Scott Stossel
Scott Stossel
Scott Hanford Stossel is an American journalist and editor. He is the editor of The Atlantic magazine, and previously served as executive editor of The American Prospect magazine. He is a graduate of Harvard University. He is the son of Anne Hanford and Dr. Thomas P. Stossel, the brother of cartoonist Sage Stossel, and the nephew of TV journalist John Stossel. In 2014, Stossel was awarded the Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth7 August 1969
CountryUnited States of America
To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala”—the home of the fight-or-flight reflex—“is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them,
To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I'm like a duck--paddling, paddling, paddling.
Generally speaking, the anxiety will pass, which is easy for me to say when I'm not in the middle of an anxiety attack. When you're in the throes of one, it's hard to feel anything other than utter misery and terror.
Anxiety has afflicted me all my life.
The fear of vomiting, which for me is one of the most original and most acute of my fears, is actually fairly common. Emetophobia, it's called, and by some estimates, it's the fifth most common specific phobia.
Carly Simon abandoned the stage for seven years after collapsing from nerves before a concert in Pittsburgh in 1981. When she resumed performing, she would sometimes ask members of her band to spank her before she went onstage, to distract her from her anxiety.
Some people say that in stressful situations I can seem unflappable, and I think that's partly because I'm always kind of internally flapped.