The door swings open and a cold beam of artificial light fills the room. Someone with a clipboard says good morning. The door closes and I’m alone again.
It has just gone 7am, but I have been awake for hours – trapped in a living nightmare.
The day before, I had been admitted to The Priory psychiatric hospital in south‑west London.
Throughout the night, duty nurses have been checking on me hourly – presumably making sure I haven’t strung myself up or escaped out of a window.
It feels like a bomb has gone off in my head. My anxiety – long bubbling and untreated in the background, and fuelled by my years-long insomnia – has finally erupted with volcanic force.
In the weeks before my hospital admission, so badly had my mental state deteriorated I’d been having panic attacks quietly alone at night.
I’d scream into pillows – all I could think to do to try to make as little noise as possible to avoid waking my husband and baby. Intrusive thoughts about suicide and self-harm had crept in.
When dawn arrived after a night of no sleep, I went into the kitchen and put on the news to drown out the noise in my head. My husband, Guy, came downstairs in his dressing gown and looked at me as if he didn’t know who I was. I was in there – but just didn’t have the words to explain what was happening to me.
India Sturgis’s anxiety was so bad she spent three months in hospital. Today it no longer affects her day-to-day
We went to a doctor, who told me I couldn’t spend another night at home; I needed professional help. He gave me Xanax (anti-anxiety medication) and told me to expect a call in a few hours about the next step: admittance to hospital.
At that moment, my life should have been on track. Aged 32, I had a husband who was a pool of tranquillity, humour and good sense. Our beautiful, good-natured ten-month-old daughter was a complete joy. And I had a job as a journalist that I loved.
I also had a confident, gregarious nature: anxiety was not an emotion anyone would ever have ascribed to me.
Yet the reality was that I was anxious. Deeply so. And it wasn’t the product of trauma, abuse, post-natal depression or anything like it. At my worst, I believed that would have been easier. At least that would have been explainable.
Instead, over years of increments and nudges, various stresses and anxieties had percolated, fed off one another and eventually imploded in this most terrifying way. My family suspected what was going on and checked in with me constantly. But I was too frightened of my thoughts to articulate them.
The diagnosis given by my new psychiatrist in The Priory was generalised anxiety disorder (or GAD) – basically an acute, excessive worry about everyday things that prevents you functioning in normal life.
I also had chronic insomnia, a phobia of going to bed, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. At this moment of diagnosis, I finally gave in.
It had been seven years since my sleeplessness had started. I had always refused to see a doctor for it, fearing medication, side-effects and all the rest.
Now, though, I knew I was ill and was going to have to do something, because ‘carrying on’ was impossible. I needed to find out what was making me so anxious and fix it, somehow.
The sleeplessness, and anxiety about sleep, were significant – indeed, just walking past my bedroom during the day elicited such a sucker punch of cortisol that I didn’t like being in there if I didn’t have to. My nights would fluctuate from between zero and six hours of sleep, and I couldn’t nap.
I had begun to worry what the result of so little sleep over such a long period would be. In the early hours my chest felt sore, as though a great fist was squeezing my heart. At root, though, my insomnia was caused by a heightened state of worry. But what on earth would ease it?
In the seven years since I found myself in The Priory – where I spent three months – I’ve tried everything in an attempt to answer this question, including antidepressants, all sorts of therapy (from psychotherapy to art therapy), meditation and hypnosis.
Anxiety was not an emotion anyone would ever have ascribed to me. Yet the reality was that I was anxious, writes India (Picture posed by model)
I’ve taken supplements (vitamin D, B12, evening primrose oil), used sleep apps, taken up yoga and tried cold-water swimming – and spoken to many of the leading experts in the field. Some things worked better than others, but I’d have regretted trying none.
I found great benefit from group therapy in particular, where a therapist works with a number of people at once. Hearing others’ problems made me feel chastened by the fact I wasn’t the only freak of this nature and comforted by the similarities.
Medication also proved essential for me. I began taking amitriptyline, an antidepressant that can be helpful for insomnia, alongside sertraline, another antidepressant, and occasionally a sedating antihistamine, promethazine, for sleep.
Combined, they pushed anxiety away during the day and encouraged my body to fall asleep for longer periods at night.
It was slow going, and I’d still wake up often, awash with adrenaline. But the medication gradually helped reset my pattern of sleeplessness.
After 14 months, in 2020, and feeling more ‘normal’, I began to taper off the amitriptyline (I was no longer using the promethazine, and sertraline had no side-effects so I wasn’t in a rush to drop it) – but then the old feelings of anxiety re-emerged along with night-time agitation.
I’d heard about ‘neurohacking’ gadgets – which use technology to optimise brain function – that promised to aid calmness and sleep. It was these that helped get me over the final hurdle of my anxiety and insomnia, aiding me in coming off antidepressants – and giving me valuable answers about why I was so anxious.
