Generalized Anxiety Quotes

The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.

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.

Nothing in life is more remarkable than the unnecessary anxiety which we endure, and generally create ourselves.

As a general rule, the less one’s sense of life fulfillment, the greater one’s death anxiety.

Self-inflation and conceit are generally the external signs of inner emptiness and self-doubt; a show of pride is one of the most common covers for anxiety.

It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones.

Happiness in a tablet. This is our world. Prozac. Daxil. Xanax. Billions are spent to advertise such drugs. And billions are spent purchasing them. You don't even need a specific trauma, just 'general depression' is enough, or anxiety, as if sadness is as treatable as the common cold.

Panic---a deep abiding, free-floating anxiety, often without any reason or logical basis.

Fear is the oldest and strongest emotion known to man, something deeply inscribed in our nervous system and subconscious. Over time, however, something strange began to happen. The actual terrors that we faced began to lessen in intensity as we gained increasing control over our environment. But instead of our fears lessening a well, they began to multiply in number. We started to worry about our status in society- whether people liked us, or how we fit into the group. We became anxious for our livelihoods, the future of our families and children, our personal health, and the aging process. Instead of a simple, intense fear of something powerful and real, we developed a kind of generalized anxiety. 

I should perhaps warn you that I am about to faint from anxiety and general depression, though. The film I saw last night was especially grueling, a teen-age beach musical. I almost collapsed during the singing sequence on surfboard.

It’s been my experience that people always assume that generalized anxiety disorder is preferable to social anxiety disorder, because it sounds more vague and unthreatening, but those people are totally wrong. For me, having generalized anxiety disorder is basically like having all of the other anxiety disorders smooshed into one. Even the ones that aren’t recognized by modern science. Things like birds-will-probably-smother-me-in-my-sleep anxiety disorder and I-keep-crackers-in-my-pocket-in-case-I-get-trapped-in-an-elevator anxiety disorder. Basically I’m just generally anxious about f***ing everything. In fact, I suspect that’s how they came up with the name.

It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before; and, generally speaking, if there has been neither ill health nor anxiety, it is a time of life at which scarcely any charm is lost.

One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority.

Ultimately, forgiveness is usually about one thing—“This is for me, not for you.” Hatred is exhausting; forgiveness, or even just indifference, is freeing. To quote Booker T. Washington, “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.” Belittle and distort and consume. Forgiveness seems to be at least somewhat good for your health—victims who show spontaneous forgiveness, or who have gone through forgiveness therapy (as opposed to “anger validation therapy”) show improvements in general health, cardiovascular function, and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Chapter 14 explored how compassion readily, perhaps inevitably, contains elements of self-interest. The compassionate granting of forgiveness epitomizes this.41

I suspect it was probably unusual to suffer from both Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Malingering, unproductiveness tending to make me feel anxious, but there it was. I had both.

The notion of general devastation had for Maria a certain sedative effect (the rattlesnake in the playpen, that was different, that was particular, that was punitive), suggested an instant in which all anxieties would be abruptly gratified, and between the earthquake prophecy and the marijuana and the cheerful detachment of the woman whose house was in the Tajunga Wash, she felt a kind of resigned tranquility.

He is full of adrenaline, his nerves are shot, and his mind is cluttered up with free-floating anxiety-floating around on an ocean of generalized terror.

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.

When the deep limbic system is less active, there is generally a positive, more hopeful state of mind. When it is heated up, or overactive, negativity can take over.

Trigger warnings are antithetical to a fundamental principle of exposure therapy, a well-researched therapeutic approach for combatting generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, phobias (like arachnophobia), panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

When anxiety becomes problematic, most people try vainly to think their way out of trouble. But worry has its roots in the reptilian brain, minimally responsive to will. As a wise psychoanalyst once remarked of the autonomic nervous system (which carries the outgoing fear messages from the reptilian brain), "It's so far from the head it doesn't even know there is a head." (49)

The discovery of this reality is hindered rather than helped by belief, whether one believes in God or believes in atheism. We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception.

IN THE LIFE we generally lead there is very little solitude. Even when we are alone our lives are crowded by so many influences, so much knowledge, so many memories of so many experiences, so much anxiety, misery and conflict that our minds become duller and duller, more and more insensitive, functioning in a monotonous routine. Are we ever alone? Or are we carrying with us all the burdens of yesterday?

So, if you're a doctor, how can you recognize that you're having a feeling? Some tips from Dr. Zinn: Most emotions have physical counterparts. Anxiety may be associated with a tightness of the abdomen or excessive diaphoresis; anger may be manifested by a generalized muscle tightness or a clenching of the jaw; sexual arousal may be noted by a tingling of the loins or piloerection; and sadness may be felt by conjunctival injection or heaviness of the chest.

He's feeling a pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. [...] Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know.

The only benefit of her generalized anxiety disorder was that it prepared Hope for the Worst-Case Scenario; she was never surprised when one materialized because the Worst-Case Scenario was where she spent most of her time.

One of the things people generally admire about Van Gogh, even though they were not always aware of it, was the way he could make even a chair seem to have anxiety in it.

Are boys encouraged to express sadness, fear, or anxiety? In general, our society gives boys permission for one emotion: anger. If a boy is hurt or upset, he may be comforted briefly, but then he is told to stop crying and "be a man." This message usually implies he should hide his feelings. Boys and men are supposed to be solid unemotional rocks. Demonstrations of emotions are seen as "silly." Anger is seen as a sign of strength. Males are considered to be standing up for their rights if they react to a frustrating or undesirable event with anger. Outrage is often the only reaction to an injustice that is allowed from boys.

Relaxing the shoulders is vital for relaxation in general. However, owing to the effects of gravity, relaxation is problematic unless we let the shoulders remain in their natural place. Let the shoulders drop, or settle in harmony with gravity, into their most comfortable position. It isn’t too difficult to do this for a moment, but to sustain this condition unconsciously in our lives is another matter. We raise our shoulders unnaturally when we lean on a desk or hold the telephone between our shoulders and ears, when we are shocked by a loud noise, and who knows how many other times throughout the day. And the unsettling of the shoulders doesn’t have to be large to produce anxiety, stiff necks, and headaches. Just slightly raising them will create tension, and this tension throws the nervous system out of balance. When do we raise the shoulders in daily life? What are we feeling at that moment and leading up to that moment? Remembering that the body reflects the mind, and that the raising of the shoulders not only creates tension but also is a physical manifestation of psychological tension itself, what are the roots of this tension? Bringing the mind into the moment, let’s observe ourselves in a state free of preconceived ideas or beliefs. Don’t guess at these questions. Observe yourself in relationship to others and the universe

Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.

The relations one has with a woman one loves (and that can apply also to love for a youth) can remain platonic for other reasons than the chastity of the woman or the unsensual nature of the love she inspires. The reason may be that the lover is too impatient and by the very excess of his love is unable to await the moment when he will obtain his desires by sufficient pretence of indifference. Continually, he returns to the charge, he never ceases writing to her whom he loves, he is always trying to see her, she refuses herself, he becomes desperate. From that time she knows, if she grants him her company, her friendship, that these benefits will seem so considerable to one who believed he was going to be deprived of them, that she need grant nothing more and that she can take advantage of the moment when he can no longer bear being unable to see her and when, at all costs, he must put an end to the struggle by accepting a truce which will impose upon him a platonic relationship as its preliminary condition. Moreover, during all the time that preceded this truce, the lover, in a constant state of anxiety, ceaselessly hoping for a letter, a glance, has long ceased thinking of the physical desire which at first tormented him but which has been exhausted by waiting and has been replaced by another order of longings more painful still if left unsatisfied. The pleasure formerly anticipated from caresses will later be accorded but transmuted into friendly words and promises of intercourse which brings delicious moments after the strain of uncertainty or after a look impregnated with such coldness that it seemed to remove the loved one beyond hope of his ever seeing her again. Women divine all this and know they can afford the luxury of never yielding to those who, from the first, have betrayed their inextinguishable desire. A woman is enchanted if, without giving anything, she can receive more than she generally gets when she does give herself.

