to check the front door is locked even though you remember turning the key. You’re not really looking for new information. You’re looking for the feeling of being safe. Research backs this up. A study by van den Hout and Kindt (2003) found that repeated checking actually erodes your confidence in your own memory, even when your memory is accurate. The more you check, the less sure you feel, which makes you check again. If that pattern of scanning for danger feels familiar beyond money, this piece on anxiety triggers and emotional reactions goes deeper into why your body responds before your mind catches up. What if this is the month it isn’t enough? That thought doesn’t need evidence to show up. It just needs a quiet moment, the 7 am kind, before the day’s noise starts, to slide in. Why It’s So Hard to Say Out Loud Here’s what makes it harder to talk about: admitting you’re anxious about money when the money is actually okay can feel like a confession of ingratitude. Like you’re not allowed to feel unsafe unless the numbers prove you should. So, people don’t say it out loud. They just keep checking. Keep tightening. Keep a private, silent inventory of every outgoing payment, as if vigilance were the same thing as security. It isn’t. Vigilance is just anxiety wearing a practical coat. What You Inherit Without Being Told There’s a cultural piece here too, and it’s worth naming plainly. Many of us were raised by people for whom money genuinely was precarious, where a bad month wasn’t hypothetical, it was Tuesday. That precarity gets passed down, not as a lesson exactly, but as a nervous system setting. You inherit the hypervigilance even when you don’t inherit the circumstances that made it necessary. That inherited nervous system setting often traces back to childhood. This article on childhood trauma and adult anxiety looks at how early experiences wire us for threat long after the original threat has passed. You can be the first person in your family with a stable income and still flinch at a card declining in a supermarket queue, because some older, wordless part of you is still calculating what that would have meant for someone before you. It’s not really about the card declining. It’s about what declining meant, once, to someone whose safety depended on it not happening. Nervous Systems Don’t Run on Timelines I should be over this by now. That’s usually the next thought, and it’s the least fair one. Nervous systems don’t run on timelines. They run on evidence, repeated slowly, over years. Which is a different thing entirely from “you should know better.” What the Anxiety Actually Tells You I’m not going to tell you the fix here, because I don’t think there is one that fits neatly at the end of an article. Building a different relationship with money, one where the anxiety doesn’t drive, is slow work. It’s not linear, and some days the checking will win even when you know better. That’s not failure. That’s just what it looks like to unlearn something your body learned for good reason, once. If you’re wondering what that unlearning process actually looks like day to day, this post on what getting better from anxiety looks like is a good place to start. What I will say is this: the anxiety is not a character flaw, and it’s not evidence that you’re bad with money. It might be evidence of something closer to the opposite. That you learned, early, to pay very close attention to the thing that kept you and the people you loved afloat. That kind of attention doesn’t switch off just because the circumstances did. Questions Worth Sitting With You don’t need to answer all of these. One might be enough: The sentence about money I heard most growing up was… The money situation I never want to find myself in again is… What I’m actually looking for when I check my balance is… The number in my account that I secretly think would finally make me feel safe is… If any of this landed somewhere familiar- the checking, the flinch, the sense that this isn’t really about arithmetic, the How Did I Get Here? journal
Did I actually do that, or did I just not stop long enough to notice I hadn’t? Reading not your thing today? Press play below. That thought arrives at odd times. Loading the dishwasher. Sitting at a red light. Ticking the last box on a list that took you four days to finish, on schedule, without complaint. You did it. Everyone would say you did it well. So why does finishing feel the same as failing? This is what high-functioning burnout sounds like not a cry for help, but a quiet confusion about why doing everything right still feels like running on empty. The version of burnout we recognise — and the one we don’t We’ve built one image of burnout and treated it as the only one. The version where someone stops answering emails. Cancels things. Cries in a car park. Cannot get out of bed. That version is real, and it deserves everything that’s been written