Make Your Brain Work by Amy Brann Perform at a Higher Level
What's it about?
Make Your Brain Work (2013) is a practical guide to understanding the brain's key systems and how they shape focus, habits, and decision-making. Grounded in neuroscience, it shows how working with your brain's natural architecture rather than against it can transform productivity, emotional regulation, and goal achievement.
Modern life is full of distractions. There’s the twenty-four-hour news cycle, endless social media feeds, overflowing inboxes, and meetings that probably should have been emails. Add in the unpredictable demands of work, family, and everyday life, and it’s no wonder focus can feel impossible and chaos often seems like the default. So how do you build the career, habits, and life you want amid all that daily noise?
The answer lies in your brain. Far from working against you, your brain is an incredibly sophisticated system designed to help you adapt, learn, and thrive. When you understand how its networks and processes operate, you can harness them to improve your focus, make better decisions, regulate your emotions, and build lasting habits instead of constantly fighting your own instincts. In this lesson, you’ll explore some of your brain’s most important functional systems and learn how to work with them rather than against them. Whether you want to stop dreading your Monday morning inbox, make healthier choices, strengthen your relationships, or finally make progress on that side hustle, understanding your brain can help you get there with greater clarity, confidence, and intention. While it may sound odd at first, you have an internal CEO.
There is a region of your brain right behind the center of your forehead known as the Prefrontal Cortex, or PFC. This region of the brain is like a control center: responsible for prioritizing tasks, making decisions, and regulating responses. As these are all high-level functions for the brain orchestrating reactions across multiple regions, the prefrontal cortex also tires easily and requires lots of energy to function. This role of the prefrontal cortex in your brain matters deeply for everyday life.
To understand why, let’s imagine a typical Monday morning for a middle manager in a mid-sized company. They arrive early to the office to get ahead of a packed to-do list from Friday, but find that over the weekend their inbox has been flooded with urgent requests from clients and colleagues. While skimming through to get a sense of what can be handled quickly, the department secretary pops in announcing an all-hands meeting has been called in an hour. The flashing red light on the phone makes it clear that messages have also piled up. Now in a panic, our fearless manager dives into small tasks before the meeting rationalizing that tackling the small things will help them get ahead. By noon, their carefully curated to-do list is scrapped, their overwhelmed brain has shut down, they’ve started snapping at colleagues, and complaining at the water cooler about overwhelming stress.
But the day could go very differently if the prefrontal cortex is functioning optimally. This region of the brain is impaired by the flood of cortisol and adrenaline that chronic or acute stress kicks off in the body. So let’s walk through that morning one more time with the PFC at its best. Instead of panicking at the pile of emails, messages, or requests, our middle manager takes ten minutes to calmly assess the situation and prioritize the day. Rather than diving into short tasks like quick-response emails to feel a quick dopamine rush of accomplishment, they stop and clearly visualize the most important tasks of the day being accomplished. With this image firmly in mind, they start to prioritize the tasks that are truly urgent, and put the rest into a folder to consider after lunch.
When the secretary pops in to announce a last-minute meeting, it is clear that this meeting would sabotage an already overpacked schedule. So our clear-headed manager politely declines citing the last-minute notice. They also make a note to talk to upper management at the next opportunity to request more advanced notice on any important meetings going forward. With the day now mapped out, our self-managed manager can tackle the most urgent and complex tasks while their higher brain functions are still focused and fresh. They silence all notifications, schedule in regular breaks to give their brain time to recover, and drink water because it keeps their brain functioning at peak performance. Instead of snapping at colleagues who make additional requests, they are able to either decline, delegate, or propose a realistic timeline understanding their current workload.
The best part is that at the end of the day our middle manager isn’t worn out, and feeling defeated. They might not have accomplished everything, of course, but the same circumstances delivered much more productive and positive results for everyone at the office. Multitasking feels like the ultimate cheat code: listening to phone messages while doing paperwork, quietly typing up memos during in-person meetings, or surreptitiously scrolling your socials at dinner with your family.
