Stress Level Quotes

Stress level: extreme. It's like she was a jar with the lid screwed on too tight, and inside the jar were pickles, angry pickles, and they were fermenting, and about to explode.

Constantly scanning the world for the negative comes with a great cost. It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals.

Convince yourself everyday that you are worthy of a good life. Let go of stress, breathe. Stay positive, all is well.

To summarize, using money to motivate people can be a double-edged sword. For tasks that require cognitive ability, low to moderate performance-based incentives can help. But when the incentive level is very high, it can command too much attention and thereby distract the person’s mind with thoughts about the reward. This can create stress and ultimately reduce the level of performance.

The same two things could happen to two people, but that doesn't mean they would experience the exact same stress over it. We all have different levels of stress that we're accustomed to. You probably felt the same amount of stress over your family situation as I sometimes do about mine, even though they're completely on different levels. But that doesn't make you weaker. It doesn't make you an asshole. We're just two different people with two different experiences.

It was after I first began to uplift my thoughts a bit that my cravings for junk food started to dissipate. I did not connect the two at that time. First, I simply noticed that I didn’t need to sleep so much. It took a while before I realized that in addition to my improved energy level, there was a direct correlation between chewing on mental garbage and putting garbage in my mouth.

Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

The salient stressors in the lives of most human beings today — at least in the industrialized world — are emotional. Just like laboratory animals unable to escape, people find themselves trapped in lifestyles and emotional patterns inimical to their health. The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities. We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot therefore act in self-preserving ways. The physiology of stress eats away at our bodies not because it has outlived its usefulness but because we may no longer have the competence to recognize its signals.

There is simply no other exercise, and certainly no machine, that produces the level of central nervous system activity, improved balance and coordination, skeletal loading and bone density enhancement, muscular stimulation and growth, connective tissue stress and strength, psychological demand and toughness, and overall systemic conditioning than the correctly performed full squat.

Male love circuits get an extra kick when stress levels are high. After an intense physical challenge, for instance, males will bond quickly and sexually with the first willing female they lay eyes on. Women, by contrast, will rebuff advances or expressions of affection and desire when under stress. The reason may be that the stress hormone cortisol blocks oxytocin's action in the female brain, abruptly shutting off a woman's desire for sex and physical touch.

In the absence of relief, a young person’s natural response—their only response, really—is to repress and disconnect from the feeling-states associated with suffering. One no longer knows one’s body. Oddly, this self-estrangement can show up later in life in the form of an apparent strength, such as my ability to perform at a high level when hungry or stressed or fatigued, pushing on without awareness of my need for pause, nutrition, or rest.

Prolonged stress causes the human body to make adaptations so it can continue to serve you at a functional level. The more stress, the more adaptations.

My idea of socialism is no state monopoly. There should be stress on the subjectivity of the human being. You need good material conditions, a high level of culture, much freedom and friendship. And it won't come today or tomorrow. It's a long and winding road

Life is not about control or making things happen in the ways we think they should happen. In fact, it's rather arrogant for us to be on this planet that's been here for so long and expect to be able to control life on it. If we want to see changes, then our task is to set things in motion, not to micromanage and make them happen in the ways we think they should. If we have something that is possessing us, such as alcohol or our television sets or our cell phones, then it could be time to let it go and move on with our lives. If we're holding on to resentment and anger, we're simply raising our own stress levels and blood pressure, but we're not contributing anything positive to the situation--and it's time to let it go.

At every level, from the microcellular to the psychological, exercise not only wards off the ill effects of chronic stress; it can also reverse them. Studies show that if researchers exercise rats that have been chronically stressed, that activity makes the hippocampus grow back to its preshriveled state. The mechanisms by which exercise changes how we think and feel are so much more effective than donuts, medicines, and wine. When you say you feel less stressed out after you go for a swim, or even a fast walk, you are.

When we learn to work with our own Inner Nature, and with the natural laws operating around us, we reach the level of Wu Wei. Then we work with the natural order of things and operate on the principle of minimal effort. Since the natural world follows that principle, it does not make mistakes. Mistakes are made–or imagined–by man, the creature with the overloaded Brain who separates himself from the supporting network of natural laws by interfering and trying too hard. When you work with Wu Wei, you put the round peg in the round hole and the square peg in the square hole. No stress, no struggle. Egotistical Desire tries to force the round peg into the square hole and the square peg into the round hole. Cleverness tries to devise craftier ways of making pegs fit where they don’t belong. Knowledge tries to figure out why round pegs fit into round holes, but not square holes. Wu Wei doesn’t try. It doesn’t think about it. It just does it. And when it does, it doesn’t appear to do much of anything. But Things Get Done. When you work with Wu Wei, you have no real accidents. Things may get a little Odd at times, but they work out. You don’t have to try very hard to make them work out; you just let them. [...] If you’re in tune with The Way Things Work, then they work the way they need to, no matter what you may think about it at the time. Later on you can look back and say, "Oh, now I understand. That had to happen so that those could happen, and those had to happen in order for this to happen…" Then you realize that even if you’d tried to make it all turn out perfectly, you couldn’t have done better, and if you’d really tried, you would have made a mess of the whole thing. Using Wu Wei, you go by circumstances and listen to your own intuition. "This isn’t the best time to do this. I’d better go that way." Like that. When you do that sort of thing, people may say you have a Sixth Sense or something. All it really is, though, is being Sensitive to Circumstances. That’s just natural. It’s only strange when you don’t listen.

I was the dhampir daughter of the family patriarch, the little known stain on an otherwise immaculate record. Louis-Cesare, on the other hand, was vamp royalty. The only Child of Mircea’s younger, and far stranger, brother Radu, he was a first-level master--the highest and rarest vampire rank. A month ago, the prince and the pariah had crossed paths because we had one thing in common: we were very good at killing things. And Mircea’s bug-eyed crazy brother Vlad had needed killing if anyone ever had. The collaboration hadn’t exactly been stress free, but to my surprise, we eventually sorted things out and got the job done. By the end, I’d even started to think that it was kind of nice, having someone to watch my back for a change. Sometimes, I could be really stupid.

When you arrive in your driveway and turn off the car, you remain behind the wheel another ten minutes. You fear the night is being locked in and coded on a cellular level and want time to function as a power wash. Sitting there staring at the closed garage door you are reminded that a friend once told you there exists the medical term—John Henryism—for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed the physiological costs were high. You hope by sitting in silence you are bucking the trend.

there is a strong association between poverty and the level of cortisol produced by the body, an indicator of stress. And

For disease prevention, berries of all colors have “emerged as champions,” according to the head of the Bioactive Botanical Research Laboratory.39 The purported anticancer properties of berry compounds have been attributed to their apparent ability to counteract, reduce, and repair damage resulting from oxidative stress and inflammation.40 But it wasn’t known until recently that berries may also boost your levels of natural killer cells.

Did you know six minutes of reading can help reduce stress levels by up to sixty percent?" ... "That's sixty-eight percent better than listening to music, one hundred percent better than drinking tea, and three hundred percent better than going for a walk.

A common misconception is that some people are only in pain because they are weak, anxious, depressed, or do not deal well with stress. This is not correct. Every experience you have — touch, warmth, itch, pain — is created by the brain and thus is all in your head, but it does not mean they are not real. Things like fear, anxiety, or depression can increase pain levels and can increase the chance of persistent pain. But often, these feelings only develop after a person already has chronic pain.

avoid doctors like the bubonic plague. On some level I know it’s ignorant, but I think the stress of knowing you have a fatal disease kills faster than the disease itself.

The link between our minds and bodies holds a well of potential when it came to radical healing — even mainstream medicine accepts that our stress levels and thought patterns, for example, can impact our physical health.

So, first, I want you to know that everybody experiences some level of anxiety. It's a normal human response to stress. It's like your body's smoke alarm. If there's a fire, you want to know so you can put it out or call 9-1-1, right?” I shrug. “I guess. But it feels like my alarm is going off all the time.” Doctor Ann nods. “Some people's systems are more sensitive than others'. For you, maybe all it takes is burning a piece of toast, and your alarm thinks the house is on fire.

Stop explaining to others, people will only understand from their level of discernment.

Fortunately, there is an inviolable law in our emotional environment that goes something like this: Our current level of stress will be exactly that of our tolerance to stress.

Are you managing your energy well and using it for things that matter? Do you stop to recharge before you push yourself to critically low levels? Unplug to recharge.

For almost every addict who s mired in this terrible disease, other -- a mother or father, a child or spouse, an aunt or uncles or grandparents, a brother or sister -- are suffering too. Families are the hidden victims of addiction, enduring enormous levels of stress and pain. They suffer sleepless nights, deep anxiety, and physical exhaustion brought on by worry and desperation. They lie awake for hours on end as fear for their loved one's safety crowds out any possibility of sleep. They liveeach day with a weight inside that drags them down. Unable to laugh or smile, they are sometimes filled with bottled-up anger or a constant sadness that keeps them on the verge of tears.

In my opinion, all HSPs are gifted because of their trait itself. But some are unusually so. Indeed, one reason for the idea of “liberated” HSPs was the seemingly odd mixture of traits emerging from study after study of gifted adults: impulsivity, curiosity, the strong need for independence, a high energy level, along with introversion, intuitiveness, emotional sensitivity, and nonconformity. Giftedness in the workplace, however, is tricky to handle. First, your originality can become a particular problem when you must offer your ideas in a group situation. Many organizations stress group problem solving just because it brings out the ideas in people like you, which are then tempered by others. The difficulty arises when everyone proposes ideas and yours seem so obviously better to

When he’d joined the Service he’d been in Psych Eval, which had involved evaluating operational strategies for psychological impact – on targets as well as agents – but had also meant carrying out individual assessments; who was stressed, who’d benefit from a change of routine, and who was a psychopath. Every organisation had a few, usually at management level, and it was handy to know who they were in case there was an emergency, or an office party.

If you’ve ever felt stress—and who hasn’t?—chances are excellent that it’s because you felt you just didn’t have enough time to do what you wanted to at the level of quality to which you were committed.

For those habituated to high levels of internal stress since early childhood, it is the absence of stress that creates unease, evoking boredom and a sense of meaninglessness. People may become addicted to their own stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, Hans Selye observed. To such persons stress feels desirable, while the absence of it feels like something to be avoided.

Coping with any death is traumatic; suicide compounds the anguish because we are forced to deal with two traumatic events at the same time. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the level of stress resulting from the suicide of a loved one is ranked as catastrophic–equivalent to that of a concentration camp experience.

If you want to immediately reduce your stress levels, to begin each day with the kind of calm, clarity, and peace of mind that will allow you to stay focused on what’s most important in your life, and even dance on the edge of enlightenment—do the opposite of what most people do—start every morning with a period of purposeful Silence.

Humans are built to move. We evolved under conditions that required daily intense physical activity, and even among individuals with lower physical potential, that hard-earned genotype is still ours today. The modern sedentary lifestyle leads to the inactivation of the genes related to physical performance, attributes that were once critical for survival and which are still critical for the correct, healthy expression of the genotype. The genes are still there, they just aren't doing anything because the body is not stressed enough to cause a physiological adaptation requiring their activation. The sedentary person's heart, lungs, muscles, bones, nerves and brain all operate far below the level at which they evolved to function, and at which they still function best.

Amy ran on sugar, caffeine, and pain pills, and would sacrifice an entire night of sleep to level up a character in one of her games. The people with health insurance get antidepressants and Adderall, the rich get cocaine, the clean-living Christians settle for mug after mug of coffee and all-you-can-eat buffets. The reality is that society had gotten too fast, noisy, and stressful for the human brain to process and everybody was ingesting something to either keep up or dull the shame of falling behind. For those few who truly live clean, well, it’s the self-righteousness that gets them high.

You lived in constant anxiety and dread, and these emotions eventually became the neurotic ingredients of your character. (I am sure it’s why you later drank and did drugs, trying to soothe yourself.) This high-level stress made it impossible for you to think or study or play or dream or learn or concentrate or remember anything. You could not relax. You did not sleep.

Your life and work are made up of outcomes and actions. When your operational behavior is grooved to organize everything that comes your way, at all levels, based upon those dynamics, a deep alignment occurs, and wondrous things emerge. You become highly productive. You make things up, and you make them happen.

This brings up a key concept, namely the inverted U. The complete absence of stress is aversively boring. Moderate, transient stress is wonderful—various aspects of brain function are enhanced; glucocorticoid levels in that range enhance dopamine release; rats work at pressing levers in order to be infused with just the right amount of glucocorticoids. And as stress becomes more severe and prolonged, those good effects disappear (with, of course, dramatic individual differences as to where the transition from stress as stimulatory to overstimulatory occurs; one person’s nightmare is another’s hobby).

Males who do extreme amounts of exercise, such as professional soccer players and runners who cover more than 40 or 50 miles a week, have less LHRH, LH, and testosterone in their circulation, smaller testes, less functional sperm. They also have higher levels of glucocorticoids in their bloodstreams, even in the absence of stress. (A similar decline in reproductive function is found in men who are addicted to opiate drugs.)

I worry about you. Not just about your safety. I worry when you’re stressed. I worry when you’re unhappy.” His words leveled her world. Her eyes snapped open and she saw him—saw him in a way that would stay with her forever. “I fucking worry about you not eating breakfast. I worry about every damn little thing about you. I worry about you like I’ve never worried about anything in my life. Because I care. I fucking care, Charlize. I care so much it makes me scared. I don’t think you’re incapable of looking after yourself—I just can’t help needing to make everything okay.

To spur growth, it must be seismic; it must shake you to your core and cause you to fundamentally rethink everything you believe. The higher the level of stress caused by the event, the greater the potential for change.

The hardest chore to do, and to do right, is to think. Why do you think the common man would choose labor, partially, as a distraction from his own thoughts? It is because that level of stress, he most absolutely abhors.

I am trying to stress a point which they do not sufficiently emphasize, or tend to overlook altogether-namely, that the organism is not a mosaic aggregate of elementary physico-chemical processes, but a hierarchy in which each member, from the sub-cellular level upward, is a closely integrated structure, equipped with self-regulatory devices, and enjoys an advanced form of self-government.

Although previous studies had suggested that friendship--male and female--could be a powerful antidote to stress, more recent research indicates that broken promises, dashed expectations, and other side effects of friendship gone wrong can actually raise the level of stress in our lives, often to disastrous effect.

the average level of happiness increases in old age; fewer negative emotions occur and, when they do, they don’t persist as long. Connected to this, brain-imaging studies show that negative images have less of an impact, and positive images have more of an impact on brain metabolism in older people, as compared to young.

the top causes of stress in the U.S. have been identified by scientists at Stanford Graduate School of Business in a major study. They are “a lack of health insurance, the constant threat of lay-offs, lack of discretion and autonomy in decision-making, long working hours, low levels of organizational justice, and unrealistic demands.