about it. But it’s not the only shape this takes. If you’re waiting for that version to arrive before you take yourself seriously, you might wait a long time. For a lot of people, the collapse never comes. Something else does instead. What high-functioning burnout actually is It helps to say plainly what burnout actually is, because the word gets used loosely. The World Health Organisation classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical diagnosis, but a syndrome resulting from chronic stress that hasn’t been managed. In practice, it’s what happens when the demand on you outpaces what you have left to give, for long enough that your system starts running on reserves it doesn’t have. The cost shows up as depletion, not danger: flattened motivation, a kind of emotional numbness where things that used to matter stop registering, a growing distance between you and the parts of your life you’re still technically doing. That’s different from anxiety, even high-functioning anxiety, which tends to run on threat. The sense that something bad is coming. The vigilance, the racing ahead to head off disaster. Burnout doesn’t feel like danger. It feels like nothing left. You can have both at once, but they’re not the same problem, and treating one as the other means you end up managing the wrong thing. If you’re unsure where the line falls for you, it can help to look at what’s actually triggering your emotional reactions before deciding which one you’re dealing with. A single afternoon, from the outside Picture it in a single afternoon. You do the school run without incident. You sit through the client call and sound sharp, prepared, on top of it. You remember to defrost something for dinner. You reply to the message that’s been sitting for two days, meaning it this time. From the outside, that’s a person managing everything well. What doesn’t show: the four minutes you sit in the car afterward before going inside, not upset exactly, just unable to make yourself move. What happens when one hard afternoon becomes every week On its own, that’s just a hard afternoon. The actual danger is what happens when this stops being one afternoon and becomes the shape of every week for a year. Sustained depletion doesn’t stay contained. It shows up in your body first, usually sleep that doesn’t restore you even when you get enough of it, an immune system that stops bouncing back, a low-grade physical exhaustion no amount of rest touches. Then it starts leaking into the relationships you thought were separate from work. The patience you don’t have left for your kids by 6 pm. The partner who says you feel far away even when you’re in the room. The flatness that used to switch off after a hard day and now doesn’t switch off at all. For some people this settles into a long, grey plateau of years of being technically fine and never actually well. For others, it’s not a plateau. It’s a delay. The collapse everyone recognises still arrives eventually, just later and often bigger for having been postponed. A health scare. A relationship that ends because you were absent inside it for so long nobody clocked it until it was over. The four minutes in the car aren’t the danger. They’re the early notice on a bill that comes due one way or another, if nothing changes. High-functioning burnout and the frightening capacity to keep going Burnout, for you, might not look like stopping. It might look like an unusual, almost frightening capacity to keep functioning at a level that should, by rights, cost you something. Researchers have a name for this pattern Jesús Montero-Marín’s work on burnout subtypes calls it the “frenetic” subtype, where people cope with overload by working harder rather than pulling back. But something’s off. I just can’t point to it. That sentence, or something close to it, is the one people say. Not “I’m burnt out.” Not even “I’m exhausted,” exactly. Exhaustion suggests you’ve slowed down, and you haven’t. What they describe instead is a kind of quiet static. A sense of being one step removed from their own life while still doing every single thing required of it. They describe irritability that arrives without warning and leaves just as fast. A flatness in things that used to feel good. And then, almost immediately, the doubt: Maybe I’m being dramatic. Maybe this is just what busy feels like. Why functioning gets mistaken for fine This is where culture does some of its worst work. We’ve inherited a very particular story about what a person in crisis is supposed to look like, and functioning was never part of that story. Functioning reads as fine. Productive reads as fine. If you can still show up, smile in the group chat, remember the birthday, hit the deadline, the story tells you that you must be coping. So, you keep the doubt to yourself, because who’s going to believe you’re struggling when you look, from the outside, like someone thriving?