I don't know whether it was the general anxiety of being on a date (albeit one with my would-be date sitting five people away from me) or the specific anxiety of having the Beast stare in my direction, but for some reason, I took off running after Takumi. I thought we were in the clear as we began to round the corner of the bleachers, but then I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a cylindrical orange object getting bigger and bigger, like a fastapproaching sun. I thought: / think that is going to hit me. I thought: J should duck. But in the time between when something gets thought and when it gets done, the ball hit me square across the side of the face. I fell, the back of my head slamming against the gym floor. I then stood up immediately, as if unhurt, and left the gym. Pride had gotten me off the floor of the gym, but as soon as I was outside, I sat down. "I am concussed," I announced, entirely sure of my self-diagnosis. "You're fine," Takumi said as he jogged back toward me. "Let's get out of here before we're killed." "I'm sorry," I said. "But I can't get up. I have suffered a mild concussion." Lara ran out and sat down next to me. "Are you okay?" "I am concussed," I said. Takumi sat down with me and looked me in the eye. "Do you know what happened to you?" "The Beast got me." "Do you know where you are?" "I'm on a triple-and-a-half date." "You're fine," Takumi said. "Let's go." And then I leaned forward and threw up onto Lara's pants.

Dabrowshi argued that fear and anxiety and sadness are nor necessarily always undesirable or unhelpful states of mind; rather, they are often representative m=of the necessary pain of psychological growth. And to deny that pain I to deny our own potential. Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally happier life.

twin studies of anxiety have revealed that genetic factors account for roughly 30 percent to 50 percent of an individual’s tendency to be generally anxious or to have a specific anxiety disorder.50

There are two extremes to be avoided, one is the disposition of the rich to aggrandize themselves at the expense of the poor. . . . The other is . . . the anxiety of poor people to get possessions of the accumulations of the rich, and to have them divided among them, and a general leveling take place.

Dreaming may simply be a by-product of this nightly cerebral housecleaning. As the brain clears wastes and consolidates memories, neural circuits fire randomly, briefly throwing up fragmentary images, a bit like someone jumping between television channels when looking for something to watch. Confronted with this incoherent flow of memories, anxieties, fantasies, suppressed emotions, and the like, the brain possibly tries to make a sensible narrative out of it all, or possibly, because it is itself resting, doesn’t try at all, and just lets the incoherent pulses flow past. That may explain why we generally don’t remember dreams much despite their intensity—because they are not actually meaningful or important.

You will remember that every psychological or inner state finds some outer representation via the moving centre—that is, it is represented in some particular muscular movements or contractions, etc. You may have noticed that a state of worry is often reflected by a contracted wrinkling of the forehead or a twisting of the hands. States of joy never have this representation. Negative states, states of worry, or fear, or anxiety, or depression, represent themselves in the muscles by contraction, flexion, being bowed down, etc. (and often, also, by weakness in the muscles), whereas opposite emotional states are reflected into the moving centre as expansion, as standing upright, as extension of the limbs, relaxing of tension, and usually by a feeling of strength. To stop worry, people who worry and thereby frown too much or pucker up and corrugate their foreheads, clench their fists, almost cease breathing, etc., should begin here—by relaxing the muscles expressing the emotional state, and freeing the breath. Relaxing in general has behind it, esoterically speaking, the idea of preventing negative states. Negative states are less able to come when a person is in a state of relaxation. That is why it is said so often that it is necessary to practise relaxing every day, by passing the attention over the body and deliberately relaxing all tense muscles.

Like most people who decide to get sober, I was brought to Alcoholics Anonymous. While AA certainly works for others, its core propositions felt irreconcilable with my own experiences. I couldn't, for example, rectify the assertion that "alcoholism is a disease" with the facts of my own life. The idea that by simply attending an AA meeting, without any consultation, one is expected to take on a blanket diagnosis of "diseased addict" was to me, at best, patronizing. At worst, irresponsible. Irresponsible because it doesn't encourage people to turn toward and heal the actual underlying causes of their abuse of substances. I drank for thirteen years for REALLY good reasons. Among them were unprocessed grief, parental abandonment, isolation, violent trauma, anxiety and panic, social oppression, a general lack of safety, deep existential discord, and a tremendous diet and lifestyle imbalance. None of which constitute a disease, and all of which manifest as profound internal, mental, emotional and physical discomfort, which I sought to escape by taking external substances. It is only through one's own efforts to turn toward life on its own terms and to develop a wiser relationship to what's there through mindfulness and compassion that make freedom from addictive patterns possible. My sobriety has been sustained by facing life, processing grief, healing family relationships, accepting radically the fact of social oppression, working with my abandonment conditioning, coming into community, renegotiating trauma, making drastic diet and lifestyle changes, forgiving, and practicing mindfulness, to name just a few. Through these things, I began to relieve the very real pressure that compulsive behaviors are an attempt to resolve.

When people have trouble with their emotions – a bout of anxiety or depression, say, or seasonal gloominess - they often want science to pinpoint an offending neurotransmitter in the way that a witness picks the perp out of a lineup. Is it excessive norepinephrine, too little dopamine, errant estrogen? The answer is apt to dissatisfy: no single suspect can be fingered with confidence because the question itself attributes a fallacious simplicity to the brain.

In anxiety, however, we are threatened without knowing what steps to take to meet the danger. Anxiety is the feeling of being “caught,” “overwhelmed”; and instead of becoming sharper, our perceptions generally become blurred or vague.

Having neurons wire together can be a good thing. A positive experience with a math teacher can lead to neural connections that link math with pleasure, accomplishment, and feeling good about yourself as a student. But the opposite is equally true. Negative experiences with a harsh instructor or a timed test and the anxiety that accompanies it can form connections in the brain that create a serious obstacle to the enjoyment not only of math and numbers, but exams and even school in general.

When the hour of departure drew near, the maternal anxiety of Mrs Morland will be naturally supposed to be severe... Cautions against the violence of such nobleman and baronets as delight in forcing young ladies away to some remote farmhouse, must, at such a moment, relieve the fullness of her heart... But Mrs Morland knew so little of lords and baronets, that she entertained no notion of their general mischievousness, and was wholly unsuspicious of danger to her daughter from their machinations.

Almost everybody says they know God loves people, but there is a difference between knowing that He loves people in general and knowing without a shadow of a doubt that God loves you and me individually and personally, even with all our imperfections.

Freedom as a given seems the very antithesis of death. While we dread death, we generally consider freedom to be unequivocally positive. Has not the history of Western civilization been punctuated with yearnings for freedom, even driven by it? Yet freedom from an existential perspective is bonded to anxiety in asserting that, contrary to everyday experience, we do not enter into, and ultimately leave, a well-structured universe with an eternal grand design. Freedom means that one is responsible for one’s own choices, actions, one’s own life situation. Though the word responsible may be used in a variety of ways, I prefer Sartre’s definition: to be responsible is to “be the author of,” each of us being thus the author of his or her own life design. We are free to be anything but unfree: we are, Sartre would say, condemned to freedom.

... adults with SM are significantly more likely than the general population to develop other mood- and anxiety-related conditions, most notably depression, generalised anxiety, panic disorder, social anxiety and PTSD. For some, chronic mental health conditions are a factor in their lives. Most indicated that they felt their long-term mental health conditions could have been avoided with appropriate support at the appropriate time in childhood.

The nine in our list are based on a longer list in Robert Leahy, Stephen Holland, and Lata McGinn’s book, Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders. For more on CBT—how it works, and how to practice it—please see Appendix 1.) EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.” CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.” OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.” DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as “black-and-white thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.” MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.” LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.” NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.” DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.” BLAMING: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”11

Many of us with anxiety don’t look like we’ve got a problem because outwardly we function ludicrously well. Or so the merry story goes. Our anxiety sees us make industrious lists and plans, run purposefully from one thing to the next, and move fast upstairs and across traffic intersections. We are a picture of efficiency and energy, always on the move, always doing. We’re Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh, always flitting about convinced everyone depends on us to make things happen and to be there when they do. And to generally attend to happenings. But beneath that veneer were being pushed by fear and doubt and a voice that tells us we’re a bad husband, and insufficient sister, we’re wasting time, we’re not producing enough, - that we turn everything into a clusterfuck.

They have extended the arrogance and insularity of the worst kind of academic professionalism beyond the academy. Generally they show no fear or even slight anxiety at the responsibility they have assumed; they have no sense of awe in the face of the questions they have raised, and no sense of humility in the face of the traditions which they condescendingly dismiss. They are aggressively without a sense of mystery and without a suspicion that anything might be too deep for their narrowly professional competence. They mistake these vices for the virtues of thinking radically, courageously and with an unremitting hostility to obscurantism.

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.1 It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters. Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others. I know about this moaning because I have done my share. Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them? Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life’s problems. Without discipline we can solve nothing. With only some discipline we can solve only some problems. With total discipline we can solve all problems. What makes life difficult is that the process of confronting and solving problems is a painful one. Problems, depending upon their nature, evoke in us frustration or grief or sadness or loneliness or guilt or regret or anger or fear or anxiety or anguish or despair. These are uncomfortable feelings, often very uncomfortable, often as painful as any kind of physical pain, sometimes equaling the very worst kind of physical pain. Indeed, it is because of the pain that events or conflicts engender in us all that we call them problems. And since life poses an endless series of problems, life is always difficult and is full of pain as well as joy.

