Anxiety seems to come from nowhere for most people, and strike them like a sledgehammer. One minute, living your life more or less peacefully, the next, frightened and depressed, maybe struggling to breathe, convinced you're dying, or someone else is going to die, and it's all going to be your fault. Perhaps you're seeing a doctor right away, maybe you're struggling on your own for as long as you can, but you're going to be told sooner or later that it's Anxiety.

That makes no sense whatsoever. You know what Anxiety really is. It's looking at the clock and uncomfortably asking why someone is late. When parking on a hill, it is double-checking that you put the handbrake on. It is not this living nightmare that turns every minute of each day into a troubling torment. Your natural Anxiety has become out of control and an Anxiety Disorder. Or put it another way, everyone has some fear, but not everyone has Fear. Within this book, we're talking about a disease when we give Anxiety a capital 'A, ' and you can heal from that.

Many people use self-help to stage a complete recovery. Others may also need a professional's help to finish their research, but they may go into the sessions armed with self-knowledge and a greater understanding of their illness. Anxiety, that's a black hole. It sucks your dreams, your desires, your expectations for the future, and your strength above all. But it's picky. It lays doubts, worries, and fatigue behind it. It's no wonder you feel like picking up yourself and having the resources for a treatment program. No wonder you're feeling like being in your safe place and doing as little as you can. You can transform this round. It is possible to get back from the Anxiety's dark hole. This book aims to help you set up a self-help rehabilitation plan and obey it. Acting at your own pace, you will learn to let go of Anxiety and recover your life in small measures.

Ways to use this book

You may feel ready to take on the task of working towards a full recovery. The idea may intrigue you, but you're nervous about it. Or you can sense a profound resistance to that. Whatever your current feeling of recovery is, whether you feel hopeful, depressed, or somewhere in between, you can start with this book. You can use the ideas and activities in whatever way currently serves you best, and you can come back to them at a later date when you're ready for further development. There are four different ways this book can help:

1. Relief from the worst forms of Anxiety and improved control of daily life.

You'll learn a set of essential tools to make you feel better, have more power over your life and have more confidence. By learning to relax, exercising more, eating and drinking more sensitively, learning not to be afraid of panic attacks, practicing self-exposure, and transforming negative thoughts to positive, you can feel more able to cope with your life now.

2. Recovering from the latest bout of Anxiety

In this book, there are several different approaches described. When you work through them, you will be developing a full Stress Management portfolio. Not all of them are going to work for everybody, but the only way to find out is to try each. Then you can build your rehabilitation plan.

3. Future problem-solving

Although you're over the worst, failures will happen. Life keeps posing challenges. When you're ready for them, they're not going to overpower you or drive you back to your safe retreat. When you've learned through this book, you'll be given the skills you need to prevent relapses. You're going to be able to identify Anxiety's early warning signs, and you're going to know which strategies work best for you to cope before it takes hold. So if you're facing a loss, you can look at the situation, so ask yourself what you might learn from it and how you could have done it differently.