Philippa Perry Quotes & Sayings

If you start from a position of I'm a no-hoper, in a paradoxical kind of way you are not risking being vulnerable. — Philippa Perry

It used to be thought that you stopped making new neural connections in your youth and from then on your brain was fixed and it was downhill all the way. But in fact as we know from our own experience we can keep on learning and learning means changing our brain on a physical level. — Philippa Perry

Whether you plan or whether you flow in order to be creative probably isn't the point. The point is to keep practicing to maintain neural pathways and to establish new ones by learning new skills. — Philippa Perry

Meditation is focused attention and the more we practise focusing our brains the more connections we build up. — Philippa Perry

It may help to remember when you receive a complaint that it is only nominally about you; it is really information about the person making the complaint. — Philippa Perry

Plasticity is an intrinsic property of the human brain and represents evolution's invention to enable the nervous system to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences. — Philippa Perry

The extreme of flexibility is chaos and the extreme of being structured is rigid and staying sane, or indeed using your creativity, is about being aware of these extremes and steering yourself to areas where you work best which usually tend to be more in the middle than at either extreme edge. — Philippa Perry

When psychotherapy began, it was about the practitioner listening to a patient and interpreting what the patient said, in order to afford the patient insights about his or her psyche. But now we understand that the main curative part of psychotherapy is the relationship itself. It appears not to be relevant which psychology school the practitioner belongs to. What matters is the quality of the relationship and the practitioner's belief in what he or she is offering. — Philippa Perry

When we had to survive on our wits, gather and kill our food from scratch and be more at the mercy of our environment than we are today, we probably had enough challenge to keep our brains healthy. — Philippa Perry

Meditators are shown to have thickening in parts of the brain structure that deal with attention, memory and sensory functions. This was found to be more noticeable in older, more practiced meditators than in younger adults which is interesting because this structure usually tends to get thinner as we age. — Philippa Perry

A relapse doesn't mean you'll never walk down the path you prefer. But I think relapses are almost an inevitable part of any course of self-development. — Philippa Perry

In order to stretch ourselves we do need to experience the vulnerability of not knowing the outcome. — Philippa Perry

If we keep practicing mental skills it is likely we can strengthen neural connections and make new connections. — Philippa Perry

A sense of achievement improves general confidence and self-esteem. — Philippa Perry

Beginning a new habit, or ending an old one can feel like letting go of a rope that swings a mile above the ground. So we feel reluctant to let go, after all, we've survived so far doing what we've done, why risk it. — Philippa Perry

Two brains are better than one. You've twice the brain capacity and you have two sets of experiences and genes to bring to any challenge. — Philippa Perry

The trouble is if we take no new steps to try a new challenge, our comfort zone doesn't seem just to stay still, but retract. — Philippa Perry

If someone is depressed they tend to retreat within the inner circle of their comfort zone which in the longer term, may contribute to exacerbating a problem rather than soothing it and if not seeking to expand the comfort zone becomes the norm. — Philippa Perry

People tend to slip up and go along the old road before they realise what they've done and climb out of it again. — Philippa Perry

A novel, or a book on philosophy, is going to use both sides of the brain: not only will you have feelings about what you read, but your mind will also get more of a work-out because you will make connections between what you are learning and what you already recognize. — Philippa Perry

Our brains do not have to be fixed, they can be plastic. — Philippa Perry

If we are not using our brains' capacity for challenge it feels to me as though it atrophies like an unused muscle. — Philippa Perry

After a stroke we can re-learn how to talk, because by practicing we can establish different pathways in the brain, circumnavigating the damaged part. — Philippa Perry

You may find that you have been telling yourself that practicing optimism is a risk, as though, somehow, a positive attitude will invite disaster and so if you practice optimism it may increase your feelings of vulnerability. The trick is to increase your tolerance for vulnerable feelings, rather than avoid them altogether.
[ ... ]
Optimism does not mean continual happiness, glazed eyes and a fixed grin. When I talk about the desirability of optimism I do not mean that we should delude ourselves about reality. But practicing optimism does mean focusing more on the positive fall-out of an event than on the negative. ... I am not advocating the kind of optimism that means you blow all your savings on a horse running at a hundred to one; I am talking about being optimistic enough to sow some seeds in the hope that some of them will germinate and grow into flowers. — Philippa Perry

We don't have to have suffered brain damage to take advantage of the plastic nature of our brains. — Philippa Perry

As we get older it is our short term memory that fades rather than our long term memory. Perhaps we have evolved like this so that we are able to tell the younger generation about the stories and experiences that have formed us which may be important to subsequent generations if they are to thrive.
I worry though, about what might happen to our minds if most of the stories we hear are about greed, war, and atrocity — Philippa Perry

Neurogenesis continues throughout life and we have the capacity to establish new neural pathways and strengthen existing ones. — Philippa Perry

Our emotional map is laid down mainly in relationship with our earliest caregiver in the first couple of years of life. — Philippa Perry

Sometimes an artist's vision may get blurred when subjected to a committee because an artwork is usually an expression of something unconscious that is better left in the realm of one person's unconscious if it is to speak to another person's unconscious. — Philippa Perry

I think there is probably something evolutionary in that we are drawn to the easiest option. But in our age of convenience, cars, ready meals and off the peg mean that we are in danger of being mentally under stretched. — Philippa Perry

We need to look at the repetitions in the stories we tell ourselves [and] at the process of the stories rather than merely their surface content. Then we can begin to experiment with changing the filter through which we look at the world, start to edit the story and thus regain flexibility where we have been getting stuck — Philippa Perry

There are probably times where the creative process is not helped by collaboration. — Philippa Perry

If we think of our brains as a map, those early roads are like grooves, tram tracks, easy to fall into. — Philippa Perry

It seems whether we have a tendency towards being flexible or structured affects how we create, how we parent, how we work. — Philippa Perry