There’s a particular kind of tired that doesn’t come from your own life. You didn’t lose anyone. You weren’t there. And yet you scroll through the news, and something in your chest tightens anyway. You close the app, then open it again ten minutes later because some part of you can’t stop checking. Prefer to listen? Hit play below. You tell yourself: “I’m fine. I’ve got my own things going on. This isn’t even my tragedy. I have enough of my own to carry. So why can’t I put the phone down?” There is a name for what you’re feeling. It’s called collective trauma. What Is Collective Trauma? Collective trauma is a wound that doesn’t stay limited to the people who directly experienced an event. It spreads through communities, generations, and sometimes across the entire world. It doesn’t ask permission before it reaches you. It doesn’t require you to have been physically present. We often think of trauma as something private — something that happens to an individual, something they carry and process in isolation. That understanding isn’t wrong. But it was never designed to hold everything. When The World Experiences The Same Wound 9/11. Covid. Gaza. Grenfell. The list continues to grow. Each event leaves behind something that extends beyond the people who were directly there. After 9/11, an entire generation changed how it moved through airports and cities. During COVID, the whole world learned to feel uneasy at the sound of a cough. And today, millions of people are watching suffering unfold in real time through the same phones they use for everyday life. That collision — horror existing beside ordinary routines — creates its own kind of emotional burden. This is collective trauma doing what it does. It settles into people who were never physically near the event. The Guilt Of Feeling Too Much “I should be able to compartmentalise this better than I am. Everyone else seems to be getting on with their day.” This is usually when guilt appears. It disguises itself as logic. It tells us there is a correct amount of emotion we should have. That continuing with normal life means something is wrong with us. But feeling affected does not mean your nervous system is failing. It means it is responding. Why We Feel The Pain Of People We Have Never Met Humans were never built to witness suffering from a safe distance and feel nothing. We are wired for connection. When you see a child pulled from rubble or watch a hospital line stretch around a block, some deep part of your nervous system reacts. Because throughout most of human history, there was no clear separation between “us” and “them.” The suffering of people nearby affected the entire community. That wiring has not disappeared. We have simply created a world where we are exposed to suffering constantly, while being expected to process it alone. Individual Healing For Collective Wounds This is what quietly wears people down. Not only the events themselves. But the loneliness of trying to process something enormous with tools designed for individual problems. A breathing exercise can help. But it was never designed to carry the weight of a pandemic, genocide, or years of repeated public tragedy. When the wound is collective — shared, historical, and structural — but the healing process is entirely individual, something feels incomplete. We end up managing our own nervous systems alone for a pain that was never meant to be carried alone. Why Community Matters In Healing Many people who work in trauma and healing have argued that some wounds cannot be repaired behind closed doors. Throughout history, humans did not process grief privately. They did it together. Through community. Through rituals. Through shared experiences. Through the presence of people who could hold what one person alone could not. Community was not simply comforting. It was part of the healing process itself. What Happens When The Wound Is Bigger Than The Room? This raises an uncomfortable question in cultures built around individual responsibility: What happens when the pain is larger than the space where we are expected to heal? There is no simple answer. There is no single exercise that can make collective grief disappear. Some things remain unresolved — within individuals, communities, and entire societies. We are still learning how to hold grief that belongs to no single person but somehow belongs to everyone. Your Reaction Is Not A Malfunction The tightness in your chest when you close the app is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is not oversensitivity. It is your nervous system responding exactly as it was built to respond. The challenge is that we now live in a world that gives us more suffering to witness than humans were ever designed to absorb. Writing Down What Feels Too Heavy For feelings that do not have a single clear origin, writing can become a place to begin. Not to solve everything. Not to force an answer. Just to move the feeling from inside your body onto a page, where it can become easier to understand. A few sentences to begin: I made the How Did I Get Here? journal for the kind of anxiety that doesn’t have a single, tidy origin; the kind with roots that stretch further back than your own life, into things you witnessed and absorbed and never quite put down. It isn’t asking you to explain the feeling or resolve it in one sitting. It’s just somewhere to start putting it into words. You can find it at Samanthia Clarke’s Shop. Sometimes The First Step Is Simply Being Witnessed Sometimes the most honest thing you can do with a feeling that feels too large is acknowledge it. Write it down. Share it. Allow it to exist. Not because you need to fix it immediately. But because some things become lighter when they are no longer carried alone.
