Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris Buddhist Neuroscientist On: How To Quit Bad Habits And Why You're Not Keeping Your Resolutions | Dr. Judson Brewer About this episode How to use your innate mindfulness to turn the volume down, or even uproot, your everyday addictions.
Dr. Judson Brewer https://drjud.com/ is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences and Psychiatry at the Schools of Public Health & Medicine at Brown University. He is the author of several books, including The Craving Mind https://www.amazon.com/Craving-Mind-Cigarettes-Smartphones-Hooked/dp/0300223242/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484833168&sr=8-1&keywords=judson+brewer, Unwinding Anxiety https://smile.amazon.com/Unwinding-Anxiety-Science-Shows-Cycles/dp/0593330447/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3QIITHXNJWIIR&dchild=1&keywords=unwinding+anxiety&qid=1602937217&sprefix=unwinding+anx%2Caps%2C167&sr=8-1, and The Hunger Habit https://drjud.com/the-hunger-habit/.
This episode is part of our monthlong Do Life Better https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast-playlists/new-years-2025-do-life-better series.
We talk about:
Jud's definition of addiction The difference between the scientific view and the Buddhist view on addiction The buddhist concept of Dependent origination Dopamine and dopamine fasting A three gear plan for sticking to your resolutions Judson's disenchantment with the term "mindfulness" What we need to know about willpower The two types of stress – and its impact on our behavior What makes us resilient – and why it matters How community plays a role in making habit changes And finally, a friendly debate on whether there is such a thing as healthy anger?
Related Episodes:
Do Life Better https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast-playlists/new-years-2025-do-life-better Get Fit Sanely https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast-playlists/get-fit-sanely The Anti-Diet | Evelyn Tribole https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/evelyn-tribole-rerun-2023 The Science of Why You Eat When You're Not Hungry–And How to Stop | Judson Brewer https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/judson-brewer-hunger?a8e9f451_page=2 Modern Life Is Making You Sick, but It Doesn't Have To | Gabor Maté https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/gabor-mate-586 Why We're All Suffering from Racial Trauma (Even White People) -- and How to Handle It | Resmaa Menakem https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/resmaa-menakem-262 I Just Went Through A Career Earthquake: This Is What's Next. https://www.danharris.com/p/i-just-went-through-a-career-earthquake/comments How to Break Your Anxiety Habit | Judson Brewer https://www.danharris.com/p/how-to-break-your-anxiety-habit-judson-cd9
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Transcript 13,704 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Dan Harris? It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:19 Dan Harris? Hello, gang. How we doing? Today, we're going to talk about how to use your innate mindfulness, the mindfulness we all have, even if we feel like we're mostly mindless, but we all have the capacity to be mindful. We're going to talk about how to use your innate mindfulness to turn the volume down or even uproot your everyday addictions. Let me just say a quick word about the word addiction. Often, that word is used to refer to full-blown addiction, something many of us, myself included, have struggled with. But in this episode, my guest and I are going to use the word addiction in a much broader sense. We all have craving minds. We're all addicted to something, our phones, shopping, food, Wordle, whatever. So we're going to dedicate this whole week on the show to managing the addictive tendency of your mind.
1:03 Dan Harris? As you've heard me say many times during this first month of 2025, we are taking on some of the biggest and most popular resolutions and tackling them TPH-style. We've covered fitness and finances, and now it's bad habits or addictions, which I know is a big issue for many of you, hence the popularity of Dry January, et cetera. Coming up on Wednesday, I'll be talking to a Buddhist nun who goes by the name Sister Dee about how an ancient eight-part list can help us move out of addiction. Today, though, it's my old friend, Dr. Judson Brewer. This is Judd's sixth appearance on the show, which may be a record. Judd, if you've never heard of him, is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and Professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences
1:48 Dan Harris? and Psychiatry at the Schools of Public Health and Medicine at Brown University. He is also the author of several books, including The Craving Mind, Unwinding Anxiety, and The Hunger Habit. In this conversation, we talk about Judd's definition of addiction, the difference between the scientific view and the Buddhist view on addiction, the Buddhist concept of dependent origination and why that's so important in this context, dopamine and dopamine fasting, which have become de rigueur recently. Judd has his take on that. Judd's disenchantment with the term mindfulness, what we all need to know about willpower, the two types of stress and the impact on our behavior from both of those types, how community plays a huge role in making behavior change or habit change.
2:31 Dan Harris? And finally, we have a friendly debate on whether there's such a thing as healthy anger. Dr. Judd Brewer, right after this.
2:39 Dan Harris? Real progress starts with action. As the executive director of the Honold Foundation, Emily Tietzworth works to expand access to solar energy in communities around the world, supporting locally-led projects that bring reliable power, greater independence, and opportunity where it is needed most. On the podcast Planet Visionaries, professional climber and Honold Foundation founder Alex Honold goes beyond the headlines with Emily to explore practical solutions for a more equitable future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.
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4:17 Dan Harris? Dr. Judson Brewer, welcome back to the show.
4:19 Speaker 03 Thanks for having me.
4:21 Dan Harris? By my count, this is your sixth appearance on this show, so you are among the most frequent of frequent flyers.
4:28 Speaker 03 Wow, I didn't think it was that many. I'm honored and blessed.
4:33 Dan Harris? We have a loyalty rewards program, so you should be getting some free shit.
4:39 Speaker 03 Great, I love free shit.
4:44 Dan Harris? All right, well, we're talking today about addiction, and I'm always a little wary of that word, just because one of my obsessions is making every episode of this podcast as applicable to as broad an audience as possible. And I think there are many people who think, "Well, I'm not an addict," and they're imagining something quite extreme. But I believe your argument is, "We're all addicted to something, if not many things."
5:09 Speaker 03 Yes, and I, you know, we can think of these as everyday addictions. Maybe it's the easiest way to think about that is the definition of addiction that I learned in residency, which is continued use despite adverse consequences. And so folks can just let that settle in, you know, continued use despite adverse consequences. So are there times when we are tempted to be scrolling on our phone instead of listening to our partner, for example, when we're having a conversation? Are there times when we are pulled to check our text message that somebody just texted us while we're driving? I think it's more of a continuum than a, you know, kind of an all or none quantum, "Yes, I'm
5:50 Speaker 03 an addict," or "I'm an addicted person" versus "No, I'm not." And I don't know anybody that can't relate to having adverse consequences from something that they've been pulled to do, you know, at some point.
6:06 Dan Harris? Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking back through my life. I mean, I think I've had some addictions that are pretty far along on the spectrum, away from everyday, but for sure, plenty of everyday. And I think, you know, just for the listeners, it can be everything from your relationship to your phone, to maybe just drinking a little bit too much alcohol or coffee. We're at the end of January here, so, you know, people may have been attempting Dry January with alcohol. So there are just so many things that the mind can cling to and crave.
6:38 Speaker 03 It's very good at doing that, yes.
6:41 Dan Harris? Why?
6:44 Speaker 03 Well, it's built off of these basic survival mechanisms. You know, we, it's helpful to crave food when we're hungry. It's helpful to avoid danger when it's staring us in the face. So those are very basic survival mechanisms. And in modern day, people know this and so they can design addictive experiences. So they can leverage those brain pathways to get us hooked. You know, in this attention economy is, is one of the big things, you know, trying to get us hooked on paying attention to their stuff. So they can sell us ideas or literal things.
7:26 Dan Harris? Right. So we have a world in which we have these ancient brains that were wired with reasonably good reason to crave the pleasant and be averse of, vis a vis the unpleasant. And then we've created a modern infrastructure that is jabbing at these ancient impulses nonstop.
7:45 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
7:47 Dan Harris? So is there a difference between, and I ask you this as a scientist and also, and I'm going to use this word, but I don't know if you would agree with it, but I would say a scientist and a Buddhist, or at least a Buddhist practitioner, or a meditation practitioner, is there a difference between the way science understands addiction and the way Buddhism does?
