The confidence queen

There is life after anxiety

Last year, Caroline Foran’s debut, ‘Owning It’, charted how crippling anxiety caused her to crash out of life in her mid-20s. It proved to be a bestseller, and that success forced her into the public situations that she had most feared. She tells Sarah Caden how testing her selfbelief and feeling her fatalism led to her new book, ‘The Confidence Kit’, as well as the determination to be a ‘chill bride’ for her wedding this year

Last year, Caroline Foran had her first book published. The title was ballsy and imagination-catching. Owning It: Your

Bullsh*t-free Guide To Living With Anxiety wasa book written from the heart, about Caroline’s own, almost-lifelong experience of anxiety that was, at times, utterly crippling. The book was a huge success, a bestseller, an honest account that saw her receive endless correspondence from readers who could not believe how accurately she conveyed their own experiences.

The next thing, obviously, was to write another. Caroline didn’t want to pluck something out of the air that she knew nothing about, but she’d ‘done’ anxiety already. Except that’s not really how anxiety works, she came to realise. Anxiety — or confidence issues, or fear of failure, or any gnawing self-doubt — doesn’t just get solved. It doesn’t go away, you know?

And if writing a successful debut taught Caroline anything, it’s that there is no cure for what she wrote about in Owning It, but there are ways of coping. And that is what she writes about in her new book, The Confidence Kit: Your Bullsh*t-free Guide To Owning Your Fear ,a handbook for coping rather than curing.

“Before I wrote Owning It,” Caroline explains, “I was really struggling. When it came out, I was at the point of owning the anxiety; still having it, but handling it really well. And then the book came out and I was thrown into this new level, and this new world of going on TV and going on radio, and being asked to do public speaking.

“And I was, like, ‘But I have anxiety, I wasn’t making that up!’ It was like I moved into this next step of, OK, I can function now and I can go out to a party without feeling like I need to run away, and I can leave my house, and I can not panic about what might happen — but these demands were much more than that, these things were: hold on! I’m not there yet!”

Maybe Caroline felt that she wasn’t there yet when it came to media appearances on television or radio, or for standing up in front of people to promote her book, but in most cases, she felt the fear and did it anyway. She found strategies that kept her anxiety in check when necessary, and she pushed her boundaries in terms of her ability and self-belief, and she did it because she wanted the book into which she’d poured her heart and soul to do well.

Entirely at odds

Caroline experienced, in a big way, how ambition and anxiety can co-exist. She also came to understand, in a greater way than before, how one’s appearance of confidence and capability can be entirely at odds with how it feels inside.

“There’s a quote from this guy Zig Ziglar,” Caroline says. “He was this motivational speaker and he wrote this

book, Over the Top, and its subtitle is: Moving from Survival to Stability, from Stability to Success, from Success to Significance.

“So I felt like I’d gone from ‘survival’ to ‘stability’,” she continues, “and now I could go a little bit further. So when I was thinking of another book, I realise that what was holding me back was fear of failure, probably brought on by my anxiety.

“I realised that so many people are struggling with fear of failure and lack of confidence, and I thought that what I was going through, trying to get up on [TV3’s] The

Tonight Show and trying to trying to hold my own with really experienced journalists, and trying to make it and just going through experiences thinking, ‘I can’t do that’, was exactly what a lot of people go through.

“I also discovered that decision-making is really powerful to give you a boost of confidence, and that indecision breeds fear. Because once I made a decision to do something, the anxiety actually went away.”

Her new book is not just for anxiety sufferers, Caroline says. It’s about how fear is something we all feel, about how crises of confidence happen to everyone; but it’s how we deal with both that matters. “It’s not about being fearless, because that will never happen,” says Caroline. “Nor is it about being confident all the time. It’s about what you do with those feelings and how you manage them.”

Of course, Caroline doesn’t seem like a person who has issues with confidence or anxiety. That is not how any of this works. In fact, it’s not how life works in general — we’re all paddling frantically under the water — and it’s foolish to imagine that anyone is really gliding through life.

