#090 - Dr. Judson Brewer - Anxiety Isn’t A Feeling — It’s A Habit You Can Break

Dr. Judson Brewer breaks down why anxiety isn’t just an emotion—it’s a habit. We explore how worry gets rewarded, why willpower is a myth, and the real reason so many of us stay stuck. He dismantles the biggest lies we believe about anxiety, from the idea it improves performance to the false comfort of soothing behaviors. At the end of the day, it’s not about managing anxiety. It’s about unlearning it.

Timestamps: 
00:00 Jud's Experience With Panic Attacks
01:34 Who Was Jud's Dr. Jud Brewer? 
02:53 Anxiety Is A Habit
05:49 What We Get Wrong About Anxiety 
13:03 How People Relate To Anxiety Today 
17:01 Anxiety Is Malleable
19:14 Anxiety Is Supposed To Be Short Lived 
20:32 Relationship Between Stress & Anxiety
21:52 The 3 Gears
26:48 Writing, Visualization, & Naming In First Gear
27:56 The Line Between Hard & Painful 
30:18 Willpower Is A Myth
33:13 Second Gear
35:55 Personal Experiences & Third Gear
40:38 Relationship Between Anxiety & Soothing
41:57 The Best Thing Sometimes Is...Nothing
43:29 Breaking Bad Habits & Building Good Habits
45:14 Jud's Self-Meditation Retreats
46:42 Why vs. How
51:30 Connect With Dr. Judson Brewer

Thank you so much for listening. I truly appreciate your time and support. Let me know what you thought of the episode and what you would like to see in the future. Any feedback would be awesome. Don't forget to subscribe for more exciting content on YouTube, and leave a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever platform you are listening on.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Jud's Experience With Panic Attacks
• 1:34 Who Was Jud's Dr. Jud Brewer?
• 2:53 Anxiety Is A Habit
• 5:49 What We Get Wrong About Anxiety
• 13:03 How People Relate To Anxiety Today
• 17:01 Anxiety Is Malleable
• 19:14 Anxiety Is Supposed To Be Short Lived
• 20:32 Relationship Between Stress & Anxiety
• 21:52 The 3 Gears
• 26:48 Writing, Visualization, & Naming In First Gear
• 27:56 The Line Between Hard & Painful
• 30:18 Willpower Is A Myth
• 33:13 Second Gear
• 35:55 Personal Experiences & Third Gear
• 40:38 Relationship Between Anxiety & Soothing
• 41:57 The Best Thing Sometimes Is...Nothing
• 43:29 Breaking Bad Habits & Building Good Habits
• 45:14 Jud's Self-Meditation Retreats
• 46:42 Why vs. How
• 51:30 Connect With Dr. Judson Brewer

Transcript

Dr. Judson Brewer breaks down why anxiety isn’t just an emotion—it’s a habit. We explore how worry gets rewarded, why willpower is a myth, and the real reason so many of us stay stuck. He dismantles the biggest lies we believe about anxiety, from the idea it improves performance to the false comfort of soothing behaviors. At the end of the day, it’s not about managing anxiety. It’s about unlearning it.

Tim Doyle (00:05.596)

How have your own experiences with panic attacks shaped the path of your work?

Jud Brewer (00:11.214)

How long do we have? I'll say briefly, you I started getting panic attacks when I was in residency, you know, talk about a perfect combination, the perfect storm of sleep deprivation, not knowing what you're doing, being thrown in as the authority, you know, trying to take care of patients and all of that. That is a great recipe for panic. The good news there, I would say, and how it

Tim Doyle (00:13.661)

Hahaha

Jud Brewer (00:38.86)

affected my trajectory was I'd actually been meditating about 10 years at that point and some of my practices naturally kicked in and showed me the power of presence basically and it I didn't know it at the time because I was one having panic attacks and two in the middle of residency but a couple of years later it actually seeded the you know planted the seeds for me to do a bunch of research and

develop clinical programs for anxiety itself.

Tim Doyle (01:12.242)

So people look to you for clarity and guidance, whether that's on a personal intimate level through your work or you've become a public figure to a degree, whether that's through your book, social media, doing interviews like this. I'm curious to know though, through your personal life, especially when you were younger, who was your jet brewer? Who were you able to look to for clarity or guidance or for help?

Jud Brewer (01:38.616)

That's a great question. There is nobody in particular that comes to mind. You know, my, my mom probably more than anybody else, although she was pretty busy. She was basically a single mom raising four kids. so I certainly looked to her as inspiration in terms of, know, you can do anything like raising four kids. She went back to law school at night, you know, while we were growing up. And so really a, a great.

role model and also she modeled this really joy of learning and the importance of just you know being a good person and and really You know exploring the world with this lens of curiosity. So I would say she's probably the one I looked up to the most

Tim Doyle (02:29.736)

That's awesome to hear. So with your work on anxiety, seems like it's not strictly work, but it's personal experience and your own life that has gone into that work and getting into your writing. You describe anxiety as a harmful habit, which I find really fascinating. When did you really begin to appreciate that? And do you feel like that's not something that's commonly

understood like understanding anxiety as a habit.

