Main description:

A neuroscientist explains how anxiety is fueled by genetic, biochemical, and anatomical factors, why treatments work or don't, and what anxious people can do themselves to stop the cycle.

Anxiety disorders affect more than 18 percent of the U.S. population, and many treatments-from talk therapy to medications-prove ineffective. In this volume, neuroscientist and author Marwa Azab explains how and why an understanding of neuroscience, when combined with talk therapy, is the most effective, safe, and non-addictive approach to reach healing and freedom from anxiety.

In this call for a combination of talk therapy and neuropsychological approaches, Azab explains how genetic, biochemical, and anatomical factors in the brain play a role in anxiety. Understanding those-as well as the physical effects of lifestyle factors including nutrition and sleep-could be the "missing link" that would make talk therapy far more effective, she says. Written in the uncomplicated language she uses in her lectures for beginning college students at California State University, Azab aims to make this science accessible to all adult readers.

Details the difference between normal anxiety and Anxiety Disorders

Uses case studies to illustrate neuroscience principles and research

Offers an introduction to the brain, genetics, and biochemical and lifestyle habits that predispose one to anxiety and fuel its experience and cycle

Explains the damage that stress hormones do to the body