Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Unwinding Your Anxiety | Dr. Jud Brewer

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Jud Brewer, a New York Times best-selling author, neuroscientist, addiction psychiatrist, and thought leader in the field of habit change. He is the Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, the executive medical director of behavioral health at Sharecare Inc., and a research affiliate at MIT. Dr. Jud has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit change, including treatments for smoking, emotional eating, and anxiety. You may be familiar with him from his first appearance on Finding Mastery a few years ago - episode #66.I wanted to have Jud back on to discuss his new book titled, “Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind.”You can probably imagine where this conversation is headed - we discuss some of his new findings around working with anxiety, in any walk of life._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Now, this week's conversation is with Dr. Jud Brewer, a New York Times bestselling author, a neuroscientist, an addiction psychiatrist, and flat out a thought leader in the field of habit change. He's also the director of research and innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center, where he also serves as an associate professor. Dr. Jud has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs. And the center of his work is really around habit change, how to create change and how change happens.

And then he narrows down into treatments for smoking and emotional eating and anxiety. And you might be familiar with his work from his first appearance on Finding Master a few years ago. That was episode 66. It's awesome. I want to encourage you to check that out as well. And I wanted to have Judd back to discuss his new book. And the title of it is Unwinding Anxiety. New science shows us how to break the cycles of worry and fear to heal your mind. You can probably imagine where this conversation is headed. We dive deep into some of his new findings around how to work with anxiety in any walk of life. So with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Judd Brewer. Juddson, how are you? I'm good. It's good to see you.

Oh, it's great. It's been too long. And so I'm stoked to be here with you and congrats on your book. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. So it's no surprising. The title of your book is no surprise, you know, knowing you and knowing what you're been interested in for the last couple of decades. Can you just talk a little bit about the title, what led you to that title and the quick flyover for like why you wanted to birth this book into the world? Yeah, happy to. So all the credit for the title goes to my wife who came up with the term

unwinding anxiety. And if anybody that reads it will actually see she, she's got plenty of anxiety herself. And I use a scenario from her describing how she didn't even know she had anxiety until she could start to see it clearly in her family. So the unwinding anxiety piece comes from what anxiety feels like, you know, it feel we feel wound up. And that wound up quality of experience actually totally get totally gets in the way for everything from helping our, you know, making our thinking and planning brain go offline to making us focused on things that are not helped in our best interest, you know, where we get caught up in, you know, unhelpful habits, you know, like stress eating and procrastinating and even addictions,

because that living quality of experience says do something, you know, our survival brain is saying this is uncomfortable, make it go away. So the title came from that, in terms of being wound up, but also came from a lot of the research that my lab had been doing around the experience of what it's like to let go. You know, we've studied experienced meditators. I've been meditating myself for a long time. And the simplest way to explain that dichotomy of, you know, wound up versus letting go is, is kind of being caught up, being wound up versus unwinding. And so the unwinding piece is this journey that we all can take as we unwind, whether it's anxiety or any other habit or any addiction, or even, you know, being attached

to views, for example. And so on the, if we just stick with this for a minute, for folks that are unfamiliar with a definition of anxiety, and I want to just do this for a moment because we throw around the word anxiety a lot. And we throw around the word anxious and worried and nervous. We throw around these words almost like they're the same thing, but anxiety has a little bit more gravitas to it than anxiousness, let's say. So when you talk about anxiety, what is your working definition? Yeah, I like that there's actually a pretty good different dictionary definition, which is a feeling of nervousness, worry, or unease about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. And I particularly like that because it describes this feeling, you know, the feeling of being wound up,

the feeling of being nervous, this unease, this restless quality to experience. And it also points to how anxiety can be this feeling. And it can also trigger the mental behavior of worrying. So we can be worried, we can feel worried, and we can also worry. Judd, you just snuck in mental behavior. Okay. You're not getting that. You're not getting that past me. Okay. Mental behavior as opposed to mental activity. And so that sounds like a behaviorist. Okay. So let's pull on that thread just a little bit because I think you're, you're nodding your kind of Eastern, you're giving a nod to either behaviorism or Eastern thought in that thread. And I know you're not to be a behaviorist, okay, but you're straight down the lane about habits and addiction and forming new habits and, and, and. So if you look at, you know, at the Buddha, he was, the story is, the word on the street

was that he became awakened when he was exploring something called dependent origination, which turns out to be the first description of reinforcement learning. And this was described before paper was even invented. We wrote a scientific paper on this. I wrote this with a Pali scholar showing how this has actually been described. So the behaviorism piece, the reinforcement learning was described way back in the Buddhist time. And that description really encapsulates and has kind of been rediscovered in modern day through reinforcement learning.

And the nod that I give there, whether it's to Buddhism or behaviorism, is that if you look at how much behavior is driven in a way that's unhelpful, habits form 95, if not more, percent of the problems that are formed in the world. The Buddha described it as craving leading to suffering. The behaviorists describe it as, you know, wanting to hold onto things that are pleasant. We get cravings to hold onto those things. And we also get urges to push away things that are unpleasant, you know, anxiety is unpleasant. So we do something to make it go away. So certainly a nod in both directions. And it just depends on how far back historically you want to go as to where the non goes. Well, I like it. Okay.

So let's go back to your train of thought. Is that mental behavior, the activity of your mind, the stringing together of thoughts, you're saying that anxiety has a psychological component and a physiological component. And so are you agreeing with somatic and cognitive anxiety as a framework for a sensitivity to the type of anxiety people can have? I think so. But just define that to make sure that we're talking about the same thing. So cognitive anxiety would be an excessive worry. So anxiety feels like I'm constantly consumed with what could go wrong later. And my thoughts find themselves in an

interloping, um, play, you know, that I can't quite get out of that drama. And I miss now because I'm trying to solve for later, but I keep solving for the same damn thing. And so that's cognitive. And then somatic anxiety is, um, I'm not quite sure, but man, I've, I've just feel tight. My heart feels like it's down in my stomach and my stomach feels like it's up in my heart and I'm breathing. It doesn't quite feel right. And I, man, I got a backache and I think I got an ulcer and, you know, like I sweat a little bit more than I, you know, like there's just the body switched on bracing something. And it's usually, it's a combination of the two, cognitive and somatic. But there are

cases where you can have one or the other as a predominant expression of anxiety. Are we on the same page with that? Yeah. A hundred percent. And I'll say that they, and you're probably saying this as well, they feed each other. So I have a lot of patients that wake up in the morning and they say, Oh, I feel anxious. It's just like you're describing. And then they start to worry, oh, why am I anxious? Or is this going to last all day or whatever? And that feeling, that somatic feeling drives the cognitive where they start to worry. That cognitive then feeds back and makes them more anxious. So the two actually feed on each other where they then start to spiral down in this tight little ball of anxiety. Yeah. You know what? You're begging the question. I didn't

