I'm pretty sure I've talked about all of these books before in other posts, but I thought it might be helpful to have them all listed in one place.
If you're not able to get any of these, please check out this post where I linked to some great free websites that help guide you through anxiety-fighting techniques.
1) The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook - Edmund J. Bourne
If you can only buy one book from this list, this should be the one you get. In my opinion, it is the best book on anxiety out there. It covers so many different skills, techniques, and exercises. It has information on all the different anxiety disorders, anxiety-related research, types of medication, good nutrition and exercise habits, etc.
The only downfall is that if you're in the middle of an anxiety crisis, the amount of information it contains can be a little overwhelming. If you are feeling overwhelmed, I wouldn't sit down and read through the entire book all at once. It is more manageable one chapter at a time. Each one gives you so much to think about that it is probably better to take breaks anyway, just to let it all sink in.
2) Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Workbook for Dummies - Rhena Branch and Rob Willson
This book was very helpful for me. I was new to trying any kind of CBT work, and it lays out the methods in simple, easy to understand ways. It has tons of exercises to work through (charts to fill out, questions to answer) to understand the faulty/irrational ways you think/act and to help you correct those thoughts and behaviors. It also includes chapters on using CBT to help with depression, low self-esteem, maintaining relationships. I skipped most of that and only worked through the anxiety-focused chapters.
3) Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life - Steven C. Hayes and Spencer Smith
I've been meaning to take a second look at this one. I really didn't care for it when I started working through it the first time. It focuses on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and I am a much bigger fan of CBT than ACT. ACT teaches that rather than trying to control your thoughts, you should just accept them and learn to live your life with the anxiety (or other unpleasant emotional pain), still doing everything you want to despite the problems you have.
For one thing, I feel it is possible to control your thoughts and change your behaviors. It's extremely difficult, but I have seen it happen in small ways with myself. For another thing, when it comes to emetophobia, I get confused as to how you can just accept it the way it is and push yourself to live your life. But I don't think I got far enough in the book to be able to say I fully understand their method.
4) Living with Emetophobia: Coping with Extreme Fear of Vomiting - Nicolette Heaton-Harris
I wrote a detailed post about this book after I read it. To summarize, I feel it is a helpful book if you are looking for validation of your issue, a detailed description of your problem and everything you have to deal with, or if you want someone else to understand and you are looking for a book to explain emetophobia to them. The book is about the author's experience of living with emetophobia, and if you have emetophobia too, it's likely you'll relate to most of it. It's also likely that there are some anxiety thoughts that the author has but you don't have, and the book could be triggering in that sense. You could end up acquiring new anxiety thoughts/behaviors, so I would be careful when reading this one, if you decide to.
5) The Miracle of Mindfulness - Thich Nhat Hanh
This book is an in-depth look at meditation and mindfulness, two techniques that can be helpful in fighting anxiety. There is also a lot of Buddhism in the book. I'm not a very religious or spiritual person. But you can skim past those parts. I would say probably the best part of the book is near the end, the section called "Exercises in Mindfulness". There is also a section after that called "Selection of Buddhist Sutras" - both of these sections can give you ideas to help with meditation or mindfulness.
6) Overcoming Health Anxiety - Rob Willson and David Veale
This book is similar to the CBT workbook for dummies. It walks you through CBT techniques and exercises, only in this book it specifically applies them to health anxiety. I have a lot of general health anxiety on top of emetophobia, so I found it really helpful.
The book also contains a chapter dedicated to emetophobia. I didn't think that chapter was as helpful as the rest of the book. I would say the same thing about it as the Living with Emetophobia book described above - it is a good description of emetophobia, but it could be triggering and give you more things to worry about that you hadn't been worrying about before. It had that effect on me, but luckily, by now I think I've forgotten all the new worries it gave me. If I was reading the book over now, I would just skip that chapter. The exercises in the rest of the book can be applied to emetophobia as well as any other health anxiety.
7) Freedom from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder - Jonathan Grayson
I don't have OCD, but during the time period where my anxiety was the worst, I started having a bunch of horrible intrusive thoughts/obsessions that bothered me even more than my emetophobia. I bought this to try to figure out how to deal with those, and it is an amazing book. I would actually recommend it to anyone with an anxiety problem, even if it's not OCD.
The premise of the book is that for people with OCD (and I would say any anxiety disorder), their main problem is that they are unable to accept uncertainty in life. This is so true for me, and it's something I've thought about frequently ever since reading this. So if I was worrying I was sick, instead of telling myself that it is extremely unlikely
that I will get sick and in CBT-fashion using logic to try to prove
that, I would tell myself "you might get sick, and you should deal with
that possibility because the alternative of not being able to deal with
it is ruining your life." I suppose it might be similar to ACT (acceptance of anxiety versus fighting it), but the way the author related it all to the fear of uncertainty made so much more sense to me. The book also focuses on exposure and response prevention, or exposing yourself to your fears and then preventing yourself from engaging in irrational behaviors as a result.
Just a warning, a large chunk of the book deals with specific OCD problems, like checking, counting, etc., and if you don't have those issues, there is probably no need for you to read any of that. I felt the rest of it was worth getting through those (for me) unnecessary sections.
