186: Stuck in Overthinking? A Simple Practice to Interrupt Stress, Overwhelm, and Habit Loops

One of the things I've been thinking about lately is how many stories we don't know about the people we love most. Just last night I was talking with my aunt and uncle about their family history, the legacy of family of which I'm apart, tiny details from their stories that absolutely shocked me and it made me realize how many stories are still tucked away waiting to be told and I don't want to lose any of them. And that's why I recommend story worth memoirs for your loved ones this holiday season. It's a gift they'll love, they won't see it coming but it's something that will make them feel truly special and honestly it becomes a gift for you too and for everyone in the family. Here's how it works. Each week story worth emails you're loved when a memory provoking question that you get to choose. Questions like what were your favorite toys as a child or what are you most proud of? All they have to do is reply with a story. They can write it over email or even record it over the phone. No apps, no passwords, perfect for the least tech savvy relatives. Here a year story worth compiles these stories and photos into a beautiful keepsake hardcover book. Get something your family will revisit for generations. I've used this and I've found the whole experience incredibly meaningful. Give your loved ones a unique keepsake you'll all cherish for years story worth memoirs. Right now save $10 or more during their holiday sale when you go to story worth dot com slash best of you. It's story worth dot com slash best of you to save $10 or more on your order. Anxiety is probably an evolutionary bottleneck in this respect because it pulls together fear and planning. The more we worry the less we're actually able to plan, we can get stuck in these habit lives of distraction where we're not learning to be with our unpleasant experiences. And if we're constantly running away from it, we're not going to know how to deal with things that are uncomfortable in the future. When we get out of our own way, when it's not about us, when it's about something much bigger than us, suddenly we've got all the strength in the world. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. The holidays are full of traditions, some we love and some we quietly outgrow. Lately I've been thinking about the ones I love and the ones I might want to rewrite. All things like creating a new ritual with my family or choosing one moment each day just to do something sacred for my own soul. And honestly, therapy has become part of that for me. It's a way to make sure I'm taking care of myself during a season that is so often joyful but can also be stressful, chaotic and even lonely. If you're thinking about starting therapy, consider BetterHelp. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P their therapists are fully licensed in the U.S. and follow a strict code of ethics they make. Getting started? Simple. You fill out a short questionnaire which helps match you with someone who fits your needs and if the match isn't right, you can switch anytime. With over 30,000 therapists and more than 5 million people serve, the platform has an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 from over 1.7 million session reviews. This December start a new tradition by taking care of you. Our listeners get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/BestOfU. Hey everyone and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You. As we are heading into this Christmas season, so many of us brace ourselves not just for the busyness, but also for the emotional undercurrents that show up around family, expectations, the pressure to feel joy when maybe we are not feeling so joyful and not to mention the constant stream of hard news in the world. It's a time when our nervous systems can run hot. Our minds can spend fast and those familiar triggers conflaren in those moments. We often reach for whatever helps us cope. It could be doom scrolling, stress eating, that extra glass of wine, small attempts to sue the nervous system that's overwhelmed and searching for steady ground. And today, we're talking about something that I love. It's just such a life changing topic, a lifeline for so many of us navigating these kinds of moments. It's mindfulness. Research consistently shows that mindfulness can reduce anxiety and prove emotional regulation and interrupt those unhealthy habit loops by strengthening your capacity for awareness and self control. This is a powerful, powerful tool. But before we get started, I want to name something upfront, especially for those of you who have been tuning into the podcast these past few years. For some of us, the word mindfulness can carry some baggage. For some of you, it might feel too self focused or too secular or even at odds with Christian prayer. And we touch on this at the end of the episode in a beautiful way. But I know that for some of you, it can bring up images of emptying your mind or practices you've been told to avoid. And I want to begin this episode by reframing what mindfulness actually is and what it isn't, because it's so much more compatible with Christian prayer and forms of spiritual practices than many people realize. Mindfulness at its core is simply the practice of paying attention. And without judgment, presence, without striving, awareness, without shame. That sounds a whole lot like what this journey of learning to walk with Jesus is all about. In the Christian tradition, prayer is always been about turning our attention, our awareness toward God being fully present to the one who is already present with us. And while mindfulness doesn't require a spiritual framework, Christians absolutely can and do practice mindfulness in a way that enhances our spiritual lives. In fact, countless believers throughout history of practice forms of mindful attention through silence and solitude, through breath prayer, through reflection and contemplative prayer. Where prayer tends to connect us to God, mindfulness helps us notice what's happening inside of us so we can bring that experience into an awareness of God. It helps us slow down enough to notice, where is my body tense? What emotion is surfacing? Which part of me feels threatened or overwhelmed? What is this moment stirring up inside of me? This awareness doesn't replace prayer, but it allows us to invite more of God's presence to be with us in whatever we're experiencing. It allows us to experience more of God's presence with us. And here's why today's conversation matters. We are living in a time of constant triggers, anxiety, overconsumption, stress-eating, doom scrolling, numbing behaviors, emotional spirals. The brain falls into habit loops when we're overwhelmed, and for many of us, those loops are rooted in fear, stress, or trying to self-sue the best way we know how. Mindfulness helps us interrupt those loops. It gives us tools to notice what's happening in real time instead of getting swept away by old patterns. It helps us learn to respond rather than react. And that's something every one of us needs right now. And that brings me to today's guest, Dr. Judd Brewer is one of the leading voices in the world of neuroscience of habit change. He's a psychiatrist, a researcher, and the author of several groundbreaking books on anxiety, craving addiction, and the power of mindful awareness, including his newest book, The Hunger Habit, which explores how we can use curiosity to understand our triggers and build healthier habits. What I love about Dr. Judd's work is that he makes something as profound as mindfulness incredibly practical. He breaks it down and helps us understand what's happening in the brain when we get hooked, whether it's by anxiety, or doom scrolling, or social media, or people pleasing. And he teaches us how small moments of awareness can actually help us change those habits. So today we're going to explore what mindfulness actually is. How it helps us approach these triggers, especially during stressful seasons, and why our brains get stuck in habit loops, and how curiosity and small shifts in attention can help us create lasting change. And lastly, we'll talk about how mindfulness can expand our practices of prayer, helping us to gain access to an even deeper sense of God's loving, powerful presence, right in the middle of our struggles. This is such a rich and beautiful and encouraging conversation, and I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Dr. Judd Brewer. Judd, I'm thrilled to have you on the podcast today. I'm just such a big fan of your work and all that you're doing to help us understand mindfulness. Can you help us understand, first off, right here at the start, what it is, and maybe what it isn't. Yeah, so let's start with what it isn't. It isn't a judgmental stance on life, you know. So it's really their two main components, awareness and curiosity. And I would also add that with the curiosity, there's an attitude of kindness. So this, this kind curiosity, if we could put it that way, that helps us meet whatever we're being aware of in a different way than what we often habitually do, which is judging our experience, whether it's judging ourselves, judging others, judging the world. And so does it not only apply to awareness of myself? Does it, can we also apply mindfulness to our awareness of others? Absolutely. Interesting. Gotcha. So it's different from maybe a sort of focus only on the inner life, although that's part of it. It's not. So for example, meditation, right, where you're just trying to, that, yeah, flush that out a little bit, because I think that's a misconception even I have. Absolutely. Well, often, you know, meditation is seen as, you know, the proverbial, naval gazing, however, it's seen, but really it's about bringing awareness and seeing relationality. So seeing our relationship with ourselves, which is internal, but also seeing our relationship with others and with the world, which is external, and I would even go as far as saying that's an artificial distinction between internal and external. It's really about being aware of everything in an ongoing flow. And it's, you know, to say internal and external, it can be helpful to make distinctions at times and it can also develop artificial dichotomies that can get in the way. Can you give me an example of even in a moment like right now, I'm aware we had some technology difficulties hopping on right, and I've learned over time to be present to what's happening and what's real versus flipping into self-shame or self-judgment. Can you give me, is that a, is there a form of mindfulness that speaks to even a moment like that, a moment right now, where I have some inner noise, and there's a way I can be kind toward what I'm noticing versus judging what I'm noticing. Yeah, absolutely. So let's say that something isn't going as planned. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And when something isn't going as planned, or we can get in the habit of judging ourselves, we can get in the habit of judging some piece of technological equipment. We can get in the habit of judging other people. We can bring awareness in and see how we are kind of going down those spirals of the judgment internal, external, whatever equipment. And we can also, so it helps us be able to recognize that and then also helps us be able to kind of meet that with this curious awareness. So for example, you know, if something isn't working like a technological glitch in a podcast, we can go a crap. And what we, when we do that, our mind, you know, whether it's judging ourselves, judging the experience, judging whatever, that kind of closes us down and puts us in this kind of constricted, contracted, frustrated mindset, which ironically makes it harder to step back and problem solve. And so there we can bring, flip that, oh, no, or a crap to, oh, okay, this piece of technology isn't working, what, how, you know, and it opens us to be able to see all the possibilities much more readily than if we were just locked into that, you know, must be that or must be that. That's really, that's really at the heart of it, is to, is to bring this playful curiosity, even when things aren't going well, you know, in one sense, this isn't helps people develop the essential skill of distressed tolerance, right? It's like something distressing is happening. How are we meeting that moment? I wrote a sub stack a little while ago about distressed tolerance because it was a little distressing to me over the years, watching how society is collectively getting trained to use their phones, Cornell West describes it as these weapons of mass distraction, right? And so all over the place, whether it's my students at Brown University or people on the streets or people in restaurants or just all over the place, people are just constantly, you know, they're captured, their attention is captured by their phones. And what what I'm seeing is that when something unpleasant is happening, so somebody has, it could be as simple as boredom that a student might have some boredom or a patient might feel anxious. And then this phone promises a distraction that makes that, you know, they can temporarily distract them from that unpleasant sensation or the emotion or the thought. And we can get stuck in these habit lives of distraction where we're not learning to be with our unpleasant experiences. So there, you know, there can be something that's uncomfortable and if we're constantly running away from it, we're not going to know how to deal with things that are uncomfortable in the future. We don't deal with them now, even if it's boredom, as a very minor example. So here, you know, I'm not seeing people learning to lean into difficulty. I'm seeing more and more that people are being trained to go, you know, be distracted by this shiny object, whether it's cute pictures of puppies on Instagram or whatever. When December hits and the pace finally slows, the moment I look forward to most is just cozying up and being present. And it always makes me think who on my list needs a gift that helps them relax and unwind a spouse, your parents, your best friend, or honestly, maybe you. Cozy Earthgifts feel less like products and more like an experience. Their bamboo sheets made from viscose from bamboo have become a staple in our home. They're unbelievably soft. They keep you cozy without overheating and they help you sleep several degrees cooler, which is perfect on winter nights. And their bubble cuddle blanket is the ultimate holiday gift. It has this beautiful textured bubble design with an ultra soft feel. 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How does that work in a social gathering where you're going to be, let's say for example at a family dinner or tough stuff in the news, a tough topic comes up or I guess these are two different things, but even news headlines themselves, how do we learn to stay mindful, stay present without just going into sort of that distract, avoidant, or even a fight flight response, because it strikes me that what you're describing is the opposite of a fight flight response. It's staying present. Yes, it is, well, yeah I would say it's the opposite. It's hard to say because fight flight is really so instinctual, the sense, it's a different time scale and so it's important just to be able to distinguish those. So if we put our hand on a hot stove, we're going to move that hand away before the signal even reaches our brain, it just arcs through our spinal cord. And when somebody has a fight flight response, they're going to be reacting faster than conscious awareness because we don't have time to sit back and process, you got to move literally. And after that, in the after effect of that, we can learn and that's really where mindfulness comes in, where we can start to first recognize how we are habitually reacting in life. So, let's use the holidays, you know, something might feel uncomfortable. And if our automatic reaction has been to, you know, turn away from the discomfort, one of my students, I was just a couple of days ago in a seminar that I teach at Brown, a student asked the question, what's the difference between discomfort and distress? Right? I think that that critical distinction comes up here where if something's uncomfortable. Right? There's this discomfort is our habitual reaction to turn away from that, to run away. Right? And that's where the, this is the first level of awareness can be helpful. And I'm going to use, I'm going to use the word curiosity here because mindfulness is a concept. Let's just get right at the, you know, so that people aren't confused or misinterpreted a concept. Let's just get right at the raw material here. So, the raw material is curiosity and so if we can notice that we are habitually reacting and we have a habit loop around turning away from discomfort, right? Because we don't know how to deal with distress, right? This is where the distress comes in when, when we can't handle discomfort, there's an eye in there. Yeah. If that makes sense. Yeah. It helps us recognize these habit loops and then helps us be able to differentiate the eye that, you know, versus the experience. So for example, I work a lot with patients with anxiety and I've had, I had one person come in and say, I feel like anxiety is deeply etched in my bones. That's how identified she was with her anxiety. And so, the idea here is to see that I'm a person who has feelings, thoughts, sensations of anxiety and just to be able to make that differentiation, help to distinguish between discomfort, I have discomfort versus distress where I am distressed, the difference between how distressed I am experiencing anxiety is different than I am an anxious person. So this is where, and I don't want to take a rabbit trail here, but I do want to run this past you because my listeners are very familiar with parts work because my background is in IFS. And it strikes me from what you're saying, there's some overlaps because IFS is teaching us to get curious about, for example, that anxiety as a part of me versus as something I'm overtaken by. So there is some overlaps with mindfulness, maybe even you might say IFS is a specific form of it. I'm not sure. They're not the same, but that's some overlap that I'm hearing there. Does that? Absolutely. For example, somebody could bring awareness in to recognize that part of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, which allows me then to tolerate the presence of it without being overtaken by it. I'm curious. I want to touch on, a lot of your work is focused on addiction, is that, is that right? Addiction and anxiety. Yeah. And what have you learned about, you talk about habits, right? What have you learned about these behaviors and why we get so hooked in the first place? Because it strikes me that the instinctive response is the, you know, kind of the first response. And then it's almost like you said, the mindfulness comes after when we can come back to, so why do we get so hooked in the first place? Yes. It's a great question. And it really boils down to these very strong evolutionary learning processes that were set up, were evolved to help us find food and remember where it is, and also avoid danger. So for example, you know, BF Skinner became known in the fifties for this concept of operating conditioning or positive and negative reinforcement. And if you think about those processes, they're very basic where, you know, the three elements are necessary and sufficient, where let's think of our ancient ancestors, you know, they see food in the woods or in the savannah. That's the trigger. The behavior is that they eat the food and then from a neuroscience standpoint, there's a reward, meaning that there's a dopamine spritz in their brain. And I want to be very clear about this because reward can be interpreted different ways. So to the brain, there are these reward circuits, meaning the dopamine fires as a way to help somebody learn. So they're truly these reward circuits are set up to help us form memories. So we remember where the food is, so we can go and get it again. We also remember where the danger is, so we can avoid it in the future. And those are the two flavors of reinforcement learning, positive reinforcement, go do that again, negative reinforcement, avoid that in the future. Okay. Wait. So that's our sort of wiring. But if I take that and import that to my life now where it's maybe not so much about food, but somehow my brain has