Drop: Making Great Decisions - Use Neuroscience to Retrain Your Brain and Make Better Life Choices by Helen McKibben
My rating: 4 of 5 stars




Dropping to the blank screen is the integral exercise to getting the most out of Dr. Helen Mckibben's book, drop: Making great decisions - Use Neuroscience to Retrain Your Brain and Make Better Life Choices. Fortunately, the process is not terribly difficult, and is a useful skill for learning to make better choices in life.

The title may sound like a big promise, especially for such a small book. It's only 215 pages, many of which are verbatim dialogue of Doctor/patient interviews (with permissions and alias', of course). But, if you use the right words you only need a few.

I like how the book starts out by describing exactly what's expected of the reader in order to be able to make better decisions, and why Dr. Mckibben's methodology is an important approach to accomplishing that goal. What we learn righ away is that working through triggered feelings requires a physical as well as an emotional awareness!

The neutral position of the physical body is referred to as the “Blank Screen” in drop: Making great decisions... It is where the reader is instructed to “drop” to when triggered by an emotional event. Dr. McKibben has developed a method, utilizing this blank screen, whereby the person works through their triggered emotions, feels them through, and finds their reason. Dr. McKibben's methods for healing people with emotional triggers affecting their lives use the physical reality of neuroscience to re-train the brain for success in gaining permanent relief from the triggered feelings.

As Dr. Mckibben addresses in the book, getting the hang of dropping may take a few attempts. At first glance, I found it hard to imagine dropping to the blank screen any time in my day-day functions such as work, meetings, social gatherings, etc. I don't have a problem imagining myself calming down and thinking through tough situations, but at first glance I had a hard time imagining some of the scenarios given in the book where a person took the time to drop to the blank screen (putting body and mind in “neutral”) before finishing out a difficult, trigger-engaged, conversation. After a little more reading, I realized that dropping to the blank screen came quicker the more I practiced it, and at that point the scenarios in the book became more easily understood.

Self esteem is not simply whether you like yourself or not, but also whether or not you are able to make your own decisions about your life based on your own feelings, not the thoughts or wishes of someone else. Dr. Mckibben includes some good examples to demonstrate her definition of self-esteem. I found the definitions and examples of gaining self-esteem and on overcoming our own critical voices to be very enlightened. The book also had specific chapters on substance abuse, eating dysfunctions, sleep problems, dealing with difficult people, parenting, dating, and performance (athletic, acting, writing, musical). These were all written in an accessible tone for anyone who hopes to learn healthy self-esteem building habits that lead to making great decisions.

The final chapter doesn't simply leave the reader to wade in the newfound knowledge found in drop: Making great decisions... and it doesn't repeat what's already been written in the book. It further defines, clarifies, and unifies the premise that we should learn to trust our brain - a scientifically proven guide to making better life choices.



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