Priya Parker turns her attention to conflict; arguing that fighting, done right, is not a failure of a relationship but proof of one.

Pollan doesn't gloss over the gaps with confident theory. He revels in the uncertainty, and that makes this one of the more intellectually honest popular science books in recent memory. Also: Venus flytraps can be anesthetized. Read it and try not to think about that for the rest of the week.

The most actionable takeaway is also the simplest. Reach out to the people in your life. Make sure they know they matter to you. Don't assume they know. Tell them.

Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.

But I think body shape and size is all about athletics — what you can do with your body. How you use it in the world to live and function better and more intentionally every day.

Prestige-based social media platforms have hacked one of the most important learning mechanisms for adolescents, diverting their time, attention, and copying behavior away from a variety of role models with whom they could develop a mentoring relationship that would help them succeed in their real-world communities.

Imagine if our negative feelings, or at least lots of them, turned out to be illusions, and we could dispel them by just contemplating them from a particular vantage point.

“Dr. Lieberman debunked the long-held myth that young children and babies don’t need treatment for trauma because they somehow don’t understand or remember the chaotic experiences they faced. Her work is built on research that shows that early adversity often has an outsize effect on infants and young children…”

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.