4/22/2016 UPDATE: I had a severe anxiety disorder for over 10 years, I reached a point where I was panicking about going outside. I can now say that I haven't had a panic attack in over 6 months and it is the greatest feeling in the world. This book didn't cure me, but it helped me understand I was not alone. There are so many varying degrees of panic attacks, and I felt like I was a little more extreme than Daniel, but it doesn't matter - we all have panic attacks and we all want to be better.

4/22/2016 UPDATE: I had a severe anxiety disorder for over 10 years, I reached a point where I was panicking about going outside. I can now say that I haven't had a panic attack in over 6 months and it is the greatest feeling in the world. This book didn't cure me, but it helped me understand I was not alone. There are so many varying degrees of panic attacks, and I felt like I was a little more extreme than Daniel, but it doesn't matter - we all have panic attacks and we all want to be better. So it took me a long time but I can now say what I never believed I would say: I am better. Keep working at it guys - stay on top of it - and know that at some point, maybe not tomorrow or next year, that you will be better too.Original Review:To soothe an anxious mind is like trying to stop a tsunami...with an umbrella. Being one of the millions who suffer from anxiety, I have tried everything to "fix" myself. I have panic attacks about having panic attacks. I am in a constant state of "fight or flight" wherever I go and, at some points of my life, considered hospitalization. That is why I connected so well with Daniel Smith's "Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety."Friends, family, and therapists always console me by saying "You're not the only one who suffers from this," to which I would reply "Well, where the hell are they?" But I finally found someone, and that someone is Daniel Smith. I have never met him in person, even though he mentions walking around the streets of Boston. Could I have bumped into him without knowing? Was I too busy having a panic attack to notice a fellow anxiety sufferer? I picked up the Advanced Reader's Edition of his book on a whim at work. Maybe I could add another useless anxiety book to my bookshelf...like I really needed another book to tell me to "breathe" when I feel that I am at the bottom of the ocean with the pressure of the water crushing my lungs like a tin can.Something strange happened when I read the first few pages...Daniel was writing about me. Sure, the names of people and places had changed but there I was living and breathing through his words. Even his panic attacks mirrored my own, they were "cerebral...starting with a thought - a what if or a should have been or a never will be or a could have been - and metastasizes from there, sparking down the spine and rooting out into the body in the form of breathlessness...and a terrible sense that the world I find myself in is...threatening." These thoughts are practically unstoppable, they start with small raindrops of what-ifs, then a flood of what-ifs these what-ifs aren't what-ifs, then an overflowing unstoppable tsunami of impending death or doom. And that umbrella you have isn't going to save you.Anxious thoughts are completely irrational, like the time I thought I was going to die in one of the bathroom stalls at college after a train of thought that went a little like this: "What if the paper I wrote isn't good? If the paper isn't good then I will get a bad grade. If I get a bad grade it will bring down my GPA. If my GPA goes down, no one will hire me when I graduate. If no one hires me, I will have to write erotica for porn websites for money. If I write erotica, some pervert is going to find out where I live. If the pervert finds me, he will rape me. If he rapes me, he will kill me." For some reason, in my irrational mind, a bad grade leads to rape then death just like Smith's anxious mind sees being fired leads to getting aids and dying.I have done many things to calm my "monkey mind" ( a state of being in which the thoughts are unsettled, nervous, capricious, uncontrollable ) including breathing exercises, meditation, yoga, and therapy but nothing will stop my mind from "bouncing skull-side to skull-side, which keeps flipping and jumping flinging feces at the walls and swing from loose neurons like howlers from vines." Because that is what most anxious thoughts are...shit, waste, useless.Daniel and I have walked the same roads emotionally (and physically through Boston) trying to deal with anxiety. We've both had " six therapists - as many shrinks as Henry VIII had wives - and five out of six have been almost completely ineffectual, like taking aspirin for leprosy." We both stood "curbside in the wet New England heat, a stout brick dorm - my new home...suddenly seized by the impulse, an impulse it took every bit of self respect I could muster to stop myself from acting on, to go bolting down the road after them, an idiot dog chasing a car" at college. We also found short lived salvation in "a small orange cylinder" filled with little chalky tablets. We have traveled a very long road together but on route he saw something I never did. People who are anxious are highly attuned to their surroundings, they see with "sharper eyes" and feel with " more active skin." We are "more receptive to the true nature of thing than everyone else" and, because of our anxiety curse, to be able view the world with such intensity is "to be an artist."Daniel describes his condition with spunk and isn't afraid to laugh or even cry in his memoir. Through him we learn about his anxious therapist mother, his first threesome, being exiled to college, and his work as a writer. He gives anxiety a body and a voice by breaking down all the technical mumbo jumbo about peripheral vessels and adrenal medulla and transforms it, to what I imagine to be that creepy old guy at the bar, saying "This right here? This right here is probably really bad for you. You should think seriously about taking off."This book isn't the end all cure, it doesn't have any relieving techniques or new ways to breathe. What it is....is that someone, the someone everyone has been telling you is out there. There are millions of people suffering from anxiety everywhere, and one of them is Daniel Smith. And another...is me.All anxiety sufferers should add this to their bookshelf!This review has been featured on Daniel Smith's Monkey Mind facebook page ( http://www.facebook.com/katsaddiction...