Atlas of the Heart Quotes

“our anxiety and our fear need to be understood and respected, perhaps even befriended. We need to pull up a chair and sit with them, understand why they’re showing up, and ask ourselves what there is to learn.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Avoidance, the second coping strategy for anxiety, is not showing up and often spending a lot of energy zigzagging around and away from that thing that already feels like it’s consuming us. And avoidance isn’t benign. It can hurt us, hurt other people, and lead to increased and mounting anxiety.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Dr. Murthy confirms the connection between loneliness and our physical health, explaining that loneliness is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and anxiety. And at work, he states that loneliness “reduces task performance, limits creativity, and impairs other aspects of executive function such as reasoning and decision making.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“I remember reading this quote from Elie Wiesel years ago and it’s become a practice for me—even when I’m enraged or afraid: “Never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it often sets you on the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis. “Life paralysis” refers to all of the opportunities we miss because we’re too afraid to put anything out in the world that could be imperfect. It’s also all of the dreams that we don’t follow because of our deep fear of failing, making mistakes, and disappointing others.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Compassion is the daily practice of recognizing and accepting our shared humanity so that we treat ourselves and others with loving-kindness, and we take action in the face of suffering.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“paradox is the appearance of contradiction between two related components. Although light and darkness seem to be opposites, you can’t have one without the other—the opposing elements of a paradox are inextricably linked. Even though the elements seem contradictory, they actually complement and inform each other in ways that allow us to discover underlying truths about ourselves and the world.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“So, when we say that anxiety can be both a state and a trait, it means that some of us feel anxious mainly in response to certain situations, while some of us can be naturally more predisposed to anxiety than others.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“I found this really interesting because I always assumed that my emotions responded to my body freaking out. But really, my emotions are responding to my “thinking” assessment of how well I can handle something.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“I learned that taking the edge off is not rewarding, but putting the edge back on is one of the most worthwhile things we can do. Those sharp edges feel vulnerable, but they are also the markers that let us know where we end and others begin.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“we find that what we regret most are our failures of courage, whether it’s the courage to be kinder, to show up, to say how we feel, to set boundaries, to be good to ourselves, to say yes to something scary.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Overwhelmed means an extreme level of stress, an emotional and/or cognitive intensity to the point of feeling unable to function. I”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“I’ve heard people say that disappointment is like a paper cut—painful, but not long-lasting. I do believe we can heal disappointment, but it’s important not to underestimate the damage it inflicts on our spirit.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“In our saddest moments, we want to be held by or feel connected to someone who has known that same ache, even if what caused it is completely different. We don’t want our sadness overlooked or diminished by someone who can’t tolerate what we’re feeling because they’re unwilling or unable to own their own sadness.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“hurt feelings are most often caused by people with whom we have close relationships when we feel devalued or rejected by the other person. Most behaviors that result in hurt feelings are not intended to be hurtful; they typically involve actions that are thoughtless, careless, or insensitive. However, “the more intentional an action is perceived [as], the more hurtful it feels.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“This combination of rumination and nostalgia emerged from our research as destructive and disconnecting. If you're wondering how dangerous the combination can be, think back to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, or examine the strategy used by every authoritarian leader in history: Exploit fears by photoshopping a picture of yesteryear to be everything people wanted it to be (but never was), seduce people into believing that a make-believe past could exist again, and give them someone to blame for ruining the picture and/or not being able to restore the mythical utopia.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Regardless of whether we choose to change our language or not, understanding the nuances of that language can help us ask ourselves the right questions when we’re experiencing jealousy or envy. If we’re feeling afraid or sad or angry or we’re deep in “coveting mode”—we have the tools now to ask ourselves: Am I fearful of losing something I value to another person, or do I want something someone else has? If I want something that someone else has, do I want to see them lose it, or is it not about that? If I’m scared I’m losing something important to me, what kind of conversation do I need to have with that person?”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“It’s normal to feel some level of jealousy, and research shows that in small doses and expressed appropriately, it’s a normal part of healthy relationships. I love how the poet Maya Angelou frames it. “Jealousy in romance is like salt in food. A little can enhance the savor, but too much can spoil the pleasure and, under certain circumstances, can be life-threatening.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“Story stewardship means honoring the sacred nature of story—the ones we share and the ones we hear—and knowing that we’ve been entrusted with something valuable or that we have something valuable that we should treat with respect and care. We are good stewards of the stories we tell by trusting them to people who have earned the right to hear them, and telling them only when we are ready. We are good stewards of the stories we hear by listening, being curious, affirming, and believing people when they tell us how they experienced something.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“I understood that people would do almost anything to not feel pain, including causing pain and abusing power, and I understood that there were very few people who could handle being held accountable for causing hurt without rationalizing, blaming, or shutting down.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“I once heard Anne Lamott say, “Help is the sunny side of control.” Yes”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“If there’s no autonomy between people, then there’s no compassion or empathy, just enmeshment.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“It also takes discipline and self-awareness to understand what to share and with whom.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“I’ve learned that power is not bad, but the abuse of power or using power over others is the opposite of courage; it’s a desperate attempt to maintain a very fragile ego. It’s the desperate scramble of self-worth quicksand. When people are hateful or cruel or just being assholes, they’re showing us exactly what they’re afraid of. Understanding their motivation doesn’t make their behavior less difficult to bear, but it does give us choices. And subjecting ourselves to that behavior by choice doesn’t make us tough—it’s a sign of our own lack of self-worth.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“For children, it’s easy for everything to become a source of shame when nothing is normalized. You assume that if no one is talking about it, it must be just you.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“With interest, our mind is open to seeing what’s there, but with curiosity, we’ve acknowledged a gap in what we know or understand, and our heart and head are both invested in closing that gap. There is a thinking challenge and an emotional experience of the satisfaction or potential satisfaction of closing the gap.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“human emotions and experiences are layers of biology, biography, behavior, and backstory.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“A big part of my book writing routine is watching super predictable, formulaic mysteries—even ones I’ve seen ten times. These shows would bore me to tears if I were in a normal mental space. But when I’m coding data and writing, something weird happens. It’s like the shows lull the easily distracted part of my brain into a rhythmic stupor, setting free the deeper, meaning-making part of my brain to engage and start making connections between things that don’t seem connectable. I actually sit on my couch with a notepad next to me because the more bored I get, the more ideas bubble to the surface.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“As consumers of information, we have a role to play in embracing a more nuanced point of view. When we’re reading, listening, or watching, we can learn to recognize complexity as a signal of credibility. We can favor content and sources that present many sides of an issue rather than just one or two. When we come across simplifying headlines, we can fight our tendency to accept binaries by asking what additional perspectives are missing between the extremes.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

“It ran so rampant among Swiss mercenaries fighting far-flung wars that playing “Khue-Reyen”—an old Swiss milking song that seemed to send soldiers into a contagiously nostalgic frenzy—was punishable by death. Matei goes on to explain how cures for nostalgia included being burned with a hot poker and punishments included being buried alive.”
― Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience