Dr. Jud Brewer on Habits to Heal Anxiety

thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks

for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Dr Judd Brewer, a thought leader in the field of habit change and the science of self mastery. Judd is the director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and Associate Professor in Behavioral and Social sciences and psychiatry at the Schools of Public Health and Medicine at Brown University. His newest book is Unwinding Anxiety. New Science shows how to break the cycles of worry and fear to heal

your mind. Hello, Dr Judd, welcome back. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on. We're going to be discussing anxiety, bad habits, habit loops in general. But before we start, let's start, like we always do, with a parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside

of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second, and she looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in

the work that you do. Well. I think it means a lot so in my life I can relate to that personally. You know, things that I do that I'm literally feeding, both mentally or physically, they get reinforced. And how that relates to my work is just about everything, because that's how habits are formed. Habits are driven not based on the behavior themselves, the behaviors themselves, but they're

actually driven based on how rewarding they are. And you can think of that reward piece being us feeding them literally, you know, everything from intellectual curiosity being you know, feeding knowledge, and you can think of food as literally feeding you know, feeding sustenance. And in that sense, virtually everything we do I can't think of many exceptions, is really fed this way. So that's what it means to me. And the mechanism that you're talking about really is a very old evolutionary

wise mechanism called reward based learning. Yes, it's actually evolutionarily conserved all the way back to the simplest of nervous systems. So the sea slug, which is the simplest known nervous system, it's got twenty thousand neurons. You know, we have a few more than that. But as humans, we learn most

behaviors basically in the same way as sea slugs. So some people might think what sea slugs, but in fact they can teach us something about what we do, and we can look at our own experience to see how true it is for us. So basically, think of our ancient ancestors on the savannah or in the you know, the woods, foraging, you know, hunting and gathering. If they happened upon a food source, their brain needed to learn to remember where that was. So you can think of

just three key elements. One is a trigger, second is the behavior, and the third is the result or the reward. So imagine foraging and then you come across food source like, oh, here's some edible mushrooms. So there's the trigger. You see the mushrooms. The behavior would be you eat the mushrooms. And then the reward from a neuroscientific standpoint, is your stomach sense this dopamine signal to your brain that says,

remember what you ate and where you found it. So it's actually there to help us learn to remember things. Oh here's food. We also learned to avoid danger in very much the same way. You come across the while the animal that's gonna chase you down, you run away, there's the behavior, and then the reward is you don't get eaten. Right, So this is often referred to as the habit loop. So let's take that basic idea and apply it to a bad habit. So walk us through

a habit loop of a bad habit. You could do a hundred of them, but yeah, could let's pick smoking or eating. Well, let's use eating because I think you know, smoking is pretty straightforward. You know, you're stressed out, you smoke a cigarette, and then you know you you feel a little bit of relief, and so you keep that going. In that case, the trigger is I'm stressed out, The routine or the habit is I smoke, and the reward

is I feel a little bit of relief. Yeah, But if you apply this to eating, for example, you know, we can think of smoking as some behavior that we've learned that we don't need to do to survive. But eating gets trickier because we could be driven by physiologic hunger and scientific terms, we talked about homeostatic hunger because we need to get back to homeostasis when we're hungry, but we could also think about this in terms of hedonic hunger, which is just a fancy term for emotional eating.

So let's talk about hedonic hunger. You know, eating in the absence of hunger is driven by boredom, by stress, by loneliness, you know, by a bunch of things, and so you can think of whatever that emotional state is as a trigger. Let's say, you know, these are negative emotional states, but there can also be positive ones. We want to celebrate some great thing that happened, and then the behavior is we go get ice cream, go get cake,

eat some chocolate whatever. Our favorite food is, our celebratory food, or we eat our comfort food if it's to help us not feel as bad as we're feeling. And then the result is, you know, if we're celebrating, we feel great. If it's that we're trying to distract ourselves or feel better from the boredom, from the sadness, loneliness, whatever that helps us distract us is a little bit or feel a little bit better. I had a patient who used to binge eat, and she would describe it as numbing

herself out from negative emotions. She would binge to the point where she would just numb out. Does that make sense totally? I have a question about that because as we look at bad habits or bad habits taken too far, right, we start to refer to that as addiction. Right, and in addiction, it seems that something breaks in that that habit loop doesn't get updated. It's like, for a long time, it's like, okay, trigger, as I feel bad, the thing I do is I take a drug and the reward

is I feel better. But after a little while that starts to become I feel bad. I take a drug. Maybe I feel better for just a brief second and then I feel terrible. Yes, or I eat, you know, I'm binge eating, I eat, I might feel better for a flicker of a second, and then I feel terrible. So it's like that loop doesn't learn. It doesn't learn.

