Scott Stossel > Quotes

“To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I'm like a duck--paddling, paddling, paddling.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“It is a fact—I say this from experience—that being severely anxious is depressing. Anxiety can impede your relationships, impair your performance, constrict your life, and limit your possibilities.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“for the existentialists, what generated anxiety was not the godlessness of the world, per se, but rather the freedom to choose between God and godlessness. Though freedom is something we actively seek, the freedom to choose generates anxiety. “When I behold my possibilities,” Kierkegaard wrote, “I experience that dread which is the dizziness of freedom, and my choice is made in fear and trembling.” Many people try to flee anxiety by fleeing choice. This helps explain the perverse-seeming appeal of authoritarian societies—the certainties of a rigid, choiceless society can be very reassuring—and why times of upheaval so often produce extremist leaders and movements: Hitler in Weimar Germany, Father Coughlin in Depression-era America, or Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Vladimir Putin in Russia today. But running from anxiety, Kierkegaard believed, was a mistake because anxiety was a “school” that taught people to come to terms with the human condition.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“social phobics are better at picking up on subtle social cues than other people are—but they tend to overinterpret anything that could be construed as a negative reaction.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“More than a few people, some of whom think they know me quite well, have remarked that they are struck that I, who can seem so even-keeled and imperturbable, would choose to write a book about anxiety. I smile gently while churning inside and thinking about what I’ve learned is a signature characteristic of the phobic personality: “the need and ability”—as described in the self-help book Your Phobia—“to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside.”c”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“The truth is that anxiety is at once a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“Some social phobics find even positive attention to be aversive. Think of the young child who bursts into tears when guests sing “Happy Birthday” to her at a party—or of Elfriede Jelinek afraid to pick up her Nobel Prize. Social attention—even positive, supportive attention—activates the neurocircuitry of fear. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Calling positive attention to yourself can incite jealousy or generate new rivalries.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“But none of these treatments have fundamentally reduced the underlying anxiety that seems woven into my soul and hardwired into my body and that at times makes my life a misery. As the years pass, the hope of being cured of my anxiety has faded into a resigned desire to come to terms with it, to find some redemptive quality or mitigating benefit to my being, too often, a quivering, quaking, neurotic wreck.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“The truth is that anxiety is at once a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture. Even as anxiety is experienced at a spiritual and psychological level, it is scientifically measurable at the molecular level and the physiological level. It is produced by nature and it is produced by nurture. It’s a psychological phenomenon and a sociological phenomenon. In computer terms, it’s both a hardware problem (I’m wired badly) and a software problem (I run faulty logic programs that make me think anxious thoughts). The origins of a temperament are many faceted; emotional dispositions that may seem to have a simple, single source—a bad gene, say, or a childhood trauma—may not.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“Individuals who rate high on the so-called Anxiety Sensitivity Index, or ASI, have a high degree of what's known as interoceptive awareness, meaning they are highly attuned to the inner workings on their bodies, to the beepings and bleatings, the blips and burps, of their physiologies; they are more conscious of their heart rate, blood pressure, digestive burblings, and so forth than other people are.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“(Researchers at the University of Iowa have for years been studying a woman, known in the literature as S.M., whose amygdala was destroyed by a rare disease—and who cannot, as a consequence, experience fear.)”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“We all know perfectly well that the man who lives out his life as a consumer,” he writes in “The Coming Crisis in Psychiatry,” “a sexual partner, an ‘other-directed’ executive; who avoids boredom and anxiety by consuming tons of newsprint, miles of film, years of TV time; that such a man has somehow betrayed his destiny as a human being.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“A panic attack is interesting the way a broken leg or a kidney stone is interesting—a pain that you want to end.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“For the social phobic, any kind of performance—musical, sporting, public speaking—can be terrifying because failure will reveal the weakness and inadequacy within. This in turn means constantly projecting an image that feels false—an image of confidence, competence, even perfection.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“And no Grand Inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharpwitted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD, The Concept of Anxiety (1844)”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the 1950s.”)”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“biomedical view, for its part, increasingly recognizes the power of things like meditation and traditional talk therapy to render concrete structural changes in brain physiology that are every bit as “real” as the changes wrought by pills or electroshock therapy. A study published by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2011 found that subjects who practiced meditation for an average of just twenty-seven minutes a day over a period of eight weeks produced visible changes in brain structure. Meditation led to decreased density of the amygdala, a physical change that was correlated with subjects’ self-reported stress levels—as their amygdalae got less dense, the subjects felt less stressed. Other studies have found that Buddhist monks who are especially good at meditating show much greater activity in their frontal cortices, and much less in their amygdalae, than normal people.n Meditation and deep-breathing exercises work for similar reasons as psychiatric medications do, exerting their effects not just on some abstract concept of mind but concretely on our bodies, on the somatic correlates of our feelings. Recent research has shown that even old-fashioned talk therapy can have tangible, physical effects on the shape of our brains. Perhaps Kierkegaard was wrong to say that the man who has learned to be in anxiety has learned the most important, or the most existentially meaningful, thing—perhaps the man has only learned the right techniques for controlling his hyperactive amygdala.o”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“No wonder I’m anxious: I’m like Woody Allen trapped in John Calvin.