Dr Jud Brewer Transcript
 8th June 2021

Intro:

Nick:

Welcome to don't quit on me.

The podcast series where we consider alternative ways to manage the inevitability of stress and pain.

Through speaking with a wide range of people who share their stories, strategies and perspectives, we aim to inspire, hope, confidence and the belief in the fact that things can get better no matter where you are.

00:00:34

Doctor Judd Brewer is an internationally renowned addiction psychiatrist and a neuroscientist. His Ted talk a simple way to break a bad habit has over 16 million views on YouTube.

Doctor Judd is an associate professor at Brown University and an executive medical director at share care.

His new book is called Unwinding Anxiety. New science shows how to break the cycles of worry and fear to heal your mind.

I hope you enjoy the chat with Doctor Judd.

00:01:09

Nick:

Judd Brewer welcome and thank you so much for taking time out to chat with me.

00:01:13

Dr Jud.

Thanks for having me.

Nick:

Not at all my absolute pleasure.

I'd like to start with a fairly generic question if I may, which is? I guess what led you into choosing psychiatry and habit change and the work that you're currently doing that led to the book and the app.

00:01:31

Dr Jud.

It's funny that you ask because Psychiatry was on the end of the list of the medical specialties that I thought I would go into, I did this MD PhD program where you do two years in medical school and then you do your PHD for long enough that you forget everything that you learned in those first two years. So, when I went back onto the wards after I finished my PhD, I decided to do so.

00:01:56

Do Psychiatry in my first rotation just so I could remember how to interview patients.And when I finished, I was thinking, wow, that was fun. I can't wait till I get to the ones that I really like or thought I would like.

00:02:08

And you know, long story short - I had been meditating. I actually started meditating at the beginning of medical school, so I've been meditating for about 6 years at that point.

And I saw this beautiful alignment with what I had learned about my own mind. What I'd learned about the theories underlying mindfulness.

And then also this real need of my patients that especially patients with addictions who are really suffering, and we didn't have great, you know, great treatments for them. And so, there was something that really just drew me into taking on psychiatry as a special team.

And that also, you know, turbo charged when I got into residency and really saw wow - This is an area of growth, let's say where we need better treatments, not just for anxiety, but for addictions. For you know, all these things. And so, I decided to shift my entire career from molecular biology into studying mindfulness, so I started retooling to be a neuroscientist and do clinical trials and all that.

Nick:

00:03:17

That's enormous. You touched on a couple things. One is it ever a need that's in demand now and obviously with what's happening with COVID and all the other shifting things globally, that are unfolding of what's been happening, and is going to happen, I think could potentially be huge, but you're better positioned to see that than I am, and you also touched on meditating at the beginning of medical school. How did you discover that and start practicing?

Dr Jud.

00:03:49

Well, I was suffering. I was pretty stressed out at the beginning of medical school and I remember the summer before starting medical school. I somehow picked up this book by Jon Kabat Zinn called Full Catastrophe Living.

And I joked with John that I didn't, I didn't actually read the whole book, but I started listening to the cassette tapes. Back then there were these things called cassette tapes, and really, you know, just was blown away by. You know I shouldn't say blown away. I was really drawn to it, and in truth, it wasn't like magically I was meditating all the time - for the first six months of medical school, I was basically falling asleep as I was trying to start to meditate. It took me a little while, to get ramped up, but ever since then you know I can't imagine not doing it.

Nick:

00:04:43

Is there a particular style of meditation? I know that a lot of the research has been done around mindfulness. Is there a particular style you favour or does it really depend on the outcome you're looking for?

Dr Jud.

00:04:55

It's, you know, I look for commonalities to be honest, because I'm looking for how we can change things at the level of public health and so as compared to giving people another thing to fight over. You know my meditation is better than your meditation. I first started practicing in the Theravada tradition that that you know, I didn't even know there were different ones. It's kind of like people who are Christians and then realize, oh, there's Catholicism, there's Protestant, there's you know, Baptist, there's this and that. I didn't even know there were different types of Buddhism, but I happened, you know I was in medical school in St. Louis, MO and was, you know, just started sitting with a local group and I'm just like, oh, it's a meditation group and it turns out that it was first led by somebody who was trained in Zen and so and then it was led by somebody who was trained in Theravada and you know that just happened to be what I started doing. Moreover, it felt, I felt very much at home in that framework, it's very analytical in the sense of it kind of scientifically driven, not that the other practices or traditions aren't. There's more of an emphasis, on that type of exploration as compared to, you know the stereotype of other things, like then it's. You know it's like just sit type of thing.

