The Rich Roll Podcast - The Craving Mind: Dr. Jud Brewer On Treating Addiction With Mindfulness

Episode Date: October 7, 2019

Addiction is tenacious. We're all craven animals, vulnerable to habits that don't serve us. Whether it’s a constantly checking social media, binge eating, smoking, excessive drinking, most of us fall prey to compulsions we feel powerless to arrest. Why is this? And what can neuroscience teach us about the nature of cravings and how to overcome them? Dr. Jud Brewer has devoted his career to answering these questions. His discoveries just might change your life. A psychiatrist, neuroscientist, thought leader and scientific researcher in the field of habit change and the “science of self-mastery”, Dr. Brewer is the founder of MindSciences and Director of Research and Innovation at the Brown University Mindfulness Center. Formerly, he served as an associate professor in Medicine and Psychiatry at UMass Medical School, an adjunct faculty member at Yale University, and a research affiliate at MIT. Dr. Brewer has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He has trained U.S.A. Olympic coaches. His work has been featured on 60 Minutes, Time magazine, Forbes, BBC, NPR, Businessweek and many other prominent media outlets. And his TED Talk, A Simple Way To Break A Bad Habit, is the 4th most viewed TED talk of 2016 with over 13 million views to date. As a long-time recovering alcoholic prone to a myriad of compulsive behaviors, it's fair to say that habit change is an obsession. Always on the hunt to extend my sobriety routine beyond 12-step, I came across Dr. Brewer's book, The Craving Mind. A scientific primer on the mechanisms of habit and addiction formation, it makes the case for how mindfulness can help us transcend cravings, reduce stress, and ultimately live a fuller life. I was compelled by Dr. Brewer's findings. I needed to know more. And so here we are. This is a powerful and potentially life altering conversation about the psychiatric and neurological nature of addiction. It's a deep dive into the science of habit change. And it's a master class on how meditation and mindfulness can help us finally overcome the unhealthy patterns that live between our reality and the best version of ourselves lurking within. Note: As a special thanks for listening, Dr. Brewer was gracious enough to offer my listeners a special discount on his evidence based habit change programs specifically designed to overcome anxiety and cravings. Visit drjud/richroll and enter code RICHROLL2019 and you will receive 20% off a subscription to any of his three apps for Android or iPhone (Unwinding Anxiety, Eat Right Now and Craving to Quit). As a disclaimer, I am not an affiliate and have no financial interest or otherwise with these programs – just sharing the good doctor's kind offer. The visually inclined can watch it all go down on YouTube.  A companion piece to my recent podcast with Atomic Habits author James Clear, my hope is that this solution-based exchange assists you in overcoming the compulsions that don't serve you On a personal level, I learned a ton — and have already experienced positive results. Enjoy! Rich

You know, on a very basic level, we're probably all addicted to some degree or another. And classically, we used to think of addictions, you know, as these substances like alcohol and cocaine and heroin and whatnot. But really, I think that's a little narrower view. If we look at this, it can be virtually anything that gets us into trouble. You can have everyday addictions where it's, you know, cell phones and technology and, you know, trying to get our inbox to zero and all these things that are failing propositions. You know, for the last 50 years, the dominant paradigm has been willpower. And that is proving to be more myth than muscle. You know, it's more legend than reality.

And that's exactly what I think we're seeing with meditation is if we get out of our own way, our brains naturally work better. And we can really start to totally get in sync with life and get into, you know, almost get into the flow of things. That's one thing I like about mindfulness practice is it basically distills down to pay attention, see what the results of your behavior

are, repeat. That's Dr. Judd Brewer, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody, how goes it? Rich Roll here, your host. This is my podcast. Welcome, first off, and again, thank you to everybody who came out for the live event. I could not have anticipated just how well it would go. It was definitely a lifetime moment for me, for sure.

An evening I know I won't ever forget. It exceeded all expectations tenfold. My sons and nephew and their band played three songs. The incredible NQ gifted us with his spoken word poetry. And the great Paul Hawken brought down the house with his powerful and quite empowering message of environmental recovery. But I think what impacted me the most was the community, just being present with all of you, seeing you connect with each other. And in my opening remarks that evening, I spoke about the abstract quality of the podcast and this desire that I have for the event to cultivate greater connectivity, communication, and real again, I am deeply, deeply grateful to everybody who showed up. And I look forward to more of these gatherings in 2020. And I'm going to be sharing the experience on the podcast in the coming weeks.

Okay. My guest today is Dr. Jud Brewer. Jud is a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist, a thought leader, and a scientific researcher in the field of habit change and the science of self-mastery. He is the director of research at the Center for Mindfulness and an associate professor in medicine and psychiatry at UMass Medical School. He is also adjunct faculty at Yale University and a research affiliate at MIT. Judd has published numerous peer-reviewed articles

and book chapters. He's trained US Olympic coaches and his work has been featured everywhere on 60 Minutes, on TED. In fact, he has the fourth most viewed TED Talk of 2016. TED Med, TEDx, Time Magazine. He was listed or enumerated among the top 100 new health discoveries of 2013,

Forbes, BBC, NPR, Businessweek, and many, many others. Judd has many fascinating things to share in the upcoming conversation, including some really compelling thoughts and discoveries in the field of addiction. And that's all coming up in a couple few, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life.

And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec,

a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful. And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com.

We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially

because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, Thank you. to support and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. really do, and they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com

and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Dr. Judd. So we cover a lot of topics in this conversation, but I think it's fair to say that the focus is around addiction and habit change, which is really the specialty of Dr. Brewer's really informative and helpful book,

The Craving Mind, which I highly suggest all of you guys check out. On some level, I think we're all craven animals subject to compulsions that don't serve us, whether it's substance abuse, social media, binge eating, or other behaviors that lead us astray, perhaps relationships. And these are things that we find ourselves repeating mindlessly or uncontrollably. And today, The Good Doctor shares more than a few valuable insights into the nature of cravings of these unhealthy patterns, including the mechanisms and the science, the neurology behind them, as well as certain keys, including mindfulness for addressing and ultimately overcoming them, for reducing stress and ultimately for just living a fuller life.

And as a special thanks for listening, Dr. Judd wanted to offer all of you guys a special discount on his evidence-based programs, his apps that are specifically designed to combat and overcome anxiety and cravings. And to avail yourself of this, go to drjud.com forward slash richroll and enter the code richroll2019 and you'll receive 20% off a subscription to any of his three apps for Android or iPhone. They include Unwinding Anxiety, apps for Android or iPhone. They include Unwinding Anxiety, Eat Right Now, and his other one, Craving to Quit. I should say, I want to point out, I'm not an affiliate. I don't have any financial entanglement or otherwise with these programs. I'm just sharing the good doctor's kind offer. And with that being said, I really enjoyed this conversation. I got a ton out of it. I think you will as well. So here we go. This is me and Dr. Jud Brewer.

All right, Dr. Jud is in the house. We're ready to rock and roll. How are you feeling? Feeling good. Super excited to talk to you. You are like the perfect guest for this podcast because you occupy this sweet spot that I don't know anybody, if anybody else can claim,

where you are steeped in the hard science, evidence-based science, psychiatrist, academic, neuroscientist, but you're also equally steeped in the world of mindfulness, like the softer sciences and all things spiritual at the same time. So this is like the bullseye of the things that I'm most interested in. And it's a rare opportunity to talk to somebody

who stands on equal footing in both of these worlds. Usually it's a hard scientist or somebody who's coming from a completely spiritual perspective and never the twain shall meet, but here you are. It's a rare creature. Well, it's been really interesting to just see how hard these hard sciences actually are

and how soft these soft sciences actually are. I don't think that we like to make dichotomies in the world, but that's one that really started to fall apart as I've explored both of them. Yeah, well, it's been an interesting journey for you, your entry point into all of this. Like I think just to contextualize what we're gonna talk about,

I think that would be interesting to learn more about. Sure, where do you wanna start? Well, how about with, you know, what got you interested in mindfulness and meditation to begin with? I mean, it was sort of precipitated by a little bit of a relationship crisis, if memory serves me. Yeah, that is true. I did start meditating my first day of medical school after going through a bad relationship breakup.

But I can look retrospectively on my life and realize there were a lot of points earlier in my life where I had touched on something that I didn't know what it was, but I knew it was really sweet. Whether it was, you know, race BMX bikes when I was a kid and I played quartet music, you know, as a group playing the violin. And there was something about being

in a group of four people and making music where just the world dissolved. and we were just the music. And I didn't know what that was. I just knew that I was some strange kid in high school that would rather play quartets than go out and get drunk. You didn't know that at some point in the future, all the cool kids would be calling this a flow state. I had no idea and here it is.

Yeah, so I think I'd touched on it at various points in my life, but it really took something that I was really devastated by to kind of precipitate a big change. Starting medical school's a new start in my life, new point, so it seemed like a good place to try something what I thought was new. Right, why that though, other than like,

hey, I'm in medical school, like I'll get a prescription to help me sleep better or to calm my nerves. Yeah, I've never really been, you know, I'm a psychiatrist, I prescribe medications, but I've never really been into, I've been pretty careful about putting medications or any types of drugs in my body.

And I really felt that throughout my life that just really finding good ways to nourish my mind and body were the better way to go. So, you know, I started getting into eating well in junior high school, actually, when I was BMX bike racing. I realized, you know, we'd race these three heats in a race. You know, you'd race a heat and then you'd have to wait and then race another one. Oh, so you were actually competing in BMX. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Well, in Indiana, there's not a whole lot else to do. But I found, you know, my, I would, I would eat junk food in between heats and realize that I didn't have much energy to race the second or third heat. And then my mom was like, Hey, why don't you try eating a peanut butter

and honey sandwich? And I was like, okay. And I realized, you know, wow, I had the sustained energy and I could do much better. And so I started getting into that back in high school and I was running cross country and track and wrestling and realizing that health food was actually really helpful for performance.

And so I think that even extended into when I started really getting into loving to explore things scientifically and not wanting to put things that might mess up my brain and my body. But psychiatry wasn't the original plan. Not at all, no. So how did that evolve? You know, I was doing this MD-PhD program where I was studying medicine and I was doing a PhD in immunology. And I got into that because

I was really interested in the brain-mind interaction. I was really fascinated by like why we get sick when we're stressed out. And so I was doing all of this mouse work where I'd make, you know, knockout genes in certain cell populations in mice and see what would happen. And that was really interesting. And at the time I was just, you know, I was meditating on my own because I was trying to work with my own stress and realized that, you know, by the time I finished that program, you know, it was like eight years into it, that I had learned so much more about the mind from my own meditation practice

than I had from actually studying mice that I shifted. I did this major, it was a seismic shift in my career. It was like one of those go big or go home moments where it was like, I'm gonna try something completely new and study it, because nobody had really been studying this stuff at that point, to the safe, where I could do science. I'd learned to do science, but I really wanted to see

how this mind-body connection really worked on a human level. But it was your experience with IBS that kind of tipped the scale, right? Like realizing that there really is this mind-body connection that transcends our typical conventional Western medicine protocol on how to treat certain illnesses.

