The Craving Mind: Dr. Jud Brewer On Treating Addiction With Mindfulness

Addiction is tenacious. We're all craven animals, vulnerable to habits that don't serve us. Whether it’s a constantly checking social media, binge eating, smoking, excessive drinking, most of us fall prey to compulsions we feel powerless to arrest. Why is this? And what can neuroscience teach us about the nature of cravings and how to overcome them? Dr. Jud Brewer has devoted his career to answering these questions. His discoveries just might change your life. A psychiatrist, neuroscientist, thought leader and scientific researcher in the field of habit change and the “science of self-mastery”, Dr. Brewer is the founder of MindSciences and Director of Research and Innovation at the Brown University Mindfulness Center. Formerly, he served as an associate professor in Medicine and Psychiatry at UMass Medical School, an adjunct faculty member at Yale University, and a research affiliate at MIT. Dr. Brewer has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He has trained U. S. A. Olympic coaches. His work has been featured on 60 Minutes, Time magazine, Forbes, BBC, NPR, Businessweek and many other prominent media outlets. And his TED Talk, A Simple Way To Break A Bad Habit, is the 4th most viewed TED talk of 2016 with over 13 million views to date. As a long-time recovering alcoholic prone to a myriad of compulsive behaviors, it's fair to say that habit change is an obsession. Always on the hunt to extend my sobriety routine beyond 12-step, I came across Dr. Brewer's book, The Craving Mind. A scientific primer on the mechanisms of habit and addiction formation, it makes the case for how mindfulness can help us transcend cravings, reduce stress, and ultimately live a fuller life. I was compelled by Dr. Brewer's findings. I needed to know more. And so here we are. This is a powerful and potentially life altering conversation about the psychiatric and neurological nature of addiction. It's a deep dive into the science of habit change. And it's a master class on how meditation and mindfulness can help us finally overcome the unhealthy patterns that live between our reality and the best version of ourselves lurking within. Note: As a special thanks for listening, Dr. Brewer was gracious enough to offer my listeners a special discount on his evidence based habit change programs specifically designed to overcome anxiety and cravings. Visit drjud/richroll and enter code RICHROLL2019 and you will receive 20% off a subscription to any of his three apps for Android or iPhone (Unwinding Anxiety, Eat Right Now and Craving to Quit). As a disclaimer, I am not an affiliate and have no financial interest or otherwise with these programs – just sharing the good doctor's kind offer. The visually inclined can watch it all go down on YouTube. A companion piece to my recent podcast with Atomic Habits author James Clear, my hope is that this solution-based exchange assists you in overcoming the compulsions that don't serve you On a personal level, I learned a ton — and have already experienced positive results. Enjoy! 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.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Dr. Jud Brewer?

  You know, on a very basic level, we're probably all addicted to some degree or another. And classically, we used to think of addictions as these substances like alcohol and cocaine and heroin and whatnot. But really, I think that's a little narrow of a view. If we look at this, it can be virtually anything that gets us into trouble. You can have everyday addictions where it's cell phones and technology and trying to get our inbox to zero and all these things that are failing propositions. For the last 50 years, the dominant paradigm has been willpower. And that is proving to be more myth than muscle. It's more legend than reality.

• 1:46Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And that's exactly what I think we're seeing with meditation, is if we get out of our own way, our brains naturally work better. And we can really start to totally get in sync with life and get into, almost get into the flow of things. That's one thing I like about mindfulness practice, is it basically distills down to, pay attention, see what the results of your behavior are, repeat.

• 2:10Rich Roll?

  That's Dr. Judd Brewer, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:25Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How goes it? Rich Roll here, your host. This is my podcast. Welcome. First off, and again, thank you to everybody who came out for the live event. I could not have anticipated just how well it would go. It was definitely a lifetime moment for me, for sure. An evening I know I won't ever forget. It exceeded all expectations tenfold. My sons and nephew and their band played three songs. The incredible In-Q gifted us with his spoken word poetry. And the great Paul Hawken brought down the house with his

• 3:06Rich Roll?

  powerful and quite empowering message of environmental recovery. But I think what impacted me the most was the community, just being present with all of you, seeing you connect with each other. And in my opening remarks that evening, I spoke about the abstract quality of the podcast and this desire that I have for the event to cultivate greater connectivity, communication, and real tactile analog face-to-face community around the ideas that I and all of us care about. I think the event was an enormous step in that

• 3:46Rich Roll?

  direction. So again, I am deeply, deeply grateful to everybody who showed up. And I look forward to more of these gatherings in 2020. And I'm going to be sharing the experience on the podcast in the coming weeks. Okay. My guest today is Dr. Judd Brewer. Judd is a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist, a thought leader, and a scientific researcher in the field of habit change and the science of self-mastery. He is the Director of Research at the Center for Mindfulness and an Associate Professor in Medicine and Psychiatry at UMass Medical School. He is also adjunct faculty at Yale University and a research affiliate at MIT.

• 4:33Rich Roll?

  Judd has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He's trained US Olympic coaches and his work has been featured everywhere on 60 Minutes, on TED. In fact, he has the fourth most viewed TED Talk of 2016, TED Med, TEDx, Time Magazine. He was listed or enumerated among the top 100 new health discoveries of 2013, Forbes, BBC, NPR, Businessweek, and many, many others. Judd has many fascinating things to share in the upcoming conversation, including some really compelling thoughts and discoveries in the field of addiction. And that's all coming up in a couple few, but first.

• 5:21Rich Roll?

  Okay, Dr. Judd. So, we cover a lot of topics in this conversation, but I think it's fair to say that the focus is around addiction and habit change, which is really the specialty of Dr. Brewer's really informative and helpful book, The Craving Mind, which I highly suggest all of you guys check out. On some level, I think we're all craven animals, subject to compulsions that don't serve us, whether it's substance abuse, social media, binge eating, or other behaviors that lead us astray, perhaps relationships. And these are things that we find ourselves repeating mindlessly or uncontrollably. And today, The Good Doctor

• 6:03Rich Roll?

  shares more than a few valuable insights into the nature of cravings, of these unhealthy patterns, including the mechanisms and the science, the neurology behind them, as well as certain keys, including mindfulness for addressing and ultimately overcoming them, for reducing stress, and ultimately for just living a fuller life. And as a special thanks for listening, Dr. Judd wanted to offer all of you guys a special discount on his evidence-based programs, his apps, that are specifically designed to combat and overcome anxiety and cravings. And to avail yourself of this, go to drjudd.com/richroll and enter

• 6:47Rich Roll?

  the code RICHROLL2019 and you'll receive 20% off a subscription to any of his three apps for Android or iPhone. They include Unwinding Anxiety, Eat Right Now, and his other one, Craving to Quit. I should say, I want to point out, I'm not an affiliate. I don't have any financial entanglement or otherwise with these programs. I'm just sharing the good doctor's kind to offer. And with that being said, I really enjoyed this conversation. I got a ton out of it. I think you will as well. So here we go. This is me and Dr. Judd Brewer. All right, Dr. Judd is in the house. We're ready to rock and roll. How are you feeling?

• 7:27Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Feeling good.

• 7:29Rich Roll?

  Super excited to talk to you. You are like the perfect guest for this podcast because you occupy this sweet spot that I don't know if anybody else can claim, where you are steeped in the hard science, evidence-based science, psychiatrist, academic, neuroscientist, but you're also equally steeped in the world of mindfulness, like the softer sciences and all things spiritual at the same time. So this is like the bullseye of the things that I'm most interested in. And it's a rare opportunity to talk to somebody who stands on equal footing in both of these worlds.

• 8:13Rich Roll?

  Usually it's a hard scientist or somebody who's coming from a completely spiritual perspective and never the twain shall meet, but here you are, this rare creature.

• 8:25Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, it's been really interesting to just see how hard these hard sciences actually are and how soft these soft sciences actually are. I don't think that, we like to make dichotomies in the world, but that's one that really started to fall apart as I've explored both of them.

• 8:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, it's been an interesting journey for you, your entry point into all of this. Like, I think just to contextualize what we're going to talk about, I think that would be interesting to learn more about.

• 8:51Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Sure. Where do you want to start?

• 8:52Rich Roll?

  Well, how about with, you know, what got you interested in mindfulness and meditation to begin with? I mean, it was sort of precipitated by a little bit of a relationship crisis, if memory serves me.

• 9:04Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, that is true. I did start meditating my first day of medical school after going through a bad relationship breakup. But I can look retrospectively on my life and realize, you know, there were a lot of points earlier in my life where I had touched on something that I didn't know what it was, but I knew it was really sweet. And whether it was, you know... Race BMX bikes when I was a kid and I played quartet music, you know, as a group, playing the violin. And there was something about being in a group of four people and making music where just the world dissolved and we were, we were just the music. And I didn't know what that was. I just knew that I was some strange kid in high school that would rather play quartets than go out and get drunk.

• 9:47Rich Roll?

  You didn't know that at some point in the future, all the cool kids would be calling this a flow state?

• 9:52Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I had no idea. And here it is.

• 9:55Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 9:56Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah. So I think I touched on it at various points in my life, but it really, you know, took something that I was really devastated by the, to kind of precipitate a big change, you know, starting medical school is a new start in my life, new point. So it seemed like a good place to try something, what I thought was new.

• 10:15Rich Roll?

  Right. Why that though, other than like, hey, I'm in medical school, like I'll get a prescription to help me sleep better or to calm my nerves?

• 10:24Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, I've never really been, you know, I'm a psychiatrist. I prescribe medications, but I've never really been into, I've been pretty careful about putting medications or any types of drugs in my body. And I really felt that throughout my life, that just really finding good ways to nourish my mind and body were a better way to go. So, you know, I started getting into eating well in junior high school, actually, when I was BMX bike racing. I realized, you know, we'd race these three heats in a race, you'd race a heat and then you'd have to wait and then race another one.

• 11:01Rich Roll?

  Oh, so you were actually competing in BMX?

• 11:03Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:04Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 11:05Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah. Well, Indiana, there's not a whole lot else to do. What I found, you know, my, I would, I would eat junk food in between heats and realized that I didn't have much energy to race the second or third heat. And then my mom was like, hey, why don't you try eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich? And I was like, okay. And I realized, you know, wow, I had this sustained energy and I could do much better. And so I started getting into that back in high school and I was running cross country and track and wrestling and realizing that that health food was actually really helpful for performance. And so I think that even extended into when I started really getting into loving to explore things scientifically and not wanting to put things that might mess up my brain and

• 11:49Dr. Jud Brewer?

  my body.

• 11:51Rich Roll?

  But psychiatry wasn't the original plan.

• 11:54Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Not at all, no.

• 11:55Rich Roll?

  So how did that evolve?

• 11:57Dr. Jud Brewer?

  You know, I was, so I was doing this MD PhD program where I was studying medicine and I was doing a PhD in immunology. And I got into that because I was really interested in the brain mind interaction. I was really fascinated by like why we get sick when we're stressed out. And so I was doing all of this mouse work where I'd make, you know, knockout knockout genes in certain cell populations in mice and see what would happen. And that was really interesting. And at the time I was just, you know, I was meditating on my own because I was trying to work with my own stress.

• 12:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 12:31Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And realized that, you know, by the time I finished that program, you know, it was like eight years into it, that I had learned so much more about the mind from my own meditation practice than I had from actually studying mice that I shifted, you know, I did this major, it was a seismic shift in my career where it was like one of those go big or go home moments where it was like, I'm going to try something completely new and study it because nobody had really been studying this stuff at that point to, you know, to the safe, you know, where I could do, I could do science. I'd learned to do science, but I really wanted to see how this mind body connection really worked on a human level.

• 13:08Rich Roll?

  But it was your experience with IBS that kind of tipped the scale, right? Like realizing the, that there really is this mind body connection that transcends our typical conventional Western medicine protocol and how to treat certain illnesses.

• 13:24Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, in college I had a really severe bout, like my senior year of college, I'd love to run and I, I would have to plan my runs around having a bathroom nearby where I could stop, you know, and go to the bathroom if I need to. And I remember going into the to the doctor at the at the university and, you know, saying, oh, maybe I got jarred here because I did a lot of backpacking. And he said, you know, could this be stress? I said, no, this can't be stress. And I listed like 10 things for the reason why I could not possibly be stressed.

• 13:57Rich Roll?

  In a very stressed out way.

• 13:58Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah. He kind of shook his head and I was like, well, maybe you'll learn someday. And it took me, you know, a while to realize that that was actually my mind that was throwing my body out of whack. And so I studied, I was studying that on a molecular level. But when I finished my PhD, I wasn't actually satisfied with the answers that I had discovered in in graduate school. You know, one, somebody asked me this question, you know, we discovered all this stuff about the immune system and whatnot and how stress affects it. Somebody said, well, how do you know that's true in humans? And I said, I don't know. I would have to actually do this in humans. And so that got me thinking about, well, you know, what do we know about the mind body interaction in humans? And how can we actually study this?

• 14:43Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And I had done some medical school rotations in psychiatry and started to see that my patients were actually talking the same language that the ancient Buddhists were talking, you know, 2,500 years ago, they were talking about craving and clinging and all this stuff. And I was thinking, you know, I don't think this can be a coincidence. It's really, you know, there's got to be some connection here. And that's when I shifted my career to saying, okay, let's study mindfulness as a treatment for addictions as compared to, you know, studying these, you know, these small molecular pathways in in mice.

