Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Okay, your turn. So let’s add to that Challenge List again. Now that you’ve done some smaller-scale stuff with your brave pants on, nudge yourself along to some things that scare you a little more, and this time get rid of the very things you think are keeping you safe. If you’re worried that your hands shake, your life preserver might be to drink only from a bottle, not a cup that might shake and spill. If you’re worried about blushing, you may wear one of your many turtlenecks. If you’re worried about running out of things to say, you may only go to parties with your partner. So drop the life preserver, pour your beer in a glass, and leave the bottle behind. Put on a V-neck shirt, blushing be damned. Go stag to a party. Or all three. Whatever your life preserver, leave it at home and see what happens. Try it out. Or as a wise, short-statured social anxiety therapist once said, “Do. Or do not. There is no try.” Below, fill in some new challenges, along with the safety behaviors you’d like to drop. Then, as Dr. Richard Heimberg, the aforementioned father of social anxiety research, said to me when I asked the secret to overcoming social anxiety, “Go forth and do.” 5. My challenge (what I would be doing if I weren’t anxious): ____________________ Safety behavior(s) I want to drop: ____________________ 6. My challenge (what I would be doing if I weren’t anxious): ____________________ Safety behavior(s) I want to drop: ____________________ 7. My challenge (what I would be doing if I weren’t anxious): ____________________ Safety behavior(s) I want to drop: ____________________ * * * Nice work. As Dr. Seuss might say, you’re off to great places; you’re off and away! We’re almost up to the hardest stuff on your list. As you cruise into the home stretch, you may wish to psych yourself up with a pep talk—perhaps some self-affirmations. But affirmations often get a bad rap, evoking cheesy, overly earnest sessions with the bathroom mirror. The interweb makes fun of affirmations: “I become better each day in every way. Unless there is a Golden Girls marathon on, and then I’m not leaving the house.” Or, “I honor and express all facets of my being, regardless of state and local laws.” We make fun of affirmations because they feel tacky and dumb. But worse, they feel like a lie. If we try, in desperation, to psych ourselves up for our Challenge List with affirmations—I got this! I’m gonna be awesome! Yeah!—we are left feeling deflated. Why? Because we don’t believe them.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  But it’s not just the physical signs of anxiety that trip us up; it’s how closely we pay attention to them. You probably know someone who’s the exact opposite of the princess in The Princess and the Pea—someone who can’t tell if she’s hungry or has no idea how he got that bruise. On the flip side, you probably also know someone with a remarkably clear sense of their own internal workings. This person may even be you. This awareness of one’s own body (or lack thereof) is called interoceptive awareness.1 Interoceptive awareness, unsurprisingly, is more sensitive in individuals with any kind of anxiety. Indeed, when those of us attuned to our bodies feel ourselves blush, sweat, tremble, stammer, or tear up that’s when things start to get all meta and we get anxious about our anxiety. Indeed, if our bodies spark the myth of how I feel is how I look, our brains fan the flames. This happens due to a quirk of thought called the illusion of transparency, which is exactly what it sounds like: We think our internal state is visible and will give us away. In normal, non-anxious life, we generally assume that others share our experience. Indeed, most of the time people can see what we see, hear what we hear. But in moments of high anxiety, we seem to forget that what goes on inside our bodies and brains is actually private. We feel our heart pounding, our panic rising, our thoughts racing, and think everyone can see through us like a jellyfish. But when reminded, we remember we are not jellyfish. One study even found that simply telling participants that, hey, guys, there’s this thing called the illusion of transparency, allowed them to strengthen their un-jellyfish-like spines and give a better speech performance. What’s more, when the participants’ speeches were viewed, raters agreed, meaning the reminder didn’t just lead to feeling better—it led to performing better. * * * Okay, now it’s time for a pop quiz! Is your refrigerator handle on the right or the left? What color was your childhood home? Did Einstein have a mustache? Got your answers? Nice work. To answer these questions, you probably conjured up a picture in your head. You “saw” your fridge, the home you grew up in, and Einstein’s mustachioed face. You created and held these images in your mind’s eye. Our brains do the same thing when we get anxious, which perpetuates “how I feel is how I look.”

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  After twenty years of helping define and refine corporate culture, we can offer up one warning: Most businesses took their corporate cultures for granted when all employees worked in the same building. When considering the world of remote work, we are entering the Wild West. Helping people—perhaps spread out over various time zones—feel like a part of a collective whole is an entirely different matter. To build culture in a remote world, and reduce anxiety in the process, managers must communicate more, not less, to help their people feel included and not be afraid to try to break out of the status quo. Kraft Heinz Company has done just that. Shirley Weinstein, head of Global Rewards, shared that her executive team has participated in live cooking showdowns in their home kitchens for employees to watch—incorporating their products from Philadelphia Cream Cheese to Oscar Mayer to Classico Pasta Sauce. The half-hour shows pit two executives against each other, cooking in their kitchens in front of their families. “Our global head of communications, Michael Mullen, is the engaging moderator, with a member of our culinary team to judge the creativity and use of our products,” she said. “The taste testers are their families, which is a great way to bring their children, their spouses, and even their dogs into the show.” She added that busy employees working remotely at first thought, “‘I don’t have time for this,’ but they joined in and appreciated the diversity that it brought to their workday. It was a time to reflect, to learn, to laugh, and to appreciate their leaders on a personal level.” As Kraft Heinz is attempting, building culture in a remote world also means clearly defining your mission and values and celebrating those who embody these grand ideals in interactions with customers or fellow team members. It also means using technology platforms and social media to provide ways that employees can connect and get to know each other, replicating the old water-cooler talk or sticking your head over the cubicle wall. Managers with remote teams also should spread leadership around to enhance ownership and engagement—asking certain folks on the team to run meetings about a subject they are passionate about or conduct training sessions on an area of their expertise. Bosses can also bring some fun into the mix by encouraging home workspace decorating contests or background competitions. Even little things can help build connection. For instance, if leaders bring in lunch for people who are in the office, they can make sure to send food to remote people as well. That’s a nice touch.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Using a computerized speed test, researchers found only 20 percent of Asian American adult test-takers and only 30 percent of White adults participating did not exhibit any subconscious racial preference between White people and Asian people. When measuring preference between White people and Black people, only 27 percent of White adults and 26 percent of Black adults showed no implicit bias. In one version of this test, researchers took famous Asian Americans such as Connie Chung, Michael Chang, and Kristi Yamaguchi and White foreigners such as Hugh Grant, Katarina Witt, and Gerard Depardieu, and timed test-takers connecting them to American symbols and foreign symbols. They learned that people found it much easier to associate Hugh Grant with American symbols than Connie Chung. “That shows how deeply the category ‘American’ is White in many people’s minds,” Banaji said. Implicit biases developed from a human need to process information quickly to make split-second decisions; the brain is constantly using shortcuts to find connections between bits of data that come our way. If we are crossing the road, for instance, and we see a moving blur in the corner of our vision, our brains will very quickly connect that with an approaching car and we’ll jump. Life saved. Unfortunately, implicit biases can lead to harmful stereotypes when applied to people. As just one example, women are too often subconsciously perceived as less capable in traditionally male roles, say computer programming. A woman might pick up on her interviewer’s hesitancy and begin to feel less confident in herself, throwing the interview off course. Despite our best intentions, and without our awareness, stereotypes and assumptions can very easily creep into our minds and affect our actions, even when we are completely determined to be objective and fair. It is so prevalent that 20 percent of large US companies today provide implicit bias trainings to their employees, and half of US companies say they will offer it within the next few years. Starbucks recently closed all of its stores to have mandatory racial bias training for its employees. That’s a good start. When biases are not addressed, they can affect working relationships and trust, undercut diverse talent recruitment and inclusion efforts, and impact promotion and professional development opportunities. Derek Lundsten, president and CEO of LifeGuides, believes being different should be a good thing. “You don’t have to be a person of color or of a certain identity or a certain gender to feel on the outside.

• From Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done

  Others don’t want to coddle their workers, especially during times of crisis when there are so many other demands on their time. A few leaders have shared the view that praising their people all the time for just doing their job will come across as condescending or fake. “Who am I,” they ask, “a praise-giving robot?” Well, first, it’s not nonstop praise that’s called for, it is gratitude expressed in the right way and at the right time. Managers need employees who are motivated to achieve. And one of the simplest and most effective ways to motivate people to achieve is by regularly expressing gratitude. Our research shows unequivocally that offering such positive reinforcement produces impressive boosts in team performance. Here’s some of that evidence: Research conducted for us by Willis Towers Watson found that when employee engagement is in the bottom quartile of national rankings, customer satisfaction is 20 percentage points lower than when employee engagement is in the top quartile. And of the people who report the highest level of engagement at work, a whopping 94 percent agree that their managers are effective at recognizing them when they go above and beyond. That shows an extremely strong link between gratitude and employee engagement, and engagement and customer satisfaction. All of this is made more startling when we add morale into the mix. Some 56 percent of employees who say they have low morale at work give their managers a failing grade on gratitude, while only 2 percent of people who have low morale say they have a boss who is great at appreciating their work. How Gratitude Affects AnxietyMore than two thousand years ago, Cicero called gratitude “not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” Yet gratitude receives little attention as an area of research in the business world. That is unfortunate. Expressions of gratitude, when done regularly, can produce profound effects. In a world filled with uncertainty, when managers frequently offer up their thanks for great work—and are specific in how an achievement has helped the team—they can significantly reduce anxiety levels. Such acts are like regular deposits in the Bank of Engagement. They build up reserves for when an employee’s work does have to be corrected. Workers who have a strong degree of confidence that their manager has faith in their abilities are better able to receive criticism and realize that the coaching is specific to a particular task or aspect of their work rather than a condemnation of their overall capabilities. Another plus: Whether leaders regularly thank team members for work well done, or if they receive thanks themselves, they are better able to bounce back from adversity with greater resilience, according to Dr.

