Unwinding Anxiety With Dr. Jud Brewer

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a perilous global moment that has indelibly changed all our lives. As we approach the one-year anniversary of societal shut-down, I find it opportune to reflect on how we are reacting, responding and adapting to it—for better or worse. In other words: How is your anxiety level? What habits, good or bad, have you formed in these past 12 months to cope with the insanity and uncertainty of having life upended and placed on indefinite hold? And most importantly—how are these habits serving or not serving you? I posit these questions as context for today’s conversation with my friend Dr. Jud Brewer—a psychiatrist and neuroscientist specializing in habit change who has extensively studied anxiety, and what science tells us about how we can break the cycle of fear and worry that affect all of us to some degree or another. Dr. Jud is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center, a research affiliate at MIT, and an associate professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences and Psychiatry at the Schools of Public Health & Medicine at Brown University. You might have stumbled upon his TED talk, A simple way to break a bad habit (which has racked in 16+ millions of views) or caught him on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper. He’s also been featured in TIME magazine, NPR, Forbes and many other places. Our previous conversation (RRP 471) focused on addiction and how mindfulness can help us break bad habits. Today we extend that exploration to Dr. Jud’s latest book Unwinding Anxiety—an evidence-backed primer on understanding what causes everything from mild unease to full-blown panic, the relationship between anxiety and addiction, and the many ways we can actually train our minds to feel, perform and live better. This exchange provides actionable steps to help you uproot stress. Break habit loops. And end the cycle of fear-based decision-making. Most importantly perhaps, you will learn how to identify your triggers in order to respond mindfully rather than react impulsively. Dr. Jud is among the very best and brightest at the intersection of neuroscience and habit change — and given that hundreds of millions of people suffer from anxiety, my hope and instinct is that you will find this conversation quite useful. FULL BLOG & SHOW NOTES: bit.ly/richroll586 YouTube: bit.ly/judbrewer586 May Dr. Jud’s words serve, soothe, and inspire. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:05Rich Roll?

  So if you zoom in on fear as a negatively reinforced behavior, fear helps us survive, right? Think of our ancient ancestors out on the savanna. They are foraging for food, right? But they don't know if it's dangerous. So they're moving from their safe zone, their cave, out into more of an uncertain space, the savanna. So fear helps us learn where things are safe and where things aren't safe, so we can avoid the unsafe places. But if you pair fear with a lack of certainty, right? Which is what the prefrontal cortex is trying to help us do, is trying to help us predict the future based on past experiences. If there is no precedent, if there's a lack of certainty, that fear plus uncertainty leads to anxiety.

• 1:49Rich Roll?

  And people think, oh, anxiety, it's going to help me survive? No, it doesn't. There is no evidence for it helping us survive. It makes our thinking and planning brain go offline. And if you think of the extreme form of anxiety, panic, right? Which is wildly unthinking behavior? That's that far end of the spectrum of anxiety. I'm Dr. Judd Brewer, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:22Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. So here we are, inching up on the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, which I think provides an opportune moment for all of us to reflect on how we are handling, reacting, responding, and adapting to it, for better or for worse. In other words, how is your anxiety level? What habits, good or bad, have you formed or doubled down on these past 12 months to cope with the utter insanity and uncertainty of having our lives upended and placed on indefinite

• 3:07Rich Roll?

  hold? And most importantly, how are these habits serving or not serving you? And I posit all of this as context for today's conversation with my friend, Dr. Judd Brewer, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist specializing in habit change, who has extensively studied anxiety and what science tells us about how we can break the cycle of fear and worry that cripples some, but I think in so many ways, it's fair to say, affect all of us to some degree or another. I've got a few more things to say about all of this, but first.

• 3:52Rich Roll?

  Okay, so many of you are likely familiar with Dr. Judd by dint of his first appearance on the podcast back in late 2019, episode 471. But for those of you who are new to him and his work, Judd is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center. He's a research affiliate at MIT and an associate professor in behavioral and social sciences and psychiatry at the Schools of Public Health and Medicine at Brown University. You might have stumbled upon Judd's TED Talk, which has something like 10 million views. Or maybe you caught him on 60 Minutes with Anderson Cooper.

• 4:32Rich Roll?

  He's also been featured in Time Magazine, NPR, Forbes, and many other places. And whereas our first conversation focused on craving and addiction, today, we extend that exploration to Dr. Judd's latest book, which is called Unwinding Anxiety. And this book provides a really helpful scientific framework to help all of us better understand what causes everything from mild unease to full-blown panic, and the relationship between anxiety and addiction, the many ways we can actually train and rewire our minds to feel, perform, and live better, and many other topics.

• 5:15Rich Roll?

  Judd is among the very best and brightest at the intersection of neuroscience and habit change. And given that hundreds of millions of people suffer from anxiety, my hope and my instinct is that he will find this conversation quite useful. So this is me and Dr. Judd Brewer.

• 5:38Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Man, I wish I could see your new studio.

• 5:40Rich Roll?

  Oh, man. I wish you were here. It's pretty dope. So next time you find yourself in Los Angeles, for sure.

• 5:48Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I will take you up on that. I would love to come visit. And, you know, this also sounds, I don't want to, well, I'll just say it. I'd love to go for a run with you sometime.

• 5:59Rich Roll?

  100%.

• 6:00Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Okay.

• 6:01Rich Roll?

  I was thinking about you the other day. I was on a long bike ride along the coast and wrapping my head around what I wanted to talk to you about. And the surf, the lineup was looking pretty good. It's calling your name, Judd.

• 6:15Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Oh, well, we could go surfing, too.

• 6:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I would like that. I could use a little. I'm a very average surfer, so I need all the help I can get in that department.

• 6:26Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, same here. Same here.

• 6:27Rich Roll?

  Trying to rewire my brain to master that skill set is no small thing at 54.

• 6:37Rich Roll?

  Anyway, man, let's just roll into it.

• 6:39Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Let's do it.

• 6:40Rich Roll?

  How's it going? How is your COVID experience been? Which is kind of relevant to everything that we're going to get into today.

• 6:48Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, well, I could say interesting, but that could be a gazillion things. So I'll be a little more specific. You know, I have to say, my wife taught me this term FGO. I'm sure many folks know what that is, but I had not heard it as of a few years ago. The frickin' growth opportunity. You can make that R rated if you want, but the, man, this has been such a growth opportunity here in terms of kind of all this adversity coming up and leaning in rather than running away. You know, you've probably heard this term, this phrase, "The only way out is through." Have you heard that?

• 7:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 7:28Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 7:29Rich Roll?

  Unfortunately, more times than I care to remember.

• 7:31Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 7:32Rich Roll?

  You know? Yeah. I mean, that's a very optimistic, you know, spin on it, of course.

• 7:39Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, what are the alternatives? I mean, we could either, we could either go for it, or we could be running our whole life. And I have to say, running's pretty exhausting in my experience.

• 7:50Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, you're quite the man for the moment. I think, you know, everything that you've been studying for many, many years is now coming to the forefront of what people are thinking about and grappling with, specifically anxiety. You know, I think it's the rare person who isn't experiencing some kind of anxiety, you know, in this predicament that we find ourselves in.

• 8:14Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 8:15Rich Roll?

  And that's what we're going to talk about today. So maybe the best way to launch into this is first to just define our terms. When we're talking about anxiety, what are we talking about specifically? And how does that differ from other kind of kindred emotions like fear and worry and the like?

• 8:35Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, I think that's a great place to start. So if you look at, I think the dictionary definition of anxiety goes something like, you know, "feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome." It's interesting, in that definition, worry is an interesting word because it can be a noun, like this feeling of unease, but it can also be a verb, where I am worrying. So I think let's bookmark that and come back to that because I think that's a really critical distinction. That in both of those can actually, the noun can lead to the verb which can feed back to the noun of worrying.

• 9:15Dr. Jud Brewer?

  But looking at it from a scientific standpoint, you know, I think a lot of people associate anxiety with something that's kind of necessary, needed for survival, you know, especially right now. And that's something that I dove into a lot in my book because I've been really interested with this idea, you know, there's this whole idea of performance anxiety. And I actually haven't found any evidence to support it. So let's bookmark that as well and talk about some of these origins here. So think of fear as a survival mechanism. Okay. We've talked before about habits and setting up habits for survival, right? To remember where food is and to remember where danger is.

• 9:59Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So these learning mechanisms go way back. You know, evolutionary, it could serve all the way to the sea slug. Like this is the oldest learning mechanism known in science, you know, positive and negative reinforcement. So if you zoom in on fear as a negatively reinforced behavior, fear helps us survive, right? So for, think of our ancient ancestors out on the savanna. They are foraging for food, right? But they don't know if it's dangerous. So they're moving from their safe zone, their cave, out into more of an uncertain space, the savanna. So their brain naturally goes on high alert to start to learn things like, oh, there's food, go there again, there's danger, don't go there again. Okay.

• 10:41Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So fear helps us learn where things are safe and where things aren't safe so we can avoid the unsafe places. That fear mechanism is, is this old part of the brain and then layered on top of it is a thinking and planning part of the brain, the neocortex or the prefrontal cortex in particular. And this is interesting because it helps us survive in a different way. It helps us survive through thinking and planning, yet it needs.

• 11:10Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Information and preferably accurate information. So in this day and age, there's a lot of misinformation, which gets in the way. But it also is helpful for it to have precedent. So when it's going into, you know, uncharted territory, it's really hard to think and plan. You know, like, oh, let's, let's go explore Saturn. Well, we've never done that before. So, so we've got it, you know, you gotta, you gotta think of a bunch of things and try to approximate, but it'd be much easier if somebody else had explored Saturn and wrote a book about it, said, oh, do this, don't do that. Okay. So the prefrontal cortex, think of fear, helps us survive. The prefrontal cortex helps us survive. But if you pair fear with a lack of certainty, right?

• 11:54Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Which is what the prefrontal cortex is trying to help us do, is trying to help us predict the future based on past experiences. If there is no precedent, if there's a lack of certainty, that fear plus uncertainty leads to anxiety. And people think, oh, anxiety, it's going to help me survive? No. It doesn't. There is no evidence for it helping us survive. It makes our thinking and planning brain go offline. And if you think of the extreme form of anxiety, panic, right? Which is wildly unthinking behavior. That's that far end of the spectrum of anxiety.

• 12:26Rich Roll?

  Right. It's an interesting, but subtle and important distinction in that it is the uncertainty that's driving the irrationality, right? You can be afraid when you have a certain set of predictable parameters to deal with. But when you don't know what you're venturing into, that's what provokes the anxiety. So to kind of extend that, what's fascinating about that is it's not the dire consequence that creates the anxiety. It's the lack of certainty around whether that consequence is going to be dire or not so dire.

• 13:01Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, absolutely. And just to be super clear for your listeners, it's not that fear is a problem, right? Fear helps us learn in new situations in particular.

• 13:12Rich Roll?

  But fear doesn't have the same neurochemical reaction in the brain as anxiety. Like, how, neurochemically, like, how do these two things distinguish themselves?

• 13:22Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, I don't think all of the neurochemistry has been worked out, but I think one way to think about this is on a temporal scale. So if you look at the time scales, you can actually differentiate them pretty well. I'll use an example of, let's say, stepping out into the street. So let's say, in this day and age, when everybody is distracted by their, what does Cornell Welsh say, that are weapons of mass distraction, you know, everybody's looking at their phone. So somebody steps out in the street and doesn't see the bus coming, you know, bearing down on them. They instinctively jump back onto the safety of the sidewalk. And I say instinctively because this is much faster than our thinking brain. You know, imagine, you look up at the bus and go, hmm, is that really going fast enough, you know, is it gonna veer, splat?

• 14:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:05Dr. Jud Brewer?

  We don't have time for that.

• 14:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:06Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So we, we jump back onto the safety of the sidewalk, and then we have a fear response. All of our, you know, our, basically, our fight or flight response kicks in and says, wow, that was crazy. And I, to be more precise, that fight or flight response is where we get these catecholamines, we get all these, basically, the adrenaline surge that says, hey, you gotta, you gotta run if you need to, if you're not, if you're not safe at this point, okay?

• 14:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:33Dr. Jud Brewer?

  But that also helps us have this fear response that says, wow, you could have almost gotten killed. You should learn from this. Look both ways, you know, relearn what you learned as a kid. The problem is, so that's, think of that as, uh, super rapid, is that instinctual response. The rapid response is that fear response. But then, ideally, that drains out of our system, you know, and we move on when we've learned.

• 14:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:59Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So this is what differentiates that from anxiety, is with the anxiety, maybe we keep replaying it in our head, oh, I could have gotten killed, I'm an idiot, I shouldn't have done that. That is just kind of keeping that fear response going chronically. And that could happen for hours, days, weeks, years. You know, and this is where people, you know, it's not like we need a lifetime of psychotherapy for a fear response.

• 15:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:23Dr. Jud Brewer?

  But what we do, what we do need is the ability to see the difference between a helpful fear response and us literally getting spun out of control because our minds going out of control, making us continue to think about it.

• 15:37Rich Roll?

  Right, and I think we're all experiencing, you know, some variation on those two things over the past, you know, year, whether it's fear or unhealthy anxiety, you know, amidst a global pandemic and, you know, our weapons of mass distraction that are feeding us conflicting, you know, information about X, Y, and Z. I would suspect that, you know, this has created an unbelievably robust Petri dish for you to really, you know, immerse yourself in the subject matter in which you are an expert. And I know that, you know, early in the pandemic, like last May, you were writing pretty extensively

• 16:17Rich Roll?

  about anxiety and how we were, you know, grappling with how to, you know, manage this, this crazy shift in all of our lifestyles. But here we are, almost a year later. It would seem to follow that there's less uncertainty now, perhaps the same amount of fear, but have you seen any kind of differentiation in how your patients or, or the population at large is kind of coping with, you know, COVID?

• 16:49Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So I would say there are two main things that I'm noticing, both in my clinic and then just at large. One is that there is that big spike of, wow, this is crazy, this is really going to be a pandemic, is it, wow, this really is a pandemic, you know? And then, how dangerous is this, you know, how infectious is this? All of that, that uncertainty has gone down a little bit, and the death rate has gone down when people figured out things like using steroids to help, you know, severely ill patients. So that part has helped, yet we've seen continual spikes, and these are intermittent ones, we don't know when they're going to happen, with other forms of uncertainty, like the variants, oh, this variant popped up, and now there's, and then those things feed

• 17:34Dr. Jud Brewer?

  a whole nother level of uncertainty. We've also seen things that really haven't changed that much in terms of the uncertainty. You know, small businesses, for example, the economy, for example. This is totally unprecedented, so everybody is kind of feeling their way through this, whether it's a very poor, small business owner. You know, I've seen so many who've just like put their life savings in there like, just one more month, just one more month.

• 17:58Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 17:59Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And then they crash and burn. Or the, you know, the feds who are trying to figure out how to prop up the economy without, you know, throwing us into whatever, wild inflation or whatever. That's not my lane, so I don't know. But the other piece that I've seen on top of this is how people are coping. And I say, you know, coping with air quotes because, you know, you've probably heard of the quarantine 15 and, you know, where people have gained weight. And people are turning to these short-term coping strategies because they're immediate and, you know, feel good in the moment, whether it's drinking. You know, drinking has gone up. Actually, it's interesting, drinking has gone up in a significant part of the population and some people have just basically cut out their drinking, probably due to lack of, you

• 18:43Dr. Jud Brewer?

  know, social resources and the usual places that they do. So drinking's gone up, Netflix has had quite a run.

• 18:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 18:50Dr. Jud Brewer?

  You know, social media, all these things have gone up as coping mechanisms that are probably going to get laid down even harder as negative habits that people are going to have that's going to give this pandemic a long tail. And then, you know, I think the anxiety piece is going to have an even longer tail. Some are describing this as the coming, you know, epidemic of anxiety.

• 19:12Rich Roll?

  Right, right. What's interesting about what you just said is this nexus between anxiety and addictive behavior patterns, right? I mean, it's logical if you really think about it, but this is something that your new book really gets into in depth, the extent to which addictive behaviors really are, you know, a close cousin to chronic anxiety and how that works neurochemically. Can you talk a little bit about what that connection is?

• 19:44Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, I'd be happy to. This was actually a big aha moment that I had several years ago now. So just to set the stage, as a budding addiction psychiatrist, I had a lot of patients, not only with addictions, but a lot of folks with anxiety. Anxiety and depression are the bread and butter of the psychiatric profession. Right. And I learned in medical school to basically give people medications for anxiety. And the best medications out there are actually in a class of antidepressants, ironically, because there aren't, you know, the anxiolytics, the benzodiazepines are now no longer recommended as a first-line treatment for anxiety. So the best evidence for these shows that you need to treat about five people before

• 20:29Dr. Jud Brewer?

  one person benefits. This is called the number needed to treat. And so as a psychiatrist, you can imagine it's not very satisfying for me to treat five people and one person shows a significant benefit. So I was struggling in my outpatient clinic, helping my patients with anxiety. And I was even trained in cognitive behavioral therapy. The response rate to cognitive behavioral therapy is about 50% if you can get a good therapist. So there are a lot of barriers to good treatment for anxiety. So I was really struggling and somebody in, we were studying one of these apps that we developed for eating called Eat Right Now, and somebody said, you know, my habit pattern around eating goes like this. I'm anxious and I eat.

• 21:13Dr. Jud Brewer?

  You know, repeat. And she said, you know, could you develop a program for anxiety? And I was thinking, well, you know, I'm a psychiatrist. I generally prescribe medications. But as a researcher, you know, I knew a little something about habits. We'd been studying this for a long time. So I went back and looked at the literature. And back in the 80s, right, this is when the stones, this is how popular benzodiazepines were. Do you remember the song "Mother's Little Helper"? Of course. Yes. So you want to sing a few bars for us?

• 21:43Rich Roll?

  No, I'm not. I'm not going to subject anybody to my singing voice, but go ahead. Feel free.

• 21:48Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, I won't sing, but it says something, you know, it goes something like, she goes running to the shelter of mother's little helper and it helps her through her day. Do, do, do, do, do, do. Yes. So the Stones were singing about benzos because they were so wildly popular in the seventies and eighties. And the psychiatric field was looking for new medications. So they came up with the SSRIs, you know, Prozac was, I think it was invented in 85 or something like that. So everybody's heralding the, the miracle of Prozac while the Stones are singing about the, the benzos. And there was this guy at Penn State who was quietly studying anxiety. His name was Thomas, Thomas Borkevic. And

• 22:30Dr. Jud Brewer?

  he said, you know, I'm, and he was very interested in the psychological aspects. And he said, you know, I think anxiety could actually be perpetuated in the same way as any other habit through negative reinforcement. And that's when all the bells went off for me when I read that, you know, I went back because I never learned this in residency or medical school. When I saw this literature, it was pretty solid. And I was thinking, wow, I never thought about that. Could anxiety actually be driven habitually? And so I started looking at that. And lo and behold, it can be negatively reinforced, just like any other bad habit. And that's where things really took off for me. And I started exploring that both in my research and also in my clinic.

• 23:12Rich Roll?

  Right. And the, in the way that an addict experiences some level of emotional discomfort and reaches for the substance to self-medicate, that anxiety is extremely similar in that you're feeling agitated and you then try to ameliorate that through any number of different behaviors, right? And this is something you talk about in the book. It's less about the anxiety and it's more about like the behavior that you're reaching out to, to, to self-medicate.

• 23:44Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, absolutely. So I've had a number of patients, and I think I write about one of them in the book, who were referred to me for alcohol use disorder. And in fact, their primary disorder, quote unquote, I don't like that word, their primary issue, let's say, is anxiety. And they're, you know, so anxiety prompts them to drink and then that gives them this brief relief and then rinse and repeat every day.

• 24:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 24:05Dr. Jud Brewer?

  The other thing, and this can, this comes back to the definition of anxiety. What Borkevic talked about was that anxiety As a noun, so that negative feeling, that unpleasant feeling or emotion can trigger worry as a mental behavior. And I want to highlight that because a lot of people think of behaviors as, you know, eating, smoking, drinking, whatever. Worry is a mental behavior because we're doing something. It's just not obvious to everybody else. And that worry gives people a couple of things. One is a feeling of control because at least they're doing something. And/or it can also distract them from that worst feeling, feeling of fear or anxiety.

• 24:49Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And so worry as that mental behavior can actually feed back and drive anxiety habit loops that then, you know, when people realize they're not really in control, then they go over that adventure horizon into the black hole of anxiety because they get worried and then they get more anxious and they get more worried and, you know, and it just spirals out of control.

• 25:07Rich Roll?

  Right. I grew up with a parent who is a chronic worrier. And, you know, in the way that, you know, you know, a virus like COVID-19 can get passed from person to person, these are emotions that travel virally in a way that's, you know, perhaps worse than a virus because of our social media apps, et cetera. And I know you've talked about this, but it took me a long time to deprogram the amount of anxiety that was layered upon me throughout my youth that made me a very afraid person.

• 25:48Rich Roll?

  But I've come to recognize the extent to which this parent relied upon worry as basically, you know, a behavior that had some reward for her, my mother, in that it made, it did make her feel like she was doing something and it was all couched under this umbrella of love, right? As a way of rationalizing something that was in truth like very unhealthy and pernicious.

• 26:19Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, well, imagine a mother of a teenager. So let's say Rich is a high school student, goes out, you know, partying with his friends and his mother worries all night until she hears the doorknob, you know, click or the garage door open or whatever, and then she can get to sleep. Well, I'm gonna guess that her worrying did not keep Rich safe.

• 26:41Rich Roll?

  No, but it did color my worldview and what I entertained as possible for my life. Like, it made me very conservative in my choices. Like, my risk analysis was very conservative. And I think it limited me until I got enough adequate therapy to kind of see more broadly what was actually going on. But I think what's interesting about that, it's almost, you know, I don't know if it's epigenetic, but the extent to which the anxiety or the worry or the fear that's carried by the people in your immediate environment affect those around those people.

• 27:25Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's so pervasive that there's a scientific term for this called social contagion. And I think, like you alluded to with social media, you know, you can prevent the spread of a virus, you know, a physical virus by social distancing and masking and all those things. But somebody can sneeze on your brain from anywhere in the world, especially if we're going on social media and constantly getting sneezed on.

• 27:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, 10 minutes before we started this podcast, I was like looking at Twitter, which I shouldn't be doing, but I was. And I watched the video of the engine on the United Airlines flight from Denver to Honolulu that like caught on fire and was exploding. And suddenly I was super agitated. I was like unnecessarily agitated. Like, it's terrible to see that. And I'm glad that everybody's safe and that that had a happy ending to it. But that caused me to enter into this conversation in a state that, you know, I would have preferred to not be in. And I did it to myself.

• 28:33Rich Roll?

  So I think the lesson is we need to be more circumspect with these tools of social contagion.

• 28:41Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yes, and I think here, you know, often people, they beat themselves up, I'm not saying this is the case for you, but I've seen a lot of people say, "Well, I shouldn't use social media so much," or "I shouldn't go on social media right before a big meeting, you know, so I can calm down," or whatever. And then they have another reason, they get in a habit loop of beating themselves up because they can't just force themselves to stop, which goes back to this, you know, this willpower myth, that's more myth than muscle. So I think that's one important thing for folks to keep in mind.

• 29:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 29:13Dr. Jud Brewer?

  There may be other ways to help us get off social media, not just telling ourselves that we shouldn't.

• 29:17Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. There is an interesting relationship between uncertainty and control, and I suspect that people have, you know, various relationships with their respective control issues, but those seem to be kind of intricately intertwined. When you enter into a situation in which you feel like you don't have agency or control, that propagates a certain level of uncertainty, and somebody who has robust control issues, it seems to me, would be more susceptible to an anxious response. Does that track?

• 29:54Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Absolutely.

• 29:55Rich Roll?

  With the research?

• 29:56Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, you can think of this, going back to this idea of, you know, our survival brains. The cave is a safe place because we're in control, you know, no saber-toothed tigers in the cave. When we go out into Savannah, if we are, you know, if we're just of the, kind of the habitual mindset of that, like, "I've gotta be in control," we can actually, that uncertainty can feel like panic, and so we move from our safety zone into our panic zone. And then, of course, while the unthinking behavior, either we run back to the safety of the cave and we starve to death because we don't get food. Or we freak out and run off a cliff or do something that's not thinking.

• 30:37Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So here, I think it's really important to see how we, how we work with that uncertainty. And in fact, we can move, instead of moving into the panic zone, this is, it goes back to the lean in, if we can lean into what's happening, we can actually move into our growth zone. So instead of thinking, oh no, this is happening again, this is terrible, this is awful, we can go, oh, this is different. And we can start to see this as a, as that FGO, the freaking growth opportunity.

• 31:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:10Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And if you, I love Carol Dweck's work, you know, she was a professor at Stanford, talks about fixed versus growth mindset. You know, fixed mindset is that safety or the panic, where we're, we're in some habitual, you know, way of being, either never venturing out or always freaking out. And that growth zone is the, oh, what can I learn from this zone?

• 31:31Rich Roll?

  Right, but the first step in that process is it not having the, the ability to on some level, step outside yourself so that you can recognize what's going on. I mean, you have this RAIN acronym that, that kind of speaks to that. Like, most of us are on some level of autopilot, where we're not recognizing the triggers, the behaviors, the results, we're just repeating a cycle without any kind of mindfulness whatsoever. So, talk a little bit about how you initiate that process of becoming a little bit more self-aware of what is actually transpiring, so that you can then, you know, look at it

• 32:13Rich Roll?

  as a growth opportunity, or recognize that there's something that you can actually do about it.

• 32:19Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Sure. I, I think of this as a three-step process, and this actually came to me as I was working more and more with my clinic patients and with our folks in our, in our eating group, actually, before we'd even developed an anxiety program. And the first step is really just kind of mapping out these habit loops. So if we can't map them out, if we can't see that we're stuck... We have no way, you know, there's no way that we can use RAIN acronyms or anything else to get out of them because we don't know what we're running from. So here, maybe I'll give an example, a concrete example. I had a patient who was referred to me for anxiety. And when he walked into my office, I could see that he was anxious. So that was pretty straightforward. But when I started taking his history, he started describing how when he would be driving

• 33:03Dr. Jud Brewer?

  on the highway, he felt like he was in a speeding bullet. And so he said, that thought was the trigger that triggered him to start avoiding driving on the highway because he would get panic attacks. And so that avoidance behavior helped him avoid getting panic attacks. And then he stopped driving on the highway. In fact, he had even gotten a bit anxious just driving the local roads to get to my office. So the first thing we did, I pulled out a piece of paper and a pen, and I just wrote "Trigger Behavior Result" out on a piece of paper. And I said, "Okay, let's go through this. What are your, you know, what's your trigger?" And he's like, "Those thoughts. What's the behavior while I avoid driving?" And then with the result, well, now I'm kind of stuck because I'm really limited in what

• 33:45Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I do, yet it helped me avoid having future panic attacks. So there's a great example of just taking five minutes, literally, to map these out. So anybody can do this. They don't need a psychiatrist to sit down with them to do it. But that's the first step. If we don't know our habits, like habit loops, we can't work with them. And so that's what I sent him home to do. I said, I gave him, we have an Unwinding Anxiety app. I sent him home with that. And I said, "Just start mapping out your habit loops." And interestingly, I'll just, I'll just say a little bit more about him. He came back two weeks later. So I said, you know, "Let's set up a follow-up appointment for two weeks." He came back two weeks later, and he said something really striking that I'd not expected him to say. Okay.

• 34:29Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And this actually leads into that second step. So first step is mapping out these habit loops. The second step is kind of seeing how rewarding they are. And what I failed to mention was that this gentleman was 180 pounds overweight, okay, when he walked into my office. So he also, when I took his full history, he had hypertension, he had high blood pressure, he had a fatty liver, he had obstructive sleep apnea. So when he walks in for his follow-up visit, he's, he looks less anxious. But the first thing he said to me... Was, "Hey Doc, I lost 14 pounds."

• 34:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And I said, "What?" Because I was thinking, "Did we talk about weight loss?" I don't think we talked about weight loss yet. We're going to save that until he worked on his anxiety. And he said, you know, he saw that I was a little confused. And he said, "Okay, I was mapping out my habit loops like you success did, and I realized that anxiety was driving me to stress eat. And that stress eating was not actually fixing my anxiety, and it was making me feel worse about myself because I know I need to lose weight, because I'm at a very unhealthy weight." So, just by mapping out these habit loops, he started to see that some of his compensatory behaviors were actually not very rewarding for him. And this gentleman went on to lose over 100 pounds. He's still going strong with that. But the way he describes it is, you know,

• 35:44Dr. Jud Brewer?

  "That 14 pounds and that next 86 pounds or whatever, he said, "It was effortless because I didn't feel like I need to lose weight. I was just paying attention and mapping out my habit loops around stressing and realizing that they weren't rewarding." So, that's really the second step here, which is tapping into our brain's reward system and helping it get updated.

• 36:06Rich Roll?

  So, is this Dave, who has the recurring narrative throughout the book, right? And if I'm not mistaken, at some point, he honks at you driving down a busy street. So, he's able to conquer his fear of driving along the way, which was the initial thing that brought him into you, right?

• 36:22Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 36:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's amazing, because it seems almost too simple to be true, but very powerful. And if you kind of extend, like, the extreme example of someone like this person who's going out of their way to avoid the thing that's causing them anxiety, ultimately leads them to become like a shut-in, right? Avoid anything that would provoke you to have any kind of anxiety response that then creates a scenario that's far worse than the anxiety itself.

• 36:56Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 36:57Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 37:02Rich Roll?

  I'm trying to square this a little bit with 12-step wherein there's this adage that self-awareness will avail you nothing. And here is an example of self-awareness availing you quite a bit, right? But that self-awareness has to be followed with the action. Like you had a patient who had a level of willingness to actually roll up his sleeves and do the work, right? Just being aware that this is the case is not enough. It was his dedication to actually tracking these triggers, behaviors, and results that led him to kind of course correct.

• 37:39Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yes, and I would say, so here I would say self-awareness coupled with just some basic understanding of how our brains work, like, you know, this reward-based learning system, really gets us pretty far. And so, you know, I'd be curious to hear, because I, obviously, I know some about 12-step programs working as an addiction psychiatrist, but I'm curious, this self-awareness avails you nothing. I'm, I have not, not many of my patients talk about that.

• 38:07Rich Roll?

  Oh, it's interesting. Yeah, it's just, it's one of the many, you know, many, many catchphrases. I think what, at the heart of what that's getting at is the fact that you can't just passively become sober, like, you actually have to do the steps and, you know, all the other stuff that comes with it. Like, just attending meetings and sitting in the back listening isn't going to provide you with the solution. Or just coming to the realization that you have a problem, that's important, but rectifying the problem is going to require you to get out of your comfort zone and do a little bit of heavy lifting that, you know, is going to be unfamiliar for you.

• 38:45Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So, yeah, that makes sense. If I'm understanding what you're saying, it's kind of like somebody could even, that self-awareness could even perpetuate a self-identification with the behavior. So if somebody says, you know, "I am an alcoholic," I have tons of patients who say, "I'm just an anxious person." And what I say to them is, "Well, let's see if that, if that's a habit, or if that's a persona that you've taken on that you can actually let go of." And actually, Dave... You know, you mentioned him. He had been so identified with anxiety. You know, he had started getting anxious around the age of eight, and he was 40 when he came to see

• 39:25Dr. Jud Brewer?

  me. So he'd been wearing this sweater, let's say, for, you know, over 30 years. When he started to reduce his anxiety, one visit, he came in to my office and he said, "Doc, it's kind of weird. I'm starting to feel prolonged periods of calmness and peace and all this, and it feels strange. So I'm getting anxious that I'm not anxious."

• 39:48Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right. Right. It's like the person who, you know, grew up in a dysfunctional household and is then attracted to, you know, a mate that has the attributes of that dysfunctional parent, and of course is in a string of really bad relationships, finally meets somebody who's healthy, and they self-destruct that relationship because it's so unfamiliar. Like, the healthy habit feels wrong until it feels right. So there's an acclimation period, especially when identity is so, you know, deeply woven into the fabric of how this person, you know, sort of navigates and sees the world.

• 40:31Dr. Jud Brewer?

  100%. And I remember somebody who was pilot testing on Unwinding Anxiety Program sent me an email and said, "You know, I feel like this anxiety is deeply etched in my bones." That's how identified she was with it.

• 40:46Rich Roll?

  And what's interesting is, I mean, that's sort of, in my mind, when I hear that, I'm like, "Well, that's going to be a tough road to hoe." Like, how are you going to get that person? I mean, because you're basically telling them they have to grow into, you know, a completely new sense of who they are. Like, how does that transpire? And yet, the success rates that you're experiencing, you know, demonstrate how powerful this is.

• 41:12Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, and so I can talk about that briefly. What I would say, you know, as a clinician, I was looking for solutions. As a researcher, I'm not going to believe anything until I see that it actually works, including my own work. You know, I'm the easiest person to fool, thinking, oh, I'm going to create a program. It's going to work for everybody. It could just be a, you know, oh, this worked for me and have won. And therefore, if it doesn't work for you, there's something wrong with you as compared to me. So, you know, the nice thing about being a neuroscientist is I can actually study this stuff in addition to developing it. Long story short, you know, we've run several clinical trials now. We started with anxious physicians because they are really hard to work with. And I say that as a card carrying member, you know, we can be a pain in the ass.

• 41:55Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And I think a lot of it is conditioned culturally, where we have to be the martyrs. You know, there's this phrase, armor up, where we have to armor up. You know, we have to take care of everyone else, but there's no time to take care of ourselves because we could have been spending that time taking care of our patients. So a lot of physicians don't take care of themselves, and we now see an epidemic of burnout with physicians. So we worked with anxious physicians. It was unfortunately the easiest study I ever recruited for because there were so many people that were eligible. And long story short, you know, we tested out this unwinding anxiety app, and after three months, we saw 57% reduction in these clinically validated anxiety scores. We also saw significant reductions in measures of burnout because the two can be correlated, especially callousness and things like that.

• 42:40Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So that was interesting. But it was a small trial, single arm, you know, we didn't have a control group. So we got NIH funding to do a randomized controlled trial with people with generalized anxiety disorder. I think of these as the Olympians of worry. You know, they're really good, really practiced at worrying. We did a randomized controlled trial, had people do their usual clinical care or clinical care plus this unwinding anxiety app, and we got a 67% reduction in these clinically validated anxiety scores. And just to put that in perspective, so remember that number needed to treat I mentioned earlier? So I need to treat over five patients for one person to benefit from the medication. The number needed to treat here was 1.6.

• 43:22Rich Roll?

  Hmm. That's crazy. I mean, that's, that, you know, when you're, when you're looking at going from basically a 20% success rate to an over 60% success rate, it's almost unheard of in your field, right?

• 43:37Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And this was with an app.

• 43:38Rich Roll?

  Right. Right, right. Not even in-person treatment.

• 43:44Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, now, to be fair, as part of this app-based program, I want to give people support. So we have an online community that I and other experts moderate, and I lead a live weekly group that anybody can join for an hour and they can ask questions. You kind of ask the doc type of thing. So we do try to give people support, but the majority of folks just use the app and do pretty darn well.

• 44:13Rich Roll?

  So you drop a statistic in the book, I believe it's something like 264 million people are dealing with anxiety. Is that globally or in the United States? I can't recall.

• 44:28Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I've mostly looked at data in the US. And so what I can say, and I'm terrible at remembering statistics, that's why I write them down and promptly forget them. But in the US, the most prevalent category of disorders, again, I don't like that term, is anxiety disorders. So I think it's basically one in three people in their lifetime is going to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. That's just the disorder spectrum. So anxiety is pretty darn prominent. I think in the United States, those data are probably from at least the Western world, if not the US. But let's just say anxiety is pretty prevalent all over the world.

• 45:09Rich Roll?

  Right. So chances are, there's a high percentage of people that are listening or watching this right now who, maybe they're not having full-blown panic attacks, but are contending with anxiety in some kind of material way on a daily basis in their lives. So I think it would be really helpful and instructive to kind of walk through this therapeutic process of how we unpack anxiety and get people to develop that self-awareness with the tools to confront it and create healthier responses.

• 45:43Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, I'd be happy to. So, and we've actually already talked about the first step, you know, which is just to map out these habit loops, which anybody can do. And we even put out a free resource, I think it's mapmyhabit.com, where somebody can download a PDF that gives them a habit mapper and explains it and gives them worksheets where they can just map it out on their daily basis, which is something, you know, it's free, anybody can do that. And the idea is just to help people start to develop that first level of awareness. Oh, I didn't notice, you know, X habit. And often there can be habit that builds on habit that builds on habit. So after that first step, you know, we talked a little bit about the second step about tapping into the reward value of the brain.

• 46:26Dr. Jud Brewer?

  This step is somewhat counterintuitive because, and this may, I'd love to hear your perspective on this. This may be this Western mindset of just do it, where, okay, I've identified the problem, now I'm going to fix the problem.

• 46:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:41Dr. Jud Brewer?

  If we could tell ourselves, you know, if we could think our way out of anxiety, I would happily find another job. It's just not how our brains work, right? So there's this idea of just telling ourselves to stop being anxious. Did you ever see, there was a Bob Newhart skit from his show in the 70s called Just Stop It?

• 47:00Rich Roll?

  No, I don't, I don't think I ever saw that.

• 47:02Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Okay, so there's this five-minute skit where this woman walks into his office, as this therapist's office, and she says, you know, I have this fear of being buried alive in a box. And basically, the skit where he just leans over his desk and he says, "Just stop it." And there are various iterations of this, and then eventually he says, you know, "Just stop it or I'll bury you alive in a box."

• 47:24Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So that, that's the concept around anxiety is, you know, oh, if you're anxious, just stop it.

• 47:29Rich Roll?

  Same with addiction.

• 47:31Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, yes, it's no different.

• 47:33Rich Roll?

  Just cut it out. Stop doing that thing that's killing you. Yeah, what's the matter with you?

• 47:39Dr. Jud Brewer?

  You weak person.

• 47:40Rich Roll?

  Right. It opens it up to a broader conversation about self-will and the inability to leverage self-will to confront these problems.

• 47:49Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yes, yes. So basically, at best, willpower can be depleted throughout the day. At worst, and I think the science is leaning in this direction, we may not really have a whole lot of willpower. It may be more a myth and muscle. And there's a fair amount of research suggesting that. But these debates have been going on since the Greece, you know, ancient Greece, even probably before that. There was this relief on the Parthenon about this rider and this horse, you know, and trying to tame the wild horse. The horse was passions. You can think of anxiety that way. And the rider is reason. You know, and so, you know, we haven't, we haven't gotten any better at taming our passions, whether they're, whether they're addictions or anxiety.

• 48:32Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So here, what I would say is, well, what we do know in modern day is a little bit of neuroscience, you know, that wasn't known back in ancient Greece. And one of the pieces that we do know is that reward-based learning is the strongest mechanism in our brain. So why not start there rather than the prefrontal cortex, which ironically goes offline when we're stressed or we're tired. You know, that's where the HALT acronym comes from, you know, hungry, angry, lonely, tired. That's when our prefrontal cortex goes offline. So if that's not accessible or useful or strong enough, why not tap into the reward-based learning part of the brain? And it too is relatively simple and has been, the research has been known for decades about how this works.

• 49:16Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And it's pretty, so basically, there are these two researchers in the seventies, Raskolow and Wagner. They developed this model, called the Raskolow-Wagner model, where we developed this, basically,

• 49:28Dr. Jud Brewer?

  A prediction value or a reward value of different behaviors. And the way this is set up is to help us not have to relearn everything every day. You know, so if given a choice between two behaviors, we don't have to try the A and then try B and then compare the two. You know, we've tried them enough before that we say, oh yeah, I'm going to do B because I know it's more rewarding than A. So our brains are going to pick what's more rewarding. So for example, I don't know, tying our shoes. Let's say A is not tying your shoes, B is tying your shoes. You realize if you tie your shoes, you don't trip. It's more rewarding. We just do it as a habit. Okay. So the only way to change a behavior is by updating that reward value. And that reward value can get laid down for a long time.

• 50:12Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I don't know, we could use eating or smoking as an example, right? So think of all the times we've eaten cake. You know, birthday parties, celebrations, all these things. That gets laid down as this rewarding behavior. And then we see cake and we eat cake because our brain says that's rewarding. The only way to change that is to bring awareness to it. And the Roschola Wagner model talks about these terms that are, sound fancy, but they're pretty straightforward. Positive prediction error or a negative prediction error. So using cake as an example. If we see a piece of chocolate cake and we haven't had it from a certain bakery before we, you know, we expected to have, you know, oh, I like chocolate cake. We expected to have a certain reward value.

• 50:55Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Then we eat it and we go, oh my goodness, this is the best chocolate cake I've ever had, you know, in my life. And suddenly there's this positive prediction error because we predicted it to be of X reward. And it was actually X plus a thousand, you know, it was much more rewarding. So we were like, oh, I gotta remember that bakery. And we, we learned to go back there for good chocolate cake. Let's say we go to the same bakery and they put a bunch of salts in the recipe instead of sugar, you know, oops. And we eat it and we go, ugh. What, you know, boy, this is not very rewarding. We get this negative prediction error that says, man, don't go back to that bakery again. Okay?

• 51:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:32Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So that's how reward value is updated, all based on one thing, which is awareness. We have to pay attention to the behavior or we're just gonna keep doing it.

• 51:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:42Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And you can see how this applies to addictions, but, sorry, I don't, go ahead.

• 51:46Rich Roll?

  No, no, no, no, finish your thought.

• 51:47Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, I was just gonna say, it's easy to see how that applies to addictions. So for example, in our smoking program, we have people pay attention when they smoke and they realize that cigarettes taste like shit and they stop, you know, that reward value goes down. We've even, we did a study recently with our Eat Right Now app where we actually found that within 10 to 12 times of people paying attention, we give them this craving tool in the app to really pay attention as they eat, that reward value drops below zero. So it doesn't actually take that long to update a reward value, whether it's addiction like cigarette smoking or even a habit like overeating cake.

• 52:22Rich Roll?

  Right. That's super fascinating. I'm just thinking about, you know, I can only couch this in my own experience, and I'm thinking about my alcoholism and the self-awareness that I would have before picking up a drink, knowing if I pick up one, that ain't gonna be the only drink, and God knows what's gonna happen, but 100% I'm gonna, at a minimum, I'm gonna wake up feeling terrible, and there's the possibility that I'm creating that all kinds of havoc is gonna ensue, that's gonna have a very negative impact on my life, and yet I make the choice anyway. There's a powerlessness over it. So maybe that's a little bit of

• 53:07Rich Roll?

  a distinction between somebody who's fully addicted to something versus an anxiety response, because the counter to that, you have an example in the book of the woman who does the very thing you just mentioned, which is goes to the bakery, is used to getting, you know, some kind of sweet and savory food, she opts for the blackberries instead, and she feels better afterwards, and so she's creating a new reward mechanism. I think Piggybacking on top of that, and this is what I want, would like you to get into a little bit, is she's opting out of that kind of vicious cycle that takes place after you've made the choice you know you're not supposed to make, that makes you feel bad, and then you beat yourself up, and you just continue to dig that hole deeper. So she arrests that cycle.

• 53:53Rich Roll?

  She doesn't have the shame reaction. She actually feels better physically. Hence, she's more likely to make the correct choice the next time. She's carving that new neural pathway.

• 54:04Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yes. Yeah. And that's really the secret sauce in terms of learning anything, whether it's letting go of an unhealthy habit, or even fostering a healthy habit, is to reflect back on what it was like last time. So as you described, you know, that playing the tape forward, what am I going to get from this? Well, the only way we can project into the future is based on past experience. And if anybody has enough experience, let's say, drinking to excess, that they can clearly see, you know, 99 out of 100 times, I'm going to wake up with a hangover, and with a worse relationship with my partner, whatever, then that starts to take hold as a reduced reward value. And if they can recall that, then their brain says, do I really want to have a drink?

• 54:49Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And the same thing is true for the eating example. It's like, if I overeat again, what am I going to get from this? So I actually like the very simple, I have folks in the step two of the book, just ask this simple question, what do I get from this?

• 55:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 55:06Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And again, it's not intellectual, it's experiential.

• 55:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, try to really connect with the emotional experience of following through on that unhealthy behavior. And one of the things that I've learned in recovery is called playing it through. And it's not, it's about having a longer view on like, okay, if I'm going to drink, like, oh, I'm going to, I'm going to ameliorate this emotional, you know, feeling of dis-ease that I'm experiencing right now, that's what's triggering me to do it. But play it through. Like, okay, then tomorrow I'm going to wake up and feel like shit. I'm not going to be able to do my job, or study, or whatever it is that I have in store. My partner is going to give me a little bit of side eye, you know, like, just,

• 55:51Rich Roll?

  like, play it all the way to its conclusion, not just the reward, but what's on the other side of that reward?

• 55:59Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Absolutely. Yes.

• 56:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah. A big part of rewiring this reward system has to do with

• 56:10Rich Roll?

  not just mindfulness, but also curiosity and kindness. So I want to spend a couple of minutes talking about curiosity. And what I loved about what you wrote in the book is there's a distinction, there are two different kinds of curiosity. There's deprivation curiosity and there's interest curiosity. Because you hear a lot about curiosity in the mindfulness space, just be curious. But it is a little bit more complicated and nuanced than that.

• 56:36Dr. Jud Brewer?

  It is, you know, and I'm laughing because I didn't even know there were two types until I think it was about two and a half years ago. And I was just, you know, you're probably this way. I was just a naturally curious kid, like I love to learn how things work. I used to destroy my toys to see how they, you know, how they worked. And so I just thought, oh, curiosity, yeah, there's one flavor to that. But turns out there's a fair amount of science suggesting that there are two types. And it's helpful to differentiate them because they both work in different ways. So the first flavor is deprivation curiosity, which is basically a lack of information. So when we don't know the answer to something, you know, this is our brain seeing, oh, this, there's uncertainty here.

• 57:21Dr. Jud Brewer?

  It is driven, literally in a survival mechanism way, same type of urges that we get when we're, you know, we go to get food or whatever. We're driven to go get the answer to that, you know, whether it's a trivia question or, you know, where is water, you know, because I'm, I don't know where water is. And there's a, that can be negatively reinforced. So the trigger is I don't know the answer. The behavior might be, you know, if it's a trivia question, we go to our weapon of mass distraction and look it up. And then the relief comes from knowing the answer. So I think of this as destination curiosity. You know, once we get to the destination, it's, it's satisfied, we're satisfied. But until we get there, it's called deprivation because we feel deprived and

• 58:05Dr. Jud Brewer?

  that deprivation drives us to go and seek out that information.

• 58:10Rich Roll?

  Right, like a heroin addict in a new city. The deprivation curiosity would be like, where am I going to score? And the level of intentionality and determination that gets channeled into that curiosity could power a city, right? Like, that person is going to figure it out and find their heroin, not such a good curiosity.

• 58:35Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yes, exactly. Yeah, don't get in their way, basically. They will be like that bus and you will be hit by that bus.

• 58:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, 100%. All right, so distinguish that from interest curiosity.

• 58:50Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So the other flavor is interest curiosity. And in contrast to the destination, I think of this as the journey, where we are just finding that it's very joyful to discover new things, to learn, right? So it doesn't matter, there's no destination in mind, we're just happy to learn new things. It's kind of like being in our growth zone. When we can go, instead of go, "Oh no," we can go, "Oh, what can I learn from this?" This can be in any day situation where we're out of our comfort zone, or it could be when we're specifically learning a new topic, or learning some new sport even.

• 59:34Dr. Jud Brewer?

  It's like, oh, you know, learning some new sport and we're struggling, we can go, "Oh, this sucks, this is terrible," and go, "Oh, well, that was different, let me try this." And we can be open to that experience. And it feels very, very different. So instead of it being negatively reinforced, so the deprivation is driven by this urge, "Get out of my way, I gotta find this," the interest is very much more open, where we are curious and like, "Oh." And that actually puts us in growth mindset, so we can actually learn a lot more, rather than just, "Okay, here's this one, I need to find where the heroin is, now I've found it, done." We haven't really learned a whole lot, except that one specific thing.

• 1:00:16Rich Roll?

  Right. I would think that that type of curiosity and the extent to which somebody is able to develop...

• 1:00:31Rich Roll?

  The open-mindedness required to explore that is going to calibrate pretty closely with how much that challenges their core values or their identity. I mean, this is something that I talked about in a different context with Adam Grant. Just like, how do you have conversations with people that see the world differently? Well, one of the things you do is you lead with curiosity. If you're in a situation in which that person's worldview is so different from your own, that it feels like a threat to who you are, or how you see the world, it's going to be more difficult to marshal that level of curiosity. So how does that map on to anxiety?

• 1:01:15Rich Roll?

  If you have a patient or individual who is so self-identifying with their anxiety as part and parcel of who they are, I would imagine that that's going to be a tougher case than somebody who's relatively less aware of the extent to which anxiety is driving their behavior.

• 1:01:36Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yes, so I think even going to that example of trying to have a conversation with somebody, if we are trying to put ourselves in their shoes and truly understand where they're coming from, as compared to, we don't have a destination in mind, we're not trying to beat them over the head with our point of view and keep yelling at them until they acquiesce. That curiosity itself, going back to social contagion, can be contagious, where they see, "Oh, this person really wants to understand who I am." And of course, people love to talk about themselves, and so you can actually capitalize on that piece, where we're sneezing curiosity on that other person.

• 1:02:23Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And so that can be translated into the clinical setting where as a therapist or as a psychiatrist, it's really helpful if I am truly curious about my patients as compared to them walking in the door looking anxious and then I just peg them and oh yeah, you're anxious, take this medication. Wow, that's not going to be that helpful. So if I'm truly curious, and the nice thing about people is everybody has their own story. So there's tons to be curious about and I'm sure you're this way. It's just like hearing people's story makes my day. It just fills me with energy because I'm learning something about somebody, you know, and everybody has a unique and interesting story. So it starts there, you know, with a

• 1:03:04Dr. Jud Brewer?

  therapist or even having a conversation with somebody. It's like, oh, you know, so when somebody walks in my door and they're anxious, if I can sneeze curiosity on them, it helps them open up to starting to see their own, you know, their own habit loops around anxiety, for example.

• 1:03:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:03:22Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And then the next thing I can do, once they've kind of gotten a taste of that, is I can give them specific things to practice to awaken that curiosity because we all have it. It's not like something you, you know, you have to buy at the store, you know, I need, I'm a little short, I have to go pick that up at the store. This is about just awakening something that we already have. That's our own natural capacity. And so, simple things like if somebody's anxious, we even have a tool built into our Unwinding Anxiety, the app to do this. We have somebody feel into their anxiety and then ask themselves, you know, when they feel into where they feel it strongest in their body, ask themselves, is this stronger on the right side or the left side of my body? And the idea there is

• 1:04:07Dr. Jud Brewer?

  to go, hmm, well, I don't know. It doesn't matter what the answer is, but that hmm, is that first hint of curiosity that they're starting to awaken curiosity instead of being sucked into their anxiety. And what this can help do is it's like the observer effect in physics. You know, when they were trying to measure the mass of an electron, they would hit it with photons with light. And by hitting it with photons, you're actually changing the velocity and therefore the measurement. So they call this the observer effect. By observing, you're actually going to affect the results. And the same thing is true in psychology or psychiatry. If we are very identified with our thoughts and emotions, it's hard to change them.

• 1:04:49Dr. Jud Brewer?

  But if we can observe them, by observing, we are less identified. And so we can start to see, oh, there's anxiety. Oh, that's on even more on the right side or the left side of my body. So we can see, start to see it more clearly simply through that awakening process. And that's truly fostered by curiosity. It helps us be able to step back and observe more.

• 1:05:09Rich Roll?

  Hmm. Yeah, and it seems, it seems that it would follow that curiosity works as a salve to the shame response to experiencing these types of emotions, right? I'm imagining the person who is in, perhaps they're having a panic attack or some kind of anxious response. They don't really want to reflect on it because then they start to feel bad about it and themselves. So, so I've seen people just, they shut down emotionally or they avoid any kind of conversational confrontation about that because it provokes so much,

• 1:05:52Rich Roll?

  you know, difficult emotion around it. But curiosity seems to just kind of allow that to evaporate. It creates space, right? And so maybe that's where the kindness piece comes in?

• 1:06:07Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yes, I think of these two, so curiosity and kindness as being complementary buckets. So there are many, you know, there are many pieces or, you know, things in each of those buckets that can help support each of these. So for example, with kindness, gratitude is a great way to reflect on kindness, whether it was the kindness of others or whatever, that helps us tap into that feeling of kindness. So on a broad scale, my labs actually did a, done a study where we queried several hundred people to see where on the reward value spectrum, different emotions are, or different mind states. And we found uniformly, probably not surprisingly, that anxiety,

• 1:06:49Dr. Jud Brewer?

  frustration, anger, all feel, you know, less rewarding and more closed down than kindness and curiosity, basically. And so connected, you can think of connection as being, you know, in the bucket of kindness, let's say. So here, when we look at this, uniformly, kindness and curiosity feel more open and expanded than feeling anxious or disconnected or whatever, or being, you know, being mean, or being the, the object of somebody's anger. So here, just being able to tap into what it feels like to be, have kindness bestowed

• 1:07:30Dr. Jud Brewer?

  upon us, or to be kind to others, and truly being kind in a selfless way, not thinking, you know, I'm gonna hold the door so she's more likely to, you know,

• 1:07:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:07:39Dr. Jud Brewer?

  smile at me, or whatever, you know, not looking for anything in return. So that's where these two share this overlap of openness, of connection, of expansion, that is just more rewarding because it feels better than being closed down or disconnected.

• 1:07:56Rich Roll?

  Is there a difference between kindness towards others versus self-kindness in terms of how that, how that affects someone's anxiety?

• 1:08:08Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I would say pragmatically, it can be more challenging for a lot of people to tap into the feeling of self-kindness. But the feeling itself, whether it's kindness toward others or kindness toward ourselves, that expanding feeling is the same.

• 1:08:22Rich Roll?

  Right. Right. I would, it seems that A gesture of kindness to another person, irregardless of motive, still has an impact. And it could be just a simple gesture. But to do that to yourself is very unfamiliar for a lot of people. They feel like it's indulgent, or they don't deserve it. It seems like it's a more complicated web to unravel.

• 1:08:49Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, I think it can be. And I see this a lot when people are working with their eating habits, where they mix up self-indulgence with self-kindness. And so they have a bad day and their habit is to stress eat or eat some ice cream at the end of the day. And a lot of people say, "Well, how do I know whether it's... It feels like I'm just being kind to myself by eating that tub of ice cream." And I say, "Check in with yourself. How kind is that? What do you get from that?" And typically, they numb themselves for a little bit, but then they feel guilty and they don't feel... They get the gut bomb and all of these things. And when they add up the reward value, they can clearly see, "Oh, that's self-indulgence. That's a habit."

• 1:09:34Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Versus, "I've had a hard day." And then they can ask themselves, "Well, what do I need?" Maybe a little bit of ice cream, but not a whole tub. Maybe a little bit of chocolate. And when they really pay attention, they can actually find that pleasure plateau, where it's just enough and then they can stop simply by bringing awareness to that. And so I think that's one of the big challenges for people, is to differentiate that self-indulgence versus the self-kindness.

• 1:10:01Rich Roll?

  Right. And I think built into something you just said, which is super important, is that no matter what behavior, errant behavior you're indulging in, you are getting something out of that. You are being rewarded, right? It's not all bad. There's a reason why this is locked in for you. And so the process of reconfiguring that whole thing is identifying that reward. I mean, it goes back to your paradigm here. But understanding, like, "I eat ice cream because I hate myself." Well, no, actually, it is doing something positive for you in a certain way that also leads to negative effects. But recognizing what that positive thing is,

• 1:10:46Rich Roll?

  I think, is an important step.

• 1:10:49Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Absolutely. And that actually leads us to the third step, which is, you know, for a lot of us, we haven't, that's been the plateau of our pleasure, of our, you know, of reward, where we think excitement, or eating ice cream, or, you know, binge watching Netflix, or whatever is the peak of experience, you know, they're only, but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, right? We can't go on vacation forever. We can't have sex forever. We can't just keep eating ice cream forever. Our body says enough. So here, we can learn to see not only how unrewarding some of, you know, when we peek at that pleasure plateau, and then start going off the other edge, we can see how unrewarding these things are,

• 1:11:31Dr. Jud Brewer?

  including habits around guilt, and all these things, which are echo habit loops, typically on top of these other habit loops. And then we can go back to that brain paradigm, and give ourself something better. So I think of this as the BBO, the bigger, better offer. So our brain, again, setting up reward hierarchies, if it starts to see that one behavior is not as rewarding, there's that negative prediction error, it's going to say, okay, give me something better. And this is where kindness and curiosity come in. So we can, when we're kind to ourselves, versus beating ourselves up, which feels better, you know, when we're, when we have

• 1:12:11Dr. Jud Brewer?

  a fixed view versus being curious in a conversation, which feels better? Which one helps us feel more connected with the other person, which would, helps us learn something, or, you know, discover something new about that person? To our brains, literally, it's a no-brainer.

• 1:12:35Rich Roll?

  You mentioned bringing mindfulness to all of this, which is kind of like the umbrella component to all of this. I think for a lot of people, we talked about this extensively last time you were on, everybody should go back and listen to that episode. But for a lot of people, that lands kind of in an esoteric space, like, what does that mean? Like, oh, bring mindfulness to my bad behavior pattern. Like, walk us through what specifically you're talking about, and how that can be helpful.

• 1:13:07Dr. Jud Brewer?

  You know, less and less these days I use the term mindfulness because it's a concept. It was actually from this old term sati, which means to remember. And you're thinking, how does to remember have to do with paying attention and all this stuff? So in modern day, there are many definitions of mindfulness. You know, John Kabat-Zinn, most famous, I think, in the Western sphere for giving this definition of paying attention on purpose in the present moment, non-judgmentally. Well, honestly, that's a pretty long definition that could trip people up along the way. What does it mean to be non-judgmental? So here, I like to break it down into its element components. And there are two, you can think of this as two sides of a coin. One is awareness. We all know what awareness is, right? We're either aware or we're not aware.

• 1:13:53Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And the other, you've already touched on, which is curiosity. And so you can think of the positive framing of non-judgment as curiosity, being curious, not jumping to conclusions, not assuming we know what's happening, truly bringing a fresh perspective, which is why in a lot of the Buddhist circles, you know, they talk about beginner's mind in Zen, or they talk in Vipassana, they talk, Vipassana literally means seeing clearly, where we've taken off our subjective bias glasses, where we see the world a certain way, we've taken those off and we're just seeing things without any of those biases.

• 1:14:30Rich Roll?

  I want to pivot and talk a little bit about teens.

• 1:14:38Rich Roll?

  There is an epidemic of teen anxiety going on right now. I've got a 17-year-old daughter who's having an unbelievably difficult time with the pandemic and having to do all of her schooling on Zoom. We tell our kids, you know, get off the screens. Now it's get on the screens. It's very confusing. My daughter's an extrovert. She's unable to see her friends to the extent that she would like. She doesn't have the freedoms that perhaps she would have if things were a little bit different. And it's taking quite a toll. And we've been struggling with trying to figure out how to be of service to her in the most productive way. So I'm interested in.

• 1:15:23Rich Roll?

  In whether you have any experience working with teens specifically, or what it is about the teen experience that perhaps is a little bit qualitatively different from maybe, you know, people like you and I.

• 1:15:36Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So we've done a little bit of research with teens, for example, teenage smokers. We've done a little bit of pilot work with our Unwinding Anxiety program to make sure it was accessible to teenagers. But by no means am I an adolescent psychiatrist. So I just want to start with that. What I can say from my own experience as an anxious teen, you know, we moved around a bit when I was a kid, and that can be challenging, you know, in terms of being anxious going into a new school, you know, not knowing anybody and all that stuff. What I can say is that it's really, really challenging. But what I can also say is that here, you know, I think kids are actually best, and

• 1:16:17Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I mean, younger kids in particular, are really good at being curious. And I think somewhere that starts to get, I'm going to use the word beaten out of them, but that's probably too strong, but somewhere as we move toward adulthood, you know, we're told things like, you know, make sure you know everything, you know, try to act like you're in control, you know, all this stuff that actually gets in the way or thwarts our natural curiosity. You know, there's not a lot of reward for being curious, although if you actually look at it, the curious people, the authentic people, tend to do pretty darn well in life. So here I would say teenagers are super interested in knowing themselves.

• 1:17:00Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I think that's where a lot of adolescence, you know, is really focused, is like, who am I as a person? How can I differentiate myself, you know, whatever, at least in the Western world? So here I would say helping teenagers foster their own curiosity, and in particular, you know, they love to learn how their own minds work. And I would even add to that, if there's a pain point like anxiety, that can be a doorway in that's non-threatening because they're hurting, they're looking for that pain reliever to say, oh, you know, let's help you understand how your mind works around, in general, how everybody's minds work. So that gives teenagers a kind of a window into the world

• 1:17:42Dr. Jud Brewer?

  and then they feel like they're a little more controlled because they can see how the world works. But also give them a window into their own minds and their own anxiety, where they can not only work with their anxiety, but work with themselves, learn how to, you know, live happier, healthier lives. So here I would say, helping foster that curiosity by being truly curious as parents, not always easy to do, but being truly curious and not jumping to conclusions might be a really good place to start.

• 1:18:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's helpful. I mean, I just, at times feel powerless. I can't, I can't solve the problem, you know, for her. And we're trying to, you know, figure out what the best way of communicating with her is. But there's also a lot of hormones going on, like it's, you know, it's a, it's a very volatile situation at times. So as anybody who is, you know, parenting a teenager can probably relate to.

• 1:18:44Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Sure.

• 1:18:45Rich Roll?

  So I think it's a common thing. Thank you for that. Let's, you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, performance anxiety, and that perhaps we'd pivot back to that. So maybe we could talk a little bit about that for a few minutes.

• 1:18:59Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, I'd be happy to. So I've gotten so many questions when I do workshops or retreats, or even in our Unwinding Anxiety app about, you know, well, if I'm not anxious, am I not going to be able to get through the day or perform at a meeting or, you know, in music or sport or whatever? And so I went as a researcher, you know, I wanted to actually see what the research shows. And it turns out, I read this very interesting review article from 2015 that's titled something like, you know, the Yerkes Dodson curve from from legend to law, or from law to folklore, or something like that. And what this review article highlighted

• 1:19:42Dr. Jud Brewer?

  was that many people have heard of this this curve, Yerkes Dodson law. I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's okay. So 1908, these two researchers, Yerkes and Dodson, were studying Japanese dancing mice. Don't ask me why Japanese dancing mice, but that what they were studying. And they found they that it was like they were measuring Goldilocks for some reason. So it's like, I'm going to shock them a little bit, a medium amount, or a lot, and see how well they perform in a maze, or some some measure that they could look at. And of course, you know, if they shocked them a medium amount, they did the best. And so they concluded that, you know, a little bit, a moderate amount of arousal is going to help these mice, you know, perform well in a maze. Now, I don't know how they

• 1:20:27Dr. Jud Brewer?

  would measure things like motivation, because the mouse is like, eh, you know, you know, when you shock them a little bit, or they're like, dude, that hurt when you shock them a lot. But anyway, that was 1908. Nobody really paid attention to that paper. It was cited like four times in the next 50 years. Yet this very famous psychologist in the in the 1950s, Hans Selye, in an address to some conference, he gave a talk where he speculated without any data, that anxiety might help improve performance in the same way that this arousal piece in Japanese dancing mice did. And then one of his old students took it and ran with it, where he took rats, and he used holding their head

• 1:21:11Dr. Jud Brewer?

  underwater as the as the arousal or the stressor. And the longer he held their head underwater, the worse they did. And again, I don't know how he accounted for them, like just catching their breath before swimming. But that was his experiment. And what he did Was that he used the terms anxiety and arousal interchangeably. And he said, you know, this irrevocably or, you know, undeniably says that this Jörgs Dodson law, he called it a law, was true. Okay. So this sets the stage, you know, still relatively quiet. And then the internet comes along. Okay. So I think it was before the year 1990, this Jörgs Dodson paper had only been cited 10 times.

• 1:21:55Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And then between 1990 and 2000, if I've got this right, it was cited 100 times. And then between 2000 and 2010, it was cited over 1,000 times.

• 1:22:05Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:22:06Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And people were writing books about this and saying, you know, you need to have some anxiety to perform well. Yet this review article also highlighted, when you look at the data, 4% of studies suggested that increased anxiety improved performance, that, that, you know, Goldilocks piece. And 10 times that number, it was over 40%, suggested that there was a direct inverse relationship. More anxiety equals more, worse performance, regardless of how much anxiety there is. And you know this yourself, and I think anybody that looks at this, when you're performing your best, you know, you're in flow. I, I think that of that is the optimal performance. And there, no, anxiety is not within miles when we're in flow.

• 1:22:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that's 100% correct. I mean, first of all, is there a difference between arousal and anxiety? Cause I do feel, let me just say this.

• 1:23:06Rich Roll?

  Part of, like, I, I sort of self identify with some level of anxiety as being a precursor to performance. I'll approach a podcast in the same way that I would approach a swim race as a kid. And if I, you know, a little bit of butterflies, like I'm excited, that tells me that I care, that this is important to me, I want it to be good. All of those things are, are information.

• 1:23:33Rich Roll?

  That helped me feel like I'm in the right place at the right time. But if it tips over and it's a little bit too much, suddenly I can't think straight. I can't find the words or my body isn't doing what my brain tells me to do. And I've often wondered like, is this necessary at all? Because I know as somebody who's done a little bit of public speaking, more often than not, I get up on stage and I have tremendous performance anxiety and I don't deliver on the level that I know I'm capable of. And then every once in a while, like I don't care or like I'm just super casual about the whole thing and I go up and I'm very relaxed and those are always the best performances.

• 1:24:13Rich Roll?

  So I think for me, I've spent a lot of time thinking about the story that I've crafted around that arousal state and how important it is when in truth, I'm not sure it's really relevant at all. Perhaps it's undermining me.

• 1:24:29Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yes, I would, I would agree. And the perhaps it's undermining you is an experiment that you or anybody or any of us can do, right? This goes back to something that my old PhD mentor used to say, Lou Moglea, great guy. He used to say, you know, Judd, is it true, true and unrelated? Or is there actual causal connection? And so we can think of performance anxiety. We get anxious, true. We perform well, or you're describing how we might not perform as well as we hope. But let's say we perform well and then our brain makes this causal inference that says, oh, that anxiety is what made me perform well, when in fact, we don't have any causal evidence that that was true.

• 1:25:10Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And yet we might even be able to tap into evidence to the contrary, like you're suggesting. When we're relaxed and go into a performance or whatever, we tend to do better. I love, there was a performance at the, was it the 2018 Winter Olympics? Chloé Kim, who's a snowboarder on the half-pipe. She rocked it and got the gold medal and she was just so relaxed when she did it. You know, it was like, wow. And I caught her social contagion when she was doing, you know, I'm, I've never snowboarded in my life, but like, I could catch that. Or if you look at Usain Bolt, you know, when, when he used to be cruising past people, he had this shit

• 1:25:53Dr. Jud Brewer?

  eating grin on his face. It's like he was having so much fun, you know?

• 1:25:56Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, he's connected to the joy. Like, the problem that I run into is that I have a certain level of perfectionism that works at cross purposes with my goals. And I'm also a bit of a, I can be a bit of a control freak and I'm a grinder. And so, to use the podcast as an example, you know, I want to be as prepared as I can possibly be. And I want to feel like revved up and excited to go. And if I don't, if I'm not experiencing that internally, then the story that I tell myself is, you didn't work hard enough. Like, you're not earning this. Like, I have to be in some level of pain, you know,

• 1:26:39Rich Roll?

  that's telling me like, okay, you've, you've exerted yourself appropriately, you're rising to the occasion. And it's all bullshit. And I know that. And yet, it's so difficult for me to counter program against that. Like, if I just waltzed into this podcast to talk to you, it's like, I didn't really look at his book, but like, you know, I know I could talk to him. I've done a bunch of these podcasts. It'll be good. I feel like I'm not doing you an adequate service and I'm not respecting the audience. So I feel like I need to experience suffering in order for it to be good. And I know intellectually that those two things don't necessarily calibrate, and yet I'm powerless to change it.

• 1:27:21Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So, so I think this is a great example that we could use to kind of highlight these aspects of how to change behaviors, whether it's anxiety or anything else. So, for example, If you, you know, if you were unprepared for your podcast, which I've never heard you be, and this is one reason I love talking to you.

• 1:27:39Rich Roll?

  Which is why I continue to do this, because everyone's like, "You're so prepared." So then I've set the bar at a certain level, right? And I have to live up to that. I put that pressure on myself, and I'll experience shame if I can't live up to that, Judd. What am I gonna do?

• 1:27:54Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So, let me ask you this. When you feel shame, or when you have all that anxiety piece, does that actually help you prepare better? Versus when you are just truly interested in the subject matter, and you're like, "Oh, this looks like an interesting book."

• 1:28:11Rich Roll?

  No, but I will say that, you know, when there's, that, that pressure will get me to do the work, you know, because I want to avoid the sensation of feeling unprepared. Because that's, that's very uncomfortable for me.

• 1:28:25Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, yeah, so that's that negative reinforcement. If I, you know, if the behavior is coming unprepared to a podcast, and then you can't really get in-depth into a conversation, which is, I think, what you're really great at doing, then that negative reinforcement says, "Ooh, that didn't go so well. You need to be more prepared next time." Yet here, you can ask yourself, and I'm not trying to give you advice, but I'm just using this as a hypothetical experiment, is, you know, "Okay, so the anxiety helps me prepare. What if you just, you cloned yourself, and you prepared through curiosity? Did that, would that get you just as prepared? And would it be less painful in the process? Does that make sense?

• 1:29:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm sure it would be, and that would be that new, healthier behavior pattern that's so uncomfortable, right? And that's the work. But it's not like I wrote, I wrote "performance anxiety" down in my notes. Like, this was not on the list of things that we were gonna talk about, but this is what's coming up, and this is probably the most fun and the most, you know, interesting part of the conversation. So, I have the awareness that when I can let go of, you know, trying to direct this whole thing, that I make the space for it to be something better than I would have originally anticipated. But, but that leap of faith, and faith is something you talk about in the book, too. Like, you have to have that kind of faith that there's something better on the other

• 1:29:47Rich Roll?

  side, if you're willing to, like, release your, your hard grip on your way of doing it, because it's the way you've always done it.

• 1:29:55Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, and I think that's, I'm just bringing this to one aspect I don't think you're naming, so I will name it, which is authenticity and wisdom. So when we try to control things, we have this closed down view of the world and we try to, let's say you're doing a podcast, you're trying to force answers or trying to force a great quippy line or whatever.

• 1:30:15Rich Roll?

  Because I don't want anyone to find out that I don't know what I'm talking about.

• 1:30:20Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yet, you are, you're curious and it's not, these podcasts are not about you. This is why I love listening to your podcasts, I'm not just blowing smoke. It's not about you talking about your experience all the time and letting the guests like say things here and there to, to support what you think about yourself and the world. This is about you truly being curious and having a really interesting conversation. And you've got the wisdom from having done this a bunch of times to know that that always works better than the other alternative.

• 1:30:49Rich Roll?

  Hmm, except I just did make it all about myself for a couple of minutes there.

• 1:30:54Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I did, for the record, I made it, as an example.

• 1:30:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it's, but it, but it's, it's instructive for me because it helps me develop greater self-awareness of the triggers, the behaviors that are leading me awry, what's beneath the anxiety. Like if I, if I, if I try to excavate, like what is driving me to behave in this way, it's that, you know, I want, I want to create the best podcast that I can. I want to acquit myself responsibly. I want to be liked. I want Judd to respect me. I want the audience to receive, you know, there's a lot of like, like infantile emotions baked into that as well, like being a people pleaser or what have you, you know, that are

• 1:31:40Rich Roll?

  also, you know, a mountain that I need to climb in terms of, you know, self-esteem, et cetera.

• 1:31:47Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, and all of that begins with awareness, you know, it comes back to just being aware of those things, but not just being aware, you know, you, like you talked about right at the beginning, but being aware and knowing how our minds work.

• 1:31:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:31:59Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Then it, then it inspires us to climb the mountain rather than seeing it as a grueling slog.

• 1:32:06Rich Roll?

  I want to round this out in a couple of minutes, but I can't let you go without talking a little bit about breath work and how breath work can be, you know, really beneficial in this process.

• 1:32:18Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Sure. So I think there are a gazillion ways to talk about breath work, you know, whether it's yogic or mindfulness or, or, you know, whatever. But I think of, I think of breath work in particular as helping develop curiosity, where, you know, our breathing is generally a neutral object unless we have COPD or some other, you know, asthma or something else that, that affects our, our breathing process, where it can, or panic attack sometimes, that, you know, we can associate breathing shallowly and rapidly with, with anxiety. But the breath is something that we're all doing all the time unless, you know, we have bigger problems if we're not. And we can, we can use that as an anchor to keep us in the present moment.

• 1:33:03Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So here I think of helping foster that awareness and curiosity through something that's neutral and always changing. So not only can we use curiosity to help us anchor, you know, I like to have, especially students who are start, just starting meditating or whatever, I have them ask themselves, well, how do I know that I'm breathing right now? Hmm. What's letting, you know, and so that awakens their curiosity, not like, hey, pay attention to your breath, you know, blah, blah, blah, count to 10, whatever. How do you know that you're breathing? I'm doing this right now. Huh? It's my, um, my diaphragm. I'm feeling my abdomen stick out. That's what's telling me most prominently right now that I'm breathing. And so that awakens the curiosity.

• 1:33:48Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And then we can use that curiosity as an anchor and ask ourselves things like, well, what are the sensations that are, you know, that are letting me that I'm breathing? As we breathe. And we can even ask questions like, how do I know, you know, is this a long breath or a short breath? Is it deep or shallow? Cause we don't know what the next breath is going to be. Our body is just doing, regulating itself. And so that can foster curiosity. It can also anchor us in the present moment. It can help us see that things are constantly changing. And with that anchor, it can help us start to see when our mind gets lost in a thought pattern. So for example, related to anxiety, we get lost in a thought, we're, we're sucked into it, we're identified with it, we're lost.

• 1:34:30Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, that anchor can, it's like that ship, you know, yanking on the anchor. When the winds blow, boom, oh, you know, oh, I'm lost. And then we can wake up. Without that anchor, we just adrift at sea. So I think of breathwork in that way as one way to help us really start to anchor in the present moment, stay more present, see that things are constantly changing, and also start to see how identified we are with our thoughts, emotions, and body sensations, and start to be able to have a greater perspective where we can observe them more.

• 1:35:02Rich Roll?

  And is there like a specific protocol that you could share with people? Or is it more of just an amorphous paying attention?

• 1:35:12Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I think, well, there are many different techniques to do this, and each person has to find what works best for them.

• 1:35:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:35:21Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And out of full disclosure, I spent probably 10 years banging my head against the proverbial wall trying to focus on my breath. I would even, you know, my first silent meditation retreat, you know, for seven days, right? Silence. By day three, I was crying uncontrollably on the retreat manager's shoulder because, you know, here it was. So I could make it through college, I could get into medical school, but I couldn't pay attention to my breath. And so the first thing I would say to people is, this is not about that forced, you know, willpower-based paying attention to your breath, which is what I was doing. That's not the way to do it. It's really about curiosity.

• 1:36:00Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And I would say, you know, finding something that helps us be curious, say about the breath as an anchor, but we can also use other physical sensations in the body. We can use hearing as an anchor. You know, for some people, that's easier. So finding whatever anchor it is that helps us be curious, and then, you know, awakening that curiosity and using that curiosity to explore our own sensations. So just like I was saying, you know, it could be as simple as, how do you know that you're breathing? And then, you know, follow your breath and just be curious about when the in-breath ends. Be curious about how long that pause is and then be curious about when the outbreath

• 1:36:41Dr. Jud Brewer?

  starts and when it ends. So those can be anchor points as we explore, you know, what are these physical sensations that help us stay present and curious? So it could be as simple as that, like asking, having these anchoring questions that layer on top of this simple but not easy practice of just paying attention to these changing physical sensations that let us know that we're breathing.

• 1:37:03Rich Roll?

  Right. One of the things that I talked about with Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist, was the way in which you can use eye movement to kind of essentially like reset your state. Do you have thoughts on how all of that works? Have you practiced that or studied that at all?

• 1:37:25Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I've, I've not practiced or studied it, but I've been at conferences. So the most common technique that I've seen that's been studied is EMDR. I was it Eye Movement Desensitization Response or something?

• 1:37:38Rich Roll?

  Right, like the lateral, is that the lateral eye movement?

• 1:37:42Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, yeah. And the idea there that I understand, and so I could be getting this wrong, is that one core aspect of that is helping people anchor on physical experience. So when you have somebody move their eyes laterally from this side to this side to this side, they have to focus on doing a task that is physical and it gets them out of their thinking head, right, into their physical body. And if you think of this, by, by focusing on something like that, you can, you can take up all of the working memory near dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, that part's not important, but like in this working memory part of our brain and kind of reboot the system because we, our brains only have

• 1:38:27Dr. Jud Brewer?

  a certain amount of working memory, a certain amount of RAM, so to speak. So we can use things like EMDR or other eye movement techniques, but you can even think of this more broadly. One practice related to the breath that I love in particular is called five finger breathing. I love this in particular because people can teach it to their young kids and then have their kids walk them through it when they're anxious. And the idea is to just add, you know, take the index finger of one hand and place it at the base of the pinky on the other hand. And then as they breathe in, Feel the physical sensations of their breath and their fingers and look at their fingers at the same time. Pause at the top as they breathe out, trace down the inside of their pinky.

• 1:39:09Dr. Jud Brewer?

  As they breathe in, trace up the outside of their ring finger, you know, and down. So for example, if you make five full breaths, you've traced your whole hand. If you do 10, you can trace back from your thumb to your pinky. And what that does is it takes up a lot of working memory because we're paying attention, we're seeing, we're feeling three different aspects of our experience, you know, two fingers and our breath. And that reboots the whole working memory system. And at the same time, paying attention to breathing often helps regulate our physiology where it calms down. So if those worry thoughts come back in, they actually need a level of arousal that meets them. You know, we're used to being worried and feeling worried, you know, thinking worried, feeling worried.

• 1:39:52Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, if we're thinking worried and we're not feeling worried, that body is going to say, hey, that's just a thought. And we can identify and let go of thoughts more easily because there's a mismatch between the arousal. So, and it's the physical body that drives experience and behavior more than thinking brain. So that one's going to win if we can really help regulate that physiology.

• 1:40:15Rich Roll?

  Sure. It's so crazy that these, I mean, it's so simple that it's like, okay, breathe and like look at your fingers and it could have like such a powerful impact on, you know, on the mind.

• 1:40:29Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, called science, you know, if we actually understand how it works.

• 1:40:36Rich Roll?

  Final thing, I mean, there's so much interesting science that's occurring right now in the study of the mind and the brain. And yet so much of it remains unmapped. There's so much that we still are grappling with trying to understand. From your perspective, like what is the study that you would like to see performed that has yet been performed that would help elucidate, you know, a lot of the things that you're, that you are curious about?

• 1:41:03Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, there are a gazillion things that I'm curious about. Yet, one thing that I'm really interested in is this, this idea of personalized medicine. Right? This has been a buzzword in medicine for a long time. And it hasn't really yet come to fruition where, you know, the idea would be to find, take somebody's genes and all these, you know, their environment and behavior and find what medication works best for them or tailor a medication to them. If you approach that same personalized medicine away from the taking a pill perspective, which is where I focus more. The idea here is can we actually personalize medicine through understanding someone's habitual reactions to their world?

• 1:41:47Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And we've done, we did one pilot study that gave us some really interesting data that says to me that this is possible, where we can actually take what we're calling a psychological phenotype of asking people just 19 questions at, at baseline before they start a program. And we can predict who's going to do better than somebody else and with a pretty striking result. And so what my next experiment that I want to do is to do this at scale where we really look at, you know, is there a way to simply and cheaply get a sense, at least for somebody's anxiety profile, let's say? And can we use that as a way to not only determine who's going to do best with our

• 1:42:29Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Unwinding Anxiety app, but also ask, well, why are the people that aren't doing well? And this is fortunately a small minority, but the, the folks that are not doing well, why aren't they doing well? And what do we need to do to help them do better? Because I'm sure you can relate to this. I'm always looking like, how can I, how can I do better? How can I help my patients more? How can we do research that helps people at a broader level in the population?

• 1:42:56Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, that's a laudable aspiration. You know, I'm still, you know, hung up on the fact that 200 million plus, you know, people are suffering from anxiety right now. There's just, there is so much suffering that's occurring right now, and it's encouraging and hopeful to, you know, hear about the solutions that you're working on. So I applaud you for, for the work that you do. So much respect for your field and your servant to humankind, Judd. Thank you. Appreciate you. I feel like my anxiety has been unwinded as a result of this hour and a half. You've

• 1:43:40Rich Roll?

  succeeded at doing what you do best, my friend. I feel good.

• 1:43:44Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Success.

• 1:43:46Rich Roll?

  Cool. So the new book is called Unwinding Anxiety, of course. Judd also has these amazing apps. If you're struggling with everything from quitting smoking to trying to ameliorate your anxiety, Crave to Quit is the one app that you still have, right? And you have an Unwinding Anxiety app, which is really kind of a compendium piece to the, to the book itself.

• 1:44:09Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yes.

• 1:44:09Rich Roll?

  Right? And if you want to learn more about Judd, drjudd.com. Anything else coming up that you want to alert people to, other than the, the new book?

• 1:44:18Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I think that's it. You know, folks are on Twitter. They can hit me up on Twitter at Judd Brewer. But other than that, I think the Dr. Judd, you know, website's got it all. I'll just mention, we've got a bunch of free resources on the website as well. So if anybody's just looking to learn a little bit more about their habits or how their minds work, you know, I love to put together short animations that describe these things in simple terms. That's one of my challenges that I, and passions. And so folks are interested in those things. Take a look. And in particular, I would say, I'm really proud of this very short, two-minute animation that we put together with Sharecare that talks about spreading kindness virally as compared to fear. So if anybody's interested

• 1:45:01Dr. Jud Brewer?

  in checking that out, there's this, you can probably find it on my Twitter feed or also on my Dr. Judd website.

• 1:45:08Rich Roll?

  Cool. We'll link that up in the show notes as well. Awesome. How do you feel? You don't feel anxious, do you?

• 1:45:15Dr. Jud Brewer?

  No, this is great. I feel energized.

• 1:45:18Rich Roll?

  Cool. Well, hopefully at some point in the not-too-distant future, we'll get together for a run and a surf out here, have you back on the show. You're welcome anytime. So, thank you again.

• 1:45:27Dr. Jud Brewer?

  That would be awesome. Thank you.

• 1:45:29Rich Roll?

  Peace. Platts.

• 1:45:33Rich Roll?

  Thanks for listening, everybody. For links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube. Sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, always appreciated. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page on richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast

• 1:46:14Rich Roll?

  was created by Blake Curtis, portraits by Ally Rogers and Davy Greenberg, graphic elements courtesy of Jessica Miranda, copywriting by Georgia Whaley, and our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. You can find me at richroll.com or on Instagram and Twitter at Rich Roll. I appreciate the love. I love the support. I don't take your attention for granted. Thank you for listening. See you back here soon. Peace. Platts.