Henry Emmons > Quotes

“Engaged, yet detached. Active, yet calm. Moving, yet still. This is how it is to be awake in the world.”
― Henry Emmons

“The poets wrestle with the angel of sorrow till he leaves a blessing upon them.”
― Henry Vaughan Emmons

“Resilience Training is a proven eight-week program that incorporates the latest science on diet, exercise, and nutritional supplements along with the best emotional self-care available—what I call the “psychology of mindfulness.”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“She began using B vitamins, magnesium, and 5-HTP twice daily, along with tryptophan and a melatonin complex at night. Sure enough, within five days she clearly began to feel better.”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“Training is a step-by-step training in mental calmness and emotional wisdom, designed to help patients recover from and prevent relapse of anxiety, depression, and similar stress related problems. It has been effective even when medications are not—and in fact, many of my patients find they don’t need to use traditional prescription antianxiety medication at all.”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“while life has always been stressful, there is something different about how it affects us”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“Every day, we wake up empty and scared.” So start by accepting that it’s okay to suffer or to feel depressed at times. And then learn to distinguish between the pain that is unavoidable and the suffering that we create for ourselves.”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Joy: A Three-Step Program for Overcoming Depression Through Western Science and Eastern Wisdom

“Then she grasped that suffering was universal, that what had happened to her, painful as it might be, was an inevitable part of life. I think of her as accepting the blow life dealt her—not fearfully, angrily, or passively, but simply, with all the fullness of her genuine grief. Her pain might continue to throb for the rest of her life—but it no longer determined her thoughts or actions. She found some freedom, and ultimately, some joy—not in spite of her pain, or even because of it, but simply alongside it. PAIN AND STRESS ARE UNAVOIDABLE; SUFFERING IS OPTIONAL”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Joy: A Three-Step Program for Overcoming Depression Through Western Science and Eastern Wisdom

“What bothered her most was the ceaseless movement of her mind, so locked in activity that it allowed her no rest, not even in sleep.”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“The problem comes when something goes awry in an otherwise normal process—when the reaction becomes excessive or unyielding. Parts of the body-mind turn off, while other areas get locked”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. —RAINER MARIA RILKE”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“I don’t see the mind, body, and spirit as separate things—they are just different reflections of a unified whole.”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“Genetic variability evolves over many millennia, yet we know that the rates of anxiety disorders have skyrocketed in just the last century, not to mention the last decade. I believe this has to do partly with changes in lifestyle, diet, sleep and work patterns, and especially our relationship with stress. Our world is unquestionably complex”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“as the military has discovered, if the amount of stress is great enough, anyone can be broken down by it.”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“Recent surveys suggest that 25–30 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from a mental disorder, and that for most of them this is the direct effect of stress. Yet because of stigma, less than half of them seek help—”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“Surely joy is the condition of life. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Joy: A Three-Step Program for Overcoming Depression Through Western Science and Eastern Wisdom

“Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging,” the report notes that while we live longer today than ever before, we are at increasing risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases. The report refers to the “Western disease cluster”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“Much of the problem, though, lies not with how things have changed outside of us but with our lack of a skillful means for dealing with a challenging world.”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“The time that we can reclaim our freedom is in the present moment. It is in learning to be aware and fully alive to the moment, with all of its beauty and terror, that we can transform ourselves.”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“Genetics plays a role in determining who gets an anxiety disorder, what type it is (e.g., worry, compulsive”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“Anxiety disorders are easily the most common mental illnesses, affecting nearly one in five adult Americans in any given year and 30 percent of people”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“what determines how well you survive chronic stress is how you react to it and whether you are able to shut it down.”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“This book focuses on ways to create innate health and resilience as a key to resolving anxiety in everyday life”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“Like depression, the effects of anxiety extend beyond the body and mind to the entire being, affecting not only one’s sense of well-being but also health, longevity, work productivity, relationships—the entire human condition.”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“In just a few decades, dramatic changes have occurred in our relationship to stress. There are many illnesses that are now associated with stress—and they have become epidemic in scope.”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“Why Anxiety Hurts, and How You Can Fix It”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“the cancer was successfully treated and her prognosis was good. It’s entirely normal to feel scared when one gets such a diagnosis, but for some reason her body and mind were unable to shut down that automatic stress reaction as they should have. And since she couldn’t sleep, there was very little chance that they would do so.”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

“we have witnessed in the Western world an explosion of other chronic diseases that apparently are affected by the stress response. Heart disease, Alzheimer’s, chronic fatigue, high blood pressure, asthma, immune system diseases, and even cancer are linked to unhealthy levels of stress and the stress hormones.”
― Henry Emmons, The Chemistry of Calm: A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety