Anxiety Is Old Habit!

I'll be having long conversations with all kinds of experts who can help us understand our anxiety, where it comes from, what we can do about it, whether it's a neuroscientist, a psychiatrist and author, a researcher, a meditator and artist, anybody who has experienced anxiety who works in the field of helping others cope with anxiety. Now, I don't want to make this podcast about me, because it's not about me. It's about everybody. It's about anxiety. But a little background

on me. I am, in my other life a comedian. I have comedy specials on Netflix. I'm also a TV writer and I've been working in entertainment for about twenty five years. But something happened during the Great Lockdown of where I was no longer on tour. I wasn't on stage, and I was fine with it, but I wanted to use my voice somehow, maybe in a way that just

didn't distract people with jokes, but maybe helped people. And I was noticing on social media that a lot of people were discovering that they had anxiety for the first time, or they were actually just becoming an anxious person for the first time, and I realized, hey, you know, I actually feelt pretty good. I have had generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, multiple phobias since I was eight years old, and none of it was diagnosed or handled properly until

I was twenty two. But as a kid, I sat around having panic attacks in school. I remember, at age twelve, thinking I was having a heart attack. But there was also a part of me that knew this has to do with mental health, even though I had never heard the expression mental health. But I knew, or I thought I knew. If I tell people what I'm feeling, if I tell people that I feel like I can't breathe and I feel like I'm going crazy, they will lock me up for life in a padded room. And I'm

not ready for that yet. And so I just had a grand plan, which was, whatever this is going on inside of me that seems to be getting worse every year, I will just ride it out until it gets so bad that I want to live in a padded room. And that is how I will deal with this thing. I never had to go live in a padded room because I got help. Ironically, there is padding in the room I am in right now, but that is just because it makes a podcast sound better. But I began

therapy in my early twenties. I've done it all, from therapy to medication to meditation, and I'm telling you everything I have tried to help my anxiety has worked. But different things work at different times. But the one thing that really tipped me over the edge into being able to say I no longer have a phobia of flying, of driving alone on the freeway, of getting in subways. My silb a fear hides what helps my circular thinking, my rumination, all of the thought processes that are anxiety.

What helped was when I realized I can apply the sense of humor I have in my job to my anxiety. I used to take anxiety so seriously and say things I suffer from anxiety. I just thought it was this scary, terrible thing, and I gave it so much weight, you know, I almost gave it so much respect in a way. And now I try to laugh about my anxiety. You know, I don't have suffer from anxiety. So I have a friend called anxiety, and it loves to get in the passenger seat of my car and try to give me

suggestions about terrible things I should think about. And I just don't let anxiety weigh in on any decisions I'm making. But it's allowed to be there if it needs to be there. You know, I learned to live with it, but it is not anything like it used to be, and it doesn't control my decisions or my life. I

know that might not sound appealing to people. I think people want to just get rid of anxiety, But it feels like I've gotten rid of it, if that makes sense, by accepting it and poking a little fun at And so I want to have honest conversations with people. I don't want to come from some lofty place of you know, peace and love. And I'm whispering, and you know I've changed my life. I still swear and and and yell fuck you at people if I'm driving in a bad mood.

This is real people talking. This is not self help, this is not wellness, This is not anything on relatable. Unless you don't have anxiety, then you know, congrats, you won't relate. But yeah, during the lockdown, I was noticing people on social media and I thought, wait, why don't they just type anxiety into the internet, like like this thing I wished I'd been able to do so many years ago. And I realized people don't know where to start.

Some people don't even know if they're allowed to claim that it's anxiety because they don't know what it is. And doesn't a doctor have to tell them they have it? And oh, maybe I'm just stressed, or it's the state of the world, or you know, once this goes away, I'll be better. And and so I started teaching breathing classes over zoom for fun, and I wrote a newsletter

about anxiety. And when the response was frankly more overwhelming than the response to my last tour as a comedian, I realized, I think I have something here, and so I pitched this podcast I did to I Heart Radio. They said, yes, so here we are together now, and I actually thought at one point, Oh, I hope, um, I hope everyone still wants to talk about anxiety by the time this podcast comes out. I had no idea that it would be the next epidemic. Anyway, I hope

you enjoy Anxiety Bites. There will be new episodes every week, and I'm sure over the course of the episodes, I'll reveal more and more about my personal experiences with anxiety. But you don't need the whole story right now. And

it's frankly again, it's not about me. It's about all of us, and it's about anxiety, and it's about not feeling so alone, because that was always the worst part of it for me, was that I felt so alone when I had it, and even after I found out what I had was normal, I still felt alone because not a lot of people were talking about it. So let's talk about it, Anxiety Bites. But you're in control, and now let's talk to our guest today on Anxiety Bites. I am talking to Dr Judd Brewer. He's a New

York Times bestselling author. He's a neuroscientist. He's the director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and Associate professor and Behavioral and Social Sciences at the School of Public Health and Psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University, as well as a research affiliate at m I T. He's a wicked smartt you guys. His latest book is called Unwinding Anxiety, a clinically proven, step by step plan to break the cycle of worry and fear

that drives anxiety and addictive habits. So in this book, Dr Judd is basically saying anxiety as a habit and we can approach treating it the way we might approach quitting smoking. Dr JEDD's book was called Craving Mind From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love, Why we get hooked and how we can break bad habits. Doctor Jedd has done a ton of TED talks, He's written articles. All of the places that you can find him will be linked in the show notes. And he's also the creator of

the Unwinding Anxiety app. It's a step by step program for your smartphone or tab it. It helps you uncover your triggers, break the cycle of worry and panic, identify your anxiety habits, and learn specific anti anxiety tools. So I've been a fan of doctor Judd for a while now.

I've just heard him on other podcasts and I've read his books and the way he approaches anxiety as something that we do have control over, and that in a weird way, the way we've been habitually having anxiety, and weirdly, there's a little bit of a reward system there, even though it's a disordered reward. We're getting something out of worrying, and so we have to change that and replace it

with something. So it's not easy, and I think a lot of people don't want to look at it that way because you want to think, no, I don't have any control. Anxiety is just something that's happening to me. And yet isn't that what all of us anxious people want is control. I think we want control over the world and other people's actions. But when we're told, oh, you have control over your own actions or well, I didn't want that's not a fun kind of control though. Anyway.

In my interview with Dr Judd, I talked to him about his personal experience with anxiety that he actually thought was ib s, how he gets anxious about his patients who have anxiety, and what he's learned over the past twenty five years studying the mind and how anxiety is driven, and we talk about why his dream for his app, Unwinding Anxiety is that people eventually unsubscribed from it. So let's talk to your new favorite person, doctor Jedd, doctor

Judd Brewer, thank you for being on anxiety Bites. I'm going to ask you what is your past relationship to anxiety and what's your current relationship to anxiety today? Be happy to explore my relationship with anxiety. You know it started way back in the day. Actually, I didn't even know I had anxiety. In college. I remember having let's just say, some g I issues, you know, I'd talk a little bit about this at the end of my book, and I thought, you know, your new book on my anxiety.

And I, you know, done a bunch of backpacking in college and was also, you know, always concerned about you know, getting back curely infections from not you know, carefully filtering my water. And so my senior year, I remember going to the student health in the doctor there you know, these g I issues, and he said, oh, could you be stressed out? And It's like, no, not me, I'm not stressed. I played the violet and I run I'm a vegetarian, blah blah blah, and he goes, Okay, it's

a long story short. It turned out that I had irritable ball syndrome, which is totally stressed and anxiety related. And so so that was my first encounter, let's say, with anxiety, not even knowing it. And so I think, you know, I think anxiety can really be a shape shifter in many ways. A long story short. I went on to get panic attacks during residency, and you know, in my psychiatry residency, which was really fun because then, you know, after I have a panic attack, I could

go down the diagnostic checklist and be like check check, check, check. Yeah, I just had a panic attack, you know. And and today I would say, you know, a lot of what I've learned about my own mind has helped me work with anxiety. I certainly get sensations and feelings that come up, but it's I'm much more able to manage and work

with it. And um, I can you know, I jokingly say, well, you know, I I wrote this book because I was anxious about how to help my patients with anxiety, because you know, what I learned in medical school and residency was to prescribe medications and the gold standard medications out there. There's this term in medicine called number needed to treat, which gives us a quick and dirty estimate of how well something works. So the higher than number of the

worst it is. So with medications, that number needed to treat is five point two, meaning you have to treat five patients before one person shows a significant reduction and symptoms. So you can imagine, for five patients come into my office in one day, I don't know which of those five is going to benefit, so I'm basically playing the medication lottery with them, and I don't know what I'm gonna do with the other. So I'm getting anxious about

to help my patients with anxiety. So those that's that's my you know, my previous and I guess current relationship is. I've been blown away with what I've learned about my own mind. So I started meditating at the beginning of medical school, first day of medical school, and over the last twenty five years have learned so much about how my mind works and all these twists and turns and

serendipity around how anxiety can be driven. That that's where we started developing programs and then as a researcher testing them to see how well they can work. And long story short, that's why I wrote this on Running Anxiety book was to make it accessible, make these these tools accessible to anyone. Man, I wish you'd been around when I was a teenager with anxiety and no Internet and

didn't know what it was. And I was afraid to ask the Life arian if they had any books about the brain, because I thought she was going to say, Oh, I have to call the hospital and you're going to have to live there the rest of your life. Are you perhaps anxious? That's very bad? You know? Can you hold for one minute please? And then she starts whispering, Well, okay,

so let me get into this. And I want to talk about obviously your book and your app, but I have a question about the brain because you are also a neuroscientist. Is that right? Okay? First of all, when the hell are our brains going to evolve past this? Because if I hear one more time, oh, it's left over from being a caveman. Well okay, but when when will this change? When will this default setting to being anxious and overreacting? You know, when in our lifetime now, well,

right from a genetic perspective, not in our lifetime. From a functional perspective, I think it can happen. You know, this evolutionary process can happen pretty quickly. So you can look at to see how quickly we have learned to use technology as a way to leverage attention. Right, So that happened pretty darned quickly, you know. Within you know, eighteen hundreds, there were you know, first researchers showing that animals could learn how to get out of cages by

you getting a food reward. So that was you know, late eighteen hundreds. That was a hundred and twenty years ago. And now you can look at social media and how they are totally getting us all addicted to those things. So this process has been understood and people have adapted it to capture our attention. And this is also driven our anxiety, and so that as soon as we learn how that works. You know, the way I think of it is, if we can learn how our minds work,

then we can start to work with our minds. And so in that sense, just like you know, it's capturing our attention, it's capturing our the uncertainty you know around um, I think of it this way. The only certain thing is that there's always going to be uncertainty. So that's not actually something that we want to evolve beyond because that helps to survive. But what we can learn is how that uncertainty drives anxiety, and that's something that we

can learn to work with within months. You know. For example, my lab has done several clinical studies where we got a fifty seven percent reduction in clinically validate anxiety scores in anxious physicians using an app. You know, we did a study with generalized anxiety disorder. We got the sixty seven percent reduction, and there we could actually calculate that number needed to treat the thing I mentioned earlier ray

for this. So in medications it's five. With this study it was one point six, So so it only takes one point six people doing this kind of a mindful thought behavioral work around anxiety to see your results. Is that what you mean? That's great. When I first found out twenty years ago, when I went to therapy for panic, and it was explained to me that it's just my adrenaline kind of seaking out and it's this leftover thing from you know, my brain is trying to protect me.

That that was of great comfort. But I know for some people that it can seem like, oh great, well now it can't be fixed. But like a lot of things, we we can actually change our mind literally literally we can. And I think one thing that I see they get some conflated or mixed mushed together, is people conflating the

survival piece with the actual anxiety piece. So if you think of the Cayman brain, it was really set up to develop habits, you know, where it's it's about learning where to remember food is and also how to avoid danger. On top of that's been layered the neo cortex, literally the new brain, which helps us survive in a different way,

which is through thinking and planning. And that survival comes based on getting information, like accurate information in the present moment, so we can our brains can basically simulate based on past experience using information that we have. So here it's about, you know, if we don't have accurate information, that's when our brains starts spinning out of control into anxiety. And I think I want folks to be very you know,

to understand that because it's not just our adrenaline. Certainly, when we get freaked out, our adrenaline pumps, but it's not that you know, that fear reaction that happens really quickly, actually faster than we can even think. That's a survival mechanism that helps us learn to avoid danger. That's different than anxiety. Does that make sense? That makes total sense?

And yeah, I'm glad you separated that for me too, because I think i've like you said, anxiety is a shape shifter, and uh, I think sometimes I have conflated that fear instinct with with anxiety. Yes, so we all have times when we're anxious and when we when we worry, for example, that can actually feedback and you know, basically kicking our adrenaline that makes us more anxious. So I have a lot of patients in my clinic who when they go to bed, there head hits the pillow and

the brain starts thinking. And it's like the brain says, okay, it's my turn. Now you get a chance to talk. And now it's we start regretting the things we've done during the day, or we start worrying about the future. And then and then they look at the clock and they think, I gotta get sleep because I got this thing to do tomorrow, and which, of course, Jack's their adrenaline. It makes it much harder for them to sleep. Yeah. Right, so now they've just created this kind of thought pattern

