Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There were several parallels between Jonestown and Escuela Caribe. Both places used isolation to control a large group of people and censored their communication with the outside world so their loved ones wouldn't know about the rampant physical abuse and misery of the residents. I think the worst fallout, in both cases, was the living in constant fear, witnessing other residents get assaulted and worrying that you'd be next. That's where Post Traumatic Stress Disorder comes from.
You start to stress yourself out about the people around you. You start to think, like, "What do you really want from me?" And then you forget that you, at some point, asked them for something. At some point you needed them to take you in because you ain't had nowhere to go. And now you turn around and question their loyalty to you, and those were the only people loyal to you. The only people that really loved you are still there, and you tanked on them. I'll never let that happen.
Christ had no interest in gathering vast crowds of professed adherents who would melt away as soon as they found out what following Him actually demanded of them. In our own presentation of Christ's gospel, therefore, we need to lay a similar stress on the cost of following Christ and make sinners face it soberly before we urge them to respond to the message of free forgiveness. In common honesty, we must not conceal the fact that free forgiveness in one sense will cost everything.
Whether I'm on the road or off the road it's really important for me mentally and physically. Physically, when I'm on the road, I work with men that love to eat - I work with former athletes, with men who love to indulge on the road, so I eat like a guy. I have four appetizers, I try their entrees, I eat mine, I like dessert. So I have to make sure that physically, I try to stay in shape. I'm always doing some sort of a workout, and then mentally it just helps a lot with the stress.
I glance back in the mirror to the concrete bridge, the one I've boldly driven straight across without second thought, and I see truth reflecting back at me: Every time fear freezes and worry writhes, every time I surrender to stress, aren't I advertising the unreliability of God? That I really don't believe? But if I'm grateful to the Bridge Builder for the crossing of a million strong bridges, thankful for a million faithful moments, my life speaks my beliefs and I trust Him again.
The health benefits, both mental and physical, of humor are well documented. A good laugh can diffuse tension, relieve stress, and release endorphins into your system, which act as a natural mood elevator. In Norman Cousin's book, Anatomy of an Illness, Cousin's describes the regimen he followed to overcome a serious debilitating disease he was suffering from. It included large doses of laughter and humor. Published in 1976, his book has been widely accepted by the medical community.
Imagine that someone said or did something cruel to you, but that you did not react in any way whatsoever – you did not become upset, resentful or even ruffled. You simply observed that this person was saying or doing something cruel, as though you were calmly observing the scene in a movie. You simply would not be stressed by what would appear to others to be a highly stressful encounter. Stress and cruelty affect us as profoundly as they do only because we react to them resentfully.
I deal with stress in two ways because there are two kinds of stress. There's stress that you can take care of and there's stress that you can't. The first one, I take care of it as fast as possible, because putting it off always makes it worse. Things that I can't fix? I think about the fact that I can't fix them. I think about why I can't fix them and I come to terms with the fact that this is a problem that I'm not going to overcome and that the world is not a wish granting factory.
Ironically, though our society of affluence brings safety and stability, it doesn't bring psychological health. As wealth goes up, suicide and depression rates tend to go up. I read one study that compared women in North America with women in Nigeria, and the group with the highest rates of depression was urban North American women, which is the wealthiest. Now, there are obviously huge stresses that come with poverty, but the poorer the society, the more collaborative people have to be.
Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation.
I think there's more stressful periods than others when you're launching new things or going into a new business, or there are many things that can stress you out. Having to let people go, that's stressful. Never fun. But for the most part, I try to manage a schedule that's achievable and try not to make a schedule that's not. And a lot of times, sometimes it becomes a little unmanageable, but in spurts. So I think being able to make an achievable schedule, one that I know I can accomplish.
However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colors his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of eloquence, in thought if not in language, and seem to move in some luminous sphere. Goriot's voice and gesture had at this moment the power of communication that characterizes the great actor. Are not our finer feelings the poems of the human will?
My grandmother instilled in me a toughness that comes with survival. She was a tough lady and never truly enjoyed her life. She would always worry about things and I would tell her that it wasn't going to get her anywhere and it didn't. I wasn't even that smart back then, but I knew that worrying about everyone else wasn't good for her health. As Latinos, we stress and worry so much about the future when the future is today. As long as we protect what's good in our lives, we will be all right.
