first, we make the beast beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

I rise at 6am. Non-negotiable. And drink hot water and lemon. I attend to ablutions. Then I slide straight into sneakers and move. I keep a bucket by my door with one pair of running shoes, one sports bra, one pair of green shorts. Every day (non-negotiable) I put on my one outfit (no room for faffing over what I’ll wear) and get out the door. I’ll

And when we veer or we deviate from the truth, anxiety steps in and forcibly tells us ‘Wrong Way Go Back’.

Turns out Chalmers went on to become a leading disrupter in consciousness research.

I often feel anxious. But if I pause and reflect, I realise it could equally be excitement that I’m feeling.

‘You don’t delete a bad habit, you build a new, better one. You feed this new habit, over and over,’ he tells me. He draws a new line, this time parallel to the first clump of lines and thickens it with more and more strokes of his pen. The new thoughts clump, layer by layer, and eventually create a habit that is stronger than the old one. You buil

my insomnia bottomed out after almost a year of trying to get by while berating myself relentlessly for not coping better.

Louise Hay told me when we met, ‘The first hour of your day is crucial.’ She starts by thanking her bed for the sleep (!), stretches, has tea, then goes back to bed to read. Because she likes it. She even made a great bed-head so she can be at the best angle to read.

That said, I do have one trick that I play with a bit. It accesses a sneaky portal to the gut. I flip a coin. But before I uncover it, I monitor my emotions to see what I’m hoping the result will be. There it is, my gut decision, peeking through my head clutter. This technique tricks you into thinking some divine intervention

Try a Think Week. Microsoft’s Bill Gates has one every six months. He extracts himself from his chino-wearing Silicon Valley brethren and heads to a wee cabin on a hill, eliminating all distractions.