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3.61 AVERAGE
3.61 AVERAGE
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I don’t really remember how I found this book, which may explain why I came into it with mixed expectations. The book’s subtitle, “a new journey through anxiety”, is probably what landed it on my radar, but even before the book begins, the author discloses that she is not a medical professional and this book is a creative response to her experience of anxiety in her own life. She also describes the book as “nomadic in nature”. Having read the book, I encourage everyone to take those two topics to heart before you dive in.
This is not a nonfiction treatise on the condition, treatment or even experience of anxiety written by a researcher. Nor is it entirely a coherent narrative describing the author’s personal journey. Between the covers, you’re taken on a somewhat meandering journey back and forth through both of those areas with a couple of additional detours thrown in for good measure. And the author tells us over the course of the book exactly why it feels that way. The contents were written long-hand, piecemeal, on the backs of napkins, menus and other stray pieces of paper that happened to be in reach. In some ways, the book is a jigsaw puzzle of several years of hard work and sudden thoughts fitted together. That brings a certain abruptness to the book that the reader should be prepared for.
The author’s personal story is an intensely interesting one. She doesn’t “have anxiety” as an acute experience. Her anxiety is roiled up with a host of other major life impacts including OCD, struggles with depression, physical ailments and career & personal ups and downs. She’s attempted escape from her normal life multiple times, disappearing to remote places to reduce distractions or uprooting and basically pushing a hard reset on her life. She’s more than just an author and journalist. She’s been editor of Australian Cosmopolitan, a television host on MasterChef Australia, and created a movement with her IQuitSugar blog, which spiraled into cookbooks and media appearances, before she walked away from it all in early 2018 for philosophical reasons.
You will stumble through a little bit of Under the Tuscan Sun or Eat, Pray, Love, too. I think the best way to describe the author is as a “seeker”, both of knowledge and experience. In this book, her other writings, or any of her public talks, you’re going to hear the word “research” a lot. As someone who also over researches, I get it. That compulsion to understand so one can control can be fueled by anxiety. But the author also couples that drive with a willingness to drop everything and go experience anything, just in case is works. Over the course of the book, we’re taken to a yoga retreat in India, a writing project in New York, a secluded shack near the beach and a Hare Krishna commune.
Interwoven with the author’s personal story is a lot of information about anxiety, pulled from every corner of the world. From Plato to Eckhart Tolle to Oprah’s personal life coach, who can bend spoons with her mind. Again, I get the feeling that Sarah Wilson will take just about any advice that moves the needle (which is something I try to practice in my own life).
As I hit the halfway point of the book, I honestly wasn’t feeling it. I set the book aside for a few days with plans to come back to it eventually. But the next few days were some of the least anxious days that I’ve had in months. When I came back to the book, there were a couple of things that I realized I hadn’t realized were happening as I read.
First, Sarah gives you permission to feel anxious. It’s not bad or some kind of moral weakness. In fact, anxiety is deeply human and, based on research in apes, maybe more than human. Anxiety stems from our primal brains reacting to the world around us. The same wiring kept your ancestors alive. So if anxiety is a problem, it’s not that the hamster is on the wheel, it’s that the stupid thing won’t get off the wheel. Anxiety is fine if we can keep the alarms bells from ringing when there’s no danger.
Second, anxiety isn’t always a bad thing. Sarah hits a point near and dear to my heart, you can’t always be chill and happy. I know Instagram makes it look like you can, but that life would be miserable. There’s a reason that stories like The Most Dangerous Game or Fight Club have resonated. We need challenge in our lives. The Soma medicated masses in Brave New World are presented as a dystopia, not an ideal. So if calm and happy is an occasional start, something we work towards and that serves as a reward for the hard work well done, then sometimes we’ll feel stressed and anxious. It’s our brains worrying that we’re falling behind. If we can understand it as a driving force - keep it from consuming us - and maybe better position it as excitment about the challenge, anxiety can actually be a good thing, in no small way evidenced by the long list of great thinkers and doers who have publicly described their anxiety.
