The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety: A Guide to Breaking Free from Anxiety, Phobias, and Worry Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

people with anxiety disorders struggle with, avoid, and run away from their fear and anxiety.

The most critical element that separates normal from problematic anxiety and fear is this: avoidance, avoidance, and more avoidance. It’s the common tie that binds all anxiety disorders together. Avoidance of fear and anxiety feeds anxiety and fear, and it shrinks lives.

Thoughts and feelings of panic and anxiety are unpleasant, intense, overwhelming at times, and even terrifying. But they aren’t the real enemy. The real enemy is rigid avoidance of fear and anxiety.

The antidote to this mind virus is compassion and learning skills that will help you look at and relate to your mind, body, and life in a different way—a way that won’t get you tangled up in what your mind is throwing at you all the time.

One thing we’ve noticed again and again in working with people struggling with anxiety and fear-related problems is this: they constantly beat up on themselves. They feel that they’re not good enough; they’re too weak; they just haven’t got what it takes to lead a more fulfilled life. They’re somehow broken. No book lists this type of self-denigrat

Living well will become your focus, not living to feel and think well.

People know anxiety by having anxious apprehension or a sense of foreboding, worry, and muscle tension.

It involves active skills that’ll help you to respond differently—with kindness, compassion, gentleness, less engagement—when anxieties, fears, worries, panic, and other sources of emotional and psychological pain show up.

Accept with serenity what you cannot change, have the courage to change what you can, and develop the wisdom to know the difference.