Yeah, in college, I had a really severe bout. My senior year of college, I loved to run, and I would have to plan my runs around having a bathroom nearby where I could stop and go to the bathroom if I need to. And I remember going into the doctor at the university and, you know, saying, oh, maybe I got giardia because I did a lot of backpacking. And he said, you know, could this be stress? And I said, no, this can't be stress. And I listed like 10 things for the reason why

I could not possibly be stressed. In a very stressed out way. He kind of shook his head and I was like, well, maybe you why I could not possibly be stressed. In a very stressed out way. He kind of shook his head and I was like, well, maybe you'll learn someday. And it took me a while to realize that that was actually my mind that was throwing my body out of whack. And so I was studying that on a molecular level,

but when I finished my PhD, I wasn't actually satisfied with the answers that I had discovered in graduate school. You know, somebody asked me this question. We discovered all this stuff about the immune system and whatnot and how stress affects it. Somebody said, well, how do you know that's true in humans? And I said, well, I don't know. I would have to actually do this in humans.

And so that got me thinking about, well, you well, what do we know about the mind-body interaction in humans and how can we actually study this? And I had done some medical school rotations in psychiatry and started to see that my patients were actually talking the same language that the ancient Buddhists were talking 2,500 years ago. They were talking about craving and clinging and all this stuff. And I was thinking, I don't think this can be a coincidence. It's really, there's gotta be some connection here.

And that's when I shifted my career to saying, okay, let's study mindfulness as a treatment for addictions as compared to studying these small molecular pathways in mice. And how was that received by your peers at the time? I remember distinctly, I was at Yale University for my residency training and there can be,

let's just say there can be some pretense in some folks. And somebody said, you're gonna kill your career. This is, you've done well as a scientist, you're going to kill your career. You know, this is, you know, you've done well as a scientist. You're going to, you know, you're going to totally dash everything that you've built up. And people just started distancing themselves from me. And I figured, well, I'd rather fail doing something that I really am passionate about than succeed and just, you know, just do science. Yeah. So just, are you one of those people who when you're told you can't do something, you're trying to prove them otherwise?

Yeah, that's actually why I went to Princeton was my college counselor told me I'd never get in. Oh, really? Well, you have an interesting upbringing, right? Like you grew up single mom with, you have three siblings, four of you guys. Yeah. On food stamps at one point, I think I heard you say at one, I think when you were talking to Dan Harris, I listened to that interview.

So it's quite, it's quite a trajectory for you to have, you know, gone from that place into Princeton. Yeah. To have a good mom. My mom is amazing. Yeah. She's really, you know, my hero. She raised four kids by herself, went to law school at night. And we all stayed out of trouble, made it through college.

What are your siblings doing? My sister is an emergency medicine doc. My little brother works at MIT. My older brother does this value, he's a business valuation person. So they brother works at MIT. My older brother does this value. He's a business valuation person. So they're all doing well. Wow. Is your mom still around? She is. Yeah. I should get her on the podcast, you know, how to raise kids. I could use a little help in that department right now.

Wow. So that's amazing. So, you know, Princeton, you got your medical degree at Washington, right, in St. Louis. Yeah. And then you're at Yale. And now you seem like you're affiliated with all kinds of universities. I can't even keep it all straight. Like you're running institutes at like Brown and MIT and you're doing something at Massachusetts General Hospital? Well, mostly I'm at Brown University. I'm the director of research and innovation

there at the mindfulness center. Right. So where does all of this dovetail into the world of addiction? You know, it's on a very basic level. We're probably all addicted to some degree or another. And I say this not lightly, you're saying, oh, everybody's got addictions.

But if we look at this, this really comes back to the most basic learning mechanisms that are known to man. And it's a matter of where along the spectrum does it get us into trouble? And so classically, we used to think of addictions, and you know this as much as anybody else, as these substances like alcohol and cocaine and heroin and whatnot. But really, I think that's a little narrow of a view.

If we look at this, it can be virtually anything that gets us into trouble. There's this very simple definition, continued use despite adverse consequences. Right. There's this very simple definition, continued use despite adverse consequences. I learned that in residency and that really stuck with me because it really defines the scope of the problem where we can have everyday addictions where it's cell phones and technology and trying to get our inbox to zero and all these things that are failing propositions.

Well, I'm delighted to hear you say that and you've written extensively on this subject, because I really do believe that there is a universal theory of addiction that when broadly defined is a net that captures all of us. And we tend to think of the drunk in the alley or the guy who can't pull the needle out of his arm or somebody who's in jail as a way of distancing those people from ourselves and not having to really look in

the mirror. But I really think that addiction is a spectrum condition and every single person falls somewhere along those lines. So you have the hopeless heroin addict on the far end of that, but if we're all really objectively honest with our own behaviors, we're all habituated to certain behaviors or activities, or the intake of substances that cause adverse effects in our lives time and time again.

And we all sort of have this sense of powerlessness over our ability to control it or arrest it. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm so glad you point out that piece because, you know, for the last 50 years, the dominant paradigm has been willpower. Right. And that is proving to be more myth than muscle. It's more legend than reality. So it really, it's fascinating in so many ways. One is we have to survive so that we can be addicted to things like sugar, where we've got to get calories or we're not going to survive as human beings. And then as you know, as humans, we're so good at refining materials.

We've been able to, you know, in the last couple of hundred years, refine things like, you know, tobacco and cocaine. You know, coca leaves are not addictive, but you know, if you get it into that little powder, that's a whole different story. Society's done an incredible job of creating pathways and products that are specifically designed to addict us,

to hook us and not let us go. Yeah, absolutely. And that's unprecedented in human history. It really is. And the more we learn, you know, there's this accumulation of knowledge that just builds on itself and builds on itself. You know, B.F. Skinner, this famous behaviorist, he wrote a novel about this in 1947 where he basically predicted.

He called it behavioral engineering. in the last couple of years to just really get us, get our focus so narrowed that we're, you know, they have to paint, look up on crosswalks, you know, in big cities now, because people are forgetting the most basic survival things like don't cross the street without looking both ways. The willpower idea, it's amazing that it perpetuates. I certainly have up close and personal experience with trying to master my many addictions through willpower to diminishing ends. who has always prided myself on my self-will, this has been a confounding sort of experiment

that has taken me to some pretty low depths. So I know firsthand that willpower does not work. I think there's a lot of education that needs to go into the public for them to appreciate the full extent of that. But why doesn't it work? Yeah, we can dive into that. But some of this piece about education, I think, can't just come cognitively. I was in the same boat where it's like I had to learn that willpower failed on a personal level before I started to let go of it.

And was fortunate that I was actually studying this stuff at the same time. So instead of saying, well, why doesn't this work? I could actually explore, oh, this is why this doesn't work. And it actually drew me into these avenues of like, well, what actually does work? So if you want to dive in- Yeah, let's do that. The way I think about this is we have this caveman brain that was really set up to help us survive. We needed food, we needed to reproduce, and we needed to avoid danger, the eat and not be eaten thing. And it can really be distilled down into a simple process of you need a trigger, a behavior, and a reward from a brain perspective.

So if you see food, you eat the food, and then your stomach sends this dopamine signal to your brain that says remember what you ate and where you found it. Now, this reward-based learning process is set up to help us remember things. So it actually, the dopamine firing is there to help us remember something it helps lay down a memory and often dopamine in modern day gets associated with pleasure but we can die we can put a pin in that and talk more about that later not really a whole lot of pleasure in that agitated frenetic driven gotta do this yeah right and that's that's the drive to use more when we get addicted. So, basic learning process, remember where food is, same thing, remember where danger is.

You know, you see the saber-toothed tiger, you run away, and then you get to remember, okay, don't go back there or I won't get to do that again. So, that process is still at play. It's the strongest learning mechanism that's known in science, all the way evolutionarily conserved, all the way back to the sea slug. So really, really well-known process. Yet in modern day, it's still at play. But we have availability of food 24-7, right? We all have refrigerators. You can find a diner or a restaurant that's open at any time, day or night. You can get food delivered any time, day or night. So we don't really need to remember where food is anymore. We just need to remember where our phone is and we can order it. Yet our brain's still saying, well, hey, you know, I'm taking up a whole lot of real estate for this learning mechanism,

so let's use it. And so we start to learn to do things like eat when we're stressed or anxious, not when we're hungry. And this splits out hedonic versus homeostatic hunger. The homeostatic hunger is like when we're actually hungry. The hedonic is based on emotions and based on stress and things like that. We learn to take pills when we are emotionally or physically in pain as compared to learning to deal with it. Social media is engineered for the likes and the retweets. Yeah, it extrapolates out even to things that are as inert as boredom.

It doesn't have to be this sense of dis-ease or some kind of emotional discomfort or something that triggers an uncomfortable memory. It can be as banal as standing in line at the grocery store. Yep. I don't know if you've ever pulled up to a stoplight late at night and you look around and everybody's crotch is glowing. It's like suddenly 30 seconds at a red light is intolerable. Right. Well, we only got there because we've let ourselves get there.

And we can say, oh, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to be a good boy and willpower my way through this. Forget about it. Like you said, that doesn't work. So let's get into why it doesn't like, why is it that I can't override that impulse and through sheer force of will, like marshal my mental and emotional powers to prevent myself from doing that thing that I am so lured to? Yeah. It sounds pretty good, doesn't it? You know, where these rational thinking beings, I think Descartes really sent us down a path that was

not so good, you know, oh,'m thinking, therefore I can think my way through stuff. It's not how our brains work. There's a part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, that's involved in willpower. It's the weakest part of the brain from an evolutionary perspective. It's the first that goes offline when we're stressed, when we're angry, when we're sad, when we're tired. That's why we wander into the kitchen late at night looking for something because we've learned that. And so we can say, don't do that, but then we just crash harder.

And in the morning, we set that resolve to like, okay, I'm really gonna do it this time. But that's just not how our brains work. Our brains don't work that way. But we think, you know, I think it's more we're rationalizing, you know, like, oh, willpower, it must be something. Let's study it. And there, you know, there's been a little bit of this and that. But it turns out that willpower, you know, if you look at the people, you know, that quote, unquote,

have good willpower habits, there's some really interesting pieces there. One is, good willpower habits, there's some really interesting pieces there. One is they actually find things that they enjoy doing. So people do something like eat healthy or exercise. If you ask them why they do it, the people that are really good at doing it, and you probably know this personally, it feels good as compared to, oh, I need to get in shape to get my body looking this way for the pitch. Right. It's not like an intellectual exercise. Not at all. And that part makes sense, but that's not willpower. And it makes sense because that is reward-based learning. We're doing something out of the reward of doing it, not because we're doing it. So that's one of the big misconceptions around willpower is that if you look at reward-based

learning, it's based on the reward. It's not based on the behavior itself. So if it were the behavior, we'd just say, stop doing this. But it's actually the reward that drives future behavior. And that's where we can start to intervene. How does it correlate with intelligence? Because just speaking from personal experience, I've noticed over the years through my adventures and journeys in the recovery community that people who are hyper-intelligent often struggle the most because they want to intellectualize this,

where truly it is an emotional thing more than anything else. And so they struggle trying to wrap their heads around how to do this, and they can't let go of the idea that that solution resides within the mind. Yeah. Well, so, hi, my name is Judd, and I'm a thinking addict. There you go. If you look at the bookshelves in my house, they are way too numerous. So speaking from personal experience, and I think this applies, is there's this, it's almost like the thinking part of our brain is kind of like this, it's like refined sugar or refined carbohydrates. It actually just gets us stoked. We're like, oh, that's interesting. I'm just going to learn more and I'm going to learn more and I'm

going to figure out the solution to this thing. Meanwhile, day after day after day, you're perpetuating the same behaviors. Unknowingly. Yeah. While you're buying every self-help book that's available. Totally. Yeah. So, what we really need is to land in our body because our body is really, really wise. And so this is, you know, this intellectual thing is like, you know, it's that it just drives more addiction where it's like, I want to learn more as compared to really landing on our direct experience that says, you know, dude, why would you do that? I'll give you an example. So, we did a study with people who are trying to quit smoking. And we randomized people to get cognitive therapy

or mindfulness training, where we train them to really just pay attention to the results of their behavior. So, when they come into the mindfulness group, they don't even know what they're getting. You know, and so they come in, they're like, I'm here to quit smoking. And I say, okay, next, when you go home, smoke. And they're looking at me like, is this the experiment that you're running? Is this the study? And I say, no, smoke, but pay attention as you smoke and see what happens. So they pay attention to the smell, to the taste, to the feeling of the superheated smoke going into their lungs. And they come back and they're this Mr. Yuck look on their face. They're like,

oh my God, how did I never notice that before? Because they realize that smoking tastes like shit. And they can only get that wisdom from their direct experience. I had a guy who, so we, in our first study, we, first class was on Monday, second class was on Thursday. This guy was smoking 30 cigarettes a day. He'd been smoking that for a long time. He came back on Thursday and he said, yeah, I'm down to 10 cigarettes. And I said, well, what happened? And he said, well, I noticed that I would drink coffee and the coffee was kind of bitter, so I'd smoke a cigarette to numb myself from the taste, because it's amazing how smoking numbs your taste. And so he realized, well, I don't need to smoke. I could brush my teeth.