Though it may feel productive, something very different is happening in your brain when you attempt to multitask. Instead of productivity, multitasking delivers traffic jams in your brain’s control center, and taps its vital resources fast. That’s because what feels like multitasking to you is actually rapid task shifting. Your brain can’t focus on two tasks at once.
In fact there is a region, called the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, that specifically inhibits distractions. So when you attempt to focus on more than one task at once, the prefrontal cortex has to continuously shift back and forth between them. This rapid-fire shifting quickly overloads the system. Imagine how your car’s transmission would look if you shifted gears a few times every second while driving for hours. Research suggests that multitasking actually drops productivity by around forty percent, and brief interruptions can require more than twenty minutes for the brain to recover optimum focus. The increasing drive to fit more into each day is driving the multitasking epidemic, and it is having negative impacts across cultures.
In addition to draining mental energy, sapping productivity, and creating the perfect conditions for mistakes or misunderstandings, brains that are struggling to focus become emotionally dysregulated. The amygdala is the brain region that processes emotions, including responses to stress and fear. When the prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed, like it was for our overwhelmed middle manager in the last chapter, the regulation of the amygdala weakens. Emotional processing becomes dysregulated because the brain’s CEO is overloaded with other tasks. The upshot is that real productivity needs monotasking – complete focus on one thing at a time. Corporate cultures in particular valorize multitasking and lightning-fast responses even outside of work hours as signs of dedication.
Changing that culture will take more than individual effort. But you can start today by protecting your focus and working with your brain’s natural preference for sustained, singular attention. Start small. Rather than trying to overhaul your habits overnight, treat monotasking as a series of experiments and build your focus gradually. The pull of notifications may be hard to resist, but one simple practice can make a difference: before checking your inbox or social media, spend ten minutes visualizing your most important tasks already completed. Picture the process, the emotions, and the sense of accomplishment as vividly as possible.
This mental rehearsal primes your brain for success and makes it easier to stay focused on what matters most. To make this a habit, silence devices for an hour at a time while you devote your attention to one thing. It may feel uncomfortable at first, but sustained focus becomes easier with practice. And when something unexpected demands your attention, resist the urge to react immediately.
Instead, pause for a few minutes before responding. Even a five-minute delay can interrupt the cycle of urgency and instant gratification, helping you respond more thoughtfully instead of reflexively. Neuroplasticity has become a hot topic in recent decades, as researchers discover more and more about the brain’s ability to forge new connections and grow new networks well into old age.
This matters for everyone who wants to accomplish more, experience better focus, or feel more emotionally stable and connected. While many think that ingrained habits are genetically predetermined, they are actually just well-worn brain circuits that have become cemented over time. So if you struggle with a habit like stress eating, procrastination, disorganization, or doomscrolling despite your best efforts to change, you’re struggling against neural circuits that no longer serve you. The structure responsible for this process is the basal ganglia, a collection of brain regions that links the prefrontal cortex – the center of planning and decision-making – with deeper systems involved in movement and reward.
Within it lies the striatum, a specialized area that helps form habits by using dopamine signals to reinforce successful actions. Each time a behavior leads to a positive outcome, the brain strengthens the neural pathway behind it, making that behavior feel more rewarding and easier to repeat. Over time, these pathways become coated in a fatty substance called myelin, which speeds communication between neurons and makes the behavior increasingly automatic. In other words, repetition doesn't just build habits – it rewires your brain to perform them with less effort and more efficiency. When habits are good this dopamine reinforcement is great, because habits let you accomplish more with much less effort from your brain. But habits can also keep people locked into the same negative patterns.
Their urge to check notifications, chomp a donut after difficult conversations, or say “yes” to every last-minute demand is driven by a hidden hit of dopamine their brain receives each time they perform this action. Both good and bad habits become enshrined in the brain because they deliver the same positive chemical reward. But here’s the good news. Every new experience that you have forges new brain circuits. That doesn’t mean your old habits vanish overnight, of course. They become more dormant as you build new ones, but can still be triggered by stress or emotional overload.
Nonetheless, you can still harness this dopamine-driven habit mechanism because of your brain’s neuroplasticity, if you know how. Building new habits begins with the same visualization exercise we learned about in the last chapter. If turning to fast food when you’re stressed is a problem, start your day mentally rehearsing making healthier choices. Rehearse going for a walk in the park or spending time with your pets as an alternative to stress eating. Your brain starts the process of forging new pathways by rehearsing them. Though mental rehearsal initiates new pathways, it needs physical follow-through to build them.
So follow mental rehearsal with purposeful, repeatable actions. Instead of absent-mindedly grabbing your phone, for instance, focus on physically organizing your workspace and writing priorities down by hand each morning. It is important to go slowly and consistently. Rewiring these dopamine pathways takes time. But as those new behaviors become reinforced, your basal ganglia begins to automate them, working for you instead of against you. Eventually, the choices that once required willpower start to feel effortless, allowing you to achieve more with less stress and far less mental energy.
While habits forge the day-to-day path towards the life, health, and relationships you want, having goals firmly in mind charts the overall course. For the brain, goals are more than an end result, they are the guiding forces shaping your neural networks and memory. Consider the surprising clinical studies of imagining physical exercise versus actually hitting the gym. In one, conducted by Guang Yue and Kelly Cole, half of the participants followed a rigorous strength training program for four weeks and had their muscle strength measured at the end.
The other half only mentally rehearsed following the same regimen every day, and were similarly measured. They were told to imagine each contraction of their muscles, each repetition and motion in painstaking detail. The results? The gym rats gained an impressive twenty percent more muscle strength after four weeks. The group that imagined their workouts, however, also gained muscle strength. This awesome power can be put to work toward your goals.
Basically, your thoughts matter a lot. Visualizing successfully completed tasks, an engaging presentation, or flawless performances actually primes your brain for this outcome. Your prefrontal cortex will suppress distractions from this goal when it can function optimally – through monotasking, frequent breaks, and energy refreshers like water, movement, healthy sleep, and nutritious food. To help your brain in this process, it helps to be specific about what you want. Just like the visualizers in the exercise study, you have to be as specific as possible about what you are envisioning. So while “having more energy” might sound like a good goal, it doesn’t give your brain structures any guidance into what that might look like.
So make your goals SMART, or specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. Instead of “more energy” as a goal, try setting a few specific goals, like eating at least five servings of fruits and vegetables per day, getting more sleep, or taking a daily walk. Visualize these in detail. Then imagine having more energy, your glowing skin, and track your progress to reinforce through positive feedback. For larger goals, like a promotion at work or finishing a degree, you’ll need to break them down into smaller chunks for your brain to effectively focus on each step. Your working memory can only hold four things in mind at once, so memory experts recommend breaking down complex information into groups of four.
This method is often called chunking. Like memory, your prefrontal cortex needs fewer elements to coordinate at once. This is why musicians rehearse short passages of a piece until they’re fluent before attempting to play the whole thing. When each small section is mapped separately, the brain circuits necessary to perform the action become strongly connected. Only then do they go on to put it all together. The same works for your larger goals.
Break them down into smaller parts and tackle each one through mental rehearsal and consistent action. This gives your brain time to build the new networks it needs to unlock the brain’s full potential. Your brain is an extraordinary goal machine, and now you know how to put it to work.
In this lesson to Make Your Brain Work by Amy Brann, you’ve learned that your brain is designed to help you succeed – if you understand how to work with it. Your prefrontal cortex, the brain’s center for decision-making, planning, and emotional regulation, is one of your most valuable cognitive resources. But it’s also easily overwhelmed by stress and constant task-switching. While multitasking may seem productive, it actually depletes your mental resources, whereas focusing on one task at a time allows your brain to perform at its best.
You’ve also seen that habits aren’t fixed character traits but neural pathways strengthened by dopamine and repetition. By combining intentional action with mental rehearsal, you can reshape those pathways over time. Finally, because your brain can only hold a limited amount of information at once, breaking big goals into smaller, manageable chunks helps you stay focused and make steady progress.
