“
But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
“
It is a rare person who can cut himself off from mediate and immediate relations with others for long spaces of time without undergoing a deterioration in personality.
”
”
Harry Stack Sullivan (The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry)
“
teaching kids that failures, insults, and painful experiences will do lasting damage is harmful in and of itself. Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate.
”
”
Greg Lukianoff (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
“
There was no manifestation of contemporary culture that did not indicate to my grandmother how steadfast was the nation's decline, how merciless our mental and moral deterioration, how swiftly all-embracing our final decadence. I never saw her read a book again; but she referred to books often - as if they were shrines and cathedrals of learning that television had plundered and then abandoned.
”
”
John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany)
“
He looks at me for a long moment. “You’re not the type of woman who gives up easily, are you?” I
can’t tell if he admires this trait or sees it as a sign of deteriorating mental health.
”
”
Eileen Cook (Unpredictable)
“
The "pathology of normalcy" rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranged the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation, in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.
”
”
Erich Fromm (The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness)
“
Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate.
”
”
Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
“
For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive.
”
”
Frances Farmer (Will There Really Be a Morning?)
“
As modern neurobiologists point out, the repetition of the traumatic experience in the flashbacks can be itself re-traumatizing; if not life-threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the brain and can ultimately lead to deterioration. And this would also seem to explain the high suicide rate of survivor, for example, survivors of Vietnam.
”
”
Cathy Caruth (Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History)
“
Aunt Léonie who, after the death of her husband, my Uncle Octave, no longer wished to leave, first Combray, then within Combray her house, then her bedroom, then her bed and no longer 'came down', always lying in an uncertain state of grief, physical debility, illness, obsession and piety.
”
”
Marcel Proust (Du côté de chez Swann (À la recherche du temps perdu, #1))
“
Now a little boy or girl, and many an older person, thinks that a spotted horse is the real thing, but practical cattle men know that this freak of color in range-bred horses is the result of in-and-in breeding, with consequent physical and mental deterioration.
”
”
Andy Adams (The Log of a Cowboy [Illustrated])
“
Unless subjected to constant discipline the mental processes of the common sign types are apt to be scattered or non-eventuating. There is a distinct tendency to carry along unfinished business and to procrastinate in decision. If left to its own disorder, the mind may deteriorate into a tumbling ground for whimsies.
”
”
Manly P. Hall (Psychoanalyzing the Twelve Zodiacal Types)
“
In view of the possibility of finding meaning in suffering, life's meaning is an unconditional one, at least potentially. That unconditional meaning, however, is paralleled by the unconditional value of each and every person. It is that which warrants the indelible quality of the dignity of man. Just as life remains potentially meaningful under any conditions, even those which are most miserable, so too does the value of each and every person stay with him or her, and it does so because it is based on the values that he or she has realized in the past, and is not contingent on the usefulness that he or she may or may not retain in the present.
More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that na individual's value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler's program, that is to say, "mercy" killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.
Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from a conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch. Even in the setting of training analyses such an indoctrination may take place. Nihilism does not contend that there is nothing, but it states that everything is meaningless. And George A. Sargent was right when he promulgated the concept of "learned meaninglessness." He himself remembered a therapist who said, "George, you must realize that the world is a joke. There is no justice, everything is random. Only when you realize this will you understand how silly it is to take yourself seriously. There is no grand purpose in the universe. It just is. There's no particular meaning in what decision you make today about how to act."
One must generalize such a criticism. In principle, training is indispensable, but if so, therapists should see their task in immunizing the trainee against nihilism rather than inoculating him with the cynicism that is a defense mechanism against their own nihilism.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
“
Please don’t blame someone when their mental health declines. It can be tough to judge when one is deteriorating, even after collapsing thousands of times. Signs of decline are not always imminent. Most importantly, please don’t make a person who tried to commit suicide feel bad or guilty. Trust me, they already feel like the scum of the earth.
”
”
K.J. Redelinghuys (Unfiltered: Grappling with Mental Illness)
“
The trouble with being a rock of sense is that, eventually, you lose the sense and become the rock.
”
”
Stewart Stafford
“
115 BPM Fine motor skills deteriorate 145+ BPM Complex motor skills deteriorate 175+ BPM “A warrior can expect to experience auditory exclusion or loss of peripheral vision and depth perception. This initiates a catastrophic failure of cognitive processing capabilities, leading to fatal increases in reaction time or hypervigilance (freezing in place or irrational acts).” p.7-8
”
”
Michael J. Asken (Warrior Mindset: Mental Toughness Skills for a Nation's Peacekeepers)
“
My only wish is that men in the world below may sometimes pick up this tale when they are recovering from sleep or drunkenness, or when they wish to escape from business worries or a fit of the dumps, and in doing so find not only mental refreshment but even perhaps, if they will heed its lesson and abandon their vain and frivolous pursuits, some small arrest in the deterioration of their vital forces.
”
”
Cao Xueqin (The Golden Days (The Story of the Stone #1))
“
Jill was born into an inner-city home. Her father began having sex with Jill and her sister during their preschool years. Her mother was institutionalized twice because of what used to be termed “nervous breakdowns.” When Jill was 7 years old, her agitated dad called a family meeting in the living room. In front of the whole clan, he put a handgun to his head, said, “You drove me to this,” and then blew his brains out. The mother’s mental condition continued to deteriorate, and she revolved in and out of mental hospitals for years. When Mom was home, she would beat Jill. Beginning in her early teens, Jill was forced to work outside the home to help make ends meet. As Jill got older, we would have expected to see deep psychiatric scars, severe emotional damage, drugs, maybe even a pregnancy or two. Instead, Jill developed into a charming and quite popular young woman at school. She became a talented singer, an honor student, and president of her high-school class. By every measure, she was emotionally well-adjusted and seemingly unscathed by the awful circumstances of her childhood. Her story, published in a leading psychiatric journal, illustrates the unevenness of the human response to stress. Psychiatrists long have observed that some people are more tolerant of stress than others.
”
”
John Medina (Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School)
“
But such wan cheer was an habitual pretense which I knew meant very little, for I was certain to feel ghastly before nightfall. I had come to a point where I was carefully monitoring each phase of my deteriorating condition.
