The Stress-Proof Brain: Master Your Emotional Response to Stress Using Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity

What a great synthesis of all the stress and brain information that we have now! Starting with understanding exactly what kind of stress I’m facing, there were wonderful “ah ha!” moments for me in this book like: depression can be a “freeze” response; chronic stress can create not just weigh problems, but the ever dreaded “belly fat”; and when it comes to stress “if you can name it you can tame it”. I really loved the list of “thinking traps” to avoid, and the list of characteristics of mindfulness. And with each idea there were really do-able exercises and practices to integrate the intellectual information into my daily life. I’m loving the gratitude journal, and the author’s approach to letting go of perfectionism. Throughout the book, the impact of mindfulness is woven in, in ways that help me see how to apply it. After reading this book I am actually experiencing a significant difference in my stress levels. Such a huge relief!

Stress and anxiety have had major seasons with differing impacts over the years. And one of the hardest lessons I've learned is that anxiety about anxiety can make it worse. This book helped me to shift away from the psychological aspects - ie get out of my head - to understand what happens biologically. It really changed the narrative, and I go back to this book often, and refer it all the time. Breaking the chain of thinking stress/anxiety are "flaws" in the way one thinks, and instead, realizing it's more complex and also the biology brought so much hope and excitement. It's so good to have this book close at hand, especially when life throws lots of lemons your way, and you need a little help making your lemonade stand :-)

(Read this in Kindle) This is a wonderful book. The main takeaway for me from this book is how your brain works (or reacts to) under stress. How the amygdala releases (automatic stress response) hormones and affects organs to put you into a fight, flight or freeze mode leading to a impulsive behavior, constant anxiety, avoidance, procrastination and rumination (how it affects). And the long term physiological effects of it such as hypertension, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart diseases etc., Learning the biological aspects of stress was an eye-opener for me as I used to wonder about avoidance and rumination habits I had. And the practical solutions such as mindfulness (most important thing), emotional awareness, self compassion, perceiving control, living healthy (exercising and avoiding weight gain/overeating/alcohol) and how to reduce perfectionism. I would re-read this book so that I hardwire these takeaways so that I can help if anyone is in need.

An excellent book! In part 1 Dr. Greenberg describes the parts of the brain that deal with stress and explains how they work together. In parts 2 and 3 she describes how one can retrain their brain to react in a less stressful way. Includes many practical exercises and suggestions to guide the reader towards a stress proof brain. Thank you, Dr. Greenberg!

It wasn't a bad book, however I found myself struggling to stay interested. It's full of great information though. I was just really struggling to keep picking it up for some reason.

Used, but good condition.

This book offers a great holistic model of life in high-stress environments and everyday life in general. I can't say many of the practices or advice was completely new to me - I'd most of it is familiar to self-help kind of book readers. But this book does a great job of walking you through the underlying mechanisms of your body and mind's stress response that often generates much of the daily suffering and anxiety, and then provides an array of tools on how to tame this.

A fairly good book for developing a better attitude toward life. Well written for moderate stress.

The book will be very beneficial to anyone who just starts to realize that s/he is being affected by stress or negative emotions, but does not have systematic knowledge on why s/he is stressed and how to deal with it. We all hear different coping approaches such as meditation, yoga, etc. However, when one does not know the source of the stress and how it triggers different ways that his brain works, it would be quite hard to see the benefit of those approaches. This work is very well structured three parts: 1) understanding your stress - to learn how your brain functions in response to stress as well as a variety of stressors; 2) calming your amygdala - to learn how to be grounded in the present moment and deal with difficult emotions rather than avoid them, how to use self-compassion; 3)moving forward with your prefrontal cortex - to learn how to be cognitively flexible and combat persistent worry, perfectionism and hyper vigilance. The book includes different questions for self-diagnosis as well as easy-to-follow exercises for self-practice. I highly recommend this book to anyone who would like know better on self-care and self stress-management.

I LOVE this book! I was so tired of people saying oh you’re stressed or depressed? Just walk a dog! Stop being sad. Eat vegetables, go for a run and blah blah blah. I knew that I needed to learn the right tools to control my emotions better and practice self regulation. This book explains EXACTLY how your brain becomes stressed and depressed. It gives you the tools to actually train your brain into becoming healthier and work through stress and depression. I learned that our brain is a like a muscle and we can train it to do what we want through neuroplasticity. Dr. Greenberg’s book saved my life by teaching me about mindfulness and neuroplasticity. I will always recommend this book to others!

Clearly written, helped me to take a step back instead of just reacting.

the book is wonderful! very helpful practical exercises to make one more aware of their emotions and the ways in which stress can affect many different areas of our lives. I listened to this as an audiobook - while it is helpful to listen to some of the exercises, I have to say that the performance of the reading just didn't appeal to me at all. The reader had an almost mechanical rhythm and sounded like a computer program reading; it was quite distracting at times. I will be striving to put into practice some of the exercises in the book, and it's a definite repeat resource for me. It's jammed full many helpful thoughts and processes to try out and test on myself, all backed up by science. very much worth a read!

If you ever have done yoga or been to meditational classes this book will be something you are already familiar with - personally, I found this perfect walk through how stress happens, understand it and then routines you can refer back to help you in stressful times.