WHOOP Podcast - Breaking the Habit Loop: Living Life With Less Stress with Dr. Jud Brewer

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

On this week’s episode, WHOOP VP of Performance Science Kristen Holmes is joined by Sharecare Chief Medical Officer Dr. Jud Brewer. Dr. Jud shares his insight on psychology and neuroscience to discuss the difference between anxiety and stress (4:03), what our mind is doing in a moment of anxiousness (6:02), how to approach habit change and habit loops (12:40), becoming aware of your habit loops (15:29), finding a way to be okay with our own thoughts and stresses (19:36), vices that cause worrying and how to break their respective habit loops (21:51), how awareness is key to understanding habits (30:20), becoming more consistent in our daily life through self-awareness (36:50), using stress to your advantage (42:27), how Dr. Jud changed his commute to break a bad habit (45:34), how different mindstates impact the reward hierarchy (49:25), and how we can all spread the work to become more self-aware and mindful (52:40).Resources:Dr. Jud's Website Dr. Jud's YouTubeUnwinding Anxiety Map My Habit Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks. Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with the best of the best, uncover human performance. I'm your host, Will Amid, founder and CEO of Woop. We're on a mission to unlock human performance. That's right. On this week's episode, our VP of Performance Science, Kristen Holmes, is joined by Sharecare's chief medical officer, Dr. Judd Brewer. Dr. Judd is here to break down the physiological impact of stress and anxiety on the body and how they can impact habits. As we all continue to work on our resolutions through January jumpstart campaign, Dr. Judge can share some of his research on mindfulness, habit change, anxiety, and sleep. His are New York Times bestselling author and thought leader in the field of habit change

and the science of self-mastery, who blends over 20 years of experience with mindfulness training in a career in scientific research. Dr. Judd has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit change, including both in-person and app-based treatments for anxiety, emotional eating, and smoking. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. He has trained U.S. Olympic athletes and coaches, foreign government ministers, and corporate leaders. His work has been featured on outlets such as 60 Minutes, Ted, the Wall Street Journal, The Today Show, and more.

Judd and Kristen will discuss, the anxiety habit loop and how to manage it, the psychological impact of breaking habits, the three pillars of how to manage and avoid stress, the difference between breaking and maintaining habits, how stress can help and hinder your goals, how stress and anxiety can impact sleep. We're going to get to the episode in half a second, but a reminder if you're new to whoop, you can use the code will when you're checking out and get a $60 credit on WOOP accessories. You can use that credit for new bands, battery packs, whoop, body apparel, and more.

That is at joined.wop.com to get started. And if you have a question, what's he answered on the podcast? Email us, podcast at whoop.com. Call us 508-443-4952. Might just be answered on a future episode. Here are Kristen Holmes and Dr. Judd Brewer. Dr. Brewer, welcome. Thanks for having me.

Oh, I'm so excited to have you. I know you mentioned this. I can call you Judd. so I'll probably go back and forth between Judd and Dr. Brewer, but we're so thrilled to have you on the podcast today. I had, as I mentioned, I had the opportunity to read your book, Unwinding Anxiety. I just found it to be so incredibly insightful. And, you know, honestly, it was just really refreshing. I loved just how you have both in your book and just in all the research that you've done, really gone a layer deeper and broken down the science behind the kind of coupling of destructive

of habits and anxiety and how really our kind of lack of understanding between the dynamics, what actually keeps us from being able to move forward in life sometimes. And I think what was, I think really eye-opening for me is I could recognize myself, you know, when I read these kind of books, I'm like, oh, you know, anxiety, that's not something I suffer from. But it doesn't have to be kind of these extreme circumstances. It's something that I think manifests in different ways and is present in kind of our habits. And, you know, I think as kind of folks tackle, you know, their January challenges and are just trying to kind of lead more effective, kind of happy lives. So I'd love to start the conversation by, you know, diving into this notion of

anxiety. What is it, I suppose? And if maybe if you don't mind just helping us understand the difference between anxiety and stress, I feel like they're used pretty interchangeably, but I think they're actually quite different. So maybe if you can just kind of help set the stage by giving us just a quick kind of understanding of the difference and really settling into what this notion of anxiety actually is. Yeah, I'd be happy to.

So I think the standard definition goes something like this feeling of nervousness or worry or unease about an uncertain event, you know, something imminent happening or something with an uncertain outcome, which is basically all of the future. We, you know, there are very few things in life that are certain.

And the way we can, you know, anxiety is interesting because they're in that definition, that word worry can be both a feeling, this feeling of worry, which helps define anxiety. But it can also be a verb where the feeling of nervousness or worry or unease leads to the mental behavior of worrying, which then feeds back to make some more anxious. We can talk more about that later. But just sticking with that definition, you know, it's a feeling that comes on. And often people think, oh, why am I anxious? And they can't find a trigger.

They can't find, you know, what's causing it. They just feel anxious. And certainly how I typically experience anxiety is it just comes on. And that's very different than stress, which generally has a pretty clear precipitant. So if we have a deadline at work, we can feel stressed until that deadline is gone. And we've completed the project. but once we've, you know, check that box of whatever is making us stressed out, whether it passes on its own or we've done something to mitigate it, that stress goes away. So we, you know,

stress has a clear precipitant. And if we do something, you know, we get our to-do list done, for example, that stress can go away. Whereas anxiety, if we, you know, if it doesn't have a clear precipitant, it's hard to do something to make it go away. But that certainly doesn't stop our human minds from trying, which actually gets us into more trouble. right well maybe expand a little bit bit on that like what what is our mind kind of doing in in these moments of anxiousness and you know even in the absence of a stressor you know we're anxious and we're worrying like what what is going on in our brains yeah so this is likely a weird mashup of two very helpful survival strategies our brains are really good at using fear to help us you know fight or flight

in the immediate, you know, in the present moment. So if there's something dangerous, you know, we, you know, it's the fight, fight, freeze reaction that happens and we do what we need to do to stay safe. We also learn from fear. So if we've been in a dangerous situation, we can look back on it afterwards and say, wow, that was dangerous. Let's avoid that in the future. So what would be a modern day example of that would be, you know, actually over the last

decade pedestrian deaths have gone up thanks to the rollout of smartphones. And so you can think of when we used to look both ways before looking, you know, crossing the street. And now a lot of people are distracted by their phones and they're looking at their phones. And so, you know, somebody's looking at their phone. They step out in the street, car honks at them and swerves to avoid hitting them. They jump back onto the sidewalk and say, wow, that was not the smartest thing in the world. Maybe I should put my phone away when I'm walking down the sidewalk and look both both ways before I cross the street. So there, that mechanism sets us up for learning where we can learn it's through what's called negative reinforcement. So any type of learning, you know, the most

commonly used mechanisms for learning are positive and negative reinforcement. And so that comes in the form of, you know, we have three elements to learn any of any of these. So through negative reinforcement, you need to trigger a behavior and a result. So if you see the car coming right at you, there's the trigger. You jump, you know, back on the sidewalk. There's the behavior and the result is that you don't get killed, but you're kind of afraid. And you're like, wow, I should learn to put my phone away. And when we learn those situations, we, you know, it helps us survive in the future. So very helpful survival mechanism going on in our brain there. There's also another helpful survival mechanism, which is planning for the future. So it's helpful to be able to, you know,

plan ahead for our day, our week, our month, our year. And that planning helps us, you know, helps us be more efficient, helps us, you know, do things that we might have not otherwise been able to do spontaneously. But when you mix those two together, when you mix fear with planning, you get fear of the future, right? Because it's about the future. And you can't, you know, you can't be afraid, you can't tell if something's actually going to be dangerous in the future because it's only dangerous right now or not. And our brains get into this model where they start moving, you know, thinking, getting afraid of the future,

which triggers this worry mechanism where they start worrying. And worrying is very different than planning. You know, planning is looking at using our prefrontal cortex, looking at all the scenarios, you know, doing the best we can to figure out what's most likely to happen and then making plans accordingly. worrying is kind of like planning on steroids minus the useful part where we start to worry oh maybe this could happen maybe this could happen maybe this could happen which ironically actually makes it harder for us to plan and to reason because that prefrontal cortex starts to go offline

the more worried we get and the more anxious we get and then we just get stuck in these cycles where the feeling of anxiety triggers the mental behavior of worrying which then gives us the result. It makes us feel like we're in control, or at least we're doing something. And that feeds back. That's enough of a reward that it feeds back and says, hey, next time you're anxious, you should worry. And then, you know, you'll feel better. So this, this was actually discovered or hypothesized back in the 1980s by Thomas Borkebeck. He suggested that worry could be reinforced in this, using the same mechanism as any other negatively reinforced behavior. But I never learn this in residency or in medical school, you know, all. So this mechanism really hasn't been

talked about a whole lot. And, you know, that's been something that kind of blew my mind as I was trying to help my own patients in my psychiatric clinic. And, you know, with medications about one in five patients is going to show significant reduction in symptoms when you give them the best medications out there. So I was basically playing the medication lottery with my patients, you know, didn't know which one of the five was going to benefit, you know, the next five patients I saw. And I didn't know what to do with the other four. So I started looking into this to see what I'd been missing, or maybe I slept through a class in medical school or something like that. And that's where I ran across work in Beck and others were to see that, you know, anxiety could

actually be driven like a habit. And I've been doing habit research for about a decade. And so it was a big light bulb moment for me to say, oh, I never thought about anxiety, you know, being driven like any other habit. And I, you know, as a researcher, as a neuroscientist, I could start to develop mechanisms to test to see if that was true and to see if we could actually treat it. We actually made this unwinding anxiety app and started testing it. This is an app that anybody can use. And we found that we got a, in our major randomized controlled trial of people with generalized anxiety disorder, you know, it was about one and two people the benefited from using the app as compared to one in five with medications.

So, you know, on average, we saw 67% reduction in anxiety in people with generalizing anxiety disorder. And this is just targeting this habit loop, helping people work with, you know, learn that it's a habit and learn to work with the habit itself. Wow. So people actually get addictive, addicted to the worry itself. I mean, that's really what's happening here. Yeah. And a lot of people describe it that way in their own terms.

They say, man, I feel like I'm addicted to worrying. So that reward mechanism obviously is so powerful. Like how do you how do you unwind that? That's going to be the goal, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, if we could make a medication for that, it would be the blockbuster drug of all time. Right. You know, just having, giving people benzodiazepines or something and not, not a helpful solution

and actually not first-line treatment anymore because of their addictive potential and the other the other downsides. Plus, they don't actually help us work with the core reason that we're getting caught in these loops. So, you know, the way we've approached it, and this is how we've been approaching habits and habit change in general, is by really bringing in something that's simple, but not necessarily easy for people to do until they see how it works. works in context. And the idea is, you know, you can be curious. And this comes from ancient

Buddhist practices where bringing awareness in and mapping out these habit loops is the first place to start. I think of it this way is, you know, if we don't know how our minds work, there's no way that we're going to be able to work with our minds. So if we can understand how our minds work, then we have a tool to be able to work with their minds. And that actually starts, you know, I think of it as a three-step process. I laid it out in the unwinding anxiety book. But the process is, you know, this works for any habit. You know, we've done studies with smoking cessation where we've got five times of quit rates of gold standard treatment. We have this app called Eat Right now where people, you know, reduce, you know, we see a 40% reduction in craving

related eating. So we can see this across the board where, where there's habit involved. And the first step is really just mapping out these habit loops, like we talked about, you know, what's the trigger, what's the behavior, what's the result. And I want to be really clear here for anybody listening, often people get stuck in trying to identify the triggers so they can avoid the triggers. You know, they're like, oh, if I can find what accused my anxiety or my worry, then I can just, you know, stop it, control it, avoid it, whatever. Well, the problem is that the feeling of anxiety typically comes on by itself. You know, it doesn't have a trigger. And it in itself can be the trigger for worrying. So you can't avoid something that you don't have

any control over. The paradox here is once we can start to map it out and just see, okay, anxiety triggered me to worry, then we can start asking ourselves what the result is. And that's where we can actually tap into the power of our brains. Because once we see the process, that's actually a really good start in being able to step out of it. But I'll pause there before I go on to the second step. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And this is really what was so eye-opening for me as I read this book, just really kind of curiosity as a strategy in of itself for to investigate kind of the contents of the mind. You know, I thought that was just really powerful. But I think what you said in terms of trigger behavior result makes a lot of sense.

And I think like maybe just a really clear example of, you know, someone that you've worked with, you know, and kind of what that step actually looks like. You know, what is that that moment of kind of like awareness? like how do you step into that awareness, I guess? You know, because that in of itself is kind of a skill, you know, and how do you kind of get someone to think about that and be more conscious of that just throughout their day? What I typically do, so let's say I have a patient that comes into my clinic who has anxiety.

There's actually one patient that I wrote a little bit about in my book who came in, you know, anxiety was the chief complaint. I didn't know anything beyond that. And as he sat down and started, describing his history, he basically had pretty severe anxiety for about 30 years. He was about 40 years of age, and he'd had it since he was, you know, probably a pretty teen. And he also had developed full-blown panic disorder where he would start to get panic attacks when driving on the highway. He tried everything. So what we did after I started to get a sense of what, you know,

what his history was, I just pulled out a piece of paper and I wrote down triggered behavior, reward of results on that piece of paper. And I said, okay, let me get this straight. You know, for your panic attacks, the trigger is thinking that you might get in a car accident. The behavior at that point was avoiding driving on the highway. And then the result was that he could avoid having panic attacks. And he said, yeah, that's it. And so then I drew arrows between the three.

So the trigger leads to the behavior, which leads to the result, which then feeds back to the trigger. And his eyes got really wide. And I said, what, you know, what's going on? And he said, well, I'd never noticed that my mind works that way, you know. And so it's really about being, first, just understanding the very simple models that our brains use to learn. So just mapping that out, it took about 30 seconds to teach him that piece. And then applying that to his real life situation really helped him see how it, those, you know, those panic attacks are just the fear of having another panic attack. That's really what panic disorder is about.

It's about, you know, avoiding situations where you might have a panic attack. It's not about the panic attacks themselves. So helping him see that really was literally eye-opening for him where he could start to see, oh, this is how my mind works because he had no idea. It was just this, you know, it was like this black box. And we had, you know, flipped on the light switch for him where he could see that he was bumbling around in this dark room and suddenly he could see what he was bumping into. So that's really where the curiosity starts.

just starting to map out these habit loops. And I found that this is so helpful. We haven't just put together a free habit mapper. I think the website's mapmyhabit.com. So anybody can just go to the mapmyhabit.com and they can download a free PDF habit mapper where they can map out any of their habits, whether it's worrying, whether it's overeating, whether it's smoking, whether it's, you know, procrastinating. I mean, all these habits are driven in the same way. And so back to your question, the curiosity simply comes from being curious about, oh, do I want to know how my mind works? I've never met anybody that doesn't want to know how their mind works, especially when they're suffering with something like anxiety. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I think, you know, what's interesting to me is, you know, kind of, you know, and this is a, you know, just a pet peeve, I guess, of just the Internet, you know, just all the tips and tricks that we get, you know, pushed.

And I feel like, you know, just after reading your book, it was very clear to me that the order of operation is kind of wrong, you know. And that's really this, you know, kind of this curiosity is really what has to come first, you know. And I love to get your thoughts on this because I feel like to be curious and to really kind of examine what's happening with your thoughts and what's in your mind, you need to give yourself time to think. And I think that of in itself just, because, you thinking can be really uncomfortable, right? Because we can not like what we're thinking about, like we can, that end of itself can kind of make us anxious. So how do we kind of move through that process of just being comfortable to really examine what's happening with our thoughts and inside our mind, you know, in a way that gets us to a point where we can start to understand what that kind of anxiety habit loop actually looks like. Yeah. The good news here is it doesn't, take a lot of deep analysis to identify these habit loops. Often people get stuck in, I think of these is the why habit loops, you know, like, why am I anxious or why am I having this loop based on,

you know, it's something that happened in the past or whatever. And then they get stuck just trying to figure it out. And those figured out habit loops can get them stuck in more like, oh, if I could just figure this out, I could fix it. The good news with these habit loops is really all we have to do is identify that we're in a habit loop. So it's really as simple as am I feeling anxious, yes or no, right? Doesn't take a lot of thought, really takes awareness of the body because that's where we typically feel anxiety. Am I having worried thoughts or am I worrying?

Am I, you know, doing this mental perseveration where the mental behavior is worrying? We don't have to identify what we're worrying about just that we're worrying. And then identify what the result is. And that's where I have people really stay in their body. Like, what does it feel like when I worry? Do I get more anxious? The typical answer is yes. So notice how that doesn't take a lot of deep thought, and it can actually be mapped out pretty

quickly. It's really at, you know, instead of why is this happening, it's at the level of what is happening right now. Does that make sense? It does, yeah. And then so oftentimes what happens, you have this worry, you notice this worry. And instead of kind of moving through. it and examining it, we immediately try to stymie it or inoculate ourselves from kind of that

anxiety. And that's what leads to potentially a bad habit, right? Or a habit that's not going to necessarily serve us. Like to placate that anxiety and that worry, we then do this thing. So maybe talk about just some examples of the worry and then what that thing could be, like overeating or, you know, gambling or going on the, you know, scrolling, Instagram or whatever it might be. And how do you think about just that whole process of kind of really developing a new behavior on kind of top of that old behavior to help us manage that anxiety more effectively? Yeah, yeah. So this is where, you know, it's really helpful to kind of understand the mechanism itself

and to map it out first, right? So often I see this quite a bit is that, you know, people with, so anxiety is uncomfortable. And our brain says, that's uncomfortable, we'll make it go away. So we do something, and it's typically in the form of distraction. So as you described, we might eat. We might scroll on our social media. We might check our news feed. We might watch a television show.

We do something to distract ourselves. And that distraction gives us this brief relief. It temporarily avoids the feeling of anxiety or distracts us a little bit and then gets reinforced. So then we don't know how to actually work with the anxiety itself. And the patient that I described with the panic disorder and the generalized anxiety disorder, he actually started distracting himself through eating when he was a kid. And by the time he came to see me, he was about 400 pounds.

With that, he had been eating quite a bit as a way to numb himself. And I see this a lot with my patients with binge eating disorder, for example, they'll binge as a way to numb themselves from negative emotions. So the first thing to know here is that these are, these become these temporary distractors that can actually make things worse. My patient, ironically, had health anxiety because he had a fatty liver, he had hypertension, he had obstructive sleep apnea, like he was having trouble sleeping. And all of this was due to him, you know, his weight.

So he was at a very unhealthy weight. So, ironically, we can use him as an example. I sent him home with our unrunning anxiety app, and I said, just start mapping out your habit loops around anxiety. And I set up a follow-up appointment for two weeks later. And he comes back, and the first thing he says to me is, hey, Doc, I lost 14 pounds. And I was trying to recall, had we even talked about weight loss at that point? I don't think we had because we were just going to focus on anxiety.

And he said, you said, yeah, you could see my puzzled look. And he said, yeah, we didn't really talk about weight loss. And he said, I started mapping out my anxiety habit loops and this was my loop. Anxiety triggered me to eat. And typically he was pretty addicted to fast food at that point. You know, all the ways of fast food can be very addicting. Easy and convenient. Yeah.

that and you know it's it's engineered to give us those dopamine hits and everything right so he he started mapping these out and he realized that he was stress eating and that the stress eating was only making him more anxious because he had health anxiety so he's he basically said so I stopped doing that and that actually it's not it's not just he told himself to stop doing that because he'd been he'd been yo-yo dieting for years, literally years, maybe decades, where he had, you know, tried to force himself, you know, to restrain himself from eating and then would go back. That's where the yo-yo-dieting term comes from because you lose a little weight.

You regain it. You lose it again. So he said, you know, I realized that it wasn't serving me. And so I just stopped doing it, not out of force, but just because I was like, wow, this is not helping. and I highlight that because that's really the second step and probably the most critical step for changing any habit. Notice how that had nothing to do with willpower. He wasn't telling himself to stop eating junk food and fat food. He just realized that it wasn't helping him. So this, just to get

into a little neuroscience here, there's a part of our brain called the orbital frontal cortex that determines and stores reward value. And there are mathematical formulas, formulae that go all the way back to this 1970s that actually map out how it's called reinforcement learning, right? So behaviors get reinforced based on certain things. And one of the key things for making something, you know, stick is it's got to be rewarding. And then if it's the only way to change that is actually to bring awareness in. So there's an error term called positive or negative prediction error, which basically means If we pay attention to something and it's more rewarding than our brain had thought, you know, kind of laid down as a reward value, we get a positive predictionary.

We're going to do it more. So, for example, if I go to a new bakery and I eat some cake in their bakery and it's like the best cake I've ever had, I'm going to learn, hey, this is a good bakery. I should go back there. But if I go in that bakery and it's not very good cake, I get a negative prediction error and my brain says, don't bother coming back here. So I learned not to go back there. So my patient had actually gotten a really strong negative prediction error where he had thought that junk food and fast food was rewarding.

And then he paid attention when he ate it. And he realized two things. One, it doesn't fix his anxiety. And two, it was actually making his health worse. And you notice a bunch of other things. You know, he would get tired. He would get the cyclical, you know, like all the dopamine hit and then the crash and all that stuff. So he tapped into this negative prediction error without.

even knowing it and that all that took was awareness you got to be curious about what what happens in fact we've even done studies we just published a study with our e right now program where we we build in a tool we call it the craving tool build that into the e right now app so people can pay attention as they overeat and are you ready for this yeah it only takes 10 to 15 times for somebody to pay attention as they overeat, for that reward value to drop below zero, below zero, as in it's not rewarding, right? It doesn't take a long time.

It doesn't take a lot of repetitions. Our brains are actually really plastic. They can learn very quickly if we pay attention. So if we learn that something's not rewarding, then we become disenchanted with it, and we can change that behavior without trying to force ourselves, without using some gimmick, without distracting ourselves, And in fact, the distraction gets in the way, as we talked about.

It's really about bringing that curiosity in. And I like to have people ask this simple question, what am I getting from this? As they overeat, what am I getting from this? So for my patient is, you know, as he ate junk food, as he ate, you know, food that was unhealthy. And as he overate, he could ask himself, what am I getting from this? And very quickly, he learned he was getting nothing and he started losing weight. He went on to lose over 100 pounds. He kept it off for over three years.

He's still losing weight as we speak in a very, you know, simple, sustained way where it's like, what do I get from eating too much? What do I get from eating healthy versus unhealthy food? And that's really just tapping into the reward, you know, the reward mechanisms in his brain. We all have those reward mechanisms. We've just been so distracted by willpower. is the dominant paradigm that nobody's thought to ask, well, what if we just simply bring awareness in, bring some curiosity in? And even with anxiety, people can become disenchanted with worrying,

where they used to think, like, this is my bedrock, you know, and they realize, why am I relying on something that's only making me more anxious? Then they get disenchanted. So that's the second of three steps in terms of changing that habit. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, this incredible explanation and I think very in such a tangible and really inspirational example. I mean, it's just a wonderful, you know, to kind of hear success rates like that in what you describe as being like quite a simple process. I mean, that's amazing. So beyond curiosity, so that's, you know, kind of, I suppose, one one tool or technique to cultivate awareness. Are there, is there anything else you found in your lab to be to kind of surface as being really

effective way to bring attention and awareness to kind of habits serving us, not serving us? Well, the awareness is key, and there's no getting around that. If we're not aware of a habit, we're going to keep doing it by definition. It's an automatic behavior. So the awareness piece is critical, but there's another piece that can really help with this. And I think of this as, you know, two flavors. So curiosity is one of these flavors. I think of it really is. a superpower because we can use curiosity, map out these habit loops. We can use curiosity to ask this very simple question, what am I getting from this, whether we're worrying or overeating or whatever? And we can also bring in another flavor. You know, it's kind of like,

I don't know, people like combinations, like peanut butter and jelly, you know, where you get you get your sustenance, but you also get a little bit of sweetness. And if we are, you know, our brains learn from sweetness. So if we're, if we're bitter on our, ourselves, if we're constantly judging ourselves, we're actually closing ourselves down from learning. Carol Dwex, a well-known researcher from Stanford who coined this term growth versus fixed mindset. And she, this was in the educational space where she did most of her research. But the idea is, if we feel like, you know, something is always going to be the way, you know,

this is always going to be this way, then we're kind of in a fixed mindset. We don't, we're not open to growth or open to learning. If we're in growth mindset, we're open to learning. And curiosity really helps us move into a growth mindset. Another thing that helps us move into a growth mindset is kindness. So when we're judging ourselves and saying, beating ourselves up over, oh, you shouldn't have eaten that cake or you shouldn't have eaten that extra cookie or you shouldn't have whatever, that puts us in fixed mindset.

And then we just get stuck in habits of judging ourselves, beating ourselves up and all of those habits that actually just reinforce those habits. also keep us from learning. So here, the other piece that's really helpful is learning to recognize those self-judgmental habit loops or the self-deprecation or whatever those habit loops are and see how unrewarding they are and then bring in some kindness. I think of this as, you know, finding bigger, better offers. That's, that's really the third step in this process is, you know, giving our brain something better because our brains are going to say, if this is unrewarding and I'm disenchanted, give me something better.

Now, something better could be simply stepping out of an old habit loop. It could be that simple. And or it could be finding something like being curious rather than worrying. Or, you know, if we have a craving for some food, we can get curious about what that craving feels like. And then curiosity feels better than craving. So if we can train ourselves just to be curious, we can see, oh, you know, their thoughts, their feelings, there are sensations that are.

that are associated with this craving, but they come and go. I don't have to act on the craving. We can do the same thing with self-judgment. We can ask ourselves, what do I get from self-judgment? How does it feel when I judge myself? And how does that compare to being kind to myself? When we're kind to ourselves, it's a no-brainer. It kindness feels better. It's that big or better offer. So the other piece that I've found pretty consistently is helpful. And other people have done research on this as well, kindness is really, really helpful. And it helps us very specifically step out of some of these old self-judgmental habit loops so that we can be open to growth, we can bring in that curiosity and start to step out of the habit loops, but also

at the same time step into new habits of kindness and curiosity. And so, you know, we can tell ourselves, oh, I should exercise, I should meditate, I should do this, I should do that. You know, that joke, what's the joke? We should all over ourselves. Right. So we can tell ourselves that we should do things, but then we just build up a list of things that we can beat ourselves up over for having failed because we're trying to use our willpower to make ourselves do things. Instead, we can just reflect on, how's it feel when I'm kind to myself? Oh, it feels good. So then that becomes naturally self-reinforcing. And then it becomes the habit, not because we think we should do it, because it will be good for us, but because it feels good when we do it.

And we can build that positive reinforcement based on our own direct experience. That's how we develop wisdom, you know, is through our own experience, not just some, you know, cognitive, you know, book learning or reading a list or, you know, the dot five things on that next blog post on, you know, what we should do for New Year's resolutions. We've got that wisdom. We all know what it feels like to be curious. We all know what it feels like to be kind. And we can, we can rely on those consistently because they're always going to be there for us.

I love that. This whole framework around kindness is just totally new to me in the sense of it's just like it's almost like kindness creates space for us to to your point kind of move into these habits with like a lot less friction. You know, whereas like when we try to enact kind of willpower or like talk ourselves, you know, kind of be hard on ourselves or I don't know, it just seems like that is creating a whole layer of friction that we actually have. to move through whereas kind of seems just so much simpler there you know there's there's like a compassion to it that yeah just seems to reduce the friction like i can feel it as you say it you know it feels really tangible or i can feel like my body almost like calming and maybe that's a good segue segue to kind of talk a little bit about the physiology obviously here at woup we think a whole lot about physiology um maybe just you know through all the research that you

you've done and just your understanding of the brain and how can we become a more aware of our kind of internal state to move around our mind more effectively? You know, what is that connection? And you kind of alluded to it earlier in the conversation, just like being aware of like that internal kind of status. But what are some like very clear links we can start to make that can help us be more effective at, you know, consistently bringing this awareness, you know, into our daily life. Like, is there something that we can connect to within our body that can kind of help create a more, a stronger connection? It's a really good question. So one practice that has been around for probably thousands of years.

Literally, you know, this comes from some of these practices in Southeast Asia. One is called the Body Sweep or the Body Scan, where we, and we actually have people start practicing this on day three of any of these app-based programs that we have, where the idea is, you know, we start just getting familiar with what our body sensations are. many, many of us live, you know, distanced from our bodies, you know, we're kind of these cognitive thinking things with, and try to avoid body sensations at all costs, often because we're either uncomfortable with our body or there's something unpleasant, you know, going on, or we might have some chronic pain or whatever. So one of the habits that a lot of people

have developed is just to kind of, you know, distance themselves from their bodies. And this isn't a new phenomenon. I love that James Joyce wrote in one of his short stories in the Dubliners. He said there was about this guy named Mr. Duffy said, Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body. How many of us live a short distance from our body? So the body scan can be a really helpful way to start becoming more familiar and more coming home to ourselves. So for example, we're so not used to paying attention to our body sensations that we're and or we are automatically reacting to them so quickly that we just you know we'll just eat when we have a craving as compared to asking ourselves if we're hungry using ways to ground ourselves and see that our

bodies are not the enemy they're not to be distanced from and in and instead of you know judging ourselves or often loathing ourselves or hating ourselves even really learning to love ourselves again and come home to ourselves. And the body scan is a really good way to do that where people are simply starting to pay attention to physical sensations in their body as they scan up or down through their bodies. And I've got a free guided meditation on my YouTube channel. If folks want to try it if they haven't, it's pretty straightforward. Yeah, great. And the idea is if we can start to notice that physical sensations are always present, you know, there's always going to be something going on in our body, that starts to help us notice our physiology more.

And it helps us to start to get curious, like, oh, am I actually hungry, for example, or am I, what does anxiety actually feel like as compared to, oh, no, I'm anxious, got to run away from this, distract myself. And the body scan is a great way to help kind of recalibrate our awareness of all the different body sensations we have, how they constantly change, what they feel like. And as part of that, you know, again, the critical ingredient of the body scan comes back to being curious. Like instead of going, oh, no, you know, I have to pay attention to my body.