And he just went through this litany of 20 cigarettes where they were all, he was smoking all these things out of habit, where he'd learned through this reward-based learning process that, oh, if I smoke, I feel better, or whatever. And he realized, oh, this was not a good way to go. So the idea being, you talk about this in your book, is diverging from what Skinner calls

the operant conditioning, right? Which is behaviorism. Yeah. This traditional approach to like dealing with these kinds of problems to a more Buddhist perspective, which you call or is called dependent origination, right? And this involves being present for the experience and rather than

getting into judgment self-judgment to just be curious about what's happening yeah absolutely and it's interesting so one of the one of the first uh aha moments for us in my you know my research career was when i was looking I was studying this operant conditioning or positive negative reinforcement. And I was thinking, wait a minute, this sounds way too familiar. And I started looking into this because I'd learned on a retreat or something, I'd learned this dependent origination piece. And it was kind of complex or these 12 steps and all this stuff about birth. And this sounds like, whoa, what is this? But when I looked at it, and I actually worked with a Pali scholar to really explore this,

it turns out that dependent origination explains operant conditioning. And so, the Buddhist psychologists had figured this out 2,500 years ago before paper was even invented. And so, they were describing the same process. And importantly, this process, dependent origination, was what reportedly the Buddha was contemplating on the night of his enlightenment. As in, hey, pay attention, guys, this is kind of important. So, really important concept that actually is rediscovered in modern day and drives and explains a lot of how addictive behavior is formed. And that concept is what distilled down? Basically that trigger behavior reward. So, you know, you see something, you eat something and you get some reward or you,

you know, let's use your boredom example. We're sitting here bored. And so our brain says, oh, why don't you look for cute pictures of puppies on Instagram or something like that? And so we look at those cute pictures of puppies and we don't know that we're actually just driving that escape from boredom process. So that's basically it. And it's interesting in ancient times, they said that the process is perpetuated through ignorance. But in modern day, we call that subjective bias because we become biased based on our previous behaviors. I'm actually driving that process where I start to navigate my world in that biased manner where I'm you know it's like any little hint of boredom my brain says oh have something sweet oh have

something sweet or look at cute pictures of puppies on Instagram or whatever but doesn't that butt up against the countervailing impulse to avoid those things based on past negative experiences with them? Like how do those things crack? I mean, I'm just thinking out loud about like what my own personal interior experience with this kind of thing is, which is I'm self-aware enough

and I've done enough internal work to be cognizant when this is happening, right? It's like, okay, yeah, I know I'm pissed off at this guy and I know I'm feeling like not really in my body and I know that this thing is going to fix it and I know I shouldn't do it. And then I do it and I have a moment of relief followed by, you know, an avalanche of shame that sends me into a spiral for the next 48 hours, only to be repeated again with a sense of powerlessness. So that self-awareness, as they say in the secret society

of which I am a member, self-awareness will avail you nothing in this. So I'm interested in how, like, we have this, you know, this reward mechanism cycle that you just described. On the other side, I have self-awareness that this is occurring in real time, a powerlessness to stop it without, you know, the break, you know, as I surmise from your work

is really letting go of trying to control it and just being in the allowing, like being in the present, right? Am I getting that right? I mean, I've thrown a bunch of ideas at you. You are, and that's the second step. So the first, and I think you've nailed the critical element, which is awareness, but like you're pointing out,

awareness doesn't do it by itself and can actually perpetuate the process. So if we don't know how our minds work, we can't work with them. And if we're aware that something is causing us pain, we might just spiral into another habit loop of shame and guilt and all that stuff. So, the first piece here is really understanding how our minds work. by these processes. And we can even entertain the possibility of willpower failing, which, you know, often it's tough to say, oh, it's willpower that's failing me as compared to that was a dead on arrival process. You know, all the diet programs want us to think that,

you know, willpower is the way to go. And we're just not strong enough. We need to just sign up for another year and then maybe we'll get it next year. Or the extra special behind the velvet rope VIT program. And I will do it only for you if you can pay the admission fee. So, the first step is really understanding how our minds work. And we've actually shifted our programs to training people in that step first. It's really, you know, it's pretty straightforward. Like we're talking about there, there are no, there's no secret behind the, behind the curtain thing to reward-based learning. It's like you identify your triggers, you see your habitual behaviors, and then most importantly, you pay attention to the rewards or

the results. And so that's where awareness actually can become, it can become our friend rather than something that just spirals us into shame and self-doubt. And the key there is, again, looking at the reward because that's what drives behavior. So for example, with the example of the guy that was smoking, he started to see that smoking actually tasted pretty crappy. started to see that smoking actually tasted pretty crappy. And so his brain started to recalibrate to see, oh, this isn't that rewarding anymore. And there's actually,

the neuroscience of this has been worked out pretty well. There's a part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex. It stores and updates reward value. I think of this as the BBO part of the brain. It's always looking for that bigger, better offer. So if we can give our orbit frontal cortex information through awareness, it gets, especially if we do it in real time, it gets accurate and updated information. So accurate being is when I smoke a cigarette, is it that rewarding? No, I didn't realize it's not that rewarding. We can do the same thing when we overeat. We're like, oh, how does my stomach feel right now? Oh, I have this gut bomb, you know, when I did this. Or even eating, you know, I found this

with gummy worms. Like when I would eat gummy worms, it was like I had to just eat the whole bag because, you know, I was just going to be jonesing for those gummy worms, you know, until I just ate it. So I started comparing those to eating blueberries and blueberries just have this natural sweetness that's just so much better than eating gummy worms. I realized gummy worms taste like petroleum compared to blueberries. You came in today with a box of blueberries that you were eating when you arrived. I'm a big fan of blueberries. Yeah, they're great natural energy. So that's the other piece is seeing, giving our brains that bigger, better offer.

So it can be blueberries over gummy worms, but it can also be awareness and curiosity over judgment. And that's the piece that can really help us right in that moment. It's not like we have to look for blueberries to, you know, the blueberry salvation. I'm not peddling like blueberry enlightenment. Yeah. Well, a couple of thoughts. I mean, to dig a little bit deeper into your smoking example and examining the reward, taste is one aspect of it, but it's almost an unfortunate byproduct of

what you're really trying to get at, which is that hit, right? That dopamine hit or whatever it does to you biochemically in your brain that gives you a sense of, like a temporary sense of wellbeing or enhanced cognition or whatever it is that nicotine does. The taste can be something you tolerate in order to get to that other aspect of it,

which is the real driver here, is it not? So the driver can be the driver, again, until we bring awareness to that. So if you look at, you know, especially cravings around any drugs, you know, alcohol, same thing. When we look at what it feels like to be totally consumed and under the control

of something other than ourselves, when we really pay attention to this, it doesn't feel very good. And so that dopaminergic drive, it's associated with restlessness, with agitation, with this one-pointedness that says, you know, I'm going to make your life miserable until you do this. And then of course, as soon as we do it, it's like, I'm going to make your life miserable until you do this. And then of course, as soon as we do it, it's like, I'm going to make your life miserable until you do it again, until you do it again. Yeah, you're a prisoner of that cycle. Totally. So, if we don't pay attention to what we're actually getting from that feeling, we don't realize that this is actually not a good way to live. And that feeling is very contracted. It's closed down. And we can actually start to see, well, is there something that feels better than this? And if we

just take the binary closed, can we find something that actually is more open? So, what would you say feels more open, craving or curiosity? Well, curiosity for sure. Yeah. So if you think of curiosity in terms of mindfulness or awareness, we can be totally curiously aware of something that's happening, even in our body right now.

And we can flip the valence from this craving that is all-consuming, where we're a prisoner to it, to, oh, wow, what does this actually feel like? And paradoxically, we turn toward it. And as we turn toward it, and it starts to just kind of dissolve on its own because it's, oh, here's a sensation. Oh, here's a heat. Here's rising. Here's this, this, this. We realize this is simply physical sensations that are driving our lives. And then the gig is up for the dopamine piece.

Yeah, it's interesting when you place your attention on what precisely it is, it tends to dissolve over time. And I've seen this, my wife has terrible migraines over the years. And she has a practice, she has a variety of practices, but one of them is to just notice it. Like, what is it? Like, what is its shape?

What is its color? Where exactly does it reside in her awareness? And the more you get closer and closer to the essence of what it is, it moves and it changes and it shifts and it dissipates. And I think I've done the same with cravings as they arise. Okay, what does this look like? What is the nature of it?

What is the texture of it? And the more specific you can get, it tends to lose its pull and its power. Totally, totally. So that awareness helps us awaken to these physical sensations that we formerly thought were us, but are actually just physical sensations and thoughts.

And we've had people be able to work with panic attacks and realize, oh, these are thoughts and these are body sensations and be able to write out full-blown panic attacks this way. So that's, the theory seems to be working pretty well. But again, this is where the soft science and the hard science comes together. I'm not satisfied with theories or anecdote.

It's great to see something might work in somebody's life. It's great to see, I found tremendous benefit from mindfulness myself. But there's this joke in research that research is really me-search. I don't know if you've heard that. Yeah, I have, yeah. So the idea is we're studying something that might have worked for us and of one,

but we don't know that that actually works for everybody. And so you see all these treatments that are developed based on the personal experience of one. So I really wanted to see, does this stuff actually stack up. I had pretty good results in my addiction clinic, but we started doing research. And our first study was actually with alcohol and cocaine dependence. And we found that mindfulness training was as good as gold standard treatment,

cognitive therapy in this case, for alcohol and cocaine use disorders. Then we moved on to smoking. We found that we could get five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment. And at that point, we started realizing, wow, there's something to this. So, we started looking to see, well, how else does this work? And it was really interesting at the time we were doing that work, this is around 2010, 2011. I was right when smartphones were starting to come out. And I realized that this process was set up for developing a context-dependent memory. So we remember where food is.

