Author
David A. Carbonell
The Chicago psychologist who shows how anxiety tricks you into fighting it, and how to stop playing along.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
David A. Carbonell is a clinical psychologist based in Chicago, where he founded and directs the Anxiety Treatment Center, a practice devoted to panic attacks, phobias, chronic worry and related anxiety problems. Most of his career has been spent in the consulting room with people whose fears had begun to run their lives. That clinical work is the raw material for everything he writes.
His first book, the Panic Attacks Workbook (2004), is a structured, step-by-step guide for people caught in the cycle of panic and avoidance. The Worry Trick (2016) turns to chronic worry and the endless stream of "what if" thoughts. It explains why the usual efforts to stop worrying tend to make it stronger. Outsmart Your Anxious Brain (2020) follows as a shorter, practical companion that distills the same ideas into ten simple strategies.
Carbonell also runs AnxietyCoach.com, a long-standing site of free self-help material on panic, phobias and worry. His books draw on cognitive behavioral therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy. They put those methods in plain, often humorous language for readers working on their own or alongside a therapist.
The signature
Carbonell's central insight is that anxiety is a trick. It makes ordinary discomfort feel like real danger, so your natural instincts work against you. Resisting the feeling, seeking reassurance, avoiding the trigger and arguing with anxious thoughts all feed the problem. The harder you try to make worry go away, the more important it seems and the more it returns. His method is to recognize the trick and then do the counterintuitive thing. You treat "what if" thoughts as noise rather than predictions, allow the uncomfortable feelings to rise and fall, set aside deliberate time for worry, and even humor the worry instead of debating it.
What makes his approach distinctive is its tone as much as its content. He does not promise to eliminate anxiety. His goal is to change your relationship with it, so that worry loses its authority even when it shows up. He writes with gentle wit and concrete exercises, and he speaks from long clinical experience. The result is help that feels less like a lecture and more like a skilled coach pointing out the move you keep missing.