The Anxious Truth : A Step-By-Step Guide To Understanding and Overcoming Panic, Anxiety, and Agoraphobia

Feeling anxious all the time? Perhaps even afraid to leave your house or be left alone? Terrified of the next wave of anxiety or panic attack?

You’ve searched "anxious help" at 2AM. You’ve read everything about how to cope with anxiety. You’ve tried breathing exercises, supplements, and the app everybody swears by, but you still feel the floor tilt when discomfort arises.

You're exhausted, confused, and starting to wonder whether you're the one who will never get better.

You're not.

Maybe it started with one scary moment or panic attack. Now you're anxious about life in general. About the drive. About the meeting. About being alone, or about not being alone. About being “trapped” in a wave of anxiety or panic. Your world keeps shrinking, because avoiding everything is the only thing that brings relief.

Except it isn't working. It's making the whole thing bigger, and some part of you already knows that.

If other anxiety books haven't moved the needle, know that this one hits differently.

The Anxious Truth is a step-by-step guide to understanding and overcoming chronic anxiety, panic attacks, and the avoidance habits you've likely built up around them. Based on the principles of mindfulness, acceptance, and exposure-based therapy, this book explains how you got where you are, why you’re not ill or defective, and what the true nature of your anxiety disorder actually is.

It walks you through building a real recovery plan and executing it correctly.

You'll learn:

• Why things that make you feel better in the moment are keeping you anxious all the time
• What's actually happening in your body during a panic attack, and why it can't hurt you, even though it’s scary
• How to stop chasing symptom relief and start changing your reaction to discomfort
• What real anxiety relief therapy asks of you, and why the uncomfortable parts are the parts that work
• How to build an evidence-based anxiety recovery plan you can follow even on the bad days
• What recovery actually looks like, including the messy, rough parts nobody puts on social media

This is not a book of coping tricks to get you through the next hour. The Anxious Truth details an approach that gives you a better chance at the outcome you want.

Getting help with anxiety shouldn't require a formal diagnosis, a decade of reading, or the ability to explain to someone else what's happening to you. What it does require is understanding what’s happening and knowing what to do about it.

That's what this book covers in detail.

Written by someone who has been through it and came out the other side, The Anxious Truth combines lived experience with clinical training. Drew Linsalata is a therapist specializing in anxiety disorders. He’s a former agoraphobic and panic sufferer who spent years where you are now. The combination is rare, and it's why this book doesn't read like a textbook or a pep talk. It's written for adults who have been carrying anxiety for years and are done trying to just manage it.

Drew is the creator and host of The Anxious Truth, an anxiety podcast with more than 5 million downloads. He co-hosts The Disordered podcast, which has amassed more than 3 million downloads. He's also the author of An Anxiety Story (his own journey through panic disorder and agoraphobia) and Seven Percent Slower, a guide to understanding and breaking one overlooked habit that fuels your anxiety and stress.

Change is possible. No matter how long you've been dealing with this, you can get better. The Anxious Truth will give you the information, understanding, and skills to move in the right direction.

Drew is a therapist specializing in the treatment of anxiety and anxiety disorders, creator and host of The Anxious Truth podcast, co-host of the Disordered podcast, an author, a psychoeducator, and an anxiety and mental health advocate. Having suffered from anxiety, panic disorder, agoraphobia, and depression several times over a 20 year period, Drew got it together once and for all in 2008. Since then life has been happy, productive, and free of anxiety-related restrictions and rituals. For the last 15+ years, Drew has been active in the online anxiety community, working to use his training, his experience, and his understanding to help those that are struggling with chronic and disordered forms of anxiety. His no-nonsense approach to these problems and willingness to compassionately provide direct, actionable information even when it might not be easy to hear, has established him as a unique voice in the community with an engaged audience of over 125,000 across multiple social platforms. In 2020, Drew published two books on anxiety and anxiety recovery. An Anxiety Story and The Anxious Truth have quickly become required reading for anyone suffering from anxiety and in need of education, instruction, inspiration, encouragement, and empowerment.