Quiet Your Mind

Never before has the psychological whistle been blown so clearly on the detrimental effects of chronic worrying, anxious problem-solving, and the general non-stop mental chatter of our thinking minds. John Selby, researcher, therapist, and educator, points out that we are indeed a nation of unwitting thinkaholics. In his essential new book, Quiet Your Mind, he offers us an easy-to-follow mind-management process through which we can learn to let go of fear-based mental habits and enter a more heart-centered, intuitively-clear, and spiritually-peaceful engagement with everyday life.

With solid scientific grounding, yet written in a heart-to-heart tone, Selby offers a precise exposé of how anxious thoughts focused on mental judgments, beliefs, and attitudes generate emotions such as irritation, worry, guilt, anger, and despair – leaving little room in our lives for positive spontaneous engagement with the world. In this definitive guidebook, Selby teaches how we can transcend such fear-based ideas and attitudes that hold us back in life, through potent yet easily-mastered techniques to quiet over-busy thoughtflows and nurture more present-moment, love-based mindstates.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.