Quotes About Anxiety

Freedom is anxiety's petri dish. If routine blunts anxiety, freedom incubates it. Freedom says, Even if you don't want to make choices, you have to, and you can never be sure you have chosen correctly. Freedom says, Even not to choose is to choose. Freedom says, So long as you are aware of your freedom, you are going to experience the discomfort that freedom brings. Freedom says, You're on your own. Deal with it.

This is why therapists go to such lengths to urge their anxious patients away from intellectualization: The first step toward peace is disarmament.

The bargain was this: Admit the anxiety as an essential part of yourself and in exchange that anxiety will be converted into energy, unstable but manageable. Stop with the self-flagellating and become yourself, with scars and tics.

The hard work, you discover over the years, is in learning to discern between correct and incorrect anxiety, between the anxiety that's trying to warn you about a real danger and the anxiety that's nothing more than a lying, sadistic, unrepentant bully in your head. The hard work is in learning to step back and analyze the data dispassionately.

Anxiety compels a person to think, but it is the type of thinking that gives thinking a bad name: solipsistic, self-eviscerating, unremitting, vicious.

Singin' In the Rain might get you through an anxious week or two, but it won't get you through an anxious life. For that you need either a brain transplant (the only procedure of its kind, it has been said, in which it is better to be a donor than a recipient), a fully stocked bomb shelter, or a thorough adjustment of your perspective on existential risk and reward.

If this all sounds melodramatic, well that, too, isn't a bad metaphor for anxiety—as a kind of drama queen of the mind. If you have ever been friends with a drama queen you know how taxing it can be. To have one in your head is enough to make you comatose.

Anxiety and panic happen to be mundane phenomena, i.e., even when they are caused by extraordinary things like war and rape, they tend to occur when things are ordinary and predictable and relatively stable, against a backdrop of normal, everyday experience. This, of course, is one of the features of anxiety and panic that make them suck so bad.

Learning to address concerns methodically, with reference to logic and empirical evidence, is one of the most useful things an anxious person can do.

The hard work, you discover over the years, is in learning to discern between correct and incorrect anxiety, between the anxiety that's trying to warn you about a real danger and the anxiety that's nothing more than a lying, sadistic, unrepentant bully in your head.

Freud was of the opinion that in fear a person is responding to a specific and immediate threat to physical safety while in anxiety a person is responding to a threat that is objectless, directionless, and located somewhere far off in the future—ruination, for example, or humiliation, or decay.

One of the things anxiety educates you in is how deeply physical thought can be, how concrete. In anxiety, there is no time to luxuriate in abstractions. It's just you and your mind, which has fists and is using them. It may be dualistic and logically untenable to posit the situation as You v. Head; it may not make sense philosophically. But in the throes of anxiety? In the cognitive shit? There's really no other way to think about what's going on.

It's like I've had a stroke. Do you think I've had a stroke? I don't think you've had a stroke. But how do you know? How can you be sure I haven't had a stroke? What are the symptoms of a stroke? I don't know. Look them up. Look them up on line. OK. Hold on...OK. Here it is. Do you have trouble speaking? I have trouble speaking intelligently.

To be anxious wasn't shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be alive to life's contradictions, more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be a person who saw with sharper eyes and felt with more active skin. It was to be a writer, and I wanted in.

And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night.

la crainte du danger est dix mille fois plus effrayante que le danger lui-meme,et nous trouvons le poids de l'anxiete plus lourd de beaucoup que le mal que nous redoutans.

All this labour I was at the expence of, purely from my apprehension on the account of the print of a man's foot which I had seen; for as yet I never saw any human creature come near the island, and I had now lived two years under these uneasinesses, which indeed made my life much less comfortable than it was before;

fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself

Thus fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger it self, when apparent to the eyes; and we find the burthen of anxiety greater by much, than the evil which we are anxious about; and which was worse than all this, I had not that relief in this trouble from the resignation I used to practise, that I hop'd to have.

In trouble to be troubled, Is to have your trouble doubled.

Thus fear of danger is often thousand times more terrifying than danger itself when apparent to the eyes; and we find the burden of anxiety greater, by much, than the evil which we are anxious about;

Thus Fear of Danger is ten thousand Times more terrifying than Danger it self, when apparent to the Eyes; and we find the Burthen of Anxiety greater by much, than the Evil which we are anxious about; and

L'attesa di un male è un supplizio assai più grave del male stesso, soprattutto se non abbiamo la possibilità di scuoterci di dosso quell'ansia tormentosa.

Threats to our standing in the eyes of others are remarkably potent biologically, almost as powerful as those to our very survival.