Jane Mayer Quotes

The last thing, and the only one that you cannot physically train for, is the psychological preparation.

War makes extremely heavy demands on the soldier's strength and nerves. For this reason, make heavy demands on your men in peacetime exercises.

In War, the young soldier is very apt to regard unusual fatigues as the consquence of faults, mistakes, and embarrassment in the conduct of the whole, and to become distressed and depondent as a consequence. This would not happen if he had been prepared for this beforehand by exercises in peace.

Grateful people may recover faster from trauma.

I do a lot of research. For 'I Am Legend', I did a lot of research about survivors. If everybody is dead around you, how you can keep surviving. I went to the bookstore and found psychiatry books about survivors from the Holocaust.

Emotional stability has not been America's gift to the world.

I think everybody has had emotional distress, but yes, I think I'm pretty stable.

And the program was developed in large part by behavioral scientists who were working with the military, who do everything they possibly can to measure a soldier's stress levels to see how they're doing physically and emotionally, as they go through this program.

You're taught that you can keep going in the military. Your point of collapse is not what you thought it was. Your body is built to survive, and when you think you're going to collapse, you still have so much more left in you.

Only the man who disciplines himself strictly can stand for long the terrific pace of modern war.

Some people just don't have the tools to deal with the stuff life throws at them.

The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none.

I never even think of the mental side of things because I never had any issues.

To help students steel themselves for captivity, SERE used a variety of 'stress and duress' techniques. The military's encyclopedic knowledge of these techniques was paid for in American blood because it was gleaned from former POWs tortured by totalitarian regimes. One technique, waterboarding, was a historically well-known torture.

The military and the Marine Corps prepared me to be numb to the stress.

The physical and the emotional are really connected. Although we know that, you kind of forget it.

Everybody reacts to very difficult circumstances differently, we have to accept that.

Westley closed his eyes. There was pain coming and he had to be ready for it. He had to prepare his brain, he had to get his mind controlled and safe from their efforts, so that they could not break him. He would not let them break him. He would hold together against anything and all. If only they gave him sufficient time to make ready, he knew he could defeat pain. It turned out they gave him sufficient time (it was months before the Machine was ready). But they broke him anyway.

You always have to prepare for the obstacles that are going to come. Consequently, when they do come, it doesn't affect you mentally near as much as when you're unprepared for them.

As a man handles his troubles during the day, so he goes to bed at night a General, Captain, or Private.

Sometimes, when I talk to someone who has just been diagnosed with cancer or some other illness, I'll remind them: "If you were honest with yourself, you were depressed before this happened. And if this were over you would be happy for a couple of weeks, a couple of months, and then something else would come along."

Previously I always thought it was just tactical and technique, but every match has become almost mental and physical - I try to push myself to move well. I try to push myself not to get upset and stay positive, and that's what my biggest improvement is over all those years. Under pressure I can see things very clear.

Yes, Chix, it's between us. Everyone has a right to be temporarily unstable. - Foaly

I think I was as mentally tough as I've ever been. I felt like I handled the situation both on and off the court extremely well. I felt like I needed to.

There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.