Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions

The first are called intrinsic motives7—they are the things you do purely because you value them in and of themselves, not because of anything you get out of them.

Disempowerment,” Michael told me, “is at the heart12 of poor health”—physical, mental, and emotional.

“you don’t have to be controlled by your concept of yourself.”

This evidence suggests if we return to seeing our distress and our joy as something we share with a network of people all around us, we will feel different.

you are at a fork in the road now. You can try to muffle the signal. That will lead you to many wasted years when the pain will persist. Or you can listen to the signal and let it guide you—away from the things that are hurting and draining you, and toward the things that will meet your true needs.

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.”

“You’ve got to pull yourself out of the materialistic environments—the environments that are reinforcing the materialistic values,” he says, because they cripple your internal satisfactions. And then, he says, to make that sustainable, you have to “replace them with actions that are going to provide those intrinsic satisfactions, [and] encourage th

What you really need are connections. But what you are told you need, in our culture, is stuff and a superior status, and in the gap between those two signals—from yourself and from society—depression and anxiety will grow as your real needs go unmet. You have to picture all the values that guide why you do things in your life, Tim said, as being l

Our ego, our sense of self, always has both these qualities—protective, and imprisoning.