Dabrowski argued that fear and anxiety and sadness are not necessarily always undesirable or unhelpful states of mind; rather, they are often representative of the necessary pain of psychological growth. And to deny that pain is to deny our own potential. Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally happier life. Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of our worst moments. It’s only when we feel intense pain that we’re willing to look at our values and question why they seem to be failing us. We need some sort of existential crisis to take an objective look at how we’ve been deriving meaning in our life, and then consider changing course.

If your boundaries have been injured, you may find that when you are in conflict with someone, you shut down without even being aware of it. This isolates us from love, and keeps us from taking in safe people. Kate had been quite controlled by her overprotective mother. She’d always been warned that she was sickly, would get hit by cars, and didn’t know how to care for herself well. So she fulfilled all those prophecies. Having no sense of strong boundaries, Kate had great difficulty taking risks and connecting with people. The only safe people were at her home. Finally, however, with a supportive church group, Kate set limits on her time with her mom, made friends in her singles’ group, and stayed connected to her new spiritual family. People who have trouble with boundaries may exhibit the following symptoms: blaming others, codependency, depression, difficulties with being alone, disorganization and lack of direction, extreme dependency, feelings of being let down, feelings of obligation, generalized anxiety, identity confusion, impulsiveness, inability to say no, isolation, masochism, overresponsibility and guilt, panic, passive-aggressive behavior, procrastination and inability to follow through, resentment, substance abuse and eating disorders, thought problems and obsessive-compulsive problems, underresponsibility, and victim mentality.

I found that when women were able to act in line with their natural inclinations and ambitions -- whether to work or stay at home -- they were generally happy, and generally felt that their children were happy too. Whereas those whose natural inclinations and ambitions had been thwarted -- whether they were working or stay-at-home moms -- were sure that they and their kids would be better off if they changed course, and either went to work or went home. The morality of the situation-- whether they felt it was good or bad for their chidlren-- derived, not from some external sense of the morality of their "choices," but from the amount of happiness generated by any given arrangement.

Symptomatically, men with PTSD are more likely to exhibit anger, paranoia, and an exaggerated startle response. Women are more likely to be avoidant and have mood and anxiety disorders. Women generally focus on regulating their emotions, while men focus on solving problems. Women often deal with stressful situations using a tend-and-befriend response, rather than men’s fight-or-flight response. Women generally seek more social support than men do, and they benefit more from psychotherapy. They also tend to lean more heavily on self-blame.[3

Scientists have found that the amount of time spent milkshake-multitasking among American young people has increased by 120 percent in the last ten years. According to a report in the Archives of General Psychiatry, simultaneous exposure to electronic media during the teenage years—such as playing a computer game while watching television—appears to be associated with increased depression and anxiety in young adulthood, especially among men.[1] Considering that teens are exposed to an average of eight and a half hours of multitasking electronic media per day, we need to change something quickly.[2] Social Media Enthusiast or Addict? Another concern this raises is whether you are or your teen is a social media enthusiast or simply a

For others, however, the significance of anxiety in disclosing a fundamental insight into human existence is grasped. At this point their consciences will never allow them to return to a contented absorption in particular entities. Any such attempt to do so will be felt deep down as a betrayal of their truer instincts. Those things which previously were experienced with full satisfaction will now seem shallow, hollow, and somehow meaningless. We come to understand with greater and greater clarity that absorption int the world of things provides no refuge, and one ceases to center one's hope in them. At this critical juncture of human existence two basic alternatives remain: either to dismiss existence in general and man's existence in particular as essentially futile and absurd, or to place one's hope in the actualization of a greater purpose or meaning that is not immediately evident within the realm of empirical data.

Want to know who I am? Your responses indicate that you have a normal desire to share yourself with others. However, this need is not being adequately fulfilled at present. As a result, you unconsciously attempt to treat this emptiness with momentary interests and temporary passions. If left unaddressed, this imbalance leads to impulsive behavior and unnecessary risks. Past betrayals have left you generally suspicious of others’ behavior, particularly regarding romantic relationships. You fear you may be exploited if you open yourself too fully. Consequently, you often seek some proof of a new friend’s or lover’s sincerity before you decide to trust them. Further complicating your relationships is the anxiety you have about your unfulfilled personal and professional goals. You fear that you’ve made decisions that weren’t in your own best interest, or failed to take advantage of opportunities when they presented themselves. The desire to overcome these challenges sometimes lead you to seem pushy or even arrogant. Because this competitive urge is not always apparent to others, they are often surprised by it. However, the passion that underlies your desire for success is unique. This makes you unlike others. You cannot simply accept what life has to offer; you aspire for more. Between each inhale and exhale we die and are reborn.

Generally, after three dates one of three things took place: 1) he’d express his lack of interest with a silent fade-out that made me go insane with anxiety; 2) I’d express my lack of interest with an overlong and tortured “it’s not you, it’s me” e-mail; 3) we’d devolve into a sexual entanglement that either was or wasn’t physically satisfying but invariably thrived on noncommunication. After a while it seemed that everyone I knew was tangled in several entanglements at a time, as if we were all becoming intertwined, like a giant rat king, our tails a knotted mass, our mouths gasping for air.

Professor Rosalind Chait Barnett of Brandeis University did a comprehensive review of studies on work-life balance and found that women who participate in multiple roles 36 actually have lower levels of anxiety and higher levels of mental well-being. Employed women reap rewards including greater financial security, more stable marriages, better health, and, in general, 37 increased life satisfaction.

For is not a Book the most reliable of Companions--and generally among the most stimulating as well? No need to worry about amusing or pleasing or making a good impression on a Book, when its only purpose is to entertain and, perhaps, instruct. And if it should fail in that purpose, one can merely return it to its shelf, without so much as a by-your-leave and no occasion for anxiety about its wounded Pride, either.

All languages that derive fromLatin form the word 'compassion' by combining the prefix meaning 'with' (com-) and the root meaning 'suffering' (Late Latin, passio). In other languages- Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance- this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefixcombined with the word that means 'feeling' (Czech, sou-cit; Polish, wsspół-czucie; German, Mit-gefühl; Swedish, medkänsla). In languages that derive from Latin, 'compassion' means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, 'pity' (French, pitié; Italian, pietà; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. 'To take pity on a woman' means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves. That is why the word 'compassion' generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love. In languages that form the word 'compassion' not from the root 'suffering' but from the root 'feeling', the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion- joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of soucit, współczucie, Mitgefühl, medkänsla) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme. By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to her again. Aware of that, Tereza said to him, 'Throw me out!' But instead of throwing her out, he seized her and kissed the tips of her fingers, because at that moment he himself felt the pain under her fingernails as surely as if the nerves of her fingers led straight to his own brain. Anyone who has failed to benefit from the the Devil's gift of compassion (co-feeling) will condemn Tereza coldly for her deed, because privacy is sacred and drawers containing intimate correspondence are not to be opened. But because compassion was Tomas's fate (or curse), he felt that he himself had knelt before the open desk drawer, unable to tear his eyes from Sabina's letter. He understood Tereza, and not only was he incapable of being angry with her, he loved her all the more.

Colonel Cathcart was impervious to absolutes. He could measure his own progress only in relationship to others, and his idea of excellence was to do something at least as well as all the men his own age who were doing the same thing even better. The fact that there were thousands of men his own age and older who had not even attained the rank of major enlivened him with foppish delight in his own remarkable worth; on the other hand, the fact that there were men of his own age and younger who were already generals contaminated him with an agonizing sense of failure and made him gnaw at his fingernails with an unappeasable anxiety that was even more intense than Hungry Joe’s.

As for my division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge that it’s somewhat arbitrary, but I don’t insist upon exact numbers. I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. There are, of course, innumerable sub- divisions, but the distinguishing features of both categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood—that depends on the idea and its dimensions, note that. It’s only in that sense I speak of their right to crime in my article (you remember it began with the legal question). There’s no need for such anxiety, however; the masses will scarcely ever admit this right, they punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfil quite justly their conservative vocation. But the same masses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal. Each class has an equal right to exist. In fact, all have equal rights with me—and vive la guerre éternelle—till the New Jerusalem, of course!

