Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose

From bestselling author, life coach, and sociologist Martha Beck comes a new path to overcoming anxiety by awakening the creativity within.

AN OPEN FIELD PUBLICATION FROM MARIA SHRIVER

Most of us assume that the key to overcoming anxiety is to think our way out of it. And for a while, it works. Meditation and mental exercises offer us relief, but there is always something—a work deadline, a family emergency, a particularly distressing newsbreak—that disrupts our sense of peace and sends us right back inside the same anxious spiral we’ve been trying to climb out of.

Is there a way to reduce our anxiety, not just in the moment, but in every moment after that?

After a lifetime of struggling with anxiety, Martha Beck studied just about everything there was to know about how to calm down. What she realized is that the analytical part of our brain—so valued in Western culture—is the same structure responsible for amping up anxiety. In other words, we cannot logic our way to relief. In Beyond Anxiety, she reveals that to find calm, we must activate an entirely different part of our brain, one responsible for curiosity, wonder, and, most of all, creativity.

Drawing on social science, Eastern wisdom, and the latest research in neuroscience and psychology, Beck shows how to move from anxiety into purpose through the power of creativity. Using techniques tested first-hand on hundreds of clients, she teaches us how to activate the creativity spiral by approaching problems with a sense of curiosity, making pleasure a priority, and inviting play and spontaneity into our every day.

Anxiety does not have to keep us from finding our life’s purpose. Beyond Anxiety invites us into a new way of being, one filled with greater abundance, joy, and possibility.

Martha Beck, PhD, is a Harvard-trained sociologist, New York Times bestselling author, world-renowned life coach, and speaker. She is the author of one novel and nine nonfiction books, including the Oprah's Book Club pick The Way of Integrity.