Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: That's why it's called distress tolerance. We start to develop our tolerance for being with our own difficult emotions to the point where we can even be with really challenging emotions so that we are fully in it. You know, this is what being alive is all about, is not running away from anything, but just meeting the moment that is tremendously rewarding for people.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: I'm Diana Earley. I know firsthand what privilege costs losing sight of your own path. The isolation, the distrust, and the guilt of feeling stuck in a life everyone thinks you should be grateful for.
Pressure isn't always the enemy. It reveals character, it challenges us, and it's something we all share. Rich or not, whether you built your wealth or were entrusted with it, sooner or later you have to ask, what is this for?
Welcome to the Pressures of privilege show.
Dr. Jud Brewer is a psychiatrist and a brain scientist. He teaches at Brown University, where he runs research at the Mindfulness Center. His book Unwinding Anxiety was a New York Times bestseller. His TED talk on habits has been watched more than 20 million times. His new book, Going Beyond Anxiety, is out for pre order. He's got a new program with the same name for people struggling with anxiety.
He also co founded MindShift Recovery, a nonprofit that gives people free tools to break free from alcohol, drugs, gambling, social media, and moreover, 100,000 people have used it. His goal is to make hard science a lot less stuffy and easier to understand.
He says anxiety is a habit, and like any habit, we can feel our way out of it not with willpower, but with curiosity. Right now, he's building a game to help teenagers break bad habits and grow two new ones. Curiosity and. And kindness. Dr. Judd, welcome to the show.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: Thanks for having me.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: It's an honor. I got to see you in Providence about, I think, two years ago, and you gave me your book, which, which transforms me, and. And I started attending your mind shift recovery meetings. And it's. It's really helped. So thank you. So going back, you started meditating as a stressed out med student. What was going on for you then?
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Well, you know, I didn't realize how anxious I was, you know, finishing college, starting medical school.
And, you know, somehow this book by Don Kabat Zinn landed in my lap. I started, you know, it was a new chapter for me starting medical school, so I figured I would try something new and realized how hard it was, but also how critical it was to meditate. And also as I went through my MD PhD program and training, I realized how little medical school actually prepared me. You Know, for, for real life.
And this was really helpful, so it helped me, but also even directed where I ended up specializing. So I didn't never thought I'd become a psychiatrist. Here I am as a psychiatrist, But I owe 90% of that to really seeing how some of the principles I've been learning in my meditation practice kind of could be applied in psychiatry and with addiction in particular.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: So when did you first see that worry could work like a habit?
[00:03:21] Speaker A: That started happening as we were. So my lab was studying habit change and probably about five years in we were developing. So first we developed a program for smoking and did some studies. We got, actually got five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment for, you know, so it seemed to work pretty well. And we were developing a program for eating, helping people who are struggling with eating.
And they were saying that anxiety was driving them to eat and they were asking for me to create an anxiety program.
But in fact, you know, I was thinking, well, I'm a psychiatrist, I prescribe medications, you know, and that's the best we have. Unfortunately, it's only about one in seven people that benefit that really show a significant reduction in symptoms when they get the best medications.
And so I was basically playing the medication lottery where, you know, I didn't know which of the next seven people would benefit and what to do with the other six. So I went back and looked at the literature and it turns out that the. There was a guy, Thomas Borc, who had suggested this back in the 80s and he got buried by the Prozac lead. You know, everybody thought Prozac was going to be this miracle drug.
And he made this simple suggestion that anxiety could be driven like a habit. And when I read that, my eyes blinked, nearly popped outta my head because, you know, here I am, a habit change researcher. Never occurred to me that anxiety could be driven like a habit. Never learned that in medical school or residency. Yet when we created our program for anxiety and started testing it, we got gangbuster results. You know, we did multiple randomized controlled trials and one of them, working with people with generalized anxiety disorder, we got a 67% reduction in anxiety versus only 14% in people who got the medications and psychotherapy. And so targeting anxiety was, you know, as a habit was probably the most important and thing that I never learned in medical school, but also just really one of the biggest things that I've seen help both the, you know, from a research standpoint, but also from a clinical standpoint, like my patients. We can get into this more later maybe, but they, we could actually get them back to baseline quickly enough that we could then take time to help them thrive and flourish, which I had never had the opportunity to do before because I was so focused on just getting people back to baseline.
[00:05:40] Speaker B: That's the big idea, right? You're that like the habit loop concept, which is part of the, your, your three gears that you use for both the anxiety but also the mind shift process. How can there be something positive about anxiety? Like the, the bigger better would be better than what you're getting out of the anxiety.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: Yeah, but you're also highlighting something that is, it's a common myth. And I write about this in the Going Beyond Anxiety book.
The idea that anxiety, there's, that there's some utility to anxiety is very seductive to people.
And it goes back to a study, and I kid you not, of Japanese dancing mice from 1908.
So over a hundred years ago, these researchers, they weren't even studying anxiety. You can't study anxiety in mice, really. You can't ask them how anxious they are.