By most of our estimations, Caroline seems like a woman who’s doing well in life. She has her bestselling debut, obviously, and now a second book to her name. She’s a successful freelance journalist; she runs interiors website Gaff with her friend Jo Linehan; she conducts a career that involves putting herself front and centre and performing, to a certain extent. She isn’t hiding in a garret or doing a job that commands no attention. Caroline is a go-getter, even if the going and the getting both scare the life out of her.

She reads like a contradiction, but then, aren’t we all contradictions, really?

There was nothing in Dubliner Caroline’s childhood that specifically caused her to become an adult with issues around anxiety and confidence, she says. She is the younger of two children — six years younger than her

brother — who had a happy and stable upbringing, with a lot of love and encouragement.

“I think my anxiety is partly nature and a bit of nurture,” she says. “My parents are so amazing and so supportive, but I think, back then, there was less awareness that when a kid is saying they don’t feel well, that it was more than something wrong with their tummy. But I wouldn’t have known either that I was anxious; for years it just seemed like there was something wrong with my tummy.”

Caroline was a super-good little girl, she explains. Her brother was very clever and she sort of followed his lead, working diligently at school, always doing her homework, never getting in trouble. But, as she acknowledges, these habits can play out differently for girls and boys. Girls have a tendency to believe that they must be good or the world will come to an end, and that can be very hard on them. It certainly seems to have taken its toll on Caroline, and for years of her childhood and teens, that manifested as stomach issues.

Think positive

“For years,” she explains, “the obsession was with fixing my stomach. It was always a bit dicky, but in secondary school, in the summer of fourth year into fifth year, things went really bad. I was told I had IBS, which is an umbrella term with no clarity, but now, looking back, I know it was pure anxiety. I missed a lot of fifth year in school. All tests came back fine, and I didn’t connect the dots to anxiety.

“I don’t know what I was anxious about,” she says with a laugh, even though she knows that there doesn’t have to be something specific.

She talks about anxiety and fear as normal responses to stresses and stressful situations, and then explains that she might have been more susceptible to them and less well armed with skills to manage them. I wonder if she thinks that age-appropriate coping mechanisms might have changed things for her.

“In general,” Caroline says, “I think the world is only coming to terms with the idea that it’s OK to think about things not going perfectly. For a long time, the message was just to ‘think positive and that’s what will happen’. I remember when I’d be worried about, like, getting sick if I went out for dinner — people would say, ‘Well, if you think like that, then it will happen’. There’s so much pressure to be positive, and for some people, that can really go against them.”

Caroline had what she would consider a good period from her mid-teens to her mid-20s, doing a good Leaving, going to university, kicking off her career in journalism.

“Things were good until around March or April 2014,” Caroline says. “I’d been doing pretty well, my stomach was good, and I was working in entertainment.ie. I’d worked my way up to editor, and was confident in that role, and I was back and forth to London interviewing movie stars, and it was, like, ‘If I can do that, I can do anything’.”

Then Caroline changed jobs and while it was a great move on paper, it just felt all wrong to her. She felt like the rug had been pulled from under her and, physically, some of the stomach symptoms of her childhood returned.

“I know changing job is something people do all the time, but I started to feel sick again and it took a long time for me to work out why. I was doing the whole, ‘Get a grip, Caroline, you’re fine’, but I think I just pushed myself too far, and my stomach was trying to communicate my unhappiness. And I didn’t take any

“I shut down physically, I wasn’t functioning, I was having a lot of panic attacks, and I was producing so much cortisol that I didn’t sleep for three or four months”

notice until I was doubled over on my couch in agony.”

Caroline gave up work and, as she describes it, just cut herself off from the world. “I shut down physically,” she says. “I wasn’t functioning, I was having a lot of panic attacks, and I was producing so much cortisol [hormone, known as the ‘stress hormone’] that I didn’t sleep for three or four months. If I slept, I woke up with aches and pains all over. I was crying all the time. Even worse than the constant panic attacks was the disappointment in myself, and my weakness, that followed them. And everyone else was out there in the world thriving in these high-pressure situations.” You thought, I interject. “Yes, I thought,” she says. “That’s how it seemed to me.”

Caroline’s parents played a huge part in her recovery, which happened slowly. She talks now about that desire for the quick fix, which she read about all over the internet. She read about other people mending themselves in a single step and beat herself up for not being like them. She turned everything on herself and felt worthless.

Caroline’s parents were amazing thorough it all, she says, as was her boyfriend, now her fiance. They are getting married later this year, despite all her insistence, at her lowest ebb, that he should break up with her. They had just moved in when she had her 2014 breakdown, she explains, and despite having no experience of anxiety, he hung in there when other guys in their 20s might have decided it was too much hassle. It was always their issue to get to grips with, not just Caroline’s.

Slowly, with help and support and proper intervention, Caroline moved from breakdown to ‘survival’, with ‘stability’ still a bit further down the road. She got back into working as a journalist and steadily rebuilt her life to the point that she was thriving as a freelancer, developing the Gaff website and writing Owning It.

Then, the success of Owning It pushed Caroline into a lot of public situations that would have paralysed her a year earlier. She wanted to rise to the occasions, and for the most part she did, but she was cognisant that too much might set her back.

“Just a while ago,” she explains, “I gave a talk to 350 people on a big stage, and a couple of years ago, I couldn’t even have come and met you for coffee. So I know I’ve come a long way and I’ve been constantly pushing my comfort zone out, but I have to stay mindful too of how far I’ve come and allow myself to go back to my comfort zone, too. It’s about finding the middle ground. You have to push, but if you’re only always pushing yourself from the frying pan to the fire, and never pulling back, then you burn out.”

Caught up in perfection

Caroline manages herself carefully in order to keep well enough to continue pushing out her comfort zone. She is determined to remain a “chill bride” during the run-up to her wedding day in Dingle, where her parents relocated in retirement.

“I always say you have to be so wary of social media, but especially when it comes to weddings,” says Caroline. “Like, you know that what you are seeing is the highlights of their behind-the-scenes and it can be so toxic. You see these gorgeous wedding photos and think it was the most perfect day, and then you hear, ‘Oh, she was a bitch to deal with’, or that there was so much drama at that wedding.

“I’m trying not to get caught up in that pressure, but people kind of expect it now. Someone said to me recently, ‘You haven’t posted much about your wedding recently’. Sort of accusingly. I mean, what is that? Who even gives a shit about other people’s weddings, really? Everyone’s so caught up in perfection, but I try to be as much myself as I can. If you put out perfection, it’s too much to live up to.”

So Caroline has all the big decisions in place, and she has decided that the small stuff is not worth worrying over. She occasionally “goes down a Pinterest rabbit hole” and worries that she should be having ivy garlands and whatnot, but tries to stop scrolling when it stops being fun.

A “professional worrier” at heart, Caroline knows that she could easily turn her wedding into a focus of all her fears and anxieties, but she is determined not to. And the techniques she explores and explains in The

Confidence Kit come into play in this instance. “My personality is always finding the worst-case scenario, but I realised that instead of trying to always think positively, which just didn’t feel real to me, I would kind of sit down and think of all the worst things that could happen. It’s a tool that some people call fatalism, but I prefer ‘fear hacking’.

“Like, ‘What if I do that and everything goes to shit?’ Instead of thinking, ‘Oh no, don’t think that way’, instead I face that fear, and ask ‘What does my fear need to hear to feel OK about this?’ It worked for me, and I felt that this was something, and then it became the second book.”

It became the second book, but it also became a way of life for Caroline, one that brings her to a good place, a second-book place, a planning-podcasts and Gaff-world-domination place. Even a chill-bride place.

“Just because I’ve written about confidence doesn’t mean I’m the most confident person in the world,” she says. “I’m more wary than most that you would assume such a thing. And it would be wrong to put that impression out there, not least because then I’d have to live up to it.

“I understand my fear and anxiety so much more, but I’m not sorted,” Caroline says, “But I am doing fine.”

No bullsh*t, just fine, thanks. ‘The Confidence Kit: Your Bullsh*t-Free Guide To Owning Your Fear’ by Caroline Foran, is published by Hachette Ireland