Unstoppable Brain

February 26, 2024
"We are being controlled, without even realizing it, by our failures,” writes Bobinet (author of Well Designed Life). In this illuminating guide to adjusting one’s mindset, breaking old habits, and understanding the neuroscience of everyday choices, motivations, and anxieties, with an emphasis on the habenula, the “failure detector” and “kill switch” of future motivation,” the area of the brain that ensures that “whenever you think you have failed at something, you will suddenly find yourself unmotivated to keep doing it.” Unstoppable Brain is a transformative original resource that offers fresh approaches to mindset adjustment and behavioral changes, as Bobinet lays out, with welcome clarity, and the ways that the habenula might be diminishing our motivation in life, at work, on social media, and everywhere else.
Packed with tools to help with goal setting and tracking progress through wins and failures, Bobinet’s inviting book blends brain science and practical advice for creating a lifestyle that builds on habits and progress instead of checklists and disappointments. Bobinet’s explanations of some heady science about the brain’s hardwiring is always clear, relatable, and backed with anecdotes and case studies providing real-world context. Bobinet demonstrates throughout the technique and tools of iteration (performing or repeatedly doing something), highlighting, with a coach’s warmth and patience, ways to restructure mindset, to "trick" the habenula that responds to perceived failure, and begin successfully seeing results through changed behavior and creating habits for life.
Bobinet writes with persuasive power about the demotivating effects of common ideals of failure and success, and the somewhat more familiar material covering the development of life-changing habits is presented with a vigor for coinages (developing the “failure-neutralizing skill,” Bobinet argues, is like developing a superpower) and compelling research. Whether focusing on business, health, or self-growth, this stand-out guide will have readers quite literally changing their minds.
Takeaway: Standout guide to training the brain not to fear failure.
Comparable Titles:Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit, Wendy Suzuki’s Healthy Brain, Healthy Life.
Production grades
Cover: A-
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A

Bobinet presents a self-help guide to changing negative behaviors that focuses on a newly researched part of the brain in this nonfiction work. Based on the latest scientific findings, the author, a physician and health care executive, believes that the way we have previously been taught to change our behaviors and alter bad habits relies too heavily on "performative approaches" that essentially set us up to fail. Per Bobinet, the dopamine rushes that occur when pursuing "SMART" ("specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound") goals don't result in long-term success. Instead, scientists have turned their focus to the habenula, a small area located in the brain's thalamus that "activates whenever there is perceived failure and then, often subconsciously, downregulates one's motivation to try again." The author explores how certain activities or events (like making New Year's resolutions) can actually trigger the habenula in different ways and introduces a new "iterative approach" toward making lasting change that can be remembered through the acronym ITERATES (standing for Inspiration, Time, Environment, Reduce, Add, Togetherness, Expectations, and Swaps). Essentially, Bobinet posits, the key to sustaining behavioral changes is using the brain's natural neuroplasticity and understanding how the habenula works. Some of what the author discusses is likely to sound familiar to most readers, such as the harmful effect of social media on mental health (especially for adolescents), but there is plenty of information about the habenula that is likely to be new. While scientific descriptions, cited studies, and occasional charts and graphs support Bobinet's argument, her writing is clear enough to prove easily accessible even to readers with no science background at all. Plenty of anecdotes, as well as a keen insight into people's internal struggles, transform a straightforward self-help guide into a motivational powerhouse: "You can't pull up an old habit's roots simply by forming another one on top; you're just providing a new highway that you prefer to drive right now." An uplifting, scientifically supported guide to motivate real and lasting life changes.

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