Finally, we do get some great tips for dealing with anxiety when it strikes. I think the core is really mindfulness. That is to say, being aware of the moment and your reaction to it. Dealing with anxiety is similar to how I deal with spiders. I’m fine if I can see it coming. It’s only when it sneaks up on me that we have a problem. Recognizing the situations that cause you anxiety and understanding your own physical and mental responses can help you step out of the moment when anxiety hits. You can look at the anxious response as a thing, name it and examine why it’s happening. Being able to step out of the moment to view an emotional response like that can be an incredibly powerful way to defuse its impact. Research has shown the same thing happens with a host of other emotional responses, including anger and depression. If you can put your finger on it, you can start to change your response to it.
Sarah gives a list of response tactics, including deep breathing, meditation, forcing a smile, writing and others. But in my mind, the key is the first part. Admitting that I am (at least sometimes) an anxious person, and when I am anxious, I feel or react in a certain way. After that, finding a way to defuse the situation that works for you is a much easier next step.
In the end, I was really surprised by this book. Turning the last page, I was struck with the thought that this book reads like anxiety feels. The sudden abrupt transitions and interweaving between personal narrative and carefully constructed research should feel familiar to anyone who’s anxious brain has kept them awake at night. I can admit to waking up at 2am with a brain that won’t turn off. Some imagined personal slight gets stuck on repeat or a concern about work gets lodged in your mind like a thorn. And no matter how you toss and turn, it just won’t stop. So I get out of bed at 2am and do something about it. I catch up on the work project or write down things that I’m grateful for. The hamster gets off the wheel, and I got back to sleep.
Sarah Wilson understands anxiety, having lived with it for years. And this book gives perspective on the beast from both inside and out. The Chinese proverb that serves as the book’s title tells us that to deal with something, one must know it intimately. To understand what makes something different or unique is to see its beauty. In this book, Sarah helps us understand anxiety that we might deal with it better.
This is not a nonfiction treatise on the condition, treatment or even experience of anxiety written by a researcher. Nor is it entirely a coherent narrative describing the author’s personal journey. Between the covers, you’re taken on a somewhat meandering journey back and forth through both of those areas with a couple of additional detours thrown in for good measure. And the author tells us over the course of the book exactly why it feels that way. The contents were written long-hand, piecemeal, on the backs of napkins, menus and other stray pieces of paper that happened to be in reach. In some ways, the book is a jigsaw puzzle of several years of hard work and sudden thoughts fitted together. That brings a certain abruptness to the book that the reader should be prepared for.
The author’s personal story is an intensely interesting one. She doesn’t “have anxiety” as an acute experience. Her anxiety is roiled up with a host of other major life impacts including OCD, struggles with depression, physical ailments and career & personal ups and downs. She’s attempted escape from her normal life multiple times, disappearing to remote places to reduce distractions or uprooting and basically pushing a hard reset on her life. She’s more than just an author and journalist. She’s been editor of Australian Cosmopolitan, a television host on MasterChef Australia, and created a movement with her IQuitSugar blog, which spiraled into cookbooks and media appearances, before she walked away from it all in early 2018 for philosophical reasons.
You will stumble through a little bit of Under the Tuscan Sun or Eat, Pray, Love, too. I think the best way to describe the author is as a “seeker”, both of knowledge and experience. In this book, her other writings, or any of her public talks, you’re going to hear the word “research” a lot. As someone who also over researches, I get it. That compulsion to understand so one can control can be fueled by anxiety. But the author also couples that drive with a willingness to drop everything and go experience anything, just in case is works. Over the course of the book, we’re taken to a yoga retreat in India, a writing project in New York, a secluded shack near the beach and a Hare Krishna commune.
Interwoven with the author’s personal story is a lot of information about anxiety, pulled from every corner of the world. From Plato to Eckhart Tolle to Oprah’s personal life coach, who can bend spoons with her mind. Again, I get the feeling that Sarah Wilson will take just about any advice that moves the needle (which is something I try to practice in my own life).
As I hit the halfway point of the book, I honestly wasn’t feeling it. I set the book aside for a few days with plans to come back to it eventually. But the next few days were some of the least anxious days that I’ve had in months. When I came back to the book, there were a couple of things that I realized I hadn’t realized were happening as I read.
