Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety by Daniel Smith
This book will change the way you think about anxiety. MONKEY MIND is a memoir written from a person who suffers horrible anxiety.
Anxiety once paralyzed Daniel Smith over a roast beef sandwich, convincing him that a alternative between ketchup and barbeque sauce was as dire as that between life and death. It has prompted him to chew his cuticles until they bled, put on sweat pads in his armpits, and confess his sexual issues to his psychotherapist mother. It has dogged his days, threatened his sanity, and ruined his relationships.
In MONKEY MIND , Smith articulates what it is like to stay with anxiousness, defanging the disease with humor, traveling by way of its demonic layers, and evocatively expressing its self-harmful absurdities and painful inside coherence. With honesty and wit, he exposes anxiousness as a pudgy, weak-willed wizard behind a curtain of dread and tames what has always appeared to him, and to the tens of hundreds of thousands of others that suffer from nervousness, a horrible affliction.
Aaron Beck, the most influential doctor in modern psychotherapy, says that “MONKEY MIND does for anxiety what William Styron’s Darkness Visible did for depression.” Neurologist and bestselling writer Oliver Sacks says, “I read Monkey Mind with admiration for its bravery and clarity. . . . I broke out into explosive laughter again and again.” Here, lastly, comes aid and recognition to all those who want someone to put what they really feel, or what their family members really feel, into words.