But they, there was this study where they were studying arousal. And somewhere along the line, probably when the Internet came out, people started morphing these and interpreting these studies as like some optimal level of anxiety where people needed a certain level of anxiety to do well, whether they're performing in a sporting event, a musical event, you know, or, or taking a test or giving a talk or something like that, setting up and giving a presentation.
And that none of that is true. There's no evidence showing that any amount of anxiety is helpful for performance.
It's this fallacy of correlation that does not equal causation. So our brains are really good at correlating things where they say, oh, this, this happened and this happened. So therefore this caused this. Well, so if we feel anxious and we perform well, we start to, can falsely associate, you know, that anxiety with performance.
But if you look at the research, there's, there's an inverse relationship. The more anxious people get, the worse they do at anything.
And it, it actually, if you sit back and think about it, you know, this is where, like when, when do people perform at their best? When they're relaxed, you know, when they're totally immersed in what they're doing. This is where flow comes in. And you know when that's the, the optimal performance.
And Mi Jiks and Mahal, the psychologist that coined that term, actually talked about flow as being selfless. So we're not even there.
But all these self help books where they're like, oh, some form of anxiety or you know, they're all, there's all sorts of stuff like these, these books on habit change where they talk about, you know, if you just get 1% better a day at something, you'll be 7:30, seven times better. Like this is literally written in books. That's, that's just not how life works. That's not how that maybe compound interest if you put money in a bank. Yes, but people are not compound interest.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Well, yeah, cause you, you showed that on that Anderson Cooper 60 Minutes when you hooked him up, you know, to EEG machine. Was it the EEG machine? And then you love to talk about that little part in the brain, the pcc, which lights up when we're talking. We're me, me, me, me, me. Right? Yeah, it's the, the craving part of the brain. Right? Am I saying that right? And it's, and it lights up when we're in a craving or if we're stressed or if we're anxious.
[00:08:56] Speaker A: Yes. You can think of it as a self referential network. So you know, when, when we're stressed or anxious, it's about me. When we're of a craving, when we're having a craving, it's about me. So yeah, absolutely.
[00:09:07] Speaker B: I guess he was a new meditator but was good enough at it that we, you actually watched his brain calm down on, in real time on the screen.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: Yeah, he'd been meditating about a month pretty diligently at that point. And so he had gotten the hang of it well enough that when we hooked him up to our neurofeedback device which could measure activity in the posterior cingulate, you know, first he got really stressed. He was good at doing that. Went off the charts.
And then he started meditating and it just bought. Bottomed out. It was, it was pretty nice to see in real time.
[00:09:37] Speaker B: So going back to anxiety, not being good for performance. So there's a certain element of anxiety that's me, me, me, the self referential part that you're, you're mentioning.
[00:09:47] Speaker A: There's a big part which is the worrying, you know, so when we are leaning into the future and worrying about the future, that's the aspect of anxiety. That's, that's about me. And you can think of anxiety forming a habit loop where the feeling of anxiety triggers the mental behavior, the me behavior of worrying. You know, I'm worried about this or that.
And that worrying makes, it gives us this illusion of control.
But the, the key there is that it's an illusion because we can't be Controlling something that isn't happening right now, we can certainly plan for things, but by definition, something that's in the future, we don't have control over because it's not happening right now.
[00:10:32] Speaker B: So when we're worrying or stressing, I mean, there's no difference between anxiety and worry. Right. It's the same thing.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: So the anxiety is defined as a feeling of worry, but then you can link it to the mental behavior of worrying as well, and the two kind of feed on each other.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: And so when somebody's having anxiety or worrying all the time, that part of the brain lights up.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:10:55] Speaker B: I quit drinking 21 years ago, almost 21 years ago. And I can tell you, Dr. Judd, I. I switched my addiction to control. Like, I just.
Like, it was like, hypervigilance kept me sober in the. In the early days, and. And it's thanks to you that I realized that.
But control is the thing.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: It is a thing for a lot of people, and it's also very seductive, too. Right? So we're like, oh, if I can. If I can just have control, you know, dot, dot, dot, over everything, then we could win the game of life.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: And like most addictions, things work until they stop working.
[00:11:32] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. And control very much falls into that category where we, you know, we think we're controlling things, and then there are things that we don't have control over, and then we wonder what to do next.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: So then why doesn't willpower work? Because willpower would probably be related to control.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: You would think so, yes. And there's. You know, there's even a relief carved into the Parthenon in Athens, you know, from ancient times, where there. It depicts a horse and a rider.
And the idea is that the horse is these, you know, our passions, and the rider is reason.
And it highlights and points out to everyone just how weak reason is relative to passions. You know, the horse can buck the rider off at any one time.
And I think that's very related to willpower, where we think that it's due to our willpower that we get things done.
But from a neuroscience standpoint, there's actually no neural evidence for willpower at all.
Wow. So just let that settle in. Yeah.
No neural evidence for willpower. And what it probably is is a story that we tell ourselves after the fact that where we are kind of narrating what happened, and we are making decisions based on how rewarding a behavior is typically in the past or how we. How we anticipate it to be rewarding. And then we tell this Story that, you know, I had willpower. So, you know, all these influencers, for example, that, that go to the gym and they say, look, I have this willpower to go to the gym.
