(2017-12-27) Manson5 Best Books For Dealing With Anxiety And Depression

Mark Manson: 5 Best Books for Dealing with Anxiety and Depression. In my experience, the best books on dealing with anxiety and depression are the best because they are honest about the situation. There is this thing that sucks, and you’re not going to magically make it go away. You have to deal with it, engage it, wrestle with it a bit and become stronger in the face of it.

Why anxiety and depression together? Well, because they often occur together. In fact, they occur so often together that people will mistake one for the other.

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon

Focuses on: Depression. Type(s): Feeling Less Alone and Greater Understanding/Research

688 pages, you start to realize why: this is everything you would ever want to know about depression

First, We Make the Beast Beautiful by Sarah Wilson

Focuses on: Anxiety. Type(s): Feeling Less Alone and Greater Understanding/Research

I’ve always argued that the key to anxiety is not getting rid of it but merely directing it in more productive ways. The heart of First, We Make the Beast Beautiful is the same argument, demonstrated through a vibrant (and slightly crazy) life

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns

Focuses on: Both. Type(s): Exercises/Action

if you were going to write a comprehensive, “This is what three months with a CBT therapist would be like,” book, full of enough exercises to fill a small notebook, you’d have Feeling Good.

The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living by Russ Harris

Focuses on: Both. Type(s): Greater Understanding/Research and Exercises/Action

Harris is probably the most visible proponent of something called ACT or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. ACT is a relatively new form of therapy that argues that the key to dealing with depression, anxiety, or addiction is to not necessarily to remove bad feelings, but rather to develop mental tools and habits to simply weather them more effectively. Whereas CBT is focused on channeling pain and suffering into more productive interpretations and actions, ACT just says fuck it, bad feelings are bad feelings and they don’t necessarily have to mean anything at all if we don’t let them

Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff

Focuses on: Both. Type(s): Greater Understanding/Research and Exercises/Action

Neff is the first psychologist to conceptualize an alternative metric for self-esteem: self-compassion.

Like many pop psychology books, her examples and anecdotes are sometimes cliche-ridden, but the central idea is important enough that this book is still worth a read if you are the insanely self-critical type.