Quotes from Johann Hari

As soon as plants began to be eaten by animals for the first time - way back in prehistory, before the first human took his first steps - the plants evolved chemicals to protect themselves from being devoured and destroyed. But these chemicals could, it soon turned out, produce strange effects. In some cases, instead of poisoning the plant's predators, they - quite by accident- altered their consciousness. This is when the pleasure of getting wasted enters the history.

I felt in that moment that we all have a choice now between two profound forces—fragmentation, or flow. Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes you bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentation shrinks us. Flow expands us. I asked myself: Do you want to be one of Skinner's pigeons, atrophying your attention on dancing for crude rewards, or Mihaly's painters, able to concentrate because you have found something that really matters?

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.

Swiss citizens could see now that U.S.-style drug crackdowns had brought chaos to their streets—and after the government provided a legal route to heroin, the chaos vanished. So they argued that the drug war means disorder, while ending the drug war means slowly restoring order.

you feel the urge to check your phone, wait ten minutes. He says you should "time-box"—which means you should draw up a detailed schedule of what you are going to do each day,

I was feeling so lost and depressed, but now, okay … I am a fighter. I feel good. You come out of your corner crying, and you start to fight." She blew her smoke away from me, into the air. "It changes you," she said. "You feel strong then.

the more a child is read storybooks—something the parents, more than the kid, choose—the better they are at reading other people's emotions.

A common symptom of depression is something called "derealization"5—which is where you feel like nothing you are doing is authentic or real.

He has found that the more you let your mind wander, the better you are at having organized personal goals, being creative, and making patient, long-term decisions. You will be able to do these things better if you let your mind drift, and slowly, unconsciously, make sense of your life.

It might look discouraging , but at every relapse, you learn something new.

Many of the things we need to do are so obvious they are banal: slow down, do one thing at a time, sleep more. But even though at some level we all know them to be true, we are in fact moving in the opposite direction: toward more speed, more switching, less sleep.

If you worked in the civil service and you had a higher degree of control10 over your work, you were a lot less likely to become depressed or develop severe emotional distress than people working at the same pay level, with the same status, in the same office, as people with a lower degree of control over their work.

every time you widen human empathy, you open the universe a little more.

to focusing carefully on one thing at a time. As I learned all this, I realized that my desire to absorb a tsunami of information without losing my ability to focus was like my desire to eat at McDonald's every day and stay trim—an impossible dream.

The worst stress for people isn't having to bear a lot of responsibility. 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.

He learned right away that the drug companies had—for years—been selectively publishing research, and to a greater degree than he expected. For example, in one trial for Prozac, the drug was given to 245 patients, but the drug company published the results for only twenty-seven of them. Those twenty-seven patients9 were the ones the drug seemed to work for.

Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist who was the pope of the neoliberal right, and a leading critic of the drug war.

reading fiction, over time, boosts your empathy.

Reading is a unique form of consciousness, while we read we direct attention outward to the page but also at the same time inwards as we imagine and mentally stimulate.

clinical depression is an understandable response to adversity.

Cuanta más desigualdad hay en una sociedad, más extendida está toda suerte de enfermedades mentales.

The policy of prohibition summoned these characters into existence, because it needs them. So long as it lives, they live.

The truth emerging from this scattered picture of nuclear proliferation is simple: there is a stronger chance of a nuclear bomb being used now than at almost any point in the Cold War.

I got my dad a great father's Day present. He called to say: 'Ach. Zis present is so good I now think it vas almost vorth having children.