Jud Brewer, Guest:
This is actually key for mindfulness in general, is I think of it this way, the feeling body is much stronger than the thinking brain.
Elizabeth Koch, Founder, Unlikely Collaborators:
Hi. I'm Elizabeth Koch. We all live inside our own personal private perception box built by our genes and the physical, social, and cultural environment in which we were born and raised. In this podcast, we explore how although the walls of this mental box are always present, they can expand in states like awe, wonder, and curiosity. Or contract and response to anxiety, fear, and anger. I'd like to introduce our esteemed hosts to incredible and distinguished minds. Dr. Heather Berlin, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. And Dr. Christof Koch, chief scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current meritorious investigator and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Welcome to the Science of Perception Box.
Heather Berlin, Podcast Co-host:
Hi, everyone, and welcome to Science of Perception Box. I'm your co-host, Dr. Heather Berlin.
Christof Koch, Podcast Co-host:
And I'm Dr. Christof Koch.
Heather Berlin:
Welcome to the show. Every week we feature an aspect of the Science of Perception Box highlighting the latest research together with our expert guests. This week on Science of Perception Box, we're going to explore mindfulness, anxiety, and how that works in the brain. But before we bring on our esteemed guest, I wanted to ask you, Christof, how do you manage your anxiety?
Christof Koch:
I go running. I talk to my dog a lot. I take a hot bath.
Heather Berlin:
What does your dog say to you?
Christof Koch:
He communicates a lot to me. Whenever there's something upsetting happening, I can just talk to him and he calms me down. He's a Bernese Mountain dog.
Heather Berlin:
Is there something about that particular breed that's anxiety reducing?
Christof Koch:
They're big, they're fat, they're gigantic teddy bears.
Heather Berlin:
So an oxytocin is released.
Christof Koch:
Oxytocin is released, yes. I think it's always fine.
Heather Berlin:
There's people too. You can also hug people.
Christof Koch:
You can also hug people. But dogs are different. Heather, so are you anxiety prone?
Heather Berlin:
I do tend to be higher on the dimension of anxiety than say the average person. But although I travel a lot and I always have my first night in a new hotel room, I really have trouble sleeping. I've read this actually a common phenomenon because your fight or flight response is sort of triggered. It's a new environment.
Christof Koch:
Kicks in.
Heather Berlin:
You're hypervigilant. Anything could happen. And so I always have trouble the first night in a new hotel.
Christof Koch:
Maybe you should bring a dog along, particularly on the first night.
Heather Berlin:
Can I borrow Felix?
Christof Koch:
Mr. Felix?
Heather Berlin:
Mr. Felix, sorry. So let's introduce our guest, and I can't think of a more qualified and interesting academic to bring to the show to explore this topic. So today we're thrilled to have Dr. Judson Brewer with us. He studies the neural mechanisms of mindfulness, and he's the director of Research and Innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center where he also is an associate professor at Brown School of Medicine. He's a leading expert in the science of self-mastery. He's the guy you basically want to talk to if you want to kick a bad habit like smoking or toxic, whatever. He's authored, Unwinding Anxiety and the Craving Mind. And his latest book, The Hunger Habit is available for pre-order now. So welcome to the podcast, Jud.
Jud Brewer:
Thanks for having me.
Heather Berlin:
Yeah, great for you to be here. So you're basically the guy to talk to about anxiety. So why don't we just start out by explaining a little bit about how anxiety works in the brain?
Jud Brewer:
Well, I wish we knew more about it, but what we do know is that anxiety tends to be this ramping up of fear of the future. And how that works is we have these two very helpful survival mechanisms. One is fear in the present moment like if you're in a hotel room and you don't know if it's safe or not, you hear some unusual noise, your brain is going to say, "Hey, what is that? Let's go figure that out. Let's reduce that uncertainty."
So fear of very helpful survival mechanism. And it also helps us learn. So if we step out into the middle of a busy street or something, we almost get hit by a car because we're looking at our phone or something like that. Then we learn, "Hey, put your phone away. Look both ways before crossing." So fear, very helpful. Learning survival mechanism in the present moment helps us learn to change behaviors like looking at our phones when we shouldn't be.
And then also another helpful survival mechanism that probably came along later in evolution is planning, right, planning for the future. Always very helpful. Don't need to explain that. But the interesting, probably evolutionary bottleneck is when you bring fear and planning together. So think of it as fear of present moment, but fear of the future is actually where anxiety comes from. So this anticipatory, "Oh no, oh no, oh no," where we start to worry is not actually planning.
It's just getting stuck in a talk track of, "Oh no, oh no, oh no." And that stuckness actually makes it harder for us to be present and react to what's happening in the present moment. Because when we're anxious, it makes our prefrontal cortex go offline. Ironically, it's harder to think and plan for the future when we're anxious right now. But that's where anxiety seems to come from. And from a brain perspective, people have actually looked to see what gets activated because people who are anxious, they feel pretty activated while their brain is pretty activated as well.
There's a part of the brain called the default mode network, which is ironically what we default to when we're not doing anything in particular. And people would say, "Generalized anxiety disorder, they default to worrying a whole lot." So it's been shown that the more people worry, the more they activate core hubs of this default mode network like the posterior cingulate cortex.
Christof Koch:
So is that because they think about themselves and think about what might happen here and what might happen there? And they have this, I think you call them loop, right? This sort of habit loop.
Jud Brewer:
So people can get stuck in these habit loops. And as you're pointing out, Christof, this network, this default mode network has been now shown to be this self-referential network. So when we're thinking about ourselves in the past, when we're thinking about ourselves in the future, even when we're caught up in cravings for substances or even social media, that network gets activated and this loop can form. It's ironic. I never learned this in medical school, but as I was struggling to help my own patients with anxiety, I started to see going back in the literature, somebody had suggested this guy, Thomas Berkovic had suggested back in the 1980s that these habit loops form through negative reinforcement through this learning process.
And the way that it works is that anxiety triggers the mental behavior of worrying, which I often think of behaviors like, "Oh, I stress eat, I smoke a cigarette, I this or that." Oh, worrying actually counts. And it counts a lot because it can actually drive results and drive other types of behavior.
Christof Koch:
So you're thinking of it as a type of behavior?
Jud Brewer:
Yes.
Christof Koch:
Although it's not an explicit behavior, it's an implicit behavior of my brain.
Jud Brewer:
Yeah. So it's not something that somebody else can see like, "Oh, you look a little anxious. Are you worrying?" And then we can ask, but we can't just peer into somebody's eyes and say, "Oh, you're worrying." So that worrying tends to be this internal thing. And that worrying, interestingly, has been shown in the literature that it can lead to a distraction from the unpleasant feeling of anxiety. And perhaps more importantly, it can make us feel like we're in control. Now, I want to highlight something really important. Worrying doesn't actually give us control. It just makes us feel like we're in control because we're doing something as compared to doing nothing.
Heather Berlin:
But what's reinforcing about that, right? Because the idea here is that somehow the worrying itself will reduce the anxiety and then it's reinforced. How? Does it actually reduce the anxiety at all?
Jud Brewer:
Yeah. So that's an interesting question. It doesn't actually reduce the anxiety. Paradoxically it increases the anxiety because it feeds back and says, "Hey, next time you're anxious, you should worry." So the only way that reinforcement works is that there's got to be something rewarding for our brain. So that feeling of control may be rewarding enough as compared to just sitting and wallowing in our anxiety.
Heather Berlin:
So it is a bit of a distraction, or it gives you a bit of a feeling of control. Then how do you break out of that cycle? How do you get a... Because you're imagining. Anxiety is just fear of a potential future threat that might never happen. And then you're ruining this present moment by imagining something that's terrible that might never happen. So how do you break that cycle?
Jud Brewer:
Let's start with how people have tried to break the cycle and how they all show up in my office because they've struggled with that. So there's this real emphasis in modern age around willpower and individual like, "I'm going to do this." And so whether it's our parents saying, "Hey, stop worrying." Or us telling ourselves and internalizing that and say, "Hey, you're anxious, stop worrying." Well, we can't just flip the switch and like, "Oh, there's the worry switch. Flip right now."
Heather Berlin:
Or depression. Just don't be depressed. It just doesn't work like that.
Jud Brewer:
And then we hear that, "What's wrong with you?" And so that's wrong with this and then we internalize that as well, and then it feeds more anxiety. So the idea here is that we think that we have a lot of control over our thoughts, over our minds, over our worrying. We don't. And the more we try to push against that worrying, the more it pushes back. I love this term where it's like what we resist persists. And so as we resist our thoughts, as we resist that worrying, the more it persists, the more it pushes back and the more it also just gets fed into this anxiety loop.
Heather Berlin:
So is the idea to accept it, let it wash over you and not try to fight it?
Jud Brewer:
So what we found is, and it's interestingly... I had been doing a lot of research on habit change, helping people quit smoking, helping people quit overeating, stuff like that. And somebody in one of our eating programs said, "Hey, can you actually develop a program for anxiety because anxiety is triggering me to eat." And I was thinking prescribed medications. But it put this bug in my ear to look back and then that's where I found this literature and was like, "Wow, I wish I'd learned this in residency." And so I said, "Well, I know something about habit change." And maybe we can apply what we're doing to help with the habit of anxiety.
Heather Berlin:
So it's almost like anxiety is an addiction or in a way?
