I am always keen to promote the best sources of information to help people gain insight into their problems, because without insight into what is making us unhappy, we cannot hope to overcome it. I'm currently reading Dr Robert L Leahy's The Worry Cure: Stop Worrying and Start Living – one of the best self-help books I have read for a long time.

Dr Leahy is one of the world's pre-eminent cognitive therapists and condenses 25 years of clinical experience into this informative and highly readable book.

As I often tell my clients, there is nothing wrong with worry per se – it is a normal and even helpful cognitive strategy for thinking about and solving problems. But, as Dr Leahy so eloquently explains, for some of us worry can be both excessive and distressing.

Chronic worry is associated with a wide range of psychological problems, from depression to anxiety disorders including OCD, health anxiety, social phobia and especially generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), in which persistent worry is one of the distinctive features.

Your worry profile

The Worry Cure explains why some of us worry more than others; offers a range of questionnaires and other diagnostic tools to help you understand what your 'worry profile' is; and, crucially, provides a wealth of tips and techniques to help you reduce your worry and learn to confront the problems that unhelpful worry actually stops you solving.

One of the paradoxical things about worry is that it can be a way of avoiding actually solving your problems. Although you may spend many hours fretting about them, which gives the illusion of control and makes you think you are tackling them, it can actually get in the way of confronting problems head-on.

This means separating the things you can control from those you cannot; coming up with solutions to those problems and taking action to actually solve them, not just spend fruitless hours worrying about them.

Warm wishes,

Dan