Book Review: Overcome Anxiety

Title: Overcome Anxiety

Author: Marcee A. Martin

Quote: "Do you have trouble sleeping, or always feel tired and panicky?"

This short e-book is meant to be a pocket guide to controlling anxiety disorders. Certainly it's possible to buy expensive pills that are said to help some people with anxiety disorders, but those pills have side effects. Many people are able to manage their anxiety disorders, which are often a major part of cardiovascular diseases, with common-sense measures like those summarized in this book. 

The basic program for managing anxiety, hypertension, and more serious cardiovascular diseases to which they contribute, was mass-marketed to Americans in the 1970s and 1980s. This book has nothing new to teach anyone who paid attention at university during those years. If you didn't pay attention, or earned all of your degrees before 1970, or were born after 1990 (and inability to pay for university is one of the subjects about which you feel anxiety), this is a first book that will help you identify the more detailed books you might also want to read. 

While this secular book does include a section on the verified benefits of prayer (by people who believe in a Higher Power that hears prayers), it lacks a section on one of the major causes of anxiety, which is guilt. Whether a person feels guilty about having committed a perfectly undetected murder, or working for a company that wastes natural resources, guilt can ruin the person's experience of what might sound like a good life. There is one cure for guilt: don't do things that cause you to feel it. Many guilty people seek comfort in beliefs that they can't change or control their actions, that they can't judge between right and wrong actions, or that everyone else ought to forgive them instantly for their wrong actions. Few if any find comfort in such beliefs, because the beliefs aren't true. Normal humans agree on most moral questions (despite attempts by guilty people to look for points of disagreement). A person who does not feel guilty after doing something wrong is mentally impaired, if not completely insane. Instead of trying to persuade ourselves that a wrong action was right, it is more effective to do the right thing in the first place, and get  it done. 

Common though anxiety disorders are in the US, most of us never have one. That probably has something to do with the fact that, even without reading books on anxiety and stress, we learned to do the things this book recommends early in life. Therefore a majority of people don't need this book, but that is no reason to disparage the book. A careful reading of this very short book can help a person who needs it.