Day Or Night: Your Brain is Always Listening! Slay The Dragons of your Past!

Written by a world-famous psychiatrist, influential expert and advocate of mental health – Dr Daniel Amen, ‘Your Brain Is Always Listening’ was released in 2021.   Divided into 7 subsections, the book provides useful advice on how to battle unseen (hidden) influences which adversely affect health, happiness and spoil relationships. 

These powerful influences come in the form of memories or events – dragons from the past, automatic negative thoughts (ANTs), bad habits,  scheming dragons such as social media, newsfeed, etc.; addicted dragons such as repetitive behaviours which damage your health, wealth or relationships or people from your life – ‘they, them or other bad influences’  which have their own set of dragons as well.

What is a dragon, to start with and how is it affecting our lives? Dragons which are being referred to here are clearly ‘mental dragons’ and place a lot of stress on past events of your life, driving anxiety, depression, fear, irrational behaviour and other negative reactions. It is very important to identify and recognise these dragons so that you learn how you can tame them; which is exactly what the book dives into explain. If these dragons do not get tamed they will haunt your unconscious mind and drive emotional pain throughout your life.

It’s simply not an adventure worth telling if there aren’t any dragons- J.R Tolkien

Do you remember COVID-19  which spread across the world, spreading anxiety, worry, fear and negative thinking patterns? As people were forced to stay at home and the economy was crippling, everyone was slowly getting traumatised as they were losing their sense of security. As social media feeds were constantly being fed news of the pandemic, our brains were closely paying attention to everything and were well aware of all the hidden dragons, whether they were anxiety, worry, fear, negative thoughts, etc. 

These dragons could be of all sorts: fear of death (Death dragons), judgemental dragons, angry dragons, grief and loss dragons, wounded dragons, anxious dragons abandoned, invisible or insignificant dragons. All of these haunting dragons from the past prove that our history is not our destiny and will not continue to remain for the future.

Whichever dragon is holding you back, it is important to remember that you can always rewrite every single dragon story and not suffer from the past. Whatever the situation is, you can rephrase the story in your head and take control of the situations occurring in your life which in turn will circumnavigate the emotions in your life. 

YOUR BRAIN IS ALWAYS LISTENING: Tame the Dragons That Control Your Mind

There are so many triggers to every one of the dragons in our lives: 

13 Different Dragons from the Past:

Can you identify your behaviour as being guided by events or beliefs from the past? Is there a way we can calm these fearful thoughts from obstructing our present situation? Of course, there is and this is exactly what the book deals with.

Whether it is the voice of your parents, siblings, friends, teachers, internet trolls or any past romantic interest; there are always voices dominating our minds and we have to learn to deal with these loud voices all around us.

Using SPECT images of healthy and unhealthy images, the book delves into ANTS (Automatic Negative Thoughts) and many other additional self-defeating dragons that creep into our lives.  What is your brain listening to and how can we navigate our brain health? We need to tame the dragons in our lives so that we can be happier, stop self-defeating patterns and cope with uncertainty. We can learn to be happier, calmer and more in control of our lives rather than succumbing to sadness, being mad, out of control or nervous.