Well, the, the real likelihood is that they go to the gym, they get rewarded, whether it's, you know, doing their social media influencer thing or just feeling good going to the gym. You don't have to be an influencer to go to the gym and enjoy it. But we often falsely associate, like, oh, I get up and I have this discipline to go to the gym every morning. Well, it's probably a habit, and it's probably based on how rewarding it is.
[00:13:27] Speaker B: That's amazing. So you. It sounds like determinism to some degree.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: You. It certainly is more consistent with that than willpower.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: Or like Sapolsky at Stanford talks about that a lot.
[00:13:40] Speaker A: Yes, he does. And, you know, there's a lot of scientific evidence that that's how, you know, even how we learn. That's how, you know, this is. This process. This learning process is evolutionarily conserved all the way back to the sea slug.
So it's pretty, you know, it's unimpeachable in terms of the how we learn. And it's just a matter of how much people really look in to see what it is that's driving their behaviors. When they look closely, they'll see that, you know, something's rewarding, they're going to do it again. If it's not rewarding, that's how they can break free from that. And that's actually one of the ways that we leverage this very powerful learning process to help people change habits, not only to let go of ones that aren't helping them, but also to build healthy habits.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: So you've got to put in a lot of benefits when early on in creating a habit.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: So there are two ways to do it. Right. So you. Our brains are relative machines, so to speak, where they're going to be comparing different behaviors. And so one way to break an unhealthy habit is to really pay attention and see how unhelpful it is.
[00:14:47] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: So in my clinic, this is where, you know, whether it's an addiction or even anxiety, I have my patients really feel into the direct results that they get from whatever the behavior is, whether it's worrying or drinking or smoking or going on social media or whatever. And that helps them to become disenchanted with that behavior so that they're naturally less excited to do it more in the future. And at the same time, Touching on what you're talking about, we can also help them find the benefits of either the, the simple benefit of not doing the thing if it's harming them, it feels better not to harm yourself. So already there's a benefit just simply to abstaining from the behavior or cutting back on it. But then there are also what I call these bigger, better offers, these rewards that come with finding other behaviors that are more in line with our values and help us thrive and flourish.
[00:15:41] Speaker B: I'm loving your sub stack, by the way, for anybody who, like, hasn't discovered that yet, but you're, you're pretty prolific. And your most recent series on grit, you. You kind of debunk some of the science out there on grit.
And, and you're saying that grit's not the thing. It's your ability to sit through difficult things. Distress tolerance. What is that skill? Can you describe it?
[00:16:05] Speaker A: Yes, I would say so. And starting with grit, you know, no shade on Angela Duckworth, but, you know, she wrote this bestselling book, and when you go and read the literature, like the actual scientific studies, there's very little if any evidence that, that it moves the needle.
And it's moves the needle much less than all these typical things that people study. And so I think it was a great story that people like, oh, yeah, I just need more grit. It's kind of like willpower. You know, it's very similar. And then, oh, if I just, if I'm gritty enough, then I'm gonna win.
Unfortunately, that sets people up for failure when they think, oh, I don't have enough grit. How do I get it?
And even, I think she even said this in her TED Talk that, you know, people, people ask me, how do you get grit? And she's like, it's a good question. You know, so, well, if it's not really a thing, it's hard to be able to. To measure it and even harder to train it. So that aside, you know, I think that's, there's very much aligned with willpower if we look at what is a little more, you know, has a little more science behind it, but also is something that we can learn to develop.
It's how we relate to ourselves when things are hard.
So this is where distress tolerance comes in. And even we don't need to get into the nitty gritty of the research. But there's a lot of research on, like, just how do people tolerate, you know, hard things? So some of the studies have been like, you stick your hand in a cold Bucket of water, you know, and see how long you can keep it there. There are all these different measures for distress tolerance. Well, people can kind of, you know, kind of force themselves to stay there for a little while and endure something.
And that is certainly one measure. But we're even looking more carefully at the way that we relate to ourselves.
And so it may not be the thing like the cold, you know, the ice bucket or whatever, or the. The hard email or the hard talk that somebody has to have with their kid, but it's more how we're relating to our own emotions when we're about to face the difficult thing.
Because when we think about, you know, when there are unpleasant emotions, our brains are set up to avoid things that are unpleasant. That's how negative reinforcement works. And so we might distract ourselves. We might, you know, you think of it as these basic fight, flight, freeze mechanisms. You know, so we might try to fix something, or we might resist it. You know, there's the fight response.
If we have a difficult emotion, we might run from it. So we might distract ourselves or literally suppress it. And then there's the feeling of overwhelm. You can think of that as the freeze reaction. So the first thing we have to do is just notice how we relate to difficult emotions, our own difficult emotions, so that we can start to identify those patterns, and then we can develop this emotional distress tolerance, right, where we can learn to tolerate ourselves, basically, where we can start to learn, like, what it feels like just to be with a difficult emotion.
Now, this is obviously critical in psychiatry, but I. I would say this is a critical skill for anybody to learn in life, because we're always going to have difficult emotions, and how we relate to them is going to determine whether we can lean into that and do the difficult thing, or we're going to fight, run away, or freeze.
[00:19:29] Speaker B: I just had an idea because I recently I've been kind of trying to differentiate between earned and unearned guilt. And the unearned guilt is sort of like breaking somebody else's rule, trying to deal with that. And traditionally, I've sort of avoided doing the right thing for me, because I'm feeling that guilt. And I wait for the guilt to go away before I take action. But I've been learning recently to kind of sit with the guilt, but then do the right thing anyway. And then magically, the guilt goes away once I start to see the benefit of taking the action.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: I love that. Sitting with the guilt. That's. That's an emotional distress tolerance, and that's the More we learn to be with these difficult things. I don't know what your experience is, like, certainly my personal experience and also working with my patients. It's like when we bring kindness and curiosity in, for example, to ourselves, this is where we can actually learn that something can feel unpleasant, but unpleasant doesn't necessarily need to be terrible.
[00:20:26] Speaker B: Yeah, well, this is. This is a habit I've got to really work on figuring out, like, why do I feel guilty? Like, it's, I didn't do anything wrong, but it's somebody. I'm breaking somebody else's rule about life. You know, this. I have to do X to be a good daughter, or I have to do X to be a good parent, but it's somebody else's. Put that belief system in my head.
[00:20:45] Speaker A: Well, and the whys can be really challenging. I wrote a whole chapter in my book called the why Habit. Because often we'll get stuck in why and the. And we can't actually. If something's happened in the past, we can't fix something that happened in the past. We have to let go of it and move on. But we can focus on the what. And that what, using your example, is like, how am I relating to this emotion? What am I doing right now?
And this is. I love this phrase. The only way out is through.
I don't know where it comes from, but it's perfect here because instead of running away from our emotions or. Or cowering or feeling overwhelmed by them, we can turn toward them. And the way we can do that is through building. You know, I think of curiosity as a superpower. Instead of going, oh, no, here's this guild that feels terrible and go, oh, what does this feel like in my body right now? You know, or, you know, any type of overwhelm or distress. It's like we can start to. To break it down into its component elements. Like, this is tightness, this is heat. This is tension. This is restlessness.
None of these things by themselves are equal, overwhelm or distress. But when we think of them, when we lump them together and we run away from them, they kind of run after us and. And become this monster that overwhelms us.
[00:22:08] Speaker B: This links a bit to the pressures of privilege. And I was, you know, wondering, in your experience, you know, people think money protects you from hard moments, but you say what matters is, you know, how you meet those moments. Right. But does having more make it easier or harder to stay balanced?
[00:22:24] Speaker A: I think it depends on the person.
So.
So certainly having, you know, enough money where we don't have to worry about our basic needs and having those met certainly help helpful.
But I would say, and I've certainly worked with patients who are billionaires, and they certainly don't seem to be protected by their money.
And it's really how they're relating to themselves and their emotions in the world because, you know, no matter how much money we have, we can, you know, we can still relate to the world in ways that are distressing, and that's not going to protect us from it. You know, we can certainly buy our way out of certain things, but we can't buy our way out of our relationship with ourselves.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: What, like, for example, with anxiety? Do, do you see anxiety inhabiting your, your wealthier patients in a different way?
[00:23:14] Speaker A: I'm just thinking back to several of my patients who are both billionaires. Anxiety is anxiety. You know, if I, if they hadn't told me what their net worth was or what their range was, you know, and coming off the street, I, you know, it's, it's pretty similar. It's just the things that they worry about are different than what other people worry about, but they, the worrying process is exactly the same.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: I also wonder about when you're raising children in, in, in sort of more privileged families. I mean, there you also see founders who are like, I had to struggle so hard to get to this point in my life, and I don't want my kids to struggle as much as I did. And then they, the kids end up being coddled and not, and not being made to develop that distress tolerance. And I'm sort of experimenting with this concept myself on this platform is like, parents maybe shouldn't be protecting their kids from natural consequences and sitting through the discomfort of watching their kids struggle.
[00:24:16] Speaker A: Yes. I'm not sure that there's an advantage to protecting people from discomfort. You know, in fact, it, as you're highlighting it may be a disadvantage. I've certainly seen people who have been protected in that way where they really struggle. Even if they're protected their, you know, as much as possible their entire lives, they're still not going to be protected from their own emotions. And so doing hard things can be really helpful, especially if these are, you know, know, when we have some, you know, we can train to do that. You know, for example, my lab at Brown, we run up, we do a hill workout every week together up a very like a 15% grade hill up in, in Providence. And the idea there is to have people literally lean into discomfort so they can practice being with it.
And this is A place where, you know, we have largely have control over how much discomfort we have, but we can start to lean into it more and more and more as. As compared to it blindsiding us at a time when we don't have control over it.
[00:25:24] Speaker B: So it is something you can train?
[00:25:26] Speaker A: I think so. I've certainly done that myself, trained that in my lab, trained that in my students, and even with my patients in my clinic.
[00:25:35] Speaker B: So there is a difference between that distress, like, like you, you mentioned running up a hill or putting your hand in cold water, and anxiety, like anxiety, as you said, is not great for performance, but having a little bit of distress is. Where's the line?
[00:25:51] Speaker A: That's a great question. So I think one thing that my lab has been studying is how much, you know, how much we basically recoil or close down in the face of difficulty.
And so we can train ourselves to really first to notice what that's like, to contract, to close down that. Oh, no quality of experience.
So let's use worrying as an example. So when somebody worries, there's this tendency to close down. Oh, no.
And so we can notice how much we are contracting and how much we're recoiling from the situation. Just to give us a baseline. Then we can start to practice bringing in things like curiosity, like, oh, what does this feel like? Because typically the distress is about, again, relating to ourselves.
So we can start. We don't have to start with the hardest thing in the world, but we can start with things that are, you know, a little bit distressing, and we can learn to lean into those. And importantly, we can see how rewarding it is to be able to be with ourselves and to tolerate it. It actually feels good. Most people report this as is. You know, they feel very accomplished to be able to be with these even small things at first, and then they can be with, you know, harder things and then harder things. And it's kind of like building up. Well, that's why it's called distress tolerance. We start to develop our tolerance for being with our own difficult emotions to the point where we can even be with really challenging emotions so that we are fully in it, you know, and we're totally. You know, this is what being alive is all about, is not shirking, not running away from anything, but just meeting the moment. And that is. That is tremendously rewarding for people.
[00:27:31] Speaker B: Yeah, you, you, you mentioned in your article the word equanimity. I love that word. You know, they always say, you know, anybody can meditate on a beach, but, you know, try meditating in a, in a crowded intersection with beeping and noise and stress all around you. But I would also say it would be hard when there's, you know, your love, when you're watching your loved ones suffer to find that equanimity.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: Yeah. And what you're bringing up, I think this is really important. So equanimity, you can think of this as balance. You know, how easily are we knocked off balance when difficulty happens?
And so let's take a loved one. You know, it could be a child, it could be a parent, it could be a sibling, it could be a good friend.
And we see that they're suffering in some manner. It doesn't even matter what it is, but just the fact that they are suffering.
Now there are two things that we can do. One is we can habitually react. One is we turn away from it and it becomes about us.
Where it's like, oh, you're suffering and now I'm feeling bad and so I'm going to give you some advice or try to fix you or do something to make my suffering go down. So let's just start there. That's like the lowest bar. But a lot of people don't even recognize that, that they're, you know, of course it doesn't take away from their love from that person. But often, you know, that's, that's the self protective stance is to start with our own distress right now. The next level is we recognize that it's not about us and then we see that somebody is suffering.
If we get sucked into the suffering, where it kind of narrows our view, where we can't see clearly because there's so much suffering, oh no, they're suffering. I don't know what to do.
Then it can be challenging for us to really find that balance, to act wisely and be able to lean in and, and determine what the best thing to do is at that moment, which might not always be obvious. You know, sometimes we're, we try something, we learn from it, we try something else, we learn from that. And so it can be an iterative process.
So the other piece there is if we're out of balance, if think of it as if we're constantly on our heels or we're constantly running forward, we're not going to be in a position to be able to really stop balance ourselves and ask, okay, what's the best thing to do here? And for anybody that's been in a situation where they've had a loved one who is suffering, we all know that coming from A place of balance is going to help us make the best decisions and also be able to just be there for someone. Because, you know, when somebody is suffering, they can sense when we're off balance. And then, you know, again, it can become about us. Or it feels like they're like, oh no, I don't want you to suffer because I'm suffering. And then they're caretaking us. And that, that's not the point either. You know, the point is that they're suffering and how can we direct the, you know, the energy toward helping them?
[00:30:19] Speaker B: Well, this brings me to young people because you're doing this game for them. And you know, they, I mean, I witness it in my own community. Young people with crippling anxiety.
Kids from privileged families who feel like they're not measuring up, they're behind, they're just not as far along as the other kids that they're comparing themselves to and, you know, what's going on in their brains.
[00:30:43] Speaker A: Well, there's a lot of, you know, and I would say growing up right now certainly does not seem as pleasant as, as when I grew up. I don't know what it was, you know, was like when, when you grow up. But the idea is that like, there's so much social comparison. There's fear of missing out. There's all this, you know, like, social media is a job for young people, which, which I never had growing up. I do remember during adolescence that there's a lot of social comparison. And now it's just heightened, you know, a hundredfold, a thousandfold because there's so much more access to comparing ourselves to others.
So there's tons of research showing that this is, you know, surprise, not so good for young people's brains, but also can throw them into these cycles of self judgment and worry and shame and all of these. And then they go to their phones to distract themselves, and then they go to their phones to chat with these, you know, these Frontier LLMs or these, you know, chatbots, which are just sycophants, you know, just basically telling them what they want to hear, which isn't going to help them either. And, and we've seen some tragedies result from these types of things. So our approach really has been, okay, what's the mechanism behind how people get stuck in some of these habits? And so the habit could be just self judgment, it could be social comparison, it could be procrastination, it could be, you know, all of the anxiety, worry. We see this a lot in young people.
