A solo episode — Florian Hohenleitner · Grow with the Flo
This is the episode I wasn't sure I'd ever make. Not because the story isn't worth telling — but because I had to live most of it before I understood it enough to speak about it honestly.
Anxiety doesn't announce itself. It moves in quietly — one small avoidance at a time, one choice to stay close to home, one excuse that feels completely reasonable in the moment. By the time I noticed how small my world had become, it had been shrinking for years.
For me, it was toilet anxiety. The specific, particular, almost absurdly named fear of being somewhere without access to a bathroom — or of needing one and not making it. On the surface it sounds manageable. Embarrassing, maybe, but manageable. That's what I told myself. And that gap between what anxiety sounds like from the outside and what it feels like from the inside is exactly what I wanted to close with this episode.
In practice, it meant planning every journey around toilet locations. Turning down invitations. Sitting near exits. Leaving before I had to, arriving late after I'd already checked. Eating in particular ways before particular events. Carrying certainty in the form of routines that got more elaborate, not less, the longer I lived with this.
The cruelest thing about anxiety is that avoidance feels like the solution. Every time you sidestep the feared situation, you get immediate relief. And your nervous system files that away as evidence: the threat was real, and you survived because you avoided it.
The anxiety was also doing something subtler: it was making me hypervigilant to my own body. Every sensation became data. Every twinge, every shift in digestion, every moment of physical discomfort got tagged immediately as a potential emergency. The nervous system that was supposed to protect me had become the loudest thing in the room.
And the more I listened to it, the louder it got.
Anxiety is not lying to you. It genuinely believes the threat is real. The problem is, it learned the wrong lesson — and it's been applying it ever since.
— Flo · Grow with the FloI tried a lot. Most of it kept me stuck because it was oriented around managing the anxiety rather than working through it. There's a big difference.
The shift came not from finding a better coping strategy, but from changing the relationship with the anxiety itself. From fighting it to — slowly, imperfectly — allowing it.
The opposite of anxiety isn't calm. It's presence. The ability to be fully in a moment without cataloguing everything that could go wrong.
— Flo · Grow with the FloFreedom from anxiety, I've learned, doesn't mean the absence of the feeling. It means the feeling no longer runs your life. That's a different finish line than the one I started with — and a better one.
I travel now. Long flights. Journeys without plans. Restaurants chosen on a whim, trains without reserved seats. Not because the anxiety is gone, but because I have a different relationship with it. It still shows up. I've just stopped giving it the keys.
I moved to Vietnam. I taught yoga. I started a podcast. I had conversations on planes with strangers that changed my life. None of that was available to the version of me who was managing his anxiety by making his world smaller.
The version of me who made this episode isn't some polished, arrived-at-a-destination version. He's someone who learned — slowly, through a lot of mistakes — that the things he was avoiding were often exactly where the life he wanted was waiting.
This section is for anyone who recognised themselves somewhere in this episode — and felt both relieved and exhausted by that recognition.
If you're currently in the middle of this — whatever your version of it looks like — I want to say something that I needed to hear and didn't hear enough: you are not broken. The anxiety is not evidence of weakness. It is evidence of a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, in response to something that felt dangerous, probably a long time ago.
The thing it learned was wrong. But it learned it from something real. And there is a way through — not around, through — that doesn't require you to be braver than you are right now, or to have more information, or to figure it out on your own.
You don't have to want to do the thing. You just have to do it. The wanting comes after — sometimes long after — but it comes.
— Flo · Grow with the Flo"The life I wanted was always on the other side of the thing I was avoiding. I just had to stay in it long enough to find out what was actually there — which turned out to be less terrifying, and much more alive, than anything I imagined."