The Lesson: Worry and anxiety can establish themselves, through feedback loops, as actual habits, instead of being simply transient emotional states. People with anxiety disorders can try and prevent these habitual loops from developing by mapping out the sequence of thoughts, i.e. first, anxious feelings lead to these thoughts, then thoughts reinforce anxious feelings, and so on. Disrupting this flow can be the key, not only for breaking out of the anxious habit, but curtailing many other downstream affects of anxiety such as over-eating, poor sleep, and more.
Notable Excerpt: “Fear plus uncertainty leads to anxiety, and that anxiety makes the thinking and planning part of the brain go offline—so I would postulate that worrying is not only not helpful, it actually makes things worse because we can’t think and plan…. If we change our relationship with our emotions we can stop feeding them, and at the same time when they do show up we don’t resist them, because that resistance is part of the feeding: ‘what we resist persists.'”
The Guest: Dr. Judson Brewer is a psychiatrist, deep dharma practitioner, and author of Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind. He’s also the creator of the Unwinding Anxiety app, which can be downloaded onto your tablet or smartphone. He says the app requires 10 minutes to walk you through the unwinding of your anxiety habit that has built up in the mind. Watch Dr. Jud’s TED Talk, “A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit”, viewed over 18 million times.
The Podcast: Believing people can be trained in happiness, the fidgety, skeptical journalist and author of 10% Happier, Dan Harris, ventures into the diverse ends of the mental health swimming pool—from science-based techniques for issues such as anxiety, productivity, and relationships, to the concept of enlightenment and the use of psychedelics. His Ten Percent Happier podcast is available where all podcasts are found.
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