Everything you need to know about anxiety. Plus, how to make stress work for you.
The Emma Guns Show
Emma Gunavardhana
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2025
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Anxiety is a huge subject yet it's only really in recent years that we've started to accommodate as a very natural and normal emotional state. In the past, being anxious might have been seen as not being able to cope, being sensitive or needing to 'buck up' and 'get on with it'. In fact, you could argue that the world has gone from being fairly intolerant of it to being hyper aware of it.
Dr Tracy Dennis-Tiwary is an expert on the subject and has written an excellent book Future Tense: Why Anxiety is Good for You (even though it feels bad) and it makes an excellent case for reframing your anxiety so you can use it to your advantage.
This conversation was originally recorded in 2022.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, hi and welcome. I am your host, Emiggen-Awardner, and in my nearly 20-year career as a beauty and health writer, I have interviewed a lot of people. |
| 0:14.1 | Supermodels, entrepreneurs, authors, celebrities and doctors, and many of these conversations had a real impact on me and I'd come away feeling |
| 0:21.6 | inspired, excited, informed and really empowered and at the back of my mind I'd always think |
| 0:26.8 | I wish I could just publish the tape so people could really feel that conversation. Well on this |
| 0:32.1 | podcast you get to feel the conversation. I talk with experts, guests and a few friends who I hope |
| 0:37.1 | will inspire, inform and empower you friends who I hope will inspire, |
| 0:37.9 | inform and empower you and maybe also challenge you, whether you're looking for self-help, |
| 0:42.8 | self-improvement, beauty advice, health insights, business know-how, or just some good old-fashioned |
| 0:47.6 | life advice and a bit of a laugh. It's all here. Welcome to the show. Joining me on the podcast is Dr. Tracy, Dennis Tawari, a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist |
| 0:58.5 | who is reframing the way we think about anxiety. |
| 1:02.7 | Anxiety is no joke. |
| 1:04.4 | Let's face it, it sucks. |
| 1:05.6 | And if you've ever had a panic attack, you will know how debilitating this heightened state |
| 1:10.1 | can feel. |
| 1:13.3 | We have so much vocabulary to describe these feelings of unease. When you really think about it, there are so many words out |
| 1:16.7 | there. So everything from feeling unsettled to being overwhelmed or one might describe themselves |
| 1:22.7 | as feeling a bit out of sorts to the much darker sense of dread, then we might say that we're feeling worried about something and that worry might be ongoing, and we also might be able to say, I feel agitated about this situation. So we have so many different words, but for a long time, it was very much a blanket term that we used to describe all of these things, and that was probably stress. So I, for example, was definitely an anxious child, but growing |
| 1:45.4 | up in the 80s and 90s before it was understood as well as it is now, I was labeled as sensitive |
| 1:50.0 | or delicate because labeling an 8-year-old as stressed would have seemed pretty ludicrous |
| 1:53.6 | considering stress of something that only really affected adults. It was something that went hand |
| 1:57.9 | in hand with modern life. And there wasn't really much advice other than get over it, get used to it, or let it go. |
| 2:04.3 | And so it struck me that we've seesawed from a world that was relatively unsympathetic |
... |
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