Quotes About Anxiety

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.

Reassurance can actually exacerbate anxiety: when you reassure your friend that the worst-case scenario he fears probably won't occur, you inadvertently reinforce his belief that it would be catastrophic if it did. You are tightening the coil of his anxiety, not loosening it. All to often, the Stoics point out, things will not turn out for the best.

Anxiety and fear are cousins but not twins. Fear sees a threat. Anxiety imagines one.

Generally speaking, the anxiety will pass, which is easy for me to say when I'm not in the middle of an anxiety attack. When you're in the throes of one, it's hard to feel anything other than utter misery and terror.

Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more completely. Perhaps the best way to phrase it is to say that meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire. They exist in relationship to each other, not independently.

In the end, I feel that one has to have a bit of neurosis to go on being an artist. A balanced human seldom produces art. It's that imbalance which impels us. I often think that all I want to do now is to avoid suicide, accidental or otherwise. Other than that, I think living on the edge is what drives my work and me beyond a certain point. The artist lives with anxiety. When you finally reach a plateau of achievement, there comes a new anxiety - the hunger to push on still further. That angst is what makes you go forward.

One of the most effective ways to overcome anxiety is to try to shift the focus of attention away from self and toward others.

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.

The anxiety does crawl up. The other night I was having panic attacks: 'Oh, my God, what's going to happen to me? Am I ever going to have another job?

It is important to understand that while oxytocin may be the hub of the evolution of the social brain in mammals, it is part of a very complex system. Part of what it does is act in opposition to stress hormones, and in that sense release of oxytocin feels good - as stress hormones and anxiety do not feel good.

The president Donald Trump took an important first step. Literally, we hadn't heard him speak in the way that he did, talking about that these threats are painful and that anti-Semitism is horrible. Of course we agree. But, as we have said for a long time, now we need the next step, which is a plan of action to calm these communities where anxiety has reached an incredibly high level.

Don’t get depressed about not being where you want to be. This nagging feeling of anxiety is actually called ambition. Ambition is your friend.

Gather experience... Look at what you should not look at. A feeling of anxiety is the sure and certain evidence that you should do this.

I have a lot of anxiety about medical things for example. I don't think I'm particularly good at it, but I'd had the practice when I went into shooting Synecdoche. It can be somewhat gratifying, too, because I don't have that relationship with other adults where I need to comfort them or they come to me for that.

Life...as God intended it enables us to live above the drag of fear, superstition, shame, pessimism, guilt, anxiety, worry, and all the negativity that keeps people from seizing each day as a gift from Him.

Another dream. Another long-distance call on my phantom party line. No wonder i had steadfastly refused to have dreams for most of my life. So stupid; such pointless, obvious symbols. Totally uncontrollable anxiety soup, hateful, blatant nonsense.

I had spent about three months where I couldn't sing at all, so that was anxiety-provoking. But after that, I went back out. I sang for two hours in my garage one day to see if I had a voice.

Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.

Release all the anxiety that keeps you from moving ahead. Keep breathing it out and letting it go.

I constantly have anxiety about being the lead of the show. I don't talk about it because it scares me. But I've always wanted to be part of something where I could work on a character in such a big manner, and you get offered that with all the trappings of being the lead of the show.

A higher rate of urgency does not imply ever-present panic, anxiety, or fear. It means a state in which complacency is virtually absent.

Magic enables man to carry out with confidence his important tasks, to maintain his poise and his mental integrity in fits of anger, in the throes of hate, of unrequited love, of despair and anxiety. The function of magic is to ritualize man's optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism.

We've been taught that the Christian life is a life of peace, and when we don't have peace, we assume the problem lies within us. Not only do we feel anxious, but we also feel guilty about our anxiety! The result is a downward spiral of worry, guilt, worry, guilt.

Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.

Worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is the oil.

I am nothing if not rational about what is worthy of my anxiety and what is not, and I refuse to live my life as if a giant bus is just around the corner, waiting to crush me the minute I step off the curb.

If an actor ever says they really enjoy the auditioning process, I truly believe that they're lying. It's an anxiety-filled waking nightmare. It's awful.

Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.

The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now.

At some stages of your life you will deal with things and at others you are overwhelmed with misery and anxiety.

Stress and anxiety cause our brains to release chemicals that put lines in our faces and tear us down emotionally and spiritually.

Every tomorrow has two handles we can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith If you can quit, quit. If you can't quit, stop complaining - this is what you chose.

It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars.

Anxiety uses imagination to picture something you don't want. Vision uses imagination to picture something you DO want. Either way, you tend to get what you focus on. Imagine a future where you shine, others thrive, and the light of hope shines brighter in the world. If you can see it, you can be it.

The public, as a whole, does not demand or appreciate the pure expression of beauty. Its cultured members expect to find in poetry, if anything, repose from material and nervous anxiety; an apt or chiselled phrase strokes the appetites and tickles the imagination. The more general public merely enjoys its platitudes and truisms jerked on to the understanding in line and rhyme; truth put into metre sounds overwhelmingly true.

God knows we have our own demons to be cast out, our own uncleanness to be cleansed. Neurotic anxiety happens to be my own particular demon, a floating sense of doom that has ruined many of what could have been, should have been, the happiest days of my life, and more than a few times in my life I have been raised from such ruins, which is another way of saying that more than a few times in my life I have been raised from death - death of the spirit anyway, death of the heart - by the healing power that Jesus calls us both to heal with and to be healed by.

the boys had learned that laughter stilled anxiety. It cleared away mystery. If you could laugh at something, it erased its importance.

Being thin created intense anxiety that I wouldn't be able to maintain that weight for life, and I couldn't.

Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his [mankind's] ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.

Racism as a form of skin worship, and as a sickness and a pathological anxiety for America, is so great, until the poor whites -- rather than fighting for jobs or education -- fight to remain pink and fight to remain white. And therefore they cannot see an alliance with people that they feel to be inherently inferior.

The feeling that was born that night, how could i describe it?Words like love or lust just don't seem right. I may call it jealousy, or may be anxiety and moreover, need. Even now I'm anxious at times because when I am with Ren, everything around feels like a dream. That was how Ren turned my boring life into an illusion, and that was too much for no matter how hard i tried, it seemed I could never catch him.

I perceive value, I confer value, I create value, I even create — or guarantee — existence. Hence, my compulsion to make “lists.” The things (Beethoven’s music, movies, business firms) won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names. Nothing exists unless I maintain it (by my interest, or my potential interest). This is an ultimate, mostly subliminal anxiety. Hence, I must remain always, both in principle + actively, interested in everything. Taking all of knowledge as my province.

One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and what people can do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities, the result is boredom. But when the match is just right, the results can be glorious. This is the essence of flow.

Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle, negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm.

I hear people say they're going to write. I ask, when? They give me vague statements. Indefinite plans get dubious results. When we're concrete about our writing time, it alleviates that thin constant feeling of anxiety that writers have - we're barbecuing hot dogs, riding a bike, sailing out in the bay, shopping for shoes, even helping a sick friend, but somewhere nervously at the periphery of our perception we know we belong somewhere else - at our desk!

No doubt the [presedential] campaigns have reflected some anxiety, anger, and resentment in the nation at large, and we must try to understand these attitudes in the electorate.

The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.

Neurotics are anxiety prone, accident prone, and often just prone.