My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind Audiobook (Free)

A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author’s struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by researchers, philosophers, and authors to understand the condition

As lately as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist being a diagnostic category. Today, it’s the most common type of officially categorized mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us over the terrain of the affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood.

Drawing on his own long- about My Age of Stress and anxiety: Fear, Wish, Dread, as well as the Search for Satisfaction standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an amazing history, simultaneously close and authoritative, from the efforts to understand the problem from medical, social, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He runs from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, towards the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William Wayne, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its resources and causes, to the most recent research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reviews on famous people who battled with nervousness, as well as in the afflicted generations of his personal family. His portrait of anxiousness reveals not merely the emotion’s myriad manifestations as well as the anguish nervousness generates but also a variety of psychotherapies, medications, and various other (often outlandish) treatments which have been created to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s individual toll-its crippling influence, its devastating capacity to paralyze-while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it.

My Age of Anxiety is normally learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, providing the reader great insight in to the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that donate to the affliction.