How to Control Your Anxiety Before It Controls You

Ellis argues that things and people do not make you anxious—you do, through your unrealistic expectations and irrational beliefs . The formula is the ABC model: activating events (A) trigger belief systems (B), which produce anxious consequences (C). The key irrational beliefs driving anxiety include catastrophizing (believing something is awful or unbearable), musts (demanding that uncertainty or discomfort not exist), and self-downing (global self-condemnation for being anxious) . Ellis distinguishes healthy concern—which motivates planning and caution—from unhealthy anxiety, which inhibits enjoyment and performance .

The book is a comprehensive toolkit. Core techniques include disputing anxiety-creating irrational beliefs, using rational coping self-statements, and practicing rational emotive imagery . Ellis also includes shame-attacking exercises (deliberately doing something foolish or embarrassing to build tolerance for disapproval), exposure and behavioral desensitization, tolerating anxiety-provoking situations without escape, cost-benefit analysis, reframing, problem-solving, and unconditional self-acceptance . The book concludes with over 230 rational maxims—numbered lists of coping statements for anxious thinking, feelings, and behavioral avoidance .

Ellis argues that not all anxiety is needless. Healthy anxiety can ward off dangers and make you aware of negative things you can change; it motivates planning and appropriate caution . Unhealthy anxiety, by contrast, inhibits you from enjoying everyday activities and relationships, causes you to perform poorly, and blocks your creativity . The distinction lies in the beliefs underlying the emotion: healthy concern involves preferences and realistic risk assessment, while unhealthy anxiety involves absolutistic demands that the risk not exist and catastrophic predictions about what will happen if it does. The therapeutic goal is not eliminating all anxiety but replacing unhealthy anxiety with healthy concern.

Ellis experienced crippling social anxiety in adolescence, particularly fear of rejection by women he was interested in pursuing . At age 19, he devised what he later recognized as exposure therapy: over one month, he approached 130 women in the New York Botanical Gardens. About 30 walked away immediately; he had conversations with roughly 100; only one agreed to a date, and she never showed up . Despite the near-total rejection, Ellis reported being freed from his crippling social anxiety, having learned firsthand that the feared consequence was not awful. This personal experiment became the foundation for the exposure and shame-attacking techniques he later formalized in REBT .

A Markham Public Library reviewer found the book provided insufficient step-by-step guidance for independent implementation, calling it a 'pointless read' for that reason . The same reviewer objected to Ellis's language and tone. More substantively, the book was written for a general audience and assumes readers can apply cognitive disputation techniques with some consistency; Ellis himself acknowledged that self-help has limits and that some readers may need professional therapy . The book is also repetitive in places, as Ellis restates core REBT principles across multiple chapters, which some readers find reinforcing and others find tedious.

How to Control Your Anxiety (1998) is a targeted application of the general REBT principles first popularized in A Guide to Rational Living (1961). Where the earlier book addressed the full range of emotional disturbance through ten core irrational beliefs, this volume focuses specifically on anxiety and develops a broader repertoire of techniques—including exposure, shame-attacking exercises, and over 230 rational maxims—tailored to anxious conditions . A reader on ThriftBooks recommended reading A Guide to Rational Living first for background, noting that it provides more foundational context, while the anxiety book is more focused and practical .