Tracy Dennis-Tiwary

Future Tense

A psychologist confronts our pervasive misunderstanding of anxiety and presents a powerful new framework for reimagining and reclaiming anxiety as the advantage it evolved to be. We taught people that anxiety is dangerous and damaging, and that the solution to the pain of anxiety is to eradicate it like we do any disease—prevent it, avoid it, and stamp it out at all costs. Yet cutting-edge therapies, hundreds of self-help books, and a panoply of anti-anxiety medications have failed to keep debilitating anxiety at bay. A third of us will struggle with anxiety disorders in our lifetime and rates in children and adults continue to skyrocket. That’s because the anxiety-as-disease story is false—and it’s harming us more than it helps. In this radical reinterpretation, Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary confronts and dismantles our pervasive misunderstanding of anxiety. She argues that it’s an evolved advantage that protects us and strengthens our creative and productive powers. Although anxiety is related to stress and fear, it’s different because it helps us imagine the uncertain future and impels us to take focused and direct action to make the future better. This future orientation, which the author calls the future tense, helps us plan, create, and envision new possibilities. That’s why anxiety is inextricably linked to hope. By distilling the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, including her own, combined with real-world stories and personal narrative, Dennis-Tiwary shows how we can acknowledge the discomfort of anxiety and see it as a tool, rather than fearing and reviling it. Detailing the terrible cost of our misunderstanding of anxiety, while celebrating the lives of people who use anxiety to their advantage, Dennis-Tiwary argues that we can—and must—learn to be anxious in the right way. Future Tense blazes the way for a paradigm shift in how we relate to and understand anxiety in our day-to-day lives—a fresh set of beliefs and insights that allow us to explore and leverage even very distressing anxiety rather than be overwhelmed by it. Achieving a new mindset will not fix anxiety itself—because the emotion of anxiety is not broken; it’s how we cope with anxiety that’s broken. Through this new prism of thinking, even anxiety disorders can be alleviated. That’s because changing our mindset about anxiety is the only way we can make anxiety work for us instead of against us. Dennis-Tiwary, by challenging our long-held assumptions about anxiety, shows that anxiety can be good for us, even though it feels bad, and provides a concrete framework for how we can reclaim anxiety for what it has always been—a gift rather than a curse, and a source of inner strength, joy, and ingenuity.

Tracy Dennis-Tiwary

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