Amber Rae

Who they are

Three things are true about Choose Wonder Over Worry, and this site records all three.

The first is that the book is honest about its own basis, and unusually so. There are no endnotes and no bibliography, and the table of contents shows there was never a place for them. On page 134 it reproduces a journal entry in her own handwriting recording that she has no master's in psychology and no credentials to offer advice. That page sits inside the imposter-syndrome chapter, so the disclaimer is doing double duty as content, but it is there, in her hand, in the middle of the book. She flags every pseudonym as a pseudonym, marks her generalisations as hers rather than as findings, labels one story as hearsay, and flags a quotation as misattributed to Einstein. A book that never enters the evidence register cannot be marked down for failing it, and scoring this one against the usual standard here would produce a number that says nothing.

The second is that she credits her borrowings better than the genre normally does. Brown, Katie, Hendricks, Cameron, Luna, Ruiz, Pressfield, Brach, Perel, Siegel, Ravikant, Hari, Clance and Imes, usually with the year attached, often with the book. Three borrowings go uncredited: nonviolent communication is used structurally with Marshall Rosenberg unnamed, the phrase the Age of Anxiety is given to the New York Times rather than to Auden, and a Rumi poem is reproduced in full with no translator. Three misses out of roughly twenty is a good record, and where she credits she is frequently precise, giving the person, the credential, the book title and the underlying story. She is plainly capable of doing it properly, which makes the misses inconsistency rather than incapacity.

Where the pattern breaks is a real and specific distinction. She credits ideas and does not cite evidence. Sources are named for ideas and omitted for findings. There are about eight empirical-sounding sentences across 235 pages and every one of them is unsourced. Because there are so few, each carries far more weight than it would in a book that argued from evidence.

The third is a failure that is editorial rather than evidential, and it is independent of genre. The book narrates severe personal material at length, including addiction, mental health crises and bereavement, and it names not one clinician, therapist, treatment, programme, organisation or helpline, and carries no disclaimer anywhere, including on the back cover. The two nearest approaches, both in the addiction chapter, are generic exhortations to admit the problem and to find the strength to seek help. Help is never defined or located. One page groups taking prescribed medication alongside having a glass of wine as avoidance behaviour, which does not merely fail to point a reader towards care, it points gently away from it. A book need not be scientific to owe a distressed reader a signpost. That duty attaches to subject matter rather than to genre, and it is the one test this book fails on its own terms.

Two things belong beside that, because the criticism is about a duty of care and not about her honesty, which is better than her genre's average. She writes her own failures at full cost, including material that reflects badly on her. And she refuses the simple version of her own thesis: Part One contains a section arguing that not all worry is destructive, with a test for when it is legitimate. A book that wanted only a slogan would not have included it.

Key papers

Rae, A. (2018), Choose Wonder Over Worry, St Martin's Essentials. Read in full on 10 September 2026, pages 1 to 235 plus the author biography and back cover. The book this site holds her through, and the source of everything on this page.

Rae, A., The Answers Are Within You. Named in Choose Wonder Over Worry. Not read here, and no year or publisher is recorded.

Key ideas

The worry-wonder reframe. Her own central device, and the one idea in the book that is hers rather than borrowed.

Personified emotion. The structure of Part Two, and the thing the book is actually built out of: emotions addressed as characters with intentions rather than as states.

She credits ideas and does not cite findings. That is the precise shape of the gap, and it is what makes the handful of empirical-sounding sentences the riskiest lines in the book.

The duty of care is owed by subject matter, not by genre. Distress material without a signpost is the failure this site records against the book.

Working rule. Do not cite her for anything empirical, because there is nothing here to cite. Do cite her as a well-made, honestly framed example of how the personal-development category handles worry, and never quote her distress material without supplying the signposting the book does not.

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