Don T Be Reactive Quotes

Mindfulness gives you time. Time gives you choices. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom. You don’t have to be swept away by your feeling. You can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity.

We need this help from the outside because we don't know how to to do this for ourselves. We start with a deep deficit—a chasm really—when it comes to understanding and being tolerant of ourselves, and that's even before we go forth to do battle with the rest of the world. As soon as someone judges, criticizes, dismisses, or ignores, the cycle of pain and reactivity ramps up, compounded by shame, remorse, and rejection. The act of validation, simply saying, 'I can see things from your perspective,' can short-circuit that emotional detour.

Traumatic experiences in early childhood may interfere with the child's ability to securely attach.

Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.

If you want to build a ship, don't summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean. Antoine de Saint-Exupery A

Attachment. A secure attachment is the ability to bond; to develop a secure and safe base; an unbreakable or perceivable inability to shatter to bond between primary parental caregiver(s) and child; a quest for familiarity; an unspoken language and knowledge that a caregiver will be a permanent fixture.

The episodic, reactive, almost frantic pace of what is broadcast makes children feel and act frantic and shortens their attention spans and their patience for activities that take time and problems that don't yield immediate solutions.

...The life of the parents is the only thing that makes good children. Parents should be very patient and ‘saintlike’ to their children. They should truly love their children. And the children will share this love! For the bad attitude of the children, says father Porphyrios, the ones who are usually responsible for it are their parents themselves. The parents don’t help their children by lecturing them and repeating to them ‘advices’, or by making them obeying strict rules in order to impose discipline. If the parents do not become ‘saints’ and truly love their children and if they don’t struggle for it, then they make a huge mistake. With their wrong and/or negative attitude the parents convey to their children their negative feelings. Then their children become reactive and insecure not only to their home, but to the society as well...

With reactive boundaries, you fight the friend who constantly bugs you. With proactive boundaries, you decide you don’t need that kind of a friend.

Your inner self knows something about what’s happening, and your reactivity is letting you know that you don’t like what’s going on, that you feel uncomfortable or threatened, or that you’re in danger.

If you don't make a conscious effort to visualize, who you are and what you want to become in life, then you empower other people and circumstances to shape your journey by default. Your silence makes you reactive vs. proactive. God will bring people in your life that can take you on many different journeys that will bring about different outcomes to your life mission. However, if you are not proactive and define your dreams you will never know where “you” need to be and who needs to be with you to fulfill what God is asking you to do. Your life is your own. You must define your dreams, not live someone else’s vision of a good life. What is it that God is asking you to do with the talents and hobbies you enjoy? What were you blessed with a desire for? A good life is one spent in the service of helping others. Find a life partner that will help you reach God’s highest potential—service to humanity, service to his Kingdom, service to building others up. Also, begin any choice with the end in mind. This means to begin each day with a clear vision of your desired direction. It is not enough to live a passive life of religious devotion. God asked you to do more than worship. He has called you to serve, not to be a servant to other people’s dreams. You and only you know where your heart must travel. God brings you storms in life to wake you up. Don’t see it as his disappointment, but as his parental love for you. Life was not meant to stay the same. If someone truly loves you they will never take you away from God’s plan, they will only magnify it.

The environmental movement up till now has necessarily been reactive. We have been clear about what we don’t like. But we also need to say what we would like. We need to show where hope lies. Ecological restoration is a work of hope.

An insecure mind is highly reactive. Don’t act until you have thought over it.

No!" Kagan exclaims. “Every behavior has more than one cause. Don’t ever forget that! For every child who’s slow to warm up, yes, there will be statistically more high-reactives, but you can be slow to warm up because of how you spent the first three and a half years of your life! When writers and journalists talk, they want to see a one-to-one relationship—one behavior, one cause. But it’s really important that you see, for behaviors like slow-to-warm-up, shyness, impulsivity, there are many routes to that.

...Communism, it's a reactive formation derived from capitalism. For this reason it's less flexible and has a lower survival potential. The days of laissez-faire capitalism are completely dead, and the assumptions of nineteenth-century Communism are equally dead, because they were based on laissez-faire capitalism. While there's hardly a trace of it left in capitalist countries, Communism is still reacting to something that's been dead for over a hundred years. And present-day Communism clings to this outmoded concepts, refusing to acknowledge the contradictions and failures of the Marxist system. Communism doesn't have any capacity to change. Capitalism is flexible, and it's changing all the time, and it's changed immeasurably. Communism apparently are still asserting that they are not changing, they're following the same Marxist principles. We don't have any principles. It's an advantage.

People don’t need to have a head in order to give someone else a headache.

Don't be carried away by the current of the situation. Focus on the essentials, take action on the best alternative are the ways of shifting from reactive to proactive mindset.

You have a choice to not add to the negativity. Remember, two negatives don't make a right.

A failure to live from the heart creates a great deal of internal conflict, which in turn encourages you to become short-tempered, easily bothered, and reactive. Deep down, you know what is true for you, what kind of life you want to be living, and what type of person you want to be.

Reactive people are also affected by their social environment, by the “social weather.” When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don’t, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them.

Freud was fascinated with depression and focused on the issue that we began with—why is it that most of us can have occasional terrible experiences, feel depressed, and then recover, while a few of us collapse into major depression (melancholia)? In his classic essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud began with what the two have in common. In both cases, he felt, there is the loss of a love object. (In Freudian terms, such an “object” is usually a person, but can also be a goal or an ideal.) In Freud’s formulation, in every loving relationship there is ambivalence, mixed feelings—elements of hatred as well as love. In the case of a small, reactive depression—mourning—you are able to deal with those mixed feelings in a healthy manner: you lose, you grieve, and then you recover. In the case of a major melancholic depression, you have become obsessed with the ambivalence—the simultaneity, the irreconcilable nature of the intense love alongside the intense hatred. Melancholia—a major depression—Freud theorized, is the internal conflict generated by this ambivalence. This can begin to explain the intensity of grief experienced in a major depression. If you are obsessed with the intensely mixed feelings, you grieve doubly after a loss—for your loss of the loved individual and for the loss of any chance now to ever resolve the difficulties. “If only I had said the things I needed to, if only we could have worked things out”—for all of time, you have lost the chance to purge yourself of the ambivalence. For the rest of your life, you will be reaching for the door to let you into a place of pure, unsullied love, and you can never reach that door. It also explains the intensity of the guilt often experienced in major depression. If you truly harbored intense anger toward the person along with love, in the aftermath of your loss there must be some facet of you that is celebrating, alongside the grieving. “He’s gone; that’s terrible but…thank god, I can finally live, I can finally grow up, no more of this or that.” Inevitably, a metaphorical instant later, there must come a paralyzing belief that you have become a horrible monster to feel any sense of relief or pleasure at a time like this. Incapacitating guilt. This theory also explains the tendency of major depressives in such circumstances to, oddly, begin to take on some of the traits of the lost loved/hated one—and not just any traits, but invariably the ones that the survivor found most irritating. Psychodynamically, this is wonderfully logical. By taking on a trait, you are being loyal to your lost, beloved opponent. By picking an irritating trait, you are still trying to convince the world you were right to be irritated—you see how you hate it when I do it; can you imagine what it was like to have to put up with that for years? And by picking a trait that, most of all, you find irritating, you are not only still trying to score points in your argument with the departed, but you are punishing yourself for arguing as well. Out of the Freudian school of thought has come one of the more apt descriptions of depression—“aggression turned inward.” Suddenly the loss of pleasure, the psychomotor retardation, the impulse to suicide all make sense. As do the elevated glucocorticoid levels. This does not describe someone too lethargic to function; it is more like the actual state of a patient in depression, exhausted from the most draining emotional conflict of his or her life—one going on entirely within. If that doesn’t count as psychologically stressful, I don’t know what does.

