Chronic Complainers Quotes

The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

The chronic kicker, even the most violent critic, will frequently soften and be subdued in the presence of a patient, sympathetic listener— a listener who will be silent while the irate fault-finder dilates like a king cobra and spews the poison out of his system.

KVETCH:(Yiddish) verb: to gripe or fret; noun: a chronic complainer, a whiner

A bad attitude from a chronic complaining employee is like a cancer; it will only spread and infect others. This can take your business down in a nanosecond. You must cut out the cancer and invite them to seek employment elsewhere. Quickly.

Psychologists tell us that by the time we’re in our mid-30s, our identity or personality will be completely formed. This means that for those of us over 35, we have memorized a select set of behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, emotional reactions, habits, skills, associative memories, conditioned responses, and perceptions that are now subconsciously programmed within us. Those programs are running us, because the body has become the mind. This means that we will think the same thoughts, feel the same feelings, react in identical ways, behave in the same manner, believe the same dogmas, and perceive reality the same ways. About 95 percent of who we are by midlife1 is a series of subconscious programs that have become automatic—driving a car, brushing our teeth, overeating when we’re stressed, worrying about our future, judging our friends, complaining about our lives, blaming our parents, not believing in ourselves, and insisting on being chronically unhappy, just to name a few.

MICHAEL BERNARD BECKWITH Creation is always happening. Every time an individual has a thought, or a prolonged chronic way of thinking, they’re in the creation process. Something is going to manifest out of those thoughts. What you are thinking now is creating your future life. You create your life with your thoughts. Because you are always thinking, you are always creating. What you think about the most or focus on the most, is what will appear as your life. Like all the laws of nature, there is utter perfection in this law. You create your life. Whatever you sow, you reap! Your thoughts are seeds, and the harvest you reap will depend on the seeds you plant. If you are complaining, the law of attraction will powerfully bring into your life more situations for you to complain about. If you are listening to someone else complain and focusing on that, sympathizing with them, agreeing with them, in that moment, you are attracting more situations to yourself to complain about. The law is simply reflecting and giving back to you exactly what you are focusing on with your thoughts. With this powerful knowledge, you can completely change every circumstance and event in your entire life, by changing the way you think.

A survey taken by the association found that 45 percent of patients with autoimmune disease were labeled as chronic complainers early in their diagnostic journeys, with the resulting delay in diagnosis often leading to organ damage from lack of appropriate treatment.

This bad habit of fault-finding, criticizing and complaining is a tool that grows keener by constant use, and there is grave danger that he who at first is only a moderate kicker may develop into a chronic knocker, and the knife he has sharpened will sever his head. Hooker

most chronic pain patients I know tend to minimize their pain to try to seem as “normal” as possible. We don’t want to be perceived as complainers so we keep much of our pain experience to ourselves.

That’s improbable to many people. People assume patients are just complaining too much, not trying their best to get better,

There will always be difficult people for us to face—the chronically insecure, the hopelessly stubborn, the hysterical complainers. Your ability to disarm these people will prove an invaluable skill. You do have to be careful, though: if you are passive they will run all over you; if assertive you will make their monstrous qualities worse. Seduction and charm are the most effective counterweapons. Outwardly, be gracious. Adapt to their every mood. Enter their spirit. Inwardly, calculate and wait: your surrender is a strategy, not a way of life.

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people’s privacy — being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler’s worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler. Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Munchausen syndrome.

Why can’t you be a fatalist about it the way I am? If I’m destined to unload these lighters at a profit and pick up some Egyptian cotton cheap from Milo, then that’s what I’m going to do. And if you’re destined to be killed over Bologna, then you’re going to be killed, so you might just as well go out and die like a man. I hate to say this, Yossarian, but you’re turning into a chronic complainer

I got used to being uncomfortable, and I internalized the idea that my mentioning my discomfort made me fussy—“The princess and the pea,” my mother once said, in irritation, making it clear that I was demanding too much when I complained.

poise and calm, easily mastering her life as she normally did? Granted, she’d never been one of those people who seemed to court good luck wherever they went—but she certainly couldn’t complain of chronic misfortune, either. Well, except for the past few months,

never been one of those people who seemed to court good luck wherever they went—but she certainly couldn’t complain of chronic misfortune, either. Well, except for the past few months, during which everything that had been dearly important to her had almost entirely vanished. Taking her grandfather’s advice, Anna turned her head toward the sky. Clouds were

There will always be difficult people for us to face—the chronically insecure, the hopelessly stubborn, the hysterical complainers. Your ability to disarm these people will prove an invaluable skill. You do have to be careful, though: if you are passive they will run all over you; if assertive you will make their monstrous qualities worse. Seduction and charm are the most effective counterweapons. Outwardly, be gracious. Adapt to their every mood. Enter their spirit. Inwardly, calculate and wait: your surrender is a strategy, not a way of life. When the time comes, and it inevitably will, the tables will turn. Their aggression will land them in trouble, and that will put you in a position to rescue them, regaining superiority.

would she be able to leave the past behind and move on with her usual poise and calm, easily mastering her life as she normally did? Granted, she’d never been one of those people who seemed to court good luck wherever they went—but she certainly couldn’t complain of chronic misfortune, either. Well, except for the past few months, during which everything that had been dearly

Not only do you have to work on avoiding the negativity of others, not taking things personally, and growing from the pain, you need to build a positive mindset. When you think about how destructive stress and chronic negativity is to your physical, mental, emotional, social, spiritual, and occupational well-being, it should be obvious why you should build up your immune system or your positivity.

Dani’s mild eating disorder was definitely the most annoying thing about her. One Christmas break I’d gained ten pounds and went up two cup-sizes—a post episode binge that finally made me look normal, like a woman. I would have killed to hold onto that version of me and all Dani did was count calories and complain about her non-existent cellulite. She was lucky. Most people were, they just couldn’t see it.

behind and move on with her usual poise and calm, easily mastering her life as she normally did? Granted, she’d never been one of those people who seemed to court good luck wherever they went—but she certainly couldn’t complain of chronic misfortune, either. Well, except for the past few months, during which everything that had been dearly important to her had almost entirely vanished. Taking her grandfather’s advice, Anna turned her head toward

Pain enacts itself in predictable ways and flows into the fault lines between all the other social problems once can imagine, mortaring the pieces in place. Those who are in chronic pain - again, mostly women - are viewed as unreliable, as an unwise investment, as a burden, as complainers, as unfixable. There are so many of us, women who are supposed to be caretakers, whose bodies have reversed the flow of care and said no, women who bodies demand alternate systems of caretaking and new methods of healing. We also need new ways of seeing and naming pain.

People in developing countries frequently do all of the things that make us fear for our backs: they engage in hard physical labor, sleep on primitive mattresses, walk long distances in worn shoes, ride in uncomfortable vehicles on bumpy roads, and receive limited medical care. If chronic back pain were really due to structural damage, we would expect them to have terrible back problems. They don’t. Doctors working in these areas report that people rarely complain of back pain (in the United States, back pain is second only to colds and flu as a reason for physician visits).

and confused if someone does not appreciate their niceness. Others often sense this and avoid giving them feedback not only, effectively blocking the nice person’s emotional growth, but preventing risks from being taken. You never know with a nice person if the relationship would survive a conflict or angry confrontation. This greatly limits the depths of intimacy. And would you really trust a nice person to back you up if confrontation were needed? 3. With nice people you never know where you really stand. The nice person allows others to accidentally oppress him. The “nice” person might be resenting you just for talking to him, because really he is needing to pee. But instead of saying so he stands there nodding and smiling, with legs tightly crossed, pretending to listen. 4. Often people in relationship with nice people turn their irritation toward themselves, because they are puzzled as to how they could be so upset with someone so nice. In intimate relationships this leads to guilt, self-hate and depression. 5. Nice people frequently keep all their anger inside until they find a safe place to dump it. This might be by screaming at a child, blowing up a federal building, or hitting a helpless, dependent mate. (Timothy McVeigh, executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, was described by acquaintances as a very, very nice guy, one who would give you the shirt off his back.) Success in keeping the anger in will often manifest as psychosomatic illnesses, including arthritis, ulcers, back problems, and heart disease. Proper Peachy Parents In my work as a psychotherapist, I have found that those who had peachy keen “Nice Parents” or proper “Rigidly Religious Parents” (as opposed to spiritual parents), are often the most stuck in chronic, lowgrade depression. They have a difficult time accessing or expressing any negative feelings towards their parents. They sometimes say to me “After all my parents did for me, seldom saying a harsh word to me, I would feel terribly guilty complaining. Besides, it would break their hearts.” Psychologist Rollo May suggested that it is less crazy-making to a child to cope with overt withdrawal or harshness than to try to understand the facade of the always-nice parent. When everyone agrees that your parents are so nice and giving, and you still feel dissatisfied, then a child may conclude that there must be something wrong with his or her ability to receive love. -§ Emotionally starving children are easier to control, well fed children don’t need to be. -§ I remember a family of fundamentalists who came to my office to help little Matthew with his anger problem. The parents wanted me to teach little Matthew how to “express his anger nicely.” Now if that is not a formula making someone crazy I do not know what would be. Another woman told me that after her stinking drunk husband tore the house up after a Christmas party, breaking most of the dishes in the kitchen, she meekly told him, “Dear, I think you need a breath mint.” Many families I work with go through great anxiety around the holidays because they are going to be forced to be with each other and are scared of resuming their covert war. They are scared that they might not keep the nice garbage can lid on, and all the rotting resentments and hopeless hurts will be exposed. In the words to the following song, artist David Wilcox explains to his parents why he will not be coming home this Thanksgiving: Covert War by David Wilcox

