Toxicity Is Contagious Quotes

If I were to share Jaques' existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious.

Incivility is contagious—often spreading by way of righteous indignation until even those without legitimate grievance have come down with symptoms and taken sides.

Don't spread negativity, that stuff is contagious and ruins us. The good news is, positivity can also be contagious and it lifts us.

Why play, lounge or labour in a social wasteland? It's toxicity is contagious, and no respecter of persons. Fall back!

Drama Series’s carcass was unceremoniously carted away, by the usual contract hauler, to the dump where dead Brisbane horses routinely go. Her cause of death remained uncertain. Had she been bitten by a snake? Had she eaten some poisonous weeds out in that scrubby, derelict meadow? Those hypotheses crumbled abruptly, thirteen days later, when her stable mates began falling ill. They went down like dominoes. This wasn’t snakebite or toxic fodder. It was something contagious

Negativity can feel familiar if that’s where you’re used to living. If you expect that things won’t work out, you can’t be disappointed, right? In fact, the mind is wired to emphasize negativity. The brain evolved to prioritize the sight of a predator over the aesthetic perfection of the sunset framing that predator as it bounds toward you with supper in mind. By default, we watch for predators and miss the sunsets entirely. This hardwired instinct is a liability in the modern world. It’s literally poisonous. Negative thinking releases stress hormones, raises blood pressure, suppresses your immune system, and leads to a host of other health problems. Negative thinking impairs your cognitive ability and memory. Worst of all, negativity becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you expect a negative outcome, you tune your intuition to act accordingly, creating the dreaded outcome and reinforcing that negative response: “See? I told you it was going to turn out like this!” It’s a downward spiral that’s also contagious. When you take a cynical view of life, your toxic outlook infects everyone around you, at home and at work.

Not only does our individual and societal sanity depend on connection; so does our physical health. Because we are biopsychosocial creatures, the rising loneliness epidemic in Western culture is much more than just a psychological phenomenon: it is a public health crisis. A preeminent scholar of loneliness, the late neuroscientist John Cacioppo and his colleague and spouse, Stephania Cacioppo, published a letter in the Lancet only a month before his death in 2018. "Imagine," they wrote, "a condition that makes a person irritable, depressed, and self-centered, and is associated with a 26% increase in the risk of premature mortality. Imagine too that in industrialized countries around a third of people are affected by this condition, with one person in 12 affected severely, and that these proportions are increasing. Income, education, sex, and ethnicity are not protective, and the condition is contagious. The effects of the condition are not attributable to some peculiarity of the character of a subset of individuals, they are a result of the condition affecting ordinary people. Such a condition exists — loneliness." We now know without doubt that chronic loneliness is associated with an elevated risk of illness and early death. It has been shown to increase mortality from cancer and other diseases and has been compared to the harm of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. According to research presented at the American Psychological Association's annual convention in 2015, the loneliness epidemic is a public health risk at least as great as the burgeoning rates of obesity. Loneliness, the researcher Steven Cole told me, can impair genetic functioning. And no wonder: even in parrots isolation impairs DNA repair by shortening chromosome-protecting telomeres. Social isolation inhibits the immune system, promotes inflammation, agitates the stress apparatus, and increases the risk of death from heart disease and strokes. Here I am referring to social isolation in the pre COVID-19 sense, though the pandemic has grievously exacerbated the problem, at great cost to the well-being of many.