Today, for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're going to talk about anxiety.

This is something close to everybody's experience, either because they've had it themselves

or someone close to them has had it.

So today we're going to ask several questions.

Does your brain accidentally teach itself to stay anxious by looping on the same fears?

Is anxiety helping you perform better or making everything harder?

What happens when you stop running from anxiety and look straight at it?

Is it possible to unlearn worry the same way that you learned it?

What if curiosity is stronger than fear?

Today we're going to talk with Dr. Judd Brewer,

who suffered with anxiety as a young man

and then became a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist,

and he studied anxiety his whole career,

and he has a very different take on what can be done about it.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe

to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed human.

What does it mean to feel anxious?

This is one of those experiences that most people know somehow.

But if you're asked to define it, it kind of slips through your fingers. So most people will grab for words like fear and

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