Brain Rules: Learning How The Brain Works Can Help You De-Stress

Brain Rules provides thorough and well-researched information on extremely relevant aspects of how the brain works, and delivers it in very engaging, user-friendly ways. This book can literally change the way you live.

Imagine if you knew everything the latest brain researchers have learned, but didn’t have to pore through boring medical literature to find it? And wouldn’t it be great to have this research explained in simple (actually entertaining and engaging) terms by the researchers who understand it the best? That’s the basic benefit of Brain Rules. It’s written by John Medina, a researcher who has worked with many, many different studies on the brain, and noticed that people who could use this information to benefit others – policymakers, educators, managers, etc. – didn’t have access to everything we now know about the brain and how it functions. With this book, he sets out to get this important knowledge into the hands of people who need it, and to engage and entertain us while he does it. These are important goals, and he succeeds beautifully!

John Medina does a fantastic job of summing up potentially boring material in an extremely interesting and easily-digestible way. The book starts with a bang and keeps the pages turning. The book is filled with relevant science, but packaged within delicious anecdotes to make the salient features very accessible and applicable to daily life.

This book is particularly useful for stress relief because not only does it have an entire chapter devoted to the effects of stress on the brain, but it provides very useful information that can help implement stress-reducing changes in our lives: information that can help us soothe conflicts with loved ones, work more efficiently at our jobs, and help our children learn more easily. There are many, many important facts listed in this book (and conveniently summarized at the end of each chapter), but here are just a few of my favorites:

• What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like – it literally rewires it.

• The brain’s attentional “spotlight” can focus on only one thing at a time: no multitasking.

• Emotional stress has huge impacts across society, on children’s ability to learn in school and on employees’ productivity at work.

• Individually, the worst kind of stress is the feeling that you have no control over the problem – you are helpless.

• Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, qualitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor desterity.

After reading this book I think about what I’ve learned all the time, and have changed many aspects of my daily life, with great results. (For example, now that I understand how exercise benefits brain functioning, I often take brisk walks before writing or performing other tasks that require thought.) Understanding the brain better has also improved my parenting. I now have more effective strategies for motivating and connecting with my children. I recommend that you pick up a copy, and see how it impacts your life.