From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
They used two wires hooked up to a car battery to give me electric shocks. They used electric stun-guns on my genitals twice. I thought I would never see my family again.
When I first began, the word 'miscarriage' was so heavy on my tongue that I couldn't utter it. The sense of shame was so overwhelming. There's this societal expectation that women's bodies are designed for childbearing, yet there's a deafening silence around what to do when things don't go as planned.
The first and most important part of tackling mental health challenges is to drive cultural change. If you don't change the culture around mental health- people will continue to be stigmatised, people will continue to stay silent, people will not seek the help they need.
Becoming more optimistic involves meticulously noting down your problems and then systematically reinterpreting them to find the most positive alternative explanation. I describe this process as becoming your own advocate—stepping outside yourself, scrutinizing your initial interpretations, and challenging them with counterarguments.
In my experience, there is a profound difference when counselling involves someone who has personally endured captivity or whose family has dealt with hostage situations. Time and again, I've observed that people find it extremely beneficial to speak with someone who can directly relate to their experience. An empathetic counsellor without this background can indeed offer substantial support, but speaking with someone who truly understands what it means to be in that situation adds a unique layer of comfort and understanding.
I want every mother in the world, from Baghdad to New York to be able to guarantee the same strength and health to her child; to give that child the tools to control their happiness and health, and to have the power to live well.
We have created a society that gives us more access to comfort. We have the ability to push much further than we think is possible, but the brain wants us to rest to allow the body to recover.
The stress response is designed for '3 minutes of screaming terror across the Savannah.' If you're not experiencing such an intense moment, it's likely that your stress response isn't calibrated right. At its core, stress is a primal reaction meant for life-threatening situations where our options are to freeze, flee, or fight.
Interestingly, the same hormonal cascade occurs when we feel excitement. Essentially, whether we're excited or stressed, our physiological response is similar. The key differentiator is our perception of these sensations. Reframing stress as our body's way of gearing up to tackle challenges can be a potent tool.
The more we recognize that we are the ocean and the waves represent different aspects of our being, the less any individual wave of difficulty will consume, overwhelm, or define us.
With technology, we're creating a lot more hammers – and with more hammers, we're able to find more nails. The question is whether those hammers are being made for the right purposes, and whether they will serve the right purpose. I often worry that when we talk about health-tech – it almost seems that in certain areas the tech is taking over the health.
Meanwhile, she eschewed Bollywood beauty standards and was frequently castigated in the press for her unique fashion sense and fluctuating weight.