So I realized, well, my patients, they don't learn to smoke in my office. They don't learn to overeat in my office. They don't learn to get anxious in my office. So I started stepping back and saying, well, wait a minute, could I actually package my office "'and bring it to them?' And we started developing, you know, app-based mindfulness training programs and testing those. And we even found, you know, our eating program, it's called Eat Right Now, we got 40% reduction

in craving-related eating. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah, and you have, what's the smoking one called? It was called To Quit, did you change the name? It was Craving to Quit originally, now it's just To, and you have, what's the smoking one called? It was called To Quit. Did you change the name? I was Craving to Quit originally. Now it's just To Quit. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Three words is too long now for America's tensions. And you have Unwinding Anxiety, right? Yeah. You still have that one? Yeah. So you have three apps that are all, they're oriented around the same perspective and protocols, but for treating these three kind of discrete conditions.

Yeah, we figured that there are a lot of apps out there to help people learn to meditate or learn mindfulness. We took a slightly different approach, which was starting with helping people understand how their minds work. understand how their minds work. And I think that was a critical piece because I spent years and years, you know, sweating my butt off on meditation cushions, you know, on silent retreats, just trying to willpower my way into concentration and just wasn't working.

And then it was when all these things came together where I realized, oh, you know, the Buddhist psychologists, the modern day psychologists, they're all talking about this learning process, this really strong learning process. Let's start there. And then, you know, so we started incorporating that piece as an entree for these programs. And that's when things really started to hum. You know, we just finished a study with anxious physicians and got close to a 60% reduction in anxiety symptoms. So we're, you know, with these common mechanisms

that are actually relatively simple, they're straightforward. I'm not saying they're easy to do, especially because we have to overcome some of our previous biases around, you know, I'm just gonna willpower my way through life, but we can help people kind of fall on their faces a little bit more quickly in terms of seeing like, what is it actually like when I smoke a cigarette? What's it actually like

when I overeat? So, we move away from prescription like, okay, thou shalt do this, this, or this to, well, just pay attention and see what the result of your behavior is. Remember, as they learn how their mind works, they can start to see that result. When that value from the old behavior drops, then we can start to offer them something new because they're hungry for it. They say, well, this is crappy. What else is there? And that's where the curiosity piece comes in. That's where the kindness piece comes in. With our eating program and our unwinding anxiety program, comes in. With our eating program and our unwinding anxiety program, we saw tons of people who had these habit loops around self-judgment and shame and blame and all this stuff. I see this with my patients with addictions as well. That's like one of their number one habit loops.

Oh, it's huge with me. I mean, it's such a massive thing because you're like, I did it again. And the cycle of beating yourself up becomes its own, like you said, like its own addictive loop. You know, there's something, I have to believe that there's something about that, like that shame spiral that is doing something for me. Right? Like it's serving some purpose.

It must, it must be. I don't know, it's not, you know, like I. It must be. I don't know. It's not, you know, like I wish it didn't and I don't know what that purpose is, but I keep doing it. So whether there's some kind of evolutionary imperative to it or it's a salve to some other wound that I still need to look at, that seems to be the big piece. But there's something about the curiosity and the paying attention that kind of just allows that to slowly evaporate. Totally. Not completely, but just being present doesn't give the space for that judgment to come in, or at least there's a time delay there. Right.

Well, that's where the attitudinal quality is really important. So curiosity, I think of it as like the other side of the coin of awareness. We can be aware and we can be like, this sucks. Or we can be aware and go, oh, wow, that's interesting. What's going on here? What's actually happening in my body? What can I learn from this? And so, we can take these and we can actually take moments where we're really struggling and we can bow to them as a teacher when we're truly interested in understanding how our minds work. And we can also truly bow to them as a teacher when we know that we're going to learn something. Now we're motivated because we're like, well, I'm stuck in this rut. Can I actually get some useful information from

this? And we can even move from, you know, I think of this, we always think of this two steps forward, one step backward, or one step forward, two steps backward. You know, if you look at this, if we're learning every time we fall on our face, does that count as going backwards? Right. To me, like we're always moving forward if we're learning something,

because we can't go back when we've just learned something about ourselves. So even there, that attitudinal quality helps us really keep the momentum moving forward, even if it feels uncomfortable at the time. Yeah, that's just a perspective shift. Like what lens are you choosing to perceive this experience through?

We're kind of raised to believe that, you know, we can't fail or failure is bad. I mean, it's a broader conversation about, you know, failure in general and what we choose to deem in that negative light. But there's such a relief when you can kind of let that go. But the mental twist here is that the trying isn't the path, right? Like in the same way that you explained, you know, your journey through meditation and like being this, you know, achievement oriented, go getting, you know,

I don't know if you're type A, but you've done a lot in your life. So, you know, you're gonna, you told Dan, like I'm gonna win at meditation, like that kind of mentality, which is the same mentality that drives that intellectual to read all the self-help books, but still remain prisoner to those behavior patterns. So the learning curve is not intellectual, but in letting go of that

intellectual exercise and to get yourself into that place of allowing where you can release your attachment to doing it right or well and just be present. And that is so difficult to learn and to really fully grok, you know? Oh man, for me being the type A go-getter, you know, drive, drive, drive. I remember being on my first week long meditation retreat. And I remember about day three or four,

I was bawling on the shoulder of the retreat manager. Didn't know the woman. She seemed nice enough. She lended her shoulder. And it was a river of tears because I was like, I made it into Princeton. I got into medical school. And I can't pay attention to my breath. What is going on here? And I was just, I was done. You know,

I was totally at my wit's end. And she ended up becoming my teacher for about 10 years. She ended up being this amazingly wise teacher. But I, you know, I've been trying to willpower my way through everything. And I figured I, well, paying attention to your breath, that can't be that hard. It was the hardest thing that I've ever done. What did she say to you? Did she drop some kind of Yoda-like wisdom on you? Suffer, you must. No, I think she kind of knew. I don't remember what she said, but I do know that she didn't say much because she kind of knew I just had to hit bottom. And I remember being on another retreat where the teacher was so frustrated with me. She

said, well, Judd, your path to enlightenment is going to be through striving because like she's, that's all she, you know, just strive, strive, strive, strive, strive. I was just like, you're really good at working hard. But she knew that that wasn't going to be the way through. So, you know, and the way out, what's that saying? The way out is through. I had to go through the process of trying to willpower my way into meditation and fail and fail and fail, and then wake up and realize that, like you're talking about, it was about letting go. that like you're talking about, it was about letting go. And the way for me to let go was through curiosity. And it started going back to when I was a kid or when I was in high school. Like I was totally fascinated by stuff. I just wanted to see how stuff worked. And so I would

learn naturally through simply being curious. And I realized I could actually be curious here too. And it totally flipped my entire meditation practice. I could go from, you know, like sweating through t-shirts trying to meditate to, you know, I learned that if you pay attention to the process and look, you know, it's actually in a causal chain that I could be one-pointed for several hours without any effort at all. And that was two breakthroughs for me. One, no more effort. I realized that that is not the way to go. And two, that it really is about just bringing these conditions together and everything will come together on its own. reframing this as curiosity is is is pretty compelling because linguistics are important and when you frame it as letting go or surrender that just you know

gets a type a person's cockles it's like i'm not gonna i don't surrender you know i don't let go you know it's like that that's not going to happen. You know, I had to be so beaten down before, you know, I was even willing to entertain that what I was trying to do was not going to work. But just by kind of tabling those two words and replacing them with curiosity is a much less threatening and inviting way of approaching all of this. Well, curiosity itself is rewarding. And so it actually hacks that same system of, you know, if we're addicted to our cell phones, we can get curious about, you know, what do I get from this? I remember there was just one example, one of the resident physicians that was training with me, she was in her last year of residency, and she came in as a skeptic, which is the best type of person to come in.

Like, what is this crap? And how do you actually help people with addictions? Are you crazy? So she was using one of our apps. I don't know if it was our Craving to Quit or our Eat Right Now program and reading my book. And she woke up to the point where she had two relatively small kids and was standing away from the dining table. Like on a Saturday night, her two kids were eating dinner, and she was away from the table checking her newsfeed. And she had to have that moment where she woke up and she's like, whoa, how did it get to this? To realize that she was under that spell. And that's when she

got really curious. She's like, oh, wow. And she totally got into it. She had lost weight. She did a bunch of things that were kind of just as a byproduct of her starting to realize her own habit patterns and wake up. Right. As somebody who's made a lot of headway in terms of solidifying or hardening these soft sciences, I wanna talk about what is actually going on in the brain,

like the neurology, the neuroscience of it all, because it's super interesting how you talk about these different areas of the brain and how they get activated and what activates them and how we can adopt certain practices to get us on a better track? Well, I've been fortunate enough to retool when I was in residency to learn neuroimaging

and neuroscience. And so I've been doing, almost two decades now, we've been studying the neuroscience behind how this stuff works. And my lab starts with finding a behavioral outcome. We need to make sure that something's actually working. So when we got five times the quit rates of smoking, with smoking, with our mindfulness training,

we're saying, okay, there's something worth looking at here. So we started by just looking at experience versus novice meditators to see what was happening in their brains. And we wanted to find if there were common mechanisms that were different with folks that had practiced for a while versus not. So we actually looked across a bunch of different types of meditation. We had people pay attention to their breath, you know, as a standard concentration practice. We have them do this thing called loving kindness, which to me was like the ooeyest, gooeyest, nastiest, softiest,

you know, I was like, oh, I'm never going to do that. And I'll tell you a little bit how- It's a great practice. Maybe it has a branding problem, but- It may. And in my self, well, I'll maybe give you a little story about how I actually learned that in a bit, but it probably does have a branding problem. And then we had people do this practice called choiceless awareness, where they would just pay attention to whatever was coming into their awareness. It could be sounds, it could be things that we're seeing, could be things that we're feeling, things that we're thinking. And we found that there was a brain network called the default mode network that was deactivated in experienced versus novice

meditators. Now, this was a surprise to me. I think I learned the most when my hypotheses are disproven, you know, because I was thinking, well, I'm working pretty damn hard. So there's got to be some brain region that's getting activated, that's lighting up when I'm meditating because, you know, my sphincter tone

is certainly pretty high right now. And, you know, it turns out that there wasn't a single brain region that was increased in activity in experienced versus novice meditators. And so I was like, wow, how could that be? But when we looked at the opposite, when there were decreases in activity, we found that this default mode network was the major difference between experienced and novice meditators, as in their default mode never got quieter. And the way I think of that is it's kind of like,

it's like you're driving your car with one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas. If you take your foot off the brake, you don't have to add more energy into the system, but the car drives faster. And that's exactly what I think we're seeing with meditation is if we get out of our own way, our brains naturally work better, you know, and

we can really start to totally get in sync with life and get into, you know, almost get into the flow of things, so to speak. Well, let's elaborate on this default mode network. Where is it in the brain and what is it responsible for? There are a bunch of brain regions that are involved in the network. So we can, we'll just talk about the two main hubs of the network. There's a part called the prefrontal cortex, which is kind of more in the front of your brain, the medial prefrontal cortex in particular, in the midline, in the middle. And then there's one called the posterior cingulate that's in the back and kind of also midline. And those two seem to be the main hubs of the default mode network. And if we zoom in on the posterior cingulate,

it's an interesting brain region from an addiction perspective because it gets activated when people who are addicted to all sorts of substances see their substances when they're triggered. So alcohol, cocaine, gambling, and even chocolate. One of my friends who's a food researcher at Yale, Dana Small, she did this study

where she would feed people chocolate and they were like, this is great. And their posterior cingulate would activate. Interestingly, it also gets activated when she keeps feeding people and feeding them, feeding more and more and more chocolate. And they're like, oh, you know, what used to be their favorite chocolate,

they're now like hating, also activates the posterior cingulate. So it seems to get activated when we get caught up in like wanting more, but also activated when we get caught up in wanting less. So when somebody gets caught up in ruminating, in depression, for example, or perseverating, like worrying about the future,

also that brain region gets activated. So that network seems to be involved in a ton of self-referential processing. So it's basically anything related to us, past, future, anything related, oh, that was, I can't believe I did that. That was terrible. Or, oh no, that might happen to me. That will be terrible. It's why Bill and Bob called alcoholism a disease of self-obsession. Totally. And that's totally rooted in the neurochemistry. Absolutely. And we now know the brain regions associated with what they observed from experience such a long time ago.

associated with what they observed from experience such a long time ago. That's so fascinating. Is there a difference in the brain chemistry or the neural makeup of somebody who is, let's say, like a substance addict, like cocaine or heroin, versus somebody who just doesn't have that? Like there are people out there that just, they're not triggered by these things in the way that, you know, somebody who's an addict or an alcoholic is.

