Two cancers in my early thirties were hard, but;
The anxiety that followed, years later, was harder.
I'm Marloes. Anxiety taught me a lot, and Serenify is what I built from everything that actually helped.
I'm Dutch, based in The Hague, and I've lived as an expat in Norway, Belgium, Italy, the United States, and India. I built The Anxiety Relief Audio Program for expats dealing with the kind of anxiety I know too well.
I was diagnosed with breast cancer at 31, and again at 34. Both times I got through the treatment, smiled at the doctors, told everyone I was fine, and went back to my life. I genuinely believed I was handling it.
What I didn't see was what I'd quietly learned along the way. That receiving praise for being strong felt better than being honest. That keeping it together was the most useful thing I could do. So I kept doing it. For years.
The anxiety arrived later. Quietly first, then loudly. It peaked while I was living in Mumbai; navigating the noise, the heat, the broken curbs, the work pressure, the long days of adapting. I kept pushing through. My body kept signalling that this wasn't going to work; constant exhaustion, then shingles, and later a stomach infection and a heat stroke. From there the real panic started. Daily. One hour of sleep a night for weeks, until sleeping pills relieved me from my misery; at least at first.
This was the part I couldn't smile through anymore.
I wasn't planning on using the pills forever. So I started learning. How the nervous system works. How the body and the mind feed each other. How avoidance keeps fear alive. How sleep slowly comes back when you stop chasing it. How acceptance does the work that all this effort never could.
I tried things I used to quietly roll my eyes at. Meditation, body work, journalling, breathing, visualisation, and talking about things I wasn't used to. And yes, I also did my fair share of ohm chanting on the couch. Most of it helped a little. The combination helped a lot. Bit by bit, the calm started to outweigh the anxiety.
Watch my full story hereThe credentials behind the calm.
01 MSc in Global Consumer Marketing, BA in Communication Studies
02 Certified coach
03 Guest lecturer at medical conventions
04 Guest lecturer at the University of Antwerp
05 Built The Anxiety Relief Audio Program from my own experience and research on anxiety
06 Built the program with input from psychologists Barbara Mulder, Aad van Leeuwen and Marc Jacobs, and many other clinical and creative contributors
When I came out the other side, one thing bothered me
The well-studied and widely available tools that actually helped me were sitting scattered across books, podcasts, therapy sessions, apps, and research articles. Nobody pulls them into one place.
So I built that place. The Anxiety Relief Audio Program is complete, structured, and made for people who are doing all this far from home.
See the ProgramNot ready for that yet? Start with The 7 Steps Audio €27