• From The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 4: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700) (1984)

  DOCTRINAL PLURALISM 66 he been the only one, or the last one, to fall into such a trap. Gerson accused various mystical writers of the fourteenth century of blurring the distinction between Creator and creature in their language about the mys- tical union between the soul and God. For a vulnerable point of mystical theology was its doctrine of "deification." This doctrine had long been a prominent feature of orthodox teaching, especially in the East, and was central to the mystical theology of Dionysius the Areopagite. Drawing upon that source, as well as upon indigenous Western Christian writers, Latin theology, too, went on speaking of sal- vation as deification. According to one pseudony- mous writing of this period, for example, the union between the Virgin Mary and her Son was so close that the angels could adore her "deified flesh" in him, and Gerson found it natural to describe the repose of the soul in the love of Christ as "a peace that deifies." But this did not mean that when the rational spirit was transported into God, it was "altogether deified" and reabsorbed into the "idea" of itself that had ex- isted eternally in the mind of God, losing its identity and its very creatureliness. Nicholas of Cusa defined the divine sonship conferred in salvation as "deifica- tion," which was a "participation in the power of God" that transformed the mind and permitted it to share in God's own perception of truth. This trans- formation did not obliterate human creatureliness. Rather it meant that "we shall then be in another manner what we now are in our own manner." Through deification, then, God and creatures would become "one" in such a way that "all things are what they are" and would be united in the oneness of God. Believers would "become God" and yet would "pre- serve the reality of their own being," and thus God would be "all in all" through Christ. Contrary to a mysticism that was in danger of heresy, the "mystical theology" that was at the same time churchly and orthodox took the favorite proof text for deification, the words of the psalm, "You are gods," to mean a change that was not ontological but "participative and assimilative." The basis for a false doctrine of union with God and "deification" was, according to Gerson, a mis-

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  So while only girls get catcalled, it’s also true that only girls’ fashions urge body consciousness at the very youngest ages. Target offers bikinis for infants. The Gap hawks “skinny jeans” for toddlers. Preschoolers worship Disney princesses, characters whose eyes are larger than their waists. No one is trying to convince eleven-year-old boys to wear itty-bitty booty shorts or bare their bellies in the middle of winter. As concerned as I am about the policing of girls’ sexuality through clothing, I also worry about the incessant drumbeat of self-objectification: the pressure on young women to reduce their worth to their bodies and to see those bodies as a collection of parts that exist for others’ pleasure; to continuously monitor their appearance; to perform rather than to feel sensuality. I recall a conversation I had with Deborah Tolman, a professor at Hunter College and perhaps the foremost expert on teenage girls’ sexual desire. In her work, she said, girls had begun responding “to questions about how their bodies feel—questions about sexuality or arousal—by describing how they think they look. I have to remind them that looking good is not a feeling.” Self-objectification has been associated with depression, reduced cognitive function, lower GPA, distorted body image, body monitoring, eating disorders, risky sexual behavior, and reduced sexual pleasure. In one study of eighth-graders, self-objectification accounted for half the differential in girls’ reports of depression and more than two-thirds of the variance in their self-esteem. Another study linked girls’ focus on appearance to heightened shame and anxiety about their bodies. A study of twelfth-graders connected self-objectification to more negative attitudes about sexuality, discomfort in talking about sex, and higher rates of sexual regret. Self-objectification has also been correlated with lower political efficacy: the idea that you can have an impact in the public forum, that you can bring about change.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Despite those risks, hypersexualization is ubiquitous, so visible as to be nearly invisible: it is the water in which girls swim, the air they breathe. Whatever else they might be—athletes, artists, scientists, musicians, newscasters, politicians—they learn that they must, as a female, first and foremost project sex appeal. Consider a report released by Princeton University in 2011 exploring the drop over the previous decade in public leadership positions held by female students. Among the reasons these über-elite young women gave for avoiding such roles was that being qualified was not enough. They needed to be “smart, driven, involved in many different activities (as are men), and, in addition, they are supposed to be pretty, sexy, thin, nice, and friendly.” Or, as one alumna put it, women had to “do everything, do it well, and look ‘hot’ while doing it.” A 2013 study at Boston College, meanwhile, found that female students were graduating with lower self-esteem than when they entered the school (boys’ self-esteem rose). They, too, in part blamed “the pressure to look or dress a certain way.” A sophomore in a survey at Duke that reached similar conclusions called the phenomenon “effortless perfection,” the “expectation that one would be smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful, and popular, and that all this would happen without visible effort.” No wonder they faltered. “Hot,” as journalist Ariel Levy wrote in her book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, is different from “beautiful” or “attractive.” It is a commercialized, one-dimensional, infinitely replicated, and, frankly, unimaginative vision of sexiness, one that, when applied to women, can be reduced to two words: “fuckable and saleable.” Levy says that “hotness” is specifically women’s work, and nowhere was that more evident than on the 2015 Vanity Fair cover featuring Caitlyn Jenner, née Bruce. To announce her physical transition from male to female, the sixty-five-year-old appeared in a corset (from a store called Trashy Lingerie), breasts overflowing, lips glossed like an ingénue’s. That image was often juxtaposed in the press with a picture of her as Bruce, hair lank with sweat, arms raised in triumph after winning Olympic gold. As a man, he used his body; as a woman, she displayed it. Certainly, it’s no revelation that girls are held to a punishingly narrow, often surgically or digitally enhanced ideal of “sexy,” and then labeled as “sluts” when they pursue it. What has changed is this: whereas earlier generations of media-literate, feminist-identified women saw their objectification as something to protest, today’s often see it as a personal choice, something that can be taken on intentionally as an expression rather than an imposition of sexuality. And why wouldn’t they, if “hot” has been portrayed as compulsory, a prerequisite to a woman’s relevance, strength, and independence?

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Brumberg’s book was published in the late 1990s, a good decade before social media took off. With the advent of MySpace, then Facebook, then Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Tinder, YikYak, and—mark my words—some social media–linked microchip that they’ll soon implant in all our heads, the body has become even more entrenched as the ultimate expression of the female self, evolving from “project” to consciously marketed “product.” There are myriad ways social media can be fun, creative, connective, political. They can be a lifeline for kids who feel different from their peers, particularly LGBTQ teens, providing them with crucial support and community. They have also reinforced the relentless externalization of girls’ sense of self. There is evidence that the more concerned a girl is about her appearance, weight, and body image, the more likely she is to consult the magic mirror of her social media profile, and vice versa: the more she checks her profile, the more concerned she becomes about appearance, weight, and body image. Comments on girls’ pages, too, tend to focus disproportionately on looks, and even more than in the real world, that becomes a measure of friendship, self-image, and self-worth. In a windowless basement office on a private midwestern college campus, Sarah, a first-semester sophomore, stood in front of me with the toes of one foot pointed forward, one knee slightly bent, to demonstrate the “leg bevel”—a pose pioneered by showgirls but which is now standard in girls’ social media photos. “It slims your body more than if you stand normally,” she explained. Sarah grew up in Atlanta, where she attended a small Christian high school. She had dyed blond hair that hung to her shoulders, blue eyes, and carefully applied makeup—foundation, eye shadow, lipstick. “People will”—she stopped and laughed self-consciously—“this is so stupid, but people will learn the ways to pose in pictures so they’ll look good on Facebook or Instagram. I mean, I do it. A hand on your hip—that makes you look thinner, too. Or, whichever side you part your hair on, the other side would be your ‘better’ side, so I try to face this way in photos.” She turned her right cheek toward me and continued. “I edit little blemishes out and fix the lighting. And if you watch things like America’s Next Top Model, you learn to ‘find your light.’ Things like that.”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Teens have always been acutely aware of how they are seen by their peers. Social media amps up that self-consciousness: rather than experimenting among a small group of people they actually know, they now lay out their thoughts, photos, tastes, and activities (as well as their lapses in judgment) for immediate approval or censure by their 947 BFFs, many of whom are relative strangers. The result, according to Adriana Manago, a researcher at the Children’s Digital Media Center in Los Angeles who studies college students’ behavior on social media, is that young people have begun talking about the self as a brand rather than something to be developed from within. Their “friends” become an audience to be sought after and maintained. Ninety-two percent of teens go online daily, including 24 percent who are online “almost constantly.” Nearly three-quarters use two or more social networking sites. Also, especially on photo-sharing sites such as Instagram, girls are more active than boys, who are more likely to be gamers. “You use your experience to create an image,” Matilda Oh, a high school senior in San Francisco told me, “with the ultimate goal being to show that you’re desirable and attractive and wanted and liked.” Every young woman, she said, knows that she will “get ten times as many ‘likes’ by posting a picture of yourself in a bikini than you would if you were wearing a snow jacket.” Yet, just as in the real world, girls must be careful to come off as “hot” yet not “slutty,” sexually confident but not “thirsty.” In one study of 1,500 Facebook profiles, college-age women judged other girls’ profiles far more harshly than they did boys’, criticizing those who had “too many” friends, shared “too much” information, showed “too much” skin in photos, name checked their boyfriends “too often,” posted “too many” status updates. This despite the fact that 1,499 of the profiles aspired to the same “ideal”: a girl who, through status updates, glamour shots, and skin-bearing selfies, depicted herself as “fun” and “carefree”; who had lots of attractive friends, went to lots of parties, and was interested mostly in romance, pop culture, and shopping. You could easily get trashed, then, for the very thing you needed to do to court approval. It doesn’t take much to become a target. “You can totally get stigmatized,” agreed Sarah. “I knew a girl who only Instagrammed selfies. Every single picture was a selfie. And people talked about it. It made her seem like she either had no friends or was too into herself. There are so many ways to be judged. And of course you’re afraid that the judgments you pass against others will be passed against you. It’s not something you ever talk about, though. You just try to listen to what people say and kind of learn those unwritten rules. Like, don’t change your profile picture too much. Don’t post statuses about everything you’re doing. Don’t have too many pictures of yourself.”

