When you move in unison with other people, particularly when it's to music, there are a couple of hormones and neurotransmitters that increase. Endorphins [are] the big one, and endorphins are part of what make you feel so good. But endorphins are also a bonding hormone ... It also increases oxytocin, which is a hormone that helps us feel close to other people and form these social bonds. And oxytocin also has the side effect of dampening down fear and anxiety. So, we start to feel braver, and we start to feel more optimistic.

One of my favorite quotes from Einstein: He says 'The consciousness that created the problem is not the consciousness that can solve it.' What mindfulness does is it begins to shift our consciousness. And so we begin to see our challenges and our difficulties from a different perspective. And we begin to see ourselves and life from a different perspective. And that changes everything.

The kindling on the fire is sugar, and the log on the fire is fat; I like to burn both. Most people are just burning kindling, and they're 'hangry' as hell because of it.

If you look at what happens to people when they get older, their mitochondria become less and less effective. Most disease states have some degree of mitochondrial dysfunction. Certainly that's the case in cancer; certainly that's the case in diabetes; it's the case for a subset of patients with Alzheimer's disease—there's clearly a broken component of metabolism. When the mitochondria go bad, the organism goes bad.

I think what you learn in college is not just the degree; you learn a lot of social interaction skills, you learn how to get along, you're exposed to all different kinds of subject matter... I am not convinced that where you got this experience is as important as people say.

There are all sorts of other explanations for why someone who struggles with addiction might benefit from things like running or ultra-endurance training ... These endurance training activities—running, swimming, hiking, biking—they seem to work like an antidepressant. And they seem to also reverse some of the brain changes you see after addiction; they restore the brain to be better able to resist impulses and cravings and also experience pleasure.

If we're this busy, this overburdened, we have all these responsibilities, we're taking care of this that and the other, and we're not stopping to breathe or walk through nature, I think, oftentimes, it's because we don't want to sit with whatever unresolved pain is underneath all that busyness.

All of us have the capacity to change. All of us have the capacity to hold ourselves with greater compassion and greater kindness. And, sometimes, it requires other people—other people re-teaching us our loveliness, re-teaching us our own worth, so that we can find it again within ourselves.

No one tells you the amount of work that has to go into making yourself okay. People think they don't have issues; we all all have issues. We don't even know about our issues. The more you can learn about yourself and the more self-aware you can become, the more of a favor you're doing for the world.

This is coming back. If you consider what happened in 2002 and 2003—if you basically look at the last 20 years, anybody who thinks we aren't in for lots more coronaviruses in our lifetime fails to appreciate probability theory.

Mindfulness is about paying attention with kindness, with curiosity, with openness ... The word 'mindfulness' means 'to see clearly' ... We're trying to see clearly what's happening in our lives so that we can respond effectively, wisely, compassionately.

If you're always being entertained and always being taken from one activity to another, you have no opportunity to be creative because you're always scheduled. And that's one of the things that parents need to remember.

You have to remember, as a parent, you're setting patterns that are going to last for a lifetime ... All you have to do is just be there and be loving. You don't have to provide a smorgasbord of activities every day.

Sleep is probably one of the most potent drivers of immune function. Sleep deprivation renders people susceptible to a downtick in immune function.

The typical 40-year-old woman in America who works full-time is making $36,000 a year.

When women have children and try to have a career at the same time, it's incredibly distressing. You're pulled in these two directions—you love your career and you adore your children more than anything in the world. You're trying to fulfill both versions of yourself at the same time.

Metformin is a mitochondrial toxin, which is a good thing if your mitochondria are really defective—taking a little bit of a toxicity hit to the mitochondria produces a lot of other benefits. That's why metformin is such a great drug for people with type 2 diabetes. But I question how valuable it is for healthy individuals.

All parents need to know: There is no perfect parenting. No matter whether you were the greatest parent or not, your kids are always going to find something that they wish you would have done differently.

If you're just nasal breathing, you're leaning more towards parasympathetic dominance, so you're actually more aware of what is going on. Because when we're stressed out... you can't actually make good decisions—you default to habitual things & responses when we're overloaded.

Nobody tells us how much work we have to do on ourselves in order to have a successful & happy relationship.