I have been filming this while I was still in Romania. I was so stoked to leave for Denmark I packed days before, including my tripod and photo gear. Yes, typical childlike Mary. So this video might be a tiny bit different yet the content is what matters.
Johann Hari. Lost connections. Why you're depressed and how to find hope.This is the best book I have read this year. Hands on. I have read it twice and I will keep it close next to another powerful favorite book of mine (Tough times never last but tough people do).
I loved this book because I discovered myself in it. I managed to understand why I was how I was. And it helped me gain compassion for other people from my past . I think many people may function with depression and have no clue about it. It takes a hard breakdown in order to realize something is off.
The idea that depression is caused by chemicals going wrong is a myth. Depression is life going wrong around you. The society we are living on now primes you for anxiety and depression. Johann shows us how we have lost connection with many valuable things which are paramount for a heathy human being.
The biggest cure for depression is connection. To feel that at least one human being loves you and cares about you genuinely is of great help. Nature is a cure. Meaningful work and authentic relationships are a cure. You need to feel that you love what you do, that what you do matters. That you have freedom and respect from your peers. That you feel safe financially and socially.
I thought about a metaphor while reading this book. If a flower does not bloom, do you blame the flower or the environment? It is the same with depressed people. They tell us something about the society. They shows us that something is off. More consumerism and the desire to have more leads to more depression.
I have also found the clinical studies about the use of psychedelics in depression and tobacco addiction fascinating. I totally recommend you to read about this.
The book is the holy bible for anyone who felt or feels lost. It will open your eyes and make you feel less shame for feeling the way you do. If I could, I would buy millions of copies of this book and give them to people before anything else.
I will not get into much details here about the big prank the pharma industry calls antidepressants. Scientific studies show how they are mostly a fluke. Please read this book if you ever took or consider taking medications, you will do yourself a huge favour.
I selected a whole lot of quotes from this book because I truly hope they will help anyone out there as much as it helped me. If I knew all of this years ago, I would have changed my environment and my life so much sooner. I would have been a different person. But you can't change if you don't know why something is off. So my best advice for you is to skip a coffee or a burger and buy yourself as a gift this book. Something inside of you will click. Something will change. Believe me.
If you can move to a job where you are controlled less, and have more autonomy, or are doing something you believe matters- do it. Your anxiety and depression levels will likely dip.
The response to a huge crisis isn't to go home and weep. It's to go big. It's to demand something that seems impossible -and not rest until you've achieved it.
It's a sign of how badly off track we've gone that having fulfilling work is seen as a freakish exception
Giving everyone a guaranteed basic income is actually all about making [it so we tell everyone] - "Of course you're going to do what you want to do. You're a human being. You only live once. What would you want to do [instead] -something you don't want to do?"
You aren't a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you've been pumped full of all your life , telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated. Every human being has these needs , and in our culture, we're relatively good at meeting physical needs -almost nobody actually starves, for example, which is an extraordinary achievement. But we've become quite bad at meeting these psychological needs. That's a crucial reason why you - and so many of the people around you - are depressed and anxious. You are not suffering from a chemical imbalance in your brain. You are suffering from a social and spiritual imbalance in how we live. Much more than you've been told up to now , it's not serotonin; it's society. It's not your brain, it's your pain
You need your nausea. You need your pain. It is a message and we must listen to the message. All these depressed and anxious people, all over the world -they are giving us a message. They are telling us something has gone wrong with the way we live
Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need the most. Lonely people are scanning for threats because they uncpnsciously know that nobody is looking out for them, so no one will help them if they are hurt. This snowball effect can be reversed-but to help a depressed or severely anxious person out of it, they need more love and more reassurance, than they would have needed in the first place. The tragedy is that many depressed and anxious people receive less love, as they become harder to be around. Indeed they receive judgement, and criticism, and this accelerates their retreat from the world. They snowball into an even colder place.
Once you settle into a story about your pain, you are extremely reluctant to challenge it
The numbers showed that 25 percent of the effects of antidepressants were due tp natural recovery, 50 percent were due to the story you have been told about them and only 25 percent to the actual chemicals
We don't know what a chemically balanced brain would look like. The whole idea of mental distress being caused simply by a chemical imbalance is a myth sold to us by the drug companies
Regular sex is one of the best natural antidepressants in the world
Almost everybody who is grieving, it turns out , matches the clinical criteria for depression
Among the women who didn't develop depression, some 20 percent had experienced a significant negative event in the preceding year. Among the women who did develop depression, some 68 percent of them had experienced a significant negative experience in the year before the depression set in
Clinical depression is an understandable response to adversity
People living in poverty were more likely to become depressed
A common symptom of depression is something called "derealization" - which is where you feel like nothing you are doing is authentic or real (similar to what you feel if you are in a meaningless job)
As your position in the civil service rose, your chances of developing depression fell, step by step. There was a very close relationship between becoming depressed and where you stood in the hierarchy
The worst stress for people isn't having to bear a lot of responsibility. It is having to endure "work that is monotonous, boring, soul-destroying; where they die a little when they come to work each day, because their work touches no part of them that is them.
Feeling lonely, it turned out, caused your cortisol levels to absolutely soar. Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack. Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger
"How many confidants do you have?" They wanted to know how many people you could turn to in a crisis, or when something really good happens to you. When they started doing the study several decades ago, the average number of close friends an American had was three. By 2004, the most common answer was none.
Loneliness isn't the physical absence of other people, it's the sense that you're not sharing anything that matter with anyone else
Being lonely will change your brain
People must belong to a tribe. Just like a bee goes haywire if it loses its hive, a human will go haywire if she loses her connection to the group.
Materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety
The more materialistic and extrinsically motivated you become, the more depressed you will be
The first thing is for people to ask themselves - Am I setting up my life so I can have a chance at succeeding at my intrinsic values? Am I hanging with the right people, who are going to make me feel loved, as opposed to making me feel like I made it?
When people rediscover each other, problems that previously seemed insoluble start to look soluble
When I feel myself starting to slide down, I don't do something for myself -I try to do something for someone else. Even if you are in pain, you can almost always make someone else feel a little bit better
The biggest job of the doctor is to listen
If you want to find a solution, you need to listen to what's missing in the depressed or anxious person's life - amd help them to find a way to resolving this , the underlying problem.
Therapeutic horticulture - getting people to try gardening to improve their mental health
You need to meet people's emotional needs if you want them to recover from depression and anxiety
It's not the work itself that makes you sick. It's three other things. It's the feeling of being controlled - of being a meaningless cog in a system. It's the feeling that no matter how hard you work, you'll be treated just the same and nobody will notice -an imbalance between efforts and rewards. And it's the feeling of being low on the hierarchy - of being a low-status person who doesn't matter compared to the Big Man in the corner office.
There is a large amount of evidence that feeling controlled and ordered around at work and feeling you're at the bottom of a hierarchy makes you more depressed and more anxious.
In our culture we end up on a materialistic autopilot. We are constantly bombarded with messages that we will feel better (and less stinky, and less disgustingly shaped, and less all-arpund worthless) only if we buy some specific product.People began to talk about how they had been spending - and they were slowly seeing what it was really all about. Often- not always- it was about "filling a hole. It fills some sort of loneliness gap.
If you want to look at other people and be happy for them, you can be happy every single day, regardless of what's happening to you
There is evidence that people who pray become less depressed
What would happen if you gave psilocybin to long-term smokers who jad been trying to quit for many years without success. After just three sessions 80% of them quit, and were still off cigarettes six months later.
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. They were the opposite of the junk values we're soaked in.(...) It's not that it flipped some chemical switch in their brains. It's thst if you zoom back and see the majesty of life, you think -Cigaretted? Crsving? I'm bigger than that. I'm choosing life
The patients who had their trauma compassionately acknowledged by an authority figure seemed to show a significant reduction in their illnesses -they were 35 percent less likely to return for medical help for any condition.
A sense of humiliation plays a big role in depression.Shame makes people sick.
If you receive a regular income from property you own, you are ten times less likely to develop an anxiety disorder than if you don't get any income from property
(about guaranteed universal income) If you know you have enough money to live on securely, no matter what happens, you can turn down a job that treats you badly, or that you find humiliating. It makes you less of a hostage to the job you have, and some of the jobs that people work just in order to survive are terrible, demeaning jobs
A universal income may be the best tool we have for recreating security, not with bogus promises to rebuild a lost world, but by doing something distinctively new. A guaranteed income is partly about removing this humiliation and replacing it with security. The key to a guaranteed income is that it empowers people to say no.
I only read fiction so I appreciate you including little nuggets of ideas in the video so that anyone can take something away from it.
I guess I didn't necessarily need anyone to tell me long walks in nature are good for me but now I've got one more reason to look forward to those moments.
Thank you🤗
This sounds a great boom, I'll check your yt channel and follow you there 😊
Thank you🤗
You should check out the Hive book club community btw, may get you some more consumers interested in your posts like these. :)
Oh yes that is a great idea, I will do it next time, thank you🤗
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