Unhelpful Quotes

I've got the Mark of Cain," said Simon. "That means nothing can kill me, right?" "You can kill yourself," Magnus said, somewhat unhelpfully. "As far as I know, inanimate objects can accidentally kill you. So if you were planning on teaching yourself the lambada on a greased platform over a pit full of knives, I wouldn't." "There goes my Saturday.

I can tell you that “Just cheer up” is almost universally looked at as the most unhelpful depression cure ever. It’s pretty much the equivalent of telling someone who just had their legs amputated to “just walk it off.” Some people don’t understand that for a lot of us, mental illness is a severe chemical imbalance rather just having “a case of the Mondays.” Those same well-meaning people will tell me that I’m keeping myself from recovering because I really “just need to cheer up and smile.” That’s when I consider chopping off their arms and then blaming them for not picking up their severed arms so they can take them to the hospital to get reattached.

This was supposed to be yesterday. I was sitting on the Cardiff/London train, supposedly about to write this very column, and realising something quite terrible. My head was entirely empty. A vast echoing void. Bigger on the inside, but with nothing in it. You could drop a pebble in my brain and wait for an hour to hear it land. No actually, you couldn't - that would be aggressive and unhelpful, so keep your damn pebbles to yourself.

If an emotion can't change the condition or the situation you're dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion. Or, quite possibly, a destructive one. But it's what I feel. Right, no one said anything about not feeling it. No one said you can't ever cry. Forget "manliness." If you need to take a moment, by all means, go ahead. Real strength lies in the control or, as Nassim Taleb put it, the domestication of one's emotions, not in pretending they don't exist.

You are the capital U in Unhelpful.

Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for. Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

Don't hang out with people who are: Ungrateful Unhelpful Unruly Unkindly Unloving Unambitious Unmotivated or make you feel... Uncomfortable

Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.

Parental criticism is unhelpful. It creates anger and resentment. Even worse, children who are regularly criticized learn to condemn themselves and others. They learn to doubt their own worth and to belittle the value of others. They learn to suspect people and to expect personal doom.

The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.

The whole point of a top secret invisible guard,” Deathbringer said severely, “is for them to be invisible and secret. Therefore it is extremely unhelpful for certain queens to go pointing them out and discussing them loudly with the entire rainforest.

The search for a "suitable" church makes the man a critic where God wants him to be a pupil. What he wants from the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise- does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going.

The frost performs its secret ministry, Unhelped by any wind.

Punching your companions is unhelpful. Go into the forest and practice unarmed combat against a tree.

There is nothing more annoying than having someone tell you that everything would be fine if you were just a better pray-er. Or if you just smiled more, or stopped drinking Diet Coke. I can tell you that “Just cheer up” is almost universally looked at as the most unhelpful depression cure ever.

Values underlie everything we are and do. If what we value is unhelpful, if what we consider success/failure is poorly chosen, then everything based upon those values—the thoughts, the emotions, the day-to-day feelings—will all be out of whack. Everything we think and feel about a situation ultimately comes back to how valuable we perceive it to be. Most

I glanced at Carson, who had promised things would be alright. His gaze was on the floor, and a muscle in his jaw flexed rhythmically but unhelpfully. If he was trying to send me a message, I was out of luck, because I'd never learned Morse Code for Assholes.

Pursing my lips, I strive to appear unaffected by his touch. He is so artful at diverting me from anything painful, or anything he doesn’t want to address. And you let him, my subconscious pipes up unhelpfully, gazing over her copy of Jane Eyre.

The Greeks had a word for this: apatheia. It's the kind of calm equanimity that comes with the absence of irrational or extreme emotions. Not the loss of feeling altogether, just the loss of the harmful, unhelpful kind. Don't let the negativity in, don't let those emotions even get started. Just say: No, thank you. I can't afford to panic.

Richard Rohr says the skills that take you through the first half of your life are entirely unhelpful for the second half. To press the point a little bit: those skills I developed that supposedly served me well for the first half, as I inspect them a little more closely, didn’t actually serve me at all. They made me responsible and capable and really, really tired. They made me productive and practical, and inch by inch, year by year, they moved me further and further from the warm, whimsical person I used to be . . . and I missed her. The

If an emotion can’t change the condition or the situation you’re dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion. Or, quite possibly, a destructive one.

Too often we react emotionally, get despondent, and lose our perspective. All that does is turn bad things into really bad things. Unhelpful perceptions can invade our minds -- that sacred place of reason, action and will -- and throw off our compasses.

After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [as a career counselor] was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited--long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms--what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true 'calling.

Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) wrote this for the genus Homo: “Nosce te ipsum” (Know thyself). I understand why he said this, but as a practicing taxonomist, I find it unhelpful.

Rufus Maleficarus has sorely disappointed me personally. I thought he was making quite a good recovery from what the previous director had unhelpfully referred to as "a soul-searing, sanity-dissolving, profoundly malevolent appetite for power and revenge." As it happens, I think the finger-painting lessons were going very well, at least up until Rufus used the paint to create a summoning circle, and then rode out of here on the back of an obliging Hound of Tindalos...

