Quotes About Anxiety

For anxiety and dread, the threat is in the future. For fear, the threat is now—in the present. Fear is a negative, short-lasting, high-alert emotion in response to a perceived threat, and, like anxiety, it can be measured as a state or trait.

We'll be watching to see if there is room for those new molars," he said. "Richie may need braces soon." Mom didn't say anything. She was back where no one could reach her. Did she even hear him? Well, I heard. Braces! They'd have to find me first. I hoped Dr. Dory couldn't swim. I already knew that my mother had never been in anything deeper or colder than bathtub water.

Most horror movies are certainly that.

The prospect of success in achieving our most cherished dream is not without its terrors. Who is more deprived and alone than the man who has achieved his dream

Every man, through fear, mugs his aspirations a dozen times a day.

We need a new kind of relationship with the Father that drives out fear and mistrust and anxiety and guilt, that permits us to be hopeful and joyous, trusting and compassionate.

I laugh maniacally, then take a deep breath and touch my chest- expecting a heart to be thumping quickly, impatiently, but there's nothing there, not even a beat.

Perhaps emotion, when it is tightly disciplined, turns into worry.

He could hear Matthews saying, 'Worry before, and you'll be prepared. Worry afterwards and you'll keep your feet on the ground. But don't worry during action; that's fatal.

She and David had a running joke about how they both feared their kids at night the same way that, as children, they'd feared monsters under the bed. Beasts that would rise up from the side of your bed, seize you with sharp nails and demand things of you.

A life lived in fear is a life half-lived

Hasn't it ever occurred to you that in your promiscuous pursuit of women you are merely trying to assuage your subconscious fears of sexual impotence? Yes, sir, it has. Then why do you do it? To assuage my fears of sexual impotence.

you believe that the only way to be successful in a pressure situation is to perform better than you ever have performed before—that is, to be perfect—you stop trusting your capabilities, and worse, you start doing things that do not help you succeed. You

He wondered if he was simply starting to crumble under the weight of all the responsibility and was now on a downward trajectory to a point where only fear remained. He

What scared him more than anything else was an old age spent simply waiting to die, a time when nothing of what had been his life was still possible.

Don't you understand that this is serious?" she screamed. "Anna is missing!

I couldn't feel the unreserved joy I should be experiencing, which worried me. Why did I carry my emotions as if they were a burden?

The dread of something menacing that you felt when you were a child returns when you get old.

It wasn't that the Gospel proved useful for my many worries but that the Gospel proved the uselessness of my worries and so refocused my whole attention.

More enslaving than our occupations, however, are our preoccupations. To be pre-occupied means to fill our time and place long before we are there. This is worrying in the more specific sense of the word. It is a mind filled with "ifs." We say to ourselves, "What if I get the flu? What if I lose my job? What if my child is not home on time? What if there is not enough food tomorrow? What if I am attacked? What if a war starts? What if the world comes to an end? What if . . . ?

When we worry, we have our hearts in the wrong place.

Our individual as well as communal lives are so deeply molded by our worries about tomorrow that today hardly can be experienced.

A lot of people have to spend so much energy on overcoming their low opinion of themselves that they seldom get round to asking about the purpose of their existence. And if they do, it is often out of fear.

The movement from loneliness to solitude should lead to a gradual conversion from an anxious reaction to a loving response. — Henri J. M. Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life ( Doubleday, 1975)