Make Your Brain Work (2013) is a practical guide to understanding the brain's key systems and how they shape focus, habits, and decision-making. Grounded in neuroscience, it shows how working with your brain's natural architecture rather than against it can transform productivity, emotional regulation, and goal achievement.
Modern life is full of distractions. There’s the twenty-four-hour news cycle, endless social media feeds, overflowing inboxes, and meetings that probably should have been emails. Add in the unpredictable demands of work, family, and everyday life, and it’s no wonder focus can feel impossible and chaos often seems like the default. So how do you build the career, habits, and life you want amid all that daily noise?
The answer lies in your brain. Far from working against you, your brain is an incredibly sophisticated system designed to help you adapt, learn, and thrive. When you understand how its networks and processes operate, you can harness them to improve your focus, make better decisions, regulate your emotions, and build lasting habits instead of constantly fighting your own instincts. In this lesson, you’ll explore some of your brain’s most important functional systems and learn how to work with them rather than against them. Whether you want to stop dreading your Monday morning inbox, make healthier choices, strengthen your relationships, or finally make progress on that side hustle, understanding your brain can help you get there with greater clarity, confidence, and intention. While it may sound odd at first, you have an internal CEO.
There is a region of your brain right behind the center of your forehead known as the Prefrontal Cortex, or PFC. This region of the brain is like a control center: responsible for prioritizing tasks, making decisions, and regulating responses. As these are all high-level functions for the brain orchestrating reactions across multiple regions, the prefrontal cortex also tires easily and requires lots of energy to function. This role of the prefrontal cortex in your brain matters deeply for everyday life.
To understand why, let’s imagine a typical Monday morning for a middle manager in a mid-sized company. They arrive early to the office to get ahead of a packed to-do list from Friday, but find that over the weekend their inbox has been flooded with urgent requests from clients and colleagues. While skimming through to get a sense of what can be handled quickly, the department secretary pops in announcing an all-hands meeting has been called in an hour. The flashing red light on the phone makes it clear that messages have also piled up. Now in a panic, our fearless manager dives into small tasks before the meeting rationalizing that tackling the small things will help them get ahead. By noon, their carefully curated to-do list is scrapped, their overwhelmed brain has shut down, they’ve started snapping at colleagues, and complaining at the water cooler about overwhelming stress.
But the day could go very differently if the prefrontal cortex is functioning optimally. This region of the brain is impaired by the flood of cortisol and adrenaline that chronic or acute stress kicks off in the body. So let’s walk through that morning one more time with the PFC at its best. Instead of panicking at the pile of emails, messages, or requests, our middle manager takes ten minutes to calmly assess the situation and prioritize the day. Rather than diving into short tasks like quick-response emails to feel a quick dopamine rush of accomplishment, they stop and clearly visualize the most important tasks of the day being accomplished. With this image firmly in mind, they start to prioritize the tasks that are truly urgent, and put the rest into a folder to consider after lunch.
When the secretary pops in to announce a last-minute meeting, it is clear that this meeting would sabotage an already overpacked schedule. So our clear-headed manager politely declines citing the last-minute notice. They also make a note to talk to upper management at the next opportunity to request more advanced notice on any important meetings going forward. With the day now mapped out, our self-managed manager can tackle the most urgent and complex tasks while their higher brain functions are still focused and fresh. They silence all notifications, schedule in regular breaks to give their brain time to recover, and drink water because it keeps their brain functioning at peak performance. Instead of snapping at colleagues who make additional requests, they are able to either decline, delegate, or propose a realistic timeline understanding their current workload.
The best part is that at the end of the day our middle manager isn’t worn out, and feeling defeated. They might not have accomplished everything, of course, but the same circumstances delivered much more productive and positive results for everyone at the office. Multitasking feels like the ultimate cheat code: listening to phone messages while doing paperwork, quietly typing up memos during in-person meetings, or surreptitiously scrolling your socials at dinner with your family.
