Anxiety Is a Habit — Here's How to Break It

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It makes checkout incredibly easy, which means fewer abandoned carts and more completed sales. It's time to turn those "what is" into reality with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial the day at shopify.com/mammeliness. That's shopify.com/mammeliness. [Music] Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now you may think of anxiety as a reaction, a feeling, or a disorder. My guest day says that perhaps the best way to think about anxiety, especially if you want to treat it effectively, is as a habit. His name is Dr. Judson Brewer. He's a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist in the author of "On Winding Exitity." New science shows how to break the cycles of worry and fear to heal your mind. Dr. Judson, I begin our conversation with what anxiety is and how it gets connected into a habit loop that can lead to other maladaptive behaviors like drinking, overeating, and worrying. Dr. Judd then explains how to hack the anxiety habit loop by mapping it out, disenchanting your anxiety-driven behaviors and giving your brain a bigger, better offer by getting curious about your anxiety. We also talk about why asking why you're anxious is not part of this process, and in our conversation with how this habit-based approach to behavior change can also work for things like depression and anger. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awm.is/anxietyhabit. Judson Brewer, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. You are a psychiatrist that specializes in anxiety, addiction, eating disorders, and you got a new book out, "On Winding Exitity," how did you end up specializing in anxiety and addiction disorders as a psychiatrist? Well, my own anxiety. It was kind of serendipitous, so I used to get panic attacks during when I was in residency. I actually got anxiety trying to help my own patience with anxiety. I say that because with the best medications out there, it takes about, for every five patients, only one of them shows a significant reduction in symptoms. There's this term called number needed to treat, which is basically what that means. I'm playing the medication lottery. I don't know which of the next five patients I'm going to treat is going to benefit, and also I don't know what to do with the other four. Serendipitously, I was doing a lot of research. I'm just really interested in addictions. It's a tough field to work in, and I'd like challenges. So I've been doing a lot of research with addictions and habit change, and we'd gotten some good results with, you know, we'd developed a program for smoking cessation. We got in five times the quid rates of gold syndrome treatment, so that was nice. And we developed this eating program called Eat Right Now that we had developed through an app. So we could deliver it as a digital therapeutic. And somebody in that program said, "Hey, you know, it looks like anxiety is driving my eating habits. Could you create a program for anxiety?" And I was thinking, "Well, I generally prescribe medications for this, but it put a bug in my ear, and I went back and looked at the literature." And it turns out way back in the 1980s, people had been talking about anxiety being driven like other habits. And when I saw that connection, I was thinking, "Well, you know, I know how to work with habits. That's my research." I never thought about anxiety that way. So I developed a program called, you know, that we called it unwinding anxiety, and we delivered it through an app so that we could measure it and study it. And we got a 67% reduction in clinically validated anxiety scores. And just to put that in the context, the number needed to treat, you know, for medications was 5.2, you know, 1 in 5. And for this study, it was 1.6. So much, you know, much better effect than I had seen with medications. Well, so I want to go back to this idea of anxiety being a habit because that's the big thrust of your book is looking at anxiety as a habit that you have. But before we do, what is anxiety exactly? Because we see this word thrown around a lot, people, you know, even here like kids like, "I'm anxious." So as a clinician, how do you define anxiety? Yeah, one of the definitions that I like is that it's a feeling of nervousness or unease about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. So it's this feeling that comes up. And I summarize it as fear of the future, you know, because we start to worry about something in the future, not something that's happening right now. Gotcha. And so is anxiety the same as, is it synonymous to fear? Is it the same as worrying? I think those are words we throw in interchangeably with anxiety. Yes. So I think of anxiety as a feeling in the body. Okay. And worrying is a mental behavior. So those two are very, very closely linked. Whereas fear is fear, you know, fear is different. So that feeling of nervousness, that feeling of unease can lead to the mental behavior of worrying, which then feeds back and drives more anxiety. That's how these two can get connected in a loop. You know, to form any habit, you need three elements, a trigger, a behavior, and a result. And from a neuroscience perspective, that result has to be rewarding in some way. So the feeling of anxiety can then trigger the mental behavior of worrying. And that mental behavior of worrying gives us the reward of feeling like we're in control, or at least that we're doing something, which feels better than doing nothing. And then that feeds back so that the next time we feel anxious, our brain says, oh, last time you worried, you should do that again. Okay. So that's how anxiety is a habit. You have the trigger, the anxiety, the feeling of anxiety, the behavior is the worrying or thinking about stuff, ruminating, and then the reward is, well, I feel like I'm doing something even though you're actually not. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. We are doing something for, you know, to be clear, we're worrying. But are we doing something that's helping the situation? Not so much. So what causes the anxiety in the first place? That feeling, you have, is it just depends on the person? Yes. And it could be anything. You know, often we get stuck in these more habit loops of trying to figure out why we're anxious. That's just a dead end. So sometimes it just comes on for people with generalized anxiety disorder, for example, that can come on early in the morning and go all day. Okay. So that's when it becomes like you're, you're just have a general anxiety about pretty much everything. Some people you might be anxious about your job. For example, and that's it, whenever you're not working, you're okay. But a person with generalized anxiety disorder, like they're going to be worried about pretty much everything throughout the day. Yes. And it could just be that they're worried. It's, there might not even be anything that they have to be worried about. They're just worried. And in fact, I've had patients who've worried so much in their lives that it's been such a habit. As they start to worry less and have moments where they're not worrying, they start to worry that they're not worried because they feel like there's something wrong that they're not worrying. Based on your work with patients and your research, why does it seem like there's an uptick in anxiety amongst Americans and Westerners in general? Like what's going on? That's encouraging more people to get on this anxious habit loop. Yes. And I would say this is worldwide. And it really, you know, the pandemic was a great, well, I should say unfortunate, but amazing natural experiment in anxiety. So the hypothesis is that our brains don't like uncertainty. Uncertainty prompts us into action to get information, to try to reduce that uncertainty. So we've had waves and the waves of uncertainty over the last couple of years where, you know, anybody can think of a gazillion different things, whether it's, you know, how dangerous the original coronavirus or the COVID-19 was to, you know, economics to schools to whatnot. Anytime there's a new wave of uncertainty, our brains start to, well, they're supposed to be thinking and planning. But if there isn't accurate information, our thinking and planning brains spin out into fear and dread where they worry about this or that, or this or that, or this or that. So, you know, we've seen that come into play where anxiety levels have spikes. They've stayed pretty high because there's pretty constant uncertainty, a lot more uncertainty than there has been in the past. And we're also, as a world, getting more in the habit of worrying. And you also make this point that the digital world that we live in through our devices also contribute to this anxiety habit loop. How so? So, information is like food for our brain, it helps us survive, it helps us think in plan. So if there's uncertainty, if we get information, that uncertainty reduces. If you think of our ancient ancestors, if they saw a saber-toothed tiger, they knew that was accurate information they could run away and survive. In modern day, not only do we have a deluge of information, thanks to the internet, we can get more information than we could ever digest, but we also have layered on top of that misinformation where people are inadvertently saying things that are going to accurate and then disinformation where people are overtly, we're on purpose, they are saying things that are not true. And we have to sort through all of that. Suddenly we have to become an expert in every one of these fields to really try to figure out whether what somebody is saying or posting online is true. And that in itself adds to those layers of uncertainty and all of that builds anxiety. All right, so let's go back to this idea of anxiety as a habit. We talked about the general habit loop, so there's the trigger, it's a feeling of anxiety, it can be caused by anything, it just depends on the person, but particularly it's uncertainty about something. Typically, the action when we experience anxiety is worrying, we start thinking about our what's going on. And then the reward is, oh, it feels like we're doing something, we are doing something. So we just keep doing that anxiety habit loop. Besides worrying, are there other actions you find that people take whenever they experience the trigger of anxiety? Yes, I see a number of generally unhelpful coping mechanisms. And I see this in my clinic and I see this in everyday life where anxiety triggers us to do something because it feels unpleasant. So our brains try to do something to make it go away. And that could be anything from distracting ourselves by going on the social media feeds. We could be drinking alcohol, eating food. So I see a lot of this, I've even seen it, you know, where they call it the COVID-20, you know, where somebody's gained 20 pounds during COVID because they're anxious and they are working from home and they go to their refrigerator and they eat. So with other ways besides worrying, it could be eating, shopping online, surfing the internet, smoking, anything that just soothes the anxiety is going to be a potential action you take because you experience that anxiety. Yes, yes. And we get that brief relief whether it's drinking alcohol or doing any of these other things. And that brief relief feeds back and says, oh, next time you're anxious, you should do this again. Okay, so knowing that anxiety is the trigger for worrying or drinking or surfing the web or whatever, I can see someone getting the idea that, okay, you can change the anxiety habit loop just the way you change any other habit loop, you know, by substituting the behavior of worrying for something more adaptive, you know, or something that will give you more positive results. So, you know, someone might think, when I experience anxiety instead of doing my typical response of worrying, I'll just replace worrying with, you know, something like, I'm going to do 10 pushups instead. But you make the case that hacking the habit loop like that for anxiety doesn't work. Why is that? And what do you recommend doing instead? Yeah, there, so it makes sense, you know, 10 pushups, but you could, you know, if you're anxious, you could suddenly become pretty strong because you're doing a bunch of pushups. The, so the problem there is that 10 pushups don't actually fix the root cause of the anxiety. And often we don't know what the root cause of the anxiety is. And so if we try to go to some substitution behavior, some distraction behavior, we just have to do it more and more and more. So if it's, let's use the 10 pushups as an example, somebody might be anxious, they do 10 pushups, they don't actually feel less anxious, you're by that much. So they do 10 more and, you know, suddenly they just can't do any more pushups, but they're still anxious. So here it's helpful to really go to the root cause and really understand how any habits formed, anxiety or otherwise. And then really tap into that system. Once you can, you can really work with it, you know, it's kind of like understanding how your mind works is the first step in working with your mind and with anxiety that's absolutely true. And so yeah, you say the first step in getting a handle on your anxiety, unwinding anxiety is you call map out your anxiety habit loops. Yes. And that's as simple as you know, just finding what the trigger is, what the behavior is and what the result is. So the trigger typically is the feeling of anxiety that's pretty straightforward. The behavior is that worrying, that's one of the typical ones, but we've named some of the others as well. We might eat some food during Calcaw's moccasigaric on the internet, procrastinate or whatever. And then map out what the result is. You know, is it an avoidance behavior? Do I feel a little bit better because I'm avoiding it? Do I feel like I've been controlled because I'm worrying or whatever the result is? And once we can map those three things out, that gives, starts to give us a picture of what our mind is doing. And that mapping process is really critical as that critical first step for working with the behavior. And you, you, you, Hylah, you give some case studies of patients you've worked with. We're just doing this mapping process that goes a long way. They suddenly, like it decreases their anxiety, not significantly, some, for some people significantly. What is it about mapping out your anxiety, habit, lose, that can immediately, before you even start doing anything, decrease anxiety, what's going on there, you think? Well, let's go back to the uncertainty and our brains don't like uncertainty. And if we don't know, you know, if our brain is like a black box, suddenly if you, you know, or it's like a dark room, you don't know what's in there and you go in there, what could it be? And you flip on the light switch and you're like, oh, this is what's in the room. Yeah, I'll give a concrete example. I had a patient who came in, who's referred for anxiety. He had, he described how when he was in a car, he would have this, these thoughts, like you might get in an accident. He would have panic attacks and avoid driving on the highway. And so I just map this out with him, you know, like, okay, what's the trigger of these thoughts? What's the behavior, avoiding driving on the highway? That's the result. You can avoid having panic attacks. And then I just drew arrows between those three. And importantly, so that first arrow from the trigger to the behavior, that second arrow from the behavior to the not having panic attacks. And then the third arrow, not having panic attacks feeds back to those thoughts. So the next time he has a thought, he says, I can't drive. And then suddenly, you know, he's really limiting himself and having, you know, meeting all the criteria for panic disorder. Just seeing that, I pulled literally pulled out a piece of paper. Or