Financial innovation can be highly dangerous, though almost no one will tell you this. New financial products are typically created for sunny days and are almost never stress-tested for stormy weather. Securitization is an area that almost perfectly fits this description; markets for securitized assets such as subprime mortgages completely collapsed in 2008 and have not fully recovered. Ironically, the government is eager to restore the securitization markets back to their pre-collapse stature.
While public school history courses in the United States stress the horrors of the German Nazi murder of 6 million Jews and Josef Stalin's pogroms against racial minorities and political dissidents in the Soviet Union, the facts that the U.S. Army's solution to the 'Indian Problem' was the prototype for the Nazi 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish Problem' and that the North American Indian Reservation was the model for the twentieth century gulag and concentration camp, are conveniently overlooked.
Any advice I could give to female directors would be the same as for males: There will be endless difficulties, some seemingly defeating, on your way. That's a given. Just wipe out the very notion of stress. Concentrate on your actors. Obsess about your story and the world it is anchored in. Deal with the hundreds of down-to-earth issues [around] the existence of your film. At some point, everything will be ripe. And you wouldn't be able to stop your film from coming to life even if you wanted to.
As a mother, the one thing that always goes through your head is, You're never enough. You never can be enough - or do enough - for your kids. It's a never-ending issue for me. I had to learn: Don't beat yourself up so much.... You have to take it one day at a time, do the best that you can and enjoy yourself. I notice that if there are some times I've been stressed, because I'm human and stress about things, that affects your kids. So you have to make sure you're a happy mom so they can be happy.
I think [testing] has had a profoundly problematic impact on student learning. It must seem to students that their worth as individuals is equivalent to their test score. The stress the high stakes culture has on teachers is also highly negative and must surely impact students in a negative way. It also de-professionalizes teachers because it encourages them to be script readers, followers of rigid schedules, and to disregard the needs of the people they teach in favor of the scripts and schedules.
Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical education - if it were admitted that the great object is to read and enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few things absolutely essential to this result, if the tortoise were allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon - all might in their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and its coolness.
As long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than there is wrong, no matter how ill or how hopeless you may feel. But if you hope to mobilize your inner capacities for growth and for healing and to take charge in your life on a new level, a certain kind of effort and energy on your part will be required.... It will take conscious effort on your part to move in a direction of healing and inner peace. This means learning to work with the very stress and pain that is causing you to suffer.
I do feel like L.A. has a very supportive and collaborative energy. I felt that in New York too but also there's so much space here! You can have a home studio. In New York you had to rent a room to do a session or to practice. As a solo artist, it was a lot more expensive. Here there is that comfort in lifestyle a little bit more, being able to breathe a little bit more, and creatively flow, not having to stress about how to get our gear there in a cab and pay by the hour, it's just a different vibe.
The person senses what it feels like to be free from inhibitions. At the same time he feels connected and integrated – with his body and, through his body, with his environment. He has a sense of well-being and inner peace. He gains the knowledge that the life of the body resides in its involuntary aspect. […] Unfortunately these beautiful feelings do not always hold up under the stress of daily living in our modern culture. The pace, the pressure and the philosophy of our times are antithetical to life.
The exact process you use to build courage isn't important. What's important is that you consciously do it. Just as your muscles will atrophy if you don't regularly stress them, your courage will atrophy if you don't consistently challenge yourself to face down your fears. In the absence of this kind of conscious conditioning, you'll automatically become weak in both body and mind. If you aren't regularly exercising your courage, then you are strengthening your fear by default; there is no middle ground.
Ninety percent of what most yoga teachers do is teach asana practice. While asana discharges stress and so forth, it was never intended to be a standalone practice. The true intent of yoga is personal transformation. What we get out of the privilege of teaching prisoners is the opportunity to focus on our own personal development. You can be of service, and, while helping others transform their lives, you have the deeper opportunity to transform your own. What we teach in prison is how we live our lives.
Don't ever think of bad things that could happen, and you'll have a better chance of them never happening. Don't ever think about doing something bad to someone, because depending on the intensity of your mind waves, something bad could really happen to them. Think love. Be love. Breathe only love, and love you shall be. When you stress out, things will stress out around you. Always control your thoughts and pacify any unnecessary stress. Control your vibrations and you are the master of your own harmony.
My prayer today is to become more mindful of my personal actions. What motivates me to do what I do and to say the things I do to others? I often dismiss my actions because of stress or anger but the people I hurt along the way do not dismiss what I've said or done. Every action and every word carries a consequence. Every person has stress and every person has anger. I would not like to be someone's target and I ask for the grace to become more mindful not to harm others just because I am having a bad day.
And exactly how does a miserable face help the war effort?" he asked sharply, his mood beginning to change. "Will a frown bring back the dead or fortify a town? If I allow myself to laugh in the face of misery, I rest my mind from the stress of it all, and then it'll work the better for you and your war. And if I'm really to be one of your advisers, Your Majesty, accept this piece of advise: Take happiness where and when you find it, because there is going to be precious little of it in the next few months!
The normal way of gathering information is through sound: when you hear information that you want to gather, you look in its direction, you see what it is, if you choose you can get closer, you can see it, you can touch, and then, finally, the most committed form of data gathering is to taste it and eat it. But for the urbanite, we're cut off from our primary sense, and I want to stress that - our primary sense of gathering information about the place that we're living in - and instead, we're in a war zone.
True happiness isn't something that can be made. It isn't the result of anything. Happiness comes to those who understand that you can't seek it any more than you seek the air you breathe. It is a part of life to be found within living. ... All pursuit of happiness is based upon the false assumption that there is a way to possess it; you may as well try to grab a handful of breeze! Happiness is the natural expression of a stress-free life, just as sunlight naturally warms the Earth after dark clouds appear.
You must learn to look at people who are angry with you straight in the eye without getting angry back. When children see their parents treating them this way, they then recognize the parents' authority. It speaks louder than words. Their new respect for the parents is as good for them as it is for the parents. It never works to demand respect of children. It must be given willingly as a result of strength of good character in the parents, which is manifested by their non-reaction to stress in the children.
There is a connection between environment and stress on both ends, with excessive clutter and excessive attention to detail both holding the power to distract us from our ability to love fully, work productively and relax effectively. So, what makes sense to me is for each of us to think this through on a few fronts: what constitutes a comfortable environment for us, how much effort we're willing to put into it relative to other priorities, and how well-matched we need our partners' preferences to be to ours.
The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.
Beginning today, make the decision to love and accept yourself just the way you are. Say your name followed by the words "I love you" and make this your daily mantra, repeating it often, especially during times of stress. Let it be your first thought upon arising and the last you think before falling asleep at night. This simple act of self-courtship can profoundly change your world. Try it for yourself and see. Make a personal decision to be in love with the most beautiful, exciting, worthy person ever - you.
Try to keep your mouth shut until you have a job offer, especially if your move is not entirely certain. There are only a few cases in which I think it would be appropriate to tell your boss what's going on. For example, if your spouse is being forced to relocate, obviously you are going to go, and if you have a good relationship with your boss, then it might take some stress off of you to tell the truth. The general rule, though, is not to give your employer more power over your destiny than you have yourself.
A married guy is responsible for everything, no matter what. Women, thanks to their having been oppressed all these years, are blameless, free as birds, and all the dirt they do is the result of premenstrual syndrome or postmenstrual stress or menopause or emotional disempowerment by their fathers or low expectations by their teachers or latent unspoken sexual harassment in the workplace, or some other airy excuse. The guy alone is responsible for every day of marriage that is less than marvelous and meaningful.
Extreme weather like the droughts in Russia, China and Brazil and the flooding in Pakistan and Australia [in 2010] have contributed to a level of food price volatility we haven't seen since the oil crisisof 40 years ago. Unfortunately, this could be just a taste of things to come because in the next few decades the build-up of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere could greatly increase the risk of droughts, flooding, pest infestation and water scarcity for agriculture systems already under tremendous stress.
We keep a lot of humor and laughter in the home. A lot of times these days, people let the stress of life take the joy from the home. When you can laugh and you can have joy, that's very healthy. Victoria is easy going. She's very spontaneous and fun. I can hear her laughter all through the house. It sets the tone for the house. I like someone who can laugh. The second thing is respect. We just do our best. We don't always agree with each other but we make the decision that we want to treat each other with respect.
There is a lot of new research about how stress hormones affect your body and how you can work on giving your body as much of the good hormones as possible, because that heals your body. I am quite a rational person - so when someone could show me that there was a rational way of seeing fear in terms of stress hormones, it was easier for me to understand. I think all autoimmune diseases are very sensitive to stress. It is typical that the flares come after a period of emotional stress. The connection is quite clear.
There is also the very real possibility that, in the justice of God, one of the reasons He uses the weak and the foolish of the world is so that no argument could be made later that certain people were advantaged in some unfair way by that which was unearned-either in the premortal life or here. Hence it seems prudent for us to realize that just because one is set apart or ordained to a certain calling or assignment he or she must not expect to be set apart from the stresses of life. There appear to be no immunities.
At every level, from the microcellular to the psychological, exercise not only wards off the ill effects of chronic stress; it can also reverse them. Studies show that if researchers exercise rats that have been chronically stressed, that activity makes the hippocampus grow back to its preshriveled state. The mechanisms by which exercise changes how we think and feel are so much more effective than donuts, medicines, and wine. When you say you feel less stressed out after you go for a swim, or even a fast walk, you are.
Stress is a choice. Do you buy that? Some people have a hard time with the idea. Yes, bad things happen: The economy sours, our business struggles, the stock market tumbles, jobs are lost, people around us don't follow through, deadlines are missed, projects fail, good people leave. Life is full of these. But still, stress is a choice because whatever the 'trigger event,' we always choose our own response. We choose to react angrily. We choose to stuff our emotions and keep quiet. We choose to worry. Stress is a choice.
You know I still get nervous speaking in front of people. Speaking reminds me of pitching in that way. No matter how much you prepare, there is always that anxiety to perform. Those butterflies. You learn to embrace that stress. Eventually you realize that stress is what pushes you to perform at your peak.... But man the roller coaster! I told myself that after my career was over I would live my life quietly, out of the public eye, with no chance of embarrassing myself in front of large groups of people. Yet...here I am!
The problem is that people are pulling farther apart, rather than make an effort to get back together. There have been remarkable moments that united this country. It makes everyone feel relieved. Then because of economic stress, political shifts, we get wrenched apart again. I think it's cyclical. I am an optimist by nature. There are moments, the period after 9/11, the way we responded. The election of Barack Obama. There are moments where the country felt good about being American. I'm waiting for that to happen again.
According to the American Psychological Association, the most effective stress-relief strategies are exercising or playing sports, praying or attending a religious service, reading, listening to music, spending time with friends or family, getting a massage, going outside of ra walk, meditating or doing yoga, and spending time with a creative hobby. The least effective strategies are gambling, shopping, smoking, drinking, eating, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and watching TV or movies for more than two hours.
I think the American people recognize is after a decade of war it's time to do some nation building here at home. And what we can now do is free up some resources, to, for example, put Americans back to work, especially our veterans, rebuilding our roads, our bridges, our schools, making sure that, you know, our veterans are getting the care that they need when it comes to post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, making sure that the certifications that they need for good jobs of the future are in place.
The Hoh Valley is an incredibly secure area. Any event occurs around us, we will instantly become informed of that event. This can even happen at a distance. When the body recognizes that you have a very large listening area, and you're getting all the information, the body relaxes. You can breathe more gently, the cortisol levels that are created by stress in our bloodstream dissipate, and we actually become healthier. And as a result, if we are actually fortunate enough to live in a place like that, we will live longer.
The side effect of expanding consciousness is that negativity starts to evaporate; it goes away like darkness when you turn on a light. Many students have so much torment, stress, depression, sorrow and hate in them these days, but then they get this technique and the negativity starts to go away. They start to feel good because the torment is leaving. Their health gets better and they get happier, their comprehension and their ability to focus grow, their grades go up and a joy for life grows; all of which comes from within.
I have the final say in the business side of my boxer's career. But as far as me being in the meetings every day, the back and forth of the paperwork and stuff like that, I have got a job to do. I am in the gym every day. The fighting lifestyle is an unforgiving one. You want to keep yourself as focussed and stress - free as possible. I have a team who focus on the more complicated aspects, on the business side of boxing, which I don't need to get myself involved in. I think I am involved in the business as much as I need to be.
(The terms douloi, banausoi and aristoi) are in a way more precise, but what is more vital and valuable, they are more comprehensive: they project a concept of psychic order that embraces entire fields that we have no other way of seeing all together as the working of a single principle. If we think of the human domain as the collaboration and the conflict of these three diverse character-types, we can understand the weave and the stress and polemics of their very different basal teleologies or ultimate governing purposes of life.
In my courses I encourage people to bring their creativity to bear on six personal challenges - discovering purpose and career, dealing with time and stress issues, developing and maintaining good relationships, achieving personal/professional balance or synergy in life, finding true prosperity, and bringing one's own creativity into the business and life. Unless people are continually dealing with these challenges, they are not bringing out their best and are not of much use to anyone, particularly themselves and their organizations.
