Why Do We Have Anxiety?

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Anxiety is a feeling of nervousness or unease about an uncertain event. Lloyd diamond: Our brains are set up to eat and not be eaten, right? And so we're set up to remember where food is. But then also, more recently, our brains have evolved to plan for the future. So when i think of anxiety as fear of the future, it's these two helpful survival mechanisms, you know, fear and planning, that kind of get mixed together.

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 counterintuitively simple. And, what if a lot of the popular thoughts around anxiety and how to deal with it today were wrong? That’s what we’re talking about today with my guest, Dr. Jud Brewer. He’s a New York Times best-selling author, neuroscientist, addiction psychiatrist, and thought leader in the field of habit change.

Jud 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 is the executive medical director of behavioral health at Sharecare Inc. and a research affiliate at MIT. And, he’s developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit change, including treatments for smoking, emotional eating, and, yes, anxiety. He is 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 Bad Habits.

You can find Dr. Jud at: Website | Instagram | Unwinding Anxiety App (sign up with code UNWIND40 for 40% off, before downloading the app)

If you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Ellen Hendriksen, PhD about social anxiety and how to handle it.

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