think I was going to ask this of you because it feels like a reductionist model. And I know you're not that, and I don't want to be, but sometimes I like to try to get right down to the kind of core precepts, if you will. And are you, okay, let's go top down, bottom up. That's where I want to go for just a minute. And let's just clarify that for a minute. Bottom up is like the brain is driving the mind. Top down is like the mind is driving the brain. It's not that simple, right? It's just not that simple. Okay. But you just kind of hinted at something when we're going to talk about unwinding anxiety is that there's an inner loop between the two. We can, we can dial into

like the amygdala limbic center, the parts of the brain that go, Hey, um, there's danger on board. And then we can talk about the psychology, which is the way we're making sense of our own thoughts and kind of the environment around us or our own body sensations. Those are kind of the three ways I think about it. So are you more of a top-down or bottom-up approach to flourishing, to the human experience? We don't need to go to flourishing, just the human experience. The more I look at it, the harder it is for me to take one or the other because the two seem so intertwined. To be honest, the more I look at this and the more research I do, the more that top-down, bottom-up can be a

heuristic that can be a helpful starting point. But the more it's just the two are just so intermixed, it's not even fun. And so that leads us to like an embedded, a cognitive embedded, you know, like this brain-mind dualism doesn't really exist. And so I find some simplicity, the error of the simplicity actually helps me focus in intervention. But I know that there's an error in the simplicity that I'm suggesting. Not always though. So here I would say, I love the concept of parsimony. You know, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, especially in medicine. You know, the more we're like, Oh, this, or maybe this, the more we actually see some simple explanation, the more likely that is to be true. And I think there is a lot of parsimony, for example, around anxiety. So for

example, if you look at our survival brains, you know, you're talking about looking for danger, right? So those, those very basic survival mechanisms are set up to help us remember where food is and help us remember where danger is. So we can go back to the food and we can not go back to the danger, right? But if you think about the prefrontal cortex, it's kind of layered on top, literally the neocortex, the new brain is layered on top of this survival brain in a way that helps us survive in a different way. And what that, what it does is it takes past and it takes past information and simulates the future based on that, right?

So if you think of anxiety, it's worried about the future. Okay. Now that simulation piece is helpful for planning for the future. That's what the neocortex is really good at doing. And we might be somewhat unique as humans in being able to do that. Yet it requires accurate information. Okay. That's the critical piece. When there's uncertainty. Okay. Think of it this way. When we don't have food, our stomach is empty. Our stomach rumbles and says, go get me some food. So there's this urge to get food. When we don't have enough, or when we don't have accurate information, our brain rumbles, our prefrontal cortex rumbles and says, go get information. So in essence, information is food for the brain, right? So there's some parsimony here. It's really, you can think of this as like

fractal patterns. It's the same mechanism that's helping us get the needed sustenance, whether it's calories or information. The problem here is there's so much information now and there's inaccurate information. There's also disinformation, right? Our ancient ancestors didn't have deep fake saber tooth tigers. It was, you've seen the saber tooth tiger, you ran, right? It wasn't that you went on a chat form or you went on Twitter to see who likes saber tooth tigers or not, or who thinks they're really dangerous or not, right? So we see this, people are going on Twitter and debating the merits of vaccines, for example, when there's pretty clear evidence that vaccines save lives, just an example, right? But this is where we have to become the virologist. We have to become the epidemiologist, the immunologist to try to sort through all this

information. Our prefrontal cortex can't handle all of this information. And so it just starts, it starts to overheat. And then we spin out into all of these stories. What if this? What if that? What if this? What if that? So anxiety can actually be explained in a whole lot in a simple, but not oversimplified way. When we look at the survival mechanism, that's kind of spinning out of control based on a specific substrate, which is a bunch of information in a lack of accurate information. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family,

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e l i x g r a y dot com and use the code finding mastery 20 at felixgray.com for 20 off pin that for just a moment because i i want to challenge something um as an intervention i want to get to the intervention things but i also want to recognize that I think my experience, this is two clinically trained, classically trained people talking to each other. And then I'm going to add a word in here that's not part of like clinical training, that anxiety is suffering. Anxiety is also the substrate to high performance. Oh my God. Okay. So, so let's make it like almost like somatic for a minute. Vasoconstriction, when, when, when, if we have too much spaciousness, as the Buddhists like to talk about, you know, too much spaciousness, we don't have enough of that kind of wound up, coiled up ability to spring.

You know, it's almost like somebody has some radical drugs on board that they don't have, they don't feel and think, you know, and, you know, I'm thinking about heroin or something like that, as opposed to like cocaine. I don't know why I'm doing a drug analogy with you right now, but like cocaine or street drugs in particular, but like if cocaine's on board, there's a constriction. And so you spring into action. So that's that kind of, that unsettledness can lead to high performance. That constriction can lead to high performance, but that excessive constriction can also lead to great suffering. So let's, let's throw down on this performance anxiety thing, because I've, I heard heard I've heard this so

much that I you know as a researcher I wanted to see what the origins were and what the evidence has been for this and I've been able to trace it back to a paper from 1908 with Japanese dancing mice I kid you not Japanese dancing mice where this group found that there was a somewhat what was now then described later as an inverted U-shaped curve, but their data weren't that clean, not that pretty, where they found that if they shocked Japanese dancing mice, you know, the Goldilocks phenomenon, if they shocked them just the right amount, if they didn't shock them enough, they wouldn't get off their butts to go through the maze. If they shocked them too much, you know, they would, it was, it decreased their performance that got, so people generally ignored this.

Cause they're like, who cares about Japanese dancing mice? I, and it was only cited like four times for 50 years. Anyway, it was a psychologist in the 1950s who gave a keynote address who said he just loosely used the terms anxiety and arousal. And then one of his graduate students, and I write all the details in my book so folks can look it up. The details aren't that important. His grad student took this and ran with it and then called this the Yerkes-Dodson law. So these two researchers from 1908, Yerkes Dodson law, that you need a certain amount of anxiety to perform well. Well, since then, that has been completely disproven, where it is, all the research basically shows that there is a linear correlation, an inverse correlation

between anxiety and performance, the more anxious someone is the worse they perform. So let's double click on this piece around where you need to have some urge to act. How does that compete with the Yerkes-Dodson? Because the inverted U, if you think about an upside down U, that with too much, the technical term that they were studying was arousal. So too much arousal has a decrease. If you look at it, X, Y axis, a decrease in performance, not enough arousal and the arousal term, you know, for those 17 year old minds out there, we're not talking about that arousal, although that holds true that the arousal we're talking about is like an internal activation, you know, the body switching on, if you will,

too much, the porridge is too hot, too little, porridge is too cold. And so there's an optimization. So how does that compete with the linear? I think you're probably going to go to the cusp catastrophe model. I don't know if that's where you're going at this is to say, well, what is optimal performance? And probably the thing that I look at most, and I'd be curious what your thoughts are here, but if I think of flow or being in the zone as optimal performance. They're just, they're off the charts in terms of how well they're performing. Okay. So if you look at flow, there are two things here. One is there is no anxiety there. Their anxiety is not even in the equation because they are so merged with what they are doing. There is no self there to be anxious. Right. And so you can't even measure arousal because there's no someone to be, you know, to check to see how aroused they are. They are so merged with action. So you could argue that is optimal arousal. That is optimal performance. And there is no anxiety there. So you could argue that as, you know, okay, optimal performance is this. How does anxiety square with that? It doesn't really. But the other piece to look at here is this goes

back to, you know, shocking mice and holding rats heads underwater. The assumption is that if you hold a rat's head underwater too long, it performs well, the observation is if you hold the rat's head underwater too long, it performs worse. The assumption there is that that's optimal arousal, that that's too much arousal. I think it's hard to extrapolate, you know, you let the rat's head up and it's catching its breath with being too aroused versus, you know, I think there's a lot of extrapolation between dancing mice and rats heads underwater to humans. And this is where we have to actually do the studies in humans. And that's, that's what people have done subsequently. And they have found that, you know, the more the more anxious somebody is, the worse they perform.