There’s a version of anxiety triggers and emotional reactions that gets talked about a lot: crowded rooms, loud noises, certain smells that pull you straight back to somewhere you didn’t want to go. Those are real, and they matter. But they’re also the easier ones to identify because they often come with an obvious label. You feel the reaction, you can usually point to the source, and at least you understand what happened. This one’s available as audio too. Press play below. But there’s another kind of anxiety trigger that often goes unnoticed. The ones that look like nothing from the outside. A phone call.A form letter.Someone saying “no” in a certain tone. And yet, something inside you suddenly becomes very quiet or very overwhelming, and you cannot immediately explain why. These moments are worth paying attention to because anxiety triggers and emotional reactions are often connected to deeper experiences, memories, and patterns beneath the surface. They are not necessarily more dangerous than obvious triggers, but they can reveal something important about how your mind and body respond to certain situations. When a Small Moment Doesn’t Feel Small “Why did that upset me so much? It was such a small thing.” Sometimes, it wasn’t actually a small thing. It just wasn’t the thing it appeared to be. A present-day moment can carry the emotional weight of something much older. The reaction may not be about what is happening right now, but about what the situation represents based on past experiences. The trigger is often not the event itself. It is the meaning your mind and body attach to it. The Trigger Behind Being Told “No”: Powerlessness Being told no by someone who has control over something you need can create a reaction that feels much bigger than the situation itself. A landlord.A doctor’s receptionist.A case worker.Someone behind a desk with a form in front of them. On paper, “no” is just a response. But if you have experienced situations where you needed help and were refused—not because you were wrong, but because helping you was inconvenient—that rejection can connect with something deeper. The pain is not always the word “no.” The deeper trigger is the feeling underneath it: The trigger is the specific kind of powerlessness that feels familiar. The Trigger Behind Being Disbelieved: Losing Trust in Your Own Reality There is a difference between someone disagreeing with you and someone refusing to believe you. Being disbelieved can affect people deeply because it challenges something fundamental: trust in your own experience. The painful question underneath may be: “I know what I saw. Why do I feel like I’m the one being questioned?” When someone with authority dismisses your experience, it can bring back memories of other moments where your perspective was ignored or invalidated. The anxiety is not always about the current disagreement. It can be about whether you are allowed to trust yourself. When Good Things Become Anxiety Triggers Not every trigger comes from something negative. Sometimes anxiety appears when life starts going well. Progress.Stability.A period of unexpected calm. For some people, peace feels unfamiliar. Their body has learned to associate calm with waiting for something to go wrong. Instead of relaxing, their nervous system stays alert, almost checking: “Is it safe to feel comfortable yet?” The anxiety does not appear because they do not want happiness. It appears because safety itself feels unfamiliar. Anxiety Triggers Are Often About History, Not the Present Moment Many triggers do not appear on typical lists. They are not always about the environment around you. They are about: A trigger is rarely only about what happened. It is often about what that moment represents. You Don’t Have to Solve Every Trigger Immediately It can be tempting to analyze every reaction and search for the exact reason behind it. But not every trigger needs to be immediately identified or explained. Some patterns reveal themselves slowly. Some experiences take time to understand. And some things may never become completely clear—and that is okay. The goal is not to solve yourself like a puzzle. The goal is to become more aware of your reactions with kindness. Replace Self-Criticism With Curiosity When something small affects you strongly, it is common to respond with thoughts like: But those thoughts usually create more shame instead of understanding. A more helpful question is: “What did this remind my body of, even if my mind hasn’t figured it out yet?” You do not need an immediate explanation. You do not need to justify your feelings. Understanding begins with noticing. Using Journaling to Understand Your Patterns Journaling can help you observe your reactions without judging them. When anxiety appears, focus on what happened immediately before the feeling started. Not the explanation you would give someone else. Just the facts: The goal is not to find a lesson instantly. The goal is to recognize patterns over time. Reflection Prompts If you want to explore your reactions further, consider these questions: 1. The Moment That Affected Me The moment that unsettled me more than it seemed like it should have was… 2. The Feeling Underneath What made me feel powerless in that moment was… 3. The Story I Created The story I told myself about what happened was… 4. Anxiety During Good Moments A time I felt anxious even though things were going well was… 5. A Kinder Response One kinder way I can respond to myself next time is… Conclusion: Your Reactions Are Information, Not Evidence Against You Your anxiety does not mean something is wrong with you. Your reactions are signals. They may be showing you where something mattered, where something hurt, or where your body learned to protect you. Instead of asking: “Why am I like this?” Try asking: “What is this reaction trying to tell me?” Compassion does not require you to have everything figured out. Sometimes, it simply means learning to listen to yourself with more patience.
