If you are feeling anxious and don’t know what to do about it, this blog post will help.

My story:

I went to Afghanistan as a soldier and my duty involved driving on roads that were rife with road side bombs.  When I came home I couldn’t sleep for days at a time.  The effect war had on me was something called hyper-vigilance.  Basically being hyper-vigilant means you never relax.  Besides being unable to sleep, I was doing paranoid things like sitting with my back to the wall, and seeing how many exits there are in restaurants – in case I had to escape.  I didn’t eat in fast food restaurants for a couple of years, because I couldn’t stand waiting in line and having strangers behind me.

I don’t know if I will ever be completely free of the experience of combat, but what helped to get me back on an even keel wasn’t in a pill, and it wasn’t the people around me, and it wasn’t working, eating right, or exercising.

I will tell you a secret, it was spiritual growth.  I grew with information I found in reading two books.

If you are suffering right now these books have a good shot at giving you the tools to reclaim your life:

My first recommendation is Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth.”  Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual teacher, and what he offers is a way to embrace life that is totally practical.  This is the single most important book I have ever read regarding mental health and how to deal with life.
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Oprah’s Book Club, Selection 61)

My second recommendation is especially important if part of your problem involves forming good relationships with other people. It is The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy by Fritz Perls.  This book has some ideas about anxiety that I use everyday.  This book can teach you how to balance your relationships, especially with people where the balance is skewed somehow.  Perls was a German Jew who escaped from Nazi Germany to fight against the Nazis as a doctor in the South African Army.  After World War II he came to the United States and wrote several influential books.