Neuroscientist REVEALS How To DESTROY STRESS & ANXIETY In Seconds | Jud Brewer & Rob Dial

Welcome to today's episode with Jud Brewer. Jud Brewer is a psychiatrist whose newest book, Unwinding Anxiety, talks about the importance of figuring out where anxiety comes from, how to work through it, and how to get rid of it. We dive really deep into the addiction of anxiety, what causes it, and how to get rid of it. So with all of the stuff that's happening in the world right now that happened last year, I can't think of a better podcast episode for all of you guys to listen to and to be a part of. So without further ado, this is psychiatrist Jud Brewer.

When somebody's in a full blown panic disorder and they've developed this system, it seems like the way that you explain it and the way that I love it is, I guess the thing that I feel like most people in the world kind of I hear from them is that they feel like anxiety is something they can't really do anything about. But from looking through what you say in your book, is it, it actually explains more of anxiety as being a habit. Is that correct?

Yes. And this is what blew me away. You know, when I was training to be a psychiatrist, I didn't learn any of this stuff, but doing research myself, and as my lab started exploring how habits and addictions form, it turns out that anxiety can be reinforced in the same way that any other habit or addiction can be reinforced. And it was just kind of this obscure part of the literature that people had been largely ignor. So in fact, if you think of actually, it's a very basic learning mechanism that helps us survive. It has three elements that trigger a behavior and a result. So the survival piece is you see some danger, there's the trigger, you run away, there's the behavior, and then the result is that you survive. This is at least for our ancient ancestors. But if you think of anxiety itself, anxiety can trigger worry thinking. And that worry thinking leads us to feel like we're in control and, or to avoid that feeling of anxiety itself. And what that can do is then feedback and trigger that same habit loop the next time we have anxiety because our brain has learned, oh, you know, next time you're anxious, you should worry about this. Does that make sense for sure?

No. I feel like I know people that are actually exactly in that loop. So, so what you're, if I'm getting it correctly, is the, the way that people actually kind of put their anxiety at bay is they worry so that they feel like they're somewhat in control of the circumstances.

Yes. Okay, I know it's Crazy, isn't it?

It's crazy when you say it. But then I know there's people listening. They're like, yeah, this is 100% me. I'm worrying too much. Because the worry actually makes me feel like I'm in control of my circumstances in some way. Even though worrying does nothing for your circumstances. Right.

Right. Now, what makes it worse is that maybe one in a thousand times when somebody worries, they're like, I'm going to think of all the worst case scenarios and I'm going to be prepared for them. That one in a thousand time when somebody has had that scenario go through their mind and then suddenly it happens. And like, wow, see, it was so good that I worried about this because then I knew it was going to happen. So that can. It's like playing the lottery, you know, it's like, I wouldn't invest in the lottery, but it gets people addicted in the same way, if people happen to have that association where they're like, wow, I worried. And it did come true. That can actually make it even that worry habit loop even stronger.

That's interesting. I know people who. I know multiple people whose parents worry like crazy, and they tend to place their worry onto them and it's kind of like it's almost hereditary. Like it just comes down through generations where they learn to worry, they learn to worry, they learn to worry. And the justification that I hear from their parents is that I just love you so much and I want to make sure you're safe as possible. But it sounds like when someone's outside of the nest, the parents are actually justifying their fear of something happening for their children with the worry, and that makes them feel at least a little bit in control of a situation that they're completely un in control of. Is that kind of right as well?

That is it in a nutshell. Because if they look at the fallacy of that logic, I love you so much, I want to make sure nothing happens. The worry actually makes it more likely that something bad is going to happen because their worrying makes it harder for them to think and to plan. And on top of that, that seeds the anxiety in their children. So, you know, children learn from their parents and so they're going to model worrying for their kids and then their kids are going to grow up and be like, man, why am I worrying so much about my kids? Well, it was because your parents modeled that behavior for you, for sure.

And so it's super interesting just because of the fact that it's completely in our control. But I feel like most people act like it's completely not in their control. And so I see a lot of. I mean, now is literally the perfect time to talk with us. Like I was saying at the very beginning is there's so much anxiety about what could possibly be happening in the future. But if you were to take out even just everything that's happened in 2020 and beyond. Right. And we could have never seen this happen, I feel like anxiety was still really on the rise a lot before COVID popped up. Before all of the things, you know, presidency popped up, all those things popped up. It seemed like anxiety was really on the rise. So if we just. I want to go back to Covid and talk a little bit about it, because I think it'll really help people. But even before that happened, it seemed like people were starting to get very anxious. Did you see that in your lab, of people getting more and more anxious? And if you did, what were the reasons why you saw that more anxiety was coming up?

Yeah, we saw this both in my lab and also in my clinic. The primary referral that I get now for my clinic is people with anxiety. And I think we can look at this in terms of. There are a number of factors that contribute, but uncertainty is probably one of the largest ones. For example, with certain political figures that are very erratic or aren't very. I don't want to use the word unstable, but, you know, they're not necessarily predictable in how they're going to behave. Right. That drives people's minds apeshit.

Right.

Because our brains. Our brains plan for the future based on previous events. And so our brains are going to do these simulations, and they're going to say, okay, based on what happened before, I'm going to project into the future, and that's going to help me survive. Yet if we don't know what, you know, how. If things are very uncertain, let's just put it that way, that uncertainty makes our brains go into hyperdrive, thinking that they need to get more information. Yet there's a ton of information out there, but it doesn't necessarily. One, it's a lot of it's not true. And the second part is it's hard to sift through all of it to figure out what information is actually relevant to us. So not only is there a ton of uncertainty happening, whether it's environmental, right now, we're seeing this with health crises, with COVID politically, people's jobs, all these things, a lot of uncertainty. And then on top of that, you throw in a fire hose of information. And people have to sift through it to figure out what's pertinent, and then they also have to sift through it to see what's real. From a survival standpoint, Our ancient ancestors, there were no such things as deep fake, saber toothed tigers, right? You're like, is that really a saber tooth tiger coming at me? Yeah. And they ran. So our survival brains are saying they just take everything as gospel because that's how our survival brains work. And so we have to help our brains step back and say, wait a minute, you got to, you know, before you freak out, you got to see if this is actually true. So there's an added layer of complexity.

Yeah, that's interesting because it's almost like what. What you're saying is people. People's brains really want things to stay consistent, which is, I found a lot of people are miserable, but they're so comfortable in misery that even getting out of that misery and developing something beautiful of their life kind of the shit out of them because it's. So there's variables that they don't understand because they haven't been there yet. And so people can literally create anxiety about changing their life into a more beautiful future. It seems like they can.

And this relates a lot to, you know, often people talk about being in a comfort zone and then moving outside of the comfort zone. And how we deal with that outside of the comfort zone makes a big difference. So comfort zones, what you're talking about, where, you know, it's very predictable. If we set up a routine or habit at home, it just feels good because our brain says, okay, I don't have to worry here. You know, I don't have to. I can basically check out. And it helps me save energy so I can save my brain power for learning things. When we move out of that comfort zone, our brain goes on high alert. And if you think about it from a survival standpoint, our brains, you know, it's like out on the savannah, scanning for danger because it doesn't know that territory. Now, what we could do in modern day, when most of us aren't in actual physical danger, is we can actually lean into that uncertainty and understand how our minds work so that we can say, oh, here's this. Instead of moving into this panic zone, like, oh, no, this is dangerous. And running back to our comfort zone, we can lean into that and say, oh, here's an opportunity to learn and grow. And here it gives us the ability to lean into that to say, okay, can I actually learn from this? Can I grow in these moments of uncertainty as compared to shrink back or panic? You know, which are the two other options?

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Are you familiar with, with Andrew Huberman? So he's in Stanford and he is a neuroscientist that's out in Stanford. And one of the things that's real interesting is he talks about how when you're about. He, he deals a lot with neuroplasticity. He says when you're about to do something that you've never done before, you start to get really stressed out, you start to get anxious and you know, like you're saying it's because it's kind of like you're stepping out. I always say, like a comfort zone is like a caveman's cave. You're stepping outside of it and there's a bunch of variables. You don't know what could possibly happen. What he says is that what's really interesting is what causes neuroplasticity. One of the big pieces of neuroplasticity is, I guess, acetylcholine. And acetylcholine actually is what marks the brain for change. And what he says is that what's really interesting about before acetylcholine becomes released is that you actually turn on the stress mechanisms in the brain. And so when most people think I shouldn't be going further, it's almost like that stress is telling you you're about to change, your body's about to change, your brain is about to change. And what you're saying is just lean into it.