Jud Brewer:
In a way. So I think of addiction, the definition that I learned in residency was continued use despite adverse consequences. So if we're continuing to use our worrying and it's causing adverse consequences, it could probably fall into that realm. So absolutely, it certainly won't.
Christof Koch:
People know that it's bad, but they still can't stop themselves from worrying.
Jud Brewer:
Exactly. And in that sense, it's very similar to other addictions. So they know that it's bad, they know that they can't stop, and then they start internalizing, there's something wrong with me.
Christof Koch:
And willing just isn't going to do it.
Jud Brewer:
I would say willpower is more myth than muscle. If you look from a neuroscience standpoint, behavior change doesn't rely on willpower. Otherwise, my clinical practice would look very different. I just tell all my patients to stop smoking, stop worrying.
Christof Koch:
Well, but on the other hand, there are people like my ex-wife, the day she learned she was pregnant with our 40-year-old son, she stopped smoking. And she was a big smoker before. So some people seem to have what conventionally is called willpower. Is it just something that some people have traits of genetics or upbringing, or at least people who are highly anxious and they have to go to other tools?
Jud Brewer:
Well, I would say that, and I can't speak for your ex-wife, but in situations like that, if you look at the neuroscience, the way we form habits is if something is rewarding, we're going to keep doing it. And if it's not rewarding, we're going to stop doing it. So let's bookmark that for a second because what you're talking about is in that same paradigm, if something is more rewarding, that's going to supersede the old habit.
And so if it's more rewarding, if the motivation for a healthy child is stronger than an urge to smoke a cigarette people can overcome these urges. And it's like this is more important. I think of this as the BBO, the bigger, better offer. And so they've got that bigger, better offer of somebody in the universe.
Heather Berlin:
And it's very immediate. Right? Whereas a smoker who you're like, "Oh, well, you might die of lung cancer," maybe that's so far off that it doesn't have that impact. Whereas this is in the moment a greater good that's supersedes it.
Christof Koch:
Well, you're a super achiever. You have two professional graduate degrees. So for those who-
Heather Berlin:
And three books.
Christof Koch:
And three books. So for that, you have to say, "Okay, I'm now going to work towards these degrees. I'm going to not do the things that my friends do and have fun because I'm going to study for all these degrees." So what is that? Is that willpower? Is that just the right habit forming?
Jud Brewer:
For me, it was just I loved learning. I was a chemistry major in college. I love these molecules that made up life. I still remember-
Christof Koch:
Gosh, you're a nerd.
Jud Brewer:
Yeah.
Christof Koch:
Real nerd.
Jud Brewer:
So I was like, "Oh, I can apply some of this research to helping people." So it turned out that this MD PhD program was better than just going straight into a PhD for me. And so it was really the joy of learning. I was like, "Oh, I can do this and I can get a stipend to study? Game on."
Christof Koch:
So it was a better, bigger offer.
Jud Brewer:
It was definitely a bigger, better offer.
Heather Berlin:
Or you can look at it like it's the alternative source of dopamine, right? Of pleasure in a way. Because if curiosity is giving you that pleasure and the dopamine, you don't need to get it from say the drugs or the partying. It's just an alternative form of pleasure.
Jud Brewer:
The one thing I would say here is we need to carefully differentiate dopamine with pleasure because I think in the common parlance is the dopamine is a pleasure molecule.
Heather Berlin:
Motivator.
Jud Brewer:
As you know, it's a motivation molecule. And so in my clinic and also in our research, the idea is that dopamine gets us to do something. If we're hungry, it gets us off the couch to get some food, whatever. So it's not supposed to be pleasant. It's actually supposed to be unpleasant to light that fire under our butt to get going. So I just want to be clear about that because often people think, "Oh, dopamine pleasure."
As you're saying, it's motivating. So there can be a joy that comes with learning that can certainly activate some dopamine pathways as we learn. But that motivation feels very different than that itchy, urgey driven, "I have to do this." I think one thing that's important to highlight here that also relates back to anxiety is those types of dopamine driven habit loops, they become habituated. So we always have to get more and more and more and more.
Christof Koch:
So let's leave the brain behind and let's go back to the mind and let's put ourselves in the mind of somebody who has this habit.
Heather Berlin:
I want to know how to break it. I want to know how to break this cycle.
Christof Koch:
And so what happens in the mind now of this person who's worrying because there's something might happen or may not happen.
Jud Brewer:
So let's use a real, real example. So I can think of a number of different patients that I have that actually have used this. So one example, a guy comes in, 40 years of age. He meets all the criteria for your panic disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. So the first thing we did as I was taking his history was I was listening for these elements of this habit loop, right? Three key elements, a trigger, a behavior and a result. For him-
Christof Koch:
Trigger, behavior...
Jud Brewer:
And result, or from a brain perspective, a reward. So for him, he would get these thoughts like, "Oh no, I'm going to get in a car accident." And those thoughts would trigger him to avoid driving on the highway. The reward of that was that he wouldn't get a panic attack on the highway because he's gotten several, and they really freaked him out. And he really thought, if I panic while I'm driving on the highway, I could actually hurt somebody.
So the first thing we did in that first session was I literally pulled out a sticky note and wrote trigger behavior result on it. And I said, "Okay, is your trigger thought these thoughts, your behaviors, this avoidance, and then the result is that you don't get a panic attack?" And he said, "Yeah." So then I drew arrows between the three and his eyes went... I said, "Well, what did you just realize?" He said, "I didn't realize that my brain is doing this." We mapped out. That's the first step in changing this, in stepping out of these loops is being able to see what they are, mapping them out.
Christof Koch:
The trigger, the behavior that it triggers and then the reward that you get.
Jud Brewer:
Yes.
Heather Berlin:
But let's say how does that relate to me not wanting to be in the hotel room the first night, right? So let's say that brings uncomfortableness and then I anticipate that. So I'm like-
Christof Koch:
What's the trigger there? The trigger is it's a new environment.
Jud Brewer:
New environment.
Heather Berlin:
Fear that I won't sleep and then I'll be tired the next day for whatever it is I'm there to do.
Christof Koch:
And then the behavior is worrying?
Heather Berlin:
Your behavior might be hypervigilance, might be worrying, those types of things that keep you from sleeping. And then the result is that you don't sleep well.
Christof Koch:
But where's the reward there? Why would the brain do that?
Jud Brewer:
So here it was probably rewarded in the past by being hypervigilant in like, "Oh no, is this a dangerous situation or not?"
Heather Berlin:
But still, I want to understand how you then break it. So you identify it as one thing. Then what?
Jud Brewer:
So the second step here is really leveraging some of the strengths of our brain. So if we know that willpower is more myth and muscle, we don't go there, but we go to the older, the stronger parts of the brain, which is where we can actually leverage this reinforcement learning process. And the key there is knowing the cause and effect relationship. If a behavior is rewarding, we're going to keep doing it. If it's not rewarding, we're going to stop.
Let me use a simple eating example. My lab has been studying these overeating habit loops, and the idea with overeating is not just telling ourselves to stop. Anybody that's struggled with overeating knows that that's a failed. That's dead on arrival. So instead, what we have people do is we have them pay very careful attention as they're overeating. And as they notice what it feels like to overeat, nobody has come back and said, "Boy, it feels great to overeat." They're like, "Oh, this is pretty terrible."
What that does is it triggers this learning mechanism in our brain. This reward-based learning, when we pay attention, two things can happen. One is we get a positive prediction error if it's more rewarding than expected. And the other is we get a negative prediction error if it's less rewarding than expected. So when we overeat and we pay attention, and it's less rewarding than expected, negative prediction error, dopamine fires. We learn, "Oh, this isn't so good." In pragmatic terms, I think of it as we become disenchanted with the behavior, we're less excited to do it in the future.
Christof Koch:
How often does this happen and how powerful does this have to do to get before it actively curtails my overeating? Is this year long, many years practice?
Jud Brewer:
It's a great question. So in a study that we published relatively recently, ready for this? It took 10 to 15 times of somebody paying attention as they overrate. 10 to 15. That reward value.
Christof Koch:
You're telling me in a week I can reduce my overeating habits?
Jud Brewer:
It could happen in a week. It could happen faster than a week. If somebody's really paying attention every time they overeat, it depends on how often they do that. So the key here is the reward value has to drop below zero to shift that behavior below it being rewarding anymore. And the second piece with that is that they really have to be able to link that up like, "Oh, this does not feel good." So as they do that, they start to become disenchanted and it becomes much easier for them.
We've got to notice what it feels like in our body. So here are a key element, and this is actually key for mindfulness in general is I think of it this way. The feeling body is much stronger than the thinking brain. We can't just say, "I shouldn't overeat." The shoulds is the whole habit loop unto itself, but it's really feeling like what does this feel like? And that's what shifts reward value. So 10 to 15 times seems crazy for changing a habit.
Christof Koch:
Particularly if you have it for many years.
Jud Brewer:
Yeah. But if you look at it from a survival standpoint, we don't have 20 times to determine whether that's a mountain dog or a mountain lion. We've got to run when there's danger. We don't get 20 chances to survive.
Heather Berlin:
So what you're saying is basically our body knows is adapted and we need to be paying attention to the signals that our body is giving us. So I think about this. You're in a movie theater eating popcorn, and you're mindlessly eating it, and you're watching the movie, and then all of a sudden the whole thing is gone. You're like, "What did I just do? I just ate." But if you are focusing your attention on either each piece of popcorn, is it crunchy? How does it taste? What does it feel like?
