Worry as habit and neural networks

Judson Brewer, MD, PhD (“Dr. Jud”), is a New York Times best-selling author and a leading authority on habit change and the science of self-mastery. He serves as the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and as a professor at Brown University. An internationally recognized psychiatrist specializing in mindfulness for addiction, Dr. Jud has developed innovative mindfulness programs for smoking cessation, emotional eating, and anxiety. He has investigated the neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI and EEG neurofeedback. He has trained U.S. Olympic athletes, coaches, and foreign government ministers. His work has been featured on “60 Minutes,” TED (one of the most-viewed talks of 2016 with over 20 million views), The New York Times, Time magazine, Forbes, BBC, NPR, and more.

Today on the show we discuss: why anxiety isn’t random but reinforced through habit loops and how understanding your brain changes everything, how dopamine drives both addiction and worry and why bad habits feel easier to form than good ones, the critical difference between fear worry and anxiety and how confusing them keeps people stuck, why willpower fails under stress and how curiosity becomes the fastest way to break anxiety cycles, how mindfulness works at a neuroscience level without meditation jargon or sitting on a cushion, and why anxiety has become an identity online and what actually helps people reduce it instead of managing it forever.

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