Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens, and I'm Jan Black. Do you suffer from anxiety? And do you have some bad habits?

Did you know that there's a link between anxiety

and bad habits? Our guest on this episode, neurologist and psychiatrist, Dr. Judson Brewer, says

anxiety hides in bad habits. Now, you may have seen Dr. Brewer on 60 Minutes or the Today Show,

or you may have viewed his TED talk on a simple way to break a bad habit,

which has had more than 16 million views. Dr. Brewer's latest book is called Unwinding Anxiety.

New science shows how to break the cycles of worry and fear to heal your mind. Dr. Brewer,

thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. You have suffered from anxiety and panic attacks yourself.

And I'm wondering how you define anxiety. So we know what we're talking about.

Yes. I think that's a great place to start. I think of anxiety as, and there's a working definition

that goes something like, you know,

feeling of nervousness, worry or unease about something with an uncertain outcome or an

in imminent event. And I think that's especially interesting because the worry piece can be both

a noun and a verb, you know, can be something we feel, but it can also be something that we do.

And what's the difference between having true generalized anxiety or just feeling anxious?

Well, I think it depends on the degree of how much it affects our lives, right? Right. With a lot of

psychiatric problems, you know, it comes down to how much is this

affecting your life? Because we all worry, we all have anxiety. Yet if it's debilitating,

that's, you know, that's where it comes, where somebody gets referred to me as a psychiatrist.

I was just thinking that you always hear people talk about how it's my anxiety acting up or, oh, I'm, you know,

I'm just anxious, but there just really isn't a universal way to describe it. And I think people

so loosely throw around that term. Yes, I think they throw it around a lot because there's

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