About
Overcoming Anxiety and Depression by Lillyin Love
Imagine a wise, warm-hearted friend gently taking your hand and guiding you step-by-step out of the darkness of anxiety and depression. That is the experience of reading Lillyin Love’s latest book Overcoming Anxiety and Depression. With empathy, expertise, and an abundance of creative exercises, Lillyin Love acts as a compassionate companion on a transformative journey to emotional wellbeing.
From the opening chapter, you are made to feel understood, validated, and hopeful. Lillyin Love doesn’t diminish the realities of anxiety and depression, but approaches them as formidable yet conquerable challenges. Her tone is caring but resolute – these are “storms” that can be weathered with the proper knowledge, tools, and perseverance. Lillyin’s wisdom is forged from
personal experience as well as years spent facilitating innovative therapies like the parrot-
human bonding that gained her national acclaim. What makes this book shine is its multifaceted, holistic approach. Like an emotional Swiss Army knife, Lillyin Love supplies us with a vast array of evidence-based strategies to combat the varied symptoms of anxiety and depression. Mindfulness, CBT, yoga, massage, diet, exercise, meditation, visualization – Love draws upon the best that Eastern and Western healing traditions have to offer. At no point does it feel like mere listing of techniques though. Her writing
sparkles with powerful anecdotes and creative metaphors that illuminate complex topics like the
vagus nerve’s role in anxiety. In addition to the cognitive tools, Lillyin Love emphasizes that our mental health is inextricably linked to physical and social wellbeing. A particularly moving chapter explores how the deceptively simple acts of breathing and human connection can be powerfully therapeutic. The
visualization exercises she provides are vibrant and immersive – I found myself instinctively taking deep belly breaths as I imagined floating on clouds and strolling through forests.
Describing visualization this way, Lillyin Love makes an abstract concept accessibly real.
