Quotes About Anxiety

Tell your lizard (brain) to shut up.

I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance…and if you have anxiety about initiating a project, then of course you will associate risk with failure.

Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance. Tell yourself enough vivid stories about the worst possible outcome of your work and you'll soon come to believe them. Worry is not preparation, and anxiety doesn't make you better.

Finding security in mediocrity is an exhausting process. You can work only so many hours, fret only so much. Being a slightly better typist or a slightly faster coder is insufficient. You're always looking over your shoulder, always trying to be a little less mediocre than the guy next to you. It wears you out.

When you work under the cloud of anxiety, the best strategy is to play it safe, because if (when!) it fails, you'll be blameless.

We're extremely adroit at hiding our fear. Most of our lives in public are spent papering over, rationalizing, and otherwise denying our fear. We go to war because we're afraid, and we often go to spiritual events for the very same reason.

Eye contact, all by itself, is enough to throw your lizard brain into a tizzy. Imagine how scary it must be to set out to do something that will get you noticed, or perhaps even criticized.

The killer: our anxiety not only makes us miserable, but ruins the interaction. People smell it on you. They react to it. They're less likely to hire you or buy from you or have fun at your party. The very thing you are afraid of occurs, precisely because you are afraid of it, which of course makes the shenpa cycle even worse.

Most of our lives in public are spent papering over, rationalizing, and otherwise denying our fear. We go to war because we're afraid, and we often go to spiritual events for the very same reason.

Anxiety is nothing but repeatedly reexperiencing failure in advance. What a waste.

the fear remains. The old stories of what happened to Joe or Bob or Sue thirty years ago are told over and over. We use them to stoke our fear, to rationalize our desire to hide.

frantically

This is what tension feels like. The tension of being left behind.

The time we spend worrying is actually time we're spending trying to control something that is out of our control.

Kiasu is the Hokkien word for "the fear of being left behind" or not getting enough.

The Two Reasons Seeing the Future Is So Difficult Attachment to an outcome combined with the resistance and fear of change.

I'd like to paraphrase the Peter Principle. I think what actually happens is that "in every organization everyone rises to the level at which they become paralyzed with fear." The

Hope and fear are two sides of the same coin... She didn't want to give up hope, so she was just going to have to live with the fear.

I had not said anything about what had happened the day before—about being scared down to my very bones when I thought they had left me. I don't know what came over me. Ever since my mother left us that April day, I suspected that everyone was going to leave, one by one.

Earthquake report: Call the paramedics. A girl in fifth grade is about to explode.

Fearful of wasting a second, we hoard time as if it were money.

The secure attachment of Western psychology is actually akin to Buddhist non-attachment; avoid-ant attachment is the inverse of being mindful and present; and anxious attachment aligns with Buddhist notions of clinging and grasping.

If I wasn't writing poems, I'd be washing my hands all the time.

So I wonder: Will a person who has drowned, Or almost drowned, always feel Like they're drowning, Even after they've been saved?