Quotes from Johann Hari

At first, ordinary citizens had taken matters into their own hands against this Yellow Peril. In Los Angeles, twenty-one Chinese people were shot,197 hanged, or burned alive by white mobs, while in San Francisco, officials tried to forcibly move everyone in Chinatown into an area reserved for pig farms and other businesses that were designated as dirty and disease-ridden, until the courts ruled the policy was unconstitutional.198

He had a sense that the deterioration he was experiencing in his focus was happening to a lot of the people around him – but he also knew that at many points in history, people have thought they were experiencing some kind of disastrous social decline, when in fact, they were merely ageing. It's always tempting to confuse your personal decline for the decline of the human species.

Nada tiene que quedarse como está. Si un dogma no funciona, por muy fuerte e inamovible que parezca, siempre puede uno desecharlo y plantear algo distinto.

Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.

The public was being told two clashing things. First, that the symptoms of depression are straightforwardly the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain that has to be fixed with drugs. Second, that somehow, and at the same time, there was one unique situation where all the symptoms of depression were, in fact, a response to something terrible happening in your life, and in that one unique case, a chemical imbalance is not the cause, and drugs are not the solution.

If you believe that your depression is due solely to a broken brain, you don't have to think about your life, or about what anyone might have done to you. The belief that it all comes down to biology protects you, in a way, for a while. If you absorb this different story, though, you have to think about those things. And that hurts.

Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015), 42.

If your picture of a perfect afterlife is being with the people you love all the time, he asked me, why wouldn't you choose today—while you're still alive—to be truly present with the people you love? Why would you rather be lost in a haze of distractions?

He knew that to secure his bureau's future, he needed a high-profile victory, over intoxication and over the blacks, and so he turned back to Billie Holiday.

When we sleep, our minds start to identify connections and patterns from what we've experienced during the day. This is one of the key sources of our creativity—it's why narcoleptic people, who sleep a lot, are significantly more creative.

In 1975 the average American had a blood lead level of 15 micrograms per deciliter. Today it's 0.85 micrograms per deciliter.

Throughout the day, in your brain, a chemical called adenosine is building up, and it signals to you when you are sleepy. Caffeine blocks the receptor that picks up on the level of adenosine. "I liken it to putting a Post-it note over your fuel-gauge indicator. You're not giving yourself more energy—you're just not realizing how empty you are. When the caffeine wears off, you're doubly exhausted.

Sospecho que todo aquel que haya querido a un drogadicto - y todo el que haya estado alguna vez enganchado a la droga - alberga en su interior el mismo impulso (...). Querrá destruir la adicción. Aniquilar esa dependencia. Asfixiarla con furia. Harry Anslinger no es sino una muestra de lo que sucede con nuestros impulsos mas escondidos cuando a uno se le da poder y licencia para matar.

The increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up.

I started to see depression and anxiety as like cover versions of the same song by different bands. Depression is a cover version by a downbeat emo band, and anxiety is a cover version by a screaming heavy metal group, but the underlying sheet music is the same. They're not identical, but they are twinned.

I was told by my doctor that I was suffering from both depression and acute anxiety. I had believed that those were separate problems, and that is how they were discussed for the thirteen years I received medical care for them. But I noticed something odd as I did my research. Everything that causes an increase in depression also causes an increase in anxiety, and the other way around. They rise and fall together.

But if you only break away from distraction into rest—if you don't replace it with a positive goal you are striving toward—you will always be pulled back to distraction sooner or later. The more powerful path out of distraction is to find your flow.

Focus, damn you. I thought back to this moment when, over a year later, I interviewed Professor Gloria Mark, who has spent years studying the science of interruptions. She explained to me that if you have spent long enough being interrupted in your daily life, you will start to interrupt yourself even when you are set free from all these external interruptions.

1993, in the death throes of apartheid, South Africa imprisoned 853 black men per hundred thousand in the population. The United States imprisons 4,919 black men per hundred thousand (versus only 943 white men). So because of the drug war and the way it is enforced, a black man was far more likely to be jailed in the Land of the Free than in the most notorious white supremacist society in the world.

Empathy makes progress possible, and every time you widen human empathy, you open the universe a little more.

different study of office workers in the U.S. found most of them never get an hour of uninterrupted work in a typical day. If this goes on for months and years, it scrambles your ability to figure out who you are and what you want. You become lost in your own

The alternative to cruel optimism - telling people a simplistic story that sets them up to fail - isn't pessimism, the idea that you can't change anything. It's authentic optimism. This is where you honestly acknowledge the barriers that stand in the way of your goal and establish a plan to work together with other people to dismantle those barriers, step by step.

Unhappiness and depression are totally different things. There is nothing more infuriating to a depressed person than to be told to cheer up, or to be offered jolly little solutions as if they were merely having a bad week. It feels like being told to cheer yourself up by going out dancing after you've broken both your legs.

So, to find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities.