Future Tense: Why Anxiety is Good for You (Even Though it Feels Bad)

Description

A psychologist confronts our pervasive misunderstanding of anxiety and presents a powerful new framework for reimagining and reclaiming the confounding emotion as the advantage it evolved to be. We are taught that anxiety is dangerous and damaging, and that the solution to its pain is to eradicate it like we do any disease. Yet cutting-edge therapies, hundreds of self-help books, and a panoply of medications have failed to keep debilitating anxiety at bay. That's because the anxiety-as-disease story is false - and it's harming us. In this radical reinterpretation, Dr Tracy Dennis-Tiwary distils the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, combined with real-world stories and personal narrative, to argue that the discomfort of anxiety is a tool, rather than something to be stamped out at all costs. Detailing the terrible cost of our misunderstanding of anxiety, while celebrating the lives of people who harness it to their advantage, FUTURE TENSE reveals how we can live and grow with anxiety.

Tracy Dennis-Tiwary is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at The City University of New York, and the Director of the Stress, Anxiety, and Resilience Research Center and the Co-Executive Director of the Center for Health Technology at Hunter College. She has been featured and interviewed in dozens of major media outlets to discuss her work, including the New York Times, ABC Special Report "Screentime" with Diane Sawyer, Wall Street Journal, CBS, CNN, NPR, The Today Show, The Daily Mail, and Bloomberg Television.

If you're feeling more anxious than usual and, on top of that, feeling anxious about feeling anxious, then this book is for you. Anxiety, it turns out, is a feature, not a bug, of human nature. In FUTURE TENSE, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary offers a much-needed guide - based on years of scientific research and her personal clinical experience - to the emotion that is in some ways most easily misunderstood and, therefore, most undervalued. Clear, practical, and incredibly readable -- Angela Duckworth This book is going to smash your existing views about anxiety - and replace them with more helpful ones. As an expert on the neuroscience of emotion, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary has delivered the riveting read we all need to help us learn to worry well instead of worrying less -- Adam Grant A powerful and deeply informed new voice in the important conversation around anxiety and its causes and effects. FUTURE TENSE offers knowledge, empathy, and clarity in these times when chronic emotional pain has been normalized. Framing how anxiety works in our favor is a revolutionizing shift in perspective -- Alanis Morissette Reading FUTURE TENSE is an epiphany; it will turn your understanding of anxiety on its head, and point you to new paths forward. It offers a long-overdue challenge to the medicalization and numbing of anxiety. Instead, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary encourages us to consider how to live and grow with anxiety, and find creativity in dealing with life's fundamental uncertainties. A wide conversation around this book is urgently needed for our anxious times -- Dacher Keltner, professor at UC Berkeley, author of AWE: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life FUTURE TENSE teaches us - with incredible research and great storytelling - that counter to everything we've thought and been taught, anxiety, when understood and used wisely, is one of the most valuable emotions to help us achieve our dreams. If you're prone to anxiety like me or live or work with people who are anxious, this is a must read! -- Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and bestselling author of PERMISSION TO FEEL FUTURE TENSE is groundbreaking. Filled with wisdom, compassion, and humor, it shatters our long-held assumptions and sets the stage for a new, hopeful way of understanding how to live - and thrive - with anxiety -- Reshma Saujani, CEO of the Marshall Plan for Moms and founder of Girls Who Code Our minds classify anxiety as 'bad', but that very idea keeps anxiety from delivering its often useful messages about what's ahead. It's time for the whole culture to learn how to use anxiety when it's helpful and let it go when it's not, but that starts with learning what it is and how to feel it. This wise and well-written book will help. Highly recommended -- Steven C. Hayes, originator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and author of A LIBERATED MIND