Books on Anxiety: A Clinician's Reading List

This reading list is organized by what each book is for, and every entry names one limit drawn from published sources. It is for adults who want books on anxiety, worry or low mood to read alongside therapy, or before starting it.

Nothing here is ranked, and no book on this list is a treatment. Where TEO has a full guide to a book, the entry stays short and links to it. No worksheet or exercise is reproduced. Before you start: the evidence is clearer for self-help worked through with some practitioner support than for a book used entirely alone, and our Mind Over Mood guide sets out those trials.

Books About CBT: Two That Teach the Skills

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a structured therapy that works on the thoughts and the behaviour keeping a problem going.

Mind Over Mood — Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky (second edition, 2015)

The Guilford Press, 341 pages (Guilford). A step-by-step CBT workbook covering depression, anxiety, panic, anger, guilt and shame. Our guide to it covers the contents, the research and the criticisms, so this entry stays short.

Its limit is the format: it asks for weeks of written practice, which is the part low mood makes hard. Guilford also publishes a separate clinician's guide for practitioners teaching the method — a fair signal that the book was built for guided work. It may suit a reader who wants a program to work through; TEO's free CBT Thought Record Bundle covers the thought-record piece in a few pages.

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy — David D. Burns (1980)

William Morrow. The book that put cognitive distortions — all-or-nothing thinking, mind reading, should statements — into everyday language, with written exercises for answering them back.

The book itself has been tested in trials, and that is where the caution sits. Scogin, Jamison and Gochneaur (1989) compared cognitive with behavioural bibliotherapy and a delayed-treatment control in mildly and moderately depressed older adults: both reading conditions beat the control, and the two were, in the authors' words, nondifferentially efficacious. Jamison and Scogin (1995) then tested what they called minimal-contact cognitive bibliotherapy with eighty adults against a waiting list. Both came from one research group, and neither abstract names the book used. A review of bibliotherapy trials reported reduced depressive symptoms in adults at follow-ups from three months to three years across eight studies, while its four studies in younger populations showed no significant result (Gualano and colleagues, 2017). Those are findings about CBT-based reading as a class, not about this title. It may suit a reader who wants the ideas in plain language first.

Workbooks and Skills: Books for Anxiety, Panic and Phobias

The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook — Edmund J. Bourne (eighth edition, 2025)

New Harbinger Publications, 488 pages, first published in 1990. The publisher lists relaxation and breathing techniques, coping strategies for panic attacks, exposure therapy for phobias, and lifestyle, exercise, mindfulness and nutrition tips; the eighth edition adds health anxiety, climate anxiety and coping with uncertainty (New Harbinger).

The breadth is also the criticism: the chapters resting on the strongest research — exposure and the cognitive work — sit beside material the publisher itself offers as tips, and at 488 pages it reads more like a reference shelf than a course. The publisher's description names obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among the conditions covered. TEO does not offer exposure and response prevention (ERP), the structured treatment for OCD, so if OCD is the question, look for a clinician who lists ERP training; a doctor or psychologist can assess whether it applies to you, and our article on scrupulosity covers religious intrusive thoughts. It may suit a reader who wants one reference to dip into. On panic, see our panic attacks therapy page.

Rewire Your Anxious Brain — Catherine M. Pittman and Elizabeth M. Karle (second edition, 2025)

New Harbinger Publications, 240 pages. It sorts anxiety into two routes and matches coping to each: an amygdala route that arrives fast and in the body without an explanation you can name, and a cortex route of worry, rumination and interpretation. Pittman is a clinical psychologist and a professor at Saint Mary's College; Karle, MLIS, manages circulation and fulfillment at the college library (New Harbinger).

The two-route story simplifies a contested area. Joseph LeDoux and Daniel Pine (2016) argue for separating conscious feelings of fear from the behavioural and physiological responses to threat; Michael Fanselow and Zachary Pennington (2018) answer that fear is one integrated autonomic, behavioural and cognitive-emotional response. Read the two routes as an organizing metaphor, not settled neuroscience. It may suit a reader whose fear arrives with no thought attached; TEO's free Calm Your Body's Alarm System and The Window of Tolerance handouts cover nearby ground. On the cortex side, our article on how to stop overthinking and the free When You Can't Stop Overthinking handout sit closer to a session.

