My rating: 3.75/5 ( or maybe 4, I don’t know to be honest)





Thank you Netgalley for sending me this book in exchange for an honest review.

First of all, I’d like to say that this review is entirely up to me. It’s my feelings, my thoughts, and my way of dealing with things. So this book may not help you, or maybe you think that it’s pointless, or barely explaining things, but we all have our ways to deal with anxiety, and two people cannot have the exact same form of anxiety. So please, respect my opinion.

“You don’t have to do this alone”

When I started this book, I was like “Meh, it’s for young people, I don’t think it’s going to help but let’s try anyway”. And then I read, and I read, and I was like “omg was someone spying on me or something because I can relate to this book way too much.”

And it feels great. To see that you’re not alone (I knew that but you know my brain is dumb sometimes and he forgets things) that there might be a solution to all this situation going on.

My story with anxiety is quite peculiar. I experienced things at a young age, that a child should not experience in my opinion. Also I was bullied for many years, and one doesn’t forget things like that. It played on my mind, I was feeling bad and anxious everyday, but I couldn’t put words on what I felt.

I realized that I was suffering from a strong anxiety disorder only 2 years ago. I realized also that I wasn’t the one having a problem, but that a lot of people actually had the same problems than me and you cannot imagine how it feels great to see that you’re not alone and that there’s nothing wrong with you. I realized that “it’s OK not to be OK” and that I shouldn’t think what I was feeling wasn’t normal or right.

I knew I was anxious with exams and all, but I didn’t realized that all the things I felt anxious for in my every day life were actually linked to this anxiety. I mean I knew I was anxious, but to suffer from anxiety disorder is something different. (at least for me). This helped me, because I was able to put words on what I was feeling, and so I was able to find solutions.

The thing is, I knew I was dealing with anxiety, but I didn’t have a clue what to do to cope with it. Nor to recognize it, because it took me so long to recognize my feelings as anxiety. (I’m rambling am I?)

I read a lot of reviews about this book, and at least 50% of them weren’t as positive as mine.

I think this book explains things very well, and is suited for young readers. However, it may not be helpful for everyone. I’m 21 (22 in June) and this book helped me understand, but it may be too simplistic for other people. It only tackles school and college and not work, so maybe another chapter on this subject would have been great.

I really liked the division between chapters, because if you ever want to read some tips or you need something from one of the chapters, it’s really easy to find in the book.

This book might help some people, and I really hope it will. 

"'Don't be anxious it will only make things worse.' If that worked we wouldn't be writing this book."

This book is aimed towards a younger audience, but there are still some good coping strategies for adults too. It is written conversationally so doesn't sound like it is talking down at people.

Oh dear.

I know the intentions of this book were good and I hate that I didn’t like it but man I really didn’t. It was repetitive and kept referring to other chapters which makes it rather clunky for an e-book. The ‘real stories’ don’t feel real due to the words of the contributors, in particular, the 12 year olds account. The vocabulary used in the account just doesn’t sound like a teenager.

I really wish I had better things to say about this book.

My Anxiety Handbook: Getting Back on Track by Sue Knowles Bridie Gallagher and Phoebe McEwen is available now.

For more information regarding Jessica Kingsley Publishers (@Jessica_JKP) please visit www.jkp.com.

I thought that this was helpful and I feel I now know more about anxiety and how to control it. I did find parts a bit repetitive, but overall I found it useful.

I'm not sure what I was supposed to get out of this book. As someone with anxiety I didn't really find it helpful, or even very interesting.

Was excited to get into this and was into it the first few chapters. However, while I understood that the goal is to target young readers and increase awareness and extend help to them, I felt like the author simplified some things a little too much, and that the book was, to use one of today's millennial terms, ~reaching in terms of explaining what to understand and how to deal with anxiety.

" 'Don't be anxious it will only make things worse.' If that worked we wouldn't be writing this book." YES!
I’ve found this book extremely useful, even if i am a long experienced anxiety manager since age 10. However, thou i thought i know it all about anxiety, this was extremely helpful and interesting, there’s so much to learn especially for younger readers.
It’s a bit repetitive sometimes but overall, i’ve loved the description of anxiety through the different stages of life in a very easy and reliable way.
if you are looking for a guide to help you with anxiety or yo help someone you know that has recently started suffering from anxiety or you are just curious to learn more about it then this book is perfect.

I received this as an arc. I think it does a lot of what other books do in the way of explaining anxiety. It gives good examples and would be good for someone who has no idea what anxiety is.

It also made me feel weird because it’s said to be targeted towards a younger demographic, but for the age group it is for it might be a little dry. It reads like one of my psychology texts instead of a guide for making a survival through anxiety.

This book is geared toward younger teenagers. It starts by explaining what anxiety is and its effects on the body. . It includes various tips on how to change anxious thinking and achieve a more peaceful mindset. Personally, I think that it could be really a helpful book for young people, rather than using Google.
As a person who suffers from mild anxiety, I think this book was great. Oh and the cute drawing scattered throughout the book was a nice touch.

This is a nice book with many tips for the reader about dealing with anxiety. I definitely agree that this is for the younger teen readers. I think that it is well organized and could be a helpful tool.

For the target age group, this is a book worth its weight in gold. If this were carried in school libraries everywhere it would do a great deal to demystify anxiety and make people more comfortable with confronting it. In an age group where anxiety can seem like a rare condition that only you suffer from, My Anxiety Handbook puts a figurative arm around the reader and says, 'Hey, its way more common than you think! There's nothing wrong with you, but here's how to manage it!" I think this is also a valuable tool for anyone who wants to understand anxiety and the people in their lives who have it. Sometimes people with the best intentions can make anxiety worse if they don't properly understand it. The personal stories add a nice touch and makes this book immediately more relatable as well! My only quibble is that this seems a bit juvenile for anyone over 17. Perhaps if a college age student had no exposure to this topic and wanted a very entry level text, it would suit them. Otherwise, I think the very simplistic and repetitive tone could isolate older readers.

This book is supposed to be a self-help book on anxiety for ages 10-21, which is just too broad of an age range to hope to serve with a single book. There is such a tremendous difference between a pre-pubescent 10 year old, a 15 year old in the middle of adolescence, and a 21-year old entering adulthood in terms of reading ability, vocabulary, development, and the types of pressures and situations they are dealing with. In attempting to serve much too broad of an age range range, the authors have produced a book that serves none of them very well.

In some parts the writing is too advanced for a 10 year old, and almost all of it would seem patronizing to a 21-year old. I would say it most closely serves 11-14. Then book does a fairly decent job of explaning what everyday anxiety is and some ways to cope with it, but what really concerns me is the way they downplay and minimize serious anxiety disorders. They seem dismissive of the whole idea that someone can have an anxiety disorder, and that it is all just "normal" anxiety. This is clearly contrary to what most of the medical and psychiatric community believe, and not only does a disservice to those who may have severe anxiety disorders, but could be dangerous and cause people not to seek help and think they just need to tough it out.

I can't help but wonder what the authors' qualifications are, as they were not mentioned in the digital ARC I received. This book reads more like a well-researched term paper supplemented with a little personal experience than one written by someone who is truly a credentialed expert.. I found it a trite and patronizing.

I think that the best way to describe this book would be to say that if I had read this 10 years ago, it would have helped me a lot. This is a fantastic read for young people suffering from anxiety which can be such a confusing time, especially in schools when you are surrounded by so many people who seem to be fine. As I have grown up, I've realised that a LOT more people suffer from anxiety than you may think. This book deals with why people get anxiety as well as how to help it. Anxiety is scary and can make you feel alone, so I think this book proves that you are definitely not alone. This would be an ideal book to purchase for young family members / friends going through mental health issues as it talks in a way that is relatable and makes you feel understood. It's easy to read and nice to pick up when you feel like you need a bit of support.

Interesting with helpful tips!

The book contains some interesting points but as the age range is so wide, some of it feels aimed mostly towards the lower end of the bracket rather than my age group at the very top.

As a psychologist, I found this to contain good general knowledge and several helpful techniques for understanding and controlling anxiety. Some of the writing would be a bit above the lower end of the target group, and other areas much too simplistic for the older readers. Overall, I feel this could be a very useful tool.

I didn't suffer from anxiety as a young adult, but I do as a not-so-young adult who works with young adults, and I can see this book being a very useful tool book to keep in the school library.

A practical handbook with some meditation and mindfulness techniques that will be familiar to anyone who's read up on anxiety before, this is jargon free and makes anxiety seem normal and not weird. As some other reviewers have mentioned, I think the target age group is a little confused. I would recommend this more for the younger end of the suggested audience. Older teenagers and young adults are likely to find it a little patronising and may find adult books better.

Oh boy!! So this is a really difficult review to write, mainly because it's not that the book wasn't good necessarily, but more that it wasn't really what I was expecting or looking for.

This book really caught my eye because I have moderate to severe anxiety and the blurb promised coping mechanisms and stories of others with an anxiety disorder. However, after reading the book, the blurb kind of... poorly advertises the book itself.

The intended audience is honestly way too broad for any book, even for non-fiction. 10-21 is just.... a lot of years.

What intrigued me, as an eighteen year-old, was the description of child development and how experiences in your early childhood can affect your anxiety levels early in life. However, if I had read some of those sections when I was ten, or even twelve, or even fifteen, I would have been bored to death.

On the flip side, a lot of the topics, particularly in the first few sections, seemed as though they would be good for a tween or young teen who has just been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, but it didn't really fit what I was looking for, because I have anxiety and I know I have anxiety and I get it, this is what happens when you get anxiety. I know this. Anyone who has had anxiety for more than like three months knows this. I get it. I don't need to hear five summaries in a row of the physical and cognitive symptoms of anxiety.

It was just weird, because on one hand this book would be great for kids/teens who have finally put a label on the anxious/scary feelings they have, but on the other it's good for upper teens/young adults if they want to learn what might be behind their anxiety. I just wish that the book could have chosen one audience and stuck to it, because the result of trying to please everyone in such a diverse age range made the book messy and not fun to read.

I did appreciate that the book continually acknowledged that the symptoms of anxiety will differ from person to person, and that it tries its best, especially in the different real-life examples, to show this. It seems as though a lot of self-help books try to put a box around mental health issues, which can be frustrating when your experience doesn't fit neatly into the box. Even in the preface, it was obvious through the author's sharing their own experiences, that this handbook was striving to encompass all the different types of anxiety.

As I mentioned briefly before, the writing style was needlessly repetitive. Reading it was like when a three year-old tells you the same story 10+ times in one day, and just when you think you can move on from this, they come up to you and tell it to you again. It was driving me up a wall. I was so annoyed. Ugh.

For a non-fiction book, it had really engaging writing, though I'm sure it helped that I was invested in the subject. I really enjoyed the bulleted lists and illustrations, because it made the reading easier for me and definitely added to the appeal for a younger teen.

I hate saying that a book was too long, because I feel like that's kind of a cop-out a lot of people use when reading, but Good. Ness. I felt like I invested way too much time into this book, especially for a non-fiction piece. I was dying inside by the end of it.

So, all in all, if the book really split in half the targeted age range, I think that this would be a much more enjoyable handbook, whether it be for tweens and teens, or upper teens and young adults. I would recommend My Anxiety Handbook for people who are interested in the psychology of anxiety or young teens just diagnosed with anxiety (that is, if you can deal with the endless repetition and sections that are obviously intended for someone older or younger than you).

Over the years I have suffered from general anxiety and occasionally talked about it on my blog in relation to books and certain fictional characters. Sometimes I have really good days in which I feel fine, and other days I struggle to get out of bed. I really love reading books with characters who have anxiety or have some anxiety symptoms. It makes me, and I think many other readers, feel not so alone in the world. My Anxiety Handbook by Sue Knowles, Bridie Gallagher, Phoebe McEwen is not only a book that those who suffer from anxiety should read, but a book that I feel everyone should pick up and read. 

This book describes different aspects of anxiety, reasons for anxiety, coping mechanisms, and more. To say I learned a lot form this book would be an understatement. I did not know that there was a lot more depth to reasoning for anxiety, rather than just stress. Anxiety can occur even as a child and due to seeing how adult figures, like parents, may act around you when you are younger and you picking their behavior up or maybe due to extreme trauma or stress that you are feeling from something big. Sometimes people are just anxious and their is not really a huge reason for it. Anyhow, I learned about the explanation of why anxiety occurs, some of which I never knew before. 

