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 Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense (2018)

  In a direct echo of Wilson’s theory about the black underclass, the academic world and popular press has focused recently on the theory that unwed parenting among white working-class Americans has increased because men have been hit hard by the loss of factory jobs. “All the men here are either on drugs or unemployed,” a young woman from an industrial region of Ohio told The Atlantic in 2017.106 This is called the “marriageable man” theory, which suggests that women are having children out of wedlock because the men they’re sexually involved with are unable to find work. If it’s true that declining job opportunities for less-educated men account for the rise in unwed childbearing, shouldn’t the opposite be true? If well-paying jobs for men without college degrees suddenly become available, wouldn’t marriage increase and unwed childbearing decline? Melissa Kearney and Riley Wilson, economists at the University of Maryland, decided to test what Kearney described to me as the “reverse marriageable man” hypothesis. Since the late 1990s, a number of regions in the United States have experienced a boom in fracking, which has led to well-paying jobs for people with no more than a high school diploma (average salaries between $70,000 and $80,000 per year). Somewhat to their surprise, Kearney and Wilson found that when working-class wages rose, marriage rates didn’t budge. Women had more children with the men who had good-paying jobs, but they were no more likely to marry. The rate of unwed childbearing didn’t change at all.107 It’s impossible to imagine the rise of single parenthood without three things: first, a welfare system that makes it economically possible to raise a child without a husband; second, a disability system that permits many men with only mild impairments to collect benefits; and third (and most important, in my judgment), an anything-goes culture that does not uphold any particular family structure. Working-class people used to have more conservative social views than other Americans, but that has been changing. In the 1970s, 39 percent of the least-educated adults said that premarital sex is always wrong, compared with 15 percent of the highly educated. By the 2000s, the people at the top had become more socially conservative: 21 percent of the highly educated thought premarital sex was wrong, and among the lesser educated, the number who thought so declined to 28 percent. Even more revealing were data showing that adolescents from homes with highly educated mothers were more likely to be “embarrassed by a teen pregnancy” (76 percent) than teenagers from homes with the least-educated mothers (48 percent).108

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  influential people to speak on its behalf when the authorities tried to act. Thus, on at least two occasions, members were hauled before the religious courts but reprieved, or at most escaped with a scourging; they were unruly yet still Jews. But of course this protection and forbearance was bought at a price. It imposed limits both on doctrinal divergence and on missionary activism among the ordinary Jewish people. Thus the whole movement was in danger of being first contained, then reabsorbed. It is at this point that the idea of a gentile mission became crucial. It had always been inherent in Jesus’s work. His chosen district, as well as his native place, had been Galilee, not the obvious Judea: Galilee was only partly Jewish and it was very poor. His mission was to the poor and deprived, without distinction. And universalism was logically implied in his theology. Of course, the road to the Gentiles lay through the diaspora. Jesus met many diaspora Jews when they came on pilgrimage to attend great feasts at which he was active. But there is no evidence of his movement in the diaspora until after the Pentecostal drive. Then it followed naturally: the diaspora, among other things, was a proselytizing agency. But the very existence of a gentile mission, run by a movement which was already itself heterodox, and careless of many Jewish regulations, was incompatible with its accommodation with mainstream Judaism. Most Jerusalem Jews of substance disapproved of the gentile mission even when conducted by learned and respectable Pharisees. And, equally, there were diaspora Jews, especially Pharisees, who disapproved of the whole enterprise, were fiercely conformist and strongly opposed to any bending of the law for the benefit of converts and ‘God fearers’. What they ultimately feared, of course, was the grave risk of Hellenization implicit in any gentile mission, a risk much increased when the mission was carried out by members of an unstable and nonconformist Jewish sect. Indeed, it is impossible completely to separate the cultural and doctrinal points at issue. The teaching of Jesus had a much stronger appeal to Greek-speakers than the Judaism of the diaspora mission. It seems to have attracted converts almost from the start, especially in Antioch. Thus, if one wing of the Jesus movement was being penetrated by Pharisees, another was being penetrated by Greek-speaking Gentiles and diaspora liberals. There was soon, says Acts, ‘disagreement between those of them who spoke Greek and those who spoke the language of the Jews’. The issue was money: the distribution of charity. Most of it came from the diaspora and Gentiles and went to the more orthodox Jews of the Jerusalem community. The Greek party set up a committee of seven to look into the matter. One of its members was Stephen;

