Tame Your Anxiety: Rewiring Your Brain for Happiness

Bruening (Greaseless), an emeritus professor of management at California State Univ., focuses on neurochemistry to help readers cope with anxiety in this approachable guide. She defines anxiety as a flood of the stress chemical cortisol, an endemic feature of the mammalian brain that evolved to detect threats. She then explains her taming tool: take a pause to determine the actual need, distract oneself with an immersive task for 20 minutes, and plan a next step. Bruening grounds her analysis in chemical considerations, tying the pleasure from reaching goals to dopamine, the drive for social inclusion to oxytocin, the need for social respect to serotonin, and relief from physical pain to endorphins. Bruening also explains how her strategy can create new connections and habits to aid the flow of the positive chemicals to the brain. She highlights possible stumbling blocks in a chapter on general pitfalls, and in another on the overuse of food as a reward. Bruening opposes the contemporary medical model of mental health (“The more you believe in an external fix, the harder it is to take internal action”), a stance that makes her suggestions better suited to readers with fleeting worries rather than those with clinical anxiety. Nevertheless, readers with mild anxiety will get much out of Bruening’s in-depth investigation. (May)