Jud Brewer (03:03.554)

Starting with that last piece. Yes. I don't think that it's commonly seen that way. I never learned that in medical school or residency. And in fact, it was years into my clinical practice that I accidentally bumped into this concept myself and it came out of necessity where I was really struggling to find good treatments for my patients for anxiety. You know, best medications help only about one in five people.

And so I was getting anxious about how to help my patients with anxiety. And at the time I was, my lab was studying habit change. We'd gotten some pretty good results with using some unconventional techniques for helping people quit smoking. Like we'd gotten five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment. We develop an eating program that was working pretty well. We'd just done a study where there was, we got a 40 % reduction in craving related eating and people in our eating.

program or saying, know, anxiety is driving my eating. Can you develop a program for that? And that planted the seed for me to go back and look at the literature. And I found this buried study or it wasn't even a study. was like a two page, very humble letter from this guy, Thomas Borkovec from 1985, I believe, where he suggested that anxiety could be driven through negative reinforcement. And that was an, huge aha moment for me because I have been studying

reinforcement learning, we'd found that we could leverage it as a paradoxical way to help people change habits. But I'd never thought about applying it clinically or doing studies. And so, you know, I started practicing in my clinic to see if we could, you know, get a signal there with my patients and they, they could understand the concept and they were starting to show some benefit, but it's easy to fool ourselves clinically. So this is where, you know, we then started doing randomized controlled trials and we've done, you know, three or four trials now.

where, for example, in one study with people with generalized anxiety disorder, we got a 67 % reduction in these clinically validated anxiety scores relative to 14 % in people who had got usual clinical care. that was a really powerful thing back then, and that was years ago. This is still, if I had to pick one thing that has changed my life from a clinical perspective and hopefully...

Jud Brewer (05:24.546)

changed my patients lives as well, it was that.

So I want to dive deeper into your work and anxiety because I think it's a lot of information and knowledge that people could benefit from. That being said, though, I do think it's also important to

take a step in the opposite direction and sort of like understand what we get wrong about it because anxiety has become a culturalized commodified buzzword it seems like where there's a lot of sensationalized information out there and a lot of media and content driven information out there. What do you see as some of the most common media or content?

Jud Brewer (08:50.456)

Mm-hmm.

Tim Doyle (09:05.1)

information on anxiety that really actually doesn't have any weight.

Jud Brewer (09:11.032)

Yeah, so we can look at this as what are the top three myths that I see. so one is that there's some level of anxiety that's helpful. So for example, there's this thing called the Yerkes-Dodson law, which is really a Yerkes-Dodson myth. I wrote about this in the Unwinding Anxiety book, but in short, it was based on a 1908 study of Japanese dancing mice. I kid you not. Go look up the paper.

And they basically checked to see what level of arousal was optimal for mice navigating a maze or something like that. And that got morphed over the years. In the 50s, it took a wrong turn where somebody was equating arousal with anxiety. And then it got picked up when the internet came out and people were saying, I need some level of anxiety to get stuff done or perform well.

And then this inverted U-shaped curve of anxiety was born. And if you go and search the internet, you'll see all these graphs. None of them are accurate. If you actually look at the studies, there were some meta-analyses done, you know, where they combined a bunch of studies. There's a pretty clear inverse relationship between anxiety and performance. So the more anxious somebody is, the worse they perform. You can also look at the corollary, which is flow. When somebody is performing optimally.

And I don't think anybody argues that flow is not optimal performance. Well, if you look at the definition of flow that me, I took some, had put forward, there's no self in the process where merged, you know, the person is merged with the, the task that they're doing. So there's no one there to get anxious. So that's, I would say that's top of the list where people have written books. remember people interviewing me who you were writing books about how

You know, but there's got to be some utility to it. The long story short is that correlation does not equal causation. Because somebody was anxious and they got something done or they solved a problem doesn't mean that the anxiety caused it. And in fact, if somebody's anxious all the time and they solve a problem, there's a good likelihood that those two are going to be correlated. But it doesn't mean that it's causal. So that's number one.

Jud Brewer (11:37.164)

you know, the anxiety myth that I get to clean up in the sense of that not being helpful. What else is a top myth that I see with anxiety? You know, I think one thing is that people, well, let's just look at how anxiety is formed and how people treat it. So there's pretty good evidence both from other labs and now my lab when we've done.

you know, number of studies looking at the mechanism and the clinical outcomes when we target those mechanisms, that anxiety is driven through negative reinforcement. And what that means is that the feeling of anxiety drives the mental behavior of worrying. Okay. And that mental behavior is rewarding enough where, again, these false associations can form this reward process where people, they associate it with solving problems.

or at least it feels better than doing nothing. You know, doing something feels better than nothing. So that's rewarding enough to feedback so that the next time somebody feels anxious, their brain says, the last time you worried and it was, you know, it felt rewarding. So do it again. So with that, you know, when we can look at anxiety and ask, well, how is anxiety treated? Right? You can look at the, you know,

SSRIs again about one in five people shows a significant reduction in symptoms. So for some people medication can be helpful. But if you look at how people go to psychotherapy and if you look at the best psychotherapies out there like cognitive behavioral therapy is top of top choice here two things there one is CBT is most associated with prefrontal cortical function with you know cognitive control. That's the weakest

And the youngest part of the brain from an evolutionary perspective, it's the first part of the brain that goes offline when people get stressed. So it's not exactly a reliable mechanism to go to when somebody is anxious. And I think that shows up in the studies, you know, with, with CBT at, you know, the, again, when you look at a bunch of studies together, about 50 % of people show benefit. So, you know, you're, you're 50 50 if you go to therapy.