• 15:17Rich Roll?

  And how was that received by your peers at the time?

• 15:21Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I remember distinctly, I was at, I was at Yale University for my residency training and there can be, you know, let's just say, there can be some pretense in some folks. And some, somebody said, you know, you're going to kill your career. You know, this is, you know, you've done well as a scientist, you're gonna, you know, you're gonna totally dash everything that you that you've built up. And they, people just started distancing themselves from me. And I figured, well, I'd rather fail doing something that I really am passionate about than succeed and just, you know, just do science.

• 15:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So just, are you one of those people who, when you're told you can't do something, you're you're trying to prove them, you know, otherwise?

• 16:04Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, that's, that's actually why I went to Princeton was my college counselor told me I'd never get in.

• 16:09Rich Roll?

  Oh, really? Well, you have an interesting upbringing, right? Like, you grew up, single mom, you know, with, with, you have three siblings?

• 16:18Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 16:18Rich Roll?

  Four of you guys?

• 16:19Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 16:21Rich Roll?

  On food stamps at one point, I think I heard you say at one, I think when you were talking to Dan Harris, I listened to that interview. So it's quite, it's quite a trajectory for, for you to have, you know, gone from, from that place into Princeton.

• 16:35Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 16:35Rich Roll?

  You have a good mom.

• 16:37Dr. Jud Brewer?

  My mom is amazing.

• 16:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 16:38Dr. Jud Brewer?

  She's really, you know, my hero. She, she raised four kids by herself, went to law school at night. And we all stayed out of trouble, made it through college.

• 16:48Rich Roll?

  What, what are your siblings doing?

• 16:51Dr. Jud Brewer?

  My sister is an emergency medicine doc. My little brother works at MIT. My older brother does this value, he's a business valuation person. So they're all doing well.

• 17:01Rich Roll?

  Wow. And is your mom still around?

• 17:03Dr. Jud Brewer?

  She is.

• 17:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I should get her on the podcast, you know, how to raise, raise kids. I could use a little help in that department right now. Wow, so that's amazing. So, you know, Princeton, you got your, your medical degree at, at Washington, right? In St. Louis?

• 17:21Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Rich Roll?

  And then you're at Yale. And now you seem like you're affiliated with all kinds of universities. I can't keep, I can't even keep it all straight. Like, you're, you're running institutes at, like, Brown and MIT? And you're doing something at, at Massachusetts General Hospital?

• 17:36Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, mostly I'm at, at Brown University. I'm the director of research and innovation there at the mindfulness center.

• 17:42Rich Roll?

  Right. So where does all of this dovetail into the world of addiction?

• 17:50Dr. Jud Brewer?

  You know, it's, on a very basic level, we're probably all addicted to some degree or another. And I say this not lightly, you're saying, oh, everybody's got addictions. But if we look at this, this really comes back to the most basic learning mechanisms that are known to man. And it's a matter of, you know, where along the spectrum does it get us into trouble? And so, classically, we used to think of addictions, you know, and you know this as much as anybody else, you know, as these, these substances like alcohol and cocaine and heroin and whatnot. But really, I think that's a little narrow of a view. If we look at this, it can be virtually anything that gets us into trouble.

• 18:32Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I really like, there's this very simple definition, continued use despite adverse consequences.

• 18:38Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 18:39Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I learned that in residency and that really stuck with me because it really defines the scope of the problem. Where we can have, you can have everyday addictions where it's, you know, cell phones and technology and, you know, trying to get our inbox to zero and all these things that are failing propositions.

• 18:55Rich Roll?

  Well, I'm delighted to hear you say that and you've written extensively on this subject because I really do believe that there is a universal theory of addiction that when broadly defined is a net that captures all of us. And we tend to think of, you know, the drunk in the alley or the guy who can't pull the needle out of his arm or somebody who's in jail as a way of distancing those people from ourselves and not having to really look in the mirror. But I really think that addiction is a spectrum condition and every single person falls somewhere along those lines. So you have the, you know, the hopeless heroin addict on the far end of that.

• 19:40Rich Roll?

  But if we're all really objectively honest with our own behaviors, we're all habituated to certain behaviors or activities or, you know, the intake of substances that cause adverse effects in our lives time and time again. And we all sort of have this sense of powerlessness over our ability to control it or arrest it.

• 20:05Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, absolutely. And I'm so glad you point out that piece because, you know, for the last 50 years, the dominant paradigm has been willpower.

• 20:13Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 20:14Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And that is proving to be more myth than muscle, you know? It's more legend than reality.

• 20:22Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So it really, you know, it's fascinating in so many ways. One is, you know, we have to survive so that we can be addicted to things like sugar, where, you know, we've got to get calories or we're not going to survive as human beings. And then, you know, as humans, we're so good at refining materials. We've been able to, you know, in the last couple of hundred years, refine things like, you know, tobacco and cocaine. You know, cocoa leaves are not addictive, but, you know, if you get it into that little powder, that's a whole different story.

• 20:56Rich Roll?

  Society's done an incredible job of creating pathways and products that are specifically designed to addict us, to hook us and not let us go.

• 21:09Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 21:10Rich Roll?

  And that's unprecedented in human history.

• 21:12Dr. Jud Brewer?

  It really is. And the more we learn, you know, there's this accumulation of knowledge that just builds on itself and builds on itself. You know, B.F. Skinner, this famous behaviorist, he wrote a novel about this in 1947.

• 21:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:26Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Where he basically predicted, he called it behavioral engineering, but he basically predicted what social media has been able to really capitalize on in the last couple of years to just really get us, get our focus so narrowed that we're, you know, they have to paint look up on crosswalks, you know, in big cities now because people are forgetting the most basic survival things like, don't cross the street without looking both ways.

• 21:51Rich Roll?

  Right. The willpower idea, it's amazing that it perpetuates. I certainly have up close and personal experience with trying to master my many addictions through willpower to diminishing ends. And as somebody who has always prided myself on my self-will, this has been a confounding, you know, sort of experiment that has taken me to some pretty low depths. So I know firsthand that willpower does not work. I think there's a lot of education that needs to go into the public for them to appreciate

• 22:36Rich Roll?

  the full extent of that. But why doesn't it work?

• 22:41Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, we can dive into that, but some of this piece about education, I think, can't just come cognitively. You know, we have to, I was in the same boat where it's like I had to learn that willpower failed on a personal level before I started to let go of it. Right. And was fortunate that I was actually studying this stuff at the same time. So instead of saying, well, why doesn't this work? I could actually explore, oh, this is why this doesn't work. And it actually drew me into these avenues of like, well, what actually does work? So if you want to dive in. Yeah, let's do that. The way I, the way I think about this is we have this caveman brain, you know,

• 23:25Dr. Jud Brewer?

  that was really set up to help us survive. We needed, we needed food, we needed to reproduce, and we needed to avoid danger, you know, the eat and not be eaten thing. And it can really be distilled down into a simple process of you need to trigger a behavior and a reward from a brain perspective. So if you see food, you eat the food, and then your stomach sends this dopamine signal to your brain that says, remember what you ate and where you found it. Now, this reward-based learning process is set up to help us remember things. So it actually, the dopamine firing is there to help us remember something. It helps lay down a memory. And often dopamine in modern day gets associated with pleasure, but we can dive, we can put a pin in that and talk more about that later. Not really

• 24:09Dr. Jud Brewer?

  a whole lot of pleasure in that agitated, frenetic, driven, gotta do this. Yeah. Right? And that's, that's the drive to use more when we get addicted. So, basic learning process, remember where food is, same thing, remember where danger is. You know, you see the saber-toothed tiger, you run away, and then you get to remember, okay, don't go back there, or I won't get to do that again. So that process is still at play. It's the strongest learning mechanism that's known in science, although evolutionarily conserved all the way back to the sea slug. So really, really well-known process. Yet in modern day, it's still at play, but we have.

• 24:50Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Availability of food 24/7, right? We all have refrigerators. There you can, you can find a diner or a restaurant that's open at any time, day or night. You can get food delivered anytime, day or night. So we don't really need to remember where food is anymore. We just need to remember where our phone is and we can order it. Yet our brain's still saying, well, hey, you know, I'm, I'm taking up a whole lot of real estate for this learning mechanism, so let's use it. And so we start to learn to do things like eat when we're stressed or anxious, not when we're hungry, you know, and this splits out hedonic versus homeostatic hunger. You know, the homeostatic hunger is like when we're actually hungry. The hedonic is based on emotions and based on stress and things like that.

• 25:33Dr. Jud Brewer?

  We learn to take pills when we are emotionally or physically in pain as compared to learning, you know, to deal with it. You know, social media is engineered for the, the likes and the retweets.

• 25:47Rich Roll?

  So yeah, it extrapolates out even to things like, that are as, as inert as boredom. You know, it doesn't have to be this sense of dis-ease or some kind of emotional discomfort or, or, or something that triggers an uncomfortable memory. It can be as banal as standing in line at the grocery store.

• 26:06Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yep, yep. I don't know if you've ever pulled up to a stoplight late at night and you look around and everybody's crotch is glowing. You know, it's like suddenly 30 seconds at a red light is intolerable.

• 26:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 26:19Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, we only got there because we've let ourselves get there. And we can say, oh, I'm not going to do that. You know, I'm going to be a good boy and, and willpower my way, way through this. Forget about it. Like you said, that doesn't work.

• 26:33Rich Roll?

  So let's get into why it doesn't like, why is it that I can't override that impulse and through sheer force of will, like marshal my mental and emotional powers to prevent myself from doing that thing that I am so lured to?

• 26:48Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, it sounds pretty good, doesn't it? You know, we're these rational thinking beings. I think Descartes really sent us down a path that was not so good. You know, oh, I'm thinking therefore I can think my way through stuff. It's not how our brains work.

• 27:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 27:01Dr. Jud Brewer?

  You know, the, there's a part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex that that's involved in, in willpower. It's the weakest part of the brain from an evolutionary perspective. It's the first that goes offline when we're stressed, when we're angry, when we're sad, when we're tired. You know, that's why we wander into the kitchen late at night looking for something because we're, you know, we've, we've learned that. And so we can say, don't do that. But then we just crash harder, you know? And in the morning, we set that resolve to like, okay, I'm really gonna do it this time. But that's just not how our brains work. Our brains don't, don't work that way. But we think, you know, I think it's more we're rationalizing, you know, like, oh, willpower, it must be something. Let's study it.

• 27:45Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Um, and there, you know, there's been a little bit of this and that, but it turns out that willpower, you know, if you look at the people, you know, that quote unquote have good willpower habits, there, there's some really interesting pieces there. One is they actually find things that they enjoy doing. So people, you know, people do something like eat healthy or exercise. If you ask them why they do it, the people that are really good at doing it, and you probably know this personally, it feels good.

• 28:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 28:12Dr. Jud Brewer?

  As compared to, oh, I need to get in shape to get a, you know, my body looking this way for the beach.

• 28:18Rich Roll?

  Right. It's not like an intellectual exercise.

• 28:20Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Not at all. And that, that part makes sense, but that's not willpower. And it makes sense because that is reward-based learning. We're doing something out of the reward of doing it, not because we're doing it. So that's one of the big misconceptions around willpower is that if you look at reward-based learning, it's based on the reward, it's not based on the behavior itself. So if it were the behavior, we'd just say, stop doing this. But it's actually the reward that drives future behavior. And that's where we can start to intervene.

• 28:56Rich Roll?

  How does it correlate with intelligence? Because just speaking from personal experience, I've noticed over the years through my adventures and journeys in the, in the, in the recovery community, that people who are hyper-intelligent often struggle the most because they want to intellectualize this, where truly it is an emotional thing more than anything else. And so they struggle. Trying to wrap their heads around how to do this and they can't let go of the idea that that that solution resides within the mind.

• 29:32Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, well, so, hi, my name is Judd and I'm a, I'm a thinking addict.

• 29:37Rich Roll?

  There you go.

• 29:39Dr. Jud Brewer?

  If you look at the bookshelves in my house, they are way too numerous. So, speaking from personal experience, and I think this, this applies, is there's this, it's almost like the thinking part of our brain is kind of like this, it's like, it's like refined sugar or refined carbohydrates. It actually just gets us stoked and like, oh, that's interesting. I'm just gonna learn more and I'm gonna learn more and I'm gonna figure out the solution to this thing.

• 30:07Rich Roll?

  Meanwhile, day after day after day, you're perpetuating the same behaviors.

• 30:11Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Unknowingly.

• 30:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah. While you're buying every self-help book that's available.

• 30:16Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Totally.

• 30:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So what we really need is to land in our body, because our body is really, really wise. And so this is, you know, this intellectual thing is like, you know, it's, it's that, it just drives more addiction, where it's like, I want to learn more, as compared to really landing in our direct experience that says, you know, dude, why would you do that? I'll, I'll give you an example. So with, we did a, a study with, with people who are trying to quit smoking. And we randomized people to get cognitive therapy or mindfulness training, where we train them to really just pay attention to the results of their behavior. So when they come into the mindfulness group, they don't even know what they're getting, you know, and so they come in, they're like, I'm here to quit smoking. And I say, okay, next, when you go home, uh, smoke.

• 31:03Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And they're looking at me like, is this the experiment that you're running? Is this the study? And I say, no, smoke, but pay attention as you smoke and see what happens. So they pay attention to the smell, to the taste, to the feeling of the superheated smoke going into their lungs. And they come back and they're, this Mr. Yuck look on their face, they're like, oh my God, how did I never notice that before? Because they realize that smoking tastes like shit. And they can only get that wisdom from their direct experience. I had a guy who, so we, in our first study... First class was on Monday, second class was on Thursday. This guy was smoking thirty cigarettes a day. He'd been smoking that for a long time. He came back on Thursday and he said, "Yeah, I'm down to ten cigarettes." And I said, "Well, what happened?"

• 31:48Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And he said, "Well, I noticed that I would drink coffee and the coffee was kind of bitter, so I'd smoke a cigarette to numb myself from the taste, because it's amazing how smoking numbs your taste." And so he realized, "Well, I don't need to smoke, I could brush my teeth." And he just went through this litany of twenty cigarettes where they were all, he was smoking all these things out of habit, where he'd, you know, he'd learned through this reward-based learning process that, "Oh, if I smoke, I feel better," you know, or whatever. And he realized, "Oh, this was, this was not a good way to go."

• 32:16Rich Roll?

  So the idea being, you talk about this in your book, is diverging from what Skinner calls the operant conditioning, right? Which is behaviorism, this traditional approach to like dealing with these kinds of problems, to a more Buddhist perspective, which you call, or is called dependent origination, right? And this involves being present for the experience and rather than getting into judgment, self-judgment, to just be curious about what's happening.

• 32:47Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting, so one of the, one of the first aha moments for us in my, you know, my research career was when I was looking, I was studying this operant conditioning or positive, negative reinforcement. And I was thinking, "Wait a minute, this sounds way too familiar." And I started looking into this because I'd learned, you know, on a, on a retreat or something, I'd learned this, this dependent origination piece. And it was, it was kind of, you know, complex, there were these twelve steps and all this stuff about birth and this, and I was like, "Whoa, what is this?" But when I looked at it, and I actually worked with a poly-scholar to really explore this, it turns out that dependent origination explains operant conditioning.

• 33:29Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And so the Buddhist psychologists had figured this out twenty-five-hundred years ago, before paper was even invented. And so they were describing the same process. And importantly, this process, dependent origination, was what reportedly the Buddha was contemplating on the night of his enlightenment, as in, "Hey, pay attention, guys, this is kind of important." So really important concept that actually is rediscovered in modern day and drives, you know, and explains a lot of how addictive behavior is formed.

• 34:01Rich Roll?

  And that concept is what distilled down?

• 34:04Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Basically, that trigger behavior reward. So, you know, you see something, you eat something and you get some reward. Or you, you know, let's use your boredom example. We're sitting here bored and so our brain says, oh, why don't you look for cute pictures of puppies on Instagram or something like that? So we look at those cute pictures of puppies and we don't know that we're actually just driving that escape from boredom process. So that's basically it. And it's interesting, in ancient times, they said that the process is perpetuated through ignorance. But in modern day, we call that subjective bias because we become biased based on our previous behaviors.

• 34:46Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So if I learn to eat, you know, eat some junk food when I'm bored or when I'm sad or when I'm lonely, I'm actually driving that process where I start to navigate my world in that biased manner where I'm, you know, like any little hint of boredom, my brain says, oh, have something sweet, oh, have something sweet, or look at cute pictures of puppies on Instagram or whatever.

• 35:08Rich Roll?

  But doesn't that butt up against the countervailing impulse to avoid those things based on past negative experiences with them? Like, how do those, those things, I mean, I'm just thinking out loud about like what my own personal interior experience with this kind of thing is, which is, I'm self-aware enough and I've done enough internal work to be conscious, cognizant when this is, when this is happening, right? It's like, okay, yeah, I know I'm pissed off at this guy and I know I'm feeling like not really in my body and I know that this thing is gonna fix it and I know I shouldn't do it and then I do it and I have a moment of relief, followed by, you know, an avalanche

• 35:51Rich Roll?

  of shame that sends me into a spiral for the next 48 hours, only to be repeated again with a sense of powerlessness. So that self-awareness, as they say in, you know, in the secret society of which I am a member, self-awareness will avail you nothing. In this. So I'm interested in how like we have this, you know, this, this reward mechanism cycle that you just described. On the other side, I have self-awareness that this is occurring in real time, a powerlessness to stop it without, you know, the, the break, you know, as I surmise from, from your work is really letting go of trying to control it and just being allowed,

• 36:34Rich Roll?

  being in the allowing, like being in the present, right? Am I getting that right? I mean, I've thrown a bunch of ideas at you.

• 36:40Dr. Jud Brewer?

  You are?

• 36:40Rich Roll?

  How do you make sense?

• 36:41Dr. Jud Brewer?

  That's the second step. So the first, and I think you've nailed the critical element, which is awareness, but like you're pointing out, awareness doesn't do it by itself and can actually perpetuate the process. So if we don't know how our minds work, we can't work with them. And if we're, if we're aware that something is causing us pain, we might just spiral into another habit loop of shame and guilt and all that stuff. So the first, the first piece here is really understanding how our minds work. If we can see that we're driven by these processes and we can even entertain the possibility of willpower failing, which, you know, often

• 37:21Dr. Jud Brewer?

  it's, it's tough to say, oh, it's, it's willpower that's failing me as compared to that was a dead on arrival process, you know, it, all the diet programs want us to think that, you know, willpower is the way to go and it, we're just not strong enough. We need to just sign up for another year and then maybe we'll get it next year.

• 37:39Rich Roll?

  Or the extra special behind the velvet rope, V I T program.

• 37:44Dr. Jud Brewer?

  That only, and I will do it only for you, if you can pay the admission fee. So the first step is really understanding how our minds work. And we've actually shifted our programs to training people in that step first. It's really, you know, it's pretty straightforward. Like we're talking about, there, there are no, there's no secret behind the, behind the curtain thing to reward based learning. It's like you identify your triggers, you see your habitual behaviors, and then most importantly, you pay attention to the rewards or the results. And so that's where awareness actually can become, it can become our friend rather than something that just spirals us into shame and self doubt. And the key there is again, looking at the reward because that's what drives behavior. So for example, with the

• 38:29Dr. Jud Brewer?

  example of the guy that was smoking. He started to see that smoking actually tasted pretty crappy. And so his brain started to recalibrate to see, oh, this isn't that rewarding anymore. And there's actually this, the neuroscience of this has been worked out pretty well. There's a part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex. It stores and updates reward value. I think of this as the BBO part of the brain. It's always looking for that bigger, better offer. So if we can give our orbitofrontal cortex information through awareness, it gets, especially if we do it in real time, it gets accurate and updated information. So accurate being is when I smoke a cigarette, is it that rewarding? No, I didn't realize it's not that rewarding.

• 39:14Dr. Jud Brewer?

  We can do the same thing when we overeat. We're like, oh, how does my stomach feel right now? Oh, I've got this gut bomb, you know, when I did this. Or even eating, you know, I found this with, with, with gummy worms. Like when I would eat gummy worms, it was like I had to just eat the whole bag. Because, you know, I was just gonna be jonesing for those gummy worms, you know, until I just ate it. So I started comparing those to eating blueberries. And blueberries just have this natural sweetness that's just so much better than eating gummies. I realized gummy worms taste like petroleum compared to blueberries.

• 39:50Rich Roll?

  You came in today with a, with a, with a box of blueberries that you were eating when you arrived.

• 39:55Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I'm a big fan of blueberries. Yeah, they're, they're great natural energy. So that's the other piece is seeing, giving our brains that bigger, better offer. So it can be blueberries over gummy worms, but it can also be awareness and curiosity over judgment. And that's the piece that can really help us right in that moment. It's not like we have to look for blueberries to, to, to, you know, the blueberry salvation. I'm not peddling like blueberry enlightenment.

• 40:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, a couple of thoughts. I mean, to, to dig a little bit deeper into your smoking example. And examining the reward, taste is one aspect of it, but it's almost an unfortunate byproduct of what you're really trying to get at, which is that hit, right? That dopamine hit, or whatever it does to you biochemically in your brain that gives you a sense of, like, a temporary sense of well-being, or enhanced cognition, or whatever it is that nicotine does. The taste can be something you tolerate in order to get to that other aspect of it, which is the real driver here, is it not?

• 41:02Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So the driver can be the driver, again, until we bring awareness to that. So if you look at, you know, especially cravings around any drugs, you know, alcohol, same thing. When we look at what it feels like to be totally consumed and under the control of something other than ourselves, when we really pay attention to this, it doesn't feel very good. And so that dopamine-energetic drive, it's associated with restlessness, with agitation, with this one-pointedness that says, you know, "I'm gonna make your life miserable until you do this." And then, of course, as soon as we do it, it's like, "I'm gonna make your life miserable until you do it again, until you do it again."

• 41:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're a prisoner of that cycle.

• 41:46Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Totally. So if we don't pay attention to what we're actually getting from that feeling, we don't realize that this is actually not a good way to live.

• 41:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 41:56Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And that feeling is very contracted, you know, it's closed down. And we can actually start to see, well, is there something that feels better than this? And if we just take the binary, closed, can we find something that actually is more open? So what would you say feels more open, craving or curiosity?

• 42:17Rich Roll?

  Well, curiosity, for sure.

• 42:19Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah. So if you think of curiosity in terms of mindfulness or awareness, we can be totally curiously aware of something that's happening, even in our body right now. And we can flip the valence from this craving that is all-consuming, where we're a prisoner to it, to, "Oh, wow, what does this actually feel like?" And paradoxically, we turn toward it. And as we turn toward it, and it starts to just kind of dissolve on its own, because it's, "Oh, here's a sensation, oh, here's a heat, here's rising, here's this, this, this." We realize this is, this is simply physical sensations that are driving our lives. And then the, you know, the gig is up for the, for the dopamine piece.

• 43:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's interesting when you place your attention on what precisely it is, it tends to dissolve over time. And I've seen this. My wife has terrible migraines over the years. And she, she has a practice, she has a variety of practices, but one of them is to just notice it, like, what is it? Like, what is its shape? What is its color? Where exactly does it reside in her awareness? And the more you get closer and closer to the essence of what it is, it moves and it changes and it shifts and it dissipates. And I think I've done the same with cravings as they arise. Okay, what does this look like? Where, what is the nature of it? What is the texture of it?

• 43:43Rich Roll?

  And the more specific you can get, it tends to lose its pull and its power.

• 43:49Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Totally, totally. So that awareness helps us awaken to these physical sensations that we formerly thought were us, but are actually just physical sensations and thoughts. And we've had people, you know, be able to work with panic attacks and realize, oh, these are thoughts and these are body sensations and be able to ride out full-blown panic attacks this way. So that's, you know, the theory seems to be working pretty well. But again, this is where the soft science and the hard science comes together. I'm not satisfied with theories or anecdote. You know, it's great to see something might work in somebody's life. It's great to see, you know, I found tremendous benefit from mindfulness myself.

• 44:31Dr. Jud Brewer?

  But there's this joke in research that research is really me-search. I don't know if you've heard that.

• 44:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I have, yeah.

• 44:37Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So the idea is, you know, we're, we're studying something that might have worked for us and have won, but we don't know that that actually works for everybody. And so you see all these treatments that are developed based on the personal experience of wine. So I really wanted to see, you know, does this stuff actually stack up? You know, I, I had pretty good results in my, in my addiction clinic. But we started doing research and we, our first study was actually with alcohol and cocaine dependence and we found that mindfulness is, mindfulness training was as good as gold standard treatment, cognitive therapy in this case, for, for alcohol and cocaine use disorders. Then we moved on to smoking, we found that we could get five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment.

• 45:19Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And at that point, we started realizing, wow, there's something to this. So we started looking to see, well, how else does this work? You know, and it was really interesting, at the time we were doing that, that work, this is around 2010, 2011, I was right when, you know, smartphones were starting to come out. And I realized that, you know, this process was set up for developing of context dependent memories. So we remember where food is. So I realized, well, you know, my patients, they don't learn to smoke in my office. You know, they don't learn to overeat in my office. They don't learn to get anxious in my office. So we started stepping back and saying, well, wait a minute, could I actually package my office and bring it to them?

• 46:02Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And we started developing, you know, app-based mindfulness training programs and testing those. And we even found, you know, our, our eating program, it's called Eat Right Now, we got 40% reduction in craving-related eating.

• 46:13Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, and you have, what is it, what's the smoking one called? It was called To Quit. You, did you change the name?

• 46:20Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I was craving to quit originally, now it's just To Quit.

• 46:23Rich Roll?

  To Quit, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:25Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Three words is too long now, you know, for America's tensions.

• 46:28Rich Roll?

  And you have unwinding anxiety, right?

• 46:30Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 46:31Rich Roll?

  You still have that one?

• 46:32Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 46:33Rich Roll?

  You have three, three apps for, that are all, they're oriented around the same perspective and protocols, but for treating these three, three kind of discrete conditions.

• 46:42Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, we, we figured that to, you know, there are a lot of apps out there to help people learn to meditate or learn mindfulness. We took a slightly different approach, which was starting with helping people understand how their minds work. And I think that was a critical piece because I spent years and years sweating my butt off on meditation cushions, on silent retreats, just trying to willpower my way into concentration. It just wasn't working. And then it was when all these things came together where I realized, oh, the psychologists, the modern day psychologists, they're all talking about this learning process, this really strong learning process. Let's start there. And then, so we started incorporating

• 47:22Dr. Jud Brewer?

  that piece as an entree for these programs. And that's when things really started to hum. We just finished a study with anxious physicians and got a close to a 60% reduction in anxiety symptoms. So we're with these common mechanisms that are actually relatively simple. They're straightforward. I'm not saying they're easy to do, especially because we have to overcome some of our previous biases around, I'm just gonna willpower my way through life.

• 47:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 47:55Dr. Jud Brewer?

  But we can help people kind of fall on their faces a little bit more quickly in terms of seeing like, what is it actually like when I smoke a cigarette? What's it actually like when I overeat? So we move away from prescription, like, okay, thou shalt do this, this, or this, to, well, just pay attention and see what the result of your behavior is. Remember, as they learn how their mind works, they can start to see that result. When that value from the old behavior drops, then we can start to offer them something new because they're hungry for it. They say, well, this is crappy. What else is there? And that's where the curiosity piece comes in. That's where the kindness piece comes in. With our eating program and our Unwinding anxiety program, we saw tons of people who had these

• 48:40Dr. Jud Brewer?

  habit loops around self judgment and shame and blame and all this stuff. I see this with my patients with addictions as well. That's like one of their number one habit loops.

• 48:50Rich Roll?

  Oh, it's huge with me. I mean, it's such a massive thing because you're like, I did it again. And the cycle of beating yourself up becomes its own, like you said, like its own addictive loop. There's something...

• 49:05Rich Roll?

  I have to believe that there's something about that, like that shame spiral, that is doing something for me, right? Like, it's serving some purpose.

• 49:17Dr. Jud Brewer?

  It must, it must be.

• 49:18Rich Roll?

  I don't know, it's not, you know, like, I wish it didn't, and I don't know what that purpose is, but I keep doing it. So whether there's some kind of evolutionary imperative to it, or it's a salve to some other wound that I still need to look at, that seems to be the big piece. But there's something about the curiosity and the paying attention that kind of just allows that to, you know, slowly evaporate.

• 49:44Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Totally.

• 49:44Rich Roll?

  Not completely, but just being present doesn't give the space for that judgment to come in, or at least there's a time delay there.

• 49:52Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Right, well, that's where the attitudinal quality is really important. So curiosity, I think of it as like the other side of the coin of awareness, you know? We can be aware, and we can be like, this sucks. Or we can be aware and go, oh, wow, that's interesting. You know, what's going on here? What's actually happening in my body? What can I learn from this? And so we can take these, and we can actually take moments where we're really struggling, and we can bow to them as a teacher, when we're truly interested in understanding how our minds work. And we can also truly bow to them as a teacher when we know that we're going to learn something. Now we're motivated because we're like, well, I'm stuck in this rut. Can I actually get some useful information from this?

• 50:36Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And we can even move from, you know, I think of this, we always think of this, two steps forward, one step backward, or one step forward, two steps backward. You know, if you look at this, if we're learning every time we fall on our face, does that count as going backwards?

• 50:51Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 50:52Dr. Jud Brewer?

  To me, like, we're always moving forward if we're learning something, because we can't go back when we've just learned something about ourselves. So even there, that attitudinal quality helps us really keep the momentum moving forward, even if it feels uncomfortable at the time.

• 51:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's just a perspective shift, like, what lens are you choosing to perceive this experience through?

• 51:13Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 51:14Rich Roll?

  We're kind of raised to believe that, you know, we can't fail, or failure is bad. I mean, it's a broader conversation about, you know, failure in general, and what we choose to deem in that negative light. But there's such a relief when you can kind of let that go. But the mental twist here is that...

• 51:35Rich Roll?

  The trying isn't the path, right? Like, in the same way that you, you explained, you know, your journey through meditation and like being this, you know, achievement oriented, go getting, you know, I don't know if you're type A, but I would, you've done a lot in your life. So, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna, you told Dan, like, I'm gonna win at meditation, like, that kind of mentality, which is the same mentality that, that, that drives that intellectual to read all the self-help books, but still remain prisoner to those behavior patterns. So, the learning curve is, is not intellectual, but in letting go of that intellectual exercise and, and to get yourself into that place of allowing, where you can release your attachment to doing it right or well,

• 52:20Rich Roll?

  and just be present. And that is so difficult to, to learn and to really fully grok, you know?

• 52:27Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Oh, man. For me, being the type A go-getter, you know, drive, drive, drive. I remember being on my first week-long meditation retreat. And I remember about day three or four, I was bawling on the shoulder of the retreat manager. You know, didn't know the woman, she seemed nice enough. She lended her shoulder and I just, I was, it was a river of tears, because I, you know, it's like, I, I made it into Princeton, I got into medical school, and I can't pay attention to my breath. What is going on here? And I was just, I was done. You know, I was totally at my wit's end. And she, she, like, she ended up becoming my teacher for about 10 years.

• 53:11Dr. Jud Brewer?

  She ended up being this, this amazingly wise teacher. But I, you know, I'd been trying to willpower my way through everything, and I figured, I, well, paying attention to your breath, that can't be that hard. It was the hardest thing that I've ever done.

• 53:23Rich Roll?

  What did she say to you? Did she drop some kind of Yoda-like wisdom on you?

• 53:29Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Suffer, you must.

• 53:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 53:31Dr. Jud Brewer?

  No, I think she kind of knew, I don't remember what she said, but I do know that she didn't say much, because she kind of, she kind of knew I just had to hit bottom.

• 53:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 53:40Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And, you know, I remember being on another retreat where the, the teacher was so frustrated with me, she said, "Well, Judd, y- your path to enlightenment is going to be through striving." Because like she's, that's all she, you know, I was just strive, strive, strive, strive, strive. I was just like, "You're really good at working hard." But she knew that that wasn't going to be the way through. So, you know, the, and the way out, what's that saying? The way out is through?

• 54:02Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:03Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I had to go through the process of trying to willpower my way through into meditation and, and fail and fail and fail. And then wake up and realize that, like you're talking about, it was about letting go. And the way for me to let go was through curiosity. And it started going back, back to when I was a kid or when I was in high school. Like, I was totally fascinated by stuff. I just wanted to see how stuff worked. And so I would learn naturally through simply being curious. And I realized, I could actually be curious here too. And it totally flipped my entire meditation practice. I could go from, you know, like sweating through t-shirts trying to meditate to, you

• 54:46Dr. Jud Brewer?

  know, I, I learned that if you pay attention to the process and look, you know, it's actually in a causal chain, that I could, I could be one pointed for several hours without any effort at all. And that was two breakthroughs for me. One, no more effort. I realized that that is not the way to go. And two, that it really is about just bringing these conditions together and everything will come together on its own.

• 55:17Rich Roll?

  Reframing this as curiosity is, is, is pretty compelling because...

• 55:23Rich Roll?

  Linguistics are important. And when you frame it as letting go or surrender, that just gets a type A person's cockles. It's like, I'm not gonna, I don't surrender. I don't let go. It's like, that's not gonna happen. I had to be so beaten down before I was even willing to entertain that what I was trying to do was not gonna work. But just by kind of tabling those two words and replacing them with curiosity is a much less threatening and inviting way of approaching all of this.

• 55:58Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, curiosity itself is rewarding. And so it actually hacks that same system of, if we're addicted to our cell phones, we can get curious about, what do I get from this? I remember there was a, just one example, one of the resident physicians that was training with me, she was in her last year of residency, and she came in as a skeptic, which is the best type of person to come in, like, what is this crap? And how do you actually help people with addictions? Are you crazy? So she was, she was using one of our apps, I don't know if it was our craving to quit or our eat right now program, and reading my book.

• 56:40Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And she woke up to the point where she had two relatively small kids and was standing out away from the dining table, like on a Saturday night, her two kids were eating dinner, and she was away from the table checking her news feed. And she had to have that moment where she woke up and she's like, whoa, how did it get to this? To realize that she was under that spell. And that's when she got really curious. She's like, oh, wow. And she totally got into it. Had, you know, had lost weight, she did, you know, a bunch of things that were kind of just as a byproduct of her starting to realize her own habit patterns and wake up.

• 57:24Rich Roll?

  Right. As somebody who's who's made a lot of headway in terms of of solidifying or hardening these soft sciences, I want to talk about what is actually going on in the brain, like the neurology, the neuroscience of it all, because it's super interesting how you talk about these different areas of the brain and how they get activated and what activates them and how we can adopt certain practices to, you know, to get us on on a better track.

• 57:58Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, I was I've been fortunate enough to retool when I was in residency to learn neuroimaging and neuroscience. And so I've been doing almost two decades now, we've been studying the neuroscience behind how this stuff works. And my lab starts with finding a behavioral outcome. You know, we need to make sure that something's actually working. So, you know, when we got five times the quit rates of smoking, it was smoking with our with our mindfulness training, we're saying, okay, there was something, there's something worth looking at here. So we started by looking, just looking at experience versus novice meditators to see what was happening in their brains. And we wanted to find if

• 58:40Dr. Jud Brewer?

  there were common mechanisms that were different with folks that had practiced for a while versus not. So we actually looked across a bunch of different types of meditation. We had people pay attention to their breath, you know, as a standard concentration practice, we have them do this thing called loving kindness, which to me was like the ooey is gooey is nastiest softy is, you know, it's like, oh, I'm never gonna do that. And I'll tell you a little bit how

• 59:04Rich Roll?

  It's a great practice. It maybe it has a branding problem, but

• 59:08Dr. Jud Brewer?

  It it may. And myself, well, I maybe give you a little story about how I actually learned that in a bit. But it probably does have a branding problem. And then we had people do this practice called choiceless awareness, where they would just pay attention to whatever was coming into their awareness. It could be sounds, it could be things they were seeing, could be things they were feeling, things they were thinking. And we found that there was a brain network called the default mode network that was deactivated in experience versus novice meditators. Now, this was a surprise to me. I think I learned the most when my hypotheses are disproven. You know, because I was thinking, well, I'm working pretty damn hard. So there's got to be some brain region that's getting activated, that's lighting up when I'm meditating.

• 59:51Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Because, you know, my sphincter tone is certainly pretty, pretty high right now. And, you know, it turns out that there wasn't a single brain region that was increased in activity in experience versus novice meditators. And so I was like, wow, how could that be? But when we looked at the opposite, when there were decreases in activity, we found that this default mode network was the only, was the major difference between experience and novice meditators, as in their default mode network got quieter. And the way I think of that is, it's kind of like, it's like you're driving your car with one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas. If you take your foot off the brake, you don't have to add more energy into the system, but the car drives faster.

• 1:00:31Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And that's exactly what I think we're seeing with meditation is if we get out of our own way, our brains naturally work better, you know? And, and we can really start to totally get in sync with life and get into, you know, almost get into the flow of things, so to speak.

• 1:00:47Rich Roll?

  Well, let's, let's elaborate on this default mode network. Where, where is it in the brain and what is it responsible for?

• 1:00:55Dr. Jud Brewer?

  There are a bunch of brain regions that are involved in the network. So we can, we'll just talk about the two main hubs of the network. There's a part called the prefrontal cortex, which is kind of more in the front of your brain, the medial prefrontal cortex in particular, in the midline, in the middle. And then there's one called the posterior cingulate that's in the back and kind of also midline. And those two seem to be the main hubs of the default mode network. And if we zoom in on the posterior cingulate, it's an interesting brain region from an addiction perspective, because it gets activated when people who are addicted to all sorts of substances see their substances when they're triggered. So alcohol, cocaine.

• 1:01:36Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Gambling and even even chocolate. One of my friends who's a food researcher at Yale, Dana Small, she did this study where she would, feed people chocolate and they were like, this is great. And their posterior cingulate would activate. Interestingly, it also gets activated when she keeps feeding people and feeding and feeding more and more and more chocolate. And they're like, oh, you know, what there used to be their favorite chocolate, they're now like hating also activates the posterior cingulate. So it seems to get activated when we get caught up in like wanting more, but also activated when we get caught up in wanting less. So when somebody gets caught up in ruminating in depression, for example, or perseverating, like worrying about the future, also that brain region gets activated.

• 1:02:22Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So that that network seems to be involved in a ton of self referential processing. So it's basically, you know, anything related to us, past, future, anything related, you know, oh, that was, I can't believe I did that. That was terrible or, oh no, that might happen to me. That will be terrible.

• 1:02:41Rich Roll?

  That's why Bill and Bob called alcoholism a disease of self obsession.

• 1:02:46Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Totally.

• 1:02:47Rich Roll?

  And that's totally rooted in the neurochemistry.

• 1:02:50Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Absolutely. And we now know the brain regions associated with what they observed from experience such a long time ago.

• 1:02:59Rich Roll?

  That's so fascinating. Is there, is there a difference in the brain chemistry or the like the neural makeup of somebody who is, let's say, like a substance addict like cocaine or heroin versus somebody who who just doesn't have that? Like there are people out there that just they're not triggered by these things in the way that, you know, somebody who's an addict or an alcoholic is.

• 1:03:25Dr. Jud Brewer?

  There seem to be some genetic, there are certainly genetic differences that can predispose people to addiction versus, you know, kind of help people become resilient, say, or less predisposed to them. I don't think that there's, at least from my perspective, there hasn't been anything that's like, oh, this brain region is it. I think it's a very complex picture and it's going to take a lot of more work bringing together genetics with, you know, the environmental work and whatnot to to really find things that are that are that are reproducible. It seems that with Addictions in general, that's where the posterior singulat seems to be one of

• 1:04:09Dr. Jud Brewer?

  the reliable markers, at least from what we've seen. And if you wanted, you know, I think this even broadens beyond, you know, we've been talking about these classic addictions. But this is where it really starts to come into the human realm, as in where, you know, we all have this human tendency to get caught up, right? You know, so it could be as simple as getting caught up in a political view, you know, and somebody says, oh, I disagree with you. And, you know, and we get, we get closed down and we, you know, we get this defensive posture and, you know, all this stuff. There's that feeling of contraction that's the same feeling that comes when we get caught up in a craving, when we want something and when we want a substance, or we want more chocolate, or we want this, we want them to agree with us.

• 1:04:53Rich Roll?

  There's also a loss of, of our ability to control our, our, our bodies and the words that are coming out of our mouth, right? Like when you get like, if you take a political argument, for example, it's like, you know, then you're like, wait, what did I just do? We're not even like, we're not in control.

• 1:05:09Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And how is that any different than an addiction?

• 1:05:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:12Dr. Jud Brewer?

  It's not. It's in same brain processes. So from that standpoint, it seems that, you know, from a neurobiologic standpoint, we can see where there's this common denominator. And it's, it's interesting because we've done, we've done some neurophenomenologic work, which is just a fancy word, where we can link up subjective experience with brain activity using real time neural feedback. We can actually directly link people's subjective experience with their brain activity. And this is where it got really interesting for us. So, for example, when people's minds are wandering, when they're daydreaming or whatever, this default mode network has been shown to be activated. And when people are concentrating on a task, or when they're meditating, this gets deactivated. That's what some of our,

• 1:05:56Dr. Jud Brewer?

  you know, the studies that my lab had done. But it, you know, it's like, okay, that's interesting. But what's actually going on here? And when we started to line up people's subjective experience, we found something really interesting, which was that they were, they were, it was this caught up quality. When somebody gets caught up in thinking, that's when the default mode network gets activated. When somebody gets caught up in a craving. And we even had some, some really Really illuminating moments where some of these, you know, like we had experienced meditators. There was, I remember one who said, you know, I was trying to meditate harder and somehow pay attention more. And that's when his posterior singul- his default mode

• 1:06:38Dr. Jud Brewer?

  network got increased in activity. And he's like, oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. This isn't about trying. This isn't about doing.

• 1:06:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that is, that's the trick, right?

• 1:06:49Dr. Jud Brewer?

  That is the trick.

• 1:06:52Rich Roll?

  This self obsession, these, these stories that we loop in our minds about who we are, the rehashing of the past, the, you know, foreshadowing of the future, the catastrophizing, all of these things that we get caught up in, this is where it resides. Yes. And so essentially, what you're saying is meditation, these mindfulness practices are a way of like lowering the volume on that. And in turn, allowing us to then be more focused, more present, more curious, and less self judging.

• 1:07:31Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Absolutely.

• 1:07:32Rich Roll?

  Is that the most elementary way of explaining this?

• 1:07:35Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, yeah. And John Cupid Zinn, who really led the way in a lot of the scientific, you know, beginning of the scientific studies around mindfulness, talks about, you know, we are human doings rather than human beings. And that lines up very nicely with this whole process. You know, we can, we get stuck in the habit loop of doing. If I just do something, you know, if I'm anxious, I'll just do something to make it go away. If I'm, you know, I'm gonna do something to make myself lose weight. But the point that we're missing is that that doing is another form of, of addiction, where we get addicted to doing. I'm just gonna do, do, do, do, do, you know, that badge of honor of I'm busy because I'm doing.

• 1:08:16Rich Roll?

  So guilty of that.

• 1:08:20Dr. Jud Brewer?

  But we can wake up to that and ask ourselves, what am I actually getting from this? And again, bring that curiosity and look at that cause and effect relationship. And my guess is, when we, you know, I don't know what it's like for you, but when you really take perspective and step back and say, well, what am I getting from all this doing? A lot of that doing starts to fall away because it's, you know, the doing for doing sake is not very rewarding.

• 1:08:45Rich Roll?

  Well, I can come up with a number of arguments about, you know, why I'm doing all the doing, but they, when you really examine them, they start to fall apart. I mean, a lot of the doing is to distract myself from whatever emotional state is making me uncomfortable. And the external validation that I'm chasing that has, you know, diminishing returns over time.

• 1:09:08Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So you just nailed that diminishing returns piece? That's when we start to see, oh, this isn't doing it. But the problem is, until we see, until we find something that works more consistently and is better, right? That bigger, better offer, we're going to keep doing that. And I think that's where we, you know, as a society, it's just do, do, do, do, do. Until we pay attention and see the diminishing returns, that's when our orbitofrontal cortex starts to see it not as rewarding. But then we start to play with being, whether it's being curious or being kind. Or, you know, those are, those are the two key elements of awareness, where we can just notice right in this moment, oh, lost in the past, lost in the future.

• 1:09:53Dr. Jud Brewer?

  What does this feel like? Oh, not that rewarding. What's it like just to be curious? Or what's it like to simply be kind to myself in this moment? And shift from maybe self judgment, like, oh, I can't believe this, to, oh, what's happening in my body? And then that wisdom starts to land and starts to grow. Over time, we start to see, oh, wait a minute. This isn't doing it for me. It's not doing it for me. And we start to, you know, sometimes it can happen quickly. More often, and I see this, you know, myself and with my patients, we see this more gradually, where, you know, our brains have to be totally convinced that this isn't going to work for us.

• 1:10:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:10:32Dr. Jud Brewer?

  This old way.

• 1:10:34Rich Roll?

  Are you finding in your studies with all of these people that, that arriving at this place is becoming more difficult because we have such a reduced tolerance for any form of discomfort? Because we always have a way to opt out? Like, it seems to me, you know, I would be interested in what's happening with, you know, teenagers and, and young people who don't know what it's like to ever be without a smartphone. The impact on that, on, on, on the human animal's ability to just be present with one's own discomfort.

• 1:11:12Dr. Jud Brewer?

  You know, it's hard.

• 1:11:13Rich Roll?

  Because you have to, you have to, you have to, in this journey towards being, right? You're gonna, you're gonna go through this period of having to be uncomfortable as you start to, you know, figure out how to become curious.

• 1:11:26Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:26Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:11:27Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, the only way out is through. It's, it's impossible to know exactly because we can't, you know, kind of clone the human race and then do the parallel experiment without smartphones. But we can look at how, how children and adolescents learn, and they learn from modeling. You know, so if they see adults modeling distraction. So if adults are bored or feeling anxious or whatever, and they're turning to their smartphones, they're going to model that for the teenagers as compared to modeling distress tolerance or modeling curiosity. And so that's one piece where, you know, we can look to see, well, what are we modeling for the next generation?

• 1:12:09Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And then we can, you know, teenagers are pretty smart. And so, you know, the sooner they hit rock bottom with the, you know, the job of liking all their friends' posts or whatever, and start to break out of that, you know, teenagers are tremendously curious, you know, they're exploratory creatures. And so I truly trust that they'll be able to, you know, find their ways into this. It'd be even better if we can model this, or, you know, throw them some bones and say, hey, try this, try this. But we can't make them do anything. The more we shake our finger, you know, especially, you know, say, do this, they're gonna say, you know, screw this.

• 1:12:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:12:48Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And go the other way.

• 1:12:51Rich Roll?

  One of the things that you're doing in hardening the soft sciences is these studies using FMRI, right? To really look at this brain activity. And people can watch The 60 Minutes where Anderson Cooper, you know, goes through this experience. But that, was that an EEG? Was that different, right, for him?

• 1:13:13Dr. Jud Brewer?

  We used source estimated EEG for that, but it's basically the same thing.

• 1:13:17Rich Roll?

  Same idea, right? Like, let's, here, you can look at a screen and you can actually see what's happening in the brain when you're meditating, when you're not meditating, and you can quantify it.

• 1:13:27Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. And I think as a hard, growing up as a hard scientist, that being able to quantify what's actually going on and link it to brain mechanisms is pretty rewarding. And it's even more rewarding when we can link all of these things up. So as a clinician scientist, the holy grail for me is having a theory that lines up with brain mechanism, that lines up with outcomes. And so if I can make the connection between all those three, that's really gratifying for me. Because as a clinician, you know, I don't want to just learn stuff that's esoteric and interesting that might, you know, feed my own addiction for knowing stuff and learning stuff. But I want to really see how is this gonna help my patients down the road, or even immediately.

• 1:14:12Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And so, for example, we just finished a study, we just published a study with our smoking program, the To Quit program, where we scanned people, we put people in the FMRI scanner at baseline who wanted to quit smoking. And we showed them a bunch of pictures of smoking cues. And we activated their posterior cingulate, you know, lights up like a Christmas tree. And then we randomized them to get the 2 quit program or the National Cancer Institute's quit guide, so we'd have an active comparison. And we'd scan them a month later to see, does change in brain activity actually predict clinical outcomes? And lo and behold, we found that there was a significant correlation between a reduction in posterior singulate activity and a reduction in cigarettes only in the 2 quit program. We actually found

• 1:14:57Dr. Jud Brewer?

  a really strong correlation even with the number of modules they completed, even though both groups completed the same number of modules. So here, we're seeing a dose-dependent relationship and a brain-specific effect that was affecting clinical outcomes based on a theory that we had been exploring, you know, over a decade before. And so, we're able to link up this theory, oh, mindfulness helps us be with our cravings and not act on them. It affects this brain network that gets activated when we're caught up in craving and gets deactivated with mindfulness, and here, it's affecting clinical outcomes. So, that's been really gratifying to be able to see, you know, to be able to live that process. You know, we've been doing research now for about 20 years to line all of these things up. It's been a long time coming.

• 1:15:41Rich Roll?

  And walk me through the exact protocol that you put these people through.

• 1:15:45Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:46Rich Roll?

  Like, it's one thing to say, be curious, right, or meditate, but like, what is the actual program?

• 1:15:52Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So, the craving to quit app is, basically, we give them a short, bite-sized modules every day. So, one thing I learned clinically when we did our first studies was, you know, we'd have people come in once a week to learn this mindfulness training. We'd teach them mindfulness. They'd go home, come back a week later. One thing we learned was, a lot of them were struggling with remembering the practices, doing the practices, just setting up the habit to do it. What we know is, from habit formation, is, you know, you need to nudge, you need to do little steps, and as much as you can do that consistently. So, then we graduated to twice a week, and that still wasn't enough. And then we said, screw this, you know, we threw all that away, and said, let's take this manualized, you know, evidence-based treatment and cut it into bite-sized pieces and deliver it through people's

• 1:16:37Dr. Jud Brewer?

  phones. And so, that's where we can actually move from, you know, in the office to in context, right?

• 1:16:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:16:44Dr. Jud Brewer?

  It goes back to the, people don't learn to smoke in my office. So, with the apps, we can actually deliver 10 minutes of training every day. You know, where they really learn the practices. Importantly, we start with helping them understand how their mind works. So we basically show them the habit loop, help them start to identify, you know, okay, what triggered smoking? What do I get from smoking? And importantly, we have them pay attention as they smoke. That's the first step. And start to really pay attention to what do I get from this? What do I get from this? What do I get from this? So that reward value starts to drop. Then we give them an exercise and this is all automated through the app, where when they have a craving, they can click on that craving button and they can actually imagine smoking a cigarette.

• 1:17:28Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So we walk them through, okay, you know, light it up. What's it feel like when it goes in your mouth? What's it taste like? What's it smell like afterwards? What does your body feel like? And that can give them a gauge to how disenchanted they are with the smoking, right? How much has that reward value dropped? And if it hasn't dropped in the past, it helps them really pay attention to see how much that engenders a craving. And if it does engender a craving, then we have them smoke mindfully and go through that smoking mindful exercise. So that it lays down that new reward value that says, oh, how good was this? And as they repeat that over time, that's when they can start to move from smoking mindfully, laying down that new reward value,

• 1:18:11Dr. Jud Brewer?

  and then just moving to imagining smoking. And then when that reward value is dropped, when they imagine doing it, their body's like, why would you do this? And actually, you know, this occurred to me when I was on a plane. I was actually on a plane to fly out to California a little while ago. And I was offered the airplane food. And I went through this simulation in my mind. I was like, do I want the food? And I imagined eating it like, ugh. That process crap. So I realized, I was like, wait a minute. We can actually turn this into an exercise that will capture whether somebody is disenchanted with the behavior or not. So we do this with our smoking program.

• 1:18:55Dr. Jud Brewer?

  We do this with our eating program. And if it, if it, if they're not disenchanted yet, that's fine. We have them go into the, into the actual experience. So smoke or eat or whatever. So they can start to build that disenchantment. So as they go through the program, you know, it's 20, 30 modules. As they go through this, they can build that disenchantment in their direct experience.

• 1:19:18Rich Roll?

  I would imagine you can, if you can master that practice, it becomes applicable, not just in smoking or airplane food, but almost in every situation. You could use it to, do I wanna, you know, say yes to this opportunity? Do I wanna, you know, do I wanna go to this place? Like all, you know, you could run that calculus for anything.

• 1:19:40Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Absolutely. So this is where I, this is like the, the stealth of this practice is, you know, as we learn something, you know, if you think of knowledge, you can learn knowledge about one thing, like, okay, this is how this thing works. But if you develop wisdom, you start to see, oh, this works in the same way as this, as this, as this, as this, and this. And we start to develop this wisdom around life where we're like, wait a minute, this is how my mind works as compared to, oh, this is how I work with eating or smoking or anxiety. Oh, this is how my mind works. So I can actually apply this to relationships. I can apply this to this.

• 1:20:20Dr. Jud Brewer?

  For example, I remember a guy in our, who'd come in for alcohol treatment. And he was this really big muscular mechanic, you know, he'd come in. You know, it's hard to get oil off your hands after working, you know, working in an engine all day. So he'd come in, having tried to wash his hands, but still, you know. Pretty gritty. And at the end of the program, I asked him, what was your favorite aspect of this? And he gave me this sheepish grin. And he said, you know, I've actually changed my relationship with my dad. This program has taught me to actually work with that and realize that this is a loving kindness practice for him, which was the last thing I thought he was going to say.

• 1:21:02Dr. Jud Brewer?

  But he had generalized this knowledge of working with, using mindfulness to work with drinking, to changing his lifelong relationship with his dad.

• 1:21:14Rich Roll?

  I would imagine on some level, that gets to the underlying impetus for a lot of addictive behavior, right? Like, I'm interested in how your work squares with, like, let's say, Gabor Maté and all the work that he's done with the impact of childhood trauma on how these behaviors manifest later in life. Or Johann Hari and his thesis on lost connection and how this is really an epidemic of connectivity among human beings.

• 1:21:47Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I think it squares perfectly. I was just to spend some time with Gabor a little while ago at a conference. And we were really, you know, just, it's so fun to geek out about this stuff with folks. And it's totally, it makes complete sense if you think about, you know, a loss of connection, for example. So we feel lonely. That's the trigger. We do something like drink or drug, and then we basically numb ourselves to that pain. So it's this temporizing measure. We get this brief relief, and then we have to repeat it. So if we never get at the heart of the issue, which is, you know, the disconnection, we're always going to feed it in a way that's not healthy.

• 1:22:27Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So here, we can, mindfulness can help us wake up to those patterns and see how we're feeding these in very unhealthy ways. And then open ourselves to finding different ways of relating.

• 1:22:40Rich Roll?

  Right. Smoking, drinking, you know, these behaviors are, we do them because they work, right? Like, they're, in certain respects, they work until they stop working. They're serving, they're filling a need, they're serving a purpose that works for a period of time until it stops working. But... They're not necessarily the problem. They're like the solution to the problem. They're like a Band-Aid on the problem, right? So you're dealing with this condition at the behavioral tip of the spear. Someone like Gabor is dealing with this at its inception point, right? Where it begins.

• 1:23:23Rich Roll?

  And so I would imagine that on some level, a combination of these two approaches would be, you know, the comprehensive solution here. Like, you gotta deal with, you gotta quit smoking. You gotta break this cycle of craving. You gotta create, you know, strategies and behavior patterns for managing this. But you still also have to go to the root of like, what is, you know, creating this level of discomfort to begin with? Or what is it that continues to creep up and makes you feel uncomfortable in your own skin? Driving that need to escape out of whatever it is you're experiencing through whatever behavior that you're choosing.

• 1:24:00Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, absolutely. And in the moment, you know, in the moment that we are uncomfortable, if we can learn to be a little more embracing of that discomfort, it can help us open to seeing where we've, you know, where that heart of the problem is. You know, oh, where we haven't been willing to look at disconnection or willing to look at, you know, all this stuff that can just keep feeding it because it's just been too painful. And we've trained ourselves to numb ourselves. When we can train ourselves to actually be with that discomfort, that opens up the possibility for true and deep healing.

• 1:24:40Rich Roll?

  And how does all of this square with traditional 12-step approaches?

• 1:24:44Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I think it works beautifully. You know, there's a, there's a book called One Breath at a Time. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but the guy lies, lays out that, how all the 12 steps line up very beautifully with Buddhism and mindfulness practice.

• 1:24:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Dr. Jud Brewer?

  You know, the step one, I am not in control. Wait a minute, willpower doesn't work, you know? So, you know, and you just go on and on and on with each of the steps. And there's, there's nothing that's discontinuous or at odds between these. That's, that's one thing I like about mindfulness practice is it's not about some big philosophy or, you know, you must do a bunch of things. It basically distills down to pay attention.

• 1:25:26Dr. Jud Brewer?

  See what the results of your behavior are, repeat. And that can, that can work with any spiritual tradition. It can work with the 12 steps. And I think it can enhance a lot of, of work that people are really struggling with. You know, I have a number of patients who go through this 12 step. And it takes them a long time to get through. You know, there's some steps that are just really, really tough that they're just like, wow, I'm not ready for that one.

• 1:25:50Rich Roll?

  It doesn't have to, but it tends to. People get hung up on around four and then there's a very protracted, long period of time before they can move on to the next one.

• 1:26:00Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I was thinking of four in particular. And I agree, it doesn't have to, especially if we can build up the ability to be with our own discomfort. That's when it can help us see for as a strength rather than as a big barrier. It's like, oh God, I gotta do this as in, oh, here we go. You know, let's, let's do this.

• 1:26:18Rich Roll?

  Rather than being afraid of confronting those difficult, complex emotions, being curious about them.

• 1:26:25Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:26Rich Roll?

  Can open up that door.

• 1:26:27Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:28Rich Roll?

  And then of course, the word meditation appears in the step. It doesn't get traditionally, it's sort of the bastard stepchild. Like it doesn't really get the, the treatment or attention that it deserves. But there's nothing about it that says that it shouldn't.

• 1:26:42Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah. Yeah. And you can look at, so let's take fear, for example. On a very experiential level, what we were finding, it goes back to the neuroimaging work that we were doing. We can actually, we were finding that this contracted or closed down quality of experience correlates with increased activity in the posterior cingulate cortex. And that's open experience correlates with decreased activity. And so on a very basic level, we can help people really pay attention to what is, you know, just pay attention to that closed feeling when you're afraid and bring curiosity to that. And it starts to open that piece right, right in that moment.

• 1:27:22Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And so we can really bring that curiosity and kindness in as a, as a way to directly, you know, clean out that wound in those moments where people are really struggling with, say, the four step or whatever.

• 1:27:35Rich Roll?

  From what I gather from your work, it doesn't seem to matter that much what type of technique you decide to adopt, meditation technique.

• 1:27:46Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, I think I've practiced a ton of different techniques and I was a technique junkie for a while because I was thinking, you know, I gotta just find the perfect technique. And then I realized I was asking the wrong question. It's, it's different, you know, different techniques work for different people. And so it's important that people find a technique that they can really resonate with. But underlying all of these techniques is this, you know, am I working? Am I closing? Am I clenching? Am I forcing? Versus, am I resting? And resting and awareness, because these practices share this common underlying element of awareness itself and that attitudinal quality of curiosity.

• 1:28:30Rich Roll?

  So there's no evidence from like an FMRI perspective, like, oh, loving kindness does this and Vipassana does this and, you know, can you, can you calibrate them in that way?

• 1:28:43Dr. Jud Brewer?

  When we've looked, we found that, you know, loving kindness, that Vipassana, that concentration practices, that a bunch of different, we've even done some pilot work with, with Christian contemplative practice. All of them share this core element of letting go. You know, whether, and the language might be slightly different, but the letting go is the same. You know, and whether it's letting go into concentration, letting go into just noticing the changing nature of reality in Vipassana practice, whether it's letting go of the small self and letting God flow through you in, in Christian contemplative practices, all of these share that common element. And we, and we see that shared element in FMRI practice, in FMRI studies.

• 1:29:27Rich Roll?

  What is the most counterintuitive or surprising thing that you've learned about this whole world as a neuroscientist? Like, did you go, I would imagine you go in, you're trying to be objective, but you're like, oh, this is going to prove this, right? And then you discover, oh, my God, it's not that way at all.

• 1:29:46Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, I mean, how much time do we have? There were, we, there were a lot of things that were really surprising. I think the biggest surprise was the one I mentioned earlier around this wasn't about doing something. This was about, I'm really just relaxing and letting, letting things be. And there was a, you know, actually even more surprising to me was the, what I'm going to describe as the causal nature of these things. And this related to everything from concentration practice to even finding flow, where there's this, you know, the Buddhists, they have, they're famous for lists, you know, for this. Very good at that. Ate this, whatever. So they have this list of these seven factors of awakening. Sounds like a pretty important list to pay attention to. I'd always tried to memorize

• 1:30:31Dr. Jud Brewer?

  the list and could never do it. You know, it's these seven things, I can't remember. I can only learn things if I understand why they work. And it occurred to me after years, probably my teachers beating their heads against the wall, like, come on, come on, that this list goes in a particular order. And it starts with awareness and basically curiosity, or Dhamma Vajrayana means like interest or kind of exploration, you know, like investigation. And so if we, if we pay attention to something and we get curious about it, we investigate it, what they describe is the third factor of awakening naturally

• 1:31:09Dr. Jud Brewer?

  coming as a result of those first two, where Virya can be translated as courageous energy. So we actually, when you're curious about something, or when I'm curious about something, I actually want to lean, I get energized, like, whoa, wow, you know, it's like reading a good book. You know, we're tired late at night, but we start reading a good book. I'm like, wow, it's three in the morning. How did, you know, and we had all this energy to read. So this actually leads to this fourth factor of awakening, which is joy or rapture, which then leads to tranquility and then concentration. So I'd been doing this all wrong in my own practice. And I was also studying this in a way where I was thinking, we're going to find that forced part of the brain, you know, part of the brain that's,

• 1:31:51Dr. Jud Brewer?

  that's going to be involved in meditation. Well, there wasn't anything, as I mentioned, that they get, got increased in activity, but it was that decrease when we started to let go. That concentration naturally emerges out of these conditions. When we're interested in something and we're curious and we're not forcing anything when we're tranquil, it actually is rewarding in itself. And so it's a feed forward mechanism that lines up beautifully with upper conditioning. Remember reward feels good. That the concentration naturally emerges out of these conditions and in itself feels pretty good. So when we're totally concentrated on something, it feels great. And when we're really concentrated on something, we totally lose a sense of ourselves

• 1:32:35Dr. Jud Brewer?

  and we start to merge with the rest of the world. And we'd even seen this in experienced meditators. There's this concept, you know it well, I'm sure, flow. You know, me, I Chiksel Mahai talks about flow in terms of it being selfless. It's effortless. It's joyful. You know, it's like this, this thing that a lot of extreme athletes really they'll die for and seen this a lot. You know, there's some great books written about how dangerous it is for, for athletes to get addicted to flow. We had people in our fMRI scanner getting into flow and reporting on it. And we got a snapshot of their brains as their posterior cingulate took a nosedive in activity, just totally quieted down as they were merging

• 1:33:17Dr. Jud Brewer?

  with their environment. And if you think about it, this, this closed quality of experience, this contracted quality is a marker of, okay, I'm here and the rest of the world is out there. Well, when that starts expanding, when you take that to infinity, where do you end and where does the rest of the world begin? So we're gone. Stuff is happening. It's no effort and we're totally dialed in.

• 1:33:41Rich Roll?

  And in the brain, all of those levels are going, there's no area of the brain that's being activated by this. It's just a de-volumization of every.

• 1:33:52Rich Roll?

  Component of the mind.

• 1:33:54Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I would, I would say, we only looked specifically at the posterior cingulate cortex. So these self referential brain regions are getting really quiet.

• 1:34:02Rich Roll?

  Responsible for that.

• 1:34:03Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:04Rich Roll?

  Given, that's super interesting. So given that addiction is a, is a condition of self obsession. The more self obsessed we are, the more imprisoned we are by these cravings and desires. The dissolution of that, that myth of, of differentiation is part of the path that walks you towards this solution. So I'm curious about your thoughts when it comes to things like ayahuasca and psychedelics. Like, these are substances that, that dissolve that illusion of self and allow us to like merge with this. You know, to be at one with the universe.

• 1:34:46Rich Roll?

  And there's certainly interesting studies that are, that are happening right now in this field. Like where, where's your head with all of that?

• 1:34:55Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I'm glad you asked that question because it's a really burgeoning field of science. And serendipitously, when we published our first big finding with experienced meditators, where we found the default mode network was deactivated. Two months later, in the very same journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this group from London, led by David Nudd and Robin Carhart-Harris, published their first study with psilocybin, so the, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. And they found, basically to a T, the same two main hubs of the default mode network were really quiet. And I immediately contacted them and said, dude, this cannot be a coincidence.

• 1:35:39Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And they said, dude, this cannot be a coincidence. And so that started the road down exploring, you know, what are the similarities here? And there's, you know, Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins has really led the way in the US with this research, looking at experienced meditators and, you know, help using things like psilocybin to help people with addictive disorders. The way I think about this, you know, to the point where Michael Pollan wrote a great book on this.

• 1:36:05Rich Roll?

  Everybody's talking about this book.

• 1:36:06Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Oh yeah. So he actually came in and visited my lab.

• 1:36:11Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And we had him do get into our neural feedback rig and just remember a time when he had done a psychedelic, remember a psychedelic experience. And that memory could put him into the feeling of what it was like to let go. And we could see the corresponding reduction in brain activity in his posterior cingulate cortex, which was pretty trippy, like literally, but also fits very interestingly with what the, you know, this translation of mindfulness, the ancient word for it is sati, which means to remember. So many people translate, you know, or interpret what that means, you know, to remember to be in the present moment,

• 1:36:55Dr. Jud Brewer?

  or, you know, to me, it's a lot related to, well, remember what happened when you did this last time, you know, do you really want to go there again? As we're being in the present moment, recalling what happened previously. So he recalled what happened previously and he was reliving, you know, this, this trip that was actually manifesting in real time in reduction in his brain activity. It was pretty, it was pretty far out.

• 1:37:22Rich Roll?

  So how does this, how do you foresee this feel playing out?

• 1:37:26Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Well, if I had a crystal ball that actually worked.

• 1:37:29Rich Roll?

  I mean, I guess my perspective is, I'm super interested. I mean, there's, there's amazing things that are happening in the world right now. And to the extent that anybody can come up with productive solutions to help heal people that suffer, I'm completely supportive of that. At the same time, as somebody who, you know, is very much an addict and an alcoholic in recovery for many years, you know, my, like, talk about, like, you know, my default node network, like firing, like, here's my solution. I just need to do more drugs. This is like, this is the path that I need to be on, you know, like, and

• 1:38:11Rich Roll?

  then I, and then I have to then be curious about what that's about. Like, what is driving that compulsion?

• 1:38:19Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:19Rich Roll?

  And realizing that there's an unhealthy aspect to that as well.

• 1:38:22Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Absolutely. So I think there are two pieces here. The first one is if people don't know or can't remember what it's like to let go. It's pretty challenging to train them in that direction. So we can use things like neural feedback. We can use things like our app-based mindfulness training programs to help people really see what it's like to get contracted and then identify moments when they're letting go. And I think that's also where we can bring together things like digital therapeutics and psilocybin and other psychedelics, where you can, in a very careful way, help people taste what it's like to let go with a psychedelic.

• 1:39:05Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And really help them integrate that experience with feedback training, with direct experience from their own lives. So we can say, okay, you just had this, we just did this session with you, really zoom in on what it's like to be contracted versus letting go. That can kind of give them that guiding star to say, okay, now as you go throughout your life, we're going to train you to notice moments when you're moving away from that, when you're getting closed down, and notice moments when you're moving toward it, when you're opening up. And importantly, we can train you to link those two things up. So again, learning through reward-based learning, we learn from cause and effect.

• 1:39:47Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So if we can see the cause of when we get contracted, and we can see how painful it is, it can help our brain reduce that tendency to go there in the future. If we can notice moments when we're open, like when we're curious or when we're kind, we can see, really pay attention and say, oh, what was that like? And our brain says, oh, that was good. I want to do that again. So we can really pair the two, give them that guiding star where they might not have had that before or remembered it, and then train them to do that over and over and over.

• 1:40:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah. A big part of me managing my addictions is being part of a community to which I'm accountable. And I'm interested in if there's any studies on the neurochemistry of what happens to our brains when we feel integrated in a group of people that care about us, that we know are looking out for us. And conversely,

• 1:40:46Rich Roll?

  What happens when we're of service to others, right? I would imagine that there's a curiosity component to that. There's sort of an engagement that occurs that allows us to transcend our self obsession and invest ourselves in other people. That is a huge part of my solution. But I'm interested in the scientific lens on that.

• 1:41:16Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, absolutely. We're actually starting to collect. So I think that community is a really critical component. And we've actually built very carefully curated online communities for the people in our programs. So for example, the Eat Right Now program, we have this large community, the Unwinding Anxiety Program, large community. So we can actually start to look at their direct experience in relationship to themselves as they progress through the program and as they keep. A lot of people will keep a journal in the community and support each other and learn from each other that way.

• 1:41:49Rich Roll?

  It's got to be a huge part of long-term success. I mean, if you don't have that in place, you might get great results over a 30, 60-day, 90-day period, but it's going to start to fall off.

• 1:42:00Dr. Jud Brewer?

  That could absolutely be the case. And I think we can also do this experiment. So I actually wrote a whole chapter in my book around this, around what's it like when we're mean versus nice, for example. And we can look at generosity, for example, being of service from a simple lens of reward-based learning. So if we see somebody in need and we help them, and we truly help them in a selfless way, where we're not looking for them to thank us, or we're not looking to be able to tell our friends, like, I helped this person, but we just truly, we see somebody in need, we help them, we can notice what that reward feels like. It's clean, it's energizing, it's not depleting, which is completely different from the martyr,

• 1:42:45Dr. Jud Brewer?

  who's like, and we see this in healthcare, physicians and clinicians, like, oh, I got to help everybody, I got to help everybody. And when we're not actually doing that from a healthy place, we get burnt out, we get depleted. And so we can all do this experiment ourself and see what is it like when we're truly doing service for service's sake.

• 1:43:08Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Not when we're depleted, but when we're really at the place to do that. And that's different, you know, we can't say, oh, I should go out and be generous because it's going to help me. That's dead on arrival. But it's truly like when we're at the place when we can do service. And it's important when we can, you know, to be there because often we think, oh, you know, I'm being selfish by taking care of myself. Well, that's not true. We're not separate from our society. If we're not helping ourselves, we're not actually going to be able to help others as well. So we really have to be at that foundational level to be able to be of service. And then when we just explore, what's it like when I do service, when I'm of service to others? We can see, is it actually energizing or depleting? And then it starts to feed forward.

• 1:43:53Rich Roll?

  I think there's also a placebo effect with that in the sense that if I,

• 1:44:00Rich Roll?

  not to play devil's advocate, but I think that, but I think that even if my

• 1:44:08Rich Roll?

  service action is motivated by selfish reasons, like let's say I'm, you know, I'm having a bad day. I'm just, I'm throwing a pity party for myself. Things aren't going right. I'm, I'm fully invested in my self obsession. I do still have enough self-awareness to say, I know that's why I'm suffering. And you know what I should do right now? I should just call somebody up who is having, who I know is having a worse time than me and just ask them how they're doing. Like a small gesture, I'm not going to a soup kitchen or something like that. But it's a way to break that cycle of self obsession and interrupt that kind of thought pattern that's looping in my head. And just momentarily invest myself in somebody else's wellbeing.

• 1:44:53Rich Roll?

  And that interruption, even when motivated purely by selfish reasons, like I'm not, you know, some white knight, you know, who's purely doing it for, you know, for reasons I wish, you know, were motivating me. It still has the same effect. Like I will feel better. It is interrupted that I feel good because I know that I, that I, you know, made myself available, even when I'm busy for somebody else. And that's a practice that has, you know, served me well over many years.

• 1:45:22Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah. So I don't think that's incongruous at all. If you look at it as I'm going to help somebody in order to feel better, then that can loop in a negative way. But what you pointed out was two things. One, awareness. You're self-aware of this is a habit pattern that I'm stuck in, and I can do this to step out of it. That's absolutely skillful as compared to I'm going to perpetuate the cycle of I have to be helping people for me to have self-worth.

• 1:45:51Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:45:52Dr. Jud Brewer?

  So that's the big difference is you're helping yourself step out of the cycle as compared to perpetuating a cycle that's unhealthy.

• 1:45:59Rich Roll?

  Right. What are the things that that trip people up the most? Like, let's take quitting smoking, for example. Like, even they come to you, they're like, I get it, Judd, I'm in. Like, tell me what to do. I'm doing it. I got the app and the whole thing. But they're still like, oh, I thought I was clear, but you're still doing that thing.

• 1:46:20Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah. We use this analogy. So I'm a big fan of riding bicycles. So we actually came up with this gears analogy. And first gear is about noticing our habit loops, right? If we can't move, notice them, we can't move at all. We're always moving backwards. Second gear is exploring what the result is. Like, what do I get from this? And that's a really critical step that people try to bypass as much as they can. Because intellectually, they know, you know, smoking or overeating, you know, I know it's not good for me. And they want to jump right to third.

• 1:46:56Rich Roll?

  Right to the end. Yeah.

• 1:46:57Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah. So third gear is when we're actually stepping out of the loop. So we're being kind, we're being curious, we're using these mindfulness practices to actually step out of these old habitual behaviors. So what I see most is people trying to jam it from thirst into first into third gear. And of course, you know, they, it doesn't work. You're on a hill, and of course, we're going to fall over on the bike, we're going to stall the car.

• 1:47:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have to just embrace the process as it's laid out.

• 1:47:24Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:25Rich Roll?

  In front of you.

• 1:47:26Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah. And the second, the second step, or that second gear. Is the most illuminating because that's really where our brain starts to shift from these unhealthy behaviors, seeing that, oh, this isn't rewarding, to finding the motivation to look for something higher. And that's where, that's when we can actually shift into third gear. It's not glamorous, but it's critical.

• 1:47:49Rich Roll?

  What is the research that has not been done yet that you would like to see be done? That could shed additional light on the craving mind?

• 1:47:58Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Oh, boy, there's a lot. One of the pieces that we're working on now is really lining up the specific mechanisms around the people doing these mental imagery exercises, not imagery, but kind of these mental imagination exercises where they imagine going and eating, overeating, or imagine smoking, and lining that directly up with the, with the change in reward value in their brain. So we've only done, you know, we've done some neuroimaging work with smoking, but we want to see this also in the eating program. We want to see this even with anxiety. And I think it's really important to show that we can, across different types of behaviors, that there's a common underlying mechanism.

• 1:48:43Dr. Jud Brewer?

  We see this behaviorally, where we can see these, you know, strong results with smoking, with eating, and anxiety. I want to also see that this is true neurobiologically, because that helps us line up these mechanisms in a more sound manner. I mean, we see this clinically, we see this behaviorally, but there's something that would be really nice to be able to say, look, here's a general, generalizable even, scientific concept that applies to what the true underlying mechanisms of mindfulness actually are.

• 1:49:14Rich Roll?

  So, The Craving Mind, your book. It's an interesting story that got you here, right? Like, this was a furious product of a self-imposed home retreat, right?

• 1:49:28Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:49:30Rich Roll?

  I mean, did you ever doubt it, like, the power of meditation and mindfulness practices in terms of unleashing your inner creative, you know, fire? Like, you're the poster boy.

• 1:49:41Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, that was a, that was an interesting experiment. So a couple of years before I wrote the book, I remember waking up one Saturday morning and I was just, you know, I'd been thinking through this concept of lining up reward-based learning with these, you know, these seven factors of awakening and whatnot for a while. And one morning I just, it was a Saturday morning, I can remember what the temperature was outside, that it was partly cloudy, all this stuff. I just went down to my dining room table, pulled out a couple of references and watched this paper write itself in three hours. And I put down, you close my laptop, I was like, wow, that was amazing. What was that? And the paper got published without, with very few revisions, you know, whatnot. I was like, oh, wow, I

• 1:50:25Dr. Jud Brewer?

  can actually, you know, I'd been, I'd been learning to get into flow through like mountain biking and playing music and whatnot. And I was like, wow, I can actually do this when writing. So fast forward several years, I, when the book felt like it was ready to be written, and that was actually a critical piece. I can't just like say, hey, I'm gonna write about, you know, cooking and sit down and write a cook. I'm, you know, I don't know how to do that.

• 1:50:49Rich Roll?

  You'd been pestered to write a book for a while, right?

• 1:50:51Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I had been. Yeah. So, you know, several publishers would say, hey, we'd like you to write a book, this and that. And it just hadn't felt right. And so I kind of been like, someday I'll do that someday. And then finally the conditions came together. And so I, I did it as a, as a experiment, as a meditation retreat. So I'm, my wife, it was over the holidays. So as a, my wife went off to spend time with her family for the, for the holidays. And so I was, it was just myself at, at our house with the cats. And so I decided to do a self-retreat. So I'd done month-long self-retreats before at home, which is really good practice because like every distraction is there. But this one, I decided, I said,

• 1:51:35Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I would just do, I would sit, walk and write. As in, you know, regular sitting and walking meditation. And I would write only when I felt totally in flow, like expanded, like it was just coming out. And so I'd sit down and write and write. And then as soon as it started to feel contracted, I would close the computer and just sit and walk. And it was really interesting because I wouldn't even, like, the thinking wouldn't even come up about the writing. I would just sit and walk. And then I would get up to, I remember this one point where I was like, ah. And then I, you know, rest of the day, sit, walk, sit, walk. And then I got up the next morning, I was like, and this whole chapter came out. I was like, wow, that's, so basically, two weeks, you know, a two-week retreat. And, and the book was written.

• 1:52:17Rich Roll?

  That's unbelievable.

• 1:52:18Dr. Jud Brewer?

  It was really fun.

• 1:52:19Rich Roll?

  And it, it, it contravenes the sort of Steven Pressfield war of art, like, shove for the page every day, no matter what, like, push through. Like, you are in, this is more of a, a surrender, like, an allowing. Like, I'm just allowing this to happen. And the minute it feels constricted, to use your word, you walk away from it without any judgment.

• 1:52:41Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Absolutely. And I think that book experience was a really good reminder that we can actually train ourselves to live our lives this way, each moment.

• 1:52:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:50Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Each moment, we can be looking, oh, did Rich ask me, did I answer Rich's question well? Oh, or, oh, wow, that was, that was a crazy answer. Don't know where that came from.

• 1:52:59Rich Roll?

  Do we have to be, uh, two decades into our meditation practice to avail ourselves of this?

• 1:53:06Dr. Jud Brewer?

  We don't. So, one thing that I want to do to be of service, you know, I've fallen on my face a lot. You know, it was over 10 years that I would, you know, struggle and struggle and struggle with meditation before I started to wake up that it wasn't about the struggle. And the struggle taught me something. So one thing I want to do to be of service is to help other people, like, learn that they don't have to, the struggle is not it. You can learn from the struggle, but the struggle is not it. And so we, you know, that's why we set up our, that's why I do this research, to really try to understand what are the mechanisms? What are the most efficient ways to deliver this? This is why this turned, you know, we started developing apps. I had no idea.

• 1:53:46Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Making app-based trainings, but the aim was can we deliver this in a way that is as efficient and as helpful as possible. And I think, you know, we can use these weapons of mass distraction, our cell phones, in a way that can actually be helpful. If people are already, you know, if they already have these things and are using them ubiquitously, why not use them as a way to help us train our minds? And then we can learn that the cell phones, the technology is not the problem. It's that we don't know how our minds work and we can start to learn to work with our minds.

• 1:54:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, our relationship to them. You wrote an interesting piece where you talk about the, I mean, there's a lot of sort of self-help apps out there that are oriented around losing weight or, you know, what have you. But you kind of canvassed the efficacy of these things. And it was something like they purport to be, for the most part, something like 70% efficacious, but in fact, only 2% effective, 2.6 or something like that?

• 1:54:49Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, basically, there's very, very, very little science behind any of these things. And there are a lot of folks that claim, oh, based on science. Well, that's, yeah, exactly. What does that mean? And when you dig into it, and people have done studies on this, when they've dug into it, it doesn't mean a whole lot for most of these. So hopefully the field will actually mature where there will be good science behind these things. But it takes years and it actually takes interest in doing that. And a lot of companies don't have that much time to survive. They've got this clock ticking, this runway that's going to run out if they don't sell a product. Fortunately, you know, we're more of the homegrown where I really want to understand mechanism. I really want to make sure something

• 1:55:32Dr. Jud Brewer?

  works, you know, and if we can put it out there and help people, great. But I'm not going to base this on, you know, we've got a 10x or whatever.

• 1:55:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And this is, this is like consumer facing, but it's also used for like enterprises, right? Like you're using this with, with just corporations and healthcare company, any like companies that want to make sure that their employees are, you know, mindfully healthy.

• 1:56:01Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah. Well, I think companies are finally waking up to the fact that they, you know, it costs them a lot of money. It costs them a lot of productivity and it's so. gratifying to see that companies are actually looking at the well being of their employees. You know, that used to be in the soft side of HR was like, oh, well being. Yeah, we'll throw a little money at that to say that we're, we're doing this. They're really saying, well, you know, well being is actually a critical element to our, you know, to keeping employees here long term, you know, the, the turn, reducing turnover and all this stuff. So I think they're really starting to look at this much more carefully to say, you know, where are the scientifically based programs that can actually move the needle for us? And so we've started to, you know, we've been getting a lot of incoming traffic where companies

• 1:56:46Dr. Jud Brewer?

  are very interested in, in seeing this because, you know, we've been doing the science for 20 years.

• 1:56:51Rich Roll?

  I know. It's got to be really gratifying for you as somebody who's been in this for so long to see the culture kind of catch up with where you've been at for some time and really embrace these ideas in a mainstream way.

• 1:57:03Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, yeah. Going from, boy, Judd, you're going to kill your career to.

• 1:57:07Rich Roll?

  Who is that guy? Have you called that guy recently? You go like, hey, 18 million on my TED Talk, dude.

• 1:57:15Rich Roll?

  You sent him a postcard.

• 1:57:16Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, yeah. Well.

• 1:57:17Rich Roll?

  From the TED conference.

• 1:57:20Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Of course, the, the, I know how ungratifying ego gratification actually is.

• 1:57:27Rich Roll?

  But play that one out like, all right, well, it feels good for a minute. And then the hangover afterwards of like, oh, man.

• 1:57:33Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Man, I sounded like a jerk.

• 1:57:36Rich Roll?

  I know, but I can at least propose it.

• 1:57:40Dr. Jud Brewer?

  It's a good thought experiment.

• 1:57:42Rich Roll?

  We got to wrap this up here, but I, I want to kind of close this with some just practical wisdom on meditation. I love everything that, that you had to say about the letting go and the allowing and, and, and trying to get into that place of, of letting go of, of, of all the self judgment and, and the willing of the process to, to be something other than it is, right? This battle like, I'm going to be a good meditator and I'm going to sit here until I conquer my, my thinking mind, god damn it, you know, as, as being like absolutely the wrong path. And it's so difficult. And I think that is the biggest kind of conventional wisdom hurdle that people need to overcome to just embrace this process and show up for, for, you know,

• 1:58:26Rich Roll?

  for what it is.

• 1:58:28Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Absolutely. That is, that is number one. You know, let's move beyond willpower. You know, it's had 50 years of stuff. Let's say, let's move on to really understanding how our minds work. And I think we're way past being able to do that.

• 1:58:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And the first, if somebody's listening to this and they, they're, they're caught in, well, let me just back up and say, if you're listening to this and, you know, you don't identify as somebody who's an addict in the traditional sense, I would encourage all of you to think more objectively and, and really do, you know, do an analysis, a forensic analysis on, on how you live your life every single day. And I don't think there's anybody out there who, who won't be able to, you know, see and identify some behavior pattern, whether it's a tendency to get into a certain kind of relationship or a certain kind of social dynamic that you perpetuate despite, you know, negative outcomes.

• 1:59:26Rich Roll?

  There is always something that can be pinpointed that needs a little redress. And I think, you know, what, what Judd has shared today can be instrumental and helpful in helping you understand, A, that you're doing that, and B, that there is a path forward that can allow you to ultimately transcend it.

• 1:59:48Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Amen, brother.

• 1:59:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And it begins with what?

• 1:59:51Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Awareness.

• 1:59:52Rich Roll?

  Awareness?

• 1:59:54Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And this-

• 1:59:54Rich Roll?

  If somebody doesn't know what awareness is though, like, what do you mean?

• 1:59:58Dr. Jud Brewer?

  By that, I mean, paying attention, like really being truly awake in the present moment. And importantly, not being pushed or pulled by our biases, you know, you know, colored by, oh, this is the way the world works, but really being colored by curiosity, like, oh, is this the way the world works? Is this actually true? So that we're observing what's actually happening, rather than what we think should be or want to be happening.

• 2:00:30Rich Roll?

  Is there a difference between curiosity and listening?

• 2:00:36Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I think we can listen curiously, or we can listen in a biased manner. So if we're listening, waiting to hear a certain thing, or hearing things a certain way.

• 2:00:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:47Dr. Jud Brewer?

  And I'm sure we've all experienced this, where like, oh, I thought I heard this. And somebody said, no, I said that. So we can listen. But if we're, I would think, I would say this is somewhat synonymous with deep listening, where we are totally out of our own way, and we are just totally in the process of listening. That's, you know, the curiosity piece, and the awareness piece, and even flow, where we're like, just so engrossed in a conversation. That's totally synonymous.

• 2:01:18Rich Roll?

  All right. I think that's a good place to land the plane. How do you feel?

• 2:01:22Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I feel great.

• 2:01:23Rich Roll?

  Are you craving anything right now?

• 2:01:25Dr. Jud Brewer?

  No, I had no idea it went this long. Wow.

• 2:01:28Rich Roll?

  A few hours is good. The book is The Craving Mind. It's a great book. I'm well into it at this point. I highly recommend everybody check it out. There's so much good stuff in here, plus an amazing foreword by John Kabat-Zinn, which was beautiful. And if people want to learn more about you, drjudd.com, what's the best place for them to go?

• 2:01:51Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah, we've got a, that's our resource website, drjudd.com, where they can learn about my research, about the book, about our apps. And we've got a bunch of animations on there that teach people, like, everyday addictions and things like that.

• 2:02:04Rich Roll?

  Right. All the apps can be found through that, that portal.

• 2:02:07Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Absolutely.

• 2:02:08Rich Roll?

  And check out his TED Talks, right? You've got two.

• 2:02:12Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Two. Well, a TED and a TEDx.

• 2:02:14Rich Roll?

  TEDx, and then the Big TED.

• 2:02:15Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:15Rich Roll?

  How many views does that thing have now?

• 2:02:17Dr. Jud Brewer?

  I've.

• 2:02:18Rich Roll?

  Crazy number of views.

• 2:02:19Dr. Jud Brewer?

  A lot.

• 2:02:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right. You don't want to admit that you check once in a while.

• 2:02:26Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Busted.

• 2:02:27Rich Roll?

  Good to talk to you, man. Come back and, and share with me more. I love what you're doing. I appreciate the work that you're doing. I think it's really important. You know, addiction is the epidemic of our time. It's why we're obese. It's why the opioid crisis exists. These are massive problems that need to be solved at scale. And so, the science that you're doing, and how it merges with these traditional historic methods of mindfulness, I think is super important and worth everybody's conscious investigation. So, thank you.

• 2:02:59Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Thank you.

• 2:03:00Rich Roll?

  All right. Peace.

• 2:03:01Dr. Jud Brewer?

  Blance.

• 2:03:05Rich Roll?

  Good stuff. Hope you guys enjoyed that. I hope you got a lot out of that. I hope that elevated your edification in this world of habit change and addiction and compulsion. For more on Judd and his world, please check out the show notes on the episode page at ritual.com. And you can let him know personally how this one landed for you by sharing your thoughts with him directly on Twitter or Instagram @JuddBrewer. Also, don't forget to pick up a copy of his book, The Craving Mind, which is also available on Audible, of course. And here's the thing, if you are struggling with your diet, if you are truly desiring of once and for all mastering your plate, but feel like you lack the skill in the kitchen, or you don't have the time, or the budget to eat properly, please check out our Plant Power Meal Planner. I really think it can help

• 2:03:49Rich Roll?

  you. It's an extraordinary product. We work very hard to create. That solves a very basic problem, making nutritious eating convenient, affordable, and delicious. When you sign up at meals.ritual.com, you will get access to thousands of constantly updated delicious, easy to prepare, nutritious, plant-based recipes that are completely customized based on a profile of personal preferences that you upload when you sign up. You also get unlimited grocery lists, grocery delivery in most metropolitan areas, and access to a team of nutrition coaches at the ready to guide you seven days a week. And all of this, you get for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year, which is insane.

• 2:04:30Rich Roll?

  It's literally the price of a cup of coffee. So to learn more and to sign up, go to meals.ritual.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on the podcast on Apple Podcasts. That really helps new people discover the show. You can tell your friends about your favorite episode on social media, perhaps. Subscribe to my YouTube channel, Spotify, Google Podcasts, all those places. And you can support us on Patreon at ritual.com/donate. I want to thank everybody, the team that helps put this show on every week. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering. Production, show notes, interstitial music, lots of behind the scenes stuff.

• 2:05:12Rich Roll?

  Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin, who do double duty on videoing the show for YouTube. Jessica Miranda for graphics, Ally Rogers for portraits, DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships, and my boys Tyler and Trapper and Harry, who created the theme music for this show that dates back all the way to day one. They called their band Analemma at the time. I don't think they're still calling their band that, but I keep saying it, Analemma. Anyway, appreciate all of you guys. Thank you for the love. I will see you back here in a couple of days with a really wonderful conversation with a true maven of all things creativity. Photographer, CreativeLive founder, and author of this new book, which I really love, Creative Calling.

• 2:05:57Rich Roll?

  His name is Chase Jarvis, and you're gonna love it. Here is a little taste. Until then, be still, be mindful, eat plants. Namaste.

• 2:06:09Speaker 02

  The people that you are inspired by, that you moved by, that you're connected to, that you admire, their lives were created intentionally. There's all kinds of circumstances, but they created the puzzle that is their life, and they're expressing themselves in a particular way. And it's intentional, it's designed, and it's created. That creativity is a muscle. It's a habit, not a skill. It's a process, not a product. It's a muscle. And the only way you learn is through practice. And this is why I advocate action over intellect. Like, if you're sitting around trying to figure this out and make the perfect chess move, like, that's not how it happens.

• 2:06:54Speaker 02

  It's the action, it's the doing that actually creates the learning. It's great to get information from the internet, or your mentor, or whomever, but learning, like, actually doing that part is incredibly valuable.

• 2:07:07Speaker 02

  It is the riskiest time in the world to play it safe.

• 2:07:46Speaker 02

  Subtitles by the Amara.org community