Best Psychology Quotes

"Tenacity, that is the willingness to persist under pressure and resistance of different kinds, and willpower, which has to do with both the motivation to do things and the motivation to resist certain things."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"Willpower sometimes also referred to as tenacity, grit, or persistence is a distinctly different phenomenon than habit execution."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"Desire and the need to move in order to pursue and reach goals are one in the same process."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring us pleasure."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"I want to point out that grief is a process. Like any biological or psychological event, it has a beginning, a middle and an end."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"Gratitude and the circuits associated with it appear to be especially plastic."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"If people can consciously override the desire to blink, at least to the point where they feel like they have to, or else their eyes would dry out, that actually can increase attention even further."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"By understanding the biology and psychology of aggression, you will be in a much better position to understand how all emotional states come to be, both in yourself and in others."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"What people were thinking at a given moment was a far better predictor of their happiness than what they were doing."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"We need to agree at the outset that emotions are complicated and yet they are tractable. They can be understood."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"What you believe about the nutritional content of your food changes the way that food impacts your brain and body to a remarkable degree."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"Self-doubt lives in all of us. And while we may wish it was gone, it is there to serve us."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"The brain activation is corresponding to the belief."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"We can't really say that certain emotions like sadness or happiness are healthy. It's context is important."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"The mind and the body are in this fascinating interplay."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"It really is almost like a piece of neural machinery of sorts."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"That feeling is the feeling of a moderate behavioral addiction."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"If you remember nothing else from this episode, please remember this: when you experience something really desirable, really exciting to you, very pleasurable. What happens afterwards is your baseline level of dopamine drops."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"The neural mechanism of cultivating growth mindset involves learning to access the rewards from effort and doing."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"That showed that hearing something that reinforces one's prior beliefs actually can evoke dopamine release."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"If you elongate the unpleasant experience by a couple of minutes, but you make those last few minutes of the unpleasant experience slightly less unpleasant than the end of the experience would otherwise have been... people look back on the experience more favorably."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"Dopamine is not about pleasure. Dopamine is about motivation, craving, and pursuit."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"Serotonin is associated with brain and body states of well-being, of comfort, of satiety."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"Most of narcissism... is rooted in the childhood trauma of not feeling good enough."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"Most people experience dips and peaks in their motivation even if they really want something."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"The most powerful words in any language are 'I am', because whatever follows that tends, if you repeat it enough, tends to have this kind of feedback effect on how you are in the world."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"Patterns that we don't like are the reflection of unhealthy defense mechanisms, and patterns that we like are the consequence of healthy defense mechanisms."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"A single event is so traumatic that it activates the circuits in a way that it's a one trial learning."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"A sense of control makes stressors less stressful."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"Our desire to continue or, put differently, our willingness to continue and our desire to quit is mediated by events between our two ears."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"Jealousy is an evolved emotion that serves several adaptive functions."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

"It's a truly masterful exploration of the biology and psychology behind what we call emotions and states of mind and body."

"Sensation, perception, feelings, thoughts, and actions really encompass all of our life experience."

"We are all knocked off of our hamster wheels... it's forcing a creativity, it's forcing the brain to rethink things in a way that is actually, despite all the lousy stuff, really good for the brain."

"New memories are not formed immediately; rather, they're in a transient state before they become permanent."

Anonymous

"Those who recover tend to inhibit the fear, a term that Pavlov over a hundred years ago in Russia termed extinction."

Anonymous

"Decades of work by neuroscientists have identified that this exact same set of symptoms in mice and men are the result of the hard-wired fear reflex of the amygdala."

Anonymous

"It's an active learning process and if we can enhance that learning process, we can make exposure therapy and emotional learning work better."

Anonymous

"Health is not not being afraid, it's being able to healthily flexibly move back and forth from a state of fear to non-fear."

Anonymous

"Your capacity to tap into dopamine as a motivator... is infinite."

"Our mind forms certain ideas about ourselves... that idea carries the maturity at which it was born."

"Our brains are not designed to fix dissonance... our brain is designed to fabricate logical reasons for illogical behavior."

"Stress releases a hormone called adrenaline... it collapses your peripheral vision... I think that it does that psychologically too."

"Psychology is the most interesting of all scientific fields because it's about us."

"It's about the most important and intimate aspects of our lives."

"Willpower isn't finite. Willpower is actually an emotion."

"This century will be the coming together of psychology and biology." - EO Wilson

"How we think and how we feel creates our state of being."

