In his bestselling book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of practice to become a master in a particular field. Gladwell based this claim on several studies, including one by German psychologists who researched violinists during the 1990s. The study found that, over their lifetimes, elite violinists averaged 6,000 more hours of practice than non-elite ones.…
I had the opportunity to speak with the remarkable Gayathri Ramprasad, whose memoir Shadows in the Sun: Healing from Depression and Finding the Light Within (Hazelden)—called a “a cross-cultural lens to mental illness”—was recently published. Her harrowing experiences with depression, the social stigma depression sufferers endure, and her courage in helping herself and others bring a new perspective to an…
I was terrified of running when I was a kid. I’m talkin’ somebody-grab-this-girl-a-paper-bag-to-breathe-into scared. My mom is asthmatic. I’m not, but when I ran and felt my breathing quicken, I associated that with my mom’s health condition. Anxiety would take over, my throat would constrict, and just as if I had asthma, I’d lose the ability to breathe. During graduate…
On August 31, 2007, I woke up in the recovery room in pain. I had undergone an endoscopic ultrasound at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., to learn more about the so-called mass that showed up on a CT scan of my pancreas. After nine years of debilitating illness, a doctor finally found the root cause. A resident came to…
