“Unwinding Anxiety” with Judson Brewer, MD, PhD
Dr. Jud is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University, as well as a research affiliate at MIT. Before that, he held research and teaching positions at Yale University and the University of Massachusetts’ Center for Mindfulness. Read more about his research here. He is passionate about understanding how our brains work, and how to use that knowledge to help people make deep, permanent change in their lives — with the goal of reducing suffering in the world at large.
As an addiction psychiatrist and internationally known expert in mindfulness training for treating addictions, Dr. Jud has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit change, including both in-person and app-based treatments for smoking, emotional eating, and anxiety (Eat Right Now, Unwinding Anxiety and Craving to Quit).
Based on the success of these programs in the lab, he co-founded MindSciences, Inc. to create app-based digital therapeutic versions of these programs for a wider audience, working with individuals, corporations, and hospital systems to put effective, evidence-based behavior change guidance in the hands of people struggling with unwanted behaviors and “everyday addictions.”
In this episode Dr. Jud shares the biggest takeaways from his new book “Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind” that got released on March 9, 2021 is already an #1 Best Seller. What if we looked at worry as if it were a bad habit?
Dr. Jud describes the effects of uncertainty on our mental and emotional health. Uncertainty can take us out fo the "safety zone" and put us in a state of high alert, that leads to anxiety. But what if, instead of entering the "panic zone", we learn how to enter the "learning zone"? Dr. Jud teaches us how to recognize anxiety, and build new habits that help us grow in a calmer state of mind. We cannot think our way out of anxiety…. but we can feel our way out of it! What does that look like? Dr. Jud shares a framework and related tools to do just that. Tune in to the episode to learn more!
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Learn more about the app-based behavior change programs from DrJud and MindSciences for eating, anxiety, and smoking cessation.
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