Nervous Energy: Harness the Power of Your Anxiety

A roadmap for high achievers to harness restlessness, roadblocks, and distractions into a productive drive towards personal and professional fulfillment.

Many people reach success by deliberately being their own worst critic and obsessively double-checking their work; or by pushing their feelings aside. This strategy is seductive because it does work, at least up to a certain point. The problems arise once you advance beyond school and early career stages. The higher you climb, the more complex projects and issues in your life become. Meanwhile, you may have become so good at putting your emotions aside in certain situations that it’s hard to reconnect with them. This is when the old tools no longer suffice.

The "somewhat OCD" tendencies we pride ourselves on, or rather, the “Nervous Energy” we possess, can become mismanaged, and lead us down a rabbit hole of excessive self-criticism, anxiety, and pessimism. In Nervous Energy, Dr. Chloe Carmichael outlines nine tools with step-by-step instructions that can help you harness your Nervous Energy in order to live a more productive and fulfilling life. If managed correctly, the nervous energy that some people label as anxiety can actually be a source of stimulation, productivity, and fulfillment—and Dr. Chloe Carmichael has tried and tested methods for making this happen.

If you've ever felt a sense of excess energy that you didn't quite know how to direct, or felt that your creativity and motivation was being drained by constant analysis paralysis, Nervous Energy is for you.

“Anxiety and stress are the number one epidemic of modern civilization. Frequently, stressed people find themselves at the pinnacle of success at the cost of unhappy lives, fractured relationships, and unhealthy bodies. Their energy is wasted even though they may have an excess of it. If 'high energy' people learnt to harness their energy to go beyond reactive responses to modes of intuition, creativity, and emotional resilience, they would achieve even more by doing less and be happier and healthier. This book offers the tools they need." —Dr. Deepak Chopra, MD