Thrive State Podcast

EPISODE 70: Reclaiming YOU: Learn How Your Mind Works and Work With Your Mind

Episode 70: Dr. Jud Brewer, M.D.

They’d say WE BECOME WHAT WE REPEATEDLY DO.
Our actions make up our habits and our habits make up who we are.

So Healthy habits = Healthy YOU. But admittedly, the everyday stresses and influence of fast-paced life make it even more challenging to adopt and keep healthy habits. And once it becomes a habit, it’s so hard to break away and implement the change you want for your life.

In a chat with Dr. Jud Brewer, New York Times best-selling author, neuroscientist, addiction psychiatrist, and thought leader in the field of habit change, we dissect how the mind works and how we can work the mind to learn and unlearn the things that influence our health and life goals

Dr. Brewer is the director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, where he also serves as an associate professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences in the School of Public Health. He is the executive medical director of behavioral health at Sharecare, a digital health company, and a research affiliate at MIT.

In a chat with Dr. Jud Brewer, New York Times best-selling author, neuroscientist, addiction psychiatrist, and thought leader in the field of habit change, we dissect how the mind works and how we can work the mind to learn and unlearn the things that influence our health and life goals

Dr. Brewer is the director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, where he also serves as an associate professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences in the School of Public Health. He is the executive medical director of behavioral health at Sharecare, a digital health company, and a research affiliate at MIT.

It’s so easy to fell into the spiral trap of overthinking. We think and regret the things of the past and worry too much that we get lost in the track of what to do in the future. This is one recipe of anxiety and, worse, depression. And for some, unhealthy vices or addiction.

So how do we pull out ourselves from these? So how do you reclaim YOU?
Is willpower enough to fight these?
How do we win over worry, anxiety, and depression?

In this latest episode of the Thrive State podcast with Dr. Jud Brewer, discover the power of habits and how you can use it to master your emotional states and deal with anxiety, depression and addiction!

Show notes

3:19

How habits form: As human beings, we develop our neurobiology—which also starts the development of our identity—including good and bad habits. As we evolve, creatures with nervous systems developed a learning process called positive and negative reinforcements. We learn to do two things—to eat and not to be eaten. Our ancestors learned the basics to survive.

4:59

Default Mode Network: a network of brain regions discovered by Dr. Marc Raichle. When people think about themselves a lot, like regretting the things they did in the past or worrying about the future or crave, the Default Mode Network gets activated. It is a way for us to survive. Our negativity bias, and confirmation bias help us survive.

There’s an anatomical connection between the conceptual sense of self and the experiential sense of self. The experiential part of the default mode network is anatomically connected to the hippocampus so there are memory connections. We attribute memories to strong emotional experiences like pain.

9:05

Seeking comfort and avoiding pain is in our subconscious. Overtime, it is who we are becoming. 95-98 percent of life is actual habits, and it’s very adaptive. As we develop habits, it frees up our brain from relearning things, giving our brain the energy to learn new things.

10:45

Habits are not only behavior, but also personality. People can develop anxiety or worry as habits.

13:05

The thinking brain is not nearly as strong as our feeling body. We feel cravings and urges. An emotional state like anxiety is perpetuated through habitual mind states. Feeling of anxiety is not the habit itself, but anxiety can trigger worry thinking, which is a mental behavior.

People don’t usually know that they have a certain mental habit. If they don’t work with it as a habit, they’re never gonna get out of it. Some people benefit from medication but everybody can benefit from learning how their mind works and working with their minds.

15:20

Awareness and mindfulness vs Negative Loop of Anxiety: Fear mechanism drives our fight or flight response. Anxiety is fear about the future. Worrying about the future makes thinking and planning go offline. One way to work with anxiety is from a mechanistic perspective.

Target habitual behavior. Habit change is all about reward value. If you want to change behavior, you have to change the reward value. Pay attention to habits we want to change. Know its reward value and make a better offer and alternative.

Be the master of your habits: 1. Map out the habit loops. 2. Pay attention to what results are not very rewarding, drip the reward value. 3. Bigger better offers we can compare.

24:47

Apps for your habits:
-unwinding anxiety app
-eat right now app
-craving to quit app

25:40

Psychedelics may help quiet down the Default Mode Network and might have some therapeutic potential for anxiety and depression.

30:28

Default Mode Network is a marker for flow.
The general concept is expansion versus contraction. Eperiment on things that make us feel the expansions or contractions: meditation, breath work, walking, hiking.

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