Great Book!

The information in this book has truly helped to understand my emotional and physical reactions to anxiety. It is concise, well written and gives you the tools to manage all forms of anxiety.

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Everything so helpful

Really suffering with my anxiety at the minute and this book has helped me so so much couldn’t recommend it enough for anyone having the same issues

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Very fun and interesting concepts

I really enjoyed this book and will be get back to it again and again. Interesting and new strategies about controling and calm your thoughts. At the beginning it looked strange and fun because I doubted it works, but some of them really works although an other ones turned out to be a bit strange for me. Great book and very different from common knowledge repeated in teh other books about the topic.

The only bad thing about it is that the narrating is too fast! I doubt the narrator herself even understand what is she reading! this really interfere with the great concepts of this book.

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Practical useable methods... great tool.

This book was packed with tools and easy to follow exercises. Really easy to digest and well delivered. Even has links to work sheet downloads etc. One I'll revisit for sure :)

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1 person found this helpful

Amazing read, would definitely recommend!

Great approach to dealing with anxiety, it really helped! I found that this book was good to have come from the perspective of a sufferer of anxiety.

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1 person found this helpful

Very insightful

Highly recommend with great tips and insights for people . Well read also and easy to revise .

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We all have a monkey to deal with

Really resonated with this book. Went through the exercises and realised what I was subconsciously doing. Eye opener. Give it a listen.

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2 people found this helpful

Very helpful

Nice easy listen and makes complete sense
I’ve listened twice now as sometimes can forget parts of it.

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Straight out of the box, this works ...

I'd always thought of myself as a pretty positive, happy-go-lucky, glass-always-half-full type of person. Then suddenly life just fell through the floor. I spent the next 9yrs feeling like a biblical-Job - everything from my health, my work, our savings *everything* was just destroyed. And although inter-linked in effect, none of the causes were related; they just happened in parallel. I felt like Jason of Argonauts-fame where the Gods just played with him - 'what happens if we do this! Then wreck this!'. My whole life was just breaking apart in every direction.

I've had to manage horrendously difficult situations all my life - being born with a facial disfigurement it took 20yrs to build my face. Having done high-level sport, I've done all the sport psychology of having to 'dig-in-there, manage the stress/anxiety, and turn things around'. But this nine years I was like grist in a mill, just being crushed from every direction. constantly.

I've read so much 'stuff' over this time about how to manage things while you're in stress circumstances, how to change things to work your way out of it. But all of it felt like 'That all sounds great. When I get out of this hole-of-Destruction and have time to practice what you're recommending, or divert time to properly understanding what you're talking about, it sounds like it will be great. But right now I've just got to focus on not falling down the hole-of-Destruction. I'll be right with you though ... in 9+years or so (and counting)!'.

Jennifer's book is *breathtakingly* simple: I'd heard the Monkey principle before but - as Jennifer mentions - it had always been in the capacity of 'soothe the monkey ... reassure the monkey ... treat the monkey like an excited child or dog and calm them down'. But as anyone knows when you're dealing with avoiding the slide into the hole-of-Destruction you don't have time for any of that. If anything, and your stress/anxiety *was* a real monkey, your approach has become 'I don't have time for this behaviour when I'm dealing with this! If *you* don't behave, you're going in the hole first, Monkey. Now, shut up!!" - (*and just for interest, that approach doesn't work and just makes the stress/anxiety monkey worse).

Based around CBT, Jennifer's solutions work instantly. It involves you taking back control of threat perception and management into your logical self instead of reacting to the Monkey; you also don't try to manage/control the Monkey, you simply recognise it and thank it. It sounds mad, but here's an example: my road-commute to work had become horrendously stressful through seeing exceptionally bad driving in high traffic levels. Having done advanced and Roadcraft driving, I had good threat perception but my Monkey was creating Fast-and-Furious road movies out of every event in which 'We nearly died!!'. The anxiety had become so bad, my blood pressure was through the roof with my GP wanting to medically intervene. So, instead of creating the 'omg, that guy is going to hit that truck and cause a pile-up where we're all going to die in a fireball!!' my thinking became calm. When Monkey started the 'omg, that guy is going to ...' my response would become 'Good spot, Monkey. And if he does, I'm going to do 'x' which will take us right out of harm's way'. Suddenly, instead of screaming, powerless anxiety inside you, Monkey just stops and goes 'Oh. OK ...' and you are calm. It applies to everything.

Like the above, Jennifer cites real, live, examples of where people changed their lives and took back control. There are links to worksheets where you can even write down/work out your routes for managing the stress/anxiety. But to me, the most important thing about this book above others is the simplicity of the principle; the ease with which you can apply it instantly, and the way it calms and changes your life instantly. And as for the hole-of-Destruction, you know what Monkey? I'm just going to fill it in ...

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5 people found this helpful

Great book!

easy and simple to understand, rich in content.
monkey exposed and no more banana. great book.

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