Amanda Robson > Amanda's Quotes

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones

“All big things come from small beginnings. The seed of every habit is a single, tiny decision. But as that decision is repeated, a habit sprouts and grows stronger. Roots entrench themselves and branches grow. The task of breaking a bad habit is like uprooting a powerful oak within us. And the task of building a good habit is like cultivating a delicate flower one day at a time.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Success is the product of daily habits—not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Professionals stick to the schedule;
amateurs let life get in the way.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“You don’t have to be the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones

“The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it. If you’re proud of how your hair looks, you’ll develop all sorts of habits to care for and maintain it. If you’re proud of the size of your biceps, you’ll make sure you never skip an upper-body workout. If you’re proud of the scarves you knit, you’ll be more likely to spend hours knitting each week. Once your pride gets involved, you’ll fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That's the paradox of making small improvements.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for it's own sake, leads to anhedonia. Which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“Lessons of the balance.
1. The relentless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, leads to pain.
2. Recovery begins with abstinence
3. Abstinence rests the brains reward pathway and with it our capacity to take joy and simpler pleasures.
4. Self-binding creates literal and metacognitive space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity in our dopamine overloaded world.
5. Medications can restore homeostasis, but consider what we lose by medicating away our pain.
6. Pressing on the pain side, resets our balance to the side of pleasure.
7. Beware of getting addicted to pain.
8. Radical honesty promotes awareness, enhances intimacy and fosters a plenty mindset.
9. Prosocial shame affirms that we belong to the human tribe.
10. Instead of running away from the world, we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“Because we’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance: Drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting . . . the increased numbers, variety, and potency of highly rewarding stimuli today is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you’ve been given. To stop running from whatever you’re trying to escape, and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is. Then I dare you to walk toward it. In this way, the world may reveal itself to you as something magical and awe-inspiring that does not require escape. Instead, the world may become something worth paying attention to.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“We’re all running from pain. Some of us take pills. Some of us couch surf while binge-watching Netflix. Some of us read romance novels. We’ll do almost anything to distract ourselves from ourselves. Yet all this trying to insulate ourselves from pain seems only to have made our pain worse.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“As the neuroscientist, Daniel Freedman, who studies the foraging practices of Red Harvester ants, once remarked to me: "The world is sensory rich and causal poor". That is to say, we know the donut tastes good in the moment, but we are less aware that eating a donut every day for a month, adds 5 pounds to our waistline.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“But, there is a cost to medicating away every type of human suffering, and as we shall see, there is an alternative path that might work better: embracing pain.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“Pleasure and pain are co-located. In addition to the discovery of dopamine, neuro-scientists have determined that pleasure and pain are processed in overlapping brain regions, and work via an opponent processing mechanism. Another way to say this is pleasure and pain work like a balance. Imagine our brains contains a balance, a scale with a fulcrum in the centre. When nothing is on the balance it's level with the ground. When we experience pleasure, dopamine is released in our reward pathway and the balance tips to the side of pleasure. The more our balance tips and the faster it tips, the more pleasure we feel. But here's the important thing about the balance. It wants to remain level! that is, in equilibrium. It does not want to be tipped for very long, to one side or another. Hence, everytime the balance tips towards pleasure, powerful self-regulating mechanisms kick into action to bring it level again. These self-regulating mechanisms do not require conscious thought or an act of will, they just happen like a reflex.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“70% of the world global deaths are attributable to modifial behavioural risk factors like smoking, physical inactivity and diet.
The leading global risks for mortality are high blood pressure 13%, tobacco use 9%, high blood sugar 6%, physical inactivity 6% and obesity 5%. In 2013, an estimated 2.1 billion adults were overweight, compared with 857 million in 1980. There are now more people world-wide, except in sub-Saharan parts of Africa and Asia who are obese, than who are underweight.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“Practicing mindfulness is something like observing the Milky Way. It demands that we see our thoughts and emotions as separate from us, and yet, simultaneously apart of us. Also the brain can do some pretty weird things, some of which are embarrassing, thus the importance of being without judgement. Reserving judgement is important to the practice of mindfulness because as soon as we start condemning what our brain is doing, eww, why would I be thinking about that, I'm a loser, I'm a freak - We stop being able to observe. Staying in the observer position is essential to getting to know our brains and ourselves in a new way.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“I suggested she try walking to class without listening to anything and just letting her own thoughts bubble to the surface. She looked at me both incredulous and afraid. “Why would I do that?” she asked, openmouthed. “Well,” I ventured, “it’s a way of becoming familiar with yourself. Of letting your experience unfold without trying to control it or run away from it. All that distracting yourself with devices may be contributing to your depression and anxiety. It’s pretty exhausting avoiding yourself all the time. I wonder if experiencing yourself in a different way might give you access to new thoughts and feelings, and help you feel more connected to yourself, to others, and to the world.” She thought about that for a moment. “But it’s so boring,” she said. “Yes, that’s true,” I said. “Boredom is not just boring. It can also be terrifying. It forces us to come face-to-face with bigger questions of meaning and purpose. But boredom is also an opportunity for discovery and invention. It creates the space necessary for a new thought to form, without which we’re endlessly reacting to stimuli around us, rather than allowing ourselves to be within our lived experience.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“Beyond extreme examples of running from pain, we’ve lost the ability to
tolerate even minor forms of discomfort. We’re constantly seeking to distract
ourselves from the present moment, to be entertained.”
― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

“Rachel and I, we’d been raised to do what we wanted to do, and we had; we’d been successful, and we’d shown everyone. We didn’t need to wear apocryphal T-shirts because we already knew the secret, which was this: that when you did succeed, when you did outearn and outpace, when you did exceed all expectations, nothing around you really shifted. You still had to tiptoe around the fragility of a man, which was okay for the women who got to shop and drink martinis all day—this was their compensation; they had done their own negotiations—but was absolutely intolerable for anyone who was out there working and getting respect and becoming the person that others had to tiptoe around. That these men could be so delicate, that they could lack any inkling of self-examination when it came time to try to figure out why their women didn’t seem to be batshit enthusiastic over another night of bolstering and patting and fellating every insecurity out of them—this was the thing we’d find intolerable.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“It was like those T-shirts all my daughter’s friends were wearing to school now, the ones that said THE FUTURE IS FEMALE in big block letters. How they march around in broad daylight in shirts like that. But the only reason it’s tolerated is that everyone knows it’s just a lie we tell to girls to make their marginalization bearable. They know that eventually the girls will be punished for their futures, so they let them wear their dumb message shirts now.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“A wife isn’t like an ultra-girlfriend or a permanent girlfriend. She’s an entirely new thing. She’s something you made together, with you as an ingredient. She couldn’t be the wife without you.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble