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

Product Information

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 First, We Make the Beast Beautiful charts Wilson's epic journey to make peace with her lifetime companion and to learn to see it as a guide rather than as an enemy. With intensive focus and investigatory skills, Wilson examines 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. Pulling at the thread of accepted definitions of anxiety, she unravels the notion that it is a difficult, dangerous disease that must be medicated into submission and reframes it as a divine journey - a state of yearning that will lead us closer to what really matters. This, Wilson says, will lead us to ourselves. "It's like we're searching for a Something Else that makes us feel... what?" she writes. "Like we've landed, I suppose. And that things are all good on this patch." The New York Times best-selling author of I Quit Sugar transforms cultural perceptions of the mental health issue of our age - anxiety - viewing this widespread condition not as a burdensome affliction but as a powerful spiritual teacher that can deepen our lives.

So here’s the thing. A lot of us are anxious. Many of us haven’t been diagnosed as such, or even worked out if our particular flavor of anxiety constitutes a problem. But we know we’re anxious. More anxious than we should be. When I mention I’m writing a book about anxiety, everyone (and I mean every single person) suddenly goes a little wide-eyed. Drops their tone a little. Leans in. And tells me... Everyone these days seems to have it, hey. I’d like to say this up front. I write these very words because I’ve come to believe that you can be fretty and chattery in the head and awake at 4am and trying really hard at everything. And you can get on with having a great life.

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. A witty, well-researched, and often insightful book about negotiating a new relationship to anxiety.” First, We Make the Beast Beautiful is a book with a big heart, paving the way for richer, kinder and wiser conversations about anxiety. Through 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.

I applaud her bravery and honesty as some aspects of the book are very hard to read. Evisceratingly honest, one might say. Some of her ideas, and approaches and themes about anxiety's manifestations and how to manage and even live with it are excellent and I think will be (largely) helpful to many readers. The title is derived from a Chinese proverb I came across about twenty years ago in psychiatrist and bipolar sufferer Kay Redfield Jamison’s memoir An Unquiet Mind. This might not sound like the most grab a highlighter and mark out the wisdoms premise for a book. But let’s see how it goes. 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."I found myself getting frustrated hearing stories about how much more anxious Wilson has been her whole life than I have. Maybe it’s my own anxiety but I kept feeling like this was a weird game of Wilson trying to one-up me. I had a difficult time listening to her stories about isolated retreats to various countries to find inner peace and working with all these different gurus and life coaches. Her advice section towards the end was unrealistic as she told the reader to “take a week off work and just sit in a room thinking about how you’re feeling” or “move to somewhere calm like Hawaii”. Sure, I have tons of money to just not go to work for a week or even better, move to the most expensive state in the country just to slow down my anxiety (unless you’re constantly worrying about how you can’t afford to live there). Her most common piece of advice to “give up eating sugar” was the most frustrating because that’s what she has built her career on. It just felt like a ploy to sell even more of her sugarless cookbooks. 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 An amazing book for people who struggle with anxiety, confusion, and existential curiosity (and pretty much as an inevitable consequence, existential angst). Practical and poetic, wise and funny, this is a small book with a big heart. It will encourage the myriad sufferers of the world’s most common mental illness to feel not just better about their condition, but delighted by the possibilities it offers for a richer, fuller life. I now know that my anxiety doesn't have to be caused by anything particularly fear-inducing," Wilson writes.

I deliberated for days. How would I reduce things to The question that would provide a salve to all us Westerners seeking a more meaningful path through the fuggy, constipated, heart-sinky angst of life? The choice left my head spinning and chattering. What is it exactly that we need to know? Are we here to evolve into higher beings? Why are we so alone? Is there a grand scheme to our allotted eighty-five years? 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. But! 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. Sarah blogs on philosophy, anxiety, minimalism, toxin-free living and anti-consumerism at sarahwilson.com, lives in Sydney, rides a bike everywhere, is a compulsive hiker and is eternally curious. Here’s a full reading listof great anxiety books by mindful types, which I hope many of you will enjoy and find useful.But for Wilson, who has taken anti-anxiety medication in the past, there's something else driving her anxiety, something deeper that warrants uncoiling. Nope. But if Ben, the family elephant, said it happened, it did. Ben’s sixteen months younger than me and I realize just now that he’s been my ballast over the years with his gruff, Sarah, just don’t worry about it sturdiness. The Mindy to my Mork. His Holiness giggles and blows his nose on a paper napkin, shoving it down the front of his robe like my Year 4 teacher used to. There’s no use, he tells me. Silly! Impossible to achieve! If you can do it, great. If not, big waste of time. To be honest, this book made me irritated because it made me feel like I was failing because I can’t manage my life in similar ways to her. This reaction isn’t all me and it was heavily influenced by the way she chose to structure and write this book. She made it seem that if you couldn’t follow her easy to manage suggestions then you aren’t trying hard enough to manage anxiety and you almost deserve your situation. I liked Wilson's definition of anxiety: she sees it as a separation of self from something larger and more meaningful. The anxiety makes us reach for this something, but we don't know what we're reaching for and it hurts.