Lost Connections (Kindle highlights)

You need your nausea. It is a message. It will tell us what is wrong with you. (p. 4)
Everything that causes an increase in depression also causes an increase in anxiety, and the other way around. They rise and fall together. (p. 12)
After twenty years researching this at the highest level, Irving has come to believe that the notion depression is caused by a chemical imbalance is just “an accident of history,” produced by scientists initially misreading what they were seeing, and then drug companies selling that misperception to the world to cash in. (p. 29)
“There’s no evidence that there’s a chemical imbalance” in depressed or anxious people’s brains. (p. 30)
Nobody denies that the drug companies’ own data, submitted to the FDA, shows that antidepressants have only a really small effect over and above placebo. (p. 33)
To me, this seems like the most crucial piece of evidence about antidepressants of all: most people on these drugs, after an initial kick, remain depressed or anxious. (p. 37)
To say that if grief lasts beyond an artificial time limit, then it is a pathology, a disease to be treated with drugs, is—she believes—to deny the core of being human. (p. 41)
Why is a death the only event that can happen in life where depression is a reasonable response? Why not if your husband has left you after thirty years of marriage? Why not if you are trapped for the next thirty years in a meaningless job you hate? Why not if you have ended up homeless and you are living under a bridge? If it’s reasonable in one set of circumstances, could there also be other circumstances where it is also reasonable? (p. 42)
The symptoms are a messenger of a deeper problem. Let’s get to the deeper problem.” (p. 43)
What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need? (p. 44)
“Clinical depression is an understandable response to adversity.” (p. 51)
They are all forms of disconnection. They are all ways in which we have been cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way. (p. 59)
The worst stress for people isn’t having to bear a lot of responsibility. It is, he told me, 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.” (p. 69)
Disempowerment,” Michael told me, “is at the heart of poor health”—physical, mental, and emotional. (p. 69)
Despair often happens, he had learned, when there is a “lack of balance between efforts and rewards.” (p. 70)
It turned out that they were three times more likely to catch the cold than people who had lots of close connections to other people. (p. 74)
John and other scientists found that being disconnected from the people around you had the same effect on your health as being obese. (p. 75)
Loneliness, he concluded, is causing a significant amount of the depression and anxiety in our society. (p. 77)
Every human instinct is honed not for life on your own, but for life like this, in a tribe. Humans need tribes12 as much as bees need a hive. (p. 77)
Loneliness is “an aversive state that motivates us to reconnect.” (p. 78)
This showed that loneliness isn’t just some inevitable human sadness, like death. It’s a product of the way we live now. (p. 78)
Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. (p. 82)
It turned out that feeling lonely was different from simply being alone. (p. 82)
To end loneliness, you need other people—plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you. (p. 83)
Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people, he said—it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else. (p. 83)
For the patient, the Internet obsession was a way of “escaping his anxiety, through distraction”. (p. 87)
The comedian Marc Maron once wrote that “every status update is a just a variation on a single request: ‘Would someone please acknowledge me?’ (p. 88)
Social media can’t compensate us psychologically for what we have lost—social life. (p. 89)
We—without ever quite intending to—have become the first humans to ever dismantle our tribes. As a result, we have been left alone on a savanna we do not understand, puzzled by our own sadness. (p. 90)
“Something about a strong desire for materialistic6 pursuits,” he was starting to believe, “actually affected the participants’ day-to-day lives, and decreased the quality of their daily experience.” They experienced less joy, and more despair. (p. 95)
Your promotion? Your fancy car? The new iPhone? The expensive necklace? They won’t improve your happiness even one inch. (p. 96)
But people who achieved their intrinsic goals did become significantly happier, and less depressed and anxious. (p. 96)
Junk values are distorting our minds. (p. 97)
That is what your head starts to look like when you become more materialistic. If you are doing something not for itself but to achieve an effect, you can’t relax into the pleasure of a moment. You are constantly monitoring yourself. (p. 98)
