Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization QUOTES

1 " you are born to move with grace, born to embrace novelty and variety, born to crave wide-open spaces, and, above all, born to love. But one of the more profound facts that will emerge is that you are born to heal. Your body fixes itself. A big part of this is an idea called homeostasis, which is a wonderfully intricate array of functions that repair the wear and tear and stress of living. "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

2 " Hippocrates, who recommended that all people in a bad mood should go for a walk—and if it did not improve, walk again. "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

3 " This pattern of balancing between comfort and exploration of the unknown is how we build our brains, "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

4 " But nutrition affects BDNF, too. Eating a diet high in sugar decreases BDNF. Eating foods with folate, vitamin B12, and omega-3 fats increases BDNF in the brain, just as exercise does. "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

5 " For a short time, one or two hours, stress does wonderful things for the brain,” Sapolsky told the conference. “More oxygen and glucose are delivered to the brain. The hippocampus, which is involved in memory, works better when you are stressed for a little while. Your brain releases more dopamine, which plays a role in the experience of pleasure, early on during stress; it feels wonderful, and your brain works better. "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

6 " What is different about meditation and a number of other practices like talk therapy or exercise or sound nutrition is that we are deliberately shaping our brains, intervening in the building process. Someone once argued that there is no choice "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

7 " Humans cannot be born with fully formed brains simply because the resulting head would not fit through the birth canal. Rather, our brains are built and formed after we are born, like a ship in a bottle, a process that takes fifteen, maybe twenty years. "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

8 " was oxytocin and, especially in the male, vasopressin. These are two closely related biochemicals, technically neuropeptides (brain chemicals). This discovery alone ratchets up the relevance of the finding to the human condition: oxytocin is the most common gene-generated molecule in the human brain. In voles, it is the transformative switch. And not just in prairie voles, it turns "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

9 " The process of digestion of carbohydrates is a disassembly of the larger, complex molecules of starches to yield sugars, and this elemental and straightforward process begins in your mouth. So simple is the process that some starches are rendered into sugars through chewing and saliva even before they hit your throat. The result is a long list of sugars, but these in turn reduce to two in the main: glucose and fructose. "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

10 " But the more telling bit of information in this aside is evidence that both vasopressin, as we have shown, and oxytocin, the “social molecule” we are trying to bottle in nasal sprayers, are triggered by exercise. Chalk up one more brain benefit from exercise. And by now, it should be no surprise that running, movement, social bonding, and emotional well-being have a common chemical pathway. Chemically, these seemingly disparate topics hang together, and we ought to pay attention to that as a big signpost of evolution’s design. But back to the social side of this "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

11 " The ability to calmly speak with one’s spouse as to the whereabouts of the espresso tamper means asking the autonomic nervous system to perform two contradictory goals at the same time—and the key to that, says Porges, is the vagal brake. The vagus nerve links up all the tools we need to respond to an existential threat, and so the vagal brake is a signal sent through the system for everything to stand down and engage—at ease. And it turns out there is a simple measure "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

12 " But here is the dark little secret in all of this, and it sounds very odd to say it: glucose is toxic. It is poison, and the body regards it just that way. We have spent generations now in a search for toxins that sponsor the diseases that ail us, the industrial chemicals, pesticides, and pollutants that may kill us, and yes, these may be killing us. But the supreme irony in all of this is that the obvious toxin hides in plain sight. It’s difficult to accuse the very substance on which all of civilization depends. People who consider these matters often refer to the “omnivore’s dilemma,” but it gets more and more difficult to claim to be omnivores, creatures that eat both plants and animals. The prima facie case is we have become carbovores as a result of our domestication by grain. This is the carbovore’s dilemma: we exist for the most part on a substance that our bloodstream treats as a toxin. "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

13 " Yet where this idea really hits home is with the breath, the one response over which we have control and which, in turn, exerts control through the alarm system that is the autonomic nervous system. Porges says he realized a long time ago—because he is a musician, specifically a horn player—that the act of controlling the breath to control the rhythm of music and at the same time engaging the brain to execute the mechanics of music works like a mental therapy. To his mind, it has all the elements of pranayama yoga, a form of yoga that stresses breath control. Breath control is common in most of yoga but also in meditation, and even in modern-day “evidence-based practices” like cognitive behavioral therapy. Relax. Take a deep breath. This "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

14 " If you come away from this book with one rule and one rule only, it is this: don’t drink sugar water. In any form. Not a Big Gulp Coke. Not a Knudsen’s 100 percent natural and organic fruit juice. "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

15 " Yet wrapped in this sort of adaptation for change is the mechanism for growth, and it, too, is rooted in what we might call stress. This is the process at work in every long run uphill or in every set of bench presses that reaches for a new personal record. We build muscles by tearing them down, stressing them beyond their limits. The body reads this as a need for more muscle to meet these new conditions of your life, and so the body builds it. And this works the same way in the brain: brain-building chemicals build new cells and make existing cells stronger. Yet Sterling’s "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

16 " Sensitivity to dopamine also declines because dopamine receptors, anticipating high levels, have down-regulated. This may explain Goethe’s famous remark, ‘Nothing is harder to bear than a succession of fair days. "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

17 " Dealing with a lion every now and again makes you better at dealing with lions. Allowing your life to surmount occasional challenges is inoculation—almost literally—against future stress. This brings us back to a central point in this book: variety. Remember, we argued from "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

18 " Dietary cholesterol, for instance, has an insignificant effect on blood cholesterol. It might elevate cholesterol levels in a small percentage of highly sensitive individuals, but for most of us, it’s clinically meaningless.” At the same time, a diet high in carbohydrates is strongly associated with high triglycerides, low HDL, and the damaging particles of LDL, which is the killer profile. "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

19 " Those substitutes had in common a type of fat that is manufactured and has no precedent in evolutionary history: what we call “trans fats,” which is a truncation of their technical chemical name, trans-isomer fatty acids. These are also labeled “unsaturated fats,” but the better way to think of them is as not existing in nature. These are the fats that harm you, and together with sugar they are the foundation of the industrial foods system. "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

20 " The elements align nicely with what we are learning about emotional trauma and the intricacies of our visceral nervous system. Breath control, rhythm, whole-body movement, narrative, social ties and cues—all of these are physical impulses that travel at the literal core of our being. Besides, he says, “people cannot rhythmically "

― John J. Ratey , Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization