Product Description

This breakthrough book presents a disarmingly simple idea: The way we pay attention in daily life can play a critical role in our health and well-being. According to Dr. Les Fehmi, a clinical psychologist and researcher, many of us have become stuck in “narrow-focus attention”: a tense, constricted, survival mode of attention that holds us in a state of chronic stress—and which lies at the root of common ailments including anxiety, depression, ADD, stress-related migraines, and more. To improve these conditions, Dr. Fehmi explains that we must learn to return to a relaxed, diffuse, and creative form of attention, which he calls “Open Focus.”

This highly readable and empowering book offers straightforward explanations and simple exercises on how to shift into a more calm, open style of attention that reduces stress, improves health, and enhances performance. The Open-Focus Brain features eight essential attention exercises for improving health, along with an audio CD in which the author guides the reader through fundamental Open-Focus exercises that can be used on a regular basis to enhance our health and well-being.

Dr. Fehmi writes, “Everyone has the ability to heal their nervous systems, to dissolve their pain, to slow down and yet accomplish more, to experience the deeper side of life—in short, to change their lives for the better dramatically.” At last readers can learn the techniques that Dr. Fehmi has offered to thousands of clients—the same drug-free, safe, and effective techniques that have led to remarkable and long-lasting results.The Open-Focus Brain offers readers a revolutionary, drug-free way to:

alleviate depression, anxiety, and ADD

reduce stress-related chronic pain

optimize mental and physical performance

Includes a 60-minute audio CD:

essential attention exercises from the book, led by Dr. Fehmi

listeners learn how to "train the brain" to reduce stress, anxiety, chronic pain, and more

safe and effective techniques used in Dr. Fehmi's clinic for decades

 

Listen to an excerpt from the audio CD online in MP3 format:

Track 1: Introduction

Track 2: Head and Hands

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8153 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-28
• Released on: 2007-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 176 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Alongtime clinician and researcher in biofeedback, Fehmi (with the assistance of science writer Robbins, author of A Symphony in the Brain) advances his program for learning to relieve stress by attaining what he calls open focus—a more diffuse, flexible form of attention that, paradoxically, allows one to focus better and in a more relaxed way. According to Fehmi, most of us habitually operate in a narrow-focus stress mode that results in anxiety and a host of physical problems, including digestive upsets, rashes and migraines. Fehmi draws on his experience with neurofeedback (brain-wave biofeedback) to explain how we can shift our brain waves to attain open focus. These mental techniques help you to experience your body and even your heart in a new way and change how you perceive the space around you. Fehmi grounds his plan in research and patient anecdotes showing the techniques can reduce pain and improve relationships and athletic performance. Fehmi acknowledges the results of open focus are similar to those from meditation, but even readers skeptical of Eastern spirituality may find Fehmi's science-based program useful. (The accompanying audio CD was not heard by PW). (July 10)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"These mental techniques help you to experience your body and even your heart in a new way. Fehmi grounds his plan in research and patient anecdotes showing the techniques can reduce pain and improve relationships and athletic performance."—Publishers Weekly

"Fehmi and award-winning science writer and journalist Robbins present a convincing argument for the effectiveness of neurofeedback in a self-help format for those who want to try the techniques. . . . This well-written book will be of interest to anyone in the alternative healing community."—Library Journal

“The concept of open-focused attention is useful and powerful. The authors of this practical and readable book explain what it is and teach you how to develop it. The techniques described in this book can make life fuller, more enjoyable, and more productive. I recommend it.”—Andrew Weil, MD, author of Healthy Aging

“Dr. Fehmi taught me the power of cultivating full, relaxed attention in sports. I’ve used his Open Focus techniques in my work with NFL players, and I’ve shared this knowledge with other athletes and coaches. The attention exercises he teaches are applicable across all disciplines. I encourage you to read this book and apply it to your field of work or play.”—Bob Ward, Director of Sports Science, former conditioning coach for the Dallas Cowboys

“Based on thirty-plus years of research and professional experience, this book reveals a startling truth: how you deploy your attention in your daily life is centrally important for your mental and physical health. It also describes a breakthrough methodology for overcoming depression, anxiety, and other hard-to-manage emotional states. As a colleague of Dr. Fehmi from the earliest days of brainwave-biofeedback  research, I can trust the credibility of his reports. He is a creative and critical thinker in the field. I heartily recommend this book.”—Joe Kamiya, PhD, research psychologist at Langley Porter Institute of Psychiatry