All of us have certain innate needs—to feel connected, to feel valued, to feel secure, to feel we make a difference in the world, to have autonomy, to feel we’re good at something. Materialistic people, he believes, are less happy—because they are chasing a way of life that does a bad job of meeting these needs. (p. 98)
The more you think life is about having stuff and superiority and showing it off, the more unhappy, and the more depressed and anxious, you will be. (p. 99)
When you’re focused on money and status and possessions, consumer society is always telling you more, more, more, more. (p. 101)
Am I setting up my life so I can have a chance of succeeding at my intrinsic values? (p. 104)
The more you were traumatized as a child, the more your risk of depression rises. (p. 112)
When you’re a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can’t move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. (p. 114)
Psychological damage doesn’t have to be as extreme as childhood violence to affect you profoundly. (p. 115)
Robert had discovered that having an insecure status was the one thing even more distressing than having a low status. (p. 120)
So it seemed like there might be something in the theory that depression and anxiety are a response to the constant status anxiety many of us live with today. (p. 120)
It strongly suggested that something about inequality seems to be driving up depression and anxiety. (p. 121)
This isn’t limited to bonobos, it turns out. We know now from over a century of observing animals in captivity that when they are deprived of their natural habitat, they will often develop symptoms that look like extreme forms of despair. (p. 125)
What if, she wondered, humans become more depressed when we are deprived of access to the kind of landscape we evolved in, too? (p. 126)
“We have been animals that move for a lot longer than we have been animals that talk and convey concepts,” she said to me. “But we still think that depression can be cured by this conceptual layer. I think [the first answer is more] simple. Let’s fix the physiology first. Get out. Move.” (p. 128)
When scientists have compared people who run on treadmills in the gym12 with people who run in nature, they found that both see a reduction in depression—but it’s higher for the people who run in nature. (p. 128)
But the research is very hard to find funding for, he said, because “a lot of the shape of modern biomedical research has been defined by the pharmaceutical industry,” and they’re not interested because “it’s very hard to commercialize nature contact.” You can’t sell it, so they don’t want to know. (p. 130)
It was, he concluded, the loss of the future that was driving the suicide rates up. A sense of a positive future protects you. (p. 138)
“It’s a kind of holdover from a highly Westernized, medicalized vision of health and well-being,” he told me, and it lacks “any serious appreciation of the cultural context in which these things are happening.” If you act this way, you ignore “the legitimacy of being depressed” for many people who have been stripped of hope. Instead of thinking about these causes of depression, though, we have been simply putting people on drugs, and “that’s become an industry.” (p. 138)
We have moved from having a “proletariat”—a solid block of manual workers with jobs—to a “precariat,” a shifting mass of chronically insecure people who don’t know whether they will have any work next week and may never have a stable job. (p. 141)
First, this sense of precariousness started with people in the lowest-paying jobs. But ever since, it has been rising further and further up the chain. By now, many middle-class people are working from task to task, without any contract or security. We give it a fancy name: we call it being ‘self employed’ or the ‘gig economy’ as if we’re all Kanye playing the Madison Square Garden. (p. 141)
Because you are feeling intense pain for a long period, your brain will assume this is the state in which you are going to have to survive from now on—so it might start to shed the synapses that relate to the things that give you joy and pleasure, and strengthen the synapses that relate to fear and despair. (p. 146)
What the leading scientists found—according to the National Institutes of Health overview of the best twin research—is that for depression, 37 percent of it is inherited, while for severe anxiety, it is between 30 and 40 percent. (p. 147)
What the leading scientists found—according to the National Institutes of Health overview of the best twin research—is that for depression, 37 percent of it is inherited, while for severe anxiety, it is between 30 and 40 percent. To give you a comparison, how tall you are is 90 percent inherited12; whether you can speak English is zero percent inherited. (p. 147)
They discovered that having a variant of a gene called 5-HTT does relate to becoming depressed. (p. 148)
People with glandular fever, or underactive thyroids, are significantly more likely to become depressed. (p. 150)
Believing depression was a disease didn’t reduce hostility. In fact, it increased it. (p. 153)
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.” (p. 156)
What if we have just been defining antidepressants in the wrong way? We have thought of antidepressants solely as the pills we swallow once (or more) a day. But what if we started to think of antidepressants as something very different? What if changing the way we live—in specific, targeted, evidence-based ways—could be seen as an antidepressant, too? (p. 160)
They didn’t need to be drugged. They needed to be together. (p. 179)
Don’t be you. Be us. Be we. Be part of the group. Make the group worth it. The real path to happiness, they were telling me, comes from dismantling our ego walls—from letting yourself flow into other people’s stories and letting their stories flow into yours; from pooling your identity, from realizing that you were never you—alone, heroic, sad—all along. (p. 182)
My desire for a solution that was private and personal—the psychological equivalent of a pill—was in fact a symptom of the mindset that had caused my depression and anxiety in the first place. (p. 183)
Now, when I feel myself starting to slide down, I don’t do something for myself—I try to do something for someone else. (p. 183)
Even if you are in pain, you can almost always make someone else feel a little bit better. (p. 183)
If you can be everywhere—in vehicles, or online—you end up, he believes, being nowhere. (p. 186)
His patients were often depressed, he realized, because their lives had been stripped of the things that make life worth living. (p. 192)
You were prescribed one of over a hundred different ways to reconnect—with the people around you, with the society, and with values that really matter. (p. 192)
The first was disconnection from other people. (p. 194)
“I stopped obsessing about me so much. I had other people to worry about.” (p. 195)
The second form of disconnection that was being healed, Lisa believes, was from nature. (p. 195)
The evidence that chemical antidepressants don’t work for most people shouldn’t make us give up on the idea of an antidepressant. But it should make us look for better antidepressants—and they may not look anything like we’ve been trained to think of them by Big Pharma. (p. 199)
What he has learned is that when you can become connected to the people around you, “it’s restoring of human nature.” (p. 199)
We spend most of our waking lives working—and 87 percent of us feel either disengaged or enraged by our jobs. You are twice as likely to hate your job as love it, and once you factor in e-mails, those work hours are spreading over more and more of our lives—fifty, sixty hours a week. This isn’t a molehill. It’s the mountain at the center of almost all our lives. This is where our time goes, and our lives go. (p. 201)
Meredith knew that in the abstract her work was probably doing some good, but she never felt any connection to it. It felt like a karaoke life1—her job was to sing along to a song sheet written by somebody else. (p. 202)
People “want to feel like they’ve had an impact on other humans—that they’ve improved the world in some way.” (p. 209)
It seems fair, then, to assume that a spread of cooperatives would have an antidepressant effect—although this is something that needs to be studied a whole lot more. (p. 210)
When there is pollution in the air that makes us feel worse, we ban the source of the pollution: we don’t allow factories to pump lead into our air. Advertising, he says, is a form of mental pollution. So there’s an obvious solution. Restrict or ban mental pollution, just like we restrict or ban physical pollution. (p. 211)
Advertising is only the PR team for an economic system that operates by making us feel inadequate and telling us the solution is to constantly spend. (p. 212)
As they explored this in the conversation, it became clear quite quickly—without any prompting from Nathan—that spending often isn’t about the object itself. It is about getting to a psychological state that makes you feel better. (p. 214)
For many people, as they talked this through, something became obvious. The pleasure was often in the craving and anticipation. We’ve all had the experience of finally getting the thing we want, getting it home, and feeling oddly deflated, only to find that before long, the craving cycle starts again. (p. 215)
This experiment showed, for the first time, that it was possible to intervene in people’s lives in a way that would significantly reduce their levels of materialism. The people who had gone through this experiment had significantly lower materialism and significantly higher self-esteem. It was a big and measurable effect. (p. 217)
