This post is all about dealing with anxiety quotes.
You’re not alone. One third of adults experience anxiety, so, when you’re getting overwhelmed by your anxious thoughts, just remember that it’s the most common mental disorder.
Let’s be honest, though. As much as people tell you you’re not alone or try and give you tools to both manage and prevent anxiety symptoms, there are times when nothing helps. Sometimes, all you can do is accept it and read some inspirational quotes.
This post is all about dealing with anxiety quotes.
DEALING WITH ANXIETY QUOTES:
1. “Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows but only empties today of its strength.” – Charles Spurgeon
As much as our anxiety feels like it’s trying to prevent us from feeling bad tomorrow or the next day or the next year, it rarely succeeds. Most of the time, it just makes us feel bad in the moment and deserve so much than that.
Anxiety will get you spiraling faster than you can realize, so challenge yourself to notice the moment when you start spiraling into the worst possible scenario or catastrophic thinking.
Remind yourself that those situations could happen, but predicting them won’t prepare you for them anymore than if you enjoyed your day without thinking about them.
2. “I promise you nothing is as chaotic as it seems. Nothing is worth your health. Nothing is worth poisoning yourself into stress, anxiety, and fear.” – Steve Maraboli
Think about that: nothing is worth your health and nothing is worth you losing out on joy right now because of how focused you are on the horrible stuff that might happen tomorrow.
You’ve probably dealt with anxiety for as long as you can remember. So, you have lots of experience with getting stressed out about the future only for something completely different to happen and everything working out.
This isn’t always the result, but it likely happens way more than any other result. Remember that the world is painfully predictable.
Every moment that you are worried some strange, awful event will happen out of nowhere, trust in your experience that that just doesn’t happen very often in our world.
3. “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
Think about how much you worry about your appearance, actions, and words. Now, think about the fact that that’s probably how much everyone else worries about their own appearance, actions, and words.
So, if everyone’s busy worrying about themselves, they’re much less likely to worrying about others as much as they believe others are worrying about them.
Sure, we judge people. But, when we’re judging people, we’re judging them because of our own insecurities that make us feel vulnerable or weak or less than. That has nothing to do with the other person and it never will.
So, maybe we use these dealing with anxiety quotes to release some of that anxiety about what other people think of us because they’re probably not even thinking about us in the first place.
4. “Anxiety is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere.” – Erma Bombeck
Anxiety is strange in that it kind of tortures us and makes us think it’s useful. So, when people tell us that our anxiety is hurting us more than it’s helping, we get defensive about our anxiety like it’s a friend or something.
The truth is our anxiety has convinced us it’s important and it’s helpful, no matter how miserable it makes us. So, it gets us worrying about everything without actually preparing us or preventing sad things from happening.
It’s kind of useless even though we want to think of it as useful for everything it has put us through or the small victories it has helped us achieve.
5. “Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.” – Deepak Chopra
Changing our behavior is hard. It’s all about creating new pathways in the brain and reinforcing them so they become easier to choose when we can decide between our old and new behavior patterns.
But, it’s possible. We have to work against our brain’s first instinct and work past that to find new ways of reacting to the same type of situation. It’s always our choice, though, so we have to choose creating new possibilities and discomfort over the pain and comfort that we’re used to.
6. “Anxiety happens when you think you have to figure out everything all at once. Breathe. You’re strong. You got this. Take it day by day.” – Karen Salmansohn
You’re not responsible for making everyone happy, controlling every possible outcome, or removing all possible sadness from your life. (Sorry about that last one—we don’t like it either.)
Take a moment and breathe. Breathe deeply and remember that you only have one task: live everyday and stay in the moment. Honestly, most people don’t and, here at Knockoff Therapy, we’re still working on that.
But, when you walk way from these dealing with anxiety quotes, the important thing to remember is you do not have to control everything to be worthy. You are worthy just by being born.
7. “Don’t let your mind bully your body into believing it must carry the burden of its worries.” – Astrid Alauda
So often, we underestimate how connected the body is to the mind. We don’t see how our stress or anxiety or anger comes out in the body. Maybe our chest tightens when we’re angry or our head aches when we’re stressed out or we cry when we’re anxious.
