Retrain Your Anxious Brain: Practical and Effective Tools to Conquer Anxiety
Tsilimparis, John, and Daylle Schwartz. U.S.A.: Harlequin, 2014.
Retrain Your Anxious Brain: Practical and Effective Tools to Conquer Anxiety is a psychotherapy book which outlines John Tsilimparis’ framework for retraining a fixed mindset, which he suggests is a cause of anxious, spiralling, thoughts. Tsilimparis asserts that individuals, particularly those prone to anxiety, have “dualistic minds”: anything other than confirmation of the norms and values they have internalised over lifetimes, is alarming. This presents itself in automatic thoughts and fixed language (such as “should” or “must”). This book guides the reader through strategies and tools to retrain and recreate their personal belief system and set of internalised norms, in order to halt automatic thoughts; it is a toolbox to alleviate inner turmoil and engender inner peace. Beyond its instructional capacity, I suggest that its emphasis on the social creation of values and reality (what “should” be), and the fact that one can define their own emotional reality, indicates that inner peace can actually be brought about by the act of individually visualising and defining what inner and outer peace looks like to oneself.