“I don’t gamble. I don’t spend recklessly. But I do have an expensive habit: anxiety. It’s cost me hours of sleep, moments with my family, and opportunities I let pass because I was too caught up in my fears. It’s the vacation I didn’t enjoy, the dinner I spoiled, the car ride I spent stressing instead of being present. Seneca said, ‘We suffer more in imagination than in reality.’ Anxiety drags us into a future that doesn’t exist, forcing us to live out worst-case scenarios that rarely happen. And yet, the time and energy anxiety steals are gone forever. The good news? If anxiety comes from within us, we can choose to let it go. Marcus Aurelius put it simply: ‘Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me.'”
Ryan Holiday
“If you are fearful of some event in the future, and all reasonable efforts to calm your fear have failed, try worrying about it as intensely, lengthily and specifically as possible. The exhausting experience of worry, which is a kind of preliving of events, may well defuse your anxiety when the event actually occurs. In the same sense, conscious worry encourages us to formulate solutions to the problems we will be facing. At any rate, do not try to repress or stifle your fear of what is to come. This is a sure path to anxiety in action.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 103)
“One of the chief benefits of games: liberation from all our other concerns. In this sense, games are more relaxing than relaxation: for when we ‘relax,’ we often open ourselves up to a hive of worries and impulses, but when we concentrate on a game, or anything else that is meaningful and definite, our life temporarily becomes simple and pure.”
Robert Grudin, Time And The Art Of Living (Page 94)
“If your eyes are blinded with your worries, you cannot see the beauty of the sunset.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 88)
“Let’s stop lying to ourselves, saying ‘it will all be better in the future,’ because the present isn’t the problem. None of the external things are. It’s our emotions at the root of discomfort. They are within us. They are our responsibility to work on.”
Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog
“All the things you’re worried about potentially happening in the future are in fact happening right now somewhere in the world. All the things you’re not sure you could handle… people have been handling since the beginning of time. Nothing new looms, only reruns of what you’ve already experienced or read about in the annals of history.”
Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog
“The potential of future suffering is not a reason to suffer now. On the contrary, it’s a reason to be present now. To be good now. To love and live, now. That future may come…and you’ll meet it. If there’s something you can do to prevent it, do it. But hopelessness and despair and dread and anger? They do nothing for nobody–least of all you.”
Ryan Holiday, Daily Stoic Blog
“Fear is not going to protect you. Action is. Worrying is not going to protect you. Preparing is. Overthinking is not going to protect you. Understanding is. When we hold onto fear and pain after something traumatic has passed, we do it as a sort of safety net. We falsely believe that if we constantly remind ourselves of all the terrible things that we didn’t see coming, we can avoid them. Not only does this not work, but it also makes you less efficient at responding to them if they do.”
Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You (Page 168)
“If your mind has developed a certain cast—the habit of panicking, then it won’t matter how good things get for you. You’re still primed for panic. Your mind will still find things to worry about, and you’ll still be miserable. Perhaps more so even, because now you have more to lose.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 289)