TEHRAN –“First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety” by Australian author Sarah Wilson has recently been published by Milkan Publications in Tehran.

Elham Seifikar is the translator of the book originally published in 2017.

Sarah Wilson, bestselling author and entrepreneur, intrepid solver of problems and investigator of how to live a better life, has helped over 1.2 million people across the world to quit sugar. She has also been an anxiety sufferer her whole life.

The book's title derives from a Chinese belief that in order to triumph over a beast, one must first make it beautiful.

In the book, Wilson directs her intense focus and fierce investigatory skills onto this lifetime companion of hers, looking at the triggers and treatments, the fashions and fads. She reads widely and interviews fellow sufferers, mental health experts, philosophers, and even the Dalai Lama, processing all she learns through the prism her own experiences.

Wilson pulls at the thread of accepted definitions of anxiety, and unravels the notion that it is a difficult, dangerous disease that must be medicated into submission. Ultimately, she re-frames anxiety as a spiritual quest rather than a burdensome affliction, a state of yearning that will lead us closer to what really matters.

Practical and poetic, wise and funny, this is a small book with a big heart. It will encourage the myriad sufferers of the world's most common mental illness to feel not just better about their condition, but delighted by the possibilities it offers for a richer, fuller life.

Photo: Front cover of the Persian translation of Sarah Wilson’s “First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety”

ABU/