And I could see, you know, I think with very high anxiety, right, you can see how that would fit with quote, unquote, optimal arousal, but I think we have to be super clear on what those, what we're talking about here in those, in those situations. So when we get into optimal activation, optimal arousal levels, there is a, do you agree that there's a cold porridge, optimal porridge, too hot porridge? Do you agree with that? Or you're saying, no, I think that it is linear, meaning that at some point we just fall off. So that's the cusp catastrophe model, that there's this arc that takes place. And then at some point, it feels like the point of no return, where that is actually, there's some challenges with that model too, because you can back out of things. You know, there is a volitional, you can control yourself in

some respects and back down your experience. But I'm just going to put an asterisk in there because if people are feeling anxious and they've got adrenaline and cortisol coursing through their system. It takes time to get that out of the system. You can't do just a couple breaths and get it out. So I think it's like 20 to 40 minutes, but that's maybe old data. Do you have a sense of how long it takes to pass cortisol through the system? I'd probably, yeah, I'd have to look at the studies myself, but I would guess it's a little faster than that. Certainly adrenaline courses,

you know, kind of clears out a little faster than that. I think it's got a pretty short half-life, but I don't remember the cortisol specific. Yeah. It's kind of the, the way I think about it, it's like, there's an agitation when you have just enough court, too much cortisol, too much adrenaline, there's an internal agitation. And some of the folks that I've spent time with do work in some of the most consequential environments. They don't perform. They'll walk away from the thing that they've dedicated two years to plan for if they've got too much of that activation on board, because they know there's a restriction, a constriction in their ability to adjust to the unfolding unknown.

That makes a lot of sense to me. And so I don't, so here, I think a lot of folks might be focused on that piece where there may be more more uh more information in looking at well what can help move us uh reliably reproducibly in the direction of you know of unwinding of expanding because there you can almost think of these as as orthogonal right the the arousal piece you can be high arousal and expanded you could also be high arousal and contracted so the arousal may not be as important as the expansion contraction continuum okay all right so let's let's kind of use that as a jumping off point to your framework which is constriction or expansion right so and i love that i love that i latter i've used that in since

our last conversation and i've oversimplified something you know on the backs of that is that thoughts if we're going to oversimplify thoughts, if we could do that for just the framework is that thoughts are either creating constriction or creating expansion. And so like to oversimplify, it's not that clean, but I love that framework. Do you like that as well? You know, our data more and more support it. And so, you know, for example, our neuroimaging studies, when we've actually studied experienced meditators, some of them have actually gotten into self-described flow in the scanner. And we can actually measure brain activity of the brain regions that are associated with getting caught up in experience and letting go. And in fact,

those brain regions, so for example, specifically the default mode network, you know, the posterior cingulate cortex, it gets activated when we perseverate, when we worry about the future, it gets, and the more we worry, the more activated it gets. It also gets activated when somebody's craving everything from chocolate to cocaine, to cigarettes, to gambling, right? So this is a well described network of brain regions that is associated with getting caught up in experience. And my lab's even done neurophenomenologic studies to link that specifically with subjective experience. Here, people getting into flow deactivate that network of brain regions. And as we do these neurophenomenal studies, people report letting go. In fact, we just completed a study with hundreds of people. This was just a way to see how universal

the language of constriction versus expansion is. So we use constriction and closed downness and expansion and openness in a specifically undefined way. We just said, do you, we went across 14 different mental states and we had people just describe how open or closed does this feel when you're anxious, for example, when you're when you're feeling frustrated and versus, you know, things like curiosity and kindness. Universally, people report that anxiety feels closed and constricted, frustration feels closed and constricted, and that curiosity and kindness. Universally, people report that anxiety feels closed and constricted, frustration feels closed and constricted, and that curiosity and kindness feel open and expanded. So we can see this both phenomenologically when people not even defined, people can, they all

relate the same way to these things. And we can also see this neurobiologically where we can link these things up to brain regional activation and, and importantly, deactivation as people are letting go. So more and more, I think the framework is lining up pretty nicely. Okay. So when folks are feeling anxious, and that's it, you know, we're being smart with that word, feeling anxious. When they're feeling anxious, they're aware of it. They recognize it. Do you have a sense

of why that is so predominant right now? I think you're going to lean on there's just so much information and our brain is trying to solve the future and we're not sure what to trust. I hear that part of your narrative there. But if you were to double click down underneath, like, do you have, can you take it one step further

about the main themes for anxiety? Yeah. And we've actually had a naturalistic experiment happen over the last year. So anxiety has been on the rise. So even BC, you know, before coronavirus, I know it's hard for people to even remember what that was like. But in 2020, we saw a huge spike in anxiety, you know, psychological distress went up like 250% diagnoses of anxiety disorders went up like almost 300%. So we saw this huge spike in anxiety. Well, the biggest thing that we saw happen was this uncertainty around a virus. It wasn't that there was a new virus. It was that there was a global pandemic. So if you look at SARS, for example, not a global pandemic,

didn't have the same level of anxiety level spike. So there's the, you think of it as the control condition. Now we saw this global pandemic, everybody's freaking out. Why? Two things. One, new thing that nobody's experienced before, global pandemic. Two, a lack of information about how dangerous it was, how we were going to deal with it. And I guess the third thing is that people were also using social media to spread misinformation. So they feel a certain way because their future is unclear. Guess what? It's always been unclear, right? Yeah, right. I barely know what you're going to say. I'm sorry. I have no idea what you're going to say. I barely know what I'm going to say in the next moment. So like our future is constantly unfolding. So, but this just kind of pulled that right into front view.

Like, okay. And then where do I go to? It is natural to look outside to say, where can I get some information, scan the world for food and or dangers. And, but that, those sources of information were not clear. Right. Okay. and um but that info those sources of information were not clear right okay so then we feel a certain way and then there's that interlooping experience so what what the world has been doing also over the last i'm going to say since the invention of the smartphone you know these weapons of mass distraction we've been continually driving ourselves more and more into

distraction and in making ways, I'll pray this differently, in finding ways to make ourselves comfortable through distraction. Our world has never had the ability to collectively distract itself to the degree that we can now. So our distress tolerance is dropping and dropping and dropping. So, for example, somebody could be sitting in a stoplight, right? 30 seconds of a red light, not a big deal, right? If you look around at night, everybody's crotch is glowing blue because they've suddenly, you know, they can't tolerate the distress of sitting at a red light for 30 seconds doing nothing. You know, there was a study in 2014 showing that people would rather shock themselves

at a level that is uncomfortable than sit in a room and do nothing, right? There was, this is a study published in science. So collectively we've been, we've been, been moving as a society toward more and more and more and more comfort. And I think that also adds to it because our collective distress tolerance has decreased. So where uncertainty, you know, you can lean into uncertainty and say, oh, this is different. This is new. We're being trained. Oh, this is different. This is uncomfortable because our survival brain is saying, hey, is there danger out there? And instead of saying, hey, let's go see if there's danger, we're going, oh, this is uncomfortable. I got to run away from it as

quickly as possible purely because we've trained ourselves that way. So let me flip on my blue and eliminate emanating crotch machine. Okay. Right. So let me, let me flip on my phone to be able to get a little hit of dopamine because that'll calm this anxiousness. Right. And I know that it's relatively safe, but it's an empty meal. And at the end of it, I might feel a bit, I'll use the word empty. Yeah. Let me throw a word out there.

Dissatisfaction where we're not fully satisfied. And it actually, that not being fully satisfied makes us want more. So it actually drives a little bit of craving that says, hey, go back and do it again. Okay. How would you map this framework that you have onto fear of people's opinions as being one of the drivers for anxiousness? And so can you, can you, I'm fascinated by, by the mechanism that many of us are operating from that we are trying to make a narrative of what they might be thinking of me. And I think if I could just kind of throw out the beginnings of a framework and see if I'm on or off, is that the default mode network, am I okay? Is this okay? Are we okay? The self-referencing obsession about, you know, that's kind of what one of the things that the default mode network is involved in. That to answer that, I look to you as a social creature and say, well, does Judson

think I'm okay? And if Judson thinks I'm okay, then I'm okay. But I've got to interpret Judson's micro-expressions, his tonal stuff. I've got to interpret all of that. And I'm not a mind reader. I can actually get some sense of expression, micro-expression, but I don't know what he's going to think of me. So boy, let me just play the game here. And let me try to do what Judson, I think, would like. Therein, I think, lies one of the great constrictors of human potential is the fear of other people's opinions. But can you get us smarter on that? Well, I can try. So if this is helpful, one way to look back on this is, what's our brain trying to do? And some of this is probably driven by

tribal psychology where we've got it. It's basically, if you run around in a pack, you're more likely to survive. And so you've got to figure out pretty quickly, is this a friendly pack? Is this a not friendly pack? So there's this underlying piece here where our survival brain is in there saying, hey, friend or foe, I got to figure this out quickly. And I think what that probably feeds into modern day, what you're talking about here, we're not as dependent on the tribal psychology now. We're a global tribe if we really look at this, and we all should be banding together to save the planet, but that's a different conversation.

So here it's less about, we've all got to gang up against this woolly mammoth because there's no way I can take down a woolly mammoth by myself. But if there are 70 of us, we've got a better chance of doing that. So that tribal psychology is still in there. And that's programs to have us say, Hey, you know, I gotta, I gotta get people to like me basically. And the other part of that programming is that says, okay, let me find things. So what's a simple way to do that? Well, you take views, for example, you know, and it's like, oh, what do you think about this? Oh, I agree with you. Now there's suddenly a tribe that's been developed based on that. And in fact, this is so simple. There've been studies done that if you give people like the same colored mug in a psychology experiment, if I'm remembering this correctly, basically the same color mug, suddenly they have a greater affinity toward a complete this correctly. Basically, the same colored mug,

suddenly they have a greater affinity toward a complete stranger just because they have the same colored mug or something. I think we all experience this. People drive down the street and they're like, oh, I drive a Mazda. That guy's a Mazda. Suddenly, we're a tribe. We're a Mazda tribe because they have no idea who this person is, but they happen to drive the same brand of car that I drive. So it is really baked in. And if we're not aware of that, this can be manipulated very easily. This is where, what was the documentary, The Social Dilemma, I think, where they talk about how the social media companies, their whole revenue structure is based on attention, the attention economy. And the best way to drive revenue is to basically polarize people. And the best way to polarize people is to nudge them farther and farther and farther and farther into these extreme views.

All of that based on tribal psychology. Does that make sense? Absolutely. And what parts of the brain would you go research a bit deeper when you think about fear of other people's opinions? And because this is kind of the, I think that this is one of the epicenters for anxiety for people, right? It's no longer the saber tooth. It is like, am I okay based on what they think potentially might be thinking of me? And so as we're starting to get into the unwinding of anxiety, what brain regions do you go, Hey, Mike, go dig here. I think that you're starting to get into the unwinding of anxiety, what brain regions do you go, hey, Mike, go dig here.

I think that you're going to love some of the research around these brain regions. Yeah. The one that I've seen most consistently implicated here is the posterior cingulate. And here, I remember there are experiments showing choice justification, meaning I think this group used CD cases where they had people pick CD cases and they're pretty much same affinity for two, and then they pick one and suddenly they like that more. That's back to the tribal psychology, the choice justification. So the posterior cingulate's activated during those times. When people feel guilty,

the posterior cingulate's activated. When people are, again, as I talked about, when people are worrying about the future, this same region is activated. So I think there's that constricted quality of experience lines up pretty nicely with activation of this brain region, which lines up very nicely with this experiential concept of self. So let's differentiate that from conceptual self, right? So the concept, you know, I am Judd is, is just a concept that helps me navigate the world. You know, somebody says, Hey Judd, you know, I'm not, I'm looking at, Oh yeah, they're talking to me. Right. But if they say, Hey Judd, you're a jerk.

Suddenly I'm attached to a view that I'm not a jerk. And maybe I'm attached to a view that I'm a jerk. And I'm say, hey, Judd, you're a jerk, suddenly I'm attached to a view that I'm not a jerk. And maybe I'm attached to a view that I'm a jerk. And I'm like, yeah, I'm that jerk. I like to try to think that I'm not. I try not to be a jerk. And so if somebody says, hey, Judd, you're a jerk, suddenly it points out that attachment to view that I have. And there's this constricted quality that comes in and says, whoa, why did that person say that to me? And I feel that. And that is the same feeling, that same constricted,

restless quality that we feel when we're anxious. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature. I tend to run warm at night and these sheets have helped me sleep cooler and more consistently, which has made a meaningful difference in how I show up the next day for myself, my family, and our team here at

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With Caldera Lab, it's not about adding more. It's about choosing better and when your day demands clarity and energy and presence the way you prepare for it matters if you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it i'd love for you to check them out head to caldera lab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. So let's, let's get into the, um, some interventions to honor unwind anxiety. And it's a beautiful title, you know,

that your wife came up with because wound up is the kind of vernacular that we'll use, you know, when we're feeling anxious and that constriction that you're talking about, you've got a set of processes to help people unwind. So can you walk through a couple of key points if people are feeling anxious? And then I also want to hit on the percentages. It was 15% of people reported general anxiety prior to the pandemic. There was a radical spike in that. And of course, correct me if our numbers are different. I've always thought that 30% was the accurate number, that three out of 10 people that I know are anxious, but 50, 15% feels like

an underreported, um, you know, there's at least double that. I'm sorry that of people that actually had it, but never raised their hand to say I'm anxious. So what, what numbers are you using as a, um, a broad suite for, let's just call it in the, in the United States right now are experiencing anxiety. Yeah. Well, and I'm glad you pointed this out because there can be an experience of anxiety and there can be anxiety disorder. So if you look at people being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, which is kind of a, a higher bar to meet, there was a meta-analysis that was just published showing that in the last year, I think it was 35% of people on average across like 17 studies. So 35% anxiety disorder. Clinical. Yeah. So here I would guess that the number of people that actually feel anxious

is even higher than that because 35% meet this bar of anxiety disorder. And that 35% means that there's a medical practitioner that has somewhere charted, you know, like that, Oh, you meet the clinical criteria. You know, it's kind of the idea there. And is that 35% in the last 30 days or 35% lifetime? I don't remember specifically, but I would, I think it was, so this was done, they were specifically looking to see it increases during the pandemic. So I think this was in the last year, probably. Yeah, probably. Okay. I don't know the research, but I think that the number is extraordinarily high for people that would meet the criteria for anxiety in their lifetime, clinical anxiety in their lifetime.

I think it's an extraordinary number. Okay. Yeah. All right. So folks that are feeling it, they're in it. Judd, take us home. What are we doing? So here, you know, and this actually goes back to the, the origin of why I actually started working with this. So in medical school, I was trained to prescribe medications for anxiety. And if you look at the best medications out there, there's this clinical term number needed to treat, which basically means, you know, how many people you need to give a certain treatment to before one of them shows a significant benefit or a significant reduction in symptoms.

For our best medications out there, that number needed to treat is 5.2, which means I have to give five patients a medication, 5.2 patients, a medication, and one of them shows a significant reduction in symptoms. So I was playing the medication lottery when I first started practicing as a psychiatrist. I didn't know which of the five I treated next was going to benefit. And I also didn't know what I was going to do with the other 80%. So, so here, you know, we were, my lab was at, you know, my lab really focuses on mindfulness and habit change. We were studying this eat right now app that we developed, and we'd found this 40% reduction in craving related eating. And, and somebody had said, you know, hey,

they were mapping out what drives their stress eating. And this person said, it's my anxiety that drives stress eating, can you create a program for that? And I was thinking, well, I prescribe medications for anxiety, I'm not sure I can help. Yet that put a bug in my ear to go and actually look at the literature. And it turns out literature from the 1980s. So this was when the stones were singing about mother's little helper, right? This is how much benzos are being prescribed like candy, like the Valium and Xanax and all these benzodiazepines, which are no longer first-line treatment because there are major problems with these things. So they were, you know, everybody was like, medication, medicate everyone.

And these researchers like Thomas Borkovec and others were suggesting that anxiety could be driven like a habit. So for me, when I read that, this was, I had this big aha moment where I was thinking, huh, I never thought about anxiety, that it could be driven this way. And the other part of my brain said,

dude, you know how to work with habits. Why don't you bring these two things together? So of course, as a researcher, I wanted to see, well, how could I research this? And as a clinician, I wanted to see how can I help people with this. So we started by developing this unwinding anxiety app, where we and then this is the basis for what turns out to be a three-step process that anybody can use. And so I'll walk us through this three-step process. The first thing we did was to see how well this thing worked. And the first thing, the first group we tested this in was in physicians. Why? Because I can speak for myself. We tend to be a pain in the ass physicians, right? We're like, oh, I'm too busy. I shouldn't be taking care of myself. And we learned to armor up in medical school. And, you know, any moment that

I could be, you know, that I take to myself could be helping my patients, all this martyrdom stuff, right? So of course, we burn out like crazy. So we did the study 57% reduction in clinically validated anxiety scores and anxious physicians who use this unwinding anxiety app. We also got a 50% reduction in burnout without mentioning the word burnout once. Okay. Cause the two are highly correlated. We did a second study with people that generalize anxiety disorder, 67% reduction in these folks. These are the Olympians of worry. They really know how to worry 67% reduction. And there we could calculate the

number needed to treat. And there, medications, it's 5.2. In this study, 1.6, right? Hey, hey. So if an app could do a mic drop, boom, 1.6. So I just highlight that because this process that I'm going to describe is actually, well, not only is it pretty well theoretically based, but we now have very strong empirical data supporting that it actually works. So it's not just, hey, Judd thinks this is a good idea and he's going to try to sell a book.

It's, hey, Judd did a bunch of research and found that this actually is the best thing that he could find that actually is out there. So three-step process, anybody can use this. It's pretty simple. The first step is that somebody's got to map out how their mind works. So this could apply to anxiety. This could apply to any habit. And it really goes back to the survival mechanism, trigger, behavior, results, right? That's what drives any habit. So for anxiety, anxiety, the feeling of anxiety is the trigger. The mental behavior of worrying is the behavior.

And other behaviors could be procrastination. There could be a bunch of things that we could substitute in there. And then the result is we get some reward out of it from our brain's perspective. And then that drives the loop. If we're not aware of it, there's no way we're going to be able to work with it. I'll give a concrete example because I think, you know, theoretically it makes sense, but people, you know, the stories really make the most sense to me. So I had a patient, I write about him in my book who was referred to me for anxiety. Okay. He'd had anxiety for over 30 years when he was referred to

me and, you know, nothing had helped. And what he described, so he comes into my office, I start taking his history and long story short, he's got full-blown panic disorder and full-blown generalized anxiety disorder. And so first thing I did after I started to get a sense for what was ailing him, I pulled out a piece of paper. I wrote down trigger behavior result. And I said, let me see if I can get this straight. For him, his panic was driven, literally driven by driving on the highway. So he would get these panic attacks on the highway, driven by thoughts.

I think it was like, I'm in a speeding bullet. He felt like he was gonna get in an accident. Those thoughts would drive him to avoid driving on the highway because that avoidance behavior could keep him from having panic attacks. So there was a reward in it for his brain. Wait, hold on real quick.

Let's do this. So the trigger is walking towards the car, knowing I'm making something up, but walking towards the car, knowing he's going to get on the freeway. Was that the trigger or was it getting in the car or was it actually the thought that I'm going to get on the freeway later? It was, it started with him being on the highway driving and having thoughts come up in his head. Like, oh no, I'm in a speeding bullet.

So he'd be driving on the highway. He'd have this random thought and he would get totally caught up in that thought to the point where he would get panic attack. Okay, so the trigger is the thought. The behavior is the loop of the thought. And the reward is the loop of the thought and the reward is what well so his behavior became avoidance where he would avoid driving on the highway so that that avoidance was that was a

compensatory mechanism for him yet as you're as you're pointing out the mental behavior was that he would start getting caught up in those thoughts like oh no i'm gonna get caught in it you know i'm gonna get in a car accident oh no i'm gonna hurt somebody blah blah that was that worrying that started to get out of control which then led to a panic attack yeah so thought you oh no the behavior was the worry at first and then the result was a panic attack that fed back into a secondary loop where the next time he had a thought, his brain would say, I'm not going there as in, I'm not getting on the highway as in, I'm not getting in my car. That's the behavior at this point. That was his compensatory mechanism.

