Is your insecure, apprehensive personality getting in your way of enjoying life? Making friends? Finding love? Landing that promotion?

Get ready to get over yourself and pull the stick out of your ass that's been holding you back from being present in your life and realizing your dreams. In this lighthearted study of how to cope with anxiety disorder and stop being so damned uptight, Bruce shares the results of 20 years of research on anxiety disorders and depression and insight gleaned from working with the nation's top mental health experts as a former journalist and publicist. Flip through these pages and you'll find raw, humorous anecdotes paired with practical advice on the following subjects: - Strategies for avoiding destructive behaviors like analysis paralysis, perfectionism, and egotism that firmly embed a giant stick up your ass.

• Techniques for loosening up, such as refraining from overplanning, getting over FOMO, increasing your tolerance, embracing your emotions, and overcoming social phobia.

• Support on how to get help if your emotional pain has become mental illness--and encouragement that doing so is a sign of strength, rather than weakness.

  With this edgy-bordering-on-profane take on breaking free from rigidity, Bruce will help you confront that little voice in your head questioning your actions and feeding you self-criticism. A hard knock at the stigma surrounding anxiety disorders, Pull the Stick out of Your @ss will leave you reeling in laughter and empowered to chuck conformity out the window and embrace your weird-ass self. Take a deep breath, get out your swear jar, and prepare to be mellowed out by this gritty approach to mindfulness. Former Journalist and Publicist, Bruce Serbin used to be a complete tightwad: quiet, nervous, preoccupied with the incessant negative chatter in his head, worried about what other people thought of him, constantly playing out different scenarios in his mind, trying to script out every interaction with people ahead of time. He experienced panic attacks, lived with severe anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and suffered from hypochondria. Until one day, enough was enough. It was time to remove the stick from his ass and start living.