Lessons in change

It’s okay to be anxious

Feeling anxious or fearful about change is very common and often the main thing standing in the way of you and the things you really want. In her book, Future Tense (Little, Brown. £14.99), Tracy Dennis-Tiwary explains how anxiety is what we feel when we think something bad could happen, but hasn’t happened yet, while fear is an immediate response to a real danger that is happening right now. ‘Anxiety is apprehension about an uncertain and imagined future, and occurs in the spaces in between – between learning that something bad could happen and its arrival; between making plans and being helpless to take any real action.’ Dennis-Tiwary advises looking at what you feel anxious about more closely and deciding what to do with these feelings by using the following criteria:

● Anxiety is information about the future; listen●●