Bad Anxiety Quotes & Sayings

No doubt I do act in 'bad faith' when I deliberately avoid facing an honest decision and follow the conventional pattern of behavior in order to be spared the anxiety that comes when one is ... thrown into seventy thousand fathoms. — John Macquarrie

This is the hour I hide everything
Behind my eyes
To see if you can see
All the trouble my brain's been brewing.
Yes, I feel I am the worst and you are the best
And yet, and yet,
Nothing bad unfolds as we sit,
Young and nervous,
Alive and bursting,
With futures that may not entwine.
Who am I?
Who am I to sabotage what may be too small
For even chaos to notice
And disassemble? — Evan Roskos

Anxiety and hostility seem to be a great part of good and bad humor. Examining humor too closely does seem to destroy it. — Matt Groening

Adoption, I was to learn although not immediately, is hard to get right.
As a concept, even what was then its most widely approved narrative carried bad news: if someone "chose" you, what does that tell you?
Doesn't it tell you that you were available to be "chosen"?
Doesn't it tell you, in the end, that there are only two people in the world?
The ones who "chose" you?
And the other who didn't?
Are we beginning to see how the word "abandonment" might enter the picture? Might we not make efforts to avoid such abandonment? Might not such efforts be characterized as "frantic"? Do we want to ask ourselves what follows? Do we need to ask ourselves what words come next to mind? Isn't one of those words "fear"? Isn't another of those words "anxiety"? — Joan Didion

The average person has 50 negative thoughts in a day, leading to stress, which leads to fear and anxiety. This is the bad stuff that can break our bodies down. — Gregg Michaelsen

I think there's a lot of anxiety about being seen as a bad parent. There's still a lot of subjects that I think people aren't entirely comfortable being honest about. — Adam Mansbach

I get inspired by so many things every single day. Things I see every day, conversations, arguments, day to day occurrences, good days, bad days, loneliness, happiness, anger, anxiety, pressure, relationships ... EVERYTHING. — Ricki-Lee Coulter

We overcome the evil in the world by the charity and compassion of God, and in so doing we drive all evil out of our own hearts. The evil that is in us is more than moral. There is a psychological evil, the distortion caused by selfishness and sin. Good moral intentions are enough to correct what is formally bad in our moral acts. But in order that our charity may heal the wounds of sin in our whole soul it must reach down into the furthest depths of our humanity, cleaning out all the infection of anxiety and false guilt that spring from pride and fear, releasing the good that has been held back by suspicion and prejudice and self-conceit. Everything in our nature must find its right place in the life of charity, so that the whole man may be lifted up to God, that the entire person may be sanctified and not only the intentions of his will. — Thomas Merton

I don't get any anxiety. I don't because of two reasons. Number one, just breaking through it as a kid and finally getting past it was like okay, nothing's ever going to feel that scary again as that deafening silence of a joke not working. Any joke not working is not as bad as not being able to even try and get on stage. — Dane Cook

Imagine saying to someone, "I have a kidney problem, and I'm having a lot of bad days lately." Nothing but sympathy, right? "What's wrong?" "My mom had that!" "Text me a pic of the ultrasound!" Then pretend to say, "I have severe depression and anxiety, and I'm having a lot of bad days lately." They just look at you like you're broken, right? Unfixable. Inherently flawed. Maybe not someone they want to hang around as much? Yeah, society sucks. My mental problems made me feel ashamed. I felt like I had to hide them until I could "work through it" on my own. Which I never did, because I didn't know how. And I didn't feel brave enough to make fixing my mind a priority because I didn't think anyone would understand. — Felicia Day

I was kind of an unhappy kid. I always felt like a cynical New Yorker trapped in a little kid's body. I started to get some pretty bad anxiety disorders around puberty, which totally did not work with growing up a mile away from the beach. I started cutting my own hair. — Rachel Bloom

I had massive anxiety as a child. I was in therapy. From 8 to 10, I was borderline agora-phobic. I could not leave my mom's side. I don't really have panic attacks anymore, but I had really bad anxiety. — Emma Stone

The anxiety that has followed me through my life like a bad friend had reappeared with a vengeance and taken a brand-new form ... I didn't know why this was happening. The cruel reality of anxiety is that you never quite do. — Lena Dunham

Many of the snarly bad-tempered teachers whom we remember with hatred were really nice people soured by years of anxiety and penny-pinching. — Gilbert Highet

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me. — Stephen Fry

My experience is that many things are not as bad as I thought they would be. — Mary Doria Russell

If you take the negative as absolute and definitive, however, you increase your worries and anxiety, whereas by broadening the way you look at a problem, you understand what is bad about it, but you accept it. This attitude comes to me, I think, from my practice and from Buddhist philosophy, which help me enormously. — Dalai Lama XIV

People who are diagnosed as having "generalized anxiety disorder" are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human inclination to focus on threats and bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even significant positive events get suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward excessive verbalizing make therapeutic intervention a further challenge. — Winifred Gallagher

When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a s**t you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is and there is no use crying over spilt milk. — Kingsley Amis

When you spend time worrying, you're simply using your imagination to create things you don't want. — Shannon L. Alder

I'm unbelievably claustrophobic, and I have really bad anxiety. There were a few moment when I was very dramatic and thought, 'I'm not going to live through this. I'm going to hyperventilate and just die. Right here in jail.' — Shannen Doherty

My friends scoffed at my anxiety and said dumb things like, 'Fifty is the new forty!' Which just made me realize that there are a whole lot of other people who suck at math as bad as I do. No. Fifty is fifty. — Celia Rivenbark

If you are the type of person to carry a lot of worry, especially about unfinished business, you are also probably the type to feel really guilty when you do things other than those pieces of unfinished business. Guilt is such a shitty thing. As if things weren't hard enough with the anxiety symptoms, guilt just creeps right up in there and makes things exponentially more difficult. I like to call this snowballing. You get worked up and then getting worked up makes you feel bad and then you get more worked up about feeling bad about getting worked up and then.... you get the point. — Robert Duff

Solomon had good days and he had bad days, but the good had far outnumbered the bad since Lisa and Clark had started coming around. Sometimes, though, they'd show up and he's look completely exhausted, drained of all his charm and moving in slow motion. They could do that to him - the attacks. Something about the physical response to panic can drain all the energy out of a person, and it doesn't matter what causes it or how long it lasts. What Solomon had was unforgiving and sneaky and as smart as any other illness. It was like a virus or cancer that would hide just long enough to fool him into thinking it was gone. And because it showed up when it damn well pleased, he'd learned to be honest about it, knowing that embarrassment only made it worse. — John Corey Whaley

'I am a bad mother.' Every Christmas, this is what I think because the holiday season fills me with such anxiety. I'm sure that other mothers are happily baking cookies, decorating trees, and finding perfect gifts for everyone. — Tess Gerritsen

The thing is, I really like working. If I sit around too much, I get really bad anxiety. — Grimes

If you start giving your kids anxiety about food, it's going to last a lifetime. Moms have to lead by example. Don't say, "Oh, my jeans don't fit," or "Oh, I was bad." No diets. Nothing like that. — Bethenny Frankel

Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so may separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. — William James

I saw that all the things I feared and which feared me had nothing good or bad in them save in so far as the mind was affected by them. — Baruch Spinoza

All of this highlights one of the most challenging obstacles that prevents teams from taking the time to work on how they work together: adrenaline addiction. Many if not most of the executives and managers I know have become so hooked on the rush of urgent demands and out-of-control schedules that the prospect of slowing down to review, think, talk, and develop themselves is too anxiety-inducing to consider. Of course, this is exactly what they need, which is what addiction is all about - doing things that are bad for you even when confronted with evidence that they are, well, bad for you. — Patrick Lencioni

SADNESSES OF THE INTELLECT: Sadness of being misunderstood [sic]; Humor sadness; Sadness of love wit[hou]t release; Sadne[ss of be]ing smart; Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]; Sadness of having options; Sadness of wanting sadness; Sadness of confusion; Sadness of domes[tic]ated birds; Sadness of fini[shi]ng a book; Sadness of remembering; Sadness of forgetting; Anxiety sadness . . . INTERPERSONAL SADNESSES: Sadness of being sad in front of one's parent; Sa[dn]ess of false love; Sadness of love [sic]; Friendship sadness; Sadness of a bad conversation; Sadness of the could-have-been; Secret sadness . . . — Jonathan Safran Foer

I often thought I was in the wrong business. I was pretty seriously thinking of tossing it in before I shot Shine. I do not know why. I was pretty restless, I had been through a bad period of stress induced anxiety - panic attacks - and I was not sure of what I wanted to do. — Geoffrey Rush