Yes, yes. So instead of the oh no, like, you know, I got to run back into the cave, we can lean into it and bring in some curiosity like, oh, what's happening here and what that actually can do. Another Stanford professor, Carol Dweck, she came up with this mindset model of growth versus fixed mindset. So you can think of being in our cave as that fixed mindset where we're, you know, this is how things work and this is always the way that it's going to be. Moving out of the cave is potential gives us the potential to move into a growth mindset. But we have to be open to change. And so we can look at that stress quote unquote as something that helps us open to that and say, okay, because that's basically our brain saying, okay, I'm ready to learn stuff. And there. If we can open to it and bring some curiosity in, what that does is literally opens us up to seeing things and seeing things differently or learning something new.

I love the idea of just the curiosity instead of the fear. I have a friend who went and lived down for 40 days with a native Brazilian tribe. Like, it took two days by boat to go live with them. He lived them for 40 days. And he looked me dead in the eyes. And the one thing he said, he said, you wanted. The craziest part about it, Rob, he goes, there is no depression with these people. And the reason why is because they've always got something to work towards. They're always working towards something. They're always happy about bringing home the anaconda. They just killed for everybody. But one thing he said, though, is he said he always had to wear with the machete because he might come across something that was going to attack him. So if he saw a jaguar, the jaguar's been seeing you for a long time. It's an issue. And so what he said is, and the way he said it to me was all my primal fears turned on and all my intellectual fears turned off of people are worrying about me, what am I thinking? And I'm really curious. Do you feel like the main reason for this anxiety and everything that's coming up now is that our brain still exists from millions of years, 100,000, a million, 2 million years ago. It hasn't changed as much as our external world has. And we still have the animalistic part of our brain that says, I could be attacked by a lion, even though I live in Austin, Texas, I could never be attacked. There are no lions in Austin, Texas. But that part of my brain, I guess the amygdala, is always still searching for something that could be a possible threat or fear in the future.

Is that right?

Yes.

It's always on the lookout for danger unless we're in the cave, right?

Yeah. And so I'm curious, what, what exactly triggers someone's anxiety? Like, what are the triggers around that and then some. How can someone become more self aware to those triggers and actually work through them so that they can actually have a system when they do have anxious thoughts that come up?

It's a really good question. I would say it's very individual in terms of what triggers anxiety for people. And often I see people just waking up in the morning and feeling anxious. And so here anxiety can be its own trigger for worry, which then feeds back to more anxiety because they're worried, why am I anxious? Is there something wrong? And then it just feeds on itself. I think here we can differentiate triggers for anxiety and triggers for worry. Here, that feeling of anxiety, often it's hard for people to identify specific triggers for that. But one thing that I do see as consistent Is that people with anxiety that tends to trigger worry. And worry is one of the key characteristics of anxiety disorders. In particular, if you look in the psychiatric, the diagnostic statistical manual, there, you can think of a lot of things will trigger worry. The feeling of anxiety can trigger worry. Another thing that can trigger worry is just uncertainty where somebody doesn't know if there's some big event that's going to happen and they start worrying, how's this going to go? And they start going through all the worst case scenarios. So those are two of the big ones that I see in terms of precipitants or triggers for worry.

If somebody catches themselves, okay, they're in this state of anxiety, they feel it coming up. What's the best route for them to go to get themselves out of it? And I guess, you know, recall themselves down.

This is one of the things that my lab's actually been studying. So we've been looking, approaching this from a neuroscientific standpoint, which is to kind of understand how anxiety and worry habit loops get perpetuated. We just talked about that, that habit loop process and then asking questions like, how can we specifically target that from a mechanistic perspective? So there's a. There's actually a part of our brain called the orbitofrontal cortex that stores and updates reward value for certain behaviors. And it sets up this reward hierarchy so that we don't have to relearn the reward value of everything we do every day. So, for example, I use an example in my book of broccoli versus chocolate. Most of our brains have this chocolate over broccoli hierarchy so that we don't have to like, oh, broccoli, oh, chocolate. And then decide every time we have the choice which one to eat. The reason I bring all of that up is that the thing that will change reward value of behaviors is awareness. And there's this. We don't have to go into all the specifics, but there are these mathematical models that came out of the 70s by these two researchers, Rescorla and Wagner, basically showing that we're going to just habitually act out certain behaviors based on their previous reward value unless something changes. And the only thing that's going to change that is awareness, to help us see, oh, this is more rewarding than expected or less rewarding than expected. Now, how this applies to anxiety is that we tend to see the feelings of anxiety and the mental behavior of worry as having a certain reward value. Yet if we pay attention to it and bring awareness to how rewarding the worry actually Is we can start to see, oh, this worry isn't getting me anywhere. And that leads to what's called a negative prediction error. Our brain has predicted that it's going to be a certain reward value, and then we just bring awareness in, and we're like, wow, this is not very rewarding. And so it drops. And what that does is it helps us start to become disenchanted with the worry itself. Now, the reason I went through all that background is because this is very different than the standard way that we're taught even in residency training, you know, to help people with anxiety, it's basically, you know, try to give them some medications. I wish our medications were better. And use cognitive control techniques, you know, things like willpower or cognitive behavioral therapy, and, you know, like, replace these unhealthy mental habits with. Or mental patterns with healthier cognitions. The problem is that that all relies on the youngest and weakest part of our brain from an evolutionary perspective. And ironically, that's the part of the brain that goes offline when we get stressed out or anxious. So we can't actually tap into these mechanisms. So we need to find something that's going to be a little more stronger. And this is where we can actually tap into this reward value piece, simply through having people just get very, very aware of what that worry gets them. I can give a concrete example from my clinic if that helps to drive it home. So I had a patient who was referred to me for anxiety, and this is the gentleman that had panic disorder. He had generalized anxiety disorder, and he was terrified of driving on the highway because he described it as, it felt like I was in a speeding bullet. And what I had him do was after his first visit, we was. During his first visit, we mapped out his habit loop around anxiety, around panic in particular. So it was. He would have these thoughts like, I'm going to kill somebody on the highway. His behavior would be, you know, I'm not going to drive on the highway. And then the result was that he could avoid those really distressing thoughts. So we mapped that out, and I sent him home, and I said, just go and map out as many of these things as you can. And all the things related to your. All these habit loops related to your anxiety. And in particular, pay attention to how rewarding they are using the simple question, what am I getting from this? Right? So when you're worrying, ask yourself, what am I getting from worrying? Is this actually helping me? Not intellectually, but dropping into their direct experience, into their bodily sensations. What's happening when I worry. So this guy came back, he actually was very overweight and he came back two weeks later and he said, you know, I mapped out these habit loops and I lost £14. And that was a surprise for me because we weren't even going to address his obesity at the beginning. But he had realized that when he got anxious, he would eat. And that eating wasn't actually fixing his anxiety. And in fact, it was making him feel worse about himself because he knew that he was very unhealthy. So when he started seeing how unrewarding that habit loop was, he was able to let go of it. In fact, he lost over £100 simply using that practice. And the same guy also, he went from not driving at all to, to becoming an Uber driver within five to six months because he could start to see how unrewarding the worry was. And then he could start to bring in tools. I think of them as like the bigger, better offer, right? Give your brain something more rewarding. He started bringing in curiosity as that bigger, better offer. And he started to get curious about what that worry felt like in his body, what the thoughts were. And he could start to just notice them and let them go rather than getting caught up in them.

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People because when you're talking about the youngest part of the brain, the thinking part of your brain. Are you speaking of the neocortex?

Yes. And the prefrontal cortex in particular, okay.

So the prefrontal cortex, so you know, I used to always say, and we used to say this when I was, you know, would manage people, is that when emotion is high, logic is low. And so what I always tell people is if you notice something, have a plan. When your logic is as high as possible, not when you're going through that. The worst time to try to fix a relationship is in the middle of a full blown fight. Wait till you're chilled out. But what it seems like is as I'm putting the pieces together is we see worrying as a reward for, like we were saying a little while ago, for we're at least being safe in case something happens. But it seems like everybody knows worry does nothing to them. But I think it seems like if you were to write it down with a pen and paper and actually as if it were a business plan and you're trying to create a business, you're going to put on a piece of paper. But most people don't take their mind where things can be very abstract and actually put them on a piece of paper where it could be concrete. And it seems like almost if you were to be able to write these things down and track them, you'd be able to see, yeah, this doesn't work here. This doesn't help me here, this doesn't help me here. This doesn't. And then your brain, as smart as it is, starts to go, well, this doesn't hold as much value as I thought it did. But it seems like what needs to happen though is you also need to have something to replace it. And it seems like from what you're saying is that curiosity is almost like when somebody worries they might get the dopamine hit they want, but it's also very anxious at the same time. It seems like what you're trying to do is you're trying to get the curiosity to be a stronger dopamine hit that you feel like your brain is getting a reward from being curious about, oh, why do I feel this way versus the worry itself. Is that kind of the thing that I'm getting there? Yeah.

This image is coming to mind as you're saying that is this business plan. If you go and pitch a business plan of worry to a bunch of investors, they're going to say, well, go find me some folks where this actually works. Give me some use case scenarios. And then you go out and you're like, I don't want to worry, this doesn't help me. And then they say, okay, we'll find a Different thing. Okay, go try the use case scenario of having people get curious and have them get curious about what those sensations of anxiety feel like in their body. Can that actually help them overcome things like anxiety? And is that something that's going to actually be a viable business strategy, so to speak? So absolutely. I think that's dead on.

You were talking about a lot of people will wake up and have anxiety. And I know that for me, I don't have anxiety throughout the day. But I found for about six months I was waking up and just immediately upon going, you know, brushing my teeth, everything, I was like, have these anxious feelings. I was like, why am I feeling anxious in the morning? So I started reading and trying to figure out what it was. And it seems like what wakes most people up is actually cortisol. Right? It's from what I've heard is that it wakes. The cortisol is at the highest in the morning. So for me, and I saw that in your book, you talk about meditation and mindfulness. So if somebody wakes up in the morning, they feel those immediate thoughts of anxiety. I mean, what's one of the worst things they could do? They could probably drink a coffee and then go on the Internet, right. And go on social media. That's probably gonna make your anxiety full blown after that. So instead of going that route, what do you recommend for people who wake up and feel anxious thoughts?

Well, I think it's a great thing to do to just take a beat, so to speak. So this reminds me of something I learned in medical school, which is if somebody is having a heart attack, the first thing that you should do is take your own pulse, which seems counterintuitive because our goal is to help the person that's dying. But what that points out is if we are freaking out, we're actually going to make things worse. And I think this can be true for us ourselves. So if we wake up and we feel anxious and we go get coffee, go get a stimulant, we're just adding fuel to that fire. Whereas if we can stimulate, take a moment, take a beat, or maybe take five or ten minutes and just. I hesitate to use the word meditate because it has all sorts of connotations for people. But let's say take five minutes to just simply scan down through our body and get really curious about where we feel different sensations in our body in that five minute period, that can help ground us a bit so that we can then get up and go throughout our day without kind of spiraling out of control and One thing I like to do to kind of help people wake up to their own natural capacity to be curious is if they're feeling anxious to just feel into where they feel that anxiety most in their body, and then ask themselves, do I feel it more on the right side or the left side of my body? And what that does is, I think you just kind of did that. Is this on the right side or the left side? Right. It doesn't matter what side it's on. But what that does is it awakens our curiosity. Like, huh, If I had to pick, which side is it on? So that brings that awareness in and helps us see, oh, these are just physical sensations. And it also awakens that curiosity, which is very much an antidote for getting caught up in anxiety.

Yeah, that's. And that's good, because the next question I was going to ask you is it seems like a lot of people that I've worked with and spoken with, it seems like a lot of people have lost a lot of their curiosity. They've lost a lot of their, you know, like, being a kid, it's like you're curious about everything and, you know, you can dream the biggest dreams you could possibly, but as you become older, you kind of become set in your ways. And it seems like being curious or actually just trying to think something amazing in the future that's different from where you currently are tends to be a chore with people, and it tends to be hard. But the questions kind of answer I was going to ask you, like, what is the best case? Like, what's the best thing to do in that case? And it seems like, just ask yourself, like, do I feel it more in my left or right? Which is just a simple question. You don't have to really visualize or think of anything or try to see a glowing ball that's in front of you. Like all of the meditations have, it's just like, okay, do I feel it more on my left or my right? In that situation, do you feel like. Or do you ever recommend for people to write these things down? Like I was saying previously, do you find that that helps with some people?

I think it can be very helpful for a lot of people. So really, some people, they like to write things down. They like to see it on paper. And there's something really transformative about just seeing something on paper that was in their head that just makes it very concrete. And often it's this big wake up. And they say, wow, I was thinking that, you know, the other thing that that helps with is. You can think of this as the observer effect. So in physics, you know, back. Back in the day when they were starting to do these quantum physics experiments, there was this. They found that by doing these slit lamp experiments with light to try to determine, you know, whether it was wave or particle and all this. That actually, by adding an observation device to measure photons, they were changing the results.

Right.

So they call this. I think it's the Heisenberg effect or the. The observer effect. And the same is true psychologically. So if we can observe our thoughts and emotions, we can see. Oh, simply by observing that gives us some distance and some perspective rather than being totally identified with them. So we can actually employ that observer effect ourselves. And the writing down on paper can add even more distance there.

Yeah, that's. And you bring in a really good point where bringing the observer into it. Because a lot of people have. Some say something like, I have anxiety. So instead of saying, like, I'm feeling anxious feelings, right? And people tend to identify with whatever they've been told that they have or, you know, that it's. You know, it's. It's really interesting. The perception of somebody will change when their identity around that thing tends to change. So if somebody has anxiety, is it better for them to say, like, at times I feel anxious thoughts? Or do you feel like it's better to actually say I have anxiety? Which in some sense, I think changes someone's identity and their perception of themselves.

I think this is something that people can experiment with. I love where you're going with this. So the. At the far end of that spectrum, I have patients who come in and say, I am an anxious person. That's how identified they are with it. I remember somebody. So we made this app called Unwinding Anxiety, same name as the book. And somebody wrote me an email who is pilot testing the program. And she wrote me this email and she said, I feel like anxiety is deeply etched into my bones. Right. That's how identified she was with the anxiety. So somebody can explore this themselves and say, what's it feel like when I say I'm an anxious person? What's it feel like when I just notice those thoughts and say, oh, I have anxious thoughts. And what's it like to simply notice, oh, there's an anxious thought? It doesn't even have to belong to me. Right. So somebody can explore that and see, what is it like I'm anxious versus there's an anxious thought. And I can. Spoiler alert. A lot of folks, it's game Changing for them just to see that they don't have to be there, identified with their thoughts and emotions, that they are not their thoughts. That is huge for a lot of people. And anybody can do this experiment. I'm anxious versus here's an anxious thought.

Yeah. And it's kind of like one of my favorite quotes is by Alan Watson. He says, you're under no obligation to be who you were five minutes ago. And I kind of think of it the easiest way to think of anxious thoughts, happy thoughts, whatever it is. It's rainy here in Austin today, but it's not going to be rainy forever. And so it's kind of like it's a rainy day, and the anxious thoughts can come in for an hour, two hours, but behind it is the sun. But when you identify as I am an anxious person, it's kind of like saying, that is the sun, and it will always be that way. It'll always be there. But it seems like the main thing is to kind of unwrap your identity from that thing that you think that you have and go, I'm having anxious thoughts right now. Okay. I'm having happy thoughts right now. And not. Identify yourself with the thoughts and the feelings that you have that run through your body and your brain.

Absolutely. So if you think about this in terms of our brains wanting to have certainty, the way to have certainty is to try to keep things from changing. Well, we can flip that on its head and accept the fact that we are constantly changing as human beings. We're constantly aging, we're constantly changing, the world is constantly changing. And so there you can think of as the only unchanging thing is change itself. And if we can start to live into that piece and kind of ride that wave, suddenly things get a lot easier to work with. Just like you're talking about, oh, things are changing. The weather's this way in this moment, but the weather constantly changes. My mind is like this in this moment. Oh, but things are constantly changing. It's really helpful to be able to kind of get on that constantly changing train as compared to really struggling all of our lives trying to make things not change. And it also helps us start to see how much suffering we cause for ourselves by trying to make things not change. Everything from relationships to our bodies.

It's funny because I guess even the phrase I'm an anxious person is me trying to find certainty and create no change. So when you're saying just a human that experiences different emotions, it's kind of a lot easier in that sense, where it's like there is certainty there, but then the anxious and the happy will come up in some form or another. So obviously I'm really curious about this and I don't even know how to dive into it exactly, but I'm really curious at this point in time, with all this stuff that's happening with COVID all the stuff that happened with the election, with vaccines, with all the stuff that's coming up, I mean, what tips and how can people create less anxiety, more happiness in all of the change that's happening right now, knowing that they want certainty? Yes.

So I think of this as a three step process. And I've seen this both in my clinic and also in the research that we've done, where the first step here is just to be able to see how our minds create habit loops around anxiety. So the first step is just mapping them out, you know, what's the trigger, what's the behavior? Is it worry, is it fear, is it whatever? And what's the result of that? Step two is what you and I just talked about a little while ago is around seeing how unrewarding that behavior is. So that habit loop. So if it's worry, we can ask ourselves, you know, what's the cause and effect relationship here? What do I get from worrying? So that we get that negative prediction error in our brain says, wow, that's really not as great as I remembered. That opens that door for step three, which is to bring in the bbo, the bigger, better offer. And here the simplest bigger, better offer that I love, I think of it as a superpower, is curiosity. So in those moments when we're anxious, instead of falling into an old habit of worrying about why we're anxious, we can simply get curious about what those sensations feel like in the moment. And then this gets back to what you were just talking about. We can see that these sensations are constantly changing. And instead of worrying like, oh no, this feels bad right now, instead of the oh no, we can dive in and say, oh, what is this? Where do I feel it is on the right side, left side, front, back, those types of things. And then it's just basically rinse and repeat. That's basically what I wrote the whole book about, was to help people kind of understand this from a neurobiological perspective and then put it into action in their own lives.

Yeah, it kind of goes back to the whole phrase of like, the world's happening to me versus the world is happening for me, I think, right. Where it's like, if you think that the world's happening to you, and you're just trying to dodge a bunch of stuff as you wake up, dodge circumstances all day long. It's going to be stressful and it's going to be anxious. But if you look at it and go, I think that it comes down to control problems, which I think a lot of people really have. I've realized through some psychedelic experiences, control problems were really my issue. And as I've tried to get rid of those, it's helped and been like, man, I can't control almost anything. I can barely control anything in myself. Right. And so if you think about the world's happening for me, it's like, okay, are these the circumstances that I would choose for myself? No. But if life is this game, if we just look at it as a game, this is my level that I'm on, and I have to deal with these circumstances to get to the next level. And it seems like for you, it's like, all right, let's be curious. If we're in this, if it's happening to me, then it's going to be hard. If it's happening for me, why is this happening for me? That seems more fun to me than being like, oh, my God, this is terrible. This is happening to me. Right? Why is this happening for me? What is it that. What can I see about this breakup? What can I see about this whole thing that's happening for me to make my future better?

Yes. And so in that sense, we can bow to every circumstance as a teacher. There's this. The phrase two steps forward, one step backward. Well, I would throw out there, if we are learning from that step backward, is it actually a step backward? Because often we learn more from our mishaps than from things going well. And so if we're actually learning from that step backward, are we ever going backwards if we're actually open to learning in each moment? Right.

It's like, you can't have an arrow go anywhere unless you pull it back to launch it. And the further back you pull it, the farther it's going to go. Totally. But bow to every circumstance as a teacher is what you said. I might have to get that as, like, a tattoo. I feel like that's the perfect phrase for. For. If people could just wrap up. This entire thing is just bow to every circumstance as if it's a teacher for you. There's a lesson in every single thing, whether it's good or bad. And usually the biggest lessons and the biggest teachers are in the bad things that happen.

Totally.

So I think it's a good way to end it right there.

That was a great.

That was a great little ending. I love that phrase. I'm gonna write that one down as soon as we get done. So the book is called Unwinding Anxiety. For people who want to go out there and purchase it, I'm sure it's available everywhere you could possibly purchase it. And for anyone else who wants to dive deeper into it, how can they connect with you? And obviously can go buy the book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble, all those places. But if someone wants to learn more about you and more about your app, how can they find more about you?

My website is drjudd.com, d r j u d.com and that has a bunch of resources, talks about the apps that we've developed. You know, the one for anxiety, as well as eating and smoking, a bunch of. And also has links to my book and ways to contact me. If folks are on Twitter, they can hit me up on Twitter. Udbrewer J U D B R E W E R Nice.

Well, man, I appreciate it. I think this is definitely the best time for this book to come out, and I think a lot of lives are going to be changed for me. So I appreciate you for that.

Thank you.

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