Anxiety and Avoidance: A Universal Treatment for Anxiety, Panic, and Fear

by Michael A. Tompkins PhD ABPP

Do you suffer from panic, anxiety, and fear in your day-to-day life? Do you often avoid social situations, activities like driving, or even going to the store because of a fear of being overwhelmed or triggering a panic attack? You might be interested to know that anxiety disorders are the most common mental health disorders in the United States.

In Anxiety and Avoidance, psychologist and anxiety disorder expert Michael Tompkins presents a universal protocol to help you cope with anxiety, panic, and fear, regardless of your particular mental health diagnosis. This universal protocol is based on David H. Barlow's "unified protocol," and is a cognitive behavioral approach. Tompkins also draws on mindfulness-based therapies such as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) that have been used successfully in the treatment of anxiety disorders for years.

The book includes present-moment awareness (mindfulness) techniques, motivational tools for overcoming experiential avoidance, and cognitive tools for reframing anxiety and fear. In addition, you will learn how to use your personal values as a vehicle for lasting change. While most anxiety treatments have focused on symptom reduction, this book teaches you the skills needed to better handle the underlying emotional reactions that lead to anxiety and panic in the first place.

If you are ready to stop avoiding situations that cause you to panic and get back to living a full life, this book is a powerful resource that can help you make a lasting change using an innovative, transdiagnostic approach.

Genres: Self Help, Psychology, Nonfiction, Health, Mental Health

231 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Heidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone experiences anxiety in some form or another in their lives. The trouble comes when you find yourself altering your behavior to avoid triggering yourself, painting your life into smaller and smaller boxes in order to attempt to control the anxiety.

This self help workbook hands you the keys to your anxiety response. By unlocking that, you give yourself back the freedom that you may have lost to uncontrollable anxiety.

"Emotional flexibility, then, is the key to recovery from your anxiety disorder."

Michael Tompkins uses cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness and acceptance therapies to tackle most major anxiety issues. I liked his approach because mindfulness is a practice that I enjoy incorporating into my life anyway. By applying it to my anxiety responses, I learned a lot about myself in a very short period of time.

"The purpose of both our primary and secondary anxious responses is to protect us from the threats and challenges of life. For some people, however, the natural and normal secondary anxious response creates problems. These people are stuck in their secondary anxious responses and because they're unable to move out of it, they have an anxiety disorder." pg 22

But no matter what coping mechanisms therapists may bring to the table, we have to be willing to put them into action. Tompkins reminds readers to be gentle with themselves and that "true motivation is an invitation, not a push."

"True motivation is a willingness to try because you recognize and accept that it makes sense for you to change." pg 43

Once you know your triggers and responses, Tompkins guides the reader through exposure therapy to continue releasing any further anxiety responses.

I know no method or book will be a breakthrough for everyone, but I found this particular book to be incredibly helpful and informative. I highly recommend it for anyone suffering from anxiety, panic or fear. It could be the jump start you need to discover true healing and freedom from the fears that may be holding you back from living the life you've visualized for yourself.

[Sharon Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist, I have been waiting for someone to write this book! Tompkins has done a masterful job of creating a workbook to help guide both therapists and their clients through the, often difficult, path toward living a more full and more meaningful life.

In my 30+ years of practice, I have found that the majority of my anxious clients are also major avoiders. Anxiety and Avoidance is user-friendly. It provides many useful exercises to help identify the anxiety-provoking triggers and the many “thinking traps” that keep us stuck going over the same terraine again and again.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is anxious, living with an anxious person, or who would just like to develop better skills to live in this anxiety-ridden world.

Thank you, Dr. Tompkins, for taking the time to enhance our understanding of the psychological connection between anxiety and avoidance, and to introduce a “single therapy for overcoming the roots of anxiety and fear” – a great contribution to our field!

[Melinda White, · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anxiety and Avoidance by Michael Tompkins is an excellent book that takes many complex concepts and makes them accessible to both professionals and those who suffer from anxiety. It is a thoughtful mix of cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy. I especially like Tompkins' concept of "watching and waiting" as a strategy for coping with anxiety rather than living with future "what ifs?". This book covers the concepts simply yet articulately and then provides worksheets clients can use for follow up to practice the skills covered. As a practitioner with over twenty years experience in the field, I found many ideas I will be happy to implement in my practice.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is clearly aimed at its target audience, that portion of the roughly ten percent of the population that suffers from various anxiety disorders [Note: in my life I have been diagnosed, to date, with two of these, namely Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder] or those who are therapists dealing with people suffering immensely from anxiety. It is telling that on this book, which I borrowed from one of my local county libraries, has a sticker on its over and another one on its table of contents that warns the reader not to write in or remove pages from this book, given that it is a self-help workbook that provides many worksheets for people to write on in an effort to master their intrusive and extreme anxiety. Anyone who is reading this book will likely know that anxiety is a problem and will be looking to this book as a way of solving them, and the fact that the book adopts a general approach to anxiety as a whole in order to help a whole suite of difficulties, including those not specifically related to anxiety like depression gives this book a wide degree of applicability and usefulness to those who choose to take advantage of it, managing to maintain an intelligent approach without falling prey to the desire to encourage New Age spirituality or promote Buddhism, making it much better than many of its peers [1].

The contents of this book are straightforward and well-organized with a process of growth in mind, as would be expected given its genre. The book’s nine chapters take up a bit more than 150 pages of 8 ½” x 11” paper, many of them filled with worksheets that help to provide some sort of data to encourage the reader that their efforts at improving their responses to stress and anxiety are working. The author introduces the book’s subject by discussing anxiety, avoidance, and anxiety disorders and then advocates a process of watching and learning by separating ourselves from the intensity of anxiety to allow us to examine the arc of anxiety (antecedent, or trigger, response, and consequence) and the types of anxious behaviors. After this the author advocates a process of moving forward by examining the pluses and minuses of avoiding change or deliberately and consciously seeking to overcome anxiety, seeking to encourage more rational thinking rather than rigid behaviors which encourage people to remain in “the anxiety box.” The author then advocates watching and waiting, developing an attitude of mindfulness towards the physical acts of breathing and the somatic symptoms of anxiety, encourages readers to think inside and outside the anxiety box by viewing their anxiety at a distance, with a critical eye to the processes of catastrophizing and remaining stuck in obsessive rumination that often go on. Perhaps of most help, the author has a chapter devoted to stepping towards discomfort, deliberately seeking out the people and situations that make one uncomfortable so as to be able to overcome such discomfort through frequent exposure. The last three chapters of the book are devoted to encouraging the reader to keep up the attitude necessary to overcome anxious thoughts when they sneak up on us, gives some discussion of the medications that are prescribed for anxiety, and then provides encouragement to the reader to maintain helpful habits in diet (like limiting or eliminating caffeine), exercise, and sleep in order to preserve better health overall before concluding and providing resources and references for further reading and investigation.

In many ways, this sort of book is likely to be read by people who are already, at least in some way, prepared to take its comments to heart. By consciously and deliberately avoiding direct appeals to Eastern religious beliefs, this book is designed for those who are irreligious or hostile to such heathen traditions, appealing instead to those who have a strong inclination towards intellectual understanding. Indeed, much of this book is structured to appeal to someone comfortable with checklists, quantitative estimations of anxiety level, calculations of the fallacious nature of catastrophic prophecies of doom, and seeks to provoke a great deal of rational thought and examination of the internal systems of anxiety in the mind and body. Those who read this book, and who complete its worksheets, are likely to be those who believe that their anxiety can be mastered and overcome, and who are willing to face what makes them feel awkward and uncomfortable so that they can be less rigid and more flexible in their thinking and in their response to the threats and dangers of life, and are likely to benefit from what this book has to offer, and to encourage others likewise.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...

[Miranda Gusmano · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was incredible. For anyone who has anxiety in any form this book helps to understand and step by step work through all facets of anxiety and it's triggers.

[Ida Wilcox · Rating 5 out of 5]

:)

DNF - very good book just not focused enough to get into it. Anxiety is way to high to focus.

[Lynne Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Michael Tompkins has written an incredibly helpful and accessible book for those who struggle with anxiety. One of the outstanding features of Anxiety and Avoidance, A Universal Treatment, is his step by step approach to reducing debilitating avoidance and unhelpful interfering anxious behavior, while accepting and mindfully tolerating anxious thoughts, physical sensations, feelings and emotions, and increasing adaptive approach behavior. He also describes the heartbreaking consequences to work, social and family life that occur when anxiety is left untreated. Dr. Tompkins’ goal is that readers become experts on their own anxiety responses. The book fulfills its promise and is the most sensible, thorough and engaging self help book in this area I have seen.

[Kiara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recieved this book through a goodreads giveaway.

This book is a gift. It truly is. I unfortunately do suffer from high anxiety. Reading this, i'm learning things about myself that I hasn't realized before. It's guiding me to help myself. It is not always as helpful due to my suffer or depression as well, a disorder that has lasted years. It doesn't conflict with my handling of anxiety sometimes. But gradually, everything will change.

[Moon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I won this in a giveaway and I am glad that I did because it helped me a lot with my anxiety.