It's like we've hit these multiple rounds of uncertainty to the point where not only has anxiety

gone nuts, but I've also seen where people are kind of getting this, I don't know if this is

perfect term, but this is how I think of it as kind of like learned helplessness where

you know a lot of people, they're like I give up, you know my brain is fried, just too much anxiety.

Anxiety, even saying the word makes me a bit anxious, but what if there was a way to unwind it and

come back to calm that was maybe counterintuitively simple? And what if a lot of the popular thoughts

around anxiety and had to deal with it today were wrong or at least took a lot more work than necessary?

Well that's what we're talking about today with my guest Dr. Judd Brewer. He's a New York Times

bestselling author, neuroscientist, addiction psychiatrist and thought leader in the field of

habit change and Judd is also the director of research and innovation at Brown University's

mindfulness center where he serves as an associate professor of behavioral and social sciences

in the School of Public Health. He's the executive medical director of behavioral health at

sharecare Inc and a research affiliate at MIT and he's developed and tested really novel mindfulness

programs for habit change including treatments for smoking and emotional eating and yes,

anxiety. He's the author of unwinding anxiety. New science shows how to break the cycles of

worry and fear to heal your mind and the craving mind from cigarettes to smartphones to love

why we get hooked and how we can break habits. So excited to share this conversation with you.

I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.

Your topic is a topic of interest. It has been for a long time and for anyone that has not been

touched by some form of anxiety I think you know the last couple of years have made it a relatively

universal experience. I'm curious from your lens. How have you seen sort of like the depth and

the scope of anxiety change over the last two or three years? Yeah I'm just thinking about

...