Jud Brewer (13:57.278)

And in other studies, if you don't look, if you take CBT in the larger array of all the different types of psychotherapies, there's a study, meta-analysis from the Journal of American Medical Association from a couple of years ago showing that five out of eight psychotherapies were no better than not going to therapy, as in no benefit. So we can then step back and ask, why are we treating anxiety with psychotherapy?

You know, it's if, if do you, what other habits do you treat with psychotherapy? None. wouldn't treat a habit with psychotherapy and I'm a psychotherapist, right? I'm a psychiatrist. Yeah. So that's the other big one that I would say is, you know, it's really time for us to step back and kind of reboot our thought process around anxiety and ask, are we even approaching it the right way?

Tim Doyle (14:37.326)

That's fascinating.

Tim Doyle (14:50.996)

Mm. Yeah, that's fascinating.

Given how casually the word anxiety is used now within our culture, I feel like it's become more accepted and almost like a badge of honor or a calling card, especially like you're saying people create that correlation between anxiety and success of like, oh, like I need this or this was like, you know.

This is what was needed for me to work hard and get those, you know, external successes within my life. And you've shared that when, know, when you were younger and when you were in college and a doctor, you know, mentioned to you like, you might be dealing with anxiety. You kind of went into a state of denial and you didn't believe that. And I feel like within today's day and age, that wouldn't necessarily happen as much or like people would just be much more open to it.

What do you think has created that shift?

Jud Brewer (15:52.718)

That's a great question. I don't know the exact societal forces there, but I've definitely seen that shift. So there are benefits and drawbacks here. The benefit is that we're normalizing mental health as an important feature of our lives that we should be paying attention to. The downside that I think you're highlighting is that the more normalized it becomes, the more people can take it on as an identity.

And especially young people, you know, in their teenage years, you know, we can all remember back to our teenage years with cringe. At least I do. I don't know anybody that was like, wow, that was great. I sailed through, through junior high school. That was awesome. I'd repeat it. So, so there was a lot of cringe there because we're trying to develop our identity. Who am I? And so if there's an identity that's out there and the zeitgeist that says anxiety and

we go on social media and we see that people are celebrating that like, yeah, I'm anxious, I'm anxious, I'm anxious. One, that gives us an in-group to relate to immediately. Two, it gives us something that we can latch onto as an identity that feels stable, even if it's uncomfortable, because anxiety doesn't feel good. But we can say, yeah, that's who I am. And with that, it can become ingrained to the point where it creates problems, just as a pregnant.

You know, an example, a reporter, I was talking to a reporter a little while ago who was writing a book on anxiety and she's, basically her premise from what I could tell from our conversation was that, you know, she had generalized anxiety disorder since high school and she had it for a long time and there was nothing that had helped her. And, you know, when I, when we finished that conversation, I was really scratching my head wondering like, what's going on? And I realized, if she,

If she gets cured, if she does better, she doesn't have a book to write. If the book's all about like, this is something that nobody can solve. And so there's an example of where we can be really identified with anxiety to the point where we can't even imagine anything different or there could be another driving force, whether it's conscious or subconscious saying, hey, you gotta keep this identity. And I had a...

Jud Brewer (18:19.234)

when we were first pilot testing one of our anxiety programs, one of our pilot testers wrote me a beautiful email depicting how identified she was with her anxiety. And she said, is deeply etched in my bones. I wrote a sub stack about this because it was so, so striking on how identified people can be with their anxiety. And the good news is it's a habit, right? And identity can be a habit. And if it's something that we can learn, it's something we can.

online.

Tim Doyle (18:50.692)

And another important point that I think needs to be said to build off of that and something that I really took away from your work is that

We can see anxiety and stress as just being this, you know, big wall in front of us that it's impossible to, you know, either climb over or, you know, break through. But it's important to see that it's not something that just is or just exists, but it made up a lot of, of a lot of different variables that are malleable. And when you're able to, you know, shift those variables around, you're like, this is just a lot of small pieces and I'm in control of these things.

Jud Brewer (19:23.15)

Mm-hmm.

Jud Brewer (19:32.236)

Yes, yes. And I think you're highlighting something really important where, you know, going back to the identity piece, when we think this is just who I am, how do you work with that? When you really break it down and you ask, what does this anxiety feel like in my body? What are the thoughts that come up and how do those thoughts and feelings play off of each other? Then now we've got, you know, these, these quanta that we can work with.