Most articles about anxiety are written for the version that feels manageable: the pre-exam nerves, the mild flutter before a big meeting, or the moment of uncertainty before something important. The usual advice is familiar: breathe deeply, go for a walk, light a candle. But when we talk about how to overcome anxiety, we need to recognise that not every experience of anxiety looks the same. The kind I want to discuss is not the occasional worry or everyday stress. I mean the kind that has a countdown attached to it. The kind where you can feel the seconds moving toward the moment when anxiety stops feeling like anxiety and becomes something else: panic. A full system shutdown. If you know that feeling, you already know a candle is not going to touch it. Rather listen? Press play below. The Moment Anxiety Becomes a Crisis There is rarely a clear thought in that moment. Everything happens too quickly. It begins as a feeling that drops through you — cold, immediate, and overwhelming — before your mind has caught up enough to explain what is happening. If you could freeze that moment and examine it, the thought underneath might sound something like: Is this it? Is this the moment I lose control? But during the experience itself, you do not get to analyse it. You simply feel it arrive. That feeling is the real crisis. Not the trigger. Not even the fear itself. It is your body deciding, faster than thought, whether you can trust yourself to survive the next few minutes. And once your body has made that decision, much of the usual advice falls away because it was written for a calmer version of you. My Experience With Anxiety and Panic I learned this properly in 2006. I was still recovering from Myoclonus, a muscle and nerve condition my body had developed after years of intense anxiety. I had reached a point where the worst of the anxiety had mostly stopped. Then, within the same few months, I was arrested for something I did not do, charged with racially aggravated criminal damage, and told my case was being escalated to Crown Court. There is no greater test for someone who has spent years learning not to panic than being locked in a police cell alone, waiting to discover whether all the work you had done to recover was real. I want to be honest about what actually helped me through that moment. It was not a candle. Four Strategies That Helped Me Regain Control 1. Using Grounding Language Instead of Positive Affirmations The first thing was changing the language I used with myself. Not traditional affirmations. Not: “I am safe and loved.” Something much simpler. Something closer to an instruction. Short. Flat. Almost boring. And that was the point. Panic feeds on drama and frightening thoughts. A calm, repetitive sentence gives panic nothing to hold onto. 2. Slowing My Breathing Before Panic Took Over The second strategy was learning to slow my breathing before I actually needed to. There is a difference between: By the time I was sitting in that police cell, I was not waiting to see whether panic would arrive. I was already slowing everything down because I knew I might need to. 3. Separating Facts From Fear-Based Stories The third strategy came from Cognitive Behavioural Techniques I had practised years earlier. The skill was learning to separate what happened from the story my mind created about what happened. For example: Fact:My neighbour smashed her own window and blamed me. Story:This will destroy my life and prove I never really recovered. The first statement is information. The second statement is a fear-driven prediction. The ability to separate the two is not something you suddenly learn during panic. It needs to be practised beforehand, so it is available when pressure arrives. 4. Training My Body to Remember Calm The fourth strategy was quieter. It was the physical work I had already done. Regular Alexander Technique sessions were not a cure, but they were training. They taught my body what it felt like to be: So when everything around me became chaotic, my body already had a memory of calm to return to. Fear Does Not Have to Mean Losing Control None of these strategies made fear disappear. I still felt fear. The difference was that fear no longer automatically meant losing control. Those became two separate things. And separating them was the real skill. The Unique Pressure Black Women Often Carry There is another layer to anxiety that is rarely discussed. Black women are often expected to be: So when panic arrives, another fear can appear: “I am not supposed to be like this.” “I am not allowed to fall apart.” That expectation does not make anxiety smaller. It simply makes it harder to admit. Building real strategies begins with accepting that needing support is not a failure of character. Finding Your Own Anxiety Tools I am not going to tell you these four things will stop anxiety from ever becoming overwhelming again. I do not believe that is true for anyone. What I do believe is that you can discover what works for you on ordinary days, before you are facing an overwhelming moment. Being prepared does not mean never feeling afraid. It means already knowing what you can reach for when fear arrives. For me, it was: Your tools may look completely different. The goal is not to find a universal solution. The goal is to discover your own. The Difference Between Who I Was and Who I Became The version of me who once could not choose a sandwich at lunchtime without anxiety spiralling is the same woman who later sat in a police cell facing a criminal record for something she did not do — and did not panic. That difference is real. It is not magic. It is practice. Practice done long before you need it, so it is already there
