Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life

Context checking:
Here you adjust your opinions and per-
ceptions to the context of the situation rather than just going 
with a preset opinion.
•
Optimism:
You consider every situation as an opportunity.
•
Detaching:
You disconnect yourself from repetitive negative 
beliefs .
•
Externalizing problems:
When something unfortunate hap-
pens, consider it a problem rather than a refl ection of your 
worth.
The key to making these methods work is to practice them often 
and consistently. By applying the FEED method to each of these 
thinking methods, you can rewire your brain. 
Megan, whom you met at the beginning of this chapter, learned to 
shift from a pessimistic frame to an optimistic one. Optimism is one of 
the most important aspects of emotional intelligence. By developing, 
cultivating, and keeping an optimistic perspective, you can weather 
most storms of misfortune. Optimism provides you with durability 
and resiliency. I ’ ll have more to say about optimism throughout the 
book because it is so fundamental to your mental health.
Social Connecting 
You are a social creature, whether or not you think you are, and your 
mood can be lifted by support from other people. Mirror neurons 
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help you to feel and convey empathy. Unfortunately, when you ’ re 
down in the dumps, you may feel like withdrawing from people. 
Don ’ t forget that withdrawing from people overactivates your right 
prefrontal cortex, and you need the action - oriented left prefrontal 
cortex to be activated. Making an effort to develop positive emotions 
depends on positive relationships. From your fi rst few breaths, your 
brain craved positive bonding experiences with your parents, and 
later this was repeated with others. Your OFC became wired to the 
type of bonding experiences that you had, and it prepared you to try 
to repeat the same type of emotional relationship with others. 
When your connection with people is positive, your OFC is 
relieved. When your relationships are negative, your OFC goes 
through withdrawals. Some neuroscientists, such as Jaak Panskepp 
from the University of Indiana, has noted that the OFC is rich in 
natural opiates. Positive feelings of closeness with another person 
help these natural opiates to activate your OFC. Separation from 
an intimate partner and the subsequent feelings of withdrawal may 
be the result of those opiate receptors losing excitation. 
The neurotransmitter dopamine is activated when you are attracted 
to another person; this leads to feelings of pleasure. Then the neuro-
hormone oxytocin is activated simply by cuddling with your partner. 
Thus, it is biochemically and neuronally comforting to have close 
relationships. Positive relationships lead to positive emotions. We can, 
therefore, call positive relationships
social medicine
. Because social 
medicine is so important, chapter 7 is devoted to its benefi ts. 
When you are feeling down, you should maximize your dose of 
social medicine to make yourself feel better. You may say that you 
don ’ t feel like being around other people when you feel down, but just 
as you take your medicine when you ’ re ill, you should take a healthy 
dose of social medicine, because it will help you to feel better.
Brenda ’ s Bumps 
Life was going along fairly well for Brenda. After graduating from 
college, she managed to get a good job as a registered nurse in a 
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community hospital. She married a bright and funny man named 
Brett. Soon they had a son, and her sisters told her that she seemed 
to have an ideal life compared to them. Brenda was the most attrac-
tive of the three sisters. When she was growing up, she always had 
a boyfriend and was pursued by other boys. Her sisters, in contrast, 
went through much adolescent angst in response to rejections and 
shifting friendships during their high school years. 
Nevertheless, Brenda was the most pessimistic and least durable 
of the three sisters. She complained often, and her sulky moods 
seemed to control the social climate no matter whom she was with 
at the time. Her two sisters dealt with various challenges through 
their lives — diffi cult marriages, health problems — but they seemed 
to be optimistic that things would get better as long as they tried to 
make them improve. 
Brenda had few if any major challenges in her life. Everything 
seemed to go rather smoothly, which is what she had learned to 
expect as she grew up. Her fi rst major “ bump ” came at work. She 
had worked for seven years in a credential offi ce, where the stress 
was low, but she complained that it was high. She worked under a 
supervisor who gave her stellar performance evaluations. Then she 
was transferred to the intensive care unit, and her world suddenly 
turned upside down. For the fi rst time in her life, she encountered 
real stress. She encountered a charge nurse who Brenda thought 
was the most controlling and critical person that she had ever met. 