8:05 Speaker 03 As far as I can tell, and this is a question that I've been studying, literally studying for over 20 years now, I haven't found any differences or even discrepancies. So, you know, my lab, if you go back to the Buddhist psychology, I started taking pieces of that and testing it as hypotheses. Cause you know, this guy was a lot smarter than I am. So it's like, well, why not take these things, create careful scientific experiments around them and see if they're true in modern day. And it turns out that every single one that he put forward has been not just true, but really eye opening. You know, for example, taking, you know, our first randomized controlled trial
8:50 Speaker 03 with trying to help people quit smoking. And I love this because people are like, no way, there's no way you can do this. That's what gets me excited to try something where instead of using the standard practices and techniques that I'd been taught in residency and medical school and all of that to help people quit smoking, which is largely cognitive, you know, I instead followed the Buddha's instruction, which was, you know, explore gratification to it. And that was an interesting one. You know, we can get into it in more detail if that's helpful, but basically we tested that by having people pay attention when they smoked cigarettes and we got five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment.
9:30 Speaker 03 And so, and even predicted that, you know, craving doesn't necessarily just vanish when you change a behavior. It dies down over time when you stop fueling it. And even some of the language, the Buddhist language, like these 12 links of dependent origination, you look at craving, you know, thonhaf thirst leads to the next link, which is, I'm not a Buddhist scholar, but I would pronounce it upadana, which often is translated as clinging and some translate it as sustenance or fuel. And so if you think of, you know, smoking a cigarette, that provides the fuel for a future round of craving.
10:13 Speaker 03 And if you stop adding that fuel to the fire, it eventually burns down. And I was actually just last weekend, speaking with a Buddhist scholar who was talking about nirvana, literally meaning, you know, the fire goes out.
10:25 Dan Harris? Yeah, the extinguishing.
10:27 Speaker 03 Yes. So it not only have I not found discrepancies and we've even published papers showing the links, you know, where I've worked with Buddhist scholars and teachers, you know, where we've written papers showing how these are basically the different language for the same thing. We haven't found a single thing that has been contradictory yet, which is pretty cool.
10:48 Dan Harris? It's really cool. I mean, it does go to emphasize, assuming we can stipulate that the Buddha was an actual person, because there's so much, nothing was really written down at the time when he allegedly lived, but assuming we can stipulate that he was an actual person, rather than this being an accumulation of learnings from a, that grew out of a multi-person tradition, the dude was a genius.
11:12 Speaker 03 Yes. Goenka called him, so Sengenka, this very famous Buddhist teacher who I think he was, he taught mostly in India and has these Vipassana centers all over the world now. He died a few years ago. He called the Buddha a super scientist. As a teacher, he was highlighting this scientific approach that the Buddha took to exploring his own experience. And just to zoom in on that for a minute, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. It wasn't about these deep states of concentration, or these magical powers that the Buddha allegedly had developed.
11:51 Speaker 03 It was about contemplating his own experience. It was dependent origination piece of his experience that actually led to his enlightenment. And so it highlights these causal nature of experience, and just kind of living into it and understanding it fully. That's what apparently led to his awakening.
12:13 Dan Harris? Can you define dependent origination for people who are new to that term?
12:18 Speaker 03 No. I think of it as these. It's a great question. Ask ChatGPT. So I can say that there are a fair number of suttas written in the Pali Canon about these links of causality. And so I think of it pragmatically, as the title suggests, dependent origination. This exists because of this is kind of some of the way that the suttas talk about it. And so you can think of craving leads to clinging. Without craving, there is no clinging, so to speak. And so he was really describing this causal nature of experience and that it actually, these 12 links actually go in a cycle that was described as samsara or
13:03 Speaker 03 endless wandering. Because when we're caught up in that cycle, we perpetuate our beliefs, our story, and even the self, the story of the self. Which every time we spin that wheel, we suffer, you know, and getting caught up in particular, I'll just mention one other thing because this Buddhist scholar blew my mind last weekend where we were talking about the, the words for dukkha and sukha. And you know, often dukkha is translated as suffering. I think that's one of the most common, you know, modern day translations I've heard. I don't know if you've heard differently. He was talking about, so the ka is common, right? Dukkha, sukha. Ka is a little hard to translate, but
13:45 Speaker 03 it's kind of like space, but it's not really, it's like the everythingness. And dukkha means contracted space, for lack of a better way of putting it. And sukha is not like the opposite, it's the negation of contraction. Because we're in a non-dual experience, we're not moving into something else that's expanded. We are just uncontracting. Think of it as the sphincter tone, it becomes a little less tight.
14:16 Dan Harris? Well, I love that. So dukkha, which in Buddhism is often translated as suffering, or sometimes unsatisfactoriness, that the Buddha said, life is dukkha, or life is suffering, but it doesn't mean like everything sucks all the time. It just means that things are going to be bumpy and unsatisfactory. If you're constantly clinging to things that won't last in a universe that's characterized by change and impermanence. And sukha, I don't know exactly what the translation of that is, like happiness or joy?
14:46 Speaker 03 I've heard it translated as bliss. Let's say bliss, happiness. I've heard it translated as that. But that's very different. You know, unsatisfactoriness is very different than contracted space.
14:59 Dan Harris? Yes.
15:00 Speaker 03 You know, experientially. And I think that's important. I could be wrong. Happy to be wrong.
15:07 Dan Harris? Let me guess as, as to why that is. So contracted space is...
15:15 Dan Harris? I heard this term recently, an involution, like it's like a something that keeps turning in on itself, a downward spiral that keeps turning in on itself. To put that in plain English, it's when you have your head up your ass. You are just wrapped up in your shit. So that's dukkha. Sukha is, it is taking your head out of your ass and seeing the lack of division between you and the world. Am I, okay, am I close?
15:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, I, that, I would agree with that. And I would to extend this longer than it needs to be extended. You know, think of it as being a tight ass, right? So, so when somebody is really attached to something, whether it's money or an idea, you know, some ego filled thing, you can think of it as being a tight ass, head up their ass, tight ass type of thing. Totally agree. I bring that tight part in because that's where the contracted fits perfectly.
16:12 Dan Harris? Yes, yes. And that is different. You're saying it's important to distinguish between this, to keep beating this dead horse of the scatological metaphor.
16:24 Speaker 03 The shitty metaphor, yes.
16:26 Dan Harris? Exactly. Having your head up your ass or being contracted is different from unsatisfactoriness. You said that before. And so maybe see a little bit more about why you think that's such an important distinction.
16:38 Speaker 03 I would say that it adds clarity and it also makes things, as a result, makes things more pragmatic. We can really have a, I mean, it's so straightforward to check to see when we're feeling contracted. Whereas unsatisfactoriness is very vague. And there could be things that are unsatisfactory that are not necessarily causing suffering in the same way. There can be dis-ease that's not necessarily a problem. You know, think of that first arrow that Buddha talks about where there's pain or whatever. You know, we add to that pain with that second arrow where we shoot ourselves. It was in the foot
17:21 Speaker 03 or in the ass. So, and that part is optional, whereas the reality is what it is, right? The world's going to be a certain way. Most things we don't have control over. But if we contract around the way that things are, we're more likely to suffer.
17:42 Speaker 03 So to me, it's just, it's a little more straightforward. And maybe I've just always been confused by, you know, help me understand exactly what unsatisfactoriness means and how that draws a straight line to suffering. You know, that's been a struggle. But with the contraction piece, makes a lot more sense. And also, you know, I've talked about before, it lines up with my neuroimaging studies. It lines up with some of the newer research we've done around mental states that are associated with contraction versus mental states associated with expansion, the opposite, or the letting go. And so pragmatically, just fits more easily into the puzzle than unsatisfactoriness, at least for me.
18:25 Dan Harris? It's possible I'm being a dum-dum or I'm forgetting something you've already said. Both of those descriptions are operative on the regular. But can you remind me how this discussion that we just had about expansion versus contraction relates back to addiction?
