Sublime

When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.

have something. Katya, a petite Russian blonde with a Smurfette voice and the energy of a Pomeranian puppy, was at the front door in ten minutes with a Xanax and a worried look on her face. “Do not come in,” I warned her. “He’ll probably kill you.” Not that she didn’t entirely deserve it, of course. Or so I thought at the time. I gave Mystery the

when those with low self-esteem were told it is OK to experience negative thoughts, their mood improved.

Freud jotted down a few more sentences

If you want to see what a person who is totally removed from relational interaction looks like, examine the brain of someone who endured prolonged solitary confinement in prison.

It may be true that strict punishment—rather than mere containment or rehabilitation—is necessary to prevent certain crimes. But punishing people purely for pragmatic reasons would be very different from the approach that we currently take.

When a core belief is questioned, though, we tend to shut down rather than open up. It’s as if there’s a miniature dictator living inside our heads,8 controlling the flow of facts to our minds, much like Kim Jong-un controls the press in North Korea. The technical term for this in psychology is the totalitarian ego, and its job is to keep out

In any given year, one-tenth of the adult population lives with clinical depression, and one in five will suffer from it at some point in their life.