Feel better, ye fretter
IF worrying was an Olympic sport I’d be the ultimate champion– the Sir Chris Hoy of cyclical stress.
Since I was a kid I’ve brooded, fretted and agonised about anything and everything.
I vividly remember lying awake, aged about nine, making a mental list of my worries: PE at school, the shame of only having a second-hand Brownie uniform, how to stop my parents arguing.
Decades later, after counselling for depression, I traced back my anxiety to the constant insecurity I felt as the child of an alcoholic father.
It hasn’t stopped me worrying and over-analysing stuff though – I’ve just learned to control it a bit better.
Like actress Samia Longchambon, 35. The star, who plays Corrie’s Maria Connor, chose Mental Health Awareness Week to reveal she’s been battling anxiety since she was 11.
She posted on Instagram saying: “Anxiety isn’t something that goes away; it’s something you learn to control.
“It is something that comes and goes with me, but when it’s there it’s awful and all consuming.”
But she added: “I love that the stigma of mental health is finally being broken, that people are opening up and realising you’re not alone.” You’re certainly not.
CHANNEL 4 is making a new series on “what it really means to be a woman in 2018”.
Another achingly-worthy PC lecture on the proper kind of feminism, then?
Nope – because C4 have signed the gloriously gobby writer, director and Waynetta Slob star Kathy Burke to present it. Fab. Gimme, gimme, gimme! The producers gush that Kathy will be “celebrating wondrous women and asking For a survey has revealed Brits spend more than two-and-a-half hours every day worrying needlessly.
We lie awake for almost five hours each week fretting about work, weight, the weather, lack of wi-fi and wiffy armpits.
A dead phone battery, body odour and personal appearance are the biggest fear for millennials while over-55s dread losing keys, missing the train, running out of loo roll or leaving the door unlocked. And all this angst – six-and-a-half years of our lives – is usually pointless. The poll was carried out for a new TV show – Jon Richardson: Ultimate Worrier – in which comedian Jon, 35, untangles his own idiosyncratic worries with guests.
Jon, pictured left, suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and believes humour can help others deal with their anxieties.
He says: “To be able to generate laughter out of talking about things other people find difficult is so cathartic.
“Just the act of laughing for an hour, I hope, will make you realise that the world is fundamentally a funny place.”
So we may still saddle ourselves with pointless worries, but we don’t have to let them spin out of control.
Sharing them with others can break the cycle and make us champions of our own mental health.
the questions others simply wouldn’t have the grace to get away with.” Grace, eh? Posh actress Helena Bonham-carter once moaned to Time Out mag that “if you’re not pretty and you’re working class you have an easier time”.
So Kathy replied on the letters page: “As a life-long member of the nonpretty working classes, I would like to say to Helena Bonham-carter: shut up you stupid c***.”