Psychiatrist Explains Why You Fail Quitting Bad Habits (and How to Finally Break Free) - Dr. Jud Brewer

Wellness + Wisdom Podcast

Josh Trent

Education, Self-improvement

4.8 • 913 Ratings

🗓️ 15 July 2025

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why can’t you quit your bad habits, no matter how hard you try? And are you ready to uncover the crucial missing link?

Josh Trent welcomes Dr. Jud Brewer, Neuroscientist and Psychiatrist, to the Wellness + Wisdom Podcast, episode 758, to reveal how your survival mechanisms hijack your mind, why willpower is NOT the key to quitting bad habits, and how understanding habit formation rewires your brain for lasting change.

In This Episode, Dr. Jud Brewer Uncovers:

(00:55) Understanding The Mind
(06:05) How to Heal Anxiety
(10:40) Can It Be Easy to Change Bad Habits?
(14:00) You Generate Your World Based on Your Past
(21:35) What Is The Source of Your Curiosity?
(28:05) Curiosity Heals Anxiety
(37:25) Psychedelics + Parts Work
(47:10) Willpower Doesn't Heal Addiction
(54:00) How to Let Go of Porn Addiction
(01:01:35) The Relation Between Addiction + Trauma
(01:09:15) The Only Way Out Is Through

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	If you want to change a habit, it's not about willpower. We don't really have willpower.
0:04.9	What we do have is awareness. We can't think our way out of a habit because that's not how they form.
0:10.9	We have to feel our way out.
0:13.5	Dr. Judd Brewer is a New York Times bestselling author and thought leader in the field of habit change.
0:19.5	How does this relate to addiction? It's really about just seeing, oh, these are habits.
0:22.6	And the behavior that I have is driven because I feel unpleasant.
0:26.6	I want to make that go away.
0:28.6	Because often we get this brief relief, but we have to see that that's actually perpetuating the cycle.
0:32.6	And it's just feeding a want, which is I want to feel better, instead of meeting a need, which is I need connection.
0:40.3	And then we get addicted to that because we're just putting band-aids upon band-aids upon band-aids because we don't know how our brains work.
0:47.0	Because if we don't know how our brain works, how can we possibly put our brain to work for us?
0:52.5	And the only way to change it is to...
0:58.0	So, people are doom scrolling at a rate maybe we've never seen before. And you said something
1:05.2	recently in an interview that just rocked my world. You said, shame is a habit loop. Self-flagellation feels better than doing
1:13.2	nothing. How does that relate to our addiction with phones right now? Oh, it's everything.
1:19.8	You know, shame feels bad. Doom scrolling numbs us out. And so it feels better than beating ourselves up. So we do it. So you can see
1:30.8	that shame feels better than doing nothing. Doom scrolling feels better than feeling ashamed of
1:36.9	ourselves. So, you know, one can spin into the other. Yeah, that seems like a snake eating its
1:42.5	tail. The shame spiral begins when someone says,
1:45.3	I'm doing this thing and I hate it, yet I can't stop doing it. And now on top of that, I'm going
1:51.0	to give my nervous system this excitatory response that makes it feel alive. But it's a pseudo-aliveness.
1:57.6	What's going on there from both a neurological and also an emotional intelligence
	...

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