mapped it out with him for 30 seconds after taking his history. And I could see the light bulb go off in his head because he just didn't know how that process worked. As simple as it is, most of us just don't see these things. And so that reduces the uncertainty because he can see how his brain works. And I can explain to him, well, this is a normal process. Your brain is, you know, adopting this old system that helps you survive. It's just ironically making you more anxious. And that in itself can reduce the anxiety because the uncertainty is lowered. And one thing to keep in mind when you're mapping out these habit loops, you're trying to, you're supposed to take like a mindful approach to it. You're not supposed to beat yourself up. Like, man, why am I such a dummy that I have this dumb anxiety habit loop? You're just supposed to be as objective and distance from it as possible so you can get a grasp on it. Because if you do that, beat yourself up. You're just putting yourself in another anxiety habit loop. Yes, absolutely. That self-judgmental habit loop. And then that habit loop distracts us from working with the original habit loop as well. So yes, this is about, I think of it as approaching it like a scientist or a physician or a lawyer or somebody that's just trying to get the facts, you know, so they can really understand what's happening. We're going to take a quick break for you, Wordsmore sponsors. For today's episode comes from Square, the business platform that helps sellers become neighborhood favorites. 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All right, so the first part is you map out your habit loops. And this again requires you to be mindful throughout the day, kind of noticing things and then making observations. After that, the next step is to update your brain's reward value. And this involves, I like how this word used the word disenchant. You want to disenchant your anxious actions. What do you mean by that? So this really is what gets to the heart of how our brains learn. And our brains are set up to be as efficient as possible. And we set up habits as a way to learn how rewarding a certain behavior is and then forget about the details. I think of it as set and forget. So you set the reward value and you forget about the details. What would be it? So a concrete example would be food. Our brains are set up to try to maximize calorie intake because back in the day, our ancestors didn't have refrigerators. And so when you got a good calorie source, the idea was to pack them in. So we prefer cake to broccoli because our brains are set up to say, hey, cake has more calories. So we set that as a habit loop. And we don't have to relearn the reward value of cake every time we eat cake. We don't have to say, my wonder if that's any good. We just look at it and we're like, cake, let's eat it. So that reward value system is set up for every behavior that we do where we'll prefer one behavior to another. We set the behavior as a habit. And we don't change it until we update that reward value. And the only way to update the reward value is to pay attention is to bring awareness in. The concrete example would be if a new bakery opens up in my neighborhood. And I don't know how good the cake is there. I go in there, I eat some cake. And if it's the best cake ever, I get what's called a positive prediction error where it's better than expected. I learn, okay, go back there for cake. If I eat it, it's crappy. My brain says, yeah, don't bother. And I get this negative prediction error, which says it's worse than predicted. So don't go back there. So I learn, right? That's how the learning process happens. We can apply that process to any behavior so that we can update the reward value to how rewarding it is right now. So if I learned the raw value of cake when I was five, and I'm just mindlessly eating cake when I'm 45, that's probably not so helpful. If I pay attention and I notice, oh, when I just eat a ton of cake, I get a sugar rush and I crash and I gain weight and I get cavities and I get diabetes, I can start to see. That's actually not that rewarding. And in fact, my lab, we did a study, we have this app called E right now that helps people pay attention as they overeat. It only takes about 10 or 15 times of somebody really paying attention as they overeat for that reward value to drop below zero where they start to shift their behavior. So we can do the same thing with worrying. And I have people ask a simple question. As they're worrying, I ask them to ask themselves, what am I getting from this and feel into their direct experience? What people typically report is that worrying doesn't feel very good itself. It doesn't keep their family members safe or solve a problem or do whatever, you know, their brain thinks it's going to do beyond distracting them. And when they can start to see that really clearly, they start to become disenchanted with it. They're not as excited to do it. We see the same thing with my patients who want to quit smoking. I have them pay attention as they smoke and they start to realize, oh, it doesn't feel very good. I run a live group for anybody using our apps. And just today, I was running a group and a woman was talking about how she ate some tortilla chips with cheese on them for dinner, you know, and she