Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JOHN B. ARDEN, Ph.D., is the author or coauthor of eleven other books, including Brain-Based Therapy with Adults and Brain-Based Therapy with Children and Adolescents (with Lloyd Linford), Improving Your Memory For Dummies, Conquering Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (with Victoria Beckner), Consciousness, Dreams, and Self: A Transdisciplinary Approach, and The Heal Your Anxiety Workbook. He is Director of Training in Mental Health for Kaiser Permanente in Northern California where he oversees training in twenty-four medical centers, and where over a hundred postdoctoral residents and interns are trained each year.

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If you want to change your life, you need to change your brain.

"Dr. Arden paved the way for brain-based therapy and what the brain can do. It's refreshing, practical, and innovative." ―Kit S. Ng, Ph.D., Director, Asia Institute of Professional Psychology, Singapore

"Rewire Your Brain translates fascinating developments in neuroscience into a powerful and practical guide to lasting change in our lives." ―Liz Sheean, Editor, Psychotherapy in Australia

Once thought to be "hard-wired," the brain is actually "soft-wired" by experience―meaning it is possible to rewire parts of your brain to improve everything from your mood and your memory to your relationships, sleeping habits, and more. Rewire Your Brain guides you through this breakthrough process, revealing how to minimize your anxiety and enhance your brain's longevity in order to live a vibrant life free of self-imposed limitations. Written by Dr. John Arden, a leader in the field of brain-based therapy, this accessible guide addresses the recent advances in neuroscience and explains exactly how to apply them to specific areas of your daily life. You'll discover how to:

• Develop mental connections that promote good habits and shut off those that support bad habits

• Quiet your brain, conquer fear, and approach life courageously

• Become calm, energized, and focused by making new connections between your neurons

• Improve and expand your relationships

Aus dem Klappentext

If you want to change your life, you need to change your brain.

"Dr. Arden paved the way for brain-based therapy and what the brain can do. It's refreshing, practical, and innovative." —Kit S. Ng, Ph.D., Director, Asia Institute of Professional Psychology, Singapore

"Rewire Your Brain translates fascinating developments in neuroscience into a powerful and practical guide to lasting change in our lives." —Liz Sheean, Editor, Psychotherapy in Australia

Once thought to be "hard-wired," the brain is actually "soft-wired" by experience—meaning it is possible to rewire parts of your brain to improve everything from your mood and your memory to your relationships, sleeping habits, and more. Rewire Your Brain guides you through this breakthrough process, revealing how to minimize your anxiety and enhance your brain's longevity in order to live a vibrant life free of self-imposed limitations. Written by Dr. John Arden, a leader in the field of brain-based therapy, this accessible guide addresses the recent advances in neuroscience and explains exactly how to apply them to specific areas of your daily life. You'll discover how to:

• Develop mental connections that promote good habits and shut off those that support bad habits

• Quiet your brain, conquer fear, and approach life courageously

• Become calm, energized, and focused by making new connections between your neurons

• Improve and expand your relationships

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Rewire Your Brain

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

There is a revolution occurring in brain science. Not long ago it was thought that the brain you were born with was the brain you would die with and that the brain cells you had at birth were the maximum number you would ever possess. The brain was thought to be hardwired to function in predetermined ways. It turns out that this is not true. The brain is not hardwired; it's "soft-wired" by experience.

It has been a common belief that our genes dictate our thoughts, our emotions, and our behavior. Throughout the 1980s and the 1990s, the press was filled with stories on how genetics predetermine everything we experience. There were also stories about identical twins who were raised apart but who nevertheless had the same mannerisms or favored the same color. Popular culture saw these stories as evidence of the power of genetic hardwiring.

Neuroscientific research is now telling us that the brain is quite plastic. The brain you were born with is actually modified by your experiences throughout your life. Your brain is changing all the time. In fact, new brain cells can be born. Genes lay out potential and vulnerabilities, but they do not dictate your thoughts, your feelings, or your behavior. It turns out that behavior is not rigidly determined. You can even turn genes on or off with your behavior.

Two of my books, Brain-Based Therapy: Adult and Brain-Based Therapy: Child, were written for professionals to help them teach their patients to rewire their brains, and they were based on these new discoveries. Rewire Your Brain explains how this information can be used directly by you. This book tells you how you can make use of the new discoveries in neuroscience. I will define and describe the following areas and explain how they can be relevant to your life:

Neuroplasticity Neurogenesis Social systems, such as mirror neurons Nutritional neuroscience

The new discoveries in neuroscience shed light on how you can maximize your potential and minimize your vulnerabilities. I will describe how to apply these findings to rewire your brain so that you can feel calm and positive. So much hinges on these two abilities: by learning to be calm and positive, you can improve your ability to focus, face challenges, reach your goals, and be happy.

Learning to be calm means feeling less tense, less anxious, and less easily stressed. There are parts of your brain that, when not tamed, tend to overreact and add to needless tension, anxiety, and stress. In this book I'll describe how to get those parts rewired. The bottom line is this: how you train yourself to think, feel, and behave on a regular basis will rewire your brain and allow you to be calm and focused.

Thanks to the new discoveries in neuroscience, we know much more about how the brain works and how you can rewire the parts of the brain that are out of balance with the others, having become either overactivated or underactivated. I'll describe how those specific parts of your brain tend to become overactivated and deregulated when you feel down in the dumps, lose your optimism, and look only at the dark side. Things don't look as bright as they could look, and the glass is half empty when it could just as easily seem half full. I will describe how to activate the parts of your brain that must be regulated and balanced so that you feel positive about your life and see the glass as (at least) half full. You'll learn to calm down in the face of stress and boost your mood when you're down. You'll also learn to improve your memory, have better relationships, and get a good night's sleep, all of which rewire your brain and thus enable you to be calmer and feel more positive.

Nurtured Nature

In order to rewire your brain, the first thing you should do is learn how the brain works. Your brain works in response to and in relation to the world around you. We have moved far away from the old debate on nature versus nurture; now we are able to "nurture nature." Since your brain is not hardwired but is really "soft-wired," your experience plays a major role in how you nurture your nature.

The brain weighs just three pounds, yet it's one of the most advanced organs in the body. It has a hundred billion nerve cells, called neurons, and many more support cells. That's equivalent to the number of stars in our galaxy.

Let's start with the brain's architecture. The neurons are clustered in the parts of the brain that have been called modules: the cortex (the outer layer, which has two hemispheres), the four lobes, and the subcortical (below the cortex) modules.

There has been a lot of hype about the character of the two halves of the brain. "Right-brain" people were said to be more creative, even more spiritual than "left-brain" people. The left-brain people were described as more rigid and picky. That hype, born in the 1970s, still exists, but many people who were instrumental in starting this fad have long since abandoned it. The truth is that the two hemispheres work together in everything you do. The brain contains a band of fibers called the corpus callosum that binds the two hemispheres together. It serves to connect distant neurons that fire together, adding dimension and depth to everything you do and think.

The corpus callosum of a woman is denser than that of a man. This means that the two hemispheres of a woman's brain work more evenly together. The female brain is more symmetrical. The male brain has an asymmetrical torque, which means that the right frontal lobe is larger than the left frontal lobe, and the left occipital (back of the head) lobe is larger than the right occipital lobe.

For both sexes, the right hemisphere processes visual and spatial information, enabling you to grasp the "big picture." The right hemisphere pays more attention to the context or the gist of a situation. The left hemisphere, in contrast, is more adept at details, categories, and linearly arranged information such as language. The right hemisphere is more active when you're learning something new. Once the knowledge becomes routine and overlearned, the left hemisphere comes more into play. This is another reason that language is processed by the left hemisphere.

The right hemisphere makes better connections with the parts of the brain below the cortex, so it is more emotional by nature. In other words, it's better able to pick up the emotional climate of a conversation. Since women's brains have a better connection between the two hemispheres than men's brains do, women are said to be more intuitive. Words often carry more emotional meaning for women than they do for men.

There are four lobes in each hemisphere: the frontal lobe, the parietal (middle) lobe, the temporal (side) lobe, and the occipital lobe. Each has specific talents. For example, when you appreciate a specific object, such as a chair you sat on at your friend's house, the thoughts and feelings you have about the chair are dispersed throughout your brain. You remember the elegant shape of the chair through your right parietal lobe. You remember the words your friend used to describe his trip to Costa Rica through your left temporal lobe, and you process the tone of his voice through your right temporal lobe. You remember looking back at the chair as you were leaving the room and...