Are you aware that anxiety is in many ways a blessing? It wards off dangers, preserves life, and makes you aware of negative things that you can change—when it is healthy anxiety, that is, involving feelings of concern, caution, and vigilance. Unhealthy anxiety is quite different. It leads to paralyzing panic, obsessive worry, and phobias that prevent you from doing things that you conceive of as dangerous but really are not. Unhealthy anxiety inhibits you from enjoying everyday activities and relationships and makes you see them as too risky. It causes you to perform poorly, preoccupies you wastefully, and stops your creativity.

Fortunately, by following the rules of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) set forth in this book, you can control your anxiety before it controls you. You can stop it in its tracks, if you allow yourself to admit one important fact: Things and people alone don't make you anxious. You do. Your unrealistic expectations produce your needless anxiety. How do you do this? By letting the must factor steer your course through life. You insist that you must achieve outstandingly—in business, sports, relationships. You demand from yourself that you must get what you want all the time, must be completely safe, must never suffer adversity. And what happens when all your musts do not translate into reality? You panic and become depressed.

How to Control Your Anxiety Before It Controls You provides you with scores of thinking, feeling, and action methods for controlling anxiety. This book describes many real cases of anxiety that Dr. Ellis has treated successfully, including those that deal with performance anxiety, as well as social, job hunting, love, sex, and other forms of anxiety. Employing the precepts of REBT, the book includes over 200 rational maxims that you can use to decrease your present anxiety and, in the process, increase your prospects for success and happiness at home and in the workplace.

Dr. Albert Ellis is the author of more than sixty books, including Sex Without Guilt, A Guide to Rational Living, and How to Control Your Anger Before It Controls You. He lives in New York.