Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 89-90 | Added on Sunday, April 26, 2020 3:04:39 PM
One of the key symptoms of depression is to see no hope. No future. Far from the tunnel having light at the end of it, it seems like it is blocked at both ends, and you are inside it.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 92-92 | Added on Sunday, April 26, 2020 10:44:11 PM
the fact that this book exists is proof that depression lies.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 93-94 | Added on Sunday, April 26, 2020 10:44:30 PM
But depression itself isn’t a lie. It is the most real thing I’ve ever experienced.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 96-96 | Added on Sunday, April 26, 2020 10:45:35 PM
Stigma is particularly cruel for depressives, because stigma affects thoughts and depression is a disease of thoughts.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 106-108 | Added on Sunday, April 26, 2020 10:47:03 PM
I wrote this because the oldest clichés remain the truest. Time heals. The tunnel does have light at the end of it, even if we aren’t able to see it.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 111-113 | Added on Sunday, April 26, 2020 10:47:32 PM
Our experience overlaps with other people’s, but it is never exactly the same experience. Umbrella labels like ‘depression’ (and ‘anxiety’ and ‘panic disorder’ and ‘OCD’) are useful, but only if we appreciate that people do not all have the same precise experience of such things.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 114-115 | Added on Sunday, April 26, 2020 10:47:51 PM
if books had to replicate our exact experience of the world to be useful, the only books worth reading would be written by ourselves. There
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 116-116 | Added on Sunday, April 26, 2020 10:48:07 PM
Misery, like yoga, is not a competitive sport.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 120-121 | Added on Sunday, April 26, 2020 10:48:28 PM
‘But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.’ —Albert Camus, A Happy Death
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 167-167 | Added on Sunday, April 26, 2020 11:15:29 PM
You can be a depressive and be happy, just as you can be a sober alcoholic.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 365-367 | Added on Sunday, April 26, 2020 11:36:45 PM
The evolutionary psychologists might be right. We humans might have evolved too far. The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe’s worth of darkness.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 599-600 | Added on Monday, April 27, 2020 11:36:56 AM
I just sat there, looking at the pink blossom and the branches. Wishing my thoughts could float away from my head as easily as the blossom floated from the tree. I started to cry. In public. Wishing I was a cherry tree.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 607-608 | Added on Monday, April 27, 2020 11:37:58 AM
more is known about those faraway stars than the processes of our brain, the one item in the whole universe that can think about, well, the whole universe.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 613-614 | Added on Monday, April 27, 2020 11:39:00 AM
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter. That is a type of chemical that sends signals from one area of the brain to the other.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 626-629 | Added on Monday, April 27, 2020 11:40:35 AM
a professor of behavioural science at Stanford University called Robert Malenka believes that research needs to be carried out in other areas. Like on the bit of the brain right in the centre, the tiny ‘nucleus accumbens’. As this is already known to be responsible for pleasure and addiction, it makes a kind of sense that if it isn’t working properly we’ll feel the opposite of pleasure – anhedonia. That is the complete inability to feel pleasure, a chief symptom of depression.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 635-636 | Added on Monday, April 27, 2020 11:02:47 PM
Maybe instead of worrying about upgrading technology and slowly allowing ourselves to be cyborgs we should have a little peek at how we could upgrade our ability to cope with all this change.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 703-705 | Added on Monday, April 27, 2020 11:11:21 PM
And the only real thing I wished for, beyond feeling better, was for time to move quicker. I would want 9 a.m. to be 10 a.m. I would want the morning to be the afternoon. I would want the 22nd of September to be the 23rd of September.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 729-729 | Added on Monday, April 27, 2020 11:14:07 PM
Anhedonia – I first knew of this word as Woody Allen’s original title for the film Annie Hall.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1082-1084 | Added on Tuesday, April 28, 2020 9:59:40 PM
One cliché attached to bookish people is that they are lonely, but for me books were my way out of being lonely. If you are the type of person who thinks too much about stuff then there is nothing lonelier in the world than being surrounded by a load of people on a different wavelength.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1113-1113 | Added on Tuesday, April 28, 2020 10:05:41 PM
Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1118-1119 | Added on Tuesday, April 28, 2020 10:06:36 PM
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino – The most beautiful book. Imaginary cities, each kind of like Venice but not at all like Venice. Dreams on a page. So unreal they could almost dislodge my strange mind-visions.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1173-1174 | Added on Tuesday, April 28, 2020 10:13:15 PM
I was starting to find that, sometimes, simply doing something that I had dreaded – and surviving – was the best kind of therapy.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1178-1179 | Added on Tuesday, April 28, 2020 10:14:08 PM
In a familiar place, your mind focuses solely on itself. There is nothing new it needs to notice about your bedroom. No potential external threats, just internal ones.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1188-1189 | Added on Tuesday, April 28, 2020 10:15:33 PM
We might be stuck in our minds, but we aren’t physically stuck. And unsticking ourselves from our physical location can help dislodge
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1188-1190 | Added on Tuesday, April 28, 2020 10:15:57 PM
We might be stuck in our minds, but we aren’t physically stuck. And unsticking ourselves from our physical location can help dislodge our unhappy mental state.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1362-1363 | Added on Tuesday, April 28, 2020 10:35:11 PM
The political philosopher John Gray – one of my favourite non-fiction writers (read Straw Dogs to see why)
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1386-1386 | Added on Tuesday, April 28, 2020 10:38:46 PM
Kafka’s most famous story is The Metamorphosis.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1400-1401 | Added on Tuesday, April 28, 2020 10:40:42 PM
Even if depression is not totally overcome, we can learn to use what the poet Byron called a ‘fearful gift’.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1418-1420 | Added on Tuesday, April 28, 2020 10:42:17 PM
Depression is also . . . Smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1750-1755 | Added on Wednesday, April 29, 2020 11:30:08 PM
if wanting things was the problem, the answer had to be in giving things up. In his language, the cause of suffering is intensity of will. Schopenhauer believed that by seeing the bigger picture, by viewing humanity as a whole and its suffering as a whole, a person would turn away from life and deny their instincts. In other words, the Schopenhauer plan involves no sex, very little money, fasting and a fair bit of self-torture. Only that way – by totally denying human will – can we see the truth that in front of us ‘there is certainly only nothingness’. Bleak, huh?
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1859-1859 | Added on Wednesday, April 29, 2020 11:44:04 PM
You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1888-1889 | Added on Wednesday, April 29, 2020 11:46:44 PM
Don’t feel guilty about being idle. More harm is probably done to the world through work than idleness. But perfect your idleness. Make it mindful.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1935-1935 | Added on Wednesday, April 29, 2020 11:49:58 PM
Books are possibilities. They are escape routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1935-1936 | Added on Wednesday, April 29, 2020 11:50:05 PM
Books are possibilities. They are escape routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind.
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1964-1965 | Added on Wednesday, April 29, 2020 11:53:47 PM
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, William Styron
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Reasons to Stay Alive (Haig, Matt)
- Your Highlight on Location 1967-1968 | Added on Wednesday, April 29, 2020 11:54:04 PM
The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic, Jonathan Rottenberg (Basic Books, 2014)
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