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Amelia seemed to have her life perfectly in place with a supportive fiancé, a satisfying career, and an active social circle. Yet, when she started experiencing overwhelming anxiety and bizarre illusions, she felt as if she was losing her grip on reality.
Visiting the dentist became a terrifying ordeal. “My mind interpreted the lights, the chair, the lab coats, and tools as if I were part of a disturbing science experiment,” she explained.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, Amelia shared that hospitals evoked panic for similar reasons, as if she feared being abducted or committed. Even in her daily interactions, familiar faces began to morph into ‘cartoon villains.’
She recalled, “I started fixating on people’s facial features. Large pupils, dark circles, and crooked teeth appeared threatening and sinister, almost as if they belonged to a cartoon antagonist.”
Working in New York’s media scene, the 31-year-old often felt disconnected from her own body and reality. Her hearing became so acute that she could catch snippets of whispered conversations, and she frequently felt as though she was submerged in water, her body weighed down.
On top of her physical symptoms, she also experienced all the hallmark signs of anxiety and depression, including nervousness, irritability and low mood.
Amelia had gone to traditional talk therapy, but the go-to methods of talking about her issues and taking antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications did nothing to make her feel better.
She also went to medical doctors to get her balance, heart and hormones checked, thinking her symptoms were stemming from something physically wrong with her. She received clean bills of health from all of them.
Then in February 2025, Amelia reached a breaking point. She felt like her body was in constant fight-or-flight mode and her symptoms became so severe she thought she would have to quit her job.
Sensitization occurs when ‘the brain’s threat system becomes overactive after repeated or prolonged stress,’ anxiety coach Rose Thompson explained (stock image)
That is when Amelia took to social media to see if anyone else was experiencing her symptoms, which felt like anxiety and depression, but didn’t fit the traditional mold and weren’t getting better with medication and therapy.
The Daily Mail is allowing Amelia is use a pseudonym to protect her privacy.
Tens of millions of people are familiar with these mental health conditions – and millions more suffer from others, such as obsessive compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
While these have long been recognized, diagnosed and treated the same way for decades, there is a newer practice of mental health ‘coaches’ who are working to raise awareness of a lesser-known disorder that often gets overlooked or misdiagnosed: sensitization.
The more Amelia read about sensitization, sometimes called nervous system dysregulation, the more she felt this was what she had. Then, she connected with Rose Thompson, an anxiety recovery coach.
Thompson, who founded F*** Off Anxiety, told Daily Mail that sensitization is a ‘blanket statement’ for many anxiety disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, body dysmorphia, OCD and PTSD.
These can all fall under the umbrella of ‘sensitization,’ which describes when the body is in a heightened state of fight-or-flight.
Thompson, who is not a therapist and does not diagnose her clients, said: ‘Sensitization is literally waking up in doom and gloom, fight or flight; when there’s no danger, there’s no stressful event, it’s just life. Your body’s in this state because of chronic stressors that have built up because of behaviors and bad thinking patterns that people follow.’
She does not believe in anxiety as a lifelong mental illness. Instead, she said it is a ‘micro situation – whether it’s your thinking patterns or actual lifestyle, that creates chronic stress in the body,’ which is what leads to sensitization.
Because sensitization encompasses multiple disorders and doesn’t have specific diagnostic criteria of its own, it is not known how many people suffer from it.
Around one in five adults, about 42 million people, have a diagnosable anxiety disorder and about 48 million have depression. The two are often co-occurring.
Traditional treatments include cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy and medication.
Common drugs prescribed for anxiety or depression include SSRIs like Zoloft, Prozac and Lexapro; SNRIs such as Cymbalta; and benzodiazepines, including Xanax, Klonopin and Valium.
However, traditional talk therapy can be expensive and time consuming, as well as difficult to deal with as the patient has to relive their trauma, and medications come with serious side effects and a potential risk of life-long dependence.
Thompson, who herself has dealt with sensitization, told Daily Mail: ‘A lot of professionals in the mental health world, they want to prescribe, prescribe, prescribe, but that is literally suppression. You’re not dealing with the root cause; so if you’re going to take pills, you’re not going to process what you need to process.
‘Think about PTSD – that is something that you went through trauma; so if you’re taking medication to deal with that, how are you processing those feelings that need to be felt?
‘So it keeps it there, under the surface, and then when you think you’re better and you stop taking your meds, bam! You feel bad again. It’s not rebound; it’s reality. You didn’t process anything.’
Amelia told Daily Mail that was similar to her experience. She saw a psychologist ‘who was really quick to try and prescribe me antidepressants and I said I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that just yet.’
But once she found Rose and started working with her, ‘I feel so much better,’ she said.
People experiencing sensitization report having an ‘out of body’ feeling or like they are in a video game (stock image)
‘I was going to the doctor all the time. I went and had a heart check. I went to the ENT. I went to the hormone specialist. I did all this stuff and all of it came back fine.
‘And I just didn’t understand, because my heart is skipping a beat, my balance is off, I feel like I’m underwater, and it feels so real all the time. It’s like, how could my body be putting me through this?
‘It took me so long to figure out because I don’t understand this stuff; I’m scared of it and the doctors should be able to figure it out, but they’re just giving me clean results.
‘And it was truly only when I had a consultation with Rose, and she was feeding back everything that I was feeling, and it was just like a light switch. I was like, “oh my gosh, I can’t believe that other people deal with this.”‘
Before Thompson, Amelia said her therapist was giving her tools to help her in the moment when symptoms flared, such as breathing techniques, but it was ‘kind of just a way to manage it, not to heal it.’
Thompson said overcoming sensitization is all about ‘rewiring the brain’ and how you process and respond to thoughts and feelings.
‘It’s learning, first of all, how do we even deal with our thoughts and feelings and emotions?’ Thompson told Daily Mail.
‘Because when we’re feeling good, we follow [our emotions] because – if you have a passion or you think you like somebody – we always believe and trust our feelings, so we follow them.
‘But when you’re in a negative headspace, and you’re in fight or flight, we have what’s called a negative bias, and the brain becomes very narrow. It’s no longer open to all these other things. Instead, it’s hyper-focusing on the worst-case scenarios and flashbacks or intrusive images.’
Rose Thompson is an anxiety recovery coach who herself has dealt with sensitization
Thompson’s philosophy is ‘let yourself feel to heal it’ instead of suppressing it.
While Thompson doesn’t subscribe to one form of therapy, she said her method most closely resembles Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
ACT is a type of mental health therapy that helps you acknowledge and accept your thoughts and feelings as part of the human experience – not as something bad or negative. Then, instead of trying to change them, you lean more deeply into understanding them and adjust your behaviors.
‘It’s really about letting things come up naturally, responding when they do, and trying to do your best to live your life, even if it feels really hard in some moments,’ Thompson said. ‘Allow it to be there, acknowledge what it is, and let it pass.’
She continued: ‘You could know everything about anxiety, but if you’re not practicing the skills, you will not recover. So, you have to respond to thoughts, emotions, physical sensations in the body, call them out for exactly what they are.
‘Do not suppress them; let them be there; let them do whatever they want – trigger you, make you feel like s*** – because you let it be there, you call it out, you process whatever it brought up and you can keep on moving on with your day the best you can.
‘And it’s very hard. It’s not easy work, but you have to ask yourself, how bad do you want your life back?’
Thompson explained that sensitization occurs when ‘the brain’s threat system becomes overactive after repeated or prolonged stress, keeping the body in a heightened fight-or-flight state’ and stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline rise.
A surge in these hormones can lead to shaking, heart palpitations and panic attacks.
And when your body is constantly having these surges, you become worn down and it takes a toll on your cognitive function, leading to brain fog.
When Thompson was experiencing sensitization herself, she said she felt ‘dumb’ and had lost her quick-witted edge.
Amelia said she was overwhelmingly exhausted from doing the simplest of tasks – even eating a meal. She also said her reactions felt very ‘big.’ She didn’t just get a little upset at an inconvenience, it was ‘like I was life-ending upset.’
‘I was a shell of myself. I felt like my body and mind had completely betrayed me,’ Amelia said.
Thompson said sensitization can be sparked by numerous things, but she commonly sees it in people who have experienced trauma, have unhealthy thinking patterns and behaviors, are a ‘people pleaser’ or perfectionist. They all cause ‘micro-doses of stress in the body’ that prime a person for sensitization.
Amelia told Daily Mail she is a ‘massive people pleaser’ and stretches herself too thin, ‘always trying to do the thing to make the other person happy that I don’t necessarily want to do.’
Now, just four months into working with Rose, Amelia said she has made a lot of progress.
‘Living with an anxiety disorder has been the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through, but it has also taught me so much about myself,’ Amelia told Daily Mail. ‘I’ve learned how to challenge unhealthy thoughts, sit with difficult feelings, and prioritize my own well-being.
‘It has been my toughest lesson, but I believe overcoming it will be my greatest reward. And because of it, I cherish the “good” days – the ones where life feels normal again – more than I ever did before.’