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

  Among the Greeks, these same anxiety themes (violence, expenditure, and death) took shape within a reflection that did not aim at a codification of acts, nor at the creation of an erotic art; rather, its objective was to develop a technique of existence. This technique did not require that the acts be divested of their primordial naturalness; nor did it attempt to augment their pleasurable effects; it sought to distribute them in the closest conformity with what nature demanded. The material it sought to elaborate was not, as in an erotic art, the unfolding of the act; nor was it the conditions of the act’s institutional legitimation, as it would be in Christianity; it was much more the relationship between oneself and that activity “considered in the aggregate,” the ability to control, limit, and apportion it in the right manner. This technē created the possibility of forming oneself as a subject in control of his conduct; that is, the possibility of making oneself like the doctor treating sickness, the pilot steering between the rocks, or the statesman governing the city*—a skillful and prudent guide of himself, one who had a sense of the right time and the right measure. We can thus understand why the necessity of a regimen for the aphrodisia was underscored so insistently, while so few details were given regarding the troubles that an abuse could bring about, and very few particulars concerning what one should or shouldn’t do. Because it was the most violent of all the pleasures, because it was more costly than most physical activities, and because it participated in the game of life and death, it constituted a privileged domain for the ethical formation of the subject: a subject who ought to be distinguished by his ability to subdue the tumultuous forces that were loosed within him, to stay in control of his store of energy, and to make his life into an oeuvre that would endure beyond his own ephemeral existence. The physical regimen of pleasures and the economy it required were part of a whole art of the self.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  That seemed to settle the matter. The thought of one day tackling such a book—the book of life —kept me tossing all night. It was there before my closed eyes, like the Fata Morgana of legend. Now that I had vowed to make it a reality, it loomed far bigger, far more difficult of accomplishment than when I had spoken about it. It seemed overwhelming, indeed. Nevertheless, I was certain of one thing—it would flow once I began it. It wouldn’t be a matter of squeezing out drops and trickles. I thought of that first book I had written, about the twelve messengers. What a miscarriage! I had made a little progress since then, even if no one but myself knew it. But what a waste of material that was! My theme should have been the whole eighty or a hundred thousand whom I had hired and fired during those sizzling cosmococcic years. No wonder I was constantly losing my voice. Merely to talk to that many people was a feat. But it wasn’t the talk alone, it was their faces, the expressions they wore—grief, anger, deceit, cunning, malice, treachery, gratitude, envy, and so on—as if, instead of human beings, I were dealing with totemistic creatures: the fox, the lynx, the jackal, the crow, the lemming, the magpie, the dove, the musk-ox, the snake, the crocodile, the hyena, the mongoose, the owl… Their images were still fresh in my memory, the good and the bad, the crooks and the liars, the cripples, the maniacs, the tramps, the gamblers, the leeches, the perverts, the saints, the martyrs, all of them, the ordinary ones and the extraordinary ones. Even down to a certain lieutenant of the Horse Guard whose face had been so mutilated—by the Reds or the Blacks—that when he laughed he wept and when he wept he jubilated. Whenever he addressed me—usually to make a complaint—he stood at attention, as if he were the horse, not the guard. And the Greek with the long equine face, a scholar unquestionably, who wanted to read from Prometheus Bound— or was it Unbound? Why was it, much as I liked him, that he always roused my scorn and ridicule? How much more interesting and more lovable was that wall-eyed Egyptian with sex on the brain! Always in hot water, especially if he failed to jerk off once or twice a day. And that Lesbian, Iliad , she called herself—why Iliad?—so lovely, so demure, so coy … an excellent musician too. I know because she brought her fiddle to the office one evening and played for me. And after she had rendered her Bach, her Mozart, her Paganini repertoire, she has the gall to inform me that she’s tired of being a Lesbian, wants to be a whore, and wouldn’t I please find her a better office building to work in, one where she could drum up a little business.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  “How beautiful and how pathetic,” I say. “It’s great to know you can still come to life like that. And you know that you can never compare this state of intoxication with life at home, because home is about something else. Home is safe. Here, you’re trembling; you’re on shaky ground. You like it, but you’re also afraid that it can take you too far away. I think that you probably don’t let your wife evoke such tremors in you. There’s an evolutionary anthropologist named Helen Fisher who explains that lust is metabolically expensive. It’s hard to sustain after the evolutionary payoff: the kids. You become so focused on the incessant demands of daily life that you short-circuit any electric charge between you. At our next session, Ryan knows exactly where he wants to start. Earlier that week, Christine and Barbara had made plans to go out to dinner. Feeling guilty, as she usually does, about going out without him, Christine invited Ryan to come along. Then she proceeded to ignore him for the rest of the evening. For once, he didn’t mind taking a backseat as he watched the women reminisce. After college they had both spent a year in Togo with the Peace Corps. Christine came home; Barbara never did. As was often the case in their conversations, each reported her envy of and admiration for the life of the other. “We’d just finished a great bottle of Australian Shiraz,” said Ryan, “and we were all pretty tipsy, when Christine totally shocked me by blurting out to Barbara, ‘I look at you and I wonder if it’s worth it. Frankly, I don’t think I’m made for this—the kids, the house, the job. Sometimes I wonder if I did it just to prove I could.’ Then she says, ‘I find it all so oppressive.’ She wondered if it was all worth it—she finds it oppressive? I was stunned.” Ryan repeated these words in a dazed voice as if he still couldn’t quite believe hearing them. At my prodding, he told me the rest of his wife’s remarks—that she felt she had always just done what was expected of her, that this was easier than figuring things out on her own. He continued, his tone both mocking and full of admiration as he expertly mimicked his wife. “‘I know it’s not right to complain when you have it all,’ she says. ‘Where’s my gratitude? I’m blessed with the kids, with Ryan, the remnants of a decent career, good friends. When you don’t have it—the family, the marriage—you romanticize it. At least I did. But then when you do have it, you feel trapped. I have my blissful moments, but mostly I’m mired in drudgery.’”