Acceptance-Based Reading, and What TEO Offers Instead

The Happiness Trap — Russ Harris (second edition, 2022)

Shambhala, 320 pages. A readable lay introduction to acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), which works on your relationship to thoughts and feelings rather than on changing their content: the argument that chasing good feelings is itself the trap, plus stepping back from thoughts, willingness, values and committed action (Penguin Random House).

Plainly: TEO does not offer ACT. If ACT is what you want, look for a clinician who lists ACT training; our anxiety therapy page sets out what TEO does offer. On the evidence, a 2026 review pooled thirty-four randomized controlled trials of full-model, therapist-delivered ACT against other bona fide psychotherapies, found it was not superior to them, and concluded that current trial evidence does not justify recommending it over established treatments, naming recurring shortcomings including outcomes and hypotheses not preregistered (Gower, Styler and Litz). Harris is a physician and psychotherapist who sells ACT training, so the book is also a doorway into a paid training world. It may suit a reader who wants to know what ACT asks of them first.

Books on Depression

The Mindful Way Through Depression — Williams, Teasdale, Segal and Kabat-Zinn (second edition, 2024)

The Guilford Press, 262 pages. The reader's companion to mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), which teaches noticing rumination as it starts and changing your relationship to low mood rather than arguing with its content, with downloadable guided meditations narrated by Kabat-Zinn (Guilford). TEO does not offer MBCT or mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR); if a structured eight-week mindfulness program is what you want, look for a clinician or health authority that runs one.

The evidence is at its firmest for preventing relapse in people with a history of recurrent depression, not for treating an episode you are in now. Kuyken and colleagues (2016) pooled individual patient data from nine randomized trials and one thousand two hundred and fifty-eight participants, and found a reduced risk of relapse within a 60-week follow-up for those who received MBCT, both against not receiving it and against other active treatments, with some evidence that greater symptom severity before treatment went with a larger effect. A pooled result describes a treatment in general, not one person's course. The book is also a solo version of a group program, asking for daily practice over weeks — the thing depression erodes. It may suit a reader whose low mood keeps returning; the free Depression Support Toolkit covers behavioural activation for low-energy weeks.

CBT Training at TEO, and Who Works Where

No book can tell you whether an anxiety disorder, OCD or depression applies to you; a doctor or psychologist can assess that. What a therapist adds is what a book cannot: noticing where you stop, and answering the question you would not write down. TEO Counselling is an online-only practice for clients in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland and Labrador.

• →Mohamad Shabib, MACP, CCC, is a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario (CRPO), and works with clients in all six provinces in English or Arabic. He is trained in CBT for Trauma (Levels 1 and 2), has Advanced EMDR training through an EMDRIA-approved programme — EMDR is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing — and is trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS) Levels 1 and 2.
• →Alison Shaji, MA, RCC #22608 (BCACC), works with British Columbia clients only, in English, Hindi or Malayalam, and is trained in CBT, dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) and EMDR.
• →Not offered at TEO: ACT, MBCT, MBSR, ERP, somatic experiencing, medication and assessment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). DBT at TEO means DBT-informed individual work, with no skills group and no phone coaching.

The handouts named above sit on the free tools page, starting with the Anxiety Relief Toolkit. More commentary on individual books is in the book guides section of our resources hub, and all seventeen are indexed on our books on mental health reading list.

If a book here has raised a question about your own situation, a free 15-minute consultation is one place to take it, by video or a scheduled phone call. Individual sessions are $150 per 60 minutes, and no referral is needed. Book a free consultation online, or text (519) 760-5211 with a question first. This text line is not a crisis service.

One step for today: pick the single book above that matches what you are trying to change, and borrow it from your public library.