Red Magazine features Dr Anna Persaud’s story: can we use our senses to make us feel safe?

For years, Dr Anna Persaud, CEO of This Works, lived with a nervous system that felt permanently switched on.
In a new interview with Red, Anna opens up about her lifelong experience of anxiety, from being acutely aware of other people’s expressions and behaviour as a child to an intense sensitivity to noise and a constant feeling of needing to stay alert.

“I now know that my anxiety was nervous system activation, a sense of hyper-awareness.”

That hypervigilance became something Anna learnt to live with – and, in some ways, something that helped propel her forwards. She describes being highly attuned to patterns and risks, but also the relentless internal pressure that accompanied it: over-functioning, over-revising and overworking.

Even as her career progressed and she became a mother, the anxiety remained. Following the birth of her children, Anna describes experiencing complex trauma alongside major hormonal changes, leaving her increasingly aware that something needed to change.

At 40, Anna decided she wanted to understand why her nervous system had been so disrupted by her early life experiences – and what she could do to help herself.

She embarked on a practitioner-level course in psychology and began researching neuroscience, including the relationship between trauma, fear, stress and our emotional responses.

“I made it my business to learn as much as I could. I get very obsessed with solving.”

Alongside this research, Anna began working through her own early experiences with a trauma-informed clinical psychotherapist, including EMDR therapy. At the same time, she was studying the neuroscience of sleep, stress, touch techniques and Functional Fragrance, bringing her personal exploration and professional work increasingly close together.

It led to a question that would become central to her work at This Works:

“How can we retrain the nervous system and use the senses to make us feel safer?”

Sleep became the first area Anna focused on.

Rather than simply getting into bed and expecting her mind and body to switch off, she began looking at the information her brain was receiving throughout the evening – and how she could deliberately change those signals.

A strict 11pm bedtime became part of her routine, alongside putting her phone away, switching down the lights and creating a calmer sensory environment.

Her evening ritual now includes low-level lighting and candles, sensory massage and a bath. She also uses deep sleep pillow spray, using familiar fragrance as part of the transition towards rest.

The idea is simple: when the nervous system has spent the day responding to stimulation, the evening can provide a sequence of familiar sensory cues that signal a change of state.

Movement has also become an important part of Anna’s approach.

She tells Red that she uses Pilates and exercise to help regulate her nervous system. Following hip problems and subsequent operations, swimming also became an important evening ritual – giving her body a way to move while supporting her recovery.

Anna has since incorporated red light into her routine too. After researching how red and infrared light can help the body, she began using red light panels as part of her morning strength and rehabilitation exercises.

It’s another example of the way she has learnt to build small, repeatable rituals into different points of the day rather than waiting until bedtime to think about recovery.

Perhaps one of the biggest shifts has been Anna’s understanding of what feeling better actually means.

“Peace, I’ve discovered, is not the same thing as staying comfortable.”

Rather than trying to eliminate every source of anxiety, she describes learning to recognise what is within her control – and what isn’t.

That philosophy extends to travel. Anna explains that part of managing her anxiety has involved deliberately moving beyond her comfort zone, including travelling somewhere alone and allowing herself to experience the discomfort that comes with uncertainty.

For Anna, the goal isn’t to live without stress or challenge. It’s to better understand the nervous system, recognise the signals it is receiving and create the sensory conditions that can help the mind and body move out of a constantly activated state.

It’s an idea that sits at the heart of our approach at This Works: recovery doesn’t begin when you get into bed, it begins when you switch off.

Read Dr Anna Persaud’s full interview in the November 2026 issue of Red in their latest print issue here.