Christof Koch:
Be mindful.
Heather Berlin:
Be mindful while you're eating it and attend to your body signals because your body has this whole normally unconscious processes that are keeping this equilibrium. But I think sometimes we override that, right?
Jud Brewer:
Absolutely.
Heather Berlin:
So the idea is to attend to what our body is telling us. Listen to your body. It's like people over exercise. If you're feeling sore the next day, don't go push yourself, do it again. Listen to your body.
Christof Koch:
No pain, no gain.
Heather Berlin:
And then you get injuries.
Jud Brewer:
Yes.
Christof Koch:
No pain, no gain. So tell me, if we now return to the hotel room where Heather is lying and she can't sleep, so where would be the negative predictive value there?
Jud Brewer:
So the first step is to map out these habit loops. The habit loop at the hotel, for example, could be thoughts of, is this dangerous place?
Heather Berlin:
There's also existential angst like I'm alone in the world, you're dislocated from your home. There's all those thoughts. But yes, go on.
Jud Brewer:
Just a few things that can trigger this existential. So let's call it the angsting where that actually is activating. It keeps us awake. And then the result of that is don't get good night's sleep. So from a survival standpoint, our brain is asking, is this dangerous or is this different? And so to step out of that, we could be asking questions like, "Oh, well, grounding ourselves in our body, noticing it, noticing the thoughts like, oh, here's, here are these thoughts that are happening."
And then we can ask, "What am I getting from this?" As I angst away all night, and then check my phone to see how little sleep I'm getting and angst even more." Is this actually helping me? What am I getting from this? So we can feel into it directly, like, "Oh, this is actually making me more activated, more anxious, and we can become disenchanted with that." And then we can also see, "This probably isn't going to solve all my life's problems now." And so then we can shift to the third step which is-
Christof Koch:
Wait, but before we come to that, so you really have to experience this closed state talking about perception box, this closed state that I'm very anxious, the world, I'm concerned, I'm afraid I'm lonely, but then how do I open the walls of this box?
Jud Brewer:
And just to be clear about that, Christof, we can all do this together. It's like how does it feel when we're anxious? How does it feel when there's existential angst? Does it feel contracted or does it feel expanded? You're nodding. What would you say?
Heather Berlin:
Closed.
Jud Brewer:
Yeah, closed down, contracted. So we can actually even take that and start to ask, "Well, how does this contracted experience feel? How does getting stuck in this mindset feel?" It doesn't feel very good. Not very rewarding. So we can actually leverage that so that we become disenchanted with that as well. And this is where we can then start to step out of it. And actually just to bring it back with my patient that I talked about with panic, so he had generalized anxiety. Probably had it for about 30 years. And what I sent him home to do in that first visit was just to start mapping out his habit loops or anxiety.
I should also mention he was 400 pounds. He was at a very unhealthy weight. So he had some health anxiety because he had obstructive sleep apnea, had high blood pressure. His liver was very fatty because of the food he was eating. So he comes back and the first thing he says to me is, "Hey, doc, I lost 14 pounds." And I'm looking at him because we hadn't even talked about weight loss yet. I was going to save that. I said, "Well, tell me what happened." He said, "I was mapping on my habit loops And I realized my habit is feel anxious, eat fast food and then numb myself."
So trigger, behavior, results. And he said, "You know what? Eating fast food was actually the other result was it was making me more anxious. It was contributing to my health anxiety. So I got totally disenchanted with that." I don't know if he used that term, but he said, "So I stopped eating fast food." He went on to lose over a hundred pounds because it was more rewarding to be healthy than to have this temporary relief of eating fast food. And he said it was the easiest weight loss he'd ever had and he's actually maintained it for years, which a lot of people, when they try to force themselves to diet, they'll yo-yo diet. They'll regain that weight.
Heather Berlin:
So as in shifting his perspective and maybe opening up this perception box and not being so closed, that helped him change his behavior in a way that shifted the whole habit. It wasn't just a temporary, "I'm going to go on a diet." And then he found that became more rewarding. It can be painful for people to change a habit and there does need to be a kind of shift and a reward for something else. That shift alone is very difficult for some people.
Jud Brewer:
So I think of this as the third step, and I think of that as-
Christof Koch:
It's like a meta step. You have to be willing to change your habits.
Jud Brewer:
Yeah, and it's interesting you say that because often the willingness comes from the pain that the habit causes. So for my patient, the pain was all this anxiety, and that's actually what he was focusing on first. But then he started to notice the pain of his fast food eating habits. And so there, it was actually just helping him start to see that and become disenchanted with the overeating and the eating of the fast food was very helpful for him. He knew that he needed to lose weight. He didn't know how to do it. It was really just seeing that it was more painful to eat fast food than to not eat it.
That was the reward that helped him step out of the loop. So I think of that as this third step is these bigger, better offers. And for some people it can be simply stepping out of an old habit loop that is more rewarding. For others, and I think more generally, we can start to see what are intrinsic behaviors that we can tap into that are probably not dopamine driven so that they aren't habituating, but are intrinsically rewarding. I think of two flavors here, and this is also what our research has shown in others has shown as well, is around mindfulness training. It's curiosity and it's also kindness.
Christof Koch:
Compassion. Curiosity and compassion.
Heather Berlin:
So if you're stuck in a habit loop that's not necessarily externally behavioral, but it's just in the anxiety and the overthinking and you realize, "Okay, this isn't doing anything for me." Then the switch would be into mindfulness, into where is that? How do you stop that mental loop of the overthinking?
Jud Brewer:
Yeah. So the key elements, and we can talk about mindfulness... Let's talk about the elements of it in case mindfulness is a confusing concept for some people. So it's really about being aware of what's happening and also bringing this curious, this nonjudgmental, this compassionate attitude to that. So not saying, "Oh, this is what's happening. It sucks." Right now we're keeping ourselves closed in our own perception box of what's happening. But we're really stepping back and going, "Oh, this is what's happening." And we're even bowing to it as a teacher. What can I learn from this? So really seeing what's happening
Christof Koch:
So I can learn that those thoughts, I don't have to identify myself with. That's not me. I can observe me.
Jud Brewer:
And that's a key aspect to it. So for example, if we're worrying, so if you're worrying if you're in a hotel room or if somebody's worrying that, "Oh, am I going to be anxious all day?" We can first help our brains see what's more rewarding. Worrying or being curious about those sensations and those thoughts? So to our brains, it's no-brainer. Being curious feels better. My lab has done research on this. It's just more rewarding.
Heather Berlin:
So you shift your perception from just being in the feelings to, "Oh, that's an interesting feeling. Let me explore that or get curious about that." But also, I like this compassion piece is about opening yourself up and maybe incorporating other people too. So I find that if I'm worrying about something, but then I have to go, then I'm helping a patient or I'm doing therapy with someone, I forget about my own problems.
Jud Brewer:
So as you're highlighting it, just connection feels good. Connection literally is expanding beyond our own little like, "This is me and I'm stuck in this little thing," to, "Oh, this is we. We're working together." And so it can actually be very energizing to bring compassion into our days as compared to being completely focused on ourselves like, "Oh, no, am I going to get through today? Oh no, look at my patient list. Oh no, I'm an hour behind in seeing my patients and all of that stuff." All of that keeps us locked, contracted in our worry boxes.
Heather Berlin:
Safe potentially.
Christof Koch:
No, that's why it's great to have a dog with you in your bed. You can just hug him.
Heather Berlin:
This is Christof's solution to anxiety.
Christof Koch:
Yes.
Heather Berlin:
All the world's problems, it's just everyone get a dog.
Christof Koch:
So tell me, so you are really putting the finger on, people have to be incredibly attentive to their own state of mind, right?
Heather Berlin:
Yes.
Christof Koch:
That's really critical.
Jud Brewer:
It is critical. And we found that in one randomized controlled trial of our unwinding anxiety app, we actually got a 67% reduction in these clinically validated anxiety measures. So by training people to be curious and pay attention, it actually can lead to really significant clinically relevant results.
Heather Berlin:
Does acceptance fall into this as well? So let's say you're feeling anxious and you say, "Okay. This is me feeling anxiety. This is okay. I'm just going to have this feeling and let it sit."
Christof Koch:
Like a distancing.
Heather Berlin:
So what about just saying, "Okay. I'm feeling anxious now I'm just going to accept this."
Jud Brewer:
I think that's key and that's actually one of the key elements that some people describe as being a mindfulness training. It's like bringing that acceptance in. And you can think of it this way. There's this great quote attributed to Marcus Aurelius where he says, "What stands in the way becomes the way." Or another quote related to that is, "The only way out is through." So we can't avoid things, but if we accept, "Oh, here's anxiety, then we can learn to be with it."
And the paradox here is that we don't have to do anything about these thoughts, about these sensations. The less we do, the more we just learn to be with them, the more they'll come and go on their own. And so pragmatically, one way that I work with my patients to put this into action is to think of what anxiety feels like, what worrying feels like. It's like this, "Oh no, oh no." So we're closed down, we're contracted, we're kind of stuck in our box.
So if we inject some curiosity, we can flip that, "Oh no," to, "Oh, oh, here's a thought. Oh, what does this feel like in my body?" And that helps us expand and not be stuck in that box, but really be with our experience. And the other part of that, "Oh, is we can watch a thought come up." We can watch it go away. We can watch another thought come up instead of like, "Oh, no, there's that anxious thought. Oh no, there, I'm worrying again."
