Anxiety & Me

An open and honest account of my four-year battle suffering from mental health, anxiety and panic attacks with uplifting stories, tips and advice that has helped me with an added self-belief confidence boost added for good measure. If you are struggling or know of someone suffering from mental health, then this book will most certainly help and inspire you to deal with your mental health and come out a stronger person for it.

Anxiety is Not Me

Life would be easier without anxiety but it also wouldn’t have anywhere near as much depth.

Ever feel like you’re different because you suffer from anxiety?

Ever feel like no one understands you and your actions?

Are you seeking guidance on how to coexist with the condition or maybe you have a loved one who suffers from anxiety and you would like to understand them better?

As you navigate your way through the shedding of old beliefs, old habits and the old you, I am here to aid the uncovering of your new form.

The journey will be rocky. It won’t always be pretty but it will be magic and I’m so excited for you.

Raise the questions. Awaken your spirit. Set your soul on fire with purpose. And you will walk away belonging.

Learn to love yourself wholly and bring your shadow self into light. Discover the endless positives and possibilities of living with anxiety without allowing it the power of taking the driver’s seat.

Delve deep into these pages and allow yourself to become completely open-minded and vulnerable and you will unlock a new, brighter perspective of life with anxiety. If nurtured correctly, it can create such awareness that we otherwise wouldn’t have the sense to feel. When you focus your attention, it can be a great gift.

This is my story – the journey back to myself. The raw, the real, the messy and the chaos of everyday living with anxiety, written to promote the normalisation of mental health and offer you exactly what you seek. Support, comfort, advice and above all else, a new perspective on life with anxiety.

Always remember, YOU ARE NOT ANXIETY.

Anxiety, It's Time to Go

Anxiety, It’s Time to Go is not just another self-help book. It is ‘the’ self-help book. It uses cutting-edge tried and tested methods that have been used time and time again to remove anxiety from people each and every day. Anxiety, It’s Time to Go will explain everything in simple terms and then show you exactly how to combat the things that hurt and control us when it comes to anxiety. The easy-to-follow exercise and instructions have been made straightforward without all the psychobabble that most people use. We say it as it is and then show you exactly how to remove it. This might just be the best thing you have done when it comes to beating crippling anxiety once and for all. 

Review:

I was given the book to read and I loved it. It was one of those books that I did not want to put down but equally did not want to finish, as I was enjoying it too much (like saving a new
dress ‘for best’). It was all so simple, it made sense and it worked!!! Now, I am not going to elaborate more, because I am now too busy living anxiety-free!
Too busy enjoying life.
Planning life.
Too happy to even think about the old me who wasted so much time feeling anxious, stressed, miserable, not wanting to be here.
So, read it for yourself.

Anyway... I Forgot to Tell You!

Medicine can be both fascinating and terrifying.

This statement can be applied equally to those who practise medicine, but also to the ‘lay’ person who observes from afar but eventually, and sadly inevitably, becomes enmeshed in it. Usually as a reluctant patient.

Erik Hagen has been practicing medicine for the last forty odd years. He has been involved in country General Practice, Emergency medicine, Retrieval medicine with the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia and also in motor sport medicine at both the national and international level, especially in the fields of Formula One and World Rallying.

This collection makes up the second volume of short stories, the first being “Imperfect Recollections; Memory Fragments from and Ageing Medico”, published in 2020.

Some of the stories are just that – stories; but some of the subjects are possibly more reflective than the first book, attempting to examine the questions that confront us all.

Perhaps that kind of musing afflicts all of us who have fewer years ahead than behind us or perhaps it is just that we are vain enough to imagine that we have something worth saying.

An Ordinary Child

Born in 1966, before it was legal to be gay in the United Kingdom. This is the personal and sometimes graphic account of a boy’s journey of sexual enlightenment through five decades. Told in short accounts the reader gets an insight into the life of a gay man. Discovering a crazy gay life only to face prejudice with the discovery of HIV in the 1980s. His travels take him through personal relationships and employment disputes. The historic changing attitudes and lowering of the age of consent in the 1990s. The introduction of civil partnership in the 2000s and eventually gay marriage in the 2010s. If the control of a relationship lies with whoever cares least, we will all go to hell!

Apocalypse Dawn

Revelation, the culminating book of the Bible has inspired, intrigued, or just plain puzzled readers for almost 2,000 years. It remains enigmatic to many. However, once his intricate codes are cracked open, St John unveils its inexhaustible treasures to the inquiring mind–be it that of a theologian or an unlettered observer.

The book is not really a compendium of conundrums at all. It was not written in order to remain within a folded scroll on a hidden shelf. It was meant to be read and understood, to be absorbed, shared and declared, for it offers God’s answer to the perplexities encountered by humankind be they endemic to the 1^st, 21^st, or any century in between.

Revelation–The Apocalypse–is exactly what its title intends it to be: it is a revelation, a peeling back of the mystery to disclose God’s great and eternal plan of redemption. This is, actually, the subject matter of the entire Bible – from Genesis to Revelation – and the news, ultimately, is good.

