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Book Review: This Is Your Brain on Joy

Can knowing if your cingulate gyrus is overactive change your whole life?This Is Your Brain on Joy by Earl Henslin

Can the right drug or herb do more than just cover up depression or anxiety, but actually restore & heal the brain?

Can physical dysfunction in the brain rob a committed Christian of the joy that is possible in Christ?

If you read this book, you’ll discover the answer to all these questions is an unqualified YES. 

This Is Your Brain on Joyis a highly readable introduction to cutting edge concepts of brain function in health and emotional disorders.  The author, Dr. Earl Henslin, is a practicing psychologist who has collaborated for ten years with Dr. Daniel Amen, a pioneer in the field of brain imaging.  They treat people suffering from depression, anxiety, panic, rage, “ADD” and other problems not by labeling them with a disease, but by considering what anatomic part of their brain is malfunctioning, and then helping them through supplements, therapy, medicine, & other supportive & healing measures.

This is not the typical paradigm that was taught to most physicians, including me.  ”Business-as-usual” medicine is to fit a person’s symptoms to a standardized diagnosis, then use a drug recommended for that diagnosis.  That approach was formalized decades ago, when we had few tools to see function & dysfunction within the living brain.

There is a better way. Physicians like Dr. Amen are performing advanced brain scanning on tens of thousands of patients and seeing the correlations between symptoms and brain function, and seeing how different therapies targeted toward specific areas of the brain can bring radical improvements in people’s lives.

This book starts out with an introduction to the relationship of a biochemically healthy brain to a joy-filled life, and how damage or dysfunction within the brain will sabotage any effort to live a fulfilling life.  The second section of the book details what dysfunction in each of the brain’s mood-related centers (prefrontal, cingulate gyrus, basal ganglia, deep limbic, and temporal lobes) look like, and details specific therapies to help each area.  There is a final chapter which draws on the New Testament book Philippians to list six ways to increase joy in your life.  The book’s only major weakness is that it largely overlooks the spiritual components to a life of joy such as freedom from sin & the new birth, but it is understandable that this book’s focus be on the physical/biochemical, while there are many other fine books to read dealing specifically with the spiritual.

If you or a friend or family member struggle with any emotional or mood disorder, this book will give you new insight, new hope, & new ideas on how your brain & your life can be all that it can be.  Highly recommended.

February 16th, 2009 | Tags: , , | Category: Book Reviews | Leave a comment

Book Review: The Truth About You

Marcus Buckingham is great at putting a life-transforming concept into a simple, doable package with zing.

In his latest offering, The Truth About You, he returns to his core message: Learn Your Strengths. In the package is a 20 minute DVD, a book, and a memo pad. The DVD is a well produced film that dynamically drives home both the importance and the process of learning your strengths and then having the courage to order your life by them. Buckingham is an arresting speaker and he is in top form in the video.

The Truth About You book is a short read but is one you’ll take plenty of notes on which reinforces the film’s message about strengths, describes Buckingham’s model of finding strengths, and has several chapters on how to practically apply a knowledge of your strengths to your work environment.

The last part of the package is a little memo pad to record your strengths. Basically, Buckingham tells you to take the memo pad with you wherever you go for a week and jot down activities that you feel strong doing, and then use that as the basis for defining your own key strengths. Even though I had done a lot of work in the past few years at identifying my strengths, I actually found the exercise to be enlightening and empowering.

I really liked this package. It would be useful for anyone from teens trying to gain direction as to career choice to the person dissatisfied in their current job and wanting to get a better “fit” to the person wanting to really optimize his joy & his performance in a position that is already a good fit. My only criticism is the inflated price: if the publisher had simply marketed a paperback book and then linked to a website video it could have been much more affordable.

You can find out more about the book at Amazon.

And what came out of reading the book myself? 

Here is my list of strengths:

I feel strong when I create, craft, organize & build, especially when I bring ideas into reality.

I feel strong when I communicate truth, especially truth geared to leading a better life.

I feel strong when I connect with people, especially to help, share, support, & guide.

I feel strong when I’m learning, digesting information, making sense of it & rebuilding it in my mind, especially when I’m feeding my other strengths.

November 8th, 2008 | Tags: , , | Category: Book Reviews | One comment

Are You Still Growing?

