You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life Paperback – June 5, 2012

While the authors don't specifically mention PTSD in this wonderful book it has been hugely helpful for me in understanding what is going on in my brain with the symptoms of PTSD from childhood trauma, and I would highly recommend it to anyone in recovery from post traumatic stress.

The understandings from this book have enabled me to rapidly see when my brain is sending messages that simply are not true in terms of my objective reality, and makes it much easier for me to redirect my attention to something that calms me down. I'm a long term meditator so do have a baseline level of mindfulness that folks new to the practice wouldn't have, but this book has taken my practice to a whole new level as I'm far less likely to be sucked into the unhelpful messages from my brain now that I really understand what's going on in there. It is so liberating to be able, for example, to be exposed to smells that in the past resulted in my brain going ballistic, without no more than the slightest hint of fear now. It is also incredibly liberating to be able to rapidly let my brain know that there is nothing to fear in situations that in the past I was seriously hijacked by the messages coming from my brain, and fear escalated rapidly to the point of me actually losing sight of the fact that my objective reality was totally safe in the moment.

Another benefit I've had from working with this book is that I am much less likely to be tipped out of my grounding when working with methods such as Wholebody Focusing to heal trauma. Where in the past I would have struggled to stay with intense emotions arising when working on my own because my brain was sending "there is something wrong" messages at a huge rate of knots, I can now rapidly tap into the understandings from this book and know that my "Uh Oh Centre" is sending false messages and I can bring my "Assessment Centre" (as the authors helpfully label different areas of the brain) online to calm things down, enabling me to stay with what is arising, which in turn enables my brain to process unresolved emotions from the past. This is powerful stuff.

The authors really made it clear that neuroplasticity (the brain's ability to change) is happening all the time, no matter what choices we are making. Each time we repeat an unskilful behaviour we thicken the associated neural networks. So the key is self-directed neuroplasticity, and that's what I've been seeing in abundance in my life since starting to work with this book. The authors stress that it's hard work to keep doing their four step process over and over but well worth it. I've found that the process can be expedited much more rapidly in many cases by combining the author's understanding with a self-help method known as EFT or Tapping (which in my opinion is one of the most powerful tools out there these days for tapping into self-directed neuroplasticity). I've seen rapid change in issues that have been stuck for a long time in my life through combining the learnings from this wonderful book with the EFT method.

I very much appreciate the authors having put this information into such a readable and useable format. This has been a life changing book for me and this review is being posted with a lot of appreciation for the powerful information it contains.

Update: While I learnt lots from this book, there has been a book published since which goes much more into the PTSD side and explains more about what this author calls "defective brain messages". I highly recommend the newer book "Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment" instead of this book now, for anyone with PTSD. It goes much further into the neuroscience behind PTSD, and explaining why we react the way we do; and has a much wider range of interventions than this book.

This book is excellent at explaining how are brain is sending us signals that are triggers to help us behave in ways we would rather not. It has tools and strategies for dealing with these signals and overcoming our seemingly compulsive behaviors. Excellent Book!! Highly recommend.

The main message about the 4 steps is given much better in brain lock. Yes agred that that book is about OCD , but the insights can easily be extrapolated to a non OCD brain that just has excessive rumination. This book only marginally ads to it & in fact the main thesis of the 4 steps is better explained in brain lock.

This is a great book for giving people practical steps they can take to get rid of harmful self-talk and replace it with habituated self-talk conducive to flourishing. And their method, while not entailing a version of substance dualism, makes the most sense if we are immaterial souls and, as such, have libertarian freedom (and attempts like Timothy O'Connor's emergentist grounding of agent causation are, in my view, confused and far less convincing than substance dualism) over our immaterial thoughts. This is helpful material and I urge those who suffer like me from anxiety or other similar mental illnesses to read and employ its wisdom.

This is a great book. It contains very practical technics based upon clinically tested neurology where by you can change your brain. The technic may sound easy but it does take much work and practice. But the result is a changed brain. It's called self directed neuroplasticity using Hebb's law which says that "neurons that fire together wire together", and the Quantum Zeno effect which says that "focused attention creates brain circuits". I use the book as a text book and have reread it many times. With a lot of work the technics will produce very positive results.

As usual for this author, well thought out and helpful for anyone who wishes to understand more about how the brain changes.

Just like Brain Lock. Something you can immediately start using right away. Do the program, work at it, don't give up and the four steps will begin to help you. I've been sharing the ideas with my high school students (assistant principal).

Excellent book for changing your thought patterns when you are stuck in detrimental thinking. Highly, highly recommended.