Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 159: Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety

Episode Date: October 31, 2018

It kind of blows my mind to consider the fact that we're up to nearly 600 episodes of this podcast, the 10% happier podcast. That's a lot of conversations. I like to think of it as a great compendium of, and I know this is a bit of a grandiose term, but wisdom. The only downside of having this vast library of audio is that it can be hard to know where to start. So we're launching a new feature here, playlists, just like you put together a playlist of your favorite songs.

Back in the day, we used to call those mix tapes. Just like you do that with music, you can do it with podcasts. So if you're looking for episodes about anxiety, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes. Or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist of all of our anxiety episodes, or if you're looking for how to sleep better, we've got a playlist for that. We've even put together a playlist of some of my personal favorite episodes. That was a hard list to make. Check out our playlists at 10%.com slash playlist. That's 10% all one word spelled out..com slash playlist singular.

Let us know what you think. We're always open to tweaking how we do things and maybe there's a playlist we haven't thought of. Hit me up on Twitter or submit a comment through the website. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ OUT Hey guys, anxiety is a huge issue these days getting worse for a variety of reasons, including technology, social media, especially among young people. And our guest this week, we've talked about anxiety on the show before, but our guest this

week has a really interesting approach to the issue. He's not a sufferer per se, but he is a neuroscientist, a really prestigious neuroscientist who has developed a new way to treat it through an app called Unwinding Exity. His name is Jud Brewer or Dr. Judson Brewer, if you want to be all formal about it. He's a friend of mine. I wrote about him in my first book and we've been friends ever since. He's actually somebody who's really influenced the way I think about the science around meditation and meditation itself. He not only is highly accomplished scientist but is somebody who's been meditating for many many years and very very

Serious about that as well. So we're gonna talk to Judd He's got a lot to say. It's all very interesting. We'll talk to Judd coming up. First though, let's do your voice mails. Here's number one. Hi, my name is Belinda, and I'm from Chicago. My question is around how do you get the to-do list and plans that you have for the day to stop running through your head in the morning when you try to meditate in the morning? That's I think a good, I'm trying to get set up into that practice,

but I continually mind in this program that way to kind of start running into, this is what I want to do today, this is my two lists, this is what I'm going to do. I plan for, and I can't put that on pause, and it keeps jumping in when I try to meditate first thing in the morning. So I wondered if you had any good tips or tricks on how to pause that just to try to kind of get through the meditation and do the meditation in the morning and kind of stop that to do list,

kind of just jumping at your first thing in the morning. Thanks. Totally normal. I happens to me when I'm not meditating in the morning, anytime I'm meditating or anytime I'm trying to focus on anything at all, I have this background static of thinking about all the stuff that I need to get done that I haven't done or I haven't done well enough blah blah blah all the time.

But specifically in terms of meditation, I'll tell you what I do. The first thing is I think trying to pause it or stop it is a fool's errand. To the extent that we understand the mind and the brain, I think we know that we don't know where thoughts come from. They come out of a void. It's the mystery of consciousness, which is one of the most interesting mysteries in a universe that is filled with them. But this, again, the mystery of consciousness is we know that we know stuff. In other words, we know that we can hear things, see things, that

ideas can be submit, can come into our mind. But we don't know what is knowing it. We don't know. There's no little you inside your, inside your your head thinking these thoughts or receiving all the audio in your environment and the visuals and all that stuff. So it's a really interesting question. Anyway, I'm getting a little high-falutin on you. To get to the specific question you asked me, how I approach it is not trying to fight it or stop it, but actually, think counterintuitively welcome it in. You know, as we know in meditation,

it's a series of humiliations where you're sitting there trying to do this seemingly simple thing, you're focusing on the feeling of your breath, coming in and going out, and then you just get distracted over and over and over and over, and if it wasn't your to-do list, it would be something else because that's the way the mind is. The mind, as my friend Jeff Warren likes to say secrete's thoughts the way

the stomach secrete's enzymes you know it is just its job to think you can't it's I understand why we do this but it's a little silly in the end to expect the mind to stop thinking and so and yet when we get, we tend to beat ourselves up. So I do this thing that the aforementioned Jeff Warren, who's a really fantastic meditation teacher with whom I wrote a book recently, he actually said to me, you know, notice that there are five, six neurotic programs that are, you know, sort of inner characters that keep popping up in your head. For me, one of them is just kind of an angry guy. Another is a planner, which is your main to what you brought up, you know, the sort of the planner,

the logistician who's always thinking about the to-do list. There's another voice in there that I've noticed that always comes up that is super ambitious and a few more. And Jeff's advice was give each of these characters who are regular players in your inner dramas a name. And when you notice them stepping on to the stage, be like, hey, what's up? You know, in my case, I call the plan or planning voice Julie, like Julie, the cruise director from the love boat. I'm dating myself here. And be like, Hey, what's up, Julie? Welcome to the party.

So that way you're not fighting against something that you're never going to win. You're not starting a fight. You're never going to win. You're kind of just welcoming whatever's happening to the party in your mind and then you go back to the breath over and over and over again rather than trying to push it away or beat yourself up for the fact that those thoughts are coming just being cool with the fact that they're gonna come no matter what and the only sane workable scalable strategy in the face of this torrent is to be

cool about it to be friendly to these characters and I think over time least the theory is, and I've seen this work a little bit in my life, that when you stop fighting or feeding these neurotic, habitual tapes that we run, actually over time they can diminish in their power. So try that, and then call me back if it doesn't work and let me have it. All right, here's voice mail number two. Hey, Dan, my name is Bob Mills. I'm from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I just want to thank you, first off, for your app and for your book. They've been truly life-changing for me. I've tried some other mindfulness apps and I really feel that a temperament happier has both the substance and the variety that I needed to to sort of get on the habit and answer the questions that I need answered. My question is this, I've always been a guy who likes to have a good time and my severe

fomo has perhaps led me to drink more and some experience than I should. Like last night, it's not. It doesn't drastically affect my work life, but today's after I'm super hard on myself, lots of judgment and anxiety. And then I try to get up in the morning and run it off, but it's harder times, like definitely harder times than others. In your experience, how critical is kicking the booze

and drug habit, which I don't have, but in creating more mindfulness in one's life, and you have both, or just one come without the other. I'd love your thoughts. Thanks again. Appreciate everything you're doing. Bye. Such a good question.

So FOMO for those who don't know what it is is a fear of missing out. And what I take from your question is that you so badly fear missing out, that you go out a lot and then end up drinking a lot. And while it's not derailing your life, you don't feel that great the next day and at least to some self-reconmination, et cetera, et cetera. So you said thankfully for me in your experience, in other words, you asked me to answer from my experience because I don't want to answer from the top of Mount Olympus,

but I'll just tell you how I deal with this. Specifically, as it comes to drinking and drugs, so I stopped doing drugs in the mid-2000s because I had a panic attack too, actually, on national television, which was pretty inconvenient. And it was fueled by the fact that I was artificially raising the level of adrenaline in my brain because I was using cocaine. And so I really had to stop that.

I stopped drinking because actually just the drinking just didn't agree with me anymore. So I didn't ever really have a drinking problem. So I don't really do either of those things, but I do have a really powerfully addictive personality and I've had to give some things up because I just noticed that I was just thinking about it too much and also just consuming,

well, in particular, I'm talking about sugar. So for me, sugar became a huge focus, where I did, you know, I had kicked a lot of my vices, but I really was into dessert. But I was into it in a way that was just gross. And I mean, I think I referenced in my most recent book that there was a night true story where I had so many Oreos that I woke up in the middle of the night and threw up. So I would just way overdo it. It was not not a good look. And also because I'm kind of my constitution isn't so strong, even if I just had a moderate amount of dessert, I would feel ill all of the next day. So this is where it becomes

relevant to your issue. So again, different substances in my case, who was sugar in your case, it's having a few beers or whatever, but it was the next day where I would feel awful and it sounds like you two are feeling awful. And so I had to, I just basically about 13, 14 months ago said, I'm done. I'm not having sugar anymore. I was inspired by my friend, Gretchen Rubin, who is the author of the Happiness Project and has been on this podcast a couple times as her own podcast. She's a really a good friend and just somebody I admire and she had told me years prior that she had quit sugar because she just noticed that it was producing this boring dialogue. She just noticed that it was just producing this boring dialogue Where she would wake up in the morning and be like, I wonder am I gonna have any sugar today? How much of me gonna have where's it gonna be am I gonna feel awful afterwards blah blah blah over and over and I know it and that was what was happening for me

And it just took I had to suffer a little bit more before I was ready to actually Do what I need to do which was just give give up sugar because it was causing me more trouble than it's worth and so yeah I you know, on, I get some cravings on birthdays or when I'm, you know, out to dinner with friends and everybody's having dessert, but I just know, look, I'm not a guy we sugar anymore. That's just the deal. And because I can't handle it just the same way I can't do cocaine, you know, like I, they have similar effect on me.

Obviously cocaine is way more dangerous, although sugar is pretty damn dangerous too. My meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein says this thing that I find really interesting, which is that the term renunciation is not a popular term in our culture, it doesn't have positive overtones. But if you reframe it as non-addiction, it actually starts to feel better. And so I'm not saying, hey, you should never drink again. The winters are long up in Halifax, I'm sure. But you might want to consider a certain degree of renunciation or non-addiction. Because if you're really serious about your meditation practice those days afterwards, it's tough.

I found the days when I was in a sugar coma, I was falling asleep or just completely fuzzed out in my meditation practice. So I'm not gonna give you a specific prescription. You should only drink once a quarter or once a week or whatever. That's totally for you to play with, but I just give you this concept of this sort of renunciation light that Joseph talks about because I found it really meaningful. Getting to a place of not being as addicted and thinking about it in that way has been really useful for me. So good luck with this. Play with it. Give yourself a break. Know that you're

going to mess up and and and you're just going to have to experiment just the way I did with sugar for so many years, even after Gretchen told me I should probably quit. I just played with it and played with it and suffered and all that stuff until I got to a point where I figured it out for myself. All right, good luck to you. Our next guest actually, it turns out, is an expert in addiction. He's an expert in a lot of things. Dr. Judson Brewer is a long time meditator,

also a student of the aforementioned Joseph Goldstein, and he is now the director of research and innovation at the Mindfoldness Center, which is in Massachusetts. He's also an associate professor in psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University. He's also affiliated with MIT. He used to be affiliated with Yale. You get a picture.

He's a pretty serious dude. He has developed, and he's been on the podcast before, talking about his app-based treatments for things like smoking and emotional eating. In fact, he teaches a course on the 10% happier app about mindful eating. He's really good about issues related to addiction, but now he's moving into anxiety, and he has a new app called Unwinding Anxiety. He's got lots of interesting thoughts about using meditation to deal with anxiety. So here he is, Dr. Jed Brewer. So this is a new app you've got.

What's it called? Unwinding anxiety. I like that. So how's it work? What's the deal? Well, it starts by helping people really understand how their minds work, which is something that most of us don't really have a good sense for. And so we really train them to start to notice how our minds work, especially in habit mode. So you're saying this is the kind of the new, I mean there's a lot new to this, but one of the new angles is that that anxiety is a habit. Yeah, it might seem paradoxical or ironic or even nonsensical, but really it is when we look at it,

and especially the loops that we get into around worry, for example. How does that work? Walk me through. I mean, I know how it works because I'm in the loop all the time, but more interesting to hear you talking to me. So let's use a simple example. So for example, if we feel a little anxious, for some of us that are stress-eaters, we might eat the proverbial Oreo if we feel a little anxious, for some of us that are stress eaters, we might eat the proverbial Oreo and then feel a little bit better. So that's how we start to generate habit loops around eating based on anxiety or stress eating.

So now what about worry thinking? So for example, let's say your mind, maybe you're good at solving problems. And so anxiety comes up and then your mind says, you know, I've got a great idea. I'm going to solve this. And so it starts going into planning or thinking or fixing mode. So sometimes fixing mode works like we can come up with a solution. But what would you say would be the percentage of time for you or for people that you know that we get really anxious that that thinking mode actually fixes the problem?

Well, I can only speak for myself, but the more mindfulness I have, the more self-awareness I have, the more I realize that most of my worrying is useless. Yes, so that will get to that in a second, but for folks that don't have that practice, for example, the worry thinking comes in and it says, I'm going to fix this and sometimes it does fix it. So we can get this intermittent reinforcement process. That's the problem, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's, you know, it comes in as a way to most of my folks that use our program talk about feeling like, oh, worry helps me feel like I'm in control, for example, or it's the researchers actually shown that it functions as a distraction mechanism.

So it feels better to worry than to have whatever the unpleasant emotion was, that was anxiety or fear or whatever in itself. But that, when that worry starts spiraling on itself, it becomes so unpleasant that it doesn't work as a control strategy, because we realize, oh, we don't actually have control over these things. And then it starts to feed on itself because it becomes that unpleasant emotion that it was trying to fix in the first place. And so we spiral out of control or tighten down at this time, little ball of anxiety based on, you know, anxiety triggering worry, triggering more anxiety, triggering more worry thinking, and it just spins out of control. Let's just step back for a second. How do you define you as a psychiatrist and neuroscientist? How do you define anxiety?

I think of it as kind of worry of the future. Excessive worry about the future. Yeah. And how do you draw the line? Because I think a lot of us would describe ourselves as anxious, it's a very common word now. Almost like the way people describe

themselves as ADD. But it's almost almost common word now, almost like the way people describe themselves as ADD, but it's almost almost almost flippantly used and I don't know if people are being precise. Yeah, I don't know how precise we need to be. I look at it as, well, are we suffering because of the anxiety or not? And so it's probably more of a spectrum like you're pointing out. And so there, you know, if I put on my psychiatrist at, there's generalized anxiety disorder, there's panic disorder, and these all have criteria that folks have to meet. But the bottom line is, if we're feeling anxious, how much is that causing problems for us?

So, if people who want to use your app, it's not like they need to have a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder. It's just like, are you suffering because of your anxiety? Yes. But the interesting part of it is, if you would ask me 10 years ago, I would have told you my anxiety is what makes me whatever success I've achieved is because I'm anxious, right? So that's, and you said it before, the worry thinking works sometimes. So we get into a story about how like, yeah, it sucks to be anxious all the time, but like if I wasn't

anxious all the time, I'd be living under a bridge. Yeah, this is so common that I wrote a specific module about this. So you know, some people describe it as performance anxiety or I need to be anxious in order to have drive. My PhD thesis advisor, Lumiclia, talked about, used to talk about true, true and unrelated. So we might be anxious. My mom talked about that actually. Oh really?

So we might be anxious and we might get something done, but it doesn't mean that there's a causal connection between anxiety, getting us to get things done. And in fact, if you look at the ultimate peak performance state flow, for example, completely anxiety free, but I would say that's where folks are performing at their best. So there's some good evidence suggesting that anxiety might actually get in the way. We just think that it's helping. Right. So it's we're actually succeeding despite our anxiety. The good ideas are sneaking up through the like sneaking up through the knots of worry. But actually if you can lower the volume on the on the on the worry inner chatter that actually more good ideas might be able to see their way to the surface. Absolutely. And in that anxiety-staking credit, it's just diabolical. It's all the function

of the ego, the thinking mind. So walk me through how we break this habit. Well, it's helpful to know how our minds work. So one useful tidbit is to see that our minds are the reinforcement learning machine. So they're looking, they're constantly comparing, looking for the BBO, the bigger, better offer. So, you know, is it this chocolate or this chocolate that's better? Whichever one we taste better than our orbital front-end cortex updates that and says, eat that chocolate, you know, eat the one that tastes better.

So if we can start to see two things. One is how much anxiety is not serving us that it's actually painful in itself. That helps diminish the value of the anxiety itself. So we're less excited to be anxious or spiral out into worrying the first place. You even said this earlier, you said, oh, the more I look at anxiety, the less I see that I get anything from it. Well, for a lot of us, especially the performance anxiety folks, et cetera, they have to really see that clearly before they're going to be convinced and not convinced on a rational level, but their brain on a very deep level is like, wow, this isn't helping me. So that's one step. But the other place that we need

to do is find something that's a relative reward. So, for example, you know, what does it feel like when you're anxious? We've talked about contraction versus expansion, that feeling of anxiety. Would you say anxiety is contracting or expanding? That's like a horse blinders. Yes, horse blinders. So it's narrowing, it's limited. There's restlessness. There's, you know, there's dis-ease that comes with it. It's narcissistic off. Exactly. At least in my case. Yeah. So that's one piece. We can start to see, well, what feels better than this? So for example, joy, curiosity, kindness. And as we start to see, oh, those actually feel better. Our brain says, ooh, I want some of that. And so it starts to not only see

the relative diminished value of the anxiety itself, but it also starts to see the relative reward that comes from kindness, for example. Well, but the anxious part of my brain is saying, if I have a problem at work, and I like somehow trick my brain into getting joyous, that's not going to solve the problem. I need to actually have my mind on the problem in order to solve it. Right, but you don't need to be anxious while you have your mind on the problem. So you can start there and you say, oh, do I need to be anxious to solve this problem?

And then you can look, it times when you solve the problem and you are anxious versus times when you weren't anxious and solve the problem and see which ones are actually more efficient. How does that app help you do that? It walks us through. You know, the first step is starting to recognize when we're stuck in that habit loop around anxiety.

So the triggers, the worry thinking and all that. So I think of this as even use this three gear analogy. So if you think of driving a car, you have to get in a first gear to get that car moving. So that first gear is just recognizing any aspect of that habit loop. The second gear aspect is somewhat paradoxical where we really help people see very clearly what am I getting from this? And so that's the piece that you talked about earlier. Oh, this anxiety is not serving me. That's where that relative reward, quote-unquote, of anxiety starts to diminish.

Then we move into third gear, when we're less excited to be anxious in the first place, our brain starts looking for other things to do. Like, oh, let's just not be anxious when we're working on this problem, or let's be kind kind or let's practice being in the moment. We can bring in specific mindfulness practices.

For example, breathing into anxiety or using noting practice as a way to note what anxiety feels like. We're stepping out of the process itself and that's third gear. Break down those two, the breathing in, two anxiety and using noting practice, because for people listening who may not have a deep meditation practice or may not have meditated at all, can you just give us

the blocking and tackling on that? Yeah, it's pretty simple. We can just do this together. So think of a time recently when you were anxious. Oh, sure, like 10 minutes ago. So notice where you feel it in your body. Okay, so yeah, I had a meeting with my boss an hour ago, one of my bosses.

And actually, it was great meeting, he was super nice, but I was just a little anxious because there were a lot of things I wanted to cover and I didn't know I had some ideas that I wanted him to say yes to and I wasn't sure if he was gonna say yes. So I'd say definitely where I feel in my body is a tightening in my chest. Okay, great.

And that's a pretty common one. There's some good research showing that the chest is one of the main areas where we feel it. So what you can do is just simply, on your next in-breath, breathe into that feeling of anxiety right there and kind of hold it with a kind, curious awareness, kind of like a mother holding her child. In the meeting, I do this, it's not going to look a little weird. No, we can do this here right now, but they're still going to look weird.

Well, you still have to breathe, so they might not know that you're actually holding it in. So it's not like a deep breath. No, no, you're just breathing. As you breathe in, you just breathe into that feeling, and you get really kind of hold it in that awareness for a second. You know, as that in breath just holds itself, and then you can just let that breath go out, and sometimes you, as that in breath just holds itself, and then you can just let that breath go out, and sometimes you can feel a little bit of that release simply by having held it and then breathing out.

And so we can do that a couple of times, it's very simple. We all have to breathe anyway, and it's very interesting because often when we're anxious, we notice that we're not actually breathing, we're holding our breath. So what is the mechanism by which just as you say, holding it in awareness releases it? Well, I don't know neurobiologically what's going on there, but we do know experientially and you can probably, you know, notice this from your own experience, bringing awareness to something that's tight. It seems it just kind of helps it loosen up on its own. It's like, oh, why would I hold this tightness in my chest? It's kind of hard and painful to do this.

Oh, I'm just gonna let go. Yes. That jibes exactly with my experience. I don't know that I can rationally explain why that is. You don't need to. You don't need to. It's just the beauty of it. Okay, so noting practice was the other thing you said

as a technique that can be used. Yeah, so you could go back to that sensation and you can simply, you know, and you could even do this out loud. Now note the physical sensations of what that anxiety feels like. So anxiety is a concept. If you had to break it down for me, how would you describe anxiety for me right now? What does it feel like? I would say, well, so based on my noting correctness, tightness. Yeah, tightness.

Mm-hmm. What else? Worry. Okay. What's worry? What does worry feel like? In the body. Okay. What's worry? What does worry feel like in the body? Yeah. Tightness in them, maybe a little gurgling in the stomach. Perfect. So we just note those physical sensations. We'd note thinking like you're a little throbbing in the head.

