All the textbooks talk about avoidance as a classic hallmark of anxiety disorder. So you need a therapist who is sympathetic and understanding but will also push you to do precisely the things that scare you. Scott Stossel Read Quote
Carly Simon abandoned the stage for seven years after collapsing from nerves before a concert in Pittsburgh in 1981. When she resumed performing, she would sometimes ask members of her band to spank her before she went onstage, to distract her from her anxiety. Scott Stossel Read Quote
Hugh Grant, who several times has announced that he was thinking of retiring from acting, has said that he suffers from panic attacks when the cameras start rolling. Scott Stossel Read Quote
Generally speaking, the anxiety will pass, which is easy for me to say when I’m not in the middle of an anxiety attack. When you’re in the throes of one, it’s hard to feel anything other than utter misery and terror. Scott Stossel Read Quote
One challenge is trying to extend access to more poorly served communities in rural areas and in the inner city. Sometimes you have kids who are suffering from trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, and they have no way of getting access to the remedies that are available to them. Scott Stossel Read Quote
Even as economic and political freedoms have advanced enormously and generated huge benefits for humanity, they’ve also created a great deal of anxiety because every time you have to make a choice, there’s anxiety about making the wrong one. Scott Stossel Read Quote
As recently as 1979, neither panic attacks nor panic disorder officially existed. Scott Stossel Read Quote
When I was 5 and my sister was 3, we went on a family trip, and she ate cheese off the floor at an airport. My mother, a germaphobe, got very upset. My sister, of course, got a stomach virus, and ever since then, I have an aversion to cheese. Scott Stossel Read Quote
An astonishing portion of my life is built around trying to evade vomiting and preparing for the eventuality that I might. Scott Stossel Read Quote
To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them. Scott Stossel Read Quote
