Don't Feed the Monkey Mind

How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry

By: Jennifer Shannon LMFT

Narrated by: Jennifer Lund Jorgens

Length: 4 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's Summary

The very things we do to control anxiety can make anxiety worse. This unique guide offers a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)-based approach to help you recognize the constant chatter of your anxious "monkey mind", stop feeding anxious thoughts, and find the personal peace you crave.

Ancient sages compared the human mind to a monkey: constantly chattering, hopping from branch to branch - endlessly moving from fear to safety. If you are one of the millions of people whose life is affected by anxiety, you are familiar with this process. Unfortunately, you can't switch off the "monkey mind", but you can stop feeding the monkey - or stop rewarding it by avoiding the things you fear.

Written by psychotherapist Jennifer Shannon, this book shows you how to stop anxious thoughts from taking over using proven-effective cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and mindfulness techniques. By following the exercises in this book, you'll learn to identify your own anxious thoughts, question those thoughts, and uncover the core fears at play.

Once you stop feeding the monkey, there are no limits to how expansive your life can feel. This book will show you how anxiety can only continue as long as you try to avoid it. And, paradoxically, only by seeking out and confronting the things that make you anxious can you reverse the cycle that keeps your fears alive.

©2017 Jennifer Shannon (P)2017 Jennifer Shannon

Great info that can be put to practice immediately

Excellent book! easy to follow along. the info makes sense. I'm using the tools to help me with my anxiety driving. I already have a new perspective and I realize that I was valuing "safety" over independence and growth. I'm ready to use these tools and conquer the anxiety and embrace the unexpected twist and turns while driving and through life!

Excellent

This book is fantastic and the audible version is great (beautiful voice) with a lot of great advises.
BTW, A very bad book called "Fu..k Anxiety" stole the content of this great book and destroyed it by adding 1000s a bad words.

LIFE CHANGER!

This book really breaks down and simplified our relationship with anxiety disorders. As someone who has lived with health anxiety for 15 years, I’ve tried too hard to reason with my monkey to no avail. Never once thought that trying to reason with said monkey was like talking to a wall. The monkey just doesn’t understand. Thank you for changing my life, I now feel like I can take on the world one day at a time. I’d recommend people with generalized anxiety to first read DARE by Barry McDonagh then read this book to make a strong connection with how Dr. Shannon writes. Both books compliment each other perfectly and Dr Shannon’s book is the necessary finally to drive the point home. 5 star all the way! Thank you Dr. Shannon, you really have changed my life. Cheers!

Helpful!

Excellent book...I highly recommend! Don’t just accept your negative emotions ( fear, anger, panic, unpleasant sensations) welcome them and really experience them. They’ll begin to diminish over time. Begin practicing this technique with situations that are less likely to evoke a full-blown reaction. Excellent examples in the book. This is helping me deal with my anxiety about traveling for work by myself and navigating cities by myself.

Best approach on anxiety!

This is the best approach on anxiety I have ever read about. The narrators voice is very soothing. Also, the exercise sheets will turn out to be very effective.

Thank you

This is the only book I’ve ever understood about anxiety. This book has got me out driving outside of my comfort zone and out of the house in bed. I am so thankful to the writer of this book. I will re read it when needed to stop the “monkey chatter” 🐒😂 as silly as it sounds it’s sooo true

I'd give it 58 starts if I could

This book is brilliant. I wish I could have read it years ago. Instead of fighting negative thoughts, learn to deal with them. Love the "thank you" response to the monkey and setting aside time to worry. Mental illness is nasty and in today's society only seems to get worse. This book gives you tools to help. Bravo!

USABLE TOOL FOR ANXIETY

Compliments dare response by Bary Macdonah
Consise and too the point.
Must read for anxious guys out there

Great Book! Very helpful.

Great book and very helpful! Recommend to all who want to improve there lives. I will re-listen to it multiple times.

The Real Deal is right!

More impressive than the strategies are the analogies and anecdotes that explain the mechanisms behind anxiety. This is exactly what I needed and I plan on listening several more times as I begin to make friends with my monkey.

Straight out of the box, this works ...

