Anxiety is a sense of worry, fear, or unease which might make your hands sweat or your heart race. It’s a normal response to stressful situations.【小题1】Or going on a date. Or performing in a concert.

A bit of anxiety can work up your energy and focus.【小题2】Feeling anxious about an upcoming test, for example, can push you to study. Techniques like deep breathing can help you power through the unpleasantness of anxiety.

But for some people, anxiety can become too much to bear. They might have frequent, intense fears about everyday situations. Or they might feel worried or afraid for no reason at all. If this high level of anxiety lasts long, it can make it hard to focus or fall asleep, bringing about health problems.【小题3】

【小题4】People with social anxiety have intense fears of being judged by others. People with phobias(恐惧症), meanwhile, are very afraid of things that do not pose much real danger, such as spiders or heights. And people with panic disorder experience panic attacks in the absence of any real danger. Other examples of anxiety disorders include obsessive-compulsive(强迫性的) disorder and post-traumatic(创伤后的) stress disorder.

Anxiety disorders are common. An estimated one-third of all U.S. teens have experienced one. And there are many factors that may heighten someone’s risk of developing an anxiety disorder. People with a family history of anxiety may be at higher risk.【小题5】People with other mental-health conditions, such as depression, often have anxiety, too. But there’ re treatments that can help manage anxiety.

As years went by, I realized that one of the biggest problems of adults was worry. A large majority of my students were businessmen, executives, salesmen, engineers, accountants: a cross section of all the trades and professions and most of them had problems! There were women in the classes business women and housewives. They too had problems. Clearly, what I needed was a textbook on how to conquer worry. So again, I tried to find one.

I went to the New York great public library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street and discovered to my astonishment that this library had only twenty-two books listed under the title WORRY. I also noticed, to my amusement, that it had one hundred and eighty-nine books listed under WORMS. Almost nine times as many books about worms as about worry! Surprising, isn't it? Since worry is one of the biggest problems facing mankind, you would think, wouldn't you, that every high school and college in the land would give a course on “How to Stop Worrying”?

Yet, if there is even one course on that subject in any college in the land, I have never heard of it. No wonder David Seabury said in his book How to Worry Successfully: “We come to maturity with as little preparation for the pressures of experience as a bookworm asked to do a ballet.”

The result? More than half of our hospital beds are all occupied by people with nervous and emotional troubles.

I looked over those twenty-two books on worry on the shelves of the New York Public Library. In addition, I purchased all the books on worry I could find; yet I couldn't discover even one that I could use as a text in my course for adults. So I decided to write one by myself.