You know. This goes back to your parable. We're constantly the loop is designed for deficit, meaning the one you feed it gets hungry again and it says, do that again, do that again. I like the simple definition of addiction as continued just despite adverse consequences. Right, So the habit could be could be anything where you know, let's say eating, you know, and so oh you get a little bit

of chocolate. But then if we keep doing that to the point where we're eating chocolate every time we're stressed out or every time we're sad, or every time whatever, and we start to notice that we're gaining a bunch of weight or we're getting cavities or whatever. We can see. Oh, they're the adverse consequences that are coming from this, so that the habit has kind of bled into addiction just because we're continuing to do it over and over and over,

because that habit loop has literally been fed. And is it that the consequences in most cases come after the reward, and so even if that reward has become vanishingly slim, it's still there for a flicker, even if then what comes as bad. And that's why the loop can't be updated as easily. Yeah, and I'm glad you bring that up because there's a nuance here. So it's as you

are talking about. But also when we form habits, habits are actually set up in a way that I think of as set and forget, so as in, we set the habit and then we forget about the details. And that's actually set up so that we don't have to remember or relearn everything every day, right, So we often set up habits. Let's keep going with the eating theme.

Birthday cake for example. You know, we set up the reward of the birthday cake when we were a kid, and every time we went to a birthday party, it gets associated, you know, not only the taste of the cake, but with presents and friends and fun and all this and rinse and repeat. You know, this happens over and over and over to the point where you know, say a middle age and our brain just says, oh, it sees cake, and it says, oh, I know how rewarding

that is. Just eat it. So we're not actually often paying attention to how rewarding that behavior is right in that moment. And if we don't pay attention, our brain does not change. It can't update that reward value, and so it doesn't change the behavior. And that's actually a critical piece for what sustains behaviors and also is a critical element for changing behavior. And this is where being mindful of what you're doing is so important. Like what

you just said, it allows us to update that reward information. Yes, so specifically, there's a part of the brain called the orbitofrontome cortex which is involved in setting reward values and kind of holding them in mind, and it kind of sets up this reward hierarchy so that when given a choice between two behaviors, it says, oh, pick this one. I already know how rewarding the So for example, you know, if we're giving a choice between broccoli and cake, our

brain says cake, duh, you know. And that's set up not only from the caloric density standpoint, from a survival standpoint, but from all the birthday parties and all of these things, so that reward hierarchy is set up so strongly. This is why parents don't bring out dessert at the same time as vegetables because their kids are you know, duh. Their kids are not gonna eat the vegetables. But that reward high degree also is the critical element for change.

So if we don't pay attention to how rewarding something is right now, we're not going to change the behavior. We're just going to keep going through the behavior and say, oh, I've got this set reward value and I'm just gonna assume it's the same and I'm not actually going to

pay attention. I'll give an example that a guy who came in so my clinic who wanted to quit smoking and he'd been smoking about forty years, so he had reinforced his smoking habit loop about three hundred thousand times literally, right, they got a pack of cigarettes. Twenty cigarettes in a pack, three five days a year. Anybody can do that math. So there he had reinforced it. And what I had him do was start paying attention as he was smoking. And he came back and he's like, how did I

not notice this before? You know, these cigarettes taste like crap? Well, it was because he would smoke a cigarette to help his dopamine deficit, because he was addicted to the nicotine, and that relief from the dopamine deficit was what he was focusing on as compared to the actual act of smoking. And as he started to pay attention to what the smoking actually tasted like, it helped him update that reward value.

And we've just recently done some studies where we can actually map out the change in reward value over time as people simply bring in mindfulness practices and pay attention when they're smoking cigarettes, or when they're over eating or when they're eating junk food. Is that based on people's surveyed response to how the activity feels. We try to do it in the moment, so that's the best way

to collect accurate data. And so we've developed these app based mindfulness training programs, and what we've done is we've embedded something that we call the creating Tool, which basically has people pay attention as they're doing the behavior. So if they're smoking a cigarette, it has this checklist that walks them through. It says, Okay, notice what it smells like. Okay, check take a drag, you know, click on the box, What does it taste like? How does it feel going

into your lungs? What does it smell like coming out of your mouth? And then we asked them how content do you feel now, you know, and we have them check in with their body, checking with our emotions, check in with themselves to see how rewarding was that behavior? Right then, same thing for eating. We have them pay attention as they eat and then ask them how content do you feel? And then we also asked them how much did you eat so they can line that up.