I think one of the reasons that I feel empty after watching a lot of TV, and one of the things that makes TV seductive, is that it gives the illusion of relationships with people. It's a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn't require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can't see me. And, and, they're there for me, and I can, I can receive from the TV, I can receive entertainment and stimulation. Without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive. The problem is it's also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I've gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know: I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up. But there's also, there's something nourishing about it, because I think like as creatures, we've all got to figure out how to be together in the same room. And so TV is like candy in that it's more pleasurable and easier than the real food. But it also doesn't have any of the nourishment of real food. And the thing, what the book is supposed to be about is, What has happened to us, that I'm now willing--and I do this too--that I'm willing to derive enormous amounts of my sense of community and awareness of other people, from television? But I'm not willing to undergo the stress and awkwardness and potential shit of dealing with real people. And that as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like--I mean, you and I coulda done this through e-mail, and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right? Like, at a certain point, we're gonna have to build some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? But if that's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. In a meaningful way, you're going to die.

Medical studies have shown that cursing reduces levels of stress and pain. Repressing your anger is not healthy. It's much better to verbalize it, and let off steam. Maybe all that repressed anger is the reason why there are so many serial killers in America.

As we just saw, in this learning process we assume from the start that as long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than wrong with you, no matter how ill or how despairing you may be feeling in a given moment. But if you hope to mobilize your inner capacities for growth and for healing and to take charge in your life on a new level, a certain kind of effort and energy on your part will be required. The way we put it is that it can be stressful to take the stress reduction program. I sometimes explain this by saying that there are times when you have to light one fire to put out another. There are no drugs that will make you immune to stress or to pain, or that will by themselves magically solve your life’s problems or promote healing. It will take conscious effort on your part to move in a direction of healing, inner peace, and well-being. This means learning to work with the very stress and pain that are causing you to suffer.

Stress is not because of work—this is important to remember. Everybody thinks their job is stressful. No job is stressful. There are many jobs that could present challenging situations. There could be nasty bosses, insecure colleagues, emergency rooms, impossible deadlines—or you might even find yourself in the middle of a war zone! But these are not inherently stressful. It is our compulsive reaction to the situations in which we are placed that causes stress. Stress is a certain level of internal friction. One can easily lubricate the inner mechanism with some amount of inner work and awareness. So, it is your inability to handle your own system that is stressing you out. On some level, you do not know how to handle your body, mind, and emotions; that is the problem. How

Open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory. They’re associated with high staff turnover. They make people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure. Open-plan workers are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure and elevated stress levels and to get the flu; they argue more with their colleagues; they worry about coworkers eavesdropping on their phone calls and spying on their computer screens. They have fewer personal and confidential conversations with colleagues. They’re often subject to loud and uncontrollable noise, which raises heart rates; releases cortisol, the body’s fight-or-flight “stress” hormone; and makes people socially distant, quick to anger, aggressive, and slow to help others.

social media addict? This is a very real problem—so much so that researchers from Norway developed a new instrument to measure Facebook addiction called the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale.[3] Social media has become as ubiquitous as television in our everyday lives, and this research shows that multitasking social media can be as addictive as drugs, alcohol, and chemical substance abuse. A large number of friends on social media networks may appear impressive, but according to a new report, the more social circles a person is linked to, the more likely the social media will be a source of stress.[4] It can also have a detrimental effect on consumer well-being because milkshake-multitasking interferes with clear thinking and decision-making, which lowers self-control and leads to rash, impulsive buying and poor eating decisions. Greater social media use is associated with a higher body mass index, increased binge eating, a lower credit score, and higher levels of credit card debt for consumers with many close friends in their social network—all caused by a lack of self-control.[5] We Can Become Shallow

fourteen-year-olds club!” He held out his hand for a high five. Sophie was too stunned to return it. “Please try not to stress, Miss Foster. Nothing has actually changed. You’re the exact same girl you were a few minutes ago. You’re simply learning the proper way of counting.” She knew he was right—but it felt so much huger than that. Especially when Biana said, “Huh, so you’re older than me.” Based on their IDs, Biana was a little more than thirteen-and-a-half. Dex was also thirteen, but he would be fourteen in a few weeks. Keefe was less than a month away from turning fifteen, and Fitz was about two months away from turning sixteen. “So, you’re kind of in the middle,” Dex said. “But you and I are still the closest in age.” He was right—though now she was six months older than him. And the gap between her and Keefe and Fitz had narrowed significantly. “Wait—was I in the wrong level in Foxfire?” Sophie asked. “Your age falls in the middle of the grade level brackets,” Mr. Forkle said. So you could’ve started as a Level Two just as easily as a Level Three. And given how behind you

White men grow on an open, level field. White women grow on far steeper and rougher terrain because the field wasn't made for them. Women of color grow not just on a hill, but on a cliffside over the ocean, battered by wind and waves. None of us chooses the landscape in which we're planted. If you find yourself on an ocean-battered cliff, your only choice is to grow there, or fall into the ocean. So if we transplant a survivor of the steep hill and cliff to the level field, natives of the field may look at that survivor and wonder why she has so much trouble trusting people, systems, and even her own bodily sensations. Why is this tree so bent and gnarled? It's because that is what it took to survive in the place where she grew. A tree that's fought wind and gravity and erosion to grow strong and green on a steep cliff is going to look strange and out of place when moved to the level playing field. The gnarled, wind-blown tree from an oceanside cliff might not conform with our ideas of what a tree should look like, but it works well in the context where it grew. And that tall straight tree wouldn't stand a chance if it was transplanted to the cliffside.

A mountain of recent data on open-plan offices from many different industries corroborates the results of the games. Open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory. They’re associated with high staff turnover. They make people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure. Open-plan workers are more likely to suffer from high blood pressure and elevated stress levels and to get the flu; they argue more with their colleagues; they worry about coworkers eavesdropping on their phone calls and spying on their computer screens. They have fewer personal and confidential conversations with colleagues. They’re often subject to loud and uncontrollable noise, which raises heart rates; releases cortisol, the body’s fight-or-flight “stress” hormone; and makes people socially distant, quick to anger, aggressive, and slow to help others.

It was as if he'd suddenly become intimately aware of the fragility of life and how precious time really was. As a result, he made a conscious effort to simplify his life, with the goal of eliminating unnecessary stress. No longer interested in society's definition of success, he began purging his life of material things. Life, he decided, was for living, not for having, and he wanted to experience every moment that he could. At the deepest level, he'd come to understand that life could end at any moment, and it was better to be be happy than busy.

Nature’s ultimate goal is to foster the growth of the individual from absolute dependence to independence — or, more exactly, to the interdependence of mature adults living in community. Development is a process of moving from complete external regulation to self-regulation, as far as our genetic programming allows. Well-self-regulated people are the most capable of interacting fruitfully with others in a community and of nurturing children who will also grow into self-regulated adults. Anything that interferes with that natural agenda threatens the organism’s chances for long-term survival. Almost from the beginning of life we see a tension between the complementary needs for security and for autonomy. Development requires a gradual and ageappropriate shift from security needs toward the drive for autonomy, from attachment to individuation. Neither is ever completely lost, and neither is meant to predominate at the expense of the other. With an increased capacity for self-regulation in adulthood comes also a heightened need for autonomy — for the freedom to make genuine choices. Whatever undermines autonomy will be experienced as a source of stress. Stress is magnified whenever the power to respond effectively to the social or physical environment is lacking or when the tested animal or human being feels helpless, without meaningful choices — in other words, when autonomy is undermined. Autonomy, however, needs to be exercised in a way that does not disrupt the social relationships on which survival also depends, whether with emotional intimates or with important others—employers, fellow workers, social authority figures. The less the emotional capacity for self-regulation develops during infancy and childhood, the more the adult depends on relationships to maintain homeostasis. The greater the dependence, the greater the threat when those relationships are lost or become insecure. Thus, the vulnerability to subjective and physiological stress will be proportionate to the degree of emotional dependence. To minimize the stress from threatened relationships, a person may give up some part of his autonomy. However, this is not a formula for health, since the loss of autonomy is itself a cause of stress. The surrender of autonomy raises the stress level, even if on the surface it appears to be necessary for the sake of “security” in a relationship, and even if we subjectively feel relief when we gain “security” in this manner. If I chronically repress my emotional needs in order to make myself “acceptable” to other people, I increase my risks of having to pay the price in the form of illness. The other way of protecting oneself from the stress of threatened relationships is emotional shutdown. To feel safe, the vulnerable person withdraws from others and closes against intimacy. This coping style may avoid anxiety and block the subjective experience of stress but not the physiology of it. Emotional intimacy is a psychological and biological necessity. Those who build walls against intimacy are not self-regulated, just emotionally frozen. Their stress from having unmet needs will be high.

