…Anxiety and panic happen to be mundane phenomena, i.e., even when they are caused by extraordinary things like war and rape, they tend to occur when things are ordinary and predictable and relatively stable, against...

One of the things anxiety educates you in is how deeply physical thought can be, how concrete. In anxiety, there is no time to luxuriate in abstractions. It’s just you and your mind, which has...

There is no such thing as a good decision and a bad decision. There are only decisions. Make them, fuck up, enjoy, repeat.

Freedom is anxiety’s petri dish. If routine blunts anxiety, freedom incubates it. Freedom says, “Even if you don’t want to make choices, you have to, and you can never be sure you have chosen correctly.”...

monkey mind.” A person in the throes of monkey mind suffers from a consciousness whose constituent parts will not stop bouncing from skull-side to skull-side, which keep flipping and jumping and flinging feces at the...

Guilt at least has a purpose; it tells us we’ve violated some ethical code. Ditto for remorse. Those feelings are educational; they manufacture wisdom. But regret—regret is useless.

If this all sounds melodramatic, well that, too, isn’t a bad metaphor for anxiety—as a kind of drama queen of the mind. If you have ever been friends with a drama queen you know how...

I felt so skinless at times! Things hit me so hard!

Listen here: Fuck you. Fuck you! I am sick and fucking tired of this bullshit. I refuse to let you win. I am not going to take it anymore. You are ruining my fucking life...