Brenda was given a performance evaluation that pointed to areas 
where she needed to improve; these were areas in which she thought 
she had been doing quite well. She perceived these criticisms as 
harassment, so she met with the nurses ’ union and explored how 
to fi le a grievance. The union representative told her that although 
he would help her to fi le the papers for the grievance, the hospital 
was gearing up for a National Commission on Quality Association 
(NCQA) review because the administration had been told that it 
was out of compliance. The NCQA review had everybody under the 
microscope, and top performance was critical. 
Brenda responded, “ Are they looking for a scapegoat? Because if 
they are, I won ’ t put up with it! ”
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“ No, actually. You aren ’ t the only one who received this kind of 
evaluation, ” said the union representative. 
“ Well, it feels like it, ” she said, and walked out of the offi ce feel-
ing bruised and uncertain if she should fi le the grievance papers. 
By the time Brenda returned home that night, she had decided 
that quitting was her best option. She would ask her husband to 
work overtime until she found a new job. Her husband looked glum 
when she walked in the door. “ So you ’ ve heard, huh? ” she asked. 
“ Yeah, they said that the layoff will occur immediately, ” he said. 
“ How dare they! ” she exclaimed. “ I didn ’ t even fi le the grievance. 
I was just thinking about it. ”
Brett starred at her, trying to connect her response to what he 
had said. 
Then it hit her like an earthquake. He wasn ’ t talking about her, 
he was talking about himself. She couldn ’ t quit now. 
It was hard for Brenda to comprehend that Brett was feeling 
dejected, because she was so upset about her own job situation. 
Now she felt trapped. Her plans of quitting suddenly were impos-
sible in light of Brett ’ s layoff. Instead of feeling empathy for him, she 
felt a confusing sort of anger. 
Going back to work the next morning was hard. Since Brenda had 
decided to quit and then found out that she couldn ’ t, she felt hope-
lessly trapped. She began to feel depressed. The more she thought 
about the confl ict, the stronger her feelings of hopelessness and 
depression became. 
She dragged herself through the next work week as if she were on 
slow - motion autopilot. Her ability to care for her patients began to 
suffer. By the end of the week, her friend Molly had to remind her 
to go back in and check a patient ’ s blood pressure. It was Brenda ’ s 
responsibility to stay on top of such routine tasks, but the combination 
of the self - pity she was cultivating and the resentment she felt for 
management was dampening her ability to function. Her ability to 
think clearly was colored by her new mood and her sense of mean-
inglessness about her work. 
Soon Brenda found herself resenting the patients because they 
somehow represented the hospital management that she had come 
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to resent. She was relieved to be off for a weekend. Unfortunately, 
she didn ’ t use the weekend to refuel herself. Instead, the weekend 
served to drag her down even further. First she turned down an 
opportunity to go to a dinner party on Saturday night. Then she told 
her husband to take their son to the park so that she could be alone. 
She closed the drapes, sat on the couch, and stewed about her situ-
ation. Her food intake dropped, and she added a few glasses of wine 
at night to “ get my mind off things. ”
The weekend only kindled the neurons that cultivated depres-
sion. Her shift to passivity led to greater activity in her right frontal 
lobe. By the next week she was even more depressed. 
Brenda slogged through another week with the same depres-
sive pattern brewing. Molly approached her with the concern that 
Brenda ’ s patient care was suffering. Instead of using this as a wake -
up call, Brenda responded by feeling worse about herself. 
At that point she realized that she needed to do something to 
break out of this downward spiral. Brenda came to me a few days 
later, suffering from a mild depression. She said that she needed 
a “ quick fi x ” and wanted an antidepressant medication. I offered 
instead to help her adapt to the situation at work and to boost her 
mood at the same time. Antidepressant medications usually take as 
long as a month to begin to work. 
“ What about Valium? ” she asked. 
“ You ’ re a nurse, ” I replied. “ You probably know that it ’ s very addic-
tive and that one of the side effects is actually depression. You could 
change your brain chemistry immediately by cutting out the wine 
and forcing yourself to eat three balanced meals per day. Also, maxi-
mize natural light and walk for at least a half hour per day. ”
I explained that she needed to eat because her body makes neu-
rotransmitters from specifi c amino acids that she consumes in her 
food. Also, her neurotransmitters GABA and serotonin were being 
decreased because of the wine she was drinking. (I ’ ll explain these 
factors in greater detail in chapter 6. ) The bottom line for Brenda 
was that she needed better neurochemistry, not worse. 