Apocalypse Dawn is written to endorse the validity of God’s word for every age–yesterday, today and, tomorrow.

You are invited to lift the veil: discover the ultimate Revelation!

Apok

Set in 1991 against the prelude to war in Croatia, Apok is a dystopian view of an imperfect world on the brink, as seen through the eyes of the equally imperfect hero sent to save it. For he is the ultimate psychopath, a formidable, soon-to-be-invincible, death machine, an anomaly which science thought impossible yet which religion had always prophesied. Who said the next messiah would be from heaven and that the second coming hasn’t already happened? And what if the battle for humankind’s survival is just about to begin? 

Apok is a thought-provoking horror-fantasy, an exhilarating tour de force of forbidden taboos and crippling addiction. It is the stuff of nightmares, a roller coaster ride through the darkest recesses of the human psyche, where demons and monsters from twilight dimensions rip your dreams apart. It takes you through the pain barrier to places none of us want to go but are still curious to explore despite the terror. Apok is about humanity’s failings and how our species is heading for oblivion; it is about one man’s incredible journey and his audacious plan to put things right. 

As the plan unfolds, Apok travels through the horrors of a damaged mind and how humankind must first suffer in order to survive. The plan to spread the madness that drives men to do evil things; his mission to wage war on everyone and everything. For his mantra is ‘take no prisoners, dispense death to all and spare no one!’ Apok is the dawn of Hell on Earth ...

Apollonia

A storm is heading towards the city of Apollonia, and it is not just the bad weather. It is on horseback and in the shape of the Flock invaders. Being led by a man of mystery, the invaders are not necessarily there to break down the fabled walls, but can the Apollonians be convinced of the newcomer’s intentions?

The usual problems persist within Apollonia; lack of jobs, high taxes, trade deals along with an unpredictable monarch who has taken a fancy to making his mark in history. Sorvus, the last mage of Apollonia, is eager to save the city from the invaders but if he could not save the king’s wife, can he be relied upon to help save the city? A killer is on the loose but could he be the answer to stopping the onslaught by the Flock or even trusted?

Amongst all the chaos is a young boy called Tius, who just is after adventure with his friends but ends up getting more than he bargained for.

Apple Cores and Mandarins

A few weeks after celebrating his 50th birthday, the author’s life was turned upside down. He faced contracting a life-threatening disease whilst on a trip to China. He collapsed on the flight home and was rushed to the hospital in London, placed in an induced coma for six weeks and ventilated as his lungs had stopped working. Facing a cruel recovery package, learning how to walk and talk again he was hit with the devastating news that his beloved wife had breast cancer. Dealing with the trauma of watching her battle the cancer, being told she had defeated it and then unexpectedly dying after three weeks from having stomach pains. This book outlines his life, medical struggles and battles with mental health. It also outlines practical ways to cope with mental health and trauma.

Applied Economics: Public Financial Management and Development

Applied Economics: Public Financial Management and Development is focused on economics applied to public financial management and development. It charts over 50 years of the author’s practical experience of economics and public policy in 60 countries on five continents, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
The book’s main focal point is on central and local government budgeting, tracing the progress of revenue aspects and expenditure allocation over time from inputs alone to matching these inputs to achieving and measuring service delivery in programmes. It also presents the assessment instruments that measure public financial management strength and weakness, with real-life illustrations of their application.
All of these instruments use examples from the countries that the author has worked in, demonstrating the conditions faced – mostly stable economic environments, but at times during periods of conflict and insecurity, as well as neighbouring geopolitical tension.These experiences have been gained from the author’s resident assignments and short-term visits (mainly multiple over many years) as a consultant for the IMF, World Bank, and bilateral development programmes as well as academic research.

Approach by Stealth

It’s 1942 and a fleet of German mini-submarines are loose in the Mediterranean wreaking havoc on Allied shipping, sinking urgently required supplies destined for Malta and Alexandria and the new invasion beachhead in Algeria, thus jeopardising the squeezing of Rommel out of North Africa.

Awaiting an ETA regarding a large American convoy, they are re-arming and refuelling at their base in Vichy France near the Spanish border.

Can the British commandos en route in motor gunboats reach the port in time to destroy the vessels or will they fall foul from information supplied by a suspected spy at the War Office in London and die like so many Special Operations Executives, agents and resistance fighters in various recent missions?

Perhaps the best chance of success lies with S.O.E.’s secretly arranged mission involving their French agent Pierre Duvalle, seconded to a special boat section of the Royal Marines and transferred by submarine to within striking distance with five experienced and lethally efficient men of that elite force. Three two-man folboat canoes would see them to their target.

But what does the informer in London know? Will Duvalle, who has a very sad and personal reason to see him exposed, find a chink in the spy’s armour?

April the Engineer

Have you ever been told that you can’t? Has someone told you that being a girl means you must only do certain jobs? Well, April is here to show you that with dedication, determination and hard work you can be whatever you want to be!

Follow April as she goes about her day, fixing things along the way. Will she achieve her dream? Will your motto be the same as her’s?

“I am a girl, that’s true,” said she,

“But watch, one day an engineer I’ll be!”