of now the anxiety is about the sleep. Yeah, we'll be right back. What what's the story on chemical imbalances? I mean, is it just sort of a a thing that people saying, it's not really something we're born with? Or can we change our chemistry in our brain? Well, we can certainly change our chemistry in our brain. Thoughts will literally have chemical have chemical cascades that lead to chemical reactions. So in that sense, we are basically just

a jumble of chemistry. If you look at the chemical and balanced thing, I think it's a simple and quick explanation. Oh take this pill because it's a chemical imbalance and it's going to help with the chemic. For some people, they have genetic polymorphisms, meaning that they're they're they're the proteins that are expressed on certain cells look slightly differently than other people, which can affect how certain neurotransmitters, you know,

function in their brain. And for some people, you know, things like selective serotonine reactic inhibitors, which are the first line treatment like the prozacs, the soul lofts, the paxels of the world. That's how you know, for some people those can be helpful. Yeah, this is where this number

needed to treat comes in. It should be noted that historically these were developed as antidepressants and people just started using um testing them out with anxiety and found, oh, they're better than placebo, so we'll prescribe those as well. So you know, they affect serrantonin reuptake, that's where their name comes from. But it doesn't necessarily mean, especially for the majority of the population, some chemical imbalance in their brain. It means, this is the best we've got, and here's

our explanation. So try the pill. And because they're generally benign, you know, they don't have generally don't have sign effects for most people, and you know, they're it's hard to overdose on them. For a psychiatrist or even a general practitioner like a primary care provider, to to prescribe these things and not worry about it too much. And there's also you know the added benefit of having a placebo effect. Oh I am taking a pill to help my brain.

And you know that's not to discount the placebo effect for some medications. That's the majority of effect that's happening in and from you know, from my clinical perspective, it's like whatever, you know, if this is helping and it's

not harming, game on. So in terms of the type of therapist someone should see, right if if they're experiencing, let's say, daily anxiety attacks, um, whether it's thoughts, you know, thoughts spiraling or sweaty palms or whatnot, or they're avoiding certain things driving on the freeway there, you know, certain places give them panic attacks, you know, all the whole shi bang. And they're looking in a directory and they're

looking to find a therapist. Is there something they should be looking for, because I know that for me when I was having daily panic attacks, you know, my therapist wanted to go back into childhood, which is great, but it wasn't going to help me have some tools to go to bring to the office the next day. And I believe in my recovery as an anxious person that I need the tools now because I need to just be able to function and then once I'm better, sure,

let's go back to childhood. Let's talk about this. I get it, um, but what what do you tell what would you tell someone to look for? So, as a hard carrying psychiatrist who is trained about the whole childhood thing and all that, it wasn't until I became a neuroscientist that I started to realize, you know, neuroscience may play a bigger role here in helping people with anxiety than going back to our childhood and that childhood piece maybe somewhat of a holdover from you know, whether it's

Freudian days or whatever. You know, in a way that we're just trained, Oh, this is what we should be doing. But if you look at it, especially looking at how anxiety is driven. So this is something I did not learn in residency training. This is something that I learned afterwards. Serendipitously,

when I was studying habit changed. You know, we were developing programs for smoking and for overeating, and especially with our we had this eat right now app that we were studying with folks, and folks were saying to me. Remember somebody asking, hey, you know, I'm realizing that anxiety is triggering me to Stressy can you create a program for anxiety? And I was thinking, well, like medications, but you know they don't work that well. So it put

a bug in my ear. And it was actually back in the eighties when prozac, you know, first came out, that people are doing research suggesting that anxiety could be driven like other habits. And this is really what this you know, at this lightbulb moment where I was like, I never learned that, Why didn't I? Where didn't I

learned that in residency? And the reason I mentioned that is that when I started looking to the neuroscience behind how that works, it's like, oh, habits are driven through rewards, not based on childhood. There's actually a formula called Carla Wagner curves. The details aren't important, but basically, how rewarding a behavior is is going to drive whether we perpetuate it or not, whether we keep doing it or not. Childhood is nowhere in that equation. You want to change

the behavior, including worrying, which drives anxiety. It's not about going back into the childhood. It's a about what's happening now, what's driving this? And can we take a neuroscience based approach? So long long answer to your short question, whoever it is make sure that they're actually up on the current neuroscience and not just you know, I had freedom psychoanalysis training or something like that. Nothing wrong with that, but we know a lot more now than was known in

Freud's days. But I think it's a it is a sophisticated concept that Okay, you're doing this habit, this anxiety, whether it's the kind of thought spiraling you're doing before you go on a trip, or you're drinking every nite to handle the work stress, whatever it is, you're actually getting some kind of reward, however disordered it is, from doing this. Let's look at it and get you a better reward. I mean, first, right there, somebody has to be willing to say, for lack of a better word,

it's my quote fault. But I feel like that that must be challenging to you know, I think there's some comfort and saying no, no, no, I'm not doing anything wrong. Life is happening to me, now fix it, you know, don't make me change something that must be extremely challenging in your podcast, right And I actually learned something from one of my patients that i've I've used to help my other patients with this exact question that you're asking,

which is one of my patients. So, as I was working with a patient and helping her understand like this was basically, you know, her brain trying to help her survive, you know, this thinking and planning brain going offline. She actually started using this mantra with herself when she noticed that she was starting to get repped up with anxiety. She just used this mantra, Oh, that's just my brain.

And what that reminded her of was that it was her brain doing this thing, it wasn't actually her fault, and it could also help her remind herself, oh, I know how to work with this, so she could ground herself and actually work with it. That's incredible, Yeah, because I do think the irony about anxious people myself and

what did is we just want control. We want to control the universe, we want to control you know, everything, and things like your book on winding anxiety and working with a therapist, you're actually being given the greatest gifts, control, options, choices, and we're like no, no, no, no, no, don't you know I don't want to It's just funny. I see that. I saw that so many years in myself, Like someone is giving me exactly what I want. Here you can control this, and I'm like, now I'm not going to

do it. And so you know, it's it's tough. I mean, like everything you're saying in your book makes total sense, but I imagine as the person that has to work with people, it might take a beat to get there, right it can, and so here I find two things that are common. One is when the anxiety gets bad enough. It's kind of like somebody getting into the gutter with when they're drinking. Becomes bad enough, then they wake up and're like, wow, this is a problem. Just something about this.

So when somebody's anxiety is bad enough, they're more driven to find a solution. I hope that we can reach people before that because I hate to see people suffer from debility to tating anxiety. The other piece is to really be able to see, oh, you know, this is just my brain and we're giving them these tools. You know, think of it as knowledge is power, And so for anybody listening, keep in mind, the more you know about how your mind works, the more you'll be able to

work with it. And this applies beyond anxiety. So if you're not sure, if you have anxiety or not. Just think of any habit that you have, and this same process can be applied in the same way, and then maybe examine whether you've got a little bit of anxiety and then use it in the same way. And I want to empower everyone listening to be able to claim anxiety.

You know, I think so many people think it is this big, bad disorder, and you know, they can't say they have it because you know, they don't have it as bad as this and that. And it's like, I just think anxiety is sort of the human condition in a way, you know, whether some people experience it often or not. I like the way you put that. So there is one condition that I certainty can say that we all have what you just named the human condition. And in that human condition is a whole range of

emotions and a whole range of states. And our brains are just they're just trying to gather information so they can predict the future. And when there's uncertainty, we might get a little anxious, and that's okay. And the more we can notice more quickly that we're anxious, the more we can actually get our thinking and planning brain back online and get back on track. So let's talk about

how we do some of that. So maybe explain to everyone what's an adaptive versus a maladaptive behavior and how does that get us on the road to learning about changing our habits within Well, let's use any habit as an example. So we form habits through a simple process. You know, three elements of trigger, a behavior, and a result. So an adaptive habit. You can think, I won't use too many examples from our ancient ancests is because I agree with you, I think that's overplayed, but it's helpful

to just kind of conceptualize where this comes from. So imagine our ancient ancestors didn't have refrigerators, right, they didn't have um sources of food that they could get every day. They had to go find food, and so the brains are set up and our brains are still set up this way, you know, to go find the food. So the first element is a trigger. They see the food, there's the trigger, they eat the food. There's the behavior.

That's the second element. And then the third element is from a neuroscience perspective or reward, where their brain, you know, the stomach sense this dopamine signal to their brain that says, remember what you ate and where you found it. So an adaptive habit is to remember where food is. Another adaptive habit in modern day is too well. Think of all the habits that we have that we do every day, like tying our shoes, putting our clothes on, walking, eating breakfast,

making breakfast, making coffee. Imagine having to relearn those things every day. You know, we'd be exhausted by the end of breakfast. So the idea there is there are tons of adaptive habits that we take for granted because their habitual, we do them without thinking. That's basically what habit is. It's an automatic behavior that that's just cute. So there, you know, we've got habits. Most of our habits are adaptive and then sometimes they become maladaptive. So based on

what we've learned, they cannot be so helpful. So maybe an example would be, so adaptive habit is learning how to eat. Maladaptive habit would be learning the value of chocolate cake. You know, so we set down this reward value of chocolate cake. Typically it starts okay, let's go back to childhood. Are you ready? So so we got a birthday parties when we're kids, and we associate cake with not only tasting good, but ice cream and presents and friends and parties. And for me, did you ever

go to roller skating birthday party? You know? Yeah? Yeah, I associate that with roller skating sometimes. Um. And so imagine all the times we laid on that reward value as a kid, and then when we're not a kid anymore. You know, when we were kids, we could eat cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Right, it didn't affect us at all, you know, just we're like boom all album more cake. Now I get a sugar rushi and crash when I eat cake, you know, so I have to

eat it very judiciously, you know. And if I ate cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, things probably wouldn't go so well in terms of my body feeling good, in my brain functioning. So, uh, we can see how that can become maladaptive if we just carry that habit forward, I'm just going to take the rest of my life. So that's where the same behavior can be just fine,

and then it becomes maladaptive. So I think of, you know, the far end of the habit spectrum as addiction, right, and the simple definition there is like continued to just despite adverse consequences. So that can be applied to everything from overeating to smoking. Ready for this to worrying, right, because worrying tends to be maladaptive. It just it's just it gets us all fired up with adrenaline. It doesn't

help us solve problems. Actually, it moves this in the opposite direction, because it's harder to think and plan when we're when we're worrying. I Yet it's it. It becomes rewarding in the sense that even if we can't control the situation, we at least feel like we're doing something. You know. It's like the parents worrying about their kidther I'm like, I don't know if he or she is safe. Well,

I'll just worry about them until they get home. I can promise you they're worrying did not keep their kids safe, but it gave them something to do. It's like if you're driving on the freeway deadlock traffic and you start taking side streets. It takes the same amount of time, but you felt like you were doing something and you still we relate to the thing because there were just too many cars on the road. That day, you know,

and and I really relate to that. You know, in my days of fear flying, I had maladaptive habits I had. I had the habit of doing certain thinking which only increased my anxiety and panic on the flight. And I couldn't let it go because the reward I was getting was that I had convinced myself that I was inherently doing something dangerous and I survived it because I got lucky, you know, when the plane landed safely, and that all

of my worrying was keeping me in reality. I had this very insistent thing that listen, nobody bullshit me here. I don't want to hear about everything's okay and blah blah. I'm going to face reality. You know. I know that wasn't even a question. It was just sort of a rant. And well, I think you're highlighting something that I think it's helpful to know, which is our brains love to

make associations, right. One of the biggest ones that I see is performance anxiety, where people feel like, well, I was anxious and I performed well, so therefore anxiety helped me perform well. Wrong, actually wrong, dead wrong. There's no evidence to support the fact that anxiety makes people for perform better. In fact, there plenty of research showing that there's an inverse relationship, being the more anxious someone is,

the worst they perform. Now, I don't know about you when you've performed, but the height, the peak of performance is when people talk about being in flow or being in the zone and how much anxiety is happening in those moments. Zer oh yes. And you know what's interesting you said that. I just figured it out now because I'm not, uh, honest to God as a performer. I really am not like this big, attention starved person. And so I used to think why the only place I'm

not anxious is on stage? And it wasn't because I love the crowd and the applause. It's not that. It's what you're saying. I was in flow, um, and and yeah, you can't really be anxious when you're I don't know, the bad word for that is happy. It's not happy. But when you're focused is way I think of this, and is you know in the way that Mehi chicks and Mohi was the psychologist that termed you know, the coin the term flow is that we're out of oursel

we're outside of ourselves. Were merged with it. You know. It's like action and events are merged into one where we lose a whole sense of who we are. We lose a sense of self. So he describes this as effortless. It's selfless, it's joyful, it's timeless, all these things that you talked about. And if you think of anxiety, so anxiety makes feels closed down, it feels contracted flow, it

feels such the opposite. So expanded that you can think of anxiety, says okay, here I am because I'm feeling anxious. When we've expanded that to infinity, we lose a sense of where we end and where the rest of the world begins. And in fact, this is where my lab has done some research, some neuroscience research on this, where there's a part of the brain called the default one network,

which is involved in self referential processing. Basically, when we're thinking about ourselves, it gets activated and it gets really active. You said, that's called the default network because it is what we default to. We're not doing, say anything else. In fact, it probably we're defaulting to this about fifty of waking life like this is this is the thinking about ourselves and how we feel and what we think

and making our associations and all that. And so it gets activated when we're craving things for everything from cocaine to chocolate to gambling, and it gets activated when we worry. The more we worry, the more it gets activated. Yet when we so my lab studied experienced meditators, we find that experienced meditators decrease activity in that defaultment network. They're

deactivating that network compared to everybody else. And in fact, we've even had folks get into flow while they're in the in our fm R I scanner and we can see their post their defaultment network. Parts of that brain, in particular the post your singulate cortex get really quiet when they're in flow. Anxiety bites will continue on the flip side of this message from our sponsors, This one is just sort of a comment, I guess. But you

mentioned fun. You know, I think anxious people forget to have fun, you know, And and I love you talk a lot about in your book having a playful attitude, right, so, being curious about our thoughts and like you said, your your patient who said, oh, that's just my brain, you know, that's sort of the point of One of the underlying points of this podcast is like we can have some fun with our self diagnosed anxiety diagnoses. You know, um,

it doesn't have to be I have anxiety. And so my point is like a little thing I do is I call my anxiety Lisa. So. I used to work at this office and the human resources woman was such a drama queen, and she would come to my desk and she would go Now, if I ask her, what's wrong, there, I go. She's often running. If I pretend I didn't hear her sighing, then she goes away. So my anxiety tries to get my attention. Hey, when are you gonna die? Hey you can't sleep tonight? Hey blah blah blah. That's

Lisa sighing. I don't have to follow it down its road. I can just go, h, thanks for weighing in and and move on. Yeah, And you're giving a great example of how things like mindfulness training like we use in this Unwinning Anxiety app can help people get that perspective where if you can see anxiety as thoughts and emotions and body sensations, then you get perspective and you're no longer as identified with it. You know, in physics they

call this observer effect. By observing, you're affecting the results. We can do that with our minds by seeing. And I love how you name it Lisa. You know, it's like, oh, there is Lisa again as compared to you know, you are locking arms with Lisa and she's your she's grabbing you and dragging you along. It's like, oh, there it is. Oh, there's that thought, there's that body sensation and the oh that's really where the curiosity comes in. It's like, oh,

this is this? So, for example, getting really curious when we're anxious, it's like, oh, there's restlessness, there's tightness, there's heat. Well, is it restlessness that equals anxiety? No, it's just restlessness. Is it heat? Well, now that's heat, is it? The you know, is that that burning quality of this rising

my chest? Well, that's just burning rising my chest. So it's not that these are pleasant, but it helps us see that this big, bad concept of that we labeled anxiety is made up of physical sensations, and the more curious we get about them, the less identified we are with them. So you have this wonderful app called unwind and I'm looking at it right now, and you can do things like check in. So I'm checking in and

it asked me how I'm feeling. I could put anxious, how anxious skill a one to tend hit next, and then you know, you might take me through. Okay, so bring your awareness to your thoughts, or it might give you a little breathing exercise. So I really highly recommend

everyone get this app. And uh, I do mean this as a compliment, but one time I used it last week when I was feeling anxious, and I swear to God, all I had to do was and I didn't even end up doing anything because there's something in my brain that goes, well, there's an app for this, so what you have is normal and you just needed to check in and get out of the default mode you talk about.

And then I didn't even end up checking and I just merely opening the app and knowing that there's a name for what I have, and it was enough for

that day. I'm not recommending people don't use and that's you know, we've designed this with the world's worst business model in mind, which is we've designed this on winding anxiety app to help empower people to learn how their minds work and to work with their minds so that they can internalize the training, because we're not trying to get them to subscribe for life so we make more money. I'm a I'm a psychiatrist. I want to help people, and so the sooner somebody learns how to work with

their mind, the less they actually need it. And like you're saying, just that association, like oh, I know how to work with my mind. Just having it there can help somebody, you know, once they've learned the tools, and it sounds like you've done a great job with this, they can internalize and use those tools whenever they need them. Yeah, and I noticed it just sort of stopped, even the physical sensation. So before we go, may I ask you to do a little a little play with me. It's

an improvisational play. And uh okay, So I want to take someone through what they should do in a panic attack, right because and I know that we could have gone on and on about your meditation practice, and maybe you'll come back and we'll talk about that. But it's really hard when you're in the middle of a panic attack to suddenly start meditating or you know, I mean, it's

just not gonna happen. Right. So, let's say I'm on an airplane and I'm having a panic attack, and you're next to me, you're my coach, and I begin So here it comes the sweaty palms, my heart's racing, and feeling feelings of unreality. I'm going to die. Oh my god. What do you say to me in that moment to get me to try to stop this attack? Yeah? So knowing, so,