If they overrate and they don't feel very content, that actually decreases the reward value in their brain so that the next time they come back they can remember it.

So the other piece that we've put in this tool is basically an imagination exercise where before they do the behavior, So after they've done them mindful eating or mindful smoking, we have them pay attention and say, okay, imagine doing this behavior before you do it, and bring to mind what you're gonna do and do it, which basically brings

forward the previous times that they've done it. And as they've paid attention previously and updated that reward value, then that's what gets stored in their brain, and as they imagine doing it in the future, their future imagination is based on previous behavior, and so that updated reward value from the last time they've done it gets into their brain and it actually helps them become less excited to do it if that reward value is dropped. Now get this so we can collect all these data as people

are in their daily lives do doing these things. It only takes ten to fifteen times of somebody using this craving tool for the reward value to trop basically to zero ten to fifteen times. So it's not like, you know, somebody has been smoking for years, it's going to take years for them to realize that smoking really taste crappy, and that it's gonna be crappy enough that it updates

the reward value. It takes ten to fifteen times of people really paying attention where they become significantly disenchanted with the behavior. That's pretty remarkable. And so the key then is to do the behavior very mindfully, then very much sort of check in on how rewarding was that. And now while I have that idea in mind, like, boy, that wasn't so great, I imagine myself doing it again from where I'm sitting right now, which then sort of

updates that value. That's basically it. And the only slight tweak there is, next time they haven't urge to do the savior, we have them go through the imagination exercise because right afterwards they might not be that excited to do it again. But the next time they want to smoke a cigarette or eat the comfort food or eat the junk food or whatever, that's the time where we can bring this in. So it can kind of bring that recollection up so that they can become disenchanted right

in that moment and help them actually change the behavior. Okay, so the imagination exercises before they do it the next time yeah. Yeah, and with this mindfulness training, when we've delivered this in person, we've had people get five times

the quit rates of gold standard treatment. Right. More recently, at a study that was led by Ashley Mason at UCSF word she found at fort reduction and craving related eating and so you know, we can see significant change as people go through this mindfulness training and in particular pay attention to the results of their behaviors. What are your ideas on moderation in the case of people who have had an addiction. I work with a lot of patients,

for example, who don't want to quit drinking altogether. You know, they've struggled with drinking, but they really struggle even more with imagining a life of abstinence. And so there's a there's a lot of research around this idea of harm reduction. You know, it's it's better to help people meet them where they're at, rather than try to force them to be somewhere that they might never be able to go.

So I very strongly found that that works pretty well in my clinic, and in particular it lines up with what we're seeing with this reward based learning piece, which is if people pay careful attention to what they're doing. This doesn't necessarily mean that, let's use alcohol as an example. It's not that alcohol is this evil thing. Now, the current research shows that no level of drinking is actually healthy, so you know, physical health benefits aside, you know, so

I just need to state that as a physician. You know, the research is relatively clear that no level of drinking is that healthy. But if somebody wants to drink um, you know, socially, what my patients do is really pay attention to what it's like if they have one drink. Okay, what's that like? If they have two drinks, what's that like. For a lot of my patients, it's actually around two to three drinks where they start to lose control. So if they want to drink, if they want to, you know,

do this in moderation. If they enjoy drinking wine, or if they enjoy the taste of beer or whatever it is, they can do that. And if they really pay careful attention, they can get that satisfaction from a single drink, and they can also notice and remind themselves what the consequences are afterwards. You know, if they drink a second or a third drink, and they get out of control, or they get drunk, or they bange or whatever. They can notice the results of that and say, oh, well, you

know that's not helping. You know that's not leading me to a happier, healthier life. What's it like compared to simply drinking a single drink? And they can start to notice that the single drink gets them a lot of the benefit that they're looking for, but also doesn't have those adverse consequences that come with binging or getting out of control. Half the listeners of this show just set down their headphones and are now about to throw off twenty years and have a drink. So so I'll point

that out as well. So folks that have you know, years of sobriety, they can probably notice the benefit of being completely sober. There. There are huge benefits to that as well, and from a physical health standpoint, that's probably the way to go. So I think it's really important, especially if somebody has had twenty years of sobriety, it's really important for them to focus on what that feels

like now to live the sober life. I have tons of patients who just feel really good physically mentally that you know, they just feel sharper, they're they're on you know, everything about their life feels better if they focus on that as compared to what, you know, what they get with a single drink. Often people are like, this isn't really doing it for me? You know, it's easier for them to even maintain the sobriety itself, right. I often talk about, in my case, the beautiful clarity of zero.

You know, for me, I start waiting out of that, and it's a lot of contemplation and debating and which I do this and a lot of work and zero is just zero. Yes, absolutely, So let's take this habit loop idea and apply it to anxiety. In what way does this help us with anxiety? Well, a lot of people don't think of anxiety as being driven by habit loops, but in fact, there's quite a bit of research showing that anxiety can actually be reinforced in the same way

as smoking or over eating or any other habit. T D. Boork Effect started doing some of this research at Penn State back in the eighties and is published quite a bit on this. Basically, if you think of that trigger behavior results relationship, so that trigger could be a negative emotion. The behavior in this case is a mental behavior worrying. So worrying does a lot of things. It can make us feel like we're in control, It can distract us from that negative emotion, It can help us plan for

a worst case scenario. You know, there are a bunch of things that worrying actually does. The results of that can actually perpetuate anxiety and worry habit loops. So if the distraction from the negative emotion feels better than the

negative emotion itself, there's a reward in that. If the feeling like somebody is in control or problem solving, even if they're not really solving the problem, that feeling of doing something feels better than doing nothing, there's a reward in that, And all of those will drive themselves as anxiety habit loops. You know, I hadn't learned this in

my psychiatry residency training. It was only when I started to look at these mechanisms and to try to understand why were my patients suffering so much that I started to understand this myself. And in fact, I do this now with every new patient that comes into my clinic. The first thing I'll do is, as I'm taking a history. I'll have them map out their habit loops and I'll

give it. I'll give an example of some that I've been seeing in my clinic who came in referred for anxiety, and you know, he sat down and I had him described what it was like. And he said, well, I go on the highway and I feel like I'm in a speeding bullet in his car. And he said that thought would lead me to avoid driving on the highway to the point where I just don't drive on the highway anymore. So we mapped it out on a piece

of paper. Actually, we just mapped it out in thirty seconds. Okay, the trigger is these thoughts, the behavior is not driving on the highway, and then the reward is that he could avoid those negative feeling thoughts. And this was to the point where he had full blown panic disorder. He would avoid driving on the highway. He barely drove on

the local roads. And just him being able to see this right, just to map this out in thirty seconds, was was really eye opening for him where he could start to understand rather than his mind being this black box, he could understand what was act really happening. So once he sees that is it just the scene it that starts to unwind it. So let's continue with him because he's an interesting example. So this gentleman, he met all the criteria for panic disorder, meant all the criteria for

generalized anxiety disorder, and he was also very overweight. It was about eighty pounds overweight. So I sent him home with the instruction to just map out these habit loops. I gave him our unwinning anxiety app and said, go map out these habit loops. He came back two weeks later and the first thing he said to me was I lost fourteen pounds. And I looked at him quizzically

because we hadn't even approached that yet. I was going to save the eating piece for later, and he said, you know, I started mapping out my habit loops, so anxiety was triggering me to eat, and that actually was making me feel bad about myself because it wasn't fixing my anxiety and it was just causing me to gain weight. And I know that, you know, my weight is very

unhealthy right now. So he became completely disenchanted with the overeating through that mechanism of just learning how his mind worked, which goes back to this orbit of frontal cortex piece. If we bring awareness in the first step is to map out a habit loop. That's what he did. What this does is it can naturally lead to a second step, which is becoming disenchanted with our behavior. And the way we can do that is by paying attention to the

cause and effect relationship. What does what's the result of the behavior that we do. So he was paying attention to the eating and he realized that the result of that was that he didn't actually feel very good about himself and he wasn't losing weight. So he became disenchanted with doing that behavior. He didn't have to force himselves to stop doing it, He just stopped being interested in doing that, and over the course of five to six months,

he lost over a hundred pounds. Notice how that doesn't take willpower, grit force, or anything. It was literally tapping into that same redward based learning mechanism that had driven

the process in the first place. One of the things that I see in a lot of people that I do one on one work with is that we don't see those loops very clearly because we have so much self judgment that just sort of kicks in and seems to trigger all this emotional which doesn't allow us to learn that part of what you guys see also absolutely absolutely so I bet you could map out self judgment habit loops with folks that you work with. I see this all the time in my clinic, especially with folks

