Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

by Judson Brewer MD PhD

Over the next few months, I saw Dave every couple of weeks to check in on his progress and give him tips for areas to focus on as he worked with his anxiety. As of my writing (about six months into the treatment), he has lost ninety-seven pounds (and is still going strong), his liver is no longer pâté, his sleep apnea has resolved, and his blood pressure has returned to normal.

Life is going to throw all sorts of stuff at you, and either you get sucked into creating habits of indulgence, distraction, and numbness through clothes and pills, or you can learn to roll with the punches, even leaning into them as a way to grow (more on this in the next chapter).

Simply mapping out habit loops and seeing their lack of value doesn’t magically unwind years and years of entrenchment. This is where patience comes in. Some habits unwind faster than others

You can probably see the irony here—old habitual behaviors are based on outdated data, yet because they are old, they are familiar; and because they are familiar, we trust them (change is scary).

Like Dave, people step out of habit loops by becoming disenchanted with them, but they have to be aware of the cycle (first gear) and the current reward value of the behavior (second gear) to do this.

Making your everyday life your mental gym also has the advantage of upending the popular “I don’t have time to work out” excuse. When the habit comes up, you have to deal with it anyway, so you might as well take a few seconds to map it out and then bring awareness to the results of the habitual behavior.

Keep going with the habit loop practice. Map out a habit loop (first gear); ask yourself, What do I get from this?; and pay attention to the body sensations, thoughts, and emotions that come as a result of the behavior (second gear). Repeat.

Another correspondent wrote this: I woke up with a bit of anxiety over what had happened the night before, but instead of giving in to it, I got curious about how that felt. This alone seemed to bring the anxiety level down a notch.

Retrospective second gear is retrospectively recalling the facts: just noting what happened and how rewarding it was, without editorializing. That editorial mental chatter just gets in the way and distracts you from accurately recalling the scenario, making it harder for you to engage with the embodied experience that emerges from that recollection.

Dr. Dweck defines fixed mindset as when you believe your basic intelligence and abilities are immutable: you’ve got what you’ve got and have to utilize them the best you can. Growth mindset, on the other hand, is a belief that your abilities can be developed and improved over time.

How do we develop a particular mindset? Here’s a hint: it has to do with reward-based learning. Let’s use a simple example, say, chocolate. If you get stressed (trigger) and you eat chocolate (behavior) and you feel a little better (reward), your brain learns something: if you are stressed, you should eat chocolate to feel better.

So while twenty-one is a generally accepted number (as in, it has been plastered all over the Internet enough times and places that it may outlive anyone reading this book), there’s no real evidence that it’s true.

Habit loops are formed simply and easily: do something, and if it’s rewarding, given a chance (and a trigger), you’ll likely do it again.

Habit formation is a bit more complicated than that figure of twenty-one days would lead us to believe.

“How Habits Are Formed: Modelling Habit Formation in the Real World.” They found a range of 18 to 254 days for behaviors to reach “automaticity.” Not only was this range rather large, but since the study lasted only 12 weeks, it was also completely reliant on mathematical modeling. To boot, only 39 of the 62 study participants showed a “good fit” to the model

Let me repeat that in non-math speak. Basically, when you perform a behavior (e.g., eat a piece of cake), your brain first lays down a memory of how rewarding that behavior is (e.g., cake is yummy!).

Once that reward value is learned, your brain expects the behavior to give you the same amount of reward the next time you do it, based on how rewarding it was in the past. The problem is that your brain expects the value to be the same as in the past (eating cake = eating cake) even if the context is different (eating cake when hungry = eating cake when full).

you habitually eat cake without paying attention to the actual outcome—as in, how rewarding is it right now?—your brain won’t signal that anything is amiss or wrong (no prediction error because cake = cake).

But one thing is pretty clear from all of the math and measurement: paying attention is really important if you want to change a habit. If it’s a habit that you desperately want to break, you can’t tell, force, or wish it to stop, because these likely don’t have an effect on its reward value.

The little engine is fighting great odds: she’s got lots of devilish confidence-squashing thoughts in her head keeping her down. To combat them, she comes up with a mantra that’s got a nice beat to it: “I-think-I-can. I-think-I-can. I-think-I-can. I-think-I-can.”

As she rolls down the hill, she changes her mantra to “I-thought-I-could. I-thought-I-could. I-thought-I-could.”

Actually, there’s something else besides effort that’s happening in this story. The little train is at first focused on the future (I think I can), and then on reliving the past (I thought I could). But what really gets her up the hill is not getting caught up in either. Instead, she’s focusing on the present moment.

Don’t trust your thoughts (especially the shoulds). Thoughts are just mental words and images that come and go and should be viewed with a healthy skepticism. This doesn’t mean that thinking is bad. Remember, planning, problem-solving, and being creative are part of what makes us uniquely human and helps us in life. Thinking trips us up when we get caught up in worry or self-judgmental habit loops (that is to say, shoulding—I should do this, I shouldn’t do that). Those types of thoughts, especially the ones that have strong opinions, are the ones to be on the lookout for, as they just make us feel bad about ourselves.

The more you know how it works, and the more you see that mapping out habit loops and becoming disenchanted with old behaviors helps to move you forward, the more this trust will deepen.

Mapping out your habit loops over and over helps your brain see that you are serious and committed to changing your habits. Paying attention to that cause-and-effect relationship between your habitual behaviors and their results really does change their reward value, and really does help you become disenchanted with habits that aren’t helpful and more enchanted with habits that are.

