According to Breuning, asking someone to help control your brain is like asking another rider to control your horse. Control comes from within and from understanding just what your mammal brain wants and needs. The human brain is wired to crave happy chemicals, and we are rewarded with these chemicals when the brain strives toward a goal, feels a part of the group, gets recognition, and faces pain. Anxiety occurs when these needs are not met. Keeping this in mind, Breuning outlines a three-step plan to combat anxiety. It includes determining what the brain really wants, distracting the brain by spending 20 minutes on a consuming, pleasurable task, and finally taking one step toward achieving the goal. The author offers suggestions for possible goals, tasks, and action based on her own and others’ experiences. She believes in designing a program based on an individual’s needs and warns of the dangers of seeking relief from anxiety with food, alcohol, and drugs (including prescriptions). Breuning presents a convincing case for controlling anxiety by tapping into natural instincts and drives.

Booklist

[Bruening] focuses on neurochemistry to help readers cope with anxiety in this approachable guide. She defines anxiety as a flood of the stress chemical cortisol, an endemic feature of the mammalian brain that evolved to detect threats. She then explains her taming tool: take a pause to determine the actual need, distract oneself with an immersive task for 20 minutes, and plan a next step. Bruening grounds her analysis in chemical considerations, tying the pleasure from reaching goals to dopamine, the drive for social inclusion to oxytocin, the need for social respect to serotonin, and relief from physical pain to endorphins. Bruening also explains how her strategy can create new connections and habits to aid the flow of the positive chemicals to the brain. She highlights possible stumbling blocks in a chapter on general pitfalls, and in another on the overuse of food as a reward. Bruening opposes the contemporary medical model of mental health (“The more you believe in an external fix, the harder it is to take internal action”), a stance that makes her suggestions better suited to readers with fleeting worries rather than those with clinical anxiety. Nevertheless, readers with mild anxiety will get much out of Bruening’s in-depth investigation.

Publishers Weekly

I read with rapt attention as Loretta Graziano Breuning drew from her own experience and that of gazelles to bring complex brain science to life. Tame Your Anxiety: Rewiring Your Brain for Happiness lays out why our brains develop as they do, and how to carve new neural pathways to shift out of anxious patterns. A practical, relate-able, sophisticated guide to changing even deeply entrenched ways of living in the world. This is a book for people who want to understand not only the hows but also the whys of rewiring the brain for happiness.

Dawn Huebner, Author of Outsmarting Worry: An Older Kid's Guide to Managing Anxiety