I explained that when her depressive pattern began, her brain 
fi red circuits that perpetuated her depression. Brenda needed to 
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take action to break out of the passive mode that overactivated her 
right frontal lobe and to shift instead to doing something to acti-
vate her left frontal lobe. She therefore had to do some things that 
she didn ’ t feel like doing to get out of the emotional rut she had 
cultivated. 
It was evident from her history that she was used to having things 
go easily for her, despite her complaining about whatever was going 
on at the time. As a result, Brenda had not developed the emotional 
intelligence to deal with the kinds of challenges that she now faced. 
She needed to rewire her brain so that she could be more durable 
for the bumpy road of life, because she had wired her brain to deal 
only with a smooth road. Consequently, when she hit one of the few 
bumps in her life, she experienced it as catastrophic. 
One of the cognitive distortions we confronted immediately was 
that Brenda had come to expect things to be too easy. Her passivity 
mode had developed because things had come so easily for her. She 
didn ’ t need to make an effort, because things usually turned out well 
without her making any effort. In fact, she even went into nursing 
because it was “ easy to fi nd a job. ”
It was evident that Brenda was a warm and compassionate person. 
I knew that we needed to tap these emotional skills to rewire her 
brain to deal with this challenge and subsequent challenges in 
her life. Her compassion represented the cognitive and emotional 
bridge we could use to establish a connection between the patients 
and the hospital ’ s effort to pass the accreditation review. 
I asked her to describe the patients that she was currently treat-
ing in the intensive care unit. She told me about an old man with 
congestive heart failure whose family lived out of state and had 
called only once to check on him. There was a man with multiple 
injuries from an auto accident. There was also a mother of a fi ve -
year - old who was being treated for complications from surgery for 
ovarian cancer. 
As Brenda continued to tell me about other people, I could see 
a stream of warmth and compassion rekindling in her. After she 
described the mother, her eyes welled up and she gazed to the left, 
apparently refl ecting on the sadness that the woman and her family 
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were going through. Then she looked at the chair in which she was 
sitting, apparently having an epiphany that in comparison to that 
woman, her “ trauma ” was petty. She glanced back at me with a fl ash 
of guilt and then reconstituted herself. 
I asked her to reconnect with those patients before our next ses-
sion and report back to me on their progress in treatment and how 
they were doing emotionally. 
“ What ’ s that got to do with why I came to see you? ” Brenda 
asked. 
“ You need to remind yourself why you are working there, 
”
I replied. “ Then we can connect that with how you can cope with 
the administrative changes. ”
What I didn ’ t tell her yet was that her homework assignment 
would serve multiple functions. It would help her to detach from 
her exaggerated sense of hurt that fueled her negative reaction 
to her supervisor ’ s evaluation, and it would enable her to refocus 
on the hospital ’ s mission to care for people. She needed to rekindle 
motivation that would activate her left frontal lobe instead of her 
overactive and passive right frontal lobe. 
When Brenda returned for the next session, there was more 
color in her face. The angry sullenness was gone, and her voice had 
a soft and warm quality. After hearing about her patients, I asked 
how the rest of her colleagues were doing as they tried to prepare 
for the reaccreditation and care for their patients at the same time. 
Here I was implicitly asking her to develop a greater context for her 
perspective. 
“ It ’ s been hard, ” she said. “ They ’ re all stressed out. ”
“ And your supervisor? ” I asked. 
“ Especially her. She looks very run down, ” she noted sadly. Then 
Brenda reverted to her old victim mode. “ But she didn ’ t have to treat 
me that way. ”
I acknowledged that her supervisor wasn ’ t perfect. This seemed to 
free her up to recognize that her supervisor was under tremendous 
pressure from the administration to get everyone in line. Brenda ’ s 
supervisor had quite a challenge on her hands. This discussion helped 
Brenda to move from black-and-white thinking to a perspective 
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with shades of gray. As we discussed what the hospital was going 
through, she was able to externalize her problem. 
Initially, Brenda was able to change by fi rst