Owning It: The Anxiety Podcast

You can support this podcast by sharing it with a friend or signing up to my Substack. Read my personal essays on Substack here with a 20% (lifetime) listener discount. Join Dr Russell Kennedy and I to talk about anxiety as alarm in the body, the root causes of it, why he believes all anxiety is separation anxiety, how much anxiety is driven by nature or nurture and so much more. His book The Anxiety Prescription is out now.

This week my guest is a psychologist and psychotherapist Dr Natalie Cawley who has just released a book called Just About Coping. It reads like a drama but it's her story, her own experience of anxiety while becoming a qualified mental health professional, and what she's learned from both sides of the therapy room. It's peppered with really helpful anxiety advice and Natalie makes it so easy for you to grasp the concepts. If you've ever been curious about the person behind the qualifications and the expertise, this is a great place to start. We talk about so many things from her story, to the impact of breakups and why these in particular can result in so much anxiety, experiences like dissociation, cognitive distortions, attachment and more. We also talk about how one type of therapy worked for me but didn't yield any results for her. You can support this podcast by sharing it with a friend or signing up to my Substack. Read my personal essays on Substack here with a 20% (lifetime) listener discount.

Welcome back to a brand new season of Owning It. Join me and author/scientist/lawyer Anu Gupta to talk about the role and relationship between bias and anxiety, the impact bias on us and others and how it's at the root of almost every social and cultural issue we experience. His book, Breaking Bias, is out now. You can support this podcast by sharing it with a friend or signing up to my Substack. Read my personal essays on Substack here with a 20% (lifetime) listener discount.

This is a solo episode. I struggled to fully explain it in the title but it's dedicated to a close friend currently in the trenches of health anxiety with plenty of additional anxiety on top. It's everything I want her to know. Everything that might help her ride this wave including a step by step roadmap for overcoming anxiety. If you would like to support this podcast you can do so by subscribing to my Substack (with 20% off for all pod listeners) at this link.

This is one of the hardest areas of anxiety to get on top of: health anxiety. Whether it's general health anxiety where you're prone to spiralling about what could or might go wrong with your health, or you suffer with OCD or body related conditions such as Trichotillomania, this episode is probably the most helpful thing you could listen to. With anxiety expert and CBT therapist Kimberley Quinlan (she's huge on Instagram here), we go through it all, if it can be overcome and how to manage something that feels so all consuming. We also talk about self compassion and how to get it right. Sign up to my Substack Substack, with 20% off forever at this link.

On this episode of the series I am joined by international bestselling author and reporter with The New Yorker Charles Duhigg who wrote The Power of Habit. Here we talk about his new book Supercommunicators and how to crack social anxiety with some really practical tools and insights.

Join me with guest Laura Guckian, life coach, host of 'Momfessions' and creator of Mind Mommy Coaching as we talk about postpartum anxiety, which, for her, was so significant she decided to check herself into a psychiatric hospital. How did the anxiety show up for her? What does a hospital level of mental health support look like? We talk about whether the problem for new mothers is the lack of support or the skewed perception of early motherhood that pervades social media. Read more of my essays on motherhood over on my Substack, with 20% off forever at this link.

This week I have a powerful episode with Terence Power, co-host of the super successful Talking Bollox podcast. We try to unpack his experience of anxiety, growing up in an environment affected hugely by poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, crime and violence. How did he cope? How did he come out the other side? Was anxiety behind all of it? Terence talks through his story with such impressive vulnerability, it will no doubt help another young person in a similar position.

My guest for this episode is the mega bestselling author of Dopamine Nation and her name is Dr Anna Lembke. She's an American psychiatrist and Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University. She is a specialist in the opioid epidemic in the United States. Here we talk about the relationship between anxiety, pleasure and pain. The pleasure pain balance and the way in which we move toward pleasure to solve anxiety and it works short term, but for many of the things we do to - such as picking up our phone to scroll - we only create more anxiety longterm. we talk about medication, addiction - and not just addiction to drugs or alcohol. We talk about our intolerance of boredom, the importance of what she calls 'pro social shame' and her go-to self binding strategies. Sign up to my Substack and get 20% off forever at this link.