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Dr. Joel Minden gets it—he understands the nature of anxiety and how to successfully treat its symptoms when they become debilitating. I know this because I just finished reading his recently released self-help book for anxiety management, Show Your Anxiety Who’s Boss.
When providing therapy for both addiction and mental health concerns, it can be helpful to recommend supplementary evidence-based learning materials to help consolidate treatment gains.
Historically, given its evidence base, my go-to recommended self-help book to assist in teaching the cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) model has been Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, by Dr. David Burns. While this book can be helpful, it is more geared towards depressive symptoms than anxiety. Fortunately, I think its anxiety-related counterpart has arrived.
While less academic and technical than Dr. Burns’ book, Show Your Anxiety Who’s Boss might very well be more accessible, as it seamlessly separates the wheat from the chaff. In other words, Dr. Minden has a talent for distilling evidence-based principles from the scientific literature and presenting them for the layperson's eyes.
The book is organized into three sections that correspond to cognitive, behavioral, and acceptance-based strategies for anxiety management. The strategies are explicitly CBT-predicated but they are delivered through a motivational interviewing (MI) style lens that also draws from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) material.
As such, the writing style uncoincidentally mimics some important qualities in a strong therapist: kind and encouraging with a view towards implicitly supporting self-efficacy—a person’s confidence in their ability to cope with anxiety.
After imbuing the book with relevant task-oriented exercises, it ends with helpfully answering a number of anticipated questions that often present themselves in clinical practice, followed by a calculated, future-oriented plan to action that pulls together the therapeutic concepts discussed.
Two major themes emerge from the book that I consider to be Anxiety Management 101:
First, successful anxiety management involves the recognition that avoidance of anxiety-provoking situations makes anxiety worse—and behaviors that temporarily avoid anxiety are unhelpful. In other words, short-term symptomatic relief of anxiety (e.g., via substance use, avoidance of situations) does not help even though it might feel that way. Instead, anxiety management involves teaching the brain that it can cope with anxiety—and the best way to do that is to intentionally lean into its symptoms and engage in meaningful activities that enhance quality of life.
The second theme rooted in the book is the idea that anxiety is optimally managed not by attempts to control it, but rather by responding to it in an accepting way. Indeed, the goal of anxiety management is not to eradicate anxiety—which is untenable and unhelpful—but rather to embrace and work with its symptoms in a way that makes them tolerable and even welcomed.
In my opinion, this book is a must-have adjunctive resource for the evidence-based treatment of anxiety disorders.
