Top 110 Quotes & Sayings by Vivek Murthy
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American public servant Vivek Murthy.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
We don't just want to eradicate illness. We want people to achieve their full potential.
I'm calling for a cultural change in how we think about addiction. For far too long people have thought about addiction as a character flaw or a moral failing.
When it comes to our relationship with loneliness, specifically, it's important to understand how our relative introversion or extroversion informs our preference for social interaction.
I firmly believe that everybody in America needs a safe place to walk or to wheelchair roll.
What defines loneliness is our internal comfort level.
Giving and receiving kindness are easy ways to feel good and to help others feel good too. People, organizations, and societies thrive when they are grounded in a culture of kindness.
We have to recognize that we can help increase happiness of other people by reaching out, and building connections. People have done that for me in my life. There have been many times that my family and friends have reached out to help support me and contributed to my emotional wellbeing, and ultimately to my health.
We can't underestimate the power that we have as individuals to provide the support that people need to provide that transition from a place of pain to a place of possibility.
Science tells us more and more now that there is a strong connection between emotional well-being and health outcomes, and that you can proactively cultivate emotional well-being through relatively simple practices like sleep, social connection and meditation.
I have come to believe that America is a promise we have made to one another.
We can work on sharpening our prescribing practices, working with clinicians to ensure we're treating pain safely and effectively.
Without strong communities, we cannot pull together during times of hardship. Our diversity turns from a source of strength to a source of conflict.
The amount of sleep you get has an impact, not just on how you feel the next day, but it has an impact on your long-term health as well.
The amount of time it takes to recover from the coronavirus differs widely. Some people will get the virus and have no symptoms at all, other people will have mild symptoms like a low-grade fever or a mild cough and others will get really ill and will need to be hospitalized.
The A.C.A. is not perfect, but it has helped us move forward.
Sometimes people get upset when you tell the truth, when you share the facts as science dictates.
In fact, people with mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence rather than anything else. So it's important that we not stereotype folks with mental illness.
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.
If you use that time where you're alone in ways that bring you joy and peace, then that solitude can have a really positive effect on your life.
Emotional well-being is more than the absence of a mental illness. It's that resource within each of us which allows us to reach ever closer to our full potential, and which also enables us to be resilient in the face of adversity.
We live in a society where individual effort and progress is valued, and that's absolutely correct and is as it should be. But we also are interdependent creatures. We can't succeed solely on our own.
Anchors are those people in your life who remind you of who you are - your values, aspirations, and worth - even when you forget. Keep them close and always let them know how much they mean to you.
If we approach other people understanding our own value, being confident in who we are, being centered and grounded, it's actually easier for us to connect with them because we can listen more deeply and we can express ourselves more authentically without fear of being judged or not being enough.
While loneliness has the potential to kill, connection has even more potential to heal.
It turns out that our ability to connect with other people is driven by our ability to connect deeply with ourselves. And that can be just a few minutes sitting on your porch feeling the breeze against your face. That can be a few moments spent in meditation or in prayer or remembering three things you're grateful for.
Empathy is choosing to see ourselves in another despite our differences. It's recognizing that the same humanity - the same desire for meaning, fulfillment and security - exists in each of us, even if it's expressed uniquely.
When it comes to creating emotional wellbeing, we are only going to achieve this, I believe, if we help each other in that effort. Part of that is reaching out and building social connections in people who may not always have the social connections or the support that they need.
I have long believed that there are fundamentally two forces or emotions that drive our decisions - love and fear. Love has its many manifestations: compassion, gratitude, kindness, and joy. Fear often manifests in cynicism, anger, jealousy, and anxiety. I worry that many of our communities are being driven by fear.
Touch is incredibly important as part of the human experience. Our ancestors relied on human touch to form and strengthen bonds with each other. Touch can accelerate a feeling of connection and releases hormones in our body that engender trust and build connection.
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.
Whenever you have large numbers of people who are dying for preventable reasons, that constitutes a public health issue.
Addiction is a chronic disease of the brain and it's one that we have to treat the way we would any other chronic illness: with skill, with compassion and with urgency.
As all of us know, health is deeply intertwined with culture: what we eat, how active we are, how much we sleep. These are rooted in cultural norms.
When you help someone else, not only do they benefit, but you reaffirm to yourself that you have something of value to give them, and you help to strengthen and nurture a bond with an individual that you're helping.
As prevalent as loneliness is, many people don't recognize that people that they know may very well be suffering from loneliness. It's important for many reasons, one of which is that it has a profound impact on health.
Service is a powerful pathway of getting out of loneliness. It takes the focus off of you and puts it onto someone else.
We forget some of the oldest medicines we have are love and compassion, and they can be deployed by everyone.
It turns out the most powerful way we can turn the tide on chronic disease is something we have been doing for millennia: That is walking.
When I was Surgeon General, I spent a lot of time talking to people in living rooms and town halls all across the country, and one of the things I started to notice was that behind many of the stories of addiction, violence, depression and anxiety were threads of loneliness.
For far too many people, the stigma around addiction prevents them from stepping forward for help.
When we have emotional pain in our lives, we are going to seek to relieve that pain in some way.
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.
Be very disciplined about dedicating some time - even if it is five minutes a day - to calling or talking to someone you love. That kind of consistency, even if it is just five minutes a day, helps to remind us that we have a well of connection in our lives.
Surgeon generals are appointed by presidents, but our work isn't about politics. Our highest duty to to the public. Our true guide is science. Our job is to speak the truth about public health, even when it's controversial or perceived as political.
Kindness is more than a virtue. It is a source of strength.
Loneliness can become a downward spiral.
Climate change poses a serious, immediate and global threat to health.
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.
There are several factors in modern society that contribute to loneliness. One is that we are more mobile than we have been in decades past, which is fantastic in many respects, but also leads to us to move away from communities that we grew up with and got to know over time.
In the short term if I feel loneliness, it's like any other biological signals. It's like hunger or thirst. It's alerting me that something that's critical for my survival is missing.
You can be surrounded by many people but still feel quite lonely if you don't have strong connections and if you feel you can't be yourself with them. Conversely, you can just be around a few people, but feel deeply connected to them.
Gun violence is a problem that this country should be addressing.
I think that if we want to create a healthier country, we need to empower more people to make changes in their lives. But we also have to empower them to help change their environment.
Part of the reason people don't talk about their loneliness is that they feel they will be judged for it.
I am a big basketball fan. I have been watching basketball ever since I was a young boy.
Loneliness is different than isolation and solitude. Loneliness is a subjective feeling where the connections we need are greater than the connections we have. In the gap, we experience loneliness. It's distinct from the objective state of isolation, which is determined by the number of people around you.
With any sort of major change we need to make in our lives, it's much easier to do it with other people. We succeed and thrive best when we work together and support each other. When we struggle alone, that's when the struggle can seem impossible.
I grew up in Miami, Florida and the Miami Heat were my favourite team growing up. In fact, the franchise started when I was here in high school, I believe. My favourite player, growing up at that time on the Miami Heat, was Rony Seikaly but in the years since, Dwyane Wade, also an icon for the Miami Heat, has become my favourite player.
I trained in internal medicine, and I expected most of my time would be spent on diabetes or heart disease or cancer. What I didn't expect was that so many people I saw would be struggling with loneliness.
A few colleagues and I began Doctors for America with a simple belief that physicians should play a leadership role in designing and running our nation's health care system.
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