It's like we've hit these multiple rounds of uncertainty to the point where not only has anxiety gonenuts, but I've also seen where people are kind of gettingthis, I don't know if this is the perfect term but this is how I think of it as kind of like learned helplessness where you know a lot ofpeople, I giveup, youknow, my brain is fried just too muchanxiety.
Anxiety even saying the word makes me a bitanxious, but what if there was a way to unwind it and come back to calm that was maybe counter intuitively simple and what if a lot of the popular thoughts around anxiety and had to deal with it today were wrong or at least took a lot more work thannecessary.
Well, that's what we're talking about today with my guestDr.
JuddBrewer. He's a New York Times bestsellingauthor,neuroscientist, addiction psychiatrist and thought leader in the field of habit change and Judd is also the director of research and innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center where he serves as an associate professor of behavioral and social sciences in the School of PublicHealth.
He's the executive medical director of behavioral health at ShareCare Inc and a research affiliate at MIT and he's developed and tested really novel mindfulness programs for habit change including treatments for smoking and emotional eating andyes,anxiety.
He's the author of unwindinganxiety.
New science shows how to break the cycles of worry and fear to heal your mind and the craving mind from cigarettes to smartphones tolove.
Why would get hooked and how we can break habits so excited to share this best of conversation withyou.
I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good LifeProject.
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Hi, this is Janice Torres from YolkietoDinedo.
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Your topic is a topic ofinterest.
It has been for a long time and for anyone that has not been touched by some form ofanxiety.
I think the last couple of years have made it a relatively universalexperience.
I'm curious from yourlens.
How have you seen sort of like the depth and the scope of anxiety change over the last two or threeyears?
Yeah, I'm just thinking about the for anyone who hasn't been touched and I was just thinking find me thatperson.
Who isthat?Yeah, it's you know just seeing the rapid increase in anxiety societally is it's just kind of like this unfortunate naturalisticexperiment.
Youknow, so me as a as a neuroscientist my brainsays,Oh,wow, I wonder how this is going togo.
This is two years ago and then started thinking aboutthe, youknow,well, brains don't like uncertainty andboy, there's a lot of uncertainty and youknow, etcetera.
And then the predictionssays,well, things are going to spike and then things spiked and then things keptgoing.
And then where these with these multiple rounds of uncertainty just with thepandemic, youknow, it'slike, youknow, first round then we getdelta.
Then we get on theground, youknow, and it just keepscoming, youknow, in economicschools.
And so it's it's like we've hit these multiple rounds of uncertainty to the point where not only has anxiety gonenuts, but I've also seen where people are kind of gettingthis.
I don't know if it's the perfectterm, but this is how I think of it is it's kind of like learned helplessness where youknow, there are these experiments that were done decades ago whereanimals, youknow, when they didn't have when they werebasically, youknow, you shocked themintermittently.
So and then they at some point they just give up and they say I can't predictthis, youknow, if they could predict theshock, then they werefine.
But if they couldn't predictit, they basically just said I giveup.
And we are kind of like that now ashumans.
Youknow, a lot of people arejust, youknow, it's just like they're like I giveup, youknow, my brain isfried, just too muchanxiety.
Yeah, Imean, and I think before this moment oftime, if so many of people have experienced it and I almostwonder, I guess here's what's spitting myhead.
If in before times anxiety was a pretty universalexperience, but not entirely universal and now basically like you can't talk to anybody who doesn't say I'm living with some level of thisthing.
Does that in any way shape or form does the normalization of an experience that would normally be really difficult to deal with does the fact that we're all in it together in anyway.
Change the way that we experience anxiety potentially for thebetter.
Yes, two things come tomind.
One is anytime we can work together against acommon, youknow, threat orenemy, let'ssay, it's alwaysbetter.
We really truly as humans are better together and the other piece that comes of that is just even knowing that we're notalone, youknow, I run a live group for people using our app based mindfulness training programs andoften, youknow, it's like every week we come together and often one of the first things I say to somebody when we're exploring one of their strugglesis, youknow, you're notalone.
Andthen, youknow, with the 200 people on thecaller, whatever Isay, youknow, raise your hand if you can relate to this and everybody raises theirhand.
And it's just the normalization just you can see that that visible is like a zoom call so I can watch the person'sexpression.
It's kind of like this settling in and the only thing that's changed is that they know that they're notalone.
This isn't something unique tothem.
It's not that they're messed up or they're brain or there'ssomething, youknow, that they are the crazyperson.
It's that this isa, youknow, I thinkof, youknow, as apsychiatrist, youknow, we have these books thatsay, youknow, thisdiagnosis, this and this andthis.
Tome, more andmore, it's just simplifies down to there's a single condition that we allhave, youknow, it's called the humancondition.
And there are variations on that human condition and we all sharein, youknow,stress, we all share inanxiety.
And so just knowing that we're all together in this can be the beginning of the healingthere.
And then also when we can relate to eachother, it's easier to empathize and bring compassion in when somebody is really struggling withanxiety.
And we know thatplace. It just opens our hearts a little bitwhere, youknow, evennonverbaly, it'slike, ohyeah, I've beenthere.
I know what youmean. And that too can be part of the process ofhealing.
Yeah, that makes a lot ofsense.
So we've used the word anxiety a whole bunch literally in the first like 60 seconds of aconversation.
I think it makes sense also to really certainly dive into what are we actually talking about when we're talking aboutanxiety?
Well, there's adefinition, I think that that works relativelywell.
Youknow, this feeling of nervousness or unease about an uncertain event or something in thefuture,basically.
I think of it another way to think of it as fewer of thefuture.
And the reason I like that definitionis, youknow, as I was doing research for my own wanting anxietybook, I was really looking intolike, why do we haveanxiety?
