Review: The Gift of Anxiety by Diante Fuchs

The Gift of Anxiety
by Diante Fuchs

My Rating: 5 stars
Genre: Non-fiction/ Anxiety/ Mental Health

Blurb:
Your anxiety has an important message for you. Are you listening?

The mistake most people make with anxiety is trying everything in their power to get rid of it. They may try meditation and breathwork, medication or therapy. The aim is almost always the same: to get rid of anxiety because “anxiety is the problem.”

But anxiety is not the problem.

In fact, anxiety is a necessary and useful emotional response that has played a critical role in our survival for millions of years. Unfortunately, most of us have not been taught what to do with anxiety when it becomes loud and intrusive. So we become afraid of it and view anxiety as a problem we want to solve once and for all.

But getting rid of anxiety is impossible because it’s a natural emotional response. And trying to get rid of it only causes more anxiety because the more we fear anxiety, the more we feel it, until we become anxious about being anxious.

Anxiety comes to use when it has an important message. It is our internal alarm system for potential threats in life. It is designed to keep you safe and alert you to areas of your life that need attention. But when you treat anxiety like it is the problem without paying attention to its message for you, the deeper problems remain, and anxiety only gets louder.

In The Gift of Anxiety, clinical psychologist Diante Fuchs offers a new way to respond to anxiety. Sharing the unique EASE Method for working with anxiety, the book offers a powerful, calm approach that has helped hundreds of people transform their relationship with anxiety and with themselves. With this step-by-step guidance anyone can learn to how to stop fighting anxiety, listen to it, and use it as the gift it truly is.

This book is specifically designed to help those suffering from anxiety find peace one simple step at a time.

In this book you will discover:

– The difference between ordinary anxiety and stuck anxiety
– Why some people struggle with stuck anxiety and others don’t
– How anxiety becomes stuck and how to get yourself unstuck
– The messages anxiety has for you and how to listen to them
– How to respond to anxiety in a way that calms it down
– How anxiety can be a gift that serves you in creating a happier, healthier, more peaceful life

My Review

I received a free copy from the publisher through Netgalley and voluntarily reviewed it.

When I saw this one on Netgalley the title caught my eye and I admit to being pretty skeptical. I definitely do not see anxiety as a gift, but that skepticism was also what made me curious. I had to know why the author thought anxiety was a gift and figured if nothing else it would have some new information about anxiety and ideas on how to handle it.

Knowing I am neurodivergent meant I couldn’t relate to all of it, but I figured I could make adjustments myself for the bits that didn’t work. And that turned to be the case indeed, but it did help me identify which types of anxiety this book was talking about and what came more from me being neurodivergent or sensory dread.

I ended up being really glad I picked this one up. It was a great read with lots of information about anxiety. And most important for me, it got me thinking about anxiety and dealing with it in a different way. I really like the way the author advocates for feeling our emotions and how emotions have a role. The way she talked about anxiety having a goal, namely to keep you safe and how anxiety could stem from different sources gave me a new way of thinking about my anxiety. I was able to identify where some of my anxiety came from as well as understand it better and what it was trying to make me hear.

I can definitely recommend this book for those who struggle with anxiety. It is a different approach than what I’ve read and heard of before, although there are also parts that overlap with things I already knew like the mindfulness techniques like the body scan for example. This book really resonated with me and fit into my current state of mind where I am trying to be more accepting of my emotions and gave me more tools and information on how to do this. This is definitely a book I plan to re-read.

To summarize: I picked this book up with some skepticism and curious why the author thinks anxiety is a gift and ended up being really happy I picked this one up. This book helped me think about anxiety in a different way and it was very helpful and informative. I like the way the author talks about emotions. There is some great information about anxiety and how to accept it and listen to it. All in all I can definitely recommend this one. It might not resonate with everyone, but it certainly resonated with me and I am glad I read it.

Links:
– Goodreads
– Bookbub
– Amazon

You can also read my review on Goodreads and Bookbub.