• From Opening Up by Writing It Down (2016)

  In law enforcement, polygraph exams and related lie detection methods assume that when suspects try to deceive their interrogators, their biological stress levels will increase relative to when they tell the truth. In other words, telling a lie should be stressful, and we should be able to reliably detect this response. Although polygraph techniques do better than chance at catching truly guilty suspects, they are far from perfect. The real value of the polygraph is in bringing about confessions. A particularly skilled polygrapher uses a suspect’s biological responses to various questions as an indicator of what topics provoke the most anxiety. Once the “hot” questions are isolated, the polygrapher may note, “Gee, I really believe what you have told me, but my machine shows a huge reaction when you answered that question. Why do you think this is happening?” In more cases than not, deceptive suspects try to rationalize their physiological responses. In so doing, they often contradict their earlier stories. The more they are confronted with these contradictions, the more likely they are to ultimately break down and confess to the crime. In the early 1980s, Jamie was invited to give a series of talks on emotion and health to some of the top-level polygraphers of the FBI, CIA, and other secret agencies. He spent several late evenings talking with the polygraphers about their jobs. As a group, these people were unusually bright and insightful. Most impressive was a remarkably similar experience that many of the polygraphers reported in interrogating some of their suspects—something we call the polygraph confession effect. A San Francisco–based polygrapher gave an unforgettable account of the polygraph confession effect. He was called in to give a polygraph exam to a 45-year-old bank vice president who was a suspect in an embezzlement investigation. When initially run through the polygraph exam, the bank vice president’s heart rate, blood pressure, and other physiological levels were quite high. This is normal for both innocent and guilty people because such an exam is almost always threatening. Nevertheless, the polygrapher suspected that the bank vice president was lying or holding back information because his physiological levels went even higher when the vice president was asked about some of the details of the embezzlement. With repeated questions and prodding, the vice president finally broke down and confessed to embezzling $74,000 over a six-month period. In line with standard procedures, after the bank vice president had signed a written confession, he was polygraphed again to be certain that his confession was itself not deceptive. When tested the second time, his overall physiological levels were extremely low. His hands were no longer sweaty. His heart rate and blood pressure were extraordinarily low. His breathing was slow and relaxed.

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

  As a wellness expert, I certainly knew better than to accept and live within this perpetual grind. Yet, a deeper part of me worried that if I paused to really hear what my inner self was saying (“Slow down!”), my world as I knew it would fall apart. The cancer would catch up. My business would fail. I’d disappoint the people in my life and forget to wear pants in public—the list went on and on. And yet, the 31-year-old me who started this journey was now the 50-year-old me, who existed in a very different place, with very different needs. I knew something had to give when I occasionally found myself fantasizing about getting sicker, as if another wake-up call would give me an undeniable excuse to stop and press reset—again. Whoa. While never a comfortable place to find ourselves, hoping that catastrophic scenarios come to pass is an undeniable data point. Maybe you, too, have found yourself casually daydreaming about rupture, thinking that this is what it would take to effect any kind of real change. You wish that the medical report (or XYZ) would be bad (just not too bad) so you can finally carve out time to take care of yourself. You secretly pray you’ll find evidence of your spouse’s infidelity so you don’t have to own up to the fact that the partnership no longer serves you. There are so many worst-case scenarios that could, in some ways, make our lives “easier” by giving us the kick in the butt we won’t give ourselves. I get it. But we can’t outsource our happiness, hoping that life will do the heavy lifting for us. Looking back, I can now see that I didn’t fully understand just how much unprocessed and repressed grief and trauma I was carrying. It was as if a part of me was frozen and I had no idea how to help her, even though I thought I did. But years later, my system was still in shock—still recovering from suddenly being thrust into a world I didn’t know, with an identity I didn’t want, and a future that terrified me. I just hadn’t stopped long enough or developed the awareness to recognize how traumatic this all was. I was too busy trying to stay alive. Facing Dad’s sickness ripped those old wounds wide open, unleashing stored pain hiding in my body and behaviors, as well as new fears about losing him—something I’d never even contemplated. READY, SET, RUPTUREDad’s cancer arrived without warning. I pulled into my parents’ driveway around midnight, taking them up on their offer to crash at their place after my nearby flight had been delayed. As I got out of the car, I noticed that all the lights in the house were on—my first clue something was wrong. Uh-oh. I felt a pang in my stomach.