who feel like their weight is unhealthy. So thinking of a patient right now, who we get up in the morning look in the mirror. Okay, so there's the trigger. Her behavior was to judge herself for being overweight, and then the result was that she would get into this shame spiral. Yet because she had binge eating disorder, she would actually because that negative emotion was a trigger for her to binge. Sometimes she would binge, you know, ironically

because she was judging herself for being overweight. So that self judgment habit loop is there all the time. I think in the West we're very good at judging ourselves. Yeah, I think it's one of the ultimate mechanisms in the downward spiral of addiction. You know, I feel bad, so I use Now I feel worse about myself. So what tool do I have to deal with except to you? And it's just but yeah, I do think there is

that ability. Like we talk a lot about self compassion being a really powerful tool, not just because it makes you feel better, that's great, but because it allows you to learn. If you can suspend that judgment and move into a more neutral place, you're actually able to learn and learning. As you're pointing out here, learning and seeing is really the key to to unwinding a lot of these things. Yes, yes, And I like the framework that Carold Dweck put or ward you know, decades ago, around

growth mindset. You may be familiar with this, but just two for anybody that's not. She talks about fixed versus growth mindset, and she had focused in the educational space where you know, if if a student feels like they've got a fixed i Q, then they're not going to be able to change. But if somebody imagines that it's not fixed, there in this growth mindset and they actually do better in school. I think this is actually true

for all of us. If we get locked into self judgment or shame spirals, we literally are closed down and we are not open to learning. But if we can bring awareness in and get curious, oh, here's this habit loop already it opens this up and it literally feels

more open. So my lab just finished a study in fact looking at these things where we had people rate a bunch of different types of mind states, everything from anxiety to frustration, to connection, to joy to curiosity, and universally people reported that anxiety, feeling, frustrated, anger, things like that all felt more closed down in and contracted, whereas things like joy, connection, curiosity felt open. So even there we can see how frustration, anger, those are motivated states.

Those are not states where we're looking for more information. They say go do something, whereas curiosity literally feels more open and opens us up into this growth mindset where we can learn. So I'm really glad you brought that forward.

So let's go back to an anxiety habit loop. So I can imagine some people who are listening saying something like, Okay, I know that I worry, and I know that it doesn't do me any good, and that the more I worry, the more sick to my stomach I feel, and the more sick to my stomach I feel, the less able I am to show up at my job and do a good job. So they started see that what's the next step for somebody to go from there. Yes, so we've talked about the first two steps. We haven't talked

about the third step yet. So step one map out that habit. Step two, you know, check in to see what we're getting from this. And as you're pointing out, with worry, it's pretty straightforward. For most people, it's not getting us anything, right. So if we can see that that reward value of worrying starts to drop, now that opens the door for step three, which I think of as bringing in a b BO, a bigger better offer. Okay.

So our brain it's always looking for something better, and it says, well, you know, I worry doesn't feel that great, give me something better. Okay. So here, well let me ask you what feels better, worry or curiosity? Curiosity? Yeah, So here we can use simple mindfulness practices. And I think of the attitudinal quality of mindfulness as that of

being curious. So if we simply get curious. So let's think of this somebody's worrying, and they can get curious and start to notice, Oh, what thoughts are going through my head as I'm worrying? What does this feel like in my body as I'm worrying? And in particular, we give people an exercise to explore that worri or the anxiety in their body and just ask a simple question, do I feel it more on my right side or my left side? Or is it more in the front

or is it more in the back. And what that does is it engenders this natural is it more on my right side on my left side? Because that draws in our natural curiosity. It doesn't matter what side it's on, or whether it's in the front more or in the back. But just asking the question naturally brings up our curiosity is it more on the right side or the left side?

And right there were more curious than we were a moment ago, and that helps us tap into the curiosity right then and there when we're anxious or we're worried. And it also helps us see, oh, these are physical sensations. Maybe I can be with these physical sensations rather than trying to push them away or get rid of them or avoid them. Oh what's this feel like? Oh it's vibration, it's tightness, its tension, And we can start to explore

what is worry actually feel like. And then as we explore it, we start to notice that it's constantly changing, and so we don't have to be as afraid of it or trying to constantly avoid it as much as we might habitually have done in the past. Does that make sense? Totally? Totally. One of my favorite questions that I'll use is something like how do I know I'm sad? I'll find my brain declaring an emotional state, and then