Watch, become alert, observe, and go on dropping all the reactive patterns in you. Each moment try to respond to the reality—not according to the ready-made idea in you but according to the reality as it is there outside. Respond to the reality! Respond with your total consciousness but not with your mind. And then when you respond spontaneously and you don’t react, action is born. Action is beautiful, reaction is ugly. Only a man of awareness acts, the man of unawareness reacts. Action liberates. Reaction goes on creating the same chains, goes on making them thicker and harder and stronger. Live a life of response and not of reaction.

You may wonder why all children don’t make up wonderfully positive role-selves—why so many people are acting out roles of failure, anger, mental disturbance, emotional volatility, or other forms of misery. One answer is that not every child has the inner resources to be successful and self-controlled in interactions with others. Some children’s genetics and neurology propel them into impulsive reactivity instead of constructive action. Another reason negative role-selves arise is that it’s common for emotionally immature parents to subconsciously use different children in the family to express unresolved aspects of their own role-self and healing fantasies. For instance, one child may be idealized and indulged as the perfect child, while another is tagged as incompetent, always screwing up and needing help.

I found out the hard way that if we don't disciple people, the culture sure will. This

Inspired action comes from the guidance of Spirit, not ego. When in doubt, don’t. Inspired action is responsive, not reactive.

Be proactive, not reactive—don't let someone else define your day in an email or phone call.

I don’t know what I’ll do until I know what you’ll do. I’m proactive with my preemptive reactive strategy.


At the end of the day we’re all reactive personalities. We just don’t know it until we meet the right catalyst.

I could see where I’d mistaken drama and conflict for life, which meant years of living reactively instead of generatively, a life I let be determined by circumstances and the choices of others. We like to think life happens to us, but pretty much everything in your life is there because you wanted it, even if unconsciously. Results, I have learned, don’t lie.

I don't think we should be unafraid not to discuss the gay dialectic as an energy and the homophobic constraints that endorse its marginalisation as a functionally reactive discourse.

Successful people do work hard, but they also think before they act. They are proactive, not just reactive. Most people mentally have a sign on their desk that reads, “Don’t just sit there—do something!” The best advice I ever received was to revise the sign to read, “Don’t just do something—sit there!

I know that therapy won’t make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I’ll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself – to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.

Why do we play our parts so earnestly? Why don't we go on strike and blow the cover of the truth? One factor is the sincerity in the face of your lover: her life of unexpected reactive emotion, her heartfelt belief in chance and spontaneity. You're slave to that gorgeous earnestness in her eyes, her engagement with a world of possibility.

Recognize the ego for what it is: a collective dysfunction, the insanity of the human mind. When you recognize it for what it is, you no longer misperceive it as somebody’s identity. Once you see the ego for what it is, it becomes much easier to remain nonreactive toward it. You don’t take it personally anymore. There is no complaining, blaming, accusing, or making wrong. Nobody is wrong. It is the ego in someone, that’s all. Compassion arises when you recognize that all are suffering from the same sickness of the mind, some more acutely than others. You do not fuel the drama anymore that is part of all egoic relationships. What is its fuel? Reactivity. The ego thrives on it.

At one seminar where I was speaking on the concept of proactivity, a man came up and said, “Stephen, I like what you’re saying. But every situation is so different. Look at my marriage. I’m really worried. My wife and I just don’t have the same feelings for each other we used to have. I guess I just don’t love her anymore and she doesn’t love me. What can I do?” “The feeling isn’t there anymore?” I asked. “That’s right,” he reaffirmed. “And we have three children we’re really concerned about. What do you suggest?” “Love her,” I replied. “I told you, the feeling just isn’t there anymore.” “Love her.” “You don’t understand. The feeling of love just isn’t there.” “Then love her. If the feeling isn’t there, that’s a good reason to love her.” “But how do you love when you don’t love?” “My friend, love is a verb. Love—the feeling—is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?” *** In the great literature of all progressive societies, love is a verb. Reactive people make it a feeling.

You refine your choices to avoid causing your own pain. But good. The pain comes anyway. You start to see that it's supposed to. Adversity forces you to grow past reactive fear and self-preservation and into a worthwhile human being. Tragedy paradoxically begins to strengthen your heart. It breaks it but then it reforms it as a better, stronger machine. And then you start to instinctually care about others. And you start to see how to be. Friendship leads to human connection which feeds your soul. More than kale. Or spinning. or 15 minute naps under your desk.

practice. Mindful Acknowledgment with Children I see this scene often: a child comes to a parent visibly upset. The parent wants to make the child feel better, so he skips right to trying to fix her problem. It usually sounds like, “Why don’t we…,” or “You can just instead.” A solution is offered and the problem is solved…right? Yet with this response, parents have just missed a potent opportunity to connect. They’ve skipped over the powerful step of acknowledgment—recognizing what’s happening for the child in that moment. Acknowledgment shows that we are seeing and accepting the truth or existence of something, such as the child’s hurt feelings.

Let’s now look at the four basic types of EI parents (Gibson 2015): Emotional parents are dominated by feelings and can become extremely reactive and overwhelmed by anything that surprises or upsets them. Their moods are highly unstable, and they can be frighteningly volatile. Small things can be like the end of the world, and they tend to see others as either saviors or abandoners, depending on whether their wishes are being met. Driven parents are super goal-achieving and constantly busy. They are constantly moving forward, focused on improvements, and trying to perfect everything, including other people. They run their families like deadline projects but have little sensitivity to their children’s emotional needs. Passive parents are the nicer parents, letting their mate be the bad guy. They appear to enjoy their children but lack deeper empathy and won’t step in to protect them. While they seem more loving, they will acquiesce to the more dominant parent, even to the point of overlooking abuse and neglect. Rejecting parents aren’t interested in relationships. They avoid interaction and expect the family to center around their needs, not their kids. They don’t tolerate other people’s needs and want to be left alone to do their own thing. There is little engagement, and they can become furious and even abusive if things don’t go their way.

the challenges of our day-to-day existence are sustained reminders that our life of faith simply must have its center somewhere other than in our ability to hold it together in our minds. Life is a pounding surf that wears away our rock-solid certainty. The surf always wins. Slowly but surely. Eventually. It may be best to ride the waves rather than resist them. What are your one or two biggest obstacles to staying Christian? What are those roadblocks you keep running into? What are those issues that won’t go away and make you wonder why you keep on believing at all? These are questions I asked on a survey I gave on my blog in the summer of 2013. Nothing fancy. I just asked some questions and waited to see what would happen. In the days to come, I was overwhelmed with comments and e-mails from readers, many anonymous, with bracingly honest answers often expressed through the tears of relentless and unnerving personal suffering. I didn’t do a statistical analysis (who has the time, plus I don’t know how), but the responses fell into five categories.         1.        The Bible portrays God as violent, reactive, vengeful, bloodthirsty, immoral, mean, and petty.         2.        The Bible and science collide on too many things to think that the Bible has anything to say to us today about the big questions of life.         3.        In the face of injustice and heinous suffering in the world, God seems disinterested or perhaps unable to do anything about it.         4.        In our ever-shrinking world, it is very difficult to hold on to any notion that Christianity is the only path to God.         5.        Christians treat each other so badly and in such harmful ways that it calls into question the validity of Christianity—or even whether God exists. These five categories struck me as exactly right—at least, they match up with my experience. And I’d bet good money they resonate with a lot of us. All five categories have one big thing in common: “Faith in God no longer makes sense to me.” Understanding, correct thinking, knowing what you believe—these were once true of their faith, but no longer are. Because life happened. A faith that promises to provide firm answers and relieve our doubt is a faith that will not hold up to the challenges and tragedies of life. Only deep trust can hold up.

Still, Kagan’s decades-long series of discoveries mark a dramatic breakthrough in our understanding of these personality styles—including the value judgments we make. Extroverts are sometimes credited with being “pro-social”—meaning caring about others—and introverts disparaged as people who don’t like people. But the reactions of the infants in Kagan’s tests had nothing to do with people. These babies were shouting (or not shouting) over Q-tips. They were pumping their limbs (or staying calm) in response to popping balloons. The high-reactive babies were not misanthropes in the making; they were simply sensitive to their environments. Indeed, the sensitivity of these children’s nervous systems seems to be linked not only to noticing scary things, but to noticing in general.

