Fretters Unite

Navigating two very different flavours of elderly determination is challenging on a good day.  Unfortunately, the past few weeks have had an added layer of pressure to them. Dealing with health and memory issues on one side, and the other in total denial against the physical limits that come with old age—and therefore making it quite clear that help is entirely unwelcome 😳—the background hum of life is pretty loud currently. The way I am feeling is not physical exhaustion exactly. It’s the invisible, emotional whiplash of being pulled in opposite directions while trying to keep everyone afloat. And when life feels like that, it can be easy to lose your footing. But I’ve noticed something through all this: small gentle moments matter more than usual. Not because they fix anything. Not because they make the hard bits disappear. But because they give me a tiny pocket of relief in the middle of everything else. Modern self-help has plenty of wonderful and insightful things to say abo...

We talk a lot about the toll anxiety takes, but rarely about the bizarre little survival toolkit that we assemble along the way. So if you’ve ever found yourself diagnosing a room’s entire emotional climate before your coat is even off, this one is for you. When you live with an overthinker's brain, you pick up a few unexpected superpowers along the way — unfortunately, they aren't the kind of glamorous skills that would land you the host spot on your own TV show or the starring role in an international spy thriller. They are the quiet, accidental ones. The ones you never meant to learn, never asked for, and certainly never signed up for… yet somehow use every single day. It even has its very own invisible job description. Essential skills: picking up on a micro-expression from across the room, sensing a shift in someone’s tone faster than a weather app can predict a sudden downpour, or forensic-level analysis of why someone is having a tiny spiral over an exclamation mark inst...

We all know what physical tiredness feels like — the kind that comes from a busy day, or maybe a long walk, or just spending two hours trying to put together flat-pack furniture that came with missing screws 😳. But anxious tiredness? That’s a completely different beast — and a rite of passage for those of us who unknowingly got lifetime VIP passes to the Overthinkers Club without ever signing up for the newsletter. It’s the exhaustion that greets you before you've even finished blinking, driven by your very own internal clerk who has been working mandatory overtime since 1998 sorting papers no one else can see. It’s not about big, dramatic moments. It’s about the sheer, quiet effort of managing your own mind. Because anxious tiredness isn’t just about being tired. It comes from the constant juggling act going on inside your own head. It’s the quiet effort of staying steady, staying aware, staying safe. It’s the emotional labour of being a person who feels things deeply and antic...

Quite early on, I wrote about sitting down and choosing my core values. They aren't fancy or dramatic—they're just me, and they matter to me. But it turns out it’s one thing to write them down on a list, and another thing entirely to remember them when life starts wobbling. It is wonderfully easy to feel enlightened when you’re sitting on the sofa with a quiet cup of tea, typing neat little bullet points into your tablet. It’s considerably harder when you’re exhausted, overwhelmed, or stuck in a supermarket queue moving at the speed of a Victorian canal boat. In those moments, that neat little document feels about a million miles away. Lately, I’ve stopped looking for some grand, cinematic expression of these words and just tried noticing the tiny ways they actually show up. Not the polished, inspirational versions fit for an Instagram quote, but the lived-in ones. The messy, quiet, imperfect habits I’m trying to practice, just to keep myself from spiralling before lunchtime. T...

I’ve always been someone who scribbles things down—shopping lists, reminders, those thoughts that just wouldn’t leave me alone—but I never wrote on the scale I do now. When I started this blog, it wasn’t for an audience. It was simply because my head felt full and my life felt complicated, and I needed somewhere to put everything: the health scares, the anxiety I had only just recognised as anxiety, and the daily realities of caring for elderly relatives. I’ve always known writing helped me organise my thoughts, but I didn’t expect that writing with intention—not just my usual jumble of notes—would become something that genuinely steadied me. For years, I believed the way I felt was “just me.” I didn’t know it had a name. I didn’t know other people lived with the same constant hum of worry. I didn’t know there were thousands of us quietly navigating the same emotional weather. So when I finally realised I had anxiety —and that it explained far more than I expected—writing became a way ...

Sometimes energy arrives at my house like a surprise visitor on a quiet Sunday afternoon: it lets itself in, makes itself comfortable, and leaves me standing in the hallway wondering what on earth I’m supposed to do with it. And because I have an anxious mind, well, I usually work out how I feel about it immediately: I panic 😳. Because truly, nothing feels quite so suspicious as suddenly realising that I actually fancy getting stuff done today—and worse, that I'm actually looking forward to it. Now, this is not the same as feeling calm. Calm is quiet, gentle, and happy to just sit with a cup of tea. Energy, on the other hand, is loud. It has opinions. It shows up holding an invisible clipboard, looks around the room, and announces, 'Right then. Let’s get moving.' And if you're wired like me, that sudden spark catches you completely off balance. Not because it’s a bad thing, but because being full of enthusiasm feels so foreign. So instead of just going with it, the bra...

There’s a whole category of care that never gets a round of applause. It’s not dramatic, it’s not glamorous, and it certainly doesn’t come with a swelling orchestral soundtrack. It’s the quiet, unglamorous kind—the sort that shows up armed with practical solutions, endless patience, and, in my house, an actual roll of bubble wrap. Living with anxiety alongside an ongoing heart condition means life has had plenty of time to wobble.  I’ve always been a bit of a fretter—even before I had a name for it—but things certainly kicked up a gear a few years ago with a shock diagnosis. What followed was a blur of hospital stays, procedures, and eventually open-heart surgery and a pacemaker. Even now, with regular tests and medication keeping things ticking over, it remains an active journey. Through every stage, it hasn’t just been the physical side to manage; it’s the sheer mental exhaustion of the “what ifs”—the quiet, daily debate over energy, limits, and restrictions. And while we often t...

I was standing in the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil yesterday morning. The sun was coming through the window, the house was completely still, and there was no rush to be anywhere. Then, out of nowhere, I felt a familiar little knot tighten in my chest. Nothing had happened. Everything was completely fine. It wasn’t that the calm felt suspicious, or that I was waiting for things to go wrong. It was just a tiny tug from a time I thought I’d completely moved on from. Like Alexa softly playing music in another room when I hadn't realised it was still switched on. It’s an odd feeling when everything is calm, but a ghost of the difficult stuff is still humming away in the background. Not causing trouble, not ruining the day—just hovering. I used to think feeling like that meant I was undoing all my progress. But lately, I’ve started wondering why an old feeling like that wakes up in the first place . So I wanted to explore that. Not in a heavy way. Not in a clinical way. Just a ...