I'm just gonna say this. So in my mind as a neuroscientist, the first thing I'm going to think is this person is having a panic attack, so they're thinking and planning. Part of their brain is offline. They can't actually utilize their rational brain right now, So we're not going to go there. Okay. So you're sitting next to me and I say, okay, pull out your hand. We're going to do this practice called five finger breathing together. You want to do this, okay, but I can't breathe

in short of breath. What do you mean, Take your index finger of one hand and put it at the outside of the base of your pinky of your other hand. Can you do that? Yeah, okay, I'll do that a while. The plane's crashing. So as you breathe in, trace up the outside of your pinky and feel what that feels like. Now pause there for a second. Now I should breathe in trace at the outside of your ring finger, long deep breath, as you breathe out, traced down the inside

of your ring finger. And we're gonna do one more. As you breathe in trace up the outside of your middle finger, and as you breathe out, traced down the inside of your middle finger. And if we were doing this, we would keep going for five breasts up to your thumb, and we do another five breasts from your thumb back to your pinky. Yeah, so ten breaths of forcing your working memory, part of your brain to pay attention to

four things at once. Okay, you're breathing rate your fingers, your index finger, and your pinky, and then also visually seeing your hands. Okay, those four things. Our brains can't hold much more in working memory than four things at once. So if we do that, it does multiple things. One is it forces us to see how quickly we're breathing. And typically when you're tracing up your finger, our breathing

starts to slow down. Already. Typically, when we're anxious, we're gonna breathe rapidly, so it starts to slow down our breathing. And at the same time, it's it's like our brain has a certain amount of working memory. It crowds out the working memory from those anxious oots. So those anxious thoughts gets booted right, and when we take ten breasts, our physiology calms down and when those thoughts come back on. Now there's a mismatch in terms of arousal level. Our

body is calmer. Those thoughts come in at a different arousal level, and they say, hey, we're supposed to be anxious, and our body says, well, I'm not actually feeling as anxious as I was. So it's easier to be able to watch those thoughts and just name, oh, there's Lisa or whatever and let them go rather than get caught up in them. Because if the arousal level is the same for the body and the thinking brain, they're gonna play off of each other and they're just gonna be like,

I'm anxious. Oh yeah, I'm really anxious. Now I'm really you know, and they just go out back and forth with each other. So if your body is calm your anxious thoughts come in like a bunch of guys with a six pack and they're like, yeah, let's party. And they opened the door to the house and it's some old ladies knitting and they're like, She's like, oh, pull

up its chair, I've got some yarn. Let's party. Well us And I know you have to go go be a real doctor here, but I want to thank you for coming on anxiety Bites and being uh so informative. My pleasure, Thanks for having him, Thanks for listening to anxiety bis. I hope you enjoyed my chat with Dr Judd Brewer. So I made a list of some of the practical takeaways that we learned today if you want

to refresh yourself. So number one is doctor Jedd said, the only certain thing is that there's always going to be uncertainty. So uncertainty is not something we want to evolve beyond because it helps us survive too. It's not just adrenaline that makes us anxious. It's a natural function of our mind to feel fear when the brain doesn't have accurate information, and it's a survival mechanism that helps us learn to avoid danger. Three worry can feedback and

kick in our adrenaline, which makes us more anxious. For neuroscience may play a bigger role in helping people with anxiety. Then, going back to childhood in our therapy sessions. Five, habits are driven through rewards and how rewarding a behavior is. So that's going to drive a whether we perpetuate a behavior or not. But by the way, rewards can be disordered, and that's where it can get tricky. Six. The more you know about how your mind works, the more you'll

be able to work with it. I think that was actually seven. I at some point I've lost to count here. I'm not going to go back and re record this. I told you this podcast is nothing if not unpretentious. So whatever the next one is, the more quickly we can notice we're anxious, then the more we can get our thinking and planning brain online and get back on track. A habit is just automatic behavior, and some are healthy, are adaptive, and some are maladaptive. Like worry, worry doesn't

help us solve problems. That actually moves us in the opposite direction, as worry makes the brain literally unable to think. There is no scientific evidence to support the notion that anxiety makes us perform better when in actuality the peak of performances when we are in the zone or what's called in flow, and the term flow means we are out of ourselves. It's effortless, selfless, joyful. Anxiety is constricted, flow is opposite. And lastly, anxiety is thoughts, emotions and

body sensations. But you are not anxiety. Thanks again for listening to Anxiety Bites. Will see you next week and remember anxiety bites, but You're in control. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.