Dr. Gabor Maté

In the long term, that's a positive and necessary physiological response of all animals.

In the long term, those same stress hormones, and this is something that

My profession, a medical profession, I only wish would understand and practice more is that in the long term, those same stress hormones give you high blood pressure, constrict your blood vessels, high risk of strokes and heart disease, thin your bones so you have no osteoporosis, suppress the immune system or can even turn it against you so you get autoimmune disease, make you depressed, put fat on your belly so that you're more at risk of heart disease,

turn on genes that can cause cancer, turn off genes that can protect you against cancer and cause inflammation in the body.

So this is what we all bring on ourselves and people don't realize how, because they've taken on these driven values of this culture, they're actually literally making themselves sick.

And sometimes it takes an illness to wake people up, and I don't recommend that way of waking up, but my God, it works that way very often.

One of the Greek playwrights, Aeschylus, wrote in a play called Agamemnon, written 2,400 years ago,

And he said that the way that the Gods created us, human beings, that we have to suffer into truth.

You have to have pain to wake us up to reality.

And unfortunately, too often, it's these stresses that we impose on ourselves that then create pain, illness, dysfunction, that then wake us up.

That maybe the way I'm living isn't the way I'm meant to live.

but I don't hate it.

I regret that that's what people have to wake up, but it often is.

Certainly, I have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the truth.

I don't gravitate there automatically.

Well, read my books.

Actually, I did mention a book I wrote called When the Body Says No, which is the whole point, is that when you don't say no, the body will say it for you in the form of illness.

In my most recent book that we've discussed before, The Myth of Normal, there's actually a whole chapter on this, and when I say this, this simple question,

to the inquiry that you just made, for that person I would say, where in your life are you not saying no?

And by that I mean, there is a no that wants to be said, but you're not saying it.