Heather Berlin:
So it's incorporating it into, it's expanding this box in a way that it incorporates it and allows for it all and we're not stuck in that.
Christof Koch:
Well, it's also the realization that we live in this perception box and to accept that and to try to explore the boundaries of that and maybe expand them, right? You keep on talking about these expanding states versus these and these contracting states. Tell me in your book, Unwinding Anxiety, you make this statement. It's less important to worry about the why, because people worry a lot. I know somebody very close. She keeps on wondering why she's so anxious and trying to go back into early childhood, but you're saying that's not really so relevant.
Jud Brewer:
The short answer is yes, it's not and it is often where people get stuck because they think, "If I can just find that trigger, I can fix it or avoid it." Well, if it's life hard to avoid life. And if it's something that we don't have control over, which is most of life, neither of those is going to work. So people get stuck in these rabbit holes of why, why, why, why thinking, "If I can figure out why, I can fix it." The other problem there is if it's something from the past, it's in the past. I love this saying, "Forgiveness is giving up hope of a better past." You heard that one, right?
Heather Berlin:
Mm-hmm.
Jud Brewer:
Giving up hope of a better past. We've got to let go of the past instead of drag it into the present moment.
Christof Koch:
But how do you let go of your past?
Jud Brewer:
Herein comes the second step is what am I getting from-
Christof Koch:
Recalling my past.
Jud Brewer:
... being stuck in this? So it's like, "Oh, it's heavy. Oh, it's not helping me move forward." All of these things are, it's not rewarding to hold on often to hold onto the past. So instead of saying, "Oh, I need to let go of this," we can say, "How is this serving me? What am I getting from this? Oh, nothing." And we bring in that bigger, better offer. So it's both seeing how painful it is, whatever the old habit is, but also finding that bigger, better offer.
Heather Berlin:
And wanting to make the change. I think there has to be that motivation to do that.
Jud Brewer:
Absolutely. So as an example, an early pilot test of our Unwinding Anxiety app wrote me an email and she said, "I feel like anxiety is deeply etched in my bones." That's how identified she was with her anxiety. That's how much she had created this very strong box where she's like, "I am anxious." And so the idea there is to, you're pointing out, recognize, "Oh, this is actually a box that I've put myself in." There's this Rumi poem like Community of Spirit where he talks about we're stuck in our... We put ourselves in jail basically where it's like, "Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?" So he even talks about this closedness of putting ourselves in jail. "Step outside that tangle of worry thinking," I think is the quote.
Christof Koch:
But she'd learned to identify herself with that anxiety.
Jud Brewer:
Exactly. Actually, that's where we start is to see, "Oh, this is jail that we've put ourselves in, and the door is open."
Christof Koch:
There's a way out.
Jud Brewer:
And that way out is through awareness, being curious. "Oh, look, this is a box. This is a box that I've created. And if I've created it, I can uncreate it. And this box could even be a habit." Some of us win the genetic lottery. Some of us get big dogs and hug them a lot. And then for the rest of us, there's this feeling like, "Oh, there's something wrong with me if I have anxiety." Me? Boy, I was pretty anxious in college. I still get anxiety. I used to get panic attacks during residency.
I created a fricking program. I wrote a book about anxiety. I still get anxious. But it's okay. It's like, "Okay. Here are these feelings of anxiety." And the more I can learn to accept them and be with them and open to them, the more they're going to come and go on their own and not create a problem.
Christof Koch:
No, wait. So you're saying you still get anxious? But haven't you mapped out your habit loop and [inaudible 00:35:08]?
Heather Berlin:
But the feeling still arise.
Jud Brewer:
Yeah. So this is really critical because often people think that anxiety is something they need to do something about. For a habit loop, it's a behavior. And what we tend to fall under the habit of doing is worrying. So that's something that can work with and unwind as a habit loop is the worrying piece. With the anxiety, it's learning to be with it, allow it open to it, even embrace it like, "Oh, here it is." As compared to, "Ooh, no, I don't want this."
Heather Berlin:
So bring it back to your patient. Whatever happened with his anxiety?
Jud Brewer:
So as I mentioned, my patient at that second visit was starting to map out these habit loops. He was becoming disenchanted with eating fast food. And at the same time, he was starting to learn to work with his anxiety. I was walking out of our school of public health one day at Brown University, so a pretty busy street. I walk out onto the sidewalk, this guy pulls up, rolls down his window, it's my patient. I'm thinking, "Great. He's driving." He gives me this huge grin and he goes, "Hey, doc, I'm an Uber driver now. I'm headed to the airport to pick someone up."
Heather Berlin:
Wow.
Jud Brewer:
So what that highlights is, the idea here was that he was learning how to see what his mind was doing, how he was boxing himself in, right? "Oh, I'm an anxious person." He was learning to map out that as a habit loop and see already expanding that box, like, "Oh, it's not me. It's a habit." And then taking that one step farther and saying, "Oh, by being curious about those sensations, he could not feed the habit, step out of it and actually lean into it so that he could go along and move forward in his life."
Heather Berlin:
That's a really wonderful story. I mean, just to show how you can really turn things around by changing your perspective and being aware, and noticing these habits, and learning how to step away from them, and break them, and become curious.
Jud Brewer:
Absolutely. One thing I just want to highlight here as related to the perception box is that we create these. One, we make them habits. Two, we blame ourselves. Three, which gets in the way of us being able to see them as boxes and then open those doors so that as Rumi put it, "We can move into ever widening rings of being."
Christof Koch:
I like that a lot.
Heather Berlin:
Well, I thought we would do something that would be fun is just to ask each other maybe some perception box questions to probe a little bit deeper.
Christof Koch:
It's funny that you ask that.
Heather Berlin:
I mean, we have some questions here. We don't know. I don't know what you're going to ask. I have questions I'm going to ask, but I think it would be a fun little exercise for us to, as individuals probe a little bit deeper and see how closed in our boxes are, and if we can expand them out. Let me ask a question. Jud, if you were able to drop all your identities, what would you be? Who would you be?
Jud Brewer:
Nobody. And it would be amazing.
Heather Berlin:
So you're comfortable with the infinite nothingness of not having an ego and just being...
Jud Brewer:
Well, I'd like to say I'm completely comfortable with it, and that would probably be a big lie. I would say just seeing how painful it is and how much energy it takes to hold up some ego identity, the more I can look into those, and, "Boy, I had plenty over the years." It's like, "Wow, that's painful. That's painful. That's painful." It makes it easier to let go of them. And also to be inspired by people who are truly humble and seeing how... And then in a moment of humility, how much better that feels than trying to put myself out there in the world.
Christof Koch:
There's something very restful about those people. They sort of spread this atmosphere of just equanimity. And you know very quickly when you interact with them. They're just calm and cool.
Heather Berlin:
Yeah. There's like a presence of that. Christof, for you, have you ever gone through something that was very upsetting or painful that you later viewed as a blessing?
Christof Koch:
My complete loss of self. It was absolutely terrifying what happened there. But I ended up in this state of what Buddhists called non-dual self where there was no more, Christof, no more memory, no more body, no more world, no more dreams, desire, memory. No time, no space. But there I was, and it has completely removed most of my anxiety. It removed completely all my anxiety around death. I used to sort of lie in bed when you can't sleep and you worry about what happens after you die and you're dead for a long time or for a really long time, or for a really, really long time.
Heather Berlin:
Yeah, I don't like this idea at all. This is making me anxious.
Christof Koch:
I'm a climber, so it's like looking down an abyss, but it's bottomless abyss. You freak out. You get this existential vertigo. But I've not have since that episode, not a single hasn't happened a single night. And because I've experienced egoic death. My ego died and it was okay. So what is the biggest lie you've ever told about yourself, funny enough?
Heather Berlin:
About myself?
Christof Koch:
About yourself? About yourself, to yourself. Not to others, but to yourself.
Heather Berlin:
Oh my God.
Christof Koch:
The biggest story you've told that turned out not-
Heather Berlin:
Not to be true?
Christof Koch:
Not to be true.
Heather Berlin:
I think early on, I told myself when I was a child... I had a traumatic upbringing, very traumatic at an early age and one of the things I told myself to protect myself was, "I don't need anybody. I can do this all on my own. I don't need these people. I am just going to be really independent." It served me well. It was a driver and I was going to be independent, and I worked really hard and get all these degrees and will never have to need anybody.
But then I realized that, "No, you actually do need people." It was a lie I told myself in order to survive being around people who were not serving me well. And in those circumstances it was better to be independent. But as I got older, I realized that that's not true. I do need people.
Christof Koch:
And cats.
Heather Berlin:
And cats.
Christof Koch:
And dogs.
Heather Berlin:
I'm not going to go as far as dogs. I'll stick with cats. I mean, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for being with us, Dr. Judson Brewer. And if you'd like to learn more about your own perception box, spend time this week answering the same perception box questions that we asked Dr. Brewer, and check out our other questions on the website, unlikelycollaborators.com. And you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch the show or listen wherever you get your podcast. So I'm Dr. Heather Berlin.
Christof Koch:
And I'm Dr. Christof Koch. Thank you very much.
Heather Berlin:
Thank you.
How Curiosity Quiets Anxiety with Dr. Judson Brewer
Anxiety can make us feel like we’re trapped in our brain. So how do we open the door and gain freedom? This week in the inaugural episode of Science of Perception Box podcast, Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch invite Dr. Judson Brewer to delve into the roots of anxiety, its impact on our perception, and how curiosity can be the key to lasting change.
