My Age of Anxiety by Scott Stossel: A 30-Minute Chapter-By-Chapter Summary: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

With InstaRead Chapter-by-Chapter Summaries, you can get the essence of a book in 30 minutes or less. We read every chapter and summarize it in one or two paragraphs so you can get the information contained in the book at a faster rate. This is an InstaRead Summary of My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind by Scott Stossel. Below is a preview of the earlier sections of the summary. PART I: The Riddle of Anxiety 1: The Nature of Anxiety On the day Scott Stossel got married, he had an anxiety attack at the altar. He sweated profusely, and thought he was going to pass out. He worried that his friends and family would think that he was having second thoughts about marriage. When the wedding was over, and he was at the reception, his symptoms faded away. Even with his anxiety attack over, he felt despair because he couldn't get through his wedding without suffering from his disorder. These panic attacks are not uncommon for Stossel. He also had them when his wife was giving birth, during public lectures, job interviews, simply reading a book, etc. These panic attacks are often accompanied by the feeling that he is going to die. When he is not enduring a panic attack, he still has constant anxiety. He worries about his health, his family's health, his finances, and many other things. These worries are worsened by stomach aches, dizziness, and other symptoms that are similar to the flu. Sometimes he also has trouble breathing and walking. He has many phobias, from a fear of heights to a fear of cheese. Stossel had anxiety as a child as well. He would worry about his parents dying in a car crash. He spent his afternoons in the school nurse's office, and ended a relationship with a girl after he had intense anxiety when she leaned in to kiss him. Stossel has tried numerous treatments for his anxiety, including psychotherapy, hypnosis, rational emotive therapy, medications, self-help books, and alcohol. None of these eased his symptoms in the long term. He has given up on trying to treat the anxiety, and hopes to learn to accept his disorder. Anxiety disorders are the most common type of mental illness in the United States. Forty million Americans have an anxiety disorder. 31% of funds spent on mental health care is to help people with anxiety disorders. 1 in 4 people will experience crippling anxiety some time in their life. Studies have found that anxiety affects people worldwide. One in six people in the world will have an anxiety disorder for a minimum of a year within their lifetime. These studies only account for people who are clinically considered to have anxiety disorders. By 1950, only three books had been written about anxiety (the authors being: Sigmund Freud, Soren Kierkegaard, and Rollo May). This dismal research continued until an anti-anxiety drug was created in 1980. The treatment helped the disorder to be added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Now, anxiety research is flourishing. fMRI technology is even being used to look at how anxiety and parts of the brain are related. For example, general worries about the future (such as when Stossel worries about if his children will be able to pay for college) occurs in the frontal lobes of the cerebral..."