Like the house committee investigation— like the preceding 45-led years since the escalator descent into the madness of the infant king, like the faulty re-emergence in fits and starts from the miasma of disease and its wake, the level of stress the prevalence of anxiety moment to moment, day to day was immense and incessant— seemingly unbearable—so great I thought so many times I could not continue to withstand it sustain it and yet and yet it had to be done. One insane venture accomplished. Lessons learned, both exquisitely beautiful and exquisitely painful.

Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colourless liquid with a slight chemical odour. It is used as an antiseptic, a solvent, in medical wipes and antibacterial formulas because it kills organisms by denaturing their proteins. Ethanol is an important industrial ingredient. Ethanol is a good general purpose solvent and is found in paints, tinctures, markers and personal care products such as perfumes and deodorants. The largest single use of ethanol is as an engine fuel and fuel additive. In other words, we drink, for fun, the same thing we use to make rocket fuel, house paint, anti-septics, solvents, perfumes, and deodorants and to denature, i.e. to take away the natural properties of, or kill, living organisms. Which might make sense on some level if we weren’t a generation of green minded, organic, health-conscious, truth seeking individuals. But we are. We read labels, we shun gluten, dairy, processed foods, and refined sugars. We buy organic, we use natural sunscreen and beauty products. We worry about fluoride in our water, smog in our air, hydrogenated oils in our food, and we debate whether plastic bottles are safe to drink from. We replace toxic cleaning products with Mrs. Myers and homemade vinegar concoctions. We do yoga, we run, we SoulCycle and Fitbit, we go paleo and keto, we juice, we cleanse. We do coffee enemas and steam our yonis, and drink clay and charcoal, and shoot up vitamins, and sit in infrared foil boxes, and hire naturopaths, and shamans, and functional doctors, and we take nootropics and we stress about our telomeres. These are all real words. We are hyper-vigilant about everything we put into our body, everything we do to our body, and we are proud of this. We Instagram how proud we are of this, and we follow Goop and Well+Good, and we drop 40 bucks on an exercise class because there are healing crystals in the floor. The global wellness economy is estimated to be worth $4 trillion. $4 TRILLION DOLLARS. We are on an endless and expensive quest for wellness and vitality and youth. And we drink fucking rocket fuel.

Like a good southern boy should, I'll start with my mom. She's a true baller, living proof that the value of denial depends on one's level of commitment to it. She beat two types of cancer on nothing more than aspirin and denial. She's a woman that says I'm going to before she can, I would before she could, and I'll be there before she's invited. Fiercely loyal to convenience and controversy, she's always had an adversarial relationship with context and consideration because they ask permission. She might not be the smartest person in the room but she ain't crying. She's 88 now, and seldom do I go to bed after her or wake up before her. Her curfew when she was growing up was when she danced holes big enough in the feet of her pantyhose that came up around her ankles. Nobody forgives himself quicker than she does and therefore, she carries zero stress. I once asked her if she ever went to bed with any regrets. She quickly told me, ‘Oh every night son, I just forget him by the time I wake up.’ She always told us, ‘Don't you walk into a place like you want to buy it, walk in like you own it.’ Obviously, her favorite word in the English language is ‘Yes.

Stress can be bad for you. We no longer die of smallpox or the plague and instead die of stress-related diseases of lifestyle, like heart disease or diabetes, where damage slowly accumulates over time. It is understood how stress can cause or worsen disease or make you more vulnerable to other risk factors. Much of this is even understood on the molecular level. Stress can even cause your immune system to abnormally target hair follicles, causing your hair to turn gray.

Depression’s defining symptom is anhedonia, the inability to feel, anticipate, or pursue pleasure. Chronic stress depletes the mesolimbic system of dopamine, generating anhedonia. The link between childhood adversity and adult depression involves both organizational effects on the developing mesolimbic system and elevated adult glucocorticoid levels, which can deplete dopamine.

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.

The creative act is primitive. Its principles are of birth and genesis. Babies are born in blood and chaos; stars and galaxies come into being amid the release of massive primordial cataclysms. Conception occurs at the primal level. I’m not being facetious when I stress, throughout this book, that it is better to be primitive than to be sophisticated, and better to be stupid than to be smart. The most highly cultured mother gives birth sweating and dislocated and cursing like a sailor. That’s the place we inhabit as artists and innovators. It’s the place we must become comfortable with. The hospital room may be spotless and sterile, but birth itself will always take place amid chaos, pain, and blood.

When a baby gets hungry and cries his levels of stress hormones will move upward. But if Mom or Dad regularly comes to feed him, they go back down, and over time, they become patterned and repetitive thanks to the daily routine. At times, nonetheless, the baby will feel distress and cry: not hungry, not wet, not in discernible physical pain, she will appear inconsolable. When this happens most parents hug and rock their children, almost instinctively using rhythmic motion and affectionate touch to calm the child. Interestingly, the rate at which people rock their babies is about eighty beats per minute, the same as a normal resting adult heart rate. Faster and the baby will find the motion stimulating; slower and the child will tend to keep crying. To soothe our children we reattune them physically to the beat of the master timekeeper of life.

Stress and glucocorticoids have inverted-U effects here as well. Moderate, transient stress (or exposure to the equivalent glucocorticoid levels) increases spine number in the hippocampus; sustained stress or glucocor-ticoid exposure does the opposite.7 Moreover, major depression or anxiety—two disorders associated with elevated glucocorticoid levels—can reduce hippocampal dendrite and spine number. This arises from decreased levels of that key growth factor mentioned earlier this chapter, BDNF. Sustained stress and glucocorticoids also cause dendritic retraction and synapse loss, lower levels of NCAM (a “neural cell adhesion molecule” that stabilizes synapses), and less glutamate release in the frontal cortex.

Stressful conditions tax our cognitive bandwidth, reducing our ability to think clearly and exercise executive control. Stress also hurts our ability to make rational long-term decisions that require delayed gratification. Living in a community in which we feel a sense of trust and support acts as a buffer against the detrimental impact of scarcity. However, a higher level of income inequality in our community can fray our sense of social trust.

Here’s the basic strategy: 1.  Turn off the starvation response by eating whenever you’re hungry and until fully satisfied. 2.  Tame your fat cells with a diet that lowers insulin levels, reduces inflammation (insulin’s troublemaker twin), and redirects calories to the rest of your body. 3.  Follow a simple lifestyle prescription focused on enjoyable physical activities, sleep, and stress relief to improve metabolism and support permanent behavior change.

Tears are good for you," Raphael said. When she opened her eyes back up, he knelt down. His large frame seemed to make the room shrink. His face was almost level with hers as his eyes met Emma's. "They are a gift from the Creator to his creation. Tears release endorphins in the mind that help sooth and comfort. They cleanse the eyes and relieve stress, thereby lowering blood pressure and taking strain off of the heart. He created you with tears and nothing he created is bad. Those tears you are holding in are necessary, Emma. Let them fall, let them heal, and let them remind you with each one that you are not alone.

generosity involved in proactively forgiving other people. This form of generosity, and the positive feelings it evokes in generous forgivers, have been shown by studies to reduce stress, tension, and sadness, and to lead to lower heart rates, lower skin conduction levels, and lower blood pressure. By contrast, those who ungenerously hold grudges are more angry, feel less in control of their lives, and, partly as a result, exhibit symptoms of unhealthy physical conditions.