So we, we first took Our going ground anxiety program and said, oh, let's just make this for young people. And that was a disaster. You know, they're like, I don't want to do more lessons because the program set up where, you know, people listen to a lesson that I deliver. And then we actually have some learning assistants that will check their comprehension and make sure that they are on track and then give suggestions. This works very well for adults. It's, it's going, you know, very well. And we can even help adults move to baseline and then thrive and flourish. So we're like, oh, great, great, we'll do this for young people. Very humbling. Didn't work. They said no in our early pilot testing. So we said, okay, what will they do? Well, they'll play games.
So can we create a game for good? And a game. What I mean by that is one that's designed to be deleted in the sense that we can teach them these scientific principles through gameplay so that they learn, for example, how to work with these habits. So, for example, first we start by externalizing them where think of it as the worry gremlin or the procrastination gremlin that casts a spell over you, you know, that's much less scary than there's something wrong with you and you need to go to therapy or you need to be on medication.
[00:33:24] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:24] Speaker A: I'd much rather not have a young person think, oh, there's something wrong with them. I much rather have them see that there's, there's so much right with them and that they're, you know, they got caught up in a spell. So we can actually use this game world fiction to help them learn. Like, oh, this is stuff I get, I get enchanted with these spells. I can break these spells. I can develop this disenchantment dust. You know, I can, I can start to use a wand of curiosity. I can start to use the shield of kindness. And we can use a game world fiction to really train these basic tools of curiosity, of kindness, of compassion, of social, you know, social bonding, where in a, in a very helpful way, which I think is probably challenging to learn in school and also probably even more challenging to learn in life. You know, right now we don't see a lot on social media about, you know, people supporting each other and being kind to each other. And, you know, you see snippets of it, but it's, it's more in group, out group and you know, anger and vitriol, unfortunately, than, you know, imagine if all of social media was about helping everybody thrive and flourish like the world would be a different place.
[00:34:37] Speaker B: What's the age group for this game?
[00:34:39] Speaker A: The age group right now is around 14 to 36. We actually just rolled this out as a pilot test in a boarding school in the northeast with the entire sophomore class.
So. But I say up to 36 because we're finding that young adults, you know, it's. It's not like when you get into college, suddenly now you've got it figured out, you know, so we're testing this in college students, but also finding that young adults like to play this game as they go out into the real world. And maybe they haven't learned these skills yet.
[00:35:11] Speaker B: What can parents do to help their kids who are anxious?
[00:35:16] Speaker A: Well, I would say the most important thing that a parent can do is to learn about how their own mind works.
And what I mean by that is that parents, you know, if they don't know how these habit loops around anxiety and worry and comparison work, they might accidentally be, you know, with the best intentions, be training their kids to be doing things that aren't as helpful for them as if they knew.
So this is why we've actually developed these two programs. So this going beyond anxiety programs for parents so they can learn how their own minds work. And, you know, even if they don't think that they have a lot of anxiety, there are a lot of ways that this can be applied, whether it's to news or health anxiety or anything. But then they. Their kids can play the game. And so the two. They might have slightly different languages, but they can connect through this shared language of neuroscience.
[00:36:08] Speaker B: Interesting. I know a kid who. Well, he's 22, but he had severe anxiety. But I think what was underlying the anxiety was a lot of grief. Like he had lost a parent and hadn't grieved properly in five years. And then all of a sudden, the grief caught up, and the anxiety was the first thing that. That was evident.
And since he's been dealing with the grieving, the anxiety has gotten better.
[00:36:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I see this, you know, fair amount where we've developed these coping habits for.
[00:36:41] Speaker B: For.
[00:36:42] Speaker A: And I think grieving is a great example of if we haven't learned, and I'm not speaking. I don't know this case, but just speaking more generally, if somebody is struggling with being with the emotion of grieving, which is really unpleasant, and it's set up that way, that's how grieving works. But if they haven't developed, for example, the. The ability to be with that emotion and really let it flow through Them that can get bottled up, that can get covered over. There can be this, you know, band aid applied, where we learn to worry, and then that's a distraction from the grieving. So we can kind of avoid it for a bit until it comes, you know, it gets so big that we can't avoid it anymore.
[00:37:24] Speaker B: That makes sense. And it reminds me, too, of a lot of grieve. A lot of addicts have to grieve things. And that shifting over to mind shift. Those meetings, you know, where I use the three gears there. And you. You explained it earlier, what that is. What do you mean by the bigger, better offer?
[00:37:42] Speaker A: Well, our brains, you know, reinforcement learning works through the simple principle of, you know, if something's rewarding, we're going to do it more. If it's not rewarding, we're going to do it less. So we talked about becoming disenchanted with some of these old behaviors, but we can leverage that same process to become enchanted with behaviors that are more rewarding for this, for us. That's why I call it the bigger, better offer, because our brains are always looking for a bigger, better offer. And if we're doing something habitually, our minds might. Our brains might be saying, well, that's good enough. I'm just gonna keep doing it.
So if we can step back and ask, well, is there something better?