Relational Trauma Recovery begins with understanding the exhaustion that comes from being close to someone while still feeling the need to protect yourself. It is a particular kind of tired that comes from bracing for something to go wrong, not because anything is wrong right now, but because your body hasn’t caught up with the fact that it is finally allowed to relax. You know the feeling. Someone goes quiet on a text and your stomach drops before your mind has even worked out why. Someone raises their voice, just a little, and you’re already rehearsing an apology for something you haven’t done yet. You may call it being sensitive, being difficult, or being too much. But what you’re actually describing may be a nervous system that learned, a long time ago, that closeness wasn’t always safe. You can also listen to this one. Press play below. Understanding Relational Trauma Relational trauma doesn’t always look the way people imagine trauma should look. Sometimes it comes from a single painful event. More often, it develops through repeated patterns in a home or relationship where love felt conditional, unpredictable, or difficult to navigate. It can leave you questioning yourself: These questions often appear because we were taught to view our reactions as the problem rather than recognising the experiences that shaped them. Relational trauma is real. It is not a personality flaw, a weakness, or something you should have simply outgrown. It has a pattern, and with patience and intentional work, it can change. The Hidden Pattern: Enmeshment One pattern that often goes unnoticed in relational trauma is enmeshment. Unlike obvious forms of harm, enmeshment can look like love. It may appear as deep care, constant involvement, or wanting to be close. But underneath, there is often a lack of emotional boundaries. Enmeshment can look like: When this happens, you may grow up unsure where you end and someone else begins. How Enmeshment Shapes Relationships Imagine a teenager who comes home with a school report showing two Bs. By most standards, these are good results. But instead of feeling proud, she walks home preparing how to explain herself. She already knows her mother may focus on why the grades were not higher, what she could have done differently, or what the results say about her future. The teenager learns to manage her mother’s feelings before she even processes her own. Years later, that pattern may continue. She becomes an adult with her own career, home, and relationships, yet she still feels responsible for keeping her mother’s emotions stable. A missed phone call becomes a problem. A different opinion becomes a betrayal. A personal choice becomes something that threatens the relationship. This is enmeshment: a boundary problem disguised as closeness. When Love and Control Become Confused In an enmeshed relationship, one person’s feelings can become another person’s responsibility. Love and control become tangled together, making it difficult to recognise the difference. You may notice this pattern in: Enmeshment does not stay in one relationship. It teaches you what closeness feels like, and you may unknowingly recreate the same patterns elsewhere, even when they take away your sense of identity. Healing Does Not Follow a Perfect Formula Although this article is called “5 Tips for Moving Past Relational Trauma,” healing does not happen through a simple checklist. Recovery is rarely a straight line. There may be times when you feel stronger and more secure, followed by moments when an old conversation, phone call, or situation brings back familiar reactions. That does not mean you have failed. It means your nervous system is learning a new way of experiencing safety. Change often happens gradually, through small moments of awareness and practice. Rebuilding Trust Slowly Rebuilding trust—whether trust in another person or trust in yourself—takes time. It requires learning to: Healing is not about reaching a point where nothing affects you. It is about developing more space between what happens and how you respond. Reflection Questions for Understanding Your Patterns Take some time to reflect on these questions: Where Did My Understanding of Wisdom Come From? My earliest sense of where wisdom came from in my family was… Who Made Me Feel Safe? The people I have felt safest with were the ones who… Which Feelings Were Labelled as “Too Much”? The reactions I was taught to see as “too much” were… Where Do I Notice Enmeshment? Where I notice enmeshment showing up in my own life is… What Does Healthy Trust Look Like? Trusting someone slowly, instead of all at once or not at all, would look like… Continue Your Reflection Journey If these questions brought something up for you, the How Did I Get Here? journal explores these ideas further. It includes exercises and information about different types of trauma, organised into sections that gradually build on each other, so you are not left trying to understand everything alone. If this reflection has been meaningful, having a dedicated journal may help you continue exploring your story. Find it here: Samanthia Clarke Shop