All lives are difficult; what makes some of them fulfilled as well is the manner in which pains have been met. Every pain is an indistinct signal that something is wrong, which may engender either a good or bad result depending on the sagacity and strength of mind of the sufferer. Anxiety may precipitate panic, or an accurate analysis of what is amiss. A sense of injustice may lead to murder, or to a ground-breaking work of economic theory. Envy may lead to bitterness, or to a decision to compete with a rival and the production of a masterpiece. As — Alain De Botton

I've learned one important lesson in my life, and I'm going to share it with you. Don't worry about bad things that haven't happened yet. It will save you a lot of anxiety." Colin — Adriana Trigiani

There is no such thing as a good decision and a bad decision. There are only decisions. Make them, fuck up, enjoy, repeat. — Daniel Smith

Even more staggeringly, depression is a disease so bad that people are killing themselves because of it in a way they do not kill themselves with any other illness. Yet people still don't really think depression really is that bad. If they did, they wouldn't say the things they say. — Matt Haig

A desperate soul needs a good and inspiring music — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi
like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth
do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs to them. "Be not anxious for the morrow," and "which of you being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?"
So they dare to be idle, i.e. not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time. They dare to love people even when they are very bad, and they dare not to try and dominate others to show them what they must do for their own good. — Brenda Ueland

The art of never making a mistake is crucial to motherhood. To be effective and to gain the respect she needs to function, a mother must have her children believe she has never engaged in sex, never made a bad decision, never caused her own mother a moment's anxiety, and was never a child. — Erma Bombeck

He meant everything he said, when he said it.
But this is his default. And it won out.
Right now you're depressed about one thing.
Before you were depressed about everything.
These are good times for you."
"I'm afraid of loving again.
I'm afraid I've lost my faith."
"You haven't."
"The trapdoor I have in my mind?
That can go to those bad places?
It's almost gave way again."
"You know the ways to keep it nailed shut. — Emma Forrest

Anxiety and panic happen to be mundane phenomena, i.e., even when they are caused by extraordinary things like war and rape, they tend to occur when things are ordinary and predictable and relatively stable, against a backdrop of normal, everyday experience. This, of course, is one of the features of anxiety and panic that make them suck so bad. — Daniel Smith

I have such bad insomnia and sometimes with insomnia, you can sort of relax and read a book, but anyone who has insomnia knows that other times, it generates incredible anxiety. — Jai Uttal

Anxiety compels a person to think, but it is the type of thinking that gives thinking a bad name: solipsistic, self-eviscerating, unremitting, vicious. — Daniel Smith

Do you sometimes wish you could fast-forward a week? You know something bad's coming up, and you know you'll get through it, but the prospect just makes you feel sick. I worried for about thirty minutes, and though I knew there was no point in doing so, I could feel my anxiety twisting me up in a knot.
'Bullshit,' I told myself stoutly. 'This is utter bullshit. — Charlaine Harris

If this all sounds melodramatic, well that, too, isn't a bad metaphor for anxiety - as a kind of drama queen of the mind. If you have ever been friends with a drama queen you know how taxing it can be. To have one in your head is enough to make you comatose. — Daniel Smith

If the mood is overly anxious, then anxiety must be reduced by lowering uncertainty. Very simply, uncertainty is reduced when people are told what's going on and what will happen to them. In the vacuum of no news, people imagine the worst. Since disappointment is much easier to handle than anxiety, then, good news or bad, honesty is honestly the best policy. — Judith M Bardwick

It's because the door hasn't been closed yet that the nightmares still find their way in. — Joyce Rachelle

Even if we take Nietzsche figuratively (which he would have much preferred anyway), fifty years of research on stress shows that stressors are generally bad for people,3 contributing to depression, anxiety disorders, and heart disease. — Jonathan Haidt

the Navy spread its influence, they were always bumping into each other. Then Wolfe had married Sarah, his sister, and the knots had strengthened even more. Until they had started working on the nuclear boats with the Americans at the Holy Loch. Looking back, it was hard to gauge the exact moment when things had started to go wrong. Jermain had returned from a long training cruise to find Wolfe beside himself with anxiety and despair. It had all seemed so confused and pointless. Sarah had left him, and it appeared that things had been bad for some time. When it became obvious that she had left him for another man, an American officer from the Holy Loch, Wolfe's bitterness had changed to an — Douglas Reeman