Do you remember backing up against a wall as a child to see how tall you were growing?  It was the visual proof that you really were growing up and becoming someone you had not been before.  You felt the excitement of realizing that you were becoming bigger, taller, & stronger. You remember the joy of someone who loved you bragging what a big boy or girl you were growing up to be.

Well, those days are long gone.

Or are they?

While all of us have reached the full measure of our physical height and maturity, none of us have reached the full potential of our spiritual maturity. No matter who you are or how old you are physically, you still have the capacity to grow spiritually, every day.

But are you?

Is your soul actually growing? How do you know? How do you measure it? How does it grow?

Those are important questions, because our soul is pretty important. As Jesus once said, “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26)

Writing about matters of the soul has forced me to take a hard look in the mirror at my own soul. Am I growing as a soul? What helps my soul to grow? What doesn’t? How can I tell?

The answers to those questions could easily take up a whole book, but let’s briefly look at three things:

Lies to Reject About Soul Growth
Truths to Embrace About Soul Growth
A Way to Measure Soul Growth

Lies to Reject About Soul Growth

Let me start by looking at four common misconceptions about the growth of the soul. I see people making these same mistakes over and over. I’ve caught myself in them too. Why? Because they’re appealing, they seem to make sense, and they are commonly taught in one form or another. But if you are going to make any progress in the growth of your soul, you must recognize all of these falsehoods and reject them:

Soul growth is not automatic. That would be great if it were true, but it’s not. I’d like to think I can just lay back and let the lessons of life or church sermons or being baptized or being a good person somehow mature me. But they won’t. I think we all know people who are eighty and have attended church all their lives, but yet frankly have made no progress in the growth of their soul. If you just let life pass you by you will one day suffer the same fate. The real truth: you must take purposeful action to grow your soul.

Soul growth can’t take place overnight. True soul growth is no different than physical growth: it takes time. The journey to true maturity is joyful but long: there are no secret shortcuts. Any person or book or seminar that tells you there is a secret or principle that will unlock overnight success, that will put you on the fast track to being a spiritual giant is LYING to you. Walk away. The real truth: you must be in it for the long haul.

You can’t choose your own path to soul growth. This lie is everywhere in our culture today. Walk into any bookstore or tune in to Oprah and you will find a smorgasbord of different “paths” to spiritual maturity. But trying to choose our own path is as old as the Garden of Eden: Eve wanted to become wise, and she chose her own path. But every path save one, no matter how attractive or how it seems to bring results, ultimately ends in destruction. The real truth is as Jesus said in Matthew 7:13-14, “For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”

Knowledge is not the same as soul growth. For people who love to seek knowledge like myself, it is all too easy to confuse accumulating more knowledge with actual spiritual growth. But let me make it crystal clear: while you cannot grow without knowledge, knowledge by itself will never result in the growth of a soul. Why not? The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 8:1 states that knowledge by itself only results in pride, and pride will never grow a soul. The real truth: knowledge is only one part of soul growth.

Truths to Embrace About Soul Growth

I am totally inadequate to say in a few words what many who are so much farther along the path to God have taken books to say. But here are a few “essential ingredients” that I know that no one can achieve true, lasting soul growth without. Here are six truths that we all can confidently embrace about spiritual growth:

God is the first “essential ingredient” to soul growth. Although most of us would acknowledge this truth, I mention it for three reasons. One: anyone who is pursuing soul growth while leaving God out of the equation will ultimately fail. Two: All soul growth that includes God but does not put him as the center and focus will likewise be incomplete. Finally, we have to realize that ultimately it is God who works in us to change us, and no soul growth is possible unless He is at work within us.

Humility is the next essential ingredient in the growth of our souls. As I said before, pride and spiritual growth are fundamentally incompatible. True humility is not feeling “bad” about yourself, but knowing and embracing who you are and who God is. This is why Jesus said the first step to receive the blessing of God and the kingdom of heaven was to be poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3).

After we see God for who He is and see ourselves for who we are, we will desire a cleansed soul. True humility before God includes recognizing that our souls are by nature in rebellion against Him and stained with evil. We see the blackness in our heart and see that it will forever block our communion with God. We realize that any effort to grow spiritually will be useless unless our hearts are cleansed and the penalty for our rebellion is paid. This is what Christ did for us by His death.

