A Course for Health Care Professionals
Help your patients hack their brains for better health
Getting Started
Welcome to the "Help your patients hack their brains for better health" online course. We created the course specifically for you so that you can help your patients make real and lasting positive changes in their lives using the latest in evidence-based approaches. All of the course modules are available for free below, and you can view them in any order.
Course Modules
Module 1: Understanding the habit-forming mind: how habits are formed and what we can do to change them
Using common treatment challenges that primary care providers face on a daily basis as examples (e.g. overeating, anxiety, smoking), this seminar will teach you the essentials on how unhealthy habits are formed, why these outcompete willpower, and how you can use this information to work with patients who are struggling to break free from unhealthy habits and solidify healthy ones.
Module 2: Mindfulness: hot or not? The current evidence underlying its mechanisms and efficacy
Interest in mindfulness has grown significantly over the past decade, with the hype outpacing our basic knowledge of what it is, how and for what conditions it works. This seminar will help you understand what mindfulness is (and isn't), the mechanisms underlying how it works in behavior change and in the brain, and what evidence is solid for its use in primary care clinics.
Module 3: How to "hack" our habit-forming brains for better health
Our brains are really good at learning, yet these days, this process can easily get hijacked by modern marvels such as refined sugar and the endless 'to do' list. This seminar will bring together the understanding of how our brains learn with how mindfulness works to show you how we can tap into our own minds to harness their power to make lasting and effective behavior change.
Module 4: How mindfulness decreases clinician burnout and builds resilience
Clinicians are more burnt out now than ever, owing to a number of factors including the introduction of electronic medical records, and ever-decreasing autonomy. This seminar will show you the latest evidence on how mindfulness is helping primary care providers and other clinicians break out of that downward spiral of anxiety and burnout.
Module 5: How to move from empathy fatigue to compassionate action (and build resilience)
Clinicians are taught to be empathetic toward their patients, yet walking in our patients' shoes can lead to the now well-known phenomenon of empathy fatigue. This seminar will teach you why empathy fatigue develops, and how to step out of the cycle and into more resilient modes of being with individuals who are suffering: compassion.
Module 6: How the 'self' part of our brain gets us caught up in eating, anxiety and chronic pain
In this seminar we will explore how the self-referential brain regions play a common role in getting stuck in patterns that contribute to medical conditions like chronic pain, overeating, depression, anxiety and addiction. Clinical tips based on the science are included.
Module 7: Addicted to your phone? What to know about how tech companies are outsmarting you, and how mindfulness can help
If you find that you are distracted by social media at the dinner table (or too busy checking email to sit down to eat with your family), this short seminar will teach you why this is the case, and will give you a few tips that you can put into play in your everyday life.
Course Summaries
Download a PDF summary of all course modules for quick reference.
View Course Summaries