Fleet MaullThe Entrepreneur’s Zen Master

What if anxiety isn’t something you’re stuck with… but a habit your brain can unlearn? 🧠✨ #drbrewer

8 May 2025 · 1 min

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Dr. Brewer explains anxiety as a habit loop: a cue triggers a mental behavior that produces a reward. Since habits can be unlearned, you can interrupt the loop by noticing what kicks off your anxiety and what payoff your brain gets from it.

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No, it was a big aha moment for me where I was thinking, wow, I never thought about anxiety like a habit. And I know a little something about habits because I've been studying this for a decade. So I started applying what I knew about habits to testing that hypothesis that Bergenvic had put forward. And the the basic premise is that to form any habit, you know, there are three key elements. Cue, a behavior and a result, or from a neuroscience standpoint, a reward. And so anxiety is a tricky beast because you can think of it as this feeling of anxiety, right? Or the feeling of nervousness or a feeling of worry. That can be a cue and then the behavior. So often we think of behaviors as like, I stress, eat, I smoke, all these things that we do when we're anxious. But Berkova suggested that mental behaviors count just as much as physical behaviors.