Hard Times: Mental Health Books
By Pooja Makhijani
Wendy Suzuki, a professor of neural science and psychology at New York University who specializes in neuroplasticity, introduces a new view in Good Anxiety (Atria, Sept.). She draws on her academic expertise and her struggles with anxiety after the deaths of her father and brother in an attempt to shift thinking around the emotion. “We’re going to flip ‘bad anxiety’ to ‘good anxiety’—an anxiety you could live with, that can be helpful to you,” she says. “Anxiety can be positively generative. That’s a big idea to swallow, but I walk through the logic and science.”
Suzuki also takes care to distinguish between “everyday anxiety” and clinical anxiety. “Anxiety exists on a spectrum,” she says. “I don’t profess to treat serious, clinical levels of anxiety. I’m treating anxiety that you deal with every day, like an odor that never leaves you.”