Proactive people show you what they love, what they want, what they purpose, and what they stand for. These people are very different from those who are known by what they hate, what they don’t like, what they stand against, and what they will not do. While reactive victims are primarily known by their “against” stances, proactive people do not demand rights; they live them. Power is not something you demand or deserve; it is something you express. The ultimate expression of power is love; it is the ability not to express power, but to restrain it. Proactive people are able to “love others as themselves.” They have mutual respect. They are able to “die to self” and not “return evil for evil.” They have gotten past the reactive stance of the law and are able to love and not react.

What scientists haven’t realized until recently is that these risk factors have an upside. In other words, the sensitivities and the strengths are a package deal. High-reactive kids who enjoy good parenting, child care, and a stable home environment tend to have fewer emotional problems and more social skills than their lower-reactive peers, studies show. Often they’re exceedingly empathic, caring, and cooperative. They work well with others. They are kind, conscientious, and easily disturbed by cruelty, injustice, and irresponsibility. They’re successful at the things that matter to them. They don’t necessarily turn into class presidents or stars of the school play, Belsky told me, though this can happen, too: “For some it’s becoming the leader of their class. For others it takes the form of doing well academically or being well-liked.

by raising what appears before you. If you can’t even serve what is put in front of you, how are you going to change the world? If you are getting so upset about conditions in the world that you’re edgy with everyone around you, you’re not helping anyone. If you can’t create harmony in your own household, what right do you have to complain that countries are shooting missiles at each other? You have to live a life that, if everyone lived it, there would be peace. If you can’t do that, you are part of the problem, not the solution. It’s all about letting go of yourself. The world is going to come in, and it’s going to hit what’s left of your samskaras. What you feel going on inside when that happens is reactive energy. Don’t ever act based on that. You will just be polluting the environment with your inner blockages. No good can come from that.

The Journal called the memo the “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” because in it, Garlinghouse complains, “We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything—to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics.… “I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. “I hate peanut butter. We all should.

On the one hand, according to the theory of gene-environment interaction, people who inherit certain traits tend to seek out life experiences that reinforce those characteristics. The most low-reactive kids, for example, court danger from the time they’re toddlers, so that by the time they grow up they don’t bat an eye at grown-up-sized risks. They “climb a few fences, become desensitized, and climb up on the roof,” the late psychologist David Lykken once explained in an Atlantic article. “They’ll have all sorts of experiences that other kids won’t. Chuck Yeager (the first pilot to break the sound barrier) could step down from the belly of the bomber into the rocketship and push the button not because he was born with that difference between him and me, but because for the previous thirty years his temperament impelled him to work his way up from climbing trees through increasing degrees of danger and excitement.

In fact, public speaking anxiety may be primal and quintessentially human, not limited to those of us born with a high-reactive nervous system. One theory, based on the writings of the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, holds that when our ancestors lived on the savannah, being watched intently meant only one thing: a wild animal was stalking us. And when we think we’re about to be eaten, do we stand tall and hold forth confidently? No. We run. In other words, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution urge us to get the hell off the stage, where we can mistake the gaze of the spectators for the glint in a predator’s eye. Yet the audience expects not only that we’ll stay put, but that we’ll act relaxed and assured. This conflict between biology and protocol is one reason that speechmaking can be so fraught. It’s also why exhortations to imagine the audience in the nude don’t help nervous speakers; naked lions are just as dangerous as elegantly dressed ones.

This is an important tool that is unique to networked products. Traditional products that lack networks often struggle with this, because they rely on spammy emails, discounts, and push notifications to entice users back. This usually doesn’t work, and company-sent communications rank among the lowest clickthrough rate messages. Networked products, on the other hand, have the unique capability to reactivate these users by enlisting active users to bring them back. Even if you don’t open the app on a given day, other users in the network may interact with you—commenting or liking your past content, or sending you a message. Getting an email notification that says your boss just shared a folder with you is a lot more compelling than a marketing message. A notification that a close friend just joined an app you tried a month ago is a lot more engaging than an announcement about new features. And the more dense the network is around a churned user, the more likely they are to receive this type of interaction.

For a non-Korean speaker it might seem strange that Koreans refer to their own children with the derogatory term for “a child of a beast”, but there’s two meanings in how Koreans use 새끼 saekki for their child - they’re being derogatory by admitting that we’re nothing but animals, but they’re also saying that being nothing but an animal is the highest honor of all. The most sophisticated and profound emotion a human can feel is the most common and bonds us to everything that has ever lived and reproduced: love of child. People who have kids like to say there’s no way to describe what it feels like to have a child to someone who doesn’t have a child, I feel the same way but I also don’t. Having a baby is strange in that it is something you’ve never felt before, but it’s also the only thing you’ve ever felt before. Having a baby makes you feel love and fear death, but it’s not because those things are taught to you, they are reactivated in you. Having a baby isn’t learning, it’s realising you’ve already known everything all along.

Public speaking phobia has many causes, including early childhood setbacks, that have to do with our unique personal histories, not inborn temperament. In fact, public speaking may be primal and quintessentially human, not limited to those of us born with a high-reactive nervous system. One theory, based on the writings of the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, holds that when our ancestors lived on the savannah, being watched intently meant only one thing: a wild animal was stalking us. And when we think we're about to be eaten, do we stand tall and hold forth confidently? No. We run. In other words, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution urge us to get the hell off the stage, where we can mistake the gaze of the spectators for the glint in a predator's eye. Yet the audience expects not only that we'll stay put, but that we'll act relaxed and assured. This conflict between biology and protocol is one reason that speechmaking can be so fraught. It's also why exhortations to imagine the audience in the nude don't help nervous speakers; naked lions are just as dangerous as elegantly dressed ones.

I went into the new year loving myself in different ways, in a different possibility. It was then that I understood things I hadn’t. It was then that I understood people I hadn’t. We work in ways where sometimes we don’t align because our intersections lead us elsewhere. We find ourselves in rapids which lead to lightning, in beds that leave us homesick. We lust after the impetuous, in hopelessness, and sometimes in the reactive. We like things and people who are bad for us and that’s fine. It’s fine because it’s life. It happens. They exist. We exist. We all exist together in this world where nothing seems to make sense. Where everything is nothing but imaginary because it’s what we imagine it to be. Reality exists and it’s there, but life is what you make it. Your actions ask for it. How you exist is how you exist. We take every new year and give it a theme because we’re scared of how it could be. You change in the moment, not by years. You be to become and becoming is something which frightens people. Lead by example instead of letting the example lead you. Take this new year and find yourself in people who question it because questioning is how you gain from it.

Scientists have known for a while that high-reactive temperaments come with risk factors. These kids are especially vulnerable to challenges like marital tension, a parent’s death, or abuse. They’re more likely than their peers to react to these events with depression, anxiety, and shyness. Indeed, about a quarter of Kagan’s high-reactive kids suffer from some degree of the condition known as “social anxiety disorder,” a chronic and disabling form of shyness. What scientists haven’t realized until recently is that these risk factors have an upside. In other words, the sensitivities and the strengths are a package deal. High-reactive kids who enjoy good parenting, child care, and a stable home environment tend to have fewer emotional problems and more social skills than their lower-reactive peers, studies show. Often they’re exceedingly empathic, caring, and cooperative. They work well with others. They are kind, conscientious, and easily disturbed by cruelty, injustice, and irresponsibility. They’re successful at the things that matter to them. They don’t necessarily turn into class presidents or stars of the school play, Belsky told me, though this can happen, too: “For some it’s becoming the leader of their class. For others it takes the form of doing well academically or being well-liked.

