David Levithan Quotes

I talk to myself quite a lot, and when things get stressful, I just tell myself to breathe.

I breathed and breathed and did feel some calmness enter in, though it was, as always, shot with a sense of loss. Loss and fear.

It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.

Just relax. When I was younger, I made myself the victim of catastrophic thinking. Anything that went wrong was the end of the world. But as I've gotten older, I've learned to stop myself and say, 'Hey babe, calm down. Tomorrow there will be sun.'

I definitely have an alter ego that can come out and get me out of situations where I'm having social anxiety. I can take a deep breath and create a bubble so I can perform in some way.

Occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness.

Become a worry-slapper. Treat frets like mosquitoes. Do you procrastinate when a bloodsucking bug lights on your skin? 'I'll take care of it in a moment.' Of course you don't! You give the critter the slap it deserves. Be equally decisive with anxiety.

When people around me are getting rattled, I may just close my eyes and do a breathing exercise.

A lot of people, for example, live an anxious life. They don't realize they have a super-high level of anxiety. So we're gonna work on really writing down how anxious you feel at the moment you wake up. There's nothing wrong with it; the point is you learn to evaluate yourself and regulate yourself.

It's important to be gentle about my routines. I've learned that the hard way. When I'm really stressed out, I can take it out on my body and hurt myself. Sometimes I need to be as loving and soft with myself as possible. I've had to learn how to pay attention. It's a kind of mind-set.

My brain is so anxiety-prone, like a pinball machine. If I don't get up in the morning and focus my thinking, my breathing, and my being for about 12 minutes, I'm just a screwball all day long.

I try not to worry about the future - so I take each day just one anxiety attack at a time.

If I start panicking a little bit, I just talk through it with somebody.

It's not onstage as often anymore, but whenever I got anxious, I used to talk a lot more, and I wouldn't even know what I was saying... it was so bad. If I just talk myself through something, even if it's just talking about nothing, it usually gets me out of it.

Tapping therapy is absolutely brilliant. Stephen Gately from Boyzone, God rest his soul, told me about it. It's just a little tap that focuses the mind away from that wave of panic and adrenalin that shoots into your body.

I can't worry about things that I can't control. That's the best approach, so I've been doing that.

I've learned to laugh most of the negativity off.

I got this advice that if you know a panic attack is happening, just sit back and go, 'Okay, this is happening to me, but it'll be over. You'll be fine. You'll live.'

As cliche as it sounds, I've always told myself, 'Don't worry about the things you can't control. Control the things you can control.' That battle has beat up on me for years.

I'll worry about things I can control.

If you're too high, it can hurt you. If you're too low, it can hurt you. I try to stay even-keel.

Even if sometimes I'm not happy with the way I'm playing the game before, during the changeover I have to stay calm. Otherwise the next game will be worse.

As long as you can worry about the stuff you can control, that's always best for you.

I understand that people talk, and frankly, I can't control that. There's no point in getting upset over a thing that you can't control. You just have to let it go.

When I was a player, all the pressures I felt created a lot of anxiety in me. I didn't know how to manage that on my own. I think I was missing someone - a manager, no doubt - who could teach me to control my emotions.