Humans have always lived with anxiety. Thousands of years ago, we feared attacks by wild animals. Today we worry whether we’ll have enough money to retire.

It’s not the anxiety that matters, but how we handle it. Our responses can often compound the problem.

For example, feeling anxious about a demanding customer, we reward ourselves with a pint of ice cream. As the pressure mounts, it becomes a daily habit, and then, an addiction. At that point, our response to anxiety is no longer giving us the reward we expected. Instead, it makes us feel worse.

Judson Brewer offers an alternate path. A medical doctor and researcher, he studies anxiety and addiction. He’s spent his career helping people unwind the habits that amplify their anxiety and lead to unhealthy, addictive behaviors. Judson shares these methods in his latest book, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind.

He argues that we can’t think our way out of anxiety. Instead, through a combination of mindfulness, practice, and understanding our habit loops, we can change our behaviors for life. It’s a thoughtful, compelling approach that will give you a different perspective on anxiety.

Episode Links

Eric Kandel

Reinforcement Learning

Thomas Borkovec

Default Mode Network (DMN)

Yerkes-Dodson Law

Flow by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi

Dopamine reward prediction error

Dana Small

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

 The Team

Learn more about host, Gayle Allen, and producer, Rob Mancabelli, here.

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