Becauseit's, youknow, our brains are set up for immediatethreat, youknow, basically our brains are set up to eat and not beeaten.
Right. And so we're set up to remember where foodis, we're set up to remember where danger is so that we can find the food and go back toit.
And we can remember where the danger is and not go back toit.
So this big question islike, why where did anxiety comefrom?
And the best that I can gather isthat, youknow, think of this survival part of our brainhelp, youknow,fear, very helpful survivalmechanism.
Welearn, youknow, don't go backthere.
But then also more recently our brains have evolved to plan for thefuture.
Youknow, and so we've got the presentmoment, is theredanger?
No.Okay, now I can plan for the future and planning for the future is alsohelpful.
But when you mix those twotogether, fear of thefuture, not sohelpful.
And so that planning part of our brain actually can start to spinout, especially the more uncertainty thereis, our brain spins out in what if scenarios and those what if scenarios make us more and more freakedout, ironically making our thinking and planning part of the brain gooffline.
And so when I think of anxiety as fear of thefuture, it's these two helpful survivalmechanisms, youknow, fear and planning that kind of get mixedtogether.
And it's not like peanut butter and jelly peanut butter and jelly generally goodtogether.
This islike, I don't know what the analogy wouldbe, but mixing something that you would never eat with peanut butter and tasting it andsaying,yep, I would never mix that with peanutbutter.
That's a badidea. Our brains just haven't figured thatout.
Yeah, Imean, so when you think about fear and planning coming together in a way where it becomesjillaterious, like I wonder is your threshold where youknow, like up to a certain point is actuallyuseful.
It's like yousaid, like we have these things in ourbrain.
They've been with us for a really long time and generally stuff thatsurvives.
Serve somepurpose, whether it keeps usalive, whether whatever it maybe.
So it's almostlike, youknow, at what point do we crossfrom,oh, this is maybe notpleasant, butuseful.
It'svaluable. There's some role that it plays that's constructive in our lives tosaying,okay, this is now tipped over to the otherside.
Now we're now on that side where it's now actuallydestructive.
It's now actually negatively impacting our ability tolive.
Youknow, we go from the experience of a state to that state tipping intodisorder.
Where's the line there and can you even make adistinction?
Well, if we talk about anxietyspecifically, youknow, there's a lot on theinternet.
And so you probably know where I'm going based just in thatphrase.
There's a lot on the internet about how anxiety ishelpful.
Yet when you lookat, youknow, so it's where where do wetip?
So forexample, I even wrote about this in my book because it is so often quoted and it is just so wrong as all I couldsay.
And as ascientist, I tend tobe, youknow,like,well, maybe this may bethat, but this is really there's no evidence for anxiety beinghelpful.
So there is really no tipping point foranxiety.
If you look at theresearch, the more anxious weare, the worse we do on cognitivetasks,whatever,whatever,whatever.
Another way to look at it is what's the opposite ofanxiety.
I thinkof, youknow,me, I chicks in my high was this psychologist that coined this term flowflow.
People think of this as being in thezone, youknow, where we're just really singingalong, youknow, inlife, youknow, and he describes this asselfless, it'seffortless, it'sjoyful.
And so the opposite of anxiety and when somebody is performing at their best is when they're inflow.
And weare, we are so not there as in we are so notanxious.
That's what flow is when we are so not so in the opposite direction ofanxiety.
We're not even experiencing getting a sense of us doinganything.
It's just stuff happening andwhere, youknow, our awareness is there along for theride.
So without going into details about allthese, youknow, the inverted U-shaped curve of anxietyperformance, which is just based on amisconception.
People can look it up if they wantto, youknow, based on a 1908 study of Japanese dancingmice.
I'm notkidding. Youknow, the short story is there is no tipping point foranxiety.
It's a linear anticorrelation, meaning the more anxious youare, the worse youdo.
So,yeah, that'sinteresting,right?
Because you'll sometimes hear like I kind of need like a baseline level of this feeling to make me because it almost like it puts me in an agitated like a vigilantstate.
That in some way makes me quote performbetter, whether it's inbusiness, whether it's insport, whether it might be I'm morehyper, but what you're saying is that's completemythology.
Like it literally serves nopurpose.
It serves nopurpose. And what you're highlighting is something that our brains do reallywell, which is to make correlations and attributecausation.
And bythat, Imean, youknow, my old PhDmentor,Lumuklia, used tosay, youknow, when you're doingexperiments, could there be a correlation withoutcausation?
Could A betrue? Could B betrue?
And they just happen to becoincidence.
They're happening at the sametime.
But is A causingB? That's when it's interesting from a scientificperspective, youknow, if we're trying to study amechanism.
And the same is truehere.
So the more anxious weare, the more that kindof, youknow, we have moments ofanxiety.
And the more likely that is to be coincidence with us performingwell, forexample, even though it's nottrue.
We, if you really look atit, anxiety decreases performance ingeneral.
But we makethis, let's say that we happen to be anxious and we happen to performwell.
Our brainsays,oh, I need this level of anxiety to performwell.
True,anxious,true, performwell, butnot, youknow, it'scorrelation.
It's notcausation. Anxiety didn't cause my performance toimprove.
Yet ourbrains, withoutknowing, youknow, to look forthat, they justassume,oh, I wasanxious.
I performwell. It must have been because I wasanxious.
And so we trip ourselves upthinking,oh, youknow, I need that baseline level of anxiety to dosomething.
And it may just be totallycorrelation, youknow,again, if we go back to lookingat,well, did you ever perform well when you weren'tanxious?
Yes. Did you perform better when you weren'tanxious?
Well,actually, now that you mentionit,yes.
Well,there's, there yougo.