I'd always thought of myself as a pretty positive, happy-go-lucky, glass-always-half-full type of person. Then suddenly life just fell through the floor. I spent the next 9yrs feeling like a biblical-Job - everything from my health, my work, our savings *everything* was just destroyed. And although inter-linked in effect, none of the causes were related; they just happened in parallel. I felt like Jason of Argonauts-fame where the Gods just played with him - 'what happens if we do this! Then wreck this!'. My whole life was just breaking apart in every direction.

I've had to manage horrendously difficult situations all my life - being born with a facial disfigurement it took 20yrs to build my face. Having done high-level sport, I've done all the sport psychology of having to 'dig-in-there, manage the stress/anxiety, and turn things around'. But this nine years I was like grist in a mill, just being crushed from every direction. constantly.

I've read so much 'stuff' over this time about how to manage things while you're in stress circumstances, how to change things to work your way out of it. But all of it felt like 'That all sounds great. When I get out of this hole-of-Destruction and have time to practice what you're recommending, or divert time to properly understanding what you're talking about, it sounds like it will be great. But right now I've just got to focus on not falling down the hole-of-Destruction. I'll be right with you though ... in 9+years or so (and counting)!'.

Jennifer's book is *breathtakingly* simple: I'd heard the Monkey principle before but - as Jennifer mentions - it had always been in the capacity of 'soothe the monkey ... reassure the monkey ... treat the monkey like an excited child or dog and calm them down'. But as anyone knows when you're dealing with avoiding the slide into the hole-of-Destruction you don't have time for any of that. If anything, and your stress/anxiety *was* a real monkey, your approach has become 'I don't have time for this behaviour when I'm dealing with this! If *you* don't behave, you're going in the hole first, Monkey. Now, shut up!!" - (*and just for interest, that approach doesn't work and just makes the stress/anxiety monkey worse).

Based around CBT, Jennifer's solutions work instantly. It involves you taking back control of threat perception and management into your logical self instead of reacting to the Monkey; you also don't try to manage/control the Monkey, you simply recognise it and thank it. It sounds mad, but here's an example: my road-commute to work had become horrendously stressful through seeing exceptionally bad driving in high traffic levels. Having done advanced and Roadcraft driving, I had good threat perception but my Monkey was creating Fast-and-Furious road movies out of every event in which 'We nearly died!!'. The anxiety had become so bad, my blood pressure was through the roof with my GP wanting to medically intervene. So, instead of creating the 'omg, that guy is going to hit that truck and cause a pile-up where we're all going to die in a fireball!!' my thinking became calm. When Monkey started the 'omg, that guy is going to ...' my response would become 'Good spot, Monkey. And if he does, I'm going to do 'x' which will take us right out of harm's way'. Suddenly, instead of screaming, powerless anxiety inside you, Monkey just stops and goes 'Oh. OK ...' and you are calm. It applies to everything.

Like the above, Jennifer cites real, live, examples of where people changed their lives and took back control. There are links to worksheets where you can even write down/work out your routes for managing the stress/anxiety. But to me, the most important thing about this book above others is the simplicity of the principle; the ease with which you can apply it instantly, and the way it calms and changes your life instantly. And as for the hole-of-Destruction, you know what Monkey? I'm just going to fill it in ...

We all have a monkey to deal with

Really resonated with this book. Went through the exercises and realised what I was subconsciously doing. Eye opener. Give it a listen.

Amazing read, would definitely recommend!

Great approach to dealing with anxiety, it really helped! I found that this book was good to have come from the perspective of a sufferer of anxiety.

Practical useable methods... great tool.

This book was packed with tools and easy to follow exercises. Really easy to digest and well delivered. Even has links to work sheet downloads etc. One I'll revisit for sure :)

pretty good

some very good insights as to why we have anxiety. I just wish there was a bit more help on how to deal with it long term. a good one to read though

Great book!

easy and simple to understand, rich in content.
monkey exposed and no more banana. great book.

Very fun and interesting concepts

I really enjoyed this book and will be get back to it again and again. Interesting and new strategies about controling and calm your thoughts. At the beginning it looked strange and fun because I doubted it works, but some of them really works although an other ones turned out to be a bit strange for me. Great book and very different from common knowledge repeated in teh other books about the topic.

The only bad thing about it is that the narrating is too fast! I doubt the narrator herself even understand what is she reading! this really interfere with the great concepts of this book.