So these are two, I guess these are two different, but related behavior loops that he had. Does that make sense? It does. And then what is the reward of not getting in the car? Is it relief? Relief and avoidance of panic attacks. So he wouldn't get panic attacks because he wasn't on the highway. Okay. All right. I'm totally with you. And so in that inner looping, let's just stick with the first one. It's super simple. And then, so what are the three steps that you help people unwind the anxious loop that you just lined up? So the critical piece here is to first check to see what we're doing to try to fix our anxiety. So in our Western world, we're just do it mentality. You know, grit is great when you're going up a hill because it gets you up the hill. Yet it's not so great when trying to work with mind because we can't just tell ourselves to

stop worrying. You can't just think your way out of anxiety. And in fact, the thinking and planning part of the brain goes offline when we get anxious, the prefrontal cortex is no longer available. So not only does it not help, but it's not available. So I just highlight that because often people think, oh, I mapped out this habit loop. Now I just got to stop it or I got to avoid those triggers, which in fact just drives other habit loops of avoidance. So here, I think a bit of neuroscience is really critical, which is to know that the only way to change a habit, this is any habit, the only way to change a habit is to update the reward value of that behavior in our brain. I'll give a simple example, and then we'll

apply this to worrying. So my lab just finished a study where we were working with people who were overeating. And so what we did was we embedded this, this awareness tool, basically in our eat right now app to have people pay attention as they overate. And our hypothesis was that as people pay attention, when they overeat, they'll realize it's not very rewarding because awareness is the only thing that updates reward value in our brains. And in fact, it only took 10 or 15 times that somebody people, somebody paying attention as they were overeating for that reward value to drop below zero to the point where they were shifting behavior. So we know that this is true. This has been known back into the 1970s. The first researchers that described this were Rescorla and Wagner,

very well-known phenomenon. So we apply that practice, which is bring awareness in, help people pay attention to the cause and effect relationship. So when apply that practice, which is bring awareness in, help people pay attention to the cause and effect relationship. So when we're worrying, what are we getting from the worry? So I have people ask that simple question, what am I getting from this, right? Is it solving the problem? No. Is it keeping my family member safe? No. You know, so whatever we think the worrying is doing, besides just occupying our mind and making us more anxious, we've got to really dive into our experience and see the worrying is actually just making us more anxious. It's not helping us. That helps us become disenchanted with the behavior of worrying. Just like when we overeat and see that it's not helpful, we become disenchanted from that behavior or smoke a cigarette or procrastinate or whatever. I think I'm tripped up on one piece because there's a statement you made, which is we can't think our way out of anxiety. And then I hear you saying, if you have a thought, which is to examine your thought,

the utility of the thought, then you'll dissipate the anxiousness. So help me understand where I'm getting tripped up there. So this is a critical distinction. So the thinking our way out of anxiety is a trying to change what's happening, right? That's very different than awareness. So awareness is something that doesn't take the prefrontal cortex. It's something more fundamental, more basic, and actually more critical for survival. So here we differentiate what the brain trying to fix or change or avoid, like doing something versus simply bringing awareness in. What am I getting from this? And asking a question rather than saying,

I need to change or fix or solve something. Okay. So when I'm, when I recognize I'm in a loop, the way I need awareness that I'm in the loop, I'm in an anxious state. And then the, uh, you're saying the off ramp is to say, uh, what's the question again? How is this? What am I getting from this? What am I getting from this? And then that actually fundamentally will change. It's an interruption in the loop, right? And so you say, what am I getting from this? I've interrupted the loop. And then I go, uh, nothing. Okay. Okay. Right. And then, okay. So now I'm fundamentally altered from the loop. What prevents me from getting back on the loop to say nothing? What is wrong with you? Jeez. Like, you know what? You should worry because you can't figure

things out. You've been stuck in this loop for so long. And you know what? I'm in a fucking silver bullet still. And I'm on the freeway. And what am I doing? Oh my God, my life is a mess. I mean, I'm catastrophizing, you know, obviously, but you're beautifully describing the catastrophizing habit loop, right? So there's another habit loop that gets built on top of this. That's another doing loop where, you know, we can't fix the anxiety, but we can sure beat ourselves up over it or think that it's never going to end. So I'm glad you point that out because that is a loop on top of a loop. It's kind of a fractal pattern of echo habit loops, one on top of another. So as you're pointing out, the what am I getting from this helps us step out of it a little bit because it gives us perspective. It gives us a little bit of distance and helps our brain see, oh, this is not rewarding. value drops and that critical drop in reward value opens up the space for what I think of as step three or the, I call it the BBO, the bigger, better offer. So again, our brains are based on,

you know, they're going to do behaviors that are more rewarding. We've got to give our brain something that's more rewarding. And it's not just staring at our phones, right? Because that those avoidance things just create other problems. It's about tapping into things that are intrinsically rewarding and that don't become habituated. And I say that in the sense of if we drink alcohol to avoid our anxiety, well, we're creating problems there, but we also become habituated. We need to drink more and more and more because we develop tolerance. Same is true for looking at cute pictures of puppies on Instagram or whatever our avoidance mechanism is. So here we ask, what is intrinsically rewarding and can actually be applied right in these moments?

Two flavors that I find. One is curiosity and one is kindness. So with those self-judgmental or the catastrophizing habit loops, the antidote there is self-kindness, right? What's it feel like when we judge ourselves? Oh, I'm a terrible person versus what's it like when we're kind to ourselves, which could be as simple as, oh, that's my brain. Let me bring a little bit of self-compassion in here. My survival brain's just a little out of whack.

It's trying to help me survive, you know, pat our brain on the head, so to speak, and say, okay, you know, this direction is compared the head, so to speak, can say, okay, you know, this direction is compared to this direction. It feels much better to be kind to ourselves. That's the bottom line. Curiosity is a direct antidote to anxiety. So again, my lab has done these studies. I know it's going to sound like a no brainer, but we've got to do the studies to show that it's true. Anxiety feels contracted. Curiosity feels expanded. Which one feels better? Curiosity universally feels better than anxiety. So in a moment that we're anxious, we can actually get curious and dive in, right? So I'm sure you know the phrase, the only way out is through, right?

We turn toward our anxiety and we go, instead of going, oh no, I'm anxious. What's wrong with me? Blah, blah, blah. We go, oh, this is oh this is anxiety what does it feel like oh is it tightness is that anxiety is it restlessness is it that and it's just like a thunderstorm like a kid who's never heard a thunderstorm before gets freaked out the first time parent can step in and say oh hey let's go to the window and look there can you see the clouds there can you look. There, can you see the clouds? There, can you see the wind? There, can you see the rain? Oh, these are elements that make up a thunderstorm. Same for anxiety. Oh, there's tightness.

