Quotes from Johann Hari

You too will become more perceptive, open, and empathetic. If, by contrast, you expose yourself for hours a day to the disconnected fragments of shrieking and fury that dominate social media, your thoughts will start to be shaped like that.

One day, James Williams—the former Google strategist I met—addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: "How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?" There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.

Stress isn't something imposed on us. It's something we impose on ourselves." Stress is a feeling. Stress is a series of thoughts. If you just learn how to think differently—to quiet down your rattling thoughts—your stress will melt away. So you just need to learn to meditate. Your stress comes from a failure to be mindful.

The Mafia paid Harry Anslinger to launch his crusade because they wanted the drug market all to themselves.

Others are run by people like the man I met in L.A. who too often seem to be playing out their own traumas and internal stigma on people too raw and fragile to argue back.

That doesn't mean all chemical antidepressants are bad: some credible scientists argue they give some temporary relief to a minority of users, and that shouldn't be dismissed. The false story is the claim that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain and that the primary solution for most people is a chemical antidepressant.

one of my biggest learnings as a designer or technologist is—making something easy to use doesn't mean it's good for humanity.

Let Grow is based on the idea that if children are going to become adults who can make their own decisions and pay attention, they need to experience increasing levels of freedom and independence throughout their childhood.

Siempre hemos tenido miedo - me dijo-, pero a veces es más fuerte el amor a nuestros hijos que el miedo

We could have looked instead at what does work: changing the environment in specific ways.

How do you slow down in a world that is speeding up?

Some scientists in the field believe that dreaming somehow helps you to adapt emotionally to waking events.

the writer Neale Donald Walsch wrote: "Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.

As a society, we are dreaming less and less.

De todos modos, seguimos pensando que podemos curar la depresión por la vía conceptual. Yo lo veo más sencillo. Primero arreglemos lo fisiológico. Sal. Muévete».

The more unequal your society, the more prevalent all forms of mental illness are. Other social scientists then broke this down to look at depression specifically16—and found the higher the inequality, the higher the depression.

If it's more enraging, it's more engaging. If enough people are spending enough of their time being angered, that starts to change the culture. As Tristan told me, that turns hate into a habit.

Curiously, it turned out emotional abuse was more likely12 to cause depression than any other kind of trauma—even sexual molestation. Being treated cruelly by your parents was the biggest driver of depression, out of all these categories.

When you have a society with huge gaps in income and status, Richard told me, it creates the sense that "some people seem supremely important, and others seem of no importance at all." This doesn't affect only people at the bottom. In a highly unequal society, everyone has to think about their status a lot. Am I maintaining my position? Who's threatening me? How far can I fall?

Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there's no time to reach depth.

Padecer depresión y ansiedad consiste en un proceso por el que te conviertes en prisionero de tu ego y no dejas que entre el aire del exterior.

When Harry and Arnold and Billie were born, drugs were freely available throughout the world. You could go to any American pharmacy and buy products made from the same ingredients as heroin and cocaine. The most popular cough mixtures11 in the United States contained opiates, a new soft drink called Coca-Cola was made from the same plant as snortable cocaine, and over in Britain, the classiest department stores sold heroin tins for society women.

It is, he told me, having to endure "work [that] is monotonous, boring, soul-destroying; [where] they die a little when they come to work each day, because their work touches no part of them that is them.

This is a common human response to the circumstances in which we all live. This is not something that separates you from the world. It's something, actually, you share with countless others." We need to see "this is not just my personal problem," he said, but "a shared problem—and attributable to the kind of society we live in.