Almost everyone feels like a bouncing brain in this hurry-up world
with its relentless drumbeat of
sound bites and deadlines. The demands
on our minds are being Super- Sized at the same time our support systems are being
downsized, and our space to relax and play is shrinking away as we
pile more and more
into our already-crowded personal time.
The result? A hurried mind propelled into a harried life with an off-and-on
attention span that makes it doubly difficult to stay plugged in to
anything from start to finish.
Whether or
not you were born with a bouncing brain, you wind up feeling like one anyway.
Perhaps you can gear it up, but then can't gear it down. Or you can't gear
it up at all unless it's about to become a crisis. Or you can plug in just fine during
working hours, and perhaps you have even achieved some amazing things, but outside
of that adrenaline stream your focus frequently sputters and fades even
if you are
honestly trying to keep your attentions engaged.
Who is a bouncing brain? People who live at the edges
are the most obvious candidates. Procrastinators
and workaholics. Inattentives
and obsessives. The extra-laid-back
and the extra- intense, the extra- precise or the
extra-scattered, and everyone
else with a harried life
filled with loose
ends untied. Any one of us can become a bouncing brain when
our attentions are not where
we want them to be. Reliably.
The semi-playful definition you saw on the opening screen describes
a few of many forces that can undermine an attention span. It also points
to the reasons why just about
all of us feel like some kind of bouncing brain these days no matter what
our genes
contain.
In milder
forms, such problems might only seem annoying, something you learn to laugh off or live
with. But if it's intense and continuous, a chronic attention
problem might also provoke instability, depression,
risk-taking, anger and rage, or aggravate issues with drugs and alcohol. Between extremes, a continuing
struggle to focus and follow through can make it seem as if your goals are always hovering
just out of reach.
How do people get this way and
what can be done to improve it? Why does all of it seem like so much larger a
problem now than it ever did before? How is it we see such similar struggles at both ends
of several spectrums, in both the extra-talented and the extra-challenged or in both the
extra-compliant and the extra- defiant? When might it be a big enough problem to see
a doctor, and when might that doctor give it a name like ADD? And why has its diagnosis
and treatment spawned so much controversy?
All these
issues and more are skillfully probed in
Surviving
Sane with a Bouncing Brain,
an upcoming series of books from veteran sci-tech writer Carla Nelson Berg, a longtime self-help
advisor who has been a virtual “Dear Abby” online to thousands of bouncing
brains worldwide and a virtual talk show host for dozens of mind-brain specialists.
The First Self-Help Guides of Their Kind: Distilling the
best from more than a decade of in-depth study, from leading-edge medical research to personal
stories in self-help groups, and drawing on her own experience, Carla is
now compiling the first self-help guides of their kind, aimed at every kind of bouncing
brain who seeks more understanding and more self-mastery.
With dynamic
illustrations of colorful concepts such as Carla's own "spectrum of inattention"
you will get a much better grasp of your focusing style and a new way of looking at how to keep
your attention aimed, while ample doses of humor and wry frame the keys to surviving it
sane. Her conversational style makes for easy reading by non-specialists and her down-
to-earth perspectives can help you make peace with the more paradoxical parts of your
personal wiring.
And if you
are wondering when these traits may cross over the line into a clinical attention
difficulty such as AD/HD, Carla tackles that set of
sometimes thorny issues with
balance and candor, including the reasons why what we call 'normal' seems to be a
moving target defined by committee.
If
you want to get a better grip on your own attention span, these books are a great way to
begin, whether you have always been a bouncing brain or simply feel like one today.
Click here
for a preview of what you will learn in volume one, then use
the link below to leave an email address if you would like to stay in touch for news of
book launchings and previews.
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