We have to be committed to unlearning the unhelpful, broken, unredemptive, false, or incomplete God if we want to have space to relearn the goodness, the wholeness, the joy of a loving God.

a large body of empirical research conducted over decades suggests that student evaluations are more than unhelpful; instead, they are likely to change the behaviors of presenters in ways that make learning and personal growth less likely. That is one reason why Armstrong concluded that “teacher ratings are detrimental to students.

The debate that has been conducted in terms of "creation versus evolution" has gotten caught up with all kinds of other debates, and this has provided a singularly unhelpful backdrop to the would-be serious discussion of other parts of the Bible.

Speaking of tongues, they are the main reason I'm a nervous wreck. Ryan is a senior and well, sadly, I'm not all that experienced with boys. I mean, I'm a freshman and have been to dances with boys my age and even have gone out with boys, but I've never really kissed them. Not like I hope to kiss Ryan anyway. Bobby Robinson did shove his tongue into my mouth one time, when we were kissing under the bleachers at a football game, but it didn't feel so good. I'm pretty sure he didn't have it exactly right. So I talked to my friends, Katie and Lisa, about how to properly make out. But, well, here is just a bit of their unhelpful advice. Just let him take the lead, do what ever he does. Um, couldn't that get me into a lot of trouble? Just sort of kiss his tongue, but try not to drool. Don't open your mouth too wide. And then, just open your mouth wide. See? Stupid, conflicting information. And this from girls who supposedly know how to do this! I feel like I'm an undercover CIA agent trying to wrestle vital information out of a ruthless double agent, and the fate of the free world depends upon it. All the while, the President is yelling at me in a panic, saying, Somebody! Anybody! Just get me the truth!

We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser.

Why do I even bother talking to you? You are not helping. You are the capital U of Unhelpful.

It wasn’t that he was unhelpful, but he had the kind of vague, cheerful helpfulness that serious men soon learn to dread.

If our basic needs were neglected: our need for safety, economic security, loving connection, autonomy, self-realization and meaningful work, our need to feel equal and respected, then poor emotional well-being will be an inevitable result. Materialism was therefore an unhelpful response to various deprivations. A culturally endorsed coping mechanism that ultimately backfired.

The very word ‘success’ has become contaminated by our ideas of someone extraordinary, very rich, etc., and that’s really unhelpful…. Ultimately, to be properly successful is to be at peace as well.

Critiquing Islam, critiquing any idea, is not bigotry. “Islamophobia” is a troubled and inherently unhelpful term. Yes, hatred of Muslims by neo-Nazi-style groups does exist, and it is a form of cultural intolerance, but that must never be conflated with the free-speech right to critique Islam. Islam is, after all, an idea; we cannot expect its merits or demerits to be accepted if we cannot openly debate it.

You did that thing again where your inside voice became your outside voice, Mini pointed out unhelpfully. “Nothing! I’m still…What’s the word—?” “Failing?” suggested Brynne. I hate you, thought Aru. Brynne grinned.

The advice to ‘hold on to your dreams’ is all well and good, but there comes a point when holding on to your dreams becomes unhelpful and even unhealthy. Dumbledore knows that life can pass you by while you are clinging on to a wish that can never be – or ought never to be – fulfilled.

Many Christians say that they get their morality from the Bible, but this cannot be true because as holy books go the Bible is possibly the most unhelpful guide ever written for determining right from wrong. It’s chock-full of bizarre stories about dysfunctional families, advice about how to beat your slaves, how to kill your headstrong kids, how to sell your virgin daughters, and other clearly outdated practices that most cultures gave up centuries ago.

Some people (like singularly unhelpful and clearly underqualified physical therapists, unsympathetic GPs, and that supremely irritating second cousin who ate all the stuffing at Christmas) assumed that a lack of feeling in certain body parts shouldn’t affect sleep at all. Her insomnia in such situations, they said, was something she could easily overcome. Chloe liked to remind those people that the human brain tended to keep track of all body parts, and was prone to panic when one of those parts went offline. Actually, what Chloe liked to do was imagine hitting those people with a brick.

Focus is one of the main pillars of self-discipline; a person who lacks the ability to focus is almost certainly one who will also lack discipline. Focus itself is dependent on something that neuroscientists call executive functions. The three executive functions that we are most concerned with when it comes to being disciplined are working memory, impulse control, and cognitive flexibility and adaptability. You can see why they are aptly named the executive functions. Your brain has to be able to set and pursue goals, prioritize activities, filter distractions, and control unhelpful inhibitions.

A good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, "There you go again; let's call this to a halt. You can do something different." Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect.

The fact is that anything we do might be characterised as unhelpful, if only by people far away from ourselves, in time or space, who must deal with consequences that are hidden from us. Being aware of this, we are less likely to get carried away with messianic zeal, and that's no bad thing. In changing the world we can proceed with a degree of humility.

Helpful is happy. Selfish is sad. (It's not uncommon to confuse the two.)

I suppose it is quite certain he is dead?” I asked faintly. “There are bits of him stuck to your shoe,” he remarked, rather unhelpfully.

When asked how he accomplished his astonishing discoveries, Newton replied unhelpfully, “By thinking upon them.

Just cheer up” is almost universally looked at as the most unhelpful depression cure ever.

Hort’s talent is busting out of his clothes. Nicola’s is reminding us how smart she is. And my mother’s is an unhelpful mix of cluelessness and evading responsibility.

