Learn to Navigate Life’s Sticky Situations with ‘The Anxiety Toolkit’ [REVIEW]

Let’s face it, the news isn’t good these days. If life made us anxious before COVID-19, we have even more reasons to go down the rabbit hole than ever before. So what’s a person to do? Don’t fret. Dr. Alice Boyes is here to help with The Anxiety Toolkit: Strategies for Fine-Tuning Your Mind and Moving Past Your Stuck Points.

If you’re someone who overthinks things, fears the worst possible outcomes in every scenario, can’t handle negative feedback, are self critical, or can’t cope with failure, this book is for you. Because if you’re doing any of those things, you may not realize it, but you’re suffering from anxiety. Thankfully, you don’t have to let your emotions paralyze you. Instead, you can learn to manage the symptoms when life’s uncertainties stop you in your tracks.

In this useful wellness guide, Dr. Boyes teaches us how to utilize powerful tools used in therapy clinics to conquer, or at least greatly decrease, the amount of anxiety we may deal with on a day-to-day basis. She even helps boost our self-confidence so we can get through difficult situations successfully, regardless of the situation.

I found The Anxiety Toolkit to be very practical and thought provoking. To begin with, Boyes breaks down anxiety into four components: behavioral, emotional, physical, and thought. She does this so we can analyze how we handle each aspect of anxiety, and thereby change the ways we react and cope in different environments.

Personally, the segment of the book about lifestyle imbalance was particularly useful. Here, she helps us deal with both external and internal forces that can make us anxious. We learn to make significant changes to our outlook on life and the way we make decisions. And the result? We begin to see a shift in our perspective, our stress diminishes, and we become happier overall. Perhaps most importantly, she reminds us that avoiding issues isn’t the solution, because doing so leads to living life less fully.

So when you look around at our current state of affairs and feel your anxiety rise, don’t be an ostrich and hide your head in the sand. Instead, learn to cope and navigate the cards we are dealt. With The Anxiety Toolkit, Boyes helps us do just that.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alice Boyes, PhD. is a former clinical psychologist turned writer and is the author of The Healthy Mind Toolkit.

She is a popular blogger for Psychology Today, where her articles have more than 10 million views, and she contributes to various magazines and blogs.

Her research has been published by the American Psychological Association.

To find out more, visit AliceBoyes.com, like her on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

THE ANXIETY TOOLKIT
By Alice Boyes, PhD.
240 pp. TarcherPerigee. $16.

Purchase The Anxiety Toolkit direct from Jathan & Heather’s Beach Reads Book Shop or from one of these other fine online retailers: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Half Price Books, IndieBound, or Powell’s.