The door swings open and a cold beam of artificial light fills my room. Someone with a clipboard says good morning, but it’s impersonal: full of tiredness and boredom. The door shuts and I’m alone again. I turn on a bedside light. It’s seven o’clock but I’ve been awake for hours, woken into a living nightmare.

I’m in London’s oldest private psychiatric hospital, the Priory in Roehampton, having been admitted the previous day as an emergency. During the night, duty nurses have checked on me every hour, making sure I haven’t strung myself up or escaped out of a window, although they’ve given it the gleam of normality by saying it’s ‘for everyone’s safety’ until they know me better.

Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t manage either. It’s as if a bomb has gone off in my head. I feel like a small child again. Even the simplest decisions, such as when to go to breakfast, cause panic. If I go now, will I be early? Or too late? Am I hungry? What should I wear to have breakfast at a psychiatric facility? What if I have to talk to someone?

Thoughts crack like lightning, shifting to my husband and 10-month-old daughter back at home, but I’m too shell-shocked, sleep-deprived and medicated to even cry. The one shining positive that grounds my stomach and drops my shoulders is that, for the first time in weeks, maybe months, I feel safe. The professionals have got their hands on me and I won’t have to cope with my mind on my own any more.

Three years ago – the day before my 32nd birthday – I became one of the 10 per cent of British people who will suffer some kind of disabling anxiety disorder. 

Back then, I felt totally at odds with the diagnosis and it’s still something that seems to conflict with so much else about me. I’d amassed, in no particular order, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), chronic insomnia, a phobia of going to bed (clinophobia) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 

Stress and anxiety had percolated, fed off each other and imploded in a sort of slow-motion car crash over at least seven years. Depression, unsurprisingly, had recently joined the party. I would have night-time panic attacks as quietly as possible, screaming into a pillow, so as not to wake my husband or baby.

GAD, which affects an estimated one in 15 people, is defined by the NHS as ‘a long-term condition that causes you to feel anxious about a wide range of situations and issues, rather than one specific event’. It’s characterised by at least six months of persistent, excessive and unrealistic worry about everyday things, and is often accompanied by many other non-specific psychological and physical symptoms. 

Mine wasn’t linked to postnatal depression, nor could it be neatly packaged as the result of one traumatic experience or moment of abuse. In some ways, at my worst, I believed that would have been easier. At least it would have been understandable, explainable.

Outwardly, it didn’t add up. I was mother to a gregarious, healthy baby who slept and smiled more often than she didn’t. I was married to a brilliant man who has always been a pool of tranquillity, humour and good sense. We lived in a comfortable home in west London. I was close to my family and there were no devastating diagnoses or unmanageable conditions that were pulling us simultaneously apart and together. 

I enjoyed life, had a good circle of friends and a decent career as a journalist. Though not a supermodel, I was content with my looks. I liked the clothes I was able to buy and the person inside them.

What happened? It’s a question I’ve returned to frequently but, as hours of group therapy and psycho-education taught me, the key to recovery had nothing to do with solving that question.

Sleepless nights 

My sleep issues began in my mid-20s when I was living in London and working for a newspaper. Like almost everyone else I knew, I worked hard and went out frequently. 

Life was busy and demanding but enjoyable and gratifying. Yet every few months, two or three nights would pass when I couldn’t fall asleep. It wasn’t that I would wake and not be able to go back to sleep, I would never get there to begin with.

According to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), insomnia is defined as difficulty getting to sleep or maintaining sleep, early waking or non-restorative sleep, that impairs your ability to function and occurs despite opportunity for sleep. Short-term insomnia lasts less than three months, long-term or chronic insomnia lasts longer and commonly co-exists with other psychiatric and medical conditions, such as anxiety and depression.

Normally, most sleep issues clear up on their own, so I kept calm and carried on. During the day, if I felt adrenaline, I pushed it down deep inside my stomach, quashing butterflies that were unhelpful to the job at hand. I moved to another newspaper – this one. 

For a time, my sleep levelled, but it slipped after a year or two and I started managing only two to four hours more frequently. Adrenaline, which my body had grown used to producing like a faulty trip switch, was triggered by less and less. I felt it when rushing to nearby Westminster to cover the 2017 terrorist attack (understandable), but also before interviewing the owner of an 80-year-old accordion, or when someone sneezed. 

Sometimes it was useful, but often it wasn’t. On the way home after a busy day, I’d be so awash with it that my mind couldn’t be static.