Nick:

00:06:22

It's funny you should mention that coming home sort of sense. I noticed the very same thing when I first had quite severe depression. My sister works in medical research in the UK and she sent me Full Catastrophe Living. Given where we are globally, I guess with the pandemic and the flow on from this, what are you seeing that indicates how, collectively, our mental health is at the moment.

Dr Jud.

00:06:47

Well, I would say that there's been a big spike in anxiety, in particular in 2020. You know anxiety was already on the rise a little bit, and I think that's probably due to our brains just inherently, don't like uncertainty. Uncertainty drives us to get information, yet when we can't satisfy that information gathering urge. It's kind of flips into anxiety and worry so you know with the pandemic, obviously we saw a huge spike and I don't remember the specific details. I'm terrible at specifics, but I wrote a whole chapter in my new book about this. You know, I think it's something like an increase of 290% in diagnosis of anxiety disorders just in 2020. So huge spike because there's so many you know, first, it was the virus, then the economy, schools, you know, jobs. All of these things were really, you know, a lot of uncertainty.

Nick:

00:07:48

It, yeah, it's certainly been, not unprecedented, but for us it has been hasn't it. I'm watching the younger generation kind of look at what's happening now and try and project, which obviously is part of anxiety. The loop that we'll talk about a little bit later. I've heard you say that anxiety is a shapeshifter. Could you talk a bit more about what that means?

Dr Jud.

00:08:13

Yes, you know I experienced this personally when I was in my senior year of college. I didn't even know that I had anxiety. In fact, I went to the went to the student health doctor and you know, said, oh, I think I have a bacterial infection. He said, could it be anxiety and I said no, you know I run, I'm a vegetarian I play the violin you know I couldn't be anxious and he's like OK.

Nick:

00:08:40

Yeah, yeah.

Dr Jud.

00:08:41

So, the shapeshifter piece means it can show up in different ways for different people and for me it was showing up as GI symptoms.

Nick:

00:08:50

I remember driving to work when I worked in banking, and I got shortness of breath, sweating, pain in the chest, I parked my car, or so, I thought I had. I was about to ring my wife and tell her that I think this is it. It's all over. It's been a brief marriage but thank you, and my car rolled back and hit a concrete post cause I hadn't put the handbrake on properly, so it was a beautiful but a pivotal moment for me.

What's the difference between anxiety and fear?

Dr Jud.

00:09:24

Well, if we think of fear, you know that's fear actually helps us survive. So, if we you know like the simple example of say, stepping off of a sidewalk into the street and it's funny these days, pedestrian accidents have gone up ever since the rollout of the smartphone. Because we our phones are getting smarter and we are getting dumber, because we forget to look both ways before crossing the street.

But so, let's say that we step out on the street. We didn't look, and we see a car coming right at us. We jump back onto the sidewalk and we have this strong fear response. So that's you know it just. Floods us like whoa. And that helps us learn. So, we learn, you know, because of that strong, that literally the strong feelings in our body. It's it says, hey, pay attention to what just happened and learn from it.

So you know. That is different than anxiety in the sense that. We can think of Anxiety as being kind of a fear of the unknown you can think of it that way where there's this constant drive of trying to understand things, trying to get information. Trying to basically reduce uncertainty. Trying to make things a little more controlled. And that's never satisfied. It's not like a single event where we can learn, you know, the fear response happens. We learn. And then we move on because we've learned - with anxiety It's just like we're constantly fueling that with the what if scenarios like what if this? What if that? I think you mentioned it earlier. A lot of it has to do with the future. The more we project into the future, the more uncertainty there is and the more anxious we get.

Nick:

00:11:21

I understand from a lived experience perspective how things like this occur, but why is there such a disconnect between feeling things like anxiety or depression and wanting to admit it and seek help?

