Quotes About Awareness

you don't need millions of people. You need a small group of people that get [what] the problems [are], and know about creative confrontation—to create drama around it, to begin the consciousness-raising…. You capture people's attention, and then enough people feel that it's a vital issue that they want to give their time and their energy [to], and that there's a clear direction.

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.

Now I make it a point to go for a walk for an hour every day without my phone or anything else that could distract me. I let my thoughts float and find unexpected connections. I found that, precisely because I give my

It's when you set aside your distractions, he said, that you begin to see what you were distracting yourself from.

they are degrading the quality of our thinking. Without mind-wandering, we find it harder to make sense of the world—and in the jammed-up state of confusion that creates, we become even more vulnerable to the next source of distraction that comes along.

what we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions…. Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection.

But when you practice moving at a speed that is compatible with human nature—and you build that into your daily life—you begin to train your attention and focus. "That's why those disciplines make you smarter.

better techniques being discovered every week. One day, when we were walking in San Francisco, Tristan said to me: "Things look pretty bad from the outside, but when you're on the inside, things can look even worse." Tristan was starting to realize: It's not your fault you can't focus. It's by design. Your distraction is their fuel.

three crucial things that are happening during mind-wandering. First, you are slowly making sense of the world.

Instead of saying our pain is an irrational spasm to be taken away with drugs, they see that we should start to listen to it and figure out what it is telling us.

something the psychologist W. M. Mace said years ago, riffing on JFK: "Ask not what's inside your head,"9 he said. "Ask what your head's inside of.

In 1975 the average American had a blood lead level of 15 micrograms per deciliter. Today it's 0.85 micrograms per deciliter.

I was told by my doctor that I was suffering from both depression and acute anxiety. I had believed that those were separate problems, and that is how they were discussed for the thirteen years I received medical care for them. But I noticed something odd as I did my research. Everything that causes an increase in depression also causes an increase in anxiety, and the other way around. They rise and fall together.

People were, [Tristan Harris] warned, living 'on a treadmill of continuous checking.

James Williams was right: our attention is a kind of light, one that clarifies the world and makes it visible to us. In Provincetown I could see more clearly than I ever had before in my life - my own thoughts, my own goals, my own dreams. I want to live in that light - the light of knowing, of achieving our ambitions, of being fully alive - and not in the menacing orange light of it all burning down.

You too will become more perceptive, open, and empathetic. If, by contrast, you expose yourself for hours a day to the disconnected fragments of shrieking and fury that dominate social media, your thoughts will start to be shaped like that.

Stress isn't something imposed on us. It's something we impose on ourselves." Stress is a feeling. Stress is a series of thoughts. If you just learn how to think differently—to quiet down your rattling thoughts—your stress will melt away. So you just need to learn to meditate. Your stress comes from a failure to be mindful.

How do you slow down in a world that is speeding up?

It's not so much what happens in those fifteen minutes—Rachel has come to feel that "you're planting seeds during the meditation, [and] it flowers spontaneously during your day, and your life.

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.

I felt like everywhere I went, I was surrounded by people who were broadcasting but not receiving. Narcissism, it occurred to me, is a corruption of attention - it's where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego.

We can't live like this!" I said. "You don't know how to be present! You are missing your life! You're afraid of missing out—that's why you are checking your screen all the time! By doing that, you are guaranteeing you are missing out! You are missing your one and only life! You can't see the things that are right in front of you, the things you have been longing to see since you were a little boy! None of these people can! Look at them!

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.