Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose

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. nFrom 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 Beyond Anxiety, she reveals that to find calm, we must activate an entirely different part of our brain, one responsible for curiosity, wonder, and, mos