When people have a low vibration they are more reactive and less able to observe and think properly. Trauma, sadness, injustice, apathy and anger, all these things bring a person down to a state from where many never get out. Then because these people can't control themselves, they are constantly reacting to the high energies they feel - pulling them down. They attack the wrong target and fear what they need the most. They literally become antagonistic to higher vibrations. It's in their nature and they can't control that. Neither do they want. They will rationalize "disbelief" and prove you wrong to make you confused before they change, even when they promise to change, because they don't want to. And why would they if they can confuse you? Confusion is a low vibration scheme, and as you go lower in this vibration of lies, you feel more lost and confused about yourself. It then happens that you are forced to abandon any group that vibrates at a low frequency because they insist on making you confused. Certainty - which is not the same as arrogance but is instead the knowing of something to be true -, is a high frequency level. And the creatures of the darkness attack precisely that certainty, by making you feel ashamed of what you know, by calling you a narcissist. You find them in all religions without exceptions. Very few people know what the light is because they have never seen their real face in a mirror when the light is on.

Better minds have said it before, but I don’t mind repeating it less well again and again: Reading, like the natural world, is good for people (though clearly at a very different level). Pace Levis-Strauss — books are good to think and books are good to be. Books have unique affordances — do things that other media cannot do as well, or at all. Reading books exercises our imaginations (which we will need to break the mind-shackles our overlords are fitting us for); reading books offers us opportunities to expand our ability to connect; reading books encourages the trickster force within, which is play. Right now there’s a whole museum-movement built around staring at a painting for ten minutes, excellent in and of itself, but books hear this and they're like, Ten minutes?! Hold my Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster! Books command our attention for hours, days, weeks, months, years — sometimes for whole lives. Reading books regenerates our ability to focus, to stay mindful. Screens do certain things very well, but collectively what they do best is naturalizing the hysterical reactive lizard logic of our capitalist vampire-squid hegemons. They convince us that to be alive is to capitalist vampire-squid all day, all night. Reading is the zafa for that particularly unbearable fukú. Reading leads us away from the Sunken Place of neoliberal capital, back to the Slow Zone of human thought and human feeling. The Slow Zone where all that truly matters for prospering — deliberation, moderation, imagination, compassion, resilience — is possible. Books are a Slow Zone oasis that can reawaken and sustain us through this age of digital decimation.

Some days the world feels too hard and heavy, too much violence, too much pain, too much, too much, too much, and no way to make any of it make sense. Some days the people we love the most are enduring deep horror and loss and fear and trauma and pain and there's not a damn thing we can do, not really - and we're left sitting with some crazy helplessness and anger and grief without anywhere that feels big enough to hold it all. Some days you don't know if you want to scream the rage or cry the grief or run to the ocean or collapse in a puddle on the floor or sink into a too-hot bath or go back to bed or lose your mind for a little while, because holding it together takes more than you've got. Some days you feel like you'd do just about anything to have someone show up at your door for no other reason but to deliver an endless hug because reactivated trauma is a bitch, even when it's not your own, and because we all need more hugs, even on the good days—and some days are as far as hell from good as you can imagine. Some days you buy yourself the pale pink roses because you need a reminder of beauty, and you make yourself cup after cup of tea and finally let yourself cry, hard. You take the invite to go out to dinner and laugh and forget for a while. You pay attention, with deep gratitude, to the spaces that feel safe enough to open fully into, and to the people that show up to fill those spaces. You do what you can even though it feels like way too little and not near enough and not anything really in the grand scheme of things, and you say a prayer of thanks for the people give without knowing even why they are giving and a blessing for the grace of connections that are strong enough for that. Whatever you're doing right now, send a wave of love out into the universe. The biggest and brightest one you've got. Send protection, and healing, and fire, and light, and love and love and love and love. I can't tell you where you're sending it, but I know there's enough hurt and hard in the world right now, that whatever direction it goes and wherever it lands, it will rest with someone who needs it.

Why, he asked, do all of our policing efforts have to be so reactive, so negative, and so after the fact? What if, instead of just focusing on catching criminals—and serving up ever harsher punishments—after they committed the crime, the police devoted significant resources and effort to eliminating criminal behavior before it happens? To quote Tony Blair, what if they could be tough on crime but also tough on the causes of crime?3 Out of these questions came the novel idea for Positive Tickets, a program whereby police, instead of focusing on catching young people perpetrating crimes, would focus on catching youth doing something good—something as simple as throwing litter away in a bin rather than on the ground, wearing a helmet while riding their bike, skateboarding in the designated area, or getting to school on time—and would give them a ticket for positive behavior. The ticket, of course, wouldn’t carry a fine like a parking ticket but instead would be redeemable for some kind of small reward, like free entry to the movies or to an event at a local youth center—wholesome activities that also had the bonus of keeping the young people off the streets and out of trouble. So how well did Richmond’s unconventional effort to reimagine policing work? Amazingly well, as it turned out. It took some time, but they invested in the approach as a long-term strategy, and after a decade the Positive Tickets system had reduced recidivism from 60 percent to 8 percent. You might not think of a police department as a place where you would expect to see Essentialism at work, but in fact Ward’s system of Positive Tickets is a lesson in the practice of effortless execution. The way of the Nonessentialist is to go big on everything: to try to do it all, have it all, fit it all in. The Nonessentialist operates under the false logic that the more he strives, the more he will achieve, but the reality is, the more we reach for the stars, the harder it is to get ourselves off the ground. The way of the Essentialist is different. Instead of trying to accomplish it all—and all at once—and flaring out, the Essentialist starts small and celebrates progress. Instead of going for the big, flashy wins that don’t really matter, the Essentialist pursues small and simple wins in areas that are essential.

All these indifferent passions, or passions born of indifference, all these negative passions, culminate in hatred. A strange expression: `I've got the hate' [J'ai la haine]. No object. It is like `I'm demonstrating', but for whom, for what? `I take responsibility' [J'assume], but for what? Nothing in particular. One perhaps takes responsibility precisely for the nothing. One demonstrates for or against the nothing -- how are we to know? This is the fate of all these intransitive verbs. The graffiti said: `I exist', `I live at this particular place'. This was stated with a kind of exultation, yet at the same time it said: `There is no meaning to my life'. Similarly, `I've got the hate' says at the same time: `This hate I have has no object'; `There's no meaning to it'. Hatred is doubtless something which does indeed outlive any definable object, and feeds on the disappearance of that object. Who are we to take against today? There, precisely, is the object: the absent other of hatred. `Having' hatred is like a sort of potential of -- negative and reactive -- energy, but energy all the same. These are, indeed, the only passions we have today: hatred, disgust, allergy, aversion, rejection and disaffection. We no longer know what we want, but we know what we don't want. In its pure expression of rejection, it is a non-negotiable, irremediable passion. Yet there is in it something like an invitation to the absent other to offer himself as an object for that hatred. The dream of hatred is to give rise to a heartfelt enmity, which is scarcely available at all in our world now, as all conflicts are immediately contained. Over against the hatred born of rivalry and conflict there is a hatred born of accumulated indifference which can suddenly crystallize in an extreme physical outburst. We are not speaking of class hatred now, which, paradoxically, remained a bourgeois passion. That had a target, and was the driving force behind historical action. This hatred is externalized only in episodes of `acting-out'. It does not give rise to historical violence, but to a virulence born of disaffection with politics and history. In this sense, it is the characteristic passion not of the end of history but of a history without end, a history which is a dead-end, since there has been no resolution of all the problems it posed. It is possible that beyond the end, in those reaches where things turn around, there is room for an indeterminate passion, where what remains of energy also turns around, like time, into a negative passion.

