The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points

Written by Alice Boyes

Narrated by Karen Saltus

Do you overthink before taking action? Are you prone to making negative predictions? Do you worry about the worst that could happen? Do you take negative feedback very hard? Are you self-critical? Does anything less than perfect performance feel like failure?

If any of these issues resonate with you, you're probably suffering from some degree of anxiety, and you're not alone. The good news: while reducing your anxiety level to zero isn't possible or useful (anxiety can actually be helpful!), you can learn to successfully manage symptoms - such as excessive rumination, hesitation, fear of criticism and paralysing perfection.

In The Anxiety Toolkit, Dr. Alice Boyes translates powerful, evidence-based tools used in therapy clinics into tips and tricks you can employ in everyday life. Whether you have an anxiety disorder, or are just anxiety-prone by nature, you'll discover how anxiety works, strategies to help you cope with common anxiety 'stuck' points and a confidence that - anxious or not - you have all the tools you need to succeed in life and work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781469093000

Alice Boyes

Alice Boyes, PhD, is a former clinical psychologist-turned-writer. The author of The Anxiety Toolkit and The Healthy Mind Toolkit, she is a popular blogger for Psychology Today (where her articles have over 23 million views) and The Harvard Business Review. Her research has been published in The American Psychological Association, and and she has been featured in publications like the Guardian and Women's Health.

Reviews for The Anxiety Toolkit

[Taylor Forrest · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Provides tons of helpful exercises to help clam your anxiety!

[Wai Leong · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fantastic for people who didn’t know how anxiety affects such a big part of their life. And wonderful and easily implementable solutions!

[sandyamcpherson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Alice Boyes presents a thoroughly straight-forward self-help book on managing anxiety. While never boring the reader with loads of academic research (or copious details of her professional training), her example situations are useful in understanding the points she conveys in her advice. The format is very approachable and it is refreshing to see how positive her counselling can be.

[askelmore · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Best for: People with certain types of anxiety (but probably not everyone with anxiety).

In a nutshell: Researcher Boyes shares actionable tips for individuals with anxiety.

Line that sticks with me: “When you’re avoiding something, try identifying the next action you need to take to move forward. Do that action.”

Why I chose it: It looked readable and possible helpful.

Review: Hmm. This book is a very easy read, and it definitely has some useful tips for addressing some of the common challenges that people with anxiety face. As someone with mild anxiety, I was hoping I would find items in here that are helpful to me, but I didn’t find a whole lot.

The way the information is presented is, I think, useful. At the start of each section, the reader takes a quiz to get some better awareness about how the reader handles certain situations. This doesn’t end up changing the advice that Dr. Boyes gives; it more just serves as a way for the reader to assess how much of what is to follow is going to be relevant to their particular challenges.

Dr. Boyes focuses on five areas that she says her research suggests are the biggest hurdles for people with anxiety: hesitancy; rumination; paralyzing perfectionism; fear of feedback and criticism; and avoidance. I found the suggestions related to the fourth item to be helpful, but the other issues aren’t how my anxiety manifests itself, so while the information shared seems like it would be good for folks, it’s just not relevant for me.