”
”
William Styron (Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness)
“
good news is that we’re all doomed, and you can give up any sense of control. Resistance is futile. Many things are going to get worse and weaker, especially democracy and the muscles in your upper arms. Most deteriorating conditions, though, will have to do with your family, the family in which you were raised and your current one. A number of the best people will have died, badly, while the worst thrive. The younger middle-aged people struggle with the same financial, substance, and marital crises that their parents did, and the older middle-aged people are, like me, no longer even late-middle-aged. We’re early old age, with failing memories, hearing loss, and gum disease. And also, while I hate to sound pessimistic, there are also new, tiny, defenseless people who are probably doomed, too, to the mental ruin of ceaseless striving. What most of us live by and for is the love of family—blood family, where the damage occurred, and chosen, where a bunch of really nutty people fight back together. But both kinds of families can be as hard and hollow as bone, as mystical and common, as dead and alive, as promising and depleted. And by the same token, only redeeming familial love can save you from this crucible, along with nature and clean sheets. A
”
”
Anne Lamott (Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace)
“
It's like the frog that tried to outdo the cow...see, the consequences are reflected in each of us as individuals. A people so oppressed by the West have no mental leisure, they can't do anything worthwhile. They get an education that's stripped to the bare bone, and they're driven with their noses to the grindstone until they're dizzy -- that's why they all end up with nervous breakdowns. Try talking to them -- they're usually stupid. They haven't thought about a thing beyond themselves, that day, that very instant. They're too exhausted to think about anything else; it's not their fault. Unfortunately, exhaustion of the spirit and deterioration of the body come hand-in-hand. And that's not all. The decline of morality has set in too. Look where you will in this country, you won't find one square inch of brightness. It's all pitch black. So what difference would it make...
”
”
Natsume Sōseki (And Then)
“
It is time for this book in the second person to address itself no longer to a general male you, perhaps brother and double of a hypocrite I, but directly to you who appeared already in the second chapter as the Third Person necessary for the novel to be a novel, for something to happen between that male Second Person and the female Third, for something to take form, develop, or deteriorate according to the phases of human events. Or, rather, to follow the mental models through which we live our human events. Or, rather, to follow the mental models through which we attribute to human events the meanings that allow them to be lived.
”
”
Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler)
“
In 1944-1945, Dr Ancel Keys, a specialist in nutrition and the inventor of the K-ration, led a carefully controlled yearlong study of starvation at the University of Minnesota Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene. It was hoped that the results would help relief workers in rehabilitating war refugees and concentration camp victims. The study participants were thirty-two conscientious objectors eager to contribute humanely to the war effort. By the experiment's end, much of their enthusiasm had vanished.
Over a six-month semi-starvation period, they were required to lose an average of twenty-five percent of their body weight." [...] p193
p193-194
"...the men exhibited physical symptoms...their movements slowed, they felt weak and cold, their skin was dry, their hair fell out, they had edema. And the psychological changes were dramatic. "[...]
p194
"The men became apathetic and depressed, and frustrated with their inability to concentrate or perform tasks in their usual manner. Six of the thirty-two were eventually diagnosed with severe "character neurosis," two of them bordering on psychosis. Socially, they ceased to care much about others; they grew intensely selfish and self-absorbed. Personal grooming and hygiene deteriorated, and the men were moody and irritable with one another. The lively and cooperative group spirit that had developed in the three-month control phase of the experiment evaporated. Most participants lost interest in group activities or decisions, saying it was too much trouble to deal with the others; some men became scapegoats or targets of aggression for the rest of the group.
Food - one's own food - became the only thing that mattered. When the men did talk to one another, it was almost always about eating, hunger, weight loss, foods they dreamt of eating. They grew more obsessed with the subject of food, collecting recipes, studying cookbooks, drawing up menus. As time went on, they stretched their meals out longer and longer, sometimes taking two hours to eat small dinners. Keys's research has often been cited often in recent years for this reason: The behavioral changes in the men mirror the actions of present-day dieters, especially of anorexics.
”
”
Michelle Stacey (The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery)
“
A sundry of intimate encounters with the vibrant intellect of perceptive thinkers dissolves a recluse’s shroud of seclusion. Can I manufacture the needed first aid kit to arrest my internal hemorrhaging? Can I stave off my mental deterioration by exploring the written words of renowned authors? Can I map a course out of my present quandary by scouring the libraries brimming with the beautiful mind works of previous generations of eminent writers? Will diligent encounters with the incisive thoughts of outstanding essayist shred the indivisible bars shielding my indeterminate self and release me from of the monochrome cage of self-imposed isolation? Can respected writers’ perceptive soul-searching create a template for my inchoative thoughts spontaneously to mature?
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, “mercy” killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
“
In 1970, Alix Kates Shulman, a wife, mother, and writer who had joined the Women's Liberation Movement in New York, wrote a poignant account of how the initial equality and companionship of her marriage had deteriorated once she had children. "[N]ow I was restricted to the company of two demanding preschoolers and to the four walls of an apartment. It seemed unfair that while my husband's life had changed little when the children were born, domestic life had become the only life I had." His job became even more demanding, requiring late nights and travel out of town. Meanwhile it was virtually impossible for her to work at home. "I had no time for myself; the children were always there." Neither she nor her husband was happy with the situation, so they did something radical, which received considerable media coverage: they wrote up a marriage agreement... In it they asserted that "each member of the family has an equal right to his/her own time, work, values and choices... The ability to earn more money is already a privilege which must not be compounded by enabling the larger earner to buy out of his/her duties and put the burden on the one who earns less, or on someone hired from outside." The agreement insisted that domestic jobs be shared fifty-fifty and, get this girls, "If one party works overtime in any domestic job, she/he must be compensated by equal work by the other." The agreement then listed a complete job breakdown... in other worde, the agreement acknowledged the physical and the emotional/mental work involved in parenting and valued both. At the end of the article, Shulman noted how much happier she and her husband were as a result of the agreement. In the two years after its inception, Shulman wrote three children's books, a biography and a novel. But listen, too, to what it meant to her husband, who was now actually seeing his children every day. After the agreement had been in effect for four months, "our daughter said one day to my husband, 'You know, Daddy, I used to love Mommy more than you, but now I love you both the same.