Dr Jud.

00:11:40

You know, I think there's a lot of social stigma or societal stigma around mental health in general. I think that's starting to shift starting to change, but we have a long way to go. I see this with everything from anxiety to addictions where, you know, maybe it's seen societally as a sign of weakness, or somebody that doesn't have it together. Or you know, I'm thinking about this right now when an animal is sick, they kind of give off this scent to other animals. You know where the animals will kind of stay away from them, cause they don't instinctually want to get sick. I think maybe there's something there where we put this off as if almost like a social contagion. Where you know if oh you know that person is anxious, you know, stay away from that. And certainly, anxiety can be spread from one person to another. You know, in the classic sense of social contagion, when somebody is anxious and they walk into a room, somebody says what's wrong and they start talking about how anxious they are. Then suddenly the person they're talking to starts feeling that anxiety or can start feeling that anxiety as well.

Nick:

00:12:49

Thank you.

Behaviors are the messages or the message to understanding anxiety, and I'm assuming I've extracted this from one of your interviews and I know that you can't hold them all in in.

I guess what I took from that was that what they're the endpoint. We're seeing behaviors and that kind of tracks back to the he root cause.

Dr Jud.

00:13:12

It does, it does, and this actually goes back to our basic survival mechanisms, where you know we if something is so, think of it as  what's called negative reinforcement is based on us surviving like running away from danger. So, if something is unpleasant, our brain tends to interpret that as danger, and then it says do something to make that go away. So, we do that thing and then we learn if it if it helped, whether it's just it's distraction or avoidance or whatever that feeds back and says oh next time you know that first thing happened you should. You should do this behavior again to put that in concrete terms when we feel anxious, that can be the trigger where it triggers the behavior of worrying. And that worrying can make us feel like we're in control. Or it can temporarily distract us from the worst feeling, feeling of anxiety and that can then actually drive anxiety and worry as a habit loop itself. Does that make sense?

Nick:

00:14:19

Yeah, that does. That makes good sense. I've often heard mental illness and mental wellness as positioned at opposite ends of the spectrum. Do you see a similar framing I guess of mental well health.

Dr Jud.

00:14:35

I think there's a lot of emphasis on illness, and I'd love to see us as a society change that you know. One thing I would say for certain is that we all share a particular condition. It's called the human condition. Yeah, and the more labels we put on certain things, the more we kind of ‘other’ people. You know where it's like, oh they are in that category, and I am not and it separates us. So here, you know, I like to think of it as we're all you know, we're all trying to be mentally healthy. And there are a couple of things that can get in the way of that. The image that comes up as I say, that is it's kind of like the sun shining. That's our mental health or mental wellness. And there are clouds that can get in the way of that, you know, so we might feel depressed. Or you might feel anxious. Those are these clouds that are just kind of blocking that that wellness that we all have this inherent nature of us to move in that direction. So, the more we can focus on the sun, compared to reifying the clouds, I think the better off will be.

Nick:

00:15:47

That that kind of dovetails beautifully with the comment I heard you make about. your very disinclined to use labels when talking of the work you do, and I love that because, they are a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know that when I first experienced depression initially it was great. OK, I've got a, I've got a thing that I am, but then that becomes the limiting step to getting better because you i so identify with this condition that anything that falls outside of that becomes, well, not part of who I am. And not helpful.

How do you practice self-care and how important is it having a practice of self-care?

Dr Jud.

00:16:31

That's a great question, so, I'd like to think that I'm moving in the direction of developing habits of self-care, because when I care for myself, it feels good, it's rewarding. And that ranges from eating healthy food. It just feels better to eat clean, healthy, unprocessed food than it does to eat processed food. It feels better to exercise than not to exercise. And it feels better to from a mental standpoint, to be curious as compared to being caught up in emotions ranging from everything from judgment you know very good habit of judging myself and others and things. And I'm finding that curiosity as a mental self-care tool. I almost think of it as a superpower, it is a great way to help me step out of judgment and into simply exploring what's true, what's actually happening, and in the process it helps me feel more connected with others and develop better relationships, even clinically, with my patients. You can imagine if somebody walks in and said, oh I'm anxious and then I just label them. Oh, that's an anxious person and give them some medications. It's really different than. Truly being curious and like oh, what do you mean and what's your story? Because that not only helps develop a therapeutic relationship, but also helps us work together as a team to come up with the best, treatment, I hesitate to say that word, but the best way to help them move forward.