The other result of true humility is seeing that we are actually spiritually dead and need spiritual life. A spirit who is not connected with God is dead, and Jesus made it clear that no matter how a person believes or feels about God, that He is the only path to connection to God. Only by loving and embracing Christ through faith will we be brought from spiritual death to life.

Once we are spiritually alive, we cannot grow without spiritual nourishment. The most important spiritual nourishment is to behold the glory of Christ. What do I mean by that? I mean to focus our mind and heart on all the glorious things about Christ: His love, His power, His justice, His dying for us, His rule over all. Why do I say that grows the soul? Because the Bible says in 2 Corinthians 3:18 that as Christians we are, “beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image.” There are many other things that God has given us, from singing to hiking in a forest to seeing children at play, that all nourish our soul. But none of these good things can take the place of focusing on Christ.

Just like a child’s physical body needs both food and exercise to grow, our souls need both spiritual food and spiritual exercise to grow. That is why Jesus commanded us in Luke 10:27 to love God and love others. His commandments were not meant to have us simply think loving thoughts, but to take loving actions. Only as we live purposeful lives to love God and others will our souls reach full spiritual maturity.

A Way to Measure Soul Growth

But how do we know whether we are on the right path with our soul? How do we measure the growth of a soul? Although there are doubtless many useful ways, I would suggest starting with the way Jesus recommended over & over: examining the fruit of our lives. The way for us to truly know the growth of what’s inside is measuring what’s on the outside— our actions.

Here’s one example for you to try: use Paul’s list of the fruits of the Spirit in Ephesians 5:22-23, and then ask yourself these questions—

Compared to five years ago, am I more loving toward people who are difficult for me to love?

Do my words and my actions express a deeper sense of joy day to day?

Do my actions show that I am at peace even in the midst of stormy situations?

Am I known for my kindness more than five years ago?

Are my actions becoming more soaked every day in goodness?

Am I being more faithful to my family, my friends, and my God?

Is harshness and anger fading from my life and being replaced by more gentleness?

Is my life marked more and more by self-control?

Let these questions be your “wall” that you back up to see your soul’s growth. Better yet, give this list to someone who knows you and who will give you some honest feedback.

Don’t let your soul slip away in the everyday business of life. Take the time to do the only thing for yourself that will survive into eternity: take the time to grow your soul.

October 13th, 2008 | Tags: , , | Category: Thoughts on Living | 2 comments

Finding Your Sweet Spot for Every Goal

Have you ever prepared a recipe and accidentally added the wrong amount of an ingredient?  I’ve certainly made my share of soupy instant mashed potatoes! For every recipe, there is an optimal level for each ingredient, such as water or flour or sugar.  Putting in either too little or too much will give you a less-than-desired result.

This optimal level of input into a process for best results is sometimes called a ”sweet spot.”  This simple principle holds true for more than just making mashed potatoes.   There’s another sweet spot that affects you every day: the sweet spot of optimal resource investment into your goals.

Every goal, every project in your life, whether business or personal, requires an investment of your resources, such as time, money, planning, & effort.  Each goal will have its own “sweet spot” of resource investment, the level that gives you the maximum accomplishment for the investment that you make.  Finding your goal’s resource investment sweet spot is a major factor in its success and the satisfaction you will receive from it.

A Practical Example

Let’s look at a very practical example of the difference finding the sweet spot of a project makes.  I know that some of you may think I am incapable of growing anything after reading my earlier post on passivity, but when I lived in North Carolina I had a garden that looked like this:

Now contrast that garden with this years’ attempt (I won’t even dignify it with the word “garden”):

Now, what was the difference between the two projects?  It was my level of resource investment.  With the first garden, I allocated an optimal level of resources.   I did some reading & planning, tilled up a manageable plot (not too large or too small), bought the right number of plants, and gave it adequate attention through the year. The result: a garden that I really enjoyed and that was very productive.  I hit the sweet spot for my North Carolina garden quite nicely.

However, with this year’s attempt, I did not allocate adequate resources.  I tried to “get by” with a patio garden that used old potting soil that was probably contaminated with fungi and other nasty stuff.  I thought to myself, “I don’t want to spend a lot of money, but I’ll make do and take what I can get.”  The result: a project that gave me almost no enjoyment and almost no produce.  What’s worse, this poor result brought in emotional discouragement and disconnection with something I’ve really enjoyed in the past, which could have made it much less likely that I would try gardening again.

On the other hand, I could have erred on the other side of resource investment.  I could have bought & read a dozen books on gardening, and then went out and got a dozen of these very sweet but very expensive tomato growing systems:

If I had chosen that level of resource investment, I indeed would have had great tomatoes, but I also would have been frustrated and discouraged about the hundreds of dollars I had spent to get those tomatoes.  Consquently, my end result would still have been sub-optimal because my level of resource investment would have been too much for the project at hand.  Bottom line: there was a “sweet spot” of optimal resource investment for my garden, and hitting or missing that sweet spot had a dramatic impact on my level of success & satisfaction.

Finding YOUR Sweet Spot

Ok, now it’s your turn:  make a list of some projects and/or goals in your life, whether they be work, personal, or hobby related.  For each one, ask yourself the question, “Am I in the sweet spot of optimal resource investment?”  For instance,  you could consider whether you are spending too little money trying to cut corners with cheap paint on that room remodel.  Or are you smothering that love interest with so much attention (or so little attention!) that they’re being driven away?  Or are you investing the right amount of prep time before that job interview?  Or spending too much (or too little) time editing that blog post before you click the “publish” button?

For each goal on your list, make a decision as to whether your resource investment is too little, too much, or just right.  Yes, I know, sometimes that’s hard to gauge, but that’s where you have to make your best judgement now, and then monitor the goal’s progress and be willing to revise your estimate up or down later.

If you have an area where you think you are over-invested, your solution is straightforward: cut back on your resource investment a little and see how it goes. However, if you have an area where you are under-invested, you have a choice:  you can either ratchet up your level of resource investment to get optimal results, OR you can further reduce your resource investment to zero and drop the goal entirely.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably got too many projects that are all performing poorly because you only have so much time and money and effort per day, and by spreading yourself too thin you end up not being optimally invested in anything.  The result: a whole series of poorly performing projects that don’t give you any joy at all.  The harder, but smarter, course of action is to invest more resources of your finite time, money, and effort optimally into fewer goals, which will then give you optimal payback, whether in produce or productivity.

Some of you may instead find that you have the reverse problem: you’re so heavily invested in one goal (like getting ahead in your career) that you don’t invest in anything else.  The danger here is that you have nothing else to fall back on if your results in that one area don’t turn out like you expected or you realize the goal isn’t as important as you first decided.  The harder, but smarter, course of action for you would be to diversify your resources into several different goals.

Finding your sweet spot of optimal resource investment in your goals will help you achieve a greater level of success & satisfaction in multiple areas of your life.  Why not make that list and start looking for your sweet spot today?

September 18th, 2008 | Tags: , , , | Category: Thoughts on Living | Leave a comment

All Things New

Just imagine that this morning you woke up, and God decided to switch your DNA with Lance Armstrong’s overnight.  You now have one of the best genetic structures in the world—your bones, your muscles, your heart and lungs, your reflexes, all genetically programmed to have the potential of winning the Tour De France.

All this is yours, an incredilble undeserved gift of God.

Question:  Now what would it take to actually win the Tour De France?  To live out the potential you now had been given by God?

First, you would have to realize your genetic structure was different, that you had been fundamentally changed.

Second, you would have to understand how you had been changed—if you knew you had been given Lance Armstrong’s DNA but didn’t know who he was or what he was good at, you would still be at a loss.

Third, you would have to train—you would have to bring those qualities to full maturity over a course of time through focused, dedicated discipline.  Only then would you be able to win the race.

So it is with the new birth:  Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.  The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Cor 5:17 ESV)  A fundamental change takes place in our heart; we are given a complete new set of “spiritual DNA”—all things have become new.

But to realize this potential, to live out what God has done for use, requires the same three things:  to realize that we have been given a new heart, to understand the nature of our new heart, and then through time and discipline to train and use our new heart until it reaches the full measure of maturity and potential that God has uniquely gifted us to be, until we fully become the people that God has destined us to be.

January 26th, 2006 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Probing the Bible | Leave a comment