”
”
Susan J. Douglas (The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women)
“
Becoming an ex-alcoholic, however, is not easy. Drink may be futile and ultimately degrading, but only the fortunate drinker discovers this. And it is the even more fortunate one who then comes upon a new and healthy path to the summit of his physical and mental powers. Before the liver goes, the heart enlarges and the brain begins to deteriorate, he must get the message that there is a better way to experience himself and the universe. My
”
”
George Sheehan (Running & Being: The Total Experience)
“
More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined
in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But
today's society is characterized by achievement orientation,
and consequently it adores people who are
successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the
young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who
are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive
difference between being valuable in the sense of
dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If
one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an
individual's value stems only from his present usefulness,
then, believe me, one owes it only to personal
inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the
lines of Hitler's program, that is to say, "mercy"
killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness,
be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental
deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
“
More specifically, this usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of society. But today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, “mercy” killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl (Man's Search for Meaning)
“
There is perhaps no harder truth for a parent to bear, but it is one that no parent on earth knows better than I do, and it is this: love is not enough. My love for Dylan, though infinite, did not keep Dylan safe, nor did it save the 13 people killed at Columbine High School, or the many others injured and traumatized. I missed the subtle signs of psychological deterioration that, had I noticed, might have made a difference for Dylan and his victims - all the difference in the world.
”
”
Sue Klebold (A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy)
“
Today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.
”
”
Viktor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
“
Groups have powerful self-reinforcing mechanisms at work. These can lead to group polarization—a tendency for members of the group to end up in a more extreme position than they started in because they have heard the views repeated frequently.
At the extreme limit of group behavior is groupthink. This occurs when a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.” The original work was conducted with reference to the Vietnam War and the Bay of Pigs fiasco. However, it rears its head again and again, whether it is in connection with the Challenger space shuttle disaster or the CIA intelligence failure over the WMD of Saddam Hussein.
Groupthink tends to have eight symptoms:
1 . An illusion of invulnerability. This creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks. [...]
2. Collective rationalization. Members of the group discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions. [...]
3. Belief in inherent morality. Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.
4. Stereotyped views of out-groups. Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary. Remember how those who wouldn't go along with the dot-com bubble were dismissed as simply not getting it.
5. Direct pressure on dissenters. Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views.
6. Self-censorship. Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed.
7. Illusion of unanimity. The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous.
8. "Mind guards" are appointed. Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group's cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions. This is confirmatory bias writ large.
”
”
James Montier (The Little Book of Behavioral Investing: How not to be your own worst enemy)
“
The most surprising discovery made by Baumeister’s group shows, as he puts it, that the idea of mental energy is more than a mere metaphor. The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose. When you are actively involved in difficult cognitive reasoning or engaged in a task that requires self-control, your blood glucose level drops. The effect is analogous to a runner who draws down glucose stored in her muscles during a sprint. The bold implication of this idea is that the effects of ego depletion could be undone by ingesting glucose, and Baumeister and his colleagues have confirmed this hypothesis in several experiments. Volunteers in one of their studies watched a short silent film of a woman being interviewed and were asked to interpret her body language. While they were performing the task, a series of words crossed the screen in slow succession. The participants were specifically instructed to ignore the words, and if they found their attention drawn away they had to refocus their concentration on the woman’s behavior. This act of self-control was known to cause ego depletion. All the volunteers drank some lemonade before participating in a second task. The lemonade was sweetened with glucose for half of them and with Splenda for the others. Then all participants were given a task in which they needed to overcome an intuitive response to get the correct answer. Intuitive errors are normally much more frequent among ego-depleted people, and the drinkers of Splenda showed the expected depletion effect. On the other hand, the glucose drinkers were not depleted. Restoring the level of available sugar in the brain had prevented the deterioration of performance. It will take some time and much further research to establish whether the tasks that cause glucose-depletion also cause the momentary arousal that is reflected in increases of pupil size and heart rate.
”
”
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
“
The notes on the flash drive showed a steady progression into dementia, a deteriorating mental state directly linked to incidents of exposure to Sovereign. There must have been some kind of field generated by the vessel; some kind of radiation or emission. Something that had destroyed and corrupted Qian’s mind when he went to study it in person. It had affected Edan, too, though the transformation was more subtle. The batarian had begun acting differently from the moment he first visited the site of the artifact: consorting with humans, risking the wrath of the Spectres. Edan probably hadn’t even been aware of the changes, though looking back it was obvious to Saren.
”
”
Drew Karpyshyn (Revelation (Mass Effect, #1))
“
For an employer, employing someone with mental health problems is not an occupational hazard. We might not always make the best first impressions, but if you give us a chance you might see a completely different side to us; a positive, resilient, and dedicated side. In your selection processes, don’t nonchalantly equate nervousness to weakness. I might stutter at times, come across as insecure, or get the occasional brain fart, but that does not mean that I’m not intelligent, suited, or capable. Sometimes people just need that belief from the outside, as the belief in themselves has deteriorated over time. Try to look beyond the surface, you might be pleasantly surprised.
”
”
K.J. Redelinghuys (Unfiltered: Grappling with Mental Illness)
“
Almost a year after the start of the corona crisis, how is the mental health of the population?
MD: For the time being, there are few figures that show the evolution of possible indicators such as the intake of antidepressants and anxiolytics or the number of suicides. But it is especially important to place mental well-being in the corona crisis in its historical continuity. Mental health had been declining for decades. There has long been a steady increase in the number of depression and anxiety problems and the number of suicides. And in recent years there has been an enormous growth in absenteeism due to psychological suffering and burnouts. The year before the corona outbreak, you could feel this malaise growing exponentially. This gave the impression that society was heading for a tipping point where a psychological 'reorganization' of the social system was imperative. This is happening with corona. Initially, we noticed people with little knowledge of the virus conjure up terrible fears, and a real social panic reaction became manifested. This happens especially if there is already a strong latent fear in a person or population.
The psychological dimensions of the current corona crisis are seriously underestimated. A crisis acts as a trauma that takes away an individual's historical sense. The trauma is seen as an isolated event in itself, when in fact it is part of a continuous process. For example, we easily overlook the fact that a significant portion of the population was strangely relieved during the initial lockdown, feeling liberated from stress and anxiety. I regularly heard people say: "Yes these measures are heavy-handed, but at least I can relax a bit." Because the grind of daily life stopped, a calm settled over society. The lockdown often freed people from a psychological rut. This created unconscious support for the lockdown. If the population had not already been exhausted by their life, and especially their jobs, there would never have been support for the lockdown. At least not as a response to a pandemic that is not too bad compared to the major pandemics of the past. You noticed something similar when the first lockdown came to an end. You then regularly heard statements such as "We are not going to start living again like we used to, get stuck in traffic again" and so on. People did not want to go back to the pre-corona normal. If we do not take into account the population's dissatisfaction with its existence, we will not understand this crisis and we will not be able to resolve it. By the way, I now have the impression that the new normal has become a rut again, and I would not be surprised if mental health really starts to deteriorate in the near future. Perhaps especially if it turns out that the vaccine does not provide the magical solution that is expected from it.
