Stand up to anxiety and take back control Is anxiety running your life? Does it dictate where you go, what you do, or who you spend time with? Does it keep you trapped in a bubble of fear and panic? Anxiety can happen anytime, anywhere–that’s why you need simple, in-the-moment skills to stay grounded when worry takes hold. This user-friendly guide will help you gain the upper hand on anxiety, … hand on anxiety, and stop avoiding the people, places, and things that make you anxious–and start living the life you were meant to live.
In Show Your Anxiety Who’s Boss, you’ll find a practical and direct three-step approach grounded in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to help you respond to anxious thoughts, respond effectively to future challenges, and make peace with uncertainty. If you’re ready to live a full and vital life without anxiety constantly getting in the way, this straightforward guide will show you how to get back on track.
With this powerful book, you’ll learn how to:
- Make useful predictions, instead of anxious fictions
- Take action and overcome avoidance
- Accept and redirect anxious or negative thoughts
“A wonderful resource for anyone struggling with anxiety.”
—David F. Tolin, PhD, ABPP, author of Face Your Fears
“Joel Minden has taken wisdom from decades of anxiety treatment research and distilled it into an accessible, compelling book.”
—Kathryn H. Gordon, PhD, psychologist
more
Show Your Anxiety Who’s Boss by Joel Minden provides strategies drawn from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to help manage anxiety. CBT is an evidence-based treatment, so while the strategies won’t necessarily for everyone, they are legit, unlike many of the other self-help books floating around.
The approach is broken down into three major steps: predictions, not anxious fictions; take action, demand satisfaction; and accept and redirect. The book is divided into three sections based on these steps.
The book starts off with information about some of the important elements of anxiety. The author explains that anxiety involves overestimating the degree of threat and underlying our ability to cope. Two key problematic responses to this are avoidance and emotion-focused coping (things that ease the anxiety temporarily but actually end up feeding into it).
You may be familiar with the term cognitive distortions, but for the most part that isn’t used in this book. Instead, the author uses the term anxious fictions to describe distorted predictions about the future. The three key anxious fictions identified are probability overestimation, catastrophizing, and inadequate coping.
The author points out that anxiety is a problem of over-control, and I found it interesting the way he explained it. While anxiety can feel totally out of control, it’s associated with a low ability to tolerate uncertainty, as well as attempts to mentally get control over things that are totally out of our control.
The second section of the book is focused on pushing through avoidance for the purpose of living a satisfying life by engaging in meaningful activities. The book uses the mantra “do it anyway.” The author acknowledges, as he does a number of times throughout the book, that actually doing this isn’t going to be easy.
Various activities are suggested, including identifying manageable first steps and conducting behavioural experiments to generate evidence. There are plenty of questions scattered throughout the book to stimulate thinking. Scenarios are given to illustrate some of the major concepts covered.
Each chapter ends with an explanation of how the material covered can help and what’s next, as well as bullet point summaries of the key points. The final chapter gives a very good quick and easy point form summary of the book’s major concepts. The second to last chapter is written Q&A style to address questions you might have about what was covered.
This book was quite good. There’s wasn’t anything that stood out enough for me to say it was great, but if you’re looking for a CBT book for anxiety, this one is well worth considering.
I received a reviewer copy of this book from http://www.netgalley.com.
I received an ARC from NetGalley for an honest review. This book was a blessing for me because the older I got, the harder it was to do the things I wanted to do. I have given up a lot of things I wanted to do and I learned it was anxiety standing in the way. I just couldn’t talk myself into doing things like I used to. It wasn’t until I found this book on NetGalley that things started to look promising. While I was reading it, I did the notebook and kept going back to it. There are so much information and tools in this book that will really help. My life has started to improve. I have the book on my kindle and have put the techniques I used there as well so no matter where I am I have my kindle so if anxiety starts taking over and I want to go hide, I can see the tools and quiet my mind.
I saw a lot of things in the book that I didn’t realize I was doing because of anxiety. I just always wished I could be different. This book was an eye-opener for me. This book has given me the tools to quiet the anxiety brain so the part that wants to do it can come through. I am using the tools and not only can I see a change but others can too. This book has helped me get my life back.