What if your anxiety could be useful?

There's a chapter in Sarah Wilson's new book about anxiety — First, We Make The Beast Beautiful — which conjures the image and sound of a bath being drained of water.

In it, Wilson — journalist, ex-reality TV host, sugar-quitter, author — describes her experiences with what she calls anxiety spirals and how they take over the "everyday beige buzzing or background anxiety" she feels most days.

An often-innocuous moment — such as someone not calling when they said they would, or not being able to decide weekend plans — will set in motion a deluge of anxious thoughts and competing potential fixes that builds into a screeching (bath draining) crescendo.

"Some days I can slow things down, piece apart the thoughts and break the cycle," she writes. "But on others the force is too much and down I go into the abyss."

It's an abyss the 43-year-old has come to know intimately over the last three decades, and one 14 per cent of Australians will be affected by in any 12-month period, making anxiety the most common mental health issue in the country.

Diagnosed at age 12, Wilson has also experienced insomnia, bulimia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and mania, and bipolar disorder, all of which she says are just different flavours of anxiety.

"I think having a diagnosis when I was younger was helpful because it allowed some breathing space; it was a shelf I could put my behaviour on," Wilson tells me over the phone.

"But it never sat comfortably with me, and I've spent decades now investigating what is actually going on."

Down black holes and spirals

Indeed, First, We Make The Beast Beautiful is a study in anxiety, both in the scientific research, facts and figures it presents, and in the way it's presented.

Describing her racing mind after not sleeping for six nights straight, Wilson writes: "Flooding through my head are thoughts about the emails that I need to send in the morning. I come up with an opening line for my next chapter. I map out my route to work tomorrow.

"I come up with an idea for a friend's business, and the logo. And I work out the significance of one of Adele's lyrics.

"These thoughts happen all at once in an explosion outwards."

Which is a near perfect summation of the nature of the book and anxiety both.

Research mentioned early on in the book suggests a chemical imbalance in the brain causes anxiety and other mood disorders; some people are content with this explanation and take medication to ease their symptoms.

But for Wilson, who has taken anti-anxiety medication in the past, there's something else driving her anxiety, something deeper that warrants uncoiling.

"I have a visceral desire to know what we're here for," Wilson says.

"Nothing is more important to me that that. And it's a big question that has sent me down rabbit holes and black holes and spirals, and at times different parts of my brain can't deal with the magnitude, and so I flip out every now and then."

The Big Trick for people with anxiety

Or sometimes, with no rhyme, reason, cancelled dinner plan, work stress, or Big Question, it's just there.

"I now know that my anxiety doesn't have to be caused by anything particularly fear-inducing," Wilson writes.

"After more than three decades of it coursing through my veins, anxiety is sometimes simply in my bones."

Helpfully, the avid researcher describes myriad ways to help cope with these debilitating moments.

If you've picked up a women's magazine or read a wellness blog in the last 10 years, some strategies will sound familiar — gratitude journals, yoga, meditation and other mindfulness techniques are usual suspects.

There are also less obvious tips and tricks: get fitted for sports shoes (the touch and care of the shoe attendant is apparently calming), walk slowly with controlled breathing, quit sugar, study the tortured minds of philosophers, writers and artists who know the taste of existential crisis very well.

And then, weaved gently throughout the book so as to not overwhelm racing or troubled minds, the big trick — the one that, if worked on diligently, is likely to make a lasting difference.

Sit with, and really feel, your anxiety.

This, Wilson says, will lead us to ourselves. "It's like we're searching for a Something Else that makes us feel... what?" she writes. "Like we've landed, I suppose. And that things are all good on this patch."

Which is easier said than done, of course.

Managing anxiety is a lonely, 24/7 job

It's uncomfortable being present with any so-called negative emotion.

The desire to distract yourself (with alcohol, emails, destructive relationships) can be strong and much easier to slip into than the work — mental, spiritual, and physical — it takes to train yourself to be at peace with the discomfort of being human.

Plus, as anyone with anxiety, depression or other mental health issues knows, the work is hard.

It's lonely and confronting; frustrating and tiring. It also takes breaks from actually working, which is disheartening at best and life threatening at worst.

"The vigilance is exhausting," concedes Wilson. "Sometimes I think, 'Why does it have to be so relentless?' [Managing anxiety] is a 24/7 job.

"But it makes it easier when I realise, as someone with my experience and platform, that I have a responsibility to facilitate a conversation about it."

Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons she wrote the book.

"I'd write about anxiety on my blog and each time I did people became very engaged," she says.

"Anxiety is a very lonely condition; when you're anxious you've got to suffer alone.

"But we can all reach out and let each other know that we're not on our own, there's other people going through the same thing."

Making the beast beautiful

Not each facet of Wilson's journey with anxiety will ring true for everyone.

Not everyone will, like she did, move house seven times in two years for fear of being stuck anywhere too long.

Not everyone will shower as many as 30 times a night or run aimlessly through Florence at 2:00am.

Not everyone will punch a hole in the wall at work, like Wilson did in an anxious "flip out" in her Masterchef trailer.

Not everyone will isolate themselves from loved ones and move to a shed in the bush for months, find it nearly impossible to have a romantic relationship, or attempt suicide.

But Wilson's ultimate message, about fully exploring your affliction, accepting it, and discovering what it can teach you about the beauty of life, is something anyone with anxiety can do.

"There's no point wishing I didn't have anxiety; it is what it is," she says.

"But I also wouldn't give it up. I wouldn't give back the richness, the depth, the emotional spectrum I've experienced.

"Anxiety is the thing that takes you down, this anxiety about not knowing what life is about takes you down. But it's also the thing that ultimately takes you to where the answer lies."

Which is to say, the beast becomes beautiful.