Quotes from Johann Hari

Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause, of personal and social maladjustment.

There's a scientific debate about the precise scale of our sleep loss, but the National Sleep Foundation has calculated that the amount of sleep we get has dropped by 20 percent in just a hundred years.

Creativity is not [where you create] some new thing that's emerged from your brain," Nathan told me. "It's a new association between two things that were already there.

When Billie Holiday came15 to London in the 1950s, she was amazed. They "are civilized about it and they have no narcotics problem at all," she explained. "One day America is going to smarten up and do the

For anybody who suspects that we need to reform the drug laws, there is an easier argument to make, and a harder argument to make. The easier argument is to say that we all agree drugs are bad—it's just that drug prohibition is even worse.

Yet all over the United States—all over the world—police officers were noticing something strange. If you arrest a large number of rapists, the amount of rape goes down. If you arrest a large number of violent racists, the number of violent racist attacks goes down. But if you arrest a large number of drug dealers, drug dealing doesn't go down. Another

The primary explanation for depression offered in our culture starts to fall apart. The idea you feel terrible because of a "chemical imbalance" was built on a series of mistakes and errors. It has come as close to being proved wrong, he told me, as you ever get in science. It's lying broken on the floor, like a neurochemical Humpty Dumpty with a very sad smile.

Tristan taught me that the phones we have, and the programs that run on them, were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold our attention

We have been systematically misinformed about what depression and anxiety are.

Materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety.

Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year.

So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you'll make more mistakes, you'll be less creative, and you'll remember less of what you do.

The US head of state grew up on food stamps. The British head of state grew up on the postage stamps.

You've got to pull yourself out of the materialistic environments—the environments that are reinforcing the materialistic values," he says, because they cripple your internal satisfactions. And then, he says, to make that sustainable, you have to "replace them with actions that are going to provide those intrinsic satisfactions, [and] encourage those intrinsic goals.

At the start of the Second World War, the English poet W. H. Auden—when he looked out over the new technologies of destruction that had been created by humans—warned: "We must love one another, or die.

One friend told me that she always knew her depression was lifting when she felt her sense of time expanding again

In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters.

the top causes of stress in the U.S. have been identified by scientists at Stanford Graduate School of Business in a major study. They are "a lack of health insurance, the constant threat of lay-offs, lack of discretion and autonomy in decision-making, long working hours, low levels of organizational justice, and unrealistic demands.

The American head of state grew up with a mother on food stamps. The British head of state grew up with a mother on postage stamps. Is that a contrast that fills you with pride?

Political pessimism keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions.

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. What's happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that's with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.

We are now exposed to ten times the amount of artificial light that people were exposed to just fifty years ago.

Disempowerment," Michael told me, "is at the heart of poor health"—physical, mental, and emotional.

Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.