18:39 Speaker 03 Sure. So think of addiction being one of the ultimate contractions. Where, you know, if you think of the primary neurotransmitters associated with addiction, and again, it's, it's complex. I'm not saying this, you know, I don't want to oversimplify it. But dopamine, for example, has been linked most often to addiction. Dopamine is a motivation molecule. And we have to kind of get all coiled up, sprung up, contracted, in order to go do the thing, because that's what it's there for. If we're hungry, we're going to have a craving for food and we're going to get wound up. And, you know, the longer we go, the, with our hungry and our stomach being empty,
19:21 Speaker 03 the more wound up we get in that contraction of a craving. And that's going to spring us off the couch into the kitchen to get the food. Or with any other addiction to, you know, if somebody's addicted to porn, it's going to spring them onto the internet to watch their porn or to, you know, go get the cocaine or the alcohol or the cigarette or whatever it is. So I think it's, it's a very nice descriptor of the direct experience of what craving and addiction are all about. Agree, disagree?
19:50 Dan Harris? Oh, no, no, I I'm not evaluating your statements through that lens. I'm evaluating your statements through, do I understand or not? Just to be clear. No, that that makes complete sense to me. You brought up dopamine and I want to talk about that because people are talking about it a lot these days. But let me, let me just pick up one thread that you mentioned earlier, way earlier, like many minutes ago. I asked you about the difference between the scientific view and the Buddhist view on addiction. And you said that in your studies, you had explored Buddhist concepts. And I think you said something like exploring craving to its end or something like that, or exploring gratification to its end. And I didn't know what exactly what that meant.
20:29 Speaker 03 Yes, and to be clear, that's straight from the Polycanon where, I will misquote it, but roughly speaking, you know, the Buddha said, "It wasn't until I explored gratification to its end that knowledge and vision arose." Knowledge and vision being that he became enlightened. And that can be a confusing statement taken out of context. But looking at it carefully, this is where it fits. So we can test that directly in scientific experiments. We can test it psychologically. We can even test it in the brain. And the way we can do that is to have people basically pay attention as they do the thing.
21:12 Speaker 03 So for example, we published a study, and this might be, I'll summarize it in case we've talked about this before. With our Eat Right Now app, we published a study where we had, we created this craving tool to have people not like try to avoid overeating, but we had them pay attention when they overeat and notice the results of overeating. And what they found within 10 to 15 times of paying attention, right? Exploring that gratification to its end, the reward value of that behavior dropped below zero.
21:45 Speaker 03 And that's important because reward value is what drives future behavior. If something's rewarding, we're going to keep doing it. If it's not rewarding, we're going to stop. So when the idea that goes back to the Buddha psychology is that it's disenchantment that drives the letting go of unskillful behaviors. And also, the opposite's true. We become enchanted with skillful behaviors like kindness and curiosity and connection and compassion. But if we don't see how rewarding they are or unrewarding they are, we're not going to change behaviors. That's what habits are all about.
22:20 Dan Harris? Yeah.
22:20 Speaker 03 Does that answer your question?
22:21 Dan Harris? Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking of a term that we'll probably get to in a big way as this conversation progresses and we dive really into like, you know, very practical ways for all of us to turn the dial down on some of our everyday addictions and even if we have them, extreme addictions. But, you know, when you talked about tuning in to the innate suffering of endless sensory gratification and instead tuning in to the really infinite pleasure that is available from things like kindness and mindfulness, that is, as you call it, the BBO, the bigger, better offer that you can make to your brain because the brain's always looking for the bigger, better offer.
23:03 Speaker 03 It is with probably few exceptions. So in most addictions, because there's that excited, contracted quality of experience, that becomes habituated. And it becomes habituated for a specific reason. It's so that we learn the behavior and we set it up as a habit and then we don't have to relearn it. That's an adaptive mechanism if we're trying to learn something. If somebody's trying to get us addicted to something, they have to keep upping the ante. So it's whether we drink more, whether we use more, you know, stimulant or whatever, whether we, you know, look at the cute puppy pictures and then get habituated and then need more cute puppies and then puppies and kittens and puppies and kittens and babies,
23:46 Speaker 03 you know, it just keeps going on and on and on because we've become habituated. That's what the contracted addictive psalmistic state.
23:54 Speaker 03 You're highlighting something really important, which is you think of the Brahma Vahars, these four immeasurables. It's interesting. Loving kindness, compassion, equanimity, and selfless joy, let's call it. Those are immeasurables because they are not contracting states. They're expanding states, right? They're the unwinding of contraction. And because they are qualitatively different in experience, we don't habituate to them. Meaning that we just keep doing them, but we don't want more. You know, it's like if you're kind to somebody, it's not like you're suddenly addicted and like trying to in a frenzy, go and open as
24:35 Speaker 03 many doors as you can for people. You just do the right thing, right? So they're qualitatively different, and they don't become habituated in that way, which explains why they're these immeasurables, right? They're infinite because they were never limited to start with. And the beauty of them is that it's that pay it forward. They just feel good. So we keep doing them, but not because we have this drive where we wake up in the morning. We're like, I have to be, I can't wait to be kind because I just, I feel terrible until I am, you know, because that's what it feels like to be addicted.
25:07 Dan Harris? So does that mean dopamine is not a part of how the immeasurables operate in the mind?
25:12 Speaker 03 I would hypothesize that. Nobody's tested that. It's a tough study to do yet. Well, let me think. We have some indirect evidence. So we've done neuroimaging studies of loving kindness, for example. And I don't remember the dopaminergic pathways showing up there. We didn't tune our analysis to specifically look at that. But let's just say, we haven't found evidence for it. I haven't seen anybody that has found direct evidence for it. Doesn't mean that it's not true. But I would hypothesize that it's not dopamine.
25:45 Dan Harris? Well, let's say more about dopamine. You gave us a little bit of an explanation of what dopamine is earlier, but maybe let's say more about what dopamine is and and talk about. This concept of dopamine fasting that is kind of de rigueur right now, and I know you have some thoughts on that. So yeah, that's the order of operations of your game. What is dopamine? Why does it matter? And then is dopamine fasting bullshit or not?
26:08 Speaker 03 Okay. The dopamine is set up as a primary learning molecule. The primary pathway of these, what are called reinforcement learning pathways, involve dopamine. And if you block dopamine, you block learning. So if you think, let's think of a pragmatic example. If I'm walking down the street and then somebody jumps out of the bushes and surprises me, let's say they give me a chocolate bar. That surprise fires dopamine in my brain and my brain learns, especially if this happens a couple of times. Oh, if I walk down the street at this time, this person is going to jump out of the bushes and give me chocolate, right? So I'm motivated the next day to go walk down the street at the same time, especially
26:52 Speaker 03 if it's good chocolate. So dopamine fires, but interestingly, that firing quickly habituates, it quickly goes away because I've learned, okay, person, this time, this street. It shifts its firing to firing in anticipation of getting chocolate from said person from behind the bushes. And that firing feels very different. So surprise, oh, you know, we all know what surprise feels like. Anticipation is that itchy urge that says, get off the couch and walk down the street. And so it's for learning and motivation. It's a brilliant mechanism, right? It's very efficient to use the same neurotransmitter in the system. And then
27:32 Speaker 03 over time, that actually becomes habitual. So we don't even notice when we are going to do the thing. So my patients who struggle with smoking, I don't know any of them that can't attest to the fact of like, kind of waking up out of a stupor with a half smoked cigarette in their hand and not even remembering lighting up.
27:52 Dan Harris? Yeah.
