This article is based on my conversation with Jud Brewer MD PhD, author of the Inside the Curious Mind Substack and the book, Unwinding Anxiety among others, this is day 3 of the first-ever Brain Health Substack Summit hosted by The Habit Healers.

Click here to join tomorrow for Brain Health Substack Summit Day 4 with Dr. Dominic Ng

If you missed Day 1 of our Brain Health Summit with Julie Fratantoni, PhD you can watch it here. We discussed how to exercise your brain day to day.

If you missed Day 2 of our Brain Health Summit with Annie Fenn, MD you can watch it here. We discussed foods to decrease dementia risks.

Jud Brewer MD PhD is a neuroscientist and physician who discovered something about worry that medical schools never taught him. It changed how he treats every patient.

In 1987, right around the time Prozac hit pharmacy shelves and promised to change everything about how we treat mental illness, a researcher published a two-page paper that almost nobody noticed. The paper proposed something that sounded, frankly, ridiculous: that anxiety might be driven by the same brain mechanism that gets people hooked on cigarettes.

The paper sat there for decades. Psychiatrists kept writing prescriptions. Patients kept struggling. And a young psychiatrist named Jud Brewer, who would go on to run habit-change research labs at both Yale and Brown University, never even heard about it.

I sat down with Jud for the third interview in our Brain Health Summit series to talk about this discovery and what came after it. Jud and I have been friends for a while now. I have lost count of how many times he has been on my podcast. But this conversation was different because we went deep into the science of why your brain treats worry like a reward, and what you can actually do about it.

For years, Jud did what most psychiatrists do with anxious patients. He prescribed medications. And he watched most of them walk out the door no better than when they came in. The best medications available for anxiety only produce a meaningful reduction in symptoms for about one in five patients. That means for every person a doctor helps, four others are still gripping the armrests. Jud describes this as “playing the medication lottery.” You write the prescription. You hope for the best. And most of the time, you lose.

Then something unexpected happened. Jud had been running programs to help people who struggled with binge eating. Those patients started telling him something he had not anticipated: anxiety was driving them to eat. Could he build a program for that?

The question sent him back to the literature. And that is when he found that forgotten two-page paper from the 1980s. He had never considered anxiety as a habit. But he knew quite a bit about how to change habits. That single realization changed the entire trajectory of his clinical work.

The Worry Loop Your Brain Doesn’t Want You to See

To understand how anxiety works as a habit, you need to understand how all habits work. And the basic formula is surprisingly simple. Every habit has three parts: a trigger, a behavior, and a result.

Take stress eating. You feel stressed (that is the trigger). You grab ice cream from the freezer (that is the behavior). And for a few minutes, you feel distracted from whatever was bothering you (that is the result). Your brain files this away as useful information. Calories, good. Pizza, very good. Stress gone, even better. As Jud explained during our conversation, our brains hit what food scientists call the “bliss point,” and the loop locks in

Smoking works the same way. So does scrolling your phone at 2 a.m. The trigger-behavior-result loop is the engine that drives nearly every habit, good and bad.

But anxiety? Anxiety is sneakier.

The formal definition of anxiety is a feeling of worry or nervousness about something that might happen in the future. Notice the problem buried in that definition. The trigger is the feeling of being worried. And the behavior? Also worrying. The feeling of worry drives the act of worrying, which produces more feelings of worry, which drives more worrying.

It feeds itself. It is a loop with no exit ramp.

So why would a brain do something so obviously counterproductive? Because decades of research show that worrying feels better than doing nothing. When you feel scared or uncertain, sitting still with that discomfort is almost unbearable. Worrying, even though it accomplishes nothing, gives your brain the sensation that you are at least doing something. And doing something, it turns out, is rewarding enough to lock in the habit.

There is another trick your brain plays on you. If you worry constantly, and then you happen to solve a problem, your brain connects the two events. You worried. The problem got solved. Therefore, worrying solved the problem. Jud calls this the fallacy of causality. Both things are true on their own: you were worrying, and the problem did get solved. But the worrying did not cause the solution. You just happened to be doing both at the same time. If you have generalized anxiety disorder (a condition where worry is your brain’s default setting), you are almost always worrying, so every good outcome looks like proof that worry works.

On top of that, worrying gives you what researchers call an illusion of control. I know this one personally. During our conversation, I admitted that I call my own version “mother worrying anxiety.” As a mother of three, I spent years convinced that worrying about my children was part of my job description. If I did not worry, who would? It felt like a form of vigilance, like standing guard. But as Jud pointed out to me, in what was essentially a live therapy session (you’re welcome for the free entertainment), worrying about my kids never once kept them safe. Three decades of worrying gave me exactly zero protection and probably a few extra gray hairs.

Why Willpower Will Not Save You

Before Jud got into his solution, he made a point that might be hard to swallow. Willpower, that thing we have been told our whole lives is the key to changing bad behavior, has zero evidence supporting it in the neuroscience of habit change.

