Scott Stossel Quotes

#1. Some people say that in stressful situations I can seem unflappable, and I think that's partly because I'm always kind of internally flapped.

Scott Stossel

#2. There's a book that's critical to understanding anxiety, a 17th-century book, 'The Anatomy of Melancholy,' by Robert Burton. I wanted to write something like that.

Scott Stossel

#3. I wanted to put a human face on anxiety disorders. I thought people who suffer from anxiety might recognize themselves and gain some comfort from my story and for those who don't suffer from anxiety disorders gain some understanding.

Scott Stossel

#4. 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

#5. The fear of vomiting, which for me is one of the most original and most acute of my fears, is actually fairly common. Emetophobia, it's called, and by some estimates, it's the fifth most common specific phobia.

Scott Stossel

#6. Anxiety has afflicted me all my life.

Scott Stossel

#7. 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

#8. There's a vast encyclopedia of fears and phobias, and pretty much any object, experience, situation you can think of, there is someone who has a phobia of it.

Scott Stossel

#9. I had no trouble with strangers finding out about my anxiety. It was my friends and colleagues I was concerned about.

Scott Stossel

#10. 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

#11. social phobics are better at picking up on subtle social cues than other people are - but they tend to overinterpret anything that could be construed as a negative reaction.

Scott Stossel

#12. My parents were not perfect, but no one's parents are. As childhoods go, mine was pretty comfortable and good in a lot of ways, and yet I still ended up with anxiety.

Scott Stossel

#13. The truth is that anxiety is at once a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture.

Scott Stossel

#14. An astonishing portion of my life is built around trying to evade vomiting and preparing for the eventuality that I might.

Scott Stossel

#15. 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

#16. During first grade, I spent nearly every afternoon for months in the school nurse's office, sick with psychosomatic headaches, begging to go home; by third grade, stomachaches had replaced the headaches, but my daily trudge to the infirmary remained the same.

Scott Stossel

#17. There is an element in which anxiety co-represents with aspects of my personality I wouldn't want to give up. It allows you to have foresight. I may not be as empathetic. It's hard to figure out the difference between pathology and personality.

Scott Stossel

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. There are lots of things, including changing the kind of inner dialog, that can mitigate anxiety. And yes, there are people who have the glass half full and glass half empty, and I'm afraid the glass is going to break and I'll cut myself on the shards.

Scott Stossel

#22. To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I'm like a duck
paddling, paddling, paddling.

Scott Stossel

#23. During high school, I would purposely lose tennis and squash matches to escape the agony of anxiety that competitive situations would provoke in me.

Scott Stossel

#24. As recently as 1979, neither panic attacks nor panic disorder officially existed.

Scott Stossel

#25. I have, since the age of about 2, been a twitchy bundle of phobias, fears, and neuroses. And I have, since the age of 10, when I was first taken to a mental hospital for evaluation and then referred to a psychiatrist for treatment, tried in various ways to overcome my anxiety.

Scott Stossel

#26. To grapple with and understand anxiety is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition.

Scott Stossel

#27. Even though my mom herself was anxious, I think she didn't know how to deal with it in her kid, and my dad just had no conception of what this was about, and sort of didn't even want to acknowledge it.

Scott Stossel

#28. I am living on the razor's edge between success and failure, adulation and humiliation - between justifying my existence and revealing my unworthiness to be alive.

Scott Stossel

#29. Barbra Streisand developed overwhelming performance anxiety at the height of her career; for 27 years she refused to perform for the general public, appearing live only in private clubs and at charity events, where she presumably believed the pressure on her was less intense.

Scott Stossel

#30. People who suffer from anxiety are very good at hiding it. That can often be a contributor to the anxiety because the gap between the internal perception and the external impression can feel so large.

Scott Stossel

#31. Many nights, I would begin the evening fueled by caffeine and nicotine, which I needed to propel me out of torpor and hopelessness - only to overshoot into quaking, quivering anxiety.

Scott Stossel

#32. 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

#33. A panic attack is interesting the way a broken leg or a kidney stone is interesting - a pain that you want to end.

Scott Stossel

#34. (Researchers at the University of Iowa have for years been studying a woman, known in the literature as S.M., whose amygdala was destroyed by a rare disease - and who cannot, as a consequence, experience fear.)

Scott Stossel

#35. For the social phobic, any kind of performance - musical, sporting, public speaking - can be terrifying because failure will reveal the weakness and inadequacy within. This in turn means constantly projecting an image that feels false - an image of confidence, competence, even perfection.

Scott Stossel

#36. The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the 1950s.")

Scott Stossel

#37. I've always been interested in intellectual history and in psychology, and anxiety is obviously something that's been a big part of my life.

Scott Stossel

#38. No wonder I'm anxious: I'm like Woody Allen trapped in John Calvin.

Scott Stossel

#39. It is a fact - I say this from experience - that being severely anxious is depressing. Anxiety can impede your relationships, impair your performance, constrict your life, and limit your possibilities.

Scott Stossel