LISTEN: Irish author, Caroline Foran, opens up about anxiety, motherhood and finding her way back

Caroline Foran has built her reputation on honesty, empathy, and a refusal to offer easy fixes, and in her latest conversation, with "Natter with Kate and Michelle", she brings that same candor to the realities of anxiety and motherhood. Speaking about her new book, "Everything I Wish I’d Known About Anxiety", she shares the practical steps, hard-earned perspective, and self-compassion that helped her reclaim her life.

There’s a reason why Caroline Foran has become one of Ireland’s most trusted voices on anxiety, and it’s not that she offers easy answers or quick fixes. It’s because, having walked the walk herself, she speaks about the issue with real honesty and empathy that makes people feel understood. 

Through her bestselling books, her hugely popular "Owning It" podcast, and her candid writing about anxiety and motherhood, she has built a community of listeners and readers who return to her work for reassurance, validation, and practical guidance when they need it most.

On the latest episode of "Natter with Kate and Michelle", Foran talks about her powerful new book, "Everything I Wish I’d Known About Anxiety", a compassionate and practical guide for anyone who has ever felt trapped by fear and overwhelm. It’s a book she wishes someone had handed to her at her lowest point.

“This is the most confident I’ve ever felt about something I’ve written,” she says.

She describes the book as a "road map" designed to guide readers step by step through anxiety, beginning with the foundational work that so many people skip in their desperation to feel better.

“So much of what we read about anxiety can feel like an overwhelming menu of options,” she explains.

“When you’re already overwhelmed, that doesn’t help. I wanted to tell people where to start.”

For Foran, anxiety is not something to be “cured” in the traditional sense: “It’s not a flaw or a failing… It’s a nervous system response.”

The goal, she argues, is not to eradicate anxiety forever, but to reach a point where it no longer dictates your decisions, relationships, or daily life.

Speaking about her own experience of severe anxiety in her twenties, Foran describes waking every morning with dread already coursing through her body before she had even opened her eyes. There’s a biological reason for this, she explains, with morning anxiety intricately connected to cortisol, the body’s stress hormone. 

“We naturally get a rise in cortisol in the morning because it mobilizes us and helps us wake up, but in an already anxious nervous system, that cortisol can feel overwhelming.”

As hard as it feels, lying there waiting for it to pass usually makes it worse, she notes. Her advice is to start moving your body. Get out of bed, into a hot shower, wake your muscles up, and eventually, the intensity of the anxiety will start to dial down. 

The impact of social media on nervous system regulation is a strong theme in Foran’s new book, and she admits she still struggles with her own relationship to her phone. Like many people today, she relies on social media as a necessary part of her work, but endless scrolling leaves her with a "fizzing, frenetic energy" and keeps her nervous system in a state of activation. She talks about feeling a shift in energy very quickly when she moves over to her Kindle in the low light of a night in bed.

“A book doesn't spike my stress the way the slot machine of the internet does. It doesn't demand more and more of me. It lets me breathe, it’s a totally different energy.”

Her mother played a pivotal role in helping her survive her darkest years and now a mother herself, Foran sees anxiety from an entirely different perspective. Her young son is autistic with a PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance, now more commonly referred to as Pervasive Drive for Autonomy) profile, and she speaks openly about how difficult the journey to understanding his needs has been. Before receiving his diagnosis, she and her husband constantly questioned themselves, wondering whether they were simply failing as parents.

“I was comparing him to every other neurotypical child and it was killing me. I was comparing myself to every other parent of a neurotypical child, which was destroying me. The worry was two-pronged because there was the sheer stress and strain of getting through the day. You're walking on eggshells, there’s landmines everywhere and his dysregulation was off the charts. We felt like we had no control in our house of the situation. And then, then there's the bigger picture worry of what does this mean? Where is this going? How are we going to manage school? The future. I would jump to the worst case scenario for him.”

While his diagnosis brought grief to Foran and her husband, they also felt relief. She threw herself into trying to learn more about autism with a PDA profile and began to really understand the reasons for her son’s behaviors and responses.

“So much of parenting is built around compliance. We praise children for being quiet, obedient and easy to control, but for PDA children, demands themselves can feel threatening to the nervous system,” she says.

Instead of rigid discipline or reward charts, Foran and her husband have had to embrace a lower-demand, more collaborative approach. The experience has fundamentally reshaped her understanding of anxiety, regulation, and compassion.

At the end of the interview, when asked for the single most important piece of advice she would offer someone living with anxiety, she suggests starting with self-compassion.

“It doesn’t mean loving the situation you’re in. Self-compassion just means creating a little bit of space to accept where you are in this moment. It doesn't mean you're accepting it forever. Meet yourself right there where you are, two feet on the ground and say, I'm going to work with you instead of against you. Even before you figured anything out. You don't have to know why you're anxious…You don't have to know how to come through it. But just to say, here I am. This is my current reality and I have got you instead of turning on yourself and launching an attack on yourself, which is so much easier to do.”

Caroline was speaking to writer friends Kate Durrant and Michelle McDonagh on the books podcast "Natter with Kate and Michelle", produced in association with Bookstation, Ireland’s fastest growing and best value bookseller, and Irish Central, your daily source for all things Irish. You can buy Louise’s new book "Everything I Wish I’d Known About Anxiety" on BookStation. 

Listen to Caroline’s interview on Natter with Kate and Michelle now at Acast or on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to follow us on Instagram @NatterWithKateAndMichelle or Facebook.