1
" Our brains resist change, they rail against it, our amygdala will always want the safe bet. But are the obstacles truly insurmountable? Is it a brick wall? Or is it a sliding door, which, once you decide to approach it, begins to swish open? Because even though our brains prefer safety in the short run, in the long run they crave meaning, challenge, and novelty. "
― , Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife
5
" Of Post-Traumatic Growth:
Rich Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun coined the term in 1995, when they noticed that some people did not recover from their traumatic experiences in a typically resilient fashion. Rather than return to their set point, everything about them radically changed: their worldviews, their goals in life, their friendships.
"It's not just bouncing back," Tedeschi explains. "Most people talk about that as resilience. We distinguish from resilience because this is transformative. "
"The one thing that overwhelmingly predicts it is the extent to which you say, "My core beliefs were shaken,'" Calhoun adds.
What kind of core beliefs? "The degree to which the world is just," Tedeschi says, "or that people are benevolent or that the future is something that you can control. Beliefs about, basically, how life works. "
― , Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife
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" Every idea in this book runs against our natural tendency to want to relax, take it easy, reward ourselves for decades of work and childrearing. Our default mode at midlife is entropy. The default is not destiny, and on this, the research is unequivocal: for every fork in the road, you are almost invariably better off making the harder choice. Harder in the moment, that is, but easier over the years, as your body and mind remain strong. By resisting entropy, but pushing through the inertia the beckons us to rest a little longer, to slow down just a notch, until your life has narrowed to a pinprick – by resisting those forces, you dramatically up the odds that your life will be rich to your final breath, deeply entwined with family and friends, engaged in intellectual pursuits, and infused with a purpose that extends beyond yourself. Yes, it's hard.
Yes, it's worth it. "
― , Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife
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" Fully a third of people who, as autopsies indicate, have the disease show no cognitive decline, no evidence of Alzheimer’s.1 At first, other scientists raised their eyebrows; now, after some five hundred autopsies, the finding is beyond dispute. Bennett tells me that he and his colleagues are approaching Alzheimer’s disease sideways. “Most of the world is focused on ‘How do we stop that pathology from developing, or how do we reverse it or get it out of your brain?’” he says. “We’re interested in those questions, too. But on the flip side, let’s assume for the moment that it’s going to happen. Then how do you build a better brain so that despite the accumulation "
― , Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife