New York Times Bestseller
“Probably the best book on living with anxiety that I’ve ever read.” – Mark Manson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast, you must first make it beautiful.
Sarah Wilson first came across this Chinese proverb in psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison’s memoir An Unquiet Mind, and it became the key to understanding her own lifelong struggle with anxiety. Wilson, bestselling author, journalist, and entrepreneur has helped over 1.5 million people worldwide to live better, healthier lives through her I Quit Sugar books and program. And all along, she has been managing chronic anxiety.
In First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, Wilson directs her intense focus and fierce investigating skills onto her lifetime companion, looking at the triggers and treatments, the fashions and fads. She reads widely and interviews fellow sufferers, mental health experts, philosophers, and even the Dalai Lama, processing all she learns through the prism of her own experiences.
Wilson offers readers comfort, humor, companionship, and practical tips for living with the Beast:
Cultivate a “gratitude ritual.” You can’t be grateful and anxious at the same time.
Eat to curb anxiety. Real food is your best friend.
Just breathe. Embrace the healing power of meditation.
Make your bed. Every day. Simple outer order creates inner calm.
Study fellow fretters to know thyself. Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. all struggled with anxiety.
Actively practice missing out. Forget FOMO, curl up on the couch, and order takeout.
Practical and poetic, wise and funny, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful is a small book with a big heart. It will encourage the myriad souls who dance with this condition to embrace it as a part of who they are, and to explore the possibilities it offers for a richer, fuller life.
The cover caught my eye, and I didn’t think the subject matter (living with anxiety) would be my thing, but this is a well-written, honest memoir/self help book. For someone struggling with similar issues, it could be life-changing.
You know how you book into a hotel and that night you can’t sleep, because of the hum of the air conditioning, or maybe it’s the loud construction noise coming right through the window? what do you do? Change rooms? Well author, Sarah Wilson has techniques that helps us with certain anxiety, how to cope with it, how to “sit with it”…. what is anxiety? It something that drives people, that highly intelligent people suffer from, like Einstein and even there are different types of anxiety. A spiral anxiety and even anxiety that goes full blown out and beyond panic attacks and then there are the milder types with the OCD.
.
I have listened to a few audio books, but none that really had grabbed my attention as much, or for as long as this one. The more I kept going deeper into this audio, the more interesting it became. This author, who “takes off her mask” is a total wreck. I questioned halfway through, how how did she get through all these life incidents and still remain in one piece? ….. the answer is clear, and stated above … anxious people drives themselves “get things done” “organise things”.
This was actually a highly interesting, but yet for me, a calming audiobook at a time when high stress is normally the case …. at Christmas time, when most people are running around I just sat quietly for a change, relaxed and just listened, giggling and laughing at the high wit that needs be, in a book like this. The author does touch briefly on other things, like sugar, and how this effects the body and mind, but the majority was about plain old anxiety.
I highly recommend you listen to the audiobook of this, or book for that matter, its extremely interesting, facinating, entertaining and it kept me captivated for hours. Read by the author herself. Duration time 9 hrs 7 mins.
.
Genre – Non-fiction – Wellbeing – Self Help – Autobiography – Australian – Health
Sarah Wilson’s First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety has a few insights, but is bogged down by its editing stye and by the author’s own privilege. It’s more of a memoir than anything else, and while I applaud Wilson for being so forthright about her own personal journey through anxiety, depression, et al, I feel that it is full of mixed-messages. For instance: on the one hand, medication can be helpful to combat anxiety, but maybe not because the drug companies created anxiety terminology whilst simultaneously creating drugs to combat it. Also, there’s a lot of emphasis on Wilson’s sugar-free ideology, which mostly felt like a constant advertisement throughout the memoir. The only reason this is getting three stars instead of two is because I did find a few nuggets of advice (most of which I’ve gotten from other sources) that I found helpful.
I also love the idea of “making the beast beautiful,” which is something the author co-opted from a Chinese proverb. If the book had been more focused on that overarching idea, I think I would have enjoyed it more. I don’t think this is necessarily the book for people who have an actual anxiety disorder, rather it seems to pander to white spiritualism/white feminism subscribers, and doesn’t hold space for the marginalized (nor, I’d argue, for those who genuinely suffer from anxiety disorders).
I spent a long time debating how to review this one. As someone who has worked through many trials with anxiety and is currently in a good place, this book came into my life at just the right time. Reading it was cathartic, as I never knew that anyone else *thought* the way I did. But seeing Sarah discuss in detail how her thoughts quickly spiral out of control made me realize I wasn’t alone. And for that reason, I adore this book.
This is not a self-help book. She’s not teaching you ways to cope with anxiety (although I did pick up a couple of good tools from her discussing her own experiences). She’s helping fellow anxiety-sufferers learn to appreciate the beauty of the chaos in our minds through sharing her own story.
Now, even though I really enjoyed this book, the reason I was torn over how to rate it was because I do not think this book is for everyone. For someone who is in the throes of an anxiety spiral, her descriptions of her own struggles could be triggering. While what I loved about this book is how vivid of a picture she was able to paint with her words, for someone who is truly suffering, it might be a little too heavy to read right now.
Plus, she mentions the idea of coming off of medications more than once. And while this is a memoir and she was writing about her own experiences and what worked for her, the power of suggestion might be a bit too strong for someone reading this who isn’t currently in a good headspace and able to think through whether that’s the right route for them (and take the initiative to discuss that with their doctor before making any decisions).
But, those issues aside, I thought this book was beautifully written, painfully raw and, ultimately, like a big hug.