The first I tried was the Alpha-Stim, a battery-powered device that generates a microcurrent of electricity (less than half a milliampere; a 60w LED lightbulb draws about 5,400 milliamperes) that’s channelled across the brain via ear clips. It increases the proportion of ‘alpha’ brain waves associated with wakeful calmness and relaxation.
An NHS trial, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders in 2019, tested Alpha-Stim on 161 people with GAD and found around half were in remission after 24 weeks, having used the device for an hour a day for 12 weeks.
On that first evening, I attach the device and feel relaxed enough to hold off taking my sleep medication. There’s a rhythmic tingle at my earlobes, but little else. I drift into sleep without trouble.
India has now written a book, titled ‘How to eat an Elephant’, about her experience
After seven days I’m sleeping more deeply. A few times I wake in the morning having slept through the night, something I haven’t done in years. I’m elated!
During this time, I also go to see Lesley Parkinson, a clinical psychologist specialising in neuro-psychophysiology. I underwent an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure my brain waves.
Lesley tells me that while using the gadget, my alpha waves increased in frequency. But something unexpected also happens. After about 20 minutes, she looks up at me, concerned, from the laptop showing my EEG tracings while using Alpha-Stim.
‘Have you had a brain injury?’ she asks.
‘No,’ I say.
There’s a pause. ‘Whiplash?’
‘Oh yeah,’ I say. ‘Loads.’
I’ve been in five car accidents over the years, including one in my early 20s when we swerved to avoid a lorry, sending the car into a spin and crashing into a central reservation barrier. Everyone was unharmed, save whiplash.
A couple of years later there was another crash – I was fine, but my husband suffered a broken back.
Now, as a passenger, if a car ever brakes late or overtakes with an irresponsible flourish, I leap out of my seat in terror.
Lesley swivels her laptop screen around. My brainwaves, she explains, suggest a regular state of alertness and high arousal, with high ‘beta’ waves (associated with anxiety and agitation).
She shows me what happened when we discussed the car crashes. The previously uniform EEG wiggly lines spiral all over the place.
She introduces me to another neurohacking trick: neurofeedback, which trains the brain to produce more beneficial brain wave patterns.
It involves having an EEG to measure my brain waves, and simply listening for occasional loud blips from a black device on her desk – a satisfying noise like a video game. The calmer your brain electrics get, the more blips you get.
It’s a bit like you might train a dog not to bark with rewards and repetition. Our brains are just as good at learning, often adapting within seconds.
At first there is more silence than blips – but they soon become more frequent.
Researchers have found neurofeedback can reorientate the brain away from anxious or hypervigilant patterns. One (albeit small) study in 2016, published in Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, showed patients with PTSD became less frantic, slept better and felt more focused following neurofeedback.
After this first session, I feel giddy. I want to laugh, possibly at the strangeness of it all.
Lesley tells me the beta waves have reduced. I have a few more sessions and my brain continues to respond well. I also continue using Alpha-Stim for a few months – and after this, stop taking amitriptyline. My anxiety around sleeplessness has dropped to almost nothing.
Another big success for me was tackling my habit of breathing through my mouth.
Around half of us have become habitual mouth-breathers, which apparently puts us at greater risk of mental health difficulties, including anxiety.
There’s a host of reasons why: one is down to nose-breathing adding 50 per cent more resistance than mouth-breathing, which means it helps slow and improve air distribution around the lungs, resulting in an uptake of 20 per cent more oxygen. And it means slower breaths, which, in turn, increases nitric oxide, a molecule that helps relax blood vessels and improve blood flow.
It was worth a try, I thought – so I sticky-taped my mouth shut occasionally during the day, slowly coaxing my nose into gear, and started breathing exercises, aiming for two ten-minute sessions a day. (While it worked for me, some doctors advise against mouth-taping, fearing it could cause choking if you suffer from acid reflux, for instance.)
I also got a steroid spray from my doctor for my allergic rhinitis, which I’d hitherto ignored. After a couple of weeks, everything felt better: my tight chest, my shoulders and my levels of agitation.
Today, I am far less affected by anxiety. I no longer have GAD or insomnia, and the PTSD that occasionally raises its head is unproblematic. Anxiety remains my Achilles’ heel but what has helped me – and what I hope may help you – is to manage it in small steps.
I once saw a piece of advice pinned to the noticeboard at a therapy session: ‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.’ Meaning our largest, most daunting challenges are best approached bit by bit.
To me, anxiety was an elephant; a gigantic heavy beast on my chest, taking up all the space in my life.
Today, it no longer affects my day-to-day – and taking it on bite by bite, with more than one approach, has got me here.
Adapted from How To Eat An Elephant, by India Sturgis (Thorsons, £16.99), published May 7. © India Sturgis 2026. To order a copy for £15.29 (offer valid to 09/05/26; UK P&P free on orders over £25), go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
