Quotes About Risk

if you want to increase your chances of avoiding stress-related diseases, make sure you don't inadvertently allow yourself to be born poor.

Lots of work has examined the genes involved, most broadly showing that variants that produce lowered dopamine signaling (less dopamine in the synapse, fewer dopamine receptors, or lower responsiveness of these receptors) are associated with sensation seeking, risk taking, attentional problems, and extroversion. Such individuals have to seek experiences of greater intensity to compensate for the blunted dopamine signaling.

Success in everything from athletics to chess to the stock market boosts testosterone levels.

in general, major stressors make people of both genders more risk taking. But moderate stressors bias men toward, and women away from, risk taking. In the absence of stress, men tend toward more risk taking than women; thus

It is never really the case that stress makes you sick, or even increases your risk of being sick. Stress increases your risk of getting diseases that make you sick, or if you have such a disease, stress increases the risk of your defenses being overwhelmed by the disease.

If they're told, "The drug has a 95 percent survival rate," people, including doctors, are more likely to approve it than when told, "The drug has a 5 percent death rate.

The health risk of poverty turns out to be a huge effect, the biggest risk factor there is in all of behavioral medicine—in other words, if you have a bunch of people of the same gender, age, and ethnicity and you want to make some predictions about who is going to live how long, the single most useful fact to know is each person's SES.

During sustained stress, the amygdala processes emotional sensory information more rapidly and less accurately, dominates hippocampal function, and disrupts frontocortical function; we're more fearful, our thinking is muddled, and we assess risks poorly and act impulsively out of habit, rather than incorporating new data.

Interestingly, traumatic stress early in life (abuse, for example) greatly increases the risk of IBS in adulthood. This implies that childhood trauma can leave an echo of vulnerability, a large intestine that is hyperreactive to stress, long afterward.

Logically, gambling shouldn't evoke much anticipatory dopamine, given the astronomical odds against winning. But the behavioral engineering—the 24-7 activity and lack of time cues, the cheap alcohol pickling fronto-cortical judgment, the manipulations to make you feel like today is your lucky day—distorts and shifts the perception of the odds into a range where dopamine pours out and, oh, why not, let's try again.

Maybe mountaineering shouldn't be considered heroic at all, since the whole effort is 'useless' and in no way to be compared with sitting down at the wrong lunch counter in the early-sixties South, or going into battle. Nevertheless, situations arise in the useless enterprise of mountaineering that present people with choices, that make emotional and physical demands that few can meet.

Ideas do not have to be correct in order to be good; its only necessary that, if they do fail, they do so in an interesting way.

It amazes me how people are often more willing to act based on little or no data than to use data that is a challenge to assemble.

Men of great spirit are at high risk at a time when small souls rule the world.

People who avoid failure also avoid success.

There is always risk, so learn to manage risk instead of avoiding it.

Many people will not head down the street until all the lights are green. That is why they don't go anywhere.

Often in the real world, it's not the smart that get ahead, but the bold.

Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn. But have fun. Most people never win because they're more afraid of losing.

The main reason that over 90 percent of the American public struggles financially is because they play not to lose. They don't play to win.

Most people never win because they're more afraid of losing.

Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.

The more security you seek, the less freedom you have. The people with the most security are in jail. That is why it is called 'maximum security.

The primary difference between a rich person and a poor person is how they manage fear.