air fried them. So, you know, better than deep frying, I guess. And we explored like, what did she get from that? She said, I had a stomach ache and I couldn't get to sleep until three in the morning. And I said, well, what does it feel like now if I put some of those chips in front of you, would you eat them? What would be your likelihood? She said zero. They're just, you know, it's disgusting. So there's a great example of becoming disenchanted with our behavior simply by paying attention to the results of, you know, to the results, what it gives us when we do it. Does that make sense? No, that makes perfect sense. In fact, I applied this to social media. You just like, notice like, you keep going there and you open up Instagram and you kind of scroll through. And then you just, you have to sit and think like, I don't feel good doing this. I'm not getting anything out of this. And then it just, it's amazing. It extinguishes like any desire to open it up. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's like disenchantment. Yeah. And so the question you asked is like, what am I getting out of this? And usually the answer is not a whole lot. In fact, that makes me feel terrible. And if that's the answer, then you just stop doing that. Whenever you experience anxiety. Yes. And I wouldn't say, so often people think, oh, just stop doing that. You know, that's right. Right. I would say, wait, if I could just, you know, I'd have one visit with every patient where they come in and they say, I want to stop social media. And I would, you know, dub them. I'd say, stop doing that. And they would just leave and stop doing it. So the critical piece here is that the reflection on the previous action helps us load that reward value into our brain. So we can ask ourselves, do I really want to do this again? And we can feel into the experience of last time. And like you described with social media, we're like, this doesn't feel so good. And so we naturally are disenchanted so that we're not pulled to do it again without having to force ourselves not to do it again. Right. There's no, yeah, that's what I like about. There's no force or gritting your teeth with this approach. No, not at all. Okay. So after you disenchanted the maladaptive behavior, whether it's worrying or eating or smoking whatever, the third part is creating what you call a bigger, better offer for your brain. Yes. So this is an homage to myself and all of us that back in high school when we had a date set up for Friday night and then Friday afternoon our dates let's us know that their parents are requiring them to power wash the car or something that's ridiculous and clushed their hair. Yes. Yeah. Where clearly somebody else called them and wanted to go out on a date and that person was the bigger, better offer. So I think of it this way because that's how our brains work. Our brains are given a choice between A and B. They're going to pick the one that's more rewarding. So if we become disenchanted with these old behaviors, why not give our brains something better to do and not in the case of, you know, if you're anxious, just go scroll on social media or drink alcohol because we can start to see that those things aren't that rewarding themselves and don't fix the root problem. But instead, we can tap into things that are intrinsically rewarding. So if we're anxious, we can get curious about what that anxiety feels like instead of worrying. And we can even compare those two. Like, well, you tell me, what feels better being curious or worrying about something? Being curious, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a no-brainer. To our brains, of course, curiosity feels better. And here, we can actually get at the root cause of the issue. So again, anxiety pops up often out of the blue. It doesn't matter what caused it. But what the problem there is is that we feed it by worrying or pushing it away. And so instead of pushing it away, this phrase, the only way out is through comes to mind. You might have heard that before. The only way out is through. So instead of running away from the anxiety or distracting ourselves or worrying about it, what if instead we turn toward it? And what helps us turn toward anxiety is curiosity. I love this quote from James Stevens, who said or wrote, "Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery well." So curiosity is like a superpower. And as we turn toward the feeling of anxiety, we can start to notice that it is simply sensations and thoughts and emotions in our body. It's not something that we have to run away from. And the more we turn toward it, the more we become familiar with it. And the more we can see, "Oh, these are sensations." They come and go, "I don't have to do anything about them. I can simply learn to be with them. And the curiosity helps me not only learn about them, but also be with them." And that's the healing process where we can learn to be. It's like the being is the new doing. So what this looks like, if you start experiencing anxiety, a curious approach, you'll be like, "Okay, where am I experiencing this? I'm feeling like a tightness in my chest. Is my pulse like you can check your Apple Watch and your heart rate is going? Is that what it would look like?" Yes, yes, really sticking with our direct experience. Not the concept or worrying about why am I anxious and trying to figure that out, really just dropping in and seeing what's going on. And then you had that section about using some little hacks, I guess you can call them, about widening your eyes to maybe encourage or know yourself and do curious, like what's going on there? Yes. So this again goes back to evolutionary neuroscience and psychology. There's some great experiments where people look at what do our eyes naturally do when we are, let's say, let's start with something different, like angry. So when we're angry, so just think of a time when you are angry and anybody listening in can do this themselves and see what your eyes naturally do. So would you say that your eyes narrow or do they widen when you're angry? Oh, they narrow, yeah. Yeah. Get that feeling too. Look in your eye. Yeah. Yeah, because anger is about focused behavior. It says, "I know what the problem is and I'm going to do something about it." So we're literally narrowed in on the quote-unquote problem and we are laser focused on doing something about it. With curiosity, well, what do your eyes do when you're curious? Do they narrow or do they widen? Typically you get narrow. Yeah, they say widen. But then if I'm getting focused on, I'd probably narrow my eyes. Yeah. So again, when we're trying to gather more information, so both with curiosity and interestingly, also with fear, which makes sense, our eyes get really wide because they have to take in information. And so here, if we aren't curious, we can simply use this trick. It's called somatic memory. So somatic memory basically just means that our bodies will hold certain postures or positions or feelings that are associated with emotion. So for anxious, for example, my shoulders tend to be more contracted or hunched or closed in than when I'm not anxious. So if we're not curious, we can simply open our eyes really wide and see if that can help induce the feeling of curiosity itself. That's kind of why it's a hack because we simply open our eyes really wide. And anybody can do this right now. It's like, when you open your eyes really wide, does that actually help you become a little more curious in that moment? You also have to tell people to say, hmm, verbally say, I'm interested in that. And you might feel silly, but I did it. I was taking a walk the other day and I did it. I think it works. There's something to it. The thing I like about, hmm, I think of it as a curiosity mantra, is that it takes us out of our thinking brain and really into our feeling body because that's where all the action is. And so if we're anxious, for example, we can go, hmm, where am I anxious right now? Is it more on the right side or the left side of my body? And that can really open us to our experience. Another way that I like to play with this is, it's kind of like if we feel anxious and we start to worry, we go, oh no, I'm anxious, why am I anxious? I'm not going to be anxious all day. Is there anything that's going to fix that? And we can notice that. We can map out that habit, and then we can go, oh, here's anxiety. What does this feel like in my body? So instead of why am I anxious or how long is this going to last? And instead of, oh, we can go, oh, and that opens us to our experience so we can really drop in and feel what it feels like and step out of the worry habit loop. Okay. So just to recap, your first steps map out your habit, your anxiety habit loops that you have, this just requires to be mindful throughout the day, whenever you experience anxiety, pay attention to what you do and what the reward you get out of that. And then after that, the second step is to disenchant that anxiety behavior. So just think about, man, how do I feel when I do this thing? Usually the answer is not great. And so just doing that naturally, your body or your mind and your body, I guess you can say, would kind of extinguish that behavior because you're not getting any value out of it. And then the other part is offering a bigger, better offer to your brain through curiosity. That's it and not sounds. But I think it was interesting to point out, and you've mentioned this, but I really want to hit this home. In this process, you are never figuring out what is making you anxious or why are you anxious. And you say that actually it's, it's, it's, it's, you call it the Y-Trap. It's actually not very useful to sometimes or to figure out why you're anxious. Why is that? So as a card carrying, you know, Bord certified psychiatrist, this might sound heretical that we're not trying to go back to someone's childhood or figure out why they're anxious. And the reason for that is that here my neuroscience hat wins out. When I think about it, and I look at the equations that have to do with behavior change, none of them have to do with childhood or past experience. It's not that that experience isn't important or meaningful. It absolutely is, but that's not what changes behavior. And like you're pointing out, we can get stuck in these Y-habit loops trying to figure out why am I anxious thinking that, you know, suddenly if we figure out why we're anxious, it's going to fix it. Well, that Y is generally in the past. So it certainly can be insightful. It can reduce uncertainty. But it's not going to fix the habit itself. This is why I, this is why I focus on the what? Like what's happening and what am I getting from being stuck in this loop? And also, even if you do figure out what's causing the anxiety, you might not be able to do anything about it. Maybe something at your job, right? That just, and no matter what you do, you cannot get rid of that thing that triggers the anxiety. So this approach is, okay, well, what can I change? What can I focus? Like, change my behavior by discounting or disenchanting that maladaptive behavior and have a different approach to it? Absolutely. You know, this is, I think of the serenity prayer. It's like, let me, you know, accept things that I can't change and have the strength or courage to change that wish I can. If we can see very clearly what we can't change, we can stop banging our head against that wall. So that that brings up the energy to look for the doors and sometimes, you know, we do need to find the door. Like, wow, this job really isn't a good fit for me. And we can walk out it as compared to being too exhausted to even notice. So you mentioned some other issues that, you know, hacking the anxiety loop or unwinding anxiety, addiction, overeating, smoking, it works for this. Does it work for other things like depression? There's a lot of good evidence showing programs like Mindfulness Space Cognitive Therapy can really highlight is that this habit loop, you know, whether I think of worry and anxiety as, you know, future oriented habits, the story of me and the future worrying and trying to protect myself against the future or what might happen in the future. Depression is more about beating ourselves up over what happened in the past. And so when we ruminate, we can get stuck in those habit loops around, you know, this is terrible. I'm terrible. The world's terrible or whatever. And bringing awareness to this and using these same processes can really help us not reinforce those habits. And, you know, these programs have been shown to be really, really helpful for depression. Yeah, there's another, another, a richero-conner, it's a psychologist, you wrote a book undoing depression. And he kind of makes the case that you do with anxiety that depression is just a series of habits. that you have and you have to undo those habits. - Certainly, and I think that's part of depression. It's often not the whole thing. Certainly for some people, there's a really strong biological component where they just, you know, they're too exhausted. Let's put it that way that the term may not be perfect, but they're just, you know, they have such low energy that they can't even think. Like thinking feels like they're going through sludge or through some bog. And so here, you know, it certainly can help with the thinking elements, but it's not necessarily, you know, I just want to emphasize how it can be very helpful for some people where some medications can be really helpful for those biological components. - As we were talking, and another problem I can see this habit approach could help is anger. Anger's a habit, right? You have this trigger and then your typical response is I'm going to get all angry, then the reward is, well, I feel like I did something, but then you sit and notice like, how do I feel when I'm angry, not really good? And so you sort of disenchanting that anger response? - Yes, and I think here, and I've certainly, this has been helpful for me, and I'm so familiar with my own frustration in anger, is looking at how we're directing our energy. So anger can feel empowering, you know, can often make us feel like we're self-righteous. Like I'm doing, you know, I'm doing this for the right reasons or whatever I'm getting angry, I'm doing something. But we have to look to see what our anger is getting us. And is it the most skillful or helpful way to change something, if there's some injustice in the world, is getting angry, gonna be the best way to solve that problem, or is it just gonna make other people push back and make it harder to solve a problem that's gonna be an inefficient use of our energy? So here, even for myself, I ask myself, when am I getting from the anger? And that opens up the space when I become disenchanted with it. It opens the space and frees up the energy to ask, "Well, is there another way to go about changing things?" - Well, Juts, and this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? - I have a website, Dr.Jud, drjududud. That has a bunch of free resources, links to my books, to the apps that we talked about, and other various and sundry things. - Fantastic. - It's been my pleasure, thanks for the time, it's been a pleasure. - It's been my pleasure, thank you. - Well, I guess there is Dr.Judson Brewer. He's the author of Unwinding Anxiety. It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, drjudud.com. Also check out our [email protected]/anxietyhabit. Refinelinks to resources, re-delt deeper into this topic. (upbeat music) Well, that wraps up another edition of the A-Wim podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanlinks.com where you can find our podcast archives, well, thousands of articles, we know there's about, pretty much anything you think of. And if you'd like to enjoy ad free episodes of the A-Wim podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. 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