There’s a version of getting better from anxiety that gets talked about a lot. The one where you do the work, find the right therapist, take the right steps, and then one day you wake up and you’re better. Lighter. Free. That’s not quite how it goes. What actually happens is quieter than that. And messier. And honestly, more interesting. Prefer to listen?Listen to the full article below. The thing about anxiety is it doesn’t announce itself as anxiety For a lot of women, it arrives as something else entirely. Exhaustion. Irritability. A sense that you’re always just about to drop something. A constant low-level hum of what if that you’ve lived with for so long, you stopped noticing it was even there. Is this just who I am? Or is this something I could actually change? Research consistently shows that women are diagnosed with anxiety disorders at roughly twice the rate of men. But that statistic doesn’t tell the whole story. It doesn’t capture how differently anxiety tends to show up, and how differently it tends to get dismissed. Men’s anxiety often gets read as stress or anger. Women’s anxiety gets read as oversensitivity, hormones, or just personality. We internalise it. We manage around it. We become very, very good at functioning while quietly falling apart. That competence is a kind of armour. It’s also part of why getting better takes longer than it should. Getting better from anxiety doesn’t look like a before and after One of the things nobody tells you is that recovery isn’t a straight line. It’s not even really a line. It’s more like weather. Some days are clear. Some days the fog rolls back in and you think: have I actually changed at all? Or have I just been waiting for the next thing to knock me sideways? I spent years managing anxiety that had taken a real physical toll on my body. Muscle tension, nerve symptoms, and eventually a full panic attack. At my worst, I couldn’t choose a sandwich at lunch without the decision sending me into a spiral. That’s not hyperbole. That was my reality. The work I did, journaling, mantras, cognitive behavioural techniques, Alexander Technique, attending a spiritual movement, none of it produced a dramatic turning point. What it produced was something more like a shift in the floor beneath me. Small. Gradual. Barely perceptible, until one day I looked back and realised I was standing somewhere different. The test of how far I’d come didn’t arrive quietly. It arrived as a police arrest, a Crown Court charge for racially aggravated criminal damage for something I hadn’t done, and nine hours in a cell with nothing but my own thoughts for company. And I didn’t panic. Not because I’d become someone who didn’t feel things. But because I’d done enough work that my feelings no longer had to run the show. I knew how to breathe. I knew how to slow my thoughts down. I had practised, enough times, the difference between fear and danger. This is frightening. And I will get through it. That’s what getting better actually looks like. Not the absence of hard things. The ability to meet them without dissolving. The layer that doesn’t get talked about enough For women, and particularly for Black women, there’s another dimension to this that sits underneath all the clinical language about anxiety. We are often raised to be capable in the face of everything. To hold it together. To not burden others with what we’re carrying. Asking for help can feel like admitting weakness, especially in communities where strength has been both a survival strategy and a source of pride for generations. If I fall apart, who holds everyone else together? That question has real weight. It’s not irrational. It comes from somewhere. But it’s also one of the quieter ways anxiety keeps its grip, by convincing you that your distress matters less than your function. Getting better, for a lot of women, starts with the uncomfortable act of believing that your inner life matters. That you are not just a vehicle for getting things done. What the work actually involves There isn’t one path. What worked for me won’t be the same as what works for you. But some things tend to be true across the board. The work is usually slow and usually unglamorous. It’s a journal entry at 6am when you haven’t slept well. It’s a mantra you’ve said so many times it’s started to sound like your own voice. It’s choosing, on an ordinary Tuesday, not to let your thoughts run unsupervised. It’s also about building something to lean on before you need it. The women I’ve seen move through anxiety most meaningfully aren’t the ones who found a single solution. They’re the ones who built a quiet infrastructure of techniques, practices, and people that held them when life did what life does. Because life will do what life does. The test of your progress won’t come in a controlled environment. It’ll come at 5am, or in a courtroom, or in the middle of an ordinary conversation that suddenly isn’t ordinary anymore. And when it does, you’ll find out what you’re made of. Not in the dramatic sense. In the quiet sense. In the sense of: I’ve been here before. I know what to do. If any of this resonates, if you’re somewhere in the middle of the work and wondering whether it’s adding up to anything, the How Did I Get Here? journal was written for exactly that place. It’s for anyone sitting with anxiety that has roots, that has history, that needs more than a breathing exercise. You can find it at Samantha Clarke’s shop. If you want to sit with this a little longer Writing isn’t a fix. But it is a way of slowing your thoughts down enough to see them clearly. If something in this piece stirred something in you, you might try putting it somewhere. When I