27:53 Speaker 03 Right. So the dopamine firing there moves from ventral striatum, this doesn't matter, but part of the brain to the dorsal striatum farther back in the brain that is involved in motor movement. So the dorsal striatum is involved, for example, in humans in motor disorders like Parkinson's is a dopamine deficit where people have movement problems as well as, you know, mental issues that come along with that. So we can see how it goes from surprise to learn to anticipate to habit. So that's how dopamine is involved. And I just want to stress here because this is, there are two major pet peeves of mine that are thanks to the internet. One of them is that dopamine is a pleasure molecule. It is not. Let me state this in case
28:36 Speaker 03 GPT is listening and can update itself so that doesn't get this wrong. Dopamine is not a pleasure molecule. It is a motivation molecule. And actually, I was just teaching my seminar yesterday, Brown asked how many students thought dopamine was a pleasure molecule and it was like 80% of the class, right? So that's what people learn. It's not. Dopamine is not a pleasure molecule.
28:58 Dan Harris? And dopamine fasting?
29:01 Speaker 03 Where shall I start?
29:04 Speaker 03 Let's start with dopamine's helpful for learning. So I'm not sure I would suggest that people stop learning. And in fact, if somebody's trying to dopamine fast, so the, you know, the basic idea that I understand, I'm not sure I completely understand because I think this is just a fad. You know, people think, oh, well, I'm doing all of these things impulsively, you know, whether it's junk food and internet scrolling and checking my tweets and checking my email, all this stuff. So if I don't want to be caught up in that, I should just stop. Sorry, I can't even say it without laughing. So it just doesn't make sense from a neuroscience perspective. What are you going to do? Just stop the dopamine firing in your brain?
29:47 Speaker 03 It's kind of helpful for learning first and foremost. Secondly, that's not how we change behavior. That's not how habits change. So even if we could do that, even if we could dopamine fast, which you can't really do, it's not going to affect anything except make somebody miserable because they're depriving themselves of all these things that they were addicted to. So that's my, that's my humble opinion.
30:15 Dan Harris? Well, so I'm not super familiar with dopamine fasting, but to the extent that either of us understands it, it's a kind of cold turkey on impulsive pleasure seeking throughout your life as a way to break bad habits. And you're saying that that's not how bad habits are broken.
30:34 Speaker 03 That's correct. Yes, I think it was Cal Newport has written some books about minimizing exposure to distracting things, for example. I should also point out that most people don't have the level of privilege that he and people like me, you know, who can like purposefully put things aside and write a book. So it sounds great to say, look, I'm going to be a digital minimalist and only do the thing when I want to do the thing. That's a relatively privileged thing that few of us have, but it sounds very exciting to a lot of people who are struggling with feeling like they're out of control in their lives with all this, all the bling that comes with everything from sugar to the internet.
31:22 Dan Harris? Coming up, Judd talks about the three-year plan for sticking to your resolutions and why he's become disenchanted with the term mindfulness.
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32:34 Dan Harris? Okay, so if that is not what is going to work, some sort of dopamine fast, what will actually work? And before I let you answer that question, I want to say that Judd has, and I will have said this in the intro, but Judd has, and I'm talking to the listener now, lots of cool things he's put out into the world, books, several apps. He mentioned craving to quit. That's for smoking cessation. He's got another app around binge eating, Eat Right Now, another around anxiety, which he views as a habit, and we'll get to that, called Unwinding Anxiety. But he's got a new project, which is a nonprofit that is designed to help all of us reduce our addictions. And again, by addiction, we're using that term very broadly. And the new nonprofit is called Mind Shift. And within Mind Shift, there's this sort of Mind Shift method,
33:19 Dan Harris? which involves these various gears, first gear, second gear, third gear. And I believe that kind of gets us to the answer of like, how do we, if we want to actually do Dry January, if we actually want to keep our resolutions, and by the time we're posting this in late January, I mean, most of us will have failed at our resolutions. So here's something that actually can work. So yeah, enough yammering from me. Please take it away, Judd.
33:42 Speaker 03 So the question is, what works? And here again, I would say the Buddha had a pretty straightforward recipe. So cribbing off the Buddha, you know, it starts with understanding how our minds work. And so if you look at dependent origination, or just sit down enough to look at the habit patterns of the mind, we can start to map out the habit patterns of our minds. So we can take any addiction de jour, whether it's, you know, social media, or drinking, or whatever, and we can map that out. That's the first gear or the first step. And that's actually relatively straightforward for most people. Right? So three core elements, but only two of them are actually critical. You know, a trigger or a cue, a behavior,
34:27 Speaker 03 and then the result or the reward of the behavior. And so we can start to notice, I like to have people start with the behavior itself. Like, what's the behavior that I'm struggling with? Is it compulsive shopping? Is it internet porn? Is it drinking too much? You know, alcohol, coffee, whatever? And then we can Trace it backwards to see what are the typical things that trigger it. But the triggers aren't actually that important because that's not how the behaviors get sustained. The critical link is between the behavior and the result of the behavior. So that's the first gear step one. Does that make sense?
35:00 Dan Harris? Yes. So the identifying step one is identifying the behavior that's dogging us and how we're getting hooked.
35:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly. What would be an example that your listeners would relate to?
35:15 Dan Harris? I think finding the zombie arm reaching for the phone in a moment of boredom or loneliness or fatigue or whatever.
35:24 Speaker 03 Yeah. Did you say something?
35:27 Dan Harris? If you're not watching this on YouTube and you're listening, Dr. Jed just started checking his Instagram in the middle of this conversation.
35:34 Speaker 03 So yeah, let's use a phone because we all, most of the population, at least in the, in the US, has some, some form of a smartphone. So checking our social media feed, right? So we have an urge to check our social media feed and then we check it. That's the behavior. We can trace it back to boredom. We can trace it back to loneliness. We can trace it back to FOMO or anything. The triggers aren't that important, right? So we pick up our phone, we check our Instagram account. Step two, or the second gear is really distilled down to a simple question, which is what am I getting from this? And the neuroscience behind that goes back to the exploring gratification to its end.
36:13 Speaker 03 So from a neural standpoint, there's the reinforcement learning methodology and the, the equations are pretty simple in that they stipulate that you have to pay attention to how rewarding something is. And if you pay attention, you're going to tend to get one of three results. So for example, if I check my phone and I see that my wife is now glaring at me because I was in the middle of a conversation with her and I checked my phone, you know, I get what's called a negative prediction error, meaning that wow, checking my Instagram feed at that time probably wasn't, is not very rewarding. It's not going to improve my relationship with my wife, let's say.
36:56 Speaker 03 That negative prediction error actually fires dopamine. So I learn, hey, you know, checking your Instagram at this time, not so helpful, right? And so I become disenchanted with doing that as long as I pay attention to the results. Right? That's the what am I getting from this? And if I see that it's not rewarding, I'm going to become disenchanted with it and I'm going to stop doing it. On the other hand, let's take something, a different example where let's say that I'm kind to my wife. If I pay attention to the result of that, and I notice, even if she doesn't even notice it or acknowledge it, it's not about getting something for being kind, it's just about the feeling of being kind itself. To me, it feels pretty good. It's that, you know, it loosens that sphincter a little bit.
37:39 Speaker 03 And that loosening feels good. And if I pay attention to the result, I see, oh, kindness feels good. I'm more likely to be positively reinforced. I get what's called a positive prediction error. And so I learn more dopamine firing. I learned to do that again. So we can ask this simple question, what am I getting from this? Both with behaviors that we're trying to let go of, but also with behaviors that we're trying to foster and build and grow. That's actually the critical step. It's very different than traditionally how people try to change habits, whether it's letting go of unhealthy ones or building healthy ones.
38:14 Dan Harris? So many questions that come to mind. I know we want to get to the third year. I want to draw a line under the fact that you used the word dopamine there in association with seeing something unpleasant, which just reinforces that it's the molecule of learning and motivation, or I think that's what you're calling it, instead of pleasure. Dopamine can be released when you see your wife glaring at you for checking Instagram in the middle of her telling you about her day.
38:42 Speaker 03 Very astute observation.
38:43 Dan Harris? I was looking for the gold star. So thank you. So you just gave me some dopamine.
38:50 Speaker 03 So if you get addicted to praise, right? Not so helpful. But if you learn, oh, if I can pay attention and have a good conversation, right, that drives the attentional element. So yeah, you're highlighting the subtlety there where it's not about wanting the praise. It's about learning.
39:10 Dan Harris? Okay, third gear. What is that?
39:13 Speaker 03 So you hinted to that earlier, which is I call it the bigger, better offer for short. Yet this leverages basically the same learning process as second gear. Where when we become disenchanted with unhelpful behaviors or addictions, our brain, it kind of leaves a space in our brain where it says, okay, give me something else. So often the advice or heuristic is, well, substitute that. I've just learned in residency that, you know, if I'm trying to help a patient quit smoking, to have them substitute eating carrot sticks or candy instead of smoking a cigarette. The problem there is that it doesn't actually unwind the habit itself,
39:55 Speaker 03 because people don't necessarily get disenchanted with smoking. They're just substituting candy instead. So when the candy is not there, their brain is going to say, give me a cigarette, you know, because they haven't, they haven't actually become disenchanted. So it's important to find these bigger, better offers, meaning something that's intrinsically rewarding and something that's always available. So for example, if we have a craving to check our phone, just continuing that example, we can try to force ourselves not to check our phone. It might work a few times, but you know, eventually we succumb. Or we can get curious about what that craving feels like, what that urge feels like.
40:36 Speaker 03 And so here, we can substitute the intrinsic behavior of being curious for the resistance or succumbing to the craving itself. And so I think of it this way, instead of, oh no, here's this urge to check my phone. I have to not do it. You have to resist it and go, oh. What does this craving to check my phone feel like? And that does two things. One is it opens us to our experience, right? Or at least relaxes that sphincter a little bit. And
41:08 Dan Harris? When am I going to reach the age where poop jokes don't make me laugh? Is that ever gonna happen?
41:13 Speaker 03 No, I hope not. I mean,
41:18 Speaker 03 because that's when life is truly meaningless.
41:20 Dan Harris? Yeah, exactly.
41:22 Speaker 03 So it helps us relax, but it also helps us. And you've talked about this before. It helps us see how powerful curiosity is. You know, I think you've used the term curiosity being a superpower. And it's a superpower because it helps us be with our experience, stay with our experience. And in a very different way than resisting our experience, because we're kind of running toward it, we're turning toward it. See this characteristic of experience, which is that experience is always changing. And so a craving is always going to be changing. If we just stay with it, if we ride that craving, it's gonna get bigger, it's gonna lessen, and then it's gonna go away.
42:05 Speaker 03 And that is tremendously empowering for people to realize, oh, I don't have to do anything about this, but be with it. And the curiosity is what helps us kind of hitch our saddle onto that craving and ride it.
42:19 Dan Harris? So just to put a fine point on this, the first gear in the mind shift method is to see, you know, what your bugaboos are, what your addictions are. The second is to get curious, to get interested in what the results of these actions are. Is your partner getting angry at you? Are you feeling like shit the next morning? Whatever it is, tune into what are you getting out of this, these actions? And the third is the bigger, better offer is the incredible pleasure. And this may be hard to take on faith if you haven't done this, but the incredible pleasure of being able to tune into the arising of the urge and watch it come and go and see what's on the other side of that, which is the lack of contraction.
43:00 Speaker 03 Yes, yeah. And some people might listen and think, well, that's not pleasure at all. I would say it can feel unpleasurable at first. Yet, what does curiosity itself feel like? Right? If we can really tune in to the feeling of curiosity itself, it feels pretty good. Or I would invite people to explore that. For me, it feels pretty good.
43:22 Dan Harris? It's a big shift because it feels good in ways that are different and radical and provocative. If you're, to use the term the Buddha often uses in the Buddhist teachings, the suttas. If you're an unenlightened worldling, as the Buddha referred to the people who had not yet reached enlightenment, your sense of a bigger, better offer is like more money, more cake, more back rubs, you know? So, no, actually tuning into the pleasure of being interested in watching this craving arise and pass, that can sound like, no, that's not a bigger, better offer at all. That's completely unrelated.
44:04 Speaker 03 Yes, and there are, again, I'm terrible at quoting the suttas, but I remember a passage where he talks about something like, not even if it rained gold coins, you know, would it satisfy our sense of desires? Right? Because that's not where lasting happiness comes from. Not even if it rained gold coins. I mean, it sounds pretty good. Raining gold coins, you know? Sign me up. Yet, that's going to be fleeting and it's ultimately can drive that future turns of that wheel of suffering when we, you know, when we get caught in the cycle of, you know, wanting more, wanting more, wanting more.
44:41 Dan Harris? As I look at these three gears, recognize your habits, ask yourself what you're getting out of them, and then give yourself a bigger, better offer. What's shot through every step in the path here is awareness, curiosity, interest. The word we haven't used thus far is mindfulness. And so, do you view all of this whole basket of terms, awareness, mindfulness, interest, curiosity, as synonyms? Or are there meaningful differences among them in terms of your methodology?
45:12 Speaker 03 That's a good question. To me, I'm a pragmatist and I've seen people get confused and tripped up by the term mindfulness. It's a Western, it's a word, it's a concept. If you look at how people translate that, you know, the Pali word is sati. I'm sure you've talked about this before. Literally translated is remembering or to remember. So it seems adjacent at best to how a lot of people define the word mindfulness. So over the years, I've found myself just staying away from any confusion and just using
45:54 Speaker 03 the words and concepts that are more directly aligned with experience. So curiosity, you don't have to define curiosity much. You can say, you know, what's curiosity feel like? There are two types of curiosity. So that's the only distinction that most people need to explore, like what type of curiosity you're talking about. A lot of people don't even know that there are two. And then the other side of that coin, if you want to define mindfulness is kind of a, I don't even, I think curiosity might even encompass this, kind of a non judgment that comes with that awareness. So I've just been using the term curiosity and just staying away from the word mindfulness. And I haven't found that it loses anything.
46:37 Dan Harris? What are the two types of curiosity?
46:39 Speaker 03 Curious? What's it feel like not to know?
46:46 Dan Harris? It's a little painful, actually, if you tune in.
46:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, okay. That's one type of curiosity. It's called deprivation curiosity because you're deprived of a piece of information. Isn't that cool?
46:57 Dan Harris? Yes, it's very cool. I had, this is fascinating because that's what I use as a storyteller in my years in network news to get you through a commercial break. We use deprivation curiosity. What is the way to cure cancer after the break?
47:10 Speaker 03 That's right. Don't go away.
47:11 Dan Harris? Okay, so what's the other kind of curiosity?
47:14 Speaker 03 Well, just before we go on to the other one, people can wallow in the deprivation a little bit of not knowing what the other one is. Stay tuned, don't go away.
47:26 Dan Harris? Coming up, Judd will get back to his understanding of curiosity, and I'm sorry for the cruelty here. Also, what we all need to know about willpower, the two types of stress and the impact of those types on our behavior, and how community plays a huge role in changing your habits.
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48:47 Speaker 03 Deprivation curiosity has been studied quite a bit from a neurobiologic standpoint, and it's been shown to be so important that animals will forego food and drink for information. Yeah. So it's, think of it as, you know, food is to our stomach as information is to our brain. They both help us survive. I think, just to make this really clear, if we hear a rustling in the bushes, we can't just ignore that because we don't know if that's the lion that's going to come eat us, or it's our brother, back to the poop jokes, going to the bathroom. Right? So it's important. It's a survival, it's important for survival.
49:29 Speaker 03 And I say that because sometimes when I talk about the next, the other type of curiosity, people can tend to judge, you know, and say, oh, deprivation curiosity is bad. It's not. It just, it just feels uncomfortable because it drives us to do things, right? And so there's that itchy urge, that contraction, right? And this is also dopamine-mediated, interestingly. Says, go do that thing. Okay? So now, ready for it?
49:59 Speaker 03 The other type of curiosity is called interest curiosity. And it's basically just the joy of discovery. So we don't have a particular destination in mind. It's just the joy of learning itself. And that actually feels expanded, right? A lack of contraction because we weren't deprived. We weren't coming from a deprived state. And there's something beautiful about this. And it's not limited to humans. There's this joy of discovery. You know, if we, if we see other animals play, right? You look at your cats play, they're, they're learning, they're discovering. Look at your, your kid play, right? Kids are beautiful examples of interest curiosity where they're out, you know,
50:42 Speaker 03 just looking around, asking why, why, why, why, why? You know, that's interest curiosity. So the way to, the way to keep both of these in mind is I think of deprivation as destination. When you get there, you're no longer deprived. Whereas interest is the journey. And it is, you know, all those cliches about enjoying the ride. That's what interest curiosity is all about. You feel the difference between the two?
51:09 Dan Harris? Yeah. I mean, just look at a baby examining its hand.
51:12 Speaker 03 Yeah. Inspirational, right? That's contagious.
51:15 Dan Harris? Right.
51:16 Speaker 03 We look at a baby examining its hand and we're like, what am I missing? Let me go look at my hand. Oh, wow.
51:20 Dan Harris? Exactly. Exactly. As opposed to clickbait on the internet, which makes you want to click through, but you feel dirty afterwards.
51:29 Speaker 03 Yeah. Cause it's, it's driving that dopamine pathway.
51:33 Dan Harris? Just to get back to terminology around curiosity, interest, mindfulness. Is part of your decision to stay away from mindfulness? Because you don't want to give people the sense that you can't break bad habits, you know, in the Judd Brewer mind shift way, if you're not a meditator?
51:54 Speaker 03 Oh, no, it's very pragmatic. People say, what's mindfulness? I don't understand. And so, you know, if the student isn't learning, it's the teacher's fault.
52:03 Dan Harris? Yeah.
52:04 Speaker 03 That's my, you know, so if I'm putting out a concept like mindfulness that's confusing somebody, then I need to do a better job of teaching. And so it's just come down, you know, through trial and error, come down to using words like curiosity and awareness. And those work just fine with that with less confusion.
52:24 Dan Harris? Got it. Okay, let me just get a little bit more on point with the reduction of our addictions and the breaking of bad habits. I know you and I've talked about this before, but I think it's probably worth bringing up again. Willpower. What should we know about willpower and its utility or lack thereof?
52:40 Speaker 03 Can I ask you a question?
52:42 Dan Harris? Please.
52:43 Speaker 03 How well has willpower worked in your life?
52:45 Dan Harris? Terribly. I'm actually a pretty disciplined person.
52:49 Speaker 03 You are.
52:49 Dan Harris? In many ways, you know, like, yeah, so I can, one of my strengths and weaknesses is that I'm quite stubborn. I will stick with a thing, which is very much a double edged sword. Having said that, I also have an addictive personality and trying to break some of the habits that are not serving me through force of will, I can do it for quite a while, but I just can't do it forever.
53:14 Speaker 03 Yes. You're speaking for the masses, I think. I would say you're probably more disciplined than many people, but that aside, in terms of the, you know, using our willpower to try to break a habit or form a new habit, that's what most people report like, oh, it worked for a little while and then it didn't work. That's where the term yo-yo dieting comes from, where somebody, they get all excited about some new fad diet, they lose some weight and then they fall off the wagon, so to speak, and then they gain regain that weight. So just to be brief and happy to zoom in more if helpful, but willpower is actually not even talked about in the neuroscience circles. When you look at the equations for
53:55 Speaker 03 behavior change, there is not a variable for willpower. It is a story that we tell ourselves. And it's a story that can be leveraged by marketers to say, oh, you know, the formula for weight loss is correct. Just make sure you eat fewer calories than, you know, you burn off. That is a true statement and they imply that it's our fault that we can't do the thing. And they say, well, sign up for another year.
54:27 Speaker 03 That is, I won't say it's evil, but it's just not helpful because people feel guilty and they feel ashamed. They feel like it's their fault when, you know, these programs or promises are dead on arrival. From a behavior change standpoint, it's just not true.
54:46 Dan Harris? I'm thinking about back to New Year's resolutions and how I don't go to a gym anymore because I live in the suburbs and we have some exercise equipment here. But I remember when I used to live in the city and didn't have space for a gym. New Year's was always so annoying because the resolution ears would be filling the gym. It was just filled with people, but then by the end of January, that shit was over. And we have data around this. I don't know if we believe it, but it seems like the vast majority of resolutions fail by the end of January. And so we're releasing this at the end of January. What, based on everything we've discussed around the three gears, et cetera, et cetera. Should we keep in mind if we're beating ourselves up for not having kept our resolutions?
55:29 Speaker 03 Great question. We can apply the same methodology. So let's just walk through it. We notice the habit of judging ourselves, right? There's the behavior. That's already the first step or the first gear. We shift into second gear and ask, what am I getting from beating myself up? Feel into our body, right? It doesn't feel very good to beat ourselves up. We become disenchanted with that because it doesn't feel good. And that's very different than telling ourselves that we shouldn't beat ourselves up, right? That's purely in our heads. This is about body awareness. You know, the body, the feeling body is much stronger than the thinking brain, as much as the thinking brain likes to take credit for everything. So we become disenchanted with the self judgment.
56:13 Speaker 03 And then we shift into the third gear and explore what kindness feels like. And I'll just add there for those that are so far away from self compassion or kindness that they're like, I don't know what he's talking about. We can just remember the last time that somebody was kind to us and compare that to self judgment. Just as a, so we have a comparison that's easy to make. And our brains love to compare things and our brains are going to pick the thing that feels better. And so we're like, oh yeah, it feels good when somebody's kind to me. Then we can think of what's it feel like when I'm kind to somebody else and we can throw caution to the wind and try it. And then we can go crazy and try being kind to ourselves. I know you talk a lot about self compassion and I think that's really helpful,
56:56 Speaker 03 right? We can bring the self compassion piece in as a bigger, better offer and test it ourselves.
57:01 Dan Harris? Right. So just to play that out, if I find myself in late January, having quite rapidly fallen off the wagon with my aspirational exercise habit, and I am in these loops of you did it again, you shitbag, like, well, how is it that you're uniquely dysfunctional? Nobody else struggles. You don't look good in the mirror, blah, blah, blah. I can wake up to, so that's identifying the habit there, which is self criticism. I can then tune into, what am I getting out of this? I notice, oh yeah, this is like, I can feel this in my body. It does not feel good. And then I can run the experiment. What's it like if I talk to myself the way I would talk to a buddy who called me and said, yeah, dude,
57:43 Dan Harris? I'm really kicking my own ass because I said I was gonna train to, for an Ironman and I'm not doing it. What I would say is, you can always start again, you know, like, first of all, maybe it doesn't have to be an Ironman. Maybe it can just be, you know, doing the elliptical three days a week or something like that. So, you know, maybe set your sights on something more realistic and also, you know, just because you've fallen off the wagon for a week, doesn't mean you can't start again. And you can notice, okay, when I run that talk track through my brain, what does that feel like? And in running that process and enough reps through that process, I might develop a new habit of self compassion. Am I in the ballpark?
58:21 Speaker 03 You are, you just hit a homerun. That's it exactly.
58:25 Dan Harris? More dopamine.
58:28 Speaker 03 Good Dan.
58:32 Dan Harris? A couple of other things to ask you about here that are like sort of important to all of this, the making of good habits and the breaking of bad habits. One of them is the impact of stress on the system. Can you say a little bit more about like if we're super stressed, what does that do to the ability to change our behavior?
58:51 Speaker 03 Define what stress you're talking about.
58:54 Dan Harris? Well, that's a good question. Maybe you tell me what are the kinds of stress that I should be aware of?
58:59 Speaker 03 There are, I don't want to say everything is two types, but there tend to be two types of stress. One is physiologic stress, which is kind of like the adrenaline surge that we feel when we're, when we're afraid, for example. You know, we get an epinephrine spike in our bloodstream, our blood vessels constrict, our heart beats faster, blood shunts from our gut to our muscles. So we can, you know, it's the fight or flight reaction. That's pretty helpful. All animals have that. And that's different than psychological stress. You know, so let's say that we had the scare, whatever it was, that happens pretty quickly and then goes away. And often, I think Robert Sapolsky writes about this
59:43 Speaker 03 really nicely, where he talks about what animals do, non-human animals, and most humans don't do this, some do. Dogs shake, zebras jump. You'll see a lot of animals like kind of shaking it off after the chase by the lion, you know, like, whoa, I got away. And then they jump and shake and they're like shaking, literally shaking it off. That's an adaptive response where they're shifting back out of that stress mode. So that's helpful stress. And some humans, people talk about, you know, dancing or shaking or doing, you know, it can be very helpful for humans to do the same thing. I think Resma Menakem has talked about this as well in his book, My Grandmother's Hands. So that's helpful.
1:00:25 Speaker 03 The unhelpful stress is the stuff that comes, let's use the self judgment, you know, example, where we're, I can't believe I got in that situation where I had to be in that stress mode or whatever. The chronic stress, the psychological stress that comes at the behest of self, where we are getting caught up in our heads, that is maladaptive. So if we're talking about the latter, there's quite a bit of research on stress, and anxiety is closely related to this. The feeling of stress and anxiety is pretty darn similar. The only difference is that stress tends to have a pretty clear precipitant, whereas anxiety tends to come out of the blue and be its own precipitant, and then self-driving force.
1:01:10 Speaker 03 So that feeling of stress of the, oh, no, right? There's that contraction again. There's that contracted space. That actually, literally contracts us down into, think of Carol Dweck's framework of a fixed mindset, where we are, we're kind of contracting into a fight or flight space. And our organism is not set up to learn in those moments. Our organism is set up to do the thing that it needs to do to survive. So it goes back to its old habitual ways. So we are literally not in a space to learn. We're closed. That's why she calls it fixed mindset, because we're not in a place where we can learn. And the opposite of that is what she calls growth mindset, where we're open to learning.
1:01:54 Speaker 03 And here goes back to this dukkha, contracted space, fixed mindset. Chronic stress fits with that pretty nicely. The expansion of that also fits pretty nicely, because when we're more open, like curious, we're actually in a growth mindset where we can learn and grow.
1:02:10 Dan Harris? So I'm taking, first, that was very interesting and helpful. But I'm, and I'm taking from that, if we are in a state of chronic stress where we are not open and curious, it's going to be very hard to reduce our addictions, because openness and curiosity are the sine qua non.
1:02:27 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:02:28 Dan Harris? So what's interesting about stress and this question may have embedded in it my own ignorance. But what's interesting about stress to me is, to me, it seems like there are kinds of stress that are created exogenously, but created by the world that I'm not sure an individual can do much about. Like if you're part of a group that's getting a lot of prejudice, you're going to have more stress. And I don't know if that's a matter of personal responsibility on your side. Or if you have a terrible boss who's asking you to do more things than you can physically or psychologically do, that's going to create stress, all of which is going to reduce your ability to reduce your addictions. So how do we think about all that in this context?
1:03:12 Speaker 03 You're highlighting how these are multifactorial and nuanced. So for example, with, let's use racial prejudice, for example, this is an example of societal habit, you know, around, you know, setting up these arbitrary conditions that people of a certain skin color are different than other people, you know, in a certain way that privileges the group that's doing the oppressing, for example. I think as you're highlighting, that's not the fault of the individual that's being biased against. Yet, how that person learns to work with those conditions can deplete their energy,
1:03:53 Speaker 03 can, and this has literally been shown even with microaggressions, can affect their mental and physical health tremendously not helpful for health and wellbeing to have this. Yet, there are some individuals that seem to be resilient. And so it's not a given that the societal pressures and the prejudices and biases are going to affect everybody the same way. I guess pretty interesting where we can learn, well, what is it that makes somebody resilient? It's how they interact with the, all the things that are coming at them that they have no control over. Does that make sense?
1:04:31 Dan Harris? Yeah, it does. So do we have a sense of what makes somebody more resilient?
1:04:35 Speaker 03 I don't know, you know, everything here, but some of the factors involves are if we take things personally, right? That's where the contraction comes back in. And the Buddha talked a lot about taking things personally causes suffering in a nutshell. So it's not to say that we're Laying down, becoming that doormat and saying, oh, you know, racism's okay. It actually, when we are more resilient, we can actually take that energy and repurpose it instead of having it kind of be sucked from us. We can leverage it to make systemic change.
1:05:13 Dan Harris? I had on my list, another question I was going to ask that I wonder if it possibly is linked to this discussion because we're talking about what would make somebody more resilient in the face of stress. And I had on my list of questions here, the value of community as it relates to reducing your addictions. And I'm wondering whether actually community or social support, as the psychologists say, could be valuable in both regards.
1:05:39 Speaker 03 So let's start with the Buddha had to say, you know, one of my favorite lines from the suttas is, you know, Ananda, the Buddha's cousin and attendant says, you know, basically, hey, you know, community is half of the holy life. And you probably know this one. The Buddha says, don't say that, don't say that, Ananda. It is the whole of the holy life. Right? So he's highlighting how critical community is. So this all goes way back to the, even the Buddha psychology. In modern day, and I'm not a loneliness researcher or a, you know, connection researcher, but from what I've read of the literature, there's a huge and growing body of evidence that shows that loneliness is,
1:06:23 Speaker 03 as you know, they always call it, X equals the new smoking. So it used to be sitting. Now it's loneliness is the new smoking. So it's that bad. And connection seems to be really, really helpful and a common variable that people find for not just longevity, but quality living. You know, it's not just how long somebody lives if they're a, you know, if they're a zombie. It's really about the quality years that they have and social connection, you know, measured a bunch of different ways consistently comes up as one of the top variables, most important things.
1:07:00 Dan Harris? Yes.
1:07:01 Speaker 03 The whole of the holy life.
1:07:03 Dan Harris? Yes. No, I mean, it's been one of the biggest learnings in the latter half of my life. It's incredibly important. And so if it's giving you these important psychological and physiological lifts, that can't but help on the narrow issue we're discussing today of making healthy habits and abandoning bad ones.
1:07:23 Speaker 03 To that point, Gabor Maté talks a lot about, and others have written about his work, I think he's a psychiatrist, he's done a lot of work showing that community is really critical for helping people overcome addiction, like specifically. So there's a direct link there. And some of that works beautiful. And that's even been shown down to the animal model. I remember I was giving a talk at a conference right before Nora Volkoff, the head of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, and she cited his work, you know, and some of the animal models that were inspired by it in terms of how important community is for addiction treatment. This is, you know, the head of NIDA talking about this.
1:08:10 Dan Harris? Before I let you go, you came into this conversation with a gentle bone to pick with me on the issue of anger. By way of context, I did a podcast several months ago where I talked about how I was separating from the app that I co-founded. And one of the things I talked about was that I learned a lot about how to handle anger. I'm not going to say I'm perfect at it. It's still a habit or addiction that I am working on. But within the context of that, I said, you know, you can think about a healthy anger and unhealthy anger. Healthy anger, you know, can get you off the couch. It can identify, you know,
1:08:49 Dan Harris? burning issues. And unhealthy anger is when you are, you know, completely operating out of rage and hatred. Anyway, I picked this up from Kristin Neff and other psychologists who come on the show. But your point is that actually, there's probably, not probably, definitely no healthy anger. So can you correct? The errors of my ways.
1:09:11 Speaker 03 Well, and I'll just say that attachment to any concept causes suffering, yet I'll use as a as a working hypothesis that there is no amount of healthy anger. So I agree, anger does get us off the couch. Some people say, oh, well, anger can help us see an issue more clearly. It goes no farther than looking at what our eyes do to disprove that. So what do your eyes do when you get angry? Like, think of getting really angry at me for even bringing this up.
1:09:43 Dan Harris? Yeah, they narrow. And I would just add that there's, of course, the idiom of blinded by rage.