Right. And which one was moreenjoyable?
Yeah.Yeah. Forsure.So, so anxiety is effectively essentially takingfear, spinning and adding into thefuture.
Well, I guess spinning is an interesting word in the context ofanxiety,right?
Also, because I would imagine a lot of people experience this thing of anxiety as a spinningsensation.
It's almost like there's something that might happen in thefuture.
There'suncertainty. Maybeit's,yeah, maybe there's a legitimate high percentage ofit.
Or maybe it's just like asmidge, but something happens in ourbrain.
Where we keep telling the story of that being our futurereality.
And it's not something we want tohappen.
And we can't let go ofit.
So it feels like compulsion is a part of the experience ofanxiety.
Is that accurate orno?Yes.
And this is something I wish I'd learned in medical school orresidency.
But it happenedto, I just kind of learned this because I wasstudying, have achange.
And we were developingthese, youknow, app-based mindfulness trainings for smoking andeating.
And somebody said tome, youknow, my anxiety is driving my eatingbehavior.
And theysaid, youknow, could you create a program foranxiety?
And I wasthinking,well, I prescribed medications for anxiety as aphysician.
But it put this bug in myear.
It'sjust,well, couldI, youknow, because medications on thatgrade, could Ido, youknow, can I look intothis?
And it turns out that anxiety is driven like any otherhabit.
And so you sayspinning, youknow, so for any habit toform, we need threeelements, atrigger, a behavior and aresult.
So just as anexample, youknow, we talked aboutsurvival,right?
You see thefood, there's atrigger, eat thefood, there's thebehavior.
And then your stomach sends us dopamine signal to your brain thatsays, remember what you ate and where you foundit.
So that's how that's the general process for habitformation.
Withanxiety, the feeling of anxiety can trigger the mental behavior ofworrying.
And I'm going to say thatagain, because that's hard for some peopleto, youknow, they'relike, I never thought about it thatway.
The physical feeling ofanxiety, that feeling of nervousness or that feeling of worry can actually trigger the mental behavior ofworrying.
And that worrying is where we start tospin, youknow, because we can'tpredict, youknow, we're not very good at predicting thefuture.
And the more wespin, the more we spin out because we start tothink, youknow,oh, this could be reallybad.
Or here's another thing I didn't thinkabout, youknow, and then our brains just get way out of control to the point where we didn't even get intopanic, youknow, thiswild, the unthinkingbehavior, which is that far end of the spectrum ofanxiety.
Soyes, what you're saying is absolutelytrue.
And it's interesting you mentioned the word spinning because that's exactly how these habit loopsform.
So worry gives usthe, the role brain reward of feeling like we're incontrol, or at least that we're doingsomething, youknow, I can't do anything aboutthis, but at least I canworry.
Soit, youknow, we're occupying ourmind.
And that is rewarding enough that it feeds back so that the next time we'reanxious, itsays,hey, why don't you worryagain?
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So I guess what I'm trying to understand then is if this effectively experiences a habit and a habit requires the trigger the behavior and thereward.
I get the trigger like this feeling of anxiety which leads to behaviorworrying.
What's thereward?Well, I know it seems crazy and people that so we have this on winding anxiety app people that use theprogram.
One of the questions we have them explore as part of the program is what are you getting fromthat?
You know like what what what is rewarding about worrying and for a lot of people when they actually start to map it out and ask themselves that question like what am I getting fromthis.
It's absolutely nothing just like you're pointing out not gettinganything.
And then they follow that question up with why am I worrying how did this become a habit and that's what goes back to at somepoint.
The worrying might have been associated with solving a problem again could be true true andunrelated.
It might be associated with just the feeling of you know I could sit here and feel like my hands are tied or I could sit here andworry.
And the worrying feels better ironically because I worry doesn't feel verygood.
But it to some people it feels better than not doinganything.
And some of that goes back to just not knowing what it feels like to not do anything in a in a time when probably the best thing to quote unquote do is to notdo.
You know I think of it as being is the new doing where can we learn to be with our thoughts can we learn to be with the anxiety can we learn to be withuncertainty.
And instead of spinning out into our panic zone we can be curious about it we can move into our growth zone instead of our paniczone.
But until we learn that it really you know we're just going to keep spinning out in those habit lips around worry it's it's a huge like we talked about itearlier.
This is happening all the time to a gazillion people you know because there is so much uncertainty outthere.
Yeah and I would imagine I mean I'm picturing this is sort of like a series of false peaks it's like there's one loop on top of another it's like you get you get to want to know there's something I'm stacking on top of that and this this leads to this which leads to this which leads to this which leads tothis.
So you have this compound effect you know it's interesting so as you're describing this the phenomenon where I'm going in my brainis.
So as we have this conversation there's a sound in my head I have ten it is and I've had it for over a decade now so there's a high pitch sound in myhead.
In the very early days of having that it was extraordinarily destructive and distressing to me and what I learned over time was that the sound itself does nothing the sound is just astimulus.
You know I lived in New York City at that time it was one of a bajillion other sounds that were entering my ears all day every day and for some reason this sound was brutalizing tome.
And what eventually I learned was it wasn't the sound it wasn't the actual circumstance it was the story that I was telling about what the sound would mean for mylife.
And then it was my brain automatically hitting spin on that and saying like what is the worst possible like case scenario of thisoutcome.
And then amplifying it and then repeating it over and over and over and over again there was something about the repetition that led me to start to feel this is my inevitable future there's no out here and I would start to spin story on top of story on top ofstory.
Until I sort of like learned how to basically peel that onion and rewire my brain to be much more okay and so as I have this conversation with right and completely fine fact the stimulus has never left and any given moment if I look for the sound it'sthere.