I'll go, how do I know that I'm that? And it it does that immediate, like I have to start sort of on a detective hunt, Like, well, that's a good question. How do I know? Yeah, well, I guess there's these thoughts and I like that idea. I think you and I may have talked about this last time you're on that if you start to unpack, these things

tend to land on us. Is this like boom? But if you can start to unpack, like, oh, there's some thoughts here, there's some of physical sensations here, there's a desired behavior that's being called for here, is I start to unpack those? Each of those is easier to handle than one big blob. Absolutely, It's like, you know, a thunderstorm by itself can seem big and bad and scary to a kid. But if the parent is explaining to the child, oh, well, there's lightning, there's thunder, there's rain,

there's wind. Suddenly the child understands what it is and it's not this foreign, big, bad entity. It's something of a natural wonder. Oh thunderstorm. Yeah, that's a great example. I have been looking for an analogy of that, and that's a really good one. Thunderstorm. Going back to anxiety, you you mentioned that the trigger is a negative emotion which would send us into worry. The reward then is that we would feel a little bit better, except until

we don't. Right. Is part of it getting back to that original core emotion that we're trying to run away from. I think really core to this is related to getting back to it, which is being able to be with the original emotion. So that's really the core of mindfulness in general, which is to change our relationship to whatever the emotion is. Often the habitual tendency is, you know, to kind of use our willpower or our control and say this is unpleasant. I want to make it go away.

So I'm going to try to do something. I'm gonna distract myself, I'm going to force it out of my mind whatever. The key here is really learning to be in relationship with whatever is. And so if we can be hey with whatever is there, that core emotion, we can be intimate with it, We can allow it to do whatever it's doing in the moment, and then also allow it to pass. So instead of pushing it away when it comes up, we allow it to come, instead of holding onto it. If it's a positive emotion, we

allow it to pass. And both of those are really key aspects of what mindfulness is all about, is changing that relationship. So we can really focus in on what's it like to resist an emotion? What's it like to hold onto an emotion? You know, both of those are actually painful. When we try to hold onto something and it's inevitably going to go away, that's painful. Right When we try to resist something and it's inevitable that it's going to come and be here, that's painful. Both of

those are optional. So curiosity is one strategy. What are other strategies for being with something that doesn't feel good? This idea of be with the emotion, welcome the emotion, allow it to be there, At least it seems to me it's a pretty common notion and that just maybe that I interview people who talk about it every week, right, But what I find with a lot of people that I talked to, they're like, well, I did that and

I still felt terrible. And so I think one of the things is to say, well, okay, yeah, it doesn't just you know, I think we hope like, if I just to allow the emotion to be here, it's just another strategy to immediately get it to go away. But what are some strategies for going all right, I'm allowing this emotion to be here, and yes, I know it will pass, but it's not passing on a time scale I would particularly like, So how do I settle in here? So there are a couple of things that we can do.

The first one is that we can turn toward ourselves to see is there impatience here? Am I not okay with the present moment? Because you're talking about this time scale, it's not on the time scale that I want, meaning I'm not okay with what's happening. And for a lot of people, it's really about identifying that impatience and noticing what impatience feels like, and bringing a kind curious awareness to that, Oh, here's impatience, What does impatients feel like?

And focusing in there. Related to that is resistance, because often where there's impatience, their resistance, and we can focus in there what its resistance feel I can get curious about that and explore that. That helps us learn a whole lot about our habitual reactions. Oh, here's an impatience, you know, peace, or a habit loop. You know, here's reactivity or here's resistance. Another thing that we can do

is to bring kindness in. You mentioned this just briefly, and I want to unpack it a little bit more. You know, we can't force ourselves to accept things, but we can notice the difference between the opposite of kindness would be judging or or meanness, you know, or whatever. How are we relating to ourselves in these moments? Are we relating to ourselves in a way that's kind or are we relating to ourselves in a way that is judgmental or even harsh? And we can see this in

even subtle things. I remember being on a a long silent meditation retreat where it was helping me dial into all the subtle way is that I was not being kind to myself, and I even noticed that the way I was brushing my teeth was kind of forced like as compared to with kindness. So we can see it even in these subtle, seemingly habitual things that we do, like brushing our teeth, and we can notice the difference between that and simply being kind as we do these

behaviors that are supposed to benefit ourselves. Do you find that having a formal meditation practice makes people better able to practice these skills that you give them in your clinic or you give them via your app Is there a correlation of Okay, I spend time formally sitting down and trying to practice, does that strengthen these mindfulness muscles?