You could have been done helping us in the time it’s taken you to explain exactly how unhelpful you delight in being.

He said that a lot back then. When I did this on Dagobah…It was obnoxious and completely unhelpful. So Leia reminded him, “You’re being obnoxious and completely unhelpful.

it is also true that by constantly looking for patterns the left brain “complicates” what is perceived in a way that can be unnecessary and unhelpful.

Dabrowshi argued that fear and anxiety and sadness are nor necessarily always undesirable or unhelpful states of mind; rather, they are often representative m=of the necessary pain of psychological growth. And to deny that pain I to deny our own potential. Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally happier life.

Since my symptoms began 13 years ago, I’ve tried every form of pain management I could access — NSAIDS, nonopioid analgesics, neurologic medications, acupuncture, laser therapy, physical therapy, prolotherapy, massage, and trigger-point injections. Most of these have been unhelpful; others provide temporary relief, often at great expense. At the end of the day, when my body is fully depleted of its resources and in the most pain, a single dose of Percocet is the only tool that silences the pain enough for me to fall asleep. I honestly don’t know what I’d do if Percocet became unavailable to me, and the very thought scares me. I’ve been taking it for five years. To avoid any chance of addiction, I only take it at night and have stayed on a consistently low dose.

The root cause of impostor syndrome is an unhelpful picture of what people at the top of society are really like. We feel like impostors not because we are uniquely flawed, but because we can’t imagine how equally flawed the elite must necessarily also be underneath their polished surfaces.

I thought back to the counselling sessions, how we'd talked about thinking things through rationally, recognizing unhelpful patterns of behaviour and being brave enough to try doing things differently.

Sharing my full truth became an essential part of my healing process, and remains that way, but it's a continuous journey in giving myself permission to grieve publicly and unapologetically. It does, at times, leave me exposed to people who don't know how to handle it, folks who offer unhelpful comments, opinions, or criticisms.

We seem normal only to those who don't know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on an early dinner date would be; "And how are you crazy?" The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don't care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with. We make mistakes, too, because are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal state of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for. The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn't exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently - the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the "not overly wrong" person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition. Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not "normal." We should learn to accommodate ourselves to "wrongness", striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and our partners.

They taught me that being of service, an ally to the lonely and suffering, a big-girl helper to underdogs, was my best shot at happiness. They taught me that most of my good ideas were not helpful, and that all of my ideas after ten p.m. were especially unhelpful. They taught me to pay attention, but not so much attention to my tiny princess mind.

We needn't quibble about numbers," I said, loftily. "Oh, I think we do need," he said, and then just when I was about to relax, thinking I'd steered us back into safer waters, he dropped his arms again and his face went open and a little pale, leaving scared pink standing out on the edges of his collarbone. "I'd - - I'd like to ask. But not - - in here. After we - - if we - -" "Don't even try. I'm not getting engaged to go out with you," I said rudely, shoving in before he could drag us back onto the shoals. "If you're not asking, that's sufficient unto the day! If we make it out of here alive and you slog across the pond to come ask me, I'll decide what I think of it at the time, and until then, you can keep your Disney movie fantasies," and your secret pet mal, my brain unhelpfully inserted, "to yourself." He said, "Okay, okay, fine!" in a tone one-tenth irritation and nine-tenths relief, while I looked away, trying to stop my mouth contorting around the laugh I was having to fight so desperately to keep in yet again: thanks ever so, Aadhya. Her mum was a genius, actually.

Twenty-five percent said they were experiencing more sibling conflict than before. This was usually in families when siblings were perceived to be unhelpful as a parent was dying, or where sibling relationships had been strained from the start.

Because here’s the thing: Emotions are not plans. They don’t solve problems or right any wrongs. You can feel them—you will feel them, inevitably—but be careful about letting them guide you. Rage can be a dirty windshield. Hurt is like a broken steering wheel. Disappointment will only ride, sulking and unhelpful, in the back seat. If you don’t do something constructive with them, they’ll take you straight into a ditch. My power has always hinged on my ability to keep myself out of the ditch.

We’re trying to get to Artemisia Port E. You know where that is, right?” “E…,” murmured Winter. “E for execution. Earth. Evret. Emperor.” She pondered a moment longer. “E for escape.” Scarlet groaned. “E for unhelpful.” “No, that does not work.” Scarlet

I gave him an unhelpfully angled eye roll. 'Oliver. It's not your job to make being with you convenient for me. Just like it's not my job to make being with me convenient for you. Which is good because if it was my job, I'd have been fucking fired ages ago.

Hayes and his colleagues have distilled these insights into seven skills for coping with loss. In more than a thousand studies over thirty-five years, they’ve found that the acquisition of this skill set predicts whether people facing loss fall into anxiety, depression, trauma, substance abuse—or whether they thrive. The first five skills involve acceptance of the bitter. First, we need to acknowledge that a loss has occurred; second, to embrace the emotions that accompany it. Instead of trying to control the pain, or to distract ourselves with food, alcohol, or work, we should simply feel our hurt, sorrow, shock, anger. Third, we need to accept all our feelings, thoughts, and memories, even the unexpected and seemingly inappropriate ones, such as liberation, laughter, and relief. Fourth, we should expect that sometimes we’ll feel overwhelmed. And fifth, we should watch out for unhelpful thoughts, such as “I should be over this,” “It’s all my fault,” and “Life is unfair.” Indeed, the ability to accept difficult emotions—not just observe them, not just breathe through them, but actually, nonjudgmentally, accept them—has been linked repeatedly to long-term thriving.

I used to struggle with letting go and allowing my children to find their own way, but something that I learned in the research dramatically changed my perspective and I no longer see rescuing and intervening as unhelpful, I now think about it as dangerous. Don’t get me wrong—I still struggle and I still step in when I shouldn’t, but I now think twice before I let my discomfort dictate my behaviors. Here’s why: Hope is a function of struggle. If we want our children to develop high levels of hopefulness, we have to let them struggle. And let me tell you, next to love and belonging, I’m not sure I want anything more for my kids than a deep sense of hopefulness.

That's because you think about everything in words ... You can go around and around the same question all you like, and never find an answer. I know that's how you cope, how you get through time, so I've never thought it was immature, or unhelpful. But there's another way of doing it: to sit with an empty space, and just look at it, without thinking anything, just enduring. Some people can do that.

Dabrowski argued that fear and anxiety and sadness are not necessarily always undesirable or unhelpful states of mind; rather, they are often representative of the necessary pain of psychological growth. And to deny that pain is to deny our own potential. Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally happier life. Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of our worst moments. It’s only when we feel intense pain that we’re willing to look at our values and question why they seem to be failing us. We need some sort of existential crisis to take an objective look at how we’ve been deriving meaning in our life, and then consider changing course.

A kind of timidity can set in with familiarity. A fear of change. We can end up stuck in jobs we don’t like, in unhealthy relationships, with similar unhelpful attitudes. We call this the “comfort zone” but often it is the opposite. A discomfort zone, a stagnation zone, an unfulfilled zone. It is surprisingly easy to walk through and out, once we decide to. And what we see beyond the discomfort zone is in fact a deeper comfort. The comfort of being the best possible version of us. Beyond the pattern or code of established behavior. Less coded, more human.

reexamine your recollections of past relationship experiences from a fresh new perspective. Viewing them through an attachment lens will allow you to change some unhelpful beliefs that rely on those particular memories, and by so doing reshape your working model into a more secure one.

Snow, the boy is called,” Pycelle said unhelpfully. “I glimpsed him once at Winterfell,” the queen said, “though the Starks did their best to hide him. He looks very like his father.” Her husband’s by-blows had his look as well, though at least Robert had the grace to keep them out of sight.

We had deluded ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to defend themselves with paper tools. Meanwhile we glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply. But now this gloss had gone from me. Chargeable against my conceit were the causeless, ineffectual deaths of Hesa. My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.

We can learn to perceive things differently, to cut through the illusions that others believe or fear. We can stop seeing the “problems” in front of us as problems. We can learn to focus on what things really are. Too often we react emotionally, get despondent, and lose our perspective. All that does is turn bad things into really bad things. Unhelpful perceptions can invade our minds—that sacred place of reason, action and will—and throw off our compass.

I was born into the apocalypse. It's probably unhelpful to throw around a word like "apocalypse," and to be honest I couldn't tell you whether it's even apt. It looks like an apocalypse from here. Or from now. From a distance, it looks like the world ended. Maybe it did. But—and I suspect that this isn't something people like to admit; I've seen a lot of people who lived through that time not admitting this—it didn't feel like an apocalypse. It just felt like life.

Decades of countercultural rebellion have failed to change anything because the theory of society on which the countercultural idea rests is false. We do not live in the Matrix, nor do we live in the spectacle. The world we live in is in fact much more prosaic. It consists of billions of human beings, each pursuing more or less plausible conceptions of the good, trying to cooperate with one another, and doing so with varying degrees of success. There is no single, overarching system that integrates it all. The culture cannot be jammed because there is no such thing as "the culture" or "the system". There is only a hodge-podge of social institutions, most tentatively thrown together, which distribute the benefits and burdens of social cooperation in ways that sometimes we recognize to be just, but that are usually manifestly inequitable. In a world of this type, countercultural rebellion is not just unhelpful, it is positively counterproductive. Not only does it distract energy and effort away from the sort of initiatives that lead to concrete improvements in people's lives, but it encourages wholesale contempt for such incremental changes.

I saw nothing and heard nothing; near dead I am with a fright I got and with the hardship of the goal. Once men fought with their desires and their fears, with all that they call their sins, unhelped, and their souls became hard and strong. When we have brought back the clean earth and destroyed the law and the church, all life will become like a flame of fire, like a burning eye... Oh, how to find words, for it all... all that is not life will pass away! No man can be alive, and what is paradise but fullness of life, if whatever he sets his hand to in the daylight cannot carry him from exaltation to exaltation, and if he does not rise into the frenzy of contemplation in the night silence. Events that are not begotten in joy are misbegotten and darken the world, and nothing is begotten in joy if the joy of a thousand years has not been crushed into a moment. The soul of man is of the imperishable substance of the stars! The day you go to heaven that you may never come back again alive out of it! But it is not yourself will never hear the saints hammering at their music! It is you will be moving through the ages chains upon you, and you in the form of a dog or a monster! I tell you, that one will go through purgatory as quick as lightning through a thorn bush. It is very queer the world itself is, whatever shape was put upon it at the first!

