BRAIN ON!

Consultant and speaker Smolensky details a concise series of strategies for improving one’s mental health.

“The core of well-being is nurturing a strong, healthy, resilient mindset,” the author writes at the outset of her nonfiction debut. “I believe the only way to thrive at work is to prioritize mental well-being above anything else.” Smolensky writes that she’s worked with hundreds of companies, including Fortune500 firms, assisting them in devising strategies to help thousands of employees create mental fitness routines; these, she says, have helped them at work and in their home lives. The two main regions of the human brain, she says, are the “emotional brain,” which she associates with the amygdala, and the “thinking brain,” which she associates with the prefrontal cortex; over the course of her book, she lays out ways that emotion and thought can cooperate to reach what she calls “Energizer” status, which is “critical to achieving a higher level of well-being and accomplishing your goals at work.” For someone in Energizer mode, their “day is devoted more to showcasing your strengths and skills, instead of merely ticking off a to-do list,” she says. In a series of quick, well-designed chapters with plenty of bullet points and discussion prompts, she goes through both the benefits of reaching this level of mental clarity and the obstacles to doing so, such as workplace choices that emphasize speed and ease without considering their effectiveness. When she addresses such stumbling block, however, she always stresses that one can always change one’s mindset. Overall, Smolensky is a lively, friendly guide to all the concepts she offers in these pages, and readers will find it easy to see why she’s been hired by so many companies to help their employees. Notably, she doesn’t pull her punches in her assessments; she always holds her readers responsible for their own shortcomings, and she acknowledges the difficult realities of maintaining one’s daily mental health. At the same time, she frames her explanations with a bracing optimism that readers are sure to appreciate.

A short but powerfully uplifting guide to fostering mental fitness in the workplace.