Caroline Foran on recovering from a breakdown and the mental health mistakes she made
We speak with podcaster and author Caroline Foran to learn more about coping with anxiety, coming back from a breakdown and the coping strategies that worked for her19:35, 06 Jul 2026Author and podcaster. . .
We speak with podcaster and author Caroline Foran to learn more about coping with anxiety, coming back from a breakdown and the coping strategies that worked for her19:35, 06 Jul 2026Author and podcaster Caroline Foran is used to putting herself out there. As one of the few people who was talking about mental health struggles before the topic was widely spoken about, she doesn’t shy away from how much anxiety used to rule her life. It’s been 10 years since her mental health breakdown, and since that terrible time, she’s written award-winning books, launched a successful podcast and become a mother. Here, we speak to the Dublin native to learn more about living with anxiety, and what she wishes she had known about the condition from the start. . . For Caroline, anxiety was always a hum in the background. “It’s definitely always been there, it’s come in and out of my life from childhood right through to adulthood. But it really wasn’t until my mid-20s that everything came to a head. ”Caroline began experiencing debilitating physical and psychological symptoms, which she found very isolating at the time. This was in 2014 and the word ‘anxiety’ hadn’t really entered into people’s vocabulary yet. Unfortunately, Caroline became very unwell, where anxiety completely took over her life. She felt constantly anxious, with racing thoughts, and her anxiety also manifested physically – she experienced aches and pains as well as fatigue. She had just started a new, much-sought-after job, which she had to quit. She had also recently moved in with her new boyfriend, Barry. “I had what can only be described as a mental health breakdown. I was 25, just starting out my life, and I had to move back into my parents’ house. I had to sleep beside my mam at night. My body felt completely unsafe, raw and exposed, and in a constant state of hypervigilance, even when there was no tangible thing I was worried about. ”Slowly but surely, Caroline returned to herself, through various strategies such as medication, therapy and lifestyle changes. Her parents were also a massive help, she says, and her boyfriend Barry also supported her. They are now married and have one son together. StrategiesOver a decade on from her mental health breakdown, Caroline has written a new book,Everything I Wish I’d Known About Anxiety. Her aim for the book is to provide people with a prescriptive roadmap towards accepting, understanding and coping with anxiety. “It will take away all the decision paralysis and the overwhelm, it tells you what to do. ”As for her journey, Caroline says she got so much wrong at the start. “Not to be hard on myself, but I didn’t understand the nature of anxiety or how it worked. I blamed myself and thought I could just will myself to stop feeling it. ”Caroline says people with anxiety should not focus on changing their thoughts. “A lot of anxious thoughts that happen in a nervous system that’s been under strain for a while, they are automatic. They are pre-rational, those fear responses happen before we have a chance to say, ‘No, we are okay, we are safe’. We are pushing against ourselves by trying not to have those thoughts in the first place. “This can make people feel very afraid of their thoughts, especially if they are having intrusive thoughts. They can feel like they are ‘doing it to themselves’, and I felt like I was doing it to myself, I was responsible for my thoughts, and it brought me to a very dark place. ”Caroline says for her, she needed to accept her anxiety and then give her body signals that she was safe. “I needed to expose myself to moments of calm, that seem like they won’t make a difference, but cumulatively and over time, they start to say to the brain, ‘You’re not in a threatening situation here’. ”Caroline says doing something simple, like going for a calm walk, can help. “Building up a steady rhythm of walking, even if your thoughts are anxious, will signal to your brain that you are safe. Your brain will think, ‘If you were actually under threat, you wouldn’t be able to walk at this steady pace, we would be fleeing and running for our lives’. Work with your body, rather than trying to change your mind,” she adds. The author emphasises that the anxious thoughts themselves are not necessarily bad, and oftentimes they don’t really represent what people think. “These thoughts can arise from a nervous system that has been overextended for a long time. ”Self-compassion is also key, she says. “All the time I had been so hard on myself, thinking things like, ‘Snap out of it, get a grip’, I thought that attitude would motivate me out of the anxiety. But in reality it was only adding to my anxiety because I was launching an attack on myself. “Your brain looks to take action when it’s anxious. Instead of attacking, you can respond compassionately to yourself, admit that it’s hard and ask yourself what you need in this moment, instead of tearing yourself asunder. On a physiological level, you are stopping that stress hormone. ”Taking time away from technology, watching ASMR videos, pulling back from being over-committed, having boundaries and prioritising her needs are other ways Caroline manages her mental health. Caroline says that there is a lot of pressure on social media to subscribe to a certain type of ‘self-care’, and we need to find what works for us and not follow trends. Everything I Wish I’d Known About Anxiety - A Roadmap Back To Yourselfis available from all good bookshops now. IG:@carolineforanTo read the full interview with Caroline, pick up a copy of RSVP, on shelves nowArticle continues belowWant tosee more of the stories you love from RSVP? To add RSVP as a preferred source of news on Google,simply click here