Like, oh, I wonder what this sensation actually feels like. So I think that's a really good way to start. and often will just suggest that people try it, you know, before they go to sleep at night. Often, you know, my patients who struggle with sleep, I will prescribe the body scan because a lot of medications can actually disrupt good sleep. So, you know, so I try to use kind of the mind remedies as compared to the medications when possible. And the two can certainly be combined. But the body scan is really helpful because often we're worried, you know, as well. as we're going out to sleep. And in fact, we just published a study with our unwinding anxiety

program where, you know, worry contributes to sleep disturbance so much that the NIH even has specific measures about that. And so we said, well, what if we just target anxiety? Will that improve people sleep if worry is interfering with their sleep? And we actually found that we could get significant large reductions in both anxiety and that sleep disturbance, you know, where they report sleeping better because they're not stuck in those worried habit loops. And one of the key ways to do that is to bring the body scan at night as they're going to sleep. I love it. Yeah, I find, you know, I'm a huge fan of Yoga Nidra and do that regularly and have for over a decade. And it's been a really powerful practice for me to kind of make those.

connections. And I think just, you know, to go back to just the difference between anxiety and stress, I think that's a great way to really recognize the difference between, oh, this is, this is actually anxiety versus, oh, this is stress. And stress, I'd love to get your thoughts on this. You know, I always see stress as this kind of mover and shaker. You know, if I feel stress, I'm like, oh, I pay attention to that, you know, and I try to harness it. You know, maybe it's just the pile of laundry that's been on my bed for three days that I keep kicking. down that I need to fold and put away. Or, you know, it's something, it's, it's kind of that surge of energy. It's, it's a sympathetic nervous system saying, okay, you know what? Here's some

stress. Here's some adrenaline, cortisol, epinephrine. Go do your thing. And I guess how do you advise patients to really understand that phenomenon and use it to their advantage? Yeah. Well, I think the understanding is the big advantage there. So if we can see, oh, this is stress, right? So we could be stressed about, you know, something on our to-do list, or we could not be stressed about it. It's still going to be on our to-do list. And that's, we can kind of transform that stress energy and say, okay, I've got all this energy boiling around. I could try to, you know, try to force myself not to be stressed. Or I could ask, you know, I like the simple question. It's like, what do I need right now versus what do I want? So often when we're stressed out, we want that stress to

go away so we might distract ourselves or we might go eat something or whatever. So if we can just step back and get curious, oh, here's stress. What do we actually need right now? And that need might be to go check that item off of our to do list. And then we've got to check that we got the energy. We've got to checked off. And then we can ask ourselves, how did that, what's the result of that? You know, as we check off our to-do list. And also, what's the results of doing it in a way where we're bringing curiosity and kindness in instead of like, I have to do this to make my stress go away? Because we can get in to-do list, stress habit loops, where we get stressed, we check

off an item on our to-do list, and then we get stuck, like, trying to check off our to-do list without knowing that we're actually just feeding those cycles of like, oh, if I just do this, I don't know, anybody that doesn't have an endless to-do list, right? it keeps adding things. So we can really shift the mindset from like, oh, I've got to do this to make it go away to, oh, here's stress. Here's a stress habit loop. Let me see what this is. And then ask ourselves, what do I need right now? And it might be to do an item on our to do list or it might be just to take a break. You know, if we've been, you know, we've been constantly running in the hamster wheel, you know, with our stress to do list for a while.

I love that technique and that kind of creates like a taxonomy almost of just where to start, you know, and how to use how to use that energy. To your point, it might be actually just this down and read for five minutes, you know, or it might be actually to tackle something on the do-do list. So I love that. I heard a story. I don't know, as I was researching for the podcast, I heard, I think it was someone talking about how you managed or kind of how you reframed your commute to work. you would find yourself really affected by the traffic and just the general, I think, just, you know, I'm from Massachusetts. I grew up in New England. So, you know, everyone is just raging on the road. So I would love to just kind of hear that example of how you kind of reframe that. And it kind of brings in, I think, a lot of things that you talked about. But I think just reinforces, I think, a lot of the principles that you've been talking about around just kindness and how to how to rethink.

you know, the everyday problems in a way that sets us up to be, you know, just kind of happier, more kind of gracious, graceful humans. Yeah. Yeah. So this goes back to me, you know, this is a long time ago now, when I was first starting to play with this mindfulness practice called loving kindness, which is basically, you know, you can think of it as kindness. You know, loving kindness is more the formal term for it. And I was working with a meditation teacher and this, you know, like offering a well-wishing to others and offering well-wishing to myself seemed pretty hokey at the time. You know, it's pretty good at, like, just riding myself and you're like, okay, you know, make sure you do this, you know, trying to take a willpower

approach to life. It seemed to have worked through college and through medical school, but I was in residency at the time, and I would, I was in New England. I was in New Haven, Connecticut, and I would ride my bicycle to the hospital on a relatively busy street and, you know, cars would honk at me and, you know, maybe give them the universal sign of displeasure or do something else that wasn't, you know, that, let's just say, didn't help the situation at all. And I would get to the hospital in kind of a not in a great mood. You know, it's not in a great place to be taking care of my patients. I started realizing, wow, that's not very helpful, you know, so I was getting paying attention to those habit loops and seeing the negative reinforcement there.

And so I started playing with this loving kindness where if somebody honked at me, I started using it as a mindfulness belt. Like, oh, wake up. You know, somebody's honking at you. And I would offer them a phrase of kindness and I would offer myself a phrase of kindness. And, you know, found that I would use the universal sound of displeasure a lot less. And we get at the hospital feeling a lot better. You know, it's like, oh, I got to practice, You know, just even just mentally wishing someone wealth is a lot better than mentally hating on somebody or, you know, being angry at them for honking. And so I would get to the hospital and feeling much better.

And then I realized, wait a minute, I don't have to wait for people to honk at me for me to practice just offering them some kindness as they drive by. So I started just using every time a car drove by just as a, you know, maybe maybe happy. me, you know, just something that could be a heartfelt well-wish, you know, that took a second, literally a second to do. And boy, that kind of turbocharged the practice for me to see that the kindness really is, you know, like curiosity is a superpower. It's a great way not only to help us step out of some of these old judgmental habit loops, but really just to see the power of kindness itself. It's really, really powerful. So that was kind of how I started, you know,

know, my bicycle incidents would help me start to explore kindness in a different way and also help me see that, you know, we don't need to be some guru or, you know, some special person to be offering kindness. And then we start to see, oh, when I'm feeling kind, I'm more likely to do acts of generosity. And then they feed on each other. I love that. You know, I think, so you kind of created almost like this new habit and you consciously practiced it. And as a result, you kind of became this like really kind, loving human being. That's a great story. Well, I still have a lot more to go. But certainly let's just say kinder. Well, so just on this like topic of habits, you know, habits, there are obviously we have

habits and they're deeply ingrained in order to kind of change the habit. You have to change the way you think about the habit, but to what degree do you have to change the way you actually think about yourself? And how does that kind of fit into this overarching kind of process of change? Yeah. Yeah. So my lab did a study related to this where we asked people, this is hundreds of people across the, you know, like basically English speaking North America. So it may be a little biased in that way. But we were just looking for something where we could, you know, have a common language. And we had people basically rate different mind states. So, you know, anxiety, anger, frustration, kindness, curiosity, things like that. And we had them kind of rank them to see

which one is more rewarding. And it's probably a no-brainer. Anybody can do this in their own head. You know, kindness, curiosity, connection are more rewarding than frustration, anger, anxiety. And so there seems to be this natural reward hierarchy in our brains that's already set up that says, you know, when given a choice, kindness versus meanness, we're going to be kind because it feels better. As long as we can see that kindness does feel better than being mean. If we've never, you know, if we've never really explored it, our brains are just going to be in whatever old habit they have, whether it's a habit of kindness or a habit of being mean. So it, we don't have to change anything. the framework, the neural networks are already there, which is, I'll just say I'm thankful for that, you know, as a species where, you know, we need to be working more together in many,

many ways. And if we weren't wired for kindness, there would be no help for us as a species. here they're you know we're wired for it and it's really a matter of seeing how basically how much better it feels to be kind than to be mean how much better it feels to be generous than it feels to be greedy you know and there's you know i was just reading about how you know there's enough wealth in the world that if if people if everybody really focused on you know kind of helping the world be a better place. Even the people who are very, very, very rich who now spend a lot of time worrying about their money, you know, they'd be happier. And the whole world would be happier in a much more secure place. And all of that is just predicated on that simple thing that we're

wired for kindness. We're wired for happiness. We just have to see it. People get so stuck in like, you know, more, more, more that they forget how good it feels to be kind. And then, you know, they get locked into these mindsets where it's really hard to step out of it because they're so stuck and spending so much energy on trying to get more as compared to, you know, trying to share it. Yeah. So, you know, I know we're coming up on time here. You know, what would be, you know, what's kind of like the final piece of advice? You know, it sounds like just awareness is kind of everything, right? Like that's where it all begins. That's kind of the foundation. Yeah. You know, what would be your advice for folks, you know, whoever's listening, you know,

thousands of people who are who listen to this podcast like how can they help spread the word about you know how to become more aware and more mindful and and so we can spread this you know this love well it's it starts at home so it's you know what's the saying a prophet's not welcome in her or his own hometown so it's really about or another way of phrasing that I've heard this is, you know, when somebody might say, people love me when I'm a Buddha, but they hate me when I'm a Buddhist, you know, or, you know, pick any religion and it applies. Where if somebody is living their religion, and because all religions share at least one thing, which is love and kindness, right? So if they're living kindness, then that's going to spread as compared to telling

people to be kind. And that all starts with our own direct experience. We're not going to live it unless we really see how good it feels. And so I would say curiosity, kindness, you know, that three-step process that we talked about, map out these habit loops where we're not curious. We're not kind. We're stuck. Second step is really asking ourselves, what am I getting from this? And then the third step is finding those bigger, better offers. And, you know, bringing kindness in in times when we're being self-judgmental, bringing generosity in in in times when we're feeling stingy or, you know, hoarding things and really just seeing those and letting our brain take care of the rest. I would say rinse and repeat. Curiosity and kindness, rinse and repeat. I love that. It's such a powerful message. And I think

it's a unique message in a lot of ways. You know, it's like I said, it's so refreshing to hear your perspective and just really appreciate your time today. So thank you for being with us. Where can people follow your work? I have a website that's just Dr.jug.com, DRJUDD.com. I'm also on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. So I think folks can find most of those materials right from the website. So that's probably the easiest place to find that whether it's the apps or the books

or any of those other resources. Awesome. Well, we'll make sure we link to all that. And thank you for being with us. Hopefully we have paths across in the future. Appreciate your time today. Great. My pleasure.

Big thank you to Dr. Judd Brewer for sharing his insights on the pod. Thank you to Kristen Holmes, as always. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating or review. Please subscribe to the WOOP podcast. You can check us out on social at WOOP at Will Amid. If you have a question you want to see answered, email us, podcast at WOOP.com. Call us 508-443-49-2. We will answer your questions on future episodes.

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