By Owen O'Kane
Breaking anxiety's addictive grip through compassion
Subject
Themes
A therapy group in an NHS anxiety service once began to improve, chapter by chapter, week by week, only for an unexpected unease to settle over the room. Getting better, it turned out, felt frightening. One participant, a recovering cocaine addict named Daryl, put it bluntly: letting go of his anxiety felt harder than coming off cocaine. That single admission cracks open a central argument: anxiety is not simply something that happens to a person, it is something a person can become quietly, unknowingly addicted to, dependent on the short-term sense of safety it provides even as it maintains a lifetime of suffering underneath.
A therapy group in an NHS anxiety service once began to improve, chapter by chapter, week by week, only for an unexpected unease to settle over the room. Getting better, it turned out, felt frightening. One participant, a recovering cocaine addict named Daryl, put it bluntly: letting go of his…
Arriving in 2025, this work sits within a wider cultural moment often described as an anxiety epidemic, a period marked by the lingering aftershocks of a global pandemic, economic instability, ongoing wars, political polarisation and a climate crisis that together have normalised chronic uncertainty…
At the centre of the entire argument sits a single, uncomfortable idea: fear is not simply something that happens to a person, it is something a person can become dependent on. Anxiety promises safety, and that promise, however uncomfortable the feeling that delivers it, proves powerfully addictive.…
A central move throughout the work is to personify anxiety as a distinct part of the self rather than an abstract diagnosis, one with a personality, motives and a name, whether 'your anxious self' or, in its behavioural guise, 'the rascal.' This framing is not merely rhetorical. It rests on the…
Personal development runs through the entire recovery process as an uncomfortable but necessary demand: the person struggling with anxiety must accept a share of responsibility for maintaining it. This is not framed as blame. Anxiety often begins in genuinely threatening circumstances, war zones,…
Overcoming anxiety's addictive grip is presented not as a single act of willpower but as a series of deliberate disruptions across five interlocking systems, body, emotions, thoughts, behaviours and energy, each requiring its own method of interruption. The unifying principle across all five is that…
Hope is treated throughout not as vague optimism but as an active, measurable counterforce to fear, one described by a Jesuit priest as knowing that morning always arrives, that nighttime is never permanent. This definition matters because it refuses the common dismissal of hope as woolly or…
Sitting in a local library trying to write this very book, a wave of anxiety creeps in. The mind wanders to the people nearby, wondering about their lives, a classic act of avoidance and procrastination. Soon the stomach churns and a heaviness settles across the chest. Anxiety is described as an…
Addictive substances or activities, whether alcohol, food, gambling or sex, are not inherently bad in themselves. What matters far more is the relationship a person forms with them, the dependency built as a means of coping, escaping or avoiding inner pain. Every person struggling with addiction,…
The focus shifts squarely onto the reader's own role in maintaining anxiety. Jolene, a client, reacted with fury when told how attached she was to the processes sustaining her anxiety. She insisted she hadn't chosen to be anxious and resisted any suggestion that she bore responsibility for its…
Attention turns to the physical epicentre of anxiety, the body, where the alarm state of fight, flight or freeze must be deactivated before other work can succeed. The body's threat response is compared to an office alarm system: lights flash, sprinklers spray, doors close, all in response to a…
Attention moves from the body to anxiety's emotional dimension. Emotions, it is argued, should be felt before thoughts are challenged; skipping the feeling stage is compared to boarding a plane without going through security, since 'it just doesn't work that way.' Emotions are framed as…
Attention turns to thinking as another engine of anxiety. The mind generates sixty to eighty thousand thoughts daily, roughly seventy per cent of them negative, and the amygdala, once triggered, floods the mind with stories designed to minimise danger. A friend with a fear of flying demonstrates…
A new part of the anxious self is introduced: behaviours, nicknamed 'the rascal,' a mischievous, boundary-testing figure not unlike a toddler or a loveable rogue. Unlike the more hidden inner worlds of emotion and thought, behaviours are visible and detectable within seconds, whether in a therapy…
The final component of the anxious self is energy, described as the overarching force behind body, emotions, thoughts and behaviours. A personal admission opens the discussion: resistance to a therapist's suggestion of having control issues, having relied on control since childhood to survive…
Having covered every part of the anxious self, focus shifts to realistic preparation for the road ahead. A blunt disclosure opens the chapter: anxiety will never fully disappear, and there is no arrival point of being permanently sorted. The anxious self is described as a lifelong companion, an…
The final chapter opens by acknowledging the discomfort the book may have stirred, insisting that irritation or frustration along the way is a sign the work landed rather than failed. Two remaining themes are addressed directly: hope and the future. Hope is presented not as vague positivity but as a…
By Owen O'Kane
Subject
Themes
A therapy group in an NHS anxiety service once began to improve, chapter by chapter, week by week, only for an unexpected unease to settle over the room. Getting better, it turned out, felt frightening. One participant, a recovering cocaine addict named Daryl, put it bluntly: letting go of his anxiety felt harder than coming off cocaine. That single admission cracks open a central argument: anxiety is not simply something that happens to a person, it is something a person can become quietly, unknowingly addicted to, dependent on the short-term sense of safety it provides even as it maintains a lifetime of suffering underneath.