It's tightness. it's restlessness. here's this worry thought. And we can see how they play off of each other where the feeling of anxiety can trigger the worry thought, which then feeds back and drives more anxiety. And now we've got something to work with. You know, there's, are great tools to be able to help people, you know, be with their physical sensations and not feed their thoughts as compared to just, you know, giving up the ghost, say, I have no idea how to work with this or even

not even imagining they can work with it because they're so identified with it.

Tim Doyle (20:31.809)

Yeah, we see anxiety as strictly being this mental and emotional thing. And that's just abstract. But what I love about your work is like, OK, we're we're changing this game. Like, let's turn anxiety into a physical game and be curious about it. And what that means is like, all right, like, let me be curious about the physical bodily sensations and let me attach the anxiety to that rather than just being totally consumed by the mental and emotional, you know.

abstract thoughts around

Jud Brewer (21:02.474)

Absolutely.

Tim Doyle (21:03.778)

An interesting quote from your book that you say is, while anxiety is born from fear, it needs nourishment to grow and flourish. So are you essentially saying that anxiety in its natural state is short lived, but we're the ones that keep it alive?

Jud Brewer (21:23.05)

Yes. So everybody has feelings of anxiety. I haven't met anyone yet who is, you know, who has a pulse, who, who doesn't have anxiety. And because it is a habit, right? Any habit needs to be fed or perpetuated, which can even be through just habitually worrying, for example, when we're not even aware that we're feeding it. Otherwise it's just a constellations of thoughts and sensations that come and go.

And one way to think about this is when we feel anxious, often the habitual response is to resist, is to avoid or resist it, right? If we run away from it, it's gonna run after us. If we resist it, this saying in psychotherapy that many have heard is, you know, what we resist persists. And so both with the running away and the pushing against, we're actually feeding that loop.

Tim Doyle (22:19.758)

Hmm. Are stress and anxiety to a large degree synonymous terms or what are the differences there?

Jud Brewer (22:28.706)

There are key similarities and key differences. that they both feel the same in the moment. You know, if you just ask somebody to describe what stress feels like and describe what anxiety feels like, I would say 90 % overlap there in the way people would describe them. The key difference is that stress is typically precipitated by something that is very tangible. You know, so I'm stressed about this deadline. I'm stressed about

you know, this conversation that I'm going to have with somebody, right? And when the stress precipitant is gone, typically the stress is gone, right? So, you know, the ship has sailed, so to speak. With anxiety, anxiety, the feeling of anxiety tends to come out of the blue and that feeling is what precipitates or drives the mental behavior of worrying. So,

Certainly when we get stressed, we can worry. And with anxiety, we often get stuck in that feeling, thinking, if I can find what caused my anxiety, I can fix it or avoid it.

Tim Doyle (23:41.284)

So your main framework that you lay out is this three gear system that I'd love to dive into. But before that, I'm curious to know just the, I guess the backstory behind that about how that came to be the three gears and you know, what made you realize it was like, okay, this is what I want to have implemented.

Jud Brewer (24:02.752)

It was, so to keep the story brief, because it was basically a decade ago that we first, this framework started emerging. We were doing work with, first with people who were trying to quit smoking, and then people who were working with stress and emotional eating. And we were doing focus groups and qualitative research studies to see, because we were seeing people make these big shifts in their eating behaviors. And we wanted to see how that worked.

And what we found was that there was this process and I call it the three gears because I like bicycles. I grew up on a BMX bike. You I love mountain biking. love road biking and the analogy worked pretty well. And the idea is, you know, so we came up with this, this analogy around these three gears and we can go through them one by one, but how that morphed into anxiety was that the process for any habit.

can be worked with using this three gears methodology. And the idea is like, you know, whether it's an anxiety or a stressing or another habit loop, well, the first gear is to recognize it and map it out, right? So to just give you that first sense of this, it emerged out of the research. Our patients were telling us, you know, what was happening for them, and they were basically describing the language for us. And then we just started testing it to see if that three gears methodology worked.

And that's where we started doing these randomized controlled trials with anxiety, for example, using that methodology, finding that it works pretty well. We've even, I'll just say we've even incorporated that we have a new next generation program where we're pairing this, you know, way to democratize and digitalize these types of treatments where there's, you know, human expert delivered content with AI based learning assistance, which we can.

Bookmark if you want to come back to that, but that's this going beyond anxiety program where all of those are combined really forefronts these three gears right at the beginning. And what we're finding is that people really appreciate being able to see that framework right at the beginning. In some of our previous programs, we kind of peppered it throughout the sequential trainings, but we're finding if we

Jud Brewer (26:22.988)

Forefront it people get it right away and then we go right into applying it in all these different ways And it's a great way to reinforce those concepts through their experience. So they develop wisdom to work with their anxiety

Tim Doyle (26:34.297)

So that's a new innovation that has just come to be very recently for you.

Jud Brewer (26:39.414)

Yes, we actually just launched the clinical program called Going Beyond Anxiety just two months ago. it's, yeah, it's early days, but we're seeing some really solid results with that so far.

