Exercise for Mood and Anxiety

Exercise has long been touted anecdotally as an effective tool for mood improvement, but only recently has rigorous science caught up with these claims. There is now overwhelming evidence that regular exercise can help relieve low mood-from feelings of stress and anxiety to full depressive episodes.

With Exercise for Mood and Anxiety, Michael Otto and Jasper Smits, well-known authorities on cognitive behavioral therapy, take their empirically-based mood regulation strategy from the clinic to the general public. Written for those with diagnosed mood disorders as well as those who simply need a new strategy for managing the low mood and stress that is an everyday part of life, this book provides readers with step-by-step guidance on how to start and maintain an exercise program geared towards improving mood, with a particular emphasis on understanding the relationship between mood and motivation. Readers learn to attend carefully to mood states prior to and following physical activity in order to leverage the full benefits of exercise, and that the trick to maintaining an exercise program is not in applying more effort, but in arranging one’s environment so that less effort is needed. As a result readers not only acquire effective strategies for adopting a successful program, but are introduced to a broader philosophy for enhancing overall well-being. Providing patient vignettes, rich examples, and extensive step-by-step guidance on overcoming the obstacles that prevent adoption of regular exercise for mood, Exercise for Mood and Anxiety is a unique translation of scientific principles of clinical and social psychology into an action-based strategy for mood change.

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 Many Faces of Anxiety

Real-world examples abound in this resource that provides a basic context for understanding how anxiety affects people and those around them. The author shares 12 cases of various clients with whom she has worked and paints detailed, clear pictures of the many reasons people become anxious and the disguises anxiety takes in their lives. Tools and techniques for reducing anxiety are interspersed throughout each section. The dozen stories in this book are told in layman’s language with a great deal of humor and compassion and will aid sufferers, families, and friends in bringing patience and awareness to the process of identifying, understanding, and healing from panic and anxiety.

Rock and Water

An integrated resource for greater happiness, Rock & Water will keep you moving peacefully through the unpredictable ups and downs of life.

Just as a stream seamlessly wanders through the natural world over, around, or surrounded by rocks, the purpose of Rock and Water is to provide access to basic skills to help us enhance our happiness in the midst of the meanderings of our everyday lives, regardless of the obstacles (in particular the emotional strain of modern living). These skills are based primarily on current research and practice in the fields of cognitive-behavioral psychology and mindfulness/acceptance, two disciplines that have mostly been isolated from each other. Rock and Water is research-based and practical, while also being philosophical and personal; and includes several narratives from the life experiences of a wide variety of prominent people in history (Viktor Frankl, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, Audrey Hepburn, Mohandas Gandhi and many others)

My Age of Anxiety

As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood.

Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as on the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations and the anguish anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze—while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it.

My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.

The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Overcoming Anxiety

Anxiety is not your fault. There are many factors that contribute to developing a mind that is prone to intense anxiety, and if you have such a mind, there are many things you can do to change the way it works. Research has shown that practicing kindness and compassion soothes experiences of fear, while self-critical thoughts tend to intensify them. If you become frustrated with your anxious reactions or consistently try to talk yourself out of your anxiety, it may be time to try a different approach.

The compassion-focused therapy (CFT) based program in The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Overcoming Anxiety will help you learn to be kinder to yourself while you soothe your anxious impulses. Complete with worksheets, exercises, and meditation practices, this book includes everything you need to learn mindfulness and compassion-focused skills for redirecting your anxious thoughts and allowing yourself to enjoy a more peaceful life.

By learning to be a compassionate witness to your own pain, you will also learn to be fully present in the moment, and develop healthier, more fluid ways of responding to life’s struggles. This resourceful guide aims to help you understand the nature of your anxiety, the best ways of dealing with it, and how your mind can help you cope with it.

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.

The Worry Solution

Our brains are hardwired for worry. While our ancient ancestors had a legitimate use for the fight-or-flight instinct, today what was once a matter of survival has become the stuff of sleepless nights and anxiety-filled days. At its best, worry is a way for us to turn over and solve a problem in our minds. But for many, worry becomes a negative cycle of unnecessary suffering. Now, based on cutting-edge brain science, Dr. Martin Rossman has developed a program to help you break the worry cycle—and transform worry into a positive force.

In The Worry Solution, Dr. Rossman gives you an easy-to-follow plan for taking control of your reactions to stress and anxiety. Using proven clinical techniques that harness the very power of imagination that creates worry and stress, you will learn the five basic skills that will help you to clarify your worries, sort them into those you can and cannot do something about, and tap the wisdom buried deep within you to help solve problems creatively. At the heart of the program is the use of guided imagery and creative visualization, techniques that invigorate the emotional and intuitive parts of the brain to add to and enhance logical intelligence.

Not only can you start to see a change in your stress levels immediately, but with regular practice, you may literally alter the worry pathways in your brain—and “hardwire” yourself for calmness and clarity. Grounded in cutting-edge science and wonderfully accessible, The Worry Solution is a powerful and practical guide to living your best life—healthier, happier, and free from unnecessary stress.