A psychologist confronts our pervasive misunderstanding of anxiety and presents a powerful new
framework for reimagining and reclaiming the confounding emotion as the advantage it evolved to
be. We taught people that anxiety is dangerous and damaging and that the solution to its pain
is to eradicate it like we do any disease-prevent it avoid it and stamp it out at all costs.
Yet cutting-edge therapies hundreds of self-help books and a panoply of medications have
failed to keep debilitating anxiety at bay. A third of us will struggle with anxiety disorders
in our lifetime and rates in children and adults continue to skyrocket. That's because the
anxiety-as-disease story is false-and it's harming us. In this radical reinterpretation Dr.
Tracy Dennis-Tiwary argues that anxiety is an evolved advantage that protects us and
strengthens our creative and productive powers. Although it's related to stress and fear it's
uniquely valuable-allowing us to imagine the uncertain future and compelling us to make that
future better. That's why anxiety is inextricably linked to hope. By distilling the latest
research in psychology and neuroscience including her own combining it with real-world
stories and personal narrative Dennis-Tiwary shows how we can acknowledge the discomfort of
anxiety and see it as a tool rather than something to be feared and reviled. Detailing the
terrible cost of our misunderstanding of anxiety while celebrating the lives of people who
harness it to their advantage she argues that we can-and must-learn to be anxious in the right
way. Future Tense blazes the way for a paradigm shift in how we relate to and understand
anxiety in our day-to-day lives-a fresh set of beliefs and insights that allow us to explore
and leverage even very distressing anxiety rather than to be overwhelmed by it. Through this
new prism of thinking even anxiety disorders can be alleviated. Achieving a new mindset will
not fix anxiety itself-because the emotion of anxiety is not broken the way we cope with it
is. By challenging our long-held assumptions about anxiety this book provides a concrete
framework for how to reclaim it for what it has always been-a gift rather than a curse and a
source of inner strength joy and ingenuity.
