Dr. Judson Brewer on Using Mindfulness to Break Bad Habits for Good
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Welcome everyone. My name is Sean Fargo, founder of Mindfulness Exercises. Today, the honor speaking with Jud Brewer or Dr. Jud as he's commonly known. Dr. Jud is the New York Times bestselling author and thought leader in the field of habit change and the science of self-mastery. He's written several bestselling books including The Hunger Habit: Why We Eat When We're Not Hungry,

and how to stop. Also, Unwinding Anxiety, new science shows how to break the cycles of worry and fear to heal your mind. He also wrote The Craving Mind, from cigarettes to smartphones to love, why we get hooked and how we can break anxiety.

bad habits. Dr. Judd has been a guest teacher for a mindfulness teacher certification program giving workshops habit change and anxiety and he shares some of the same mindfulness and meditation teachers that I have in my life. He's a dedicated mindfulness meditator and practitioner who

really is a pioneer in learning the science of habit change, the craving mind to help us to live with more peace and ease, non-clinging so that we can feel more balanced and have more choice in our lives. He's an excellent teacher. He has a TED Talk online, has many, many, many millions of views. He's very personable.

kind and it's a real honor to speak with you again Judd. For those of you who may not know, he's very passionate about understanding how our brains work, how to use that knowledge to help us to make deep and permanent change in our lives with the goal of reducing suffering in the world at large. He's the Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center, where he also serves

as an associate professor in behavioral and social sciences at the School of Public Health and Psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University. And also he's a research affiliate at MIT. Previously, Dr. Judd held research and teaching positions at Yale and the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness. I highly encourage everyone listening to check out

his website, drjudd.com, and to check out his books wherever you buy your books. And so, Dr. Judd, welcome to the podcast. It's an honor to see you again, and I'm looking forward to diving into your story a little bit. So welcome. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. I'd like to start by learning a little bit about your personal journey with mindfulness and or meditation. What started your journey with mindfulness? Long story short, I was pretty stressed out at the end of college and the beginning of medical school. And I remember the summer before starting medical school, somehow John Kabat-Zinn's Full Catastrophe Living book landed in my lap. I read some of that and

Started listening to the cassette tapes of guided meditations my first day of medical school. It felt like a new chapter in my life and seemed like this was something new to try. Full disclosure, I was falling asleep for probably six months. That was for six months of listening to those meditations. But after a while...

you know, started to get getting the hang of it. And one thing I realized was that medical school isn't teaching me some of these fundamental truths about the mind. And so as I went through my MD PhD program, you know, over the next eight years, really got deeper and deeper into the practice and studying the Buddhist psychology underlying all of these practices.

when I went back into the wards at the end of medical school, started hearing my patients using very similar language around suffering. And at that time, realized that it was, for me, it was really important to combine my personal experience in exploration of Buddhism

with my career. And so I shifted gears from doing molecular biology research to studying neuroscience and clinical trials and during residency shifted my entire career, you know, my research focus, my career to studying mindfulness. So just bringing that personal understanding into

into the research sphere. Yeah. And what a fortuitous time to have been, you know, in Massachusetts at that time when when Jon Kabat-Zinn is really providing a lot of research to the effects of mindfulness. Had you met him or were you just kind of aware of the book that was released and what drew you to the book? I don't remember what drew me to the book. I can't remember how it landed in my lap, honestly, but

When I was in residency, so this is about 10 years after I'd started practicing myself. I was at Yale at the time and I remember getting a research week where we could go and do, you know, go to a conference or something. And so I ended up going down to Washington, D.C., where there was a one of those mind and life conversations with the Dalai Lama. And

And I was really blown away by how people were moving this research into the mainstream. I've been told by people, yeah, it's going to kill my career if I studied this stuff because it was very early days. And even though John Kabat-Zinn had been doing research since the 70s, you know, this is the early aughts, really hadn't taken off much. And there were very few

or even programs, you know, there were very few centers. For example, there was the Center for Mindfulness at UMass, Richie Davidson's group at Wisconsin,

Wisconsin, you know, was a pretty established group, but that was about it. There wasn't much going on. So I was really just trying to explore whether this was viable. And I remember talking to one of the people, I think, who had been on stage with the Dalai Lama, John Teasdale. This was just a couple of years after their their real their landmark study around mindfulness based cognitive therapy for depression had come out and they were just in the process of publishing the replication. And I