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“The voyage of the Beagle, four years and nine months long, was a pivotal experience, enabling Darwin to develop his scientific work.k The months in port prior to the launch of the Beagle were, as Darwin would write in his old age, “the most miserable which I ever spent”—and that’s saying something, given the terrible physical suffering he would later endure. “I was out of spirits at the thought of leaving all my family and friends for so long a time, and the weather seemed to me inexpressibly gloomy,” he recalled. “I was also troubled with palpitations and pain about the heart, and like many a young ignorant man, especially one with a smattering of medical knowledge, was convinced I had heart disease.” He also suffered from faintness and tingling in his fingers. These are all symptoms of anxiety—and in particular of the hyperventilation associated with panic disorder.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“I smile gently while churning inside and thinking about what I’ve learned is a signature characteristic of the phobic personality: “the need and ability”—as described in the self-help book Your Phobia—“to present a relatively placid, untroubled appearance to others, while suffering extreme distress on the inside.”c”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“when not actively afflicted by such acute episodes, I am buffeted by worry: about my health and my family members’ health; about finances; about work; about the rattle in my car and the dripping in my basement; about the encroachment of old age and the inevitability of death; about everything and nothing. Sometimes this worry gets transmuted into low-grade physical discomfort—stomachaches, headaches, dizziness, pains in my arms and legs—or a general malaise, as though I have mononucleosis or the flu. At various times, I have developed anxiety-induced difficulties breathing, swallowing, even walking; these difficulties then become obsessions, consuming all of my thinking.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“panic disorder with agoraphobia (DSM-V code 300.22): the condition, as Hippocrates described it, “usually attacks abroad, if a person is travelling a lonely road somewhere, and fear seizes him.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“On the other hand, I can tell you, both from extensive research and from firsthand experience, that as convincing as the case made by Lane and his fellow Antipharma critics can be, the distress felt by some social phonics is real and intense. Are there some 'normally' shy people, not mentally ill or in need of psychiatric attention, who get swept up in the broad diagnostic category of social anxiety disorder, which has been swollen by the profit-seeking imperatives of the drug companies? Surely. But are there also socially anxious people who can legitimately benefit from medication and other forms of psychiatric treatment- who in some cases are saved by medication from alcoholism, despair, and suicide? I think there are.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“W., echoing Freud, says that while fear is produced by “real” threats from the world, anxiety is produced by threats from within our selves. Anxiety is, as Dr. W. puts it, “a signal that the usual defenses against unbearably painful views of the self are failing.” Rather than confronting the reality that your marriage is failing, or that your career has not panned out, or that you are declining into geriatric decrepitude, or that you are going to die—hard existential truths to reckon with—your mind sometimes instead produces distracting and defensive anxiety symptoms, transmuting psychic distress into panic attacks or free-floating general anxiety or developing phobias onto which you project your inner turmoil. Interestingly, a number of recent studies have found that at the moment an anxious patient begins to reckon consciously with a previously hidden psychic conflict, lifting it from the murk of the unconscious into the light of awareness, a slew of physiological measurements change markedly: blood pressure and heart rate drop, skin conductance decreases, levels of stress hormones in the blood decline. Chronic physical symptoms—backaches, stomachaches, headaches—often dissipate spontaneously as emotional troubles that had previously been “somaticized,” or converted into physical symptoms, get brought into conscious awareness.p But”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“Studies of the DSM-II found that when two psychiatrists consulted the same patient, they gave the same DSM diagnosis only between 32 and 42 percent of the time. Rates of consistency have improved since then, but the diagnosis of many mental disorders remains, despite pretensions to the contrary, more art than science.b”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“According to recent epidemiological data, the “lifetime incidence” of anxiety disorder is more than 25 percent—which, if true, means that one in four of us can expect to be stricken by debilitating anxiety at some point in our lifetimes. And it is debilitating: Recent academic papers have argued that the psychic and physical impairment tied to living with an anxiety disorder is equivalent to living with diabetes—usually manageable, sometimes fatal, and always a pain to deal with.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“When man lost his faith in God and in reason, existentialists like Kierkegaard and Sartre believed, he found himself adrift in the universe and therefore adrift in anxiety. But for the existentialists, what generated anxiety was not the godlessness of the world, per se, but rather the freedom to choose between God and godlessness. Though freedom is something we actively seek, the freedom to choose generates anxiety. “When I behold my possibilities,” Kierkegaard wrote, “I experience that dread which is the dizziness of freedom, and my choice is made in fear and trembling.” Many”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“It is an irony of medical history that even as Freud’s later work would make him the progenitor of modern psychodynamic psychotherapy, which is generally premised on the idea that mental illness arises from unconscious psychological conflicts, his papers on cocaine make him one of the fathers of biological psychiatry, which is governed by the notion that mental distress is partly caused by a physical or chemical malfunction that can be treated with drugs.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“When a mother is afraid that her child will die when it has only a pimple or a slight cold we speak of anxiety; but if she is afraid when the child has a serious illness we call her reaction fear,” Karen Horney wrote in 1937. “If someone is afraid whenever he stands on a height or when he has to discuss a topic he knows well, we call his reaction anxiety; if someone is afraid when he loses his way high up in the mountains during a heavy thunderstorm we would speak of fear.” (Horney further elaborated her distinction by saying that while you always know when you are afraid, you can be anxious without knowing it.) In”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind

“Physical states create psychic ones and not vice-versa. The James-Lange theory was later undermined by research on patients with spinal cord injuries that prevented them from receiving any somatic information from their viscera—people who literally could not feel muscle tension or stomach discomfort; people who were, in effect, brains without bodies—yet who still reported experiencing the unpleasant psychological sensations of dread or anxiety. This suggested that the James-Lange theory was, if not wholly wrong, at least incomplete. If patients unable to receive information about the state of their bodies can still experience anxiety, then maybe anxiety is primarily a mental state, one that doesn’t require input from the rest of the body.”
― Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind