Change Your Brain, Change Your Pain: Breaking the Doom Loop to Heal Chronic Physical and Emotional Pain

One of our leading experts on the brain and #1 New York Times bestselling author explores how chronic physical and emotional pain are both rooted in your brain’s wiring, leaving you stuck in the doom loop and how you can break free to heal from the ""doom loop"" and reclaim a vibrant, pain-free life.

In the United States alone, one in five adults experiences chronic pain. For too long, when a doctor couldn’t find the source of frequent pain, the patient was dismissively told “it’s all in your head.” Today, we know that our somatic responses to trauma, anxiety, and depression create real suffering, and that physical pain can lead to trauma, anxiety, and depression. Dr. Daniel Amen calls this “the doom loop”—the dance between physical and emotional pain. These doom loops interfere with our ability to live our lives. But we can shift the doom loop into a healing loop, and in this vital book, he shows us how.

Dr. Amen has been researching a new brain-based approach to pain. In Change Your Brain, Change Your Pain he draws on those studies to reveal:

• Pain producing versus pain soothing thought patterns • Muscle tension and trauma vs calmness and clarity • The use of medical and nutraceuticals to help calm the pathways • The effects of diet, exercise, meditation, breath to help pain

Our current approach to understanding and treating physical and emotional pain is misguided. Change Your Brain, Change Your Pain offers a healthier way, one that involves less medication, less surgery, and better outcomes. Just like the human heart, the human brain is an organ, and that to be free of emotional or physical pain, it is critical to get the brain as healthy as it can be—not just physically, but emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually, as well.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the enhancement.

© 2025 Harper (Audiobook): 9780063426726

Release date

Audiobook: 2 December 2025