Taming The Anxious Mind

Taming the Anxious Mind deconstructs the complex treatment of anxiety and stress disorders into a user-friendly and action-oriented guidebook. Parables, infographics, charts, and illustrations supplement the material and creates a more digestible approach to psychological content.

Do you ever wonder what is happening inside your brain when you feel anxious, panicked, and worried? In Rewire Your Anxious Brain, psychologist Catherine Pittman and author Elizabeth Karle offer a unique, evidence-based solution to overcoming anxiety based in cutting-edge neuroscience and research. In the book, you will learn how the amygdala and cortex (both important parts of the brain) are essential players in the neuropsychology of anxiety. The amygdala acts as a primal response, and oftentimes, when this part of the brain processes fear, you may not even understand why you are afraid. By comparison, the cortex is the center of “worry.” That is, obsessing, ruminating, and dwelling on things that may or may not happen. In the book, Pittman and Karle make it simple by offering specific examples of how to manage fear by tapping into both of these pathways in the brain. As you read, you’ll gain a greater understanding how anxiety is created in the brain, and as a result, you will feel empowered and motivated to overcome it. The brain is a powerful tool, and the more you work to change the way you respond to fear, the more resilient you will become. Using the practical self-assessments and proven-effective techniques in this book, you will learn to literally “rewire” the brain processes that lie at the root of your fears.

Anxiety is natural. Calm is learned. If you didn’t learn yesterday, you can learn today. It’s not easy, of course. Once your natural alarm system is triggered, it’s hard to find the off switch. Indeed, you don’t have an off switch until you build one. Tame Your Anxiety shows you how. Readers learn about the brain chemicals that make us feel threatened and the chemicals that make us feel safe. You’ll see how your brain turns on these chemicals with neural pathways built from past experience, and, most important, you discover your power to build new pathways, to enjoy more happy chemicals, and reduce threat chemicals. This book does not tell you to imagine yourself on a tropical beach. That’s the last thing you want when you feel like a lion is chasing you. Instead, you will learn to ask your inner mammal what it wants and how you can get it. Each time you step toward meeting a survival need, you build the neural pathways that expect your needs to be met. You don’t have to wait for a perfect world to feel good. You can feel good right now. The exercises in this book help you build a self-soothing circuit in steps so small that anyone can do it. Once you learn how it’s done, and how it can help ease your anxiety, you will learn how to handle situations in which you feel threatened or anxious. Understanding the underlying mechanisms will help you stop them before they get ahead of you.

New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller A step-by-step plan clinically proven to break the cycle of worry and fear that drives anxiety and addictive habits We are living through one of the most anxious periods any of us can remember. Whether facing issues as public as a pandemic or as personal as having kids at home and fighting the urge to reach for the wine bottle every night, we are feeling overwhelmed and out of control. But in this timely book, Judson Brewer explains how to uproot anxiety at its source using brain-based techniques and small hacks accessible to anyone. We think of anxiety as everything from mild unease to full-blown panic. But it's also what drives the addictive behaviors and bad habits we use to cope (e.g. stress eating, procrastination, doom scrolling and social media). Plus, anxiety lives in a part of the brain that resists rational thought. So we get stuck in anxiety habit loops that we can't think our way out of or use willpower to overcome. Dr. Brewer teaches us to map our brains to discover our triggers, defuse them with the simple but powerful practice of curiosity, and to train our brains using mindfulness and other practices that his lab has proven can work. Distilling more than 20 years of research and hands-on work with thousands of patients, including Olympic athletes and coaches, and leaders in government and business, Dr. Brewer has created a clear, solution-oriented program that anyone can use to feel better - no matter how anxious they feel.

"A chronic sense of unease. Nagging what-ifs. Worry about what other people think. Paralyzing phobias. Full-blown panic attacks. Anxiety shows up in a lot of different ways and can permeate every aspect of your life. The good news is that although it can feel confusing and overwhelming -- as if things will never get better -- it is possible to retrain your brain and put yourself back in the driver's seat. In Taming Your Amygdala, clinical psychologist Dr. Catherine Pittman offers scientific insight, clear explanations, and simple brain-based strategies to help you overcome excessive worry, anxiety, and fear. Based on the principles of neuroscience and cognitive behavioral therapy, the tools in this workbook will teach you the 'language of the amygdala' so you can: Understand how and why your brain gets 'hijacked' by anxiety and fear; Identify and cope with anxiety triggers and stuck points; Develop new, adaptive coping skills to prevent and reduce anxious thoughts and feelings; Live your life to the fullest, breaking free of the limits of chronic anxiety, paralyzing worry, or debilitating panic." -- From back cover.

The very things we do to control anxiety can make anxiety worse. This unique guide offers a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)-based approach to help you recognize the constant chatter of your anxious “monkey mind,” stop feeding anxious thoughts, and find the personal peace you crave. Ancient sages compared the human mind to a monkey: constantly chattering, hopping from branch to branch—endlessly moving from fear to safety. If you are one of the millions of people whose life is affected by anxiety, you are familiar with this process. Unfortunately, you can’t switch off the “monkey mind,” but you can stop feeding the monkey—or stop rewarding it by avoiding the things you fear. Written by psychotherapist Jennifer Shannon, this book shows you how to stop anxious thoughts from taking over using proven-effective cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and mindfulness techniques, as well as fun illustrations. By following the exercises in this book, you’ll learn to identify your own anxious thoughts, question those thoughts, and uncover the core fears at play. Once you stop feeding the monkey, there are no limits to how expansive your life can feel. This book will show you how anxiety can only continue as long as you try to avoid it. And, paradoxically, only by seeking out and confronting the things that make you anxious can you reverse the cycle that keeps your fears alive.

How To Tame My Anxiety Monster is about a child with a monster that no one else can see but him. He doesn't like when his monster comes around because it makes his stomach hurt, or makes it hard to concentrate or sleep. It makes him feel lots of other upsetting and uncomfortable things as well. He decided to talk to his parents about it and his mom told him that she had one too. He learned that his monster's name was Anxiety. Throughout the book the child talks about the ways that he can tame his anxiety monster. He can play sports, do yoga, art, or talk to a therapist to help calm him among other things. He then discovers the good ways that his anxiety monster can help him; during a test, a report, or riding a big scary-fun rollercoaster! He may not be able to make his monster go away, but he can learn to tame him! In the back of this book are some parent helps that can be great conversation starters for children that deal with anxiety.

Breaking the Anxiety Cycle - A Treatment Blueprint for Acute & Chronic Anxiety Relief is a workbook by Dr. Heidi Schreiber-Pan, the clinical director of Chesapeake Mental Health Collaborative, and a sought-after international speaker and trainer. With 46 amazing tools and exercises, Its six-step treatment model lies within the distinctive arrangement of evidence-based therapeutic interventions that reduce symptomology common to the experience of anxiety. The workbook describes a blend of effective elements of neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology, CBT, ACT, and logotherapy. It serves as a must-have blueprint for clinicians treating clients with acute and chronic anxiety. It also serves as a great companion workbook Dr. Heidi Schreiber-Pan's popular book Taming the Anxious Mind - A Guidebook to Relieve Stress & Anxiety. This workbook will help the readers: Uncover the root cause of anxiety Apply cognitive and behavioral intervention Learn to calm the amygdala Determine life goals and values Cultivate self-compassion Understand attachment theory Provide a practice and maintenance plan