A psychologist confronts our pervasive misunderstanding of anxiety and presents a powerful new framework for reimagining and reclaiming the confounding emotion as the advantage it evolved to be.

We are taught that anxiety is dangerous and damaging, and that the solution to its pain is to eradicate it like we do any disease. Yet cutting-edge therapies, hundreds of self-help books, and a panoply of medications have failed to keep debilitating anxiety at bay.

That's because the anxiety-as-disease story is false - and it's harming us.

In this radical reinterpretation, Dr Tracy Dennis-Tiwary distils the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, combined with real-world stories and personal narrative, to argue that the discomfort of anxiety is a tool, rather than something to be stamped out at all costs. Detailing the terrible cost of our misunderstanding of anxiety, while celebrating the lives of people who harness it to their advantage, FUTURE TENSE reveals how we can live and grow with anxiety.