”
”
Mattias Desmet
“
Daily life makes us all susceptible to accumulating stress, mostly due to the non-stop demands and pressures of juggling work, home and personal responsibilities. This stress revs up the nervous system, causing the brain to flood the body with hormones that trigger overreacting, irrational thinking, and even insomnia. After years of unavoidable exposure to the stress reaction with no defense, the nervous system can become severely deteriorated, leaving us defenseless against mental or physical illness and disease.iv As it happens, meditation has been proven as one of the greatest counter-stress solutions.v When practiced daily, meditation can help to restore balance and re-supply much-needed rest to your physiology. Common side effects of daily meditation are increased energy and feelings of contentedness and inner happiness.vi
”
”
Light Watkins (The Inner Gym: A 30-Day Workout For Strengthening Happiness)
“
Apparently at every stage of mental development, save the highest of all, the mind's growing point is tender and easily misdirected. However this may be, it is a fact that a few rather highly developed worlds, even with communal mentality, were disastrously perverted in a strange manner, which I find very difficult to understand. I can only suggest that in them, seemingly, the hunger for true community and true mental lucidity itself became obsessive and perverse, so that the behavior of these exalted perverts might deteriorate into something very like tribalism and religious fanaticism. The disease would soon lead to stifling of all elements which seemed recalcitrant to the generally accepted culture of the world-society. When such worlds mastered interstellar travel, they might conceive a fanatical desire to impose their own culture throughout the galaxy. Sometimes their zeal became so violent that they were driven to wage ruthless wars on all who resisted them.
”
”
Olaf Stapledon (Star Maker)
“
The Pathe & Mullen (1997) sample almost unanimously reported deterioration in mental and physical well-being as a consequence of the harassment. (..) These victims often described a preoccupation with their stalker, one commenting: "I think I’ve become as obsessed as the stalker himself". (..) Whenever stalking victims present it is essential to assess their suicide potential and continue to monitor this. (..) Victims of stalking often respond to cognitive-orientated psychological therapies because stalking breaches previously held assumptions about their safety. The belief of victims in their strength and resilience and their confidence in the reasonable and predictable nature of the world are frequently shattered, to be replaced with feelings of extreme vulnerability and an expectation of pervasive danger and unpredictable harm. Cognitive therapies attempt to restructure these morbid perceptions of the world that threaten the victim’s adaptation and functioning. (..) Avoidance can respond to behavioural therapies such as prolonged exposure and stress inoculation, which aim to assist victims to gradually resume abandoned activities and manage the associated anxiety.
”
”
Julian Boon (Stalking and Psychosexual Obsession: Psychological Perspectives for Prevention, Policing and Treatment (Wiley Series in Psychology of Crime, Policing and Law Book 6))
“
spontaneity begin to deteriorate. The goose gets sicker day by day. And what about a parent’s relationship with a child? When children are little, they are very dependent, very vulnerable. It becomes so easy to neglect the PC work—the training, the communicating, the relating, the listening. It’s easy to take advantage, to manipulate, to get what you want the way you want it—right now! You’re bigger, you’re smarter, and you’re right! So why not just tell them what to do? If necessary, yell at them, intimidate them, insist on your way. Or you can indulge them. You can go for the golden egg of popularity, of pleasing them, giving them their way all the time. Then they grow up without any internal sense of standards or expectations, without a personal commitment to being disciplined or responsible. Either way—authoritarian or permissive—you have the golden egg mentality. You want to have your way or you want to be liked. But what happens, meantime, to the goose? What sense of responsibility, of self-discipline, of confidence in the ability to make good choices or achieve important goals is a child going to have a few years down the road? And what about your relationship? When he reaches those critical teenage
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)
“
But then, to its more severe leftist critics, some of them Jews, Israel is not the “democratic exception” it is said to be. The New Left sees it as a reactionary small country. Its de-tractors tell you how it abuses its Arab population and, to a lesser extent, Jewish immigrants from North Africa and the Orient. It is occasionally denounced by some Israelis as corrupt, “Levantine,” theocratic. Gossip traces the worst of the Israeli financial swindles to the most observant of Orthodox Jews. I am often told that the old Ashkenazi leaders were unimaginative, that the new Rabin group lacks stature, that Ben-Gurion was a terrible old guy but a true leader, that the younger generation is hostile to North African and Asian Jews. These North African and Oriental immigrants are blamed for bringing a baksheesh mentality to Israel; the intellectuals are blamed for letting the quality of life (a deplorable phrase) deteriorate—I had hoped that six thousand miles from home I would hear no more about the quality of life—and then there is the Palestinian question, the biggest and most persistent of Israel’s headaches: “We came here to build a just society. And what happened immediately?” I speak of this to Shahar. He says to me, “Where there is no paradox there is no life.
”
”
Saul Bellow (To Jerusalem and Back)
“
The crime was discovered when Trina became pregnant. As is often the case, the correctional officer was fired but not criminally prosecuted. Trina remained imprisoned and gave birth to a son. Like hundreds of women who give birth while in prison, Trina was completely unprepared for the stress of childbirth. She delivered her baby while handcuffed to a bed. It wasn’t until 2008 that most states abandoned the practice of shackling or handcuffing incarcerated women during delivery. Trina’s baby boy was taken away from her and placed in foster care. After this series of events—the fire, the imprisonment, the rape, the traumatic birth, and then the seizure of her son—Trina’s mental health deteriorated further. Over the years, she became less functional and more mentally disabled. Her body began to spasm and quiver uncontrollably, until she required a cane and then a wheelchair. By the time she had turned thirty, prison doctors diagnosed her with multiple sclerosis, intellectual disability, and mental illness related to trauma. Trina had filed a civil suit against the officer who raped her, and the jury awarded her a judgment of $62,000. The guard appealed, and the Court reversed the verdict because the correctional officer had not been permitted to tell the jury that Trina was in prison for murder. Consequently, Trina never received any financial aid or services from the state to compensate her for being violently raped by one of its “correctional” officers. In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.
