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.

Belong

How is it that the internet connects us to a world of people, yet so many of us feel more isolated than ever? That we have hundreds, even thousands of friends on social media, but not a single person to truly confide in? Radha Agrawal calls this “community confusion,” and in Belong she offers every reader a blueprint to find their people and build and nurture community because connectedness—as more and more studies show—is our key to happiness, fulfillment, and success.

A book that’s equal parts inspiring and interactive, and packed with prompts, charts, quizzes, and full-color illustrations, Belong takes readers on a two-part journey. Part one is Going IN—a gentle but intentional process of self-discovery and finding out your true energy levels and VIA (values, interests, and abilities). Part two is Going OUT—building on all that you’ve learned about yourself to find those few special people who feed your soul, and discovering, or creating, the ever-widening groups that align with your aims and desires.

As the Co-founder and CEO of the popular global morning dance community Daybreaker, Radha Agrawal developed an immense offline community with her team of Community Catalysts in 25 cities and on a dozen college campuses around the world by creating a physical space for people to connect, self-express, sweat, and dance. Now, Radha offers life-changing strategies, tips, and tricks for making friends that will light your fire and give you the exhale of  “Ahh, I’m home.”

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.

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 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.

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.

Girl, Wash Your Face

Do you ever suspect that everyone else has life figured out and you don’t have a clue? If so, Rachel Hollis has something to tell you: that’s a lie.

As the founder of the lifestyle website TheChicSite.com and CEO of her own media company, Rachel Hollis developed an immense online community by sharing tips for better living while fearlessly revealing the messiness of her own life. Now, in this challenging and inspiring new book, Rachel exposes the twenty lies and misconceptions that too often hold us back from living joyfully and productively, lies we’ve told ourselves so often we don’t even hear them anymore.

With painful honesty and fearless humor, Rachel unpacks and examines the falsehoods that once left her feeling overwhelmed and unworthy, and reveals the specific practical strategies that helped her move past them. In the process, she encourages, entertains, and even kicks a little butt, all to convince you to do whatever it takes to get real and become the joyous, confident woman you were meant to be.

With unflinching faith and rock-hard tenacity, Girl, Wash Your Face shows you how to live with passion and hustle–and how to give yourself grace without giving up.

The Broken Mirror

In a world obsessed with appearances, it is not surprising that body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD, has manifested itself as a troubling and relatively common problem for many individuals. In The Broken Mirror, the first and most definitive book on BDD, Dr. Katharine Phillips draws on years of clinical practice, scientific research, and professional evaluations of over 700 patients to bring readers her expertise and experience with this often debilitating illness.

BDD causes sufferers to be obsessed by perceived flaws in their appearance and may afflict as much as two percent of the population, or nearly five million people. Many sufferers are able to function well in society, but remain secretly obsessed by their “hideous acne” or “horrible nose,” sneaking constant peeks at a pocket mirror, or spending hours at a time redoing makeup. Others find their lives disintegrate because of their appearance obsessions. It is not an uncommon disorder, simply a hidden one, since sufferers are often embarrassed to tell even their closest friends about their concerns. The author presents the stories and interviews of over 200 individuals to show the many different behaviors and symptoms of BDD, and includes a quick self-assessment questionnaire. Four new chapters provide updated information on treatment of BDD, frequently obtained treatments to be avoided, and more detailed advice for family members and friends on how to cope with the disorder.

Left untreated, the torment of BDD can lead to psychiatric hospitalization and sometimes suicide. With treatment, many sufferers are able to lead normal lives. The Broken Mirror is literally a lifesaving handbook for sufferers, their families, and their doctors.