…it is easier for us to examine the behaviour of the victim than it is for us to challenge the perpetrator. This may be because the victim, be it male or female, is more likely to present to our services and thus become a burden on our resources. As a community we try to limit our involvement by getting the victim to cooperate in his/her own safety. When the abuse continues we conveniently blame the victim for his/her lack of cooperation.

The history of prescriptions about English ... is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance. But it is also a history of attempts to make sense of the world and its bazaar of competing ideas and interests.

A great many of my thoughts fell into the ‘unhelpful and unproductive’ category. ‘If you’re worried about losing these creative thoughts,’ he gestured somewhat dismissively, ‘then where do you think they come from in the first place? Do those moments of inspiration come from cold, rational thinking, or do they arise from the stillness and the spaciousness of the mind? When the mind is always busy there’s no room for these thoughts to arise, so by training your mind you’ll actually make more space for these creative thoughts to arise. The point is, don’t be a slave to your mind. If you want to direct your mind and use it well, then good. But what use is the mind if it’s all over the place, with no sense of direction or stability?

* We note that the Library has not had fire alarm drills for the last two hundred years. This is because we found the two default responses unhelpful. These being "running away screaming" or "resigning yourself to death while clutching your favourite books." Librarians with more useful suggestions should contact Yves via email and attach a full benefit-threat analysis.

That’s the thing I’ve never really understood about emotions. We’re given unhelpful words for them—sad, happy, angry, scared, disgusted—but they’re not accurate and there never seems to be anywhere near enough of them. How could there be? Emotions aren’t binary or finite: they change, shift, run into each other like colored water. They are layered, three-dimensional and twisted; they don’t arrive in order, one by one, labeled neatly. They lie on top of each other, twisting like kaleidoscopes, like prisms, like spinning bird feathers lit with their own iridescence.

But she thought that maybe she didn’t like all that many people. How many people are you supposed to like? she wondered. Below what number are you attachment-disordered? She liked colleagues in a drinks-after-work kind of way. But in general, they were net-unhelpful during the workday, and often annoying, with their egg salad sandwiches and their bike helmets perched on their monitors.

The message here is that the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch and urge of shenpa, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn’t continue to rule our lives, and the patterns that we consider unhelpful don’t keep getting stronger as the days and months and years go by.

. . . Neither ecological nor social engineering will lead us to a conflict-free, simple path . . . Utilitarians and others who simply advise us to be happy are unhelpful, because we almost always have to make a choice either between different kinds of happiness--different things to be happy _about_--or between these and other things we want, which nothing to do with happiness. . . . Do we find ourselves a species naturally free from conflict? We do not. There has not, apparently, been in our evolution a kind of rationalization which might seem a possible solution to problems of conflict--namely, a takeover by some major motive, such as the desire for future pleasure, which would automatically rule out all competing desires. Instead, what has developed is our intelligence. And this in some ways makes matters worse, since it shows us many desirable things that we would not otherwise have thought of, as well as the quite sufficient number we knew about for a start. In compensation, however, it does help us to arbitrate. Rules and principles, standards and ideals emerge as part of a priority system by which we guide ourselves through the jungle. They never make the job easy--desires that we put low on our priority system do not merely vanish--but they make it possible. And it is in working out these concepts more fully, in trying to extend their usefulness, that moral philosophy begins. Were there no conflict, it [moral philosophy] could never have arisen. The motivation of living creatures does got boil down to any single basic force, not even an 'instinct of self-preservation.' It is a complex pattern of separate elements, balanced roughly in the constitution of the species, but always liable to need adjusting. Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means to survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict. Motivation is fundamentally plural. . . An obsessive creature dominated constantly by one kind of motive, would not survive. All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like. The traditional business of moral philosophy is attempting to understand, clarify, relate, and harmonize so far as possible the claims arising from different sides of our nature. . . . One motive does not necessarily replace another smoothly and unremarked. There is _ambivalence_, conflict behavior.

It is far from guaranteed that an empathic state leads to a compassionate act. One reason for this is captured superbly by the essayist Leslie Jamison: [Empathy] can also offer a dangerous sense of completion: that something has been done because something has been felt. It is tempting to think that feeling someone’s pain is necessarily virtuous in its own right. The peril of empathy isn’t simply that it can make us feel bad, but that it can make us feel good, which can in turn encourage us to think of empathy as an end in itself rather than part of a process, a catalyst.46 In such a situation, saying “I feel your pain,” becomes a New Age equivalent of the unhelpful bureaucrat saying, “Look, I sympathize with your situation, but …” The former is so detached from action that it doesn’t even require the “but” as a bridge to the “there’s nothing I can/will do.” Having your pain validated is swell; having it alleviated is better.

As a child, the best way to survive was to be still, to submit—to do nothing that might incur further harm. That belief had grown with me through my teens, my twenties, my thirties, an unacknowledged mentor directing my every path, reinforcing a ubiquitous sense of powerlessness and victimhood. I had believed that I was bad, and unloveable, and cowardly, and weak—beliefs that had been unconscious, and had always gone unchallenged. I believed them because they were true, and they were true because I believed them.

When you arrive unexpectedly at someone’s house you go in through the front door, often after making sure you’ve got a couple of mates waiting round the back. For a business, especially the kind that involves big trucks and heavy metal, it’s always better to go in through the back. The customer-facing part of any modern business is purposely designed to be as politely unhelpful as possible. If you go in from the rear, the customer-facing staff are all facing the wrong way and everybody starts their conversation on the back foot.

In a state of homicidal seizure I demand to know why the CD image does not repeat the LP image. ‘But we couldn’t fit the entire LP image on the CD because a CD is too small,’ says Richard Boon, unhelpfully. ‘But they managed quite well with Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band!’ I stomp, suddenly wondering why I continued to bother. I could, instead, be skiing in St Moritz. As the years go by, and The World Won’t Listen changes labels, the CD image remains heart-sinkingly abysmal compared to the majesty of the LP sleeve. These things count.

Celebrity, even the modest sort that comes to writers, is an unhelpful exercise in self-consciousness. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his over animation. One can either see or be seen. Most of the best fiction is written out of early impressions, taken in before the writer became conscious of himself as a writer. The best seeing is done by the hunted and the hunter, the vulnerable and the hungry; the ‘successful’ writer acquires a film over his eyes. His eyes get fat. Self-importance is a thickened, occluding form of self-consciousness. The binge, the fling, the trip — all attempt to shake the film and get back under the dining room table, with a child's beautifully clear eyes.

Popular books promise that we can and should learn how to feel good, manage our anxiety, or get rid of our depression—but not so much information about how to learn from our own experiences. Our medications are anti-depressants, or anti-anxiety, or anti-psychotics, as if the only sensible goal is to subtract them. Our disorders are called “mood disorders” or “thought disorders” or “anxiety disorders”—once again feeding a cultural view that is often outright hostile to anything painful. We’ve got to put aside this unhelpful messaging to create some space to try truly new things.

We began crafting ways to apply defusion and self skills to coping with the fear and pain of acceptance. Learning to defuse from the voice of the Dictator helps us keep a healthy distance from the negative messages that pop uninvited into our minds, like “Who are you kidding, you can’t deal with this!” It also helps diminish the power of the unhelpful relations that have been embedded in our thought networks, which are often activated by the pain involved in acceptance. For example, the relation between smoking a cigarette and feeling better will be triggered by the discomfort of craving a smoke. Reconnecting with our authentic self helps us practice self-compassion as we open up to unpleasant aspects of our lives, not berating ourselves for making mistakes or for feeling fear about dealing with the pain. We see beyond the image of a broken, weak, or afflicted self to the powerful true self that can choose to feel pain.

Putting It into Practice: Neutralizing Negativity Use the techniques below anytime you’d like to lessen the effects of persistent negative thoughts. As you try each technique, pay attention to which ones work best for you and keep practicing them until they become instinctive. You may also discover some of your own that work just as well. ♦ Don’t assume your thoughts are accurate. Just because your mind comes up with something doesn’t necessarily mean it has any validity. Assume you’re missing a lot of elements, many of which could be positive. ♦ See your thoughts as graffiti on a wall or as little electrical impulses flickering around your brain. ♦ Assign a label to your negative experience: self-criticism, anger, anxiety, etc. Just naming what you are thinking and feeling can help you neutralize it. ♦ Depersonalize the experience. Rather than saying “I’m feeling ashamed,” try “There is shame being felt.” Imagine that you’re a scientist observing a phenomenon: “How interesting, there are self-critical thoughts arising.” ♦ Imagine seeing yourself from afar. Zoom out so far, you can see planet Earth hanging in space. Then zoom in to see your continent, then your country, your city, and finally the room you’re in. See your little self, electrical impulses whizzing across your brain. One little being having a particular experience at this particular moment. ♦ Imagine your mental chatter as coming from a radio; see if you can turn down the volume, or even just put the radio to the side and let it chatter away. ♦ Consider the worst-case outcome for your situation. Realize that whatever it is, you’ll survive. ♦ Think of all the previous times when you felt just like this—that you wouldn’t make it through—and yet clearly you did. We’re learning here to neutralize unhelpful thoughts. We want to avoid falling into the trap of arguing with them or trying to suppress them. This would only make matters worse. Consider this: if I ask you not to think of a white elephant—don’t picture a white elephant at all, please!—what’s the first thing your brain serves up? Right. Saying “No white elephants” leads to troops of white pachyderms marching through your mind. Steven Hayes and his colleagues studied our tendency to dwell on the forbidden by asking participants in controlled research studies to spend just a few minutes not thinking of a yellow jeep. For many people, the forbidden thought arose immediately, and with increasing frequency. For others, even if they were able to suppress the thought for a short period of time, at some point they broke down and yellow-jeep thoughts rose dramatically. Participants reported thinking about yellow jeeps with some frequency for days and sometimes weeks afterward. Because trying to suppress a self-critical thought only makes it more central to your thinking, it’s a far better strategy to simply aim to neutralize it. You’ve taken the first two steps in handling internal negativity: destigmatizing discomfort and neutralizing negativity. The third and final step will help you not just to lessen internal negativity but to actually replace it with a different internal reality.

he dropped his arms again and his face went open and a little pale, leaving scared pink standing out on the edges of his cheekbones. “El, I’d—I’d like to ask. But not—in here. After we—if we—” “Don’t even try. I’m not getting engaged to go out with you,” I said rudely, shoving in before he could drag us back onto the shoals. “If you’re not asking now, that’s sufficient unto the day! If we make it out of here alive and you slog across the pond to come ask me, I’ll decide what I think of it at the time, and until then, you can keep your Disney movie fantasies,” and your secret pet mal, my brain unhelpfully inserted, “to yourself.

Speaking to a foreigner was the dream of every student, and my opportunity came at last. When I got back from my trip down the Yangtze, I learned that my year was being sent in October to a port in the south called Zhanjiang to practice our English with foreign sailors. I was thrilled. Zhanjiang was about 75 miles from Chengdu, a journey of two days and two nights by rail. It was the southernmost large port in China, and quite near the Vietnamese border. It felt like a foreign country, with turn-of-the-century colonial-style buildings, pastiche Romanesque arches, rose windows, and large verandas with colorful parasols. The local people spoke Cantonese, which was almost a foreign language. The air smelled of the unfamiliar sea, exotic tropical vegetation, and an altogether bigger world. But my excitement at being there was constantly doused by frustration. We were accompanied by a political supervisor and three lecturers, who decided that, although we were staying only a mile from the sea, we were not to be allowed anywhere near it. The harbor itself was closed to outsiders, for fear of 'sabotage' or defection. We were told that a student from Guangzhou had managed to stow away once in a cargo steamer, not realizing that the hold would be sealed for weeks, by which time he had perished. We had to restrict our movements to a clearly defined area of a few blocks around our residence. Regulations like these were part of our daily life, but they never failed to infuriate me. One day I was seized by an absolute compulsion to get out. I faked illness and got permission to go to a hospital in the middle of the city. I wandered the streets desperately trying to spot the sea, without success. The local people were unhelpful: they did not like non-Cantonese speakers, and refused to understand me. We stayed in the port for three weeks, and only once were we allowed, as a special treat, to go to an island to see the ocean. As the point of being there was to talk to the sailors, we were organized into small groups to take turns working in the two places they were allowed to frequent: the Friendship Store, which sold goods for hard currency, and the Sailors' Club, which had a bar, a restaurant, a billiards room, and a ping-pong room. There were strict rules about how we could talk to the sailors. We were not allowed to speak to them alone, except for brief exchanges over the counter of the Friendship Store. If we were asked our names and addresses, under no circumstances were we to give our real ones. We all prepared a false name and a nonexistent address. After every conversation, we had to write a detailed report of what had been said which was standard practice for anyone who had contact with foreigners. We were warned over and over again about the importance of observing 'discipline in foreign contacts' (she waifi-lu). Otherwise, we were told, not only would we get into serious trouble, other students would be banned from coming.

When I wrote Lean In, some people argued that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they don’t have a partner. They were right. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home. I wrote a chapter titled “Make Your Partner a Real Partner” about the importance of couples splitting child care and housework 50/50. Now I see how insensitive and unhelpful this was to so many single moms who live with 100/0. My understanding and expectation of what a family looks like has shifted closer to reality. Since the early 1970s, the number of single mothers in the United States has nearly doubled. Today almost 30 percent of families with children are headed by a single parent—84 percent of whom are women. I

The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition. We decide what we will make of each and every situation. Our perceptions are the thing that we're in complete control of. When people panic, they make mistakes.They become unresponsive and stop thinking clearly. They just react. If an emotion can't change the condition or the situation you're dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion. Or, quite possibly, a destructive one. Perspective is everything. That is, when you can break apart something, or look at it from some new angle, it loses its power over you. Focusing exclusively on what is in our power magnifies and enhances our power. But every ounce of energy directed at things we can't actually influence is wasted - self-indulgent and self-destructive. Our best ideas come from where obstacles illuminate new options. Failure puts you in corners you have to think your way out of. It is a source of breakthroughs. True will is quiet humility, resilience and flexibility. The other kind of will is weakness, disguised by bluster and ambition. See which lasts longer under the hardest of obstacles.

For me, going high usually involves taking a pause before I react. It is a form of self-control, a line laid between our best and worst impulses. Going high is about resisting the temptation to participate in shallow fury and corrosive contempt and instead figuring out how to respond with a clear voice to whatever is shallow and corrosive around you. It’s what happens when you take a reaction and mature it into a response. Because here’s the thing: Emotions are not plans. They don’t solve problems or right any wrongs. You can feel them—you will feel them, inevitably—but be careful about letting them guide you. Rage can be a dirty windshield. Hurt is like a broken steering wheel. Disappointment will only ride, sulking and unhelpful, in the back seat. If you don’t do something constructive with them, they’ll take you straight into a ditch.

It is unfortunate that in some places, especially in the United States, people have resisted making choices that will keep them and their families safer. I don’t agree with these choices, but I also think it’s unhelpful to simply label them “anti-science,” as so many people do. In her book On Immunity, Eula Biss looks at vaccine hesitancy in a way that I think also helps explain the resentment we’re seeing toward other public health measures. The distrust of science is just one factor, she says, and it is compounded by other things that trigger fear and suspicion: pharmaceutical companies, big government, elites, the medical establishment, male authority. For some people, invisible benefits that might materialize in the future are not enough to get them past the worry that someone is trying to pull the wool over their eyes. The problem is even worse in periods of severe political polarization, such as the one we’re in now.

Yet I also felt, for the first time, truly and sincerely pissed. It was enough already. Enough! I’d reached that point that comes in the life of most anxiety sufferers when, fed up by the constant waking torture, dejected and buckled but not yet crushed, they at last turn to their anxiety, to themselves, and say, “Listen here: Fuck you. Fuck you! I am sick and fucking tired of this bullshit. I refuse to let you win. I am not going to take it anymore. You are ruining my fucking life and you MUST FUCKING DIE!” Unfortunately, this approach rarely solves the problem. Anxiety doesn’t bend to absolutism. You have to take a subtler, more reasoned approach. But that doesn’t mean anger is totally unhelpful. Being pissed off is a strong cocktail for the will. It stiffens the spine. It strengthens resolve. It makes a person less willing to run away from the anxiety and more willing to walk into it, which you’re going to have to do, ultimately, if you don’t want to end up a complete agoraphobic. Anger breeds defiance, and defiance is inspiriting. It’s good to refuse to give in to anxiety. You just have to know how much you can take.

In 2003, a Dutch clinical psychologist named Christof van Nimwegen began a fascinating study of computer-aided learning that a BBC writer would later call “one of the most interesting examinations of current computer use and the potential downsides of our increasing reliance on screen-based interaction with information systems.”26 Van Nimwegen had two groups of volunteers work through a tricky logic puzzle on a computer. The puzzle involved transferring colored balls between two boxes in accordance with a set of rules governing which balls could be moved at which time. One of the groups used software that had been designed to be as helpful as possible. It offered on-screen assistance during the course of solving the puzzle, providing visual cues, for instance, to highlight permitted moves. The other group used a bare-bones program, which provided no hints or other guidance. In the early stages of solving the puzzle, the group using the helpful software made correct moves more quickly than the other group, as would be expected. But as the test proceeded, the proficiency of the members of the group using the bare-bones software increased more rapidly. In the end, those using the unhelpful program were able to solve the puzzle more quickly and with fewer wrong moves. They also reached fewer impasses—states in which no further moves were possible—than did the people using the helpful software. The findings indicated, as van Nimwegen reported, that those using the unhelpful software were better able to plan ahead and plot strategy, while those using the helpful software tended to rely on simple trial and error. Often, in fact, those with the helpful software were found “to aimlessly click around” as they tried to crack the puzzle.

Starting with Theodor Adorno in the 1950s, people have suggested that lower intelligence predicts adherence to conservative ideology. Some but not all studies since then have supported this conclusion. More consistent has been a link between lower intelligence and a subtype of conservatism, namely right-wing authoritarianism (RWA, a fondness for hierarchy). ... The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills. The literature has two broad themes. One is that rightists are relatively uncomfortable with ambiguity; ... . The other is that leftists, well, think harder, have a greater capacity for what the political scientist Philip Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania calls "integrative complexity". In one study, conservatives and liberals, when asked about the causes of poverty, both tended toward personal attributions (“They’re poor because they’re lazy”). But only if they had to make snap judgments. Give people more time, and liberals shifted toward situational explanations (“Wait, things are stacked against the poor”). In other words, conservatives start gut and stay gut; liberals go from gut to head. ... Why? Some have suggested it’s a greater respect for thinking, which readily becomes an unhelpful tautology. Linda Skitka of the University of Illinois emphasizes how the personal attributions of snap judgments readily feel dissonant to liberals, at odds with their principles; thus they are motivated to think their way to a more consonant view. In contrast, even with more time, conservatives don’t become more situational, because there’s no dissonance.

Wandering has long been seen as part of the pathology of dementia. Doctors, carers, and relatives often try to stop patients from venturing out alone, out of concern they will injure themselves, or won’t remember the way back. When a person without dementia goes for a walk, it is called going for a stroll, getting some fresh air, or exercising, anthropologist Maggie Graham observes in her recent paper. When a person with dementia goes for a walk beyond prescribed parameters, it is typically called wandering, exit-seeking, or elopement. Yet wandering may not be so much a part of the disease as a therapeutic response to it. Even though dementia and Alzheimer’s in particular can cause severe disorientation, Graham says the desire to walk should be desire to be alive and to grow, as opposed to as a product of disease and deterioration. Many in the care profession share her view. The Alzheimer’s Society, the UK’s biggest dementia supportive research charity, considers wandering an unhelpful description, because it suggests aimlessness, whereas the walking often has a purpose. The charity lists several possible reasons why a person might feel compelled to move. They may be continuing the habit of a lifetime; they may be bored, restless, or agitated; they may be searching for a place or a person from their past that they believe to be close by; or maybe they started with a goal in mind, forgot about it, and just kept going. It is also possible that they are walking to stay alive. Sat in a chair in a room they don’t recognise, with a past they can’t access, it can be a struggle to know who they are. But when they move they are once again wayfinders, engaging in one of the oldest human endeavours, and anything is possible.