First, Sarah gives you permission to feel anxious. It’s not bad or some kind of moral weakness. In fact, anxiety is deeply human and, based on research in apes, maybe more than human. Anxiety stems from our primal brains reacting to the world around us. The same wiring kept your ancestors alive. So if anxiety is a problem, it’s not that the hamster is on the wheel, it’s that the stupid thing won’t get off the wheel. Anxiety is fine if we can keep the alarms bells from ringing when there’s no danger.
Second, anxiety isn’t always a bad thing. Sarah hits a point near and dear to my heart, you can’t always be chill and happy. I know Instagram makes it look like you can, but that life would be miserable. There’s a reason that stories like The Most Dangerous Game or Fight Club have resonated. We need challenge in our lives. The Soma medicated masses in Brave New World are presented as a dystopia, not an ideal. So if calm and happy is an occasional start, something we work towards and that serves as a reward for the hard work well done, then sometimes we’ll feel stressed and anxious. It’s our brains worrying that we’re falling behind. If we can understand it as a driving force - keep it from consuming us - and maybe better position it as excitment about the challenge, anxiety can actually be a good thing, in no small way evidenced by the long list of great thinkers and doers who have publicly described their anxiety.
Finally, we do get some great tips for dealing with anxiety when it strikes. I think the core is really mindfulness. That is to say, being aware of the moment and your reaction to it. Dealing with anxiety is similar to how I deal with spiders. I’m fine if I can see it coming. It’s only when it sneaks up on me that we have a problem. Recognizing the situations that cause you anxiety and understanding your own physical and mental responses can help you step out of the moment when anxiety hits. You can look at the anxious response as a thing, name it and examine why it’s happening. Being able to step out of the moment to view an emotional response like that can be an incredibly powerful way to defuse its impact. Research has shown the same thing happens with a host of other emotional responses, including anger and depression. If you can put your finger on it, you can start to change your response to it.
Sarah gives a list of response tactics, including deep breathing, meditation, forcing a smile, writing and others. But in my mind, the key is the first part. Admitting that I am (at least sometimes) an anxious person, and when I am anxious, I feel or react in a certain way. After that, finding a way to defuse the situation that works for you is a much easier next step.
In the end, I was really surprised by this book. Turning the last page, I was struck with the thought that this book reads like anxiety feels. The sudden abrupt transitions and interweaving between personal narrative and carefully constructed research should feel familiar to anyone who’s anxious brain has kept them awake at night. I can admit to waking up at 2am with a brain that won’t turn off. Some imagined personal slight gets stuck on repeat or a concern about work gets lodged in your mind like a thorn. And no matter how you toss and turn, it just won’t stop. So I get out of bed at 2am and do something about it. I catch up on the work project or write down things that I’m grateful for. The hamster gets off the wheel, and I got back to sleep.
Sarah Wilson understands anxiety, having lived with it for years. And this book gives perspective on the beast from both inside and out. The Chinese proverb that serves as the book’s title tells us that to deal with something, one must know it intimately. To understand what makes something different or unique is to see its beauty. In this book, Sarah helps us understand anxiety that we might deal with it better.
To describe people with anxiety Wilson says “they give a shit. About everything” and honestly that is one of the most apt descriptions of anxiety I’ve ever read.
Wilson tracks the course of her anxiety, OCD, and bipolar disorders in a tangental timeline that also incorporates many sources and facts as “evidence” of what she has gone through. Honestly, as someone living with generalized anxiety disorder having Wilson tell her story was more soothing than anything. I have empathetic anxiety, so unlike some of the chapters that explain the selfish nature of anxiety, I will always put other people and their situations/issues/feelings/etc. first, and coming to terms with mine and Wilson’s differences was eye-opening.
I think this book is important not only for people who live with anxiety, but also for anyone who knows someone with anxiety. It is illuminating in ways that we perhaps are unable to voice. We don’t need to be fixed. Thank you Wilson for reminding me of this.