Thus polyvictimization or complex trauma are "developmentally adverse interpersonal traumas" (Ford, 2005) because they place the victim at risk not only for recurrent stress and psychophysiological arousal (e.g., PTSD, other anxiety disorders, depression) but also for interruptions and breakdowns in healthy psychobiological, psychological, and social development. Complex trauma not only involves shock, fear, terror, or powerlessness (either short or long term) but also, more fundamentally, constitutes a violation of the immature self and the challenge to the development of a positive and secure self, as major psychic energy is directed toward survival and defense rather than toward learning and personal development (Ford, 2009b, 2009c). Moreover, it may influence the brain's very development, structure, and functioning in both the short and long term (Lanius et al., 2010; Schore, 2009). Complex trauma often forces the child victim to substitute automatic survival tactics for adaptive self-regulation, starting at the most basic level of physical reactions (e.g., intense states of hyperarousal/agitation or hypoarousal/immobility) and behavioral (e.g., aggressive or passive/avoidant responses) that can become so automatic and habitual that the child's emotional and cognitive development are derailed or distorted. What is more, self-integrity is profoundly shaken, as the child victim incorporates the "lessons of abuse" into a view of him or herself as bad, inadequate, disgusting, contaminated and deserving of mistreatment and neglect. Such misattributions and related schema about self and others are some of the most common and robust cognitive and assumptive consequences of chronic childhood abuse (as well as other forms of interpersonal trauma) and are especially debilitating to healthy development and relationships (Cole & Putnam, 1992; McCann & Pearlman, 1992). Because the violation occurs in an interpersonal context that carries profound significance for personal development, relationships become suspect and a source of threat and fear rather than of safety and nurturance. In vulnerable children, complex trauma causes compromised attachment security, self-integrity and ultimately self-regulation. Thus it constitutes a threat not only to physical but also to psychological survival - to the development of the self and the capacity to regulate emotions (Arnold & Fisch, 2011). For example, emotional abuse by an adult caregiver that involves systematic disparagement, blame and shame of a child ("You worthless piece of s-t"; "You shouldn't have been born"; "You are the source of all of my problems"; "I should have aborted you"; "If you don't like what I tell you, you can go hang yourself") but does not involve sexual or physical violation or life threat is nevertheless psychologically damaging. Such bullying and antipathy on the part of a primary caregiver or other family members, in addition to maltreatment and role reversals that are found in many dysfunctional families, lead to severe psychobiological dysregulation and reactivity (Teicher, Samson, Polcari, & McGreenery, 2006).

Reactive people are also affected by their social environment, by the “social weather.” When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don’t, they become defensive or protective. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses of other people to control them. The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values—carefully thought about, selected and internalized values. Proactive people are still influenced by external stimuli, whether physical, social, or psychological. But their response to the stimuli, conscious or unconscious, is a value-based choice or response. As Eleanor Roosevelt observed, “No one can hurt you without your consent.” In the words of Gandhi, “They cannot take away our self respect if we do not give it to them.” It is our willing permission, our consent to what happens to us, that hurts us far more than what happens

I know that therapy won’t make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I’ll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself — to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.

DBT posits that borderline patients possess a genetic/biological vulnerability to emotional overreactivity. This view hypothesizes that the limbic system, the part of the brain most closely associated with emotional responses, is hyperactive in BPD. The second contributing factor, according to DBT practitioners, is an invalidating environment: that is, others dismiss, contradict, or reject the developing individual’s emotions. Confronted with such interactions, the individual is unable to trust others or her own reactions. Emotions are uncontrolled and volatile. To calm these erratic emotions, DBT emphasizes mindfulness, the process of paying attention to what is happening at the moment, without extreme emotional reactivity, judgment, or invalidation. In the initial stages of treatment, DBT focuses on a hierarchical system of targets, confronting first the most serious and then later the easier behaviors to change. The highest priority addressed immediately is the threat of suicide and self-injuring behaviors. The second-highest target is to eliminate behaviors that interfere with therapy, such as missed appointments or not completing homework assignments. The third priority is to address behaviors that interfere with a healthy quality of life, such as disruptive compulsions, promiscuity, or criminal conduct; among these, easier changes are targeted first. The fourth priority is to focus on increasing behavioral skills.

Conflicts are a normal, natural part of family life, and we should expect them frequently. In fact, research has shown that siblings have a conflict on average once an hour, and, on average, parents have a conflict with their adolescent once a day (Bögels and Restifo 2014). We have so much resistance to conflict, but when we accept that conflicts are normal, it becomes easier to let go of the irritation that arises. Remember that equation, pain x resistance = suffering? It’s time to expect conflict and accept that it’s an inevitable part of human relationships. We don’t have to feel guilty or that it’s somehow our fault when children fight or when we have a conflict with our partner. Conflict is normal.

But when we instead tell our children how their unacceptable behavior makes us feel, the language turns into an “I” message: “I feel discouraged when I see this big mess.” “I don’t want to race right now because I’m tired.” “I feel stressed when we have to hurry.” Kids receive an I-message as a statement of fact about what the parent is feeling, so it causes less resistance. How do you

...therapy won’t make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I’ll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.

when we remember the truth of constant change in our daily lives, it’s easier to feel gratitude for what we have in the present moment, because nothing lasts forever. We don’t. Our children don’t. Our problems don’t. There are a lot of good reasons to practice to become fully present for life now.

As the tantrum subsides, offer hugs and closeness. Don’t rush to the next thing. Move slowly and allow time for recovery.

He did not want to leave, but he had a doctor’s appointment. His mom, Karen, remembered the skill of acknowledgment as Asher began to protest. Karen said to Asher what she was seeing: “You really don’t want to go. You wish you could stay. I get it. We’ve got to go, though.” Asher wasn’t thrilled about it, but he left with less fuss than usual. He felt seen and heard. His feelings were respected. Acknowledgment means “I see you.

Stop. This first step simply asks you to stop and pause rather than react in habitual ways. When you enter an interaction that feels challenging, work hard to stay open-minded. Open-mindedness means being open to other points of view, other ways of doing things, and staying open to changing your own view point. This might mean not allowing a certain cultural display such as a student’s animated verbal exchange trigger you. Observe. In the second step, check yourself. Don’t react to what is going on. Instead, take a breath. Use the 10-second rule. When the brain gets triggered, it takes stress hormones approximately 10 seconds to move through the body to the prefrontal cortex. In the pre-hijack stage, the biochemicals cortisol and adrenaline are just beginning to kick in. There is still some “wiggle room” to listen to your wiser self and begin using stress management techniques to interrupt the amygdala takeover effectively. Try to describe to yourself what is happening in neutral terms. It is during this step that you can recognize that what was originally perceived as a threat isn’t really. Detach. Sometimes when we get triggered, we get personally invested in being right or exercising our power over others. Deliberately shift your consciousness to more pleasant or inspirational images. If those techniques fail, go get a drink of water, literally take a few steps back to shake yourself up a bit. When we can detach from the goal of being right or defending ourselves, we can redirect our energy toward being more responsive rather than reactive. Awaken. When our amygdala reacts, it’s because we are trying to protect ourselves. Shifting focus from yourself to the other person in front of you helps you “wake up” or become present in the moment. Try to see the other person as someone with his own feelings. He might be scared and reacting out of fear. Ask yourself a few questions about the other person. What are they thinking? How are they feeling in this moment? Shifting over to their perspective will get you out of your own reactive mode and will put you in a better position to have a positive interaction.

Notably, many postmenopausal women also report that emotions like sadness and anger don’t hold quite the same charge as they once did, while the capacity to sustain joy, wonder, and gratitude often increases. There is a neurological reason for these shifts. Among other things, all the rearrangements in the menopausal brain may result in yet another upgrade to some networks involved in the theory of mind. Only this time, the transition brings forth better emotional control. If you recall from the previous chapters, how we respond to emotionally charged situations depends partly on how we’re wired in our brains. Connections related to the emotion-processing amygdala versus the impulse-controlling prefrontal cortex can influence our approach. Puberty asks us to lean into the prefrontal cortex’s rationale, whereas pregnancy attunes us to our instincts (while striking a balance between our emotions and our head). Now it’s menopause’s turn. This time around, we are about to fine-tune the emotional amygdala in a highly selective and precise way: it becomes less reactive to negative emotional stimulation!

Yet another pitfall of language is the illusion that our thinking can easily be corrected if it doesn’t “make sense.” The “cognitive” part of cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on changing such “dysfunctional thinking.” This is a top-down approach to change in which the therapist challenges or “reframes” negative cognitions, as in “Let’s compare your feelings that you are to blame for your rape with the actual facts of the matter” or “Let’s compare your terror of driving with the statistics about road safety today.” I’m reminded of the distraught woman who once came to our clinic asking for help with her two-month-old because the baby was “so selfish.” Would she have benefited from a fact sheet on child development or an explanation of the concept of altruism? Such information would be unlikely to help her until she gained access to the frightened, abandoned parts of herself—the parts expressed by her terror of dependence. There is no question traumatized people have irrational thoughts: “I was to blame for being so sexy.” “The other guys weren’t afraid—they’re real men.” “I should have known better than to walk down that street.” It’s best to treat those thoughts as cognitive flashbacks—you don’t argue with them any more than you would argue with someone who keeps having visual flashbacks of a terrible accident. They are residues of traumatic incidents: thoughts they were thinking when, or shortly after, the traumas occurred that are reactivated under stressful conditions.

If you want to build a ship, don’t summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean.

STRAWBERRY RHUBARB JAM Makes 3 pints 4 cups of chopped strawberries (about 2 pounds) 2 cups of chopped rhubarb (about 1 pound) 4 cups sugar 3 tablespoons powdered pectin 1 lemon, zested and juiced Prepare a boiling water bath canner and 3 pint jars. Place the chopped berries and rhubarb in a large, non-reactive pot. Whisk the pectin into the sugar and stir it into the berries. Let it sit for 10-15 minutes, until the sugar has begun to dissolve. Place the pot on the stove and bring to a boil. Cook jam over high heat, stirring regularly for 20-25 minutes, until it takes on a thick, syrup-y consistency. Add the lemon zest and juice and stir well. Check for set by taking the temperature of the cooking jam (it should set around 220F) or by watching how the droplets fall off the spoon. Remember that it will thicken as it cools, so don’t cook it so long that it achieves your desired consistency while still hot. Remove the jam from the heat and ladle it into the prepared jars, leaving 1/2 inch. Wipe the rims, apply the lids and rings and process them in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. When the time is up, remove the jars and set them on a folded kitchen towel to cool. When the jars have cooled enough that you can comfortably handle them, check the seals. Sealed jars can be stored at room temperature for up to a year. Any unsealed jars should be refrigerated and used promptly.

Evidence suggests that people with irritable bowels have bodies that are more physically reactive to stress. I recently came across an article in the medical journal Gut that explained the circular relationship between cognition (your conscious thought) and physiological correlates (what your body does in response to that thought): people who are less anxious tend to have minds that don’t overreact to stress and bodies that don’t overreact to stress when their minds experience it, while clinically anxious people tend to have sensitive minds in sensitive bodies—small amounts of stress set them to worrying, and small amounts of worrying set their bodies to malfunctioning. People with nervous stomachs are also more likely than people with settled stomachs to complain of headaches, palpitations, shortness of breath, and general fatigue. Some evidence suggests that people with irritable bowel syndrome have greater sensitivity to pain, are more likely to complain about minor ailments like colds, and are more likely to consider themselves sick than other people.

In this work, our real purpose is to seek the Self, we don't just use techniques to achieve perception. To reach the Self, we use perception. If you have two oranges in a basket and a cherry, the oranges can easily hide the cherry. But if you remove the two oranges from the basket, the cherry becomes visible. One orange is the object of perception, the other is the perception process, and the cherry is the perceiver's self-awareness. When separating the sight from the object of perception, you achieve a discernment stage similar to removing the two oranges from the basket. That's why you may have such wonderful flashes of internal awakening when you become conscious of the seeingness–unexpected inner explosions that expose the Self. As you continue to practice the triple vision process, your vision will gradually evolve. It seems to be faint at the start. But as you practice it, it turns into an increasingly tangible quality, becoming as clear and evident as the warmth perception. One might also compare the sight to a muscle that hasn't been used for a long time. It is likely to be slow at the beginning to reactivate the muscle: you hardly feel it, you don't even know when it contracts or doesn't, and its contraction is weak. Once you've done the job, it becomes as clear and tangible to activate your vision as contracting your biceps. This aspect of the inner alchemy process actually involves bodybuilding–not concrete, but subtle bodybuilding. There's a paradox now. What do you do if you want to become conscious of seeingness? You make sure you don't look at anything, and you don't care about the content of the image. In other words, you are getting out of the basket one of the two oranges. You're getting rid of the perception object. And then the second orange (seeing, awareness process) becomes apparent.

What we learn in meditation isn’t so much to stop thoughts, but to change our relationship to them. We learn to be less reactive, less ruled by our thoughts, and to see that they aren’t all true. “You don’t have to believe your thoughts,” one of my teachers says. What a revelation! When I see my thoughts more clearly, I’m able to make choices to act or not act based on what I see; I can exercise Right Intention to steer my life in the direction I want to go. Sometimes thoughts and emotions seem overwhelming, even in the context of mindfulness. At these times you might fall back on compassion—not pity—for yourself, for the great task you are attempting: facing down the demons of the heart and mind. Perhaps then you can begin to forgive yourself and your failures. THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS The Four Noble Truths are at the core of all Buddhist teachings.

When you use emotion regulation skills, you focus on dealing with difficult emotions without acting on behaviors that might have adverse consequences. On the other hand, distress tolerance skills are used for the tolerance and momentary acceptance of difficult situations without making the situations worse. Using all of these ideas on a regular basis is the DBT way to find emotional balance. Identifying the emotion: SUN Many people who struggle with emotional intensity and reactivity recognize that they don’t know precisely which emotion they are feeling, and so it makes sense that they might not know what to do when they are feeling unbalanced. One way to identify the emotion is to use the acronym SUN: Sensations: Focus on what you feel and the physical sensations in your body. Notice whether there is tension in any part of your body. Urges: Do you have any urges to do anything in particular? Most emotions come with an action urge. For instance, people who are angry have the urge to attack, while people who are sad have the urge to cry or isolate. Name (the emotion): When you put together the body sensations and action urges, it’s easier to name the emotion. Riding out the emotion like a WAVE Emotions are like waves: They will start to form, peak, and

In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky details how reactivity and your temperament are also strong predictors of how stressed-out you are likely to be. Our sensitive high reactor can be compared to a neurotic “Type A” personality. Any little thing sets them off, and once they’re going it can be hours before they settle back down. It’s easy for a high reactor to stay soaked in stress hormones for hours on end, set off by an ever-compounding series of morning traffic, meetings, bosses, co-workers, and traffic on the way home. These people set themselves off, yes, but it’s in their nature to do so. Being effectively numb to the same pressures, low-reactors can handle much more without flinching. The low reactor isn’t a psychopath, as they experience emotions and react to life-events as anyone would, but the effects of stress aren’t pronounced. It takes an extraordinary event to provoke a response, and they’re much better at turning all the coping systems off after the fact. You’d be absolutely right if you guessed that these neural and psychological differences translate to different physical outcomes. Stress is stress. Your brain is the master controller, and it doesn’t care if the threat is a third-degree burn or you clenching your teeth for 16 straight hours because you don’t know how to relax. To the high reactor, intense exercise becomes just another log on the bonfire, whereas a low reactor may not even notice.

We can help patients find peace, but maybe a different kind than they imagined they'd find when they started treatment. ... I know that therapy won't make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I'll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don't perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself- to let go of the limiting stories you've told yourself about who you are so that you aren't trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you've been telling yourself about your life.

Many people make lists as a way to keep organized. If you don’t keep a list, you are most likely a very reactive person. Lists help you stay focused on high priorities and highly productive matters. Keeping a list will double your productivity right away.

There is no question traumatized people have irrational thoughts: "I was to blame for being so sexy." "The other guys weren't afraid - they're real men." "I should have known better than to walk down that street." It's best to treat those thoughts as cognitive flashbacks - you don't argue with them any more than you would argue with someone who keeps having visual flashbacks of a terrible accident. They are residues of traumatic incidents: thoughts they were thinking when, or shortly after, the traumas occurred that are reactivated under stressful conditions. A better way to treat them is with EMDR....

