Anxiety Quotes

For me, concept of death works as a liberator from anxiety -- no matter whatever is happening, its all going to end when we die.

~ Shon Mehta

For one, dazzling, infinite moment, August felt like he was standing on a precipice, the end of one world and the beginning of another, a whisper and a bang.

~ Victoria Schwab

When you are open to living and trust the process of life and ready to face all your fears, and not afraid to go astray with life, life definitely comes and talk to you, in its own language.

~ Roshan Sharma

But at home, that same day he'd jumped into the fountain, he'd gotten so anxious, pacing around the living room listening to his parents try to calm him, that he suddenly just lost it completely and slapped his face. He immediately started crying, confused and guilty, looking up at his parents like he had no idea how it happened. And, really, that's the way it always was with the hitting. It would happen so fast, his body shaking to release the tension that built up from all the thoughts swirling through his mind and all the air he was having trouble breathing and all the loud beating of his own heart ringing in his ears. It had to get out and that was the path it chose. Slap. Instant relief.

~ John Corey Whaley

People-pleasers feel they must constantly be performing acts of service to others to gain acceptance. That requires a lot of work, effort, and energy. From the book: Removing Your Shame Label.

~ Eddie Capparucci

What starts out as an intrusive thought can turn into an overwhelming concept if we feed it with more negative thinking. From the book: Removing Your Shame Label.

~ Eddie Capparucci

What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this would abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who's ever known it knows that it has no components but is instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next. And yet I keep lying, by describing, because how else can I avoid this second, and the one after it? This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.

~ Adam Haslett

Everything takes place at a right time. It’s your anxiety to achieve everything before time or grab things more than you required, add misery to your life.

~ Roshan Sharma

I was brought up,' Freddy informed him, 'not to suffer anxiety about decisive initiative of all types.

~ Mark Helprin

Forsake it in the morning. Do not ring it the next day.Make no commitment to comfort.

~ Taylor Patton

The plan is to start performing smaller venues and work my way up from there, this anxiety isn't going to get the better of me.

~ Zayn Malik

I felt sick. I couldn't breathe. The idea of it totally freaked me out and I was paralyzed with anxiety. This overwhelming fear just kicked in out of nowhere, bringing with it a shitstorm of self-doubt

~ Zayn Malik

But I was living my life sideway. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else.

~ Curtis Sittenfeld

Your man may be untroubled about the Future, not because he is concerned with the Present, but because he has persuaded himself that the Future is going to be agreeable. As long as that is the real course of his tranquillity, his tranquillity will do us good, because it is only piling up more disappointment, and therefore more impatience, for him when his false hopes are dashed. If, on the other hand, he is aware that horrors may be in store for him and is praying for the virtues, wherewith to meet them, and meanwhile concerning himself with the Present because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell, his state is very undesirable and should be attacked at once.

~ C.s. Lewis

Attempting to succeed in a competitive external environment, we can lose track of how to live without anxiety.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Even through the dulling effects of the pill, he wanted to be rid of his itching brain, his ignited skin, the flesh beneath, to in some way become so ethereal and Unbound to the earth that he could unsee, disavow, disavow

~ Jeff Vandermeer

He thought the library door would never open again, but that he would be left to live out the rest of his life rooted to the spot on the library carpet, afraid to move a muscle lest the house fall upon his shoulders. He deliberately shrugged them and shuffled his feel just to prove to himself that it could be done.

~ Mary Balogh

Rapid movement was a relief in the midst of so much feeling.

~ Gail Carson Levine

Everything in us presses toward decision, even toward the wrong decision, just to be free of the anxiety that precedes any big step in life.

~ May Sarton

Math anxiety is worst than a regular check up at the dentist.

~ Charmaine J. Forde

Nothing conquers the chaos around me like the calm assurance that I am at peace with God.

~ Ron Brackin

Procrastination is the lazy cousin of fear.When we feel anxiety around an activity, we postpone it.

~ Noelle Hancock

Anxiety has a purpose. Originally the purpose was to protect the existence of the caveman from wild beasts and savage neighbors. Nowadays the ocassions for anxiety are very different - we are afraid of losing out in the competition, feeling unwanted, isolated, and ostracized. But the purpose of anxiety is still to protect us from dangers that threaten the same things: our existence or values that we identify with our existence. This normal anxiety of life cannot be avoided except at the price of apathy or the numbing of one's sensibilities and imagination.

~ Rollo May

An anxious heart is like a string that's out of tune.

~ Naguib Mahfouz

The line between 'normal' and 'neurotic' begins to appear when any activity becomes compulsive - that is, when the person feels pushed to perform the act because it habitually allays his anxiety rather than because of any intrinsic wish to perform the act.

~ Rollo May

This is Long Island, land of the rushed, home of the stressed.

~ Will Bly

She finished getting ready with plenty of time to eat breakfast but didn't feel up to braving the dining hall; she still didn't know where it was or how it worked....In new situations, all the trickiest rules are the ones nobody bothers to explain to you. (And the ones you can't Google.) Like, where does the line start? What food can you take? Where are you supposed to stand, then where are you supposed to sit? Where do you go when you're done, why is everyone watching you?... Bah.

~ Rainbow Rowell

in this type of anxiety neurosis the anxious attitude is so intimately a part of the individual's method of evaluating stimuli, of orienting herself or himself to every experience, that he or she cannot separate him-or herself enough from anxiety to comprehend the goal of avoidance of, or freedom from, anxiety. What Nancy sought was to be able to step cautiously from rock to rock without falling; the idea or possibility of not being on a precipice at all did not occur to her.

~ Rollo May

It is very difficult to appreciate from the outside what a person in severe anxiety is experiencing. Brown rightly remarked about his friends 'imploring a drowning man [me] to swim when they don't know that under the water his hands and feet are tied.

~ Rollo May

anxiety, with its concomitant feelings of helplessness, isolation, and conflict, is an exceedingly painful experience. One tends to be angry and resentful toward those responsible for placing him in such a situation of pain. Clinical experience yields many examples like the following: A dependent person, finding himself in a situation of responsibility with which he feels he cannot cope, reacts with hostility both toward those who have placed him in the situation and toward those (usually parents) who caused him to be unable to cope with it. Or he feels hostility toward his therapist, whom he believes should bail him out

~ Rollo May

I'm the problem of anxiety we must, therefore, always ask the question of what vital value is being threatened

~ Rollo May

But, as is obvious to any observer, many people are thrown into anxiety by situations which are not objectively threatening either in kind or degree. The person may very often state himself that the occasion of his anxiety is a relatively minor event, that his apprehension is 'silly,' and he may be angry with himself for letting such a minor thing bother him; but he still feels it.

~ Rollo May

Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs.

~ Alain De Botton

The threat, thus, in anxiety is not necessarily more intense than fear. Rather, it attacks us on a deeper level. The threat must be to something in the 'core' or 'essence' of the personality. My self-esteem, my experience of myself as a person, my feeling of being of worth - all of these are imperfect descriptions of what is threatened.

~ Rollo May

One means of allaying anxiety is frantic activity. The anxiety arising out of the dilemma of powerlessness in the face of suprapersonal economic forces on one hand, but theoretical belief in the efficacy of individual effort on the other, was symptomized partly by excessive activism.

~ Rollo May

Intense fatigue or illness may also weaken the control of the cortex. Hence we find tired or sick persons responding to threats with a greater degree of undifferentiated anxiety. In psychoanalytic terms, we would speak of this as regression.

~ Rollo May

The threat of frustration of a biological urge does not cause conflict and anxiety unless that urge is identified with some value essential to the existence of the personality.

~ Rollo May

It struck me then, for the first time, how unethical anxiety is, how it voids the reality of other people by conscripting them as palliatives for your own fear.

~ Adam Haslett

I was afraid to go into a restaurant because I was intimidated by the waiters furtively hovering behind me waiting for my plate to be emptied. Most of all I dreaded paying a bill-my awkwardness when I handed over the money after buying something did not arise from my stinginess, but from excessive tension, excessive embarrassment, excessive uneasiness and apprehension.

~ Osamu Dazai

Honestly? I think all of this would be easier if I could point to one thing, one moment, one person, and say this is why. I could explain it, then. Understand the why of it. Blame it on something other than myself. If I were a victim, maybe it would keep everyone from being so frustrated with me. On a few occasions, I’ve even considered making up something, just to see the sympathy that flashed in my mom’s eyes a second ago, just to have her be patient with me for more than a minute at a time. But I’m not a liar, so instead I get the frustrated, calculating way she’s glaring at me now. I’ve seen it so many times before. It’s a look that makes my stomach ache.

~ Mila Ferrera