Making Sense of Anxiety, Self-Doubt & Imposter Syndrome
Practical, compassionate articles for capable people who overthink, second-guess themselves, and feel like frauds despite the evidence. Drawing on CBT, ACT, CFT and EMDR, these posts will help you make sense of what your mind is doing, understand the patterns that keep you stuck, and learn to trust your own experience.
You can’t order your nervous system to calm down. If you’ve ever told yourself to relax while your heart pounded and your shoulders crept towards your ears, you’ll know how little it helps, and how often it makes things worse. The part of you running things in those moments doesn’t take instructions. Your body isn’t […]
In years of CBT, ACT and CFT training, nobody ever taught me why nasal breathing matters, and plenty of the breathing exercises I was taught, inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth, work against it without anyone meaning them to. That’s an odd gap, because how you breathe has a direct line to the […]
Imagine you’re walking through a park and a dog suddenly lunges at you, barking. In that moment your body doesn’t wait for permission. Your attention locks onto the dog and nothing else. Your muscles tense, your heart rate spikes, your breathing changes. Your mind starts generating pictures of what happens next, most of them bad. […]
You’ve been really busy at work lately, you’ve picked up extra responsibilities and there have been a fair few changes, more moving parts than usual, and your mind is finding it difficult to switch off when you leave the office. You’re finding that this is affecting your sleep, that you’re waking in the night and […]
It is a bit after eleven and tomorrow there is a meeting, or a conversation you have been putting off, or a decision that has to be made by Friday. You are not asleep. You are running it on a loop in your mind, every version of how it might go, each one ending somewhere […]
You sent the email at four in the afternoon, but by nine that evening it is still with you. You have read it back twice, maybe three times, hunting for the word that landed wrong. You are picturing the person opening it in the morning and deciding what they make of you. Part of you […]
You have probably tried to reason your way calm. You have talked yourself through it, weighed the evidence, told yourself it will be fine, and noticed the worry barely flinched. That is not a personal failing. It is a clue about how anxiety actually works, and why the usual advice to think positive or just […]
Maybe you cannot switch off, your mind races at night and your shoulders seem to live somewhere up around your ears, and even on a quiet evening your body stays braced for something that never quite arrives. Or maybe it is the opposite, and you feel flat, heavy, and oddly far away, going through the […]
If you live with anxiety, self-doubt, or that nagging sense that you are about to be found out, you will know the sense of certainty that comes with it. The thought does not arrive as a maybe, it arrives as a verdict, a fact or reality that is strangely convincing, and your whole body seems […]
I want to admit to something I got wrong for a long time. For years I did not value the importance and benefit of breathwork. My training had taught me to be sceptical of it, that the use of breathing exercises could actually operate as a safety-seeking behaviour which would slow down the treatment rather […]