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Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption)
“
We shall see one another some day, brother. I believe in that as in the multiplication-table. To my soul, all is clear. I see my whole future, and all that I shall accomplish, plainly before me. I am content with my life. I fear only men and tyranny. How easily might I come across a superior officer who did not like me (there are such folk !), who would torment me incessantly and destroy me with the rigours of service—for I am very frail and of course in no state to bear the full burden of a soldier's life. People try to console me: " They're quite simple sort of fellows there." But I dread simple men more than complex ones. For that matter, men everywhere are just— men. Even among the robber-murderers in the prison, I came to know some men in those four years. Believe me, there were among them deep, strong, beautiful natures, and it often gave me great joy to find gold under a rough exterior. And not in a single case, or even two, but in several cases. Some inspired respect; others were downright fine. I taught the Russian language and reading to a young Circassian—he had been transported to Siberia for robbery with murder. How grateful he was to me ! Another convict wept when I said good-bye to him. Certainly I had often given him money, but it was so little, and his gratitude so boundless. My character, though, was deteriorating; in my relations with others I was ill-tempered and impatient. They accounted for it by my mental condition, and bore all without grumbling. Apropos: what a number of national types and characters I became familiar with in the prison ! I lived into their lives, and so I believe I know them really well. Many tramps' and thieves' careers were laid bare to me, and, above all, the whole wretched existence of the common people. Decidedly I have not spent my time there in vain. I have learnt to know the Russian people as only a few know them. I am a little vain of it. I hope that such vanity is pa r donable. Brother
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoyevsky to his family and friends)
“
Thus, the vigorous defense of the Faith eventually deteriorated into what might simply be characterized as a defensive attitude. In his book The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America, David Carlin makes a point that resonates with Weigel’s historical analysis: One of the great hymns of the Reformation was Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” In its reaction to the Reformation, Catholicism might well have taken the title of this hymn for its own slogan—for that is what the Church became: it turned itself, metaphorically speaking, into a mighty ecclesiastical fortress. Eventually it recognized that the chances of regaining most of the lost provinces were slim, but it was absolutely determined to hold on to what remained: France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, southern Germany, Poland, Ireland, and (an area of great new gains) Latin America. This siege mentality prevailed in the Counter-Reformation Church—a mentality that placed primary importance on survival. The fortress mentality exercised enormous influence on the Church in the United States, where Catholics were always a minority, anxious to gain acceptance in a predominantly Protestant society. Ambitious Church leaders sought to build up their parishes, parochial schools, Catholic universities, and lay associations, for whose use the “parish plants” were built. With each succeeding generation, the Catholic Church became a more entrenched institution, with all the benefits—but also the dangers—of acceptance as part of the established American way of life.
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Philip F. Lawler (The Smoke of Satan: How Corrupt and Cowardly Bishops Betrayed Christ, His Church, and the Faithful . . . and What Can Be Done About It)
“
Some children who grow up the be cutters may have been forced to take on the mother's role in childhood due to their father's sexual abuse or their mother's death or incapacity. Or a mother may simply have been too overwhelmed by life circumstances to meet her children's needs. In some cases, both parents may be conscientiously attuned to their child but because of some physical trauma she must endure—such as childhood illness, accident, or extensive medical procedure—no amount of comforting can diminish the pain and distress the child has to manage. Whatever the source, the child is left feeling emotionally abandoned and her unmet needs and unsoothed fears create an overwhelming level of anxiety. Later in life, cutting or burning becomes her primary strategy for regulating her emotions and avoiding further mental deterioration. It is a means of self-soothing and in that sense it can be viewed as a flawed attempt at self-mothering.
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Marilee Strong (A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain)
“
All of the above blocks our growth and development in the mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of our being. But we have a desire to contact and know our True Self. We learn that “quick fixes” such as compulsive behaviors will allow us to glimpse our True Self and will let off some of the tension. However, if the compulsive behavior is destructive to us or to others, we may feel shame and a resulting lower self-esteem. At this point we may begin to feel more and more out of control and we try to compensate by the need to control even more. We may end up deluded and hurt and often project our pain onto others. Our tension has now built to such an extent that we may develop stress-related illness manifested by aches and pains and often by dysfunction of one or more body organs. We are now in an advanced state of co-dependence, and may progressively deteriorate so that we experience one or more of extreme mood swings, difficulty with intimate relationships and chronic unhappiness. For those who are attempting to recover from alcoholism, another chemical dependence, or another condition or illness, this advanced state of co-dependence may seriously interfere. The development of co-dependence may thus be summarized as follows:
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Charles L. Whitfield (Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families)
“
It is not a forgotten place, but it is a place for forgetting - the crimes committed by its patients settling into the dust like the gradual deterioration of the buildings themselves.
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John Burley (The Forgetting Place)
“
In best-case scenarios, the loss of a parent can be anticipated. Perhaps they had a known or chronic illness that slowly deteriorated their health over time. Perhaps their healthcare provider had told you a proposed time limit that your parents had left. Perhaps you’d had discussions with your parents in their last days and had had the opportunity to prepare yourself mentally and emotionally. In cases like these, you’re given the chance to say goodbye and have closure.
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Cortez Ranieri (Grief Of A Parent And Loss: Navigating And Coping With Grief After The Death Of A Parent (Grief and Loss Book 3))
“
and, most striking, why I failed to notice any of these insidious changes in myself. Even as my mind was deteriorating, I couldn’t see that I was slipping into mental illness.
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Barbara K. Lipska (The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery)
“
Onanism was hardly murder. Masturbation did not fall within the category of mania but instead was thought to cause mental and physical deterioration. I’d witnessed attempted cures involving mechanical restraints, surgery and moral discipline, most often delivered in clinical settings. None of which had probably been offered Mr. Tarski. I’d entered the cell expecting a monster. I left having met a simpleton. Tarski was not the Shoreditch killer.
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Thea Sutton (The Women of Blackmouth Street)
“
But it is not the minds of heretics that are deteriorated most by the ban placed on all inquiry which does not end in the orthodox conclusions. The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy.
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John Stuart Mill (On Liberty)
“
Edward III’s wooden funerary mask survives, and shows a slight droop to his mouth, leading some historians to speculate that the slow mental deterioration of his last few years of life may have been due to a series of strokes.Edward III’s wooden funerary mask survives, and shows a slight droop to his mouth, leading some historians to speculate that the slow mental deterioration of his last few years of life may have been due to a series of strokes.