Tim Doyle (26:53.572)

Wow, that's awesome to hear. Yeah, I mean, I'd love to dive deeper into, I guess, the step by step of the three gears. Like, could you just walk us through that first gear?

Jud Brewer (27:03.022)

Sure. So first gear is recognizing the habit loop and mapping it out. So for example, I'm thinking of a patient that I wrote about in my Unwinding Anxiety book who has referred to me for anxiety. And as I was taking history, was listening to hear where these elements were showing up for him. So there are three elements, a trigger, a behavior, and a result, or from a neuroscience standpoint, a reward. So basically this patient's

He'd had anxiety for about 30 years and he had been referred to me because he was getting panic attacks and had panic disorder where he couldn't even drive on highways. And so we'd map out, you know, that feeling of anxiety was driving him, driving him to not drive, but it was also driving a habit of avoidance where he was eating fast food a lot as an avoidance mechanism. So I basically sent him home.

to map out, know, what are his triggers, what's the behavior, whether it's stress eating or worrying or whatever, and then what's the result. And so that's really the first gear is just mapping it out. This can be simplified. So over the past couple of years, we've found that we can simplify that process to just recognizing what the behavior is. The trigger is the least important part of the equation, and often people get stuck in that. You know, they think if they can figure out why they're getting anxious, they can solve it, but that's not.

our brains work. So really the first gear boils down to identifying the behavior, which typically is worrying.

Tim Doyle (28:37.86)

It seems like a large part of that work that I deduced from your writing in your book, especially with some of the examples. Do you see as literally writing and visualization for first gear being an essential part of that step?

Jud Brewer (28:55.31)

For some people, journaling or whatnot can be helpful. I would say for even more people, it's simply just naming what the behavior is. Like, I'm worrying again. I really emphasize for a lot of my patients to keep it simple, right? And the simplest thing to do is just recognize, there it is, I'm worrying again.

Tim Doyle (29:17.048)

Hmm, interesting. Building. Well, that's interesting because that actually leads into my next question because you can verbalize that that naming and it makes it easy to to speak it out when you have concrete language behind that. You emphasize verbalizing when it comes to like repeating certain phrases because it kind of mimics creating new habits.

where it's just like a very repetitive, consistent getting into that wiring. And you say in your book to repeat this phrase three times when you're reading the book, you say, changing habits is hard work, but doesn't have to be painful. And you say to repeat that three times. And I'm curious to know, where do you see that line between hard and painful?

Jud Brewer (30:04.984)

It's a great question. And I kind of write it in the book as a tongue in cheek way to remind people to be, you bring some levity and some playfulness to these things. Cause you know, good. How we can out it go for you. Yeah. The idea is one hard work. So for example, my lab does hill repeats on Tuesdays.

Tim Doyle (30:15.03)

I said it out loud when I was reading the book.

Jud Brewer (30:29.784)

There's there's a steep hill near Brown University where we go and do the hard work of running hills. And that is very different than the pain and suffering that can accompany that. Right. We can take it as a joyful expedition where we're collaborating in something that is challenging and we're in community and it can be, it can even be fun. It's still hard work. Right.

It doesn't have to be painful in the sense where we don't have to add to it where we're saying, I hate this or this is really hard or this or this. And in fact, we even, one of my post-docs is Italian. we start each hill with the phrase uno impio, which means just one more.

where we're really just focusing on the present moment, not thinking about how many hills we've run or how many we might run next, but really just focusing on the present moment. And that's the idea of like, let's lean into this challenge. This can be hard, but it doesn't have to be painful.

Tim Doyle (31:37.366)

Yeah, I've definitely experienced this with I've experienced this within my own life. I feel like, yeah, we put that mental framing onto it. Like, hey, this is gonna be really tough. And it's like, well, is it actually tough or am I making it tough? Like, am I making it tougher than it actually needs to be? And I just think like, OK, if I have to, you know, overcome my anxiety, it's going to be this grind it out type of thing. Well, it's like, well, if you believe it's going to be that way, then you'll turn it into that.

Jud Brewer (31:51.799)

Right.

Jud Brewer (32:07.466)

Absolutely.

Tim Doyle (32:08.652)

What do we need to know about willpower?

Jud Brewer (32:11.118)

Well, here's another common internet myth so briefly I so the the Answer here is that willpower is more myth and muscle to explain that a little bit more if you look at the neuroscience behind how habits form and how they change willpower is nowhere near the equation or behavior change

So just want to state that really clearly. Neuroscientists don't use the, they don't talk about willpower, right? This is, don't know where this came from, but it's been a centuries old debate. There's a relief on the Parthenon where there's a rider and a horse. And the idea is that it's more related to reason and passions, but it highlights how our emotions are definitely going to run away.

and we are not in control. So for anybody to think that they can think their way out of anxiety, they're probably fooling themselves. Yet, I don't know. Again, this is just the zeitgeist in common culture. It's like, well, there must be something wrong with you. Your willpower is not strong enough or it's weak. And there were even, there was a whole, probably a decade's worth of many, studies

where people were even looking at this concept called ego depletion, where it's like, I can resist unhelpful behaviors in the morning, but by night I'm tired and I can't, right? And the same is you can apply that to anxiety or worry. So we just think, we can muscle our way out of something. We can grid our way through something. But if you look at the neuroscience, nothing in the equation suggests that that is true. Everything that the neuroscience points to is that

We form a habit based on how rewarding the behavior is. This is where positive and negative reinforcement come in. And this is such a strong finding that Eric Kandel got the Nobel Prize in 2000, showing that it's evolutionarily conserved all the way back to the C-slot, right? That's how we form memory is through positive and negative reinforcement. So that it's really hard to argue with that. And then the equations, they date back to the seventies. were these two researchers, Resquartla and Wagner, and we still use these equations today.

Jud Brewer (34:34.604)

They suggested that the thing that can help change a habit is paying attention to it, right? So if by definition, a habit is something we do automatically, it gets formed based on how rewarding a behavior is. Once we form that reward value, our brain puts this in habit mode so we don't have to think about the reward anymore. that, but we do have to think about it if we want to change the behavior. So we bring that back online and ask how rewarding is this?

which actually gets to the second gear of these three gears. So with second gear, we have to see exactly how rewarding or unrewarding worrying as a behavior is. And so we can tell ourselves not to worry, to which I say, good luck. I don't mean this in a mean way, but it's just like, I'm sure people have tried this a lot and they wouldn't come to my clinic if it worked, right? Because they wouldn't need my help.

So we can tell ourselves to not worry. We can see that the willpower doesn't work and we can take a couple of approaches. One is to say, well, my willpower is weaker, broken or depleted, or we could take a neuroscience approach and say, well, am I approaching this the right way? So if you take the neuroscience approach, you can ask a simple question, which is what am I getting from this? And this typical answer that I get from a patient when they really look at what worrying is getting them is,

not much at best and nothing at worst. That's typically why I they're like, I can't believe I'm worrying. This doesn't get me anything, right? Especially when they dispel the myth that they're problem solving or whatever, you know, where when they realize they problem solve better when they're not worrying, right? So, so when they, when they dispel that correlation equals causation around needing their worry or anxiety, then they can see pretty clearly that the worry only makes them more anxious. And then they're pretty motivated.

to change their behavior because they see that worrying is not rewarding. That's what these equations point out. And it's called either getting a negative prediction error, meaning that their brain is seeing that worrying is not as rewarding as they previously thought. It opens up this neuroplastic period where their brain says, that's not so great. Why would I do that again? Makes it much easier to let go of the worrying once they can recognize the habitual nature of it.

Jud Brewer (36:59.532)

Notice when they're doing it and then learn to let go. Notice how willpower has nothing to do with this.

Tim Doyle (37:07.598)

not sure if you've done much research between different populations of countries, but is this largely an Americanized idea with willpower and creating this correlation between stress and willpower and success?

Jud Brewer (37:24.376)

That's a great question. It's certainly a very Western concept, or at least, you we see this in Europe, et cetera. We have not done those studies specifically, so I'd be driving outside of my lane to say anything more than, that's a very interesting idea, and I have no idea. You know, I don't know how pervasive it is.

Tim Doyle (37:42.188)

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised, but yeah, that's interesting to think of. So getting deeper into second gear and to give you like a personal anecdotal experience to, guess, sort of further bring the the language and understanding of second gear. So I had Dr. Anna Lemke on a few months back from Stanford, you know, for people who don't know her. She's well known for writing Dopamine Nation. And I gave her

an experience of mine that I'd love for you to bring language to as well. like for me, when I was younger, like my, you know, when I was like, okay, I want to, you know, start eating healthier, like let me get on a, you know, a clean eating meal plan. And, you know, I would still get like urges and like, would cheat on it. And, know, afterwards would either, you know, feel crummy, like physically like, that didn't wouldn't make me feel good, but it would be more so mentally of like,

like, dude, like, why did you cheat on your diet? And I feel like I would, got to the point where, you know, when I would get those urges, I would quickly be able to think of like, I know what I'm going to feel like in the future of like, dude, why did you do that? And she brought the language of understanding that as urge surfing. And like what I'm explaining to you right now, like, is this what you describe as disenchantment or like, what is your breakdown of

what I'm describing to you.

Jud Brewer (39:08.14)

Yes, so it's funny that she brings up the term urge surfing. This is very much in line with third gear. And it was actually, as far as I can tell, Alan Marlett, who is an addiction researcher at the University of Washington, first coined that term urge surfing back in the 1980s. And so it's interesting that she brings that forward, because I'm not sure how familiar she is with the mindfulness schools or the awareness schools as a

clinical psychiatrist, but that's it in a nutshell, is being able to recognize what an urge feels like. I think you and I touched on this a little bit earlier. We can see the components and then that gets sucked into them. An example comes to mind with a patient, I was working in the VA at the time, who came into my office and said, Doc, I feel like if I don't smoke, my head will explode. It was my first chief complaint of head exploding.

