You Are Not Your Brain Quotes

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. —ARISTOTLE”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“THE FOUR STEPS Step 1: Relabel—Identify your deceptive brain messages and the uncomfortable sensations; call them what they really are.   Step 2: Reframe—Change your perception of the importance of the deceptive brain messages; say why these thoughts, urges, and impulses keep bothering you: They are false brain messages (It’s not ME, it’s just my BRAIN!).   Step 3: Refocus—Direct your attention toward an activity or mental process that is wholesome and productive—even while the false and deceptive urges, thoughts, impulses, and sensations are still present and bothering you.   Step 4: Revalue—Clearly see the thoughts, urges, and impulses for what they are, simply sensations caused by deceptive brain messages that are not true and that have little to no value (they are something to dismiss, not focus on).”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“The experience of learning how to Relabel, Reframe, Refocus, and Revalue was eye-opening for them because it allowed them to see that their time could be better spent on other pursuits and in healthier ways.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“Psychologist and mindfulness expert David Richo, Ph.D., has focused on how these healthy connections are formed and what is needed to keep them alive. He describes the “5 A’s” as the qualities and gifts we all naturally seek out from the important people in our lives, including family, friends, and especially partners. What are these 5 A’s? • Attention—genuine interest in you, what you like and dislike, what inspires and motivates you without being overbearing or intrusive. You experience being heard and noticed. • Acceptance—genuinely embracing your interests, desires, activities, and preferences as they are without trying to alter or change them in any way. • Affection—physical comforting as well as compassion. • Appreciation—encouragement and gratitude for who you are, as you are. • Allowing—it is safe to be yourself and express all that you feel, even if it is not entirely polite or socially acceptable. What Richo is describing, in essence, are those genuine needs we have that form the basis of secure, healthy relationships. The 5 A’s are what we all should have received most of the time from our caregivers when we were growing up. They are also what we want in our adult relationships today. In his book How to Be an Adult in Relationships, Richo compares and contrasts the 5 A’s with what happens in unhealthy or unequal relationships.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“The more often you act in these unhealthy ways, the more you teach your brain that what is simply a habit (a learned behavior) is essential to your survival.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“your mind is your biggest ally. It gives you the capacity to choose where to focus your attention so that your actions align with your true self. As you’ve seen from the stories we’ve shared with you, recruiting and directing the mind is difficult, especially when you are dealing with anxiety, depression, addiction, or unhealthy habits. Why is it so hard to engage your mind and overcome the habits fueled by deceptive brain messages? The answer lies in your brain—in the way it is wired and how it functions.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“The biggest challenge you will face as you start using the Four Steps is in believing that you are worth the time and effort required to challenge the deceptive brain messages and not give in to their commands.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“In other words, what Libet was saying is that you really can’t decide or determine what will initially grab your attention—your brain does. However, his research also indicated that once your initial attention is grabbed, you can determine whether you keep your attention focused on that object (and act on it) or veto it based on the principle of Free Won’t.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“identify the cravings for what they are—a desire to feel better right now.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“the harmful strategies used to avoid and escape those uncomfortable sensations vary depending on the content of the deceptive brain messages and the patterns you have developed to attempt to deal with distress. The range of possible responses is endless and includes feeding an addiction, getting into an argument, avoiding a situation, shutting out the world, or endlessly checking something.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“JOURNAL YOUR SUCCESSES To help you realize you truly are making progress, Steve gives this advice to people who are new to the Four Steps: “Write down the successes that you have early on because it encourages you to keep going. It’s not always easy, but over the long haul, it does make a big difference and you will see how much progress you’ve made.” The main point to keep in mind is that you want to focus on the things you have accomplished, no matter how small or inconsequential they seem to you. Do not minimize, ignore, or neglect even the most seemingly minuscule achievement. Rather,”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“ALLOW THE SENSATIONS TO BE PRESENT, BUT DO NOT ACT ON THEM This is probably the hardest thing to do when you start using the Four Steps. When you refuse to give in to the content of your deceptive brain messages by not performing the action your brain is telling you to do, your Uh Oh Center fires even more intensely, which makes you feel extremely uncomfortable. You want to do virtually anything to get rid of those sensations, both physical and emotional, and know that simply following your deceptive brain messages will accomplish that task in the short term. The problem, as we all must learn the hard way over time, is that doing so will only fuel the negative messages and further entrench the maladaptive circuits ever more powerfully into your brain. Said another way, short-term relief rapidly causes more pain and suffering, not less.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“To help you along the way, our patients shared these catchphrases they used that inspired or motivated them when they were feeling down or defeated. Use one of theirs or come up with some of your own. • Only I have the power to let myself down.17 • I don’t have unlimited time to flail around in the universe. • I don’t really want to give up ever . . . if I give up, what else do I have? • Reality is better than the fiction in my head. • I’d rather feel the uncomfortable sensations for a while (by not giving in to the false messages) and have my sanity. • What am I doing today to improve my life? • These thoughts and sensations are not real—do not give in to them. • Do not feed the monster. • Remember what it is like to give in—you lose time, energy, and relationships. • With respect to deceptive brain messages, it’s not what you think or feel, it’s what you do that counts.18 • These deceptive brain messages have no power—they are false. EXERCISE: Write down what you will say to inspire and motivate you to keep going when you feel like giving up or believe the deceptive brain messages are true:”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“Let’s begin with a quotation from mindfulness expert and teacher Bhante Henepola Gunaratana. It beautifully encapsulates what deceptive brain messages are, what they do to you, and how they keep you from following the path of your true self: We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those [thoughts] for reality. We get so caught up in this endless thought-stream that reality flows by unnoticed. We spend our time engrossed in activity, caught up in an eternal pursuit of pleasure and gratification and eternal flight from pain and unpleasantness. We spend all our energies trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to bury our fears, endlessly seeking security.16 To phrase it another way: We spend a considerable amount of our time engrossed in following deceptive brain messages until we begin to see them for what they are and value our true emotions and needs.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life

“To help them understand that they are not to blame for their deceptive brain messages, we taught Steve and Sarah about Free Won’t, a term popularized by the well-known neuroscientist Benjamin Libet. In a series of carefully executed scientific experiments completed in the 1980s, Libet studied how people decide whether and when to move their own bodies and what generated the initial desire to move. While the meaning of what he discovered is still the subject of passionate disagreement in academic circles, the bottom line for you is this: Your brain—not your mind—generates the initial desires, impulses, thoughts, and sensations, but you can veto almost any action before it starts. This means that while you are not responsible for the emergence of thoughts, desires, impulses, urges, or sensations, you are responsible for what you do with them once they arise. Libet himself interpreted his results in this way and emphasized that you have a choice in whether or not to respond when your brain puts out the call—this is the essence of Free Won’t. As he described it in one of his landmark papers:7 The role of conscious free will [aka Free Won’t] would be, then, not to initiate a voluntary act but rather to control whether the act takes place. We may view the unconscious initiatives for voluntary actions as “bubbling up” in the brain. The conscious will then selects which of these initiatives may go forward to an action and which ones to veto and abort, with no act appearing. In other words, what Libet was saying is that you really can’t decide or determine what will initially grab your attention—your brain does. However, his research also indicated that once your initial attention is grabbed, you can determine whether you keep your attention focused on that object (and act on it) or veto it based on the principle of Free Won’t. Free Won’t turns out to be of the utmost importance because it tells us that we have, in essence, the power to veto almost any action, even though the desire to perform that action is generated by brain mechanisms entirely outside of our conscious attention and awareness. How might that Free Won’t express itself? Through Veto Power.”
― Jeffrey M. Schwartz, You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life