We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.

There's the complex categorization of low warmth/high competence. This is the hostile stereotype of Asian Americans by white America, of Jews in Europe, of Indo-Pakistanis in East Africa, of Lebanese in West Africa, of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, and of the rich by the poor most everywhere. It's the same low-high derogation: They're cold, greedy, clannish - -but, dang, they're sure good at making money and you should go to one who is a doctor if you're seriously sick.

We live well enough to have the luxury to get ourselves sick with purely social, psychological stress.

On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor.

Oxytocin is a Teflon hormone - bad news rolls off it.

What happened during the minutes before? That's the realm of sensory stimuli of the nervous system.

But often, it's easier to resist temptation with distraction, or to be so inculcated in doing the right thing that it's automatic, outside the frontal cortex's portfolio - Then it isn't the harder thing, it's the only thing you can do.