From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
When you close your eyes and imagine the person you're going to be in 10 years, this area of your brain is totally deactivated – it's treating the person you are going to become as a stranger. This is why people have such a hard time getting prostate exams, staying on a diet, quitting smoking, because the person who is going to benefit the most from these things is literally not you.
My actual definition to describe mental fitness is your ability to remain in a neutral to positive state for most of your day, regardless of what the day is throwing at you and that is not the state people are in nowadays.
My training as an actor prepared me for caregiving. As actors, we show up ready to explore what might happen without a clear sense of the outcome. This requires you to be nimble, flexible, and curious, qualities I had to embrace daily as a caregiver.
Nobody should ever feel isolated, or like they have nowhere to turn. Whether it's at school, home, or in the workplace. Nobody should ever feel a cultural burden of silence around mental health challenges.
Alzheimer's starts its destructive process 30 years prior to its typical diagnosis. Therefore, when considering the prevalence of this disease, we're speaking of 7 million diagnosed patients in the US. But then, one might ask, how many Americans currently have the initial stages of Alzheimer's, characterized by amyloid plaques, cell death, tangles, and inflammation, already festering in their brains? I concur with the higher estimates, suggesting around 40 million people.
By measuring skulls from 400 years ago, you'll find that our ancestors had straight teeth, prognathic faces, and very wide jaws. Compare these to modern skulls, which show very slender, narrow faces and small jaws. It's all there, plainly evident, yet it seems as though nobody is really talking about this or acknowledging the rapid changes that have occurred over just a couple of hundred years.
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.
Fear is like being shot out of a cannon. Imagine a car has fallen on someone I love—I get this clear, calm, intense bolt of energy. Anxiety, on the other hand, is like being haunted. You never actually see what's scaring you—it's just a story in your head that never goes away.
The microbiome is taking up space, so it is not letting the viruses and the bad bacteria come, adhere to the tissue and then grow. To conclude these are the two mechanisms. It's very simple.
We come from mammals, we are mammals… we're just mammals that wear clothes. We're destimulated – we don't feel the cold, the heat, everything in our environment – even though our physiology is built for it. We've allowed them to lose this fitness, to lose their conditioning – and so our hearts compensate.
If we treat the mind and body as one unit, then wherever we put the mind, we necessarily put the body—and that opens up enormous possibilities for control.
Loneliness is thought to be as bad for our health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. We're essentially creatures of togetherness. We are hardwired to connect and so when we're lonely, an alarm bell goes off within our bodies that triggers fight or flight mode. Our heart rate goes up, our stress levels go up, our pulse rate goes up and our blood pressure goes up.