That Anxiety You’re Feeling? It’s a Habit You Can Unlearn.

This has been a bad year for the anxious among us — myself very much included. The pandemic was objectively terrifying. And many of us were trapped inside, with nothing we could do about it, severed from social connection and routine, with plenty of time to fret. But that almost gives anxiety, at least as I experience it, too much credit. This year, anyway, being anxious made sense. It so often doesn’t. Your mind has so much power and capacity, and there are so many real problems to solve or wonders to contemplate, and instead you’re obsessively ruminating over something that happened three years ago or might happen three years from now. So, what is anxiety? How do we learn it as a behavior? And more to the point, how do we unlearn it? Jud Brewer is an associate professor of psychiatry at Brown University, where he is the director of research and innovation at the Mindfulness Center. I’ve followed his work on meditation and addiction for years, and his new book, “Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind” applies that research to anxiety, which he understands as a kind of addiction. And just like with any addiction, you have to understand its rewards in order to begin addressing it. It’s a powerful framework, and one I’ve found useful in my own life. I’m not saying his book, or this conversation, cured me of anxiety. But it helped me understand it better. I hope it’ll do the same for you Recommendations: "The Art of Racing in the Rain" by Garth Stein "Barbarian Days" by William Finnegan "The Underground Railroad" by Colson Whitehead You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.

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

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein and this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:19Ezra Klein?

  I am an anxious person. I come from a family of anxious people and I'm gonna be honest, it sucks. There's this line from the book, "The Way to Love", by the Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello. Great, great book, by the way. I don't talk that much about it, but it's one of my favorites. But it describes my experience of this so perfectly. He's not talking about anxiety, he's talking about the way human beings experience life, but he writes, quote, "Think of yourself in a concert hall, listening to the strains of the sweetest music, when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You're anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall, and you cannot enjoy the music." End quote. That is often how life feels to me. Things are

• 1:01Ezra Klein?

  objectively amazing. I live in an age of antibiotics and vaccines and YouTube and the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the internet and I have a family I love and a job I love and I'm healthy and I'm privileged in a million ways. And I'm still just spinning my mental wheels, like endlessly ruminating on things I don't want to be thinking about. I pride myself on my own discipline and my own mind is so out of control. So then in addition to whatever it is I'm worried about, I'm also meta pissed off at myself for that worrying. Why can't I just focus on what I know I should be focusing on? I don't say any of this for sympathy. I say it because I know I'm not alone in it. Every time I mention anxiety on the show, I get emails from you all about your experiences with it, about

• 1:44Ezra Klein?

  how it feels. And obviously, this has been a year that has supercharged anxious tendencies for a lot of us. The actual situation has been, and frankly, still is terrifying. And then we're trapped inside with nothing to do about it. It's the worst possible mix. So I've been wanting to do a show on anxiety for a while, but I wasn't sure who to do it with. And then Judd Brewer releases book Unwinding Anxiety. Brewer is at Brown University, where he's a director of research and innovation at the Mindfulness Center, and he's an associate professor in psychiatry. But I followed his work for a while, both because of the studies he's done around meditation and the minds of master meditators, but also because of his previous book, which is called The Craving Mind, which I found to be one of the best things I've read, at least on addiction.

• 2:28Ezra Klein?

  But here, he extends that framework and argues that anxiety is a kind of addiction, and that like any addiction, you have to understand its rewards in order to begin addressing it. I think it's a pretty interesting framework. I'm not saying it has cured me of anxiety, but it's given me a much more generative way to think about it and to approach it. And so I asked him on the show. As always, my email is [email protected]. Please send me your guest suggestions. Here's Dr. Judd Brewer.

• 2:58Ezra Klein?

  The core of your book is this idea that anxiety is a learned habit. So what is a habit?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Well, if we think of a habit as needing three essential elements, it's a trigger, a behavior, and a result. And if you think of this from a basic survival brain perspective, you know, our ancient ancestors needed to remember two main things, like where to find food and how to avoid danger. So if they saw food, you know, they're out foraging for food, they saw food, there's the trigger, they would eat the food, there's the behavior, and then their stomach would send this dopamine signal to their brain that was the reward. And it basically said, remember what you ate and where you found it. Same is true for a danger. You see the danger, you run away, and your reward is that you don't get eaten.

• 3:39Ezra Klein?

  So why is anxiety then a habit?

• 3:41Speaker 01

  If you look at anxiety, the definition of, you know, this feeling of nervousness or worry or unease about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome, that worry can actually be a mental behavior. So we can have a feeling of anxiety, and then that can trigger the mental behavior of worrying. And as we start worrying, that actually gets reinforced in our brain because it makes us feel like we're in control, or at least it makes it feel like we're doing something.

• 4:07Ezra Klein?

  I do want to hold on to this idea of how we learn this, because so much of the book is about reward-based learning and the power of that. But it's really counterintuitive what you're saying because if I run away and the reward is I don't get eaten, great, I get why that feels like a reward. If I eat a cookie and the reward is I got to eat a cookie, I get why that feels like a reward.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:26Ezra Klein?

  I am anxious a lot. I am anxious this morning. It's a great day to talk to you. It does not feel like a reward. It does not feel good. I don't enjoy it. I yell at myself in my own head about it. So when you say that I'm learning this through some kind of dopamine signal, how?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, there can be a couple of elements here. One is our brain goes into problem solving mode. So if you think about our old brain, that survival brain that we talked about, right? Trigger behavior reward layered on top of it more recently is the new brain, literally called the neocortex. And it helps us survive in a slightly different way, which is through thinking and planning. So think of your cookie when, if you're hungry, your stomach starts rumbling and you go get a cookie from the kitchen or something like that. If we don't have information, our neocortex starts rumbling and says, go get information. So there's that survival signal that says, hey, there's some uncertainty here. You know, let's make this more certain. Let's go get information to do that.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  And when we get information, we get this reward. Oh, I figured something out or I now know something. And that piece is actually helpful for survival. The problem is when we don't find a solution, our brain just starts worrying and worrying, kind of spinning out of control, like what if this, what if that, what if this, what if that? So it's kind of this survival mechanism that gets tweaked a little bit when we don't have information. Does that make more sense?

• 5:51Ezra Klein?