Dr. Judson Brewer studies the neural mechanisms of mindfulness. He is the Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, where he’s also an Associate Professor at the School of Medicine. Dr. Brewer is a leading expert in the science of self-mastery and breaking habits. His books include Unwinding Anxiety, The Craving Mind, and The Hunger Habit.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show.
Jud Brewer, Guest:
This is actually key for mindfulness in general, is I think of it this way, the feeling body is much stronger than the thinking brain.
Elizabeth Koch, Founder, Unlikely Collaborators:
Hi. I'm Elizabeth Koch. We all live inside our own personal private perception box built by our genes and the physical, social, and cultural environment in which we were born and raised. In this podcast, we explore how although the walls of this mental box are always present, they can expand in states like awe, wonder, and curiosity. Or contract and response to anxiety, fear, and anger. I'd like to introduce our esteemed hosts to incredible and distinguished minds. Dr. Heather Berlin, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. And Dr. Christof Koch, chief scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current meritorious investigator and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Welcome to the Science of Perception Box.
Heather Berlin, Podcast Co-host:
Hi, everyone, and welcome to Science of Perception Box. I'm your co-host, Dr. Heather Berlin.
Christof Koch, Podcast Co-host:
And I'm Dr. Christof Koch.
Heather Berlin:
Welcome to the show. Every week we feature an aspect of the Science of Perception Box highlighting the latest research together with our expert guests. This week on Science of Perception Box, we're going to explore mindfulness, anxiety, and how that works in the brain. But before we bring on our esteemed guest, I wanted to ask you, Christof, how do you manage your anxiety?
Christof Koch:
I go running. I talk to my dog a lot. I take a hot bath.
Heather Berlin:
What does your dog say to you?
Christof Koch:
He communicates a lot to me. Whenever there's something upsetting happening, I can just talk to him and he calms me down. He's a Bernese Mountain dog.
Heather Berlin:
Is there something about that particular breed that's anxiety reducing?
Christof Koch:
They're big, they're fat, they're gigantic teddy bears.
Heather Berlin:
So an oxytocin is released.
Christof Koch:
Oxytocin is released, yes. I think it's always fine.
Heather Berlin:
There's people too. You can also hug people.
Christof Koch:
You can also hug people. But dogs are different. Heather, so are you anxiety prone?
Heather Berlin:
I do tend to be higher on the dimension of anxiety than say the average person. But although I travel a lot and I always have my first night in a new hotel room, I really have trouble sleeping. I've read this actually a common phenomenon because your fight or flight response is sort of triggered. It's a new environment.
Christof Koch:
Kicks in.
Heather Berlin:
You're hypervigilant. Anything could happen. And so I always have trouble the first night in a new hotel.
Christof Koch:
Maybe you should bring a dog along, particularly on the first night.
Heather Berlin:
Can I borrow Felix?
Christof Koch:
Mr. Felix?
Heather Berlin:
Mr. Felix, sorry. So let's introduce our guest, and I can't think of a more qualified and interesting academic to bring to the show to explore this topic. So today we're thrilled to have Dr. Judson Brewer with us. He studies the neural mechanisms of mindfulness, and he's the director of Research and Innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center where he also is an associate professor at Brown School of Medicine. He's a leading expert in the science of self-mastery. He's the guy you basically want to talk to if you want to kick a bad habit like smoking or toxic, whatever. He's authored, Unwinding Anxiety and the Craving Mind. And his latest book, The Hunger Habit is available for pre-order now. So welcome to the podcast, Jud.
Jud Brewer:
Thanks for having me.
Heather Berlin:
Yeah, great for you to be here. So you're basically the guy to talk to about anxiety. So why don't we just start out by explaining a little bit about how anxiety works in the brain?
Jud Brewer:
Well, I wish we knew more about it, but what we do know is that anxiety tends to be this ramping up of fear of the future. And how that works is we have these two very helpful survival mechanisms. One is fear in the present moment like if you're in a hotel room and you don't know if it's safe or not, you hear some unusual noise, your brain is going to say, "Hey, what is that? Let's go figure that out. Let's reduce that uncertainty."
So fear of very helpful survival mechanism. And it also helps us learn. So if we step out into the middle of a busy street or something, we almost get hit by a car because we're looking at our phone or something like that. Then we learn, "Hey, put your phone away. Look both ways before crossing." So fear, very helpful. Learning survival mechanism in the present moment helps us learn to change behaviors like looking at our phones when we shouldn't be.
And then also another helpful survival mechanism that probably came along later in evolution is planning, right, planning for the future. Always very helpful. Don't need to explain that. But the interesting, probably evolutionary bottleneck is when you bring fear and planning together. So think of it as fear of present moment, but fear of the future is actually where anxiety comes from. So this anticipatory, "Oh no, oh no, oh no," where we start to worry is not actually planning.
It's just getting stuck in a talk track of, "Oh no, oh no, oh no." And that stuckness actually makes it harder for us to be present and react to what's happening in the present moment. Because when we're anxious, it makes our prefrontal cortex go offline. Ironically, it's harder to think and plan for the future when we're anxious right now. But that's where anxiety seems to come from. And from a brain perspective, people have actually looked to see what gets activated because people who are anxious, they feel pretty activated while their brain is pretty activated as well.
There's a part of the brain called the default mode network, which is ironically what we default to when we're not doing anything in particular. And people would say, "Generalized anxiety disorder, they default to worrying a whole lot." So it's been shown that the more people worry, the more they activate core hubs of this default mode network like the posterior cingulate cortex.
Christof Koch:
So is that because they think about themselves and think about what might happen here and what might happen there? And they have this, I think you call them loop, right? This sort of habit loop.
Jud Brewer:
So people can get stuck in these habit loops. And as you're pointing out, Christof, this network, this default mode network has been now shown to be this self-referential network. So when we're thinking about ourselves in the past, when we're thinking about ourselves in the future, even when we're caught up in cravings for substances or even social media, that network gets activated and this loop can form. It's ironic. I never learned this in medical school, but as I was struggling to help my own patients with anxiety, I started to see going back in the literature, somebody had suggested this guy, Thomas Berkovic had suggested back in the 1980s that these habit loops form through negative reinforcement through this learning process.
And the way that it works is that anxiety triggers the mental behavior of worrying, which I often think of behaviors like, "Oh, I stress eat, I smoke a cigarette, I this or that." Oh, worrying actually counts. And it counts a lot because it can actually drive results and drive other types of behavior.
Christof Koch:
So you're thinking of it as a type of behavior?
Jud Brewer:
Yes.
Christof Koch:
Although it's not an explicit behavior, it's an implicit behavior of my brain.
Jud Brewer:
Yeah. So it's not something that somebody else can see like, "Oh, you look a little anxious. Are you worrying?" And then we can ask, but we can't just peer into somebody's eyes and say, "Oh, you're worrying." So that worrying tends to be this internal thing. And that worrying, interestingly, has been shown in the literature that it can lead to a distraction from the unpleasant feeling of anxiety. And perhaps more importantly, it can make us feel like we're in control. Now, I want to highlight something really important. Worrying doesn't actually give us control. It just makes us feel like we're in control because we're doing something as compared to doing nothing.
Heather Berlin:
But what's reinforcing about that, right? Because the idea here is that somehow the worrying itself will reduce the anxiety and then it's reinforced. How? Does it actually reduce the anxiety at all?
Jud Brewer:
Yeah. So that's an interesting question. It doesn't actually reduce the anxiety. Paradoxically it increases the anxiety because it feeds back and says, "Hey, next time you're anxious, you should worry." So the only way that reinforcement works is that there's got to be something rewarding for our brain. So that feeling of control may be rewarding enough as compared to just sitting and wallowing in our anxiety.
Heather Berlin:
So it is a bit of a distraction, or it gives you a bit of a feeling of control. Then how do you break out of that cycle? How do you get a... Because you're imagining. Anxiety is just fear of a potential future threat that might never happen. And then you're ruining this present moment by imagining something that's terrible that might never happen. So how do you break that cycle?
Jud Brewer:
Let's start with how people have tried to break the cycle and how they all show up in my office because they've struggled with that. So there's this real emphasis in modern age around willpower and individual like, "I'm going to do this." And so whether it's our parents saying, "Hey, stop worrying." Or us telling ourselves and internalizing that and say, "Hey, you're anxious, stop worrying." Well, we can't just flip the switch and like, "Oh, there's the worry switch. Flip right now."
Heather Berlin:
Or depression. Just don't be depressed. It just doesn't work like that.
Jud Brewer:
And then we hear that, "What's wrong with you?" And so that's wrong with this and then we internalize that as well, and then it feeds more anxiety. So the idea here is that we think that we have a lot of control over our thoughts, over our minds, over our worrying. We don't. And the more we try to push against that worrying, the more it pushes back. I love this term where it's like what we resist persists. And so as we resist our thoughts, as we resist that worrying, the more it persists, the more it pushes back and the more it also just gets fed into this anxiety loop.
Heather Berlin:
So is the idea to accept it, let it wash over you and not try to fight it?
Jud Brewer:
So what we found is, and it's interestingly... I had been doing a lot of research on habit change, helping people quit smoking, helping people quit overeating, stuff like that. And somebody in one of our eating programs said, "Hey, can you actually develop a program for anxiety because anxiety is triggering me to eat." And I was thinking prescribed medications. But it put this bug in my ear to look back and then that's where I found this literature and was like, "Wow, I wish I'd learned this in residency." And so I said, "Well, I know something about habit change." And maybe we can apply what we're doing to help with the habit of anxiety.
