1,086 quotes from books that matter
In the final analysis, I tell my patients that on the basis of the least bad, least ambiguous data available, MUFAs are probably the fat that should make up most of our dietary fat mix, which means extra virgin olive oil and high-MUFA vegetable oils.
One fundamental rule—if you’re asked how you feel, you cheerfully answer fine, even if you can barely stand on your feet.
The more automatic a behavior becomes, the less likely we are to consciously think about it. And when we’ve done something a thousand times before, we begin to overlook things.
To the team at Avery and Penguin Random House who made this book a reality, thank you. I owe a debt of special thanks to my publisher, Megan Newman, for her endless patience as I continually pushed back deadlines.
Labeling is a way of validating someone’s emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone’s emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels.
The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity.
By cleansing our cells of damaged proteins and other cellular junk, autophagy allows cells to run more cleanly and efficiently and helps make them more resistant to stress.
We pick up habits from the people around us. We copy the way our parents handle arguments, the way our peers flirt with one another, the way our coworkers get results.
Not exactly Star Trek, but the point right now is just to successfully exist.
Charm and intrigue can only get you so far, Libby Loo. Those things always disappear, which is why you never, ever choose the bad boy.
Stores feature mannequins with exaggerated hips and breasts to sell clothes. Social media delivers more ‘likes’ and praise in a few minutes than we could ever get in the office or at home. Online porn splices together stimulating scenes at a rate that would be impossible to replicate in real life.
Trying to pump up your motivation to stick with a hard habit is like trying to force water through a bent hose. You can do it, but it requires a lot of effort and increases the tension in your life.
The Grail test, known as Galleri, looks at methylation patterns of the cell-free DNA, which are basically chemical changes to the DNA molecules that suggest the presence of cancer.
But was it just a fluke? For more than three decades, Harvard had been the world epicenter of negotiating theory and practice. All I knew about the techniques we used at the FBI was that they worked.
Even if someone has been training diligently, a short period of inactivity can erase many of those gains.
People who are high in neuroticism tend to be anxious and worry more than others. This trait has been linked to hypersensitivity of the amygdala, the portion of the brain responsible for noticing threats.
The difference is that while most centenarians seem to get their longevity and good health almost accidentally, thanks to genes and/or good luck, the rest of us must try to achieve this intentionally.
The point of this exercise is twofold. First, it forces people to focus on their own endgame, which most of us might prefer to avoid thinking about. Economists call this “hyperbolic discounting,” the natural tendency for people to choose immediate gratification over potential future gains, especially if those gains entail hard work.
When you’re “just talking” to yourself, two minutes feels like all five centuries of the Dark Ages.
Intriguingly, this reduction appears to be especially dramatic in brain regions that are also affected in Alzheimer’s disease, including the parietal lobe, which is important for processing and integrating sensory information; and the hippocampus of the temporal lobe, which is critical to memory.
It is much better to save and invest and plan ahead, letting your wealth build gradually over decades, than to scramble to try to scrape together an individual retirement account in your late fifties and hope and pray that the stock market gods help you out.
Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.
The more tightly bound your new habit is to a specific cue, the better the odds are that you will notice when the time comes to act.
Just to give you a sense of how exclusive this club is, for every supercentenarian in the world at this writing, there are about nine billionaires.