Through her research and personal experiences, Wilson shares the best, and the worst, of the treatments and latest scientific advances. Even though we don't have the treatments for anxiety nailed down yet, it helps to know that sufferers are not alone in their struggles. Anxiety is the thing that takes you down, this anxiety about not knowing what life is about takes you down. But it's also the thing that ultimately takes you to where the answer lies." But it makes it easier when I realise, as someone with my experience and platform, that I have a responsibility to facilitate a conversation about it."

Also, this had just happened. On my second run on the catwalk for the Saturday morning shopping crowd I’d spun in front of the judges. All eyeballs were on me. If you told me it was in fact a compilation of a whole lot of her blog posts (which I know it is not) I would not be at all surprised. One of the dear, dear things about getting older, is that it does eventually dawn on you that there is no guidebook. One day it suddenly emerges: No one bloody gets it! None of us knows what we're doing. pg 5, ebook I suspect you might be reading these words here because you’re a fretter with a mind that goes too fast, too high, too unbridled. And, like me, you might have tried everything to fix this fretting, because fretters try really, really hard at everything. They also tend to think they need fixing. At thirty-five I was also suicidal for the second time in my life. I was unable to leave the house or go to work for nine months. Everything unraveled again.

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It reads like a mishmash of teenage diary, pseudo pop science, random thoughts about stuff and life, snippets of quotes from key thinkers on the topic and modern day confessional. If this grabs you then go for it. I’d like to say this up front. I write these very words because I’ve come to believe that you can be fretty and chattery in the head and awake at 4am and trying really hard at everything. And you can get on with having a great life. I found myself getting frustrated hearing stories about how much more anxious Wilson has been her whole life than I have. Maybe it’s my own anxiety but I kept feeling like this was a weird game of Wilson trying to one-up me. I had a difficult time listening to her stories about isolated retreats to various countries to find inner peace and working with all these different gurus and life coaches. Her advice section towards the end was unrealistic as she told the reader to “take a week off work and just sit in a room thinking about how you’re feeling” or “move to somewhere calm like Hawaii”. Sure, I have tons of money to just not go to work for a week or even better, move to the most expensive state in the country just to slow down my anxiety (unless you’re constantly worrying about how you can’t afford to live there). Her most common piece of advice to “give up eating sugar” was the most frustrating because that’s what she has built her career on. It just felt like a ploy to sell even more of her sugarless cookbooks.

Sarah blogs on philosophy, anxiety, minimalism, toxin-free living and anti-consumerism at sarahwilson.com, lives in Sydney, rides a bike everywhere, is a compulsive hiker and is eternally curious. I deliberated for days. How would I reduce things to The question that would provide a salve to all us Westerners seeking a more meaningful path through the fuggy, constipated, heart-sinky angst of life? The choice left my head spinning and chattering. What is it exactly that we need to know? Are we here to evolve into higher beings? Why are we so alone? Is there a grand scheme to our allotted eighty-five years? But for Wilson, who has taken anti-anxiety medication in the past, there's something else driving her anxiety, something deeper that warrants uncoiling. Several dozen more books and academic papers then appeared on the subject. In the main, though, the mind-body split persisted and anxiety was regarded as an everyday condition (we all get anxious, right?) that some of us are just too weak to handle. Women who got anxious were slapped with the hysteria diagnosis. Men self-medicated with drugs or alcohol or went into man caves. And we all got on with things. Near the beginning of the book, Wilson states that this isn’t a self-help book, it’s more an account of her experiences with anxiety. But I would disagree. I found so many tips in here and just being able to relate and agree with her about so many things provided some help in itself.

I come up with an idea for a friend's business, and the logo. And I work out the significance of one of Adele's lyrics. The three best things about this book, in my opinion, are: Wilson’s honesty, the vast amount of research and studies she cites, and some of the sporadic insights she makes about living with anxiety and depression. There are, undoubtedly, some things to take away here, even if they are hidden within a manic memoir narrative. In first, we make the beast beautiful, Sarah directs her intense focus and fierce investigatory skills onto this lifetime companion of hers, looking at the triggers and treatments, the fashions and fads. She reads widely and interviews fellow sufferers, mental health experts, philosophers, and the Dalai Lama, processing all she learns through the prism of her own experiences. But! One of the dear, dear things about getting older, is that it does eventually dawn on you that there is no guidebook. One day it suddenly emerges: No one bloody gets it! None of us knows what we’re doing. So here’s the thing. A lot of us are anxious. Many of us haven’t been diagnosed as such, or even worked out if our particular flavor of anxiety constitutes a problem. But we know we’re anxious. More anxious than we should be. When I mention I’m writing a book about anxiety, everyone (and I mean every single person) suddenly goes a little wide-eyed. Drops their tone a little. Leans in. And tells me... Everyone these days seems to have it, hey.