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  In 2013 selfie was named the “international word of the year” by Oxford Dictionaries. Anyone with a Facebook or Instagram account probably has posted a few, but no one matches the self-chronicling output of adolescent girls (interestingly, after age forty, men become the more dominant selfie posters—perhaps in midlife, women unconsciously render themselves invisible). The portraits can be a giddy assertion of pride for young women, a claim staked for the right to take up public space. “If you write off the endless stream of posts as image-conscious narcissism,” Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out, has written, “you’ll miss the chance to watch girls practice promoting themselves—a skill that boys are otherwise given more permission to develop, and which serves them later on when they negotiate for raises and promotions.” Personally, I love flipping through posts by the girls I know (my nieces, my friends’ kids, the girls I interview), seeing them in front of national monuments or on graduation day or clowning around with friends. That doesn’t, however, allay my concern that selfies can impose another tyranny on girls, another imperative to dish up their bodies for inspection by others and themselves, another way in which their value is reduced to the superficial, flattened, measured by visibility. As one girl said to me, “It’s like cell phones, Facebook—all of it comes back to the issue of: Am I pretty? How many friends do I have? How do my profile pictures look? Let me stalk myself.” The girls I met, again, were not passive; they were not victims of social media. They were acutely literate, often avidly feminist. They actively engaged in contemporary culture even as they struggled with the meaning and impact of that engagement. Nearly two-thirds of teen girls in one large-scale survey did feel that selfies boosted their confidence. So there’s that. But about half also said that photos posted of them by others (presumably less mindful of their best angles) have the potential to make them feel bad. Body dissatisfaction seems less driven by the actual time young women spent on social media than by how much of that time they spend sharing and viewing photos; the more they look at others’ pictures, whether close friends or distant peers, the more unhappy they become about their own appearance. Little wonder, then, that there has been a proliferation of “selfie surgery apps,” which allow a user to shrink her nose, whiten her teeth, broaden her smile. Actual plastic surgery among those under thirty is on the rise, too. In 2011 there was a 71 percent increase in the number of high school girls obtaining chin implants specifically because they wanted to look better in prom selfies. One of every three members surveyed by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in 2013 said that their patients sought their services to look better in selfies.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  Posting pictures of yourself—even lots and lots of pictures of yourself—while eating cereal or shopping for a prom dress or hanging with your besties is one thing. What really worries parents is the selfie’s evil cousin: the sext. Do not, we tell our daughters, absolutely do not send anyone sexually explicit messages or, God forbid, a nude or seminude photo. The Internet is forever, we say. Snapchat doesn’t prevent screenshots that can be redistributed in an instant and used as weapons (witness the rise of “revenge porn”: explicit images posted online without the victim’s consent, often following a breakup). In truth, it’s hard to know exactly how common “sexting” is among teens. In surveys, between 15 and 48 percent (depending on the age of the children asked and how “sexting” is defined) say they have sent or received an explicit text or photo. What is clear, though, is that the practice is not gender neutral. While equal numbers of boys and girls may sext voluntarily, girls are twice as likely to be among those who were pressured, coerced, blackmailed, or threatened into it—fully half of teen sexting in one large-scale survey fell into those categories. That’s particularly disturbing, since coercion into sexting appears to cause more long-term anxiety, depression, and trauma than coercion into real-life sex. Among the girls I met, the badgering to send nude photos could be incessant, beginning in middle school. One girl described how, in eighth grade, a male classmate threatened (in a text) to commit suicide if she didn’t send him a picture of her breasts. She told her parents, while a friend of hers he also targeted complied. Sometimes the pressure was mixed with girls’ own desire to please, to provoke, or to be affirmed as hot. They sexted photos to boyfriends to prove their trust, or to boys whose interest they hoped to attract. (Boys did this, too, but girls typically considered it aggressive and “gross.”) One girl told me that there had been an “epidemic” of classmates at her private Jewish middle school who flashed their breasts at boys while video chatting. The boys began taking screenshots and posting them online. “Did the girls want that to happen?” I asked. “No,” she said. “But it did.” By high school, the girls had “grown out of it,” but the boys had not. “I would video chat with boys, and they’d be like, ‘Come on! Flash me! Flash me!’ I wouldn’t do it, but they’d be very persistent. They’d say, ‘Just do it. I promise I won’t take a picture.’ And if you really like the guy, you think maybe he’ll like you back. . . . There were boys who had whole folders of pictures. Like trophies.”

• From Three Women (2019)

  But she wanted so badly to see him. Meanwhile Kel Thomas accepted her friend request and later that night he started Facebook chatting with her. He was calling her doll and sweetheart and hot lady. She saw Aidan come online and wrote to him. Well you sure as heck must be related to Kel Thomas because you boys talk exactly the same! Changed my mind, Aidan wrote back. Toys could be good for my girls. Where do u wanna meet. Her heart rose into her trachea. I know he wasn’t one hundred percent sure he wanted to see me, Lina tells the women, but he was sure he didn’t want me to see somebody else. They arranged to meet behind a golf cart warehouse halfway between their houses. She got dressed. She applied perfume to her wrists and the backs of her knees. When she was thrillingly on her way, he texted to say he wasn’t sure he wanted to meet. That was the precise moment his waffling began. It would set a precedent for every future interaction—the crazy, anxious Will I see him or won’t I panic that would undercut even Lina’s happiest times. Now now, she wrote back. Come on I have all the darn toys packed into my car! For minutes there was nothing and she tried to concentrate on the road but her heart was beating so fast and her limbs were trembling. Then her phone rang in her lap and she jumped in her seat and picked it up. She heard his voice. You know the County Line Road? She knew right away that he meant for them to meet at the river. Probably he had just been nervous about the warehouse. Yep! she said. Then she hung up and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. She didn’t want to give him an opportunity to change his mind. She wished she could knock down all the cellular towers and stop the world to ensure she would see him. At that point it had been three weeks since their first time at the hotel. She checked her face in the mirror as she drove and kept glancing at her phone on the opposite seat. God, please don’t let him cancel, she kept repeating. She was certain her praying worked because when she pulled in she saw that his car was already there. They got out of their cars and greeted each other awkwardly. He was bundled up in many layers. Jeans and two sweatshirts, one on top of the other, and a sort of scarf around his head. She was cold but thrilled to see him. He focused his eyes on her in a way that made her ecstatic and terrified at once. There was no way of knowing what he was thinking. I am telling you, Lina says to the women later, there is something about the way this man stares.