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

  But over the long term, it can be a different story. First, while drinking may take away social anxiety, over time many people start to drink in response to social anxiety. Indeed, another study found that in individuals with both social anxiety and a problem with alcohol the social anxiety almost always came first. Second, folks experiencing social anxiety are more likely to drink alone to drown out negative emotion, like Mateo ruminating into his beer as he kicks himself. Finally, we might associate alcohol and confidence, like Nia and her parking lot swigs. We listen when vodka makes the promise: I alone can make you a good conversationalist! Any way you slice it, capital-S Social Anxiety Disorder more than quadruples the risk of developing an alcohol use disorder. Why do we keep looking for hope in a bottle? Remember the perceived gap between standards and ability: we simultaneously think that social expectations are sky-high (“I must always have something interesting to say,” “I should hit it off with this guy right away”) and that we are too hopelessly awkward, weird, or inept to ever reach those standards. Alcohol then artificially closes the gap. Herein lies the final myth of social anxiety: I need alcohol to feel comfortable. Sure, alcohol makes us less inhibited, but then it steals the credit for conferring social skills. We don’t realize we had those skills all along and were just too inhibited to use them. Alcohol becomes like Dumbo’s magic feather; take it away and we only think we can’t fly. So tone down your sky-high standards, thank the Inner Critic for trying to keep you safe, but then challenge it and be kind to yourself. Turn your attention outward and tune into conversation rather than letting your internal dialogue drown it out. Be brave and go over the mountain. In short, instead of giving all the credit to liquid courage, nurture your own courage. Raise a glass because you want to, not because you need to. And that’s way better than any awesome water. PART 5 All You Have to Be Is Kind 16 The Building Blocks of Beautiful Friendships (They’re Not What You Think) It is a luxury to be understood. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON Maddy turned the key and opened the door to her apartment, where another long evening stretched before her. She felt deflated. She was a year into living in San Jose, having moved there from her tiny hometown in the Sierra Nevada. Jobs were scarce there, so when she got an offer to manage payroll for a shipping company in San Jose she took the chance, even though she didn’t know a soul in the city. Overall, the move had been a success. The only problem, according to Maddy, was that she had yet to make any friends.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  And as we scroll, we’re physiologically short-circuited, as we’re often fighting with both people we know and strangers as we attempt to distinguish between fact and fiction. This is different than for previous generations who got their news from the morning paper and the nightly news. Now we have a firehouse of information—all of which has become more graphic, inflammatory, and polarized. It’s addicting to stay constantly plugged in as it feeds our anxiety beast. It temporarily feels good to bathe ourselves in information. It feels relieving to know that we’re not missing anything. This checking behavior ultimately intensifies our anxiety, though. In fact, a survey done by Digital Third Coast found that during the pandemic, 68 percent of people said the news left them feeling more anxious, and about 66 percent of respondents said that they felt overwhelmed and burned-out by the news.198 This is once again where our empowerment can come in. Just because the news is constantly there, you don’t have to consume it. It doesn’t mean you’re an ignorant citizen of the world or that you’re avoiding reality if you don’t watch or read about current events for hours a day. You can still stay aware without soaking up so much toxicity constantly. When you’ve integrated acceptance, you know that tragedy exists. You acknowledge that fact. You’re not constantly on the lookout for the possibility of loss because you know it’s a reality. However, you also don’t drown yourself in distressing news because you know that you can handle pain and discomfort if and when you have to. Instead of doubting your ability to endure (and hence the need for your ever-present anxiety), you can begin trusting that you can cope with whatever comes. You can handle pain. It’s not pleasant—not by any means. But you also trust that you can find a way through. If you’ve never experienced loss, you may be wondering how one simply trusts that they will survive through pain. That is one of the side effects of grief: you learn that even when your worst nightmares come true, the darkest night does not last forever. Sam saw this firsthand. They told me how they used to worry all the time about their home burning down, especially since it was on a hillside and they’d had more and more close calls through the years. They used to lose sleep worrying about what it would be like someday if their home went up in flames. They thought they would never be able to get through it. And then, one day their worst fear came true. It actually happened. While Sam was shattered by the loss of their home, they also told me over the next several months that the reality of the pain was not nearly as intense as what they had imagined.