Oh, there's tension. Oh, there's burning. That oh is the curiosity that already feels better and helps us see these are just physical sensations that come and go rather than something that's gonna be an ailment forever. And it helps us change our relationship to those physical sensations. And in the process helps us step out of the anxiety loop. I love it. Okay. So what part of the brain is, is activated during curiosity or

kindness? So let's go in stepwise, which part of the brain is activated when we're in a loop? When we're feeling anxious, either we've got a thought loop or we feel tight and or some sort of harmony between the two, disharmony between the two. So what part of the brain is switched on there? Again, it's actually the default one network. The posterior cingulate cortex, the more we're worried, the more the posterior cingulate gets activated. So if we zoom in there, that's a pretty consistent finding. And also, that's the same brain region that gets deactivated when we're curious.

In fact, there was a study that was published a couple of years ago. They induced awe in people, which I think of as one of the, you know, the so blown away by curiosity that, you know, it blows your mind. That also has been shown to have a linear drop in PCC activation. I want to know how you induce awe. I'll tell you how I measure daily success in a minute. And then what part of the, I'm not so sure it's curiosity. I think curiosity is the mechanism for deep focus. You've studied this.

I have not. I've just read your work. But when I'm really curious and I'm committed and my hands are on the panes of glass and I'm like a kid looking up at the thunderstorm and I've got someone guiding like, look at that and listen to this and watch the windows rattle when the lightning and count the step. Like my parents said that with me, you know, like just, just like you described, you know, count the seconds that'll tell you how far it is away, whatever, whatever, like there's science involved. So I'm with a curious mind. I think that that's deep focus is what you're doing for me, for my brain. But when I'm in that

state, I'm now fundamentally out of the loop. Okay. So there's a cognitive thing here, but I'm interested in the brain region that's on during curiosity. Yeah. So let's start with the experience. So when you're, so you're saying, I'm not sure that I'm out of the loop. So can you be contracted and expanded at the same time? No, I say, I'm saying I am out of the loop. You've just taken me out of the loop.

I've asked a question, a fundamental question that's altered, that's kind of interrupted my loop. And then I've gone to either curiosity or kindness. Now I'm in curiosity. And I think there's a third I want to add. This is me being unreasonable for a minute. So there's the second one you've got, which is curiosity. And my hands are on the glass and I'm looking and examining at my own internal state, you know, like, oh, wow, look, my anxiety is in my hands. Look at them trembling. Oh, that's interesting. Like, look at that. I wonder where that comes from. Oh, you know what that comes from? My heart's kind of pounding a little bit. Oh, my hands are downstream from my heart pounding. Okay, so I'm in this loop of being curious, right? what part of the brain is switched on at that point you know i only know which parts of the brain are switched off and i would guess that it's probably less of a localized process because with curiosity you can think i mean literally it's where our where where our mind is probably a bunch of things happening at the same time and the most the best i can just uh i'm thinking of the research here around psychedelics, which are kind of like throwing a hand grenade in the brain and like

literally expanding the mind so much that we don't even know where we are. There's no self there, right? There are people when people have looked at connectivity, the brain regions talking to each other, there's this huge increase in a connectivity, if I remember correctly, when people are on psychedelics. And I would guess when people are truly experientially curious. So there are two types of curiosity, not deprivation curiosity, where somebody doesn't know the

answer to something. Most of the research in the scientific realm has been done in that way. And that's more of a dopaminergically driven. I've got to get the answer type of thing. Interest curiosity is what we're talking about here, where we're just, you know, we're staring out at the thunderstorm and we're totally fascinated. And there, I would say it's probably less of a localized phenomenon. Okay. So you're more interested in the posterior cingulate cortex being damped down and it gives other available resources to come online.

Does that seem right? Okay. It does. And I'll say specifically, there have been studies showing that the more the posterior cingulate is activated, the worse we do on cognitive tasks, the more these other networks, like the executive network, dorsal anterior cingulate in particular, the more they're kind of acting. And I don't want to say dampening down the PCC because it's hard to know exactly if it's causing that or if it's just correlated, but the more the PCC is deactivated, the better we do on cognitive tasks. So a hundred percent, but I just wanted to add that little detail in. What switches on the PCC? Posterior cingulate cortex. What switches that on? Or is it all, is it always kind of on until we go to deep focus? Yeah. It's hard to know because at rest,

when we're not doing anything in particular, it seems to be activated. And in fact, it was serendipitously discovered because of this right default mode. This is what we do when we're not doing anything in particular. So it seems to be, and whether this is a habit or not, who knows, but what in the general population, it seems to be on pretty much, you know, when we're not doing anything else. And so I agree with you, curiosity can help us switch that off and switch into deep focus. Yeah. So, all right. So deep focus is an inoculation potentially for the posterior cingulate cortex to damp down. So this is why mindfulness and meditation is a mechanism, right?

Because it requires some deep focus, some curiosity, if you will, in open monitoring. Okay. So, all right. This is exciting. Can I add a third? Yeah, I'd love to hear it. So I think kindness, I get it. Curiosity, I definitely get. I love the, that. Okay. And then I think the third would be celebrating like a wild person. I caught you. I got you. I found the loop. I'm in. So I think that there's something, this is, I think it fits in your model, is that if you can celebrate like a wild person

and manifest internally the, and I don't mean manifest like woo woo, I mean manifest internally the unique chemical response of excitement, but you're manifesting it. You're like, look at me. I just did it. I found it. I got, Hey, I'm going to call Judd later and tell him I got this loop. I'm nailing it. Good job, Gervais. Let's go. And then, and so celebrating like a wild person, I think is non-addictive. It's an interruption. And I bet it gets you some of that neurochemical exchange that would, I don't know if there's not a single, there's not a deep focus there necessarily, like curiosity and kindness, but I'm wondering if that would hold up in your lab in any respects. So it would, if you differentiated joy from excitement,

is it more joy or is it more excitement? And then I'll tell you why. So I think I might know where you're going. I was saying more excitement. Yeah, I know. I think excitement might pull us right back in, huh? Yeah, so the excitement has a contracted quality to it. And the excitement has a self in there

where you're just using your examples, like check me out, got it whereas joy is just the joy of getting it it doesn't matter who got it or whether somebody's going to get it again but if it's the excitement i got it that actually drives it back and says and i want it again that's addiction right and it's at its heart is oh that good. I want to do it again. Joy, there's this great line from Blake where he says, he who binds himself to joy does the winged life destroy. He who kisses joy as it flies lives in eternity's sunrise, if I've got that right. And the idea is, oh, here's something good. I want it. There's a self there, self-referential processing, PCC activity.

