Matthew McKay - Thirty-Minute Therapy for Anxiety: Everything You Need To Know in the Least Amount of Time

Are you ready to do something about your problems with anxiety? Thirty-Minute Therapy for Anxiety is a great place to start. In the sections that follow, youll find useful ideas and skills you can practice, all of which have helped people live better lives with anxiety.

We wrote Thirty-Minute Therapy for Anxiety for people like you and like us: real people with real problems who need a little know-how and a little helpfast. Weve made the information in your hands as accessible as we could. Our goal is to give you the information you need in as little as thirty minutesinformation about skills and approaches that, with a little practice, can create real and positive results in your life.

Can you really get results in just thirty minutes? That depends on what you mean by results. If your goal is to get rid of anxiety completely, to make your nervous or worried feelings go away, then no, you cant get those kinds of results in thirty minutes. (In fact, its likely that you can never get those results, no matter how much time you spend. But well have more to say about that later.) And if your goal is to have an experience like working with a qualified and experienced mental health expert, you wont find that in these pages. The education and experience it takes to become a therapist is considerable, and no matter how detailed a book may be, nothing you can read is a substitute for working with a qualified professional.

But if youre looking to learn more about your experience of anxiety, then you can make a lot of progress by spending thirty minutesor even lesswith the sections that follow. If you want to learn some simple, evidence-based things you can do to reduce the impact anxiety has on your life, you can certainly get that result from the material in front of you. Are you ready?

Part 1

Getting Oriented

Weve divided the book into four basic parts. In part 1, well answer some basic questions you might have about anxiety as a phenomenon. In part 2, well introduce you to powerful concepts from cognitive behavioral therapy, an evidence-based approach to psychotherapy that has proven effective as a treatment for anxiety and related problems. In part 3, well discuss ideas from some other models of psychotherapy. In part 4, well cover basic wellness concepts that play into anxiety, such as how to take good care of yourself by eating well, getting active, and taking the edge off anxiety by getting enough sleep.

As youll quickly see, the parts of the book are divided into short, bite-size sections. In the first segment of each section, we quickly summarize the main concepts and, if we can, give you a little something you can do in that moment so that you can experience what were talking about. This is kind of like what you might hear during your initial visit to a therapist, so we call these segments What You Need to Know.

As you read along, you may find that the material in a particular What You Need to Know segment doesnt interest you all that much. This is totally fine. Anxiety is a very broad topic, and not all people experience anxiety in the same way. If you find that a What You Need to Know segment isnt for you, let your fingers do the walking and flip ahead to the next section to see where it leads you.

If something in a What You Need to Know segment resonates with you and you want to learn more, you can move on to that sections Taking It Further segment. In therapy, you might have to wait until the following week to go deeper into a topic. Here, just keep reading. In the Taking It Further segments, we expand on what you read in What You Need to Know in a way that can really start to open up your understanding of the topic. These segments include deeper explanations of the sections concept as well as some additional skill- or concept-building exercises.

If you work with a therapist, you might leave each session with small assignments to do before the next session. These could be observations to write down or things to work out on paper, to read, and to do. Weve tried to give you the flavor of these useful, between-session activities not only in the exercises provided here, but also in the Practice and Examples segments of this material. Practice and Examples segments are not included in your paper or electronic copy of this book. Instead, you can download the material to your computer or mobile device by visiting http://9813.nhpubs.com.

There youll find a PDF file that includes exercises, worksheets, assessments, and additional reading, all formatted so that you can easily print or read them on any device. You can access the Practice and Examples material as many times as you like and store it wherever you choose.

How you use Thirty-Minute Therapy for Anxiety is totally up to you. You can read through the book from start to finish, or you can scan the table of contents for the particular sections that interest you. You can read the What You Need to Know segments first for a quick overview of the material. Then you can read more deeply in the Taking It Further material in any of the sections that have special interest or meaning for you. And when youre ready to monitor your progress, get more practice at new skills, or read some examples that illustrate the concepts youve just learned, open up your copy of the Practice and Examples file, and youre on your way.