Book Club Report: How Can We Live Well with Anxiety?

Hello, this is Yamamoto, manager of JIYUCHO.

Did you know that JIYUCHO holds a book club twice a month on Sunday mornings before the shop opens?

Participants bring any book they would like to read. We first spend about an hour reading quietly, and then share impressions, thoughts, and conversations that grew from the books. In this blog series, the facilitator of each session introduces what happened that day.

Book Club Report: November 17

This session was a small gathering of three people: two participants and myself. One was returning after some time, and one was joining for the first time. At first, someone said that the small number made them feel even more nervous, but the atmosphere quickly became relaxed and friendly.

Both participants chose books from JIYUCHO’s Connected Bookshelf rather than books they had brought themselves.

Topics We Talked About

• The difference between reading alone and reading at the JIYUCHO book club
• How to live with anxiety and stress
• The connection between body and mind
• The story of The Fool at the End of the World
• Finding yourself through writing interviews with others
• Whether managers and employees can become friends

One topic that drew many different opinions came from the book Anxiety Makes You Stronger: how should we relate to anxiety and stress?

Some people talked about trying to remove sources of stress or changing their environment so that anxiety does not fall on them in the first place. Others said that when they feel stressed, they intentionally place physical load on the body, such as through strength training, and that this helps emotional anxiety feel more manageable.

What about you?

By the end of the conversation, we came to a shared thought: no matter how much we try to eliminate anxiety, difficult things continue to appear one after another. Perhaps what matters is flexibility, the ability to change the way we see anxiety so that it does not remain only anxiety.

Of course, when something truly worrying is right in front of us, we often forget that idea and become anxious anyway. That may be very human.

When that happens, I hope I can remember the people I spoke with at this book club and think: I am not the only one facing anxiety. I can keep going.

About the Book Club

One of the joys of this book club is that a book can become a doorway to asking, “What do you think?” and hearing many different answers. Please feel free to bring any book you want to read.

The book club is held at JIYUCHO in Kuramae. Tickets are available through Peatix when sessions are announced.