Powerful ideas from top nonfiction
Try Blinkist to get the key ideas from 5,500+ bestselling nonfiction titles and podcasts. Listen or read in just 15 minutes.
Start your free trial
Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Listen to the Intro
Future Tense summary
Tracy Dennis-Tiwary
Why Anxiety Is Good for You (Even Though It Feels Bad)
19 mins
Table of Contents
Future Tense
summarized in 5 key ideas
Audio & text in the Blinkist app
Key idea 1 of 5
Anxiety isn’t the problem – our ways of coping with it are.
Butterflies in the stomach. A pounding heartbeat. A tight throat. Thoughts that loop over and over.
This is what anxiety feels like. But what causes it? Ultimately, anxiety always stems from something bad that we imagine could happen but that hasn’t actually happened yet. We experience it as a sensation in our bodies – tension, agitation, and jitteriness – and a quality of our thoughts: apprehension, dread, and worry.
Anxiety can be less or more intense. Regardless, we can usually talk ourselves through it and dial it back to a point where we feel comfortable and not overwhelmed.
However, we sometimes end up using the wrong thoughts and behaviors to cope with or avoid our anxiety. In doing so, we make it worse. When we begin to do this more often than not, normal anxiety transforms into an anxiety disorder.
The key characteristic of an anxiety disorder is a functional impairment – something that prevents you from living your life normally. For someone with an anxiety disorder, the distress caused by their feelings can last weeks, months, or years, and it interferes with their home life, work, and relationships.
Almost 20 percent of adults in the US – that’s over 60 million people – live with an anxiety disorder every year. Thirty-one percent of American adults will experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives. Yet fewer than half of people with anxiety show lasting change from therapy.
One reason for this is that many people cope with anxiety poorly. Take the hypothetical example of Kabir, who at age 15 began feeling afraid to speak during class. Before having to give presentations, he refused to eat, didn’t sleep, and worried constantly. As time went on, he began to fear going to school altogether. He started missing days, which caused his grades to suffer. Then he began to feel afraid of any social situations whatsoever. He avoided parties and swim meets because of this fear. Over the following months, Kabir broke off all of his friendships and started to experience severe panic attacks.
Kabir went from feeling highly anxious to developing social anxiety, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and panic disorder. But his anxiety itself was not the problem. The problem was his way of coping with the anxiety – his refusal to eat and sleep, his staying home from school, and his isolating himself from his friends.
Kabir’s solutions helped him avoid his anxiety. But in doing so, they just intensified his feelings. In the following chapters, we’re going to discuss some much healthier coping mechanisms for anxiety.
Want to see all full key ideas from Future Tense?
Key ideas in Future Tense
More knowledge in less time
Read or listen
Get the key ideas from nonfiction bestsellers in minutes, not hours.
Find your next read
Get book lists curated by experts and personalized recommendations.
Shortcasts New
We’ve teamed up with podcast creators to bring you key insights from podcasts.
What is Future Tense about?
Future Tense (2022) puts to rest a huge and socially pervasive myth about anxiety: that it’s bad and should be avoided at all costs. Today, anxiety is considered an illness – something that should be treated with medicine or coped with in some other way. But that isn’t the case. Ultimately, anxiety is simply information, and it’s incredibly important for our survival. It’s up to us to make the best use of it.
Who should read Future Tense?
- Anyone intimately familiar with anxiety
- Parents worried about their children’s emotional lives
- Psychology fans
Categories with Future Tense
Books like Future Tense
People ❤️ Blinkist
Sven O.
It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. Added to that the apps ability to suggest kindred interests opens up a foundation of knowledge.
Thi Viet Quynh N.
Great app. Good selection of book summaries you can read or listen to while commuting. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion.
Jonathan A.
Life changing. The concept of being able to grasp a book's main point in such a short time truly opens multiple opportunities to grow every area of your life at a faster rate.
Renee D.
Great app. Addicting. Perfect for wait times, morning coffee, evening before bed. Extremely well written, thorough, easy to use.
People also liked
Start growing with Blinkist now
26 Million
Downloads on all platforms
4.7 Stars
Average ratings on iOS and Google Play
91%
Of Blinkist members create a better reading habit*
*Based on survey data from Blinkist customers