From Head to Tale: THE MORNING MIND by Dr. Robert Carter III & Dr. Kirti Salwe Carter ~ Nonfiction Self-Help

FROM HEAD TO TALE Presents THE MORNING MIND Book Tour

THE MORNING MIND by Dr. Robert Carter III & Dr. Kirti Salwe Carter, Nonfiction/Self-Help, 197 pp., $12.18 (paperback) $9.99 (Kindle)

Title: MATERIAL THINGS
Author: Larry Spencer
Publisher: Independent
Pages: 367
Genre: Fiction

Unleash positive thinking and productive imagination, and flip negative thoughts and behaviors into a lifetime to improve every aspect of your life—each morning, one day at a time.

Bad habits. Bad feelings. Bad mornings that turn into regrettable days.

Banish them all with simple brain hacks that flip negative thoughts and behaviors into positive, productive ones. Instead of dragging through your day, learn to wake up refreshed, recharge regularly, and live better than ever.

The Morning Mind makes it easy. Based on findings from neuroscience and medicine, the book helps you tamp down on the fear-driven reptile brain and tap into the part linked to thinking and imagination.

With topics ranging from diet and hydration to exercise and meditation, you’ll find ideas for activating your brain—and improving every aspect of your life:

Restore healthy cycles of waking and sleeping
Block harmful cortisol hormones
Boost mental performance
Create calmer mornings
Develop self-discipline
Stimulate creativity
Improve your leadership skills
And more.

From the moment the alarm clock rings, The Morning Mind helps you greet each day with gusto.

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Excerpt from Preface and Introduction

A new day is dawning. As the sun rises, so do new opportunities to grow, develop, and improve. Are you raring to go in the morning, eager to jump out of bed and welcome a new day? Or are you hitting the snooze button, resentful of getting up to another day of tedium? Either way, how you start your morning is a decision you make every single day. What if you could become the master of your mornings and establish a routine that supports you not just in waking up but also in defining and creating the life you want? This book was written to help you make better choices about your mornings, wake up early and happy, and create the most fulfilling and empowering start to your day. Building a solid foundation for beginning your day will help you achieve success in every area of your life. The hours of the morning are the most critical time of the day, and to optimize them we first must be aware of our internal 24-hour clock (circadian rhythm) and its role in our brain function. In fact, there is an ongoing biological battle between regions of our brain, senses, and nervous system that plays a vital role in determining whether we can successfully establish new and empowering morning routines. Our objective is to learn to master our morning and the rest of the day efficiently. Each brain region is vital to overall performance in life, and they are all interconnected and so are dependent on one another. Much of humanity is entirely unaware of the shortcomings of the structure and function of this most vital organ. Learning to master your psychology through a better understanding of neuroscience will empower you in more ways than you could ever imagine. To begin, you must become aware of the conflict between two internal forces in your brain. These two forces are the Lizard and the Wizard, and both of them live inside your head.

Chapter 1

Why Should We Manage the Lizard?

If you had to escape from a burning building, then you would certainly want your Lizard to be in charge, but if you were a firefighter who had to the lizard and the wizard go into the same building to rescue someone, you would be far more efficient with the Wizard in command. Apparently, this takes training. Both the Lizard and the Wizard have their fair places in helping you think and make informed decisions. One of the remarkable secrets to creating productive and fulfilling mornings (and by extension creating a productive and fulfilling life) is in identifying the Lizard and the Wizard, being aware which is in charge, and learning how to modulate this at will. Survival is the number one job of our brain, notably the Lizard. The ability to cope with life requires us to both protect ourselves from outside threats and adjust or adapt to life’s fluctuations and trials. Because reptilian brain coping functions help keep us alive, we are all born with instinctive and automatic survival behaviors. Because these are automatic responses, we do not even need to think before we act to protect ourselves when we feel threatened or wounded (mentally or physically).

Humans and all other vertebrates have intuitive ways to defend themselves when threatened or injured. The reptilian coping brain’s instincts are to either hide or attack to protect one’s life. One type of reptilian coping behavior is trying to show that you are stronger or more robust than others by using aggression, such as the threat of violence, whether physical or psychological. This could include, for example, asserting your dominance in a group of people or laughing at the misfortune of others. This Lizard behavior can be seen in students starting fights on the playground or bullies who threaten and hurt others. Anger is another automatic reptilian brain response that is used to frighten others to prevent them from destroying or controlling us. When we display anger, we are not only intimidating others, we are also preparing ourselves for battle. In humans, aggressive behaviors and feelings such as anger increase blood pressure and heart rate by releasing stress hormones (to qualify for either a fight or to run away, also called flight). Reptiles and all mammals, including humans, have reptilian brains that trigger anger to protect themselves and keep others from harming them or their offspring.

Humans often get angry when their feelings are hurt, without knowing why. A good way to remember this part of our coping brain is to add “D” in front of “anger.” This is how the Lizard survival brain causes us to show anger when we fear we’re in DANGER.

Fear is an instinctive, primitive response to help us avoid threats, injuries, or death. We would all fear for our lives if we were hiking and came upon a wild bear or mountain lion. But we also dread things that we have learned through experience are capable of hurting us. One automatic fear we quickly learn is touching a hot stove. Another common concern is fear of spiders and other insects that hide and bite, as well as snakes and wild animals. When we become consistently fearful of specific things, we call it a phobia. Revenge or retaliation is the Lizard brain’s urge to avenge or “get even” with others when we perceive we have been injured, threatened, or something is taken from us that we value. Revenge almost always leads to even more violence between humans since both sides in conflict use Lizard responses to increase their threat to each other. The Lizard’s urge for revenge leads humans to punish people or groups because we are hurt by their actions or words.

Dr. Robert Carter III, FACSM, FAIS was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He is a US Army officer, an expert in integrative human physiology and performance and has academic appointments in emergency medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, in public health and health sciences at Los Angeles Pacific University, and in nutrition at the University of Maryland, University College. Dr. Carter completed military assignments in Germany, France, Afghanistan, Washington, DC, and the White House as a military social aide for the Obama administration.

He holds a doctorate in biomedical sciences and medical physiology, and a master of public health in chronic disease epidemiology. Selected as a Yerby Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Dr. Carter received his postgraduate training in environmental epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. He serves on several scientific editorial boards, is a reviewer for 14 scientific and medical journals, and is a fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine (FACSM) and the American Institute of Stress (FAIS). Carter is also Thermal Councilor for the Exercise and Environmental Committee of the American Physiological Society.

He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, abstracts and technical reports on human performance, breath-based meditation, nutrition, human water needs, trauma, and environmental medicine in noted publications such as The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Nutrition Reviews and the Journal of Applied Physiology.

Dr. Kirti Salwe Carter, FAIS, was born in Pune, India, and received her medical education in India, where she practiced as an intensive-care physician before moving to Texas to complete postgraduate training in public health. In 2010, she received her master of public health in occupational health from The University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth. She also has done graduate studies in integrative physiology.

Carter is a Fellow of the American Institute of Stress (FAIS). She has more than 18 years of experience in meditation and breathing techniques, and has been facilitating wellness seminars for the past decade. Her work has been instrumental in bringing stress-management and resilience programs not only to the general population but also to corporate employees, educators, middle school and university students, and to special populations such as refugees in violence-prone areas and victims of military sexual trauma.

She is passionate about researching the effectiveness of breathing and meditation techniques to improve human performance. Dr. Carter has published her research on human performance, ergonomics, and breath-based meditation in periodicals such as the World Journal of Clinical Cases, the Journal of Visual Experiments and the Journal of Environmental and Public Health.