Unwinding Anxiety Quotes

“Worrying does not take away tomorrow’s troubles. It takes away today’s peace.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“Notice how fear itself does not equal anxiety. Fear is an adaptive learning mechanism that helps us survive. Anxiety, on the other hand, is maladaptive; our thinking and planning brain spins out of control when it doesn’t have enough information.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“Forgiveness is giving up hope of a better past.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“Watch your thoughts. They become words. Watch your words. They become actions. Watch your actions. They become habits. Watch your habits. They become character.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“RAIN Recognize what is happening right now. Allow/Accept it: Don’t push it away or try to change it. Investigate body sensations, emotions, thoughts: Ask, “Hmm, what is going on in my body right now?” Note what is happening in your experience.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“A problem can’t be solved by the same consciousness that created it.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“To artists, a block of clay says possibility. To travelers, a weekend promises adventure. To the nervous, that lack of structure screams anxiety.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“La ansiedad surge cuando nuestra corteza prefrontal no dispone de suficiente información para predecir el futuro con precisión.”
― Judson Brewer, Deshacer la ansiedad

“mindfulness is about changing our relationship to those thoughts and emotions.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“To hack our brains and break the anxiety cycle, we must become aware of two things: that we are getting anxious and/or panicking and what results from anxiety/panicking.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“The more inaccurate the information your PFC incorporates, the worse the outcome. And as the scenarios become more worst-case (which tends to happen as the PFC starts to go off-line, ironically due to the ramping up of the anxiety), your fight/flight/freeze physiology can get triggered to the point that just thinking about these possible (but highly improbable) situations can make you feel that you’re in danger, even though the danger is only in your head. Voilà! Anxiety.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“Anxiety is born when our PFCs don’t have enough information to accurately predict the future”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“What are my top three habits and everyday addictions? What bad habits and unwanted behaviors do I keep doing, despite adverse consequences?”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“If you really pay careful and close attention—without making any assumptions or relying on past experience to guide you—and you see that a behavior is not rewarding right now, I promise you that you will start to get less excited about doing it again.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“Importantly, like zebras who jump and kick, or dogs who shake their bodies after surviving stressful situations, you need to learn how to safely discharge the excess energy associated with that “I almost died” adrenaline surge, so that it doesn’t lead to chronic or post-traumatic stress and anxiety. Simply talking to someone doesn’t count here; you may really have to do something physical, like shout, shake, dance, or engage in some type of physical exercise.1 Your”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: Train Your Brain to Heal Your Mind?– The New York Times Bestseller

“Hate to also tell you this, but … your smartphone is nothing more than an advertising billboard in your pocket.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: Train Your Brain to Heal Your Mind?– The New York Times Bestseller

“Over the past several decades, T. D. Borkovec, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, wrote a number of scientific papers showing that anxiety can trigger worry. Back in 1983, Borkovec and his colleagues described worry as “a chain of thoughts and images, negatively affect-laden, and relatively uncontrollable,” representing an attempt to engage in mental problem-solving on an issue with an uncertain outcome.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“Remember, the definition of anxiety is “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“From cave people to scientists, our brains have never liked uncertainty. It feels scary. Uncertainty makes it difficult to predict what is going to happen. Both “Am I going to get eaten by a lion?” and “Is my scientific theory going to hold up?” register in roughly the same way in our brains, leading to a particular feeling: an urgency to act.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“This is a crucial moment, so please read this slowly: With the same brain mechanisms as that unnamed cave person, we modern geniuses have gone from learning to survive to literally killing ourselves with these habits. And it’s gotten exponentially worse in the last twenty years.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“Seeing what my patients were going through brought to life the otherwise dry definition of addiction: “continued use despite adverse consequences.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“While anxiety is born from fear, it needs nourishment to grow and flourish. To help you see more clearly what feeds anxiety, you need to know how habits get set up in the first place to help you understand how your mind works.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“It simply takes a little practice so that the bigger, better offers become new habits not just for anxiety, but far beyond.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“Here you can leverage certainty: if you’ve just washed your hands, haven’t been in public, and so forth, the likelihood that you’re going to get sick is pretty low.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“Since our brains will choose more rewarding behaviors simply because they feel better, we can practice replacing old habitual behaviors such as worry with those that are naturally more rewarding.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“Once we are aware of how unrewarding anxiety is, we can then bring in the bigger, better offer, or BBO”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“I start by teaching them how their brains work so that they can understand how uncertainty weakens their brain’s ability to deal with stress, priming it for anxiety when fear hits.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“I can clearly see how I got caught in this habit loop, trying to escape difficult feelings with food, but that ultimately it doesn’t work.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“Like someone who has fallen into a raging river, worry calls to you to help from the shore. It frantically grabs on to your hand or leg, causing you to lose balance and get sucked into the rapids with it, or into a never-ending whirlpool of anxiety where you don’t know which way is up.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

“So, you can see that worry can function as a mental behavior that results in distracting yourself from the worse-feeling anxiety and/or feeling like you have some control because you are (in theory) problem-solving.”
― Judson Brewer, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind