Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions

Our ego, our sense of self, always has both these qualities—protective, and imprisoning.

I started to see depression and anxiety as like cover versions of the same song by different bands.

He feels, he told me, that the experience made clear to him that people need a sense “of being accepted, to have some sense of importance, and to be loved. And I can give that to anyone at any time, and it’s that simple. It’s just paying attention. It’s just being with people. It’s loving.”

This evidence suggests if we return to seeing our distress and our joy as something we share with a network of people all around us, we will feel different.

“you don’t have to be controlled by your concept of yourself.”

The conversation shifted from figuring out what was is making us so unhappy in our lives, to trying to block the neurotransmitters in the brain that allow us to feel it.

Everyone I interviewed who worked with administering psychedelics clinically emphasized that these substances most often leave people with a profound sense of connection—to other people, to nature, and to a deeper sense of meaning.

Despair often happens, he had learned, when there is a “lack of balance between efforts and rewards.”

But that comes at a cost. If you were responsible for being hurt, then at some level, you have to think you deserved it. A person who thinks they deserved to be injured as a child isn’t going to think they deserve much as an adult, either.

What you really need are connections. But what you are told you need, in our culture, is stuff and a superior status, and in the gap between those two signals—from yourself and from society—depression and anxiety will grow as your real needs go unmet. You have to picture all the values that guide why you do things in your life, Tim said, as being l