MOODSTRControl Your Mood – Control Your Life

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A strategy-filled handbook to understand, manage, and conquer your own stress.Anxiety disorders-grouped into three main categories: panic, generalized anxiety, and social anxiety-are among the most common and pervasive mental health complaints. From the subtlest effect of sweaty palms during a work presentation to the more severe symptom of reclusion, anxiety casts a wide net. Medication, once considered the treatment of choice, is losing favor as more and more sufferers complain of unpleasant side effects and its temporary, quick-fix nature. Now, thanks to a flood of fresh neurobiology research and insights into the anatomy of the anxious brain, effective, practical strategies have emerged allowing us to manage day-to-day anxiety on our own. Addressing physical, emotional, and behavioral symptoms, Margaret Wehrenberg, a leading mental health clinician, draws on basic brain science to highlight the top ten anxiety-defeating tips. Everything from breathing techniques and mindful awareness to cognitive control and self-talk are included-all guaranteed to evict your anxious thoughts. 20 illustrations

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BRAIN PRESCRIPTIONS THAT REALLY WORKIn this breakthrough bestseller, you'll see scientific evidence that your anxiety, depression, anger, obsessiveness, or impulsiveness could be related to how specific structures in your brain work. You're not stuck with the brain you're born with. Here are just a few of neuropsychiatrist Dr. Daniel Amen's surprising--and effective--"brain prescriptions" that can help heal your brain and change your life:To Quell Anxiety and Panic: ¸  Use simple breathing techniques to immediately calm inner turmoilTo Fight Depression: ¸  Learn how to kill ANTs (automatic negative thoughts)To Curb Anger: ¸  Follow the Amen anti-anger diet and learn the nutrients that calm rageTo Conquer Impulsiveness and Learn to Focus: ¸  Develop total focus with the "One-Page Miracle"To Stop Obsessive Worrying: ¸  Follow the "get unstuck" writing exercise and learn other problem-solving exercises

In this age of do-it-yourself health care (heck, if the doctor only sees you for 10 minutes each visit, what other options are there?), Change Your Brain, Change Your Life fits in perfectly. Filled with "brain prescriptions" (among them cognitive exercises and nutritional advice) that are geared toward readers who've experienced anxiety, depression, impulsiveness, excessive anger or worry, and obsessive behavior, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life milks the mind-body connection for all it's worth. Written by a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who has also authored a book on attention deficit disorder, Change Your Brain contains dozens of brain scans of patients with various neurological problems, from caffeine, nicotine, and heroin addiction to manic-depression to epilepsy. These scans, often showing large gaps in neurological activity or areas of extreme overactivity, are downright frightening to look at, and Dr. Amen should know better than to resort to such scare tactics. But he should also be commended for advocating natural remedies, including deep breathing, guided imagery, meditation, self-hypnosis, and biofeedback for treating disorders that are so frequently dealt with by prescription only.

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Developed by two master clinicians with extensive experience in cognitive therapy treatment and training, this popular workbook shows readers how to improve their lives using cognitive therapy. The book is designed to be used alone or in conjunction with professional treatment. Step-by-step worksheets teach specific skills that have helped hundreds of thousands people conquer depression, panic attacks, anxiety, anger, guilt, shame, low self-esteem, eating disorders, substance abuse and relationship problems. Readers learn to use mood questionnaires to identify, rate, and track changes in feelings; change the thoughts that contribute to problems; follow step-by-step strategies to improve moods; and take action to improve daily living and relationships. The book's large-size format facilitates reading and writing ease.

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Most of What Happens in Your Life Happens Because of the Way You Think.Wrong thinking produces wrong emotions, wrong reactions, wrong behavior--and unhappiness! Learning to deal with your thoughts is the first step on the road to healthy thinking.How to handle one's thoughts properly is what this book is all about! It explains the life-changing method the authors call Misbelief Therapy, and it can work for you--In your homeIn your own circumstancesIn your own problemsIn your own adverse environmentIn your own thinkingBased on the Bible, this book has helped thousands of people for many years, and it can help you!Telling Yourself the Truth can show you how to identify your own misbeliefs and replace them with the truth.Also available: the corresponding Telling Yourself the Truth study guide.Winner of the Gold Book Award (500,000 copies sold),Winner of the Gold Medallion Award (ECPA), which recognizes excellence in evangelical Christian literature

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• ISBN13: 9780764223259
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

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When we are regularly undone by our emotions, we become victims of damaged relationships, trapped circumstances, self-sabotage, and illness. Don't Let Your Emotions Run Your Life offers help to all of us who want to gain the upper hand on our feelings and our lives. Even high reactors, people disposed to experiencing strong, even overwhelming emotions on a regular basis, will find its strategies easy to use and effective at managing frequent emotional flare-ups. This book develops proven DBT techniques into worksheets, exercises, and assessments that show you how to pay attention to emotions when they arise, assess blocks to controlling them, and overcome them to eliminate overpowering feelings. Learn what emotional triggers exist in your environment and become less judgmental about yourself when you do experience a surge. Avoid or reduce the distress that strong emotions cause you. This workbook teaches you to reduce the impact of painful feelings and increase the effects of positive ones so that you can tolerate life's ongoing stresses and achieve a sense of calm coexistence with your emotions.

