‘Your Worry Makes Sense’ Book Review

Your Worry Makes Sense (Anxiety and Burnout are Logical (and You Can Overcome Them)

Dr Martin Brunet
Illustrated by Hannah Robinson

In ‘Your Worry Makes Sense’, Dr Martin Brunet offers a helpful and compassionate exploration of anxiety and burnout. His thirty years’ professional experience as a GP, combined with reassuring empathy, serve to reframe what many feel as a personal failing into a natural, understandable, and crucially, surmountable, response to life’s pressures.  The book is in four parts: anxiety, burnout, recovery, and other potential helping factors (sleep, breathing, medication, and therapy).

Part One
Explores the origins and purpose of anxiety in an affirming and accepting way, gently challenging the harsh judgment with which people struggling with it can view themselves.

Brunet describes how anxiety serves a helpful function to protect us from harm. Yet in the modern world, there are so many perceived ‘threats’ that this healthy protective mechanism can go into overdrive. And because the experience of anxiety is so unpleasant, avoidant behaviour makes logical sense in the short term.  However, he shows how it is highly unhelpful in the long term, as our comfort zone gets smaller and smaller. A particularly pertinent chapter is included on health anxiety, one of the most pernicious forms of anxiety and one of the hardest to address. 

The book demystifies the harmful ways that we commonly try to reduce anxiety (avoidance, alcohol, sheer will power), and proposes more helpful, long-term strategies that can help us regain control.

Part Two
Addresses burnout and works as a standalone section.  It is again relatable and compassionate, proposing a non-stigmatising understanding of burnout that shows how strength, rather than weakness, causes people to push themselves to this point. 

It movingly paints a picture of the kind of person likely to experience burnout and why; what it feels like to go through it; and the factors that compound it.  The suggestions for recovery are practical, readily understandable, and feel achievable.

The section on moral distress resonated with me. It highlights the impact on mental health when obliged to work within constraints that go against one’s conscience, and the powerfully detrimental effect of an unsupportive, toxic culture. 

Part Three
Offers a roadmap for recovery and the encouragement to begin. The section on anxiety rehabilitation is helpful, practical, and empowering, breaking the problem down into tiny steps that help the person recovering to see progress. 

Brunet likens rehab to any training programme: it is about committing to the ongoing actions that will strengthen one’s power to overcome anxiety (rather than fell it at a stroke).   He contrasts this with the less helpful reliance on will power and brute force that readers may recognise.

Throughout, illustrations by Hannah Robinson add both levity and clarity. I particularly enjoyed the image of a crowd of people all conducting life with their ‘anxiety monster’ carried along in a pocket, handbag, or backpack.

Brunet gives hints and tips for anxiety rehabilitation: the positive energy is infectious. Brunet acknowledges that readers may have tried before and ‘failed’, but he anticipates resistance and challenges it convincingly, instilling optimism to try again with a different mindset.  He advocates ‘feeling better than you do now’ as an achievable yet worthwhile goal, rather than putting pressure on yourself to solve all ills.

Part Four
Includes a chapter on sleep that feels hopeful and offers a route forward.

Much sleep hygiene advice can feel wildly unachievable to anyone lying awake with self-tormenting thoughts in the small hours of the morning.  Brunet acknowledges potential objections and answers them by proposing the concept of ‘marginal gains’ from British Olympic Cycling. 

The book also addresses breathing, the benefits and shortcomings of medication, and the potential value of therapy. This last chapter is heavily weighted to CBT to the near exclusion of other therapeutic approaches, but again, the rationale is explicit.

In conclusion, ‘Your Worry Makes Sense’ is eminently readable and effectively alleviates the shame often encountered with anxiety and burnout. With so many practical suggestions, it would be hard to engage with this book and not benefit, whether struggling yourself or seeking (personally or professionally) to help someone else.

Review by Caroline Hukins – Lapidus Member