Sympathetic joy is a method for cultivating “the opposite of jealousy or envy … It’s simply feeling happy for other people.” (p. 220)
You imagine something good happening to you—falling in love, or writing something you’re proud of. You feel the joy that would come from that. You let it flow through you. (p. 220)
Then you picture somebody you love, and you imagine something wonderful happening for them. (p. 220)
Then you picture somebody you don’t really know—say, the clerk who serves you in the grocery store. You imagine something wonderful happening to her. (p. 220)
You picture somebody you don’t like, and you try to imagine something good happening for that person. And you try to feel joy for that person. (p. 220)
You do this every day, for fifteen minutes. (p. 221)
Part of the point of sympathetic joy meditation is that you feel less envy, but an even more important part is that you start to see the happiness of others not as a rebuke, but as a source of joy for yourself, too. (p. 221)
“There’s always going to be shit coming into your life to be unhappy about. If you can be happy for others, there’s always going to be a supply of happiness available to you. Vicarious joy is going to be available millions of ways every single day. 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.” (p. 222)
Another is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which encourages people to train themselves out of negative patterns or thoughts and to move to more positive ones. The evidence suggests that this kind of therapy has a small effect, and it doesn’t last very long—but its effect is real nonetheless. (p. 224)
And another is psychotherapy. It’s hard to scientifically measure whether that helps you—you can’t set up a clinical trial in which you give someone fake therapy and compare it to real therapy. (p. 224)
The way people described feeling when they took psychedelics was strikingly similar to the way people said they felt if they had a deep, sustained program of meditation. (p. 227)
Some 80 percent of people who were given the highest dose of psilocybin said, two months later, that it was one of the five most important things that had ever happened to them. (p. 233)
A large majority had more “positive attitudes about themselves and about life, better relationships with others, [and they became] more compassionate.” It’s precisely what has been shown to happen with meditators too. (p. 233)
But the long-term meditators had plenty of words, because to them, the drug seemed to be bringing them, they said, to “the same place” that really deep meditation, at its highest peaks, could sometimes reach. (p. 235)
They both, he said, break our “addiction to ourselves.” (p. 235)
What both deep meditation and psychedelic experiences teach us is the ability to see how much of that self—that ego—is constructed. (p. 235)
“If meditation is the tried and true course for [discovering this],” Roland said, “psilocybin surely has to be the crash course.” (p. 236)
These experiences left people with a sense that the stuff we obsess about every day—the shopping, the status, the petty slights—really doesn’t matter. (p. 236)
While some people find it liberating to be released from their ego, some people find it absolutely terrifying. Around 25 percent of people in the Johns Hopkins studies had at least some moments of real terror. (p. 237)
Our egos protect us. They guard us. They are necessary. But when they grow too big, they cut us off from the possibility of connection. Taking them down, then, isn’t something to be done casually. To people who feel safe only behind walls, dismantling their walls won’t feel like a jail break; it will feel like an invasion. (p. 238)
Its value is not as a drug experience but as a learning experience. And you need to keep practicing the lesson, one way or another. (p. 239)
You can pull the plug on the things that are fragmenting us—the junk values and the egotism they create—in many ways. Some people will do it with psychedelics; more people will do it with loving-kindness meditation—and we need to look at exploring many other techniques too. But whatever way you choose, he says, “it’s not a trick of the mind. It’s an opening of the mind that allows you to see … [the] things that are inside you already.” (p. 240)
“In that very brief process,” he told me, “one person tells somebody else who’s important to them … something [they regard as] deeply shameful about themselves, typically for the first time in their life. And [she] comes out of that with the realization—‘I still seem to be accepted by this person.’ It’s potentially transformative.” (p. 243)
What this suggests is it’s not just the childhood trauma in itself that causes these problems, including depression and anxiety—it’s hiding away the childhood trauma. It’s not telling anyone because you’re ashamed. When you lock it away in your mind, it festers, and the sense of shame grows. (p. 243)
There is a great deal of evidence—as I discussed before—that a sense of humiliation plays a big role in depression. (p. 243)
“I’m not saying this as a religious person—because I’m not [religious]—but confession has been in use for eighteen hundred years. Maybe it meets some basic human need if it’s lasted that long.” (p. 243)
This evidence suggests that by reconnecting a person with his childhood trauma, and showing him that an outside observer doesn’t see it as shameful, you go a significant way toward helping to set him free from some of its negative effects. (p. 243)
Most people are working all the time, and they are insecure about the future. They are exhausted, and they feel as if the pressure is being ratcheted up every year. (p. 245)
What if we simply mailed every single Canadian citizen—young, old, all of them—a check every year that was enough for them to live on? It would be set at a carefully chosen rate. You’d get enough to survive, but not enough to have luxuries. They called it a universal basic income. Instead of using a net to catch people when they fall, they proposed to raise the floor on which everyone stands. (p. 246)
When Rutger asks people what they actually do at work, and whether they think it is worthwhile, he is amazed by how many people readily volunteer that the work they do is pointless and adds nothing to the world. The key to a guaranteed income,7 Rutger says, is that it empowers people to say no. For the first time, they will be able to leave jobs that are degrading, or humiliating, or excruciating. (p. 251)
There’s a huge fight ahead of us to really deal with these problems. But that’s because it’s a huge crisis. (p. 254)
It’s a sign, Rutger says, of how badly off track we’ve gone, that having fulfilling work is seen as a freakish exception, like winning the lottery, instead of how we should all be living. Giving everyone a guaranteed basic income, he says “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?’ ” (p. 254)
The false story is the claim that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain and that the primary solution for most people is a chemical antidepressant. (p. 255)
Depression and anxiety have three kinds of causes—biological, psychological, and social. They are all real, and none of these three can be described by something as crude as the idea of a chemical imbalance. The social and psychological causes have been ignored for a long time, even though it seems the biological causes don’t even kick in without them. (p. 255)
We need to move from “focusing on ‘chemical imbalances’ to focusing on ‘power imbalances.’ ” (p. 255)
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. (p. 255)
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. Your biology can make your distress worse, for sure. But it’s not the cause. It’s not the driver. It’s not the place to look for the main explanation, or the main solution. (p. 255)
Your distress is not a malfunction. It is a signal—a necessary signal. (p. 255)
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. (p. 255)
Deep grief and depression, she explained to me, have identical symptoms for a reason. Depression, I realized, is itself a form of grief—for all the connections we need, but don’t have. (p. 255)
I’ve put into practice some of the psychological tools I talked about in this book: I learned to spend less time puffing up my ego, seeking material possessions, seeking a superior status—they were all, I see now, drugs that left me feeling worse in the end. I learned to spend far more time on pursuits that feed my intrinsic values. I used techniques like meditation to be more calm. I released my trauma. (p. 255)
I began to use some of the environmental tools I’ve talked about too. I have tried to tie myself more deeply into collectives—with friends, with family, with causes bigger than myself. I changed my own environment so I’m not surrounded by triggers that get me thinking about things that depress me—I’ve radically cut back on social media, I’ve stopped watching any TV with advertising. Instead, I spend much more time face-to-face with the people I love, and pursuing causes I know really matter. I am more deeply connected—to other people, and to meaning—than I have ever been before. (p. 255)
You have to turn now to all the other wounded people around you, and find a way to connect with them,7 and build a home with these people—a place where you are bonded to one another and find meaning in your lives together. (p. 255)
Sign up to receive occasional e-mail updates at www.thelostconnections.com/updates (p. 255)
If you want to be taught sympathetic joy meditation by the person who taught me—either in person in Illinois, or online—go to rachelshubert.com (p. 255)