First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety

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In First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, Wilson directs her intense focus and fierce investigating skills onto her lifetime companion, looking at the triggers and treatments, the fashions and fads. She reads widely and interviews fellow sufferers, mental health experts, philosophers, and even the Dalai Lama, processing all she learns through the prism of her own experiences. I’ve written a full list of science and source endnotes from my book that you might enjoy nerding up on, you can find them here. There’s a book club guide Several dozen more books and academic papers then appeared on the subject. In the main, though, the mind-body split persisted and anxiety was regarded as an everyday condition (we all get anxious, right?) that some of us are just too weak to handle. Women who got anxious were slapped with the hysteria diagnosis. Men self-medicated with drugs or alcohol or went into man caves. And we all got on with things. She includes a couple exercises to help bring yourself down when you're experiencing anxiety. But not too many, because: "I don't plan on filling this book with too many exercises that people like me skim over to get to the meaty theory. I'll just include the ones that suit people like you and me." pg 57, ebook

Gabrielle Bernstein, #1 New York Times bestselling author of May Cause Miracles Here’s where you find all the science and source referencesThrough her research and personal experiences, Wilson shares the best, and the worst, of the treatments and latest scientific advances. Even though we don't have the treatments for anxiety nailed down yet, it helps to know that sufferers are not alone in their struggles. Sarah Wilson—bestselling author and entrepreneur, intrepid solver of problems and investigator of how to live a better life—has helped over 1.2 million people across the world to quit sugar. She has also been an anxiety sufferer her whole life.

The name dropping was so frustrating. Oprah, Brene Brown, Gabrielle Bernstein etc get to have their names in the book, but then she refers to "some guy" who uses the analogy of walking on custard. His name is Neil Hughes, he has a lovely TED talk and he wrote a book called "Walking on Custard and the meaning of life: a Guide for Anxious Humans". Surely she could have included that? There was also a lot of things I struggled with in terms of the structuring of the book itself. Don't get me wrong I loved that this listed things in numbers, counting things is such an anxious perk of mine and the ironic comments on the side or generic side notes were really great. But there were a reasonable number of grammatical discrepancies, changes in tense.Inconsistencies in timelines such as (and I'm paraphrasing) 'I haven't owned a car in 5 years' to 'I spent years researching what car to buy and I bought the most environmentally sound car in the world', 'I live in the city' to 'I am a nomad and have lived in 7 different places in the last year'. Huh? I'm lost. But it makes it easier when I realise, as someone with my experience and platform, that I have a responsibility to facilitate a conversation about it." It's an abyss the 43-year-old has come to know intimately over the last three decades, and one 14 per cent of Australians will be affected by in any 12-month period, making anxiety the most common mental health issue in the country. First, we make the beast beautifulwas published on February 28th, 2017 (Pan Macmillan Australia) and April 24, 2018 (US, Harper Collins) and is now published worldwide, in South Korean, Lithuanian and French. Where to buy the book

However, what I loved most about this book were the parts where Wilson tried to approach anxiety in a positive way, in other words - make the beast beautiful. And she’s right! For all the negativity that anxiety can bring to our lives, it also makes us the people we are. If you simply removed my anxiety from my personality, I would be a very different person. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t receive treatment or counselling if it is impacting your life in a hugely negative way, but there’s something to be said for how anxiety can be beneficial in some ways. For me, it means that I am extremely efficient and organised; time management is my jam, even if it also turns me into a little bit of a control freak. The author describes the positive effects that meditation, hiking, decluttering, and quitting sugar (among other changes) have had in her life. We’ve heard about these steps from other sources about a thousand times, but when Sarah describes it she does it in a sincere and candid voice which I found compelling.

first, we make the beast beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

I’ve put an octopus on the cover because they are beasts that have been made more beautiful through our deeper understanding of them. Their intelligence and sentience is hard to fathom. They are driven by 500 million neurons and have a deep desire to connect and communicate with humans. The one on the cover is a Gyotaku print by Damian Oswald. One of the dear, dear things about getting older, is that it does eventually dawn on you that there is no guidebook. One day it suddenly emerges: No one bloody gets it! None of us knows what we're doing. pg 5, ebook I also related strongly to a quote on 276, "I generally find that anxious people spend a lot of their lives trying to have fun doing stuff other people find enjoyable." This is another thing that I am a firm follower in, and reading it will hopefully make me choose my own plans, no matter how small they are. The first time this realization came crashing down on me I was fifteen, crouching in an Asian-style squat behind a curtain in a Canberra shopping mall waiting to see if I’d won the inaugural Face of Miss Gee Bees modeling competition. Anxiety is a disconnection with this Something Else. As I say, the doctors and scientists can call it all kinds of things, but I believe it all comes down to this disconnect." pg 44, ebook