How I fell in love with my anxiety
A memoir
By Adam Knights
What if the enemy you’ve been fighting your whole life was never an enemy at all?
Coming 2026
Overview
Nine years in the Parachute Regiment.
Belfast. Africa. The Far East.
Adam Knights learned to fight. To survive. To neutralise threats.
So when anxiety arrived - uninvited, unwelcome, utterly relentless - he did what any good soldier would do.
He went to war.
He lost. Badly.
“The bravest thing I ever did wasn’t on a battlefield.
It was learning to sit still with myself.”
A Different Kind of Survival Story
This isn’t a book about defeating anxiety.
It’s about something far stranger: learning to live with her.
Somewhere between the boardrooms of pharmaceutical giants and the quiet terror of 3am panic attacks, Adam discovered something that changed everything.
His anxiety wasn’t trying to destroy him.
She was trying to protect him.
He just couldn’t hear her over the sound of his own resistance.
He calls her the Pink Spaghetti Mistress.
Don’t ask - it’ll make sense eventually. Or it won’t.
Either way, they’re stuck with each other now.
And that, it turns out, isn’t the tragedy he once thought it was.
What this book is.
A memoir of military service, business success, and the invisible battles in between
An unconventional guide to coexisting with anxiety rather than conquering it
Dark British humour forged in barracks and sharpened by decades of pretending everything’s fine
One man’s honest account of learning that sometimes the bravest thing isn’t fighting - it’s sitting still
What this book isn’t.
A self-help manual
A clinical guide
A promise of a cure
“I’m a dyslexic C-student who scraped through school and stumbled into success by learning one crucial skill: hiring people smarter than myself and getting out of their way.
But I am qualified to tell you what happened when I stopped treating my anxiety like an intruder and started treating her like a rather difficult girlfriend who’d moved in permanently.”
Inside these pages.
The Greeting
A daily practice that transformed anxiety from enemy to uncomfortable ally
The Pink Spaghetti Mistress
How personifying anxiety changed everything about the relationship
From Barracks to Boardrooms
What military service teaches you about fear - and what it doesn’t
The 3am Conversations
Learning to listen when your mind won’t stop talking
Coexistence
Practical tools for living alongside anxiety without letting it run the show
Who this book is for
If you’re looking for a cure, you’re in the wrong place.
If you’re looking for company, pull up a chair.
This book is for:
Anyone exhausted from fighting themselves
Veterans who came home to discover the hardest battles were still ahead
High achievers who look successful on the outside and feel like frauds on the inside
Anyone who suspects there might be another way
You don’t have to win this.
You just have to stay.
Coming 2026