Quotes About Anxiety

It is important that we and the public not confuse high sensitivity with "neuroticism," which includes certain types of intense anxiety, depression, overattachment, or avoidance of intimacy, and are usually due to a troubled childhood. True, some of us were dealt both hands in life—high sensitivity and neuroticism—but the two things are not at all the same.

HSPs know all about being "too tired to sleep." They are actually too frazzled to sleep.

It is painful to imagine what would have happened if I had been the sort to have shouted at Rob to shut up and get back to bed. He probably would have done just that, feeling abandoned in a dangerous world. But he would not have slept. His intuitive mind would have elaborated on the experience for hours, including probably deciding he was somehow to blame. With sensitive children, physical blows or traumas aren't required to make them afraid of the dark.

shy, weak, or that greatest sin of all, unsociable. Fearing these labels, we try to be like others. But that leads to our becoming overaroused and distressed.

HSPs with a troubled childhood are more at risk of becoming depressed, anxious, and shy than those with a similar childhood who are not highly sensitive. But HSPs with good-enough childhoods were no more at risk than others. Another study the same year by Miriam Liss and others found the same result, mainly for depression.

anxious HSPs almost all had troubled childhoods. Non-HSPs with troubled childhoods do not show nearly as much depression and anxiety.

If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of troubles

The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually fearing that you'll make one.

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.

There is nothing to fear except fear it's self.

Looking back I see that I was always afraid of something: of the dark, of displeasing people, of failure. Anything I accomplished had to be done across a barrier of fear. ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

Anxiety," Kierkegaard said, "is the dizziness of freedom.

Anxiety," Kierkegaard said, "is the dizziness of freedom." This freedom of which men speak, for which they fight, seems to some people a perilous thing. It has to be earned at a bitter cost and then—it has to be lived with. For freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.

Lies are better than tranquilizers.

I thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty, I thought anxiously, is this forgetfulness.

We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.

I felt squeezed in that vise along with the mass of everyday things and people, and I had a bad taste in my mouth, a permanent sense of nausea that exhausted me, as if everything, thus compacted, and always tighter, were grinding me up, reducing me to a repulsive cream.

That connection between anxiety and ugliness unexpectedly consoled me. You can turn ugly because of worries—

That people, even more than things, lost their boundaries and overflowed into shapelesness is what most frightened her.

I was so afraid that I thought I was sick. But was I sick? Did I really have a murmur in my heart? No. The only problem has always been the disquiet of my mind. I can't stop it, I always have to do, redo, cover, uncover, reinforce, and then suddenly undo, break.

For the first time, I left Naples, left Campania. I discovered that I was afraid of everything: afraid of taking the wrong train, afraid of having to pee and not knowing where to do it, afraid that it would be night and I wouldn't be able to orient myself in an unfamiliar city, afraid of being robbed. I put all my money in my bra, as my mother did, and spent hours in a state of wary anxiety that coexisted seamlessly with a growing sense of liberation.

Le cose brutte che non dici a nessuno diventano cani che ti mangiano la testa di notte mentre dormi.

she did not still feel, as I did, the anxiety about a woman who was suffering for love. What did I care about shoes. I still had, in my mind's eye, the most secret stages of that affair of violated trust, passion, poetry that became a book, and it was as if she and I had read a novel together, as if we had seen, there in the back of the shop and not in the parish hall on Sunday, a dramatic film. I