Anna Mathur
Anna Mathur is a psychotherapist, bestselling author, and mother of three, known for her relatable and compassionate approach to mental health, parenting, and emotional wellbeing. ...
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Who are you?
Hi, I am Anna Martha. I'm a psychotherapist. I am an author. I've got a podcast called The Therapy Edit, and basically I am a passionate psycho educator, which basically means taking all of the insights, all of the tips, all of the thoughts that I often share within the therapy room with my clients, and just throwing them out there for everyone to help you understand yourself a little bit better, and most importantly, find more compassion for yourself. I'm a mom as well. I've got three young kids. They are six, nine, and 10. I have a cat called Felix, very inventive, very original name, a few fish. I love cooking, I love walking. I'm in a bit of a homebody. I've recently got into looking after my plants instead of almost killing them, so I'm there often spraying my plants, cooking, making pancakes for the kids in the kitchen. And I love writing. I love people very much so, and I love sharing some of my own story of mental health as a way of showing people that they are not alone, but also sharing my psychotherapeutic knowledge to give them some tips and some tools to support themselves.
What is your background?
So I am a psych therapist and I'm accredited with the BACP, and I did a psychology degree all the way back in 2004. And after that I worked in marketing for a little bit. I did lots of voluntary pastoral work, and then when I was 25, which was the minimum age for doing a master's in psychotherapy, I did my master's at Regents University in London. And I have worked in lots of classic clinical settings that you would imagine really as a therapist. I've worked in GP surgeries, I've worked in private practise. And then after having my second child in 2016, I downloaded Instagram and I started sharing little bits on there about mental health. And I learned this amazing word that I didn't know at that point called psychoeducation. And I thought, ah, this is what I'm doing. I'm taking all of that, learning all of those insights from the therapy room, and I'm communicating them and sharing them. And I often do that alongside my own story because instead of sharing my client stories, I love sharing some of my own experience with challenges around mental health, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, burnout, navigating motherhood, postnatal depression, all of these different experiences that I've had. I have this absolute privilege of having sat in the therapy room for so many years that I fundamentally know for certain that I am not alone. So I don't feel a huge amount of shame in sharing these things. I love sharing my story and weaving it in with psychology to hopefully just really help people feel a little bit less shame and a lot more self-compassion and ability to share their own stories too.
What are intrusive thoughts and why do we experience them?
Intrusive thoughts are just thoughts really. We don't have a huge amount of control over the things that we think about. All sorts of stuff runs through our mind minute to minute, doesn't it? And the intrusive thoughts that I think we're talking about here tend to not be the funny thoughts, the boring thoughts, the thoughts of what would it be like to do something wild in this moment? What would it be like to suddenly break out into song on the tube? The thoughts that we are talking about when we talk about intrusive thoughts tend to be the ones that interrupt, that come into our mind, and that conflict somehow with our values, conflict somehow with the person that we understand ourselves to be. So they really grab our attention. That's what we mean when we talk about intrusive thoughts.