I asked him, you know, I was like, can I do this? He said, yes. You know, this is, you go for it. And so I remember saying, okay, I'm, you know, I'm all in. Never looked back. You know, I figured I'd rather fail at something that I was passionate about that

then succeed you know doing the usual stuff that that I've been doing that many other people could do as well or better than I could sure it's really fascinating when you started practicing mindfulness you maybe have jokingly said that you were kind of falling asleep a lot and I'm sure you were super busy with your schoolwork and you know just ramping up your career but what kinds of

practices spoke to you the most or which ones do you remember providing a lot of juice for you personally when you were starting out? It's been a while. What I do remember is during boring medical school lectures that I would find myself

going to breath awareness practice. And I remember thinking, well, at least I'm not going to completely waste my time in this lecture because I'm, you know, I'm at least doing some mindfulness practice. So that was, that was something that was helpful early on. Although ironically, I remember also, geez,

I don't remember when this was, maybe my second year of medical school. I went on my first seven day silent meditation retreat. It was led by a monk, Bhante Gunaratne, who has a center in West Virginia, I believe. And I remember by day three crying uncontrollably on the shoulder of the retreat manager because I was thinking, you know, I can get into medical school, but I can't pay attention to my breath. So I felt like there was something wrong with me.

Yet, you know, it probably took me 10 years to realize that I was taking the Western, you know, grit your teeth and try to force it approach to meditation, which is the opposite of what it's about. Yeah. And for context, Bante Gunaratani, some people call him, wrote Mindfulness in Plain English, which is a seminal book for a lot of Westerners and highly recommended to anyone listening for

accessible approach to mindfulness and how to weave it into daily life. It's really cool that you did a retreat with him. And yeah, day three is usually when the tears start shedding for a lot of people. For a lot of you listening, you know, I think it's really helpful to hear from, you know, Dr. Judd that, you know, a lot of us can treat meditation as a to do or a chore, you know,

a way to fix ourselves, quote unquote fix. But, you know, we can be mindful of that. You know, how are we treating mindfulness? Can we find some ease in it? You know, treat it as a journey and not an outcome. And we all have our challenges with meditation. The fact that you had a retreat manager to, you know, cry on their shoulder speaks to the need for community, the need for

others who can support us on our path and we can then, you know, support others on their path as well. Thanks for sharing that. I'm curious in a professional context, if you had ideas in the beginning about what kinds of practices may have the most potential in say a medical context or a secular clinical context for, you know, improving people's lives. Did you have a sense of a

a practice or a discipline that you thought had the most potential in the early days? Well, I was pretty, I was more naive even than I am now. And so having been mostly steeped in the Theravada tradition, which I think,

spoke to me because it is a very kind of a scientific approach to experience. It's interesting. There are these different schools that probably resonate with different people based on their personality or their conditioning. And this is the one that spoke to me the most in our first randomized controlled. Well, actually, this is even we did a couple of randomized controlled trials where it brought in some of the practices that I had learned and seemed to have

you know, have applicability to people with addictions. So, for example, in our first study, we worked with people who are addicted to alcohol and cocaine and, you know, brought in breath awareness, brought in a rain practice. This is this popularized by Tara Brock, you know, recognize, you know, allow and investigate and and

It has has morphed over the years, but back then it was described as non-identification. It was actually Michelle McDonald, I think, who first put this acronym out. And so we we brought that into some of our studies, also brought in loving kindness practice, which is really critical for people with addiction, where there's a lot of self-judgment, a lot of societal judgment.