Because instead of flinging that hand grenade out of the room (by apologizing), I buried it deep inside me, and once in a while I’d privately take the pin out. I couldn’t change what I had done, but I could beat myself up over it. Over and over.

Of course, I did learn from that ill-fated lunchroom moment. I haven’t done anything remotely like that since, but I still carry the scars. And crucially, they are scars that don’t need to be there—in fact, the injury never needed to happen in the first place. Had I apologized, I imagine we both would have nervously laughed my What was I thinking? brain fart off and moved on.

realized that there are two paths with every FGO (fucking growth opportunity) (props to my wife for introducing me to the phrase). Path 1 is the “look and learn” healthy option, where we actually learn and grow. We bow to it as a teacher, looking at what happened and learning from the situation (including our own internal feedback).

Trigger: Make a “mistake.” Behavior: Look and learn. Result: Don’t repeat said “mistake”; grow from the experience and move on.

Path 2 is the “review and regret” option, a much less healthy one, where we get stuck in a self-judgment habit loop and don’t really learn anything. We ignore or suppress the growth opportunity, focusing instead on our self-imposed self-flagellation.

Trigger: Make a “mistake.” Behavior: Judge or beat ourselves up (i.e., pick the scab off the wound). Result: Old wound is now fresh and bleeding again.

A while ago I stumbled on the saying “Forgiveness is giving up hope of a better past.” It’s taken a while, but assisted by my own mindfulness practice and by the knowledge of how unrewarding “review and regret” habit loops are, I’ve forgiven myself, which opened the doorway so that I could really learn from that lunchroom FGO.

Trigger: Remember lunchroom brain fart. Behavior: Notice clenching in my stomach and self-judgment start to play in my head. Give myself a mental hug and remind myself that I can’t change what I did ...

But enough about me—now it’s your turn to reflect on your self-judgment habit loops. Map them out. By mapping them, you will start to be able to step out of those old habit loops and instead look and learn, not from what has happened in the past, but from how you meet yourself in the present, right at the moment when those self-judgment habit ...

Can you look at the self-judgment habit loops that you mapped out (first gear) and shift into second gear, asking yourself: “What do I get from beating myself up? Can I see more clearly that self-flagellation perpetuates the process? Can I see now that paying attention to ho...

Yet not all curiosity is created equal. And curiosity wasn’t always seen as a good thing. You could argue that curiosity is what got Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

Curiosity Comes in Two Flavors: Pleasant and Unpleasant

In 2006, the psychologists Jordan Litman and Paul Silvia itemized two main “flavors” of curiosity, which they dubbed I-curiosity and D-curiosity. The I in I-curiosity stands for interest, the pleasurable aspects of the hunger for knowledge, while the D in D-curiosity stands for deprivation, the idea that if we have a gap in information, we go into a restless, unpleasant, need-to-know state.

Think of what it feels like to be stuck in traffic without knowing how long the backup will last. Once you look at Google maps or Waze and see how long the delay might be, you feel a lot better. The amount of time you have to wait hasn’t changed a bit, but your anxiety has been relieved simply by knowing how long you will be stuck.

The relief of the negative state, the scratching of the itch, is in itself rewarding. That’s why TV shows have cliffhangers—to drive deprivation curiosity.

Interest curiosity is like diving into an Internet search and realizing hours later that you’ve learned a whole bunch of stuff and your thirst for knowledge has been quenched.

The idea that curiosity aligns with reward-based learning has been supported by a growing body of research.

At peak curiosity, dopamine pathways in the brain fired with increased intensity and there was a stronger connection between reward centers and the hippocampus, a brain area associated with memory. Peak curiosity primed students to remember more information—not just the answers to their trivia questions.

This is critical for two reasons. First, with interest curiosity, you don’t need something outside of yourself to get a reward—the curiosity is rewarding in and of itself—and second, because of its inherent nature, it doesn’t run out.

Put another way, curiosity seems to follow a Goldilocks rule with regard to information. Too little uncertainty about something fails to provoke curiosity (of the deprivation type); too much uncertainty provokes anxiety. Finding the sweet spot of curiosity requires staying atop the inverted U-shaped curve and having just enough information to sustain curiosity.

And yes, this links back to Carol Dweck’s growth mindset—being open and interested in learning from our experiences rather than closing down at the first sign of “failure” (and sliding off the inverted U into a lack of interest or frustration).

Hopefully you’ve got enough conceptual information at this point to put you in the sweet spot to get even more curious about your own experience. This will allow you to move out of trying to think your way out of anxiety and into behavior change, and instead allow you to harness the power of curiosity, tapping into it as an inner resource that drives itself (because it is rewarding).

When they felt frustrated or stuck during a meditation practice, hmm seemed to help them explore what that felt like in their body and mind (instead of trying to fix or change it). When they got caught in a habit loop of worry or self-judgment, hmm could help them shift into third gear and step out of the loop.

Curiosity also helped them stay present in a nonjudgmental way to whatever their experience was. It proved to be stronger than any type of force or willpower they (habitually) used, and also brought a playful, even joyful attitude to the meditation retreat. (It is hard to take yourself too seriously when you are hmm-ing all day long.)

Curiosity (the interest type, not the deprivation type) fits all of the third-gear conditions perfectly: it is an internally based (and thus always available) BBO behavior that enables us to step out of our old habit loops in a sustainable way.