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Danièle Cybulskie (Life in Medieval Europe: Fact and Fiction)
“
Richter compares the conditions of rat domestication with those now provided by the 'Welfare State'-ample food, no danger, no stress, uniform environment and climate, and so forth. But he notes that, under these seemingly favorable conditions, organic deterioration has taken place: a decrease in the size of the adrenal glands, which help the organism meet stress or fatigue and forfend certain diseases: while the thyroid gland, the regulator of metabolism, becomes less active. Not strangely, perhaps, the brains of the domestic rat, and perhaps their mental ability, are smaller. At the same time, the sex glands mature earlier, become bigger, show more activity, and result in a higher rate of fertility. How human!
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Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
“
This materialistic and competitive striving and needing ‘to have and own’ has been linked to deteriorating mental health, especially in young people.16
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Paul B. Gilbert (Mindful Compassion)
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My only wish is that men in the world below may sometimes pick up this tale when they are recovering from sleep or drunkenness, or when they wish to escape from business worries or a fit of the dumps, and in doing so find not only mental refreshment but even perhaps, if they will heed its lesson and abandon their vain and frivolous pursuits, some small arrest in the deterioration of their vital forces. What
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Cao Xueqin (The Golden Days (The Story of the Stone #1))
“
A few years later, researchers at Yale University School of Medicine quantified this risk. They reviewed the records of 87,290 patients diagnosed with depression or anxiety between 1997 and 2001 and determined those treated with antidepressants converted to bipolar at the rate of 7.7 percent per year, which was three times greater than for those not exposed to the drugs.17 As a result, over longer periods, 20 to 40 percent of all patients initially diagnosed with unipolar depression today eventually convert to bipolar illness.18 Indeed, in a recent survey of members of the Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association, 60 percent of those with a bipolar diagnosis said they had initially fallen ill with major depression and had turned bipolar after exposure to an antidepressant.19 This is data that tells of a process that routinely manufactures bipolar patients. “If you create iatrogenically a bipolar patient,” explained Fred Goodwin, in a 2005 interview in Primary Psychiatry, “that patient is likely to have recurrences of bipolar illness even if the offending antidepressant is discontinued. The evidence shows that once a patient has had a manic episode, he or she is more likely to have another one, even without the antidepressant stimulation.”20 Italy’s Giovanni Fava put it this way: “Antidepressant-induced mania is not simply a temporary and fully reversible phenomenon, but may trigger complex biochemical mechanisms of illness deterioration.”21
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Robert Whitaker (Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America)
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But teaching kids that failures, insults, and painful experiences will do lasting damage is harmful in and of itself. Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure)
“
Safetyism was imposed on the millennials beginning slowly in the 1980s and then more quickly in the 1990s.[5] The rapid deterioration of mental health, however, did not begin until the early 2010s and was concentrated in Gen Z, not among millennials.[6] It was not until the addition of the second experience blocker—the smartphone—that rates began to rise.
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Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness)
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The Nazi method of completely dehumanizing us before throwing us into the fire worked beautifully. Only a very few, the strongest, the cleanest, the noblest were able to retain a semblance of human dignity; the rest were engulfed by the gurgling swamp of crime, mental deterioration, and filth.
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Gisella Perl (I Was A Doctor In Auschwitz)
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When Vincent Van Gogh was 27, he dedicated himself entirely to painting. He used to work with extreme intensity. Painting was his whole life and he was highly productive. He used to paint at lightning speed but despite his hard work and genius, he struggled financially because his painting wouldn’t sell. He was a man ahead of his time. His younger brother, Theo Van Gogh, had to support him financially. Later on in life, Vincet’s mental health deteriorated and on July 27th, 1890, he shot himself in the chest with a pistol while painting alone in a field. He died two days later.
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Library Mindset (The Art of Laziness: Overcome Procrastination & Improve Your Productivity)
“
gaslighting has come to be defined as the manipulation by psychological means of an individual in order to cause that individual to question their own memory, perception, and sanity (Stout, 2005). It is a tactic often associated with bullies, sociopaths, narcissists, and verbal or emotional abusers who want to deflect their own wrongdoing and belittle or degrade the intelligence of their victims and undermine their credibility as witnesses (Stout, 2005). During the retaliation of the whistleblower, gaslighting purposefully creates a cognitive dissonance within the victimized employee/whistleblower so that they question their own sense of reality, lose confidence in their own judgment, and experience mental health deterioration from the stress (Ahern, 2018).
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Jacqueline Garrick (The Psychosocial Impacts of Whistleblower Retaliation: Shattering Employee Resilience and the Workplace Promise)
“
I see on various internet forums, people talking about their “inadequate” mental health. They are depressed, anxious, worried etc. But they blame their minds. Not one person has ever blamed the economic system that causes their deterioration. That is how brainwashed they are on the system, that they blame themselves for what is the systems flaw.
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Jack R. Ernest (Remarks On Existential Nihilism: Labelling, Narcissism and Existential Maturity)
“
For example, it is only in the past few years that scientists have discovered how the brain gets rid of its waste. In other parts of the body, waste is removed in several ways, including via the lymphatic system, a system of vessels that run in parallel to the blood circulatory system. The lymphatic system picks up waste, broken-down cells, and invaders like viruses, bacteria, and fungi and carries them to the lymph glands, where the immune-system cells deal with them. Despite our well-established understanding of this process, we really didn’t know how the brain accomplished the same feat because the lymphatic system had not yet been discovered in the brain. One of the coolest studies I’ve seen in a long time was released last year by Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center.21 Nedergaard’s team showed that during sleep, the size of the neurons in the brain is reduced by up to 60%. This creates a lot of space between brain cells. Then, still during sleep, a microscopic network of lymphatic vessels—the glymphatic system—clears the metabolic waste from these spaces between the neurons. This research shows that you can literally wash your brain of waste products and damage each night, if you sleep well.22 Dr. Jeffrey Iliff, who works in the same lab as Dr. Nedergaard, has shown that more than half of the amyloid beta, a protein that accumulates in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, is washed out of the brain each night via the glymphatic system. This is important because waste buildup in the brain occurs in nearly all people with neurodegenerative diseases, and this buildup may kill neurons, ultimately leading to cognitive diseases and mental deterioration. (Dr. Iliff’s TED Talk “One More Reason to Get a Good Night’s Sleep” is a great watch.)
