With repeated exposure to the same or similar pleasure stimulus, the initial deviation to the side of pleasure gets weaker and shorter and the after-response to the side of pain gets stronger and longer, a process scientists call neuroadaptation.

Learning how to push yourself to take action when you are afraid or full of self-doubt or overwhelmed with excuses is a life skill you can learn. Once you master it, you’ll understand that you can achieve anything through small, consistent moves forward.

One of the great revelations of feminism may turn out to be that men need women more than women need men. Wives were economically dependent on their husbands, but men were emotionally dependent on their wives.

Nothing is stronger than a small hope that doesn’t give up.

If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country’s oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.

Validation: communication that one is mindful, understands, and empathizes with another person’s experience, thereby accepting it as valid. Put simply, validation shows that you’re there, you get it, and you care.

When you’re too busy to think about your life, you’re able to put off proactive decisions under the guise of responding to what seems urgent. You think you’re doing all the right things, but really you’re just keeping busy.

What if, instead of being diagnosed—being called mentally ill—what if I had been able to receive care for its own sake. To be in distress, to ask for care, to receive it. What if there were space in this world for care.

The Western funeral home loves the word “dignity.” The largest funeral corporation has even trademarked the word. What dignity translates to, more often than not, is silence, a forced poise, a rigid formality.

There is one indisputable way to identify a cult, one characteristic they all share. It is the notion that anyone who does not agree with the group’s beliefs or choices, who expresses concerns, who simply dares to ask questions, is deemed “unsafe.”

Parentified children are often referred to as “old souls” —wise and calm beyond their years. But they can pay for their precocity by harboring a squishy center of insecurity and loneliness, a wound formed in their earliest unsupported years.

Fantasy is a safe space; it is not necessarily what we wish was real. Crucially, in a fantasy we don’t need anyone’s permission other than our own: a fantasy is a deliberate, and usually entirely private, act of both memory and imagination.

You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered.

Discipline is like knowing the rules of a game; once you understand them, you can play freely and even win.

We live a life dominated by stress and are too busy to really take notice of who we are, where we are going and what we want from life. We are now at a moment where technology will disrupt our minds and bodies more than we can begin to imagine.

Diagnosis is a gatekeeping process, and it slams its heavy bars in the face of anyone who is too poor, too busy, too Black, too feminine, too queer, and too gender nonconforming, among others.

I'm a huge believer that, as long as you’re still alive and your heart beats in your chest, you can change, you can improve, you can influence, you can motivate, you can build, and you can do better.

When conflict escalates past a certain point, the conflict itself takes charge. The original facts and forces that led to the dispute fade into the background. The us-versus-them dynamic takes over. Actual differences of opinion on health care policy or immigration stop mattering, and the conflict becomes its own reality. High conflict is the invisible hand of our time.

There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.

The American Dream’s narrowly defined paths to happiness and success rely on an acceptance of prescribed roles, and a lot of accumulation and exhibition.