Wilson tracks the course of her anxiety, OCD, and bipolar disorders in a tangental timeline that also incorporates many sources and facts as “evidence” of what she has gone through. Honestly, as someone living with generalized anxiety disorder having Wilson tell her story was more soothing than anything. I have empathetic anxiety, so unlike some of the chapters that explain the selfish nature of anxiety, I will always put other people and their situations/issues/feelings/etc. first, and coming to terms with mine and Wilson’s differences was eye-opening.
I think this book is important not only for people who live with anxiety, but also for anyone who knows someone with anxiety. It is illuminating in ways that we perhaps are unable to voice. We don’t need to be fixed. Thank you Wilson for reminding me of this.
Can’t finish this. Annoyed at the writing style, the fat phobia/YOU MUST NOT EAT SUGAR, the rants against medication and the terrible science summaries. If a paper finds 8 out of 100 people have an anxiety disorder, this is not 3.2% of the population, unless she excluded some other information from the paper to make that work out.
I liked the premise. I even could stay with it if it were a memoir. But it is neither a memoir nor a well researched popular science book, nor even a convincing self-help book. It is none of these things.
I liked the premise. I even could stay with it if it were a memoir. But it is neither a memoir nor a well researched popular science book, nor even a convincing self-help book. It is none of these things.
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
tense
slow-paced
Rating this one 2.5 and am rounding down. There were parts that I do not think belonged in the journey about anxiety, I mean I thought I was reading a memoir for some portions.
reflective
medium-paced
I have to admit, this is one of those books I judged by its cover. It kept catching my eye and I really loved the title, so I ended up getting it.
I started the book on a flight to a job interview in Montana (in which I ended up accepting). I felt like reading about dealing with anxiety before an anxiety-inducing event was a good idea. Then sometime in September I stopped reading - I’d made it about halfway. I liked that the pages weren’t laid out like typical books and she has commentary on the side margins. However, she numbers every section, and silly me was stressed out by them. I felt like she was going to play a trick where she skipped a number and I would fail to notice, so I would go in and out of checking number order. That aside, I think I would’ve given the book a 4 at this time in my reading.
Then I picked this book back up after reading Tara Westover’s “Educated” and the writing just couldn’t compare. It was choppy, repetitive and all over the place in relation to Tara’s poetic fluidity. I will say, it seems like Sarah Wilson’s brain is almost always highly active, so it did feel I was getting a peek inside her head.
I think Sarah has a lot of good tips, tricks and advice for people. I also think that it was great that she opened up about all her eccentricities, to make talking about mental health more acceptable. So it ended up being a memoir/self help book.
I would have appreciated more scientific references and organization of topics. She kind of rubbed me the wrong way a little when she would talk about hiking for days alone and flitting from city to city. It seemed incredibly reckless but it’s her story to tell.
I’m waffling between giving it 3 and 4 stars now, and she talks about how anxious people tend to have trouble making decisions. Great. I’ll keep it at three for now and see how I feel about it.
I started the book on a flight to a job interview in Montana (in which I ended up accepting). I felt like reading about dealing with anxiety before an anxiety-inducing event was a good idea. Then sometime in September I stopped reading - I’d made it about halfway. I liked that the pages weren’t laid out like typical books and she has commentary on the side margins. However, she numbers every section, and silly me was stressed out by them. I felt like she was going to play a trick where she skipped a number and I would fail to notice, so I would go in and out of checking number order. That aside, I think I would’ve given the book a 4 at this time in my reading.
Then I picked this book back up after reading Tara Westover’s “Educated” and the writing just couldn’t compare. It was choppy, repetitive and all over the place in relation to Tara’s poetic fluidity. I will say, it seems like Sarah Wilson’s brain is almost always highly active, so it did feel I was getting a peek inside her head.
I think Sarah has a lot of good tips, tricks and advice for people. I also think that it was great that she opened up about all her eccentricities, to make talking about mental health more acceptable. So it ended up being a memoir/self help book.
I would have appreciated more scientific references and organization of topics. She kind of rubbed me the wrong way a little when she would talk about hiking for days alone and flitting from city to city. It seemed incredibly reckless but it’s her story to tell.
I’m waffling between giving it 3 and 4 stars now, and she talks about how anxious people tend to have trouble making decisions. Great. I’ll keep it at three for now and see how I feel about it.
adventurous
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced