one two three, skinnification, yeah.

Hey guys, it's Dr. Z. Welcome to the Z Dog MD show. Today I have a guest that I've been wanting to talk to for a long time.

And it just so happens with everything going on with the COVID pandemic. This is actually the perfect time.

So this guest and I were supposed to meet in person a little later. And now with the social distancing and everything that's changed, we're going to move this up because his work on mindfulness, on anxiety, on how we can watch our minds with curiosity instead of losing ourselves in the primitive fear response is so timely right now, especially for frontline healthcare professionals who are walking into situations where they're going to be

terrified every single day. And so let's just cut to the chase. Dr. Judd Brewer is the director of research and innovation at the Brown Mindfulness Center. He is a psychiatrist and PhD by training. This guy has done everything relating to mindfulness and the study of how science and neuroscience can actually correlate with the benefits and aspects of meditation and mindfulness that

many people now talk about and take as a given. He's done the earliest sort of functional MRI studies looking at the brains of adept meditators and how they change from those parameters. He's the founder of mind sciences. Is that right, Judd?

That's right.

And this is Judd, by the way, mind sciences, which creates app based interventions that can actually help with anxiety, addictions, eating disorders, things like that. So we're going to talk about that as well.

Let's stop talking about it and just get into it. Judd, thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks for having me.

Man, and you know what, it's funny. I think we're roughly the same age and have a very similar sensibility about the world. My mom's a psychiatrist and you are a psychiatrist. So there's going to be transference and issues like that. Just so you know.

Great. Let's get into it.

Where are you based, by the way? Where are you right now?

I'm in some of my day jobs at Brown University. I live in Massachusetts because my wife's a professor at Holy Cross in Western Massachusetts.

Got it, got it, got it. And how just to get people up to speed, how did you get into the space of mindfulness? Because so many doctors kind of have historically blown it off as some woo, woo, you know, new age garbage.

And you and I know better. I myself have been trying to meditate for upwards of eight years with varying success. And I find it so central to my sanity and also to my sanity of my family.

Because I'm much better around them when I have a meditative practice that's stable. How did you even get into this stuff?

Yeah, it was a totally tripped into it. I was scheduled scheduled. I was aiming to marry my college sweetheart and we'd both gotten into the same MDPHC program. And then we broke up as we signed leases for apartments.

We were going to wash you in St. Louis. These are apartments like the summer before we started school.

Oh, what?

Yeah, so I lost my best friend. You know, we dated for years in college. And I was having trouble sleeping because she wasn't that excited about that, you know, we planned to be together and then we weren't.

The blank story short, we were not probably not meant to be together with happily married to other people. But I was, you know, beginning medical school.

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