Do you find and is that an important part of being able to get over anxiety or smoking or eating is to actually get my ability to practice these mindfulness based type things. Do I get better at it over time? Well? Certainly, I think we get better at anything that we do over time. So it's it's, you know, the one you feed. So if we feed the habit of practicing mindfulness, it's

going to strengthen. Now, when we were doing some of our early clinical studies, we were looking at both formal mindfulness practices like meditation, and we were also looking at informal in the moment practices. So, for example, if somebody was paying attention as they were smoking a cigarette in our smoking studies, that counted as an informal mindfulness practice

because they were paying attention. We found that both correlated with clinical outcomes, but in fact we found that the informal practices were stronger in their mediation effects or their moderation effects to be precise. So we actually started changing up our training to the point where we start with the informal stuff. We say, you know, don't commit to sitting thirty minutes a day, don't don't worry about that. Let's start with helping you understand how your mind works.

Let's start with helping you work through these three steps where you map out your habit lives, where you look at the cause and effect relationship, and where you start to bring even in a moment, you bring in kindness rather than self judgment. The more people do that, the more they can start to see how mindfulness works, and then they can start to apply that in ways where

the formal practices support the informal daily practices. So we start layering in the formal practices after we start with the informal stuff, and I think it gives people a much better framework with which to understand and benefit from the formal meditation practices. So you're having people bring mindfulness to a situation. So I'm going to smoke. I bring mindfulness to the experience of smoking, and that's where my

mindfulness is. Is it important that it expands beyond those moments or is it just enough to just be mindful just in those moments. I know that's a question there's not a simple answer to. So yes, it is complex, like you're saying. Yet I think that the more we just even focus in on those simple things, the more it helps us start to just naturally see how our binds work, and our minds are really good at generalizing things where they'll say, oh, maybe it's also over here,

maybe it's also over here. And I see this all the time, both in my clinical work and in our research studies, where people make these insights and make these leaps where it had nothing to do with what we were talking about in the training, but they're seeing the parallels and they're seeing that these habit loops are playing out somewhere else. For example, we did this study with anxious physicians. We gave them our unwinning anxiety app and

we were just focusing on helping them with anxiety. Yet we found that there was a strong correlation between anxiety and burnout. And we also found, without even mentioning the word burnout in any of the training, that we got a fifty percent reduction in certain aspects of burnout simply by people helping to unwind their anxiety, but also learning to apply this to certain aspects of burnout, like callousness

towards their patients. Interesting. One of the things I find with people is that it's a challenge to remember to be mindful during today. Our day starts and we go off. Do you have any practices that you recommend that help people remember to be mindful to actually do some of this practice, because I think I agree with you. I think having a seated meditation practice has a lot of benefit, but it almost seems that the ability to actually bring some of those concepts to mind as we go through

our lives is of more benefit. And yet that's challenging, absolutely challenging. I think that's one of the biggest challenges that people face you can think of this is how do you start a new habit? So I think one of the key pieces here is a little paradoxical, which

is to focus on after you've done the behavior. So after somebody has been mindful for a moment, or they've done a five minute meditation, or they've done a ten minute meditation or whatever, to really focus on what the result is, where they can see, oh, I learned something about myself, or even if they just mapped out a habit loop, right, so it takes some ten seconds they've mapped out a habit loop. If they focus afterwards and say, oh, what does it feel like to know my mind a

little bit more? There's some juice to that reward. It feels better, and because it is rewarding, that will help to drive that behavior in the future. So previous moments of mindfulness will lead to future moments of mindfulness, I would suggest, especially if we notice the results of that, Oh you know I was aware, or oh I was kind of myself as compared to being mean to myself. Oh, that feels pretty good to be kind to myself. That's gonna update that reward value and it's going to be

more rewarding for the brain. So the brain is going to say, oh, yeah, I want to do that again. Excellent. We are at the end of time. I've got one more question. I don't know if there is an answer to it, but I constantly wonder about it, and it is this. Every single time in my life that I have exercised, every single time afterwards, I have gone, that

was a great idea. I'm glad I did that. And yet you would think with that kind of track record, I would sprint to my treadmill or to my exercise bike, and yet I still find it takes effort. Now again, I've been doing it long enough, consistently enough, It's not like I have have to put a huge amount of effort. But I'm just stunned that it seems like it should be easier. What's going on here? Yeah, So let me

ask you. When you say, oh, that was a great idea, is that kind of up in your head or are you feeling down into your body and really paying attention to what your body feels like. I think I'm paying attention to my body. You say, oh, that was a great idea, what does it feel like? My body feels like it has energy. It feels like it's alive, it feels like it's loose. So the next time you think about exercising, do you recall that piece what it actually

felt like the last time you did. When I want to get myself to exercise, I do, and what happens well I go exercise. I'm wondering if there's a habit in there is where it's like, oh, this felt like effort, but what you just described I didn't hear effort in it.

