Anguish

Anguish is a feeling of severe emotional pain, distress, or suffering that can occur as a result of a traumatic mental or physical event.

More about this emotion

While we usually feel anxiety in response to day-to-day situations, anguish, also referred to as emotional distress, is caused by events we perceive as more fundamental and imminent threats against which we are defenceless.

Anguish can manifest itself physically, as pain or tears for instance, and make us question existential aspects of our lives, such as our identity, beliefs, or important choices we've made.

Related emotions

Anxiety

Fear

Sadness

Stress

Vulnerability

Sources and other readings

Atlas of the heart

B. Brown

Atlas of the heart

B. Brown

Warning signs of emotional distress and how to help

S. Douglas Kelley

Warning signs of emotional distress and how to help

S. Douglas Kelley

Quotes

After college, I went through my own shit and decided that all physical suffering in the world couldn't compare to mental anguish. And when I got myself, I decided to help other people.

N. Vizzini

After college, I went through my own shit and decided that all physical suffering in the world couldn't compare to mental anguish. And when I got myself, I decided to help other people.

N. Vizzini

I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.

L. Cohen

In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

S. Weil

In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

S. Weil

Anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being

J.-P. Sartre

Anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being

J.-P. Sartre

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