Dr. Marc Schoen discusses his new book Your Survival Instinct is Killing You: Retrain Your Brain to Conquer Fear, Make Better Decisions, and Thrive in the 21st Century. I just picked up a copy of this book, so this was a good preview of the book for those of you who get a copy.

This book seems useful for anyone has experienced trauma or PTSD in their lives. The limbic system (also sometimes known as the paleomammalian brain) is the part of the brain that deals with fear, threats, and survival (the amygdalae). However, the limbic system is also the seat of long-term memory and emotions (the hippocampus). Those with PTSD often have an over-active amygdala (responsible for processing and encoding emotional memories) and therefore live with highly-charged emotional memories (thanks to the amygdalae) that often have a physiological component as well.

Anyway, this is good stuff.

Book Description
Release date: March 21, 2013

Thanks to technology, we live in a world that’s much more comfortable than ever before. But here’s the paradox: our tolerance for discomfort is at an all-time low. And as we wrestle with a sinking “discomfort threshold,” we increasingly find ourselves at the mercy of our primitive instincts and reactions that can perpetuate disease, dysfunction, and impair performance and decision making.

Designed to keep us out of danger, our limbic brain’s Survival Instinct controls what we intuitively do to avert injury or death, such as running out of a burning building. Rarely are we required to recruit this instinct today because seldom do we find ourselves in situations that are truly life-threatening. However, this part of our brain is programmed to naturally and automatically react to even the most benign forms of discomfort and stress as serious threats to our survival.

In this seminal book we learn how the Survival Instinct is the culprit that triggers a person to overeat, prevents the insomniac from sleeping, causes the executive to unravel under pressure, leads travelers to avoid planes or freeways, inflames pain, and due to past heartache, closes down an individual to love. In all of these cases, their overly-sensitive Survival Instinct is being called into action at the slightest hint of discomfort. In short, their Survival Instinct is stuck in the “ON” position…with grave consequences.

Your Survival Is Killing You can transform the way you live. Provocative, eye-opening, and surprisingly practical with its gallery of strategies and ideas, this book will show you how to build up your “instinctual muscles” for successfully managing discomfort while taming your overly reactive Survival Instinct. You will learn that the management of discomfort is the single most important skill for the twenty-first century. This book is, at its heart, a modern guide to survival.

Here is the video.

Authors@Google: Marc Schoen - Your Survival Instinct is Killing You

Published on Apr 2, 2013