So I went to my old habit and like backed up to my whiteboard in my office and I was like, what do we do? And so I pull out a marker and I had him start describing what the feeling of that craving for a cigarette was like. And we can think of there's a very clear parallel with worrying and feelings of anxiety. And so I had him describe, you know, he saying tightness, tension, burning. And I was asking him what the intensity was at the same time. And it was getting more and more and more intense. And then at some point it peaked.

And it started, the intensity started to go down and down and down. And he gave me the, had this big, you know, aha look in his eyes. And I said, what happened? He said, I always smoke before the thing crests, you know, but I realized, I can just be with these sensations. Basically, you know, to summarize what he said, I can be with these sensations. I don't have to smoke. And of course his head did not explode. So that's urge surfing in a nutshell. And we can do this with.

cravings for food, we can do this with cravings for substances or behaviors, right? The new hyper palatable experience or hyper processed experience that we have is social media, right? So tons of people are addicted to their phones now. People can urge surf when they have an urge to check their phone when they're distressed. You know, I wrote a sub stack on distress tolerance and how these phones are weapons of mass distraction as Cornel West puts it.

Jud Brewer (41:34.848)

So the good news there is, you know, that's about being with our experience and relating to it differently. And that's really what the third gear is all about. You know, I call it finding the bigger, better offer. And the idea is if we're feeling anxious, right, we can see, I'm starting to worry. That's the first gear. And then we ask, what do I get from worrying? Nothing, right? We become disenchanted with the worrying. And then we can shift into third gear and we flip that.

no, of worrying to, what does this feel like in my body? And we start using curiosity as a superpower. And that's what really gives us that surfboard to be able to ride that wave of, you know, that urge, whether it's a difficult emotion, anxiety, or an urge to eat something, you know, or anything, or to check our phones or whatever.

Tim Doyle (42:29.772)

Yeah, you say each time we reach out for something to soothe ourselves, we reinforce the learning to the point of where it becomes automatic and habitual. This is how we end up in anxiety. So to bring even more language into it, seems like to understand anxiety, we also need to understand what soothing means. What's the relationship there between the two?

Jud Brewer (42:50.734)

You

Yes, so with negative reinforcement, if something is unpleasant like anxiety, our brains are wired to say, I got to get away from this as quickly as possible. So for example, we can soothe ourselves by eating food, right? That's why it's called stress eating. Or we can distract ourselves by going on social media or checking our newsfeed or whatever. And those, those temporary

fixes and I say that they're temporary because they distract us from the underlying fielding of anxiety yet, they don't solve the underlying issue itself. so soothing can come in the form of distraction. It can come in the form of some type of a behavior. Those tend to be the main flavors that I see.

Tim Doyle (43:48.75)

Yeah, obviously we want to replace bad habits with good habits, like, AKA replace one thing with something else. But like going to that curiosity component, like I feel like what can really help people is like sometimes the replacement is just nothing. Like, like, let me just let me just be like, let me just be in this state of nothingness rather than like trying to reach for something. What are your thoughts on that?

Jud Brewer (44:16.386)

Yeah, you highlight something really important because we often, and with anxiety, there's this huge urge to do something, right? this is so unpleasant. Do something. And the doing can become a habit itself. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to go clean my house. I'm going to distract myself, whatever. The key piece here is that being becomes the new doing. And what I mean by that is we're learning to be with our experience, to relate to it differently.

so that we no longer need to run from it or soothe ourselves, but we can learn to develop these critical skills of distress tolerance. I love the phrase, the only way out is through. And so instead of running away from our anxiety by distracting ourselves or soothing ourselves, paradoxically run toward it so that we can learn to be with it. And at the same time, we learn how much better it feels

to be curious about something rather than worry or run away from.

Tim Doyle (45:21.508)

Breaking bad habits and building good habits. Is that a simultaneous process? that happening at the same time? that two sides of the same coin? Is that a two-step process or is that happening all at the same time?

Jud Brewer (45:39.682)

Well, it depends on what they are. So for example, if they can be two sides of the same coin, if the good habit is simply not doing the bad habit. if we worry less, if we stress eat less, if we doom scroll less, yes. And we can also look to see, so the process is the same for developing good habits as it is with breaking bad habits. So if you take that second gear and you're asking,

Tim Doyle (45:51.054)

Yeah.

Jud Brewer (46:09.442)

what am I getting from this? If it's a bad habit and we see that it's unrewarding, we become disenchanted. On the flip side, if it's a good habit and we see how rewarding it is, we become more enchanted with it. So here we can use the same process to start moving from these unhelpful habits to the helpful ones. And the helpful ones can be as simple as being curious. Or if we're in the habit of judging ourselves, we see how unhelpful that is.

And then we compare that to being kind to ourselves and let our brains really see clearly that, kindness feels better than judging ourselves. So we're going to naturally flip to that. And in that sense, you could say, well, maybe two sides of the same coin, maybe, you know, different habits. doesn't really matter. The thing that matters the most is that we're seeing the reward value, right? That's the key for change is that question. What am I getting from this?

Tim Doyle (47:06.148)

going to building those habits, but then I guess also tying it back into being in this state of nothing or the being is the doing something that I find really fascinating about you. Do you still do any of yourself meditation retreats?

