Beyond Anxiety

From bestselling author, life coach, and sociologist Martha Beck comes a new path to overcoming anxiety by awakening the creativity within. AN OPEN FIELD PUBLICATION FROM MARIA SHRIVER Most of us assume that the key to overcoming anxiety is to think our way out of it. And for a while, it works. Meditation and mental exercises offer us relief, but there is always something--a work deadline, a family emergency, a particularly distressing newsbreak--that disrupts our sense of peace and sends us right back inside the same anxious spiral we’ve been trying to climb out of. Is there a way to reduce our anxiety, not just in the moment, but in every moment after that? After a lifetime of struggling with anxiety, Martha Beck studied just about everything there was to know about how to calm down. What she realized is that the analytical part of our brain--so valued in Western culture--is the same structure responsible for amping up anxiety. In other words, we cannot logic our way to relief. In Drawing on social science, Eastern wisdom, and the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Beck shows how to move from anxiety into purpose through the power of creativity. Using techniques tested first-hand on hundreds of clients, she teaches us how to activate the creativity spiral by approaching problems with a sense of curiosity, making pleasure a priority, and inviting play and spontaneity into our every day. Anxiety does not have to keep us from finding our life’s purpose. <Beyond Anxiety <invites us into a new way of being, one filled with greater abundance, joy, and possibility.

Auteur

Martha Beck, PhD, is a Harvard-trained sociologist, New York Times bestselling author, world-renowned life coach, and speaker. She is the author of one novel and nine nonfiction books, including the Oprah's Book Club pick The Way of Integrity.

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From bestselling author Martha Beck, a new path to overcoming anxiety by awakening the creativity within

We live in an epidemic of anxiety. Most of us assume that the key to overcoming it is to think our way out. And for a while it works. But there is always something that sends us back into the anxious spiral we’ve been trying to climb out of.

In Beyond Anxiety, Dr. Martha Beck explains why anxiety is skyrocketing around you, and likely within you. She also tells you how to not only reduce your anxiety but use it to propel you into a life filled with peace, meaning, and joy.

Using a combination of the latest neuroscience as well as her background in sociology and coaching, Beck explains how our brains tend to get stuck in an “anxiety spiral,” a feedback system that can increase anxiety indefinitely. To climb out, we must engage different parts of our nervous system—the parts involved in creativity. Beck provides instructions for engaging the “creativity spiral,” in a process that not only shuts down anxiety but leads to innovative problem solving, a sense of meaning and purpose, and joyful, intimate connection with others—and with the world.

The opposite of anxiety, it turns out, is a wonderful new way of life—one that can calm and inspire us as individuals and help us become a source of healing for everything around us.