These last couple of things have probably been thee most helpful with my anxiety in terms of an all-around mindset and perspective change. There are three different books that help me immensely when I feel like I just can't deal with it anymore.
The first one is Victor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning. Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist that spent three years in four different concentration camps and dealt with the loss of his parents, brother and pregnant wife. While the book covers some of his experiences in the camps, it is more about his observations of people's behaviors (both prisoners and guards) while in the camps and how people survived the unthinkable. He argues that we cannot avoid suffering, but we can choose how we cope with it. He noticed that the people who typically survived the atrocities of the camps all had something in common: purpose. He went on to practice his own type of therapy: logotherapy, which in Greek means "meaning". Simply put: if people feel they have meaning and a purpose, they tend to be able to bear burdens. He quotes Nietzsche, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how."
This book does not show you how to make your problems go away, but helps you look at it from a different perspective. Suffering is inevitable, it's in the giving it a purpose that makes it worth going through.
The second book, by far, is the most important. The Bible. I was raised a Christian, but if I can be completely honest, I didn't touch a bible until I was 18. I avoided it more out of fear than anything else. But when my anxiety took hold of me right out of high school, I picked it up out of pure desperation. I told myself that there was nothing I could read in it that could possibly make me feel worse than I was already feeling every day. For the first time, I felt like I wasn't alone, that someone (and not just anyone but the creator of the universe) was looking out for me, cared for me, and wanted to help me. From then on, it became a life source of comfort and assurance (and not at all as scary as my childhood self imagined it). Admittedly, there are times when I slack, but this past year, I held onto it for dear life. I learned the importance of a quiet time with God, with journaling my prayers to look back on and see how He was working in my life and how He answered things, looking for His winks throughout my day and learning scripture and God's promises that I could repeat to myself when I got overwhelmed with life. Here are some of my favorite verses to recite:
"So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand."Isaiah 41:10
"Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go." Joshua 1:9
"The Lord will continually lead you; he will feed you even in parched regions. He will give you renewed strength, and you will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring that continually produces water." Isaiah 58:11
"I will walk in the strength of the Lord." Psalm 71: 16
"There was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'" 2 Corinthians 12: 8
There are obviously a plethora of verses to choose from, but these are the ones that I use the most to give me strength. I've used the last verse, Paul's plead with God, and ultimate embrace of his weakness for the purpose of showing God's grace and power, to reconcile and embrace my anxiety in the terms of Frankl's logotherapy. Meaning, I've chosen for that to be the purpose of my anxiety, and that in itself has made a huge difference.
And the third book that I cannot recommend enough is Sarah Young's Jesus Calling. It's a daily devotional written as if Jesus himself is speaking to you. They are about a paragraph long, but they're like personal pep talks from Jesus to get you through the day. These help me just to get out the door. These ones in particular completely changed me:
"Trust me and don't be afraid, for I am your Strength and Song. Do not let fear dissipate your energy. Instead, invest your energy in trusting Me and singing My Song. The battle for control of your mind is fierce, and years of worry have made you vulnerable to the enemy. Therefore, you need to be vigilant in guarding your thoughts. Do no despise this weakness in yourself since I am using it to draw you closer to Me. Your constant need for Me creates an intimacy that is well worth all the effort. You are not alone in this struggle for your mind. My Spirit living within you is ever ready to help in this striving. Ask Him to control your mind; He will bless you with Life and Peace."How amazing, right? The first time I read it, tears ran down my face, just from sheer relief. You are not alone in this struggle for your mind, I am using this to draw you closer to Me. And this one:
"Walk by faith, not by sight. As you take steps of faith, depending on Me, I will show you how much I can do for you. If you live your life too safely, you will never know the thrill of seeing Me work through you. When I gave you My Spirit, I empowered you to live beyond your natural ability and strength. That's why it is so wrong to measure your energy level against the challenges ahead of you. The issue is not your strength but Mine, which is limitless. By walking close to Me, you can accomplish My purposes in My strength."The thing with anxiety is that it just makes you tired all the time. The amount of adrenaline my body produces leaves me completely exhausted when I finally calm down. It makes even little things feel like too much work. I would always think, how am I ever going to do anything? But when I read this, it changed everything. I don't have the strength or energy, but that doesn't matter because God does. After reading this, every time I thought to myself, I can't do this, I would immediately remind myself, you're right, you can't, but God can. And He does. Every time I walk out to my car from a hair appointment or from a shift at work (normal things that most people don't think twice about doing but require enormous effort for me), I think, I don't know how I just did that. And then I remember, I didn't.