"Dr. David Buss has been a real influence on my thinking, perhaps more than any other living psychologist."

"What motivates people, what are the goals towards which people aspire, what gets people out of bed in the morning, what makes people tick?"

"One of the skills you have to learn is not falling apart in the presence of pain or suffering. There's a lot of ways to do that."

"When you feel lonely, that's your brain and your body trying to get you to connect."

"Investing in the right comparison between biology and psychology is essential because people often overlook the complexity of psychological phenomena by focusing on more tangible biological processes."

"Motivation is nothing about your behavior; it has everything to do with the mind."

"Our brain makes us unmotivated. Your lack of motivation is not a problem; it's how your brain is wired."

"Psychology studies what is going on in there; spirituality studies who is in there noticing what is going on in there."

"Dopamine isn’t the pleasure molecule, it’s the molecule that controls wanting - the seeking of pleasure."

"In order to know and accept ourselves fully, we need to understand why we think and feel the way we do."

"Just smile. Crazy as it sounds, studies suggest that happiness doesn't just cause smiling; smiling causes happiness."

"What role does early childhood trauma play in how we respond in situations? And well, now we're really getting deep."

"Extrinsic motivation means you're being motivated from the outside in... Intrinsic motivation is when it comes from the inside out."

"Motivation is a result of action, not the other way around."

"You can act your way into right thinking, but you can't think your way into right action."

"It's only by developing a better understanding of how games can manipulate our psychology for good that we can come to understand and appreciate why our favorite games work so effectively."

"Gratitude is not complacency. It's scientifically proven that gratitude makes you happier."

"I've always believed that the study of psychology is the study of everything because every other subject is the human understanding of said subject."

"Our understanding of space is affected by our psychology and everything that how we grasp things."

"Modern evolutionary psychologists believe that our skulls host a Stone Age mind."

"What makes people happy? And can we think about that, in particular, sort of financial choices and others?"

"In particular, I'm interested in integrating psychological issues and helping us understand better the lives of the poor."

"Being able to understand where your emotions come from and being able to address them is a process that takes on psychology, mindfulness."

"Whatever we think about regularly, that becomes the habit of our mind."

"Cynicism is a guarded response which sets yourself up against disappointment...it's sour grapes at an existential level."

"The natural state of the human psychology is total bliss and happiness."

"Core motivations are...reward, ideology, coercion, and ego. Reward is anything that you want... Ideology is the things that you believe in... Coercion is all the negative things... Ego is everything that has to do with how the person views themselves."

"Every day, I get up and I try to answer one simple question: 'Why are some people happier than others?'"

"To give our lives any sense of meaning and psychological stability, we must choose to believe certain things matter more than ourselves."

"Study after study link gratitude to happiness. The more grateful you are, the happier you are."

"Psychologists have shown us that 95 percent of our life is subconscious; it's on autopilot."

"The most resilient parasite is not a bacteria, it's not a virus, it is a thought."

"It's not the event; it's the story you tell yourself about it that makes you unhappy."

"The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior."

"You can literally change the way that you think. You can re-wire your brain and develop a mindset that can lead you to achieving whatever it is that you set your mind to."

"People are complicated. We're walking contradictions."

"Happiness is not about money because very simply, people who are much richer are only a little bit tiny bit happier than the rest of us."

"What we need to teach is how to cope with the so-called tyranny of choice... When exposed to too much choice, it actually has the opposite effect; we shut down."

"To counteract the negative effect of negative emotions, we need three times as many positive emotions in our life to actually counterbalance."

"As long as you have the belief that you are rejectable, it's going to be easy to be rejection sensitive."

"Emotions are renewed every 90 seconds and if it lasts for longer than that it's because you're choosing to tell yourself a story that's causing the emotion to be renewed."

"If you can observe your mind from your Consciousness, you're proving to yourself that you aren't your mind. Your mind is something that's doing that's working for you."

"How you choose to see things in life can change how you react to things both subconsciously and consciously."

"When you sleep, the tethers from the world are loosened, and your internal model becomes unconstrained by the immediate world."

"The majority of people got mental illnesses, the majority of people including attractive people have got depression, huge levels of insecurities, traumas as children."

"Empathy is a sort of umbrella concept with several different components... it's no different to other psychological processes like language or like memory."

"Self-esteem is the psychology that sustains your confidence and optimism about life."

"To me, what a meaningful answer to this question is, I would like to understand how the mind works in those terms."

"The trickiest thing about depression as a clinician dealing with it is that one problem leads to another problem."

"People need to understand that they can manufacture their own happiness."

"Narcissism has so many different etiologies."

"An atheist materialist account of reality can't make sense of our ability to reason, think, and understand."

"Studies show we have 60 to 80,000 thoughts per day, and eighty percent of them are negative and repetitive."

"Codependency is an individual disorder that is expressed in relationships. You can't be codependent unless you are connected to another person."

"Let's move beyond willpower... let's move on to really understanding how our minds work."

"The very ground of the most expansive understanding of the psyche you could get to become self-aware."

"Just being able to differentiate between system one and system two... is the first level of self-awareness."

"Only 10% of your long-term levels of happiness are predicted based upon the external world. 90% of your long-term levels of happiness is predicted by how your brain processes that external world."

"Confidence never accusing. The only time I see any lack of confidence is a lip withdrawal."

"The insults that somebody chooses almost always expose the hidden fears of that person."

"It's a real-life example of how our need to feel important can really control our lives."

"I remember once I said to my therapist, 'You know, I'm always like, I'm an idiot and I'm stupid,' and she's like, 'Why do you talk about yourself that way?'"

"What is working against you is your own mind."

"The single thing that's holding you back is how you think."

"Eighty percent of your success and wealth is going to be your psychology and only twenty percent is going to be the mechanics."

"Your emotions are the primary source of motivation that runs your life."

"The whole point of people who are manipulative like that, the whole game is to put you in a position where no matter what you do, you're wrong and they're right."

"Confirmation bias is when your brain ignores evidence that doesn't support your beliefs. And then it cherry-picks the evidence that does."

"The unconscious is pure nature, and like nature, pours out its gifts in profusion, but left to itself, and without the human response from consciousness, it can again, like nature, destroy its own gifts and sooner or later sweep them into annihilation."

"Fear is not merely some psychological problem... it's really a universal problem of consciousness."

"Emotional reappraisal: the basic idea is that your emotions are really a combination of your physiology and what you're thinking, so changing what you think can literally change the emotion you experience."

"It really comes down to not the stressors of what happens to us, but really how we respond."

"It's not what happens to us, it's how we're interpreting it and how we're responding to it."

"Losing your cell phone is like missing limb syndrome."

"Humans are not fragile psychologically and emotionally; we can do amazing things."

"Is it possible to reach our potential, or is it always expanding? The word 'potential' is problematic because it's a crippler for many people."

"The greatest coaches... were almost like modern-day psychologists at the time, connecting on a relationship level and the mental level with their players."

"Mindfulness is the dark meeting the light. It's the anima and the animus, there's a marriage."

"If you get angry at those thoughts... if you run from the monster, it chases you. And if you face it, it runs from you."

"ACT says no do the things that provide you with meaning and the byproduct is that you actually then feel better."

"Our mind is an exquisite time-travelling master."

"Loss aversion teaches us that that which you already own is worth more to you than a possibility of something else."

"Our minds are like Velcro for bad experiences and Teflon for good ones."

"The internet is really good at amplifying our insecurities because the human brain is not designed to deal with the internet."

"Your overall experience of life in general is influenced not only by the events that happen to you, but also, and perhaps more profoundly, by how we perceive and how we react to them."

"We have medieval institutions, a primitive psychology, and godlike technology."

"Human beings vary substantially from individual to individual in terms of personality on the five cardinal dimensions of personality."

"Social media is literally addictive... it's giving them huge floods of serotonin and dopamine."

"Metacognition is defined as cognition about cognition, or knowing about knowing."

"Making money in the stock market is just as much strategy as it is psychology."

"The Looking Glass self: You slowly build an idea of how people see you."

"Shakespeare...invents psychology...explaining why people think the way they do."

"The spotlight effect in psychology... we tend to think that people are thinking about us as much as we're thinking about it, whereas we are just fleeting thoughts in people's heads."

"The only difference between fear and excitement is what your brain is doing."

"If you repeat something enough, people will start to believe it's true."

"The essence of addiction is trauma. The addiction is not the primary problem; it's an attempt to solve a problem."

"The idea is that social influence can help encourage or promote behavior change."

"We're all somewhere in a sliding scale of trait narcissism... a healthy narcissistic phase is good, it is healthy. All human beings passed through a phase."

"All trauma is pre-verbal... Trauma is not what happens to you, it's what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you."

"Before our minds can make the world that we then live in, the world makes our mind."

"The child has an absolute need to belong... This drive to be close to somebody in order to be taken care of... is called attachment."

"The way you think determines the way you feel and the way you feel determines the way you act."

"The human mind...is a very large exploit surface."

"What Acceptance and Commitment Therapy really gets at is this idea that language imprisons us."

"We're the only species with the capacity to see that our own psychology, our own emotions, our own Paleolithic evolutionary system has been hijacked."

"We were really controlling the world's psychology because every single time people look at their phone, they are basically experiencing thoughts and scrolling through feeds and believing things about the world. This has become the primary meaning-making machine for the world."

"Your subconscious mind is a recording machine which reproduces your habitual thinking."

"Your subconscious mind is going to generate the way to be able to do it, and this comes from a place of acceptance of yourself and acceptance with others."

"The Maximizer... thinks that he's going to become happy this way... the Satisficer... he's actually the one that's happy because happiness is about acceptance."

"Self-esteem is based on three sequential factors: unconditional human worth, love, and growing."

"Emotional mirroring is responsible for a large part of security in a person."

"Understanding how the mind works was probably the most important thing I could ever share with you."

"The pleasure drive may be low or it may be high, but it may not be gratified."

"Salience is a huge concept in human existence."

"The idea of a generative drive is strengthened when you look at how humans behave when they're not struggling."

"Control can sometimes be an illusion, but sometimes you need illusion to gain control."

"If I could imagine a great way to take down polarization, to take out the 'us vs. them' impulse in the human psyche, I'd be open to it."

"It's so difficult to live without any trust."

"What I'm thinking about has to do with a psychological theory that kind of step-by-step explains how you can open up a greater amount of your creativity."

"They tend to actually see a negative emotion in a neutral face."

"Craving for things is not just about craving for those things per se, it's also a desire to relieve the pain of not having those things."

"I consistently describe something as cult-like if it adheres closely to a model developed by psychologists and cult experts Steven Hassan called the BITE model."

"Polyvagal theory is a way to understand how trauma can be stored in our body."

"A strong delusion so strong, you can tell a lie so much even you believe it."

"Self-actualization sits right at the very peak of Maslow's hierarchy of needs."

"Self-actualization, this feeling of fulfillment, it's right at the top; it's right at the end destination."

"The internal narrative... can become so strong that there's no room for anything else."

"Why do we repeat things? Because we bring an unhealthy set of defenses."

"It brings the idea of domestic homicide and domestic abuse to a whole new level... It's the same old psychology as domestic violence, just a new means, a new method, a new level of evil cleverness."

"People don't like to think about free will. It may be because it threatens their sense of agency and sovereignty."

"The neurotic character takes many forms, but all of them involve a struggle in the individual, between what he is and what he believes he should be."

"A distorted way of looking at the world and at oneself; which is determined by compulsive needs, rather than a genuine interest in the world as it is."

"That intense music tends to be played for about 45 minutes to 90 minutes, depending on the study one looks at."

"A neurotic is a person who incessantly demands that life be other than what it is."

"They also have an inferiority complex with a superiority complex at the same time."

"Courage has a lot to do with the unexpected. As a matter of fact, what keeps us from being courageous is we don't know what to expect."

"Good is so rare. So I want to know why some people turn out good. That's a real interesting puzzle."

"People don't accidentally say things; people say things because their brain is functioning in a way they're either guarding or they're forthcoming."

"Confidence, if there's one thing you can bottle up in football, it's confidence."

"The more you think about yourself, the more miserable you are."

"The more that you say mean things to yourself inside of your head, the stronger those things become."

"Your outfit is reprogramming the human brain. We've all been programmed, right? Our brains are computers, but a lot of people are lacking software updates."

"This effortless psychological experience means 'not forcing' or 'allowing,' a state of 'intelligent spontaneity.'"

"'Cause these negative fantasies of the future, they may help us feel better about something in the present, but they don't help us make anything better, right?"

"This is where trauma and all this reflexive stuff that happens after trauma ultimately lead us."

"Our brains are built that way and that's part of survival too, right?"

"We share... the tendencies that allow us to be social."

"I think the subject of how people lie, mis-remember, and exaggerate when telling stories is kind of fascinating on its own."

"The brain, where that worrying is happening, is sending alarm messages... it only listens for and sends out two messages: one is everything's okay, and the other one is watch out, danger."

"Emotions are data, but they are not directives."

"There are psychological techniques that professional interrogators use to dramatically increase the odds of getting the truth out of their suspects."