Zero.

He acknowledged that this can be a lot to take in. If you are not ready to accept it right now, that is fine. But neuroscientists do not even use the word willpower when they study how habits form and break. What they study is reinforcement learning, which is the actual mechanism that determines how strong a habit becomes and how it can be dismantled. The concept has been researched for over fifty years and is considered the most well-established model of behavior change in all of neuroscience. The basic idea: if something feels rewarding, your brain will push you to do it again. If it stops feeling rewarding, your brain starts to let it go.

This is how habits form, and it is also the key to breaking them.

Jud illustrated this with his smoking patients. Instead of telling them to resist cigarettes through sheer force of will, he does something that sounds insane. He tells them to go ahead and smoke. But he adds one instruction: pay attention while you do it.

What happens? They notice that cigarettes taste awful. Really awful. The experience without autopilot running is so different from what their brain expected that it creates what neuroscientists call a negative prediction error. That is the technical term for what happens when your dopamine system fires a signal that basically says: “Hey, this is not nearly as good as you remembered.” That signal updates the habit. The cigarette loses its grip. Not because the patient muscled through a craving, but because the brain revised its own math.

Jud calls this the Santa Claus moment. It is like being a kid and pulling down on Santa’s beard at the mall, only to see your neighbor Dave underneath. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The spell is broken. You cannot go back to believing.

The good news? This same mechanism also reinforces good habits. When you pay attention while exercising or eating a healthy meal, your brain registers a positive prediction error: “Oh, this actually feels better than I expected.” The good stuff gets stronger. The bad stuff gets weaker. Same system, working in both directions.

And here is the part that should make anyone dealing with anxiety sit up a little straighter: this same mechanism works for worry.

Seeing the Gig Is Up

Jud walked me through what he calls the three gears method. It is the core of his book Unwinding Anxiety and the foundation for his clinical programs.

First gear is simply recognizing the behavior. Not analyzing it. Not asking why you are anxious. Not diving into your childhood or trying to trace the worry to its source. Just naming the behavior. “I am worrying.” That is it. Jud has found that when patients spend too much time asking why they are anxious, they burn energy and get stuck in yet another unproductive loop. He now teaches a rapid version of this gear: just identify the behavior and move on.

Second gear is the Santa Claus moment applied to worry. You ask yourself one question: what am I getting from this? And then you actually feel the answer in your body. Not intellectually. Physically. What does worrying actually feel like? Tight chest. Clenched jaw. Racing thoughts that go nowhere. You sit with that experience and you let your brain register what is really happening. No sugar coating. No story about how worry keeps you safe. Just the raw deal: worry feels terrible and does not produce anything useful.

This is where disenchantment happens. Disenchantment is a term from psychology that means losing your positive illusion about something. When you truly see that worrying gives you nothing of value, the habit starts losing its power. Your brain gets that negative prediction error, just like the smoker who finally tasted the cigarette. You cannot go back to pretending worry was helping you.

Third gear is what Jud calls finding the bigger, better offer. Your brain needs a replacement. Not a distraction, not a coping strategy, but something that genuinely feels more rewarding than the old habit. During our conversation, Jud actually put me on the spot and had me do this exercise live. He boiled the rapid version of this gear down to a single comparison: what does it feel like to worry versus not worry? My answer was instant. Worry felt like a tight chest, stress, and the sensation that I could not breathe. Not worrying felt like peace. It felt like trusting that my children would grow up and figure things out on their own. Your brain can hold both of those experiences side by side and decide which one it prefers.

The Difference Between Planning and Worrying

One of the most useful things that came out of our conversation was the distinction Jud makes between planning and worrying. They look similar from the outside, but they are completely different animals.

I got personal during our discussion, and I want to expand on that story here. When my oldest daughter was five, someone tried to take her at a mall. It was terrifying. My husband was deployed and I was alone. Afterward, I was afraid to take her anywhere. My pediatrician told me I had to go back to that mall with her, which felt impossible. But I did it. I picked her up, held her tight, walked through the building, and left.

After that, I enrolled in Krav Maga. I put the kids in self-defense classes. Those were plans. Those were concrete actions I could take to increase our actual safety. But alongside those plans, I also started worrying constantly about my children. And all those defense classes? They never reduced the worry. All they did was reinforce the feeling that I had to keep doing something, anything, to make sure my kids were okay.

Jud pointed out something that stopped me cold: learning self-defense after a scary experience is a reasonable response. Walking through life expecting to be attacked at any moment is not. One is preparation. The other is a habit that runs on fear.

And that distinction matters enormously for parents. We live in a culture that mistakes worry for good parenting. Social media amplifies it. You see influencers modeling a version of parenthood that nobody can actually maintain, and then you feel guilty because you cannot keep up. Jud told me that anxiety is more learned than genetic. There are genetic components, sure, but we do not have control over our genes. What we can control is whether we pass our worry habits down to the next generation by modeling them every day.

He and I both grew up in the era that people now call “free-range parenting,” which at the time was just called parenting. My mom opened the front door, told us dinner was at five, and did not expect to hear from us until then. We survived. And yet the generation raising kids today has been conditioned to believe that anything less than constant vigilance is neglect. That conditioning is, itself, a habit loop. Jud is writing an entire chapter about this in his upcoming book, and it is about how parents can break the cycle so their kids do not inherit it.

From Unwinding to Flourishing

The most exciting part of what Jud shared is the work he is doing now that goes well beyond reducing anxiety. His new program, called Going Beyond Anxiety, uses a rapid induction method to teach people the three gears faster than ever. Instead of working through an entire book to understand the framework, patients can learn the essentials quickly and get back to what Jud calls baseline, meaning a state where anxiety is no longer running the show.

But baseline is not the finish line. As he put it during our talk: “Who wants to be normal? I don’t want my patients to be normal. I want them to be exceptional.”

Once the foundation is solid, the same reinforcement learning mechanism that broke the anxiety habit can be used to build new habits around things like generosity and patience. Jud runs live group sessions where he teaches the science of gratitude and how it can be reinforced just like any other habit. Gratitude feels good. It is relatively easy to practice. The hard part is remembering to do it, and then pushing into what he calls the advanced level: being grateful even to the driver who just cut you off in traffic, because that person just taught you something about your own reactivity. There is a Tibetan teaching that says “be grateful to everyone,” and Jud takes that seriously enough to build clinical exercises around it.

His clinical results back all of this up. In randomized controlled trials funded by the National Institutes of Health (the government agency that funds medical research in the United States), Jud’s approach produced a 67 percent reduction in anxiety among people with generalized anxiety disorder. The group that received standard clinical care? Fourteen percent. That fourteen percent lines up almost exactly with the one-in-five odds of the medication lottery he was playing years ago.

He also mentioned something his Substack readers have been wondering about: the pause in new articles over the past couple of months. The reason is that he has been writing his next book, and he now has 42 chapters done. He will be back to publishing on Substack soon, and the book, which builds on everything since Unwinding Anxiety, should be out next year.

One more myth worth busting, and we had a good laugh about this one. The popular idea that it takes 21 days to change a habit has no basis in science. It came from a 1960s book by a plastic surgeon named Maxwell Maltz called Psycho-Cybernetics. Maltz noticed that his patients took about 21 days to adjust to their new nose. Somehow this observation about rhinoplasty became a universal rule about habits. The real answer, as Jud put it, is that the right question is not “how quickly can I change this habit?” but “what do I need to change this habit?” Because once you understand the methodology, the habit changes at whatever speed your brain can process the new information. Nobody Jud has ever worked with has said “all I needed was three weeks.” If it were that easy, he and I would both be out of a job.

A Practical Guide to Breaking the Anxiety Habit

Based on our conversation, here is a framework you can start using today.

Recognize the behavior, not the cause. When you notice anxiety, do not spiral into trying to figure out why you feel this way. Just name what you are doing. “I am worrying.” “I am ruminating.” “I am catastrophizing.” Naming the behavior without judgment is the first gear.

Ask yourself: what am I getting from this? Do not answer this in your head. Feel it in your body. Notice what worry actually does to you physically. Does your chest tighten? Does your breathing get shallow? Does your stomach clench? Let yourself experience the full reality that this habit does not deliver what it promises. This is how your brain becomes disenchanted with the old pattern.

Compare the two states. What does it feel like to worry versus not worry? Hold both experiences side by side. Let your brain do the math on which one it actually prefers.

Stop confusing worry with preparation. Making a plan is useful. Running disaster scenarios on repeat is not. If your action produces a concrete result, that is planning. If it just produces more of the same feeling you started with, that is a worry loop.

Know that this takes practice, not willpower. You are not weak for having anxiety habits. You are running software that was installed by experience, reinforcement, and a brain that is doing what brains do. The update comes from paying attention, not from gritting your teeth.

Consider structured support. Dr. Brewer’s Going Beyond Anxiety program and his book, Unwinding Anxiety, offer a step-by-step framework with clinical evidence behind it. He also has free resources on his website for anyone who wants to start with the basics. I have referred my own patients to his programs and watched them come back with life-changing results.

Dr. Jud Brewer’s gratitude article mentioned in video from Inside the Curious Mind on Substack.

Click here for Chef Martin Oswald’s recipe, created specially for Dr. Jud Brewer.

Resources

Jud Brewer MD PhD is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and author of Unwinding Anxiety, The Craving Mind, The Hunger Habit, and the forthcoming book on going beyond anxiety. He is the director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center and writes the Inside the Curious Mind Substack. You can find his programs and free resources at his website.

Books by Dr. Brewer:

* Unwinding Anxiety

* The Craving Mind

* The Hunger Habit

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