As a teenager Valentine’s Day was a stressful time. Either I didn’t have a “girlfriend” and was forced to endure a day of hearts, cards and stuffed animals parading through my loneliness or even worse I had a “girlfriend” and felt pressure to provide just the right combination of cards, candy and stuffed animals to show the appropriate level of affection. Are flowers and a card enough? Should I get her balloons? Does she like balloons? If I don’t get her candy will she think I think she’s fat? Why did I want a girlfriend again? Valentine’s Day was a report card on how you were, or were not in some sad cases, perceived as “boyfriend” material.

The typical image of a depressed, lazy and tired person is someone hunched over and inert. Often, the assumption is that if one had more enthusiasm and inspiration, he would then stand up straight and move. In many cases, this equation is backward. But, as with everything related to one’s physicality, balance is the key. An overly erect and rigid posture may convey confidence and power to some, but it also causes a subtle accumulation of tension and rigidity on various levels, including psychological and emotional.

According to the Turnaround paper, which was written by a consultant named Brooke Stafford-Brizard, high-level noncognitive skills like resilience, curiosity, and academic tenacity are very difficult for a child to obtain without first developing a foundation of executive functions, a capacity for 
self-awareness, and relationship skills. And those skills, in turn, stand atop an infrastructure of qualities built in the first years of life, qualities like secure attachment, the ability to manage stress, and self-regulation.

This changing international environment brought to the fore the fundamental cultural differences between Asian and American civilizations. At the broadest level the Confucian ethos pervading many Asian societies stressed the values of authority, hierarchy, the subordination of individual rights and interests, the importance of consensus, the avoidance of confrontation, “saving face,” and, in general, the supremacy of the state over society and of society over the individual. In addition, Asians tended to think of the evolution of their societies in terms of centuries and millennia and to give priority to maximizing long-term gains. These attitudes contrasted with the primacy in American beliefs of liberty, equality, democracy, and individualism, and the American propensity to distrust government, oppose authority, promote checks and balances, encourage competition, sanctify human rights, and to forget the past, ignore the future, and focus on maximizing immediate gains. The sources of conflict are in fundamental differences in society and culture.

Often, the answer to a problem or dilemma is not immediately obvious, and we simply don’t know what to do next. As we mentioned earlier, a problem cannot be solved at the same level of thinking in which it was created; we need a shift in our level of understanding. This logic reminds us that if we do not know the answer to a specific problem, recycling the same information over and over usually will not produce a solution. It will, however, keep our minds busy and speeded up. It will create stress. We’ve all had the experience of being stuck in “thought quicksand,” where our mental struggling sucks us deeper into our analytical thinking. This is an example of the misuse of the analytical thought process.

Many „pathogens“ (both chemical and behavioral) can influence how you turn out; these include substance abuse by a mother during pregnancy, maternal stress, and low birth weight. As a child grows, neglect, physical abuse, and head injury can cause problems in mental development. Once the child is grown, substance abuse and exposure to a variety of toxins can damage the brain, modifying intelligence, aggression, and decision-making abilities. The major public health movement to remove lead-based paint grew out of an understanding that even low levels of lead can cause brain damage that makes children less inteligent and, in some cases, more impulsive and aggressive. How you turn out depends on where you´ve been. So when it comes to thinking about blameworthiness, the first difficulty to consider is that people do not choose their own developmental path. It´s problematic to imagine yourself in the shoes of a criminal and conclude, „Well, I wouldn´t have done that“ – because if you weren´t exposed to in utero cocaine, lead poisoning, or physical abuse, and he was, then you and he are not directly comparable.

No matter how rich their fantasy life had been, it cannot begin to compensate for the bleak emptiness that the real world now presents to their eyes. When they lose the ability to interact in the interpersonal environment, they are profoundly and terribly lonely, for they are not only without others, they also have less of themselves. In this precarious and weakened state of inwardness, a single traumatic event or a stressful interpersonal situation can create a panic or confused state that catapults the person into an acute psychotic episode. In the regression to a previous level of ego development, the patient’s attempts to stabilize and integrate the personality at intermediate stages fail, until finally a very primitive level of equilibrium is reached.

Cycling has nothing to do with the Tour de France. Racing a bike is a totally different sport than just being into cycling. Cycling is this therapeutic, beautiful mode of transportation where you attach yourself to this machine and it becomes part of you. Then you can go to all of these new places that you weren’t able to go before, and that has nothing to do with racing. I’m not a bike racer; I’m a bike rider. I love riding my bike, but I also love testing what I can do on my bike. So, in that regard, I am a racer. But if I had been born in Belgium and I had to race in Belgium all the time, I would’ve never gotten to the level that I am now, because the racing over there is so stressful. It just takes everything away from the niceness of being able to ride a bike.

Stress is not because of work—this is important to remember. Everybody thinks their job is stressful. No job is stressful. There are many jobs that could present challenging situations. There could be nasty bosses, insecure colleagues, emergency rooms, impossible deadlines—or you might even find yourself in the middle of a war zone! But these are not inherently stressful. It is our compulsive reaction to the situations in which we are placed that causes stress. Stress is a certain level of internal friction. One can easily lubricate the inner mechanism with some amount of inner work and awareness. So, it is your inability to handle your own system that is stressing you out. On some level, you do not know how to handle your body, mind, and emotions; that is the problem.

I was diagnosed with ADHD in my mid fifties and I was given Ritalin and Dexedrine. These are stimulant medications. They elevate the level of a chemical called dopamine in the brain. And dopamine is the motivation chemical, so when you are more motivated you pay attention. Your mind won't be all over the place. So we elevate dopamine levels with stimulant drugs like Ritalin, Aderall, Dexedrine and so on. But what else elevates Dopamine levels? Well, all other stimulants do. What other stimulants? Cocaine, crystal meth, caffeine, nicotine, which is to say that a significant minority of people that use stimulants, illicit stimulants, you know what they are actually doing? They're self-medicating their ADHD or their depression or their anxiety. So on one level (and we have to go deeper that that), but on one level addictions are about self-medications. If you look at alcoholics in one study, 40% of male adult alcoholics met the diagnostic criteria for ADHD? Why? Because alcohol soothes the hyperactive brain. Cannabis does the same thing. And in studies of stimulant addicts, about 30% had ADHD prior to their drug use. What else do people self-medicate? Someone mentioned depression. So, if you have been treated for depression, as I have been, and you were given a SSRI medication, these medications elevate the level of another brain chemical called serotonin, which is implicated in mood regulation. What else elevates serotonin levels temporarily in the brain? Cocaine does. People use cocaine to self-medicate depression. People use alcohol, cannabis and opiates to self-medicate anxiety. Incidentally people also use gambling or shopping to self-medicate because these activities also elevate dopamine levels in the brain. There is no difference between one addiction and the other. They're just different targets, but the brain systems that are involved and the target chemicals are the same, no matter what the addiction. So people self-medicate anxiety, depression. People self-medicate bipolar disorder with alcohol. People self-medicate Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder. So, one way to understand addictions is that they're self-medicating. And that's important to understand because if you are working with people who are addicted it is really important to know what's going on in their lives and why are they doing this. So apart from the level of comfort and pain relief, there's usually something diagnosible that's there at the same time. And you have to pay attention to that. At least you have to talk about it.

We like to think we control our minds, control the flow of thought, but if it was possible to do that then you wouldn’t have travelled halfway around the world for my advice.’ He pointed at me, playfully, laughing. ‘In fact, if it were possible to control your thoughts then you’d never have any reason to get stressed at all. You’d simply block out all the unpleasant thoughts and live peacefully with all your happy thoughts.’ I couldn’t believe how obvious it sounded when he explained it like that. It was almost as if I already knew it at some level, but had somehow forgotten to apply the idea to my life.

According to an equally lovingly preserved English translation of the prospectus, the purpose of Ibuka’s firm was “to establish an ideal factory that stresses a spirit of freedom and open-mindedness, and where engineers with sincere motivation can exercise their technological skills to the highest level.” We shall, he pledged, “eliminate any unfair profit-seeking exercises” and “seek expansion not only for the sake of size.” Further, “we shall carefully select employees . . . we shall avoid to have [sic] formal positions for the mere sake of having them, and shall place emphasis on a person’s ability, performance and character, so that each

Work by Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, Tom Boyce of UCSF, and others demonstrates something outrageous: By age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the (a) higher the basal glucocorticoid levels and/or the more reactive the glucocorticoid stress response, (b) the thinner the frontal cortex and the lower its metabolism, and (c) the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regulation, impulse control, and executive decision making; moreover, to achieve equivalent frontal regulation, lower-SES kids must activate more frontal cortex than do higher-SES kids. In addition, childhood poverty impairs maturation of the corpus callosum, a bundle of axonal fibers connecting the two hemispheres and integrating their function. This is so wrong—foolishly pick a poor family to be born into, and by kindergarten, the odds of your succeeding at life’s marshmallow tests are already stacked against you.34

Rearview Mirror Syndrome One of the most crippling causes of mediocrity in life is a condition I call Rearview Mirror Syndrome (RMS). Our subconscious minds are equipped with a self-limiting rearview mirror, through which we continuously relive and recreate our past. We mistakenly believe that who we were is who we are, thus limiting our true potential in the present, based on the limitations of our past.   As a result, we filter every choice we make—from what time we will wake up in the morning to which goals we will set to what we allow ourselves to consider possible for our lives—through the limitations of our past experiences. We want to create a better life, but sometimes we don’t know how to see it any other way than how it’s always been.   Research shows that on any given day, the average person thinks somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 thoughts. The problem is that ninety-five percent of our thoughts are the same as the ones we thought the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. It’s no wonder most people go through life, day after day, month after month, year after year, and never change the quality of their lives.   Like old, worn baggage, we carry stress, fear, and worry from yesterday with us into today. When presented with opportunities, we quickly check our rearview mirror to assess our past capabilities. “No, I’ve never done anything like that before. I’ve never achieved at that level. In fact, I’ve failed, time and time again.”   When presented with adversity, we go back to our trusty rearview mirror for guidance on how to respond. “Yep, just my luck. This crap always happens to me. I’m just going to give up; that’s what I’ve always done when things get too difficult.”   If you are to move beyond your past and transcend your limitations, you must stop living out of your rearview mirror and start imagining a life of limitless possibilities. Accept the paradigm:  my past does not equal my future. Talk to yourself in a way that inspires confidence that not only is anything possible, but that you are capable and committed to making it so. It’s not even necessary to believe it at first. In fact, you probably won’t believe it. You might find it uncomfortable and that you resist doing it. That’s okay. Repeat it to yourself anyway, and your subconscious mind will begin to absorb the positive self-affirmations. (More on how to do this in Chapter 6:  The Life S.A.V.E.R.S.)   Don’t place unnecessary limitations on what you want for your life. Think bigger than you’ve allowed yourself to think up until this point. Get clear on what you truly want, condition yourself to the belief that it’s possible by focusing on and affirming it every day, and then consistently move in the direction of your vision until it becomes your reality. There is nothing to fear, because you cannot fail—only learn, grow, and become better than you’ve ever been before.   Always remember that where you are is a result of who you were, but where you go depends entirely on who you choose to be, from this moment on.

A note about me: I do not think stress is a legitimate topic of conversation, in public anyway. No one ever wants to hear how stressed out anyone else is, because most of the time everyone is stressed out. Going on and on in detail about how stressed out I am isn’t conversation. It’ll never lead anywhere. No one is going to say, “Wow, Mindy, you really have it especially bad. I have heard some stories of stress, but this just takes the cake.” This is entirely because my parents are immigrant professionals, and talking about one’s stress level was just totally outlandish to them. When I was three years old my mom was in the middle of her medical residency in Boston. She had been a practicing obstetrician and gynecologist in Nigeria, but in the United States she was required to do her residency all over again. She’d get up at 4:00 a.m. and prepare breakfast, lunch, and dinner for my brother and me, because she knew she wouldn’t be home in time to have dinner with us. Then she’d leave by 5:30 a.m. to start rounds at the hospital. My dad, an architect, had a contract for a building in New Haven, Connecticut, which was two hours and forty-five minutes away. It would’ve been easier for him to move to New Haven for the time of the construction of the building, but then who would have taken care of us when my mom was at the hospital at night? In my parents’ vivid imaginations, lack of at least one parent’s supervision was a gateway to drugs, kidnapping, or at the very minimum, too much television watching. In order to spend time with us and save money for our family, my dad dropped us off at school, commuted the two hours and forty-five minutes every morning, and then returned in time to pick us up from our after-school program. Then he came home and boiled us hot dogs as an after-school snack, even though he was a vegetarian and had never eaten a hot dog before. In my entire life, I never once heard either of my parents say they were stressed. That was just not a phrase I grew up being allowed to say. That, and the concept of “Me time.

Our world is so complex that we take for granted engineering processes that would dwarf any of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World; we ride railroad tracks that do not follow faithfully the curvature of the earth, for the train would jump the tracks if they were level. We pass skyscrapers whose stress and strain are figured to the millionth of an inch, yet take for granted that the Empire State Building actually sways constantly many feet. If we are religiously inclined, we take going to the church of our choice for granted; if we are non believers, we give no second thought to the fact that we do not have to attend religious services if we do not choose. Yet the very privilege of non-belief represents the victory of philosophy; otherwise the non-churchgoer would still face the lions or the stake.

The problem is that the pressure to disprove a stereotype changes what you are about in a situation. It gives you an additional task. In addition to learning new skills, knowledge, and ways of thinking in a schooling situation, or in addition to trying to perform well in a workplace like the women in the high-tech firms, you are also trying to slay a ghost in the room, the negative stereotype and its allegation about you and your group. You are multitasking, and because the stakes involved are high--survival and success versus failure in an area that is important to you--this multitasking is stressful and distracting. ...And when you realize that this stressful experience is probably a chronic feature of the stetting for you, it can be difficult for you to stay in the setting, to sustain your motivation to succeed there. Disproving a stereotype is a Sisyphean task; something you have to do over and over again as long as your are in the domain where the stereotype applies. Jeff seemed to feel this way about Berkeley, that he couldn't find a place there where he could be seen as belonging. When men drop out of quantitative majors in college, it is usually because they have bad grades. But when women drop out of quantitative majors in college it usually has nothing to do with their grades. The culprit, in their case, is not their quantitative skills but, more likely, the prospect of living a significant portion of their lives in a domain where they may forever have to prove themselves--and with the chronic stress that goes with that. This is not an argument against trying hard, or against choosing the stressful path. There is no development without effort; and there is seldom great achievement, or boundary breaking, without stress. And to the benefit of us all, many people have stood up to these pressures...The focus here, instead, is on what has to be gotten out of he way to make these playing fields mere level. People experiencing stereotype threat are already trying hard. They're identified with their performance. They have motivation. It's the extra ghost slaying that is in their way.

