This is my new favorite story about mental health and brain science, and it elegantly summarizes much of the latest thinking about the mind-body connection: “Anxiety does not cause stomach aches; rather, feelings of anxiety and stomach aches are both ways that human brains make sense of physical discomfort. There is no such thing as a purely mental cause, because every mental experience has roots in the physical budgeting of your body. This is one reason physical actions like taking a deep breath, or getting more sleep, can be surprisingly helpful in addressing problems we traditionally view as psychological.”

A reading list for people looking to make sense of the feelings overtaking their nervous system—the feelings that cause physical and emotional pain. These 18 books helped me in the past 5 years. Let’s see if they can help you, too.

‎Comedian Sara Schaefer is proud of her new book, GRAND: A Memoir, and she should be! It is the kind of delightful and moving tale that makes you feel like you know Sara, even more so if you listen to her read it, as I did. I loved talking to Sara about what it was like to write this book after years of comedy writing, how her own internal critic (nickname DOOM) tried to sabotage her along the way, and why the Babadook is a perfect metaphor for loss. If there’s one thing I love more than funny people, it’s funny people who are real, and that is definitely Sara.

A compact, illustrated book offering soothing techniques for understanding anxiety and moving through the traps of overthinking by me, Meredith Arthur. Art by the one and only Leah Rosenberg.