To sum up, we lose the ability to transport copper because we don’t have access to the ceruloplasmin taxi, which feeds copper to the cells and to the mitochondria. If ceruloplasmin cannot get copper to the cells and their mitochondrial power grids, the result is a general breakdown of ATP production. And if enough copper is not available, we cannot regulate oxygen metabolism and cytochrome c oxidase is not going to be able to activate oxygen to create energy. If that happens, then we’re not going to be able to regulate iron metabolism. The end result is that our mitochondria are not able to make energy, and the body is not going to be able to make heme and iron sulfur clusters, which are created as a part of the mitochondrial actions. Given that iron is a terminal destination in the mitochondria, we’re going to have a serious problem because this iron will build up inside the ferritin storage proteins, both inside the mitochondria, as well as inside the cells. Then we’re going to lose the ability to regulate the reactive oxidative stress that takes place. And we’re not going to have enough antioxidant enzymes to break down the oxidative stress that’s building. This is why both copper and ceruloplasmin are so important for proper energy production that does not result in iron buildup and oxidative stress, particularly in Complex IV, but in all mitochondrial complexes of the ETC.

Reactivation is often a quicker, simpler, and more effective approach to increasing revenue than attracting new customers. Your old customers already know and Trust you, and they’re aware of the value you provide. You have their information—you don’t have to find them. Your cost of customer acquisition (a component of Allowable Acquisition Cost) is low—all you have to do is contact them and present an attractive offer.

They Have Low Stress Tolerance Emotionally immature people don’t deal with stress well. Their responses are reactive and stereotyped. Instead of assessing the situation and anticipating the future, they use coping mechanisms that deny, distort, or replace reality (Vaillant 2000). They have trouble admitting mistakes and instead discount the facts and blame others. Regulating emotions is difficult for them, and they often overreact. Once they get upset, it’s hard for them to calm down, and they expect other people to soothe them by doing what they want. They often seek comfort in intoxicants or medication

A great marker is turning out to be something called C-reactive protein (CRP).

We will say again something we have said before: If you read this conversation more than once, you will realize you are reading a different conversation each time. And if you don’t quite get that, or are a little mystified by that, we will tell you the secret to it: You are listening multidimensionally. Which means you are a multidimensional being, remembering that you are. And conversations like this are designed to reactivate that memory inside you.

Endometriosis, or painful periods? (Endometriosis is when pieces of the uterine lining grow outside of the uterine cavity, such as on the ovaries or bowel, and cause painful periods.) Mood swings, PMS, depression, or just irritability? Weepiness, sometimes over the most ridiculous things? Mini breakdowns? Anxiety? Migraines or other headaches? Insomnia? Brain fog? A red flush on your face (or a diagnosis of rosacea)? Gallbladder problems (or removal)? — PART E — Poor memory (you walk into a room to do something, then wonder what it was, or draw a blank midsentence)? Emotional fragility, especially compared with how you felt ten years ago? Depression, perhaps with anxiety or lethargy (or, more commonly, dysthymia: low-grade depression that lasts more than two weeks)? Wrinkles (your favorite skin cream no longer works miracles)? Night sweats or hot flashes? Trouble sleeping, waking up in the middle of the night? A leaky or overactive bladder? Bladder infections? Droopy breasts, or breasts lessening in volume? Sun damage more obvious, even glaring, on your chest, face, and shoulders? Achy joints (you feel positively geriatric at times)? Recent injuries, particularly to wrists, shoulders, lower back, or knees? Loss of interest in exercise? Bone loss? Vaginal dryness, irritation, or loss of feeling (as if there were layers of blankets between you and the now-elusive toe-curling orgasm)? Lack of juiciness elsewhere (dry eyes, dry skin, dry clitoris)? Low libido (it’s been dwindling for a while, and now you realize it’s half or less than what it used to be)? Painful sex? — PART F — Excess hair on your face, chest, or arms? Acne? Greasy skin and/or hair? Thinning head hair (which makes you question the justice of it all if you’re also experiencing excess hair growth elsewhere)? Discoloration of your armpits (darker and thicker than your normal skin)? Skin tags, especially on your neck and upper torso? (Skin tags are small, flesh-colored growths on the skin surface, usually a few millimeters in size, and smooth. They are usually noncancerous and develop from friction, such as around bra straps. They do not change or grow over time.) Hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia and/or unstable blood sugar? Reactivity and/or irritability, or excessively aggressive or authoritarian episodes (also known as ’roid rage)? Depression? Anxiety? Menstrual cycles occurring more than every thirty-five days? Ovarian cysts? Midcycle pain? Infertility? Or subfertility? Polycystic ovary syndrome? — PART G — Hair loss, including of the outer third of your eyebrows and/or eyelashes? Dry skin? Dry, strawlike hair that tangles easily? Thin, brittle fingernails? Fluid retention or swollen ankles? An additional few pounds, or 20, that you just can’t lose? High cholesterol? Bowel movements less often than once a day, or you feel you don’t completely evacuate? Recurrent headaches? Decreased sweating? Muscle or joint aches or poor muscle tone (you became an old lady overnight)? Tingling in your hands or feet? Cold hands and feet? Cold intolerance? Heat intolerance? A sensitivity to cold (you shiver more easily than others and are always wearing layers)? Slow speech, perhaps with a hoarse or halting voice? A slow heart rate, or bradycardia (fewer than 60 beats per minute, and not because you’re an elite athlete)? Lethargy (you feel like you’re moving through molasses)? Fatigue, particularly in the morning? Slow brain, slow thoughts? Difficulty concentrating? Sluggish reflexes, diminished reaction time, even a bit of apathy? Low sex drive, and you’re not sure why? Depression or moodiness (the world is not as rosy as it used to be)? A prescription for the latest antidepressant but you’re still not feeling like yourself? Heavy periods or other menstrual problems? Infertility or miscarriage? Preterm birth? An enlarged thyroid/goiter? Difficulty swallowing? Enlarged tongue? A family history of thyroid problems?

Visionary leadership is not reactive. It refuses to arrogantly offer the right solution or give the right answer. Rather, leading with vision requires that we relate to people. Dan Allender writes, Leadership is not about problems and decisions; it is a profoundly relational enterprise that seeks to motivate people toward a vision that will require significant change and risk on everyone’s part. Decisions are simply the doors that leaders, as well as followers, walk through to get to the land where redemption can be found.3 Leadership hinges on relationship, and that requires us to risk. And though I’m convinced that visionary, relational leadership is a bedrock Christian posture, we all have a disturbing bent toward relational immaturity. I see how easily I become cynical, dismissive, judgmental, and reactive. I see how quickly I’m tempted to blast back at the person who sends a critical e-mail, or judge the person who doesn’t make progress fast enough, or get impatient with those I manage who don’t accomplish exactly what I think they should. Our journey toward dealing compassionately with difficult people doesn’t simply require us to learn a bit more about others. It also requires us to become better acquainted with ourselves.

Sniff, swill, sip 329 words Leading whisky expert Charles MacLean on the underrated art of downing a good Scotch. USE ALL YOUR SENSES We all love a splash of golden liquor now and then, but the fine art of appreciating whisky requires a heightening of the senses. 'Nosing' whisky, a technique employed by blenders, is called sensory evaluation or analeptic assessment. Prior to sipping, examine its colour and 'tears', which are the reams left behind on the glass after you swirl it. Even our sense of hearing can help us judge the whisky; a full bottle should open with a happy little pluck of the cap. APPRECIATE A GOOD MALT Appreciation and enjoyment are two dimensions of downing a stiff one. Identify how you like your whisky (with ice, soda or water) and stick with it. Getting sloshed on blended whisky is all very good, but you will need single malt and an understanding of three simple things to truly cherish your drink. A squat glass with a bulb at the bottom releases the full burst of its aroma when swilled. A narrow rim is an added advantage. Instead of topping the drink with ice, which dilutes the aroma, go for water. NIBBLE, DON'T GOBBLE Small bites pair best with your whisky. It excites the palate minimally, letting you detect the characteristics of the whisky through contrast. If you're not a big fan of food and whisky pairing, skip it. OLD IS GOLD While old whiskies are not necessarily better, it's a known fact that most of the finer whiskies are well-aged. I would consider whiskies that are anywhere between 18 and 50 years as old, but it also depends on the age of the cask. If the cask is reactive, it will dominate the flavours of the whisky within ten years of the ageing process. If you leave the spirit in the cask for much longer, the flavour of the whisky will be overpowered by the wood, lending it a distinct edge. Maclean was in Delhi to conduct the Singleton Sensorial experience.