  It does in a slightly unnerving way to me. So, and I'm just going to use myself liberally in this conversation. But I always think of one of my great attributes as a person as being my problem solving capability. Very, very good at finding problems, very good at coming up with solutions to them, very good at implementing those solutions. And so what you're saying is that the piece of me that has learned that that is a core driver and a core way I move through the world is also the piece of me that is driving the unproductive, turning over in my head, things that I can't solve.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. So think of it as a double edged sword. So it can help us survive through that planning mode. But when we don't have information and we keep revving it, you know, or maybe the apt analogy would be an engine, you know, we're driving forward. And if we put the clutch in and the engine, we just keep slamming our foot on the gas, that engine's going to rev and burn itself out. That's what worry is. It's our mind revving and revving and revving and saying, what if this, what if that, what if this? The irony there is, it actually makes it harder for us to think and plan.

• 6:56Ezra Klein?

  So we've talked about anxiety as being a product of reward based learning. And so quite a bit of the book is about trying to untangle what you have actually learned and how you keep learning it. Can you talk about habit loops?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  I'd be happy to. And here, I think of it as, you know, if we don't know how our minds work, we're not going to be able to work with them. Maybe I can give an example. I write about one of my patients from my clinic in the book, who was referred to me for anxiety. And I could tell he was anxious right when he walked in the door. So that was pretty clear. But when I started taking his history, we started talking about how he had developed panic attacks around driving. So he'd be on the highway driving, and he felt like, he described it as, I feel like I'm in a speeding bullet. And as he would drive and get those thoughts, he would start to panic. And then that led to panic attacks, and he started avoiding driving on the highway. So we, I just pulled out a piece of paper, and on my desk wrote out trigger behavior reward. And I said, okay, let me see if I'm

• 7:55Speaker 01

  understanding what you're describing. You know, is the trigger these thoughts? Is the behavior avoiding driving on the highway? And is the result or the reward you not having those panic attacks? And he said, yes. And he kind of had this aha moment, where he started to see how that was feeding back in leading him to have full blown panic disorder. He had never recognized that before. He hadn't seen how his mind worked. So here, I think of this as the first step is just mapping out these habit loops. If we can become aware of how we're being driven by these things, whether it's anxiety, procrastination, or any other habit, that's the first step in being able to work with it.

• 8:34Ezra Klein?

  This is such an important part of the book. I actually want to try to model it a little bit. So let's say I was coming to your class or I was in your clinic. How would you help me map out my habit loops? Let's do it live.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  So one thing I would say is, hey, you know, we have a free habit mapper. Go to mapmyhabit.com and download this PDF. And so you download it and there would be this circle with three boxes, you know, that are interconnected. So I would say, okay, Ezra, well, what's the behavior? Is it worrying? Is it procrastinating? What's the behavior? Let's start there.

• 9:03Ezra Klein?

  Worrying, fretting, ruminating, turning around one thought over and over in my mind.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Okay, so the behavior is worry. If you trace it back, are there specific things that trigger you to worry?

• 9:13Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, there are certain things that have like long stuck in my head. You know, they're things from the past or they're particular worries I have about the future. That if I get caught on one of them or triggered on one of them, if something brings it back to mind, it's like it's a more magnetic thought for me, right? Other thoughts I pick up and I put down. And these, if they, if they get in there, they, they stick like it's on, it's on flypaper.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  That's a really nice image. They're magnetic. The closer they get, the harder it is to get away from them. And I like how you say sometimes because the trigger is actually the least important part of the equation. And the reason I say that is triggers don't actually drive future behavior. They just trigger it. It's actually the, the behavior and then how rewarding that behavior is. So if we'd finished out the mapping, so you might be triggered by certain thoughts, these magnetic thoughts in particular, the behavior is to worry. And then I would ask you, well, what's the result of worrying? How does it feel in your body when you worry?

• 10:13Ezra Klein?

  So this is a part I had the most trouble with in the book. It feels bad.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:17Ezra Klein?

  It feels bad all the time. And not only does it feel bad, I mean, you've done a tremendous work on meditation. I've had a mindfulness practice for a long time now. I know it feels bad. I watch it. I do meditation in part to try to deal with this. I yell at myself in my own head. I'm like, you know, like the kind of stop, you know, just like stop that. It does not feel good.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:37Ezra Klein?

  And that's why it's hard for me to imagine it's a reward-based learning system, because I feel like I'm constantly punishing myself. And not only that, but I have the the frame around it, that it's a kind of constant self-castigation.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's geek out about this a little bit, because I think that'll help explain what you're talking about. So there are two elements here that can be happening in terms of how worry gets formed as a habit. So one is, it feels better to worry than not to worry. So if you think of maybe a parent of a teenager who just gets their driver's license, and the kid goes out to, you know, party with their friends on a Friday night, the parent stays up worrying, oh, is my kid going to be okay, until they hear the doorknob open or the garage door open, and they know, okay, my my child is home safely. Now, I can promise you that that worrying did not keep their child safe, yet it feels better than not doing anything. So our brain says,

• 11:33Speaker 01

  oh, this is bad. Do something, do something. And the worrying is doing, and it feels better than not doing. So there's one piece. The other piece is, you know, if it's a problem that we're worrying about, okay, occasionally, we'll come up with a solution, and then we'll ascribe the worrying with coming up with a solution, which is likely not the case, because worrying makes it harder to think, it makes it harder for us to be in our growth mindset, where we can really see lots of possibilities. But just the fact that the two happen at the same time, our brains love to make causal connections, where they say, oh, I was worrying, true, and I came up with a solution, true. So therefore, the worrying must have helped me come up with that solution.

• 12:14Ezra Klein?

  That's the place where I sort of saw it in myself in the book, that I do a lot of planning when I worry. And the plans often don't work. But but it does seem to me, at least, that something I've learned is a tremendous amount of like fret, plan,

• 12:33Ezra Klein?

  And I feel in the moment, if I'm able with that concern to come up with a theory of what I'm going to do about it, then I feel the little reward of like the anxiety going down, right? I feel the little bit of relief. And so in some ways, the rewarding behavior seems to me to be coming up with plans, they're just not very good plans typically. And I think like we're in podcasting here, podcasting loves nothing like it loves productivity life hacks. And I love productivity life hacks. I love thinking about ways I could get up earlier and do more and I do it, you know, and sometimes it's useful for me.

• 13:10Ezra Klein?

  But I do think that whole world a little bit builds this way, like, okay, you have a problem. Like, here's a quick plan. Here's a plan. Here's another plan. And even if the plans don't work, or the diets don't work, or whatever it is, that there is this intermediate thought step where it feels to your brain like it worked before anything has happened.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. And this is even, we see this with the placebo effect with medications. We're like, oh, I'm taking a new medication and therefore, you know, I'm feeling better, even if it's just a placebo effect. So that's, that's how our brains are set up. They're set up to say, oh, here's something new, you know, I'm going to try it. And then it takes a while for that to tail off where that, that initial excitement was actually driving the effect more than whatever that life hack was itself.

• 13:54Ezra Klein?

  But then here's a question, as I understand the dopamine system, it's a learning system. It's a, it's a pretty complicated system, but it, but it has to do with changing your expectations of the future as much as it does anything else. But it doesn't explain why it prioritizes some things over others, right? Why some thoughts are sticky for me, some worries are sticky for me. Why so much it is good in my life does not have the same magnetic pull? Why things that are more objectively important does not have the same magnetic pull? I mean, as you were saying, anxiety is frustrating because you're not thinking clearly. And often my meta frustration is that I know what is more important that I probably should be worrying about, and I'm not, I'm on this like little piddling argument from three years ago

• 14:39Ezra Klein?

  or something. So what is the theory of not just like why we worry, but why we worry about such dumb things?

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Well, it really depends on how rewarding they either are now or how rewarding they were when they first got set up. So our brains really set up this whole hierarchy of reward value in terms of different behaviors. And that can even apply to specific instances that we've had. So for example, if somebody did us wrong and we start ruminating about that, we're like, oh, I can't believe I should have said this. You know, there's this self-righteous quality that has to do with our ego that is very rewarding to think about, oh, if I had only said this or, you know, I can't believe this person said this. So it's not only the self-righteous piece, but also outrage. All of those actually can activate the same system where we get, you know,

• 15:29Speaker 01

  we get excited, we get outraged, and that actually can jack the dopamine system as well. So it becomes reinforcing in that respect. There's actually a Burmese meditation teacher, Sada Upanthita, who said, you know, we mistake excitement of the mind for happiness. And so here, that exciting quality, that's indicating that dopamine is firing, generally speaking. And so there's that exciting quality of life that we can actually get addicted to drama or excitement itself. And there can be that excitement in rehashing that argument that we had three years ago as compared to something that is more meaningful now, but doesn't quite have that juice, that dopamine juice to it.

• 16:10Ezra Klein?

  Why is the I so powerful here? Well, one of the things I always notice about my own fretting is my job, my work, like what I've devoted most of my waking hours to, is thinking about societal and global problems, right? I write about climate change, I write about healthcare policy, I write about the economy, I write about the coming of AI, and on and on and on. I have trouble focusing on those things in my head. I could do it externally, but I worry about me in my head. I worry about dumb stuff in my life. And that strikes me as true for a lot of the people I know. I don't think it's just my own experience. Yeah, so what is going on in the connections there that we worry so much more about, you know, small bore individual things than large-scale societal things that really do affect us quite a bit

• 16:54Ezra Klein?

  and affect our children and the people we care about?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  There's a network of brain regions, actually, called the default mode network that has to do with self-affirmational processing. It's called the default mode because that's what we default to when we're not doing anything else. The sense of self is kind of a habit in the sense of this is what, this is just what I do, I think about myself. And it's also helpful be planning about our future. It's not just planning about the future, but it's, it's helpful when we're planning to think about us in the future. So we can see how that's pragmatic. But also, there was an interesting study that was published a couple of years ago, where this group at UCLA looked at Instagram feeds from adolescents. And what they did was they just manipulated the number of likes some pictures got.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  So some pictures got a bunch and some pictures got a few. And what they found was that they're activating their, their reward system, but they were also activating, co-activating this default mode network. So there seems to be something inherently quote unquote rewarding about things related to us. So, ooh, I got a bunch of likes. There's that excited quality that comes with that that activates this self-referential network. So it seems to be baked right into our brains.

• 18:08Ezra Klein?

  There's a study you reference in the book, A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind. Can you tell me a bit about that?

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yes, this is one of the first studies that I'm aware of that actually used smartphones. So this is back in 2010, when the iPhone was first being rolled out. And there was a couple of researchers at, at Harvard, I think it was Killingsworth and Gilbert, where they basically just pinged people on their phone and asked them about, you know, basically what are you doing and how happy are you? And what they found was that on average, people's minds were wandering to the past or the future. Ready for this? Forty-seven percent of waking life. I just want to let that settle in. Almost 50% of waking life, we are not present. Wow.

• 18:48Ezra Klein?

  That seems low to me.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. The next piece here is that on average, they concluded, when they asked people whether their mind was wandering, they actually were feeling worse. Then when they were present. So they concluded a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. That was their conclusion based on what they what they observed.

• 19:09Ezra Klein?

  And to what extent is this wandering versus just functioning? Something weirdly that's coming to my mind here is that there's a famous podcast that Elon Musk did with Joe Rogan. And it's famous because Elon Musk just like smokes a joint in it and that became a whole thing. But there's a pretty, I always thought, very telling moment in that conversation where Rogan says, and this is from my memory, but he's basically like, it seems great to be you. Like you make rocket ships, you make cars, you date beautiful women, you're you're rich. And Musk, sounding really sad, just says, yeah, but if you were in my mind, you'd know. And I, again, I'm paraphrasing, you can't turn it off. He does, he says this a couple of times, like, you can't turn it off.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:52Ezra Klein?

  And like, here's a real smart guy, you know, has a lot, like, has done really, really well. And it it struck me as his subjective experience of his of his own mind was a pretty, a pretty tough one, which I think then like, you know, suggests some other things in his behavior make make a little bit more sense. If you're trying to distract from that, is that right? That like, the more we're sitting in our minds, the more we're at least at risk for for some of these more frustrating moments?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think this reminds me of this great five minute skit from Bob Newhart. Do you remember that was the comedian from the 70s? So he had this skit called Just Stop It, where a woman walks into the therapist's office and he's the therapist, and basically says, I have this problem. And he basically leans over his desk and says, just stop it, you know? And they go back and forth for five minutes. There's a relief on the Parthenon from ancient Greece where there's this rider and the horse. And the rider is is reason and willpower and and the horse is passions. And so if you if you, you know, I don't presume to know exactly what's going on in Elon Musk's mind. But these thoughts are like these are horse and it's just running and we're the rider.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  And if we try to stop it, you know, it it just doesn't work as much as it would be great if it did. You know, it'd be great. My patients walk into my office and I say, just stop smoking. You know, just stop overeating, just stop worrying. It'd be great. It could be one visit for every patient and we'd cure everyone.

• 21:18Ezra Klein?

  Take another moment on that. You have a point in the book where you say that you believe willpower is functionally a myth, and that even if I don't buy your argument that willpower is functionally a myth, it is definitely a myth in the times when you need it most, when you are most concerned, that's when your willpower is going to be most absent. Why?

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Yes, so the prefrontal cortex is kind of the seat of cognitive control, is the seat of the proverbial willpower. And that's the part of the brain, it's the youngest and the weakest from an evolutionary perspective. It's the first that goes offline when we get stressed or when we get anxious. I'm not sure we know exactly why it's the first that goes offline, but there's a lot of, you know, a lot of research suggested that is the first that goes offline. And we probably know this from our own experience. You know, my patients who struggle with addictions, for example, there's this acronym HALT. When they're hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, that's when they're most likely or most vulnerable to relapse because their thinking and planning brain is offline.

• 22:17Ezra Klein?

  You have a line in the book, you write, "You can't think your way out of a bad habit or into a good one. As much as we all have wishes and plans for our habits, our feeling body trumps our thinking mind." Tell me about that.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Yes, so we like to think that our thinking mind is in control, but if you look at how behavior is driven, thinking really doesn't hold a candle to the feeling body. The feeling body, you know, those urges are much stronger. And in the same way, we can't stop our thoughts. You know, I often get people coming to me, you know, in a seminar, or if I'm teaching a class where they say, "Oh, how do I just turn off my mind? You know, how do I just stop my thoughts?" And the first thing I say to them is, "Well, good luck. You know, tell me if that, if you can get that to work." Nobody's ever come back and said, "I figured out the thought switch and I've turned it off." The second thing is, "Well, I actually think thinking is helpful, you know, thinking and planning is helpful." But the third piece

• 23:12Speaker 01

  here is, you know, our brains are driven based on how rewarding something is. So if we can actually change our relationship to our thoughts, we can actually get in control. So I think we've been looking in this direction, whether it's willpower or however you want to think of it, we've been looking in the, in the wrong direction. It's actually, you know, we should be looking in the neuroscience direction, like how does our mind work? And if we can understand how our mind work, then we can actually, you know, hack it if you want to put it in the life hack perspective.

• 23:40Ezra Klein?

  I don't. I want to avoid that word for what you're talking about.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:44Ezra Klein?

  Very, very specifically, I want to avoid that word. But so let's go through that then. So something triggers me. I worry and then I plan. And that feeling of planning gives me some sense of control that is some kind of reward. Now what?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  I actually set up the book in kind of three steps. So the first step is being able to map out these habit loops, right? So we just talked about that. And the second step is really understanding that our brains are set up based on how rewarding behaviors are. If a behavior is rewarding, we're going to keep doing it. If it's not rewarding, we're going to stop. So actually, let me use an analogy or an example from something else around habit change, and then we'll come back to the worrying piece because I think this will help frame it. My lab just finished a study where we were looking at how to help people stop overeating. And so we'd actually built this tool into this Eat Right Now app where we could measure reward value as somebody was going through the process of trying to stop overeating. And instead of telling them to stop overeating,

• 24:45Speaker 01

  what we had them do was bring awareness to the process of overeating itself. And we specifically had them really pay attention as they overate and also on the results of overeating. And it took only 10 to 15 times of somebody really paying attention as they overate to realize that overeating feels worse than not overeating and to actually shift the behavior. So we can apply that here to anxiety and to worry as well. The key aspect there is really paying attention to how rewarding the behavior is. You've already named it. You said, well, when I worry, it's not that rewarding. Yes, we're doing it as a habit. So we really have to link up that cause and effect relationship

• 25:30Speaker 01

  because that's what changed reward value. And when that reward value changes, that's when we change a behavior.

• 25:37Ezra Klein?

  Let's try to ground this and I'll again use myself as an example. I have a lot of trouble exercising control around a lot of food. You know, because I know my willpower will fail me. I don't keep a lot of ready to eat food in my house. Like I have to cook almost everything that I would consume and that that works for me. But I've known forever that if I'm out and people order pizza, I will have like five or six slices and I will feel sick. And I actually, to some degree, avoid those events because I know I will feel bad. So this has been many, many times it's happened. I know I don't enjoy it. I have watched the feeling in myself. I feel ill afterwards. I wake up and you know, the next morning and don't feel good from how I slept. And it hasn't really changed that drive, you know, where I'm sitting there at a table.

• 26:21Ezra Klein?

  And 40% of my mind is on the fact that there's still more pizza right there in front of me. So what went wrong for me? Why didn't I change the reward?

• 26:29Speaker 01

  So you can't change the reward by avoiding the behavior. If I'm understanding what you're saying, you know, you, you try to avoid those situations. Or, well, let me ask you this. When you overate the pizza, were you paying attention as you were overeating?

• 26:42Ezra Klein?

  I mean, probably not bite by bite as a meditation master might. But I'm attentive to the fact that there was a cause and effect that feels bad in my body. Like, it's not that I mentally am mad at myself about pizza. And yet I don't really trust that if you put me back in that situation, I would do any better.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So here, if you ever go back into the situation, one thing to play with, I actually have folks do this. I have them do it bite by bite to just ask themselves, is this bite more rewarding than the last bite? So they can actually map out that pleasure plateau where they can see, oh, this is where it ends. And I've actually had a lot of people do it with New York pizza because it tastes so good. And I would say on average, people report that it's after about two slices that it really plateaus. And then that third slice and there on is, is bad news for them.

• 27:28Ezra Klein?

  What is happening in the person when you do that? Because what, what you're saying is you want to pay really close attention at at some point through some kind of repetition. Your brain's sense of the reward of the behavior will change, but it will only change because you are giving it the somatic data. Right? This felt sense data. So that's what I'm trying to get at here. Like what I'm saying to you in different ways is I've had a bunch of experiences where I think I fed my brain somatic data that this doesn't feel good. And yet clearly my reward structure hasn't changed that much. So what is the gap here? Like what, what is changing in the way you do it?

• 28:02Speaker 01

  So there are two pieces here. One is it's the quality of the data coming in. So if there's noise in the system, our brain is not going to believe it. And I say noise as in you could have an accurate data point where you clearly see, oh, this is not rewarding for me in one time. And then your brain says, well, the other 50 times that I ate pizza, it was great, which could have been a long time ago, right? So your brain says, maybe that's an aberrant data point, meaning that you have to do it over and over, depending on how entrenched that habit is. The more you see clearly how unrewarding it is, the more your brain will be convinced, oh, this is actually real. The other piece there is you've got to recall that last time or what that composite reward value is by remembering,

• 28:46Speaker 01

  oh, what was it like the last time I ate, overate the pizza? So let me ask you that. Can you remember the last time you ate five or six slices?