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Greg Wells (The Ripple Effect: Sleep Better, Eat Better, Move Better, Think Better)
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Gradually, from 1862 onward, Faraday's health deteriorated and his mental grasp of what was going on around him crumbled; the present and the past were equally confused in his mind. In a last letter to a close friend, he wrote: My Dear Schönbein, Again and again, I tear up my letters, for I write nonsense. I cannot spell or write a line continuously. Whether I shall ever recover—this confusion—I do not know. I will not write anymore
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Nancy Forbes (Faraday, Maxwell, and the Electromagnetic Field: How Two Men Revolutionized Physics)
“
Want to be a Freelancer?
Do You want to be a Freelancer? If so, first of all - You need to be well-versed in the subject you want to freelance on. If you can be good at a few things, you will get more work as a freelancer. Most of the clients on this platform are foreigners. So to communicate with them you have to master the English language very well.
How to Start Freelancing?
To start working as a freelancer you need to work step by step from the very beginning. Find a specific task or skill that you want to excel at.
Must practice speaking or communication in English. Create your own freelancing account. You have to decide how much money you will take in exchange for the work.
Choose the Topic that Suits You -
There are many types of jobs that can be done on the freelancing marketplace. Both fairly easy and difficult jobs are available on this platform.
Easy jobs include data entry, article writing, and jobs for which a large number of bids are received due to which these jobs have to be rushed and competition is high.
Difficult jobs include high-quality expensive jobs like web development, web design, graphics design, and software development. Which have higher remuneration. Now you have to decide what kind of work you will do in freelancing.
Everything You Need to Train -
The first thing you need to train is patience. Without patience, you can never survive on this platform. There are quite a number of freelancing service providers in our country who provide coaching through various courses.
You can complete your training through coaching if you want. You will need a good laptop or computer with an internet connection for regular practice.
A minimum of basic computer knowledge is essential for learning the job, along with the ability to speak English. You have to focus hard on the subject you want to master and develop a mindset to stick with it.
Incorporate what you have learned and done into your portfolio, gain an understanding of the marketplaces, be disciplined, and work on time.
Work to Gain Experience -
Your path to freelancing may not be smooth. But it should not stop there. Just as in life, there are various problems, pains, and dangers, so it is in the case of freelancing.
At first, you may not get job offers or get results as expected.
So don't be impatient, you have to strengthen yourself mentally. Because you are in the first step of gaining your experience.
Don't just think of yourself as a freelancer, think of yourself as a student who needs experience, not money. So if you make a mistake at work, try to learn from it.
You can Reduce the Unemployment rate by Teaching others to Work -
Apart from earning income by teaching others to work, you can reduce the unemployment rate by contributing to the economic development of the country.
Day by day the country's job market is deteriorating due to which the number of unemployed is increasing every year. Many youths have lost their whole lives, lost precious time of their lives in the pursuit of government jobs.
If you are thinking of making your career permanently as a freelancer then you can train those youngsters and form a team of yours.
By doing this you can help create employment for millions of youth and increase your income.
Please Visit Our Blogging Website to read more Articles related to Freelancing and Outsourcing, Thank You.
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Bhairab IT Zone
“
Akathisia's stygian abyss, where immeasurable restlessness tears the matrix of the psyche apart, is where beauty, love, and resilience find their most resolute expression. Even though Akathisia makes the body a puppet to an unseen puppeteer and the soul a vessel adrift in turbulent seas, human strength is the ability to find grace amidst chaos, cultivate love in desolate landscapes, and summon resilience in the face of despair and deterioration. Thus, amid mental and physical anguish, humanity's indomitable spirit transforms suffering into a crucible that yields a transcendent understanding of beauty, love, and the will to overcome. We become wise, compassionate, and resilient through suffering in this crucible.
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Jonathan Harnisch
“
The country in America to-day is constantly paying a similar tribute to the city in the sacrifice of its best blood, its best brain, the finest physical and mental fiber in the world. This great stream of superb country manhood, which is ever flowing cityward, is rapidly deteriorated by the softening, emasculating influences of the city, until the superior virility, stamina and sturdy qualities entirely disappear in two or three generations of city life.
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Napoleon Hill (The Prosperity Bible: The Greatest Writings of All Time on the Secrets to Wealth and Prosperity)
“
But it is not the minds of heretics that are deteriorated most, by the ban placed on all inquiry which does not end in the orthodox conclusions. The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy.
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John Stuart Mill (On Liberty)
“
It’s easy to conclude the following: if you fail to take care of your mental health, your discipline and willpower quickly deteriorate.
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Peter Hollins (Finish What You Start: The Art of Following Through, Taking Action, Executing, & Self-Discipline)
“
Persons who have made a special study of the physical condition of these people declare that this part of the population shows marked signs of physical and mental deterioration, due, they say, to the lack of sufficient food. For example, in respect to stature and weight, the Sicilians are nearly 2 per cent. behind the population in northern Italy. This difference is mainly due to the poor physical condition of the agricultural classes, who, like the agricultural population of the southern mainland of Italy, are smaller than the population in the cities.
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Booker T. Washington (The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe: Exploring Social Inequality: European Perspectives and African American Insights)
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His physical and mental state sharply deteriorated.
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David M. Rubenstein (The American Story: Conversations with Master Historians (Gift for History Buffs))
“
His mental state had been deteriorating for some time and while he was in the hospital had definitely taken a turn for the worse.
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Mary L. Trump (Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man)
“
primary reason we procrastinate is that we feel we are unable to do that particular thing because we look at its entirety and decide that it is quite big to achieve. Procrastinating is quite harmful to your health too; it can have a significant effect on your sleep, activate anxiety issues, and your mental health deteriorates.
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Intensive Life Publishing (Summary of Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life)
“
Upon the proper use and conservation of sexual force the progress of civilization itself depends. All history shows that just in proportion as the sex instinct is kept sacred, pure, and the life essence properly used and converted into creative, productive power, does a nation reach a high state of civilization. Wherever this instinct becomes generally perverted, as it did in ancient Rome, people become devitalized, lose their physical and mental stamina, and rapidly deteriorate. Where it is protected by virtue and purity of life, the nation rises in the scale of civilization; where it is abused, perverted, the nation sinks to the level of low-flying ideals.
