The physical response of my anxiety was so great, at one point I had to have an operation to enable me to urinate properly. The heart palpitations perfectly mimicked what I imagine having a heart attack would be like and the constantly active mind (worry) sent me into bouts of spiralling depression with no escape in sight. 

My search for a cure to what started off as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and later developed into the broader Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) led me to a book called `Cognitive Therapy of Anxiety Disorders' (same author), which in turn led to this current publication. 

The book is very well written and there is minimal technical jargon in it. It is aimed at practitioners, rather than to be used as a self-help guide, but, nonetheless after some time spent slowly digesting the relevant chapters, massive gains can be achieved. 

The concepts are logical and the content is fairly straight forward after the initial understanding. There are individual rating scales, treatment plans and process diagrams for GAD, OCD, PTSD and MDD, plus more general chapters which detail the common themes. 

There are examples of behaviour, which I could immediately relate to and begin to question my own behaviours. Hypothetical questions gave me something productive to think about, stimulated recovery and enabled me to see the bigger picture. There are experiments to challenge unhelpful beliefs and enable new, more helpful counter evidence to generate a `new plan' for processing information. 

The book clearly describes the technique of `Detached Mindfulness', which is a key component to the therapy. This allows thoughts to be treated as `events in the mind', rather that actively engaging with them in the first place. This means that the content of thoughts and worries is largely irrelevant and things can be treated in a more logical problem solving manner. 

I cannot rate this book highly enough. From a personal perspective it has turned my life around and the future (which wasn't looking too promising) is now looking bright. In my opinion, the NHS fails to successfully treat conditions like mine and advances such as this have the potential to save large amounts of money- I'm sure I have cost the tax-payer a small fortune unnecessarily, when treatments such as this could be available. 

Since I picked the book up eighteen months ago, I have unravelled my condition back to the route cause and come off all medication, that included a maximum dose of the beta blocker propranolol. I have travelled to Australia on my own, done a sky dive, a bungee jump and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro……,things that GAD suffers may believe will never be possible for them. 

My condition is more complex and I am under the care of a clinical psychologist to round off my own progress, but I believe a full recovery is only a matter of time.