After reading the book, this description fits perfectly.
I read this book for a research paper I did in my philosophy class, but the topic and book were suggested to me as I struggle with anxiety myself (as most Americans do). Stossel is a wreck but very smart and well researched in the history of anxiety. It was very interesting reading about the evolution of anxiety, as well as, the history of pharmacology is relation to anxiety medication.
As a warning if you have anxiety, reading this book did increase my anxiety a little. However, the end leveled it, not by offering a solution, but by offering hope.
This was a borrowed book, so I could not highlight or write in it, so I was not able to collect as many favorite quotes as usual, although I used post-its to mark pages or paragraphs I thought were interesting.
pg. 58: "He believes medication can be an effective treatment for the symptoms of anxiety. But his view, based on thirty years of clinical work with hundreds of anxious patients, is that at the root of almost all clinical anxiety is some kind of existential crisis about what he calls the "ontological givens" -- that we will grow old, that we will die, that we will lose people we love, that we will likely endure identity-shaking professional failures and personal humiliations, that we must struggle to find meaning and purpose in our lives, and that we must make tradeoffs between personal freedom and emotional security and between our desires ad he constraints of our relationships and our communities."
pg. 111: "Two influential twentieth-century psychotherapists, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, the founders of rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT) and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) respectively, eau argued that the treatment of social anxiety boils down to overcoming fear of disapproval. To overcome social anxiety, they say, you need to inure yourself needless to shame.
pg. 114: "Anxiety about doing something wrong that will lead to social humiliation is quite common. But Ned's fear was interestingly specific: his performance anxiety was only acute when working on patients whom he perceived - based on the kind of insurance they carried- to have social status greater than he did."
pg. 123: "I don't give a shit what you say. If i go out there and miss game winners and people say, "Kobe choked" or "Kobe is seven for whatever in pressure situations," well, fuck you. Because I don't play for your fucking approval. I play for my own love and enjoyment of the game. And to win. That's what I play for. Most of the time, when guys eel the pressure, they're worried about what people might say about them. I don't have that fear, and it enables me to forget bad plays and to take shots and play my game." -Kobe Bryant
pg. 129: "I concede, "I say to my opponent. "I'm sick." And I scurry off the court in defeat. I have not just lost. I have given up. Folded like a cheap lawn chair. I feel mortified and pathetic.... I know: the reality is that no one cares. Which somehow just makes this all the more pathetic."
pg. 138: "On the other hand, British psychiatrists observed that during World War II, as the Luftwaffe rained bombs on London, civilians with pre-existing neurotic disorders found that their general levels of anxiety actually declined. As one historian has written, "Neurotics turned out to be remarkably calm about being threatened from the "skies"-- probably because they felt reassured to discover that "normal" people shared their fears during the Blitz. One psychiatrist speculated that neurotics felt reassured by the sight of other people "looking as worried as they have felt over the years." When it's acceptable to feel anxious, neurotics feel less anxious.
pg. 179: "The bases of mental illness are chemical changes in the brain... There's no longer any justification for the distinction... between mind and body or mental and physical illness. Mental illnesses are physical illnesses." -David Satcher
pg. 214: "... SSRI consumption over the last twenty years has created organic changes in the brains of tens of millions of drug takers, making them more likely to feel nervous and unhappy."
pg. 215: "the pharmacological Calvinists believe that to escape psychic pain without quest or struggle is to diminish the self or the soul; its getting something for nothing..."
pg. 221: "Anxiety, in this view, is a sign that our psyche is trying to tell us something."
pg. 255: "Researchers have found analogous evidence i the descendants of trauma victims: the children and even grandchildren of Holocaust survivors exhibit greater psychophysiologic evidence of stress and axioms arousal -- such as elevated levels of various stress hormones -- than do ethically smiler children and grandchildren of cohorts who were not exposed to the Holocaust."
pg. 255: "It's as though traumatic experiences get plastered into the tissues of the body and passed along to the next generation."
pg. 257: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do." -from Philip Larkin, "This Be The Verse"
pg. 277 "Karen Horney writes about how a standard behavioral tic of the neurotic is to reduce himself to nothing - I am such a loser, he says to himself, look at all the obstacles that impede me and the handicaps that confine me; it's a ender that I can function at all - in order to relieve the pressure to accomplish anything. The neurotic secretly (sometimes without even knowing it) nurtures a powerful ambitions to achieve as a means of compensating for a weak sense of self-worth. But the fear of failing to accomplish, or of having his poor self-worth confirmed by manifest lack of achievement despite a sincere effort to succeed, is too unbearable to abide....."
pg. 294: "I've read about the recent findings on neuroplasticity -- about the way the human brain can keep forming new neuronal connections into old age. I tell him that I understand the importance of resilience in combating anxiety. But how, I ask, do I gain the quality?
pg. 309: "Many men are so amazed and astonished with fear, they know not where they are, what they say, what they do, and that which is worst, it tortures them many days before with continual affrights and suspicion. It hinders most honorable attempts, and makes their hearts ache, sad and heavy. They that live in fear are never free, resolute, secure, never marry, but in continual pain: that, as Vives truly said, Nulla est miseria major quam metus, no greater misery, no rack, nor torture like unto it; ever suspicious, anxious, solicitous, they are childishly drooping without reason, without judgment, 'especially if some terrible object be offered, 'as Plutarch hath it."
pg. 309: "There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, 'no better cure than business.'"
pg. 310: "As a fat body is more subject to diseases, so are rich men to absurdities and fooleries, to many casualties and cross inconveniences."
pg. 310: "As soon as the human brain became capable of apprehending the future, it became capable of being apprehensive about the future."
pg. 324: "Anxiety is an important component of motivated cognition, essential for efficient functioning in situations that require caution, self-discipline and the general anticipation of threat."
pg. 325: "Saint Augustine believed fear was adaptive because it helps people behave morally."
pg. 329: "Johnson seized on the idea that idleness and slothful habits were breeding grounds for anxiety and madness and that the best way to combat them was with steady occupation and regular habits, such as rising at the same time early each morning."
pg. 332: "The ten critical psychological elements and characteristics of resilience that Charney has identified are optimism, altruism, having a moral compass or set of beliefs hat connote be shattered, faith and spirituality, humor, having a role model, social supports, facing rear (or leaving one's comfit zone), having a mission or mean in life, and practice in meeting and overcoming challenge."
