Description
Book SynopsisAnxiety is natural. Calm is learned. If you didn’t learn yesterday, you can learn today. It’s not easy, of course. Once your natural alarm system is triggered, it’s hard to find the off switch. Indeed, you don’t have an off switch until you build one. Tame Your Anxiety shows you how. Readers learn about the brain chemicals that make us feel threatened and the chemicals that make us feel safe. You’ll see how your brain turns on these chemicals with neural pathways built from past experience, and, most important, you discover your power to build new pathways, to enjoy more happy chemicals, and reduce threat chemicals. This book does not tell you to imagine yourself on a tropical beach. That’s the last thing you want when you feel like a lion is chasing you. Instead, you will learn to ask your inner mammal what it wants and how you can get it. Each time you step toward meeting a survival need, you build the neural pathways that expect your needs to be met. You don’t have to wait for a perfect world to feel good. You can feel good right now. The exercises in this book help you build a self-soothing circuit in steps so small that anyone can do it. Once you learn how it’s done, and how it can help ease your anxiety, you will learn how to handle situations in which you feel threatened or anxious. Understanding the underlying mechanisms will help you stop them before they get ahead of you.
Trade ReviewI read with rapt attention as Loretta Graziano Breuning drew from her own experience and that of gazelles to bring complex brain science to life. Tame Your Anxiety: Rewiring Your Brain for Happiness lays out why our brains develop as they do, and how to carve new neural pathways to shift out of anxious patterns. A practical, relate-able, sophisticated guide to changing even deeply entrenched ways of living in the world. This is a book for people who want to understand not only the hows but also the whys of rewiring the brain for happiness. -- Dawn Huebner, Author of Outsmarting Worry: An Older Kid's Guide to Managing Anxiety
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. What is Tame? 2. What Is Anxiety? 3. A Taming Tool That Works 4. Find Your Power Over Your Brain 5. Design the Tool That’s Right For You 6. Avoid These Six Pitfalls 7. Keep It Tame In the Long Run 8. Stock Your Pantry with Anxiety Tamers 9. Food and Anxiety 10. Help Others Tame Anxiety Epilogue Keep In Touch