• From Three Women (2019)

  Jenny wore jeans and a yoga wrap under her winter jacket. She was a woman who carried babies in slings effortlessly, who could tie one child to her back and breast-feed a second one while making oatmeal cookies. She had the beauty that was particular to the island, calling to mind yoga in the sunshine and nut milks. Both women were pushing carts of food. Sloane felt ridiculous, with her bags of frozen kale and her almond butter. Can we talk? Jenny said loudly, as though this were the second time she was asking. Perhaps Sloane, momentarily lost in her own thoughts, hadn’t heard her the first time. The balloon inside Sloane’s chest deflated a bit. Yes, she said. Do you want to come to my house? Jenny nodded. Both women resumed their shopping. Sloane picked out several small things she didn’t need. Chocolate-covered macadamia nuts. Gluten-free fig bars. Afterward, Jenny followed Sloane home. They parked and Sloane headed for her front door. Jenny got out of her car. Wait, she said. I don’t want to go into your house. Sloane stood on her front stoop, shivering. She realized that her house was haunted for Jenny the way the market was haunted for her. Though not in the same way. Do you want to get into my car? Sloane asked. Jenny agreed and they got into the SUV. Sloane turned the engine on and adjusted the heat so that it would blow onto their legs and not their faces. For a little while they were both quiet. Sloane listened to the sound of the heat blowing and the sound of her own breathing, and Jenny’s. For a few weeks she’d been worried about her daughter’s eyesight. Her youngest had been born with Group B streptococcus, an infection passed from the mother in the womb. The child developed late-onset sepsis, which in turn led to meningitis a week after her birth. The doctor explained to Sloane that such babies are at risk of losing their hearing or their eyesight, of developing learning disabilities and severe neurological problems later in life. Luckily, they treated the child with intravenous antibiotics and she had been otherwise healthy enough to beat the odds. But these past few weeks the child had been complaining of the world blurring before her eyes. Why? Jenny said, breaking the quiet. Sloane immediately shook her head, as though she knew that would be the first question. Jenny had turned to look at her, to glare. I didn’t realize, Sloane began, up until the end. I didn’t know you had no knowledge. Jenny laughed. Give me a break, she said. You didn’t give a shit about me. That’s not true! Jenny kept laughing. Sloane felt a great blackness, a sludge, moving through her body. She felt the pure hatred from this woman. She had never been so close to hatred.

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  What is rumination: Rumination is typically defined as a style of repetitive cognitions (thoughts) that focus the depressed individual’s attention on his or her symptoms, the potential causes and consequences of those symptoms, but in nonproductive ways. Individuals who suppress thoughts appear somewhat more likely to be ruminators. Both require cognitive effort and may represent incomplete cognitive processing or disrupted/ineffective efforts to “make sense” of experiences. As more effort is used to suppress thoughts, the thoughts become more and more accessible. Rumination can also predict depressive episodes in some individuals, and formerly depressed individuals display high rates of rumination and thought suppression.Ironic process theory: Wegner’s ironic process theory says that “intentional operating processes” of thought suppression are effortful; in other words, intentionally trying to suppress thoughts is difficult. Many people, for example, will try to suppress a thought by distracting themselves by focusing on some object in immediate sight. Such strategies, however, do not typically work—the target distractor object tends to not hold our attention long, and our minds tend to return to the original (suppressed) thought relatively quickly. Ultimately then, these distractions may remind the individual of the suppressed thought. Wegner also proposes that an “ironic monitoring process” operating in the background of our consciousness allows us to unconsciously monitor for unwanted thoughts and simply alerts the intentional operating process when the unwanted thought occurs that a distraction is needed (Wenzlaff & Wegner, 2000).Accepting the unacceptable: The interested reader is again encouraged to look at Brené Brown’s work. Several of her books (e.g., The Gifts of Imperfection; Daring Greatly) extend this concept and apply it to everyday living. She suggests that letting go of who you think you ought to be will help you understand, accept, and embrace who you actually are. In doing this, she believes, you can live a life with more joy, compassion, and gratitude.Thought cycles that people coping with PTSD struggle with: There are some risk factors for the development of posttraumatic symptoms or even PTSD following exposure to traumatic events or experiences. Individuals who are highly reactive to novel stimuli, highly anxious, avoidant, and self-blaming, or high in hypnotic ability, may be particularly susceptible to traumatic experiences. Similarly, the more extreme the trauma and the longer the time over which it lasts, the higher the incidence of PTSD (e.g., Breslau, Chilcoat, Kessler, & Davis, 1999). It is also generally agreed that people most prone to PTSD have had a history of depression, trauma, and other PTSD episodes in the past even prior to their most recent traumatic experience (Cabrera, Hoge, Bliese, Castro, & Messer, 2007).The benefits of mindfulness: There are now hundreds of books and articles on topics related to mindfulness, some that examine the systematic practices of mindfulness and meditation, others that apply the general ideas and concepts to specific tasks (work, relationships, etc.) or daily life. Does mindfulness work?

