Go Wild Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Go Wild reveals the depth of our current evolutionary discordance, awakening us to how our lifestyle choices foster maladaptive gene expression and thus pave the way for disease.”
― John J. Ratey, Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

“Edward M. Hallowell, MD, author of Shine”
― John J. Ratey, Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

“Frank Forencich, who lives in Portland, Oregon, and writes and thinks about the role of movement and play in people’s lives;”
― John J. Ratey, Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

“The Zen Buddhists have another way of saying pretty much the same thing: meditation is not something you think about; meditation is something you do. Same with well-being. No matter what ails you, you are not going to think your way out of it or read your way out of it. Living well is something you do. So then it’s not something we”
― John J. Ratey, Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

“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

“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

“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

“A newer model, “allostasis,” proposes that efficient regulation requires anticipating needs and preparing to satisfy them before they arise.”
― John J. Ratey, Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The new and urgent message, not just from meditation research but from neuroscience in general, is that we know now that directed forms of mental exercise begin shaping our brains in ways we want them to go. Davidson said in an online interview that what he has produced in his lab at Madison is really “the invitation to take more responsibility for our own brains. When we intentionally direct our minds in certain ways, that is literally sculpting the brain.” Yet this”
― John J. Ratey, Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

“With meditation, the misinformed assumption is that the practice is aimed at relaxation and bliss. It is not. It is about attention and awareness of the here and now, which is precisely what wild people need in order to survive in a state of nature.”
― John J. Ratey, Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

“Worthman’s answer is this: we pay for sleep deficit in the currency of stress. “Sleep deprivation looks like stress. It increases cortisol, it increases appetite, decreases satiety, increases blood glucose levels,” she says. “This is straight out of the stress literature. If you curtail sleep just now and then, you can manage the hit, but if you do it too much, it erodes the health of the organism, the person, and her ability to cope.”
― John J. Ratey, Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

“One of Bob’s aphorisms,” says Stickgold, “is that for every two hours your brain spends taking in information during the day, it needs an hour of sleep to figure out what it means. If you don’t get that hour, you don’t figure it out. The difference between smart and wise is two hours more sleep a night.” This idea takes on a new dimension”
― John J. Ratey, Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

“Sedentary behavior causes brain impairment, and we know how: by depriving your brain of the flood of neurochemistry that evolution developed in order to grow brains and keep them healthy.”
― John J. Ratey, Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

“Movement places demands on the brain, just as it does on muscle, and so the brain releases BDNF, which triggers the growth of cells to meet the increased mental demands of movement. But BDNF floods throughout the brain, not just to the parts engaged in movement. Thus, the whole brain flourishes as a result of movement. It provides the environment that brain cells need to grow and function well. Chemically, there is more to this story—lots”
― John J. Ratey, Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

“Hormesis is a biological response to low doses of a stressor, such as a toxin, that improves the ability of the body to handle that toxin. It can be applied to exercise. Unlike homeostasis, hormesis does not return the body to a normal state. It returns it to a better-than-normal state. When a bodybuilder lifts weights, he is placing”
― John J. Ratey, Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

“This is because even the simplest of motions—a flick of a finger or a turn of the hand to pick up a pencil—is maddeningly complex and requires coordination and computational power beyond electronic abilities. For this you need a brain. One of our favorite quotes on this matter comes from the neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás: “That which we call thinking is the evolutionary internalization of movement.”
― John J. Ratey, Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization

“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