5 Best Books for Dealing with Anxiety and Depression

Focuses on: Anxiety

Type(s): Feeling Less Alone and Greater Understanding/Research

I loved this book but I don’t think everyone will. This is mostly due to Wilson’s writing style and, I suppose, the way her brain works. Like a chronically anxious person, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful  is frenetic and at times, overly-energetic, leaping from story to story, back ten years to ahead five years to childhood to imagined old age, from personal disaster to scientific research to that thing my meditation teacher told me that, by the way, totally didn’t work, but hey, it’s funny now, looking back.

Focuses on: Anxiety and Depression

Type(s): Exercises/Action

Godwin’s Law famously states that the longer any internet discussion continues, the probability of someone being compared to Hitler approaches 100%. Well, in my experience, the longer an internet discussion about depression, anxiety, or any other mental health problem goes on, the probability that Feeling Good gets recommended to them also approaches 100%. I see this book mentioned everywhere.

That’s because if you were going to write a comprehensive, “This is what three months with a CBT therapist would be like,” book, full of enough

Focuses on: Anxiety and Depression
Type(s): Greater Understanding/Research and Exercises/Action

I love this book. It was quite influential on me when I read it years and years ago and I was quite upset to find out that I had inadvertently ripped off one of the exercises in it in my Self-Knowledge PDF (it has since been fixed and credited appropriately).

Focuses on: Anxiety and Depression
Type(s): Greater Understanding/Research and Exercises/Action

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck  (yes, I had to find a way to plug my own shit here), I made the point that true self-esteem can’t be a measure of how someone feels about their successes, it must be a measure of how we feel about our failures .

This isn’t a terribly original idea. People have been shitting on self-esteem for a couple decades now. But Neff is the first psychologist to conceptualize an alternative metric for self-esteem: self-compassion .