While Phairoh's solution seems theoretically sound, I have also found another solution to this problem. By passing the UpdatePanels id as a paramater (event target) for the doPostBack function the update panel will post back but not the entire page.
__doPostBack('myUpdatePanelId','')
*note: second parameter is for addition event args
hope this helps someone!
EDIT: so it seems this same piece of advice was given above as i was typing :)