Healing the Hardware of the Soul: How Making the Brain-Soul Connection Can Optimize Your Life, Love, and Spiritual Growth - Hardcover

Amen, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743204751 ISBN 13: 9780743204750

Publisher: Free Press, 2002

Synopsis

Dr. Daniel Amen's breakthrough brain-healing program has helped hundreds of thousands to overcome depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and attention deficit disorder. The maverick author of Change Your Brain, Change Your Life and Healing ADD now presents his proven program for repairing and strengthening our relationships, child-rearing practices, work and study routines, and, ultimately, our soulful connections, in the deepest ways possible. Guided by this book, each of us can learn to balance and optimize the parts of the brain responsible for inner growth, intimacy, and spiritual health.

Drawing upon his experience with over fourteen thousand brain-imaging studies of patients from all walks of life, Dr. Amen has developed an essential tool called the Amen Brain System Checklist, a 101-question self-test used to evaluate the five brain systems that are key to achieving and maintaining a healthy brain-soul connection. The questionnaire identifies the problem brain areas readers may need to work on, offers insight into the degree to which these imbalances affect their lives, and provides targeted strategies for each area of the brain involved with spiritual issues.

These are just a few of the many "brain prescriptions" to be found in Healing the Hardware of the Soul:

• Develop focus and improve decision-making with the One-Page Miracle for the Soul
• Use prayer, meditation, and diaphragmatic breathing exercises for superior emotional and spiritual flexibility
• Heal painful deep soul memories through thought and behavior exercises
• Learn how forming strong, positive new bonds actually controls impulsive behavior and stabilizes mood swings

Dr. Amen's recommendations include cutting-edge advice on diet, nutritional supplements, and the judicious use of medication when needed. He also explains which medications can unbalance the brain when used improperly. Dramatic before-and-after pictures of the brain demonstrate the medical effectiveness of these clinically based healing techniques.

Whether we learn the self-help strategies of cognitive reprogramming, self-hypnosis, or nutraceutical therapy, seek out psychotherapy, or rely on prescription antidepressants and antianxiety medications, Dr. Amen's sage advice and comprehensive treatment programs give us all the tools we need to optimize our work, relationships, and spiritual connections to become the people we want to be.

About this title

Review

As the title suggests, Healing the Hardware of the Soul is a unique blend of advanced scientific technique and fundamental religious principles. Dr. Daniel Amen, a graduate of Oral Roberts University, isn't promoting a strictly Christian agenda, but he makes it repeatedly clear that one of the crucial steps in achieving mental health is prayer. Depending on your beliefs, this insistence can range from pleasing to offensive.

His work is centered around the physical aspects of the brain--in some ways, it resembles a modern form of phrenology. Using detailed imaging technology, he has established connections between specific behaviors--panic disorders, depression, ADD--and over- or underactive areas of the brain. As with most new forms of medical research, his work is both lauded and ridiculed, and only further research will determine its ultimate validity.

For people anxious to put his findings to use, there are several chapters devoted to questionnaires that can be used in place of brain scans. Exercises and suggestions follow, and stay surprisingly simple--forming personal connections, seeking appropriate medical care and medications, and creating short-term, specific goals are a few old standbys. Regardless of what methods Amen is using to arrive at the solutions, it's clear he finds plenty of value in tried-and-true solutions. --Jill Lightner

About the Author

Daniel G. Amen, M.D., is a clinical neuroscientist, a psychiatrist, and the medical director of The Amen Clinics in California. The author of a number of books, he is the country's foremost pioneer in applying brain-imaging science to clinical practice. Dr. Amen lives in Newport Beach, California.

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743204751
• ISBN 13: 9780743204750
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288