Jud Brewer (47:24.505)

yeah.

Tim Doyle (47:25.796)

How often do you do those?

Jud Brewer (47:28.322)

Well, I used to do month long retreats early in my career. I don't have that luxury anymore. but I, yeah, I mean, I started at retreat centers, you know, doing week long couple of weeks and then started doing self retreat. It's hard. Like that was the hardest part, you know, cause it's like, you've got to be with yourself, you know, you've, you've got to show up for yourself. And so I learned a ton from doing those. did that for a number of years.

Tim Doyle (47:34.99)

Just by yourself, you would do those month long.

Jud Brewer (47:57.686)

And now the retreats, know, I basically, whenever I can, I've typically done them yearly and they're different. They take different forms. Yet I'll also say, you know, it's a very privileged to be able to do stuff like that. It's really about the every day, you know, it's meditating every day and also bringing that curiosity into every moment. Right. So every moment becomes a micro retreat where it's an opportunity to be with myself.

an opportunity to learn and practice being with my experience and also learning from

Tim Doyle (48:33.858)

We've laid out, feel like a lot of binary relationships so far, like willpower versus being more mindful and curious, anxiety versus soothing, something versus nothing, writing and verbalizing. And I think the biggest duality I took away from your work, and it's not something that is...

It seems like a major framework from your book, but it really stood out to me as this relationship between why and how. And I feel like within our culture today, especially within, you know, when you think about like therapy talk or just like personal development, it's like, feel like we've become so obsessed and consumed with the why of, you know,

Why am I the way that I am? You know, why do I feel this way? Why are these these things that I'm struggling with and we feel like Like I need the answers like if I don't get the answers that I'm not doing the work that I need to be doing and you just stay Stuck within that one lane and you're like you you're like, okay, I need to dig I need to dig well, it's like well maybe you're just digging yourself into a hole that you don't need to be in and like

Tim Doyle (49:58.164)

there's this metaphorical weight that we that we are like putting on ourselves that doesn't need to be there. And like how we get rid of that weight is like, okay, you can just free yourself by focusing on the how of like, okay, maybe I don't need the answers, but okay, how am going to get better? Like, how can I get past this? How do you see that whole relationship between why and how and just like focusing on the how is what like you can really

Jud Brewer (50:13.922)

Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Doyle (50:25.208)

Just like that is what's going to allow you to heal yourself and evolve.

Jud Brewer (50:29.186)

Yeah, you're highlighting a critical, critical point. So there's this, you've probably heard this, the joke is, you know, if you're digging yourself into the hole, rule number one is to stop digging. You know, the first thing to do is stop digging. And so with the why, I see this so much that we developed a specific lesson in our going beyond anxiety program called the why trap. And the idea is we've been, I don't know,

let's say, psychologized into thinking if we can just figure it out, it's, why was this, how did I do this? You know, why was it, you know, was my parents, my childhood, whatever, you know, why do I do this? Because it gives us an object to focus on the think that if we can just figure it out, we can solve it. Well, there's a saying attributed to Einstein. probably didn't say it. We can't solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it.

And so if we try to figure out why we're anxious, we're asking the wrong question. And in fact, it drives these self referential processes. know, Ethan Cross wrote a book called chatter where these can actually be worse for us to talk about ourselves more. And then you get your therapist involved and then you're co-cogitating where it becomes this, you know, this co-rumination. And in fact, one

one consistent finding in neuroimaging is that when people ruminate and when they worry, they activate these self-referential networks. And in fact, our lab found that those networks quiet down with meditation. even doing, we just finished up a study which might even suggest that with specific practices that people can deactivate that default mode network, that self-referential network with people who are very anxious. And so

you know, the why actually may get us, keep us stuck and literally digging, you know, I don't want to say digging your own grave, but digging that hole deeper and deeper and deeper. So that's really critical to notice so that we can stop digging. And then we can also learn that we can climb out of the hole by asking the different question, you know, the how, how am I relating to my experience? And that how brings in the curiosity where we can

Jud Brewer (52:55.608)

check to see are we resisting, we running away, or are we running toward our experience? And that running toward is analogous to putting down that shovel and climbing out of the hole.

Tim Doyle (53:07.342)

Judd, I think that's a fantastic place to stop because I think that's the most important thing. And like I said, that breakdown between why and how, that's something that I didn't realize where I had the epiphany because of your work. So I really appreciate that. Judd, where can people go to learn more about you? Anything else you'd like to plug?

Jud Brewer (53:24.034)

Great to hear.

Jud Brewer (53:31.566)

They can go to our going beyond anxiety calm if they want to learn about the clinical program that I've been talking about in terms of Helping anybody with anxiety. It's just going yeah going behind anxiety calm. I also write a sub stack It's Judd Brewer at judbrewer.substack.com and also a website with a bunch of free resources and Access to my books. It's just dr. Judd calm

Tim Doyle (53:59.426)

Awesome Judd, great talking with you today.

Jud Brewer (54:01.71)

Thank you.