Take Back Control of Your Mind

Book excerpt: You don't control your mind. Most of the day, your mind is on autopilot, or worse yet, is being hijacked and controlled not by you, but by the many primitive "subminds" someplace inside your skull, lurking in your brain's subconsciousness. These subminds include your insecurity submind, your envy submind, your worry submind, your machismo submind, your frustration submind, your anxiety submind, and your hedonism submind. These subminds, not you, send you into episodes of frustration, sadness, worry, anxiety, and anger. They lead you to crave things you do not need. They cause you to think thoughts you would not want to think, to replay over and over again in your mind past unpleasant memories you would not consciously choose to rehash, and to worry about things that may not even happen in the future, and over which you have no control anyhow. They lead to you fixate only on "me, me, me", never considering the desires, preferences, and happiness of your family and loved ones. They delude you into believing that you need certain things and conditions in some ill-defined future to be happy, rather than to appreciate and be happy with what you have right now. But the good news is that we can learn to understand how our minds work, and how to recognize, tame, and control these subminds that perturb and subvert our happiness and inner peace. In Take Back Control of Your Mind, you will learn how to use mindfulness, meditation, and other techniques, approaches, and strategies to better control your thoughts, emotions, reactions, actions, and your mind itself, in order to have a happier life and a greater sense of inner peace, and to be a at least a little better person.