Though it may feel productive, something very different is happening in your brain when you attempt to multitask. Instead of productivity, multitasking delivers traffic jams in your brain’s control center, and taps its vital resources fast. That’s because what feels like multitasking to you is actually rapid task shifting. Your brain can’t focus on two tasks at once.
In fact there is a region, called the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, that specifically inhibits distractions. So when you attempt to focus on more than one task at once, the prefrontal cortex has to continuously shift back and forth between them. This rapid-fire shifting quickly overloads the system. Imagine how your car’s transmission would look if you shifted gears a few times every second while driving for hours. Research suggests that multitasking actually drops productivity by around forty percent, and brief interruptions can require more than twenty minutes for the brain to recover optimum focus. The increasing drive to fit more into each day is driving the multitasking epidemic, and it is having negative impacts across cultures.
In addition to draining mental energy, sapping productivity, and creating the perfect conditions for mistakes or misunderstandings, brains that are struggling to focus become emotionally dysregulated. The amygdala is the brain region that processes emotions, including responses to stress and fear. When the prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed, like it was for our overwhelmed middle manager in the last chapter, the regulation of the amygdala weakens. Emotional processing becomes dysregulated because the brain’s CEO is overloaded with other tasks. The upshot is that real productivity needs monotasking – complete focus on one thing at a time. Corporate cultures in particular valorize multitasking and lightning-fast responses even outside of work hours as signs of dedication.
Changing that culture will take more than individual effort. But you can start today by protecting your focus and working with your brain’s natural preference for sustained, singular attention. Start small. Rather than trying to overhaul your habits overnight, treat monotasking as a series of experiments and build your focus gradually. The pull of notifications may be hard to resist, but one simple practice can make a difference: before checking your inbox or social media, spend ten minutes visualizing your most important tasks already completed. Picture the process, the emotions, and the sense of accomplishment as vividly as possible.
This mental rehearsal primes your brain for success and makes it easier to stay focused on what matters most. To make this a habit, silence devices for an hour at a time while you devote your attention to one thing. It may feel uncomfortable at first, but sustained focus becomes easier with practice. And when something unexpected demands your attention, resist the urge to react immediately.
Instead, pause for a few minutes before responding. Even a five-minute delay can interrupt the cycle of urgency and instant gratification, helping you respond more thoughtfully instead of reflexively. Neuroplasticity has become a hot topic in recent decades, as researchers discover more and more about the brain’s ability to forge new connections and grow new networks well into old age.
This matters for everyone who wants to accomplish more, experience better focus, or feel more emotionally stable and connected. While many think that ingrained habits are genetically predetermined, they are actually just well-worn brain circuits that have become cemented over time. So if you struggle with a habit like stress eating, procrastination, disorganization, or doomscrolling despite your best efforts to change, you’re struggling against neural circuits that no longer serve you. The structure responsible for this process is the basal ganglia, a collection of brain regions that links the prefrontal cortex – the center of planning and decision-making – with deeper systems involved in movement and reward.
Within it lies the striatum, a specialized area that helps form habits by using dopamine signals to reinforce successful actions. Each time a behavior leads to a positive outcome, the brain strengthens the neural pathway behind it, making that behavior feel more rewarding and easier to repeat. Over time, these pathways become coated in a fatty substance called myelin, which speeds communication between neurons and makes the behavior increasingly automatic. In other words, repetition doesn't just build habits – it rewires your brain to perform them with less effort and more efficiency. When habits are good this dopamine reinforcement is great, because habits let you accomplish more with much less effort from your brain. But habits can also keep people locked into the same negative patterns.
Their urge to check notifications, chomp a donut after difficult conversations, or say “yes” to every last-minute demand is driven by a hidden hit of dopamine their brain receives each time they perform this action. Both good and bad habits become enshrined in the brain because they deliver the same positive chemical reward. But here’s the good news. Every new experience that you have forges new brain circuits. That doesn’t mean your old habits vanish overnight, of course. They become more dormant as you build new ones, but can still be triggered by stress or emotional overload.