learned, and it could be erroneous that this is where there's, this is where there's a dopamine hit of reward. So go back to it. Yes. Yes. And in fact, it's not something that is genuinely giving me true relief. Is that right? Right. And then yes, absolutely. So let's take two examples. One is if you look at food, and another example is experience. So in modern day, we've had both food and experience be really designed to be hyper-palatable. And you know, we hear all this stuff about hyper-processed food, which is hardly food anymore. The hyper-processed thing that has calories that gets us addicted, that's really how these things became hyper-processes because they get us hooked to eating them more. And the same is true for social media, even use feeds now. They've been hyper-processed to be hyper-palatable and also addictive. So there are a number of, we don't have to go into all of that, there are a myriad different ways in which those, their elements brought together to make them more and more addictive. But that's, you know, a very common example, and now I'll bring something more nuanced, which I never learned in medical school or residency, but was probably the most important thing that I missed, which was, or that none of us were taught, is that even the experiences like anxiety can be driven in that same reinforcement process. And Thomas Borkavek, a psychologist, wrote in a two-page, very humble paper back in the 1980s, suggested that anxiety could be driven through negative reinforcement. And what he, and this got buried in the pro's acolyte because pro's ac came out and everybody thought, "Oh great, you know, depression and anxiety solved with one pill, turned out not to be the case." No. It's not even close. And so his suggestion was that the feeling of anxiety triggers the mental behavior of worrying. Mm-hmm. Okay. And yeah, and that mental behavior of worrying, I know it's not intuitively obvious. The mental behavior of worrying has been shown to lead to two things. One is it distracts us from the unpleasant feeling of anxiety and on top of that, it gives us a feeling of control. Yes. And I'll add one more, which is that if people worry all the time, they solve a problem, they're very likely to associate those two, because they're worrying all the time. And so they make this false association that worrying equals problem solving. But it's that correlation that does not equal causation problem there, where they're correlated but not causal. Exploring that with my patients is to say, "Well, have you ever solved a problem when you weren't worrying?" Yes. Do you solve more problems when you're not worrying? Yes. Yeah. But it's just when somebody has, for example, if somebody has generally anxiety disorder and they're worrying literally all the time, the likelihood that they're going to be worrying when they solve a problem is pretty high. Sure. It makes perfect sense. At this point in my life, I'm less interested in surface answers and more drawn to Scripture that speaks to both the heart and the mind. And that's why I've been spending time with the new NIV Application Bible from Zondervin. It's not just another study Bible, it's an experience that helps you truly understand what Scripture meant in its original context and what it can mean for your life today. The original meaning notes provides clarity around each passage, while the application notes help connect those teachings to the real everyday moments we're walking through now. Each book begins with a thoughtful introduction and there are questions for growth woven throughout, inviting deeper reflection, not just information, but transformation. I've also appreciated the character of God articles which give rich insight into who God is across all of Scripture. If you're looking for a Bible that helps you really live the Scriptures, not just read it. This is a beautiful resource to explore. Learn more at nivapplicationbible.com that's nivapplicationbible.com So how do we knowing in some ways where I don't want to say negatively but we're sort of working against to some degree these ways in which we've been conditioned for a variety of reasons. So how do we begin to change those pathways and how is mindfulness a part of that? Yes. Right? That's the million dollar question. That's not just a pill and we've learned so many things about, and I think to some degree these are skills we have to learn. There's no easy button for it and also some of these things work. Right. Right. So let's use the example of anxiety because that's what my lab has been studying the most recently. But we've done studies where this applies to smoking. We've got five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment for smoking for example. So just showing that this applies to other things. If you look at anxiety there is, and you look at any habit that these habits form through this process of reinforcement learning that you and I have been speaking about and there's actually a very simple formula that was developed back in the 1970s by these two researchers named last name sort of a scorela and Wagner and this scorela Wagner formula is still in play today. It still uses it and the idea is that once we set up a habit by definition it is something that we do automatically and I just want to be clear that most habits are actually helpful. So this isn't this isn't to demonize habits. Imagine trying to live your life having to relearn everything you've learned in your life every day. You know, we'd be exhausted over breakfast. You know, we have to relearn how to walk, put our clothes on, make breakfast and all that stuff. So most habits are really helpful. So this is a good survival mechanism, yet some of them get in the way. So fear in the present moment is helpful, right, because it helps us learn and planning in the present moment is also helpful planning for the future. But you can't be afraid of the future in the sense that when we worry about the future, we don't have control over it right now. So it actually, the research is pretty clear on this. The more we worry, the less we're actually able to plan and problem solve for the future. So it's this evolutionary bottleneck that comes in. So going back to your question of how does mindfulness come in here? If you look at that equation, for any habit to change, you have to bring awareness back in to update the reward value. And the reason for that is, if something's rewarding, we're going to do it again. Right. And if something's not rewarding, it opens up that space for change. Let's use an everyday example. Let's say that I have a certain reward value in my mind for mango habanero truffles, which is true. Okay. My mother-in-law. A specific element. Sense me. Yeah. These great mango habanero truffles at the holidays from the Seattle area and they are delicious. Let's say a new chocolate rich, he opens up in my neighborhood. And I go in and I eat, they have mango habanero truffles and I'm like, great, let me try one of those. If I eat one and he's just like mind-blowingly good, I get what's called a positive prediction error, meaning that that was better than expected. I had a certain expectation that it probably wasn't going to be as good as the ones that I get at Christmas and it was better than expected. So I get this dopamine spritz in my brain and I learn this is a good chocolate retreat. Go back and eat. Go and get chocolate surrogun. On the other hand, if they taste like cardboard, I get what's called a negative prediction error, which says where my brain's like, yeah, not as good as expected. I also get a dopamine spritz and I learn, don't go back there again. Notice how there's learning on both sides. And critical for learning, one ingredient, awareness. I have to pay attention. If I'm on the phone and I eat one of those and my wife says, hey, how is the chocolate retreat? I'm like, I don't know. I just, I don't remember what it tasted like. So I haven't changed that reward value or that expectation when I haven't paid attention. So that's where this comes in and I want to highlight something. Notice how will power has nothing to do with this. Yeah. It's critical because everybody, you know, if somebody's trying to stop over eating, if somebody's trying to stop worrying, you know, there's, I don't know if you ever saw this, the Bob Newhart skit from the 70s called stop it. It's amazing. It's hilarious. We'll post it. It's an amazing clip. Yeah. That is credible. But back in the 70s, he was highlighting the problematic nature where there's all this emphasis on cognitive therapies like they were going to solve all our ills just like present. And the idea is you, we can't think our way out of a paper bag. And if you look at it now from a neuroscience perspective, nobody knew this in the 70s. Neuroscience was a very young feel back then. If you look at it from a neuroscience standpoint, this isn't about thinking. In fact, the parts of our brain that are associated with cognitive control and willpower at, you know, willpower is more myth and muscle. But those go offline when we get stressed out or anxious. So at best, we don't have access to these resources. At worst, they're more myth and muscle. So wherever somebody is on that spectrum, you know, that's not, that's not what I would go to to help somebody work with anxiety as an example. That is so helpful. And I think what you're saying there, dovetails, again, it's different. But what I found so powerful coming out of being trained in more of a CBT area when I discovered IFS. Because I was like, oh, this actually helps me. Interesting. Because I can think about the logic. I know the logic is, you know, but that doesn't help me in the moment. Right. And if you look at it, our feeling body is much stronger than our thinking brain. Yeah. So logic is helpful to, you know, solve a logic problem. Yeah. But logic doesn't solve emotional issues, right? And reward value gets set up as a feeling. It doesn't get set up as a logic problem. Yeah. If it did, all my patients would have quit smoking the first time I told them to stop smoking. 