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

  The phenomenon of power posing, pioneered by Dr. Amy Cuddy, was built on this principle. While researchers are still slugging it out on whether or not power posing “works” biologically by changing your cortisol and testosterone, it definitely changes your mindset, as power posing’s many adherents report. Indeed, you’re not pretending to feel powerful; you’re taking on the posture of someone who is powerful. Traditionally, power posing is done to prepare for a big moment. Stories abound of ducking into a bathroom stall before an audition, interview, or presentation. But it can also help before, during, or after a dubious social moment. When you start to feel a cringe coming on, take a moment to arrange your body in a confident posture. Why? Our brain likes to coordinate posture, facial expression, tone of voice, and emotion like a well-matched outfit, a phenomenon known as congruence. Try this: sit in a slouch, cross your arms over your chest, put a frown on your face, and say, “I’m ready for a challenge.” Try it. I’ll wait. Not so convincing, huh? Now stand in the classic “Wonder Woman” stance—feet apart, arms akimbo, fists on hips, chin raised—and say, “I’m ready for a challenge.” Different, right? Not only does emotion affect the body; the body also affects emotion. If that’s not a superpower, I don’t know what is. * * * Like Aisha, most people susceptible to social anxiety are reluctant to play a role that benefits only themselves. There’s no point in being Wonder Woman or Superman if we can’t use our powers for good. This is part of the package deal of social anxiety—being self-serving isn’t our style. But we’ll step up in service of someone we love or on behalf of a cause we believe in, like Aisha and the families from her clinic. So play the role of Host and organize a playdate in service of your toddler’s social development. Play the role of Good Pet Parent by taking your dog to the dog park and assigning yourself the task of learning one other dog’s (and dog owner’s) name. Play the role of Icebreaker by introducing yourself to the new guy at work to help him feel more comfortable. Or, like the girl from the epigraph, pay it forward by advising your stage-frightened friend to pretend she’s Beyoncé. Now, that’s some fierce structure.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  In the dream I see the cathedral darkening, the doors locking. You can imagine the dream from there. When I left the cathedral after placing her ashes in the marble wall I avoided thinking about the dream. I promised myself that I would maintain momentum. “Maintain momentum” was the imperative that echoed all the way downtown. In fact I had no idea what would happen if I lost it. In fact I had no idea what it was. I assumed, incorrectly, that it had something to do with movement, traveling, checking in and out of hotels, going to and from the airport. I tried this. A week after placing the ashes in the wall at St. John the Divine, I flew to Boston and back to New York and then to Dallas and back to New York and then to Minneapolis and back to New York, doing promotion for The Year of Magical Thinking. The following week, again doing promotion and still under the misapprehension that momentum was about traveling, I flew to Washington and back and then to San Francisco and Los Angeles and Denver and Seattle and Chicago and Toronto and finally to Palm Springs, where I was to spend Thanksgiving with my brother and his family. From various points on this itinerary, over the course of which I began to grasp that just going to and from the airport might be insufficient, that some further effort might be required, I spoke by telephone to Scott Rudin, and agreed that I should write and he should produce and David Hare should direct a one-character play, intended for Broadway, based on The Year of Magical Thinking. The three of us, Scott, David, and I, met for the first time on this project a month after Christmas. A week before Easter, in a tiny theater on West Forty-second Street, we watched the first readings of the play. A year later it opened, starring Vanessa Redgrave in its single role, at the Booth Theater on West Forty-fifth Street.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  On the internet she had found a private detective who said that he could locate Quintana for two hundred dollars. Quintana had an unlisted telephone number. The two hundred dollars was for accessing her Con Ed account. The sister had agreed to the deal. It had taken the detective only ten further minutes to call the sister back with a street address and apartment number in New York. 14 Sutton Place South. Apartment 11D. The sister had written the letter. She had sent it to Apartment 11D at 14 Sutton Place South via Federal Express. “Saturday delivery,” Quintana said when she showed us the letter, still in its Federal Express envelope. “The FedEx came Saturday delivery.” I remember her repeating these words, emphasizing them, Saturday delivery, the FedEx came Saturday delivery, as if maintaining focus on this one point could put her world back together. 23Icannot easily express what I thought about this. On the one hand, I told myself, it could hardly be a surprise. We had spent thirty-two years considering just such a possibility. We had for many of those years seen such a possibility even as a probability. Quintana’s mother, through a bureaucratic error on the part of the social worker, had been told not only our names and Quintana’s name but the name under which I wrote. We did not lead an entirely private life. We gave lectures, we attended events, we got photographed. We could be easily found. We had discussed how it would happen. There would be a letter. There would be a phone call. The caller would say such and such. Whichever one of us took the call would say such and such and such. We would meet. It would be logical. It would all, when it happened, make sense. In an alternate scenario, Quintana herself would choose to undertake the search, initiate the contact. Should she wish to do so, the process would be simple. Through another bureaucratic error, a bill from St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica had reached us without the mother’s name redacted. I had seen the name only once but it had remained imprinted on my memory. I had thought it a beautiful name. We had discussed this with our lawyer. We had authorized him, should Quintana ask, to give her whatever help she wanted or needed. This too would be logical. This too would all, when it happened, make sense. On the other hand, I told myself, it now seemed too late, not the right time. There comes a point, I told myself, at which a family is, for better or for worse, finished. Yes. I just told you. Of course I had considered this possibility. Accepting it would be something else. A while back, to another point, I mentioned that we had taken her with us to Tucson while The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean was shooting there.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (Tr. l. 2) He who came from heaven to suffer, wished to draw near the place of His Passion, His hour being now at hand: And the Jews’ passover was nigh at hand. That passover they had resolved to celebrate by shedding our Lord’s blood; the blood which consecrated the Passover, the blood of the Lamb. The Law obliged every one to go up to the feast: And many went out of the country up to Jerusalem before the passover to purify them. But ours is the true Passover; the Jewish one was a shadow. The Jews held their passover in the dark, we in the light: their posts were stained with the blood of a slain animal, our foreheads are signed with the blood of Christ. THEOPHYLACT. They went up before the passover, to be purified. For whoever had sinned willingly or unwillingly could not keep the passover, unless they were first purified by washings, fastings, and shaving of the head, and also offering certain stated oblations. While engaged in these purifications, they were plotting our Lord’s death: Then sought they for Jesus, and spake among themselves, as they stood in the temple, What think ye, that He will not come to the feast? CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxv) They lay in wait for Him at the passover, and made the feast time the time of His death. ORIGEN. (t. xxviii.) Wherefore the Evangelist does not call it the Lord’s passover, but the Jews’ passover. For then it was that they plotted our Lord’s death. ALCUIN. They sought Jesus with bad intent. We seek Him, standing in God’s temple, mutually encouraging one another, and praying Him to come to our feast, and sanctify us by His presence. THEOPHYLACT. If the common people only had done these things, the Passion would have seemed owing to men’s ignorance; but the Pharisees it is, who order Him to be taken: Now both the chief priests and the Pharisees had given a commandment, that, if any man knew where He were, he should shew it, that they might take Him. ORIGEN. (tom. xxviii.) Observe, they did not know where He was; they knew that He had gone away. Mystically, they did not know where He was, because, in the place of the divine commandments, they taught the doctrines and commandments of men. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. l. 4) Let us at least shew the Jews where He is; O that they would hear, that they would come to the Church, and take hold of Him for themselves! CHAPTER 12 12:1–111. Then Jesus six days before the passover came to Bethany, where Lazarus was which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead. 2. There they made him a supper: and Martha served: but Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him.

