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

by Judson Brewer MD PhD

In other words, meditation falls within the category of ways to train mindfulness. You don’t need to meditate to be mindful, yet meditation helps you become more and more aware of what’s happening right now.

In fact, a 2010 Harvard study showed that we get caught up in thinking (mind-wandering, to be exact) for about 50 percent of our waking lives. That’s a lot of time running on autopilot.

When we are sad or anxious all the time, that sadness or anxiety becomes familiar, a place that we gravitate toward, something like a morning routine or a regular route to work. Any deviation feels unfamiliar, perhaps scary or even anxiety-provoking.

Don’t forget, not all habits are bad. They become bad only when they are tripping us up or slowing us down instead of helping us move forward.

In theory, mindfulness and meditation help us become aware of perseverative thinking. Instead of getting stuck in a groove of repeating the thought pattern, we can see that we are stuck and pull ourselves out of it, creating new and more positive habits along the way.

One of the worries that often drives procrastination is a fear of failure or inadequacy.

Remember, you learn a habit based on how rewarding the behavior is. The more rewarding a behavior is, the stronger the habit.

Reward value has been mapped to a certain part of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). The OFC is a crossroads in the brain where emotional, sensory, and previous behavioral information gets integrated.

The only sustainable way to change a habit is to update its reward value. That’s why it’s called reward-based learning.

Most people start smoking when they are teenagers, so they’ve laid down a strong reward value for cigarettes: being young and cool at school, rebelling against their parents, all of that.

Your brain has lumped together all of the times that you relaxed and ate chips while watching TV and combined them into a single reward value of chips + TV = relaxation.

someone to become the heavyweight’s coach or trainer. The coach helps the heavyweight see that doing the lifting is going to help him become stronger, so he naturally wants to do it for you. Think of awareness as your brain coach.

Then ask yourself, What do I get from this? Don’t ask it in an intellectual way.

thinking doesn’t change behaviors on its own. It isn’t strong enough. Changing a reward value is what gets the heavy lifters on board to do the lifting for you.

In a world of instant gratification, it is pretty easy to get trained into an impatience habit loop:

Trigger: See solution (to anxiety, habit, problem) Behavior: Want problem to change immediately Result: Frustration that it isn’t gone

Repetition works when you are lifting weights and building your biceps; it also works when you are strengthening your mental muscles.

In fact, the best way to train your brain for behavior change is to make your life your mental gym.

Remember: this whole reward-based learning is about laying down context-dependent memory.

Making your everyday life your mental gym also has the advantage of upending the popular “I don’t have time to work out” excuse.

On the other hand, if you have a growth mindset, you can see failure as a learning opportunity instead of as a failure.

I love her phrase enjoy effort. It’s kind of hard to enjoy what is happening when we are clenching our teeth together as we try to force something to change, as we beat our heads against the wall.

Teachers help us learn. When we learn something, we feel good (it is rewarding).

I asked, “If you learned something, does that count as moving backward?”

I love the saying: “Running away from any problem only increases the distance from the solution.”

All experiences move us forward if we are aware and open to learning from them.

“I really want more” and “I really want this to end” activated both times.

Dr. Small’s study showed that wanting more activates the same brain region as wanting less.

we tend not to notice when we’ve reached the tipping point from pleasure to displeasure.

You can bring that same playful attitude to any thoughts and emotions that come up. Instead of fighting against them or pushing them away, you can simply and playfully recognize them as thoughts and emotions.

Thoughts are just mental words and images that come and go and should be viewed with a healthy skepticism.

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).

Facebook is “a social validation feedback loop

You need to find a reward that is more rewarding and doesn’t feed the habit loop through mere substitution of a different behavior.

you might have noticed the same thing and realized that joy is an expansive feeling, while stress and anxiety are constricted ones.

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

(that is, you didn’t know you didn’t know about big lobsters, but when you found out about them, you were intrigued and delighted). Unlike the D-curiosity—which is about destinations—the I-curiosity is more about the journey.

You want to do more of the things that feel good and fewer of the things that feel bad.

Too little uncertainty about something fails to provoke curiosity (of the deprivation type); too much uncertainty provokes anxiety.

When I go mountain biking, willpower helps me get in low gear and “grind” up a hill so I can get to the top.

The prefrontal cortex can tell the limbic system that knives are dangerous, but the limbic system doesn’t respond to reason. It has to feel the pain of the wound to learn its lesson.

“If someone dies, first take your own pulse.”

Loving kindness practice (also known as metta, from the ancient Pali language) can help us start to soften and to accept both others and ourselves as we are.

“Forgiveness is giving up hope of a better past.”

When we’re really interested in learning something, our eyes tend to get big and wide.

When you open your eyes wide in fear or wonder, this signals to your brain that you are in a good place to take in new information. If you narrow your eyes in disgust or anger, this may signal to your brain that you aren’t open to learning right now—instead, you’re primed to act.

As the American writer Ellen Parr put it, “Curiosity is the cure for boredom. There is no cure for curiosity.”

All of the gears move you forward. This is really important. No matter what gear you’re in, you’re moving forward.

The spin and commentary are what turn panic symptoms/attacks into a panic disorder: we start worrying about the next time we will worry; we start getting anxious that we might get anxious.

Panic attacks are just panic attacks (which doesn’t diminish how horrible they can feel at those moments). It is only when we start to get worried about having another attack that this becomes a problem and affects how we live our lives.