Heather Berlin:
So it's almost like anxiety is an addiction or in a way?
Jud Brewer:
In a way. So I think of addiction, the definition that I learned in residency was continued use despite adverse consequences. So if we're continuing to use our worrying and it's causing adverse consequences, it could probably fall into that realm. So absolutely, it certainly won't.
Christof Koch:
People know that it's bad, but they still can't stop themselves from worrying.
Jud Brewer:
Exactly. And in that sense, it's very similar to other addictions. So they know that it's bad, they know that they can't stop, and then they start internalizing, there's something wrong with me.
Christof Koch:
And willing just isn't going to do it.
Jud Brewer:
I would say willpower is more myth than muscle. If you look from a neuroscience standpoint, behavior change doesn't rely on willpower. Otherwise, my clinical practice would look very different. I just tell all my patients to stop smoking, stop worrying.
Christof Koch:
Well, but on the other hand, there are people like my ex-wife, the day she learned she was pregnant with our 40-year-old son, she stopped smoking. And she was a big smoker before. So some people seem to have what conventionally is called willpower. Is it just something that some people have traits of genetics or upbringing, or at least people who are highly anxious and they have to go to other tools?
Jud Brewer:
Well, I would say that, and I can't speak for your ex-wife, but in situations like that, if you look at the neuroscience, the way we form habits is if something is rewarding, we're going to keep doing it. And if it's not rewarding, we're going to stop doing it. So let's bookmark that for a second because what you're talking about is in that same paradigm, if something is more rewarding, that's going to supersede the old habit.
And so if it's more rewarding, if the motivation for a healthy child is stronger than an urge to smoke a cigarette people can overcome these urges. And it's like this is more important. I think of this as the BBO, the bigger, better offer. And so they've got that bigger, better offer of somebody in the universe.
Heather Berlin:
And it's very immediate. Right? Whereas a smoker who you're like, "Oh, well, you might die of lung cancer," maybe that's so far off that it doesn't have that impact. Whereas this is in the moment a greater good that's supersedes it.
Christof Koch:
Well, you're a super achiever. You have two professional graduate degrees. So for those who-
Heather Berlin:
And three books.
Christof Koch:
And three books. So for that, you have to say, "Okay, I'm now going to work towards these degrees. I'm going to not do the things that my friends do and have fun because I'm going to study for all these degrees." So what is that? Is that willpower? Is that just the right habit forming?
Jud Brewer:
For me, it was just I loved learning. I was a chemistry major in college. I love these molecules that made up life. I still remember-
Christof Koch:
Gosh, you're a nerd.
Jud Brewer:
Yeah.
Christof Koch:
Real nerd.
Jud Brewer:
So I was like, "Oh, I can apply some of this research to helping people." So it turned out that this MD PhD program was better than just going straight into a PhD for me. And so it was really the joy of learning. I was like, "Oh, I can do this and I can get a stipend to study? Game on."
Christof Koch:
So it was a better, bigger offer.
Jud Brewer:
It was definitely a bigger, better offer.
Heather Berlin:
Or you can look at it like it's the alternative source of dopamine, right? Of pleasure in a way. Because if curiosity is giving you that pleasure and the dopamine, you don't need to get it from say the drugs or the partying. It's just an alternative form of pleasure.
Jud Brewer:
The one thing I would say here is we need to carefully differentiate dopamine with pleasure because I think in the common parlance is the dopamine is a pleasure molecule.
Heather Berlin:
Motivator.
Jud Brewer:
As you know, it's a motivation molecule. And so in my clinic and also in our research, the idea is that dopamine gets us to do something. If we're hungry, it gets us off the couch to get some food, whatever. So it's not supposed to be pleasant. It's actually supposed to be unpleasant to light that fire under our butt to get going. So I just want to be clear about that because often people think, "Oh, dopamine pleasure."
As you're saying, it's motivating. So there can be a joy that comes with learning that can certainly activate some dopamine pathways as we learn. But that motivation feels very different than that itchy, urgey driven, "I have to do this." I think one thing that's important to highlight here that also relates back to anxiety is those types of dopamine driven habit loops, they become habituated. So we always have to get more and more and more and more.
Christof Koch:
So let's leave the brain behind and let's go back to the mind and let's put ourselves in the mind of somebody who has this habit.
Heather Berlin:
I want to know how to break it. I want to know how to break this cycle.
Christof Koch:
And so what happens in the mind now of this person who's worrying because there's something might happen or may not happen.
Jud Brewer:
So let's use a real, real example. So I can think of a number of different patients that I have that actually have used this. So one example, a guy comes in, 40 years of age. He meets all the criteria for your panic disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. So the first thing we did as I was taking his history was I was listening for these elements of this habit loop, right? Three key elements, a trigger, a behavior and a result. For him-
Christof Koch:
Trigger, behavior...
Jud Brewer:
And result, or from a brain perspective, a reward. So for him, he would get these thoughts like, "Oh no, I'm going to get in a car accident." And those thoughts would trigger him to avoid driving on the highway. The reward of that was that he wouldn't get a panic attack on the highway because he's gotten several, and they really freaked him out. And he really thought, if I panic while I'm driving on the highway, I could actually hurt somebody.
So the first thing we did in that first session was I literally pulled out a sticky note and wrote trigger behavior result on it. And I said, "Okay, is your trigger thought these thoughts, your behaviors, this avoidance, and then the result is that you don't get a panic attack?" And he said, "Yeah." So then I drew arrows between the three and his eyes went... I said, "Well, what did you just realize?" He said, "I didn't realize that my brain is doing this." We mapped out. That's the first step in changing this, in stepping out of these loops is being able to see what they are, mapping them out.
Christof Koch:
The trigger, the behavior that it triggers and then the reward that you get.
Jud Brewer:
Yes.
Heather Berlin:
But let's say how does that relate to me not wanting to be in the hotel room the first night, right? So let's say that brings uncomfortableness and then I anticipate that. So I'm like-
Christof Koch:
What's the trigger there? The trigger is it's a new environment.
Jud Brewer:
New environment.
Heather Berlin:
Fear that I won't sleep and then I'll be tired the next day for whatever it is I'm there to do.
Christof Koch:
And then the behavior is worrying?
Heather Berlin:
Your behavior might be hypervigilance, might be worrying, those types of things that keep you from sleeping. And then the result is that you don't sleep well.
Christof Koch:
But where's the reward there? Why would the brain do that?
Jud Brewer:
So here it was probably rewarded in the past by being hypervigilant in like, "Oh no, is this a dangerous situation or not?"
Heather Berlin:
But still, I want to understand how you then break it. So you identify it as one thing. Then what?
Jud Brewer:
So the second step here is really leveraging some of the strengths of our brain. So if we know that willpower is more myth and muscle, we don't go there, but we go to the older, the stronger parts of the brain, which is where we can actually leverage this reinforcement learning process. And the key there is knowing the cause and effect relationship. If a behavior is rewarding, we're going to keep doing it. If it's not rewarding, we're going to stop.
Let me use a simple eating example. My lab has been studying these overeating habit loops, and the idea with overeating is not just telling ourselves to stop. Anybody that's struggled with overeating knows that that's a failed. That's dead on arrival. So instead, what we have people do is we have them pay very careful attention as they're overeating. And as they notice what it feels like to overeat, nobody has come back and said, "Boy, it feels great to overeat." They're like, "Oh, this is pretty terrible."
What that does is it triggers this learning mechanism in our brain. This reward-based learning, when we pay attention, two things can happen. One is we get a positive prediction error if it's more rewarding than expected. And the other is we get a negative prediction error if it's less rewarding than expected. So when we overeat and we pay attention, and it's less rewarding than expected, negative prediction error, dopamine fires. We learn, "Oh, this isn't so good." In pragmatic terms, I think of it as we become disenchanted with the behavior, we're less excited to do it in the future.
Christof Koch:
How often does this happen and how powerful does this have to do to get before it actively curtails my overeating? Is this year long, many years practice?
Jud Brewer:
It's a great question. So in a study that we published relatively recently, ready for this? It took 10 to 15 times of somebody paying attention as they overrate. 10 to 15. That reward value.
Christof Koch:
You're telling me in a week I can reduce my overeating habits?
Jud Brewer:
It could happen in a week. It could happen faster than a week. If somebody's really paying attention every time they overeat, it depends on how often they do that. So the key here is the reward value has to drop below zero to shift that behavior below it being rewarding anymore. And the second piece with that is that they really have to be able to link that up like, "Oh, this does not feel good." So as they do that, they start to become disenchanted and it becomes much easier for them.
We've got to notice what it feels like in our body. So here are a key element, and this is actually key for mindfulness in general is I think of it this way. The feeling body is much stronger than the thinking brain. We can't just say, "I shouldn't overeat." The shoulds is the whole habit loop unto itself, but it's really feeling like what does this feel like? And that's what shifts reward value. So 10 to 15 times seems crazy for changing a habit.
Christof Koch:
Particularly if you have it for many years.
Jud Brewer:
Yeah. But if you look at it from a survival standpoint, we don't have 20 times to determine whether that's a mountain dog or a mountain lion. We've got to run when there's danger. We don't get 20 chances to survive.