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

  Many of us find another way to feel less awkward and less inhibited. Someone really did bottle it, and it really does make billions. It’s liquid courage, survival juice, awesome water. Indeed, for the socially anxious among us, alcohol has many names and, surprisingly, just as many functions. It’s not just a way to feel less inhibited (“Hey, whiskey says I can dance!”) or less awkward (“Must. Grip. Beer bottle. For dear life!”). While the science of the complex relationship between social anxiety and alcohol is still emerging, I’ve encountered at least four types of socially anxious drinkers. Let’s call the first the Pre-Gamer. Meet my client Nia. She’s an administrative assistant with a wide smile. She can handle pretty much anything as “office manager Nia,” but if she has to show up somewhere as “just plain Nia,” like a party or a fundraiser, she needs a drink or two to steady her nerves. “It’s cliché,” she says, rolling her eyes at herself, “but it really does take the edge off.” Nia wouldn’t be caught dead with an actual flask, but she’s been known to fill an empty water bottle with a couple of shots of vodka and stow it in her purse. When she gets to an event, she’ll park her car, slug the vodka down, wait a few minutes, then head in. “It works right when I need it,” she says, “arrival and settling in.” Then there’s Mateo, a boat salesman who loves nothing more than being out on the water. We’ll call him the After-Drinker. He dreads going to trade shows and networking events, but they’re all inescapable parts of his job. He always feels awkward at events and tries his best, as he says, “to act like a normal human being,” but gets stuck afterwards in post-event processing. He can’t help but play interactions over in his head, focusing on jokes that fell flat or the things he wishes he had said or done differently. “I dwell,” Mateo says simply. He doesn’t drink much, if at all, at events, but when he gets home he’ll open beer after beer, trying to drown out his own ruminating. “Basically, I drink when I’m kicking myself,” he says. Then there’s David, the Supersized Social Drinker, who manages a food service warehouse. He’s not much of a drinker, except on the rare occasions when his friends manage to drag him out. Inevitably, he ends up drinking way more than he knows is good for him. “My friends say I’m a unicorn: I’m both a lightweight and a party animal,” he says. “I get really, really social. I admit it’s fun, except for the hangover. I probably wouldn’t have a social life at all if not for Jack and Cokes. I know that’s lame, but if there’s no booze, I don’t go. If I can’t drink, I can’t be social.”

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  This doesn’t mean that we operate devoid of logic. While anything can happen, we can keep in mind that the likelihood of our worst fears coming true is actually fairly low. For example, you’re more likely to die from an accidental opioid overdose than a car crash. The odds of dying from gun violence is, on average, 0.0045 percent. And dying from being a passenger on an airplane? According to the National Safety Council, there were too few deaths in 2020 to even calculate the odds.194 , 195 At the same time, we have to acknowledge that we live in a world with disease, natural disasters, and heartbreak. One in six will die from heart disease and one in seven will die from cancer. A statistic that floored me was learning that in 2020, one in twelve people died from COVID-19.196 In addition, in 2021 the Emergency Events Database reported that there were 432 natural disasters throughout the world, impacting 101.8 million people, with 10,492 people dying.197 And the reality that we will all, at some point, lose someone we love dearly? One hundred percent. Even though it’s inevitable, it can be hard to accept nonetheless. When you’ve been hardwired to see your anxiety as a protective factor that might magically prevent this pain, leaning into this notion of acceptance is beyond counterintuitive. In some ways it feels like giving up—like we don’t care enough if we don’t worry ourselves silly. But here’s the thing: your anxiety will not be the saving grace that protects you from your pain. That pain will come (or not) regardless of your anxiety. Believing that your anxiety is serving you is a false premise. It’s only exacerbating your distress. This begs the question: What would happen if you gave your anxiety up? I know it’s not that simple, as it often feels automatic and uncontrollable. But what if you stopped seeing your worrying as something that was protecting you? What if, instead, you believed that you had the ability to cope? That your pain was not something to be feared but rather accepted as a part of the human condition? We live in a broken world. Bad things do happen—but they don’t always happen, as much as the news would like you to think they do. We’re inundated by negative events and it can seem like the majority rather than the minority of our experiences. It’s not by happenstance that as the news cycle has become twenty-four hours and the scrolls on our phones have become bottomless, our mental health has deteriorated. People can create anything on social media and say it’s truth. We’re fed a specific algorithm that knows exactly how to cater to our specific fears. I see it all the time as my community on TikTok tells me that my posts on separation anxiety, anxious attachment, and high-functioning anxiety hit a little too close to home.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  When Mikaela entered into her most recent relationship, she carried with her all of these familial “words of wisdom.” Her people-pleasing, agreeableness, and fear of disappointing others were in full force, especially in the bedroom. It’s vulnerable enough to have sex with a partner—and that’s when things are good. With her boyfriend, her distress only intensified as she would find her body uncontrollably blocking his entry. To her increasing embarrassment, he was not happy when he was denied access to her body through no fault of her own. Because of a lifetime of blaming herself, Mikaela became frustrated with herself and she felt it was “understandable” that her boyfriend would be mad at her when they were unable to have sex. She wondered, “What’s wrong with me?” Mikaela’s anxiety was confusing her so much that she didn’t know what was up and what was down. I see this happen frequently, as our anxiety makes us doubt ourselves and question our ability to know what’s okay and what isn’t. Sometimes a helpful question to ask ourselves is “If this were happening to a friend, would I be okay with it?” And if we follow up with “Well, no . . . but it’s different because it’s happening to me,” this is our cue to take a closer look at why we apply different rules to ourselves. As we talked this through in session, I saw the color drain from Mikaela’s cheeks. As she considered another vantage point, she realized that if a friend told her about a partner shaming them for not being able (or simply not wanting) to have sex, she would not be okay with it. In fact, she said she would consider it assault. When she realized this, she felt sick to her stomach. She was seething with anger that this had happened to her. While she was mad at him for doing that to her, she was also mad at herself for allowing it to happen . . . many times over. I made it clear to Mikaela that she did nothing wrong. She shouldn’t have ever been put in that situation. It was not okay what happened to her, and her boyfriend’s behavior was inexcusable. Though Mikaela is not a real person, her story is all too common. Sadly, I’ve seen this story play out with too many women, and some men, in my practice. Mikaela saw more clearly after that session. The shroud of anxiety had been lifted and she realized just how unacceptable her boyfriend’s behavior was, and that it was a likely indicator of additional forms of abuse in the future. Within a week or so, she ended it. (Are you clapping a little bit internally?) It was a proud therapy mama moment as I watched Mikaela take that step for herself. As therapists, we want you to be empowered in the choices that you make in your life. What you decide to do is solely up to you.

