First, We Make the Beast Beautiful : A new story about anxiety

‘Probably the best book on living with anxiety that I’ve ever read’ Mark Manson, bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Sarah Wilson gravitates to life’s problems, passing on her hard-earned wisdoms to all who want to make life better. Having helped over 1.5m people across the world to quit sugar, in First, we make the beast beautiful she now turns her intense focus and fierce investigatory skills onto the lifetime companion that’s brought her the most pain and become her finest teacher. Anxiety.

Looking at the triggers and treatments, fashions and fads, she reads widely, interviewing fellow sufferers, mental health patients, philosophers, and even the Dalai Lama, processing all she learns through the prism of her own experience. She pulls at the thread of accepted definitions of anxiety, unravelling the notion that it is a disease that must be medicated into submission. Could anxiety be re-sewn, she asks, into a thing of beauty?

There are many books about coping with anxiety. This one encourages the myriad sufferers of the world’s most common mental illness to thrive with anxiety, and even to delight in the possibilities it offers for a richer, fuller life.

Practical, poetic, wise and funny, this is a small book with a big heart.