I have had a fight with anxiety for most of my life. It manifests itself almost daily and can have a corrosive effect on my capacity, if I let it. From time to time I become a kind of captive to my anxiety, its dark invisibility, yet omnipresence, a debilitating factor. Most people don't understand this condition, only those who have experienced it in its most nightmarish form.

Anxiety is a well-designed feature for an earlier time when humans faced existential threats day and night. Would there be enough food in the morning to stave off hunger pangs? If I venture further will I be attacked by a wild animal? Anxiety prepared you for fighting or fleeing. Today, we don't have such threats - there is surplus food and all the wild things are in retreat - so our anxiety has nowhere useful to go. It emerges in the body as a series of often frightening symptoms, and the mind, if not well-trained and advised, is likely to be an unwitting ally. A cycle is perpetuated and if not healed early on, can destroy a life.

So it is that I have to return, time and time again, to the book that saved my life thirty years ago. I have to relearn all the lessons that I had already learned, but which the persistence of memory, overwhelms. The fearful nature of the anxiety state is such that it leaves a seemingly indelible scar on the mind, one which can be almost instantaneously retrieved. It is much harder to recall the lessons learnt and pathways taken, so sometimes the memory recreates the past in the present. I think that there is no cure for this but there are certainly ways to manage anxiety and to deal with serious recurrences. It's a case of, well, here I go again!

The book, you ask? I have often talked about it. Self-Help For Your Nerves by Dr Claire Weekes. From my point of view, it is the most important book ever written, since it kept me on the planet for a few more decades. If you are an anxiety sufferer, then this is a book worth reading, again and again and again.