Controlling Mental Chaos

For centuries, spirituality has told us that the answer to life’s problems lies within us, if only we would realize that we are more than what we imagine. Now, scientific understanding is showing us the way. For humans, anxiety is the background “fever” that never breaks but can often get much worse. Whether the causes are individual, relational, cultural, or pandemic problems, when they occur, they affect our ability to live a joyful and creative life. This often means getting mired in uncontrolled mind loops and incessant circular thinking, making us feel helpless and stuck. In this book, Jaime Pineda shows how the dynamics of anxiety and incessant rumination reflect uncontrolled creativity, and how using simple, time-tested techniques we can learn to control the chaos and recover our creative nature.
The key to the solution is to understand that the intellect only helps to some extent, but by itself cannot solve its own problem. What we need is a mind that can, in a nonjudgmental way, distance itself from the thought patterns that trap us. We are born with an incredible, original mind that quickly becomes obscured by the fever of fear and anxiety. But we can recover this mind quickly. Pineda teaches us how to recognize the basic problem and find the solution through a series of steps and techniques that help bring us out of the loops and recover a cleaner mindset that enables us to move beyond the static of anxiety.
Jaime A. Pineda, PhD, is professor of cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. For 28 years, he directed the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory where he explored the relationship between mind and brain. He is the author of many widely cited papers in animal and human cognitive and systems neuroscience. He is the editor of Mirror Neurons and author of The Social Impulse: The Evolution and Neuroscience of What Brings Us Together. He residesJaime lives in San Diego, California with his wife Jane.

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