There seem to be some genetic, there are certainly genetic differences that can predispose people to addiction versus, you know, kind of help people become resilient, say, or less predisposed to them. I don't think that there's, at least from my perspective, there hasn't been anything that's like, oh, this brain region is it. I think it's a very complex picture and it's gonna take a lot of more work

bringing together genetics with the environmental work and whatnot to really find things that are reproducible. It seems that with addictions in general, that's where the posterior cingulate seems to be one of the reliable markers, at least from what we've seen. And if you want to, you know, I think this even broadens beyond, you know, we've been talking about these classic addictions, but this is where it really starts to come into the human realm as in where, you know, we all have this human tendency to get caught up.

Right. You know, so it could be as simple as getting caught up in a political view, you know, and somebody says, oh, I disagree with you. And, you know, and we get closed down and we, you know, we get this defensive posture and all this stuff. There's that feeling of contraction that's the same feeling that comes when we get caught up in a craving when we want something. And when we want a substance or we want more chocolate or we want this, we want them to agree with us. There's also a loss of our ability to control our bodies and the words that are coming out of our mouth, right? Like when you get, like, if you take a political argument, for example,

it's like, you know, then you're like, wait, what did I just do? We're not even like, we're not in control. And how is that any different than an addiction? Yeah. It's not, and same brain processes. So from that standpoint, it seems that, it seems that from a neurobiologic standpoint, we can see where there's this common denominator. And it's interesting because we've done some

neurophenomenologic work, which is just a fancy word where we can link up subjective experience with brain activity using real-time neurofeedback. We can actually directly link people's subjective experience with their brain activity. And this is where it got really interesting for us. So, for example, when people's minds are wandering, when they're daydreaming or whatever, this default mode network has been shown to be activated. And when people are concentrating on a task or when they're meditating, it gets deactivated. That's what some of the studies that my lab had done. But it's like, okay, that's interesting, but what's actually going on here?

And when we started to line up people's subjective experience, we found something really interesting, which was that it was this caught-up quality. When somebody gets caught up in thinking, that's when the default mode network gets activated. When somebody gets caught up in a craving. And we even had some really, really illuminating moments where some of these, you know, like we had experienced meditators. I remember one who said, you know, I was trying to meditate harder and somehow pay attention more. And that's when his posterior cingulate, his default mode network got increased in activity. And he's like, oh, wait a minute. This isn't about trying. This isn't about doing.

Yeah, that's the trick, right? That is the trick. This self-obsession, these stories that we loop in our minds about who we are, the rehashing of the past, the foreshadowing of the future, the catastrophizing, all of these things that we get caught up in, this is where it resides. Yes. And so essentially what you're saying is meditation, these mindfulness practices are a way of like lowering the volume on that. And in turn, allowing us to then be more focused, more present, more curious, and less self-judging.

Absolutely. Is that the most elementary way of explaining this. Yeah. Yeah. And John Kabat-Zinn, who really led the way in a lot of the scientific, you know, beginning of the scientific studies around mindfulness, talks about, you know, we are human doings rather than human beings. And that lines up very nicely with this whole process. You know, we get stuck in the habit loop of doing. If I just do something, if I'm anxious, I'll just do something to make it go away. If I'm, you know, I'm going to do something to make myself lose weight. But the point that we're missing is that that doing is another form of addiction where we get addicted to doing.

I'm just going to do, do, do, do, do. You know, that badge of honor of I'm busy because I'm doing. I'm so guilty of that. But we can wake up to that and ask ourselves, what am I actually getting from this? And again, bring that curiosity and look at that cause and effect relationship. And my guess is when we, I don't know what it's like for you, but when you really take perspective and step back and say, well, what am I getting from all this doing? A lot of that doing starts to fall away because it's, you know, the doing for doing sake is not very rewarding.

Well, I can come up with a number of arguments about, you know, why I'm doing all the doing. But they, when you really examine them, they start to fall apart. I mean, a lot of the doing is to distract myself from whatever emotional state is making me uncomfortable and the external validation that I'm chasing that has, you know, diminishing returns over time. So you just nailed that diminishing returns piece. That's when we start to see, oh, this isn't doing it. But the problem is until we see, until we find something that works more consistently and is better, right? That bigger, better offer, we're going to keep doing that. And I think that's where we, as a society, it's just do, do, do, do, do. Until we pay attention

and see the diminishing returns, that's when our orbitofornal cortex starts to see it not as rewarding. But then we start to play with being, whether it's being curious or being kind or, you know, those are the two key elements of awareness where we can just notice right in this moment, oh, lost in the past, lost in the future. What does this feel like? Oh, not that rewarding. What's it like just to be curious? Or what's it like to simply be kind to myself in this moment and shift from maybe self-judgment, like, oh, I can't believe this, to, oh, what's happening in my body? And then that wisdom starts to land and starts to grow. Over time, we start to see, oh, wait a minute, this isn't doing it for me. It's not doing it for me. And we start to,, oh, wait a minute, this isn't doing it for me. It's not doing it for me.

And we start to, you know, sometimes it can happen quickly. More often, and I see this, you know, myself and with my patients, we see this more gradually where, you know, our brains have to be totally convinced that this isn't going to work for us. Right. This old way. Are you finding in your studies with all of these people that arriving at this place is becoming more difficult because we have such a reduced tolerance for any form of discomfort because we always have a way to opt out? to me, you know, I would be interested in what's happening with, you know, teenagers and young people who don't know what it's like to ever be without a smartphone. The impact on that, on the human animal's ability to just be present with one's own discomfort. You know, it's hard because you have to, you have to, you have to, in this journey towards being, right, you're going to,? You're gonna go through this period

of having to be uncomfortable as you start to figure out how to become curious, right? Yeah, the only way out is through. It's impossible to know exactly because we can't kind of clone the human race and then do the parallel experiment without smartphones, but we can look at how children and adolescents learn and they learn from modeling. So if they see adults

modeling distraction, so if adults are bored or feeling anxious or whatever, and they're turning to their smartphones, they're going to model that for the teenagers as compared to modeling distress tolerance or modeling curiosity. And so, that's one piece where, you know, we can look to see, well, what are we modeling for the next generation? And then we can, you know, teenagers are pretty smart. And so, you know, the sooner they hit rock bottom with the, you know, the job of liking all their friends' posts or whatever and start to break out of that, you know, teenagers are tremendously curious. You know, they're exploratory creatures. And so, I truly trust that they'll be able to, you know, find their ways into this. It'd be even better if we can model this or, you know, throw them some bones and say, hey, try this, try this. But we can't make them do anything. The more we shake our finger, you know, especially, you know, say, do this, they're going to say, you know, screw this.

And go the other way. One of the things that you're doing in hardening the soft sciences is these studies using fMRI, right? To really look at this brain activity and people can watch the 60 minutes where Anderson Cooper goes through this experience, but that was at an EEG, we actually different, right? For him, but. We used a source estimated EEG for that,

but it's basically the same thing. Same idea, right? Like, here you can look at a screen and you can actually see what's happening in the brain when you're meditating, when you're not meditating, and you can quantify it. Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. And I think growing up as a hard scientist, that being able to quantify what's actually going on and link it to brain mechanisms is pretty rewarding. And it's even more rewarding when we can link all of these things up. So as a clinician scientist, the holy grail for me is having a theory that lines up with brain mechanism that lines up with outcomes. And so if I can make the connection between all those three, that's really gratifying for me. And so if I can make the connection between all those three, that's really gratifying for me.

Because as a clinician, I don't want to just learn stuff that's esoteric and interesting that might feed my own addiction for knowing stuff and learning stuff. But I want to really see how is this going to help my patients down the road or even immediately. And so, for example, we just finished a study with our smoking program, the 2Quit program, where we scanned people. We put people in the fMRI scanner at baseline who wanted to quit smoking. And we showed them a bunch of pictures of smoking cues. And we activated their posterior cingulate, you know, lights up like a Christmas tree. And then we randomized them to get the 2Quit program

or the National Cancer Institute's quit guide. So we'd have an active comparison and we'd scan them a month later to see does change in brain activity actually predict clinical outcomes. And lo and behold, we found that there was a significant correlation between a reduction in posterior cingulate activity and a reduction in cigarettes only in the two-quit program. We actually found a really strong correlation even with the number of modules they completed, even though both groups completed the same number of modules. So here we're seeing a dose-dependent relationship

and a brain-specific effect that was affecting clinical outcomes based on a theory that we had been exploring over a decade before. And so we're able to link up this theory, oh, mindfulness helps us be with our cravings and not act on them. It affects this brain network that gets activated when we're caught up in craving and gets deactivated with, you know, with, with mindfulness and here it's affecting clinical outcomes. So that's been really gratifying to be able to see, you know, to be able

to live that process. You know, we've been doing research now for about 20 years to line all of these things up. It's been a long time coming. And walk me through the exact protocol that you put these people through. Yeah. Like it's one thing to say, be curious, right? Or meditate, but like, what is the actual program? So the Craving to Quit app is basically,

we give them a short bite-size modules every day. So one thing I learned clinically when we did our first studies was, we'd have people come in once a week to learn this mindfulness training, we'd teach them mindfulness. They'd go home, come back a week later. One thing we learned with a lot of them

were struggling with remembering the practices, doing the practices, just setting up the habit to do it. What we know is from habit formation is, you know, you need to nudge, you need to do little steps and as much as you can do that consistently. So then we graduated to twice a week and that still wasn't enough. And then we said, screw this, you know, we threw all that away and said, let's take this manualized, you know, evidence-based treatment and cut it into bite-sized pieces and deliver it through people's phones. And so that's where we can actually move from in the office to in context, right? It goes

back to the people don't learn to smoke in my office. So with the apps, we can actually deliver 10 minutes of training every day where they really learn the practices. Importantly, we start with helping them understand how their mind works. So we basically show them the habit loop, help them start to identify, okay, what triggered smoking? What do I get from smoking? And importantly, we have them pay attention as they smoke. That's the first step. And start to really pay attention to what do I get from this? What do I get from this? What do I get from this? So that reward value starts to drop. Then we give them an exercise and this is all automated through the app, where when they have a craving, they can click on that craving button and they can actually

imagine smoking a cigarette. So we walk them through, okay, light it up. What's it feel like when it goes in your mouth? What's it taste like? What's it smell like afterwards? What does your body feel like? And that can give them a gauge to how disenchanted they are with the smoking, right? How much is that reward value dropped? And if it hasn't dropped in the past, it helps them really pay attention to see how much that engenders a craving. And if it does engender a craving, then we have them smoke mindfully and go through that smoking mindful exercise so that it lays down that new reward value that says, oh, how good was this? And as they repeat that over time, that's when they can start to move from smoking mindfully, laying down that new reward

value, and then just moving to imagining smoking. And then when that reward value is dropped, when they imagine doing it, their body's like, why would you do this? And actually, this occurred to me when I was on a plane. I was actually on a plane to fly out to California a little while ago, and I was offered the airplane food. And I went through this simulation in my mind. I was like, do I want the food? And I imagined eating it. I'm like, ugh, I don't want that processed crap. So, I realized, I was like, wait a minute, we can actually turn this into an exercise that will capture whether somebody is disenchanted with the behavior or not. So, we do this with our smoking program, we do this with

our eating program. And if they're not disenchanted yet, that's fine. We have them go into the actual experience, so smoke or eat or whatever, so they can start to build that disenchantment. So as they go through the program, it's 20, 30 modules. As they go through this, they can build that disenchantment in their direct experience. Mm-hmm. I would imagine if you can master that practice, it becomes applicable, not just in smoking or airplane food, but almost in every situation. You could use it to, do I wanna say yes to this opportunity?