Nick:

00:18:19

Beautiful thank you. I spoke with Llama Christopher Coriat and Sebene Selassie about the power of loving kindness, and that's something we can touch on a bit later on. Yeah, that we'll talk about that a bit later. I really wanted to talk specifically about the book Unwinding Anxiety and also the app. There is - I mean from my novice perspective, there's clearly a ton of work that's gone into it. It's a fully sequenced program. Could you talk a little bit about the work? And I guess the philosophy that went into designing that and making it what it is.

Dr Jud.

00:18:59

Yes, I'd be happy to you know this was somewhat serendipitous you know my lab has been focused a lot on studying addictions and I've been developing treatments for addictions using mindfulness and testing to see how well it works. And we had recently developed an app called Eat Right Now that we were studying and we somebody in the program said, ‘You know, I'm noticing that anxiety triggers me to eat, to stress eat. Could you make a program for anxiety?’ And I was thinking, well, I prescribed medications for anxiety yet, the there's this term called number needed to treat meaning how many patients I need to treat with it with the medication, say before one person benefit so it gives us a quick and dirty sense of how good the treatment is. The higher the number, the worst the treatment and that number needed to treat for the best medications we have is 5.2 - So I have to treat 5 patients, One person shows a significant benefit. So not only was this person in our eat right now program saying hey, could you make a program for anxiety, but I'd been struggling in my clinic just prescribing medications, so I went back and looked at the literature and found that back at the 80s there was rich literature suggesting that anxiety could be driven as a habit. I'd never thought about that before. I didn't learn that in medical school or residency, but it really set off this light. I had this light bulb moment where I was thinking. Wow - Anxiety as a habit. Oh, I know how to develop treatments for habits. Let's bring those two together. So, we developed Unwinding Anxiety - This is an app that anybody can use and really framed it in the way of helping, starting by helping people understand how their minds work. Because I'd found clinically that people you know they have anxiety, they don't know what's happening, they don't know how to work with it. So if you want to work with your mind, you got to know how your mind works first. So we start there and then help them really see what they're getting from anxiety and worry around. You know how rewarding it is and we can get into more details later if that's helpful, and then the third step is helping them find something better than worrying. And so we developed that sequential process in, you know 30 core modules, about 10 minutes a day, videos, animations, in the moment exercises for people to really put this into practice because they have to learn the concepts, but then they also have to experience it, I think of it as concepts in the service of wisdom. You know they get the concept, but they've got to practice it and then they develop their wisdom. So, we developed the app and started testing it. You know, as a researcher I wanted to see how well this actually worked. We did two clinical studies, one with anxious physicians, right for this we got a 57% reduction in clinically valid anxiety scores, so that was I was like, OK, that's pretty good. We did a randomized control trial where we could, you know, do Group A versus Group B. In the group that got the mindfulness training, we got a, you know, with the unwinding anxiety app. We got a 67% reduction in these anxiety scores, and here we could calculate that number needed to treat. So, as I mentioned with medications, that's 5.2. With this study it was 1.6. - So much, much lower number, you know with an app.

Nick:

00:22:33

That's just mind-blowing.

Dr Jud.

00:22:36

Yeah, we were very happy with that.

Nick:

I'm in the app. There's talk of two concepts which I'd love you to give a brief overview of one is mapping habit loops and the other one is the metaphor of using gears to kind of work through the process. Would you mind unpacking those just a little bit?

Dr Jud.

