InformationWeek's Business Matters: Change Your Brain, Change Your Career

What would it mean to your career—what would it do for your effectiveness as an IT professional—if your brain worked considerably better than it does today? And more important than that, what kind of impact would that have on rest of your life? Our guest on this episode of Business Matters is uniquely positioned to answer those questions… and here’s a spoiler alert: there real answers aren’t anything like what you see on the TV show Limitless.

Our guest on this episode is Debbie Hampton. Debbie is the author of a recently released book titled “How to Beat Depression and Anxiety by Changing Your Brain” and she blogs regularly, not only on her own web site—thebestbrainpossible.com—but also as a popular guest blogger on a number of health- and psychology-related sites.

In 2007, after battling depression and going through a divorce, Debbie suffered a traumatic brain injury as a result of a suicide attempt. She was severely impaired, both physically and mentally. She lost her fine motor skills, couldn’t speak properly, and wasn’t given much hope for recovery. Ultimately, she decided to take charge of her own recovery and began learning about an emerging concept in neuroscience called “neuroplasticity.” The basic idea is that, contrary to what doctors had believed for centuries, scientists were discovering that not only do our brains keep changing throughout adulthood but also that we can deliberately direct those changes in a positive direction.

What Debbie began learning back then changed her life dramatically but one of the most important things she discovered is that all of her discoveries have huge implications for everyone, people like you and me, not just brain injury patients. In this episode, you'll hear Debbie's story and learn how its lessons can apply to you.