Do I wanna go to this place? Like all, you could run that calculus for anything. Absolutely. So this is where I, this is like the stealth of this practice is, you know, as we learn something, you know, if you think of knowledge, you can learn knowledge about one thing. You're like, okay, this is how this thing works.

But if you develop wisdom, you start to see, oh, this is how this thing works. But if you develop wisdom, you start to see, oh, this works in the same way as this, as this, as this, as this, and this. And we start to develop this wisdom around life where we're like, wait a minute, this is how my mind works as compared to, oh, this is how I work with eating or smoking or anxiety. This is how my mind works. So, I can actually apply this to relationships. I can apply this to this. For example, I remember a guy who'd come in for alcohol treatment and he was this really big muscular mechanic. He'd come in, it's hard to get oil off your hands after working in an engine all day. So he'd come in, having tried to wash his hands, but still pretty gritty. And at the end of the program, I asked him, what was your favorite aspect of this? And he gave me

this sheepish grin. And he said, you know, I've actually changed my relationship with my dad. This program has taught me to actually work with that and realize that this is the loving kindness practice for him, which was the last thing I thought he was gonna say. But he had generalized this knowledge of working with, with using mindfulness to work with drinking to changing his lifelong relationship with his dad. I would imagine on some level that gets to

the underlying impetus for a lot of addictive behavior, right? Like, I'm interested in how your work squares with, like, let's say Gabor Mate and all the work that he's done with the impact of childhood trauma on how, you know, these behaviors manifest later in life. and how these behaviors manifest later in life, or Johann Hari and his thesis on lost connection and how this is really an epidemic of connectivity among human beings. I think it squares perfectly. I was just to spend some time with Gabor a little while ago at a conference,

and we were really just, it's so fun to geek out about this stuff with with with folks and it's totally it makes complete sense if you think about you know a loss of connection for example so the we feel lonely that's the trigger we do something like drink or drug and then we we basically numb ourselves to that pain so it's this temporizing. We get this brief relief and then we have to repeat it. So if we never get at the heart of the issue, which is a disconnection, we're always going to feed it in a way that's not healthy. So here, mindfulness can help us wake up to those patterns and see how we're feeding these in very unhealthy ways and then open ourselves to finding different ways of relating. Right.

Smoking, drinking, you know, these behaviors are, we do them because they work, right? Like they're- They work, define work. Well, they work until they stop working. They're serving, they're serving it, they're filling a need, they're serving a purpose that works for a period of time until it stops working. But they're not necessarily the problem.

They're like the solution to the problem. They're like a Band-Aid on the problem, right? So you're dealing with this condition at the behavioral tip of the spear. Someone like Gabor is dealing with this at its inception point, right? Where it begins. And so I would imagine that on some level, a combination of these two approaches

would be the comprehensive solution here. Like you gotta deal with, you gotta quit smoking, you gotta break this cycle of craving, you gotta create strategies and behavior patterns for managing this, but you still also have to go to the root of like, what is, you know, creating this level of discomfort to begin with, or what is it that continues to creep up and makes you feel uncomfortable in your own skin, driving that need to escape out of whatever it is you're experiencing through whatever behavior that you're choosing.

Yeah, absolutely. And in the moment, you know, in the moment that we are uncomfortable, if we can learn to be a little more embracing of that discomfort, it can help us open to seeing where we've, you know, where that heart of the problem is, you know, oh, where we haven't been willing to look at disconnection

or willing to look at all this stuff that can just keep feeding it because it's just been too painful. And then we've trained ourselves to numb ourselves. When we can train ourselves to actually be with that discomfort, that opens up the possibility for true and deep healing. Mm-hmm. And how does all of this square be with that discomfort, that opens up the possibility for true and deep healing.

And how does all of this square with traditional 12-step approaches? I think it works beautifully. There's a book called One Breath at a Time. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but the guy lays out how all the 12 steps line up very beautifully with Buddhism and mindfulness practice. You know, step one, I am not in control. Wait a minute, willpower doesn't work, you know? So, you know, and you just go on and on and on with each of the steps. There's nothing that's discontinuous or at odds between these. That's one thing I like about mindfulness practice is it's not about some big philosophy or you must do a bunch of things. It basically distills down to pay attention, see what the results of your behavior are, repeat. And that can work with any spiritual tradition.

It can work with the 12 steps. And I think it can enhance a lot of work that people are really struggling with. A number of patients who go through this 12 step and it takes them a long time to get through. You know, there's some steps that are just really, really tough that they're just like, wow, I'm not ready for that one. It doesn't have to, but it tends to. People get hung up on around four

and then there's a very protracted long period of time before they can move on to the next one. I was thinking of four in particular. And I agree, it doesn't have to, especially if we can build up the ability to be with our own discomfort. That's when it can help us see four as a strength rather than as a big barrier. It's like, oh God, I got to do this as in, oh, here we go. You know, let's do this. Rather than being afraid of confronting those difficult, complex emotions, being curious about them can open up that door.

Yeah. And then of course the word meditation appears in the step. It doesn't get, traditionally, it's sort of the bastard stepchild. Like it doesn't really get the treatment or attention that it deserves, but there's nothing about it that says Like it doesn't really get the treatment or attention that it deserves, but there's nothing about it that says that it shouldn't. Yeah. Yeah.

And you can look at, so let's take fear for example. On a very experiential level, what we were finding, this goes back to the neuroimaging work that we were doing, we can actually, we were finding that this contracted or closed down quality of experience correlates with increased activity in the posterior cingulate cortex. And that's open experience correlates with decreased activity. And so on a very basic level, we can help people really pay attention to that closed feeling when you're afraid and bring curiosity to that, and it starts to open that piece right in that moment. And so we can really bring that curiosity and kindness in as a way to directly clean out that wound in those moments where people are really struggling with, say, the fourth step or whatever.

the fourth step or whatever. From what I gather from your work, it doesn't seem to matter that much what type of technique you decide to adopt, meditation technique. Yeah, I think I've practiced a ton of different techniques and I was a technique junkie for a while because I was thinking, you know, I got to just find the perfect technique. And then I realized I was asking the wrong question. I got to just find the perfect technique. And then I realized I was asking the wrong question. It's different techniques work for different people. And so it's important that people find a technique that they can really resonate with. But underlying all of these techniques is this, am I working? Am I closing?

Am I clenching? Am I forcing versus am I resting and resting in awareness? Because these practices share this common underlying element of awareness itself and that attitudinal quality of curiosity. So there's no evidence from like an FMRI perspective, like, oh, loving kindness does this and Vipassana does this and you know can you can you calibrate them in that way when we've looked we found that you know loving kindness that

vipassana that uh concentration practices that a bunch of different we've even done some pilot work with with christian contemplative practice all of them share this core element of letting go. You know, whether the language might be slightly different, but the letting go is the same, you know, and whether it's letting go into concentration, letting go into just noticing the changing nature of reality and Vipassana practice, whether it's letting go of the small self

and letting God flow through you in Christian contemplative practices, all of these share that common element. And we see that shared element in fMRI studies. What is the most counterintuitive or surprising thing that you've learned about this whole world as a neuroscientist? Like, did you go, I would imagine you go in,

you're trying to be objective, but you're like, oh, this is going to prove this, right? And then you discover, oh my God, it's not that way at all. Yeah. I mean, how much time do we have? There were a lot of things that were really surprising. I think the biggest surprise was the one I mentioned earlier around this wasn't about doing something, this was about really just relaxing and letting things be. And there was a, actually even more surprising to me was what I'm gonna describe as the causal nature of these things. And this related to everything from concentration practice

to even finding flow. Where there's this, the Buddhists, they're famous for lists, you know, for this, eat this, whatever. So they have this list of these seven factors of awakening. Sounds like a pretty important list to pay attention to. I'd always tried to memorize the list and could never do it.

You know, it's these seven things I can't remember. I can only learn things if I understand why they work. And it occurred to me after years, probably my teachers beating their heads against the wall, like, come on, Judd, come on, that this list goes in a particular order. And it starts with awareness and basically curiosity, or dhammavataya means like interest or kind of exploration, like investigation. And so if we pay attention to something

and we get curious about it and we investigate it, what they describe is the third factor of awakening naturally coming as a result of those first two, where virya can be translated as courageous energy. So we actually, when you're curious about something or when I'm curious about something, I actually wanna lean, I get energized. I'm like, whoa, wow.

You know, it's like reading a good book. You know, we're tired late at night, but we start reading a good book. I'm like, wow, it's three in the morning. How did, you know, and we had all this energy to read. So this actually leads to this fourth factor of awakening, which is joy or rapture, which then leads to tranquility and then concentration.

So, I'd been doing this all wrong in my own practice, and I was also studying this in a way where I was thinking, we're going to find that forced part of the brain, you know, part of the, that got increased in activity, but it was that decrease when we started to let go that concentration naturally emerges out of these conditions. When we're interested in something and we're curious and we're not forcing anything when we're tranquil, it actually is rewarding in itself. And so it's a feedforward mechanism that lines up beautifully with operant conditioning. Remember, reward feels good. That the concentration naturally emerges out of these conditions and in itself feels pretty good. So, when we're totally concentrated on something, it feels great. And when we're really concentrated on something, we totally lose a sense of ourselves and we start to merge with the rest of the world. And we'd even seen

this in experienced meditators. There's this concept, you know it well, I'm sure, flow. You know, me, I, chicks, I'm a high. Talks about flow in terms of it being selfless, it's effortless, it's joyful. You know, it's like this thing that a lot of extreme athletes really, they'll die for. And I've seen this a lot. There's some great books written about how dangerous it is for athletes to get addicted to flow. We had people in our fMRI scanner getting into flow and reporting on it. We got a snapshot of their brains as their posterior cingulate took a nosedive in activity, just totally quieted down as they were merging with their environment. And if you think

about it, this closed quality of experience, this contracted quality is a marker of, okay, I'm here and the rest of the world is out there. But when that starts expanding, when you take that to infinity, where do you end and where does the rest of the world begin? So we're gone. Stuff is happening. It's no effort. And we're totally dialed in. And in the brain, all of those levels are going. There's no area of the brain that's being activated by this. It's just a devolumization of every component of the mind. I would say we only looked specifically at the posterior cingulate cortex. So these self-referential brain regions are getting really quiet.

The part that's responsible for that. Yeah. Given, that's super interesting. So given that addiction is a condition of self-obsession, the more self-obsessed we are, the more imprisoned we are by these cravings and desires. The dissolution of that myth of differentiation is part of the path that walks you towards this solution.