There's this peace and relief that comes with surrendering the idea of having to be enough. Or having to do everything on your own. Or having to figure everything out. You don't. It's so nice to be able to rest in the realization that someone out there is bigger than this, and they're with you, they're fighting for you, they're helping you, they're rooting for you. But this realization doesn't come easily. Your human mind and body are constantly trying to drag you back to this place where it tells you you're the only one that can help yourself and you'll never be able to do it. That's why I have to constantly be in the Word, reminding myself of His promises and His plans. I can tell when I've gone too long without it. Anxious thoughts start creeping back in, I go back to my old ways of thinking. I'm restless, cynical and easily unsettled. In order to get a hold of your anxiety, you have to change your thought process, and this is the best way I know how. Read it, repeat it, remind yourself of it.
I hope this helps, even if just a little. And if it doesn't, know that I love you and am rooting for you. :)
for my birthday last week so I finally had an excuse to ignore the piles of unread books in my room and buy a new book to read. I decided on 
by John Green. I'd already read Looking For Alaska by him and I'd been hearing good things about The Fault in Our Stars so I decided to give it a go. The above illustration pretty much sums up my experience with the book. It is sad and beautiful and truthful about how we deal with life and death. I was happy with it being the first book I read on my Kindle.
by Robin Schwarz is about a woman who is given a year to live, and realizing she hasn't really lived at all, decides to rob a bank and move to California. While it has all the ingredients to the average chick-lit: an overweight woman out on a journey of self-discovery who finds romance and acceptance along the way, there still is more to it. It's about living life and letting go of your past in order to cherish what little time you have in the present. I mean sure, we'd all be able to cherish the present a little bit more if we had 2 million dollars and the guts to change our identity and move across the country. Sure, it might not evoke world peace, or win a Pulitzer Prize, but if you want to read a story about a woman living the life she always wanted, while you lay out on the beach drinking some fruity drink with an umbrella, then this is your book.
by Sylvia Plath. This one I'm sure a lot of you have already read. I, myself, had already read it once before after I was given it as a present for my 19th birthday from my friend Taryn. But this time reading it was nothing like the first time I read it. I don't think I really grasped and connected with it the first time around, because I just don't think I was ready for it. This time it was like reading it with a new pair of eyes. Everything that has happened in the 5 years since first reading it made me identify so much more with Esther. Sure, I never tried to commit suicide, or got shock treatments, or got admitted into an asylum, but I still understood where she was coming from and on a level, how she felt. Like when she went to see her psychiatrist for the first time and him asking her if she could tell him what she thought was wrong, as if nothing was really wrong, but she only thought was wrong. "I had imagined a kind, ugly, intuitive man looking up and say, 'Ah!' in an encouraging way, as if he could see something I couldn't, and then I would find words to tell him how I was so scared, as if I were being stuffed farther and farther into a black, airless sack with no way out." How when you feel so isolated and hopeless and all you want is for some doctor to be able to just look at you and know what's wrong and what will help, and that's just not the case. And knowing, while reading, that the majority of the story mirrors Plath's own life makes you even more sympathetic to Esther, knowing that Plath was writing with true emotion from first-hand experience. It's just an interesting insight into someone's nervous breakdown that will stay with me for awhile. 
by Billy Crystal. I heard from a couple different websites that this book was funny, and since I enjoy a funny book, when I saw it for $3 at Big Lots I decided to give it a shot. While it wasn't the funniest book I'd ever read, it was humorous, but more than that it was sad and surprising and heartwarming all at the same time. Billy Crystal's childhood spent around famous jazz musicians was something I was very surprised to learn about. I mean, Billie Holiday took him to his first movie and he watched a Yankees game from Louis Armstrong's seats at Yankee Stadium, really now. It was heartbreaking reading about how he lost his father when he was a teenager, but encouraging how his family dealt with it. It's definitely a book that shows you the importance of family and that's what I loved most about it. 
by Irene Gut Opdyke. I must state that Holocaust memoirs are my favorite books to read. Not that the subject matter, or reading about people dying, is one of my favorite things to read about, but I find them infinitely interesting. I am so intrigued by World War II and the unthinkable things people went through, and the amazing stories that came from it. I feel that these people's stories deserve to be heard, and even though they are extremely upsetting, you can always take away the strength and courage of the human spirit that these people show. 
by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer. While I stated above that my favorite books to read are Holocaust memoirs, I had no idea this was going to be (but not really) a Holocaust fictional book. I actually bought it not knowing what it was about or what to expect. It's a book made up entirely of fictional letters between numerous different characters. From an author to her publisher to her best friend and ultimately to the members of a literary society on the island of Guernsey in England that formed during The Occupation. It takes place after the war, in 1945, when the Nazi no longer had control over the island. At first it was a bit confusing trying to keep all the characters straight and remember who the letter was being written to, and written by but after awhile everything kind of straightens out. 
by Irmgard Hunt, 
by Howard Dully, 
by Chris Mitchell, and 
by Marjorie Hart (which I talked about 
by Billy Crystal yesterday, but I think I'll count that towards my books of 2011. I know what you're thinking, "what is this? a book list for ants?! it needs to be at least... three times this long." 
