A WORLD OF WORRY
FIVE YEARS AGO, Meredith Arthur, a 45-year-old San Francisco employee of the social media company Pinterest, arrived at a neurologist appointment in a distraught state. She spoke a mile a minute, rattling through her extensive research on the vagus cranial nerve and explaining why she thought it might hold clues to her crippling shoulder and neck pain, frequent dizziness and nausea and chronic migraines. “I was presenting my inexpert case to an expert, and she stopped me and said, ‘I know what’s wrong. You have generalised anxiety disorder.’”
For Arthur, the diagnosis was a shock. She had been so focused on her debilitating physical symptoms that she hadn’t considered that they could be linked to her mental health. But almost immediately, it clicked.
“My brain was always in overdrive, from early childhood,” Arthur recalls. “I always wanted to work really hard all the time and solve everything.”
She would have never described herself as a worrier, however, and certainly didn’t connect her perfectionism to anxiety or its impact on her body. But in fact, physical discomfort (like stomach and