Nonetheless, you can still harness this dopamine-driven habit mechanism because of your brain’s neuroplasticity, if you know how. Building new habits begins with the same visualization exercise we learned about in the last chapter. If turning to fast food when you’re stressed is a problem, start your day mentally rehearsing making healthier choices. Rehearse going for a walk in the park or spending time with your pets as an alternative to stress eating. Your brain starts the process of forging new pathways by rehearsing them. Though mental rehearsal initiates new pathways, it needs physical follow-through to build them.
So follow mental rehearsal with purposeful, repeatable actions. Instead of absent-mindedly grabbing your phone, for instance, focus on physically organizing your workspace and writing priorities down by hand each morning. It is important to go slowly and consistently. Rewiring these dopamine pathways takes time. But as those new behaviors become reinforced, your basal ganglia begins to automate them, working for you instead of against you. Eventually, the choices that once required willpower start to feel effortless, allowing you to achieve more with less stress and far less mental energy.
While habits forge the day-to-day path towards the life, health, and relationships you want, having goals firmly in mind charts the overall course. For the brain, goals are more than an end result, they are the guiding forces shaping your neural networks and memory. Consider the surprising clinical studies of imagining physical exercise versus actually hitting the gym. In one, conducted by Guang Yue and Kelly Cole, half of the participants followed a rigorous strength training program for four weeks and had their muscle strength measured at the end.
The other half only mentally rehearsed following the same regimen every day, and were similarly measured. They were told to imagine each contraction of their muscles, each repetition and motion in painstaking detail. The results? The gym rats gained an impressive twenty percent more muscle strength after four weeks. The group that imagined their workouts, however, also gained muscle strength. This awesome power can be put to work toward your goals.
Basically, your thoughts matter a lot. Visualizing successfully completed tasks, an engaging presentation, or flawless performances actually primes your brain for this outcome. Your prefrontal cortex will suppress distractions from this goal when it can function optimally – through monotasking, frequent breaks, and energy refreshers like water, movement, healthy sleep, and nutritious food. To help your brain in this process, it helps to be specific about what you want. Just like the visualizers in the exercise study, you have to be as specific as possible about what you are envisioning. So while “having more energy” might sound like a good goal, it doesn’t give your brain structures any guidance into what that might look like.
So make your goals SMART, or specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. Instead of “more energy” as a goal, try setting a few specific goals, like eating at least five servings of fruits and vegetables per day, getting more sleep, or taking a daily walk. Visualize these in detail. Then imagine having more energy, your glowing skin, and track your progress to reinforce through positive feedback. For larger goals, like a promotion at work or finishing a degree, you’ll need to break them down into smaller chunks for your brain to effectively focus on each step. Your working memory can only hold four things in mind at once, so memory experts recommend breaking down complex information into groups of four.
This method is often called chunking. Like memory, your prefrontal cortex needs fewer elements to coordinate at once. This is why musicians rehearse short passages of a piece until they’re fluent before attempting to play the whole thing. When each small section is mapped separately, the brain circuits necessary to perform the action become strongly connected. Only then do they go on to put it all together. The same works for your larger goals.
Break them down into smaller parts and tackle each one through mental rehearsal and consistent action. This gives your brain time to build the new networks it needs to unlock the brain’s full potential. Your brain is an extraordinary goal machine, and now you know how to put it to work.
In this lesson to Make Your Brain Work by Amy Brann, you’ve learned that your brain is designed to help you succeed – if you understand how to work with it. Your prefrontal cortex, the brain’s center for decision-making, planning, and emotional regulation, is one of your most valuable cognitive resources. But it’s also easily overwhelmed by stress and constant task-switching. While multitasking may seem productive, it actually depletes your mental resources, whereas focusing on one task at a time allows your brain to perform at its best.
You’ve also seen that habits aren’t fixed character traits but neural pathways strengthened by dopamine and repetition. By combining intentional action with mental rehearsal, you can reshape those pathways over time. Finally, because your brain can only hold a limited amount of information at once, breaking big goals into smaller, manageable chunks helps you stay focused and make steady progress.
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