Quotes & Tips on Anxiety

[David Baxter PhD]

I love Joseph Campbell. I watched his PBS series with Bill Moyers years ago and bought the book, The Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers. Worth a read.

 

[Daniel E.]

 

[Daniel E.]

"You can relax because everything you could ever want or be, you already have and are."

~ I Heart Huckabees

 

[Daniel E.]

 

[Daniel E.]

“If you surrender to uncertainty, nothing goes wrong.”

~ Deepak Chopra

 

[Daniel E.]

Supporting a Partner With an Anxiety Disorder

Living with someone who has an anxiety disorder can strain a romantic relationship. Here's what to do about it.

www.psychologytoday.com

“Patience, open-mindedness, and caring will go a long way to supporting a partner who is struggling with anxiety. We cannot 'cure' another person’s anxiety, but we can do our best to support them as they learn to manage it. Remember that anxiety does not define the person or your relationship. Work to build positive experiences together as a couple—laugh, travel, do things you enjoy, spend time with friends, have fun. These positive experiences can serve as a buffer to the stress anxiety can cause.”

~ Kathleen Tallon

 

[Daniel E.]

Shift from Worry to Wonder

Shift from Worry to Wonder Whenever our mind desperately tries to control some future event, we experience anxiety and worry. Worry creates an image of an event or problem that's in future and then – like a faithful servant – our body tries to work on it. This plays a dirty trick on the body by...

forum.psychlinks.ca

Expect a surprise. Tell your worrying mind to take a break and expect a surprise. Practice rapidly shifting from trying to know what's going to happen in the future to being comfortable wondering what interesting solutions and surprises soon will occur to you. Tell your worrying mind "You haven't the foggiest idea how we'll get through this one, so it's going to be a surprise. This is going to be interesting."

 

[Daniel E.]

Phone Call Anxiety: Why So Many of Us Have It, and How to Get Over It

If you find phone calls stressful, there are a few things you can do to make it easier.

getpocket.com

One of the most effective ways to overcome phone anxiety is to expose yourself to more phone calls. The more you do it, the less overwhelming it becomes. It’s also likely that your phone anxiety is linked to a lack of experience. The more practice you have, the less anxious and more confident you’ll feel.

 

[gooblax]

Phone Call Anxiety: Why So Many of Us Have It, and How to Get Over It

If you find phone calls stressful, there are a few things you can do to make it easier.

getpocket.com

One of the most effective ways to overcome phone anxiety is to expose yourself to more phone calls. The more you do it, the less overwhelming it becomes. It’s also likely that your phone anxiety is linked to a lack of experience. The more practice you have, the less anxious and more confident you’ll feel.

True although it's really difficult to get started.

 

[Daniel E.]

That was the good thing about rotary phones. You could work off your anxiety by dialing the number

 

[gooblax]

I never used a functional rotary phone, only had one as a toy. I like dancing to call waiting music to get rid of anxiety, but it's anxiety inducing when they loop the music with a giant click-pause that sounds like someone has answered, only to resume the music.

 

[Daniel E.]

“Anything I have ever done that was ultimately worthwhile, initially scared me to death!”

― Helen Keller

 

[Daniel E.]

“Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known.”

"Meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire. They exist in relationship to each other, not independently.”

― Mark Epstein, Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life -- Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy

 

[Daniel E.]

“The way out Is through.”

― various

 

[Daniel E.]

“þetta reddast” (‘it’ll all work out in the end’)

~ Icelandic saying


"I think the Icelanders had to face so many hardships that they learned to meet adversity with a combination of laissez-faire and capitulation. It’s something that became ingrained in the Icelandic people through centuries of living with a climate and landscape that always had the upper hand, against which you had to surrender, again and again, because you couldn’t fight them. It’s difficult in Iceland not to feel your insignificance against the elements.”

~ Alda Sigmundsdóttir

 

[Daniel E.]

Breaking Anxiety's Bizarre Death Loop

A person can be utterly overwhelmed by fear even though there's nothing organically wrong within his or her brain: complex systems can go off the rails despite every component working properly, a phenomenon of which ant colonies offer a vivid example.

www.psychologytoday.com

The complex societies of eusocial insects like ants and bees can be a useful model for the workings of the human brain. In both cases, an intercommunicating population of dumb agents (insects/neurons) spontaneously gives rise to an entity capable of complex behavior (the hive/the brain). And, as it turns out, the human brain has its own version of the ant mill. It can get caught in a loop, so to speak, without anything being wrong with it organically...

When we feel fear, we’re not just following a trail; we’re leaving one too. That is to say, fear is not just a response to aversive stimuli, but an aversive stimulus itself. And so, like an ant mill, the path of fear can double back on itself.

 

[Daniel E.]

Phenomenology of racing and crowded thoughts in mood disorders: A theoretical reappraisal​

"Crowded thoughts may be conceptualized as a pathological thought process characterized by the occurrence of too many thoughts that co-exist almost simultaneously in consciousness, and that give to the subject a sense of constant and unpleasant agitation in his/her own thinking."

​

Various forms of depression

Symptoms similar to those of mixed depression (especially irritability and psychomotor agitation) can be found in other Axis I disorders, especially in the anxiety disorders which frequently co-occur in mood disorders. "Crowded thoughts,“ ie, the flooding of the mind by ideas which cannot be stopped, are similar to obsessive ruminations and to the ruminations of excessive worry. Irritability is frequent in major depressive disorder, and psychomotor agitation can be a sign of major depressive disorder or of anxiety. ”Anxious depression“ was defined as a major depressive disorder plus the ”psychic anxiety“ item of the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, which includes excessive worrying.

 

[Daniel E.]

Amazon.com

Have you ever had an unwelcome thought that you just couldn't get rid of, no matter how hard you tried to push it away?

In Catching Thoughts, a girl is plagued by an unwanted thought. No matter what she does--ignore it, yell at it, cry about it--the thought won't go away. Frustrated and discouraged, she finally looks that bad thought in the face and says, ""Hello."" At last, she is able to notice other more beautiful, positive thoughts all around her. As she catches hold of new thoughts, the girl discovers she can fill her mind with whatever she chooses.

For every child who has been weighed down by sadness or anxiety, this story teaches kids how to acknowledge unwanted thoughts, show them compassion, then actively replace them with positive thoughts instead. Catching Thoughts is a quiet, thoughtful story that teaches readers how to practice mindfulness, focusing on thoughts that bring beauty, joy, and calm into their lives.

 

[Daniel E.]

 

[Daniel E.]

Amazon.com