Change Your Brain, Change Your Life: Revised and Expanded Edition: The breakthrough programme for conquering anxiety, depression, anger and obsessiveness

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You brain is soft and your skull is hard. Brain injuries can ruin your life, so wear your seat belt, drive in safe vehicles, don’t hit soccer balls with your head, and stay off the roof. One of the most common brain injuries in men over 40 is falling off the roof. One of the MOST important things you can do to keep your memory strong is exercise because cognitive abilities are best in people who are physically active. There are also a number of supplements that have good supporting research for memory including fish oil, gingko biloba, sage and a Chinese moss extract called huperazine. The book explains how the brain is the most important organ in the body and how its health and function affect every aspect of our lives. It identifies five major brain systems that are involved in various mental and emotional problems and how they can be improved with proper care and treatment. For those of us with a pragmatic bent, Amen offers a list of Brain Do’s and Don’ts. The following is a sampling so you might start to sharpen your razor edge thinking. Brain Do’s Why do some people have an ear for music while others struggle to carry a tune? And why are some more prone to anxiety while others remain calm in stressful situations?

If you’ve ever struggled with anxiety, depression, or another mental health condition, you know how challenging it can be to find the right treatment. Sometimes medications can help alleviate symptoms, but they’re not a cure-all. In a post last November, I explained the fascinating science of coffee drinking. From the time you wake up until you lay down to sleep, neurons in your brain produce a curious chemical called adenosine. As adenosine is produced, it binds with adenosine receptors in the brain, causing you to feel tired and eventually fall asleep. Below are ten of the ways that we can literally change our brains, for better or worse... 1. Exercising After meditating, your brain is not the same. The most powerful demonstration that this is true was presented in 2011 by Sara Lazar, a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital (USA). Using magnetic resonance to scan the head of 16 patients, Lazar showed that eight weeks of practicing mindfulness meditation for half an hour a day was enough to increase the density of gray matter in the hippocampus —an area shaped like a seahorse and associated with learning and with stress. The gray matter also increased in brain areas associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection, while it decreased in the amygdala —an almond-shaped structure with a key role in anxiety and stress. These brain changes may explain why mindfulness meditation, currently in vogue, is highly effective in combating stress. Playing sports Credits: Norwegian University of Science and TechnologySo, if you believe that your thoughts have something to do with your destiny. And you can’t think greater than how you feel, or feelings have become the means of thinking, by the very definition of emotions you’re thinking in the past, and for the most part, you’re going to keep creating the same life. This means that, through meditation, we can become better at managing anxiety, stress, and potentially dangerous situations. In addition, the neural connections which grow stronger through meditation help promote empathy and compassion, particularly for people who are most unlike us, says Gladding. Dr. Amen discusses how our lifestyle choices affect our brain health and offers practical advice on how to make changes to improve brain function. The book also includes brain imaging scans to help readers understand how their brain works and identify potential health issues.

I don't often read this kind of book, and it is not inspiring reading. On the other hand, there are enough nuggets of interest to have allowed me to read it through (mostly). Brooding, which is known among cognitive scientists as morbid rumination, is a mental state familiar to most of us, in which we can’t seem to stop chewing over the ways in which things are wrong with ourselves and our lives. This broken-record fretting is not healthy or helpful. It can be a precursor to depression and is disproportionately common among city dwellers compared with people living outside urban areas, studies show.

The book is based on the author’s experience and research using SPECT scans, a technique that shows the blood flow and activity of different brain regions. It shows that the brain is not fixed or static, but rather plastic and dynamic, meaning that it can change and improve with proper care and treatment. It also provides hope and motivation for people who struggle with mental and emotional issues that they can overcome them by changing their brains. Maintaining the social circle of brain health is about building and maintaining strong social connections for brain health. Strong social connections provide emotional support, cognitive stimulation, and a sense of belonging, all crucial for brain health. Notice how those regular phone calls with your loved ones keep you in a good mood. In short, exercise makes you smarter and happier at the same time. Sounds like a win-win to me. 2. Sleeping Your body is your unconscious mind, so if you’re sitting down and you start thinking about some future worst-case scenario that you’re conjuring up in your mind and you begin to feel the emotion of that event. Your body doesn’t know the difference between the event that’s taking place in your world, our world and what you’re creating by emotional thought alone. I once did a study with psychologist Noelle Nelson on the power of appreciation. I scanned her twice: once when she was focused on what she loved about her life, and then again while she focused on what she hated about her life. The scans were radically different. The loving scan looked healthy, while the hateful scan showed decreased activity in several important areas of her brain, involving emotions and memory.

Dairy products--low-fat cheeses and cottage cheese, low-fat sugar-free yogurt and low-fat or skim milk We know to wait for something outside of us to change how we feel inside does not work. When we feel better inside and we chase whoever or whatever caused it that never works. What this means is that when we start from the Newtonian world where most people spend their whole life living, in lac, waiting for or trying to find something out there to change how we feel inside.If you think you spend much of your time "multitasking", you could actually be rewiring your brain – and not in a good way. Most people are constantly reaffirming their emotional states. So when it comes time to give up that emotion, they can say I really want to do it. But really the body is stronger than the mind because it’s been conditioned that way. The servant now has become the master and the person, all of a sudden, once they step into that unknown they’d rather feel guilt and suffering because at least they can predict it. Being in the unknown is a scary place for most people because the unknown is uncertain I think that’s the difference between living as a victim in your world, saying I am this way because of this person or that thing or this experience, they made me think and feel this way. When you switch that around you become a creator of your world and you start saying, my thinking and my feeling is changing an outcome in my life. Now, that’s a whole different game and you start believing more that we’re creators of reality. In this way, eating too much sugar can impair memory and learning skills, and may even contribute to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia. He does not balance his pro-drug argument with the consequences of misdiagnoses, negative side effects, and so forth. Every time he names the brand of a drug, it feels like a product placement, which distracts and undermines the sincerity of his recommendations.

So sitting still and trying to focus on the present moment for as little as 15 minutes per day significantly reduces stress and essentially makes you a better person overall. 4. Drinking coffee Factors like obesity, consuming too much white sugar, and drug abuse can be detrimental to brain health. Monitoring your brain health and taking active steps to maintain it will make you feel more in control of your life. And your brain will certainly reward you for it. Summary But that’s not all. Including too much of the sweet stuff in your diet has been shown to correlate with increased risk of depression. Sugar activates the mood-enhancing neurotransmitter serotonin in our brain. When continuously overstimulated, our serotonin levels begin to deplete, making it more difficult for us to regulate our mood. 10. Believing you can change your brain Did you know that even Abraham Lincoln struggled with depression throughout his life? That’s not all: His physician in 1840 diagnosed him using the same symptom observation method that many psychiatrists still use today. It’s the basis for the entire DSM-5, the mental health manual that therapists today live by.Learning new dance steps is a great mental exercise, because it involves learning, coordination, music AND physical exercise. All of those things are great for your brain. Crossword puzzles, learning a musical instrument or exploring a new country or a new language with enthusiasm can also help. If we strictly applied the Spanish saying “Never go to bed without learning one new thing,” our brains would notice. At the biochemical level, the most immediate consequence is that, at the junctions between neurons, a brain protein called delta-catenin binds to a fatty acid to allow us to store new data in memory. But brain structure is also reconfigured. As a matter of fact, learning a new language makes the brain grow by increasing gray matter in the areas related to the use of language. And a neuroscience study based on London taxi drivers has revealed that learning the routes of this huge British city causes their hippocampus —where the spatial representation of the world around us is stored— to be much larger than in the rest of us ordinary mortals Cigarettes In fact, music service focus@will has partnered with leading neuroscientists to curate a selection of tunes designed to help you concentrate while working or studying. Trials carried out by the company show a 12-15% increase in focus and up to 400% longer work session time. 7. Wandering in nature The answer lies in three main brain systems: the limbic, the basal ganglia, and the prefrontal cortex. Each system plays a unique role in our brain function. Acquiring the ability to keep three balls circling in the air is not only a lot of fun, but according to research by the University of Oxford (UK), it produces changes in the white matter of the brain at any age. White matter is the tangle of nerve fibers that conduct electrical signals between neurons and connects nerve cells to each other, while in the gray matter information is processed. Working with 24 volunteers, Heidi Johansens-Berg and her colleagues found that after six weeks practicing with juggling balls for 30 minutes a day, there were visible changes in brain wiring in areas related mainly with peripheral vision, a capacity which is useful in everyday life. Accumulating too much fat