A straightforward, hands-on approach to self-calming.
All we have to fear is fear itself according to this practical psychotherapeutic guide to working through anxiety.
Nicolaou begins by recounting his own history of frequent, crippling panic attacks that assaulted him whether he was flying in a plane or lying comfortably in bed. After years of unhelpful treatments with anti-anxiety meds and bouts of paralyzing depression, he became a therapist and developed the nonpharmaceutical treatment program elaborated here. Drawing on cognitive behavioral therapy, he pegs anxiety disorders as purely mental phenomena in which our normal response to stress pathologically feeds on itself. The stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol, Nicolaou argues, produce physical symptoms of fear that are not harmful but can feel like a heart attack and make us think we are suffering from a serious disease; meanwhile, they suppress the brain’s rational circuitry and bring on morbid ruminations. (In the author’s case, he became obsessed with researching anxiety disorders on the internet, which only fueled his worries.) The result is a vicious circle in which dread of anxiety, panic, and depression becomes the driver of further anxiety, panic, and depression. Debut author Nicolaou outlines a six-step self-help plan for short-circuiting the downward spiral by redirecting the mind away from anxious anticipation and toward relaxing activities and reflections. The regimen includes hot showers, breathing exercises, meditation, and diet tips, but its heart is a set of self-talk scripts to repeat whenever anxiety mounts. (Sample inner monologue: “I’m not in any danger. These feelings started because I scared myself by something I thought.”) In prose that’s confident and reassuring, Nicolaou lays out his treatment and its underpinnings in brain science in a lucid way. Some psychiatrists may wince at his contempt for theories of biological causation and rejection of psychiatric meds and consider his very stripped-down version of cognitive therapy simplistic, but readers will find here a constructive, easy-to-follow path toward addressing psychological problems.
A straightforward, hands-on approach to self-calming.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-6742-9
Page Count: 158
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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