Wendy Suzuki > Quotes

“Anxiety’s arousal, triggered by the stress response, will alert you to something that’s bothering you—a sudden change at home or work, for instance. You pay attention and think through what’s at stake: What does this change mean for you? For your loved ones? Can you control the situation? By organizing your thoughts around what you can control, you draw upon serotonin, dopamine, and cortisol to keep you focused on next steps. This action keeps you emotionally regulated and goal-driven.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“By reframing the way you think about anxiety, you can take what was once a major drag and turn it into something useful and even beneficial in your life. And as you achieve this flip, you will naturally open the door to the extraordinary benefits that anxiety is designed to bring into your life. When functioning properly, anxiety can essentially grant you six superpowers: the ability to strengthen your overall physical and emotional resilience; perform tasks and activities at a higher level; optimize your mindset; increase your focus and productivity; enhance your social intelligence; and improve your creative skills. Getting a handle on your anxiety and shifting it to good opens the door to discovering how anxiety can become a superpower.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“So, what is resilience? It’s tenacity in response to falling short of your goal. It’s courage to continue despite disappointment. It’s the belief that you can and will do better if you put in the effort or practice. It’s the confidence to believe that you matter. It’s an openness to learning and relearning. It’s the stamina to persevere.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Anxiety is Your Superpower (GOOD ANXIETY): Using anxiety to think better, feel better and do better

“Anxiety really does work like a form of energy. Think of it as a chemical reaction to an event or situation: Without trustworthy resources, training, and timing, that chemical reaction can get out of hand—but it can also be controlled and used for valuable good.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“Just as preventative medicine acts as a way to avoid disease and offset aging, building resilience before we necessarily need it is not just a safety measure but a route to living a healthier, more balanced life.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“Everyday anxiety can be a life-robber.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“What the science of stress inoculation tells us is that we are all born with tools to get ourselves out of the stress/anxiety-provoking situation. Just to be clear, all anxiety-provoking situations will engage your stress response, but the act of exercising those responses helps inoculate you from future stress/anxiety responses. It is as if you are teaching yourself that you CAN survive these situations, and the better you get at first feeling that anxiety and then acting to mitigate the stress response, the better you will manage in the future. In a sense, this gives you the opportunity to retrain your stress response with every anxiety-provoking situation you encounter as long as you are aware of your options and tools to flip that bad-anxiety response to a good one.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“Though anxiety might originate as some form of attention-getting signal to avoid danger, it doesn’t necessarily have to cause discomfort, distraction, or otherwise interfere with our natural drive toward well-being and balance. We can learn to use awareness to reframe a situation, remove the perception of danger, and reappraise it instead as an opportunity to overcome a challenge and set down new learning (i.e., responses). We have multiple options for managing both the attention to the signal and the anxiety (the feelings), and if it gets to that point, the response itself. Our brain is a wondrous thing!”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“When the brain-body has just enough stress, it functions optimally. When it has no stress, it simply lists, like a sailboat with no wind to direct it.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“At its core, anxiety can be explained as an arousal and activation of both brain and body when they encounter negative stimuli or stress. The brain and body are essentially interconnected.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“I cried because the story made me realize something important about myself. I had spent the last 16+ years studying the mechanics of memory, without truly thinking about what memories meant to me. I spent no time thinking about how precious my own memories were to me.
Aren't our memories our most precious possession?”
― Wendy Suzuki, Healthy Brain, Happy Life

“Resilience is not an either/or. It is not only a dynamic system of interacting brain-body signals that protects us as a survival mechanism by coming to our rescue in the hardest of times but is also a daily awareness, energy, and resourcefulness that we actively cultivate and strengthen.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“The sources of our anxiety are great pointers toward what we value in life. Does it take effort to shift those negative emotions to their positive versions? Yes. But they are also indications of what is important or valuable to us.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“We build resilience by learning how to think flexibly and accepting that we are not defined by our failures. We build resilience by acknowledging what we need and knowing when to ask for help. We also build resilience when we seek out pleasure and sources of enjoyment, from food to sports to sex. Yes, having fun helps build our stores of resilience!”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“Our brains work automatically to create strategies for avoiding unpleasant feelings (such as anxiety) and masking their severity. This avoidance is built into our neural pathways and wiring and helps us manage stress and keep going. But as our internal and external lives/environments change, we often outgrow these coping mechanisms or they just stop working.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“What’s crucial, from my point of view as a teacher, is that students learn to manage their anxiety. As we know, stress in life is inevitable; a student who opts for less stress is only hurting his or her chances of learning how to operate well under stress.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“For instance, some people become anxious before a public speaking event. For others, the idea of getting up in front of a crowd can be stimulating and exciting. One way of responding is not necessarily better than the other; it’s more accurately a reflection of a person’s way of managing stress at any given moment combined with their history.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“Stimulate the brain with new things to do or new individuals to interact with and it reacts by creating new connections that cause it to actually expand in size. But deprive your brain of new stimulation or bore it with doing the same thing day after day after day, and the connections will wither away and your brain will actually shrink.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Healthy Brain, Happy Life

“An optimistic outlook (often referred to as having a positive affect) has been shown to reduce negative mood and anxiety and quicken recovery from traumatic events.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“The key point here is that resilience comes not only from the confidence and self-belief that we gain from the successes in our lives but, perhaps more importantly, from surviving, adjusting, and moving on after the inevitable failures and challenges. It takes both sides of this equation to build our superpower of resilience. We need to go through hard things in order to know we can survive them.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“When we have just the right kind or amount of stress in our lives, we feel balanced—this is the quality of well-being we always seek.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“Chronic maladaptation to stress affects our brains and bodies in numerous ways, at numerous levels, including the neuroendocrine system, the autonomic nervous system, and the cardiovascular and immune systems.1”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“When we understand how these underlying pathways trigger, reinforce, or redirect anxiety’s arousal, then we can combat bad anxiety and make conscious decisions that enable us to steer our own path. When we learn to cue in to our own feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, not only can we shift from bad to good anxiety but we can shift our energy, attitude, mindset, and intentions.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“When a brain-body encounters too much stress, it begins to respond negatively. But when it does not have enough stress, it plateaus and begins to coast. Emotionally, this plateau might feel like boredom or disinterest; physically it can look like a stagnation of growth.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“our modern-day brains do not automatically discern between a real and an imagined threat; as a result, we often get stuck in anxiety mode.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“negativity bias.2 This refers to the natural bias our brain gives to negative feelings over positive ones. A growing number of studies show that negative information not only attracts our attention more quickly than similarly powerful positive information but that negative information also influences people’s evaluations more than the equivalent amount of positive information.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“2) Cognitive flexibility and reappraisal, two funda-mental aspects of emotion regulation, can also be learned, practiced, and ultimately used as a form of psychological resilience.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“Anxiety is a bundle of emotions that upset our ability to emotionally regulate. And they are meant to, because they are meant to draw our attention to an area where all is not as it should be. Once anxiety has triggered arousal, we are meant to apply our regulatory tools to those emotions in order to begin processing them; once we do so, anxiety should ebb and homeostasis should be restored. However, our ability to regulate our emotions is not always predictable. Indeed, the degree of one’s capacity for emotion regulation varies depending on a number of factors—how we were raised, our lifestyle, and even our genetic profile.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“We are unable to filter possible threats in our environment, and we are unable to turn off the emotional, mental, and physiological response to these threats even if they are imagined. These unregulated responses undermine our health and create what can become a near-constant negative feedback loop—the very essence of everyday anxiety.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion

“Getting a handle on your anxiety and shifting it to good opens the door to discovering how anxiety can become a superpower.”
― Wendy Suzuki, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion