"Nervous Energy" was a good, shorter read. The book is focused on people who have high anxiety/nervous energy levels who need a few coping skills to help them step back from perfectionist tendencies that keep them highly strung. Dr. Carmichael elaborates on nine tools that can be helpful for these cases. For instance, the very first skill that is discussed is a breathing technique that can be used as a base-level calming down skill. The book is written very thoroughly, with each chapter detailing a human example, how to do the technique, and how to troubleshoot it if you don't find it is working for you. It is a great read if you are looking for a little help on how to put away intrusive thoughts, react in situations better, etc.

Thanks to Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Nervous Energy by Dr. Chloe Carmichael is a book that provides guidance on dealing with nervous energy in a way that helps you move through it effectively. The book shares a variety of mental techniques related to time-management, reducing stress, and developing boundaries. This book hopes to help those that deal with anxiety, panic attacks, OCD, and other disorders to make daily life manageable. The author draws upon techniques from cognitive-behavioral therapy, mindfulness, yoga, and techniques she has developed herself for a holistic framework.

I found this book well-written that is able to communicate effectively with people without dumbing things down that it loses its meaning. Through this book I realized I am a bit of a "scrutinizer" and I found the specific techniques of three pint breath, zone of control, worry time, and mind mapping helpful after reading this book. I also appreciated the anecdotes with clients that helped support the information throughout the book. Specifically, I liked the author's anecdote on how she used this as a graduate student since I can apply this to my own career as an academic. I found it interesting how the author highlighted the benefits of structure since I found in my own experience that helps me manage my overwhelm. Overall I highly recommend this book for those who find themselves to naturally run more anxious or for anyone looking for some acute help when dealing with random anxiety.

Many thanks to the publisher St. Martin's Press and Netgalley for the ARC in return for an honest review.

Y'all, if you have somewhat OCD tendencies and are looking for a way to turn that anxious energy into something more productive, I recommend you read Dr. Chloe Carmichael's new book, NERVOUS ENERGY. She provides 9 tools for managing excess energy that are very helpful! #NervousEnergy
Why not use all that nervous, fidgety anxious energy for good?

Managing Anxiety for High Functioning People

A person driven to succeed, tries to do everything right, wants to be in charge and has lots of nervous energy. This is the person Dr. Chloe Carmichael’s book is intended for. However, even if you don’t qualify as a super Type A personality some of Dr. Carmichael’s treatment suggestions can be valuable.

Although high energy people who are very successful can appear to have it all under control, they can also suffer from sever anxiety. I thought the author did a good job of illustrating this type of person in the examples she chose. Whether you find yourself in those people, it will give a better understanding of this personality type.

I thought the best part of the book was the treatments described by Dr. Carmichael. She doesn’t focus on just one approach but goes into several treatments. One chapter is devoted to a laundry list of approaches for dealing with OCD type problems. With so many tools, not all will be appropriate for each situation. The author encourages you to look at the spectrum and decide what might work for you.

This is a helpful book for anyone suffering from nervous energy that threatens to control their life leading to OCD like behaviors. The book is very readable and the client descriptions are well done.

I received this book from St. Martin’s Press for this review.

I’ve been in therapy for PTSD and general anxiety disorder for most of my life. I expected that this book would be a lot of the same techniques and visualizations that I’ve always heard. I was surprised to find that it was very useful and had some really helpful tips and tricks for turning my anxiety into a positive. I will definitely recommend it.

This is the first I guess you could say “self help” book I have read in a long time! I got it because I thought it was about anxiety! Though it was more for “high functioning” personalities I did find some of the techniques insightful!

I related to parts of the book but at times felt the explanations of patients was drawn out and would love more examples on the techniques! This was something I find myself needing more so after 2020 so overall a very helpful book!

Smart, lively, and thoroughly entertaining, Chloe Carmichael's NERVOUS ENERGY delivered far more than my high expectations. With fact, stories, and hard-won experience, Carmichael encourages those of us who are powerfully driven to achieve to channel our talents, ambitions, and dreams with motivating, clear insights and simple, potent techniques. Her frank discussions and explanations of how and when to apply the tools propelled me to hurtle through this read and put it into immediate application. Perhaps my favorite aspect of NERVOUS ENERGY is the consistent emphasis that the tools are ours to use as makes sense to us, modifying and shifting our work with changes in our lives. I received an advance reader copy of this title from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for my unbiased review.

This book was only written for people with high functioning anxiety as someone who has real anxiety it is extremely triggering,

This book is geared for high-functioning people with anxiety, and the author gives a thorough description early on in the book as to just who these people are. She then goes on to list nine tools to deal with anxiety and nervous energy. There are step-by-step instructions to guide the reader through the tools, as well as patient stories to show the author's success in using these practices. The book wasn't quite what I was expecting, but there are some tips that most people in her target audience could utilize at some point in time.

I would like to say thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for my Arc of "Nervous Energy: Harness the Power of Your Energy". I don't usually read the self-help genre but I am glad to have had the opportunity to open my horizons to give it a chance. "Nervous Energy" was a perfect introduction to the genre.

In today's world we suffer from anxiety, panic attacks, and worry disorders. "Nervous Energy" tackles these ailments and offers readers different techniques and exercises to work with these issues head on. The book provides examples, client stories and personal experiences that take a look at the many different forms of anxiety induced activities and tasks that we may encounter on a daily basis. There are a variety of techniques and ideas that are helpful for many different situations.

I was able to take away some great ideas to help deal with my anxious behaviours and I am going to continue with a few of the activities as I found them very helpful. Not all of the activities were persuant to my needs but those activities may be perfect for others. I definitely feel that if you suffer from generalized anxiety disorders or other behaviour around worriesome thoughts, you should be able to learn some coping techniques and exercises to help you.

This is a must read for high achievers. This book helps you level up by better controlling your emotions. And for those high achievers like myself who struggles with always needing achievement, fear of failure, etc. - there is a whole toolbox of tools to leverage to help you cope and excel.

To be honest, when I started reading this book I actually double-checked the title page because I was sure I must have accidentally opened the wrong book. I expected the focus to be on managing anxiety but it is specifically written for "high functioning" people to manage their anxiety. Huh, it turns out that I've been a "low functioning" person all my life and never knew it.

The start of the book is so pompous and pretentious about the clients she chooses to work with (only "high functioning" overachievers like herself) that I stopped reading it fairly early on. This is rare for me since I'll generally even hate-read a book to finish it, but this just made me feel bad and I'm not giving that many hours of my life to something this annoying.

I identify as someone who has nervous energy and anxiety, and I actually think I achieve quite a lot in my life. I do not at all relate to her high achiever profile though -- perfectionists who manage to do everything better than everybody else and get tons accomplished in the blink of an eye (join everything and run it, host perfect parties, have perfectly dressed and coiffed children, etc.). Nope, I'm the scatterbrained artist intellectual mama type who has a million projects and aims for "good enough" in lots of it in order to get things done. I do have nervous energy and I have had anxiety since I was a little girl, but I am not a type A person and I honestly felt like I was a failure reading her definition of the people she works with and wrote this book for.

If you are a super successful overachiever with anxiety, then this will probably serve you well -- and stroke your ego, since she's all about fawning over you (and herself). I'm now going to go do a dozen things with slightly better than mediocre aspirations since that's how I manage to juggle all that I do without even more anxiety, and go find a book that makes me feel slightly less stabby. 😉

I read a digital ARC of this book for review.

This was an interesting topic and definitely one I related too. I'd never heard of this form of therapy before. Sometimes I felt like the examples were too long. But the book was formatted easily enough to be able to decipher the cogent points.

Interesting subject matter and very long slow read unless you are one of the people described or have a particular interest in counseling. The techniques descibed for alleviating stress would be beneficial primarily to those types of persons. I think I am quite "burned out" on the topic of mindfulness in general.
I was provided an advanced reader copy of the book and was under no obligation to provide a review. The opinions expressed are my own. Thanks to the author,publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to read this book.

Overall, I really like this book. Dr. Carmichael is a New York City based therapist who specializes in “high functioning people”. This is actually my only real complaint about the book. Low functioning people she defines as people who struggle to meet their most basic needs (food, shelter, employment), who have mental health diagnoses that prevent them from doing these things, or who have big social challenges. High functioning people, on the other hand, are people who are successfully employed, were successful in school, pay their bills and have some savings, have satisfying relationships, and so forth. She says that while lower functioning people need weekly therapy to learn skills and be in the presence of a higher functioning person, higher functioning people may not need weekly therapy and tend to need more goal-oriented and practical approaches. Maybe I don’t really think this designation is necessary because I do work with more high functioning clients and not at an inpatient or county mental health facility? But I feel like most of us therapists (in fee for service private practice anyway) are seeing higher functioning clients, and it’s such a huge category that I think making any really large sweeping statements about the whole group is insufficient. But be that as it may, this book is for “high functioning” clients who need practical tools for their particular issues.

While anxiety is typically categorized as “bad”, Carmichael explains that some level of healthy anxiety – or “nervous energy” – is what makes a lot of high functioning clients successful. And while this energy/anxiety is great to get through school or be successful at a high paced job, sometimes it is not helpful in their personal lives or inside their heads. So she gives 9 tools that she has found helpful in teaching high functioning or driven clients to cope with excess anxiety or energy. Many of these tools are common mindfulness or CBT tools that many therapists use, with both high and low functioning clients. There were a few things I found here that I thought were new, but most of the information can be found elsewhere. Still, I did really like the organized way that she laid out the information and the examples and step-by-step instructions that she portrayed.

The 9 tools are: 1) a three part breath (a mindfulness technique that is grounding); 2) Zone of Control (making lists of what you can and can’t control); 3) Mental shortlist (a list of things you’d rather be thinking about besides the thing you are ruminating about); 4) a To-Do List with Emotions (adding emotions can help clarify why you’re having trouble getting your to-do list done); 5) Mind Mapping (a visual map of all the thoughts and feelings you have about a certain issue); 6) Worry Time (scheduling worry time so you don’t worry all the time!); 7) Response Prevention (finding alternatives to a behavior you want to stop doing); 8) Thought Replacement (finding a replacement thought for a problematic one); and 9) Anchoring Statements (simple statements to ground you when you are panicky).

I have used almost all of these techniques with clients, but I like the idea of keeping this menu “handy” with certain clients so that I can more easily remember them and decide when they are appropriate. I also think that a lot of clients would really like this book, as it explains very simply and clearly how to do each technique and when/why you would. I’ll definitely buy a copy for my shelves!

This is a great guide for so many in this age of anxiety. I love the approach Carmichael has outlined and feel like this could be beneficial to those who struggle with their anxiety, as well as those who are "high-functioning" but still know their anxiety is holding them back ,
Many thanks to St. Martin's Essentials and NetGalley for the advance copy.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced e-copy of Nervous Energy by Chloe Carmichael!!!

This is a good read for someone that has high functioning anxiety. Lots of tips and ways to try and help deal with it. A good read for anyone with or without anxiety.

I am a very nervous and anxious person so having Dr. Carmichael create a guide during these tumultuous times was incredibly helpful. It was a bit slow and dry to read through but the information is very helpful. Great tips on how to harness your energy into something productive rather than destructive.

This read is a great marriage between cognitive ideas and mindfulness techniques. The how-tos are accessible to those new to meditation and breathing but also detailed enough that a seasoned yogi or meditator can gain value.

I chose this bool because I recognized myself in the author's description of high-functioning people who acknowledge that their anxiety leads to a declining life quality, and they wish to do something about it. I appreciated how the author gives several techniques right off the bat to help readers gain control of their anxiety and the nervous energy that often results. However, I eventually found the writing very repetitive and thought this might have been better as an article than a book.

My other qualm about this book was how much bold print there was. The author seemed to want to hammer home what they wanted the reader to pay attention to instead of letting the reader draw their own conclusions based on what they personally needed to get out of the book. When multiple lines per page are bolded, it takes me out of the flow of reading. When everything is important, nothing is important.