This feeling of stress triggers a cascade of physiological consequences. The hypothalamus and pituitary gland in the brain release hormones that cause the release of cortisol from the adrenal glands located on the kidneys. Cortisol increases heart rate, among other things, readying the body for “fight” or “flight.” Acutely, the release of cortisol is beneficial and helps you cope with whatever is urgently being demanded of you. But if the stress becomes chronic, maladaptive things begin to happen. Normally, the release of cortisol turns the hypothalamus and pituitary off, stopping the release of hormone, which in turn stops the further release of cortisol from the adrenal glands. It’s a nice, clean, negative feedback loop. But in the chronically stressed, the loop breaks. The brain stops reacting to cortisol. Our natural, automatic shutoff valve stops working. The brain keeps releasing hormone, and the adrenal glands keep dumping cortisol into the bloodstream, even when the stressful thing that initially triggered the stress response is no longer around. Chronic, elevated levels of cortisol have been associated with a weakened immune system, deficits in short-term memory, chronic fatigue syndrome, anxiety disorders, and depression.

This is great. But what I’m grasping at is an idea about a subtler goal. This thinking owes a lot to conversations with Manjula Waldron of Ohio State University, an engineering professor who also happens to be a hospital chaplain. This feels embarrassingly Zen-ish for me to spout, being a short, hypomanic guy with a Brooklyn accent, but here goes: Maybe the goal isn’t to maximize the contrast between a low baseline and a high level of activation. Maybe the idea is to have both simultaneously. Huh? Maybe the goal would be for your baseline to be something more than the mere absence of activation, a mere default, but to instead be an energized calm, a proactive choice. And for the ceiling to consist of some sort of equilibrium and equanimity threading through the crazed arousal. I have felt this a few times playing soccer, inept as I am at it, where there’s a moment when, successful outcome or not, every physiological system is going like mad, and my body does something that my mind didn’t even dream of, and the two seconds when that happened seemed to take a lot longer than it should have. But this business about the calm amid the arousal isn’t just another way of talking about “good stress” (a stimulating challenge, as opposed to a threat). Even when the stressor is bad and your heart is racing in crisis, the goal should be to somehow make the fraction of a second between each heartbeat into an instant that expands in time and allows you to regroup. There, I have no idea what I’m talking about, but I think there might be something important lurking there. Enough said.

The connection between childhood adversity and frontocortical maturation pertains to childhood poverty. Work by Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, Tom Boyce of UCSF, and others demonstrates something outrageous: By age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the (a) higher the basal glucocorticoid levels and/or the more reactive the glucocorticoid stress response, (b) the thinner the frontal cortex and the lower its metabolism, and (c) the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regulation, impulse control, and executive decision making; moreover, to achieve equivalent frontal regulation, lower-SES kids must activate more frontal cortex than do higher-SES kids. In addition, childhood poverty impairs maturation of the corpus callosum, a bundle of axonal fibers connecting the two hemispheres and integrating their function. This is so wrong—foolishly pick a poor family to be born into, and by kindergarten, the odds of your succeeding at life’s marshmallow tests are already stacked against you.

Despite the intervening six decades of scientific inquiry since Selye’s groundbreaking work, the physiological impact of the emotions is still far from fully appreciated. The medical approach to health and illness continues to suppose that body and mind are separable from each other and from the milieu in which they exist. Compounding that mistake is a definition of stress that is narrow and simplistic. Medical thinking usually sees stress as highly disturbing but isolated events such as, for example, sudden unemployment, a marriage breakup or the death of a loved one. These major events are potent sources of stress for many, but there are chronic daily stresses in people’s lives that are more insidious and more harmful in their long-term biological consequences. Internally generated stresses take their toll without in any way seeming out of the ordinary. For those habituated to high levels of internal stress since early childhood, it is the absence of stress that creates unease, evoking boredom and a sense of meaninglessness. People may become addicted to their own stress hormones, adrenaline and cortisol, Hans Selye observed. To such persons stress feels desirable, while the absence of it feels like something to be avoided. When people describe themselves as being stressed, they usually mean the nervous agitation they experience under excessive demands — most commonly in the areas of work, family, relationships, finances or health. But sensations of nervous tension do not define stress — nor, strictly speaking, are they always perceived when people are stressed. Stress, as we will define it, is not a matter of subjective feeling. It is a measurable set of objective physiological events in the body, involving the brain, the hormonal apparatus, the immune system and many other organs. Both animals and people can experience stress with no awareness of its presence. “Stress is not simply nervous tension,” Selye pointed out. “Stress reactions do occur in lower animals, and even in plants, that have no nervous systems…. Indeed, stress can be produced under deep anaesthesia in patients who are unconscious, and even in cell cultures grown outside the body.” Similarly, stress effects can be highly active in persons who are fully awake, but who are in the grip of unconscious emotions or cut off from their body responses. The physiology of stress may be triggered without observable effects on behaviour and without subjective awareness, as has been shown in animal experiments and in human studies.

including salutary effects on the following: • major depression • drug addiction • binge eating • smoking cessation • stress among cancer patients • loneliness among senior citizens • ADHD • asthma • psoriasis • irritable bowel syndrome Studies also indicated that meditation reduced levels of stress hormones, boosted the immune system, made office workers more focused, and improved test scores on the GRE. Apparently mindfulness did everything short of making you able to talk to animals and bend spoons with your mind. This research boom got its start with a Jew-Bu named Jon Kabat-Zinn, a Manhattan-raised, MIT-trained microbiologist who claimed to have had an elaborate epiphany—a “vision,” he called it—while on a retreat in 1979. The substance of the vision was that he could bring meditation to a much broader audience by stripping it of Buddhist metaphysics. Kabat-Zinn designed something called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an eight-week course that taught secularized meditation to tens of thousands of people around America and the world. Having a simple, replicable meditation protocol made it easy to test the effects on patients.

... A lobotomy involved some kind of rod or probe inserted through the eyesocket,the term was always "frontal" lobotomy;but was there any other kind?Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress. There must be some other way to deal with the knowledge of the disastrous consequences fear and stress could bring about.Some answer or trick of the will:the ability not to think about it.What if everyone knew this trick but Claude Sylvanshine?He tended to conceptualize some ultimate,platonic-level Terror as a bird of prey in whose mere aloft shadow the prey was stricken and paralyzed,tembling as the shadow enlarged and became inevitability.He frequently had this feeling:What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people?What if he was simply ill-suited,the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs?The neurology of failure.What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair,and all his so called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?...

Some people have more highly activated left prefrontal cortexes and some people have more highly activated right prefrontal cortexes. (This has nothing to do with the question of hemispheric dominance that determines whether you are right-handed or left-handed, which occurs in other areas of the brain.) The majority of people have higher left-side activation. People with higher right-side activation tend to experience more negative emotion than people with higher left-side activation. Right-side activation also predicts how easily someone’s immune system will become depressed. The right-brain activation is also correlated with high baseline levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. Though the settled patterns of activation do not stabilize until adulthood, babies with greater right-side activation will become frantic when their mothers leave a room; babies with strong left-side activation will be more likely to explore the room without apparent distress. In babies, however, the balance is subject to change. “The likelihood,” Davidson says, “is that there’s more plasticity in the system in the early years of life, more opportunity for the environment to sculpt this circuitry.

