Overcoming Anxiety Through Mindfulness Practices

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Judson Brewer about addiction, craving, and mindfulness. They discuss the nature of reward-based learning, the role of subjective bias in addiction, the neuroscience of craving, the neural correlates of the sense of self, real-time neuroimaging, effort and effortlessness in meditation, smoking cessation through mindfulness, the difference between dopamine-driven reward and happiness, how to make meditation a habit, working with anxiety, and other topics.

Judson Brewer, MD PhD., is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University, as well as a research affiliate at MIT. Before that, he held research and teaching positions at Yale University and the University of Massachusetts’ Center for Mindfulness. Jud is the founder of the digital therapeutics platform, MindSciences, and author of The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love—why we get hooked and how we can break bad habits.

Website: DrJud.com

Twitter: @judbrewer