• From Quiet (2012)

  Esther was fine if given a chance to prepare, but sometimes her colleagues failed to mention that they’d be delivering a talk until she arrived at work that morning. She assumed that their ability to speak improvisationally was a function of their superior understanding of tax law and that, as she gained more experience, she too would be able to “wing it.” But as Esther became more senior and more knowledgeable, she still couldn’t do it. To solve Esther’s problem, let’s focus on another difference between introverts and extroverts: their preference for stimulation. For several decades, beginning in the late 1960s, an influential research psychologist named Hans Eysenck hypothesized that human beings seek “just right” levels of stimulation—not too much and not too little. Stimulation is the amount of input we have coming in from the outside world. It can take any number of forms, from noise to social life to flashing lights. Eysenck believed that extroverts prefer more stimulation than introverts do, and that this explained many of their differences: introverts enjoy shutting the doors to their offices and plunging into their work, because for them this sort of quiet intellectual activity is optimally stimulating, while extroverts function best when engaged in higher-wattage activities like organizing team-building workshops or chairing meetings. Eysenck also thought that the basis of these differences might be found in a brain structure called the ascending reticular activating system (ARAS). The ARAS is a part of the brain stem that has connections leading up to the cerebral cortex and other parts of the brain. The brain has excitatory mechanisms that cause us to feel awake, alert, and energetic—“aroused,” in the parlance of psychologists. It also has calming mechanisms that do the opposite. Eysenck speculated that the ARAS regulates the balance between over- and under-arousal by controlling the amount of sensory stimulation that flows into the brain; sometimes the channels are wide open, so a lot of stimulation can get in, and sometimes they’re constricted, so the brain is less stimulated. Eysenck thought that the ARAS functioned differently in introverts and extroverts: introverts have wide-open information channels, causing them to be flooded with stimulation and over-aroused, while extroverts have tighter channels, making them prone to under-arousal. Over-arousal doesn’t produce anxiety so much as the sense that you can’t think straight—that you’ve had enough and would like to go home now. Under-arousal is something like cabin fever. Not enough is happening: you feel itchy, restless, and sluggish, like you need to get out of the house already. Today we know that the reality is far more complex. For one thing, the ARAS doesn’t turn stimulation on and off like a fire truck’s hose, flooding the entire brain at once; different parts of the brain are aroused more than others at different times. Also, high arousal levels in the brain don’t always correlate with how aroused we feel .

