The Anxious Achiever

2 Anxiety Is a Double-Edged Sword

Alyssa Mastromonaco built a long and storied career in politics, but she is perhaps best known for her White House role as the deputy chief of staff for operations in the Obama administration—the youngest person ever to hold that position. (For fans of The West Wing, she was President Obama’s Josh Lyman.) Post-Obama, Mastromonaco became chief operating officer of Vice Media and then president of global communications strategy and talent at A&E Networks. She’s also a New York Times bestselling author, a contributing editor to Marie Claire, and cohost of the Crooked Media podcast Hysteria. And she’s accomplished all of this while suffering from both anxiety and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which anxiety ...