Another thing I really liked in this book was the coping mechanisms it talked about. Some mechanisms were things that I learned in Psychology class in High School and other where things that I never even thought about like thinking of reaching your goals as climbing a ladder. This means exposing yourself to little things at a comfortable pace & amount, to help you prepare for a bigger challenge or end goal. This would be like if I was really worried about going to dance with a bunch of people, I may want to try to go to small venues and hang around smaller groups of people before the dance and have the events and amount of people I spend time with get bigger and bigger leading up to that dance. That way when I finally do get to my end goal it will not be as scary. I see this as possibly working in some situations and something I may even want to try for myself one day. They do warn about doing things at a comfortable pace and that doing something head on is not always best for everyone. Overall, find what is best for you and try to use that method as you see fit. 

A quote I really appreciate in this book is " 'Don't be anxious it will only make things worse.' If that worked we wouldn't be writing this book." I really appreciate this quote because one of the things people who have anxiety hate hearing the most is that "anxiety is all in our heads" or to just "stop being anxious then." If there was some magic switch to turn off our anxiety I would love to know about it. In reality though there is not magic switch or power that people who have anxiety have that can just stop anxiety. Sometimes anxiety can be triggered by going to certain places or being around large groups or people or during certain situations like exams or performances and then there are times where anxiety just creeps on us for no reason. Why are we feeling anxious just sitting around in our dorm room? I have no clue. Honestly, I wish I did. That is just how anxiety can work and this book makes sure to express that. While some of the mechanisms they talk about may not work for all people and situations, they do give a handful of different ways to cope with our anxiety. This includes this like breaking your thoughts about yourself and situations that are negative and thinking if they are really true and % of truth related to it. It is something I never really thought about. Or maybe having something physical like a worry box to put all your worries in that you write down and place in the box. I am someone who is really creative and I find crafts relaxing so doing a project like that could even just help me with anxiety before I even start putting notes in the box. The book later talks about finding what relaxes you and doing it. I feel this is important because a lot of people can have different ways of coping with anxiety and one person way of dealing is not always the best way of dealing. Self-soothing can be different for a lot of people. For me it is crafting and watching my favorite TV shows. For others it may be reading or taking a bath or writing. The book discusses this and I really appreciate not only giving me creative ideas, but how the authors express that everyone has their own ways of coping with stress and anxiety and coping mechanisms are not all one size fits all. The book even talks about ways to cope through different breathing and physical exercises. I think it's important to stress the variety of ways that you can help anxiety levels to go down, even if one way may not work for every person. Just having the different coping mechanisms in this book is what really helps to make this a great guide. 

Another thing I really like about this book is it talks about how to deal with different types of stress related to different types of things. For instance, their is a whole chapter about dealing with anxiety that is related to school. That is something I feel myself and many other will appreciate as I know a lot of people who have anxiety can have it triggered or made worse due to school work or a school environment. There is even an entire chapter about how to cope with transitioning and maybe moving to a new places or leaving something familiar in exchange for a new experience. I like that this was added as it shows the variety of aspects that can bring on major anxiety and what to do to help with it. 

One of my favorite things about the book was the personal story section. In this chapter people shared their stories about their experiences with anxiety and what they do to cope and relax. As I read these parts I really felt a strong bond between the writers of these passages and a connection to the actions and ideas they had. I tried a lot of the same things they done in the past to help with anxiety from apps to talking about it with people. I liked the variety of people that they choose for this section as it showed that anxiety can come in many forms and occur in many different people and situations. 

The photos in this book are also really cool. I like the illustrations and have to commend the artist for drawing pictures to show people doing literal and theoretical things related to anxiety & anxiety relief. I really liked the creativity that went into the design ideas of these drawings, whether it be more simple or complicated. 

Overall, this book was interesting, helpful, and made me think and learn a lot about what I believed or did not believe about my anxiety or anxiety in general. I think if I had to say one complaint about this book I would say it felt a little repetitive and long at some parts and I would have liked a few more illustrations, but those are just nit picky things. Honestly, if you are looking for a guide to help with anxiety or just to learn more about it then this book is for you. 

4 out of 5 Stars 

**** out of *****

I received this book from Netgalley In exchange for an honest review.