But because I've trained my brain to basically not look for it functionally doesn't exist unless I look for it now and there's no anxiety attached to it anymore because ofthat.
Yeah, but this is it was this really interesting cascading compounding story telling process that actually wasn't entirely related to the circumstanceitself.
You know the way you describe that you describe it so beautifully it brings to mind this image of you know like a car where for the car to move forward say you know drive down the road of tinnitus or anxiety we have to engage thegears.
Right we have to put the clutch in or if it's an automatic you know basically put it in drive and that process of linking is what moves us down that road and so if we get stuck in the story like you're talking about that engages us and gets us caught up in it and suddenly we get caught up in these gears and we're racing down theroad.
Whereas if we can notice it and notice the process where and I don't know if this was the case or the process that you went through as you started to learn to what I'm hearing is unlinked these like oh there can be sound and I don't have to be reactive toit.
Right it's when we get stuck in the story it's like their sound and I'm reactive to it so I'm thinking my paper since it's like I'm an anxious person you know they're so caught up in that story that they can't even see that they are caught up in thestory.
And that we can learn in like you're I think as you said we can learn to retrain our brains and is actually relatively straightforward not always easy but relatively straightforward the process isstraightforward.
We can learn to retrain our brains through simply bringing awareness one noticing the process noticing when we're caught in a loop and then noticing that the being caught up is the criticallink.
You know I think of it as you know I we functionally use this we actually use a three gears analogies and no wonder I'm talking about gears but think of it as this first step is recognizing that we're caught in that the second step is seeing what we're getting from that which actually taps into the the neuroscience of how our brains work you know it's oh I'm worrying I'm seeing you know there's the behavior what's the result of the behavior well I'm getting more anxious and when we can see that we're getting more anxious and I'm going to say that I'm going to be able to see what we're getting from that which actually taps into the the neuroscience of how our brains work you know it's oh I'm worrying I'm seeing you know there's the behavior what's the result of the behavior well I'm getting more anxious and when we can see that we're getting more anxious and I'm going to see that we're getting more anxious and I'm going to see that we're getting more anxious and I'm going to see that 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people have been doing pieces of this in a lot of different ways for a really really really long time and it's had really interesting cultural effects and how can we understand what's really happening underneath the hood here like what's happening in the systems in the body in the brain and make it more systematic in a really interesting way and I have no doubts it's driven no small part because there's a lot of suffering happening in the world right now and the traditional approaches aren't necessarily working as well as we'd like themto.
Yeah, it's so interesting you mentioned that the I've been very interested in Buddhist psychology for she's 25 years now and I worked with a poly scholar to look at the parallels between these Buddhist concepts for example you know the there was one concept that the Buddha was apparently contemplating on the 90 of his enlightenment you know it's like oh that's probably a good one to look into and it basically long story short is he was describing what we now think of as positive and negative reinforcement in modern day and so here you know before paper was even invented you know somebody had described this process that air candle gets the Nobel Prize for showing that it's evolutionarily conserved all the way back to the sea select and like you're saying you know even if you take a Darwinian perspective you know the best treatment is going to outcompete the othertreatments.
So modern day you know think of psychoanalysis and again I'm a psychiatrist or not anti you know psychiatry or psychology but if you just take a Darwinian perspective like which ones have lasted the longest you know these principles have not changed in 25 hundred years whereas the closest that we have in modern day you know the oldest one is you know based on Freudian psychoanalysis which is you know just over a hundred years old and that's not on its upswing it you know it's not out competing this very simple process so even now we're seeing this surge of people you know bringing forward mindfulness practices in the west that have been around you know the core once I all of them because I'm not sure that all of these programs really kind of get the Buddhist psychology but if you look at the heart of it it's certainly I'll just say it's worked well for us so when we've developed these programs based on these just you know going straight at the Buddhist psychology saying let's strip away everything else and see if this works you know we get five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment in smoking cessation you know we got a40% reduction in craving related eating in our eat right now up and as I mentioned we got this67% reduction in anxiety with our unwinding anxiety at and that's basically just bringing these concepts forward in you know in a modern day context and so to me as a scientist you know I just want to see what I'm doing is going to do is I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things and I'm going to do a lot of things ofeverything,right?
The more where we are of ourexperience, the more helpful it can be for helping us live a healthy happylife.
So let's drill down on that because that sounds kind ofbig.
Inparticular, when it comes to things like anxiety or things that are causing oursuffering, like you'resaying, there's a lot of suffering in the worldtoday.
If you look at the Buddhistpsychology, they talk about cause andeffect.
That's kind of the essence ofkarma,basically, it's cause andeffect.
If you frame that in terms of modernpsychology, it's positive and negative reinforcement are another way that they're described as reward basedlearning.
And that it's described that way for areason.
If a behavior isrewarding, we're going to keep doingit.
If it's notrewarding, we're going to stop doingit.
And so here withawareness, what I would say is it's helpful to drill down on awareness of the results of ourbehaviors.
If we can see what the result of worryingis, then it helps us become disenchanted withit.
If we can see if we're a jerk tosomebody, if we can see what the result of thatis, instead of just yelling at somebody on the internet and then turning our computer off our phone and ignoringit.
Butreally, if we did that face toface, we get to see the results ofthat.
And just the results can help us start to change our behavior and become disenchanted with being ajerk.
If we can see the results of being kind or having kindness bestowed uponus, we can start to see the joy that comes withthat.
So I would say awareness of cause and effect or basically awareness of the results of ourbehavior.
If we're looking specifically at behaviorchange, habit change oranxiety.
But ingeneral, awareness isgood.
Looking both ways before crossing thestreet, veryhelpful.
Yeah, it'sinteresting.
When I think aboutthat, what I'm also wondering about in the context of awareness is what about awareness of our currentsensation, even before we get to sort of like the result of a behavior that we say yes to in the firstplace.
Because what I'm thinking is so few ofus, Ithink, are tapped in at any given moment intime.
Imean, if somebody's spinning something in their head or somebody's in an anxiety state in theirhead.
And it's because like there's a projected storyline or projected out to them and doom and gloom scenario that they're kind oflike, do they actually know that they're telling this story in the firstplace?
Or is it this autopilot thing that's happening and before we can even get to like the reward based learning side ofit.
What about the awareness of simply like metaawareness, awareness of where our attention actually is at any given moment intime?
Yes. So I think that can be very helpful and I also think it can be very confusing for people because it can sexually can be easy to get caught in theconcept.
But the idea of being aware that you know that meta awareness being aware that we're not aware or aware that we are thinking for example can be challenging forpeople.
And so I often startwith, youknow, what are the simplest ways for somebody to get the idea of thisconcept?
And so behaviors are generally a little more straightforward and lessconceptual.
And it'slike, did I overeat ornot?
Did Iworry? So those are concrete things that we can pay attentionto.
And then we can pay attention concretely to the results ofthose.
So I often find that that is a good doorway in to then asking the questionlike,huh,okay, so you notice that you areworrying.
Now can you notice thatthought, youknow, or that there isthinking?
And then that's a doorway into that metaawareness.
Oh, I am somebody who isthinking, youknow, or is one person put it in ourprogram.
I'm a person with anxiousthoughts.
I am not an anxiousperson.
Right? But that conceptuallysaying,oh, justnotice, youknow, that can be reallychallenging.
But starting with something superconcrete, typically not involving thinking or our minds because it's so easy to get lost in thestory.
Especially when we've never had enough distance to be able to see that there'sthinking.
That then the second step canbe, youknow,oh, youknow, can you notice athought?
Like a cloud in the sky or like a leaf in a river drifting by us compared to you being thatleaf.
Does that makesense?Yeah,no, totallydoes.
Imean, it's interesting that you asked me like what my process was around tennis and a lot of it actually was mindfulnessbased.
And, youknow, forme, the reason that I was drawn to mindfulness and still it is my dailypractice, youknow, like 12 yearslater, is that it trained me to just sort of like dedicate a small amount of time every day to continuously inquire into where my mindwas.
And it's not easy and it's notfun.
And to thisday, I feellike, youknow, if I was going to rate on the scale of one toten, like how good my seatwas, I'm going to probably tell you two tofour.
Youknow, it'slike, and we're not supposed to dothat.
Ofcourse, like it's not aboutthat.
Youknow, can't game a five like the whole practiceitself.
But youknow, what's interesting is that a big part of thatpractice, it teaches you to dedicate a regular amount of time on a daily basis or a regular basis to just sitting there and noticing where your brainis.
And then making an intentional choice aboutlike, youknow, like noticeit, if there's athought, whatever itis, let itgo.
And it's not about clearing yourmind.
It's not about trying to get all thoughts out of yourmind.
It's just to practicing noticing anddropping.
It's like a daily training in noticing and dropping and noticing and dropping returning notice dropreturn.
And I agree withyou. I think it is stunninglyvaluable.
But the practice itself is hard todescribe, sort of like what comes out ofit.
And we tend to experience it as being so unsuccessful at it by sort of like Western terms for solong.
Yeah. That nobody wants to stick withit.
Yeah. Youknow, it's funny you mentioned that because in one of our firststudies, this is the study of smokingcessation.
I was at Yale at the time andwe, youknow, just I've been meditating for about 10years.
So we wanted to see if you know mindfulness training couldhelp.
And what we did was we looked at both formal meditation practices like you'redescribing, youknow,sitting,walking, things likethat.
But we also looked at informal mindfulness practices where in the moments it's somebody to craving for acigarette, youknow, we give them tools to work with and could they use thosetools.
And we found that both the formal like the sitting meditations and theinformal, youknow, in the moment that I have a craving both helped both were correlated with productions and cigarettesmoking.
Yet we found that the informal practices formally moderated a decoupling of craving andsmoking, which is just fancy terms for there was a greater effect for the informalpractices, which made me totally rethink how I approachedmindfulness.
And part of it is what you'redescribing, it can feel like aslog, youknow, saying that's what you'redescribing, but a lot of people describe it aslike,oh, Ihave, youknow, andfor, youknow, even people getting in thehabit, it's kind oflike, youknow,oh, I should exercise because it's good for mybody.
I should meditate because it's good for mybrain.
And that sometimes can get in the way of the practiceitself.
And sohere, I think of itas, youknow, there's people talk about psychedelicsand, youknow, as an emerging field of treatment inpsychiatry.
And they're also exploring doing a lot ofresearch.
We don't know how good this will beyet, but with a term called micro dosing wherethey'll, the tiny dose of LSD or psilocybin every day and see that can help people in differentways.
Andthen, researchesout, don'tknow, but the term micro dosing and looking at our own research made me start torethink,huh?
Well, how are habits formed throughrepetition, youknow, and is there away, this is actually borrowingfrom, youknow, to bettenbeardism where they talk about short moments manytimes, youknow,just, can you be alright rightnow?
Don't worry about sitting for 30minutes.
Don't worry about sitting for threeminutes.
Just can you be alright rightnow?
Let's startthere. Those results from our studysuggested,huh, that could actually be a powerful way tostart.
So we'veactually, we actually tooled all of our digital therapeutics based onthat, on that findingwas, can we start with these short moments manytimes?
Andactually, can we start beforethat?
Can we help people understand how their mindswork?
So we teach people about these habit loopsfirst.
So they know why they're practicing and part of this was my own ignorance oflike, why am I supposed to pay attention to mybreath?