Our body reacts to the way we feel and we can put our bodies through a lot without even realizing we’re the ones making ourselves feel like that.
This is when exercises like yoga, meditation, and mindfulness can really unite the mind and body so we stop mistreating our bodies. It’s not your fault that your body is taking the burden of your mind, but this is an invitation to feel better emotionally and physically.
8. “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
You’re allowed to jump into something without knowing where you’re going to go with it. You can start a hobby without knowing if you’ll do it for more than a week. Your anxiety is probably telling you that you have to keep at it or you’re a failure.
Honestly, the only reason you think that is because you’ve grown up in a society that tells you you’re only worthy if you produce. But, you’re worthy whether or not your hobby lasts or if it produces something to prove you did it.
You deserve to feel the joy of a hobby for as long or as little as you want, so try new things and move on when you want to.
9. “Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action.” – Walter Anderson
When you’re in the middle of an anxiety spiral, the last thing you want to be told is “just do it” or some variation of that. But, it’s a good reminder for times when it helps.
It doesn’t always help. This quote is for those days when it will help and when you will need a reminder that your anxiety is paralyzing (and it might even be paralyzing you over some tiny insignificant issue that it’s made you think is the end of the world).
10. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” – Søren Kierkegaard
The more choices you have, the more absolutely terrifying it is to make one. It could be the wrong one that you’re stuck with for a little while and you’ll beat yourself up the entire time.
But, there’s really decision you can’t come back from. Even if there were, you spend so much time deciding on it and ruminating on the pros and cons that you’re making the right one.
We decide the biggest decisions in our lives so quickly that the time we spend “deciding” them is really just us trying to convince ourselves we’re trustworthy.
11. “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” – William James
You get to choose how you think. It takes time for it to get easier and less painstaking every freaking time. You have to repeatedly remind yourself that you’re spiraling or your anxiety is lying to you about the severity of a situation.
But, once you do that enough, your brain makes it easier for you (thank you, plasticity). Gradually, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you notice your thoughts, you talk back to them, and you feel differently because of which thoughts you’re focusing on.
12. “Stress, anxiety, and depression are caused when we are living to please others.” – Paulo Coelho
Clearly, stress, anxiety, and depression are never as simple as this. But, there’s no denying that trying to please everyone around and acting like a person you probably are not will have a negative effect on you.
People-pleasing is all about trying to control how people see and there’s literally no way to do that. So, when you change based on what you think people will like, you’re going to experience stress, anxiety, and depression.
If nothing else, use this as a reminder the next time you feel down because you were not successful in getting everyone to like you (even if you’re only focusing on the people who matter).
You can be there for people and show up as a good partner or friend, but you can’t be everything to everyone just like they can’t for you.
13. “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” – Wayne Dyer
Anxiety teaches us to see the pain in a situation before we see the joy. That way, we can never get hurt. But, when we teach ourselves to only see the negative, it makes us into negative people.
Luckily, if we notice this happening, we can work on changing our perspective. We can start a gratitude journal in which we write down the things that make us grateful everyday.
14. “It’s not stress that kills us; it is our reaction to it.” – Hans Selye
No feeling is harmful on its own. When we think about stress as bad for us, our body reacts to stress in a negative way. For instance, when your heart starts pounding because you’re stressed out or your adrenaline is pumping, your body is trying to prepare for whatever is happening.
Normally, we’ve been taught to regulate our breathing and get our bodies back to the baseline heartrate. But, maybe we need to change the way we approach stress.
Instead of rejecting the way our bodies prepare for stressful events, we need to be grateful to our bodies for trying to help us out. If we’re nervous for a presentation and our heart races, we can think about that as our body forcing more blood into our brain to get us thinking faster.
15. “Trust yourself. You’ve survived a lot, and you’ll survive whatever is coming.” – Robert Tew
If nothing else works, remind yourself of the simple fact that you have survived a lot. You’ve gotten through a lot painful stuff and, yes, that’s a low bar, but you meet that requirement.
So, you are capable of so much more than you give yourself credit for. You’ll survive whatever happens to you.
