Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life

effortless
for you to remain in that 
mood. As you begin to feel good about yourself and enjoy the posi-
tive feelings, note that you have indeed rewired your brain. 
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68 Rew i r e
Yo u r
B r a i n
You may begin to enjoy things so much that you sit back and 
passively wait for the next series of good things to happen to you. 
If you sit back too long, you ’ ll run the risk of reverting back to the 
old pattern. This could happen quickly if an event or a crisis arises 
that makes you upset. This is when you need to be
determined
to 
stay with your new strategy to ensure that the previous three steps 
of feeding your brain are practiced. 
If you stay determined when an unfortunate incident occurs, you 
can weather the storm despite the complications of fi erce winds. 
This resiliency depends on a sense of optimism that the plan will 
work. You need to remind yourself that the previous steps helped 
you to feel good before. Now you must stay in practice to make 
sure that this new emotional foundation is your default emotional 
mode. 
Being in a positive mood is not only more pleasurable, it ’ s also 
more practical. If your moods are positive, you ’ ll be more prone to 
think about possibilities and potentialities and to view your chal-
lenges in life as vitalizing.
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69
S
ylvia was a fi fty - fi ve - year - old mother of three who came to see 
me with complaints that her memory had been failing in the 
last few years. She insisted that she was “ too busy ” to have memory 
problems. Then she looked at me, horrifi ed, and said, “ I just saw 
a TV show on attention defi cit disorder. Maybe I ’ ve come down 
with it? ”
Sylvia was indeed quite busy, but she didn ’ t have attention defi cit 
disorder. She had teenage daughters and was holding a job as a sales 
representative for a furniture wholesaler, so she was always on the 
go. During the fi rst fi fteen minutes that she was sitting in my offi ce, 
she received two text messages from her daughters. Despite the fact 
that we were meeting for the fi rst time, she felt compelled to pick 
up her cell phone and read the messages. Each time, she turned to 
me afterward and asked, “ Now, what were we talking about? ”
Sylvia told me that she barely had time in the morning to make 
coffee before her daughters needed something from her and she had 
to get them out the door to school. I asked her if she had time for 
breakfast. She laughed and responded, “ You ’ re kidding, right? ”
4 
Cultivating Memory
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70 Rew i r e
Yo u r
B r a i n
As she described the rest of her day, it quickly became evident 
that her typical day was disorganized and required much crisis 
management. Sylvia was perpetually putting out fi res that she had 
unknowingly set because she rarely followed through on things that 
she had begun earlier. That part of it did sound like attention defi cit 
disorder, but there was more to her story than that. She told me 
that she had recently lost a few accounts for new orders with fur-
niture stores because of her failure to remember to close the deals. 
Her supervisor put her on probation after the last time. That ’ s what 
prompted her to come in to see me. 
As for her hunch that she had “ come down ” with attention defi cit 
disorder, I explained that people don ’ t develop that condition like the 
fl u. In fact, it was clearly evident that up until three years ago, and 
even well back into college and high school, Sylvia did not suffer from 
the symptoms of attention defi cit disorder. In fact, she had been a very 
attentive and focused student who earned good grades. Her problem 
had developed recently, and it had a lot to do with her lifestyle. 
Our fi rst task was to change her practice of not eating breakfast. 
The next task was to minimize the scatter in her life. I told her 
that it was no wonder she wasn ’ t remembering anything, since she 
rarely focused attention on anything long enough to code it into her 
memory. 
We began to structure Sylvia ’ s day so that she was present with 
whatever she was doing at any given time. The text messaging and 
the calls on her cell phone were scheduled to a specifi c time of the 
day. She learned to
focus
attention on each task until it was com-
pleted. With better DLPFC activation, her working memory (which 
used to be called short - term memory) began to function well so that 
she could code information into her long - term memory. 
Sylvia had to get over the simplistic notion that her memory was 
something to be either lost or found. Rather, her memory repre-
sented a range of skills that she could enhance. She learned the 
distinctions among the various memory systems so that what she 
expected of herself would be reasonable. 
As soon as her diet had improved and she had made a concerted 
effort
to structure her day so that she was better able to focus on 
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C u l t i va t i n g
M e m o r y
71
one task to completion, her stress level dropped. Sylvia said, “ I can ’ t 
believe that I ’ m not on edge all the time. It feels strange! ” She was 
gaining confi dence in herself as she stopped spinning her wheels 
and actually accomplished tasks. The fi res that she had perpetually 
put out in the past seemed to die down or never ignite at all. 
“ It ’ s like I ’ m getting my brain back again, ” she said during one of 
our sessions. Sylvia described how her working memory had improved 
to such a degree that it seemed easier and at times even