Authors have many images to describe distorted mental states, but that of a glass enclosure, which warps vision and sound, is among the most common. In his searing essay on the loss of his daughter, Aleksandar Hemon uses the metaphor of an aquarium to describe the detached sensations caused by profound grief. Sylvia Plath's titular bell jar is her symbol for the airless perceptions of suicidal depression. The intercession of glass between human sight and the world is present even in the New Testament, when, in 1 Corinthians, we are told that earthly life is seen "through a glass, darkly." In a heavenly future, no glazier's hand will intercede before the face of God.

Anxiety, too, can have this distorting, glassy quality. When I had my first panic attack, in Russia in the summer of 2010, the entire world shrank to the size of my frantically pulsing aorta. I could feel nothing beyond the hammering in my wrists and neck, the freezing sweat that burst out on my forehead, the swishing thrum in my ears. I called emergency services from my host family's couch in Kazan. Russian EMTs pronounced that an impromptu EKG had shown me to be in perfect condition, and gave me a decoction of "herbs" to drink. At dawn I nodded into uneasy sleep. For the next week, smoke from forest fires igniting all around Russia descended on the city, and my heart intermittently skittered in my chest like a rat. Each time it did I thought I was going to die, although death, unaccountably, never came.

When I came back from Russia to my family's home in New Jersey, I was a small being hobbled by fear. In the ensuing years I have experienced these moments of pure compression-the universe eaten alive by dread, consisting only of me and my own death-with some frequency. Other passengers on the subway are reduced to shadows, the rattle of the train a faint echo of my own deafening heartbeat, and the glass-haze of terror blots out light.

Explaining a panic attack is a little like explaining an explosion: You can talk about adrenaline, as you can talk about a flurry of reactive particles clashing until they burn. You can talk about the fight-or-flight reaction and the symptoms-sweating, rapid heartbeat, trembling, the overwhelming urge to escape. But you cannot truly convey a swelling balloon of heat, a concussion in the air, the lancing pain of shrapnel, in words. You cannot convey the pure concussive terror of a panic attack in words either, the sense that all your bones are thrumming a bad, insistent chord. I have tried to explain why I must leave the restaurant, why I must have an aisle seat at the show, why sometimes my throat seizes so powerfully I can't even drink water. Some friends and family members understand; others don't; and I hide my phobias when I can. The rest of the time, I live within the ringing glass walls of my own panic.

I put my hand on a bishop and slide it several squares before moving it back. "Should I move a different piece instead?" I wonder to myself.

"You have to move that piece if you've touched it," my opponent says, flashing a wry grin.

Fine. I move the bishop. It's becoming increasingly obvious to me now - I'm going to lose a game of chess to a 12-year-old.

My opponent is Tanner Collins, a seventh-grade student growing up in a Pittsburgh suburb. Besides playing chess, Collins likes building with Legos. One such set, a replica of Hogwarts Castle from the Harry Potter books, is displayed on a hutch in the dining room of his parents' house. He points out to me a critical flaw in the design: The back of the castle isn't closed off. "If you turn it around," he says, "the whole side is open. That's dumb."

Though Collins is not dissimilar from many kids his age, there is something that makes him unlike most 12-year-olds in the United States, if not the world: He's missing one-sixth of his brain.

Religions provide a collection of values by which their adherents strive to live, a story in which they play an important role. These timeless values and stories are some of humanity's greatest achievements. But they can also go wrong - very wrong. Just as religions can offer the impetus towards the development of conscience, they can also be distorted to such a degree that they actively stifle conscience, elevating a group of believers to a chosen status denied to all others, and thus justifying the worst of attitudes and behaviors towards such outsiders, regardless of such individuals' individual character.

Today on the Truth Perspective we continue our discussion of Israel Shahak's Jewish History, Jewish Religion and Shiraz Maher's Salafi-Jihadism, and the two religious ideologies they criticize. Both are founded on a distorted view of human nature, a demonization of outsiders, and rigid doctrines of political and social absolutism: religious pathocracy. Tune in to see how the operate, and how they justify the unjustifiable.

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Everything starts with a thought, so let's start by making space for some new ones. The mind is the root of all clutter. It has helped you create everything you see and live, the good the bad and the ugly. Now let's put it to work, to de-clutter your whole life, step-by-step, freeing you from unwanted and unneeded life-sucking energy and burdens.

