Quotes from Johann Hari

In the drug war, we guarantee addicts will find it almost impossible to work again, by marking them with the scarlet letter of a criminal record. After the drug war, we will make it easier to employ recovering addicts, with subsidies—because we understand this will keep them from relapsing more effectively than the threat of being caged.

We're all on the same ball of mud and water that is heading toward a catastrophic end potentially. If we are going to solve these problems, we can't do it alone," he said. "That's why I think empathy is so valuable.

When the government war on alcohol stopped, the gangster war for alcohol stopped.

They explain that when a popular product is criminalized, it does not disappear. Instead, criminals start to control the supply and sale of the product.

There's a Buddhist saying—be grateful for your suffering, because it allows you to empathize with the suffering of others.

American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.

Depression and anxiety have three kinds of causes—biological, psychological, and social. They are all real, and none of these three can be described by something as crude as the idea of a chemical imbalance. The social and psychological causes have been ignored for a long time, even though it seems the biological causes don't even kick in without them. These causes aren't some kooky fringe theory, I would explain.

Mental health is produced socially: the presence or absence of mental health is above all a social indicator and therefore requires social, as well as individual, solutions.

Flow can only come when you are monotasking

How could I still be depressed when I was taking antidepressants? I was doing everything right, and yet something was still wrong. Why?

This gap in understanding between books and screens is big enough that in elementary-school children, it's the equivalent of two-thirds of a year's growth in reading comprehension.

We could work less and buy less. It would prevent the environment—our habitat—from being systematically destroyed. But we don't do it, because we are isolated in our individual cages.

To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe. You need to be able to switch off the parts of your mind that are scanning the horizon for bears or lions or their modern equivalents, and let yourself sink down into one secure topic.

in a culture where people are not "getting the connections that they need in order to be healthy human beings," and that is why we can't put down our smartphones, or bear to log off.

Now that they are effectively under house arrest, what are kids doing with the time they used to spend playing? One study of this found that this time is now overwhelmingly spent on homework (which exploded by 145 percent between 1981 and 1997), screens, and shopping with their parents. A 2004 study found that U.S. kids spent 7.5 hours more each week on academics than they had twenty years before.

You are not suffering from a chemical imbalance in your brain. You are suffering from a social and spiritual imbalance in how we live. Much more than you've been told up to now, it's not serotonin; it's society. It's not your brain; it's your pain. Your biology can make your distress worse, for sure. But it's not the cause. It's not the driver. It's not the place to look for the main explanation, or the main solution.

be grateful for your suffering, because it allows you to empathize with the suffering of others.

Big Pharma was offering the solution that an isolated, materialistic culture thought it needed—one you can buy. We had lost the ability to understand that there are some problems that can't be solved by shopping.

There's no point giving people sweet self-help lectures about the benefits of unplugging unless you give them a legal right to do it. In fact... [it] becomes a kind of maddening taunt... If you have an independent fortune and you don't need to work, then you can probably make these changes now. But for the rest of us, we need to be part of a collective struggle in order to reclaim the time and space that has been taken from us - so we can finally rest, and sleep, and restore our attention.

If you put shampoo into a car engine, you're not going to scratch your head when the thing conks out,' [Dale Pinnock] said. Yet every day, all over the Western world, we are putting into our bodies substances 'which are so far removed from what was intended for human fuel.

A compassionate approach leads to less addiction.

Depression and anxiety might, in one way, be the sanest reaction you have.6 It's a signal, saying—you shouldn't have to live this way, and if you aren't helped to find a better path, you will be missing out on so much that is best about being human.

psikoloji profesörü olan Jan Tonnes­vang'?n söyledi?ine göre, herkesin bir "ustal?k" duygusuna bir alanda iyi oldu?unu hissetmeye ihtiyac? var. ?nsan?n temel psikolojik ih­tiyaçlar?ndan biri bu. Bir konuda iyi oldu?unuzu hissetti?inizde ona çok daha kolay odaklanabiliyorsunuz; beceriksiz oldu?unuzu hissetti?inizde ise dikkatiniz da??l?p gidiyor.

An antidepressant, they have learned, isn't just a pill. It's anything that lifts your despair.