Hijacked By Your Brain

What do you do when stress takes over your life, and nothing you do to feel better seems to work? When you... •Melt down over the smallest things •Get angry at the people you love •Choke under pressure •Feel tense and worried all the time •Procrastinate or give up in the face of a crucial deadline •Use food, alcohol, gambling, or other addictions to cope •Dwell on the past when you just want to move on Hijacked by Your Brain is the first book to explain how stress changes your brain and what you can do about it. Stress is not the enemy. In order to reduce stress, you have to understand why your brain causes you to feel stress and how you can take advantage of it to handle the high-stress people and situations in your life. This groundbreaking book reveals the step missing in most stress reduction guides. We can't stop stress, but we can control the effect stress has on us. Hijacked by Your Brain is the user's manual for your brain that shows you how to free yourself when stress takes over.

Most people believe that it's natural to gain a lot of weight as we get older. But this is not true. Kessler knows it's not true because until about 30 years ago, we did not have a weight problem in North America. In fact, throughout history, the human body weight stayed pretty much the same. People ate the amount of food they needed and no more. Then, in the 1980s, something changed. North Americans started gaining a lot of weight. What happened in such a short time to add so many millions of pounds to so many millions of people? Something had changed in North America, but it wasn't us. It was our food. These processed foods - loaded with sugar, fat, and salt - make it almost impossible for some people to stop eating. Many years ago, the food industry managed to figure out that they could sell more food if it had a lot of sugar, fat, and salt in it. Good food should make you feel full and satisfied. But foods that are high in sugar, fat, and salt have the opposite effect on many people. Instead of easing our hunger, these foods make us want to eat more. Even when we're full, even when we're not hungry, we feel the need to eat. Hijacked helps us understand what it is that we're eating and helps us train our brains to know when to stop eating and to stop craving food.

Technology surrounds us every day: a phone alarm wakes us up, an electronic calendar tracks assignment deadlines, GPS directs us to the new dentist’s office, social media keeps us connected to friends and family, and streaming platforms make sure we’re never without something new to binge-watch. Our devices and apps can make life much more convenient and entertaining. But for years, scientists have warned that too much screen time may have negative effects on our health. With portable devices and remote learning, it is even more difficult to put down electronics. Being intentional about how and when to unplug can help teens and young adults to protect their physical and mental wellbeing in a world where screens and technology are increasingly becoming necessities rather than just conveniences. Attention Hijacked offers a roadmap for those deciding how they want to deal with technology, exploring the ways technology affects the individual, dispelling common misinformation, and using this knowledge to make personalized decisions. Page Plus links in the book lead to mindfulness and meditation audio clips. Using mindfulness techniques, this book gives readers the power to take charge of their technology use.

This book, written from the perspective of a practicing primary care physician, interweaves patientsÕ stories with fascinating new brain research to show how addictive drugs overtake basic brain functions and transform them to create a chronic illness that is very difficult to treat. The idea that drug and alcohol addiction are chronic illnesses and not character flaws is not newsÑthis notion has been around for many years. What Hijacked Brains offers is context and personal stories that demonstrate this point in a very accessible package. Dr. Barnes explores how the healthy brain works, how addictive drugs flood basic reward pathways, and what it feels like to grapple with addiction. She discusses how, for individuals, the combination of genetic and environmental factors determines both vulnerability for addiction and the resilience necessary for recovery. Finally, she shows how American culture, with its emphasis on freewill and individualism, tends to blame the addict for bad choices and personal weakness, thereby impeding political and/or health-related efforts to get the addict what she needs to recover.

Hijacking the Brain provides the first-ever scientific explanation for the success of Twelve-Step programs. Hijacking the Brain examines data provided by recent rapid growth in the fields of neuroscience, neuroimaging, psychology, sociobiology and interpersonal neurobiology that have given us new, dramatic insights into the neural and hormonal correlates of stress and addiction, cognitive decline with addiction, as well as for the relative success of Twelve-Step Programs of recovery. Addiction is recognized by experts as an organic brain disease, and most experts promote Twelve-Step programs (AA, NA, CA, etc.) which invoke a 'spiritual solution' for recovery. To date, no one has described why these programs work. 'Hijack' tells us why. In 'Hijack, ' the role of 'working The Steps' for reducing stress and becoming emotionally centered is discussed in depth. A full chapter is devoted to the rewarding and comforting physiology of meditation and the spiritual experience. The author uses examples from animal sociobiology, as well as sophisticated human brain-imaging studies, to demonstrate that empathic socialization and altruism are instinctive and 'naturally rewarding' and, along with Step Work, act as a substitute for the 'synthetic rewards' of drugs of abuse. 'Hijack' does not challenge the Steps or the Traditions of Twelve-Step programs. The sole intention of Hijacking the Brain is to 'connect the dots' between an 'organic brain disease' and a 'spiritual solution' with sound physical, scientific evidence. Avoiding strict scientific language as much as possible, 'Hijack' is written for the layperson and abundantly illustrated.

Originally published by Viking Penguin, 2014.

A too-busy brain can interfere with attention, concentration, mood and even the ability to make decisions and solve problems. Annibali shows you how to restore cognitive calm, and provides useful suggestions to help you understand your own brain functions so you can discover which techniques will work for you.

"Explores how industry has manipulated our most deep-seated survival instincts."—David Perlmutter, MD, Author, #1 New York Times bestseller, Grain Brain and Brain Maker The New York Times–bestselling author of Fat Chance reveals the corporate scheme to sell pleasure, driving the international epidemic of addiction, depression, and chronic disease. While researching the toxic and addictive properties of sugar for his New York Times bestseller Fat Chance, Robert Lustig made an alarming discovery—our pursuit of happiness is being subverted by a culture of addiction and depression from which we may never recover. Dopamine is the “reward” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we want more; yet every substance or behavior that releases dopamine in the extreme leads to addiction. Serotonin is the “contentment” neurotransmitter that tells our brains we don’t need any more; yet its deficiency leads to depression. Ideally, both are in optimal supply. Yet dopamine evolved to overwhelm serotonin—because our ancestors were more likely to survive if they were constantly motivated—with the result that constant desire can chemically destroy our ability to feel happiness, while sending us down the slippery slope to addiction. In the last forty years, government legislation and subsidies have promoted ever-available temptation (sugar, drugs, social media, porn) combined with constant stress (work, home, money, Internet), with the end result of an unprecedented epidemic of addiction, anxiety, depression, and chronic disease. And with the advent of neuromarketing, corporate America has successfully imprisoned us in an endless loop of desire and consumption from which there is no obvious escape. With his customary wit and incisiveness, Lustig not only reveals the science that drives these states of mind, he points his finger directly at the corporations that helped create this mess, and the government actors who facilitated it, and he offers solutions we can all use in the pursuit of happiness, even in the face of overwhelming opposition. Always fearless and provocative, Lustig marshals a call to action, with seminal implications for our health, our well-being, and our culture.