And I remember analyzing our first smoking study where we had brought these practices in and I was thinking, oh, these formal meditation practices are going to be most helpful. And so we analyzed formal versus informal mindfulness practices, and it turned out that both were helpful, but most helpful were these informal practices. And it really kind of it was a great humbling reminder that I can go in

with certain ideas, but really it's about me setting up experiments that let the data speak, let the data points speak for themselves. And it was really helpful because it opened up my eyes to what I was seeing clinically, but may not have been paying attention to enough, which is, you know, I had a lot of patients, whether it was, I was working at the VA hospital at the time,

So who were really, you know, they weren't set up to have some formal meditation practice, but they could learn to do an informal practice. And here, you know, I look to what a lot of Tibetan teachers talk about these short moments many times as a way to set up a habit. And that's what our data showed was, you know,

giving people skills that they could use in the moment that they had a craving for a cigarette, for example. Those skills were the ones that drove the biggest reductions in cigarette smoking, much more than formal mindfulness practices did. - And when you're saying informal practices,

You know, earlier you referenced, say, loving kindness practice, RAIN, which some people may describe those as more like heart-centered practices. Are you saying that the informal practices were the heart practices or were they something different? It's a good question. So the RAIN practice was one of these informal practices that people could bring into the moment that they had a craving. The more formal practices were...

things that we had set up you know and you can do loving kindness informally of course but we had set it up as you know a certain number of minutes that people would sit down and meditate and practice going through these phrases much like the commentaries suggest also breath awareness you know body scan those are more we just categorize those as formal practices

But our operational definition was just that somebody would sit down or lie down or be in a sequestered environment to do them as compared to doing the practice on the fly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Rain practice that, as you said, Tara Brock has popularized has been around for decades.

quite a while. You mentioned that, you know, the breakdown of it and things, a couple of the letters have morphed over the years a little bit, but generally speaking, you know, recognizing what's here, maybe just pausing and, you know, noting what's happening, you know, physically, mentally, emotionally. I'm the A,

I've heard, you know, allow or accept different A's, but not fighting it, not resisting it, not judging it, but rather just kind of being able to be with it, maybe with some sense of gentleness. I investigate, you know, unpacking it, sensing deeper, maybe asking some questions. Some people might journal. And then the N is, you know, understanding.

You can take your pick, but I think early on it was non-identify with the emotion or the experience. It's not all of who I am, you know, I'm more than this or, you know, I'm not this thing right now, which is always changing anyway. But some people like nourish ourselves with kindness or, you know, attention or something that will help us to find comfort or ease or safety in that moment.

And then nurture, I think, is another one that some people like, which is very comparable, in my opinion, to nourish. Well, I'll just add there. Sorry to jump in. The one thing that we've used, and this was, I pilot tested this in my clinic, and I'd also been doing some practice in this tradition at Bacardi.

myself at the time. So the Mahasi Sayadaw practice of noting also starts with N. And so we played with that and found that that was very accessible to people of any background, of any education level.

Etc. And it was really helpful for, you know, that the noting really literally helps people not identify with their experience. If you think of the physics, they talk about the observer effect or in psychology, they talk about the Hawthorne effect by observing, you're going to affect the results. And I think that noting practice is a really good way to.

of learning how to do that very quickly, where by noting our experience, we're less identified with it. And that can be really helpful for anyone ranging from struggling with addiction to anxiety. Wow. I want to unpack that with you, say, in a clinical way.

in noting, you know, do you note emotions, physical sensations, changing nature of things. But for context, for some of the listeners, I think it might be helpful to hear that the noting practice has been around for centuries or millennia, I think. I think Mahasi was not the first, but I believe it's been around for a long time and is, you know, one of the early practices brought to the West. Mahasi came over and taught it and,

influenced people like Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, who are, I believe, some of Judd's teachers and some of my teachers. And now there's a new wave of research, and maybe you can speak to this, about social noting practice around not just noting internally, but noting interpersonally, you know, noting your experience in real time out loud.

and sharing it with others. I'd love to hear what types of noting practices have you found helpful in terms of noting physical or emotional or mental thoughts and how that plays with, say, addiction and the easing of cravings. It's a great question. As a place to start, I have people...

start with their five senses plus thinking. And what I found is that it's it's easy to get caught up in the procedure when that doesn't need to happen. So if one way to bypass that is to have people just note, you know, thinking, feeling if they're feeling physical sensations, seeing, hearing, tasting, you know, et cetera. So there are five senses plus thinking until they get the hang of just noting, you know, it's like, oh, seeing,

hearing, feeling, thinking, that type of thing. I've also found that I guess this may be a form of social noting. I've taught

my patients to do ping pong noting. I don't remember who I learned this from originally, but basically two people who are basically just holding each other accountable. So one person notes, then the other person notes, then one person notes. And it doesn't matter what they're noting. It just matters that each one is, is the witness there and holding the space to, to practice noting together. So for example, couples can do it when they're, your families can do it when they're driving, you know, if they're both in the front seats of the

car. Patients have pointed out how it's helpful for if they get nervous with their partner driving, you know, and they both do noting practice together. It also helps somebody driving pay attention to what's happening in their experience, which is really helpful, you know, because often people zone out when they're driving, you know, that can be very helpful. Now, the

