Horse and Rider? What? My Review of Tame Your Anxiety by Loretta Graziano Breuning

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this book that I was given in exchange for a fair and honest review.

As a nearly lifelong anxiety sufferer (I was in fifth grade when I started having full blown panic attacks, but had anxiety stomach pain as early as second), I always love to check out new books that claim to help with the anxious mind. Anxiety sucks, y'all, and anything that can help is a lifesaver.

I was nearly thirty percent of the way through this book before Breuning started actually discussing ways to handle anxiety. Waiting to get past all the scientific explanations that I'd read a thousand times (and assume other anxiety sufferers will also know) to actually get to help with my anxiety gave me anxiety. Not only did I not like how slow this book was to get started, but Breuning uses this incredibly weird extended metaphor of a horse and a rider that felt totally unnecessary. Have you ever been trying to explain something, but you aren't sure if you are making your point so you keep providing more and more basic examples to try to make things clearer? That was the whole beginning of this book. Every couple [pages it was a new hypothetical scenario that would honestly have been much more appropriate had she been addressing children. Maybe Bruening should write a children's anxiety book.

Then, finally, we get to the meat of the book and Bruening starts to unveil her big strategy, which she says will tame anxiety if you do it every day. Awesome, right? We can finally get to the real heart of things. Except no, because immediately after revealing her strategy, we are in the jungle and rather than explaining how to implement her approach, she's back to convincing us it will work. there is way too much filler in this book and not even close to enough content. In a 160 page book, nearly half of it is useless to anyone who knows even the basics of how anxiety works.

I don't want to give a big spoiler alert and reveal her three steps, but no. they were not practical, they couldn't easily be applied while anxious, and they're less concise versions of books that have just explained it better.

Two summers ago, I read DARE: the New Way to End Anxiety and Stop Panic Attacks, by Barry McDonagh. It is my suggestion that you return Tame Your Anxiety and pick up Dare instead because it was actually easy to follow and contained implementable steps to dealing with anxiety. It was a life changer.