Quotes from Scott Stossel

There is an element in which anxiety co-represents with aspects of my personality I wouldn't want to give up. It allows you to have foresight. I may not be as empathetic. It's hard to figure out the difference between pathology and personality.

People who suffer from anxiety are very good at hiding it. That can often be a contributor to the anxiety because the gap between the internal perception and the external impression can feel so large.

I wanted to put a human face on anxiety disorders. I thought people who suffer from anxiety might recognize themselves and gain some comfort from my story and for those who don't suffer from anxiety disorders gain some understanding.

Hugh Grant, who several times has announced that he was thinking of retiring from acting, has said that he suffers from panic attacks when the cameras start rolling.

An astonishing portion of my life is built around trying to evade vomiting and preparing for the eventuality that I might.

Many nights, I would begin the evening fueled by caffeine and nicotine, which I needed to propel me out of torpor and hopelessness - only to overshoot into quaking, quivering anxiety.

During high school, I would purposely lose tennis and squash matches to escape the agony of anxiety that competitive situations would provoke in me.

Anxiety has afflicted me all my life.

I've always been interested in intellectual history and in psychology, and anxiety is obviously something that's been a big part of my life.

I don't want to be in a position that could make me vomit, like air travel. I've purloined airsick bags and stuffed them everywhere, just in case I ever feel the need to throw up. I haven't vomited since 1977, but I think about it all the time. I recognize that it's irrational, but I'd rather jump out of a window than vomit.

During first grade, I spent nearly every afternoon for months in the school nurse's office, sick with psychosomatic headaches, begging to go home; by third grade, stomachaches had replaced the headaches, but my daily trudge to the infirmary remained the same.

I am living on the razor's edge between success and failure, adulation and humiliation - between justifying my existence and revealing my unworthiness to be alive.

As recently as 1979, neither panic attacks nor panic disorder officially existed.

Even though my mom herself was anxious, I think she didn't know how to deal with it in her kid, and my dad just had no conception of what this was about, and sort of didn't even want to acknowledge it.

To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I'm like a duck--paddling, paddling, paddling.

It is a fact—I say this from experience—that being severely anxious is depressing. Anxiety can impede your relationships, impair your performance, constrict your life, and limit your possibilities.

social phobics are better at picking up on subtle social cues than other people are—but they tend to overinterpret anything that could be construed as a negative reaction.

The truth is that anxiety is at once a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture.

Some social phobics find even positive attention to be aversive. Think of the young child who bursts into tears when guests sing "Happy Birthday" to her at a party—or of Elfriede Jelinek afraid to pick up her Nobel Prize. Social attention—even positive, supportive attention—activates the neurocircuitry of fear. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Calling positive attention to yourself can incite jealousy or generate new rivalries.

But none of these treatments have fundamentally reduced the underlying anxiety that seems woven into my soul and hardwired into my body and that at times makes my life a misery. As the years pass, the hope of being cured of my anxiety has faded into a resigned desire to come to terms with it, to find some redemptive quality or mitigating benefit to my being, too often, a quivering, quaking, neurotic wreck.

Individuals who rate high on the so-called Anxiety Sensitivity Index, or ASI, have a high degree of what's known as interoceptive awareness, meaning they are highly attuned to the inner workings on their bodies, to the beepings and bleatings, the blips and burps, of their physiologies; they are more conscious of their heart rate, blood pressure, digestive burblings, and so forth than other people are.

panic disorder with agoraphobia (DSM-V code 300.22): the condition, as Hippocrates described it, "usually attacks abroad, if a person is travelling a lonely road somewhere, and fear seizes him.

A panic attack is interesting the way a broken leg or a kidney stone is interesting—a pain that you want to end.

Hippocrates, the ancient Greek doctor, concluded in the fourth century B.C. that pathological anxiety was a straightforward biological and medical problem. "If you cut open the head [of a mentally ill individual]," Hippocrates wrote, "you will find the brain humid, full of sweat and smelling badly." For Hippocrates, "body juices" were the cause of madness; a sudden flood of bile to the brain would produce anxiety.