• Your body's defense system--the release of adrenaline and cortisol--is built for an immediate response to a serious but passing danger, such as a saber-toothed tiger. Chronic stress, such as hostility at home, dangerously deregulates a system built only to deal with short-term responses.
• Under chronic stress, adrenaline creates scars in your blood vessels that can cause a heart attack or stroke, and cortisol damages the cells of the hippocammpus, crippling your ability to learn and remember.
• Individually, the worst kind of stress is the feeling that you have no control over the problem--your are helpless.
• Emotioanl stress has huge impacts across society, on children's ability to learn in school and on employees' productivity at work.

Humanistic ethics: The applied science of the art of living

• Humanistic vs. Authoritarian ethics


• Subjectivistic vs. objectivistic ethics


• The science of man


• The tradition of humanistic ethics


• Ethics and psychoanalysis

Human nature and character

• The human situation




• Man's biological weakness


• The existential and the historical dichotomies in man




• Personality




• Temperament


• Character




• The dynamic concept of character


• Types of character: the nonproductive orientations




• The receptive orientation


• The exploitative orientation


• The hoarding orientation


• The marketing orientation




• The productive orientation




• General characteristics


• Productive love and thinking




• Orientations in the process of socialization


• Blends of various orientations

Problems of humanistic ethics

• Selfishness, self-love, and self-interest


• Conscience, man's recall to himself




• Authoritarian conscience


• Humanistic conscience




• Pleasure and happiness




• Pleasure as a criterion of value


• Types of pleasure


• The problem of means and ends




• Faith as a character trait


• The moral powers in man




• Man, good or evil?


• Repression vs productiveness


• Character and moral judgment




• Absolute vs relative, universal vs. socially immanent ethics

The moral problem of today

(source)