Quotes About Well-being

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.

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

Depression isn't a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences!

Stop thinking only about individual recovery, he argues, and start thinking about "social recovery.

Ço­ cuklar?n etrafta ko?turmaya dönük do?al arzular?n?n önüne geçildi?inde, dikkat becerileri ve beyinlerinin genel sa?l??? zarar görüyor.

The vitally important corollary is that evolution shaped us not only to feel bad in isolation, but to feel insecure." It's a beautiful theory.

Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack.

The science is so clear on this that a recent summary explained: "It is now obvious that stress can cause structural changes in the brain with long-term effects.

When the results came back and were all calculated out, Tim was struck by the results: materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety.

Rufus tells his patients when they come to him feeling deeply depressed or anxious: You're not crazy to feel so distressed. You're not broken. You're not defective. He sometimes quotes the Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti,26 who explained: "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

But I was going to learn that neither of these stories is true. The primary cause of all this rising depression and anxiety is not in our heads. It is, I discovered, largely in the world, and the way we are living in it. I learned there are at least nine proven causes of depression and anxiety (although nobody had brought them together like this before), and many of them are rising all around us—causing us to feel radically worse.

Toda la lógica de nuestra cultura conspira para que se quede en la rueda consumista, que salga a comprar cuando se sienta mal, que persiga valores de usar y tirar.

Loneliness, he concluded, is causing a significant amount of the depression and anxiety in our society.

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.

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.

And if the standards of the culture were wrong then, I realized, they can be wrong now. You can have everything a person could possibly need by the standards of our culture - but those standards can badly misjudge what a human actually needs in order to have a good or even a tolerable life.

One study of depressed people in Norway found that a program like this moved people on average 4.5 points on the depression scale—more than double the effect of chemical antidepressants.

The stunning thing was that loneliness is not merely the result of depression," he told me. "Indeed—it leads to depression.

I would start with three big, bold goals. One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can't focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can't pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely—in their neighborhoods and at school—because children who are imprisoned in their homes won't be able to develop a healthy ability to pay attention.

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.

The term doesn't really make any sense, she said: we don't know what a "chemically balanced" brain would look like. People are told that drugs like antidepressants restore a natural balance to your brain, she said, but it's not true—they create an artificial state. The whole idea of mental distress being caused simply by a chemical imbalance is "a myth," she has come to believe, sold to us by the drug companies.

The concept of "work hours" is vanishing for most people—so this thing that 87 percent of us don't enjoy is spreading over more and more of our lives.

His goal as a doctor was always "trying to identify what happened in the past" of an addict that made them find everyday life unbearable, and to help them overcome it by offering compassion and helping them to build a good life as an alternative. Now they were asking: If this is the goal of all good doctors, why can't it be the goal of government policy?

To have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong with it," Mihaly has explained. "We also need a positive goal; otherwise why keep going?