Quotes from Johann Hari

This showed there's just a maximum limit for how quickly humans can absorb information, and trying to bust through that barrier simply busts your brain's ability to understand it instead.

today's flood of addiction is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel social[ly] or culturally isolated. Chronic isolation causes people to look for relief.

More speed means less comprehension.

Just as we are rescuing the sex drive from our subconscious and from shame, so we need to take the intoxication drive out into the open where it can breathe.

in 1995, the World Health Organization12 (WHO) conducted a massive scientific study of cocaine and its effects. They discovered that "experimental and occasional use are by far the most common types of use, and compulsive/dysfunctional [use] is far less common." The U.S. government threatened to cut off funding to the WHO unless they suppressed the report. It has never been published; we know what it says only because it was leaked. As

In the United States, 90 percent of the money spent on drug policy goes to policing and punishment, with 10 percent going to treatment and prevention. In Portugal, the ratio13 is the exact opposite.

Sheriff Joe has built a jail that he refers to publicly as his "concentration camp," and presidential candidates flock here during election campaigns, emerging full of praise. Anslinger said addicts were "lepers" who needed to be "quarantined," and so Arpaio has built a leper colony for them in the desert.

2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.

In general, we want to take the easy way out, but what makes us happy is doing the thing that's a little bit difficult.

If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.

It's easier to find serenity through meditation when you haven't just lost your job and you aren't wondering how you're going to avoid being evicted next Tuesday.

In most cases, Joanne says, we would have to stop talking about "mental health"—which conjures pictures of brain scans and defective synapses—and start talking about "emotional health." "Why do we call it mental health?" she asked me. "Because we want to scientize it. We want to make it sound scientific. But it's our emotions.

simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book

Nine million Americans--4 percent of adults--are using prescription sleeping pills, and vastly more are using over-the-counter sleep aids.

Addiction," he said, "is a disease of loneliness.

As John was proving how this effect plays out in humans, other scientists were investigating it in other animals. For example, Professor Martha McClintock separated out lab rats. Some were raised in a cage, alone. Others were raised in groups. The isolated rats developed eighty-four times the number of breast cancer tumors as the rats who had a community.

one professor told me that he struggled to get his students there to read even quite short books, and he increasingly offered them podcasts and YouTube clips they could watch instead. And that's Harvard.

James Baldwin—the man who is, for my money, the greatest writer of the twentieth century—said: "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

I realized that the collapse in reading books is in some ways a symptom of our atrophying attention, and in some ways a cause of it. It's a spiral – as we began to move from books to screens, we started to lose some of the capacity for the deeper reading that comes from books, and that in turn, made us less likely to read books.

Saw a sunken army who had spent fourteen years waging war on alcohol only to see alcohol win, and win big.

Back when the United States was ordering its doctors to block up all legal supplies of heroin and breaking Henry Smith Williams's brother, doctors in Britain flatly refused to fall into line.

It said depression and anxiety were carried in your genes. I knew my mother had been depressed and highly anxious before I was born (and after), and that we had these problems in my family running further back than that.

Jean tells me the drug dealers he used to work for are "completely against this program. They can control people in weak states and make money from them. If I was still in the criminal milieu, they could make me a killer, I would do anything." As he said this, I thought of Chino and Rosalio. "But now? No. I am lost for them.

What we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions … 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. Depth connected to your work in relationships also takes time. It takes energy. It takes long timespans. And it takes commitment. It takes attention, right? All of these things that require depth are suffering. It's pulling us more and more up onto the surface.