2025-01-07 – Health – www.theguardian.com
Famous for her work with Oprah Winfrey, Martha Beck is a bestselling author and self-help superstar. But for 60 years she was anxious and terrified – until she found a simple, uplifting answer
All her life, Martha Beck had been anxious, but a few years ago she began to get really curious about anxiety. And curiosity, she wants us all to know, may just be the path out of paralysing, life-spoiling terror. During the pandemic, Beck – a bestselling author and life coach – started looking deeper into anxiety in order to help her clients. It was something she thought she knew about, having experienced it throughout her life, and over the years she had followed the standard advice: she had practised meditation for 30 years, and been on medication, but now Beck was starting to wonder if inner peace was as far as it went.
Instead of trying to control her anxiety, Beck started to befriend it: “I started treating myself like a frightened animal and doing for myself what we all…