00:22:56

I'd be happy to, and I'll say we developed a habit Mapper that's free that anybody can download just from mapmyhabit.com. And the idea is, you know any habit is formed through three elements and trigger a behavior and a result. And if we don't see those. If we don't see that process unfolding in our experience, we can't work with it. So we developed this habit mapper for people to just start mapping out their habits on a daily basis. I give a concrete example. I write about this in my book. I had a patient who came in who was referred for anxiety, and as I started taking his history, he was describing how he would get panic attacks on the highway, and he was, it was full blown panic disorder and was around driving and he was avoiding driving on the highway, so I pulled out a piece of paper. And I just wrote trigger behavior, results or reward on it on the paper and I said OK, let me see if I get this straight that trigger is these thoughts that you're going to get in the car accident, the behavior is to avoid driving on the highway, and then the results or the reward is that you avoid having panic attacks, is that right? 

So, it took us 30 seconds to map that out, but he had this. You know, I could just see the his eyes light up because he had never really seen this connection before because, that reward was feeding back and every time he was triggered by the thought he would avoid driving on the highway and so he just he hadn't known that it's a very simple process and that's the first step in any type of habit change, really seeing what the process is so anybody can do that and start to map out that, whether it's worry, procrastination or stress eating or social media or any habit.

Nick:

00:24:40

I think you touch on social media. It's such a rabbit hole. I see people very close to me and even myself. I think I said to Lama Christopher that If I don't want to think, I'll often go to that and it is  habit, but it's you know. Obviously, I think you mentioned the definition of a habit is continuing to do something, even though you know it's not going to give you a positive outcome, but that may be a conversation for another day, cause I'm sure we could debate that. 

The concept of gears I loved because for me it really gave an indication, like a litmus you know, kind of where you're at and where you want to go. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Dr Jud.

00:25:22

Sure, and that's actually how I set up the book is, you know, and the app is is set up the same way. So, you can think of if we're driving a car, we've got to get moving and 1st gear helps us move forward. So, I think of mapping out our habit loops is first gear and then once we start to build momentum we can shift into second gear. We can't just keep driving in first gear because we'll burn out the engine, cause you know we can't. Yeah, that's not our cars are designed so the 2nd gear it really taps into this reward based learning system and it really focuses, instead of using willpower or some something outside of ourselves, it really goes right to the heart of it, because if we form the habit of worrying in anxiety through reinforcement learning, why not go there? Because that's the strongest part of our brain so With that, with changing any habit, we have to help our brain see very clearly how rewarding a behavior is right now, not how rewarding it was when we set it up as a habit, because we won't pay attention, you know? If we do something habitually, we're not paying attention to how rewarding it is. So second gear is really focused on helping them see very, very clearly what they're getting from that behavior. So, if it's worrying I have people ask this simple question. You know what am I getting from this, like? Like

If I'm worrying because my family members not safe, is my worrying actually keeping them safe? No, if I, if it's making me feel like I'm in control, is it actually helping me control the situation? No, and is it just something to do because it's better than doing nothing which is often the case? You know cause it can't do anything, but at least I can worry so I feel like I'm being a good parent or whatever, cause I'm worrying. But what they can see also is that that worry feeds back and drives more anxiety. And so in fact, not only does it not help the situation makes it harder to think and plan. You know, when we're really anxious and it just drives anxiety and worry more, so it just feeds itself as a habit loop and gets deeper and deeper so the 2nd gear is really about helping people see how unrewarding the habit is. Worry stressing whatever, because then their brain says oh, that's not really that great and we become disenchanted in a way that's not forced. It's not intellectual, it's experiential.

And what that does is it sets up the stage for us to bring in something better, cause our brains are always comparing things. And so it says, well, if it's not rewarding, give me something better and that's the third gear in the book, and I think if this is finding the BBO, the bigger, better offer. And here you know, we’ve talked tiny bit about this already. One of my favourite, bigger, better offers is curiosity because, you know it's a no brainer if we compare being anxious or worrying to being curious, curiosity feels better and in fact, curiosity brings us back in a full circle into what that uncertainty is driving us to do in the first place, right? Uncertainty tells our brain to go get information. If we're anxious, we're not actually open to learning. We're not actually open to gathering information. But if we're curious. We're actually very open here in what Carol Dweck calls growth mindset, and so right then in there intrinsically we have something that is that Bigger Better Offer - curiosity as compared to anxiety or as compared to getting caught up in a craving and feeding it by eating or smoking or using a substance.

Nick:

00:29:09

We talked a little bit about before loving kindness. In a couple of other interviews, a few people have said not these exact words, but that it can act as an antidote for burnout, and I'm just wondering from a neuroscience perspective. Why something like repeating phrases, I'm thinking maybe that it might touch back to another comment that I heard you made make about, small moments many times. How that can help us shift from a downward spiral to balance and then moving upward.

Dr Jud.

00:29:46

Yes, so I think of loving kindness and saying phrases of loving kindness - I think of those phrases helping to anchor us in the present moment, but really loving kindness is about kind of awakening. This feeling of warmth of connection of openness, and we all know what this, feels like, when somebody is loving on us unconditionally. You know like a friend or a family member or grandparents? Something like that? Or a pet - family pets are great at exhibiting kindness and loving kindness. Our hearts just open and so phrases can be helpful to help us, kind of tap into that in a way. My labs actually done studies, neuroimaging studies, of people practicing loving kindness meditation, and what we find, is that this open quality of experience, this warm, loving kindness deactivates brain regions that get activated when we are craving substances and get activated. When we're worrying, you know, they get activated when, when we're ruminating. And so, it's a, it's a great example of how you know this, staying present and just awakening, this feeling of loving kindness really opens us up, and there's actually a shared characteristic between loving kindness and curiosity. They both open us, where some cravings tend to make us close down and contracted and restless, as well as anxiety makes us feel closed down and contracted.

So here we can link up the brain. You know the brain neuroscience around  this network or brain region, called the default mode, gets activated when we're anxious, gets activated with craving, gets deactivated when we're practicing loving kindness. But experientially, we all know what this feels like, because we're moving from contraction to expansion.

Nick:

00:31:50

Beautiful.

I love what Jon Kabat Zinn said of the book the Craving Mind. He said it was ‘a masterful, personal, friendly, compelling, humorous and erudite book that offers radical new perspectives on learning on breaking habits of mind, not by forcing through application of willpower and desire for reward, but truly inhabiting the domain of being.’, and in the book you highlight that we're all vulnerable to addiction. Whether it's a compulsion to constantly check social media, which we've talked about, binge, eat, smoke excessively drink, or any other behavior that we might find ourselves uncontrollably repeating.

Why habits so hard to overcome and is there a key to conquering cravings that we know of? And I imagine, I know where this question is going, but I'll let you answer.

Dr Jud.

00:32:44

I would say they're hard to overcome. Some of this is, if not a large portion of this is societal, where there's so much emphasis on willpower, you know. There's a, and I write about this in the Unwinding Anxiety book, there's actually a relief on the Parthenon in Greece, from I don't know. 450, you know 480 something. I'm terrible at dates, but a long time ago, let's just put it that way, where there's this horse and a rider on the horse. It kind of denotes the passions, you're cravings, and the rider is reason or willpower. Well guess which one is stronger?

And so we've been, we've been approaching this from the rider mentality forever, you know? If it's a diet program, you know. Just make sure you eat salad instead of cake.

Nick:

00:33:29

Yeah.

Dr Jud.

00:33:35

Whether it's you know our addictions, just stop it. Just stop smoking, stop drinking. Just stop using opioids.

That they're hard to overcome, is because we've been approaching it from an inherently flawed system, not in the sense that our brains are flawed, but in the sense that our approach is, I'm going to go out and say that it's flawed because we're relying on the weakest part of our brain that is increasingly being shown to be more myth than muscle. So that's why.

And of course, you know there is a solution and this you know. We talked about these three gears with regard to say anxiety and worry. This can also be applied to, any addiction, because you know, we can map out our habit loops around stress eating or smoking or whatever. We can ask ourselves, what do I get from this? And in fact, my lab just finished some studies where we found that having people really pay attention, we can build this craving tool right into our, we have this eat right now app for overeating and it’s built right in.

Having them pay attention as they eat, they can see how unrewarding it is, and it only takes 10 to 15 times as somebody is really paying attention as they do this, to significantly change that reward value and then they can find that bigger, better offering, which we've already talked about. You know curiosity so, I would say if we actually look at the neuroscience, the neuroscience would point us towards looking at reward value and reinforcement learning rather than willpower.

Nick:

00:35:11

Thank you, thank you, and this is a bit off topic, but it's something that's I guess is a personal experience for me, and I've also had other listeners comment on it as well, but, the podcast has been beneficial to people who are working through grief. Are there any methods, or I guess framings or tools to deal with navigating grief, that have maybe stemmed from the work that you've done.

Dr Jud.

00:35:44

I would say, well, I would say our work is very much aligned with the concept of looking to see if we're getting caught up in grief, for example, there's a big difference between grief and mourning. Grief can tend to reify, a concept, like ‘I am grieving’. So, we become more identified with that, and then it becomes more rigid and more locked in, and then can become anytime we're thinking about something that we've lost that, we're grieving. I am grieving, as compared to morning. Where morning denotes fluidity, movement, future. And so here I would say we can, and we haven't studied this, but I would say the concept holds where we can be triggered by a thought of whatever, whatever it is that we're grieving about, the behavior is grief – grieving, and then the reward is that it just it feels comfortable because we take it on as an identity. Yet the problem is that it reapplies itself and we're stuck as compared to, you know, mapping it out, getting curious, what am I getting from taking this so personally, or finding a way to explore that? And then bringing in, you know, the bigger, better offer? What's it like to move into morning as compared to grief, and finding what that mourning process feels like for us, and looking for, you know there can be expansion there, where we can still you know, if it's it was we've lost a loved one, we can still hold them in our memory and in open way as compared to the closed down quality that that comes with grief. And so there we can look for movement. We can look for opening, as compared to closing down and contraction.

Nick:

00:37:42

I'm just I'm wondering if somewhere in the podcast sphere, I'm listening to this and I'm feeling a constant sense or an increasing sense of overwhelm. What's the best place to start? And I've got a sense where you might go with this, but …

00:38:00

I’d be curious if your sense is similar to where I am I going with this, so I would say we started in the present moment and often, and anxiety is related to, you know it's fear of the future basically, and so the first place is to kind of ground ourselves in the present moment, and see how far into the future our mind has just gone. You know, what am I worrying about now?

And how far into the future is it? And I think of this I. I think I have a chapter in my book entitled Anxiety Sobriety. Because there's a tool that a lot of my patients with addictions use to good effect, which is you know, they say I don't know if I can be sober in a month, and I say well dial it back. How about a week and I don't know if I can be sober in a week. Well, dial it back. How about a day? Well, I don't know. How about right now? They're sober, sitting in my office, and so it's really about dialing it back and taking it one moment at a time, and I think that's also true for anxiety you know? Can we gain some anxiety sobriety, by dialing whatever we're worried about way into the future, back to what we actually need to do right now. And so instead of worrying. Oh no, what could happen, really ask ourselves. Well, what do I need to do right now and that actually helps us move from the uncertainty of the future into the Certainty of OK, I'm going to take a step forward right now.

Nick:

00:39:26

That's beautiful you mentioned, and just in closing you mentioned map my habit as one of the websites that you offer. How do people who resonate with the message they've heard today find Doctor Jud, and engage with your offerings?

Dr Jud.

00:39:43

I have a website, that has a bunch of resources on it.

Dr. Jud Brewer’s website
Follow Dr. Jud Brewer on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
Unwinding Anxiety (app)
Eat Right Now (app)
Craving To Quit! (app)So that's that's the best way.

00:40:08

For folks to find me, and then I think we mentioned I've got a couple of books. The unwinding anxiety book and the craving mind book as well.

00:40:16

I will. I'll include all that in the show notes. And yeah, if anyone is, struggling, wrestling, trying to navigate anxiety. I'd highly recommend the Unwinding Anxiety book. Both the written and also the audible version is good if the brain isn't wanting to take information through the eyes.

So, Doctor Judd Brewer. I am so grateful. I really am very grateful for you taking time out to chat with me.

Dr Jud.

00:40:41

It was my pleasure.

Nick:

00:40:43

Yeah, thank you so much.

I hope you've enjoyed the show and if you feel inclined to support us, you can do so on the website at www.DontQuiton.me. Thank you!