I don't getit, youknow?
So we'relike, thisis, thisis, this is how your brainswork, youknow, habitually all of our brains work thisway.
Let's startthere.Okay,great.
Now, in the moment that you're caught up in a habitloop, can you just noticethat?
Great. What's it like to notice it as compared to not having noticed it and beinglost?
That isit. I think of it as a quick win because it feels better to know thannot.
Imean, youknow, we'd rather know that we're stuck in a habit loop than keep being stuck in it for alonger, youknow, because it's just buildingup.
And sohere, I think of thisas, can we bring awareness in any moment and becurious,right?
Curiosity is that attitude and equality of mindfulnesswhere, youknow, it'slike, instead ofgoing,oh, I waslost, my mind wanderedagain.
Where we kind of judgeourselves, wego,oh, I waslost.
And now I seethat,right?
And so there can actually be some joy and some reward that comes just from thenoticing.
And that can happen off thecushion, youknow, through our dailylives.
And it can even happen when we're on thecushion, when we'remeditating.
It'slike,oh, my mindwandered.
Oh, my mindwandered. And it gives us an opportunity to inject some curiosity and curiosityitself.
I think of it as a super power because curiosity feelsgreat.
Yeah,no, Iagree. And just that it's so funny you described this to relatethat,oh, like justnoticing, it's almost like you get like alittle, a little credit for actually picking up on the fact that you've noticed like when you're when your mind doessummer, it'slike,oh,score, like I get like a little checkbox rightthere.
It'slike, where's my goldstar?
I would say a lot of credit because all we have is any onemoment.
And soit's, it's kind of on oroff.
Are weaware? Are we notaware?
So if we'reaware, youknow, it's like jackpot multiple gold stars because that's all we can be doinganyway.
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And that drops us into the space of as you described curiosity where now we can kind of inquire into a littlebit.
Under thatcontext, you also you write about and I know it's part of yourwork.
This acronym that I again was familiar with originally from a Buddhistteacher, TarrBrock, and it's ashorthand, youknow, the acronym is Rain orAIN.
So it was interesting to see you bringing it in in the context in a very sort of like specific way in the work you'redoing.
Walk usthrough, sort of like what those letters stand for and how it actually really plays into the curiosity and reinterpretingprocess.
Yes. So first off a shout out to Tara because she makes these practices so accessible for so manypeople.
So youknow, she is certainly adding light into the world in a much neededway.
So this rain practices thisacronym, I think it was actually Michelle McDonald who first first come up with it and then Tarr has done a great job of helping people learn aboutit.
Our strengths forrecognize, youknow, for lost we can't we're notaware.
So the first step is that moment of recognition like we've been talking aboutGoldstart, I'maware.
Oh,okay. And it could be acraving, it could beworry, it could beanything,right.
Whatever we're lostin, we'reaware.
The second step that A stands for allowing or acceptingwhere, youknow, if we notice something and we'relike,oh, my mindwandered, we kind of want to push itaway.
We don't want to faceit.
Youknow, we run away or we push itaway.
What we resistpersist,right.
So here instead of pushing somethingaway, we invitedin.
Oh,well, here itis. Can I just allow it to be here as compared to pushing it awayalready.
There's less energyneeded,right.
Because it's like we're not resisting that I stands forinvestigate.
And this is where curiosity comesin.
So if werecognize, let's use craving as an example of craving forfood, recognize thatcraving.
Andallow,okay, here's the scraving instead ofsaying, I want to ignoreit, get rid ofthis.
Oh, what does this craving feel like in mybody,right.
That I stands for that investigation where we're starting to get curious about what that craving feels like in ourbody.
And thenN, Satara originally talked about non identification where we're seeing that it is notme, youknow, like athought, I have a thought it's notme.
That can be challenging for people who are first learning thesepractices.
So I brought this together with a practice from a Burmeseteacher, Masi Saida was the first one that popularized this noting practice where you basically note physical sensationsthoughts, youknow, sounds smellstaste.
And you just basically note whatever's in your experience and that noting practice is a really helpful way to help us gainperspective, youknow, it's in physics they call this observer effect when you're observing something you're likely to affect theresult.
And inpsychology, I think the same is true when we observe a thought we're less likely to be identified with thatthought.
So the end happened to be the sameend.
So I waslike,okay,great, let's use noting instead of nonidentification.
So we can really get keep it on the pragmaticlevel.
And so somebody is acraving, they can note what does that craving feel like is it tightness is attention is it burning is it heat and you knownote,note,note,note,note.
And as somebody notes and they're having thatperspective, they're less identified with it and they cannotice,oh, this can come and go and I don't have to act on it because it is not me just physicalsensations.
And so the more they inject the curiosity that I part of thepractice, the more even belike,huh, what's going to comenext?
Youknow,oh, what's next isconverted.
Oh,no, thiscraving, youknow, when's it going to goaway?
So that's what the the rain practice is foragain, we use it as a core practice in all of our digitaltherapeutics, youknow, inour, in our eat right nowprogram, we got these gangbusterresults, youknow,40% reduction in craving relatedeating.
And so practice is really a critical piece ofthat.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me and it's an interesting reframe the sort of the non-attachment versusnoting.
It's almost likeagain, it's creating this kind of similargoal, but or similar sort of likestate, but maybe more accessible language to differentpeople.
The lastpiece, the third element is for you and you referenced it earlier askindness, I've seen you describe it as compassion or selfcompassion, youknow, we're not talking about being kind to other people when you'reanxious, not necessarily a badthing, ofcourse, but it'sabout, youknow, it's about it's about ourselves and that was interesting to me because I recently had a conversation with vessel Van the Koch about trauma and what it does tous.
