Quotes from Ruby Wax

Being on automatic pilot, multitasking and using past or future thinking are all techniques for ensuring survival, but they can also be at the heart of our unhappiness.

the gap between wanting and getting, while the 'being' mode has no voice, it's just directly sensing something; and being in the eye of the experience.

You could go through a whole lifetime in your head dreaming of another life, instead of living your own. Steve

Epicurus said that there are only three important ingredients to happiness: friendship, freedom (not to be owned by anyone), and an analysed life. The more you lack these three things, the more you'll want power and money, and they always lead to unhappiness.

No matter how many decathlons you run, how many shoes you buy or how famous you get, those unresolved, unbearable feelings exist below. Freud was on the button when he said you have to bring your darkness into the light if you want to free yourself from those deep unconscious emotions. Just like a virus has to be sweated out, your malignant thoughts and feelings have to surface.

ever the skeptic, I demanded hardcore proof. It appeared I didn't trust my own feelings as much as I did science.

to fill that gap. The habit of judging ourselves is what pounds us into the ground. You're

It all went wrong when some deluded optimist wrote the words, 'All men are created equal'. This is clearly not the case; some people are losers. He never even lived to see the can of worms he released once he wrote that with his feather. He just signed his autograph and let the chaos begin. (I'm going to name names. It was Thomas Jefferson – another American.) The

We have to stop speaking about the Earth being in need of healing. The Earth doesn't need healing, we do.

we're living longer, getting taller, and are a push of a finger away from every other person on the planet and yet we do not know how to run ourselves. Maybe we're not supposed to know and when we're finished filling the world with parking lots, muffin shops and Starbucks, our point on Earth is finished and with one big cataclysmic boom we'll be gone.

Our culture promotes an endless need for fulfillment to always want what the next guy has, even though the effort might kill us.

our hearts bleed because we hear of a beached whale while the next minute we're baying for the blood of someone who stole the last shopping trolley.

Now nothing is anything, and everything is nothingness, just the cannons of pressure going off in my head. It's as if your old personality has been sucked out so slowly that you didn't notice its departure. Very slowly it's been stolen away and each day you remember less and less of who you are and what you feel.

With dopamine it's the craving; that's the thing that drives you, not the actual shoe. It's the chase – the thrill of the hunt driven on by cues in the environment that predict the next shoe around the corner. Dopamine does not always generate pleasure but impels you to seek rewards. You can be a very unhappy addict. If

Unfortunately our old reptilian brain didn't get absorbed, it's still in there squashed with the newer models, like a relative you can't get rid of. This ancient brain, developed about 400 million years ago, is called the brain stem; it is the 'duh' part of the brain. It prompts us to mate, kill and eat, which is perfect if you're living in a field or working at Goldman Sachs.

Changing the way you think changes the chemicals in your brain. For

Raising a teenager makes the terrible twos seem like a holiday in Hawaii.

My final word on this is that only if you find something you love doing and then do it, is life worth living.

But you need to realize that we are constantly in flux, and everything changes constantly, even you. You're always in a state of 'becoming'. There is no point in grabbing onto anything – people, money, clothes, stuff. No point. There is no safety anywhere because everything is the unknown. And

For me mindfulness is like building a house, so the next time the tsunami that is depression comes I'll have a structure in place to resist it.

By the time dessert arrives I am usually so drunk, I can't remember what I'm serving.

I knew nothing about football, then someone showed me a film of Petit and I realised how interesting the game could be. He is divine. When I met him I could barely speak, he was so gorgeous. Women will love that show.

Mum used to hide love letters from my boyfriends and put me down. Now I understand that she was a Polish immigrant forced to settle in Chicago. She was jealous of the freedom life gave me.

I can't do anything too serious like Saddam Hussein, but I would like to do Bill Clinton. That'd be fun.