Description

Occasional clashes between parents and children are not uncommon, but when defiant behavior — such as tantrums, resistance to chores, and negativity — becomes chronic, it can cause big problems within the family. In 10 Days to a Less Defiant Child, child and family psychologist Dr. Jeff Bernstein has developed a ground-breaking 10-day program to help parents gain back control over their defiant child or teen. This powerful and exceptionally reader-friendly guide explains what causes defiance in kids, why it's so destructive to the family, and shows parents step-by-step how they can end the behavior. Simple-to-follow and extremely effective, 10 Days to a Less Defiant Child will bring much-needed relief to the millions of frustrated parents out there living with defiant children.

Description

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a new approach to psychotherapy that rethinks even our most basic assumptions of mental well-being. Starting with the assumption that the normal condition of human existence is suffering and struggle, ACT works by first encouraging individuals to accept their lives as they are in the here and now. This acceptance is an antidote to the problem of avoidance, which ACT views as among the greatest risk factors for unnecessary suffering and poor mental health. The process of ACT includes help for individuals to identify a set of core values, a personal set of objectives that matter to them personally. The therapy then encourages the individual to commit to behavior that furthers these values despite potentially painful emotional obstacles.Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life offers a five-step plan for coping with painful emotions such as anxiety and depression. It teaches you how to learn life-enhancing behavior strategies that work to further the goals you value most. You'll learn to engage with and overcome painful thoughts and feelings with step-by-step acceptance and mindfulness-based techniques. You'll find out how to let go of control, and develop compassion and flexibility. The realization that painful feelings cannot be controlled will open you to the possibility of fully emotional living. Once present, engaged, and aware, you can begin to build new lives for yourself filled with significance and meaning. This book is not about overcoming pain or fighting emotions; it's about embracing life and feeling everything it has to offer. In this way, it offers a way out of suffering by choosing to life a life based on what matters most.This book has been awarded The Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Self-Help Seal of Merit — an award bestowed on outstanding self-help books that are consistent with cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) principles and that incorporate scientifically tested strategies for overcoming mental health difficulties. Used alone or in conjunction with therapy, our books offer powerful tools readers can use to jump-start changes in their lives.

Trying to "change" negative thoughts through cognitive gymnastics is like trying to win a war single-handedly. Why waste a life trying the impossible? In Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, advocate Dr. Steven Hayes escorts the mildly depressed, angry, and anxiety prone through a new approach to handling suffering--universal human suffering caused by language's illusions. Rather than fighting off bad thoughts and feelings with internal pep talks, Hayes beautifully explains how to embrace those pessimistic and foreboding mental voices (much like welcoming home one's cranky, play-worn children), "defuse" them with respectful attention, and commit to leading a purposeful life that includes their occasional ranting. Intriguing exercises help readers identify their core struggles, parse these into manageable pieces, and develop effective ways to move beyond rumination. The work progresses easily, thanks to Hayes' engaging style and his grace in coaching readers. Critics of cognitive and behavioral therapies will warm to Hayes' logical explanations of language's pitfalls (even language used by other therapeutic approaches); his sometimes goofy--but surprisingly effective--exercises; well-timed etymology lessons; and his uncanny ability to predict and skillfully address reader reactions throughout the workbook. Ironically, the path to life clocks many hours in the mind; plan to dedicate an intensive month of introspection to this program. Anyone who has been accused of thinking too much, who begrudges compliments, pines for a different life, or feels trapped at a mental dead end can benefit from Hayes' superior guidance.--Liane Thomas Dr. Steven Hayes answers a few questions about his book, and describes how his research was inspired by his own struggles with panic and anxiety. Questions for Steven Hayes Amazon.com: Can you give us a lay person's primer on acceptance and commitment therapy? Steven Hayes: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is based on a rather remarkable fact: when normal problem solving skills are applied to psychologically painful thoughts or feelings, suffering often increases. Our research program has shown this in thousands of patients, in almost every area of human suffering. Fortunately, we have discovered why this is and we have developed some ways of correcting it. The basic research underlying ACT shows that entanglement with your own mind leads automatically to experiential avoidance: the tendency to try first to remove or change negative thoughts and feelings as a method of life enhancement. This attempted sequence makes negative thoughts and feelings more central, important, and fearsome--and often decreasing the ability to be flexible, effective, and happy. The trick that traps us is that these unhelpful mental processes are fed by agreement OR disagreement. Your mind is like a person who has to be right about everything. If you know any people like that you know that they are excited when you agree with them but they can be even more excited and energized when you argue with them! Minds are like that. So what do you do? ACT teaches you what to do. I will say what that is, but readers need to understand that these mere words will not be useful in and of themselves. Minds are too clever for that! That is why the book has so many exercises and why we have a free discussion group on line for people working through the book (http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/ACT_for_the_Public/). What ACT teaches is acceptance of emotions, mindful awareness of thoughts, contact with a transcendent sense of self, and action based on chosen values. This constellation of skills has shown itself in controlled research to help with an amazingly large range of problems, from anxiety to managing the challenges of physical disease, from depression, to stopping smoking. Amazon.com: Some of this work is said to have come from your own battles with anxiety and panic. How did these ideas apply to your own struggles? Steven Hayes: It was my own panic disorder that first put me on to the problem we have now confirmed in our research. My panic disorder began a little over 25 years ago. I watched in horror as it grew rapidly, simply by applying my normal problem solving skills to it. Anxiety felt awful and seemingly made it impossible to function, so it was obvious to me that I first needed to get rid of it before my life would improve. I tried lots of things to do that. But this very effort meant I had to constantly evaluate my level of anxiety, and fearfully check to see if it was going up or down as a result of my efforts. As a result, anxiety quickly became the central focus of my life. Anxiety itself became something to be anxious about, and meanwhile life was put on hold. After two or three years of this I'd had enough. I began to experiment with acceptance, mindfulness, and valued action instead of detecting, disputing, and changing my insides. I remember a moment that symbolizes the change in direction. In the middle of a panic attack, with a guttural scream like you hear in the movies, I literally shouted out loud to my own mind. "You can make me feel pain, you can make me feel anxiety," I yelled. "But you cannot make me turn away from my own experience." It has not been a smooth path and it was several years before anxiety itself was obviously way down (getting it to go down was no longer my purpose, remember, but ironically when you stop trying to make it happen, often it does), but almost immediately life opened up again. ACT is the result of over 20 years of research, following the lead this provided. Amazon.com: You are a language researcher and chapter two of Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life is called "Why Language Leads to Suffering." Can you tell us why you suggest that language is a source of human suffering? Steven Hayes: Human language (by that I mean our symbolic abilities generally) is central to effective human cognition. It evolved to keep us from starving or being eaten--and it has done a pretty good job of that. The key to symbolic processes is the ability to relate events in new and arbitrary ways. Our research program has shown this ability even in 14 month old babies, and we now know it comes from direct training from parents and others as part of normal language development. It is a wonderful skill. It allows us to imagine futures that have never been, and to compare situations that have never actually been experienced. That is the every essence of human verbal problem solving. But that same process has a downside for human beings. For example, it allows us to fear things we have never experienced (e.g., death). It allows us to run from the past or compare the dull present to a fantasized future and to be unhappy as a result. And in my case it lead to the common sense but ultimately unhelpful idea that I needed to get rid of anxiety before I could live well. We get a lot of training in how to develop and use our minds, but we get very little training in how to step out of the mental chatter when that is needed. As a result, this mental tool begins to use us. It will even claim to BE us. The overextension of human language and cognition, I believe, is at the core of the vast majority of human suffering in the developed world and human technology (the media) is only amplifying the problem by exposing us to an ever increasing stream of symbols and images. Learning how to get out of your mind and into your life when you need to do that is an essential skill in the modern world.

Description

Unlock the power of the songs in your pocket Maybe you blast the speakers when you need to get pumped up. If that's all you do, though, you're not taking full advantage of the way music can help you. Listen to a slower track first and the one-two punch of the playlist can push you even higher. Overflowing with easy-to-use tips like these, Your Playlist Can Change Your Life is the first book to offer scientifically proven methods for using your favorite music to enhance your life. You'll discover how you can use the tunes you love to: •Relieve anxiety •Increase your alertness •Feel happier •Organize your brain •Sharpen your memory •Improve your mood •Live creatively •Enhance your ability to fight off stress, insomnia, depression, and even addiction Teaching readers how to customize playlists for a feel-good prescription that has no side effects, Your Playlist Can Change Your Life offers a natural way to a better you simply by listening. GALINA MINDLIN, MD, PHD, is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, found of Brain Music Therepy (BMT) in the United States, and clinical and executive director of the BMT Center, NYC. DON DUROUSSEAU, MBA, is a cognitive neuroscientist. He is the founder and chief executive officer of Human Bionics, LLC, and executive director of Peak Neurotraining Solutions, Inc. JOSEPH CARDILLO, PHD, is the author of Be Like Water, among other books, and has taught at various universities.

Description

This book describes techniques for improving mental abilities. Some of the things it can help you to achieve include the following: Depending on circumstances, use different lifestyles that improve one or another mental function.Experience euphoria without drugs and come up with new ideas, when needed.Slow down and prevent yourself from making rash, impulsive decisions, when necessary.Sharpen your wit, become more talkative, and entertain people.When necessary, lower your mood and increase emotional tension, which can reduce procrastination.Increase your score on intelligence or general aptitude tests.Concentrate on reading and writing for many hours daily.Increase your grade point average if you are a student or improve your job productivity if you are a knowledge worker.Get along with people and live without arguments and conflicts.     The proposed methods are brief cooling or heating of the body (water thera- py) and three different "smart diets," each suitable for a different type of task. The text also describes a "depressant diet," which is not a smart diet but can im- prove self-control and sleep. Readers don't need to use the strict diets on a per- manent basis and the book recommends the conventional food pyramid most of the time. The text also discusses several useful social skills and studying/writing techniques as well as the role of luck in personal achievement.      Most authors in this field will tell you that you should read more books, solve mental puzzles, buy their nutritional supplements, sleep well, and exercise in or- der to get smarter. In contrast, this book is proposing moderately cold hydrother- apy and a smart diet (which involves avoiding all dietary supplements). To give another example, most books on anger management say that you should try to change your thinking in order to overcome anger, while this book suggests hot hydrotherapy and the exclusion of certain foods from your diet. The main focus of discussion in this text is on changing the biological workings of the brain, not on pop psychology. In particular, the book describes various combinations of diets and hydrotherapy that have the following effects: sedative/sleep-promoting, stimulant/wakefulness-promoting, attention-enhancing, antianxiety, antidepres- sant, mood-stabilizing (mood-lowering), and euphoriant. In addition, the book presents existing scientific evidence of pain-reducing, fever-reducing, anti- fatigue, immunostimulatory, antinausea, antihypertensive, and anti-inflammatory effects of hydrotherapy. The text also discusses the possible side effects of the diets and hydrotherapy.      Despite its technical content, the book is written in an accessible language and has an informative summary for each chapter and a list of key points at the end of each section. The book supports most of the claims in the bulleted list above with a theory and the author's personal experience (a healthy subject). Previously published scientific studies directly support about a half of these claims, including the claim about intelligence tests. The author's academic transcripts and test scores have been documented and can be verified independently.

Description

Do you toss and turn at night with a knot in your stomach, worrying about your job, your family, work, your health, or relationships? Do you suffer from crippling shyness, obsessive doubts, or feelings of insecurity? Are you plagued by fears, phobias, or panic attacks?What you may not realize is that these fears are almost never based on reality. Anxiety is one of the world’s oldest cons. When you’re anxious, you’re actually fooling yourself. You are telling yourself things that simply aren’t true. See if you can recognize yourself in any of these distortions:• All-or-Nothing Thinking: “My mind will go blank when I give my presentation at work, and everyone will think I’m an idiot.”• Fortune Telling: “I just know I’ll freeze up and blow it when I take my test.”• Mind Reading: “Everyone at this party can see how nervous I am.”• Magnification: “Flying is so dangerous. I think this plane is going to crash!”• Should Statements: “I shouldn’t be so anxious and insecure. Other people don’t feel this way.”• Emotional Reasoning: “I feel like I’m on the verge of cracking up!”• Self-Blame: “What’s wrong with me? I’m such a loser!”• Mental Filter: “Why can’t I get anything done? My life seems like one long procrastination.”Now imagine what it be like to live a life that’s free of worries and self-doubt; to go to sleep at night feeling peaceful and relaxed; to overcome your shyness and have fun with other people; to give dynamic presentations without worrying yourself sick ahead of time; to enjoy greater creativity, productivity and self-confidence.Does that sound impossible? The truth is you can defeat your fears. In When Panic Attacks, Dr. Burns takes you by the hand and shows you how to overcome every conceivable kind of anxiety. In fact, you will learn how to use more than forty simple, effective techniques, and the moment you put the lie to the distorted thoughts that plague you, your fears will immediately disappear. Dr. Burns also shares the latest research on the drugs commonly prescribed for anxiety and depression and explains why they may sometimes do more harm than good.This is not pop psychology but proven, fast-acting techniques that have been shown to be more effective than medications. When Panic Attacks is an indispensable handbook for anyone who’s worried sick and sick of worrying.