Scott Stossel

“Hugh Grant, who several times has announced that he was thinking of retiring from acting, has said that he suffers from panic attacks when the cameras start rolling.”

“Some people say that in stressful situations I can seem unflappable, and I think that's partly because I'm always kind of internally flapped.”

“There is an element in which anxiety co-represents with aspects of my personality I wouldn't want to give up. It allows you to have foresight. I may not be as empathetic. It's hard to figure out the difference between pathology and personality.”

“I am living on the razor's edge between success and failure, adulation and humiliation - between justifying my existence and revealing my unworthiness to be alive.”

“To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them.”

“One challenge is trying to extend access to more poorly served communities in rural areas and in the inner city. Sometimes you have kids who are suffering from trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, and they have no way of getting access to the remedies that are available to them.”

“I've always been interested in intellectual history and in psychology, and anxiety is obviously something that's been a big part of my life.”

“Carly Simon abandoned the stage for seven years after collapsing from nerves before a concert in Pittsburgh in 1981. When she resumed performing, she would sometimes ask members of her band to spank her before she went onstage, to distract her from her anxiety.”

“All the textbooks talk about avoidance as a classic hallmark of anxiety disorder. So you need a therapist who is sympathetic and understanding but will also push you to do precisely the things that scare you.”

“As recently as 1979, neither panic attacks nor panic disorder officially existed.”

“Anxiety has afflicted me all my life.”

“There are lots of things, including changing the kind of inner dialog, that can mitigate anxiety. And yes, there are people who have the glass half full and glass half empty, and I'm afraid the glass is going to break and I'll cut myself on the shards.”

“The fear of vomiting, which for me is one of the most original and most acute of my fears, is actually fairly common. Emetophobia, it's called, and by some estimates, it's the fifth most common specific phobia.”

“I don't want to be in a position that could make me vomit, like air travel. I've purloined airsick bags and stuffed them everywhere, just in case I ever feel the need to throw up. I haven't vomited since 1977, but I think about it all the time. I recognize that it's irrational, but I'd rather jump out of a window than vomit.”

“To grapple with and understand anxiety is, in some sense, to grapple with and understand the human condition.”

“An astonishing portion of my life is built around trying to evade vomiting and preparing for the eventuality that I might.”

“Generally speaking, the anxiety will pass, which is easy for me to say when I'm not in the middle of an anxiety attack. When you're in the throes of one, it's hard to feel anything other than utter misery and terror.”

“I had no trouble with strangers finding out about my anxiety. It was my friends and colleagues I was concerned about.”

“There's a vast encyclopedia of fears and phobias, and pretty much any object, experience, situation you can think of, there is someone who has a phobia of it.”

“There's a book that's critical to understanding anxiety, a 17th-century book, 'The Anatomy of Melancholy,' by Robert Burton. I wanted to write something like that.”