“I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future,” Ric told me. “If you want to find someone’s true age, listen to them. If they talk about the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they did, they’ve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to—they’re

There’s a quote from Paulo Coelho that I think about often: “Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything,” he writes. “Maybe it’s about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”

If you take nothing else from my story, take this: If I can change, you can change. All of this has to begin with the simple belief that real change is possible. That’s the most important step. I believed I was the most horrible, incorrigible, miserable son of a bitch that was ever shat into civilization. For as long as I could remember, I believed

The most important “tactic” by far is my regular weekly therapy session (down from three or four per week when I left PCS). This is not optional. Each session begins with a physical check-in: How am I feeling? How have I slept (a big one)? Am I in physical pain? Am I in conflict? Then we dissect and discuss the events and issues of the week in

And as Michael Easter pointed out to me, there is actual research suggesting that exposing oneself to the fractal geometric patterns15 in nature can reduce physiological stress, and that these effects show up on an EEG.

changing the behavior can change the mood. You do not need to wait for your mood to improve to make a behavior change.

One simple tactic that I use to cope with mounting emotional distress is inducing an abrupt sensory change—typically, by throwing ice water on my face or, if I’m really struggling, taking a cold shower or stepping into an ice bath. This simple intervention stimulates an important cranial nerve, the vagus nerve, which causes our heart rate and

Another way in which mindfulness helps is by reminding us that when we are suffering, it is rarely because of some direct cause, like a rock that is crushing our leg at this very moment. Much more often, it is because we are thinking about some painful event that occurred in the past or worrying about something bad that may occur in the future.

this observation by Jacob Riis, the great Danish American journalist and social reformer: “When nothing seems to help, I go back and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did