About the Author
Jim Robbins is an award-winning journalist and science writer, with frequent contributions to the New York Times, Smithsonian, Scientific American, Discover, and Psychology Today. In connection with his reporting, he has appeared on ABC’s Nightline and on NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

Customer Reviews

TRULY REMARKABLE!
From co-author Jim Robbins; "The premise is that we all hold on to emotional stress that we have carried with us since infancy and childhood. Because this stress -- which moves through our body as well as our mind -- is painful, we shut it down reflexively to keep from feeling it. To keep our stress from surfacing we stay in a type of attention called narrow objective. This fear lives on in our stomach, our chest, our heart and other organs and muscles and causes a host of problems, including anxiety, depression, chronic pain, ADD, ADHD and many other things. It also contributes to an overall physical and emotional numbness.

Stress and fear is held in place by the narrow focus objective style of attention. We can release this held fear, and reverse negative physiological and psychological symptoms, by moving into a less rigid, more flexible styles of attention. Taken far enough we can even move into transcendent states. The book includes a CD with exercises that very quickly move us out of narrow objective focus, and into other forms of attention."

...I purchased and have been doing the Open Focus exercises for 6 months. After 2 months of twice daily practice, a pleasurable feeling developed throughout my entire body that lasts day and night. This pleasurable feeling is such a gift - I guess I never really knew what true relaxation felt like before as I was unknowingly stuck in alarm-mode 24/7.

Thank you, Dr. Fehmi for this user-friendly, highly effective contribution to the world. It's hard to believe that listening to a CD and using one's imagination can have such a powerful effect on one's life and physiology. Those who panned this book likely failed to hang in there long enough to derive benefits. If stress is the root cause of disease then the relaxation response is the ultimate remedy out there.

These exercises will get you there fast!

Methods to Attain Alpha and Beyond
This fascinating piece of work is a both a history and a set of methods for those who wish to improve their perceptions, physical well-being and emotional state. Fehmi, one of the original researchers in biofeedback, tells of how he stumbled upon the technique of paying attention to space (like between the eyes, the fingers, etc.) and how that instantly catapulted subjects into an Alpha state, while no other method worked, whether visual, mental, auditory, olfactory, tactile or a combination of these.

The author provides several excellent and well tested methods to open one's focus, and the effects of this process are extremely beneficial in almost all areas of life.

The text is well written and easy to understand, and I recommend it highly for just about anyone that isn't an Aharant.

Academia Puffery Promoting the Writer's Business
Readers gain nothing from the introduction. Chapter 1 bores readers with useless Academia jargon.

Les Fehmi brags about himself and who he knows in Chapter 2.

In Chapter 3, Fehmi shows some cheezy diagrams that he claims represents how attention would look if you could model it.

The writers suffer from a weak wordhoard. Too often, forms of the verb 'to be' rob their sentences of power. Worse, they use dull Latinate words to puff up their writing instead of choosing better, clearer, stronger Old English words, e.g., they use "realize" instead of stronger, better "see".

As a reader, you must suffer through a dry telling of basic psychology well-known since the early 1900s combined with some more recent computer-based brainwave findings.

If you believe that High Priests from the Church of Academia have all the answers to the woes and wows of man, buy or borrow this book.

Bear in mind that these guys first devise equipment to measure what they want to measure and then make up a story to fit what they measured.

However, if you believe that there are enlightened men who know better about human nature from watching men under circumstances of everyday living, then avoid buying the Open-Focus Brain.

Instead buy a few books by Vernon Howard.

Fehmi fails to see and know what attention is. Attention is the habit learned through which men limit their awareness.

Men as children learn their attention from accepting False Beliefs burned into their minds from their moms, dads, school teachers, TV watching.

The words that describe both your circumstances and the nature of men as you encounter them shape what you come to believe. Those who teach you, guide you as to what you should notice -- to what you should attend.

Often those who teach you lack awareness as to what they should see.

To see more within the same circumstancs, you must change your viewpoint to change your perspective. A changed perspective raises your awareness. With raised awareness your beliefs about the circumstance change.

You throw away your old beliefs. This gives you relief first and power second as you come to see there is a bigger way, a better way. With relief and power you act from strength within any like circumstances of any future.

Wait a few years and find copies of The Open-Focus Brain gathering dust in the back of the used bookshop, you know, the one run by the overeating guy whose always talking too loud on the telephone while his unkept dog stays beneath his desk.