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Anne Lamott basically summed up my experience when she wrote, “My mind is a bad neighborhood that I try not to go into alone.” One minute I was centered, calm, and present. Feeling my butt on the chair. Paying attention to my breathing. Noticing my peaceful surroundings—a cardinal at my birdfeeder. The next minute I’d be planning the guest list for my funeral. What kind of food would be served? Should there be a DJ? No. Not classy enough. Who should get my good jewelry? My mom and goddaughter. Will Brian remember to feed our dogs? Brian is so lonely now. I love Brian. Maybe he should start dating again? But not someone younger and prettier than me. Oh my God, Brian is dating a hot 20-year-old! I hate Brian. If I had enough awareness to recognize what my brain was actually doing and why, I’d meet my fear and anxiety with compassion (and a hearty chuckle). But more often than not, my negative fantasies would hold my brain hostage, and the next time Brian asked me if I knew where his glasses were, I’d tell him to consult his child bride. We humans are extremely creative creatures. Our imaginations have allowed us to invent microscopes to peer into the smallest cells of our bodies and rocket ships that hurtle us into the realm of the stars. But our imaginations can also freak us the fuck out. Think about it, is there anything scarier than all the awful stories we tell ourselves? We’re so damn good at devising the most frightening tales. Yet most of us have no desire to be Stephen King, channeling our darkest thoughts into best-selling horror novels. Instead, we do our best to bury our paranoid thoughts in the boneyard of our psyche and desperately try to become “fearless,” an impossible task that goes against our very DNA. THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROADAs the years ticked by and my disease remained stable (not advancing enough to warrant experimental treatment that might extend my life but not fully cure me), my time between scans increased and my fear decreased. At first my tests moved to every three months, then six months, then finally a year—which felt like a lifetime. With each graduation, I was better able to settle into my new life as a long-haul patient. When my scans got pushed to every two years, it was as if I’d won the lottery and might actually be able to go the distance with my incurable disease.

• From The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1984)

  But this sensibility was also connected with feelings of anxiety in the face of those rapid changes and the nearness of their completion; by a sense of the fleeting character of that beauty and of its legitimate desirability; and by fear, the double fear so often expressed in the lover, of seeing his beloved lose his charm, and in the beloved, of seeing his lover turn away from him. And the question that was then posed concerned the possible conversion—an ethically necessary and socially useful one—of the bond of love (doomed to disappear) into a relation of friendship, of philia. The latter differed from the love relation, out of which it would ideally and sometimes actually be formed: it was lasting, having no other limit than life itself; and it obliterated the dissymmetries that were implied in the erotic relation between man and adolescent. It was one of the frequent themes in moral reflection on this type of relation, that these relations needed to rid themselves of their precariousness: a precariousness that was due to the inconstancy of the partners, and that was a consequence of the boy’s growing older and thereby losing his charm; but it was also a precept, since it was not good to love a boy who was past a certain age, just as it was not good for him to allow himself to be loved. This precariousness could be avoided only if, in the fervor of love, philia—friendship—already began to develop: philia, i.e., an affinity of character and mode of life, a sharing of thoughts and existence, mutual benevolence.28 The beginning of this cultivation of indestructible friendship in the love relation is what Xenophon is describing when he portrays two lovers who look into each other’s faces, converse, confide in one another, rejoice together or feel a common distress over successes and failures, and look after each other: “It is by conducting themselves thus that men continue to love their mutual affection and enjoy it down to old age.”*

