Quotes About Anxiety

He looked around at the chaos of the jacked-up children and then back at his nervous daughter. "I believe I'll stay, if you don't mind." What if she did mind? What if the idea of him watching her for the next two hours made her more nervous than a turkey at Thanksgiving?

Every instinct inside her cried out for her to rush back down the street, race up the three flights to her apartment, climb into her bed and yank the covers over her head.

Endless worry about tomorrow only steals joy from today.

My brain is so anxiety-prone, like a pinball machine. If I don't get up in the morning and focus my thinking, my breathing, and my being for about 12 minutes, I'm just a screwball all day long.

The experience of riding in a subway or elevator calls to mind Bertrand Russell's remark that much of modern anxiety stems from the time we spend in unnatural proximity to strangers without the preliminary sniffing that is instinctive in animals, including us.

Fear is felt by writers at every level. Anxiety accompanies the first word they put on paper and the last.

wrote Lawrence Block. "Someone once told me that fear and courage are like lightning and thunder; they both start out at the same time, but the fear travels faster and arrives sooner. If we just wait a moment, the requisite courage will be along shortly." (quoted from Write for Your Live by Lawrence Block)

Fear flushes clogged pores of perception.

Authors always feel in danger of being abandoned by loved ones. This is a potent fear. Yet it's as inevitable as writer's cramp when we presume to write words for others to read.

Reading this book is like waiting for the first shoe to drop.

severe depression as well as depersonalization disorder, which is to say he no longer felt in control of his feelings, emotions, or behaviors. He was aware of his actions, but felt he was watching them from a third-person perspective. I recommended he take corrective action to reduce the depression and anxiety he was experiencing.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

What torments of grief you endured, from evils that never arrived.

The moment we fear anything we open the door for the entrance of the actualization of the very thing we fear.

Nerviosismo de la ciudad: no poder abrir el paquetito de azúcar para el café.

We are united by our common fears and divided by our individual freedom!"

The surest signs of spiritual progress are a lack of concern about spiritual progress and an absence of anxiety about liberation.

The crying wailed, somewhere beneath the planks. Several sweeps of the light showed that the cellar was otherwise deserted. Though the face mouthed behind him, he ventured down. For God's sake, get it over with; he knew he would never dare return.

The reality for those in the successful inner circle is simply "the mundanity of excellence": a smoothly applied routine of using finely tuned resources with the confidence that one knows how to make them pay off. To those in the outer tiers, even those in the second competitive rank, there seems to be some mysterious quality that the successful possess, and this sense of difference generates a barrier of anxiety which makes it all the more impassable.

In the meanwhile, people with anxiety disorders deserve recognition for their courage and daily determination to live full lives despite their symptoms.

First, the rest of medicine recognizes symptoms, such as pain and cough, as protective defenses and carefully distinguishes them from the disorders that arouse them. In psychiatry, by contrast, extremes of emotions, such as anxiety and low mood, are categorized as disorders, irrespective of any situation that might be arousing them. This error is so basic and pervasive that it deserves a name: Viewing Symptoms As Diseases (VSAD).

Internal medicine doctors know the functions of the kidneys. They don't confuse protective defenses such as cough and pain with diseases such as pneumonia and cancer. Psychiatrists lack a similar framework for the utility of stress, sleep, anxiety, and mood, so psychiatric diagnostic categories remain confusing and crude.

Just as the capacity for experiencing fatigue has evolved to protect us from overexertion, the capacity for sadness may have evolved to prevent additional losses. Maladaptive extremes of anxiety, sadness, and other emotions make more sense when we understand their evolutionary origins and normal, adaptive functions.

Worry is momentary atheism crying out for correction by trust in a good, sovereign God. Suffering breaks self-reliance.