(...) performance anxiety [in the worplace] is connected to other, more general fears which have to do with feeling inadequate and defenseless in the world: the fear of retaliation from someone with whom one disagrees; the fear of being critisized for doing something wrong; the fear of saying "no"; the fear of stating one's needs clearly and directly, without manipulating. These are the kinds of fears that affect women in particular, because we were brought up to believe that taking care of ourselves, asserting ourselves, is unfeminine. We wish (...) to feel attractive to men: non-threatening, sweet, "feminine". This wish crimps the joy and productiveness with which women could be leading their lives.

Sometimes death anxiety is dismissed as trivial in its universality. Who, after all, does not know and fear death? Yet it is one thing to know about death in general, to grit one's own teeth and stoke up a shudder or two; it is quite another to apprehend one's own death and to experience it in the bones and sockets of one's being. Such death awareness is a terror that comes rarely, sometimes only once or twice in a lifetime-a terror that Marvin now experienced night after night.

But another part of me felt hugely ambitious. People assumed that the Spare wouldn’t or shouldn’t have any ambition. People assumed that royals generally had no career desires or anxieties. You’re royal, everything’s done for you, why worry? But in fact I worried quite a lot about making my own way, finding my purpose in this world. I didn’t want to be one of those cocktail-slurping, eyeroll-causing sloths everyone avoided at family gatherings. There had been plenty of those in my family, going back centuries.

Our deep irrational feelings of death anxiety have been attributed to multiple sources. In part, they may arise from evolved self-protection mechanisms or survival responses of being a victim of predators. They might, conversely, stem from unconscious fear (or guilt) of retribution resulting from our own acts of harming or predation. According to existential psychologists, the most powerful form of death anxiety comes from our general ability to anticipate the future, coupled with conscious anticipation of inevitable personal demise.

The sixties began what many admirers of Eliot would consider a bleak period. The anxiety of influence of the profession at large seemed to inspire quick and increasingly uninformed dismissals of Eliot, and these repeated denigrations produced, predictably, a generation of students with vague and inaccurate impressions about his poetry and ideas. But there is a bright side to Eliot studies of the last quarter century. The general retreat from Eliot coincided with the beginning of basic and important work on his ideas, especially on his early philosophical writings.

The lifetime prevalence of dissociative disorders among women in a general urban Turkish community was 18.3%, with 1.1% having DID (ar, Akyüz, & Doan, 2007). In a study of an Ethiopian rural community, the prevalence of dissociative rural community, the prevalence of dissociative disorders was 6.3%, and these disorders were as prevalent as mood disorders (6.2%), somatoform disorders (5.9%), and anxiety disorders (5.7%) (Awas, Kebede, & Alem, 1999). A similar prevalence of ICD-10 dissociative disorders (7.3%) was reported for a sample of psychiatric patients from Saudi Arabia (AbuMadini & Rahim, 2002).

In this chapter I will describe the effects of the data deluge on all members of society generally and how it erodes the confidence, judgment, and decisiveness of leaders in particular. Then I will show the paradoxical side of the data deluge. Despite its anxiety-provoking effects, the proliferation of data also has an addictive quality. Leaders, healers, and parents “imbibe” data as a way of dealing with their own chronic anxiety. The pursuit of data, in almost any field, has come to resemble a form of substance abuse, accompanied by all the usual problems of addiction: self-doubt, denial, temptation, relapse, and withdrawal. Leadership training programs thus wind up in the codependent position of enablers, with publishers often in the role of “suppliers.” What does it take to get parents, healers, and managers, when they hear of the latest quick-fix fad that has just been published, to “just say no”?

It’s just human psychological truth really. Anything acquired without effort and without cost investment of time and energy is generally unappreciated within you. And in this day and age of ultra-convenience and easy credit – it seems the damaging consequence of this combination is that the only thing so many people value now – is what they can “covet” and “want for” – And that isn’t a recipe for appreciation – it’s a recipe for angst – which is why there is so much depression and anxiety in the modern world. The void of true inside-out appreciation will seldom ever be filled with instant gratification.

One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority,’ observed Chamfort, adding that what is flatteringly called common sense is usually little short of common nonsense, suffering as it does from simplification and illogicality, prejudice and shallowness: ‘The most absurd customs and the most ridiculous ceremonies are everywhere excused by an appeal to the phrase, but that’s the tradition. This is exactly what the Hottentots say when Europeans ask them why they eat grasshoppers and devour their body lice. That’s the tradition, they explain.

This summer, a lot of what I was teaching was against Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, very broadly speaking, this anxiety of sounding too much like another poet, especially a firmly established poet, for fear of not sounding original. I kept telling my students, “Why wouldn’t you want to be influence by these poets! Why wouldn’t you want to sound like Keats or Robert Hayden?” Pound and Eliot were influenced by Browning, and they influenced one another. James Wright—when he came on the scene, many of us were consciously imitating him, trying to do do what he so gloriously did.... I tell them not to worry about influence or imitation as long as you’re emulating the best work, the work you love. How much imitation is too much? You’ll know it when you see it. . . .And that’s just a huge problem in general, especially in America. We’re individuals. we’re the one, not the many. We want to stand out from the crowd. Everyone is trying to differentiate themselves. The fact is we are one big organism. We belong together. We are a tribe. Not one of us can do something that doesn’t affect the other, past or present.

Another example of how the sense of the self has been disintegrating in our day can be seen when we consider humor and laughter. It is not generally realized how closely one’s sense of humor is connected with one’s sense of selfhood. Humor normally should have the function of preserving the sense of self. It is an expression of our uniquely human capacity to experience ourselves as subjects who are not swallowed up in the objective situation. It is the healthy way of feeling a “distance” between one’s self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one’s problem with perspective. One cannot laugh when in an anxiety panic, for then one is swallowed up, one has lost the distinction between himself as subject and the objective world around him.

Robin Carhart-Harris’ theory of the entropic brain represents a promising elaboration on this general idea and a first stab at a unified theory of mental illness that helps explain all three of the disorders we’ve examined in these pages. A happy brain is a supple and flexible brain, he believes. Depression, anxiety, obsession and the cravings of addiction are how it feels to have a brain that has become excessively rigid or fixed in its pathways and linkages—a brain with more order than is good for it. On the spectrum he lays out in his entropic brain article, ranging from excessive order to excessive entropy, depression, addiction and disorders of obsession all fall on the too much order end. Psychosis is on the entropy end of the spectrum which is why it probably doesn’t respond to psychedelic therapy. The therapeutic value of psychedelics, in Carhart-Harris’ view, lies in their ability to temporarily elevate entropy in the inflexible brain, jolting the system out of its default patterns. Carhart-Harris uses the metaphor of annealing from metallurgy: psychedelics introduce energy into the system, giving it the flexibility necessary for it to bend and so change.

The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary.

shocking conclusion. It suggested that there appears to be one common pathway to all mental illnesses. Caspi and Moffitt called it the p-factor, in which the p stands for general psychopathology. They argued that this factor appears to predict a person’s liability to develop a mental disorder, to have more than one disorder, to have a chronic disorder, and it can even predict the severity of symptoms. This p-factor is common to hundreds of different psychiatric symptoms and every psychiatric diagnosis. Subsequent research using different sets of people and different methods confirmed the existence of this p-factor.25 However, this research was not designed to tell us what the p-factor is. It only suggests that it exists—that there is an unidentified variable that plays a role in all mental disorders.

A person’s average or typical level of happiness is that person’s “affective style.” (“Affect” refers to the felt or experienced part of emotion.) Your affective style reflects the everyday balance of power between your approach system and your withdrawal system, and this balance can be read right from your forehead. It has long been known from studies of brainwaves that most people show an asymmetry: more activity either in the right frontal cortex or in the left frontal cortex. In the late 1980s, Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin discovered that these asymmetries correlated with a person’s general tendencies to experience positive and negative emotions. People showing more of a certain kind of brainwave coming through the left side of the forehead reported feeling more happiness in their daily lives and less fear, anxiety, and shame than people exhibiting higher activity on the right side. Later research showed that these cortical “lefties” are less subject to depression and recover more quickly from negative experiences.29 The difference between cortical righties and lefties can be seen even in infants: Ten-month-old babies showing more activity on the right side are more likely to cry when separated briefly from their mothers.30 And this difference in infancy appears to reflect an aspect of personality that is stable, for most people, all the way through adulthood. 31 Babies who show a lot more activity on the right side of the forehead become toddlers who are more anxious about novel situations; as teenagers, they are more likely to be fearful about dating and social activities; and, finally, as adults, they are more likely to need psychotherapy to loosen up.

If you’re anxious and agreeable, you may find yourself over-committing to things because you overestimate the potential negative consequences of saying no. More generally, you may hold back from saying things you want to say because of anxiety about how you’ll be perceived. The skills you’ll learn in this book will help you balance your goal of being well liked with other priorities—like managing your schedule and speaking your mind.