100%. I know I shouldn't smoke, right? How often have we? So just a quick example. Let me see if I'm hearing you correctly, practically. I had never been on TikTok. I discovered it and it's like crack. I've never seen anything like it. And I've noticed, and is this kind of what we're saying I don't go, but I've noticed. I'm like, some part of me, but despite all logic. If I'm stressed out to click on that app, feels like relief. And so I can't talk myself out of that with logic, but what I might do, and I'm wondering if this is, is, is become aware. What is going on in that moment that I want to push, click on that app? There's something pulling me, and it almost always is my own distress, wanting a relief. I am getting a hit of dopamine, and that's not untrue, and I'm curious what I'm saying this correctly. I don't, I don't have to talk myself out of that by saying, no, this is bad for you. You know, no, no, no, it, it, in some way, there is a hit of dopamine I'm getting, but if I can become aware, it allows me to make a different choice, and bring more of my, finish that for me. What is, I'm aware that that's working, but I'm not sure why. Yes. Yes. So here, and I diagram this, we did a series of studies, a couple of years ago, now we published these in my lab, where we trained people in mindfulness with using an app, it was mindfulness training program specifically for anxiety, and we did a study with people with generalised anxiety disorder. And in this randomized controlled trial, we got a 67% reduction in GAD7 scores, these clinical scores of anxiety relative to 14% in the usual clinical care, which is what we wouldn't expect about one in five people, is what the number needed to treat is for the best medications out there. So here, if you, so I just use that as background to say, you know, we've done the research to work out the mechanisms of this, and what it turns out to be is a three step process. And so first, we have to become aware, yeah, for example, that we're worrying, and often people don't think of worrying as a behaviour, but it's a behaviour, right, it says mental behaviour, some people are so habituated to worrying, they don't even notice that they're doing it just because it's automatic, it's a habit. So the first step is being able to recognise that we're worrying. The second step is to leverage this reinforcement learning process that you and I've been talking about by asking a simple question, which is, what am I getting from this? So if we take this to your TikTok example, right, where TikTok is, the algorithm is dialed in so much that it is like the most, it's, it's a more safely guarded secret than like the Colonel Sanders secret recipe for the FC, you know, it's like, this is, this is buried in the vaults of, of wherever because they did such a good job of algorithmically addicting people. And there was even a, in the one of the ongoing lawsuits against TikTok where the, I think it was the eternal, turning general of Kentucky, their, their documents were accidentally re, unredactable, like where they could redact the red action. And the, I think it was NPR that broke the story where they found that the people were saying, you know, we can dial in, we know exactly how long it takes to dick somebody. And it's like as few as 30 videos, it's, it's a very short period of time where they're that good at that. So it's not about telling ourselves, oh, TikTok's addictive because we know it is. Yep. I'm asking ourselves this simple question, what do I get from going on TikTok? And that then gets to the, this piece where I think of this as we can develop these disenchantment databases where if we're enchanted with something, we're going to keep doing it, right? Because the reward value is high enough that we keep doing it. If we become disenchanted, it's much easier to say, you know, why would I do that? It's just, I'm just not into that anymore. And that's where asking that question brings online or curiosity and go, oh, what am I getting from this? Right? And it's not that TikTok is inherently bad. You know, like there are plenty of entertaining short videos that whatever, whatever, you know, whatever people get, you know, are into an TikTok, there are lots of different things. They'll, they'll get on TikTok. But if we find that we're spending every, you know, two hours a day or five hours or eight hours a day scrolling on TikTok, or we're turning to that as our distressed tolerance, you know, or avoidance mechanism, it's not a distressed tolerance mechanism. Then it falls more into the unhelpful spectrum. And so if we ask, what am I getting from this? And we feel into our direct experience and we see, oh, you know, every now and then if you TikTok videos find, but if I'm, if this is my ruling my life now, not so good, and we become disenchanted with that, I think, I call this the pleasure plateau, we do the same thing with eating, we can do the same thing with all sorts of behaviors. Yes. So we can find where it's fine and we can find where we're going off that cliff of over indulgence. And then we can, the third step just to finish this quickly, the third step is to find what I call the bigger, better offer. And this is where simply stepping out of doing the thing is better than being sucked into it, right? So if we find that, you know, scrolling on Instagram a couple of times a day when we just need a mental reset is fine, but when we find that we're going to scroll on Instagram instead of confronting our partner, because we're, you know, there's, we have to have a tough conversation, not so fine, right? And we can, so we can start to dial in and see, kind of get control back over where we might be pulled to do something to distract ourselves. Yeah. And come back into reality and lean and learn to lean into discomfort. This is where discomfort does not need to become distress. It can simply be discomfort because we learn, Oh, you know, curiosity is a super power for this. I'll just mention one other thing, just applying this, for example, to worrying. When we feel anxious, that feeling of anxiety could lead us to worry, Oh, no, what's going to happen. We could lead us to distract ourselves by going on tick-tock or we could learn to lean into curiosity and flip that, Oh, no, to, Oh, so let me ask you, which one feels better? Oh, no, or oh, Oh, this is interesting. Yes. I wonder what's happening here. Yes. So powerful. So you're leveraging that same reinforcement learning mechanism. You're leveraging it against itself, and that's where we're getting huge changes in anxiety, for example. It's so powerful. You work with yourself. I really want to ask you this. And if a lot of that is a huge bucket, so a lot of my listeners come from face backgrounds. And I am curious about how, and I know you've done a little study on this, I think, how spiritual practices like prayer can function as a form of mindfulness, just for my own experience, what I find is some of what we're talking about can apply in the sense of if I'm going to prayer as a sort of cognitive way to try to pull myself up out of what I'm feeling versus if I'm sort of going to prayer as a way of inviting God to attune with me to what is. They function very differently. Can you, are you comfortable speaking to that? Well, I'm trying to do that in a very short amount of time. Well, I think you articulated it beautifully. One example of this is centering prayer, which is a specific practice that uses prayer to help people center, that's why it's called centering prayer, but also be present. And so what it can do is help people really dial in to the strength of presence. Yeah. And that strength of presence, talk about distress tolerance. Yes. You know, when, when somebody knows that God has their back, who needs to run away from anything? And yes, and it's in, God has your back in it. Yes, in it. Not necessarily. Like, let me, let me help you cover your eyes so you don't see it. Yes. Yes. Oh, that's such a helpful centering prayer. That's a great connection there. I love that. And so that is a form of bringing mindfulness into a spiritual practice. Yes. Yeah. And if you look at many, I haven't studied every spiritual tradition out there, but if you look at many religions, many spiritual traditions, they're going to use different language for this experience of being present, right? I love the phrase letting, dying to the small self so God can flow through you. You know, that's one of the ones that I love, you know, because it's, when we get out of our own way, right, when, when our ego is not controlling things or is not afraid, when it's not about us, when it's about something much bigger than us, suddenly we've got all the strength in the world. I love that. I love that. Can you let us know, let my listeners know where to find out more about your work. I know you've written a couple of books. You've got a lot of resources, where can people find more information? I want to find all the information myself. Sure. I run a program called Going Beyond Anxiety that actually teaches these skills that we've been talking about in terms of helping people relate to anxiety differently. I also have a website, so that that's just going beyond anxiety.com. And I also have a website, just Dr. Judd.com, that has a lot of free resources and also has, I wrote, you know, my books on it, like Unwinding Anxiety is most relevant to this conversation, but also wrote a book called The Hunger Habit, if people struggle with eating, you know, emotional eating. That's just drjud.com, Dr. Judd.com. Awesome. Oh, yeah. Also, write a substack to brewer.substack. Great. You can find me there. All right. We will link to all of that. I'm so grateful for your time. I love this topic, and I'm just so grateful for your work in this space and all you're doing to bring these resources to people. So thank you. Yeah. My pleasure. Thank you for joining me for this episode of The Best of You. Be sure to check out the show notes for any resources and links mentioned in the show. You can find those on my website at drallysoncook.com, that's Allyson with one-elcook.com. Before you forget, I hope you'll follow the show now so that you don't miss an episode, and I'd love it if you'd go ahead and leave a review. It helps so much to get the word out. I look forward to seeing you back here next Thursday and remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God, you heal others, and you stay true to your God-given self. [BLANK_AUDIO]