A new book uses neuroscience to impart advice on building a better relationship with your brain.gorodenkoff/Getty Images
Breaking through the noise of the self-help industry, neuroscientist Rachel Barr‘s new book How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend, roots its advice in science (the bibliography section alone is more than 40 pages).
Holding a master’s degree in molecular neuroscience, Barr wrote the book while completing her PhD in the electrophysiology of memory and sleep. She has been demystifying the connections between the brain and mental health on TikTok and Instagram, with viral videos such as Why the Brain needs Screen Breaks and Five Tips to Improve Memory from a Neuroscientist that offer helpful, research-based habits for a happier day-to-day life.
She takes a more personal touch in her book, sharing stories about her battles with loneliness and the loss of her mother to suicide, which help emphasize why a better understanding of the brain is meaningful to the author.
Recently The Globe and Mail spoke with the Quebec-based neuroscientist about how, with more knowledge about our brain’s patterns and habits, we can start making informed decisions on our recurring choices.
Can you talk about your neuroscience background and how that’s also a through-line for the book?
I noticed a lot of the conversations that we have about mental health, about personal growth and about building a happy life are at odds with what I know about the brain. And I felt the need to reorient that conversation. Not only to drag it back from the clutches of capitalism but also to put that knowledge and understanding back into the mix. The brain is the organ that we’re tasked with caring for. So it’s important that mental health conversations – personal growth conversations, sorting out a happy life – have to be constructed upon a foundation of what does the brain need? What does the brain thrive on?
Neuroscientist and author Rachel Barr.Supplied
Where does brain science and typical mental health advice differ the most?
One of the key tensions, I think, is this persistent idea in wellness and person. But cognitive effort is resource-limited, attention is finite. We’re asking our brains to do far more than they evolved to do, in an informational environment that’s louder and more demanding than ever before in human history. Many of the symptoms we’re now collectively struggling with – chronic fatigue, burnout, anxiety – are entirely consistent with an overtaxed system, not an under-optimized one. So when the advice we get is to push harder, wake earlier, tolerate more discomfort, this often pulls us further from what we need. What moves the needle is reducing the actual load and restoring the conditions brains evolved to function under: adequate sleep, connection, protected periods of single-tasked focus, delight, creative play, real rest.
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You mentioned that a lot of the conversations about building a happy life are rooted in capitalism. Can you clarify what you mean?
Capital extraction comes in different forms, broadly labour, attention and consumer spends. Most wellness content has to live inside an attention economy that rewards novelty, certainty and ongoing extraction. The easiest way to grow is to sell an ever-refreshing stream of hacks or to make promises that are simple, viral and, usually, not quite true. The harder, truer guidance is slower, caveated and typically stays the same.
This book has a lot of personal anecdotes and scientific facts. How do you find the balance between the two for your readers?
I’m offering up a topic that’s usually very sterile in a way that feels a bit warmed up and gives it a human touch. The book has a philosophical edge as well. It’s not all, like, cold plunge, going for a run and protocols for healthy living. For some people, mental ill health is lifelong. I wanted to give readers reasons for living. Not just how to care for the brain in a basic biological sense, but also how to provide it with reasons to live, whether you’re dealing with mental ill health or not.
When you were writing the book, did you have a particular reader in mind and a takeaway you wanted them to leave with?
I’m not sure I really realized that at the time, but it’s clear to me now that it was written for my mom. If somebody dies of cancer…it’s terrible and awful, but it feels like an act of nature. When somebody dies from mental health, it feels like it should have been preventable. And in the aftermath of my mom’s passing, I’m just left with all this stuff that I wish I had said. Things I wish I had been able to convince her of, that life is worth living and how to take care of her mind. When I was writing the book, I felt like we were in conversation. I was reluctant to finish writing and send it off into the world, because that conversation is now over.
It was kind of a love letter to her and to every other brain that reads it. I can’t cure poor mental health. But I’m trying to help people muddle through and take care of their brain and in such a way that they never reach that level of despair.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