When would she be able to leave the past behind and move on with her usual poise and calm, easily mastering her life as she normally did? Granted, she’d never been one of those people who seemed to court good luck wherever they went—but she certainly couldn’t complain of chronic misfortune, either. Well, except for the past few months, during which everything that had been dearly important to her had almost entirely vanished. Taking her grandfather’s advice, Anna turned her head toward the sky. Clouds were moving in quickly to cover the moon and stars, but for now the stars were so bright they almost blinded her. She stared up into the sky for several minutes and then closed her eyes. Gradually, her thoughts dissolved in the glistening

Delay. Here is an excellent strategy for being chronically miserable and maddening to others: Be chronically dissatisfied with everything in your life, complain constantly, but do nothing effective to change your situation. If you are in a particularly bad marriage or work situation, be sure to stay there, in that it provides a never-ending supply of material to complain about and to justify why you feel so badly. If someone suggests an alternative, reject it as something that wouldn't work or that you've already tried. Or, try it out, but make sure it doesn't work. If anyone ever criticizes you for any of this, either agree profusely with their criticism and extend it even further, or, if you feel you have enough credits to do so, finally let out your frustration and spite on them for their insensitivity, ineptitude in trying to assist you, or their stupidity in not seeing the hopelessness of your situation. Whether you continue with your habitual passive-aggressive behavior or show a rare indulgence of aggression, remember to always hold to the morally superior position. By adopting this strategy, you will remain defeated but you won't be alone. By dragging the other down with you, you can further justify your position and enjoy a certain amount of triumph. After all, you are used to this and have never expected anything different. This will be a particularly effective strategy with your children who will find it more than usually difficult to reject you. With any luck at all, they will never give up on you, and you can sustain this solution to life's problems for a life time.

Economics today creates appetites instead of solutions. The western world swells with obesity while others starve. The rich wander about like gods in their own nightmares. Or go skiing in the desert. You don’t even have to be particularly rich to do that. Those who once were starving now have access to chips, Coca-Cola, trans fats and refined sugars, but they are still disenfranchized. It is said that when Mahatma Gandhi was asked what he thought about western civilization, he answered that yes, it would be a good idea. The bank man’s bonuses and the oligarch’s billions are natural phenomena. Someone has to pull away from the masses – or else we’ll all become poorer. After the crash Icelandic banks lost 100 billion dollars. The country’s GDP had only ever amounted to thirteen billion dollars in total. An island with chronic inflation, a small currency and no natural resources to speak of: fish and warm water. Its economy was a third of Luxembourg’s. Well, they should be grateful they were allowed to take part in the financial party. Just like ugly girls should be grateful. Enjoy, swallow and don’t complain when it’s over. Economists can pull the same explanations from their hats every time. Dream worlds of total social exclusion and endless consumerism grow where they can be left in peace, at a safe distance from the poverty and environmental destruction they spread around themselves. Alternative universes for privileged human life forms. The stock market rises and the stock market falls. Countries devalue and currencies ripple. The market’s movements are monitored minute by minute. Some people always walk in threadbare shoes. And you arrange your preferences to avoid meeting them. It’s no longer possible to see further into the future than one desire at a time. History has ended and individual freedom has taken over. There is no alternative.

Suffering takes many forms. Usually it’s manifested by complaining, arguing, manipulation, gossiping, etc. There are often strong repetitive thoughts regarding the mess that your life has become. The resulting anger is the jet fuel that gets these circuits really spinning. It’s almost impossible to “let it go” because the anger feels so justified. Remember,

Gracious God, I can talk myself out of a generous impulse by saying, “What’s the point?” A few coins to a panhandler, a listening ear to a chronic complainer or a word of encouragement to a grieving friend seem so inadequate in the face of need. Yet you ask love from us, not efficiency or effectiveness. Help me to see a brother or a sister rather than a statistic, and help me respond with a more generous heart. Amen.

The unborn” are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It’s almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative,” John Stuart Mill once complained. This problem is chronic: if you tell people that the key to success is not always skills, they think that you are telling them that it is never skills, always luck.

The information consumer, enslaved by e-commerce, video streaming, and social media, a narcissist and a chronic complainer, is not well versed in the art of critical thinking and is incapable of employing his gray cells to their full capacity.

The typical medical interpretation of microscopic colitis does not include the possibility of constipation as a symptom, nor alternating diarrhea and constipation, and yet many MC patients have those symptoms rather than chronic diarrhea. ...Unless a patient comes to a gastroenterologist complaining of watery diarrhea, MC will probably be completely off the doctor's radar. Few colonoscopies are done to investigate cases of constipation, and without a colonoscopy or sigmoidoscopy plus biopsies, diagnosis of MC is impossible. In cases such as these, the default diagnosis will almost surely be irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), so the patient will be very unlikely to receive any treatment that is effective at relieving the inflammation that's causing the symptoms.

There is a difference between being grateful and being gratified. A modern problem of privilege, to be sure, but a very real problem nonetheless. Most people will scoff that if you have the time to be bored, you can't complain, right? The rest of us have actual work to do! But chronic boredom doesn't come from not having anything to do: it comes from doing the wrong things. It comes from a fundamental lack of understanding of what you really want. Turns out, chronic boredom is actually an evolutionary response to destructive patterns. It's a signal designed to tell you to get the hell out of there, something doesn't feel right. Kids know this instinctively: anything even remotely boring, and they're out. But as adults, we've been taught to withstand. To persevere. To "keep calm and carry on." So we don't recognize the warning signal. We keep working for the wrong things.

unpredictable relationships, news media that leave us feeling scared and angry, social media that allow us to pick fights online. This is why we are drawn to vent to friends and chronically complain; these behaviors help us remain in a heightened state. Nonactivated peace is dull and unfamiliar. Our

unpredictable relationships, news media that leave us feeling scared and angry, social media that allow us to pick fights online. This is why we are drawn to vent to friends and chronically complain; these behaviors help us remain in a heightened state. Nonactivated peace is dull and unfamiliar. Our body and mind seek the familiar, even if it is painful, and many of us are left ultimately feeling ashamed about and confused by our behavior.

Over time (as with other addictions, such as to sugar or sex, or drug or alcohol dependency), our body needs more and more intense experiences to receive the same chemical “hit.” Our subconscious leads us into situations where we can get that hit in increasingly powerful doses: unpredictable relationships, news media that leave us feeling scared and angry, social media that allow us to pick fights online. This is why we are drawn to vent to friends and chronically complain; these behaviors help us remain in a heightened state. Nonactivated peace is dull and unfamiliar. Our body and mind seek the familiar, even if it is painful, and many of us are left ultimately feeling ashamed about and confused by our behavior.

Mark, at dinner, said he’d been re-reading “Anna Karenina”. Found it good, as novels go. But complained of the profound untruthfulness of even the best imaginative literature. And he began to catalogue its omissions. Almost total neglect of those small physiological events that decide whether day-to-day living shall have a pleasant or unpleasant tone. Excretion, for example, with its power to make or mar the day. Digestion. And, for the heroines of novel and drama, menstruation. Then the small illnesses—catarrh, rheumatism, headache, eyestrain. The chronic physical disabilities—ramifying out (as in the case of deformity or impotence) into luxuriant insanities. And conversely the sudden accessions, from unknown visceral and muscular sources, of more than ordinary health. No mention, next, of the part played by mere sensations in producing happiness. Hot bath, for example, taste of bacon, feel of fur, smell of freesias. In life, an empty cigarette-case may cause more distress than the absence of a lover; never in books. Almost equally complete omission of the small distractions that fill the greater part of human lives. Reading the papers; looking into shops; exchanging gossip; with all the varieties of day-dreaming, from lying in bed, imagining what one would do if one had the right lover, income, face, social position, to sitting at the picture palace passively accepting ready-made day-dreams from Hollywood.

Mark, at dinner, said he’d been re-reading “Anna Karenina”. Found it good, as novels go. But complained of the profound untruthfulness of even the best imaginative literature. And he began to catalogue its omissions. Almost total neglect of those small physiological events that decide whether day-to-day living shall have a pleasant or unpleasant tone. Excretion, for example, with its power to make or mar the day. Digestion. And, for the heroines of novel and drama, menstruation. Then the small illnesses—catarrh, rheumatism, headache, eyestrain. The chronic physical disabilities—ramifying out (as in the case of deformity or impotence) into luxuriant insanities. And conversely the sudden accessions, from unknown visceral and muscular sources, of more than ordinary health. No mention, next, of the part played by mere sensations in producing happiness. Hot bath, for example, taste of bacon, feel of fur, smell of freesias. In life, an empty cigarette-case may cause more distress than the absence of a lover; never in books. Almost equally complete omission of the small distractions that fill the greater part of human lives. Reading the papers; looking into shops; exchanging gossip; with all the varieties of day-dreaming, from lying in bed, imagining what one would do if one had the right lover, income, face, social position, to sitting at the picture palace passively accepting ready-made day-dreams from Hollywood Lying by omission turns inevitably into positive lying. The implications of literature are that human beings are controlled, if not by reason, at least by comprehensible, well-organized, avowable sentiments. Whereas the facts are quite different. Sometimes the sentiments come in, sometimes they don’t. All for love, or the world well lost; but love may be the title of nobility given to an inordinate liking for a particular person’s smell or texture, a lunatic desire for the repetition of a sensation produced by some particular dexterity. Or consider those cases (seldom published, but how numerous, as anyone in a position to know can tell!), those cases of the eminent statesmen, churchmen, lawyers, captains of industry—seemingly so sane, demonstrably so intelligent, publicly so high-principled; but, in private, under irresistible compulsion towards brandy, towards young men, towards little girls in trains, towards exhibitionism, towards gambling or hoarding, towards bullying, towards being whipped, towards all the innumerable, crazy perversions of the lust for money and power and position on the one hand, for sexual pleasure on the other. Mere tics and tropisms, lunatic and unavowable cravings—these play as much part in human life as the organized and recognized sentiments. And imaginative literature suppresses the fact. Propagates an enormous lie about the nature of men and women.

Facing this undesirable result, the highly educated Negro often grows sour. He becomes too pessimistic to be a constructive force and usually develops into a chronic fault-finder or a complainant at the bar of public opinion. Often when he sees that the fault lies at the door of the white oppressor whom he is afraid to attack, he turns upon the pioneering Negro who is at work doing the best he can to extricate himself from an uncomfortable predicament.

But the biomedical model creates uncertainty for these common conditions that are not explained by underlying disease.”2 That uncertainty follows from our innate distrust of the patient’s story when we cannot match it with the hard data of physical examination techniques or scans, X-rays, blood tests, scopes, biopsies or electrodiagnostic tools. In such cases, the complainant finds her symptoms dismissed by doctors. Worse, she may be accused of drug-seeking behaviour, of being neurotic, manipulative, of “just looking for attention.” IBS patients, as well as people with chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, often find themselves in that situation.

In America, particularly in non-unionized workplaces, this sort of chronic understaffing acquires a logic all its own. If you can stand to lose employee weight, you should; if you don’t, you’re leaving profits on the table. Appropriately staffing isn’t a way to create a better work environment; it’s “bloat.” Workplaces attempt to counter the negative effects of understaffing with professional development, bonuses, perks, snacks, therapy dogs, subsidized gym memberships, swag, happy hours, access to meditation apps; the list is truly endless. One HR person told us that she was always amazed that employees complained about stress and overwork but then never took advantage of the perks. It makes sense, though. They don’t have the time. What would really make their lives better isn’t a meditation app, but adding a few more employees without also adding the expectation of more work.

Paul told us in 1 Corinthians 5 that we should be more concerned with judging the sins of the church instead of judging the sins of the world. I think if we spent half the time judging ourselves that we spend judging the world, we’d have enough integrity and spiritual power to command respect from the world. Instead, the world sees a bunch of chronic complainers and finger-pointers preaching about a dead guy they don’t imitate. “Edwin,

This bad habit of fault-finding, criticizing and complaining is a tool that grows keener by constant use, and there is grave danger that he who at first is only a moderate kicker may develop into a chronic knocker, and the knife he has sharpened will sever his head.

The sustained release of cortisol in states of chronic stress results in the disruption of two things vital for learning: neuroplasticity and hippocampal health (Podgorny & Gulyaeva, 2021; Raffington et al., 2018). It inhibits neuroplasticity by inhibiting protein synthesis, an essential aspect of brain building. At the same time, it results in the death of hippocampal neurons through the disruption of cellular processes of homeostasis. At its core, psychotherapy is a learning process which relies on our clients’ ability to learn new information and practice new ways of being. From specific stress reduction techniques to the soothing effects of a supportive relationship, stress modulation and success in psychotherapy go hand in hand. Thus, stress reduction skills should not be limited only to those complaining of stress disorders, but should be a central part of our work with all clients. While evolution once favored an anxious gene, fitness in our contemporary world may require a state of mind and brain that is open to new learning, mindfulness, and relaxation.