Qualcomm is putting these sensor clips on all forty-eight buildings in San Diego. Suddenly the building maintenance guys “got converted to data engineers, which is exciting for them,” added Tipirneni. They made sure the data was “distilled in a way that is easy for them to understand and be actionable. In the old days, when a facilities manager looked at a building, he would say: “If there is a leak someone will call me or I will see it.” They were reactive. Now, says Tipirneni, “We trained them to look at signals and data that will point them to a leak before it happens and causes destruction. They did not know what data to look at, so our challenge was [to] make sensor data easy for them to make sense of, so we don’t overwhelm them with too much data and just say ‘You figure it out.’ Our goal was, ‘We will give you information you can use.

The management is screwing things up. Or it’s the “process” that gets in the way. It’s time to stop blaming our surroundings and start taking responsibility. While no workplace is perfect, it turns out that our gravest challenges are a lot more primal and personal. Our individual practices ultimately determine what we do and how well we do it. Specifically, it’s our routine (or lack thereof), our capacity to work proactively rather than reactively, and our ability to systematically optimize our work habits over time that determine our ability to make ideas happen. DON

Everyone in a walking-on-eggshells family loses some degree of dignity and autonomy. You become unable to decide your own thoughts, feelings, and behavior, because you are living in a defensive-reactive pattern that runs largely on automatic pilot.

This means that the high performance habits you’ll learn in this book are deliberate habits. These must be consciously chosen, willed into existence, and continually revisited to strengthen your character and increase your odds of success. Deliberate habits usually won’t come easily. You have to practice them with real mental focus, especially in changing environments. Every time you feel stuck, every time you start a new project, every time you measure your progress, every time you try to lead others, you must deliberately think about the high performance habits. You’ll have to use them as a checklist, just as a pilot uses a preflight checklist before every takeoff. I believe this is a good thing, too. I don’t want my clients getting ahead unconsciously, reactively, or compulsively. I want them to know what they do to win, and do it with full intention and purpose. That way, they are captains of their own fate, not slaves to their impulses. I want you in charge, conscious, and clear about what you’re doing, so you can see your performance get better and better—and so you can help others get better, too. It’s going to take a lot of work to deploy the high performance habits you’re about to learn, but don’t shy from the effort. When you knock on the door of opportunity, do not be surprised that it is Work who answers.

People have to learn to listen and listen and listen and listen until they finally get it that their partner has their own inner world - that you like apples and your partner likes oranges and that it's okay to like oranges. One of my axioms is that if you want to be in a relationship, you have to get it that you live with another person. That person isn't you. She's not merged with you. She is not your picture of who she is. She doesn't live inside your find. She doesn't know what you're thinking, and you don't know what she's thinking. So you have to back off and move from reactivity to curiosity. You have to ask questions. You have to listen." (Hendrix) (p. 271)

Secondly, after you stop thinking about the problem consciously, the subconscious will continue thinking about it 24/7. Your super-fast creative mind will process millions of thoughts and give you ideas while you are on a walk, taking a shower or sleeping. The subconscious mind is responsible for most original and successful ideas that you create. Once the subconscious generates an idea for you, write it down no matter where you are and what time of the day it is. Finally, think about your task occasionally for 2 to 5 minutes. During this time you will not only generate fresh ideas but will also reactivate your creative mind and make it think intensively while you are not consciously thinking about the problem. The Think and Rest technique will help you generate successful business ideas in 100% of cases. If after using this technique a great idea didn’t come to you, it means that either not enough time has passed or that you don’t have enough raw materials to create an idea from and need to do more research. Think and Rest is a strategy that most effectively activates the thinking process in the brain. To become as effective at generating successful business ideas as possible, use Think and Rest consciously. The best innovators and thinkers in the world use this strategy daily.

Then love her. If the feeling isn’t there, that’s a good reason to love her.” “But how do you love when you don’t love?” “My friend, love is a verb. Love—the feeling—is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?” *** In the great literature of all progressive societies, love is a verb. Reactive people make it a feeling. They’re driven by feelings. Hollywood has generally scripted us to believe that we are not responsible, that we are a product of our feelings. But the Hollywood script does not describe the reality. If our feelings control our actions, it is because we have abdicated our responsibility and empowered them to do so. Proactive people make love a verb. Love is something you do: the sacrifices you make, the giving of self, like a mother bringing a newborn into the world. If you want to study love, study those who sacrifice for others, even for people who offend or do not love in return. If you are a parent, look at the love you have for the children you sacrificed for. Love is a value that is actualized through loving actions. Proactive people subordinate feelings to values. Love, the feeling, can be recaptured. CIRCLE OF CONCERN/CIRCLE OF INFLUENCE Another excellent way to become more self-aware regarding our own degree of proactivity is to look at where we focus our time and energy.

When a reactive person is complimented, their mental balloon goes along with that breeze: they are happy, suddenly their self-worth is higher. But, by the same token, when someone insults them, their mental balloon bobs back in the other direction. Now, they are worthless. You could spend your whole life in this back and forth.

It is natural to take it personally when someone disconnects from vou. especiallv if they don't tell vou why. At the same time, it is also important to realize that people's decision to disconnect often has nothing to do with you. It is often entirely about them.One of the most common things I have witnessed, is a need to sever connection that is rooted in the personal individuation process. That is, someone has gone through their life as a people pleaser, as a co-dependent, as someone whose experience of the self is confusingly intertwined with others, and they need to push someone away in order to finallv feel separate. They need to claim their stake as an individuated entity, but they don't know how to do it non-reactively. So they abruptly terminate a personal connection. in order to establish a new way of being.Quite often, they do this with someone who is peripheral to their primary co-dependencies,because they are not ready to live without those.They pick a friend or a secondary figure, as their first stepping out. In these situations, you are merely a relational symbology, a figure that had to go in order for them to finally feel like a boundaried, empowered person. This is not to say that it won't hurt, but it is to say that it was never about vou.

Codependents have poor communication skills. They’re so preoccupied or emotionally reactive that often they don’t really listen. The other person’s words get filtered through layers of fear and low self-esteem.

I know that therapy won’t make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I’ll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.

Patience in your life. Remember that we don’t have to fill up every moment with entertainment, distractions, and activity. Life gets better when we make space and time to absorb each moment rather than rushing to the next thing. When we allow some spacious, unstructured time around activities, we enjoy them as a family even more. Downtime is a good thing.

When we discipline with threats—whether explicitly through our words or implicitly through scary nonverbals like our tone, posture, and facial expressions—we activate the defensive circuits of our child’s reactive reptilian downstairs brain. We call this “poking the lizard,” and we don’t recommend it because it almost always leads to escalating emotions, for both parent and child. When your five-year-old throws a fit at the grocery store, and you tower over him and point your finger and insist through clenched teeth that he “calm down this instant,” you’re poking the lizard. You’re triggering a downstairs reaction, which is almost never going to lead anywhere productive for anyone involved. Your child’s sensory system takes in your body language and words and detects threat, which biologically sets off the neural circuitry that allows him to survive a threat from his environment—to fight, to flee, to freeze, or to faint. His downstairs brain springs into action, preparing to react quickly rather than fully considering alternatives in a more responsive, receptive state. His muscles might tense as he prepares to defend himself and, if necessary, attack with freeze and fight. Or he may run away in flight, or collapse in a fainting response. Each of these is a pathway of reactivity of the downstairs brain. And his thinking, rational self-control circuitry of the upstairs brain goes off-line, becoming unavailable in that moment. That’s the key—we can’t be in both a reactive downstairs state and a receptive upstairs state at the same time. The downstairs reactivity holds sway. In this situation, you can appeal to your child’s more sophisticated upstairs brain, and allow it to help rein in the more reactive downstairs brain.