You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taki ng Control of Your Life

by Jeffrey Schwartz MD, Rebecca Gladding MD

Overview

Two neuroscience experts explain how their 4-Step Method can help identify negative thoughts and change bad habits for good.

A leading neuroplasticity researcher and the coauthor of the groundbreaking books Brain Lock and The Mind and the Brain, Jeffrey M. Schwartz has spent his career studying the human brain. He pioneered the first mindfulness-based treatment program for people suffering from OCD, teaching patients how to achieve long-term relief from their compulsions.

Schwartz works with psychiatrist Rebecca Gladding to refine a program that successfully explains how the brain works and why we often feel besieged by overactive brain circuits (i.e. bad habits, social anxieties, etc.) the key to making life changes that you want—to make your brain work for you—is to consciously choose to “starve” these circuits of focused attention, thereby decreasing their influence and strength.

You Are Not Your Brain carefully outlines their program, showing readers how to identify negative impulses, channel them through the power of focused attention, and ultimately lead more fulfilling and empowered lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781583334836
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/05/2012
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	150,505
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D., is a research psychiatrist at UCLA School of Medicine and a seminal thinker and researcher in the field of self-directed neuroplasticity. He lives in Los Angeles.Rebecca Gladding, M.D., is a psychiatrist specializing in anxiety and depression. She recently was Medical Director of the UCLA Adult Inpatient Eating Disorders Program. She lives in Los Angeles.

Table of Contents

Introduction xi

Part 1 A Sense of Self

Chapter 1 You Are Not Your Brain 3

Chapter 2 Using Your Mind to Change Your Brain: The Power of Self-Directed Neuroplasticity and Meaningful Goals 30

Chapter 3 Why Habits Are So Hard to Break 60

Chapter 4 Why These Sensations Feel So Real: The Biology of Deceptive Brain Messages 73

Chapter 5 A New Sense of Self: Overcoming Your Deceptive Brain Messages with the Four Steps 82

Part 2 The Skills

Chapter 6 Ignoring, Minimizing, and Neglecting: How Deceptive Brain Messages Distort Your View of Yourself 103

Chapter 7 Moving Forward with the Four Steps: Tips and Recommendations 125

Chapter 8 You Can't Change What You Can't See. The Power of Awareness and Step 1: Relabel 144

Chapter 9 Changing Your Relationship to Deceptive Brain Messages with Step 2: Reframe 179

Chapter 10 Reframing Your Thinking Errors 200

Chapter 11 The Power Is in the Focus: Step 3: Refocus 238

Chapter 12 Progressive Mindfulness and Step 4 Revalue 274

Part 3 Applying the Four Steps to Your Life

Chapter 13 What Is Going On Here? Is This a True Emotion or an Emotional Sensation? 297

Chapter 14 Using the Four Steps to Help You Move Forward in Your Life 309

Chapter 15 Putting It All Together 335

Acknowledgments 347

Recommended Reading 351

Index 353

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The idea that we can deliberately and systematically change our brains with our minds was once thought ridiculous. But now, largely due to Jeffrey Schwartz and his UCLA research on neuro-plasticity and OCD, this once revolutionary idea is well accepted. Rebecca Gladding and Jeffrey Schwartz adapt Schwartz’s extraordinarily successful program for a mainstream audience giving simple, self-directed tools to help achieve greater happiness, emotional balance, and overall well-being.”
—Susan Kaiser Greenland, author of The Mindful Child

Editorial Reviews

A testament to mind over brain ... It's the truth of the matter that sheer willpower can truly make you break free.”
—Leonardo DiCaprio

“Operating on the highly rational perspective that we are not our brains, but rather, substantial free agents who exercise control over our brains, Schwartz and Gladding develop a simple, yet profoundly insightful approach for developing a flourishing life.  The result is truly life-giving, and it will bring healing and hope to all who read it and practice its wisdom.”
—J.P. Moreland, author of The God Question

"How can the brain, which is just a complex network of interconnected nerve cells, give rise to consciousness and to thought? Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz and Dr. Rebecca Gladding argue, persuasively, that the mind actually has massive causal effects on the functioning of the brain. In other words, you can not only change the way you think, feel and behave through conscious effort when you're upset, but you can also change the programming and chemistry of your brain. A compelling and important message."
—David Burns, M.D., author of Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

“The idea that we can deliberately and systematically change our brains with our minds was once thought ridiculous.  But now, largely due to Jeffrey Schwartz and his UCLA research on neuro-plasticity and OCD, this once revolutionary idea is well accepted.  Rebecca Gladding and Jeffrey Schwartz adapt Schwartz’s extraordinarily successful program for a mainstream audience giving simple, self-directed tools to help achieve greater happiness, emotional balance, and overall well-being.”
—Susan Kaiser Greenland, author of The Mindful Child

From the Publisher

Using research based on patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, U.C.L.A. psychiatrists Schwartz (The Mind and the Brain) and Gladding have developed a program that helps patients literally change the brain pathways that lead to unhealthy behavior-from obsessively checking e-mail to self-hatred to drug addiction. Aspects of their common-sense scientific approach include: understanding how the brain works; understanding what constitutes a "deceptive brain message;" acting as one's own Wise Advocate by analyzing the effects of any choice and picking the one likely to lead to a positive result; setting and prioritizing goals, and more. Success depends on the patient's innate ability to reason and focus on healthy alternatives to the preferred or automatic behavior. Changing one's will can essentially change the brain, the authors argue, and the methods will work as long as the desire to change is there. Though Schwartz and Gladding add a fascinating self-actualizing component of choice and control, readers may have trouble grasping the more science-heavy passages, such as why addiction happens at the cellular level or neuroscience theory.
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