Quotes About Anxiety

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more in apprehension than in reality,

to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside."c

species that "fear rightly" increase their chances of survival. We anxious people are less likely to remove ourselves from the gene pool by, say, frolicking on the edge of cliffs or becoming fighter pilots.

Fear sharpens the senses. Anxiety paralyzes them. —KURT GOLDSTEIN, The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology (1939)

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 and depression also have a shared basis in a feeling of a lack of self-esteem or self-efficacy. (Feeling like you have no control over your life is a common route to both anxiety and depression.) Moreover, reams of studies show that stress—ranging from job worries to divorce to bereavement to combat trauma—is a huge contributor to rates of both anxiety disorders and depression, as well as to hypertension, diabetes, and other medical conditions.

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 worry that their interpersonal awkwardness or the physical manifestations of anxiety—their blushing and shaking and stammering and sweating—will somehow reveal them to be weak or incompetent. So they get nervous, and then they stammer or blush, which makes them more nervous, which makes them stammer and blush more, which propels them into a vicious cycle of increasing anxiety and deteriorating performance. Blushing

But less so than I did before. Not long ago in my own therapy with Dr. W., we moved gingerly into "imaginal" exposure for my phobias.

Anxiety," he wrote, "is apprehension about future suffering—the fearful anticipation of an unbearable catastrophe one is hopeless to prevent." For Dr. W., the defining signature of anxiety, and what makes it more than a pure animal instinct, is its orientation toward the future.

If we expect to suffer, we are anxious," Darwin wrote in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. "If we have no hope of relief, we despair.")

Those who are unable to experience anxiety are, generally speaking, more deeply pathological—and more dangerous to society—than those who experience it acutely or irrationally; they're sociopaths.)

My anxiety is a reminder that I am governed by my physiology—that what happens in the body may do more to determine what happens in the mind than the other way around.

Dr. W. believes, as Freud did, that anxiety could be an adaptation meant to shield the psyche from some other source of sadness or pain. I ask him why, if that's the case, the anxiety often feels much more intense than the sadness.

A report published by Britain's Mental Health Foundation in 2009 concluded that a "culture of fear"—marked by a shaky economy and hyperbolic threat-mongering by politicians and the media—had produced "record levels of anxiety" in Great Britain.

The very best meditators seem even to be able to suppress their startle response, a rudimentary physiological reaction to loud noises or other sudden stimuli that is mediated through the amygdala. (The strength of one's startle response—whether measured in infancy or adulthood—has been shown to be highly correlated with the propensity to develop anxiety disorders and depression.)

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, some forty million Americans, nearly one in seven of us, are suffering from some kind of anxiety disorder at any given time, accounting for 31 percent of the expenditures on mental health care in the United States.

I smile gently while churning inside and thinking about what I've learned is a signature characteristic of the phobic personality: "the need and ability"—as described in the self-help book Your Phobia—"to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside."c

Fear arises from a weakness of mind and therefore does not appertain to the use of reason. —BARUCH SPINOZA (CIRCA 1670)

The result of a physiological fear response that has no legitimate object, or that is disproportionate to the size of the threat, can be pathological anxiety—an evolutionary impulse gone awry.

I knew it; I bloody knew it," he muttered. "It followed us. Whatever was in that house, it followed every one of us.

From ghoulies and ghosties And long-leggedy beasties And things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!

Father, I cannot add one minute to my life through worry. In fact, I can take a lot away from my life through trying to carry burdens you alone can carry. Turn my "What ifs?" into "Now thats"—now that Jesus has risen from the dead, everything has changed.

Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. (1 Pet. 5:7 NIV)