My Standard of Performance—the values and beliefs within it—guided everything I did in my work at San Francisco and are defined as follows: Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic directed at continual improvement; demonstrate respect for each person in the organization and the work he or she does; be deeply committed to learning and teaching, which means increasing my own expertise; be fair; demonstrate character; honor the direct connection between details and improvement, and relentlessly seek the latter; show self-control, especially where it counts most—under pressure; demonstrate and prize loyalty; use positive language and have a positive attitude; take pride in my effort as an entity separate from the result of that effort; be willing to go the extra distance for the organization; deal appropriately with victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation (don’t get crazy with victory nor dysfunctional with loss); promote internal communication that is both open and substantive (especially under stress); seek poise in myself and those I lead; put the team’s welfare and priorities ahead of my own; maintain an ongoing level of concentration and focus that is abnormally high; and make sacrifice and commitment the organization’s trademark.

The three conditions without which healthy growth does not take place can be taken for granted in the matrix of the womb: nutrition, a physically secure environment and the unbroken relationship with a safe, ever-present maternal organism. The word matrix is derived from the Latin for “womb,” itself derived from the word for “mother.” The womb is mother, and in many respects the mother remains the womb, even following birth. In the womb environment, no action or reaction on the developing infant’s part is required for the provision of any of his needs. Life in the womb is surely the prototype of life in the Garden of Eden where nothing can possibly be lacking, nothing has to be worked for. If there is no consciousness — we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Knowledge — there is also no deprivation or anxiety. Except in conditions of extreme poverty unusual in the industrialized world, although not unknown, the nutritional needs and shelter requirements of infants are more or less satisfied. The third prime requirement, a secure, safe and not overly stressed emotional atmosphere, is the one most likely to be disrupted in Western societies. The human infant lacks the capacity to follow or cling to the parent soon after being born, and is neurologically and biochemically underdeveloped in many other ways. The first nine months or so of extrauterine life seem to have been intended by nature as the second part of gestation. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu has called this phase exterogestation, gestation outside the maternal body. During this period, the security of the womb must be provided by the parenting environment. To allow for the maturation of the brain and nervous system that in other species occurs in the uterus, the attachment that was until birth directly physical now needs to be continued on both physical and emotional levels. Physically and psychologically, the parenting environment must contain and hold the infant as securely as she was held in the womb. For the second nine months of gestation, nature does provide a near-substitute for the direct umbilical connection: breast-feeding. Apart from its irreplaceable nutritional value and the immune protection it gives the infant, breast-feeding serves as a transitional stage from unbroken physical attachment to complete separation from the mother’s body. Now outside the matrix of the womb, the infant is nevertheless held close to the warmth of the maternal body from which nourishment continues to flow. Breast-feeding also deepens the mother’s feeling of connectedness to the baby, enhancing the emotionally symbiotic bonding relationship. No doubt the decline of breast-feeding, particularly accelerated in North America, has contributed to the emotional insecurities so prevalent in industrialized countries. Even more than breast-feeding, healthy brain development requires emotional security and warmth in the infant’s environment. This security is more than the love and best possible intentions of the parents. It depends also on a less controllable variable: their freedom from stresses that can undermine their psychological equilibrium. A calm and consistent emotional milieu throughout infancy is an essential requirement for the wiring of the neurophysiological circuits of self-regulation. When interfered with, as it often is in our society, brain development is adversely affected.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert talks about this phenomenon in his 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. “The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real,” he writes. “The frontal lobe—the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age—is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens.” This time travel into the future—otherwise known as anticipation—accounts for a big chunk of the happiness gleaned from any event. As you look forward to something good that is about to happen, you experience some of the same joy you would in the moment. The major difference is that the joy can last much longer. Consider that ritual of opening presents on Christmas morning. The reality of it seldom takes more than an hour, but the anticipation of seeing the presents under the tree can stretch out the joy for weeks. One study by several Dutch researchers, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life in 2010, found that vacationers were happier than people who didn’t take holiday trips. That finding is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the timing of the happiness boost. It didn’t come after the vacations, with tourists bathing in their post-trip glow. It didn’t even come through that strongly during the trips, as the joy of travel mingled with the stress of travel: jet lag, stomach woes, and train conductors giving garbled instructions over the loudspeaker. The happiness boost came before the trips, stretching out for as much as two months beforehand as the holiday goers imagined their excursions. A vision of little umbrella-sporting drinks can create the happiness rush of a mini vacation even in the midst of a rainy commute. On some level, people instinctively know this. In one study that Gilbert writes about, people were told they’d won a free dinner at a fancy French restaurant. When asked when they’d like to schedule the dinner, most people didn’t want to head over right then. They wanted to wait, on average, over a week—to savor the anticipation of their fine fare and to optimize their pleasure. The experiencing self seldom encounters pure bliss, but the anticipating self never has to go to the bathroom in the middle of a favorite band’s concert and is never cold from too much air conditioning in that theater showing the sequel to a favorite flick. Planning a few anchor events for a weekend guarantees you pleasure because—even if all goes wrong in the moment—you still will have derived some pleasure from the anticipation. I love spontaneity and embrace it when it happens, but I cannot bank my pleasure solely on it. If you wait until Saturday morning to make your plans for the weekend, you will spend a chunk of your Saturday working on such plans, rather than anticipating your fun. Hitting the weekend without a plan means you may not get to do what you want. You’ll use up energy in negotiations with other family members. You’ll start late and the museum will close when you’ve only been there an hour. Your favorite restaurant will be booked up—and even if, miraculously, you score a table, think of how much more you would have enjoyed the last few days knowing that you’d be eating those seared scallops on Saturday night!

In attunement, it is the infant who leads and the mother who follows. “Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses,” writes John Bowlby, one of the century’s great psychiatric researchers. The infant initiates the interaction or withdraws from it according to his own rhythms, Bowlby found, while the “mother regulates her behaviour so that it meshes with his... Thus she lets him call the tune and by a skillful interweaving of her own responses with his creates a dialogue.” The tense or depressed mothering adult will not be able to accompany the infant into relaxed, happy spaces. He may also not fully pick up signs of the infant’s emotional distress, or may not be able to respond to them as effectively as he would wish. The ADD child’s difficulty reading social cues likely originates from her relationship cues not being read by the nurturing adult, who was distracted by stress. In the attunement interaction, not only does the mother follow the child, but she also permits the child to temporarily interrupt contact. When the interaction reaches a certain stage of intensity for the infant, he will look away to avoid an uncomfortably high level of arousal. Another interaction will then begin. A mother who is anxious may react with alarm when the infant breaks off contact, may try to stimulate him, to draw him back into the interaction. Then the infant’s nervous system is not allowed to “cool down,” and the attunement relationship is hampered. Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense — rightly or wrongly — that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.” Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment. Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody. It represents the absolute need of the utterly and helplessly vulnerable human infant for secure closeness with at least one nourishing, protective and constantly available parenting figure. Essential for survival, the drive for attachment is part of the very nature of warm-blooded animals in infancy, especially. of mammals. In human beings, attachment is a driving force of behavior for longer than in any other animal. For most of us it is present throughout our lives, although we may transfer our attachment need from one person — our parent — to another — say, a spouse or even a child. We may also attempt to satisfy the lack of the human contact we crave by various other means, such as addictions, for example, or perhaps fanatical religiosity or the virtual reality of the Internet. Much of popular culture, from novels to movies to rock or country music, expresses nothing but the joys or the sorrows flowing from satisfactions or disappointments in our attachment relationships. Most parents extend to their children some mixture of loving and hurtful behavior, of wise parenting and unskillful, clumsy parenting. The proportions vary from family to family, from parent to parent. Those ADD children whose needs for warm parental contact are most frustrated grow up to be adults with the most severe cases of ADD. Already at only a few months of age, an infant will register by facial expression his dejection at the mother’s unconscious emotional withdrawal, despite the mother’s continued physical presence. “(The infant) takes delight in Mommy’s attention,” writes Stanley Greenspan, “and knows when that source of delight is missing. If Mom becomes preoccupied or distracted while playing with the baby, sadness or dismay settles in on the little face.