And, youknow, he said one of the things that's so difficult to deal with is actually not the traumaitself, it's actually the shame that people have around thetrauma, youknow, not necessarily aroundlike, youknow, feeling there's any responsibility for the events that led toit, but they'reinability, their inability to integrate it to move through it to find a way back tolife.
And, youknow, if you can't find a place to let that go if you can't step into a place of selfcompassion, it becomes this persistently brutalizing experience and it sounds like there's a similar context for anxietyhere.
Absolutely.Yes,absolutely.
So, youknow, think of theirhabit, lip aroundanxiety, youknow, anxiety triggersworry, whichthen, youknow, makes us feel like we're doing something incontrol.
It feels back toanxiety.
Theshame, forexample, or selfjudgment, youknow, something we have a thought that could trigger us to judge ourselves or feel bad about ourselves shame isabout, youknow, I'm a badperson.
And then that shame can often the reward there because it's not very rewarding if you just look atit, youknow, doesn't look for pleasant to be in the shamespiral.
But it again feels us makes us feel like we're incontrol.
I can beat myself up over who I am or what Idid, youknow, guilt is about what Idid, shame is about who Iam.
We can beat ourselves up over those things and it makesus, youknow, that self-flagulation ironically feel can feel better because we're doing something active as compared to not doinganything.
And that's because wedon't, we just don't know anythingbetter.
We don't know what else we coulddo.
Sohere, those all share the characteristic of this contractedquality, youknow, think of we're feelingshame, we feel this closed down contractedness is where whether we're beating ourselves up ornot.
Same is true foranxiety, we feel coldness andcontracted, same is true forcraving, wefeel, youknow,contracted.
And that restlessness that I don't realize all of them drives us to dosomething, whether it'sto, youknow, worry more or beat ourselves up orfeel, youknow, feelshame.
So here we can just compare what isit, what is shame or self-judgment feel like compared to being kind toourselves.
And this isn'tabout, youknow, roses and scented candles andunicorns.
This is simply about like thinking about the last time somebody was kind tous.
Youknow, what did that feellike?
Oh,well, forme, it feels a lot better than somebody yelling atme.
And then we can think about times when we've been kind toourselves, youknow, like when have Itruly, youknow, think oftime, we've all had moments where we've been kind to ourselves for a lot ofpeople.
It's foreign because they're so used to being in this otherloops.
But then we can just compare like what does it feel like to feel shame or to be stuck in a shame spiral as compared to being kind toourselves.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense tome.
I want to zoom the lens out a little bit and talk about theseideas.
Maybe let's do a walkthrough of sort of like the process in a very specificcontext.
We've been talking a lot about generalizethat, which we're all experiencing for a lot of differentreasons.
One of the other sources of anxiety for a lot of people is moment or eventbased.
And the thing that I think whether it's testanxiety, interviewanxiety, it's around a very particular thing where they're anticipating how it's going to go and they're freakingout.
Yeah. Maybe let's take like a just as an example test anxiety testanxiety.
Sure. Walk me through like a process of like how this unfolds in the context of trying to just really step into a better place aroundthat.
Yes. So with testanxiety, forexample, and I'll justsay, youknow, if it's been a while since somebody's taken atest, it couldbe, youknow, they have to give a presentation at work orthey, youknow, there's some event that's about to comeup.
So we use test anxiety as anexample.
So what can happen is that we have thisthought, youknow, it's about thefuture.
Oh, I have to take this test in thefuture.
How am I going todo? Do I study wellenough?
Are there going to be trickquestions?
I'm not going to be up forit.
So thosethoughts, there's thetrigger.
They trigger us toworry.
Right. We startworrying.
Oh,no, how am I going todo?
Ironically, worrying doesn't help us study for our tests because we closedown.
We're notopen, youknow, and you think of fixed versus growthmindset.
Youknow, we're growth mindset is where we can we canlearn.
So when we're worrying about thetest, we're not actually in a good place to be studying for the testironically.
So that worrying can be that habitual behavior thatthen, youknow, our brain hassomehow, youknow, lodged in there or habituated to itsaid,yeah, worry about thetest, youknow, and we can be a number of reasons whether it's that correlation that we talked about earlierwhere, youknow, I worried and then I did okay on thetest.
So I assume that I need to worry for the test orwhatnot.
So the first step here is just map that habit loopout.
We actually have a habit map or that's free anybody can download and print itout.
It's map myhabit.com. But basically what I do with my patients and my clinic or anybody just wants to learn other mind works is I say start by mapping itout.
So if you have testanxiety, map itout.
What's thetrigger? What's thebehavior?
Mental orphysical? And what's the result of that the second step very simple also includes awareness right because you have to be aware to map itout.
You also have to be aware of the result of the behavior right we talked about calls and in fact we talk about reward basedlearning.
So what is my brain thinking is rewarding forthis.
So if it's worrying about atest, I would ask somebody not to think aboutit, but to really feel into their body because our feeling bodies are much stronger than our thinkingbrains.
That's really where behavior isdriven.
So it's like what do you get from worrying is it helping you study for the test is helping you retain information generally answers no no no right but just seeing that it's not rewarding is that critical step for helping us to become disenchanted with thebehavior.
And so instead of telling ourselves that we shouldn't worry and then beating ourselves up over the fact that we can't stop ourselves fromworrying.
We can actually go to the source where our brain is in our brain if it sees very clearly that something is not rewarding it's going to become less likely to do it in the future and that's where the process of changehappens.
Now we can accelerate that process when in this third step I think of it as finding that bigger betteroffer.
So our brains are relative organs so they'll look for relative rewards like is this rewarding more rewarding than somethingelse.
And so if we can start to see that worry is not rewarding that reward value drops it opens up the space for some to find something that's more rewarding that bigger betteroffer.
And here we can ask ourselves what happens if I just bring curiosity in instead of worrying like oh can I let me get curious about those thoughts those worry thoughts and does it help me notice the thoughts and I get stuck inthem.
And does it also help condition made to be curious and learn the material for the test instead of going oh no I have to study for this test like oh what's this material you know always that you know and see where we can find the natural curiosity to you know it's not that we're going to be curious about every single subject matter that we're ever going to be testedon.
But it can certainly go a long way in helping us start to at least have that mindset that curious mindset so that's the three step process you know map out the habit loop awareness right requires awareness ask ourselves what am I getting from this also requires awareness and then ask ourselves you know is that awareness that curious awareness itself even more rewarding then getting stuck in a habit loop ofworry.
I guess part of my curiosity is can we actually do this to ourselves for ourselves or or is it much more I get how if somebody's working with somebody else who's really skilled at walking you through this that can be an incredibly powerful thing I'm envisioning somebody who's frantic before you know like a big meeting or presentation or a test or whether it maybe.
And they're in this state and you just walk through a process that sounds linear and rational and cool and the data shows that it works do you find that people are really capable of doing this to and for themselves or do you need someone else to help you through or some other technology which I guess is part of what you've beenbuilding.
Yes, so if somebody just listen to this conversation and said and then they're freaking out before a big presentation and they've not employed any of this stuff it's not like they can just flip a switch and suddenly well he said to be curious okay go because their brains going to be freaking out and they're they're not going to be in a place where they can practiceit.
So here you know this is I mean I'm as a you know practitioner of medicine I want to figure out what are the systematic ways that we can help as many people as possible to learn how to be aware basically because this is all about awareness and curiosity andkindness.
So that's why we developed you know it's interesting I started my first studies were with once weekly groups to help people with addictions we're doing work with alcohol and cocaine isdisorder.
And then I I started saying okay we need more than once a week okay let's do twice a week groups and then I threw the whole thing out the window when the apps started coming around you know we developed our first digital therapeutic back in 2012 or 13 like right when smartphones were everybody was just playing games on these things and nobody really thought about it could be actually deliver treatment through them but I was thinking well you know people learn in context kind of deliver treatment instead of inmy.
In my in my clinic you know make them come to my clinic can I deliver it right to their context and so we started developing these digital therapeutics and what we found so far is that sure again it goes back to these short moments many times can we give people bites eyes training you know like 10 minutes a day systematically you know for over the course and we've you know we've the core trainings for each of these apps is about 30 days but then we have these theme weeks where they can build them over and over and they go back and you know so we've set up the context for people to do the learning in a self-paced manner and I find you know our data are gangbusters I never thought they would work this well so if you look at the studies works they work pretty darn well if you look at the process you know I if I'm trying to learn something I want to be able to do it at my own pace you know little bits at a time and be able to practice it over and over and over so we've tried to set that framework up so people can do that now that's just one way to doit.
Also I think that like you're talking about having somebody help you with it can be very helpful so for example we have online communities in our programs other people you know I'm just saying like as an example there are online communities so I moderate a section in there called ask the experts to somebody has a question they can ask me and we also run a weekly group via zoom for anybody with any of our apps where they can ask me any question related to the practices or the program so I'm going to ask you to dothat.
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You just this or that may not beenough.
So we try to provide whatever level of support people actually need in a way that'sscalable.
Youknow, I can't be available to everybody all thetime.
But we can do things in ways that seem tohelp.
Yeah. And what you're describing also really takes us back to the beginning of our conversation around the normalizingeffect.
It's sort of like if you're experiencing something that's causing some level of suffering ordistress.
And then you start to realizethat,oh,like,hey, I'm notalone.
It actually in this contextbe, I'm sort of like in the vastmajority.
I'm not theweirdo. I'm notbroke.
And this is a part of the human condition that we're all experiencingtogether.
And that alone has got to just be like change the nature and the quality of what you're goingthrough.
And then you add to it process and tools and ways to actually collectively integrate the experiencedifferently.
Yeah. Superpowerful. Andsensible.
And I love the fact that youknow,like, fundamentally we're talking about these interesting ideas and we're talking about peer-reviewed research and we're talking abouttechnology.
And we're also talking about things that people have beendoing.
4,000 and 10,000 ofyears.
That have worked and made them feelbetter.
And it's just about making them accessible to a broaderaudience.
And for the rational brain people who need toknow,well, prove to me that thisworks.
Here yougo.Yeah. It's like these ideas actuallywork.
Yeah. Very supercool. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle aswell.
I always wrap these conversations with the samequestion.
So I'll pose it to you sitting here in this container of good lifeproject.
If I offer up the phrase to live a goodlife, what comesup?
Yeah.Curiosity,kindness, rinse andrepeat.
That's what comesup. Loveit.
Thankyou.Hey, before youleave, if you love this conversationsafe, that you'll also love the conversation that we had withDr.
Ellen Hendricksen about social anxiety and how to handleit.
You'll find a link to Ellen's episode in the shownotes.
This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me JonathanFields, editing help by AlejandroRamirez, ChristopherCarter, crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Del for her research on thisepisode.
And ofcourse, if you haven't already doneso, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listeningapp.
And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring orvaluable, and chances are you did since you're still listeninghere, would you do me a personalfavorite, a seven-secondfavorite, and shareit?
Maybe on social or by text or byemail, even just with oneperson.
Just copy the link from the app you'reusing.
And tell those youknow, those youlove, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a littlebetter, so we can all doit.
And tell them tolisten.
Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations becomeaction, that's how we all come alivetogether.
Until nexttime, I'm JonathanFields, signing off for Good LifeProject.
