Tame Your Thoughts

Thank you NetGalley and Thomas Nelson for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

Renown author and pastor Max Lucado has touched many lives, delivering Biblical principals in ways that are easy to understand and digest for any reader.  With over 100 books attributed to his name and awards like Reader’s Digest’s “The Best Preacher in America”, his writing has covered topics from followers of Christ being chosen by Him, to dealing with negative thoughts and anxiety more recently.  His latest release Tame Your Thoughts follows in that path.  Focused on how to combat the negative thinking that can derail us from finding joy in life, Lucado provides readers with tools to reshape our view on “problems” and allow God to retrain our brains.

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I give Tame Your Thoughts 4 out of 5 stars.  I have long been a fan of Lucado’s work, especially his writing.  However, as a lifelong sufferer of anxiety and depression, simply telling someone to think about something differently does not work.  That wasn’t exactly Lucado’s approach here, but it was close.  He does give some good examples of times that we are self-sabotaging and how to recognize those moments, but for readers who are actively struggling with clinical depression or severe mental illness, this book may do more harm than good.  I was also a little surprised at the amount of time a book whose blurb discusses “worry, guilt, anxiety, and other types of mental quicksand” spent on pornography obsessions.  I understand this could fall into other types of mental quicksand, but this is the second of Lucado’s books to cover pornography in more detail than I had expected.

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With that said, I will always recommend Lucado’s books to my friends.  While not every paragraph may apply to me, there is so much detail on his pages that does.  I happened to listened to this audiobook, read by the author, on a particularly difficult week at work where I would normally have sat in my negative thoughts each day, allowing them to stack up over the week.  But at the end of the week, I found that I had addressed self-doubt, found ways to combat negative situations in the workplace, and was in a better mental place than I would normally have been.  If you’ve liked other works by Lucado, I think you will enjoy this as well.

Tame Your Thoughts released August 19^th and is available at all your favorite retailers.  You can order your copy today on our Bookshop.org page!

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