And ideally, the better thing would be something that's intrinsically rewarding and not something that becomes habituated. So, you know, for example, we could. And I've seen this with some of my patients, where they'll go and they'll be addicted to looking at cute pictures of puppies on social media as a way to, you know, cope.
Yeah. So it can be a coping mechanism for when they have a craving for whatever the behavior or substance is. And so they're like, well, puppies are more socially acceptable than drinking or. Or whatever. And they are. And they're probably healthier. You know, looking at puppy videos is healthier than. Than drinking ourselves into a stupor. So that's, you know, that piece means, okay, puppies are better. But, you know, then our brain's like, okay, I've seen enough puppies for today.
When we haven't learned to really be with those difficult emotions, then the puppy videos, you know, they. They don't. They're not enough. So we need puppies and kittens, and then puppies, kittens and babies. And then, you know, you can see how it just. It. We just keep looking for more, more, more, and we get stuck in the same Cycle of looking for more.
So instead we can ask, well, what is something that I already have and I can awaken? So we can awaken our own curiosity. When it comes to a craving to do, you know, to use a substance or do a behavior, that craving has this restless, itchy urge and do something. That's what a craving is for.
So instead of, oh, no, where we grit our teeth, you know, this is where grit comes. Grit our teeth and try to fight that craving, or we run away from it, or we distract ourselves, you know, puppy videos or whatever.
Neither of those helps us develop balance. We're either resisting something or we're running away from it.
So here we can use our own capacity, our superpower of being curious. And instead of going, oh, no, we can go, oh, what does this actually feel like right now? Like, what is so scary about a craving?
So when I have my patients start to ask and look inside, I ask, I have them describe what a craving feels like. And they describe it as, well, it's heat, it's tightness, it's tension, it's this contraction, it's this, this, this. And I've even had them kind of describe how intense it is. And it goes up and up and up. And I've had patients who. Who have. Now, they've always smoked or used the substance or whatever before it started to go down on its own. But as we track them, invariably, the craving will go down on its own. And that is tremendously enlightening for people. The first time they see that, they realize that simply by being with that craving, by being curious about it, it will come and go on its own instead of them having to do something to make it go away.
My favorite part is I'll. I'll say, okay, time your cravings. So once they learn to develop these mindfulness skills to be with their cravings, they can set the timer. The longest crate. Well, I'm curious. How do you. How long do you think the longest one is reported to date? This is in the last 20 years.
[00:41:22] Speaker B: I think on average, they're two minutes. But is it four or five?
[00:41:25] Speaker A: It's. So the longest one that anybody has reported in My clinic is 13. But you're highlighting. But you're absolutely right. They go by pretty quickly. Especially.
This is critical, especially if we don't resist them. So if we resist them, they're going to stick around a little bit longer. But if we just open to them and run toward them, they start running away. They realize, oh, the gig is up, and they start running away from Us.
[00:41:49] Speaker B: That doesn't mean giving in to them though.
[00:41:51] Speaker A: No, not at all. Not at all. But opening to them, welcoming them in. So welcoming all of our sensations. This is again, back to distress tolerance.
So it's like if we have something unpleasant happening, how are we meeting that moment? Right. So is it, oh, here's tightness. Am I resisting it? Am I turning away from it or am I turning toward it? Oh, tightness. Okay, here's tightness. I can be with tightness. Right, that's, that's distress tolerance in a nutshell.
[00:42:18] Speaker B: Because in 12 step, a lot of, you know, sponsors say, well, when you feel craving, just call, gimme a call. And a lot of people in 12 step have said that's worked. But, but when I couldn't stop calling a boyfriend compulsively, I never really reached out for somebody else when I just called. It was too easy.
[00:42:36] Speaker A: So you're highlighting and you know, 12 Steps has helped so many people throughout the years. So. But one thing that you're highlighting is if we need something outside of ourselves to be with ourselves, then that is a frail process. You know, I've had plenty of patients whose sponsors weren't available at the moment that they called, you know, and then they relapsed or whatever.
So it's about being our own sponsor in that sense, you know, so sponsors will often talk people through emotion, like, okay, what's it feel like? Can you be with it? Well, we can talk ourselves through that by learning to lean in instead of run away or go externally to, you know, have somebody else do it for us.
[00:43:22] Speaker B: Oh, that's nice. I like that. That's making them more self sufficient.
Yeah. I just had a guest who takes calls in the middle of the night from clients and I'm like, wow.
[00:43:31] Speaker A: And it's great that, you know, that they're willing to do that. You know, it. It'd be amazing if we had enough people that were selfless like that.
And, you know, we can train everybody to do this, to be able to tolerate themselves.
[00:43:46] Speaker B: Also, those mind shift meetings are really cool. I think they're every Thursday at noon Eastern time.
[00:43:51] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:43:51] Speaker B: And you have a, you have a crew that runs them and they're free and anybody can go. And you don't have to sign. I mean, you don't really have to commit to coming every single week. You can just drop in. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
[00:44:04] Speaker A: You know, this has been a dream of ours for probably the last several decades, was to take all the science that my lab hadn't been doing. To really study, you know, how to help people with addiction.
Also what I've been doing clinically, but also do this responsibly. So we waited for a long time until we felt like we had the right resources and the right ways to support people. So it's not only so we've got the. And actually that now there are daily groups where people can drop in every day. But also we have the Mindshift recovery app that again also is free, that anybody can download and that will give people the skills training that they can use to then complement or have the groups complement the skills training themselves. So that's where we felt, okay, if we can, if we can do an evidence based app and then also pair that with peer support, we've got something that can be supportive of people.
[00:44:58] Speaker B: Yeah, it's cool. The app explains the difference between good, like the good curiosity and the bad curiosity. Good curiosity is like wanting to read a certain book or reading books in the library.
And bad curiosity is that notification on your phone.
[00:45:13] Speaker A: Yep, that did in a nutshell.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: So someone's listening who just wants like one simple tool for when, like when worry kicks in. What is it?
[00:45:20] Speaker A: Oh, the one simple tool would be just to map out. Map it out. Even that is the most important place to start. You know, okay, if I'm worrying, what is the what triggered it? And if they can't recognize what triggered it, no problem. But what's the result of the worrying? That's really critical. So the question I would have somebody ask themselves is what am I getting from this? So if they're worrying, ask what am I getting from this? Really feel into their body and see what the result of the worrying is. You know, is it keeping someone safe? Is it solving a problem or is it just making them more anxious?
[00:45:55] Speaker B: I was wearing one of those glucose monitors for two weeks just to see and kind of pre diabetic and I wanted to see what would happen. And you know, I ate an apple and it went way up and three prunes way up. So I'm having to be a little careful. But what I noticed was when I got a little stressed, especially in the morning when I first woke up, all of a sudden my glucose started to climb without food. And I'm thinking that, oh my God, that's maybe some kind of a stress hormone that's causing my glucose to rise.
[00:46:26] Speaker A: Well, and it's been a little while since I've been in medical school, but I think that there's this diurnal cortisol rhythm that hap and Cortisol, I think, releases glucose or can. Can mobilize glucose, if I remember correctly. So I could see. So cortisol's a stress hormone. Right. And so it can certainly cause our glucose to rise, you know, when we get stressed out as a way, you know, it's a survival mechanism. And that can also even happen at the beginning of the morning. And it's funny you mentioned that, because that's when a lot of my patients with generalized anxiety disorder report feel they wake up and they're just feeling anxious and nothing's happened. Nothing's triggered it. They just wake up feeling anxious, and then they get in the habit of being anxious and worrying all day.
[00:47:09] Speaker B: Yeah. And I was trying to match it up. I wear a whoop that has my stress levels on it. And I was trying to see if there was a correlation between my glucose rise and the stress. And there was a little bit of. Of. Of a correlation. And I thought, wow, that's. That's really interesting. So I've been trying to keep my glucose levels from spiking because I think that might be better for anxiety levels, I would think. I mean, that's just my own little experiment I'm running with myself. Yeah.
[00:47:36] Speaker A: Well, I would say it's probably reciprocal. It'd be interesting to hear what you discover. Certainly, working with anxiety is a great way to help keep those glucose levels probably pretty more stable and. But also looking to see what types of food that we eat that can actually contribute to anxiety. You know, it's finding people stressy, but they don't think as much about what they eat, can also cause stress and, you know, cause a lot of negative emotions to come up.
[00:48:05] Speaker B: I could go on for another hour with you, Dr. Judd.
It's so interesting. Maybe I need to come back to school, be one of your student.
[00:48:14] Speaker A: Well, I think of life as a school. Right. We all can be constantly learning all the time by just really seeing, you know, monitoring ourselves and seeing how we're meeting life.
[00:48:23] Speaker B: Continuous learning. I love it.
So where can people find you? There's. You're on so many sites. There's the mindshiftrecovery.com and where do you want people to go?
[00:48:34] Speaker A: The thing that has everything is the drjudd.com website. So drjud.com. but as you mentioned, I also write a substack. It's just Judd Brewer, substack. Com.
But also our people are interested in our anxiety program. That's just going beyond anxiety. Com. And then as you mentioned, the Mindshift Recovery. Org or they can just download the Going beyond anxiety app or the Mind Shift recovery app.
[00:49:00] Speaker B: What's the game for the teenagers going to be called?
[00:49:03] Speaker A: It's going to be called your life, the game.
And the idea is that they learn how to deal with life through gameplay, but then they bring that gameplay back into life. So it's not that they're just distracting themselves by playing a game, but they're learning about life. And a lot of the gameplay is to say, okay, you've learned this skill, now go apply it in life and come back and tell the wizard, you know how you did.
[00:49:25] Speaker B: Well, thank you so much, Dr. Jen.
[00:49:28] Speaker A: It's my pleasure.
[00:49:33] Speaker B: If this episode landed for you, share it with someone who might need to hear it and click Follow or subscribe on whatever platform. You're listening to this so you don't miss what's coming, because whether we have everything, nothing or something in between, we all face pressure. The question is what we do with it. So this week, look around your community and see where you can be of service. Thanks for listening.
