Welcome to my book about anxiety and its close cousin, despair. Over the years, I have found ways of tackling these painful experiences and to help myself by seeing them from a variety of different perspectives. These include ideas from cosmology, evolution, biology, neuroscience, sociology, philosophy and history. These subjects help you to see your life in a much wider context which puts all emotional difficulties into its true perspective. My view is that that the traditional way of trying to overcome anxiety and despair has questionable merit for most people. Psychotherapy and drugs have their place in cases of severe mental illness but not for the average sufferer of anxiety whose life might be severely limited but not dysfunctional or deluded. Becoming a 'patient' for such people only adds to a feeling of helplessness and doesn't offer any new insights that might make all the difference. If you are an intelligent, thinking person but are hampered by feelings of anxiety or despair, this book is sure to help you.