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Mei is a director at a footwear company you’ve definitely heard of. With a pixie haircut and hipster glasses, she looks way cooler than most moms in their early fifties. She is warm and gracious, with a dedication implied by her striding pace and the venti-sized Starbucks she carries at all times. She likes her job and the close-knit team she supervises, but whenever she is called upon to present, Mei either begs her co-worker Yaser to take her place or insists on emailing the slide deck around and explaining it by conference call so no one can see her. A couple of times, when there was no other option, Mei called in sick. Why does a smart, capable woman like Mei turn to Jell-O when faced with a PowerPoint deck? Let’s ask Mei: “I just feel like a babbling idiot. I’m worried I’ll lose it and that everyone will think I’m an anxious freak.” Mei isn’t alone in this. When we’re anxious, we think we wear it on our sleeve. No matter our worry—we’ll look stupid, seem incompetent, lack personality, or anything else—we assume that it’s written all over our face. For Mei, it all boiled down to: “I must look like what I fear.” This second myth is unbelievably common. But why? What’s to blame for the idea that how we feel is how we look? For the primary culprit, look no further than your body. To explain, let’s take a quick tour through the physiology of anxiety. All emotions are physical: sadness is heavy and slow; anger is a roiling rush of adrenaline and bared teeth; disgust is a shudder of revulsion. Anxiety? Finely honed by millennia of evolution, all systems work together in service of sending oxygen to your lungs and shunting blood to your large muscle groups, readying you to come out swinging or to turn and flee. The result is the physiological signature of anxiety: Blushing is the dilation of blood vessels. Sweating is a natural consequence of raised body temperature. Shortness of breath and dry mouth are explained by your muscles’ increased demand for oxygen and water. Cold hands and feet? Victims of the sudden diversion of blood to your biggest muscles. Shaking hands or lips? Blame the adrenaline that floods the body, leaving us trembling like a revving motor. Muscles get fatigued from being coiled like a spring. And finally, the gastrointestinal system discharges any, uh, extra weight, thus lightening the load so we can run faster or fight more nimbly. None of this is particularly pleasant. Prolonged anxiety leaves us exhausted, with knots in our shoulders, back, and stomach. Plus, it’s hard to think through adrenaline, which makes it difficult to concentrate, think of what to say next, or remember what you were talking about—not exactly the impression you’re aiming for during, say, a job interview, a date, or, in Mei’s case, a presentation before a packed auditorium.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  One of the first evenings when Vernon was complaining that Raleigh hadn’t come in or sent, my father said: “Why not try, Joe?” (my nickname!) In a jiffy I had the gloves on and got my first lesson from Vernon who taught me at least how to hit straight and then how to guard and side-step. I was very quick and strong for my size; but for some time Vernon hit me very lightly. Soon, however, it became difficult for him to hit me at all and then I sometimes got a heavy blow that floored me. But with constant practice I improved rapidly and after a fortnight or so put on the gloves once with Raleigh. His blows were very much heavier and staggered me even to guard them, so I got accustomed to duck or side-step or slip every blow aimed at me while hitting back with all my strength. One evening when Vernon and Raleigh both had been praising me, I told them of Jones and how he bullied me; he had really made my life a misery to me: he never met me outside the school without striking or kicking me and his favorite name for me was “bog-trotter!” His attitude, too, affected the whole school: I had grown to hate him as much as I feared him. They both thought I could beat him; but I described him as very strong and finally Raleigh decided to send for two pairs of four ounce gloves or fighting gloves and use these with me to give me confidence. In the first half hour with the new gloves Vernon did not hit me once and I had to acknowledge that he was stronger and quicker even than Jones. At the end of the holidays they both made me promise to slap Jones’s face the very first time I saw him in the school. On returning to school we always met in the big schoolroom. When I entered the room there was silence. I was dreadfully excited and frightened, I don’t know why; but fully resolved: “he can’t kill me”, I said to myself a thousand times; still I was in a trembling funk inwardly though composed enough in outward seeming. Jones and two others of the Sixth stood in front of the empty fire-place: I went up to them: Jones nodded, “How d’ye do, Pat!”

• From Open (2009)

  The banjos are getting louder. I look around for a certificate on the wall, something to prove that this is in fact a courthouse and he’s a real judge. All I see are heads of dead animals. The judge begins by rattling off a series of random questions. You’re playing in Scottsdale? Yes, sir. You’ve played that tournament before? Uh—yes, sir. What kind of draw do you have? Pardon? Who do you play in the first round? The judge, it turns out, is a tennis fan. Also, he’s followed my career closely. He thinks I should’ve beaten Courier at the French Open. He has a slew of opinions about Connors, Lendl, Chang, the state of the game, the scarcity of great American players. After sharing his opinions with me, liberally, for twenty-five minutes, he asks, Would you mind signing something for my kids? No problem, sir. Your honor. I sign everything he puts before me, then await sentencing. All right, the judge says. I sentence you to go give ’em hell down in Scottsdale. Sorry? I don’t under—. I mean, your honor, I drove back here, thirty-some miles, sure I was going to be sent to jail, or at least fined. No! No, no, no, I just wanted to meet you. But you’d better have your friend out there drive you to Scottsdale, because one more ticket today and I will have to keep you in Kingman until the cows come home. I walk out of the courthouse but sprint to the Corvette, where Gil is waiting. I tell him the judge is a tennis buff who wanted to meet me. Gil thinks I’m lying. I beg him to please just drive us away from this courthouse. He pulls away—slowly. Under normal circumstances, Gil is a cautious driver. But so unnerved is he by our run-in with Arizona law enforcement that he keeps the car in sixth gear and goes fifty-four miles per hour all the way to Scottsdale. Naturally I’m late to the hit-and-giggle. As we roll into the parking lot of the stadium, I pull on my tennis gear. We stop at the security hut and tell the guard I’m expected, I’m one of the players. He doesn’t believe me. I show him my driver’s license, which I feel fortunate to still have in my possession. He waves our car through. Gil says, Don’t worry about the car, I’ll take care of it. Just go.