There you go. And so we can bring awareness simply through these, this noting practice, so we'd note the physical sensations, we'd note thinking, we'd note anything that's arising, and it's really interesting because as we bring that kind of curious awareness to it, we start to see that these sensations aren't quite as, you know, as formed and as stable as we might think they are. You know, I've a lot of patients that wake up in the morning and say, oh, I'm anxious and they feel like they're going to be anxious all day. When they break it down, in any one moment that anxieties is very

much in flux. So that's really why don't I let that pass. It's so important that when one of the many benefits of mindfulness in many cases, but specifically in this case, is that you notice that you're anxious and you immediately, your mind, if this is the Buddhist word for this is propuncia, you immediately create a mental, this is the Buddhist word for this, is propuncia. You immediately create a mental movie of a whole day filled with anxiety where you're unable to function. But if you actually just zip into right now and investigate it with some curiosity and friendliness, you see that anxiety as you're experiencing it truly right now, is this whole circulating booleavase

of physical sensations and mental phenomena. And then it all of a sudden, it doesn't seem so monolithic. Right, it's more manageable. Right, because in this moment, it's constantly changing. It's compared to, oh no, I'm gonna have anxiety today,

tomorrow, forever, to rest of my life, whatever. That's the Papacha. I love that word because it sounds like we're galloping off into the future. Papacha. It's one of my favorite words of all time. It's just for the uninitiated, it's an ancient Indian word from the Pali language that used at the time of the Buddha. It means, I think it translates into the imperialistic tendency of mind. So, it's like the mind is colonizing the whole future with a data point from the present moment, which may or may not have any basis in reality.

Yeah. And so part of this seems to be seeing the difference, seeing that your thoughts are just that, thoughts, that they don't, you don't have to take them. The thought of, I'm going to be anxious all day is if you can zoom back the camera just a little bit and see that's just a thought, that is a huge victory. Absolutely. Yeah. So those are a couple of ways that this program and there are many programs that teach these types of things.

But we'd link the courses the best. We want to be clear with that. Absolutely. So, how many days is the app? We're actually not using the term days, we're using modules. So there are 30 main modules that start off the program. And we use that because folks that are anxious tend to be anxious. And so they think, oh no, I have to do this within 30 days, for example.

But if we've formed a habit around anxiety, that can be a lifelong thing that can be really challenging to break in 30 days. So we really want to have people take it at their own pace. Every seven modules, there's a quiz that says, have you gotten this, this, this, if not, go back and review these modules. And so we really want folks to be taking this in personalizing and individualizing in a way that will help them the most as compared to, great, I've got to do this in personalizing it, individualizing it in a way that will help them the most as compared to, great, I've got to do this in 30 days go.

How much does it cost? It's about, I should know this better, I think it's about $30 a month or there's discounts for folks getting a six month subscription, etc. Okay, so you don't just buy the modules and then you're done with it, actually, it's like an ongoing time. It's a subscription. And part of that is related to we have an online community that I moderate and we've trained people to help support folks in the community.

We have a weekly live session via web. We zoom as a way to do that so folks can join us from anywhere in the world and I'll moderate that session so they can have access and ask questions, et cetera. Wow. Yeah, so it's something that we're trying to really have this be supportive and accessible, and so it's not just an app with a couple of modules. What are the things you're hearing from your users that they're finding most useful? Where do I begin? I would start with some of the things that have really blown me away. One was a couple of folks have been describing how they're writing out full blown panic attacks. Things that they have, you know, panic disorder where they've had this for years and years and

years, and they're actually able to write out full blown panic attacks. Well, I mean, I find that extremely interesting, although I'm a little skeptical having been through many full-blown panic attacks myself, it doesn't seem, I often joke, you can't hurl yourself into the lotus position when you're having a panic attack. It's like, you can't, but I think, and this is, I agree with you,

I was, this is where it really stunned me because I was not expecting effects like this, but when you really understand how your mind works and you've really got these practices down pretty well, the noting practice, in particular, one of the people I'm thinking of was using the noting practice. And she'd note note note note note.

And I'm gonna tell you, my own personal experience with panic attacks, I started having them, I think during residency, when I was training to be a psychiatrist, and I'd wake up in the middle of the night with a full-blown panic attack and Fortunately, I'd been practicing for a while at that point and I automatically would start noting And I remember at the end of these I would note oh I would just go through the DSM criterion check check check check

Oh, I just had a full-blown panic attack But I noted it to the point where I was able to ride with it and be with it where it's just kind of, it came up full force, did its thing and then stopped. And I probably had four, maybe five of those, and then I've never had one since then. Wow. I mean, I think for me, the panic attack only happened, well, there are two things, times when I get them. One is when I'm on live television, so it's like noting is a little hard to do. When you just be talking to the other would be when I'm

claustrophobic. So the latter seems more workable, although I'm just so terrified that I can't do anything. And I've been meditating, you know, not forever, but like nine years, that's not nothing. And I just, I just feel like I'm no match for it. Yeah, so I can't say I've had one on air. And I wouldn't recommend that to anybody.

I don't need having seen yours. It helps not to do cocaine. I'm sure, I'm sure. But I think the other piece here to have a little bit of trust to yourself in is that, you know, these practices really build up over time. And so the thing that I was really just really grateful for after having had these myself was that this practice just kicked in automatically on its own.

Yes, it's just like so interesting. I often liken it to times when I've interviewed police officers or members in the military and you asked them about a stressful situation and they always say, my training kicked it. And that's what we're doing in meditation. Exactly. And it can kick in like just when we need it. I know we're going to talk about some of the, we're in the middle of talking about some

of the responses you're getting from users. I'm going to call a tangent briefly because I just want to know, are you an anxious person? Would you describe that as being something you wrestle with? Absolutely, absolutely. And I would say that my mindfulness practice has been a lifesaver in that respect, to be able to have it come up and not have it ruled the day. So, but it doesn't alleviate it. It doesn't mean you never get anxious. It's either you catch it sooner. You know, it's hard to say I'd have to clone myself and do the parallel experiments now, especially,

because it's, you know, their times where it just pops up and then it's gone, pops up and then it's gone. Their times where it sticks around a bit longer. And their times, you know, when I'm not anxious at all, and it's hard to know, you know, what my new baseline is after having practiced for a couple of decades. Yeah. So you don't find yourself a week into an anxiety jag. And it's hard to know what my new baseline is after having practiced for a couple of decades. So you don't find yourself a week into an anxiety jagged. And you're like, Oh, now the mindfulness is kicking in. No, no, no, it's, I would say, on a daily basis, I can definitely consider myself not to have, and generalizing anxiety disorder or anything to that extreme. And that in general, I can't complain about my life. It's not bad.

That's great. Okay, so back to things that you're hearing that are surprising you from users, or it doesn't necessarily have to be surprising, but the things that they're finding the most applicable to their data moments and moment lives. So besides things like panic attacks, there's for a lot of folks where they just have this low grade or even medium or high grade anxiety that's throughout the day, just really understanding this habit loop around the worry and seeing that there is a way out. I'm thinking of, there was one of our pilot testers was so compelling. She wrote

me an email and said, you know, I feel like this anxiety, I am anxiety. It's deeply etched in my bones. And that was so compelling to me that I wrote our module 29 actually about that to see where we become so identified with anxiety that we can't Imagine ourselves without it and in fact as people go through the program They start to see they are not anxiety just like they're not their thoughts They are not anxiety and that is a tremendous relief for them just to know that Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after this So you just woke up your phone is lighting up with headlines and push notifications Stay tuned more of our conversation is on the way after this.

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What does a science say about how good meditation is? Mindfulness practices are for anxiety. Some of the best evidence is around anxiety in particular. So some of the earliest and strongest and most robust data are around, for example, MBSR, mindfulness-based stress reduction, for anxiety, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy has also been used for it as well.

And so these in-person trainings have been shown to be tremendously helpful. We have some pretty positive pilot data from our program. For your app. Yeah, so we've embedded validated measures right into the app so that we can folks can track their own progress. Also, so they can bring their scores to their clinicians. I can't tell you how many times I've had a patient walk into my office and I say, what's your anxiety

been like over the last month? And they give me the blank stare. I'd love to be able to look and wear say, oh, you've tracked this on a weekly basis. What was it like this? You've tracked this on a daily basis. So they can not only identify their habit patterns, but also I can see, are they making progress? Are they not making progress? Where do we need to tweak things a bit? So for somebody listening to this who may have, you know,

Garden variety, anxiety may not feel compelled to get the app yet or may not have the money yet for the app. What do you say is your general advice for managing anxiety in our lives? You want me to honest? Yes. I managing anxiety in our lives. You want me to honest? Yeah. It really starts with really understanding how our minds work. I think that's what mindfulness training in general is about.

And so, you know, a lot of meditation practices, a lot of noting practices, to help us start to see the patterns that we've set up in our minds. We don't need an app for that. We can start to pay attention to that ourselves. And so, you know, I would say, just like I talked about with First Gear, just starting to recognize what our habit patterns are, what triggers anxiety for us, what is our go-to? Is it worry thinking? And then starting to dive into worry thinking and asking, what do I get from this?

Not in a thinking way, but really just seeing what the results of worry are. We talk a lot in Buddhism about cause and effect. If worry is the cause, what's the effect of that? So we can start to see very clearly what those results are. So our brain can really see, hey, what am I getting out of this? I remember I was taking a walk with you once and you sort of describe, I'm probably going to mangle this so you'll correct me, that the core of your approach, because you work on,

you bring mindfulness to all sorts of issues including mindless eating The core of your approach is seeing clearly that if you can teach you can teach a person to see their own mental processes Clearly, they are not as owned by them and that gives you the leg up I would even say that that seeing clearly helps us hack into the very process that setting up these unhealthy habit loops in the first place. So we can start to if our you know habitual behavior is worry, what if we replace that behavior with awareness? That does two things. One is it steps out of the worry cycle in itself, but that awareness helps us see how painful the

worry is, and it also helps us start to see how sweet awareness itself is. All right, I have a million questions based on that. So just walk me through how that would work. I have enough self-awareness so that when I may notice that I'm caught in a little tangle of worry, and instead of my old habitual response, which is just feed it, feed it, feed it through more neurotic obsession, I actually just step back and bring some awareness to the fact that this is happening. And then what? I would even say, and one piece of that awareness is this additional quality of curiosity. So curiosity keeps us draws us in and says, Oh, what is this?

Curiosity in itself feels pretty good. So if we can tap into that capacity to be curiously aware, right there, we're not only stepping out of the process, but we're stepping into something that feels better than anxiety itself. So I mean, I've noted this about your approach before, which is that in some ways, you're, I mean, he evenistic maybe the wrong word, but you're trying, the brain wants things that are pleasant. And so you're always trying to tap into the reward system to help us break out of these habits that are actually causing us suffering. If it's the strongest learning process that we have, why not use it?

Right. What would you rather use? No, no, I'm definitely heathenist. And so yeah, I want to use the reward system of the brain to be able to, because I think it will, I just know it for myself, it will work. So ride that one. Rather than grit and willpower, which, as you've pointed out before, can evaporate pretty quickly. Yeah, unfortunately. What do we know about the prevalence of anxiety

in our culture now, as opposed to, I don't know, 50 years ago? I don't know historically, but I do know that it is the most prevalent category of psychiatric disorders if you want to look at disorders themselves. So the anxiety disorders are the most prevalent on average. If I remember the numbers correctly, the prevalence, for example, of generalizing anxiety disorders, about 20% in the population, there were some New York times there was a New York Times article talking about the prevalence in college students. And if you believe the data they were

they were reporting greater than 50% of college students meet some level of you know clinical grade anxiety. I Can't imagine that college students 50 years ago Were that anxious, but I don't know they seem pretty chill in animal house So what do you think is going on? Well, I don't know because I was in the live 50 years ago, I can say that there is a lot of... So one thing we can look at the causes of anxiety.

So this uncertainty is a killer for folks that are anxious. Our minds are trying... Their prediction machines trying to make sense of the world and trying to predict the future. They're trying to create stability, trying to get control. The more instability there is, so for example, just use political instability, for example, if we don't know what's gonna happen day to day

on the political sphere, that can cause anxiety for anybody that follows that piece. If we don't know what's going to happen day-to-day environmentally, a little less volatile than the political sphere, but there's more uncertainty with the environment, for example, no. That increases folks' anxiety. And we can apply this to any aspect of our life. So if we don't know if we're going to have a job tomorrow, that causes anxiety. If we don't know if we're going to you know if our relationship is on the rocks or that. Or if we pay off our student loans. Yeah, all of those things. So anything that increases the likelihood of instability or unpredictability, that's going to relate and be proportional to anxiety. What role, if any, do you think the

proliferation of technology and social media play in anxiety, especially among young people? Well, there are a couple of new pieces there that we haven't had before. So what is it, FOMO, the fear of missing out? So one is the availability of information. We've never had access to information like we do now. And so there's this whole thing about, oh, if I don't know everything, or if I'm not up to date, there's this worry that we, oh, if I don't know everything or if I'm not up to date,

there's this worry that we're going to miss out on something. So that's one piece of it. Or you're seeing pictures on Instagram of all of your buddies at a party that nobody invited you to. That doesn't help either, right? And there's also this, we can talk about technology addiction. That wasn't around, you know, smartphone. The iPhone came out in 2007.

So we've only had the ability of these, I love the term, the weapons of mass distraction. We've only had this for a decade. And so that's completely new. And it's burst onto the scene. You know, texting is now more addictive or more dangerous than drunk driving. You know, so we see all of this just completely swooping in. I don't think anybody had an idea about how massive this was going to be.

Do you have thoughts on how we can use mindfulness to manage our relationship tech technology? That phrase from Princess Leia comes to mind, help me, Obi-Wan, you're my only hope. I really, because these are being engineered on such a rapid scale to increase the addictive potential of these things, just as companies try to compete with each other to be more and more addictive,

there are a couple of, if you think about it, you can, large companies that have user bases of a billion or whatever, can do a study in a single day where they have sample sizes of 100,000 where they can test A versus B. Avers, and they're doing this constantly. So the rapidity with which this stuff gets iterated on is mind-boggling. So the only thing that I see that's going to help us be able to work with that. This isn't about setting up government regulations or asking companies to police themselves

because this is their revenue stream generally, for a lot of these. So I would say the only way that we're going to be able to be able to work with this is to really understand how our minds work and watch them, you know, watch our minds so we can see how we're getting sucked into this. And then we can use the same process that we were talking about with anxiety. We can start to see, oh, what do I get when I am, you know, addicted to my phone? I'm thinking of a specific example.

There was a resident physician that I was that was working with me who was, she was, she woke up one Saturday night from a daydream, basically, where she said that, you know, I was standing in the kitchen. My two kids were at the dining room table, and I was away from the table checking my news feet. And I woke up to the fact that I am completely disconnected from my kids, and that was such a wake up call for her to say, wow, look, how did I get here? That was the gutter, the proverbial gutter for her. That was a big gut check where she really motivated her to really change that, that behavior herself simply by

waking up to it. So we're talking about waking up. Seeing that process clearly, it's the exact same for technology, is it just with anxiety? So it's not there's not some magical, I mean, Obi-Wan is not going to show up with a lightsaber. Basically, you just have to use the tools and mindfulness, the sort of daily reps of learning how to see what's happening in your head so that it doesn't own you. And so for me, I'll just say, I am checking my phone all the time, but sometimes I notice, why am I doing this? Like, I'm not getting anything out of this.

I'm just doing it to do it. Why not just like put it away and just be alive for a minute? So each time you wake up and to that, that helps to help you become disenchanted with the process. And then you get more control. And if you have control over your mind, where you through these awareness practices, then it doesn't matter what technology throws at you

because your mind will know what to look for. Disenchantment is such a great word. You just unpack it. I would say not being, I think of Peppy Lepew, the cartoon skunk who would, you know, float through the room at the scent of that female cat, you know, where it's like we're completely enamored and enchanted and under the spell of what, you know, whether it's technology or our minds or whatever. The disenchantment is simply seeing that that scent is actually rotten. Oh, wow.

Why, you know, this is what's drawing me in. This doesn't do it for me. Yeah, so I'm stuck on Twitter for, I'm in a Twitter hole for seven hours and my, you might wake up at some point and notice you have a throbbing headache, your stomach is upset, you've eaten seven sleeves of Oreos and you're like, what am I getting out of this? Nothing but suffering. Right. Same for video games, same for any of these other socially addictive things. Important and note, used in moderation, all of these things are just fine.

Absolutely. I couldn't navigate Boston without my phone. I'm not saying we should become Luddites. The technology is only going to get more and more integrated. It's a matter of being able to use it responsibly. Do you not think there's some responsibility on the companies? I think it's an individual choice ultimately. If the company executives decide that it's important, more important to help society than to make profits for their shareholders, then I imagine they'll make those choices themselves. Maybe about whatever pressure is brought to bear on them. There's a complex calculus. I'm sure it's very complex. But in the end of the day, you don't want to have your happiness dependent upon the decisions made in a C-suite and Silicon Valley.

You want to be taking responsibility for your own mind. And so that's in some ways, in many ways, if not in all ways, it's on you, the user. Yes, and I would love everybody to take responsibility, whether it's us as the individual user, and as well as the C-suite folks. I hope that everybody is thinking about this. It's our, my new friend, Mnuchem Rode, I don't know if you know her,

she's an excellent podcast called Note to Self. And it's about the relationship we have to technology. She said, and I'm going to mangle the quote, that we're basically conducting a global science experiment right now with our minds and this technology. And it's uncontrolled, and nobody knows what the outcome is going to be. Yes. It's really incredible to watch. I was just on the train yesterday and I just took a look around and everybody's on their phone.

Absolutely. I was hearing about college students, my wife's a college professor and they have these seminars and they take a bio break in the middle of the seminar and instead of these college students actually talking to each other, they're all just instantly on their phones again. No social interaction with each other at all. Yeah. I mean, I'm sighing in part because like, I know I do that too, you know.

I try not to do it that much, but I can't claim to be a... Well, here's the next part is when we wake up from this and we see that the joy in the end of that, the wild to wave when we're actually connected with folks, that's really tasty. And so when we start doing that, other people are going to say, wow, you know, what are you smoking? I want some of that. Yeah. But I find that so often for me, the moment of waking up is just basically a moment of

self-flagulation. Like, how could I have done this? I'm never going to be able to break out of this habit. So it seems to be something, there are ways to wake up that are wise and unwise. Yeah, so you can wake up and then start self-flagulating and then you can wake up to the self-flagilation and see how hilarious you're self-flagulating. And then you've popped that bubble as well. hilarious. Yeah. You're self-legilating. And then you've popped that bubble as well. So, my friend Jeff says we're walking around in a thousand nested trenches. You know, and you just have to systematically wake up from them, you know, the best you can. Absolutely. Anything I should have asked you about, I didn't? No, this has been great.

Let's do the plug zone. Say more about where we can get your app, and where we can follow you on social media about where we can get your app, where we can follow you on social media, where we can get any information about you or anything you care about, give me everything. It's unwindinganxiety.com. People can learn more about the app. My self-referential website is chutsinbrewer.com that links to all unwinding anxiety program or eat right now program for emotional and stress eating. Which by the way we've talked about on this podcast before. So if you want to hear about that, Sci-D program are eat right now, program for emotional and stress eating and then- Which by the way, we've talked about on this podcast. Before so if you wanna hear about that,

which is super fascinating, you can go check it out. We have a whole course. And this 10% happier app that's kind of like a taste appetizer of what you'd get if you did eat right now. So, and you also have a smoking cessation app? Yeah, it's called Craving the Quit. So those are the three main apps. Craving the Quit, eat right now, unwinding anxiety.

Right, and for the Eat Right Now program, it's goeatrightnow.com, but the others are just self-named. And if I want to, you can get to app in the Google Play or in the Apple App Store too, okay. Yeah, yeah. And oh, I wrote a book called The Craving Mind that details all the science behind of this. Great book.

And you were on the podcast talking about that as well. How many times you've been on this podcast? This is a second. Only a second? Well, I've been something wrong. Social media? I'm not on social media very much. My Twitter handle is Judson Brewer, but I think I've tweeted like 36 times ever.

Okay. And you have a TED talk? I do. That one was seen a couple of times. Yeah. It's on TED. I think it's a simple way to break a bad habit. Simple way to break a habit. Bad habit. Yeah. Awesome. Did we get it all? We did. You're the man. You are. No. Thank you. Thank you. Peace. Okay, that does it for another edition of the 10% happier podcast. If you liked it, please take a minute to subscribe, rate us. Also also if you want to suggest topics you think we should cover or guests

that we should bring in hit me up on Twitter at Dan B Harris importantly I want to thank the people who produced this podcast Lauren Efron Josh Cohan and the rest of the folks here at ABC who helped make this thing possible we have tons of other podcasts you can check them out out at ABC newspodcasts.com. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon music.

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