When I was training in medicine for example, there was a culture in medicine that strong people didn't need sleep, that the less you slept, the more you just powered through a tough call not on no sleep, the stronger you were. That is not helpful to have a culture that supports healthy practices like that.
Interpretation
Emphasizing the importance of sleep for overall strength and health.
Vivek Murthy critiques the medical culture that glorifies sleeplessness as a form of strength. He argues that promoting such attitudes is detrimental, as it undermines the necessity of healthy practices, particularly the value of adequate rest for both physical and mental well-being.
In practice
In a speech on workplace wellness, one might say, 'As Dr. Vivek Murthy pointed out, we must challenge the culture that equates sleeplessness with strength.'
I think sometimes in the focus on deep friendships and on romantic relationships, we can lose sight of how important the small connections we make are with strangers and with people that we may encounter for just a few seconds or a few minutes, whether it's the barista at our coffee shop or the stranger next to us on the subway.
Without strong communities, we cannot pull together during times of hardship. Our diversity turns from a source of strength to a source of conflict.
One of the things that happens in our regular lives is that when we're in moments of pain or feeling alone, we may hesitate to reach out to others because we may think - they're not going through the same experiences I am.
There's a tremendous sense of shame that people who are lonely feel. I say that as someone who felt ashamed of being lonely as a child and even at points during adulthood.
Our health care workers are the heroes of the Covid-19 response.
What you quickly realize once you commit to getting more sleep is it can increase your productivity, it can improve your mood. And that doesn't just help you at work, but it helps you be the kind of person you want to be with your family and your friends and that's ultimately what matters most.
They don't actually see the real world, where 95% of the people with HIV are not treated and are dying. And even though we have some blue sky now in our country, the sky could become cloudy again very soon.
Network Spinal Analysis inspires us to trust the healing power within.
We need to make sure that access to a curative drug doesn't become a yardstick by which poverty is eventually measured. Doing so requires a shared commitment between innovators and the insurance plans that are harder pressed to offer these advances to the poor.
I was anorexic in the 60s and 70s, although it wasn't called anorexia then. I thought people would be nicer to me if I looked very small and delicate, so food wasn't high on my agenda. But it is now.
What we have now is doctors who are actually better technically at what they're doing in their specialty than 30 or 40 years ago, but we lost the relationship, when the doctor would look people in the eye and say, 'I care about you. We can do this together.'
When it comes to health care policy, we keep failing to take seriously the value of human relationships. The cost of this oversight is staggering.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.