From an addiction standpoint, I also find that it's extremely helpful with cravings. And I still remember, I think I wrote about this in The Craving Mind, but I remember a patient at the VA hospital who walked into my clinic one day and he walked into my office and he said, Doc, I feel like my head's going to explode if I don't smoke. No.

never experienced chief complaint of head exploding before. So I went to my, you know, my fallback, my habit, which is to my whiteboard. It was right, you know, in my office. And I asked him to start noting, you know, I didn't say, you know, here's noting practice. I don't think he knew it at the time. I just said, Hey, just, just describe what your experience is like, you know? And I gave him the parameters, like, does it, does it feel like tension or tightness and is it

Is the craving getting stronger or weaker? And so I just drew as he noted, you know, he's like, oh, there's tightness, there's tension, there's burning. So it is getting stronger. And so I drew this arrow in vertical upward on the board. And then at some point it kind of peaked and started.

And at that point, his eyes got really wide. And I asked him what he just noticed. And he said, you know, I always smoke before the thing peaks because I feel like my head's going to explode. So I make sure my head doesn't explode. He said, this is the first time I noticed that.

that these cravings come and go on their own. And that happened just spontaneously through us, you know, going through this noting practice together where he was noting his experience and I was mapping it out on the board for him to realize, oh, these are not me. This is, you know, this is not self. This is impermanent. It comes and goes. And the noting practice helped him really be with that experience rather than be identified with it. So powerful. Yeah, I think...

You know, you mentioned earlier how what we're learning in physics can, say, validate what happens in these, say, Theravadan practices. You know, a lot of Theravadan monks and deep practitioners were former physics majors in college. And a lot of Theravada Buddhism is just about understanding the mind, right?

It's really all it is. It's really not that belief base. It's just being curious about what's actually happening. And I think that lends itself well to people in medicine and working with mental health, that the goal is the same, just to understand the mind and how we can be happy, basically live with less suffering. And didn't the wasn't the Buddha famous for saying maybe even on his deathbed, you know, don't believe.

what I say, you know, go and see for yourself. You're very evidence-based. Collect your own data. That's right. Yeah. Be a lamp unto yourself. Yeah. Judd, I'm curious how the transition, by the way, I think the way that you helped that person whose head was going to explode was brilliant. It was, you know, you met him where he was and you worked with him, you know, in a very kind, just

you know, accessible way. You didn't say, okay, now sit in an erect posture and we're going to do a noting practice. And, you know, here are the steps. You just asked him, how does it feel? And it was a very organic way of teaching and inviting him to be present for his experience in a kind way. And so I'm, I'm curious how the transition went for you from

practitioner, researcher to teacher in teaching a lot of these practices. What was that transition like and how did it go? It was probably very gradual. I haven't really, this is a great question. I haven't really thought about it much so we can kind of unpack it in real time.

I remember certainly trying out some of these practices with my clinic patients and my infinite gratitude to my patients for being my guinea pigs for like, oh, let me try this practice. Let me try this, you know.

And I would use as a guideline, you know, if they remembered it and practiced it before their next visit, then it was worth exploring. And if they came back looking glassy-eyed when I said, how'd that go? Then I knew that that wasn't something that was going to be, you know, worth exploring. So...

I kind of pilot tested a lot of these practices for accessibility based on my VA patients. So I guess that was a piece of mini, you know, micro moments of teaching. And I remember I was still at Yale at the time and I was talking to Joseph about, you know, I think somebody had asked me to start a meditation group or something on campus. He said, oh, yeah, yeah, I think, you know, I think you should do that. And I was like, I don't know if I, you know,

if I'm qualified enough to do this, I'd only been practicing about 12 or so years at the time. I went ahead and he said, just don't, he and several other teachers all independently said the same thing, which is just don't teach outside of your direct experience and you'll be fine.

which is gold, right? So the best thing a doctor can say is, I don't know if they don't know. And I think that also translated into teaching for me. It was like, if I didn't know, okay, that sounds interesting. I don't know from my own direct experience, but that was really helpful. I learned later, Joseph jokingly said that he had met some law students or something at Yale and he was like, wow, those students really need a lot of help. So he kind of

threw me into this crucible of there could be a lot of pressure on campus, let's just say. And so it was a great proving ground for kind of cutting my teeth on teaching.

And I remember I would the group started out as a Sunday night group at the one of the chapels. And, you know, I'd spend the week exploring a topic and then, you know, write write up kind of a short talk, you know, during Sunday, kind of like a sermon, so to speak. But it was really not, you know, there are parallels, but all the differences. And then, you know, the group just grew exponentially.

And, you know, I learned a lot from that sangha and also, you know, reminded me of a saying I learned in my psychiatry training, which is, you know, your patients vote with their feet. So if you're if you're doing something that's working, people will continue to come back. And if not, you know, it's

It's not going to work out. And so there was something there where there was a mutuality around this need for Sangha, for community, and then being able to speak a language, you know, the science and bring it together with direct experience and practice and even stories from my clinic that seemed to, you know, seem to be a good mixture, a good formula for Sangha.

know bringing you know my my first experiences of learning how to teach and then it the more i could in all my research is based on like testing these buddhist theories like let's test this one oh yeah this is true too you know so the more i could bring the science in the more i could bring together the language of science with the language of practice and also the practice helped

what questions I would ask scientifically. So kept the questions very pragmatic.

You know, I had a research mentor. His name was Bruce Roundsville. He used to say, so what? You know, and he was a he's a psychiatrist, practicing psychiatrist, as well as a really brilliant researcher. And that question always kept me grounded in like, how is this going to help people? And I thought that was very helpful as well. And so bringing all of those together, you know, I think that really informed, you know, my research, my

My own personal practice informed the teaching, but the teaching also fed back and informed the research and my clinical practice. Beautiful. You know, you help a lot of people with addiction and unwinding anxiety. And there's, you know, obvious parallels with

with Buddhism there, did you kind of choose addiction because of its parallel with Buddhism in terms of, you know, calming the craving mind just, you know, directly from the, you know, Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path? Was it because of that correlation or was there something say personal or some other reason why you kind of chose addiction as one of your specialties?

I'd like to say that I chose it, but I don't think that's true. I think it shows me. And what I mean by that is when I, one, started to see how Buddhism was describing addiction so much more clearly and pragmatically than what I'd been learning in the Western science med school residency, you know, I think.

they gave it valiant efforts but really had ignored the you know this fundamental science that had been there for 2500 years and so kind of seeing these parallels and asking these questions like wait why don't we why are we reinventing stuff or trying to you know discover new things when it might already be here that was really bolstering for me but also just the way that my patients spoke i i could really relate to that and

On top of that, you know, there's people with addiction really suffer a lot. I mean, we all have addictions of some sort, yet the societal judgment and stigma that comes with addiction and self-judgment, you know, there's a lot of suffering there. And so I could, you know, really resonate with that and felt moved to help in whatever way I could. And on top of that, it helped me discover how many things I was addicted to myself and

And so it just seemed like a commonality. We were all going to link arms and march forward together. That's for sure. Yeah. I, you know, to this day, I find myself noticing addictive tendencies arising, you know, the flavor of the week or the flavor of the month. But still, it's that sort of underlying sense of dis-ease or inability to be with what's

kind of troubling me either consciously or subconsciously, you know, past traumas that haven't been fully processed. And, you know, we all have our stuff. And I think that I agree with you. I think we all have addictions to something, whether they're stigmatized or not, you know, Netflix,

wine, certain patterns that we have that don't quite serve us very well. I think that addiction is not just reserved for the people who, you know, drink a bottle of Jack Daniels every day. It's something we can all look at internally and find compassion for ourselves and for others, because we do have this shared challenge. And I think it just, it speaks to that need for

care for ourselves and for others because life is hard and we all we all need help yes well and I think there can be you know one thing that I realized in doing the research for my for the craving mind my first book was

was realizing just the subtle levels that addiction can manifest whether it's distraction whether it's addiction to thinking you know boy when i would go on long silent retreat my my brain would perk up and say oh i get to think you know and it took me a while to realize that addictive pattern but even addiction to you know romantic relationships if you look at certain

you know, quote unquote personality disorders, you can see even borderline personality disorder as being an unstable, you know, the definitions, the unstable sense of self where someone could be addicted to stability, for example, where they've gotten intermittent reinforcement around stable relationships in their lives or look at narcissistic personality disorder, which is on the opposite end of that spectrum where they're so enamored with themselves. You know, they they

create their environment to be surrounded by people who are going to give them praise and feed, you know, kind of feed that addiction. So there are so many ways that we can be subtly addicted to ourselves, you know, and I think you would even highlighted this, the self at a very fundamental level.

is an addiction. Yeah. It causes suffering. Totally. Yeah. And conceit is one of the very final fetters to unwind before enlightenment, that sense of me or I am-ness. I remember I was on retreat once with Guy Armstrong, senior teacher at IMS in Spirit Rock. And I

I had been like furiously journaling and thinking about Buddhism on retreat. And Guy Armstrong said, oh, those are the golden handcuffs. You think that this is forward leaning and wholesome and there's nothing inherently wrong with it per se, but it's so...

attractive, you know, golden, that like, it feels good. And it feels wholesome. But it's also handcuffing you away from the present moment. Like you're, you're attached to thinking you're addicted to this thinking and contemplating that, you know, on retreat, how much have you actually been present? How much have you actually been here on retreat versus, you

you know, thinking about, you know, metta practice, you know, you're thinking a lot. And so these are the golden handcuffs. And it just speaks to this nuance of these layers of kind of grasping onto things at the sake of actually being here now and noticing what's here in the present moment. Jed, I'd love to segue into what you're teaching about now, what you're working on now, and

I believe you've, did you start a nonprofit around anxiety and what's that about? Yes. So the, we, we, I co-founded a nonprofit called Mindshift Recovery. Anybody can check it out. The website's mindshiftrecovery.org and there's a free app called Mindshift Recovery. And

And this was born out of kind of 20 years of waiting, of research, of practice, of clinical work. And what I mean by that is my lab for the last 15 years has been developing and studying digital therapeutics. So we created apps for smoking, for eating, for anxiety. It never felt comfortable from an ethical standpoint of creating an

app for addiction. It just felt like that was I needed to provide more than just an app. Over the years, we've been exploring a flipped classroom model where we pair an app with in-person or virtual support. And we've been training peer mentors, people who have gone through our Mind Shift Recovery methodology, which is based on this

you know, now two decades of research where people can learn the methodology through an app so that the mentors aren't expected to be teachers. They're not expected to be therapists, all these things that often are laid at the feet of

sponsors, for example, in 12-step programs where they're just not trained for a lot of this. And I've seen that lead, unfortunately, to a lot of problems. So here we can provide a very evidence-based curriculum, not expect peer mentors to teach that curriculum, but we can have peer mentors support each other through their own experience, right? Don't teach beyond your own experience.

And importantly, we have very clear and very few rules for them. One is don't give advice. Two is speak from your own experience. That gives a lot of guardrails, even those two rules. We have a lot of guidelines, but only two rules. And those rules really help keep folks from inadvertently getting into trouble where they might be going beyond what their own expectations

expertise is. If you don't go beyond your own experience, you're not going beyond your own expertise. And so we found that this can be a way to support people at scale. Mostly we're supported by donations, but also are working on government grants and things like that to support the programs. But the idea is to provide this free of cost because there are a lot of predatory

addiction, quote unquote, services out there whose business models are based on people not getting better because if they come back to the rehab, then they get more money. And so I've also seen that with a lot of patients firsthand. We really want to provide something that has enough of a foundation and has enough support that is really going to help people and not create harm. As a physician, I took a

oof, first do no harm. So it took 20 years or so before I felt comfortable putting this together. And now we've got something where we're getting some very nice proof of concept. And this is for any type of addiction. So typically people think of chemical addictions, you know, cocaine, alcohol,

fentanyl, whatever, but we're actually able to extend this because it is a universal process to porn addiction, to people getting being addicted to their news feeds, to even anxiety. We don't have time to talk about that today, but the anxiety was a whole

interesting avenue of research that I didn't even know anxiety could be, you know, could become habitual where people get literally, as some of my patients described it, they get addicted to worrying. And this can be we can learn how this process works and learn how to work it. This is the whole basis for the Unwinding Anxiety book. But we can package all of this together in this free mind shift recovery app.

and then have people get peer support as well. Beautiful. I'm at mindshiftrecovery.org right now learning about it. And I recommend that everyone listening or watching checks it out. We'll put links in the show notes and the descriptions. It looks like the MindShift method offers a three-step approach. Could you just quickly outline what that is and how the app sort of delivers that? I'd be happy to. So

The more we learn, the more things get condensed and simplified. You know, if something finds that it is multiplying because you have to keep adding in clauses or, you know, caveats, then you probably haven't gotten at a fundamental truth. You know, I love this about Buddhism. There are four noble truths. There aren't 14 or 40 or 400, you know.

And based on that, you know, the first we we call this gear, the gears process, because I like to ride bicycles. So you can think of gears as, you know, in a car or bicycle, you shift into first gear to get going. And that first gear is just recognizing what the habitual behavior is. You know, it can be as simple as that. And in fact, we have a mapping technique.

process that people can get through mind shift recovery or there's a we got a URL called map my habit dot com. So if somebody wants to download a free PDF to map their habits, they can. That's an easier one to remember. So that's the first step really is just mapping out our habit loops. The second step is looking at is creating

cribbed straight from the Pali canon, where we have people ask a simple question, what am I getting from this? And this comes from where the Buddha talked about exploring gratification to its end. You know, he talked about his enlightenment. He said, it wasn't until I explored gratification to its end that knowledge and vision arose.

you know, that he basically got enlightened. And the idea there is, if you look at it from a modern neuroscience standpoint, if something is rewarding to our brain, we're going to keep doing it. If it's not, we're going to stop doing it. And the Buddha described this in terms of disenchantment. So if we explore gratification to its end and something's not helpful for us, we're going to become disenchanted.

but we have to pay attention. That's where awareness is critical. And so that's the second step, where I just have people ask, what am I getting from this? And feel into their direct experience, not just think about it. And then the third step is related to the second. So if we become disenchanted with our old,

habits that gives room to become enchanted with new habits, which can simply be stepping out of the old one. And on top of that, finding ones that are more rewarding. So, for example, if we have an addiction of any type, we can notice that gravy and get curious about it, just like we spoke about with my patient.

who head was going to explode, right? He got curious about his craving and he could notice that it passes. So what feels better, being curious or having a craving? And it's a no brainer. So we can train people in these, what I call these bigger, better offers where they can learn to become more curious as the new habit.

On top of this, if somebody has a habit of judging themselves, they can compare that to what it feels like to being kind to themselves. Again, no brainer, kindness feels better. So that's the third step is just finding these bigger, better offers and then comparing them so that our brain knows what to do. It's just a matter of bringing awareness to it.

and to the process. - Beautiful. Yeah, you're like just inviting people to notice for themselves, what is your addiction or your habit? Where does that lead? And where is a bigger, better offer? I don't mean to butcher it, but very simple. And we all need help doing these types of things. I'm looking at your app right now and it looks really cool. I'm gonna share this with our community. I love the premise behind it. It looks like there's some live calls that are offered.

lot of, yeah, like a step-by-step journey to help people through this. Yeah. For everyone listening, please check out mindshiftrecovery.org, whether you want to use it for yourself, with your clients, your students, or your colleagues. I think this seems like a very accessible approach to wellness. Dr. Judd, thank you so much for your time today. It's really a pleasure to reconnect with you. I hope to speak with you again at some point, but I'm a big fan of your work and

how you're going about things, really teaching with integrity and just being very vulnerable and authentic about your journey. It's really neat to listen to your journey of meeting mindfulness practice and then over time using it to help millions and millions of people in various ways. So it's an honor to speak with you again. Thank you so much for everything you're doing. Do you have any final words that you'd like to share before we wrap up?

each other well. I guess I would just say don't underestimate the power of curiosity and kindness. Beautiful. All right. Well, thank you, Dr. Judd. Thank you everyone for listening and watching and wish you well. Thank you.