Restless, I want more. Joy is expanded as compared to the contracted quality of excitement. So here I would say I love that concept. Celebrate like a wild person, but don't hold on to it. Just celebrate. Enjoy the celebration. And that will get somebody there. But the more they say, I did that, or the celebration. And that will get somebody there. But the more they

say I did that, or I want to do that again, the more they, you know, destroy that winged life. Yeah. That's super interesting. In the sport world, that is a framework that works. Like it's like, have your own back. It's like self-talk for confidence, saying things to yourself to back yourself. Like, yeah, let's go. You got this. But whatever those kind of frameworks or those statements are. But it doesn't, I don't think it works here. Because of your point that is ego referenced, it's self-referenced, which, and then you're

using excitation, which is really close to anxiousness, right? Curiosity is not kindness is not joy is not, but Hey, let's go. That's right. It feels like I might've just gotten really close back to the on-ramp. Yeah. Okay. So, so just one way to highlight this, and this is more your lane than mine. So tell me to step out. If you look at team sports, so me just watching team sports, and I've only worked with some like Olympic teams, so not, you know, this isn't my day job. When there's a team that's working really well together, really harmoniously, and somebody does a really good job, and they become the prima donna and are like, I a great job right it totally blows the whole the whole vibe whereas when every somebody's like yeah we did it i mean look at look at all these

great players and they get interviewed and they're like no it wasn't me it was the team right as compared to yeah it was me check me out i'm the best that nobody wants to hear that because it just that vibe sucks and so here it's the joy, it's the connection, it's the camaraderie as compared to the self. Yeah, that's cool. Okay. How about this idea? People that are anxious are actually and need to go do something. So call it performance anxiety, but it's a jet. Really? It's a general anxiety triggered by something, you know, like we can get into the weeds here, but just say there's an anxiousness and they're about to go do something, whether it's on stage or important conversation with a loved one or whatever it is that really what they're looking for is relief. And that relief is it's not going to get you to your most optimal way of being. You know, you're just trying to get through it as opposed to capture the unique

opportunity of that moment and be able to express yourself in that unfolding moment that, you know, is the quote unquote opportunity. So how do you think about the relief experience that people are looking for as opposed to really meeting the opportunity? It's a great question. So here, I would say, you know, the first step there is really helping people see what that process is, what's driving the need for relief and separating out the needs versus the wants, right? So if we're feeling lonely, for example, and that loneliness is driving us to go on social media, which drives more social media loops, it doesn't actually provide a sustainable or nourishing relief to the feeling of loneliness, right? It just drives more loneliness and more

social media use. So if we look to see how we're actually approaching the problem, the relief problem, it actually helped just map it out, you know, what's the we're actually approaching the problem, the relief problem, it actually helps just map it out. You know, what's the trigger? What's the behavior? What's the result? We can start to see clearly what we're doing. And then we can check in with ourselves that second step.

What am I getting from this? Is this actually solving the problem or is it just making it worse? Just that illumination helps us step back and say, oh, you know, if it's helping, great, keep doing it. If it's not helping or if it's driving even more problems, then we can become disenchanted and find another way out. And here, you know, I think, boy, so much of this is solved simply from defining the problem clearly, seeing it, becoming disenchanted with the things that didn't work.

And that disenchantment, especially if we're bringing curiosity in, it opens up the space for us to move into growth mindset and say, Oh, that's not working. What might I do differently? And we can start experimenting with what's actually going to satisfy our needs. And when we get to needs satisfaction, we're hitting Maslow's hierarchy. We're doing all this stuff that we need to do. And then we can move to, you know, self-actualization and even self-transcendence. Transcendence, you said at the end? Yeah, there you go. Okay. And then if you were to, if you were to help people that are struggling with sleep and because they are wound up with

anxiety, how would you help them? Let's say they're trying to shut down, lights are off, they got the face mask on, the temperature's just right. It's been like three hours since they ate something. They're hydrated properly well before they go to bed. They're doing all the behavioral stuff, but their head hits the pillow and they go, boom, and they start to think and they're trying to solve things and they're in the loop. How would you help people while they're in bed? Yeah. You're describing about 90% of my, my clinic patients, right? You it's like you were there watching every one of my patients walk in the door and describe exactly what their issue is. So, and it's funny, my lab just finished a study on this. So we had an NIH funded study looking at, can we actually address worry as it applies to sleep? Long story short, we use our own learning anxiety app here to help people map out their habit loops around worry and sleep.

And you just nailed it, right? It's like their head hits the pillow. It says my turn. And they start worrying about tomorrow. They start, you know, regretting things they've done today. And then they can't get to sleep because they're aroused, right? They're anxious. They look at the clock and they get more freaked out because they're like, oh no, I can't get to sleep. And now they're definitely not getting to sleep. So here, same process, map it out, start to work with that worry. And here I bring in specific mindfulness practices like body scans are a really great way for someone to kind of take that energy and help it, help transform it into exploration of one's direct

experience rather than feeding that worry habit loop. Okay. So, so you recognize it. There's a, you're in the behavioral activity. The mental behavioral activity is the worry loop. And then what is the, there's no real reward. So you're saying, yeah. So then you've got the interrupting thought, right?

And then, so you would say, hey, here's a better solution, which is let me just have a deep focus on relaxing my feet, relaxing my calves, relaxing my hamstrings and my quad and just, just body scan that way. Yeah. And not, they don't even have to relax. They can just get curious. Like, Oh, what are my toes feel like? Oh, you know, is my left foot warm now? They can even get curious. Like, um, so this isn't a specific body scan, but they can be like, is my left foot warmer than my right foot, you know, as a way to bring awareness and curiosity into their body. If they want to do a specific body scan, like you're pointing out, they can just be scanning up the body,

but they don't even have to focus on relaxing. Okay. So you're, yeah. So I added that to it. Yeah. You S you're staying with kindness and curiosity as the, as the, the, the big kind of differentiator there. Okay. Hey Judd, this is awesome, dude. I think we went into some serious technical areas, but the simplicity of your model is appreciated. And it feels like there's a key question and then there's a direction to go. So become aware, ask yourself a key question

and go to kindness or curiosity. And you'll find yourself interrupting the loop and then replacing it with something that is sustainable and non-addicting. How about that? Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Brilliant. Judd, that's cool, man. All right.

So where can we find the app? How do we get on your app? The app is just called Unrunding Anxiety. There's a website, same name, unrundinganxiety.com, or people can just download it on the app store, or they can go to my website, which is just drjudd.com. So we've got a bunch of resources there, including links to the book and the different apps that we have. What do you, what do you,

so you're solving something that has had a 250, no 250% increase. Is that right? Did you, is that the number? 250% increase over 2020, 35% of the population. It's probably more like 70, you know, right. Struggle with anxiety. What are you going to do with your, and you've got a solution. You've got an app for that. What are you going to do with your billions? Dude, the thing that is most rewarding to me is hearing people transform their lives. And it might sound hokey, but honestly, I don't think money makes people happy. I think helping people, at least for me, makes people happy. And so I'm happy just to be out there trying to help people wake up and- Hey, a yacht in Tahiti, you can help people from a yacht in Tahiti as well. It's okay, Judd. Well, so I would like to do a little more surfing, but other than that, I'm pretty happy

doing what I'm doing. All right, good. When you get the yacht and you're going to go fire up the mentois and go surfing, hit me up, okay? Yeah, good. All right, that's perfect. I'm so stoked for you, Judd. I want to really support people to follow your good science. I hope this conversation did a fraction of the, you know, celebrate the brilliance that you hold. And this was a treat for me. And so, yeah, thank you, brother. My pleasure. It was a treat for me as well. Really enjoyed this. Okay, good. Okay. All the best to you. All right. Thank you so much for

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