Sometimes I think my brain does this mental calculation and it's like, all right, I'm going to go exercise, and that takes you know, imagine a big stack of quarters in one hand, that much energy, and then I look at my current level of energy and it's like one quarter and I go, I don't have that, And so you know, the strategy I use, of course, is to just go we'll just get started, and I go, oh, that's one quarter of effort versus quarter of energy. I

can do that. You know that maybe that that's what's going on. I was a heroin addict and I would have robbed you a gunpoint for that. But I don't quite feel like I'm ready to do that for my thirty minutes on the dreadmill, right, right, Well, you're bringing up something really interesting, which is when there's an energy and mismatch, if we just feel into that in that moment, it can feel like this is not matched, right, And

so you're saying the stack of quarters. It's not a stack of quarters to get started, yet intellectually it's hard to kind of remember, oh, when I get started, you know, that's like somebody handing me a stack of quarters, you know,

that's right, that's right. Yeah, So remembering into that piece as compared to just feeling the energy level right now, if you go back and remember what does it feel like when I'm exercising, I'd be curious to see and we're not trying to kind of force the point here, but it'd be curious to see if that actually bring that stack of quarter that more quickly by remembering, you know, specifically, oh, what's it what's my energy level feel like when I'm exercising,

not at the moment when I'm not exercising, Because when you're not exercising, it's different, right, that's right, that's true. It's not a it's not a fair comparison to say, well, exercisings one stack at quarters. No, it's this stack of quarters when I'm actually doing it, but just recalling it, not intellectually, but just recalling it. I'd be curious to see if that actually helps that movement into it more quickly. Yeah,

it does. You know. I always remember that basic idea that I think is so powerful, which is that we get motivated and then we do something, and a lot of times we start doing something and then the motivation

comes rushing in. I just say, you know, I remind myself like it just feels like something that is that good for me to do is exercise, like it would just be always easy to do, and it sometimes just doesn't feel I mean, again, it doesn't feel terribly hard, but I have to convince myself it's a good idea, whereas you know, there's a there's some chocolate chip cookies on the table that I don't need any convincing on.

I wonder if it's the immediacy of the of the reward versus the expected output, So that could certainly be some of it. And I'm not saying this is the case for you, but just in case any of your listeners would benefit from this one thing that I see often is that people are kind of stuck up in their heads and they're saying, oh, it's a good idea to exercise, But our thinking brain does not hold a candle to our feeling body. Our feeling body is really

what drives behavior. Which is why I was asking you about recalling what it feels like to exercise, because that could be that refreshment of the stack of quarters, simply by recalling what it feels like to exercise as compared to not currently exercising and thinking, oh I should exercise again. Yeah, I agree, I think and I do this with coaching clients a lot, which you were talking about before, which is you've got to take a moment and feel the

goodness that came from the behavior you just took. Like we've got to stop and go, look how good this feels? Yeah, so that we can update it. And yeah. I often with exercise, I will just feel into my body and be like, I don't like it. So I know if I exercise what it will be like and there I am. Yeah, And let's just take thirty seconds to apply this to

other things. So one thing that I'm seeing a lot of is like self righteousness or divisiveness in in communities and families in society, and so it can feel immediately good to think, oh, I'm right, you know, and i'm gonna you know, I'm gonna push my point forward, and it's hard to in that moment remember what it feels like to actually be connected. So let's say that we're

having an argument with our significant other or partner. There can be this tendency to say, I'm gonna dig in and i'm gonna you know, I'm gonna push my point, I'm right, you know, and I'm gonna fight or I'm not going to talk to them until they get my point. If we just feel into how it feels to be connected with the other person and we compare the two, there's this ancient saying, you know, anger with its honeyed

tip and poisoned root. So that honeyed tip can just be so delicious right now, but we don't realize that we're actually causing harm to ourselves, to our relationships to others.

And if we can just take a moment to feel into what it feels like to be kind, to be connected, that can sometimes be a great way to humble ourselves, to step back and say, oh, this actually feels better to be connected, you know, to try to understand where the person is coming from, rather than trying to ram my point down their throat, which generally doesn't go so well, does not tend to work. No, and yet talk about another feedback loop that we as a human species don't

seem to have quite figured out. Yes, unfortunately, but we can this. Yeah, yeah, Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to see you again. I find your work fascinating. These topics are are near and dear to my heart. So thank you for taking some time with us. It's my pleasure. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One

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