Think about that for a moment. Childhood trauma and adult anxiety are often deeply connected. The anxiety you carry, the hypervigilance, the overthinking, and the way your body tenses before anything has even gone wrong didn’t arrive from nowhere. It was built carefully, over time, by a younger version of you who needed a way to get through something that felt impossible to survive. That’s not weakness. That’s extraordinary resourcefulness. The problem is that the system she built doesn’t know the danger has passed. It’s still running. Still scanning. Still doing the job it was made to do, even when you’re sitting in a perfectly safe room on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday with nothing to be afraid of. Why am I like this? Why can’t I just relax? That question, and the shame underneath it, is where a lot of women live. But it’s the wrong question. The right one, the one that actually leads somewhere, is gentler. What was I responding to? And what did I need that I didn’t get? Prefer to listen?Listen to the full article below. The connection that doesn’t get made often enough There’s a significant body of evidence linking childhood experience to adult anxiety. Not the dramatic, obvious kind of childhood trauma, though that matters too, but the quieter, more common kind. The home where feelings were never talked about. The parent who was physically there but emotionally somewhere else. The child who learned that her needs were inconvenient, that love came with conditions, or that the world was fundamentally unpredictable. These experiences don’t have to be extreme to leave a mark. What matters is whether they were too much for you to process at the time. Whether they left you with a nervous system that learned: the world is not reliably safe. I need to stay alert. That lesson, absorbed young enough, becomes the way you move through the world as an adult. It can look like a constant low hum of what if that never quite goes quiet. It can look like people-pleasing so automatic you barely notice you’re doing it. It can look like difficulty trusting that good things will last, or a persistent sense that you are too much, or not enough, or somehow different from everyone else who seems to be managing just fine. Maybe I’m just a worrier. Maybe this is just who I am. It isn’t. It’s who you learned to be. And that distinction matters more than it might seem. The shame that lives inside anxiety One of the cruelest things about anxiety rooted in childhood experience is the shame it carries. Because you grew up. You became a functioning adult. You have a job, relationships, responsibilities, maybe even children of your own. And yet underneath all of it, there is this thing that won’t leave. This persistent fragility that you hide, manage, work around, and quietly despise yourself for. I should be over this by now. Other people had it worse and they’re fine. What is wrong with me? Nothing is wrong with you. Whatever happened, whatever form it took, shaped a nervous system that is still, all these years later, doing exactly what it was trained to do. The shame belongs to the experience, not to you. And one of the most significant shifts that can happen in healing is the moment those two things come apart. When you stop asking what is wrong with me and start asking what happened to me, something changes. The ground shifts. Not dramatically. But enough. What it means to have grown up too carefully on Childhood Trauma and Adult Anxiety For many women, the childhood that produced their anxiety wasn’t chaotic or obviously harmful. It was simply one where they had to be very, very careful. Careful not to upset anyone. Careful not to take up too much space. Careful not to need things that made other people uncomfortable. Careful to read the room, manage the mood, smooth things over before they escalated. That carefulness was a skill. It kept the peace. It may well have kept you safe. But it came at a cost that tends to show up in adulthood, as anxiety, exhaustion, difficulty knowing what you actually want, and a deep-seated belief that your needs are somehow less valid than everyone else’s. If I just keep everything together, nothing will fall apart. That belief is still running. Still costing you. And it started long before you were old enough to question it. The work of becoming safe in yourself Healing from childhood-rooted anxiety isn’t about going back and fixing the past. It’s about updating the system. Teaching your nervous system, slowly, with patience and repetition, that the old dangers are no longer here. That you are no longer a child who needs to brace for impact. That you are allowed to exist without earning it. This kind of work often benefits from professional support, a therapist who understands trauma, who can help you connect then to now, and who won’t rush you toward resolution before you’re ready. In the UK, trauma-informed therapy is available through both the NHS and private practitioners, and approaches like EMDR and somatic therapy can be especially helpful when anxiety lives in the body as well as the mind. But some of the work is quieter than that. It’s noticing, day to day, when the child takes over, when you’re reacting to now as though it’s then. It’s learning to offer yourself the reassurance that nobody offered you at the time. It’s the slow, unglamorous work of becoming a safe place for yourself. That work is not linear. It is not quick. But it is possible. And it is worth it, not just for you, but for every relationship you’re in, and every version of yourself that’s still waiting for permission to exist. If you’re beginning to make sense of where your anxiety comes from, tracing it back, asking harder questions, sitting with things you’ve kept at a distance,