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  [image file=image_rsrc3ND.jpg] CHAPTER 5Make Way for Duck SexA few years ago my wife, Ann, and I attended a lovely dinner party in our New Haven neighborhood with four other couples. We dined by candlelight on a delicious meal at a table set with beautiful linens, crystal wineglasses, and hefty heirloom silverware, while a passel of young children ate in front of an animated cartoon in another room. Many of us were meeting for the first time, so we engaged in the usual polite introductions and chitchat. A short way into our meal, the mother of a few of the spaghetti-eating children in the other room spoke to me from down the table. “Oh, you’re an ornithologist! You’re just the person I need to ask.” I expected to field another of the innumerable identification questions that arise from people’s personal encounters with birds, but her question proved to be much more thought provoking. “The other day I was reading Make Way for Ducklings to my kids.” I nodded in recognition of the classic story by Robert McCloskey, a book that had been read to me as a child and that I in turn had read to my three boys—so many times that I had nearly memorized it. “So, you know when the pair of Mallards settles down and builds their nest, and she lays her eggs? It seems that they’re just getting started with a nice family together, but then he just takes off! What’s with that?” Before I could even inhale, from the other side of the table Ann gave me the anxious look we refer to in our house as the “hairy eyeball.” She murmured the verbal warning shot “Don’t go there!” Soon, all attention was on us, and everyone wanted to know exactly where it was I was not supposed to go. As if to warn all involved, Ann asked the curious mom, “You didn’t just ask my husband about duck sex, did you?” From this casual inquiry into the family life of ducks, our conversation veered into territory I knew in far greater depth than anyone might have expected. Thanks to Dr. Patricia Brennan, who spent from 2005 to 2010 as a remarkably enterprising postdoc in my lab at Yale, my research in those years had taken an unexpected detour into the study of the sexual behavior and genital anatomy of waterfowl. So, just as my wife feared, discussion of the kinky qualities of duck sex came to dominate the conversation that evening.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Richard Dawkins once described evolution by natural selection as the “blind watchmaker”—the impersonal, inexorable force that produces functional design from variation, heritability, and differential survival. This analogy is entirely accurate. But because natural selection is not the only source of organic design in nature, as Darwin himself was the first to recognize, Dawkins’s analogy remains an incomplete description of evolutionary process and the natural world. The blind watchmaker cannot actually look at nature and see all the stuff that he hasn’t made and cannot explain. Indeed, nature has evolved its own eyes, ears, noses, and so on and the cognitive mechanisms to evaluate these sensory signals. Myriad organisms have then evolved to use their senses to make sexual, social, and ecological choices. Although animals are not conscious of their role, they have become their own designers. They are no longer blind. Aesthetic mate choice creates a new mode of evolution that is neither equivalent to nor a mere offshoot of natural selection. The concept of aesthetic mate choice is at the heart of Darwinian aesthetics, and it remains a revolutionary idea to this day. — The aesthetic view of life reveals new ways in which evolutionary biology has been hampered by failing to recognize the aesthetic agency of individual animals. For example, we can see that much of the scientific study of sexuality has been characterized by a deep anxiety about the subjective experiences of sexual pleasure and desire—especially when it’s a matter of female pleasure. A symptom of this anxiety is the great lengths that evolutionary biologists have gone to avoid engaging with sexual pleasure and desire altogether. After the rejection of Darwin’s aesthetic view of mate choice, sexual desire and pleasure had to be explained away as mere secondary consequences of natural selection. Unfortunately, the anxious remove of sexual science from sexual pleasure was built into the structure of scientific objectivity—into the discipline of science itself. To imagine animals as aesthetic agents with their own subjective preferences was considered anthropomorphic. Scientific “objectivity” came to require us to discount or ignore the subjective experiences of animals. Adaptive, anhedonic theories of mate choice were developed to explain animal mating behavior and reproduction, and these theories were proposed to be sufficient to explain the evolution of human sexuality. Sexual pleasure was not only laundered from scientific explanation; it was banished as an appropriate subject of science. The result was generations of antiaesthetic sexual biology—such as Zahavi’s handicap principle, or the upsuck theory of female orgasm—which entirely ignored and denied the existence of subjective experience of sexual pleasure. A scientific anxiety about sexual pleasure persists in much of the contemporary science of mate choice. The result is a sanitized sexual science that lacks the theory and vocabulary necessary to investigate and explain sexual pleasure in the natural world and ourselves.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  his second invasion of Egypt, in 168, which was a disaster. He was confronted by the Romans (the Kittim) and ordered to withdraw. He obeyed. Daniel implies that he took out his frustration on Jerusalem. While the king was in Egypt, civil war had broken out in Jerusalem between the former high priest, Jason, and the current one, Menelaus (see 2 Macc 5:5-14). The king took it that Judea was in revolt and sent in the troops. After this, for reasons that remain controversial, Antiochus attempted to suppress the Jewish cult. Some Jews collaborated. Daniel says, “He shall seduce with intrigue those who violate the covenant” (11:32). The people who know their God, however, stand firm. The real heroes, from the viewpoint of Daniel, are the “wise” (Hebrew maskilim ) who instruct the common people, even though some of them do so at the cost of their lives. It is reasonable to suppose that the authors of Daniel belonged to the circle of “the wise.” The instruction they gave to the masses presumably corresponded to the revelations of Daniel: that the human conflicts were only a reflection of conflicts on the supernatural level, and that the outcome was assured. Some scholars have argued that “the wise” should be identified with a party known as the Hasidim, who are mentioned three times in the books of Maccabees (1 Macc 2:42; 7:12-13; 2 Macc 14:6). We know very little about these people, except that they were militant supporters of the Maccabees. Daniel, in contrast, says nothing about the Maccabees. Daniel 11:34 says that the wise shall receive little help. This has often been interpreted as a slighting reference to the Maccabees. It is not clear, however, that Daniel would have regarded the Maccabees as a help at all. In his view, the battle would be won by the archangel Michael. The role of the Jews was to keep themselves pure and not do anything to obstruct their heavenly deliverer. Daniel 11:40-45 describes the downfall of the king. Verse 45 claims that he would meet his death between the sea and the holy mountain, that is, in the land of Israel. This prophecy was not fulfilled. Antiochus Epiphanes died in Persia late in 164 B.C.E. from wounds received in an attempt to rob a temple. The unfulfilled prophecy reveals the date of the composition of Daniel. All the “predictions” are correct down to the persecution. This part of the prophecy was