The Anxiety Antidote: How Awareness and Action Can Lead to Self-Control and Inner Peace

In this competent guide, life coach Bedi (Your Mind Is Your Home) details exercises intended to relieve anxiety. Contending that the “mind directly influences the body,” the author offers advice on identifying and inhibiting cognitive drivers of anxious behavior. He notes that worrying about hypothetical situations can produce anxiety and encourages readers to break ruminative cycles by “looking at the big picture” and focusing on the current moment. The author urges readers to interrogate the underlying motives of their anxiety and recounts how a client who feared she “wasn’t good enough” for a job opening realized her anxiety stemmed from her aversion to feeling vulnerable and outside her comfort zone. Bedi notes that repressing, ignoring, or avoiding anxiety can strengthen it, and recommends using hypnosis to uncover unconscious sources of unease. The advice sometimes oversimplifies, as when Bedi entreats readers to “isolate the source of the hurt. Find it. Work with it. Heal it and free it.” However, there’s plenty of worthwhile pragmatic guidance, such as the suggestion to list and reflect on moments one did not feel anxious during one’s day as a means of disrupting fixation on anxiety-producing events. The result is an instructive road map for finding peace of mind. (Oct.)