Change Your Brain, Change Your Life: The Breakthrough Program for Conquering Anxiety, Depression, Obsessiveness, Anger, and Impulsiveness
by Daniel G. Amen
from Three Rivers Press
In this age of do-it-yourself health care (heck, if the doctor only sees you for 10 minutes each visit, what other options are there?), Change Your Brain, Change Your Life fits in perfectly. Filled with "brain prescriptions" (among them cognitive exercises and nutritional advice) that are geared toward readers who've experienced anxiety, depression, impulsiveness, excessive anger or worry, and obsessive behavior, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life milks the mind-body connection for all it's worth.
Written by a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who has also authored a book on attention deficit disorder, Change Your Brain contains dozens of brain scans of patients with various neurological problems, from caffeine, nicotine, and heroin addiction to manic-depression to epilepsy. These scans, often showing large gaps in neurological activity or areas of extreme overactivity, are downright frightening to look at, and Dr. Amen should know better than to resort to such scare tactics. But he should also be commended for advocating natural remedies, including deep breathing, guided imagery, meditation, self-hypnosis, and biofeedback for treating disorders that are so frequently dealt with by prescription only.
BRAIN PRESCRIPTIONS THAT REALLY WORK
In this breakthrough bestseller, you'll see scientific evidence that your anxiety, depression, anger, obsessiveness, or impulsiveness could be related to how specific structures in your brain work. You're not stuck with the brain you're born with. Here are just a few of neuropsychiatrist Dr. Daniel Amen's surprising--and effective--"brain prescriptions" that can help heal your brain and change your life:
To Quell Anxiety and Panic:
¸  Use simple breathing techniques to immediately calm inner turmoil
To Fight Depression:
¸  Learn how to kill ANTs (automatic negative thoughts)
To Curb Anger:
¸  Follow the Amen anti-anger diet and learn the nutrients that calm rage
To Conquer Impulsiveness and Learn to Focus:
¸  Develop total focus with the "One-Page Miracle"
To Stop Obsessive Worrying:
¸  Follow the "get unstuck" writing exercise and learn other problem-solving exercises
Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Revised and Updated
by David D. Burns
from Harper
The good news is that anxiety, guilt, pessimism, procrastination, low self–esteem, and other "black holes" of depression can be cured without drugs. In Feeling Good, eminent psychiatrist, David D. Burns, M.D., outlines the remarkable, scientifically proven techniques that will immediately lift your spirits and help you develop a positive outlook on life. Now, in this updated edition, Dr. Burns adds an All–New Consumer's Guide To Anti–depressant Drugs as well as a new introduction to help answer your questions about the many options available for treating depression.
– Recognise what causes your mood swings
– Nip negative feelings in the bud
– Deal with guilt
– Handle hostility and criticism
– Overcome addiction to love and approval
– Build self–esteem
– Feel good everyday
You Can Heal Your Life (Gift Edition)
by Louise Hay
from Hay House
If you haven't seen Hay House's Lifestyles series of gorgeous gift books, there is no better way to acquaint yourself than with publisher/author Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life. A bestseller for many years, You Can Heal Your Life has been republished with bright, beautiful illustrations in full, living color and exquisite typography--each and every page is a work of art by artist Joan Perrin Falquet. The timeless message of the book is that we are each responsible for our own reality and "dis-ease." Hay believes we make ourselves ill by having thoughts of self-hatred. She includes a directory of ailments and emotional causes for each with a corresponding affirmation to help overcome the illness. For example, the probable cause of multiple sclerosis is "mental hardness, hard-heartedness, iron will, and inflexibility." The healing "thought pattern" would be: "By choosing loving, joyous thoughts, I created a loving joyous world. I am safe and free." --P. Randall Cohan
An excerpt from You Can Heal Your Life:
Life Is Really Very Simple. What We Give Out, We Get Back
What we think about ourselves becomes the truth for us. I believe that everyone, myself included, is responsible for everything in our lives, the best and the worst. Every thought we think is creating our future. Each one of us creates our experiences by our thoughts and our feelings. The thoughts we think and the words we speak create our experiences.
Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior
by Ori Brafman
from Doubleday Business
A fascinating journey into the hidden psychological influences that derail our decision-making, Sway will change the way you think about the way you think.
Why is it so difficult to sell a plummeting stock or end a doomed relationship? Why do we listen to advice just because it came from someone “important”? Why are we more likely to fall in love when there’s danger involved? In Sway, renowned organizational thinker Ori Brafman and his brother, psychologist Rom Brafman, answer all these questions and more.
Drawing on cutting-edge research from the fields of social psychology, behavioral economics, and organizational behavior, Sway reveals dynamic forces that influence every aspect of our personal and business lives, including loss aversion (our tendency to go to great lengths to avoid perceived losses), the diagnosis bias (our inability to reevaluate our initial diagnosis of a person or situation), and the “chameleon effect” (our tendency to take on characteristics that have been arbitrarily assigned to us).
Sway introduces us to the Harvard Business School professor who got his students to pay $204 for a $20 bill, the head of airline safety whose disregard for his years of training led to the transformation of an entire industry, and the football coach who turned conventional strategy on its head to lead his team to victory. We also learn the curse of the NBA draft, discover why interviews are a terrible way to gauge future job performance, and go inside a session with the Supreme Court to see how the world’s most powerful justices avoid the dangers of group dynamics.
Every once in a while, a book comes along that not only challenges our views of the world but changes the way we think. In Sway, Ori and Rom Brafman not only uncover rational explanations for a wide variety of irrational behaviors but also point readers toward ways to avoid succumbing to their pull.
Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
by John J. Ratey
from Little, Brown and Company
A groundbreaking and fascinating investigation into the transformative effects of exercise on the brain, from the bestselling author and renowned psychiatrist John J. Ratey, MD.
Did you know you can beat stress, lift your mood, fight memory loss, sharpen your intellect, and function better than ever simply by elevating your heart rate and breaking a sweat? The evidence is incontrovertible: Aerobic exercise physically remodels our brains for peak performance.
In SPARK, John J. Ratey, M.D., embarks upon a fascinating and entertaining journey through the mind-body connection, presenting startling research to prove that exercise is truly our best defense against everything from depression to ADD to addiction to aggression to menopause to Alzheimer's. Filled with amazing case studies (such as the revolutionary fitness program in Naperville, Illinois, which has put this school district of 19,000 kids first in the world of science test scores), SPARK is the first book to explore comprehensively the connection between exercise and the brain. It will change forever the way you think about your morning run---or, for that matter, simply the way you think
Body for Life: 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strength
by Bill Phillips
from Collins Living
By Bill Phillips and Michael D'Orso. 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strength. No. 1 New York Times Bestseller. Change your mind - Change you body - Change your life. Imagine, just 12 weeks from now, having the lean, healthy body you've always wanted and not having to turn your life upside down to get it. Imagine having the energy to be at your peak from dawn to dusk, having the confidence to do all the things you've been putting off, having the certainty to make the right decision at the right time, knowing that you really do have the power to change - not just your body but anything in this world you set your mind to. If this sounds unlikely, or even impossible, it's time you were introduced to Bill Phillips and his Body-for Life programs - it's time you join those who have experienced breakthroughs with the help of his expert advice. Legal Disclaimer: These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
Bill Phillips had been publishing bodybuilding magazines and marketing nutritional supplements for years when he had a weird revelation at a trade show: many of the most loyal and enthusiastic readers he had were totally out of shape. From that uncomfortable realization came his popular Physique Transformation Contest (top prize that first year: Phillips's own Lamborghini), now world famous, and this book.
The three-times-a-week weightlifting program in Body for Life is deceptively simple. If you've spent any time in the gym, you've already done all the exercises. But Phillips includes a couple of high-intensity sets at the end of each exercise that should compound the training effect on each muscle group. Same goes for the cardiovascular exercise he recommends: just 20 minutes, three times a week. But those 20 minutes are spent jacking the intensity up and down, accomplishing more in less time.
Phillips arranges all this into a 12-week program, along with nutritional and motivational tips. Be warned that the nutritional advice gets a little spacey. For example, he puts "carbohydrates" and "vegetables" into separate categories, and recommends three daily doses of a nutritional supplement called Myoplex, which his company manufactures. (Fortunately, he gives tips on how to make each dose taste different, such as by adding drops of peppermint extract.) Despite this strangeness, Body for Life still motivates because so many others have achieved astounding results in similar 12-week windows, and the pictures and testimonials are here as evidence. --Lou Schuler
Making a Good Brain Great: The Amen Clinic Program for Achieving and Sustaining Optimal Mental Performance
by Daniel G. Md Amen
from Three Rivers Press
Daniel Amen, M.D., one of the world’s foremost authorities on the brain, has news for you: your brain is involved in everything you do—learn to care for it properly, and you will be smarter, healthier, and happier in as little as 15 days!
You probably run, lift weights, or do yoga to keep your body in great shape; you put on sunscreen and lotions to protect your skin; but chances are you simply ignore your brain and trust it to do its job. People unknowingly endanger or injure their brains, stress them by working at a frenzied pace and not getting enough sleep, pollute them with caffeine, alcohol, and drugs, and deprive them of proper nutrients. Brain dysfunction is the number one reason people fail at school, work, and relationships. The brain is the organ of learning, working, and loving—the supercomputer that runs our lives. It’s very simple: when our brains work right, we work right—and when our brains have trouble, we have trouble in our lives.
Luckily, it’s never too late: the brain is capable of change, and when you care for it, the results are amazing. Making a Good Brain Great gives you the tools you need to optimize your brain power and enrich your health and your life in the process. The principles and exercises in this book, based on years of cutting-edge neuroscience research and the experiences of thousands of people, provide a wealth of practical information to teach you how to achieve the best brain possible. You will learn:
•how to eat right to think right
•how to protect your brain from injuries and toxic substances
•how to nourish your brain with vitamins and do mental workouts to keep it strong
•the critical component of physical exercise, and which kinds work best
•how to rid your brain of negative thoughts, counteract stress, and much more
Full of encouraging anecdotes from Dr. Amen’s many years of experience, Making a Good Brain Great is a positive and practical road map for enriching and improving your own greatest asset—your brain.
From the Hardcover edition.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
by Oliver Sacks
from Touchstone
In his most extraordinary book, "one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century" (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.
If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks's splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine's ultimate responsibility: "the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject."
Heal Your Body
by Louise Hay
from Hay House
104 Activities That Build: Self-Esteem, Teamwork, Communication, Anger Management, Self-Discovery, Coping Skills
by Alanna E. Jones
from Rec Room Publishing
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