Stress, worry, and anxiety simply come from projecting your thoughts into the future and imagining something bad. This is focusing on what you don't want! If you find that your mind is projecting into the future in a negative way, focus intensely on NOW. Keep bringing yourself back to the present.
Use all of your will, and focus your mind in this very moment, because in this moment of now there is utter peace. — Rhonda Byrne

Even if the wealth and power be well distributed throughout a community, its members will not be happy unless they are inwardly so, and obviously where the distribution is bad, where the few have a vast superfluity and the many are consumed by anxiety or want, or where a few controllers can exercise their will over the many, society has failed, even though its total wealth and power be increased. — Hilaire Belloc

I had very low self-esteem. Books saved me. I found friends in stories like The Chronicles of Narnia and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. During lunch hour at school I'd avoid social interactions by sitting on the bathroom sink and reading. My mother worked in my school cafeteria. When my anxiety got really bad, I'd put a coat on, grab my book and a flashlight, and hide in the freezer with the mac and cheese. — Jenny Lawson

My anxiety level was rising pretty fast now. Visits with the FBI can do that to you, I guess. I'd had bad experiences with them before. Ironically, so had Kit. They're good people, mostly, but something got screwed up along the way. I guess that's what happen when J. Edgar Hoover is your daddy. Talk about the road to perdition. — James Patterson

When my sons arrived in the family, their legal status was not ambiguous at all. They were our kids. But their wants and affections were still atrophied by a year in the orphanage. They didn't know that flies on their faces were bad. They didn't know that a strange man feeding them their first scary gulps of solid food wasn't a torturer. Life in the cribs alone must have seemed to them like freedom. That's what I was missing about the biblical doctrine of adoption. Sure it's glorious in the long run. But it sure seems like hell in the short run ... — Russell D. Moore

DON'T GO LOW-CARB! CARBOHYDRATES ENERGIZE your body and brain. So if you cut back on carbs too much, you will feel horrible. Low-carb diets deplete your body of glycogen, the muscle fuel it makes from carb-rich foods. Strange things start happening to your body when it's deprived of glycogen. Without it, your body makes a less efficient fuel from fat. That fuel is called ketones. Ketones are nasty. They give you bad breath, make you feel dizzy and tired, and make your system slow to a crawl; some research shows they may also cause acid buildup in the bloodstream - which can be lethal. Low-carb eating lowers brain levels of serotonin, a chemical critical to controlling depression and anxiety. So you want to make sure you're eating enough carbs. — Jackie Warner

Feelings and stories of unworthiness and shame are perhaps the most binding element in the trance of fear. When we believe something is wrong with us, we are convinced we are in danger. Our shame fuels ongoing fear, and our fear fuels more shame. The very fact that we feel fear seems to prove that we are broken or incapable. When we are trapped in trance, being fearful and bad seem to define who we are. The anxiety in our body, the stories, the ways we make excuses, withdraw or lash out - these become to us the self that is most real. — Tara Brach

With the second record (2012's Anxiety), I was quite jaded, and exhausted, and tired. With this third record, I feel that I've come full circle. I had gotten to the absolute pinnacle of how bad someone could feel. — Ladyhawke

If you're worried you have a psychosis, you probably don't, but even if you do, there's help for it. Fighting with anxiety makes it worse; instead, accept the anxiety, and it will become less scary. Take a moment to breathe and take stock of your surroundings. Remember what's real. Say, "This sucks, but it will pass." We aren't responsible for our thoughts, we are only responsible for what we do with them. Mental health care can and should be taken as seriously as physical health care. A diagnosis is not a bad thing. — Mara Wilson

When girls feel bad about their looks, 60 percent avoid normal daily activities like raising their hand in class or even going to the doctor. That means that girls do not show up for life when they don't feel good enough or pretty enough. A role model can help girls see beauty as a source of confidence, not anxiety. — Mandy Moore

Unfortunately, I think depression and anxiety are really hard to live with. And what people don't need is to feel bad about themselves because they decide to go on medication. — Rene Russo

You can eliminate depression without making someone happy. You can cure anxiety without teaching someone optimism. You can return someone to work without improving their job performance. If all you strive for is diminishing the bad, you'll only attain the average and you'll miss out entirely on the opportunity to exceed the average. — Shawn Achor

The only thing that feeling bad accomplishes is to plummet you into anxiety, despair, depression, and stress. In such situations, ask yourself in that moment what THOUGHT you can have that will make you feel GOOD! — Wayne Dyer

Since the beginning of the year, she was on a train wreck of emotions crashing through every town of bad anxiety a person could feel and none of the stops had ever reached Happy Ville. — Aneta Krpekyan

For most of my life, I was a worrier and an over-thinker. I had pretty bad social anxiety. — Rob Corddry

Avoiding life, avoiding making any concrete plans for your life
that's just one way you're pretending you can keep bad things from happening to you again. — Susan Vaught

what's really unique about maternal anxiety today is our belief that if something goes wrong with or for our children, it's a reflection on us as mothers. Because we believe we should be able to control life so perfectly that we can keep bad things from happening. — Judith Warner

You learn to be friends with someone, get to really know them before you get all excited about the guy. You have to keep it tempered and figure out if you even like him, for who he is, not how he feels about you. I know it's not easy. Believe me, I know. But this thrill you feel.. is probably only there because things are new and uncertain. It's not about him. It's you, caught up in you. Your mind craves anxiety, the good exciting kind and the bad I-can't-function-at-work kind. You need to deprive your body and recognize that your propensity to chase codependency is leading you toward a fat, greasy life of miserable. — Stephanie Klein

If you keep on saying things are going to be bad, you have a good chance of being a prophet. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

The phrase "going to sleep" has always given me great anxiety. I don't like doing things I'm bad at, and I have been told since I was very young that I am a bad sleeper. As soon as I become prone, my head will begin to unpack. My mind will turn on and start to hum, which is the opposite of what you need when you begin to switch off. It is as if I were waiting the whole day for this moment. Trying to go to sleep is often when I feel most engaged and alive. My brain starts to trick me into thinking this is the moment it should turn on and start working overtime. It is a problem. I need some rest. I have a lot to do. — Amy Poehler

Sometimes I panic to the point where I don't know what I'm thinking or doing. I have a full anxiety attack. I have them all the time anyway, but with auditioning, it's bad. — Dakota Johnson

I was full of doubts, of course, not a particularly bad way to be, but I didn't know that. Doubting so much made me suffer, but I could have saved myself the anxiety and simply doubted, without any problem. I was unaware that to doubt is to write. Marguerite Duras would say so in 1995, toward the end of her days: I can say what I like, but I shall never know why people write and how it is people don't write. In life, there comes a time, and I think it is total, that we cannot escape, where we doubt everything: that doubt is writing. — Enrique Vila-Matas

When my anxiety is really bad, the fast beating of my heart makes my body feel like it rocks back and forth. — Tina J. Richardson

Don't worry about bad things that haven't happened yet. It will save you a lot of anxiety. — Adriana Trigiani

Anxiety is just groundless and pointless. It occurs only as a hangover of bad habits established when we were trusting things - like human approval and wealth - that were certain to let us down. Now our strategy should be one of resolute rejection of worry, while we concentrate on the future in hope and with prayer and on the past with thanksgiving. — Dallas Willard

The media not only fans our fears, it comforts us in our hubris. Nearly every scare story comes with a Message: You can take control. You can do something to keep bad things from happening to your children and to keep life from throwing you curveballs. — Judith Warner

Vision creates faith and faith creates willpower. With faith there is no anxiety and no doubt - just absolute confidence in yourself. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggies - that is, accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: truths such as "Your actions actually don't matter that much in the grand scheme of things" and "The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that's okay." This vegetable course will taste bad at first. Very bad. You will avoid accepting it. But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive. After all, that constant pressure to be something amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your back. The stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations. You — Mark Manson

I envision my mind as a plot of grass full of sheep surrounded by a perimeter of electric fence. If I'm not constantly vigilant and aware of my thoughts, the electric fence shuts off, the sheep jump out, and my panic gets away from me. The chance for an attack is especially bad just before bed or when I'm distracted or lost in thought in the car, causing me to slap myself in the face as hard as I can or bite the inside of my upper arm. If I can feel the pain, then I am still alive and can begin to focus on rounding up the sheep again. See? This makes perfect sense in my head. — Brittany Gibbons