The Ultimate List of Stress and Anxiety Quotes
We’ve gathered the ultimate list of stress and anxiety quotes … 136 in all … to help inspire the stress relief you’ve been longing for and reduce the anxiety that’s been plaguing your life.
The stress and anxiety quotes we’ve chosen for this collection come from many different sources: medical professionals, authors, spiritual leaders, philosophers, and we’ve even thrown in a few from famous entertainers just for fun.
Take your time scrolling through this massive list of stress and anxiety quotes and allow the wisdom you find to sink in and inspire you to make the changes in mind and habit that will help you reduce stress and anxiety in your life … and help you stop worrying and start enjoying your life.
For your convenience, throughout this post I’ve sprinkled some anxiety and stress-related resources for you to explore that will help you reduce stress and anxiety. I’ve also listed a few additional posts on the Believe and Create Blog that you may find helpful in creating your happier, less stressed, more peaceful lifestyle.
I hope you’ll take a moment to explore the resources I’ve included here; you never know what gems you’ll find that could totally transform your life and bring more inner calm and joy into your life!
Enjoy this amazing list of stress and anxiety quotes! (and if you love it, be sure to share this post with your family friends on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn).
NOTE: If you are experiencing extreme stress or anxiety, please consult a medical professional. These stress and anxiety quotes are meant for inspiration and are not intended to treat or replace medical attention.
How to Kick Your Worry Habit and Just Be Happier, featuring the 21-Day Worry Begone Challenge
- In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers. – Fred Rogers
- The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world; they simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do. – Wayne Dyer
- If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress, and tension. And if you didn’t ask me, I’d still have to say it. – George Burns
- Relax. No one else knows what they’re doing either. – Ricky Gervais
- The truth is that stress doesn’t come from your boss, your kids, your spouse, traffic jams, health challenges, or other circumstances. It comes from your thoughts about these circumstances. – Andrew Bernstein
- It’s a toxic cycle: Your thoughts become your worries and your worries become your thoughts. – Lindsay Holmes
Bella Therapy Aromatherapy Lotus Diffuser Necklace and Bracelet Pendant Jewelry Set. Use your favorite essential oils to relieve stress.
- My body needs laughter as much as it needs tears. Both are cleansers of stress. – Mahogany SilverRain
- Every single choice we make is either going to enhance the spirit or drain it. Every day, we’re either giving ourselves power or taking it away. – Caroline Myss
- I do not fix problems. I fix my thinking. Then problems fix themselves. – Louise Hay
- There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them. – Anthony De Mello
- Drag your thoughts away from your troubles … by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it. – Mark Twain
- Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it. – Ray Bradbury
- Anxiety is such a simple but costly trap to fall into. All your additional worry and stress make the problem worse, fueling more anxiety and creating a vicious cycle or loop. – Barry McDonagh
Samadhi Board: Water Drawing Set for Painting, Sketching and Meditation
- You don’t have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you. – Dan Millman
- Each moment of worry, anxiety, or stress represents a lack of faith in miracles, for they never cease. – T.F. Hodge
- Don’t let your mind bully your body into believing it must carry the burden of its worries. – Astrid Alauda
- The elimination diet: Remove anger, regret, resentment, guilt, blame, and worry. Then watch as your health, and life, improve. – Charles Glassman
- Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it, just as we have learned to live with storms. – Paulo Coelho
- I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance. – Seth Godin
- Live a good life. More smiling, less worrying. More compassion, less judgment. More blessed, less stressed. More love, less hate. – Roy Bennett
- Whatever is in me is stronger than what is out there to defeat me. – Caroline Myss
Amy Garden All Seasons 7-Layer Cotton Weighted Blanket. Research shows that weighted blankets can offer relief to stress and anxiety sufferers.
- When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which never happened. – Winston Churchill
- He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life. – Shannon Alder
- The thoughts we choose to think are the tools we use to pain the canvas of our lives. – Louise Hay
- Being in control of your life and having realistic expectations about your day-to-day challenges are key to stress management, which is perhaps the most important ingredient to living a happy, healthy, and rewarding life. – Marilu Henner
- Live your life as you see fit. That’s not selfish. Selfish is to demand others live their lives as you see fit. – Anthony de Mello
- Sometimes we can focus so much on nothing that we make it a big something of nothing. – Ricky Maye
- You need to be able to manage stress because hard times will come and a positive outlook is what gets you through. – Marie Osmond
- When you find yourself stressed, ask yourself one question: Will this matter 5 years from now? If yes, then do something about the situation. IF no, then let it go. – Cathrine Pulsifer
- As usual, the deed was less daunting than the thought of it. –Osamu Tezuka
50 Stress Less Cards ... inspirational mindfulness and meditation exercises that help you relax while relieving your stress and anxiety
- A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety. – Aesop
- Making yourself more anxious by worrying about something is a totally needless way to increase your stress. – Rebecca Turner
- Nothing is worth poisoning yourself into stress, anxiety, and fear. – Steve Maraboli
- My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry. – Virginia Woolf
- You can’t always control what goes on outside, but you can always control what goes on inside. – Wayne Dyer
- Once you replace your bad habits with good habits, you can also eliminate the stress and anxiety that those bad habits cause in your life. – Sarah Devnil
- If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath. – Amit Ray
- Dread is anxiety on steroids. – Emily Nagoski
- If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you’ll die a lot of times. – Dean Smith
The Mindfulness Journal for Anxiety, featuring daily prompts and practices to find peace
- It’s okay to be scared. Being scared means you’re about to do something really, really brave. – Mandy Hale
- I think and think and think. I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it. – Jonathan Safran Foer
- We are defeated the moment we start listing our burdens instead of counting our blessings. – Unknown
- People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar. – Thich Nhat Hanh
- Make others laugh by laughing at yourself. This is the best way to destress. – Tapan Ghosh
- You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking. – Henri Nouwen
- Remember: you are the only person who thinks in your mind. You are the power and authority in your world. – Louise Hay
- If you don’t think your anxiety, depression, sadness, and stress impact your physical health, think again. All of these emotions trigger chemical reactions in your body, which can lead to inflammation and a weakened immune system. Learn how to cope, sweet friend. There will always be dark days. – Kris Carr
- When you spend time worrying, you’re simply using your imagination to create things you don’t want. – Shannon Alder
- If we do not fill our mind with prayer, it will fill itself with anxieties, worries, temptations, resentments, and unwelcome memories. – Scott Hahn
From Anxiety to Love, a Radical Approach for Letting Go of Fear and Finding Lasting Peace
- The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another. – William James
- In times of stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive. – Lee Iacocca
- An hour of anxiety cannot change my circumstances, but a minute of prayer can alter everything. – Al Bryant
- My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne. – Tina Fey
- If you focus on success, you’ll have stress. But, if you pursue excellence, success will be guaranteed. – Deepak Chopra
- Anxiety in human life is what squeaking and grinding are in machinery that is not oiled. In life, trust is the oil. – Henry Ward Beecher
- Those who are extremely anxious wear themselves out become in a sense their own executioners. – John Calvin
- Follow your pain as if it were a candle in the night, leading you to a place of decision. – Caroline Myss
Yoga Therapy for Stress and Anxiety: Create a Personalized Holistic Plan to Balance Your Life
- If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief – Brené Brown
- Live in the moment, day by day, and don’t stress about the future. People are so caught up in looking into the future that they kind of lose what’s in front of them. – Jenna Ushkowitz
- If the mind can cause stress, the mind can alleviate it. It’s within our power to choose one thought over another, to choose optimism over pessimism. – Ernest Cadorin
- We do not have a fear of the unknown. What we fear is giving up the known. – Anthony De Mello
- Time management helps you reduce stress because when you manage your time properly, you have plenty of time to complete tasks and assignments within the given period. – Ahad Gill
- Stress is the trash of modern life. We all generate it, but if you don’t dispose of it properly, it will pile up and overtake your life. – Danzae Pace
- The only feelings that do not heal are the ones you hide. – Henri Nouwen
- Taking time out of each day to relax and renew is essential to living well. – Judith Hanson Lasater
- We must have pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of pie. – David Mamet
- Stress and anxiety are you mind trying to use logic to meet the expectations of what you think your life should be. – Shanna Star
- Anxiety is wanting to fix something that isn’t even a problem. – Kirsten Corley
The Tapping Solution: A Revolutionary System for Stress-Free Living
- Getting stress out of your life takes more than prayer alone. You must take action to make changes and stop doing whatever is causing you stress. You can learn to calm down in the way you handle things. – Joyce Meyer
- Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. – Thomas Merton
- We’ve all had stress creep up on us without even noticing it until we lost it on someone who didn’t deserve it, and we realize that we probably should have checked in with ourselves a little earlier. – Ariel Garten
- Stop giving your precious energy to things that make you feel bad. – Louise Hay
- Excessive caution destroys the soul and the heart, because living is an act of courage, and an act of courage is always an act of love. – Paulo Coelho
- I shall stay calm in moments of stress and anxiety, so as to allow positive thoughts and actions to manifest from me. – Leon Brown
- Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it. – Lily Tomlin
- Both what you run from and what you yearn for are within you. – Anthony de Mello
- Success is not synonymous to stress, but to happiness. So be happiness oriented. – Debasish Mridha
Color Me Stress-Free, featuring nearly 100 coloring templates to unplug and unwind
- Stress is caused by being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there.’ – Eckhart Tolle
- What worries you masters you. – John Locke
- Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be. – Wayne Dyer
- Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith. – Henry Ward Beecher
- Your anxiety may be a part of you, but it does not in any way define who you are. No matter what, you’re going to be okay and know that it will not defeat you. – Nicole Vetrano
- Sometimes when people are under stress, they hate to think, and it’s the time when they most need to think. – Bill Clinton
- Worrying is carrying tomorrow’s load with today’s strength; carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn’t empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength. – Corrie Ten Boom
- Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop. – Ovid
- Life is very simple. What I give out comes back to me. – Louise Hay
- Taking time to contemplate what you’re grateful for isn’t merely the ‘right’ thing to do, it also improves your mood because it reduces the stress hormone cortisol by 23 percent. – Travis Bradberry
- If your teeth are clenched and your fists are clenched, your lifespan is probably clenched. – Terri Guillemets
- Take up a hobby and bring back the passion in life. Don’t let stress creep in to cause you mayhem and strife. – Dee Waldeck
The Anti-Anxiety Diet: A Whole Body Program to Stop Racing Thoughts, Banish Worry, and Live Panic-Free
- The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind. – Caroline Myss
- Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place. – Kurt Vonnegut
- Stress, anxiety, and depression are caused when we are living to please others. – Paulo Coelho
- One new perception, one fresh thought, one act of surrender, one change of the heart, one leap of faith, can change your life forever. – Robert Holden
- When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused. – Rainer Maria Rilke
- Everybody dies, but some spend a whole life digging their grave. – Shon Mehta
- Much of stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do; it comes from not finishing what they started. – David Allen
- Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything. – Ernest Hemmingway
- A feeling of being ‘out of control’ of your time is the major source of stress, anxiety, and depression. The better you can organize and control the critical events of your life, the better you will feel, moment to moment, the more energy you will have, the better you will sleep, and the more you will get done. – Brian Tracy
You Can Do All Things, featuring drawings, affirmations and mindfulness ideas that help with anxiety and depression
- Just let go. Let go of how you thought your life should be, and embrace the life that is trying to work its way into your consciousness. – Caroline Myss
- Your relationship with yourself sets the tone for every other relationship you have. – Robert Holden
- Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, So what. That’s one of my favorite things to say. So what. – Andy Warhol
- Sometimes, too often, I don’t want to muster the energy. Stress and anxiety seem easier. – Ann Voskamp
- Challenges are what make life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. – Joshua Marine
- Gratitude can reduce your stress and anxiety. – Bree Miller
- When money becomes your purpose, stress and depression become your path. – Prabakaran Thirumalai
- Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose. – Eckhart Tolle
- Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it. – Khalil Gibran
The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety: A Guide to Breaking Free from Anxiety Phobias, and Worry Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
- Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. – Confucius
- Today is just another day full of miracles, gifts, and opportunities. – Robert Holden
- You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. – Maya Angelou
- I care too much about the little things that I shouldn’t care about. Things that I wish I didn’t care about at all. – Holly Riordan
- Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness. – Richard Carlson
- Anxiety is not a monster out to get you. I know it feels like that most of the time, but it isn’t. – Barry McDonaugh
- Every day brings a choice: to practice stress or to practice peace. – Joan Borysenko
- When you’re anxious, you’re fooling yourself. Anxiety results from distorted, illogical thoughts. It’s a mental con. – David D. Burns
- You’ve got to give yourself permission to not have the answers, to survive things going amiss, to exert less energy into bullshit and trust that you’ll be okay. – Martine Thompson
- Just because I can’t explain the feelings causing my anxiety, doesn’t make them less valid. – Lauren Elizabeth
- It isn’t the mountain that wears you out; it’s the grain of sand in your shoe. – Robert Service
Yoga for Energy and Stress Relief: Restorative Practices to Revitalize Mind and Body
- Whenever you are enacting a big change, anxiety is going to be present … Understand that you will feel anxiety, and that is not a bad thing in all cases. – T. Whitmore
- Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. – Natalie Goldberg
- You’re not alone. And you are going to be okay. Be kind to yourself. – Andrea Russett
- If you can’t do anything about it, then let it go. Don’t be a prisoner to things you can’t change. – Tony Gaskins
- It’s not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it. – Hans Selye
- A little anxiety and tension is good for us and is necessary for the body to work effectively, but all too often, we are subject to a lot of stress and tension which in turn creates more anxieties, worries, and depressions. – Lois Hewitt
- Stress and anxiety cause our brains to release chemicals that put lines in our faces and tear us down emotionally and spiritually. – Chris Prentiss
- Our stresses, anxieties, pains, and problems arise because we do not see the world, others, or even ourselves as worthy of love. – Prem Prakash
- Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future. – Deepak Chopra
How to Kick Your Worry Habit & Just Be Happier, featuring the 21-Day Worry Begone Challenge
- People with high self-esteem will do, try and achieve more in their lifetime, whereas those with low self-esteem can develop depression, anxiety, and stress. – Alex Altman
- Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create. – Roy Bennett
- The truth is that stress doesn’t come from your boss, your kids, your spouse, traffic jams, health challenges, or other circumstances. It comes from your thoughts about your circumstances. -Andrew Bernstein
- When you feel anxious, stress or worried, use positive visualization to combat the feelings that hurt you. – Mark Snyder
- My yoke is easy and my burden light – Saint Boniface
- Time spent in nature decreases stress and anxiety and improves focus for adults as well as children. – Laura Bush
- People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them. – George Bernard Shaw
- Whether a person is spiritual or not, we all seek to get away from the stress, anger, and anxiety of everyday life. Some people drink, do drugs, or do worse to escape, and they hurt themselves in the process. Some people listen to music, mine included, and feel better. – Yanni
I hope you enjoyed this extensive list of stress and anxiety quotes. Here are just a few more resources you may want to explore.
This meant the most to me… i’m scared every day.
It’s okay to be scared. Being scared means you’re about to do something really, really brave.
Love this! My favorite one is “Relax. No one else knows what they’re doing either.”
Thanks for your feedback, Diane! I like that one, too! -J. Marie