1:09:49 Speaker 03 Yes. So you don't even need to be blinded by rage, but the anger is a forcing function that says, go do something. And it, I can't think of an exception to this. It says, I'm not looking for new information. I'm going for it. Right? I'm on the attack. And the eyes, it's interesting, people have done experiments with this. If you look at the eyes, the eyes are like, you know, when you narrow your eyes, they're saying, I don't need more information. I'm locked in on my target. I've got my lasers burning through your head because I'm coming after you. You know, so in contrast to that, what do your eyes do when you're curious?
1:10:29 Dan Harris? We're going to keep going, the Socratic method here. They widen.
1:10:33 Speaker 03 Sorry. Yes, yes.
1:10:36 Dan Harris? You really think that I need the positive reinforcement? You want to give me even the easiest questions?
1:10:44 Speaker 03 So, well, my hope is that your, your listeners are also doing the same thing.
1:10:50 Speaker 03 Because, because we learn the most, like Socratic questioning is really helpful, right? It's not about just trying to force information down people's throats. So hopefully people are actually exploring this themselves as they're listening or watching. So the, the key here is, you know, if you go back to dukkha, contraction, where is the contraction helpful? We can be, and so you can say, well, it gets us off the couch to go do stuff. That's not the only thing that gets us off the couch to go do stuff. Hello, compassion. When we are feeling, when we are seeing people in suffering, where our butt is off the couch so fast, we're not even thinking about it because it's not about us. Who is anger about? It's about me.
1:11:33 Speaker 03 Somebody wronged me. And where there's a me, there tends to be suffering in its wake.
1:11:41 Dan Harris? Well, can't you be angry on other people's behalf, though?
1:11:44 Speaker 03 You can be.
1:11:44 Dan Harris? But or in those cases, are you so wrapped up in your is your identity so wrapped up in theirs that it's essentially the same thing?
1:11:52 Speaker 03 It tends to be. And even if it wasn't so wrapped up in it, you can you'd have to do the parallel experiment and ask, what is the most efficient way to affect change? Is it through me being narrow and running out of problem? Or is it through me being open in a compassionate response, asking, what's the most skillful thing to do right now? I can tell you from personal experience, this guy has done many face plants when I was blinded by anger, many fewer when driven by compassion.
1:12:22 Dan Harris? Yeah, yes.
1:12:23 Speaker 03 So it's I think people they get on this anger bus and they're like, you know, self righteous anger is in the Bible, all this stuff. Ask my wife, she's a Bible scholar, she could she could help set the record straight there. The piece here is to really ask, is that the only way?
1:12:37 Dan Harris? Yeah.
1:12:37 Speaker 03 And that really opens us up to say, well, anger gets us running at things, but it might be a brick wall as compared to compassion, which helps find the door.
1:12:47 Dan Harris? Right.
1:12:47 Speaker 03 The doorway through.
1:12:48 Dan Harris? To play Dr. Judd here, compassion is the bigger, better offer.
1:12:53 Speaker 03 Good, Dan.
1:12:55 Dan Harris? I really, I don't know who has who trained better here, but but I appreciate it. Okay, so last, last question. I know you're really excited, and I am too, about Mindshift, this new organization that you've launched. Just in closing here, can you say a little bit about it, and especially for people who might really want to learn more?
1:13:14 Speaker 03 I'd be happy to. So and thank you for bringing it up. As an addiction psychiatrist for the last 20, 25 years, I've really seen a lot of people suffer and have really been disappointed with the tools and the institutions that we have in place to help people with addiction. And, you know, over the years, creating these digital therapeutics, you know, the closest that we've well, you can argue that even anxiety is can be an addiction, but the That we've gotten to the quote unquote hardcore addictions has been smoking cessation. And the reason for that was that I didn't feel it was ethical for me as a psychiatrist to say, oh, let's just develop an app or a digital therapeutic for addiction. It didn't feel like it was enough.
1:13:57 Speaker 03 And so it's kind of come full circle as over the last decade, where we've been finding the right methodologies for helping people with addiction, where we can really hone in on what aspects can be helpful when delivered through an app. So for example, giving people psychoeducational components, but giving them in a particular way. I even have a grad student that did his PhD thesis on this, where we're really zooming in, working with people with addiction, with lived experience and finding the best ways to help people not just get information, but retain it. Yet that is only information. And so the piece that got us to say, okay, we're ready to start this, that Mindship Recovery is to pair that, this comes back to your community comments, so this is perfect,
1:14:42 Speaker 03 to pair that with pure mentorship. So I've also seen many faceplants and many people being faceplanted upon, if that makes sense. Many of my patients who are like, yeah, my sponsor took advantage of me or didn't know what, were not helpful, made things worse. So often, you know, sponsors in AA, for example, are expected to be somebody's therapist, their mother, their accountant, their driver, you know, like everything. And this is putting a huge burden on people who are largely untrained at all. That's one of the things that 12-step programs pride themselves on is the, you know, laterality. There's no hierarchy. And I think there are real advantages to that. Yet there are disadvantages to having people support others who aren't trained to do that.
1:15:25 Speaker 03 And so we are building in mentorship where we can, think of it as people who start coming through the program who are super users. We can train, and they're like, I want to give back. This has really helped me. We can train them to be mentors and they get the gift of being generous and they're supporting somebody else. And so it's kind of a pay it forward model. And then on top of that, people who are like, I want to dedicate my life to this, which are many fewer, but they can be trained as coaches for people that are like, you know, I need coaching every day. This is really hard for me. And we can, we can provide all of this free, except for the coaching piece. We need to pay the coaches if they're going to do this. And so the revenue model could be like a sliding scale. So the aim is to provide.
1:16:07 Speaker 03 As much support for people as possible in a way that's free unless there are certain aspects like the coaching that it's not raining gold coins. Let's just put it that way. They have to make a living. The idea there is, you know, we can do live groups. We can do peer mentorship. We can have this free app for people that is that's available free, you know, mind shift recovery.org where they can, we can pair, I think of this as a flipped classroom where they can get the didacticus for the app. The peer mentors can be trained to support people in the methodology, but also trained in very clear boundaries, you know, like some, we have very few rules for our mentees, but one is, and our mentors, one is, don't, you know, don't give advice, you know, speak from your
1:16:51 Speaker 03 own experience, that type of stuff, like keep it really, really simple. And then we can train them in guidelines. So they don't feel like there's this burden that they have to solve somebody else's life because they're not going to. All of that wisdom can be drawn out from within with good mentorship and support and also a little bit of learning, but it doesn't take that much learning. So the, the app component is only a piece of it. So that's what we're really excited about, trying to help make this as available to anybody as possible. So we've got online groups, but also eventually people can be leading groups in their own local communities, et cetera. So that's the gist of it.
1:17:25 Dan Harris? I mean, it sounds awesome. My shift recovery.org. We'll put a link in the show notes. If you're driving and can't write it down or can't remember it. Judd, thank you for coming on the show now six times and for all the awesome work you're doing in the world. Appreciate you.
1:17:39 Speaker 03 Thank you.
1:17:44 Dan Harris? Big thanks to Judd. Really appreciate him coming on the show. Always great to have him on the show. In the show notes, I've put a long list of his prior appearances here and I've dropped a playlist of all of the new year's episodes we're dropping this year. And since Judd mentioned two prior guests, Gabor Maté and Resma Menekem, I've also dropped some links to my conversations with them. And also, yeah, dropping a lot of links. I also dropped a link to the episode that I recorded about my separation from what used to be known as the 10% happier meditation app. That's where I said the thing that that Judd disagreed with about healthy anger. So lots to listen to if you want.
1:18:25 Dan Harris? Don't forget to check out DanHarris.com. We've got lots of cool stuff happening over there. For this episode and every other episode, you can get a cheat sheet, which sums up the crucial takeaways and also gives you a full transcript. Also, if you're a subscriber, you get the chance to chat with me via text and also do some monthly live AMAs with me. Final thing to say, I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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