9 Quotes by Jeffrey M. Schwartz

Chet found another way to best the OCD: Every time he had an OCD thought, he would do something nice for his fiancée—buy her roses, perhaps, or cook her dinner. Whenever the OCD wanted to make him miserable, he would make himself happy by making his fiancée happy.

Carried to its logical limits, a system in which no one has a choice about what action to take is unworkable.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – ARISTOTLE.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

The brain, to be sure, is indeed the physical embodiment of the mind, the organ through which the mind finds expression and through which it acts in the world.

The experience of learning how to Relabel, Reframe, Refocus, and Revalue was eye-opening for them because it allowed them to see that their time could be better spent on other pursuits and in healthier ways.

The life we lead, in other words, leaves its mark in the form of enduring changes in the complex circuitry of the brain-footprints of the experiences we have had, the actions we have taken. This is neuroplasticity. As Mike Merzenich asserted, the mechanisms of neuroplasticity “account for cortical contributions to our idiosyncratic behavioral abilities and, in extension, for the geniuses, the fools, and the idiot savants among us.

Each connection that neuroscientists forged between a neurochemical and a behavior, or at least a propensity toward a behavior, seemed to deal another blow to the notion of an efficacious will.

To refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one.