Freedom from Anxiety

This book presents hundreds of safe, practical, and effective tools and techniques to alleviate anxiety, an epidemic that affects nearly 20 percent of Americans. Author and seasoned physician Marcey Shapiro, MD, shares how her personal struggle with this widespread syndrome led her to discover that there is not one treatment program that works for everyone and provides a wide range of integrative methods that will help readers find real and transformative relief.

Dr. Shapiro grappled with anxiety on her own path to greater health and wholeness and observed, through her personal experience and that of treating numerous patients who suffer from the heartache and despair that anxiety causes, that finding peace involves a spiritual journey of self-awareness and self-acceptance. She has successfully helped herself and her patients bring ease and peace of mind back into their lives using a diverse assortment of complementary techniques, including dietary changes, visualizations, shifting thoughts, breathing techniques, nutritional supplements, herbs, homeopathy, bodywork, aromatherapy, flower essences, and acupuncture, as well as more commonplace Western techniques such as medication and therapy, when appropriate.

Offering a variety of nondogmatic, empowering tools for enhancing personal growth, Freedom from Anxiety will help anxiety sufferers find ways, many of them free or very low cost, to achieve immediate relief as well as long term care and treatment. It can be read from cover to cover or perused for specific problems or solutions. Readers are able to take advantage of Dr. Shapiro’s vast knowledge and research as well as her engaging personal anecdotes and those from her decades of clinical practice.

The Healing Power of the Breath

Here’s a drug-free, side-effect free solution to common stress and mood problems—developed by two physicians. Millions of Americans suffer from mood problems and stress-related issues including anxiety, depression, insomnia, and trauma-induced emotions and behaviors; and most would prefer not to take medication for their conditions due to troublesome side effects, withdrawal symptoms, and disappointing success rates.

Drs. Richard P. Brown and Patricia L. Gerbarg provide a drug-free alternative that works through a range of simple breathing techniques drawn from yoga, Buddhist meditation, the Chinese practice of qigong, Orthodox Christian monks, and other sources. These methods have been scientifically shown to be effective in alleviating specific stress and mood challenges such as anxiety, insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder, and many others. The authors explain how breathing practices activate communication pathways between the mind and the body, positively impacting the brain and calming the stress response. The enclosed audio program guides readers through the techniques and helps make these breathing practices an ongoing part of daily life.

This book and CD set includes breathing techniques to relieve

• anxiety and depression
• trauma-related emotions and behaviors
• post-traumatic stress disorder
• insomnia
• addiction-related behaviors

It also offers breathing techniques to enhance concentration, peak performance, and personal relationships.

The Worry Wars

The Worry Wars is a step-by-step guide to helping children conquer their fears. Three heroic characters battle formidable fears and defeat them. Children who struggle with anxiety will identify with one or more of the hopeful and beautifully illustrated metaphoric stories that provide a springboard for dozens of fun, clinically sound interventions. The activities provide child-friendly ways to: Understand how anxiety works Identify worries and anxious thoughts Develop and practice adaptive coping strategies Practice relaxation Create and practice cognitions to help boss back the worries Develop an attack plan that includes doing the scary thing anyway … but in a gradual way that allows the child to experience a sense of mastery. A variety of fun reproducibles help children and their helpful adults plan their battles, record their successes and track rewards as they gradually boss back the worry. Finally, activities are provided to help families celebrate after they emerge victorious from the Worry Wars.

You and Your Anxious Child

Anxiety affects more children and teens than any other psychiatric illness, but it’s also the most treatable emotional disorder. Some 25 percent of children and adolescents will suffer an anxiety disorder at several points in their lifetime, resulting in serious problems in their ability to function in school, with peers, and on a general day-to-day basis. A renowned researcher and clinician who has developed groundbreaking, proven coping strategies illuminates a new path to fear-free living for families.

You and Your Anxious Child differentiates between separation anxiety, generalized anxiety, and social phobia, and guides parents on when and how to seek intervention. With moving case studies, such as Jon’s, whose mother quit her job because his separation anxiety compelled her to stay with him full-time, this book elucidates the nightmare that families can be living, and helps them understand that they are not alone. Every step of the way, Albano illustrates proven therapies to manage anxiety issues in children while addressing the emotional needs of parents, too. You and Your Anxious Child brings much-needed hope to families, helping them shape a positive new vision of the future.

The Anxious Thoughts Workbook

Are your thoughts getting in the way of living your life? Based in cutting-edge neuroscience and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), this important workbook will help you regain control from unwanted thoughts and get back to the things that matter.

Do you have unwanted, disturbing, upsetting, or weird thoughts that you just can’t seem to shake? Violent or sexual thoughts that cause you to feel ashamed, anxious, or depressed? Maybe you think they mean something about you—and that thought scares you even more. While you may not be able to shut your thoughts off permanently, you can gain distance from them and improve your life. This step-by-step guide will show you how.

In The Anxious Thoughts Workbook, renowned psychologist David A. Clark presents a targeted, transdiagnostic approach to help you move past unwanted mental intrusions. You’ll learn how to change the destructive patterns responsible for the persistence of anxious and depressive thinking, and strip these upsetting thoughts of their meaning—a process Clark refers to as “detoxing.” Finally, you’ll learn to manage the feelings of shame that can accompany these thoughts.

Are you ready to move past your thoughts and start focusing on more important things? If so, the proven-effective techniques in this workbook will help you get started.

Monkey Mind

Daniel Smith’s Monkey Mind is the stunning articulation of what it is like to live with anxiety. As he travels through anxiety’s demonic layers, Smith defangs the disorder with great humor and evocatively expresses its self-destructive absurdities and painful internal coherence. Aaron Beck, the most influential doctor in modern psychotherapy, says that “Monkey Mind does for anxiety what William Styron’s Darkness Visible did for depression.” Neurologist and bestselling writer Oliver Sacks says, “I read Monkey Mind with admiration for its bravery and clarity… I broke out into explosive laughter again and again.” Here, finally, comes relief and recognition to all those who want someone to put what they feel, or what their loved ones feel, into words.

Spent

Today, Americans are saving less, carrying larger debt loads, losing their homes to foreclosure, and filing bankruptcy in record numbers. People are spending more than they can afford, and many feel guilty, anxious, and overwhelmed as a result.

Moving beyond the advice of financial planners who only treat the symptoms of overspending, in Spent Sally Palaian offers proven plans for taking on a range of personal issues with money by examining those underlying emotional, familial, and societal factors that trigger spending behaviors.

Spent teaches readers to control shopping, pay off debt, develop budgets, and become financially competent through:

• Easy-to-use assessment tools designed to pinpoint the severity of a problem
• Questionnaires that facilitate the exploration of the root causes of unhealthy financial behaviors
• User-friendly exercises created to influence change from within

Palaian’s system for financial recovery is designed to not only help excessive spenders overcome their spending habits, but also to help hoarders, financial codependents, and underachievers let go of fears, take responsibility for their actions, and break unhealthy cycles. Spent empowers people in every financial predicament to disentangle their financial messes to achieve lasting, positive change and a healthy view of one’s true value in life.

Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents

With anxiety at epidemic levels among our children, Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents offers a contrarian yet effective approach to help children and teens push through their fears, worries, and phobias to ultimately become more resilient, independent, and happy.

How do you manage a child who gets stomachaches every school morning, who refuses after-school activities, or who is trapped in the bathroom with compulsive washing? Children like these put a palpable strain on frustrated, helpless parents and teachers. And there is no escaping the problem: One in every five kids suffers from a diagnosable anxiety disorder.

Unfortunately, when parents or professionals offer help in traditional ways, they unknowingly reinforce a child’s worry and avoidance. From their success with hundreds of organizations, schools, and families, Reid Wilson, Ph.D., and Lynn Lyons, LICSW, share their unconventional approach of stepping into uncertainty in a way that is currently unfamiliar but infinitely successful. Using current research and contemporary examples, the book exposes the most common anxiety-enhancing patterns—including reassurance, accommodation, avoidance, and poor problem solving—and offers a concrete plan with 7 key principles that foster change. And, since new research reveals how anxious parents typically make for anxious children, the book offers exercises and techniques to change both the children’s and the parental patterns of thinking and behaving.

This book challenges our basic instincts about how to help fearful kids and will serve as the antidote for an anxious nation of kids and their parents.