First and foremost, you need to monitor your thoughts. What are you thinking? Look around. Your reality is a reflection of your inner terrain, both mentally and emotionally. Be mindful of your thoughts. Be observant of how you respond to situations and your own beliefs. You can only hold one thought at the time, so remember that a negative, or un-serving thought is occupying the space of a serving one.

Readers above a certain age may well recall, several decades ago, regularly being told by parents and teachers that watching too much television rots the brain.

Now, research by two scientists at University College London in the UK suggests that, at least metaphorically, the oldies were right.

In a study covering a seven-year period, Daisy Fancourt and Andrew Steptoe tested the effect of television watching among people over 50 years old. Most research into the relationship between television and cognition, they point out, has focussed on children and adolescents - older people have been largely overlooked.

The researchers used data from a long-term project called the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), an ongoing population-based mission to collect information regarding health, wellbeing and economic outcomes for over-50s

To establish a baseline, they looked at television-watching data for 3662 adults recorded in 2008 and 2009. They then flipped forward six years and looked at levels of cognitive decline in the same cohort during the period 2014 and 2015.

As a trauma therapist I am always interested in learning about my clients' childhood attachment patterns. Growing up with parents who were either emotionally unavailable, inconsistently responsive, frightened by or frightening to their child has a profoundly negative impact on social, behavioral, emotional, and neurological development. "Trauma-informed care" includes assessing for adverse childhood experiences and reframing clients' subsequent "symptoms" and struggles as the inevitable by-products and coping strategies of attachment trauma. However, I am concerned that a newer version of attachment trauma has invaded even the most "loving" families. Our reliance on, and, in some cases addiction to, digital gadgets and technology has hijacked the face-to-face parent-child interactions that are necessary for consistent, sustained and secure attachment.

Is this scenario familiar? After standing in line at the post office for fifteen minutes - a somewhat inherently traumatic experience in and of itself - I witnessed a two-year-old having a complete meltdown. Her mother's immediate response was to hand her an iPad. In her wisdom, the child initially rejected it. In a soothing yet frustrated tone, the mother said "Use your iPad! Do you want to look at pictures? Play a game?" The child was not appeased and continued to wail. As the woman bent towards the stroller, I felt a sense of relief, assuming she was about to pick up her dysregulated child. Instead, she turned on the tablet and said with greater agitation, "look at the pictures on your screen!" After several more minutes of crying, the child realized that what she wanted and needed-to be comforted by her mother, not an inanimate object-was not going to happen. I watched as she went into collapse, emotionally shutting down and compliantly staring at the screen.

Jordan Peterson joins Tyler to discuss collecting Soviet propaganda, why he's so drawn to Jung, what the Exodus story can teach us about current events, his marriage and fame, what the Intellectual Dark Web gets wrong, immigration in America and Canada, his tendency towards depression, Tinder's revolutionary nature, the lessons from The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, fixing universities, the skills needed to become a good educator, and much more.

Listen to the full conversation

My name is Kevin, and I have a phone problem.

And if you're anything like me - and the statistics suggest you probably are, at least where smartphones are concerned - you have one, too.

I don't love referring to what we have as an "addiction." That seems too sterile and clinical to describe what's happening to our brains in the smartphone era. Unlike alcohol or opioids, phones aren't an addictive substance so much as a species-level environmental shock. We might someday evolve the correct biological hardware to live in harmony with portable supercomputers that satisfy our every need and connect us to infinite amounts of stimulation. But for most of us, it hasn't happened yet.

Homesteading attracts people wanting a simpler lifestyle and self-sustainability. In the most recent USDA census of agriculture, the government found that out of the approximately 2.1 million farms in the U.S., around 88 percent were small family farms.

In a 2017 survey of over 4,746 young farmers, about 75 percent stated they didn't grow up on a farm and 69 percent had post-secondary degrees. A first winter on the homestead seems long and cold when you aren't used to the lifestyle.

Fortunately, the Danish lifestyle called hygge - pronounced hoo-gah - makes things much more comfortable. Hygge is the concept of enjoying the simple things in life. Most homesteaders already live a relatively simple life, but for the winter months on a small farm, this means staying warm and cozy and enjoying the slower pace after the harvest passes.

My life is messed up, why can't I get my act together?

Most of us have heard a variation of this talk track in our heads, or we've heard it from others. If only, we think, I didn't have this problem, then everything would be all right.

We feel burdened by what seems to be our unique sticky problems. Immersed in such a mindset, our actions may not demonstrate our highest values and purpose. What if, Ryan Holiday asks, the adverse circumstances we face offer "a formula for thriving not just in spite of whatever happens but because of it?"