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Orison Swett Marden (The crime of silence ([c1915]))
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Our pursuit of instant gratifications and instant progress has been leading us down the path of mental deterioration and we seem to be completely unaware of it. And if this continues, then soon serenity will become the most expensive commodity in the market - which will be sold to everyone by the pharmaceutical industry in the form of pills and treatments.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Gospel of Technology)
“
ME is a neuroimmune disease that, contrary to common misconceptions, is not characterised by chronic fatigue, but rather by a severe exacerbation of symptoms which manifest after a minor physical or mental exertion. This hallmark symptom characteristic of ME, known as Post-Exertional Malaise (PEM), can persist for days, weeks or consequently be a the trigger for a relapse or deterioration.
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Anil van der Zee
“
She looked down at her burger. “Josh, I’m just a little run-down, okay? I’m sleeping with Sloan in the hospital every night. I’m living off of black coffee and whatever I can shove in my mouth. My OCD is manic—”
“You have OCD?” It didn’t really surprise me. I’d seen a touch of it in her since I’d known her. One of my sisters had it. I knew it when I saw it.
“Usually it’s not this bad, but it gets worse when I’m under stress.” She finished the burger and balled up the paper like it was an effort to even do that. Then she lay back against the headrest and closed her eyes.
She was falling apart. She was deteriorating physically and mentally trying to keep Sloan together. And where the fuck was I in all this?
Failing her.
She wouldn’t ask for my help. I knew her well enough to know this, and I hadn’t even been to the hospital in three days to check in on her. I’d left her on her own with Sloan and Brandon’s family and all the rest of it.
I should have been there. Maybe I could have gotten ahead of this life-support thing. Taken a spot on the overnight shift to be with Sloan so Kristen could get some sleep. Made sure she ate. Talking to me or not, Kristen never turned down food.
I blamed myself for this. But I blamed her too. Because if she had let me, I would have taken care of her. We could have taken care of each other, and neither of us would be in such bad shape.
I reached over and threaded my fingers through hers. She didn’t pull away. She looked too tired to fight me. She squeezed my hand, and the warmth of her touch coursed through me.
“I’ll go to the hospital,” I said. “I’ll talk to his parents, and I’ll stay with Sloan today. I need you to go home and sleep. And tomorrow I want you to go to the doctor. Call to make the appointment tonight because you might have to fast before they do bloodwork.”
She just looked at me, her beautiful face hollow and weary. She was always so strong. It was scary seeing her declining like this.
Love did this to her. Her love of Sloan.
And probably her love of me too.
I knew it wasn’t easy on her. I knew she thought she was doing the right thing. But fuck, if she would just stop. If she would stop, we could both be okay.
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Abby Jimenez
“
As Twenge wrote for The Atlantic, “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”12
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Abigail Shrier (Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters)
“
Idleness & isolation both starts with “I.” What can I do, should I do nothing by waiting for better things to arrive hence surrendering to the moment of in-action or should I act & make this moment best of all moments? Who am I? Someone good with making the best use of given opportunities or someone who creates opportunities! Workstations are lonely, customer queries are declining, we enter the phase of isolation & idleness, deciding the next move becomes impossible. We begin the day looking for work, which is non-existent so we decide to let ourselves flow with the tide of idleness. We do nothing which seems difficult in the beginning but gradually it becomes a part of routine. We get surrounded by nothingness; nothing in-hand & nothing in sight. We stop thinking, we stop moving, like our physical fitness even our mental fitness start to deteriorate by lack of thinking.
Nothing to think is a situation when we believe what others say, we become slaves of their thoughts, we stop being ourselves we choose to be like them, because it offers us a chance to avoid being singled out, we follow where others lead us, we knowingly become a sheep and blindly start following the herd. Idleness & isolation always gives us a choice to get-up and change the next moment, to come out of slumber, to try things not tried before, because we perform the best when we have nothing to lose, it’s that moment when we decide to give-up on being a follower & become the leader. Slowly results start coming, people start looking at us, what have we done & how have we done it. That is the moment when we transform the thought process of the teams, departments & organizations. That is when the “I” transforms itself into “WE” and impossible transform into the possible.
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Shahenshah Hafeez Khan
“
But the United States lost more than its innocence in the 1960s. Its moral deterioration constituted one of the most catastrophic collective mental breakdowns the world had ever witnessed.
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Christopher Bollas (When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia)
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Parents beware! Your children . . . are being introduced to a new danger in the form of a drugged cigarette, marijuana. Young [people] are slaves to this narcotic, continuing addiction until they deteriorate mentally, become insane, [and] turn to violent crime and murder.
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Johann Hari (Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs)
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However, Wallace's research proceeded on the assumption that people are aging not by bits and pieces but as human beings as a whole. Consequently, ageing contains a large option dimension. When old people will maintain their mental faculties by using them constantly, then the practice of meditation, which fully unlocks the mind, can do even more. As mentioned earlier, Wallace's basic observation was that long-term meditators had their biological age lowered by five to twelve years. (High levels of an unknown hormone called DHEA[dehydroepiandrosterone] have also been found; it has been hypothesized that DHEA somehow helps slow aging and may prevent cancer development and growth.) This research suggests that aging is regulated by consciousness. Operating at the usual level of shallow, confused thinking, we intensify the aging process of our bodies, but as we step into the transcendent area of quiet movement, mental activity ceases, and cell activity evidently responds accordingly. If this is true, then ageing can be programmed from different awareness levels. When we program to deteriorate ourselves, which was the norm in previous generations, then that becomes the truth. This kind of programming is not simply a matter of reasoning or believing. Positive attitudes, mental alertness, willingness to survive and other psychological characteristics can ease old age; they certainly help to crack the rigid social conditioning that often traps old people.
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Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
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Just as a lack of physical exercise has negative effects on our bodies and mood, a lack of mental exercise is bad for us because it causes our neurons and neural connections to deteriorate—and, as a result, reduces our ability to react to our surroundings.
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Héctor García (Ikigai: The Japanese secret to a long and happy life)
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I have found that most serial killers suffer from personality disorders rather than mental diseases. People with personality disorders have rigid personality structures and often have difficulties with interpersonal relationships, but they are not mad. On the other hand, people suffering from mental diseases may lose contact with reality, hallucinate and deteriorate in their general functioning.
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Micki Pistorius (Catch me a Killer: Serial murders – a profiler's true story)