Learning to embrace your anxiety. Really!

Hello and welcome to the year of Embracing Anxiety!

There is a lot going on in our world, but luckily, we have an emotion whose genius can help us envision, plan, and work toward a healthy future: it’s anxiety!

Really!

Learning how to embrace your anxiety

I’m excited to announce my newest book, Embracing Anxiety, which will be released in June. You can preorder now!

Many emotions are deeply misunderstood, but anxiety probably wins in the misunderstood category. It’s a marvelous emotion that helps us look toward the future and prepare ourselves to complete our tasks and projects, but it’s regularly mistaken for 3 or 4 other emotions (mostly panic)!

Because of this, people not only don’t embrace their anxiety — they almost don’t know how to identify it.

In the next months, I’ll share short excerpts of my new anxiety book to help you identify this wonderful emotion and learn how to work with it. 

Excerpt from Embracing Anxiety:

EMOTIONS are at the center of everything you are: every relationship, every dream, every failure, every triumph, every act of violence, and every act of love.

Your emotions are not just random sensations or meaningless moods — your emotions are vital to your intelligence, your social skills, and your ability to understand yourself and the world around you. Each of your emotions has a specific purpose, and each emotion brings you a unique set of gifts, skills, and genius.

Your emotions are your guardians, your support system, and your friends, and you can learn how to work with all of them, brilliantly. Anxiety, the task-completion expert of your emotional realm, is no exception.

Anxiety does so much for us, but sadly, it’s usually treated as a problem or a disease. There are many reasons for this. One is that we haven’t been taught to treat our emotions as necessary parts of our intelligence.

Another is that emotions tend to be looked down on as less valuable than our so-called rationality (or our spirituality). Yet another reason is that many people experience anxiety as a painful and overwhelming emotion that doesn’t seem to have any value.

Because of these and many other reasons, we’re usually taught to overlook anxiety’s gifts and focus only on its flaws, and it’s hard to love something we see as a flaw. Therefore, the first thing we’ll do in this book is embrace anxiety so that we can approach it in a new way and learn how to love it. 

Really. 

From Embracing Anxiety: How to Access the Genius Inside This Vital Emotion by Karla McLaren, M.Ed. (Sounds True, June 2020)

I look forward to sharing more in the months to come as we prepare for the release of Embracing Anxiety. Happy 2020!

~Karla McLaren