'I feel paralysed with anxiety and my life is wasting away as I worry about everything'

Dear Coleen

I’m a married woman in my early 50s with two teenage ­children. I’ve started to worry a lot about everything, including my ageing parents (both 80), my kids, my work (or lack of it), money and marriage. You name it, I worry about it.

At the moment, I’m spending so much time worrying and overthinking everything that I’m not actually doing anything.

Physically, I feel awful, like I have zero energy. Some days, I feel so paralysed with worry that I don’t do anything and just go back to bed after I’ve dropped the kids at school.

I don’t know what’s happened to me – I used to be so much more positive and things didn’t get to me like they do now. I feel I’m missing out on my life and I know I’m grumpy and short with the kids, as they’ve commented on it several times.

My relationship with my husband is OK. It used to be great, but I think life just got in the way. Plus, I don’t think he’s very sympathetic to how I feel. He just keeps emailing me job vacancies like that’s the answer!

Where have things gone wrong? I’d love it if you could shed some light and help me move forward.

Coleen says

First of all, don’t beat yourself up because this is a tough life stage for many people and there’s a lot of potential for worries to get on top of us. I’m not trying to minimise your personal situation, but it’s the time of life when your kids are in the teenage phase, your parents are elderly and may need extra support, then chuck in menopause and a good old midlife crisis and it’s a lot!

Try to take it one thing at a time. The changes around menopause can affect us mentally as well as physically, so make an appointment with your GP or a gynaecologist to talk through the options.

Sometimes just knowing it’s a part of the jigsaw puzzle can give relief.

And consider therapy, too. I can tell you from experience that it can make such a ­difference by helping you to see situations more clearly and giving you coping mechanisms.

The good thing is, you’ve acknowledged you’re struggling and that’s half the battle, so hopefully you can prevent the stress getting out of control.

So many of us go through it. What’s helped me is making a conscious decision not to worry about what might lie ahead in the future and focus on dealing with today.

Another good trick, which works for some of my Loose Women friends, is writing down all your worries before you go to sleep at night. Literally doing a brain dump on paper helps clear your mind and you can deal with it in the morning.