Anxiety Recovery Quotes & Sayings

That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren't ready, then you weren't ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that. — Norah Vincent

Silver-the first book of dreams — Kerstin Gier

Sometimes we self-sabotage just when things seem to be going smoothly. Perhaps this is a way to express our fear about whether it is okay for us to have a better life. We are bound to feel anxious as we leave behind old notions of our unworthiness. The challenge is not to be fearless, but to develop strategies of acknowledging our fears and finding out how we can allay them. — Maureen Brady

When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker ... but as survivors. Survivors who don't get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand. I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like. — Jenny Lawson

This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself. — Norah Vincent

Develop an 'attitude of gratitude. — Brian Tracy

Powerful new drug-free treatments have been developed for depression and for every conceivable type of anxiety, such as chronic worrying, shyness, public speaking anxiety, test anxiety, phobias, and panic attacks. The goal of the treatment is not just partial improvement but full recovery. — David D. Burns

I want to feel calm and at ease. Like someone who lives in Half Moon Bay, California, and makes hummus from scratch. Instead, I feel like I'm a contestant on some awful supermarket game show where I've got sixty seconds to hurl my shopping cart down the aisles, piling it with as much as possible before the buzzer goes off. — Augusten Burroughs

I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government — Henry David Thoreau

A level of anxiety and tension and outright fear that so many people have felt, not only during the recession but during this slow economic recovery since. This made me very much want to up the conversation about how miracle-minded thinking applies to that area of life. — Marianne Williamson

Suffering, therefore, is not merely the abrupt delivery of violence and death. Its greatest and most valuable expression is in dashed hopes, ruined dreams, perennial pain, torment, confusion, misunderstanding, prolonged anxiety, recovery, repair, exhaustion, and, eventually, full bodily capitulation in a drama where warm survivors, not cold victims, are more valuable to the Omnimalevolent Creator. — John Zande

I realized that I was okay with myself. I was quirky and withdrawn and loud, but I liked that. I smiled at strangers without thinking they were going to attack me and drag me into their cars. I went to doctors' offices and touched magazines that had been touched by sick people. — Anna White

Eating disorders are prevalent among women who were sexually abused as children. They seem to have components of other symptoms such as obsessions, compulsions, avoidance of food, and anxiety, and they primarily include a distorted body image and feelings of body shame.
For some women, eating disorders are related to the loss of control over their bodies during the sexual abuse and serve as a means of feeling in control of their bodies now. Eating disorders can also be indicative of the developmental stage and age at which the sexual abuse began. Women with anorexia and bulimia report that they were sexually abused either at the age of puberty or during puberty, when their bodies were beginning to develop and they felt a great deal of body shame from the abuse. By contrast, women with compulsive eating report that the sexual abuse occurred before the age of puberty; they used food for comfort. — Karen A. Duncan

Toxic relationships are dangerous to your health; they will literally kill you. Stress shortens your lifespan. Even a broken heart can kill you. There is an undeniable mind-body connection. Your arguments and hateful talk can land you in the emergency room or in the morgue. You were not meant to live in a fever of anxiety; screaming yourself hoarse in a frenzy of dreadful, panicked fight-or-flight that leaves you exhausted and numb with grief. You were not meant to live like animals tearing one another to shreds. Don't turn your hair gray. Don't carve a roadmap of pain into the sweet wrinkles on your face. Don't lay in the quiet with your heart pounding like a trapped, frightened creature. For your own precious and beautiful life, and for those around you - seek help or get out before it is too late. This is your wake-up call! — Bryant McGill

The mind that constantly wanders through the past is always a terrible mess. — Marwane Caber

Defrosting is excruciatingly painful. You have been numb for so long. As feeling comes back to your soul, you start to tingle, and it's uncomfortable and strange. But then the tingles start feeling like daggers. Sadness, loss, fear, anger, anxiety - all of these things that you have been numbing with the booze - you feel them for the first time. And it's horrific at first, to tell you the damn truth. But welcoming the pain and refusing to escape from it is the only way to recovery. You can't go around it, you can't go over it, you have to — Glennon Doyle Melton

Patriarchy, hierarchy, and capitalism create, encourage, maintain, and perpetuate addiction and dependency. Patriarchy and hierarchy are based on domination and subordination, which result in fear. This fear is expressed by the dominators through control and violence, and in subordinated people through passivity and repression of anger. The external conflict of hierarchy between dominants and subordinates becomes internalized in individuals, creating personal inner chaos, anxiety and duality. To quell the inner conflict people resort to addictive substances and behavior. — Charlotte Davis Kasl

At its heart, Codependency is a set of behaviors developed to manage the anxiety that comes when our primary attachments are formed with people who are inconsistent or unavailable in their response to us. Our anxiety-based responses to life can include over-reactivity, image management, unrealistic beliefs about our limits, and attempts to control the reality of others to the point where we lose our boundaries, self-esteem, and even our own reality. Ultimately, Codependency is a chronic stress disease, which can devastate our immune system and lead to systemic and even life-threatening illness. — Mary Crocker Cook

I've had a lot of therapists, so I've had the opportunity to approach my fear in many different ways. I've faced it head on and sideways and tried to tiptoe up behind it. — Anna White

Since the Second World War, rates of common mental illness (depression and anxiety) have been increasing in the industrialized nations, whereas rates of recovery from severe mental illness have not improved despite the availability of apparently effective therapies such as antipsychotic drugs. — Richard Bentall

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's true!" She whirled toward Jamie, fists clenched against the cloak she still wore. "It's true! It's the Sassenach witch! How could ye do such a thing to me, Jamie Fraser? — Diana Gabaldon

I would need an awful lot of willpower to fight my way through the ups and downs of the road to recovery, and there might be times when I may feel a bit down and depressed, but there would be counsellors that I could talk to about how I was feeling. — Sue Whitaker

Anxiety becomes high energy when taken to the light. For me, it worked like this: I used to live in a constant state of anxiety, worrying about the past and the future. Now I do my best to focus my attention on the present moment. So the mental energy I used to waste on worrying is channeled into the present, making me better able to focus intently and enthusiastically on a task (whether work or play). In a similar way, perfection becomes tenacity, and compulsivity becomes drive. Traits that once brought us down can lift us up when taken to the light. — Jenni Schaefer

In recovery, we try to take the opposite of our character defects/shortcomings and turn them into principles. For example, we work to change fear into faith, hate into love, egoism into humility, anxiety and worry into serenity, complacency into action, denial into acceptance, jealousy into trust, fantasizing into reality, selfishness into service, resentment into forgiveness, judgmentalism into tolerance, despair into hope, self-hate into self-respect, and loneliness into fellowship. Through this work we learn to understand the principles of our program. — Anonymous

Being stress and anxiety free is a human preset, I just show you how to 'flick the switch' to off. Permanent stress and anxiety recovery is possible quickly and simply despite what many are told. — Charles Linden

Does sex education encourage sex? Many parents are afraid that talking about sex with their teenagers will be taken as permission for the teen to have sex. Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the more children learn abour sexuality from talking with their parents and teachers and reading accurate books, the less they feel compelled to find out for themselves. — Benjamin Spock

If you have an old habit of competing and comparing yourself with others, then you are still living your life like a sperm. GROW UP!! — Saurabh Sharma

A small step toward recovery is giant progress. — Mark Cortes