If you're one of the many who suffer from anxiety and are looking for ways to ease your suffering, then this book offers hundreds of ways to combat your anxiety. Whether you want to better deal with everyday stress or you have phobias and full-blown panic attacks, this book suggests strategies for you. The book is written by Dr. Edmund Bourne, who is also the author of the bestselling classic The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook (now in its seventh edition).
The subtitle of the Coping with Anxiety is "10 Simple Ways to Relieve Anxiety, Fear & Worry", and it's broken up in into 10 chapters organized around themes. Within each chapter, though, are actually a plethora of ways to deal with your anxiety. The author specifies up front that he doesn't talk about anxiety medication as he feels that this is something to best be talked about with your psychiatrist. In the opening chapters, he focuses on ways to relax your mind and body through muscle relaxation, visualization, and meditation. Dr. Bourne then leads you through patterns of thinking that may be leading to anxiety, using the cognitive distortions of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to help you recognize when your thinking is not realistic. He goes on to describe exposure therapy, which is especially useful for people who deal with phobias. In the next few chapters, he suggests exercise and dietary practices that are useful for people who deal with anxiety. In the last chapters, he suggests lifestyle changes to help you cope with anxiety.
The book is straightforward and practical. The writing is a bit dry and doesn't feature examples of people coping with anxiety in the way some other self-help books do. But it does give listeners many doable ideas for coping with their anxiety, provided they are willing to take action!