Thank you for listening to owning it. If you would like to support the series, the best thing you can do is just tell a friend or better yet share it on social media. If you really, really want to support, you can subscribe to me on Substack where I write a weekly column. Listeners of the pod get a 20% discount forever at carolinephorun.substack.com. Thank you.

Hello, dear listeners. Or maybe it's just my mom and my relatives for now.

Welcome to Owning It, the Anxiety Podcast with me, your host, Caroline Forring.

So if you're familiar with my name already, you will know that I am the author of Owning It,

which is a book that is all about anxiety, how to manage it, and also the author of The Confidence Kit,

which followed on from that. And as the title suggests, it was all about how to build your

confidence. So I have been meaning to this podcast for quite a long time. I've been asked about

different topics to explore. People have

been like, why haven't you done a podcast yet? And the truth is I have just been putting it off,

procrastinating, very intimidated by not just the technology involved. I'm currently sitting here with a

sock over my recorder because that is how advanced I am. And also the fact that I fall into a trap of social

comparison, which I'll explore in more detail, where I'm thinking about all the other podcasts

that exist in the world and thinking, well, I could never do something like that, or mine would

never be good enough, or who would want to listen to me? So in acknowledging the irony of that

and the fact that the podcast is about anxiety, I can't really put it off for too much longer.

So if you've been familiar with the books, thank you and thank you for your messages that you've sent me because I would say on a daily basis now I get a message from someone on different corners of the world telling me that the book

has resonated with them. Either they've just really found it relatable and that I was sort of

speaking their language and the amount of times people say, wow, it's like I'm reading my own words.

And then there's also the people who say, do you know what? I had no idea how shit anxiety can be and I've never experienced it but now I have a

better understanding of my girlfriend or my friend or my family member who struggles with anxiety. So

I had no idea when I brought the book out the extent to which people were actually struggling

and how many people there were who felt just like I did.

...