Building and Breaking Habits with Dr. Jud Brewer

what's up folks welcome back to the whoop podcast where we sit down with the best of the best uncover human performance I'm your host will Ahmed founder and CEO of whoop we're on a mission to unlock Human Performance that's right on this week's episode our VP of performance science Kristin Holmes is joined by share cares 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 Judd can share some of his research on mindfulness habit change anxiety and sleep he's a New York Times best-selling 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 Dr Judd and Kristen will discuss the anxiety habit Loop and how to manage it the psychological impact of braking 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 gonna 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 whoop accessories you can use that credit for new bands battery packs with body apparel and more that is at join.woop.com to get started and if you have a question what's he answered on the podcast email us podcastgroup.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 uh we're so thrilled to have you on the podcast today I had um as I mentioned I had the opportunity to read your 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 the science behind the kind of coupling of destructive habits and anxiety and and how really our kind of lack of understanding between the Dynamics so it actually keeps us from being able to move forward uh in in life sometimes and I think what was I I think really eye-opening for me is 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 or um but it doesn't have to be kind of these extreme circumstances it's something that I think manifests in different ways and and is present in kind of our habits and you know I think as as kind of folks tackle you know their January challenges and are just trying to kind of lead a 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 help set the stage by giving us just a quick kind of understanding of the difference and um really settling into what this notion of anxiety actually is yeah I'd be happy too 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 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 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 if we have a deadline at work we can feel stressed until that deadline is gone uh and and we've completed the project but once we've you know checked 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 a bit on that like what what is our mind kind of doing in in these moments of 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 uh 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 you know let's avoid that in the future so what would be a 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 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 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 it 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 you can't be afraid you you can't tell that something's actually going to be dangerous in the future because it's 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 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 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 borkovic he suggested that worry could be reinforced in this using the same mechanism as any other negatively reinforced Behavior but I never learned 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 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 gonna show a 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 working back and others work on 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 some an app that anybody can use and we found that we got a in our our major randomized controlled trial of people with generalized anxiety disorder it was about one in two people the benefited uh from from using the app as compared to one in five with medication so you know on average we saw 67 reduction in anxiety in people with general 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 I mean that's the goal right yeah yeah yeah if we could make a medication for that it would be the Blockbuster drug of all time right the 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 you know the core reason that we're you know 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 uh and habit change in general is by really bringing in something that's that's simple but not necessarily easy for people to do until they see how it 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 as 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 think of it as a three-step process I 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 the crit 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 accuse 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 see ask our 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 uh 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 a 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 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 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 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 uh he also had developed full-blown panic disorder where he would start to get panic attacks when driving on the highway and he you know 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 rewarded results on the on that piece of paper and I said okay let me get this straight you know for your panic attacks the trigger is thinking of 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 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 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 never noticed that my mind works that way you know and so it's really about being you first just understanding the very simple models that our brains use to learn so just mapping that out 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 a 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 I 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 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 is 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 that websites mapmyhabit.com so anybody can just go to go to the mapmyhabit.com and they can download a free pdf uh 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 I 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 but just a pet peeve I guess of just the internet um you know just all the tips and tricks that we get you know pushed and and I feel like you know just after reading your your book it was very clear to me that the order of operation is is kind of wrong you know and that's really this you know kind of this curiosity is is really what has to come first you know and and I love to get your thoughts on this because I 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 self just because thinking can be really uncomfortable right because we cannot like what we're thinking about like we can that in 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 how the 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 as the why habit lives 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 you're 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 it 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 it's 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 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 not 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 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 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 go scroll our on our social media we might check our news feed we might watch a television show you know 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 in the generalized anxiety disorder he actually started distracting himself through eating uh we knew as 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 uh 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 a certain trouble sleeping and all of this was due to him you know his weight so he was he was at a very unhealthy weight so you know ironically we can use him as an example I sent him home with our unwriting 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 he said yeah you could see my puzzled look and he said yeah we did we didn't really talked 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 all the ways of fast food can be very addicting easy inconvenient 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 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 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 fast food he just realized that it wasn't helping him so this just to get into a little of 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 formulas 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 the kind of laid down as a as a reward value we get a positive prediction error we're going to do it more so for example if I go to a new bakery and I eat uh some cake in their Bakery and it's like the best cake I've ever had I'm Gonna 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 brand 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 the dopamine hit and then the crash 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 we 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 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 right 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 over ate 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 uh 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 as 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 they get disenchanted so that's the second of three steps in terms of changing that habit does that make sense yeah absolutely yeah it's incredible um explanation and I think very uh and such a tangible and really inspirational example I mean it's just a wonderful you know to kind of hear success rates like that um well in what you describe as being like quite a simple process I mean that's amazing um so in Beyond curiosity so that's you know kind of I suppose one one tool or technique uh 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 to kind of habits serving us not serving us um well the 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 you know 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 as a superpower because we can use curiosity to map out these habit Loops we can use curiosity ask this 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 ourselves if we're constantly judging ourselves we're actually closing ourselves down from learning all right Carol to wax 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 but 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 growth mindset is kindness so when we're judging ourselves and saying beating ourselves up over oh though 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 with then we just get stuck in habits of judging ourselves beating ourselves up and all of those habits that actually just reinforce those habits and 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 unreboarding 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 well 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 curiosity feels better than craving so if we can train ourselves just to be curious we can see oh you know their their thoughts their feelings their Sensations that 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 kind of feels better it's that bigger better offer so the other piece that I found you know 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 yeah 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 that positive reinforcement based on our own direct experience that's how we develop wisdom you know it's through our own experience not just some you know cognitive you know book learning or reading a list or you know the the top five things on that next blog post on you know what we should do for a New Year's resolutions we 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 they're always going to be there for us this whole framework around kindness is just totally new to me in the sense of it's just like it's almost like kind of 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 just like a compassion to it that yeah it 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 that's a good segue to kind of talk a little bit about the physiology obviously here at woop we think a whole lot about physiology um maybe just you know through all the research that 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 our mind more effectively you know what how 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 in within our body that will can kind of help create a more uh 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 uh practices in Southeast Asia uh one is called the body sweeper the body scan where uh where we and we actually have people start practicing this on day three of any 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 we're kind of these cognitive thinking things with uh 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 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 now this isn't a new phenomenon I love that James Joyce wrote in um one of his short stories in The Dubliners he said there's about this guy named Mr Duffy said Mr Duffy lived a short distance from his body so how many of us live a short distance from our bodies 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 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 uh 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 um guided meditation on my YouTube channel if folks want to try it if they haven't it's pretty straight yeah great and the idea is if we can start to notice that physical Sensations are you know always present you know there's always going to be something uh going on in our body we 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 uh or am I what does anxiety actually feel like as compared to oh no I'm anxious gotta 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 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 we'll 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 I will prescribe the body scan because a lot of medications can actually disrupt good sleep so yeah you know so I try to use kind of the the Mind remedies as compared to the medications uh when possible uh and the two can certainly be combined uh but the body scan is really helpful because often we're worrying you know as we're as we're going out to sleep and in fact we just published a study with our unwinding anxiety program where you know worry makes sleep 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's sleep if they're you know 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 worry 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 uh yeah I find uh you know I'm a huge fan of Yoga Nidra and and do that regularly and um have for over a decade and it's uh 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 that stress I think and 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 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 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 just 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 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 right and that's we could 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 we can if we can just step back and get curious oh here's stress what do I actually need right now and that need might be to you know go check that item off of our to-do list and then we've got to check we've got the energy we've got it 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 result of doing it in a way where we're bringing curiosity and kindness and instead of like I have to do this to make my stress go away because we can get in to-do lists 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 you know I don't know anybody that doesn't have an endless to-do list it's totally 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 the 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 spread 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 and how to use how to use that energy to your point it might be actually just this down and breathe for five minutes you know um or it might be actually to tackle something on the to-do list so I love that I heard a story I don't know um as I was researching for the podcast I I heard I 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 you know just the Gen you know General um 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 um would love to just kind of hear that example of how you kind of reframe that and um 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 they've been talking about around just kindness and and how to 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 it you can think of it as kindness you know love and kindness is is more the the formal term for it and I I was working with a meditation teacher in 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 writing myself and you're like okay you know make sure you do this you know trying to take a willpower approach to life it 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 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 then let's just say it didn't help the situation at all and I would get to the hospital in kind of a not in a great mood 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 I started using it as a mindfulness spell 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 son of displeasure a lot less and we get to 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 some money or you know being angry at them for honking and so I would get to the hospital I'm 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 you know just just something that could be a heartfelt well wish you know that 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 habits but really just to see the power of kindness itself it's it's really really powerful so that was kind of how I started you know my bicycle incidents would help 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 of more likely to do acts of generosity and then they feed on each other I love that uh 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 it's such a great story I still have a lot a lot a lot more to go but certainly let's just find her well so just on this like topic of havocs you know habits there obviously 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 a 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 uh 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 the kindness does feel better than being mean if we if we've never you know 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 we're you know we need to be working more together in many many ways uh and if we weren't wired for kindness it would there would be no hope for us as a species here there you know where 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 and they'd be happier and the world would be happier in a much more secure place uh just 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 and more and more that they forget how good it feels to be kind and then you know they 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 I 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 there's thousands of people who are who listen to this podcast like how can they help spread the word uh 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 profit's not welcome in her or his own Hometown so it's really about or the another way of phrasing that I've heard this is um you know uh when some 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 um then that's gonna 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 right second step up 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 times when we're we're feeling stingy or um you know hoarding things and really just seeing those and letting our brain take care of the rest you know I would say rinse and repeat curiosity and kindness rinse and repeat love that that's such a powerful message and I and I I think it's a unique message in a lot of ways um you know it's like I said it's so refreshing to hear your perspective and just really appreciate your time today um so thank you for being with us um where can people follow your work I have a website that's just Dr judd.com drjud.com I'm also on Twitter yeah yeah so I I think folks can find most of those materials right from the website um so that's probably the easiest place to find that whether it's the apps or the or the books or or any of those other resources awesome we'll make sure we link to all that and thank you for being with us hopefully we have Pastor cross 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 review please subscribe to the wolf podcast you can check us out on social at whoop at Willamette if you have a question you want to see answered email us podcastbook.com call us 508-443-4952 we will answer your questions on future episodes new members use the code will w-i-l-l get a 60 credit on whoop accessories that's a wrap for this week don't be afraid of quitters day this Friday the 13th that's right quitter's day Friday the 13th and stay strong with those goals and resolutions we'll see you next week as always stay healthy and stay in the green [Music]

Channel: WHOOP

Views: 927

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Id: L0fWAHPye1Q

Length: 55min 40sec (3340 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 26 2023