Anxiety Quotes - It is not depression or anxiety that
truly hurts us
“I sat down and tried to rest. I could not; though I
had been on foot all day, I could not now repose an instant; I was too much
excited. A phase of my life was closing tonight, a new one opening tomorrow:
impossible to slumber in the interval; I must watch feverishly while the change
was being accomplished.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
“In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I
have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to
stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is
precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some
obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men's, and yet
not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods
“I never do enjoy my breaks, long or short...I look
forward to them intensely, but as soon as they begin, I can feel them starting
to end. I feel the temporariness of my freedom, and find it hard to concentrate
on anything other than the sensation of it trickling away.”
― Sophie Hannah, The Wrong Mother
“The sky was so blue I couldn’t look at it because it
made me sad, swelling tears in my eyes and they dripped quietly on the floor as
I got on with my day. I tried to keep my focus, ticked off the to-do list, did
my chores. Packed orders, wrote emails, paid bills and rewrote stories,
but the panic kept growing, exploding in my chest.
Tears falling on the desk
tick tick tick
me not making a sound
and some days I just don't know what to do. Where to go
or who to see and I try to be gentle, soft and kind,
but anxiety eats you up and I just want to be fine.”
― Charlotte Eriksson
“It is not depression or anxiety that truly hurts us.
It is our active resistance against these states of mind and body. If you wake
up with low energy, hopeless thoughts, and a lack of motivation - that is a
signal from you to you. That is a sure sign that something in your mind or in
your life is making you sick, and you must attend to that signal. But what do
most people do? They hate their depressed feelings. They think "Why
me?" They push them down. They take a pill. And so, the feelings return
again and again, knocking at your door with a message while you turn up all the
noise in your cave, refusing to hear the knocks. Madness. Open the door. Invite
in depression. Invite anxiety. Invite self-hatred. Invite shame. Hear their
message. Give them a hug. Accept their tirades as exaggerated mistruths typical
of any upset person. Love your darkness and you shall know your light.”
― Vironika Tugaleva
“Some part of me can't wait to see what life's going to
come up with next! Anticipation without the usual anxiety. And underneath it
all is the feeling that we both belong here, just as we are, right now.”
― Alexander Shulgin
“Fear and anxiety affect decision making in the
direction of more caution and risk aversion... Traumatized individuals pay more
attention to cues of threat than other experiences, and they interpret
ambiguous stimuli and situations as threatening (Eyesenck, 1992), leading to
more fear-driven decisions. In people with a dissociative disorder, certain
parts are compelled to focus on the perception of danger. Living in
trauma-time, these dissociative parts immediately perceive the present as being
"just like" the past and "emergency" emotions such as fear,
rage, or terror are immediately evoked, which compel impulsive decisions to
engage in defensive behaviors (freeze, flight, fight, or collapse). When parts
of you are triggered, more rational and grounded parts may be overwhelmed and
unable to make effective decisions.”
― Suzette Boon, Coping with Trauma-Related
Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists
“The human ego prefers anything, just about anything,
to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the
status quo – even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and
fears the future.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the
Two Halves of Life
“The more honest you are, the more open, the less fear
you will have, because there's no anxiety about being exposed or revealed to
others.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness
“When someone is stalking you because they think you
are stalking them, it makes you wonder who really is the true stalker?”
― Shannon L. Alder
“…there is also an underlying, less specific fear -
what some might call an ontological or existential anxiety - that shrouds our
days and seeps into our dreams. We feel empty and seek meaning. We feel empty
and seek meaning. We yearn and know not what we yearn for. There is a black
hole at the center of our understanding that engulfs and crushes our every
attempt to explore it. Something is missing. ”
― Jesse Browner
“She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show
it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous
Men
“My room is the safest place my body has. My mind
doesn’t really have a safe place.”
― Anna Whateley
“I had the chance to make every possible mistake and
figure out a way to recover from it. Once you realize there is life after
mistakes, you gain a self-confidence that never goes away.”
― Bob Schieffer, This Just In: What I Couldn't Tell You
on TV
“You may marry Miss Grey for her fifteen pounds but you
will always be my Willoughby. My nightmare. My sorrow. My past. My mistake. My
regret. My love.”
― Shannon L. Alder
“That is how I experience life, as apocalypse and
cataclysm. Each day brings an increasing inability in myself to make the
smallest gesture, even to imagine myself confronting clear, real situations.
The presence of others — always such an unexpected event for the soul — grows
daily more painful and distressing. Talking to others makes me shudder. If they
show any interest in me, I flee. If they look at me, I tremble. I am constantly
on the defensive. Life and other people bruise me. I can’t look reality in the
eye.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“I didn't totally fit in. I kind of disintegrated
around people and became what they wanted me to be. But paradoxically, I felt
an intensity inside me all the time. I didn't know what it was, but it kept
building, like water behind a dam. Later, when I was properly depressed and
anxious, I saw the illness as an accumulation of all that thwarted intensity. A
kind of breaking through. As though, if you find it hard enough to let your
self be free, your self breaks in, flooding your mind in an attempt to drown
all those failed half-versions of you.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
“Dropping in and out of your own life (for psychotic
breaks, or treatment in a hospital) isn’t like getting off a train at one stop
and later getting back on at another. Even if you can get back on (and the odds
are not in your favor), you’re lonely there. The people you boarded with
originally are far, far ahead of you, and now you’re stuck playing catch-up.”
― Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey
Through Madness