• 28:54Ezra Klein?

  Definitely.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  What did it feel like? Okay.

• 28:57Ezra Klein?

  Wasn't even that long ago.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Okay. And how did it feel?

• 29:01Ezra Klein?

  Terrible. I mean, actually bad. Like, I sleep badly that night. I wake up and I'm sluggish the next morning. Like, I, like, it is distinctive as a food that makes me feel bad.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Okay. So imagine you're out eating pizza and you're at your first slice. And you recall, oh, what was it like the last time I ate five slices? And you bring that up. How excited would you be to eat that third or that fourth slice? If you brought that up every time?

• 29:26Ezra Klein?

  Those don't feel, I mean, I know, right? Like, those don't feel the same to me. Like, I will go into that situation and be like, okay, dude, this time do not overeat on the pizza. Like, you know you're not going to enjoy this.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  So the do not is your thinking brain. I'm asking you to recall what it felt like the last time. Like, bring it up in your body.

• 29:46Ezra Klein?

  Well, that, that I don't know.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Do you see the difference?

• 29:47Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I see what you're saying.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  So there's a real difference between our thinking brains and our feeling bodies. So the key here is really focusing like, ooh, what was that like last time? And then also checking in my body, how full do I feel? Do I feel at that just good enough stage where I can stop? The other piece there is getting some data where when you actually stop, When you're before overeating to get those data points in so you can see how that feels. So you can then recall that because our brains are always going to compare things and they're going to say, oh, what's it like when I overate versus what was it like when I didn't overeat? And if you haven't not overeaten a lot, then your brain's going to say, well, I'm not really sure. I'll just go ahead and overeat.

• 30:30Ezra Klein?

  And so you're saying here, there's a, there's an important difference between thinking about how something felt and using thought to bring up a feeling.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Yes, we have to elicit the feeling. We're trained to think using our thinking brains, really trying to think through things. Yet that's not really what drives behavior.

• 30:50Ezra Klein?

  So what do you do when you have bad habits that do make you feel good in the short term? You know, let's say you enjoy day trading and it's great for a while. And then later on, it turns out a bunch of these stocks don't work out well. Or, you know, you enjoy like a bowl of ice cream before bed, which is, you know, maybe in the long run, not, not what you want for your goals, but is it going to make you feel or doesn't make you feel terrible right then?

• 31:10Speaker 01

  So here, we're really not going to change a behavior if we don't see the negative consequences. And typically as humans and other animals run this way as well, we learn best from immediate feedback. So, you know, if we eat a bowl of ice cream before bed and it doesn't actually cause any adverse consequences, it's going to be really hard to change. And honestly, you know, if there are no adverse consequences, I would be asking myself, well, what is it? What is it that I'm looking for that I'm trying to change here? You know, if it's like, oh, I'm worried about gaining weight or something like that. That's when I could just explore, well, what's it like to eat that ice cream versus what's it like to not eat that ice cream? You know, are there any effects, certainly, you know, I myself tend not to feel so good in the morning if I eat a bowl of ice cream right before bed.

• 31:55Ezra Klein?

  So let's go back to anxiety then to map this back onto that topic. What you're saying, as I understand it, is that what I should be doing is paying attention while worrying to the way worrying feels more than to the feeling that I get once I've come to like a little hitch in my brain where I'm like, aha, I have a plan. Like it's basically that I need to be paying attention to the part of worrying that feels bad physically, not sort of ignoring that until finally I find an answer that makes me feel better physically and I get that little reward.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely. So paying attention to that piece and also comparing what that's like. So how often you come up with a solution or how often you get that little aha, comparing that to when you're not worrying. Because what the science suggests is that we actually do a better job at planning when we're not worried.

• 33:03Ezra Klein?

  So the next piece of your book is not just about watching these feelings and trying to update your somatic reward system, but it's actually replacing it. And this was really striking to me that a lot of your sort of big solution here is around crowding out or what you call the bigger, better offer. So tell me about that piece.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  There are a couple of aspects to the bigger, better offer. So basically, you know, our brain is going to always pick something that is more rewarding. So not only do we have to help ourselves see how unrewarding the previous behavior is. For example, let's use procrastination as an example. So when I procrastinate, I realize it actually makes me farther behind on the project and it doesn't feel that good in itself. It might give me some temporary distraction, but it doesn't actually get anything done. So when I see, oh, when I procrastinate, I'm actually farther behind, it feels bad and I worry more. Then that opens the door for something better. So the bigger, better offer. So broadly speaking, anything that is better than the previous behavior is something that our brain is going to prefer.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  And two key buckets, you can think of this, that don't become habituated are curiosity and kindness. So here I highlight curiosity. I think of it as a superpower because curiosity not only feels better than anxiety, but it also is intrinsically different. And I mean that in the sense that my lab did this big study with several hundred people where we not only measured the reward value of these different mental states and found that, shocker, you know, curiosity feels better than anxiety, but also that anxiety feels closed down, whereas curiosity feels open or expanded and you can't be closed and open at the same time. So if you inject a little bit of curiosity into that closed feeling of anxiety,

• 34:49Speaker 01

  we can actually start to move in the opposite direction simply by being curious in that moment.

• 34:54Ezra Klein?

  That's pretty abstract. What do you mean by injecting curiosity into that moment of anxiety?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  So if I'm feeling anxious, I can just feel into my body and ask myself, okay, where do I feel this anxiety most strongly? For a lot of folks, they feel it in their chest. Sometimes I'll feel it in my, you know, if I'm stressed, I'll feel it in my shoulders or my jaw, or even in my eyes kind of tensing. And then I can get curious and say, okay, where do I feel it more? On the left side or the right side of my body? And then my brain goes, hmm, well, I don't know. Let's explore. Is it more on the right side or the left side? The answer doesn't matter, but that little hmm is that indication that we're starting to get curious as we explore our body sensations. That's what I mean by injecting a little bit of curiosity.

• 35:40Ezra Klein?

  So you're not talking about distracting yourself from, from the issues. If I'm sitting around like worrying about finances, you're not saying, think to yourself, huh, how do octopi think? You're saying be curious about like this experience in this moment.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Yes, because that's what's most relevant. Bringing curiosity into that feeling of anxiety helps us not avoid it because as we've talked about, avoidance doesn't actually work. It not only helps us not avoid it, but it helps us start to see that anxiety, well, for example, is just these felt physical sensations. So it's not this scary thing that we have to run away from. And in fact, we can start to develop our tolerance for this unpleasantness. And the curiosity can help us be with that to the point where we can realize, oh, it's actually, you know, these physical sensations, while they might not be pleasant, are not something that I can't work with.

• 36:35Ezra Klein?

  This is a counterintuitive space too, at least it was to me when I read it. In the sense that often when I'm worried about something, the last thing I feel like I want to do is try to look at it more closely. What I tend to try to do is open Twitter or watch TV or have a drink or something to get away from it. When you're saying that it will feel better to explore it. And I've tried a bit and I'm not sure it's wrong, but I also don't find that to be obviously right.

• 37:07Speaker 01

  Yes. So you're highlighting the normal tendency of our brain. Remember our survival brain says, ooh, that's bad, run away. If that worked every time, if we could just say anytime we're anxious, we should run away, we should avoid the situation and life worked that way. Then I wouldn't have to write this book. But that's not how life works. We have to be able to work with things that are unpleasant. We have to be able to tolerate uncertainty. Right? So we can approach it two ways. We can say, well, if I could run away and it worked, great, we'll do that. But when I run away, it doesn't actually solve the problem. So eventually I have to circle back around and deal with it.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  So why not deal with it right from the get go? So while it might not feel pleasant, right when I first start doing this. What I can learn to do is start to be with the unpleasantness and see, oh, okay, this is unpleasantness. I can be okay with unpleasantness. You know, you think of it as accepting what's happening as compared to pushing it away. And in that acceptance piece, we can start to see, oh, physical sensations aren't going to make my head explode. I'll give a concrete example. I had a patient who came to my office who was trying to quit smoking and he literally walked in the door and said, doc, if I don't smoke, my head will explode. And I said, okay, let's, let's explore this. I was kind of not sure what to say. So I said, well, let's map this out.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  And I had him start exploring these physical sensations that were head exploding. And as he did that, they get, you know, we mapped them out and then also, you know, they got stronger and stronger and then they started to get weaker. And he had this aha moment and he said, you know, doc. I always smoke when it peaks and I never realized that it gets more intense and then it gets less intense and I don't have to actually smoke. So here with anxiety, if we can learn that these sensations can get strong and sometimes for folks with generalized anxiety, sort of they can feel like they can last all day. But if we can learn to be with those sensations, we're not pushing them away. And there's this saying, you know, what we resist persists.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  When we push them away or run away from them, they're going to persist. When we learn to be with them and acknowledge them and see them for what they are, we can learn, oh, I can be with this. Then we start to develop our distress tolerance. That's really helpful.

• 39:27Ezra Klein?

  And this comes, as I understand it, from, from the work you did that you wrote about in the, in the craving mind on, on addiction. The thing that I really remember from that book is, is your metaphor of kind of surfing a wave into the shore. You have a feeling and the feeling is something that you want to run from seems a little bit intolerable. And this is true for, for addiction and particularly the kind of intense addictions that you've dealt with. And that what you've done, which has worked in a lot of studies to help people break addictions, is to try to help people like ride these feelings in, like watch them as they peak and then watch them as, as they abate. Is that right?

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Yes. And what people learn from their own experience is that they are not their thoughts, they are not their physical sensations, whereas previously they were so identified with them, they felt like, oh, this is just who I am. I remember somebody in our, in my anxiety program wrote me an early email. She said, you know, I feel like anxiety is deeply etched in my bones. That's how identified she was with the anxiety.

• 40:24Ezra Klein?

  You know, something that struck me in that book, I'll use a small example to get at this. I went on a book leave now years ago and we were in Half Moon Bay and it was beautiful. But one of the things I did during this period, which is a, you know, a multi-month period is I turned off Twitter and I wasn't checking my work email. And I remember right at the beginning, I would constantly get this like shot of agitation that made me want to pick up my phone and check it. And I hadn't noticed until then, when I was no longer really able to, that a lot of those habits were driven by this bad feeling. Like, it was so quick that I would answer the feeling that I didn't even really notice the feeling was what was driving those phone habits. And it took, like, I would

• 41:05Ezra Klein?

  say, two to three weeks of just letting that feeling happen. It is noticing, well, nothing happens. It builds and then it goes down. It doesn't just keep building. It's not like the steam keeps building. It's just, it's there and then eventually something else is going on. And like, by the end, I really had broken that habit. And now, of course, it's all completely rebuilt. But that was interesting, right? Because I think the intuition is that the feeling is going to keep progressing linearly, but it, but it doesn't.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Right. So you're describing detox, basically. So you're, this was a digital detox for you, it sounds like. And this is what happens with anything that we're withdrawing from. We don't notice that we've just habitually been doing whatever the behavior is, whether it's smoking a cigarette, or checking our phone, until we know that we can't do that. And then our brain says, hey, where's your phone? Go check it. Go check it. Until we see, oh, that's what that urge feels like. That's our dopamine system driving us to go get it. It's, you know, it's back to the survival thing where it says, oh, time to go get food, you know, time to go get your phone.

• 42:05Ezra Klein?

  But back to the anxiety question, tell me about the what, why distinction, because that feels useful here.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  I see this so much in my clinic where my patients come in and they say, you know, oh, I get anxious. And then I start trying to figure out why I'm anxious. And what they're doing is they're trying to solve the trigger, you know, something triggers them to get anxious, or something triggers them to worry. But that's not actually what's going to perpetuate the behavior of worrying itself. And so they get stuck in these rabbit holes of, oh, I just have to figure out what it was in my childhood, or I have to figure out, you know, what it was so I can fix it, or I can avoid it. Well, we can't fix things from the past because they're already over. And good luck avoiding all these different things that lead us to worry. So instead of focusing on the why, if we focus on the what, what's happening? Am I getting stuck in this worry habit loop? Then we can work with it.

• 42:55Ezra Klein?

  So then let's go back to the habit loop around anxiety. So I notice that I'm anxious. And I'm feeling anxious about something that might happen in the future. And typically, what I do is think about that thing and then try to work backwards to understand ways I could solve it, ways I could prevent it, ways I could plan for it. And what you're saying is I actually need to travel down a different track of not thinking about the issue, right? Not treating the issue as solid, but instead just thinking about and trying to explore the feeling in my body, treating it as like a somatic experience and not an important conceptual problem.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  So here, I would say you can differentiate those two. So if you're getting anxious when you're thinking about it, yes, focus on the somatic feeling of anxiety to help calm down. And often, you know, I'll have folks do some simple grounding practice. For example, I write it in the book about this five finger breathing practice where somebody's basically just tracing their fingers as they inhale, you know, they're tracing up a finger as they're exhaling, they're tracing down a finger. And basically, you know, with five breaths, we can trace from our pinky to our thumb and back again. And that helps us kind of ground the physiology. So the idea there is to bring it into our somatic experience and ground ourselves. So if we're getting anxious, basically map out those habit loops, get curious, or even bring in a grounding practice. What that does is it helps us then

• 44:17Speaker 01

  be able to do that second piece, that separable piece around thinking and planning. And the reason I'm making that distinction is I want folks to understand clearly, it's the thinking and planning can be helpful, but the anxiety on top of the thinking and planning is not helpful. So we can actually think and plan much more easily and in ways that feel better when we're not anxious.

• 44:39Ezra Klein?

  Do you recommend then that people put aside time to think and plan? Like, okay, explore the somatic feeling now and tell yourself, you know, in the morning, I'll sit down with a piece of paper and then work through the problem?

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It's helpful to set aside time to think and plan because if we're rushed, then we can get anxious about it. We don't necessarily need to even plan, you know, say, okay, tomorrow to do that. But it can be, okay, let me see if I can just take a few minutes to ground myself and then move to the thinking and planning rather than rushing to thinking and planning while we're feeling anxious.

• 45:09Ezra Klein?

  You have a discussion in the book of the power of the saying from Alcoholics Anonymous, you know, one day at a time and how you've used in addiction practices, you know, one day, well, can you not do this for three hours? Can you not do it for five minutes? Could you talk a bit about the power of time delimiting?

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yes. So if you think of anxiety as basically being fear of the unknown or fear of the future, the farther out we think, or the farther out something is, something with an uncertain outcome, the more uncertain it's going to be because the variables aren't in place yet. And so if we think, okay, what's my life going to be in five years? Well, I don't know. What's it going to be like in two years? What's it going to be like in one year? We can start to see that the resolution starts to come. Things start to come a little more into focus, especially if we say, well, what's my life like right now? So with anxiety, I often see folks really looking way into the future and saying, wow, that is really scary. That is really unknown.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Just like my patients who are struggling with drinking, where they say, I don't know if I can be sober in a month. And I say, okay, well, how does that feel compared to imagining whether you could be sober in a week? And they're like, well, it's better. It's still not great. How about in a day? Uh, I don't know. How about right now? Well, I am sober right now. Okay. So we can actually have that, you think of it as anxiety sobriety, right now, each moment. And we can catch ourselves when we're running off into the future and say, wow, there I am, lost in the future again. What do I get from that? Oh, it makes me more anxious. Okay, let me dial it back, just to today, just to two hours from now. And if we need to, well, what do I need to do in the next five minutes?

• 46:54Speaker 01

  And that really brings things into perspective where we can see, oh, this is much more certain. And with that certainty, we get a reduction in anxiety.

• 47:04Ezra Klein?

  One of the reasons that affected me, and maybe this speaks to bigger, better offers, but I've actually begun thinking about it in the opposite way, right? So if a lot of worrying is thinking about, oh, what if this is wrong next year? You know, this thing that I'm worried about how it's going to play out? What if it plays out poorly and then in a year I'm in this terrible position?

• 47:24Ezra Klein?

  Asking the question like, how can I just have a good day today? Like, I am objectively unbelievably privileged. Everything is great. And the question of like, well, can I just have a good day today? And like, what would that look like? What would I do from here to get there? Could I have a good, good time for the rest of the hours I'm awake? You know, it's evening now, has actually been, been a pretty calming practice. I'm curious if there's a version of that, right? Like sort of positive, one day at a timing.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that. And I think that positive version is what you just described. So we can ask ourselves, well, can I just have a good day today? Okay, what leads to that, right? Well, it's about, you know, all these things that, that helped me have that good day today. And then we can actually learn from that and we can reflect back on those good days. And we can have that positive framing of this same tactic that still brings us into the present moment.

• 48:33Ezra Klein?

  You know, Lisa Feldman Barrett, who's a neuroscientist, she, she talks about the way that emotions are partially constructed by our feelings and partially constructed by the world we're in, right? So things are coming in, but also we have these concepts that we apply to them. You know, so I understand these feelings to be anxiety. We talk a lot about anxiety in the modern world. We've just been talking about it for, for over an hour now. Is there a problem or a danger in thinking of yourself as an anxious person? Or getting too used to applying the label of anxiety to certain somatic experiences? Where then you begin, you know, absorbing more and more things into that frame? And it reinforces that, that idea of yourself?

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm glad you bring this up because this is very important. So the more we start thinking of ourselves as anxious people. For example, you know, this woman who said, you know, I feel like anxiety is deeply etched in my bones. The more we identify with it, the more we start to see the world through anxiety glasses. Oh, I am an anxious person. What that does is it reifies the concept in our minds so that we start to interpret things through that anxious lens. But it also makes us become more rigid where it's like, oh, I'm anxious and nothing's going to change, basically. You know, so I'm an anxious person. That's really different than if we really look at it as, oh, I'm a person and here are feelings

• 49:56Speaker 01

  of anxiety. Oh, those come and go. So we start to have much more fluidity with our experience. And we start to see that we can also let go, or we can shed some of these sweaters, let's say, that we've been wearing all the time. We're like, you know, oh, this is a very comfortable sweater. You know, I'm, this is my anxiety sweater. Oh, I can actually take this off. You know, I don't need this anymore.

• 50:18Ezra Klein?

  So you have this other thread of your work where you focus on meditation. You know, you've done retreats and led them, is my understanding. You've done a tremendous amount of lab work studying the minds of master meditators and seeing how they differ. And it's interesting because in this book, you talk a little bit about the way people misunderstand mindfulness and believe it to be this kind of anxiety-free, different way of thinking. What have you learned from doing that work and studying those minds that has actually helped you here?

• 50:48Speaker 01

  One of the biggest things that I've learned that's very pragmatic is that meditation isn't about doing something. It's about, more about being. And so I say this personally, I remember, you know, my first seven-day silent meditation retreat that I went on, it was by day three or four, I found myself crying uncontrollably on the shoulder of the retreat manager because I felt like I couldn't do meditation. And I was just trying to force myself to pay attention to my breath. You know, so I was like, I can get into medical school, but I can't pay attention to my breath. So one thing that I learned from the research was that it's not about doing. It's really about being. And I saw that line up when we

• 51:32Speaker 01

  were doing brain scans of experienced meditators where this default mode network was getting really quiet. And we actually were able to link up this default mode network activity with doing or getting caught up in experience. So I myself was getting caught up in this experience of trying to meditate, which was actually the opposite of what meditation is about. I was taking this Western concept and just saying, well, just meditate, you know, just pay attention to your breath and just do it. Meditation is about being curious, bringing that curiosity in and just simply observing and being with our experience. And I think a lot of our research has really highlighted that aspect. The other qualitative aspect that we've noticed is that it's really about, you

• 52:12Speaker 01

  know, as we get curious, that curiosity helps us kind of open up instead of contract down. So as we close down and contract, this is a marker of kind of a reification of self identification with whatever it is, whether it's anxiety or a concept that we're attached to or whatever. Meditation helps us let go of these attachments to these concepts or these feelings. And there we can literally feel the difference as we start to unwind, as we start to open up.

• 52:44Ezra Klein?

  This is a subtle distinction you're making, though, and it's a really hard one. And actually, one I've had a lot of struggle with in my own practice over the past year, which is certainly if you're doing concentration meditation, right, the posana, you are being asked to do something that is mentally pretty hard, which is, you know, focus on your breath, notice when you have a thought, stay aware the whole time. And then you're doing that and you're like clenching down and you're really trying to keep from mind wandering and trying to maintain that awareness. And somebody's like, well, you're trying too hard. And you notice it in yourself, right? You're working at it. You're fighting to be there. You know, it's like, well, just be. And it's like, well, if I just be, I'm just sitting here worrying about stuff from five years ago. And it's tough. I mean, it's a,

• 53:29Ezra Klein?

  you know, it's a little bit like if somebody told you to lift weights, but you know, don't grip the bar very hard. That combining lack of effort with something that requires a lot of awareness, when awareness can be a hard thing to hold, it's quite a line to walk.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So let me ask you this question. When you are curious about something, how hard is it for you to pay attention to it?

• 53:52Ezra Klein?

  Not at all. I love the feeling of curiosity.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 53:55Ezra Klein?

  I don't find it easy to be curious about my own internal experience.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  Okay, so that is the key aspect here, which is instead of trying to force ourselves, let's say the breath, for example, it's really bringing in that curiosity. And so, like you're saying, internal experience may not be that exciting to us because, you know, for me, it's like, okay, I know what my breath feels like. Yet in each moment, I can ask a question like, well, when is this in-breath going to end? I don't know, but just asking that question can help inject a little bit of curiosity because the breath is always different. You know, it's like it might be a longer one, it might be a shorter one in this moment. And if I ask, well, when is this in-breath going to end? My curiosity draws me in to paying attention to those physical sensations

• 54:40Speaker 01

  until that question is answered. So even with the breath, we can start to play with ways to bring curiosity in. The other aspect here is it's not just about paying attention to the breath. It's about understanding our own minds. And I don't know about you, but I find that my mind is endlessly fascinating. And not just like getting lost in, oh, this is, you know, this is doing all, my mind doing stuff. But if I focus in on where am I getting caught up in stuff? And how is this leading to my life being worse? Suddenly, there's a pain point that I can focus in on there. Because there's pains, like, oh, where's, where's this causing more suffering, let's say, versus where's

• 55:22Speaker 01

  this causing less suffering? And if I can see very clearly where I'm causing my own suffering, suddenly, I'm very interested in that question. And if I'm also interested in, well, what causes less suffering? Suddenly, I'm interested there, too. And so I'm, then I will start mapping out and paying attention to my mind much more closely. And that curiosity just keeps me there.

• 55:43Ezra Klein?

  So let's go to this last point as we wrap up here, which is kindness. You talk about kindness as a bigger, better offer. You talk about it in context of both anxiety and in meditation. That seems like a big leap, right? You go from worrying about something to kindness. What do you mean there?

• 56:00Speaker 01

  There are two aspects. One is, I see a lot of folks who have habit loops around self-judgment. So they'll judge themselves for a number of reasons. We're really good at doing this in the West, in fact. And so when somebody is judging themselves, there's, you know, that self-flagellation is, for some reason, rewarding. You know, we don't need to go into all the details, but let's just say, people get stuck in those loops. So somebody's working with self-judgment, or just noticing that they're judging themselves. I have them pay attention to what it feels like. You know, when you judge yourself, does it actually feel good? Does it feel closed down? Does it feel contracted? You know, typically, the answer is yes. And then I can say, well, how does that compare to when you're kind to yourself? And they notice, well, kindness feels better. It feels more open and expanded.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  So the commonality between kindness and curiosity is that both feel more open. They both feel more expanded than judgment and anxiety, say. And in fact, you know, my lab's done research showing that that is indeed the case. Both feel better and both are more open. So if you think of the broad category of things that make us feel open and expanded, you know, kindness and curiosity are these two main flavors, if you want to think of it that way.

• 57:13Ezra Klein?

  That's a nice way to put it. And then let me ask you the ending question here, which is, what are three books that have influenced you that you'd recommend to the audience?

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Well, just off the top of my head, one, I, there's a novel that I read a while ago that I loved called The Art of Racing in the Rain. That was told from a dog's perspective of his owner, who is this amateur race car driver. In a beautiful way, this book talks about a kind of getting caught up in experience versus, versus letting go. And it actually introduced me to this, this Formula One race car driver named Ayrton Senna, who was really good at racing in the rain because he relaxed while everybody else freaked out. Another book that I just read that was just beautifully written was William Finnegan's Barbarian Days. Surfer's Life, I think, is the subtitle where he writes about his life. He's a writer for The New Yorker and he just describes his whole life of, you know,

• 58:05Speaker 01

  for decades and decades of growing up before there was surfing culture and kind of being part of it. You know, another one that has influenced me that I read very recently is called The Underground Railroad, a novel. A heartrending and beautiful story about basically slavery in the South, told from a perspective through a novel. So that was actually really influential for me.

• 58:29Ezra Klein?

  By Colson Whitehead, yeah?

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 58:31Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, that's a remarkable book. Your book is Unwinding Anxiety. Jed Burer, thank you very much.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 58:48Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klontz Show is a production of New York Times Opinion. It is produced by Raja Karma and Jeff Geld. Fact-checked by Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones and mixing by Jeff Geld.