The Science of Healing Unlocking the Power of Prescription Diets

Does belief have the power to heal? Even science says it might.

Belief is natural. It comes partly from the way our minds are hardwired, says Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford University who has dedicated much of her professional life to understanding peoples interactions with God.

She says that belief-based healing requires not only a good story but also the effort of an active listenerone with the ability to make what is imagined feel real. When story and imagination sync, the results can be astounding. Humans have the capacity to change their experience, she says. These are skills, and we can learn them.

Id heard of the belief-based healing of the brujos, or witch doctors, of Catemaco, in the state of Veracruz on the eastern coast of Mexico. They are particularly theatrical healers, blending shamanistic traditions with Roman Catholicism much as Christians did a thousand years ago. Id heard stories of massive, pentagram-shaped bonfires and dancing madmen who spit all over you as a blessing. Certainly worth a visit.

But when I arrived in Catemaco and made my way to a modern brujos office, I found no fires or whooping shamans. Far from the dark, bat-infested cave Id expected, the waiting area turned out to be a tidy little living room that smelled of disinfectant. Plastic amulets and glass crystals lined the shelves. About 10 people sat in chairs, reading magazines or watching soccer on TV. As witch doctors go, the brujo who greeted me looked more doctor than witch. Dressed all in white, he sported a neat mustache and short, heavily gelled hair. Half his office was taken up by an altar packed with crucifixes, statues of saints, flowers, and hundreds of blinking, colored lights.

Id come for a simple limpiaa cleansing of my spirit. The brujo grabbed an egg, a few sprigs of basil, and a couple of plastic squirt bottles filled with what he said were envy blockers, bad-energy protection, and a liquid that makes wealth. Everything was orderly and sanitized. After a short interview, he got down to the business of my spirit, squirting me liberally with pungent oils and rubbing an egg over my body before cracking it open into a glass of water and examining the contents.

The Sleep Prescription: Seven Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest (The Seven Days Series #2)

Description

Vastly knowledgeable and genuinely brilliant . . . An easy yet most effective how-to guide on sleep.Dr. Matthew Walker, New York Times bestselling author of Why We Sleep

From renowned sleep scientist Dr. Aric Prather, a book that offers a simple yet powerful plan to improve your sleep in seven days

We need sleep to survive. Sleep is as essential as food, water, and oxygen. So how can something that should be so instinctual and automatic be so hard? Dr. Prather runs one of the worlds most successful sleep clinics and has cracked the code to help even the most restless of sleepers get a good nights rest.

In The Sleep Prescription, Dr. Prather shares the powerful solutions that he uses to help his patients at the clinic achieve healing and restorative sleep. Going beyond the obvious solutions, Dr. Prather shares surprisingly simple yet deeply effective techniques that will help you lie back and let sleep work its magic.

The seven-day prescription will lead you through these exercises:

Day 1: Set Your (Internal) ClockDay 2: Ease Off the GasDay3: EnergizeBut Do It RightDay4: Worry EarlyDay5: You Are Not a Computer; You Can't Just Shut DownDay6: (Re)Train Your BrainDay7: Stay Up Late

Over the course of seven days, this book will teach you how to get out of your own way, so that your body can do effortlessly what it was built to do: sleep well.

About the Author

Aric A. Prather, PhD, is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, where he co-directs the Aging, Metabolism, and Emotions Center. A licensed clinical psychologist, he has helped hundreds of patients improve their sleep using cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia.

Praise for The Sleep Prescription: Seven Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest (The Seven Days Series #2)

Praise for Dr. Aric A. Prather and The Sleep Prescription The Sleep Prescription is designed to help you figure out exactly whats troubling your sleep. Prather . . . takes us beyond anodyne tips like turn off your phone and digs into the way our body responds to all of the various factors that make up our lives over the course of a given week. For each of seven days, the book guides you to focus on one aspect of building a good sleep routine, paying attention to how your mind works in concert with your body and the sleep habits youve built over your lifetime. . . . The Sleep Prescription is the first book that showed me its possible to understand the science behind it, and find a way to unlock those perfect, restful hours.The Boston Globe

Science-backed tips for sounder sleep.The New York TimesThe vastly knowledgeable and genuinely brilliant Dr. Aric Prather can take detailed scientific concepts and distill them into wondrous bite-size chunks, digestible to all. An easy yet most effective how-to guide on sleep. Dr. Matthew Walker, New York Times bestselling author of Why We Sleep and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science, University of California, Berkeley Deceptively simple and refreshingly straightforward, The Sleep Prescription is an immediately useful guide to getting better sleep. Aric Prather is an internationally-recognized scientific authority on sleep health and his advice can help just about anyone sleep more restfully in just a week.Dr. Michael Grandner, director of the Sleep and Health Research Program, University of Arizona College of Medicine The Sleep Prescription is a practical guide to improving your sleep and enhancing your life. Prather offers a set of transformative and doable changes in sleep habits that can make you healthier, happier, and more productive.Tom Boyce, MD, author of The Orchid and the Dandelion The Sleep Prescription is a game changer. Its an original and effective take on how we sleep and why so many of us struggle to do it well. A must-have for anyone looking to improve their waking life by fixing their sleeping one.Dr. Sara Mednick, author of The Power of The Downstate and Take a Nap! Change Your Life. Through a series of seven sensible steps, Dr. Prather guides us to relearn what our bodies and brains already know: we can use our voluntary, waking behaviors to influence the involuntary, restorative process of sleep.Dr. Daniel Buysse, director of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Science, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine