The key ideas

Hope and Help for Your Nerves

Claire Weekes, 1962

A young scientist’s heart raced for years without reason. A phrase from a friend who had served in war helped her: your nerves are simply bluffing you. After becoming a physician, Claire Weekes turned this insight into a four-step method: face, accept, float, and let time pass. A book about why fighting fear sometimes only feeds it.

Who it is for

For people who know anxiety and panic from the inside, and loved ones who want to understand what is happening.

Face. Accept. Float. Let time pass.

About the book

Australia, the late 1920s. Young zoologist Claire Weekes notices her heart repeatedly racing for no reason. According to her biography, doctors diagnose tuberculosis and send her to a sanatorium where she is surrounded by seriously ill people. The diagnosis will later prove mistaken. But the racing heart, fear, and trembling do not go away.

A friend who had served in the First World War offered a clue. Her biographer Judith Hoare says he told her something like this: we all had that in the trenches; your nerves are simply bluffing you; keep living and float past it.

More than thirty years later, Weekes, now a physician, wrote a book about this. It appeared in 1962 as Self Help for Your Nerves, and in the United States as Hope and Help for Your Nerves. This is a historical book by a practicing physician rather than a scientific study: the method grew from her experience and patient work. It should therefore be read through a contemporary lens: Weekes’s words and explanations are her model from that era rather than today’s classification of anxiety disorders. The book helps explain anxiety but does not diagnose it.

Idea 1. Two fears instead of one

Why does panic sometimes grow when nothing is happening around you? Weekes proposes separating fear into two layers.

First fear arrives by itself, almost reflexively: your heart accelerates, your stomach feels cold, your palms sweat. Second fear is what you add: “It’s happening again! I can’t bear it! What if I collapse now?” In Weekes’s model, this second layer stimulates the body, which responds with new sensations, closing the loop.

This is how she explains why, she says, her patients became and remained ill through fear of what they thought might happen next.

In a stuffy subway, your pulse suddenly rises. “What if I become ill right here?” may accelerate your heart more than the stuffiness itself.

In Weekes’s model, people usually cannot cancel the first wave, but their response may determine what it grows into.

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About the author

Claire Weekes (1903–1990) was an Australian general practitioner and scientist, the first woman to receive a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Sydney. As a young woman, she experienced a long period of anxiety herself. Her book Self Help for Your Nerves (1962) has been translated into many languages.

All books by this author: Claire Weekes

Terms from the book

  • First fear: In Weekes’s model, the almost reflexive first wave of fear with bodily sensations such as a racing heart, trembling, and sweating.
  • Second fear: In Weekes’s model, fear you add to the first by becoming frightened of the sensations themselves: “Here it goes again,” “What if?” The author’s term rather than a diagnostic category.
  • Sensitization: For Weekes, a state in which the nerves react excessively to stress. The word is also used in science, but here it carries the book author’s meaning.
  • Nervous fatigue: The author’s description of exhaustion after prolonged tension, which Weekes says may be muscular, emotional, mental, or spiritual. An image from the book rather than a medical diagnosis.
  • Glimpsing: Weekes’s term for a brief moment when you can see your problem differently and more calmly. The author believes this perspective can gradually be practiced.
  • Setback: A temporary return of symptoms after improvement. Weekes considers setbacks an expected part of the journey.

All terms

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