So I'm curious about your thoughts when it comes to things like ayahuasca and psychedelics, like these are substances that dissolve that illusion of self and allow us to merge with this, to be at one with the universe. And there's certainly interesting studies that are happening right now in this field. Like where's your head with all of that?

I'm glad you asked that question because it's a really burgeoning field of science and serendipitously when we published our first big finding with experienced meditators where we found the default mode network was deactivated two months later in the very same journal the proceedings of the national academy of Sciences, this group from London, led by David Nutt and Robin Card Harris, published their first study with psilocybin. So the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. And they found basically to a T, the same two main hubs of the default mill network were really quiet. And I immediately contacted them and said,

dude, this cannot be a coincidence. And they "'Dude, this cannot be a coincidence.'" And they said, "'Dude, this cannot be a coincidence.'" And so that started the road down exploring, you know, what are the similarities here? And there's, you know, Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins has really led the way in the US with this research, looking at experienced meditators and, you know, help using things like psilocybin to help people with addictive disorders. The way I thinkators and, you know, help using things like psilocybin to help people

with addictive disorders. The way I think about this, you know, to the point where Michael Pollan wrote a great book on this. Everybody's talking about this book. So, he actually came in and visited my lab and we had him to get into our neurofeedback rig and just remember a time when he had done a psychedelic, remember a psychedelic experience. And that memory could put him into the feeling of what it was like to let go. And we could see the corresponding reduction in brain activity in his posterior cingulate cortex, which was pretty trippy, like literally, but also fits very interestingly with what the, you know, this translation of mindfulness, the ancient word for it is sati, which means to remember. So, many people translate, you know,

or interpret what that means, you know, to remember to be in the present moment or, you know, to me, it's a lot related to, well, remember what happened when you did this last time. Do you really want to go there again? As we're being in the present moment, recalling what happened previously. So, he recalled what happened previously and he was reliving this trip that was actually manifesting in real time in reduction in his brain activity. It was pretty far out. So how do you foresee this field playing out?

Well, if I had a crystal ball that actually worked. I mean, I guess my perspective is I'm super interested. I mean, there's amazing things that are happening in the world right now. And to the extent that anybody can come up with productive solutions to help heal people that suffer, I'm completely supportive of that. At the same time as somebody who is very much an addict

and an alcoholic in recovery for many years, an addict and an alcoholic in recovery for many years, talk about my default node network firing, here's my solution, I just need to do more drugs. This is the path that I need to be on. And then I have to then be curious about what that's about. Like what is driving that compulsion? Yeah. So realizing that there's an unhealthy aspect

of that as well. Absolutely. So I think there are two pieces here. The first one is if people don't know or can't remember what it's like to let go, it's pretty challenging to train them in that direction. So we can use things like neurofeedback. We can use things like our app-based mindfulness training programs to help people really see what it's like to get contracted

and then identify moments when they're letting go. And I think that's also where we can bring together things like digital therapeutics and psilocybin and other psychedelics, where you can, in a very careful way, help people taste what it's like to let go with a psychedelic and really help them integrate that experience with feedback training, with direct experience from their own life. So we can say, okay, you just had this, you know, we just did this session with you, really zoom in on what it's like to be contracted versus letting go. That can kind of give them that guiding star to say, okay, now as you go throughout your life, we're going to train you to notice moments when you're moving away from that, when you're getting closed down and notice moments when you're moving toward it, when you're opening up. And importantly, we can train you to link those two things up. So again, learning through reward-based learning, we learn from cause and

effect. So if we can see the cause of when we get contracted and we can see how painful it is, it can help our brain reduce that tendency to go there in the future. If we can notice moments when we're open, like when we can notice moments when we're open, like when we're curious or when we're kind, we can see, really pay attention and say, oh, what was that like? And our brain says, oh, that was good. I wanna do that again.

So we can really pair the two, give them that guiding star where they might not have had that before or remembered it, and then train them to do that over and over and over. Yeah. A big part of me managing my addictions is being part of a community to which I'm accountable. And I'm interested in,

if there's any studies on the neurochemistry of what happens to our brains when we feel, you know, integrated in a group of people that care about us that we know are looking out for us. And conversely, what happens when we're of service to others, right? I would imagine that there's a curiosity component to that. There's sort of an engagement that occurs that allows us to transcend our

self-obsession and invest ourselves in other people. That is a huge part of my solution, but I'm interested in the scientific kind of lens on that. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We're actually starting to collect. So, I think that community is a really critical component. And we've actually built very carefully curated online communities for the people in our programs. So, for example, the Eat Right Now program, we have this large community, the Unwinding Anxiety program, large community. So, we can actually start to look at their direct experience in relationship to themselves

as they progress through the program. And as they keep, you know, a lot of people will keep a journal in the community and support each other and learn from each other that way. It's gotta be a huge part of long-term success. I mean, if you don't have that in place, you might get great results over a 30, 60 day, 90 day period, but it's gonna start to fall off.

That could absolutely be the case. And I think we can also do this experiment. So I actually wrote a whole chapter in my book around this, around what's it like when we're mean versus nice, for example. And we can look at generosity, for example, being of service from a simple lens of reward-based learning. So if we see somebody in need and we help them, and we truly help them in a selfless way where we're not looking for them to thank us or we're not looking to be able to tell our friends, like, I helped this person, but we just truly, we see somebody in need, we help them, We can notice what that reward feels like. It's clean. It's energizing. It's not depleting, which is completely different from the martyr who's like, you know, and we see this in healthcare, you know, physicians and clinicians like,

oh, I got to help everybody. I got to help everybody. And when we're not actually doing that from a healthy place, we get burnt out, we get depleted. And so, we can all do this experiment ourself and see what is it like when we're truly doing service for service's sake, not when we're depleted, but when we're really at the place to do that. And that's different. We can't say, oh, I should go out and be generous because it's going to help me. That's dead on arrival. But it's truly like when we're at the place when we can do service. And it's important to be there because often we think, oh, I'm being selfish by taking care of myself.

Well, that's not true. We're not separate from our society. If we're not helping ourselves, we're not actually going to be able to help others as well. So we really have to be at that foundational level to be able to be of service. And then when we just explore what's it like when I do service, when I'm of service to others, we can see, is it actually energizing or depleting? And then it starts to feed forward. I think there's also a placebo effect with that in the sense that if I, not to play devil's advocate, but I think that even if my service action is motivated by selfish reasons,

like let's say I'm having a bad day. I'm just throwing a pity party for myself. Things aren't going right. I'm fully invested in my self-obsession. I do still have enough self-awareness to say, I know that's why I'm suffering. And you know what I should do right now? I should just call somebody up who I know is having a worse time than me and just ask them how they're doing. Like a small gesture. I'm not going to a soup kitchen or something like that, but it's a way to break that cycle of self-obsession and interrupt that kind of thought pattern

that's looping in my head and just momentarily invest myself in somebody else's wellbeing. And that interruption, even when motivated purely by selfish reasons, like I'm not some white knight who's purely doing it for reasons I wish were motivating me, it still has the same effect. Like I will feel better. It is interrupted that I feel good because I know that I made myself

available even when I'm busy for somebody else. And that's a practice that has served me well over many years. Yeah. So I don't think that's incongruous at all. If you look at it as I'm going to help somebody in order to feel better, then that can loop in a negative way. But what you pointed out was two things. One, awareness. You're self-aware of this is a habit pattern that I'm

stuck in and I can do this to step out of it. That's absolutely skillful as compared to I'm going to perpetuate the cycle of I have to be helping people for me to have self-worth. So that's the big difference is you're helping yourself step out of the cycle as compared to perpetuating a cycle that's unhealthy. Right. What are the things that trip people up the most? Like let's take quitting smoking, for example. Like even they come to you, they're like,

I get it, Judd, I'm in, like, tell me what to do. I'm doing it. I got the app and the whole thing, but they're still like, oh, I thought I was clear, but you're still doing that thing. Yeah, we use this analogy. So I'm a big fan of riding bicycles. So we actually came up with this gears analogy.

And first gear is about noticing our habit loops, right? If we can't notice them, we can't move at all. We're always moving backwards. Second gear is exploring what the result is. Like, what do I get from this? And that's a really critical step that people try to bypass as much as they can. Because intellectually, they know,

smoking or overeating, I know it's not good for me. And they wanna jump right to third gear. Right to the end, yeah. So third gear is when we're actually stepping out of the loop. So we're being kind, we're being curious, we're using these mindfulness practices to actually step out of these old habitual behaviors. So what I see most is people trying to jam it from first into third gear. And of course, it doesn't work. You're on a hill and we're going to fall over on the bike

and we're going to stall the car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have to just embrace the process as it's laid out in front of you. Yeah, and the second step or that second gear is the most illuminating because that's really where our brain starts to shift from these unhealthy behaviors,

seeing that, oh, this isn't rewarding to finding the motivation to look for something higher. And that's when we can actually shift into third gear. It's not glamorous, but it's critical. Right. What is the research that has not been done yet that you would like to see be done that could shed additional light on the craving mind? be done that could shed additional light on the craving mind? Oh boy, there's a lot. One of the pieces that we're working on now is really lining up the specific mechanisms around the people doing these mental imagery exercise, or not imagery, but kind of these mental imagination exercise where they imagine going and eating, overeating,

imagination exercise where they imagine going and eating, overeating, or imagine smoking, and lining that directly up with the change in reward value in their brain. So we've only done, you know, we've done some neuroimaging work with smoking, but we want to see this also in the eating program. We want to see this even with anxiety. And I think it's really important to show that we can, across different types of behaviors, that there's a common underlying mechanism. We see this behaviorally, where we can see these strong results with smoking, with eating, and anxiety. I want to also see that this is true neurobiologically, because that helps us line up these mechanisms in a more sound manner. I mean, we see this clinically, we see this behaviorally,

but there's something that would be really nice to be able to say, look, here's a general, generalizable even scientific concept that applies to what the true underlying mechanisms of mindfulness actually are. So, The Craving Mind, your book, it's an interesting story that got you here, right? Like this was a furious product of a self-imposed home retreat, right?

Yes. Yeah. I mean, did you ever doubt it, like the power of meditation and mindfulness practices in terms of unleashing your inner creative fire, like you're the poster boy. Yeah, that was an interesting experiment. So, a couple of years before I wrote the book, I remember waking up one Saturday morning and I was just, you know, I'd been thinking through this concept of lining up reward-based learning with these seven factors, awakening and whatnot for a while. And one morning, it was a Saturday morning. I can remember what the temperature was outside, that it was partly cloudy, all this stuff. I just went down

to my dining room table, pulled out a couple of references, and watched this paper write itself in three hours. And I closed my laptop. know, closed my laptop and I was like, wow, that was amazing. What was that? And the paper got published without, with very few revisions, you know, whatnot. And I was like, oh, wow, I can actually, you know, I'd been, I'd been learning to get into flow through like mountain biking and playing music and whatnot. And I was like, wow, I can actually do this when writing. So fast forward several years, I, when the book felt like it was ready to be written, and that was actually a critical piece. I can't just say, hey, I'm going to write about cooking and sit down and write a cook. I don't know how to do that.

You've been pestered to write a book for a while, right? I had been. Prior to this. Yeah. So, several publishers would say, hey, we'd like you to write a book, this and that. And it just hadn't felt right. And so I kind of been like, someday I'll do that, someday. And then finally the conditions came together.

And so I did it as an experiment, as a meditation retreat. So my wife, it was over the holidays. So my wife went off to spend time with her family for the holidays. And so it was just myself at our house with the cats. And so I decided to do a self-retreat. So I'd done month-long self-retreats before at home, which is really good practice because every distraction is there. But this one, I decided, I said, I would just do, I would sit, walk, and write, But this one, I decided, I said I would just do, I would sit, walk, and write, as in regular sitting and walking meditation. And I would write only when I felt totally in flow, like expanded, like it was just coming out.

And so, I'd sit down and write and write. And then as soon as it started to feel contracted, I would close the computer and just sit and walk. And it was really interesting because I wouldn't even, like the thinking wouldn't even come up about the writing. I would just sit and walk. And then I would get up. I remember this one point where I was like, ah. And then I, you know, rest of the day, sit, walk, sit, walk. And then I got up the next morning.

It was like, and this whole chapter came out. I was like, wow. So, basically, two weeks, you know, a two-week retreat, and the book was written. That's unbelievable. It was really fun. And it contravenes the sort of Steven Pressfield, war of art, like shelf for the page every day, no matter what, like push through. Like you are in, this is more of a surrender,

like an allowing, like I'm just allowing this to happen. And the minute it feels constricted to use your word, you walk away from it without any judgment. Absolutely. And I think that book experience was a really good reminder that we can actually train ourselves to live our lives this way each moment.

Yeah. Each moment we can be looking, oh, did Rich ask me, did I answer Rich's question? Well, oh, or, oh, wow, that was a crazy answer. I don't know where that came from. Do we have to be two decades into our meditation practice to avail ourselves of this? We don't. So, one thing that I want to do to be of service is, you know, I've fallen on my face a lot. You know, it was over 10 years that I would, you know, struggle and struggle and struggle with meditation before I started to wake up that it wasn't about the struggle.

And the struggle taught me something. So one thing I want to do to be of service is to help other people learn that they don't have to – the struggle is not it. You can learn from the struggle, but the struggle is not it. And so that's why we set up our – that's why I do this research to really try to understand what are the mechanisms, what are the most efficient ways to deliver this. This is why this turned – we started developing apps. I had no idea I would be making app-based trainings. But the aim was can we deliver this in a way that is as efficient and as helpful as possible? And I think we can use these weapons of mass distraction,

our cell phones, in a way that can actually be helpful. If people are already, you know, if they already have these things and are using them ubiquitously, why not use them as a way to help us train our minds? And then we can learn that the cell phones, the technology is not the problem. It's that we don't know how our minds work and we can start to learn to work with our minds. Our relationship to them. You wrote an interesting piece where you talk about the, I mean, there's a lot of sort of self-help apps out there that are oriented around losing weight or what have you,

but you kind of canvassed the efficacy of these things. And it was something like they purport to be, for the most part, something like 70% efficacious, but in fact, only 2% effective, 2.6 or something like that. Yeah, basically, there's very, very, very little science behind any of these things. And there are a lot of folks that claim, oh, based on science. Well, that's- What does that mean? Yeah, exactly. What does that mean?

And when you dig into it, and people have done studies on this, when they've dug into it, it doesn't mean a whole lot for most of these. So hopefully the field will actually mature where there will be good science behind these things, but it takes years. And it actually takes interest in doing that.

And a lot of companies don't have that much time to survive. They've got this clock ticking, this runway that's going to run out if they don't sell a product. Fortunately, we're more of the homegrown where I really want to understand mechanism. I really want to make sure something works. And if we can put it out there and help people, great. But I'm not going to base this on, you know, we've got a 10X or whatever. Yeah, and this is like consumer-facing, but it's also used for like enterprises, right?

Like you're using this with just corporations and healthcare companies, like companies that want to make sure that their employees are, you know, mindfully healthy? Yeah. Well, I think companies are finally waking up to the fact that they, you know, it costs them a lot of money. It costs them a lot of productivity. And it's so gratifying to see that companies are actually looking at the well-being of their employees. You know, that used to be in the soft side of HR where it's like, oh, well-being. Yeah,. You know, that used to be in the soft side of HR, where it's like, oh, well-being, yeah, we'll throw a little money at that

to say that we're doing this. They're really saying, well, you know, well-being is actually a critical element to keeping employees here long-term, you know, reducing turnover and all this stuff. So I think they're really starting to look at this much more carefully to say, you know, where are the scientifically-based programs that can actually move the needle for us? And so we've started to,

you know, we've been getting a lot of incoming traffic where companies are very interested in seeing this because, you know, we've been doing the science for 20 years. I know. It's got to be really gratifying for you as somebody who's been in this for so long to see the culture kind of catch up with where you've been at for some time and really embrace these ideas in a mainstream way. Yeah, yeah, going from, boy, Judd, you're gonna kill your career to, oh. Who is that guy?

Have you called that guy recently? You go like, hey, 18 million on my TED Talk, dude. Well, I know. You sent him a postcard. Yeah, yeah, well, that'scard from the TED conference. Of course, I know how ungratifying ego gratification actually is. But play that one out. Like, all right, well, it feels good for a minute.

And then the hangover afterwards of like, oh man. Man, I sounded like a jerk. I know, but I can at least propose it. It's a good thought experiment. We got to wrap this up here, but I want to kind of close this with some just practical wisdom on meditation. I love everything that you had to say

about the letting go and the allowing and trying to get into that place of letting go of all the self-judgment and the willing of the process to be something other than it is, right? This battle, like I'm gonna be a good meditator and I'm gonna sit here until I conquer my thinking mind, God damn it, you know,

as being like absolutely the wrong path. And it's so difficult. And I think that is the biggest kind of conventional wisdom hurdle that people need to overcome to just embrace this process and show up for what it is. Absolutely. That is number one, let's move beyond willpower. It's had 50 years of stuff. Let's say, let's move on to really understanding how our minds work. And I think we're way past being able to do that. Yeah.

And the first, if somebody is listening to this and they're caught in, well, let me just back up and say, if you're listening to this and you don't identify as somebody who's an addict in the traditional sense. I would encourage all of you to think more objectively and really do an analysis, a forensic analysis on how you live your life every single day. some behavior pattern, whether it's a tendency to get into a certain kind of relationship or a certain kind of social dynamic that you perpetuate despite negative outcomes, there is always something that can be pinpointed that needs a little redress. And I think what Judd has shared today can be instrumental and helpful in helping you understand, A, that you're doing that, and B, that there is a path forward

that can allow you to ultimately transcend it. Amen, brother. Yeah, and it begins with what? Awareness. Awareness? And this- If somebody doesn't know what awareness is though, like, what do you mean?

By that, I mean, paying attention, like really being truly awake in the present moment. And importantly, not being pushed or pulled by our biases, you know, colored by, oh, this is the way the world works, but really being colored by curiosity. Like, oh, is this the way the world work, but really being colored by curiosity, like, oh, is this the way the world works? Is this actually true? So that we're observing what's actually happening

rather than what we think should be or want to be happening. Is there a difference between curiosity and listening? I think we can listen curiously, or we can listen in a biased manner. So if we're listening, waiting to hear a certain thing or hearing things a certain way, and I'm sure we've all experienced this where like, oh, I thought I heard this.

And somebody said, no, I said that. So we can listen. But if we're, I would think, I would say this is somewhat synonymous with deep listening, where we are totally out of our own way and we are just totally in the process of listening. That's the curiosity piece and the awareness piece and even flow. We're just so engrossed in a conversation. That's totally synonymous.

All right. I think that's a good place to land the plane. How do you feel? I feel great. Are you craving anything right now? No, I had no idea it went this long. Wow. Two hours is good.

The book is The Craving Mind. It's a great book. I'm well into it at this point. I highly recommend everybody check it out. There's so much good stuff in here, plus an amazing forward by Jon Kabat-Zinn, which was beautiful. And if people want to learn more about you, drjudd.com, what's the best place for them to go? Yeah, that's our resource website, drjud.com, where they can learn about my research, about the book, about our apps.

And we've got a bunch of animations on there that teach people like everyday addictions and things like that. Right, all the apps can be found through that portal. Absolutely. And check out his TED Talks, right? You've got two. Two, well, a TED and a TEDx.

TEDx and then the big TED. Yeah. How many views does that thing have now? I'm- Crazy number of views. A lot. Yeah, all right. You don't wanna admit that you check once in a while. Busted.

Good to talk to you, man. Come back and share with me more. I love what you're doing. I appreciate the work that you're doing. I think it's really important. Addiction is the epidemic of our time. It's why we're obese. It's why the opioid crisis exists.

These are massive problems that need to be solved at scale. And so the science that you're doing and how it merges with these traditional historic methods of mindfulness, I think is super important and worth everybody's conscious investigation. So thank you. Thank you. All right. Peace. Blance.

Good stuff. Hope you guys enjoyed that. I hope you got a lot out of that. I hope that elevated your edification in this world of habit change and addiction and compulsion. For more on Judd and his world, please check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. And you can let him know personally how this one landed for you by sharing your thoughts with him directly on Twitter or Instagram at Judd Brewer. Also, don't forget to pick up a copy of his book, The Craving Mind, which is also available on Audible, of course. And here's the thing, if you are struggling with your diet, if you are truly desiring of once and for all mastering your plate, but feel like you lack the skill in the kitchen or you don't have the time or the budget to eat properly,

please check out our Plant Power Meal Planner. I really think it can help you. It's an extraordinary product. We work very hard to create. That solves a very basic problem, making nutritious eating convenient, affordable, and delicious. When you sign up at meals.richroll.com, you will get access to thousands of constantly updated, delicious,

easy to prepare, nutritious plant-based recipes that are completely customized based on a profile of personal preferences that you upload when you sign up. You also get unlimited grocery lists, grocery delivery in most metropolitan areas, and access to a team of nutrition coaches at the ready to guide you seven days a week. And all of this you get for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year, which is insane. It's literally the price of a cup of coffee.

So to learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on the podcast, on Apple Podcasts. That really helps new people discover the show. You can tell your friends about your favorite episode

on social media, perhaps. Subscribe to my YouTube channel, Spotify, Google Podcasts, all those places. And you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I want to thank everybody, the team that helps put this show on every week. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music, lots of behind-the-scenes stuff. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin who do double duty on videoing the show for YouTube.

Jessica Miranda for graphics, Allie Rogers for portraits, DK, David Kahn for advertiser relationships, and my boys, Tyler and Trapper and Harry, who created the theme music for the show that dates back all the way to day one. They called their band Analemma at the time. I don't think they're still calling their band that,

but I keep saying it, Analemma. Anyway, appreciate all of you guys. Thank you for the love. I will see you back here in a couple of days with a really wonderful conversation with a true maven of all things creativity, photographer, creative live founder, and author of this new book, which I really love, Creative Calling. His name is Chase Jarvis, and you're going to love it. Here is a little taste. Until then, be still, be mindful, eat plants. Namaste. The people that you are inspired by, that you moved by, that you're connected to,

that you admire, their lives were created intentionally. There's all kinds of circumstances, but they created the puzzle that is their life and they're expressing themselves in a particular way. And it's intentional, it's designed, and it's created. The creativity is a muscle. It's a habit, not a skill. It's a process, not a product. It's a muscle. And the only way you learn is through practice. And this is why I advocate action over intellect. If you're sitting around trying to figure this out and make the perfect chess move, that's not how it happens.

It's the action. It's the doing that actually creates the learning. It's great to get information from the internet or your mentor or whomever, but learning, like actually doing that part is incredibly valuable. It is the riskiest time in the world to play it safe. Thank you.