Heather Berlin:
So what you're saying is basically our body knows is adapted and we need to be paying attention to the signals that our body is giving us. So I think about this. You're in a movie theater eating popcorn, and you're mindlessly eating it, and you're watching the movie, and then all of a sudden the whole thing is gone. You're like, "What did I just do? I just ate." But if you are focusing your attention on either each piece of popcorn, is it crunchy? How does it taste? What does it feel like?
Christof Koch:
Be mindful.
Heather Berlin:
Be mindful while you're eating it and attend to your body signals because your body has this whole normally unconscious processes that are keeping this equilibrium. But I think sometimes we override that, right?
Jud Brewer:
Absolutely.
Heather Berlin:
So the idea is to attend to what our body is telling us. Listen to your body. It's like people over exercise. If you're feeling sore the next day, don't go push yourself, do it again. Listen to your body.
Christof Koch:
No pain, no gain.
Heather Berlin:
And then you get injuries.
Jud Brewer:
Yes.
Christof Koch:
No pain, no gain. So tell me, if we now return to the hotel room where Heather is lying and she can't sleep, so where would be the negative predictive value there?
Jud Brewer:
So the first step is to map out these habit loops. The habit loop at the hotel, for example, could be thoughts of, is this dangerous place?
Heather Berlin:
There's also existential angst like I'm alone in the world, you're dislocated from your home. There's all those thoughts. But yes, go on.
Jud Brewer:
Just a few things that can trigger this existential. So let's call it the angsting where that actually is activating. It keeps us awake. And then the result of that is don't get good night's sleep. So from a survival standpoint, our brain is asking, is this dangerous or is this different? And so to step out of that, we could be asking questions like, "Oh, well, grounding ourselves in our body, noticing it, noticing the thoughts like, oh, here's, here are these thoughts that are happening."
And then we can ask, "What am I getting from this?" As I angst away all night, and then check my phone to see how little sleep I'm getting and angst even more." Is this actually helping me? What am I getting from this? So we can feel into it directly, like, "Oh, this is actually making me more activated, more anxious, and we can become disenchanted with that." And then we can also see, "This probably isn't going to solve all my life's problems now." And so then we can shift to the third step which is-
Christof Koch:
Wait, but before we come to that, so you really have to experience this closed state talking about perception box, this closed state that I'm very anxious, the world, I'm concerned, I'm afraid I'm lonely, but then how do I open the walls of this box?
Jud Brewer:
And just to be clear about that, Christof, we can all do this together. It's like how does it feel when we're anxious? How does it feel when there's existential angst? Does it feel contracted or does it feel expanded? You're nodding. What would you say?
Heather Berlin:
Closed.
Jud Brewer:
Yeah, closed down, contracted. So we can actually even take that and start to ask, "Well, how does this contracted experience feel? How does getting stuck in this mindset feel?" It doesn't feel very good. Not very rewarding. So we can actually leverage that so that we become disenchanted with that as well. And this is where we can then start to step out of it. And actually just to bring it back with my patient that I talked about with panic, so he had generalized anxiety. Probably had it for about 30 years. And what I sent him home to do in that first visit was just to start mapping out his habit loops or anxiety.
I should also mention he was 400 pounds. He was at a very unhealthy weight. So he had some health anxiety because he had obstructive sleep apnea, had high blood pressure. His liver was very fatty because of the food he was eating. So he comes back and the first thing he says to me is, "Hey, doc, I lost 14 pounds." And I'm looking at him because we hadn't even talked about weight loss yet. I was going to save that. I said, "Well, tell me what happened." He said, "I was mapping on my habit loops And I realized my habit is feel anxious, eat fast food and then numb myself."
So trigger, behavior, results. And he said, "You know what? Eating fast food was actually the other result was it was making me more anxious. It was contributing to my health anxiety. So I got totally disenchanted with that." I don't know if he used that term, but he said, "So I stopped eating fast food." He went on to lose over a hundred pounds because it was more rewarding to be healthy than to have this temporary relief of eating fast food. And he said it was the easiest weight loss he'd ever had and he's actually maintained it for years, which a lot of people, when they try to force themselves to diet, they'll yo-yo diet. They'll regain that weight.
Heather Berlin:
So as in shifting his perspective and maybe opening up this perception box and not being so closed, that helped him change his behavior in a way that shifted the whole habit. It wasn't just a temporary, "I'm going to go on a diet." And then he found that became more rewarding. It can be painful for people to change a habit and there does need to be a kind of shift and a reward for something else. That shift alone is very difficult for some people.
Jud Brewer:
So I think of this as the third step, and I think of that as-
Christof Koch:
It's like a meta step. You have to be willing to change your habits.
Jud Brewer:
Yeah, and it's interesting you say that because often the willingness comes from the pain that the habit causes. So for my patient, the pain was all this anxiety, and that's actually what he was focusing on first. But then he started to notice the pain of his fast food eating habits. And so there, it was actually just helping him start to see that and become disenchanted with the overeating and the eating of the fast food was very helpful for him. He knew that he needed to lose weight. He didn't know how to do it. It was really just seeing that it was more painful to eat fast food than to not eat it.
That was the reward that helped him step out of the loop. So I think of that as this third step is these bigger, better offers. And for some people it can be simply stepping out of an old habit loop that is more rewarding. For others, and I think more generally, we can start to see what are intrinsic behaviors that we can tap into that are probably not dopamine driven so that they aren't habituating, but are intrinsically rewarding. I think of two flavors here, and this is also what our research has shown in others has shown as well, is around mindfulness training. It's curiosity and it's also kindness.
Christof Koch:
Compassion. Curiosity and compassion.
Heather Berlin:
So if you're stuck in a habit loop that's not necessarily externally behavioral, but it's just in the anxiety and the overthinking and you realize, "Okay, this isn't doing anything for me." Then the switch would be into mindfulness, into where is that? How do you stop that mental loop of the overthinking?
Jud Brewer:
Yeah. So the key elements, and we can talk about mindfulness... Let's talk about the elements of it in case mindfulness is a confusing concept for some people. So it's really about being aware of what's happening and also bringing this curious, this nonjudgmental, this compassionate attitude to that. So not saying, "Oh, this is what's happening. It sucks." Right now we're keeping ourselves closed in our own perception box of what's happening. But we're really stepping back and going, "Oh, this is what's happening." And we're even bowing to it as a teacher. What can I learn from this? So really seeing what's happening
Christof Koch:
So I can learn that those thoughts, I don't have to identify myself with. That's not me. I can observe me.
Jud Brewer:
And that's a key aspect to it. So for example, if we're worrying, so if you're worrying if you're in a hotel room or if somebody's worrying that, "Oh, am I going to be anxious all day?" We can first help our brains see what's more rewarding. Worrying or being curious about those sensations and those thoughts? So to our brains, it's no-brainer. Being curious feels better. My lab has done research on this. It's just more rewarding.
Heather Berlin:
So you shift your perception from just being in the feelings to, "Oh, that's an interesting feeling. Let me explore that or get curious about that." But also, I like this compassion piece is about opening yourself up and maybe incorporating other people too. So I find that if I'm worrying about something, but then I have to go, then I'm helping a patient or I'm doing therapy with someone, I forget about my own problems.
Jud Brewer:
So as you're highlighting it, just connection feels good. Connection literally is expanding beyond our own little like, "This is me and I'm stuck in this little thing," to, "Oh, this is we. We're working together." And so it can actually be very energizing to bring compassion into our days as compared to being completely focused on ourselves like, "Oh, no, am I going to get through today? Oh no, look at my patient list. Oh no, I'm an hour behind in seeing my patients and all of that stuff." All of that keeps us locked, contracted in our worry boxes.
Heather Berlin:
Safe potentially.
Christof Koch:
No, that's why it's great to have a dog with you in your bed. You can just hug him.
Heather Berlin:
This is Christof's solution to anxiety.
Christof Koch:
Yes.
Heather Berlin:
All the world's problems, it's just everyone get a dog.
Christof Koch:
So tell me, so you are really putting the finger on, people have to be incredibly attentive to their own state of mind, right?
Heather Berlin:
Yes.
Christof Koch:
That's really critical.
Jud Brewer:
It is critical. And we found that in one randomized controlled trial of our unwinding anxiety app, we actually got a 67% reduction in these clinically validated anxiety measures. So by training people to be curious and pay attention, it actually can lead to really significant clinically relevant results.
Heather Berlin:
Does acceptance fall into this as well? So let's say you're feeling anxious and you say, "Okay. This is me feeling anxiety. This is okay. I'm just going to have this feeling and let it sit."
Christof Koch:
Like a distancing.
Heather Berlin:
So what about just saying, "Okay. I'm feeling anxious now I'm just going to accept this."
Jud Brewer:
I think that's key and that's actually one of the key elements that some people describe as being a mindfulness training. It's like bringing that acceptance in. And you can think of it this way. There's this great quote attributed to Marcus Aurelius where he says, "What stands in the way becomes the way." Or another quote related to that is, "The only way out is through." So we can't avoid things, but if we accept, "Oh, here's anxiety, then we can learn to be with it."
And the paradox here is that we don't have to do anything about these thoughts, about these sensations. The less we do, the more we just learn to be with them, the more they'll come and go on their own. And so pragmatically, one way that I work with my patients to put this into action is to think of what anxiety feels like, what worrying feels like. It's like this, "Oh no, oh no." So we're closed down, we're contracted, we're kind of stuck in our box.
