“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.”

“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.”

  “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)”

 “The very best meditators seem even to be able to suppress their startle response, a rudimentary physiological reaction to loud noises or other sudden stimuli that is mediated through the amygdala. (The strength of one’s startle response—whether measured in infancy or adulthood—has been shown to be highly correlated with the propensity to develop anxiety disorders and depression.)”

Scott Stossel