What, in fact, do we know about the peak experience? Well, to begin with, we know one thing that puts us several steps ahead of the most penetrating thinkers of the 19th century: that P.E’.s are not a matter of pure good luck or grace. They don’t come and go as they please, leaving ‘this dim, vast vale of tears vacant and desolate’. Like rainbows, peak experiences are governed by definite laws. They are ‘intentional’. And that statement suddenly gains in significance when we remember Thorndike’s discovery that the effect of positive stimuli is far more powerful and far reaching than that of negative stimuli. His first statement of the law of effect was simply that situations that elicit positive reactions tend to produce continuance of positive reactions, while situations that elicit negative or avoidance reactions tend to produce continuance of these. It was later that he came to realise that positive reactions build-up stronger response patterns than negative ones. In other words, positive responses are more intentional than negative ones. Which is another way of saying that if you want a positive reaction (or a peak experience), your best chance of obtaining it is by putting yourself into an active, purposive frame of mind. The opposite of the peak experience—sudden depression, fatigue, even the ‘panic fear’ that swept William James to the edge of insanity—is the outcome of passivity. This cannot be overemphasised. Depression—or neurosis—need not have a positive cause (childhood traumas, etc.). It is the natural outcome of negative passivity. The peak experience is the outcome of an intentional attitude. ‘Feedback’ from my activities depends upon the degree of deliberately calculated purpose I put into them, not upon some occult law connected with the activity itself. . . . A healthy, perfectly adjusted human being would slide smoothly into gear, perform whatever has to be done with perfect economy of energy, then recover lost energy in a state of serene relaxation. Most human beings are not healthy or well adjusted. Their activity is full of strain and nervous tension, and their relaxation hovers on the edge of anxiety. They fail to put enough effort—enough seriousness—into their activity, and they fail to withdraw enough effort from their relaxation. Moods of serenity descend upon them—if at all—by chance; perhaps after some crisis, or in peaceful surroundings with pleasant associations. Their main trouble is that they have no idea of what can be achieved by a certain kind of mental effort. And this is perhaps the place to point out that although mystical contemplation is as old as religion, it is only in the past two centuries that it has played a major role in European culture. It was the group of writers we call the romantics who discovered that a man contemplating a waterfall or a mountain peak can suddenly feel ‘godlike’, as if the soul had expanded. The world is seen from a ‘bird’s eye view’ instead of a worm’s eye view: there is a sense of power, detachment, serenity. The romantics—Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe, Schiller—were the first to raise the question of whether there are ‘higher ceilings of human nature’. But, lacking the concepts for analysing the problem, they left it unsolved. And the romantics in general accepted that the ‘godlike moments’ cannot be sustained, and certainly cannot be re-created at will. This produced the climate of despair that has continued down to our own time. (The major writers of the 20th century—Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Musil—are direct descendants of the romantics, as Edmund Wilson pointed out in Axel’s Castle.) Thus it can be seen that Maslow’s importance extends far beyond the field of psychology. William James had asserted that ‘mystical’ experiences are not mystical at all, but are a perfectly normal potential of human consciousness; but there is no mention of such experiences in Principles of Psychology (or only in passing).

Perfect Joy (excerpts) Is there to be found on earth a fullness of joy, or is there no such thing? . . . What the world values is money, reputation, long life, achievement. What it counts as joy is health and comfort of body, good food, fine clothes, beautiful things to look at, pleasant music to listen to. What it condemns is lack of money, a low social rank, a reputation for being no good, and an early death. What it considers misfortune is bodily discomfort and labour, no chance to get your fill of good food, not having good clothes to wear, having no way to amuse or delight the eye, no pleasant music to listen to. If people find that they are deprived of these things, they go into a panic or fall into despair. They are so concerned for their life that their anxiety makes life unbearable, even when they have the things they think they want. Their very concern for enjoyment makes them unhappy. . . . I cannot tell if what the world considers "happiness" is happiness or not. All I know is that when I consider the way they go about attaining it, I see them carried away headlong, grim and obsessed, in the general onrush of the human herd, unable to stop themselves or to change their direction. All the while they claim to be just on the point of attaining happiness. . . . My opinion is that you never find happiness until you stop looking for it. My greatest happiness consists precisely in doing nothing whatever that is calculated to obtain happiness: and this, in the minds of most people, is the worst possible course. I will hold to the saying that:"Perfect Joy is to be without joy. Perfect praise is to be without praise." If you ask "what ought to be done" and "what ought not to be done" on earth in order to produce happiness, I answer that these questions do not have an answer. There is no way of determining such things. Yet at the same time, if I cease striving for happiness, the "right" and the "wrong" at once become apparent all by themselves. Contentment and well-being at once become possible the moment you cease to act with them in view, and if you practice non-doing (wu wei), you will have both happiness and well-being. Here is how I sum it up: Heaven does nothing: its non-doing is its serenity. Earth does nothing: its non-doing is its rest. From the union of these two non-doings All actions proceed, All things are made. How vast, how invisible This coming-to-be! All things come from nowhere! How vast, how invisible - No way to explain it! All beings in their perfection Are born of non-doing. Hence it is said: "Heaven and earth do nothing Yet there is nothing they do not do." Where is the man who can attain To this non-doing?

At a higher level of abstraction, the behavioral correlates of life history strategies can be framed within the five-factor model of personality. Among the Big Five, agreeableness and conscientiousness show the most consistent pattern of associations with slow traits such as restricted sociosexuality, long-term mating orientation, couple stability, secure attachment to parents in infancy and romantic partners in adulthood, reduced sex drive, low impulsivity, and risk aversion across domains. Conscientiousness and (to a smaller extent) agreeableness are also the most reliable personality predictors of physical health and longevity; the contribution of neuroticism is mixed and may depend on the specific facets considered. The life history correlates of neuroticism are much less straightforward; for example, high neuroticism tends to predict increased short-term mating in women but reduced short-term mating in men, with much cross-cultural variation. There is also evidence that slow life history–related traits can be associated with social anxiety and insecurity, which is consistent with a general profile of risk aversion and behavioral inhibition. As a first approximation, then, metatrait alpha can be treated as a broadband correlate of slow strategies, with the caveat that neuroticism may be elevated at both ends of the continuum.

Ego or fixed identity doesn’t just mean we have a fixed idea about ourselves. It also means that we have a fixed idea about everything we perceive. I have a fixed idea about you; you have a fixed idea about me. And once there is that feeling of separation, it gives rise to strong emotions. In Buddhism, strong emotions like anger, craving, pride, and jealousy are known as kleshas—conflicting emotions that cloud the mind. The kleshas are our vehicle for escaping groundlessness, and therefore every time we give in to them, our preexisting habits are reinforced. In Buddhism, going around and around, recycling the same patterns, is called samsara. And samsara equals pain. We keep trying to get away from the fundamental ambiguity of being human, and we can’t. We can’t escape it any more than we can escape change, any more than we can escape death. The cause of our suffering is our reaction to the reality of no escape: ego clinging and all the trouble that stems from it, all the things that make it difficult for us to be comfortable in our own skin and get along with one another. If the way to deal with those feelings is to stay present with them without fueling the story line, then it begs the question: How do we get in touch with the fundamental ambiguity of being human in the first place? In fact, it’s not difficult, because underlying uneasiness is usually present in our lives. It’s pretty easy to recognize but not so easy to interrupt. We may experience this uneasiness as anything from slight edginess to sheer terror. Anxiety makes us feel vulnerable, which we generally don’t like. Vulnerability comes in many guises. We may feel off balance, as if we don’t know what’s going on, don’t have a handle on things. We may feel lonely or depressed or angry. Most of us want to avoid emotions that make us feel vulnerable, so we’ll do almost anything to get away from them. But if, instead of thinking of these feelings as bad, we could think of them as road signs or barometers that tell us we’re in touch with groundlessness, then we would see the feelings for what they really are: the gateway to liberation, an open doorway to freedom from suffering, the path to our deepest well-being and joy. We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased. So the challenge is to notice the emotional tug of shenpa when it arises and to stay with it for one and a half minutes without the story line. Can you do this once a day, or many times throughout the day, as the feeling arises? This is the challenge. This is the process of unmasking, letting go, opening the mind and heart.

But the greatest human problems are not social problems, but decisions that the individual has to make alone. The most important feelings of which man is capable emphasise his separateness from other people, not his kinship with them. The feelings of a mountaineer towards a mountain emphasise his kinship with the mountain rather than with the rest of mankind. The same goes for the leap of the heart experienced by a sailor when he smells the sea, or for the astronomer’s feeling about the stars, or for the archaeologist’s love of the past. My feeling of love for my fellowmen makes me aware of my humanness; but my feeling about a mountain gives me an oddly nonhuman sensation. It would be incorrect, perhaps, to call it ‘superhuman’; but it nevertheless gives me a sense of transcending my everyday humanity. Maslow’s importance is that he has placed these experiences of ‘transcendence’ at the centre of his psychology. He sees them as the compass by which man gains a sense of the magnetic north of his existence. They bring a glimpse of ‘the source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside himself. This can be seen with great clarity in the matter of the cure of alcoholics. Alcoholism arises from what I have called ‘generalised hypertension’, a feeling of strain or anxiety about practically everything. It might be described as a ‘passively negative’ attitude towards existence. The negativity prevents proper relaxation; there is a perpetual excess of adrenalin in the bloodstream. Alcohol may produce the necessary relaxation, switch off the anxiety, allow one to feel like a real human being instead of a bundle of over-tense nerves. Recurrence of the hypertension makes the alcoholic remedy a habit, but the disadvantages soon begin to outweigh the advantage: hangovers, headaches, fatigue, guilt, general inefficiency. And, above all, passivity. The alcoholics are given mescalin or LSD, and then peak experiences are induced by means of music or poetry or colours blending on a screen. They are suddenly gripped and shaken by a sense of meaning, of just how incredibly interesting life can be for the undefeated. They also become aware of the vicious circle involved in alcoholism: misery and passivity leading to a general running-down of the vital powers, and to the lower levels of perception that are the outcome of fatigue. ‘The spirit world shuts not its gates, Your heart is dead, your senses sleep,’ says the Earth Spirit to Faust. And the senses sleep when there is not enough energy to run them efficiently. On the other hand, when the level of will and determination is high, the senses wake up. (Maslow was not particularly literary, or he might have been amused to think that Faust is suffering from exactly the same problem as the girl in the chewing gum factory (described earlier), and that he had, incidentally, solved a problem that had troubled European culture for nearly two centuries). Peak experiences are a by-product of this higher energy-drive. The alcoholic drinks because he is seeking peak experiences; (the same, of course, goes for all addicts, whether of drugs or tobacco.) In fact, he is moving away from them, like a lost traveller walking away from the inn in which he hopes to spend the night. The moment he sees with clarity what he needs to do to regain the peak experience, he does an about-face and ceases to be an alcoholic.

To the night version of her (mother) I owe free-floating anxiety. I am no longer a child in an unsafe home, but anxiety became habit. My brain is conditioned. I worry. I recheck everything obsessively. Is the seat belt fastened, are the reservations correct, is my passport in my purse? Have I done something wrong? Have I said something wrong? I'm sorry - whatever happened must be my fault. Is everyone all right, and if they aren't, how can I step in? That brilliant serenity prayer: God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. To all the children of alcoholics I want to say, Good luck with that. If I don't do it myself, it won't get done (this belief is often rewarded in this increasingly incompetent world). Also, I panic easily. I am not the person you want sitting in the exit row of an airplane. And distrust. Just in general, distrust. Irony. Irony, according to the dictionary, is the use of comedy to distance oneself from emotion. I developed it as a child lickety-split. Irony was armor, a way to stick it to Mom. You think you can get me? Come on, shoot me, aim that arrow straight at my heart. It can't make a dent because I'm wearing irony.

Progress is man’s mode of existence. The general life of the human race is called Progress, the collective stride of the human race is called Progress. Progress advances; it makes the great human and terrestrial journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has its halting places where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its stations where it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly unveiled on its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.

A number of factors contribute to the development of an individual’s “practiced self-deception.” First, people who live primarily in fantasy confuse fantasy images with real, goal-directed action. They believe that they are actively pursuing their goals, when in fact they are not taking the steps necessary for success. For example, an executive in the business world may only perform the functions that enhance an image of himself as the “boss,” and leave essential management tasks unattended. The distinction between the image of success and its actual achievement is blurred. Retreat from action-oriented behavior is masked by the person’s focus on superficial signs and activities that preserve vanity and the fantasy image. Secondly, involvement in fantasy distorts one’s perception of reality, making self-deception more possible. Kierkegaard (1849/1954) alluded to this power of fantasy to attract and deceive when he observed: Sometimes the inventiveness of the human imagination suffices to procure possibility. Instead of summoning back possibility into necessity, the man pursues the possibility—and at last cannot find his way back to himself. (p. 77, 79) Thirdly, through its assigned roles and its rules for role-designated behavior, including age-appropriate activities, our culture actively supports people’s tendencies to give themselves up to more and more passivity and fantasy as they move through the life process. In addition, the discrepancy between society’s professed values on the one hand, and how society actually operates, on the other, tends to distort a person’s perceptions of reality, further confusing the difference between idealistic fantasies and actual accomplishments. The general level of pretense, duplicity, and deception existing in our society contributes to everyone’s disillusionment, cynicism, resignation, and passivity. The pooling of the individual defenses and fantasies of all society’s members makes it possible for each person to practice self-delusion under the guise of normalcy. Thus chronic self-denial becomes a socially acceptable defense against death anxiety.

Again they mention the Siriono who, they say, rarely if ever lack for sexual partners and where sex anxiety seems to be remarkably low. Recall that the Siriono live in small inbreeding groups under one roof and in a constant state of hunger, which makes food anxiety their main experience. Men use food to get sex, women are subservient, marriage is monogamous or polygynous, and women receive the blame for all adultery which is hidden as much as possible. A man alone with a woman in the forest may throw her to the ground and have sex with her without so much as a word. Sex is generally a violent and rapid affair, and while kissing is unknown, biting occurs. How would it feel to live in such a world, Ryan and Jethá ask. Hungry, probably, and not that great for women.

Low inhibition and anxiety “There was no fear, no worry, no sense of reputation and competition, no envy, none of these things which in varying degrees have always been present in my work.” “A lowered sense of personal danger; I don’t feel threatened anymore, and there is no feeling of my reputation being at stake.” “Although doing well on these problems would be fine, failure to get ahead on them would have been threatening. However, as it turned out, on this afternoon the normal blocks in the way of progress seemed to be absent.” 2. Capacity to restructure problem in a larger context “Looking at the same problem with [psychedelic] materials, I was able to consider it in a much more basic way, because I could form and keep in mind a much broader picture.” “I could handle two or three different ideas at the same time and keep track of each.” “Normally I would overlook many more trivial points for the sake of expediency, but under the drug, time seemed unimportant. I faced every possible questionable issue square in the face.” “Ability to start from the broadest general basis in the beginning.” “I returned to the original problem…. I tried, I think consciously, to think of the problem in its totality, rather than through the devices I had used before.” 3. Enhanced fluency and flexibility of ideation “I began to work fast, almost feverishly, to keep up with the flow of ideas.” “I began to draw …my senses could not keep up with my images …my hand was not fast enough …my eyes were not keen enough…. I was impatient to record the picture (it has not faded one particle). I worked at a pace I would not have thought I was capable of.” “I was very impressed with the ease with which ideas appeared (it was virtually as if the world is made of ideas, and so it is only necessary to examine any part of the world to get an idea). I also got the feeling that creativity is an active process in which you limit yourself and have an objective, so there is a focus about which ideas can cluster and relate.” “I dismissed the original idea entirely, and started to approach the graphic problem in a radically different way. That was when things started to happen. All kinds of different possibilities came to mind….” “And the feeling during this period of profuse production was one of joy and exuberance…. It was the pure fun of doing, inventing, creating, and playing.

Ideas for Journal Entries You may find the following ideas useful in beginning your journal or keeping the entries varied. If you are not used to expressing your thoughts on paper, it may seem awkward at first. The longer you do it, the easier it will become. You’ll be amazed at the insight you gain into your life. -Write about your most memorable experience with social anxiety. How did you feel? What did you think? How did others react? Why do you think the event happened? -Write about situations that make you anxious every day. Record your thoughts, feelings, and actions. You may want to divide the page into columns with the headings: situation or event; negative thoughts; physical reactions; and actions. Following is an example of how this may look: Situation or Event Should I attend the first art class after school. Negative Thoughts I thought about skipping out. I was afraid of what people would think. I wanted to do a good job. Physical Reactions I felt a shortness of breath. In general, I was nervous and in a bad mood. Actions I took some deep breaths and visualized the class going well. Later, I became engrossed in my drawing. -Write about a time when you were pleased with how you acted in a social situation. -Identify times when anxiety symptoms kept you from doing something that you really wanted to do. How did you feel? What might have happened if you had not been afraid? -Write a letter to someone who made you feel bad about yourself. You aren’t going to show the letter to anyone, so feel free to write whatever you want. -Write out a conversation with your inner voice. Begin the entry with a question directed to yourself, then write your mental response. It may help to label the different voices A and B. Dialogue writing is a very effective way to get to the heart of the matter.

The Agreeable vs. the Disagreeable Anxious Person Earlier I mentioned people being agreeable or disagreeable. Being generally agreeable or disagreeable has been identified as one of the fundamental dimensions of personality. Just like anyone else, anxious people can be either agreeable or disagreeable. It pays to know which you are. People who are agreeable tend to prioritize getting along with others. They may not be willing to make waves when they can see problems with other people’s ideas or plans. In contrast, people who are naturally disagreeable may underestimate the importance of getting along with others and not invest enough in relationship building. Once you recognize whatever tendencies you have, you can keep them in mind and modify your responses as you see fit. For example, if you’re anxious and disagreeable, you may say no more than you should. After all, your nature has you on the lookout for things that could go wrong.

Predominantly inattentive type Perhaps the majority of girls with AD/HD fall into the primarily inattentive type, and are most likely to go undiagnosed. Generally, these girls are more compliant than disruptive and get by rather passively in the academic arena. They may be hypoactive or lethargic. In the extreme, they may even seem narcoleptic. Because they do not appear to stray from cultural norms, they will rarely come to the attention of their teacher. Early report cards of an inattentive type girl may read, "She is such a sweet little girl. She must try harder to speak up in class." She is often a shy daydreamer who avoids drawing attention to herself. Fearful of expressing herself in class, she is concerned that she will be ridiculed or wrong. She often feels awkward, and may nervously twirl the ends of her hair. Her preferred seating position is in the rear of the classroom. She may appear to be listening to the teacher, even when she has drifted off and her thoughts are far away. These girls avoid challenges, are easily discouraged, and tend to give up quickly. Their lack of confidence in themselves is reflected in their failure excuses, such as, "I can't," "It's too hard," or "I used to know it, but I can't remember it now." The inattentive girl is likely to be disorganized, forgetful, and often anxious about her school work. Teachers may be frustrated because she does not finish class work on time. She may mistakenly be judged as less bright than she really is. These girls are reluctant to volunteer for a project orjoin a group of peers at recess. They worry that other children will humiliate them if they make a mistake, which they are sure they will. Indeed, one of their greatest fears is being called on in class; they may stare down at their book to avoid eye contact with the teacher, hoping that the teacher will forget they exist for the moment. Because interactions with the teacher are often anxiety-ridden, these girls may have trouble expressing themselves, even when they know the answer. Sometimes, it is concluded that they have problems with central auditory processing or expressive language skills. More likely, their anxiety interferes with their concentration, temporarily reducing their capacity to both speak and listen. Generally, these girls don't experience this problem around family or close friends, where they are more relaxed. Inattentive type girls with a high IQ and no learning disabilities will be diagnosed with AD/HD very late, if ever. These bright girls have the ability and the resources to compensate for their cognitive challenges, but it's a mixed blessing. Their psychological distress is internalized, making it less obvious, but no less damaging. Some of these girls will go unnoticed until college or beyond, and many are never diagnosed they are left to live with chronic stress that may develop into anxiety and depression as their exhausting, hidden efforts to succeed take their toll. Issues

Next Action When you’re avoiding something, try identifying the next action you need to take to move forward. Do that action. For example, if you have a legal situation and you feel overwhelmed about it, the next action you need to take might be something like emailing a lawyer friend and asking for a referral. If your garden has become overgrown with weeds, the next action you need to take might be locating your gardening tools. If your smartphone is acting up, the next action you need to take might be to run a backup. If you need to buy a new laptop, your next action might be to decide on your budget. Keep in mind that the next action you pick shouldn’t be too big. Generally, try to think of something you can do in 15 minutes or less. If you still feel overwhelmed, try picking an even smaller next action. To give credit where credit is due, the concept of defining your next action was first popularized in a productivity book called Getting Things Done. It’s a concept many of my clients have found useful.

Virtually every version of CBT for anxiety disorders involves working through what’s called an exposure hierarchy. The concept is simple. You make a list of all the situations and behaviors you avoid due to anxiety. You then assign a number to each item on your list based on how anxiety provoking you expect doing the avoided behavior would be. Use numbers from 0 (= not anxiety provoking at all) to 100 (= you would fear having an instant panic attack). For example, attempting to talk to a famous person in your field at a conference might be an 80 on the 0-100 scale. Sort your list in order, from least to most anxiety provoking. Aim to construct a list that has several avoided actions in each 10-point range. For example, several that fall between 20 and 30, between 30 and 40, and so on, on your anxiety scale. That way, you won’t have any jumps that are too big. Omit things that are anxiety-provoking but wouldn’t actually benefit you (such as eating a fried insect). Make a plan for how you can work through your hierarchy, starting at the bottom of the list. Where possible, repeat an avoided behavior several times before you move up to the next level. For example, if one of your items is talking to a colleague you find intimidating, do this several times (with the same or different colleagues) before moving on. When you start doing things you’d usually avoid that are low on your hierarchy, you’ll gain the confidence you need to do the things that are higher up on your list. It’s important you don’t use what are called safety behaviors. Safety behaviors are things people do as an anxiety crutch—for example, wearing their lucky undies when they approach that famous person or excessively rehearsing what they plan to say. There is a general consensus within psychology that exposure techniques like the one just described are among the most effective ways to reduce problems with anxiety. In clinical settings, people who do exposures get the most out of treatment. Some studies have even shown that just doing exposure can be as effective as therapies that also include extensive work on thoughts. If you want to turbocharge your results, try exposure. If you find it too difficult to do alone, consider working with a therapist.

Processing Change One of the ways people fundamentally differ from one another is that individuals vary in how much emotional energy it takes for them to process change or the idea of change. For example, some people may find it incredibly jarring when they have to deal with last-minute changes in plans or they have to work with different people from those they usually work with. People who need time and psychological space to adjust to change won’t necessarily be anxious. However, they’ll tend to develop anxiety if they aren’t allowed, or don’t allow themselves, the time they need to adjust to change, or if they don’t have any emotional energy in their tank to cope with small changes in plans. Are folks who require more energy to process change always rigid and unadaptable? No. They can still be very good at adapting—if they have the self-knowledge to navigate changes in a way that works for their nature. They will generally function best if they have habits, routines, and relationships in their life that give them a base level of consistency and familiarity. This could be as simple as eating the same thing for breakfast every day, having stable long-term relationships, or having particular routines for what they like to do on the weekend. Having some stable, familiar elements to life can help people tolerate changes in other areas.

Question the Thought “Failure is Just for Losers” A failure-related thinking error that anxious perfectionists sometimes make is thinking that failure is just for losers. If you have this thinking bias, try this thought experiment: Experiment: Think of a highly successful person you admire. It can be anyone, from Oprah to someone you actually know. What failures has this person experienced in areas where he or she is generally successful? Has a businessperson you admire made some bad investments? Has your favorite actor made a movie that lost money? Has your favorite musician had an album flop? You may be able to think of examples and failures off the top of your head, or you may need to do some online research or read a biography of that person. Make sure the examples are relevant to the person’s core domain of success. A superstar chef opening a restaurant and failing is more relevant than an actor opening a restaurant and failing. After you’ve done the thought experiment, ask yourself, “What’s an alternative thought that’s more realistic and less harsh than ‘Failure is just for losers’?” Alternate option: Ask mentors (people you actually know) about examples of their failures. Ask them what they learned from the experiences. You could also ask your mentors for examples of failures that have happened to prominent people in your field. They might be more willing to volunteer this information than to talk about their own failures.

The Blue Mind Rx Statement Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans. The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being. In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters. Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history. Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more. Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety. We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points: •Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies. •Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits. •All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy. •Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both. •Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support. •Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy There are almost no pure cognitive or behavioral therapists. Instead, most therapists use a combination of both techniques. This is known as cognitive-behavioral therapy. It is generally recognized as the best therapy for social anxiety. In cognitive-behavioral therapy, a therapist helps you identity maladaptive thinking patterns and replace them with new ways of thinking. He or she also teaches you relaxation techniques and new behaviors that make you feel more comfortable in social situations. Cognitive-behavioral therapy uses many of the same techniques that we explored in the previous chapter. Although you might make great strides on your own, sometimes it is easier and faster to have someone guide you. Often it is difficult for people to explore hidden beliefs about themselves. A professional therapist is experienced in working with people who are trying to change. Often a therapist will see connections in your situation that you cannot. Carlos was terrified of speaking in class. Whenever the teacher called on him, his heart raced, he blushed, and his stomach felt upset. His therapist first had him focus on his thoughts during class. As an experiment, she had him purposely answer a question incorrectly during biology class. To his surprise, the teacher didn’t make a big deal out of it, and the other students didn’t laugh. As a result, Carlos realized that his imagined consequences for making errors were greatly exaggerated. He also realized that he held himself to a higher standard than other people, including the teacher, did. Next, his therapist showed him various relaxation techniques to lessen the physical symptoms of anxiety. Soon, he felt more comfortable and even volunteered to lead a discussion group.

Like stress, emotion is a concept we often invoke without a precise sense of its meaning. And, like stress, emotions have several components. The psychologist Ross Buck distinguishes between three levels of emotional responses, which he calls Emotion I, Emotion II and Emotion III, classified according to the degree we are conscious of them. Emotion III is the subjective experience, from within oneself. It is how we feel. In the experience of Emotion III there is conscious awareness of an emotional state, such as anger or joy or fear, and its accompanying bodily sensations. Emotion II comprises our emotional displays as seen by others, with or without our awareness. It is signalled through body language — “non-verbal signals, mannerisms, tones of voices, gestures, facial expressions, brief touches, and even the timing of events and pauses between words. [They] may have physiologic consequences — often outside the awareness of the participants.” It is quite common for a person to be oblivious to the emotions he is communicating, even though they are clearly read by those around him. Our expressions of Emotion II are what most affect other people, regardless of our intentions. A child’s displays of Emotion II are also what parents are least able to tolerate if the feelings being manifested trigger too much anxiety in them. As Dr. Buck points out, a child whose parents punish or inhibit this acting-out of emotion will be conditioned to respond to similar emotions in the future by repression. The self-shutdown serves to prevent shame and rejection. Under such conditions, Buck writes, “emotional competence will be compromised…. The individual will not in the future know how to effectively handle the feelings and desires involved. The result would be a kind of helplessness.” The stress literature amply documents that helplessness, real or perceived, is a potent trigger for biological stress responses. Learned helplessness is a psychological state in which subjects do not extricate themselves from stressful situations even when they have the physical opportunity to do so. People often find themselves in situations of learned helplessness — for example, someone who feels stuck in a dysfunctional or even abusive relationship, in a stressful job or in a lifestyle that robs him or her of true freedom. Emotion I comprises the physiological changes triggered by emotional stimuli, such as the nervous system discharges, hormonal output and immune changes that make up the flight-or-fight reaction in response to threat. These responses are not under conscious control, and they cannot be directly observed from the outside. They just happen. They may occur in the absence of subjective awareness or of emotional expression. Adaptive in the acute threat situation, these same stress responses are harmful when they are triggered chronically without the individual’s being able to act in any way to defeat the perceived threat or to avoid it. Self-regulation, writes Ross Buck, “involves in part the attainment of emotional competence, which is defined as the ability to deal in an appropriate and satisfactory way with one’s own feelings and desires.” Emotional competence presupposes capacities often lacking in our society, where “cool” — the absence of emotion — is the prevailing ethic, where “don’t be so emotional” and “don’t be so sensitive” are what children often hear, and where rationality is generally considered to be the preferred antithesis of emotionality. The idealized cultural symbol of rationality is Mr. Spock, the emotionally crippled Vulcan character on Star Trek.

Know Yourself: Are You a Freezer, Flyer, or Fighter? How avoidance coping manifests for you will depend on what your dominant response type is when you’re facing something you’d rather avoid. There are three possible responses: freezing, fleeing, or fighting. We’ve evolved these reactions because they’re useful for encounters with predators. Like other animals, when we encounter a predator, we’re wired to freeze to avoid provoking attention, run away, or fight. Most people are prone to one of the three responses more so than the other two. Therefore, you can think of yourself as having a “type,” like a personality type. Identify your type using the descriptions in the paragraphs that follow. Bear in mind that your type is just your most dominant pattern. Sometimes you’ll respond in one of the other two ways. Freezers virtually freeze when they don’t want to do something. They don’t move forward or backward; they just stop in their tracks. If a coworker or loved one nags a freezer to do something the freezer doesn’t want to do, the freezer will tend not to answer. Freezers may be prone to stonewalling in relationships, which is a term used to describe when people flat-out refuse to discuss certain topics that their partner wants to talk about, such as a decision to have another baby or move to a new home. Flyers are people who are prone to fleeing when they don’t want to do something. They might physically leave the house if a relationship argument gets too tense and they’d rather not continue the discussion. Flyers can be prone to serial relationships because they’d rather escape than work through tricky issues. When flyers want to avoid doing something, they tend to busy themselves with too much activity as a way to justify their avoidance. For example, instead of dealing with their own issues, flyers may overfill their children’s schedules so that they’re always on the run, taking their kids from activity to activity. Fighters tend to respond to anxiety by working harder. Fighters are the anxiety type that is least prone to avoidance coping: however, they still do it in their own way. When fighters have something that they’d rather not deal with, they will often work themselves into the ground but avoid dealing with the crux of the problem. When a strategy isn’t working, fighters don’t like to admit it and will keep hammering away. They tend to avoid getting the outside input they need to move forward. They may avoid acting on others’ advice if doing so is anxiety provoking, even when deep down they know that taking the advice is necessary. Instead, they will keep trying things their own way. A person’s dominant anxiety type—freezer, flyer, or fighter—will often be consistent for both work and personal relationships, but not always. Experiment: Once you’ve identified your type, think about a situation you’re facing currently in which you’re acting to type. What’s an alternative coping strategy you could try? For example, your spouse is nagging you to do a task involving the computer. You feel anxious about it due to your general lack of confidence with all things computer related. If you’re a freezer, you’d normally just avoid answering when asked when you’re going to do the task. How could you change your reaction?

Experiment: To replace negative character labels, try the following steps: 1. Pick a new, positive character label that you would prefer. For example, if your old belief is “I’m incompetent,” you would likely pick “I’m competent.” 2. Rate how much you currently believe the old negative character label on a scale of 0 (= I don’t believe it at all) to 100 (= I believe it completely). Do the same for the new positive belief. For example, you might say you believe “I’m incompetent” at level 95 and believe “I’m competent” at level 10 (the numbers don’t need to add up to 100). 3. Create a Positive Data Log and a Historical Data Log. Strengthening your new, positive character label is often a more helpful approach than attempting to hack away at the old, negative one. I’m going to give you two experiments that will help you do this. Positive Data Log. For two weeks, commit to writing down evidence that supports your new, positive character belief. For example, if you are trying to boost your belief in the thought “I’m competent” and you show up to an appointment on time, you can write that down as evidence. Don’t fall into the cognitive trap of discounting some of the evidence. For example, if you make a mistake and then sort it out, it’s evidence of competence, not incompetence, so you could put that in your Positive Data Log. Historical Data Log. This log looks back at periods of your life and finds evidence from those time periods that supports your positive character belief. This experiment helps people believe that the positive character quality represents part of their enduring nature. To do this experiment, split your life into whatever size chunks you want to split it into, such as four- to six-year periods. If you’re only in your 20s, then you might choose three- or four-year periods. To continue the prior example, if you’re working on the belief “I’m competent,” then evidence from childhood might be things like learning to walk, talk, or make friends. You figured these things out. From your teen years, your evidence of general competency at life might be getting your driver’s license (yes, on the third try still counts). Evidence from your early college years could be things like successfully choosing a major and passing your courses. Evidence for after you finished your formal education might be related to finding work to support yourself and finding housing. You should include evidence in the social domain, like finding someone you wanted to date or figuring out how to break up with someone when you realized that relationship wasn’t the right fit for you. The general idea is to prove to yourself that “I’m competent” is more true than “I’m incompetent.” Other positive character beliefs you might try to strengthen could be things like “I’m strong” (not weak), “I’m worthy of love” (not unlovable), and “I’m worthy of respect” (not worthless). Sometimes the flipside of a negative character belief is obvious, as in the case of strong/weak, but sometimes there are a couple of possible options that could be considered opposites; in this case, you can choose. 4. Rerate how much you believe the negative and positive character labels. There should have been a little bit of change as a result of doing the data logs. For example, you might bow believe “I’m incompetent” at only 50 instead of 95, and believe “I’m competent” at 60 instead of 10. You’ve probably had your negative character belief for a long time, so changing it isn’t like making a pack of instant noodles.