So if we inject some curiosity, we can flip that, "Oh no," to, "Oh, oh, here's a thought. Oh, what does this feel like in my body?" And that helps us expand and not be stuck in that box, but really be with our experience. And the other part of that, "Oh, is we can watch a thought come up." We can watch it go away. We can watch another thought come up instead of like, "Oh, no, there's that anxious thought. Oh no, there, I'm worrying again."
Heather Berlin:
So it's incorporating it into, it's expanding this box in a way that it incorporates it and allows for it all and we're not stuck in that.
Christof Koch:
Well, it's also the realization that we live in this perception box and to accept that and to try to explore the boundaries of that and maybe expand them, right? You keep on talking about these expanding states versus these and these contracting states. Tell me in your book, Unwinding Anxiety, you make this statement. It's less important to worry about the why, because people worry a lot. I know somebody very close. She keeps on wondering why she's so anxious and trying to go back into early childhood, but you're saying that's not really so relevant.
Jud Brewer:
The short answer is yes, it's not and it is often where people get stuck because they think, "If I can just find that trigger, I can fix it or avoid it." Well, if it's life hard to avoid life. And if it's something that we don't have control over, which is most of life, neither of those is going to work. So people get stuck in these rabbit holes of why, why, why, why thinking, "If I can figure out why, I can fix it." The other problem there is if it's something from the past, it's in the past. I love this saying, "Forgiveness is giving up hope of a better past." You heard that one, right?
Heather Berlin:
Mm-hmm.
Jud Brewer:
Giving up hope of a better past. We've got to let go of the past instead of drag it into the present moment.
Christof Koch:
But how do you let go of your past?
Jud Brewer:
Herein comes the second step is what am I getting from-
Christof Koch:
Recalling my past.
Jud Brewer:
... being stuck in this? So it's like, "Oh, it's heavy. Oh, it's not helping me move forward." All of these things are, it's not rewarding to hold on often to hold onto the past. So instead of saying, "Oh, I need to let go of this," we can say, "How is this serving me? What am I getting from this? Oh, nothing." And we bring in that bigger, better offer. So it's both seeing how painful it is, whatever the old habit is, but also finding that bigger, better offer.
Heather Berlin:
And wanting to make the change. I think there has to be that motivation to do that.
Jud Brewer:
Absolutely. So as an example, an early pilot test of our Unwinding Anxiety app wrote me an email and she said, "I feel like anxiety is deeply etched in my bones." That's how identified she was with her anxiety. That's how much she had created this very strong box where she's like, "I am anxious." And so the idea there is to, you're pointing out, recognize, "Oh, this is actually a box that I've put myself in." There's this Rumi poem like Community of Spirit where he talks about we're stuck in our... We put ourselves in jail basically where it's like, "Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?" So he even talks about this closedness of putting ourselves in jail. "Step outside that tangle of worry thinking," I think is the quote.
Christof Koch:
But she'd learned to identify herself with that anxiety.
Jud Brewer:
Exactly. Actually, that's where we start is to see, "Oh, this is jail that we've put ourselves in, and the door is open."
Christof Koch:
There's a way out.
Jud Brewer:
And that way out is through awareness, being curious. "Oh, look, this is a box. This is a box that I've created. And if I've created it, I can uncreate it. And this box could even be a habit." Some of us win the genetic lottery. Some of us get big dogs and hug them a lot. And then for the rest of us, there's this feeling like, "Oh, there's something wrong with me if I have anxiety." Me? Boy, I was pretty anxious in college. I still get anxiety. I used to get panic attacks during residency.
I created a fricking program. I wrote a book about anxiety. I still get anxious. But it's okay. It's like, "Okay. Here are these feelings of anxiety." And the more I can learn to accept them and be with them and open to them, the more they're going to come and go on their own and not create a problem.
Christof Koch:
No, wait. So you're saying you still get anxious? But haven't you mapped out your habit loop and [inaudible 00:35:08]?
Heather Berlin:
But the feeling still arise.
Jud Brewer:
Yeah. So this is really critical because often people think that anxiety is something they need to do something about. For a habit loop, it's a behavior. And what we tend to fall under the habit of doing is worrying. So that's something that can work with and unwind as a habit loop is the worrying piece. With the anxiety, it's learning to be with it, allow it open to it, even embrace it like, "Oh, here it is." As compared to, "Ooh, no, I don't want this."
Heather Berlin:
So bring it back to your patient. Whatever happened with his anxiety?
Jud Brewer:
So as I mentioned, my patient at that second visit was starting to map out these habit loops. He was becoming disenchanted with eating fast food. And at the same time, he was starting to learn to work with his anxiety. I was walking out of our school of public health one day at Brown University, so a pretty busy street. I walk out onto the sidewalk, this guy pulls up, rolls down his window, it's my patient. I'm thinking, "Great. He's driving." He gives me this huge grin and he goes, "Hey, doc, I'm an Uber driver now. I'm headed to the airport to pick someone up."
Heather Berlin:
Wow.
Jud Brewer:
So what that highlights is, the idea here was that he was learning how to see what his mind was doing, how he was boxing himself in, right? "Oh, I'm an anxious person." He was learning to map out that as a habit loop and see already expanding that box, like, "Oh, it's not me. It's a habit." And then taking that one step farther and saying, "Oh, by being curious about those sensations, he could not feed the habit, step out of it and actually lean into it so that he could go along and move forward in his life."
Heather Berlin:
That's a really wonderful story. I mean, just to show how you can really turn things around by changing your perspective and being aware, and noticing these habits, and learning how to step away from them, and break them, and become curious.
Jud Brewer:
Absolutely. One thing I just want to highlight here as related to the perception box is that we create these. One, we make them habits. Two, we blame ourselves. Three, which gets in the way of us being able to see them as boxes and then open those doors so that as Rumi put it, "We can move into ever widening rings of being."
Christof Koch:
I like that a lot.
Heather Berlin:
Well, I thought we would do something that would be fun is just to ask each other maybe some perception box questions to probe a little bit deeper.
Christof Koch:
It's funny that you ask that.
Heather Berlin:
I mean, we have some questions here. We don't know. I don't know what you're going to ask. I have questions I'm going to ask, but I think it would be a fun little exercise for us to, as individuals probe a little bit deeper and see how closed in our boxes are, and if we can expand them out. Let me ask a question. Jud, if you were able to drop all your identities, what would you be? Who would you be?
Jud Brewer:
Nobody. And it would be amazing.
Heather Berlin:
So you're comfortable with the infinite nothingness of not having an ego and just being...
Jud Brewer:
Well, I'd like to say I'm completely comfortable with it, and that would probably be a big lie. I would say just seeing how painful it is and how much energy it takes to hold up some ego identity, the more I can look into those, and, "Boy, I had plenty over the years." It's like, "Wow, that's painful. That's painful. That's painful." It makes it easier to let go of them. And also to be inspired by people who are truly humble and seeing how... And then in a moment of humility, how much better that feels than trying to put myself out there in the world.
Christof Koch:
There's something very restful about those people. They sort of spread this atmosphere of just equanimity. And you know very quickly when you interact with them. They're just calm and cool.
Heather Berlin:
Yeah. There's like a presence of that. Christof, for you, have you ever gone through something that was very upsetting or painful that you later viewed as a blessing?
Christof Koch:
My complete loss of self. It was absolutely terrifying what happened there. But I ended up in this state of what Buddhists called non-dual self where there was no more, Christof, no more memory, no more body, no more world, no more dreams, desire, memory. No time, no space. But there I was, and it has completely removed most of my anxiety. It removed completely all my anxiety around death. I used to sort of lie in bed when you can't sleep and you worry about what happens after you die and you're dead for a long time or for a really long time, or for a really, really long time.
Heather Berlin:
Yeah, I don't like this idea at all. This is making me anxious.
Christof Koch:
I'm a climber, so it's like looking down an abyss, but it's bottomless abyss. You freak out. You get this existential vertigo. But I've not have since that episode, not a single hasn't happened a single night. And because I've experienced egoic death. My ego died and it was okay. So what is the biggest lie you've ever told about yourself, funny enough?
Heather Berlin:
About myself?
Christof Koch:
About yourself? About yourself, to yourself. Not to others, but to yourself.
Heather Berlin:
Oh my God.
Christof Koch:
The biggest story you've told that turned out not-
Heather Berlin:
Not to be true?
Christof Koch:
Not to be true.
Heather Berlin:
I think early on, I told myself when I was a child... I had a traumatic upbringing, very traumatic at an early age and one of the things I told myself to protect myself was, "I don't need anybody. I can do this all on my own. I don't need these people. I am just going to be really independent." It served me well. It was a driver and I was going to be independent, and I worked really hard and get all these degrees and will never have to need anybody.
But then I realized that, "No, you actually do need people." It was a lie I told myself in order to survive being around people who were not serving me well. And in those circumstances it was better to be independent. But as I got older, I realized that that's not true. I do need people.
Christof Koch:
And cats.
Heather Berlin:
And cats.
Christof Koch:
And dogs.
Heather Berlin:
I'm not going to go as far as dogs. I'll stick with cats. I mean, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for being with us, Dr. Judson Brewer. And if you'd like to learn more about your own perception box, spend time this week answering the same perception box questions that we asked Dr. Brewer, and check out our other questions on the website, unlikelycollaborators.com. And you can also subscribe to our YouTube channel and watch the show or listen wherever you get your podcast. So I'm Dr. Heather Berlin.
Christof Koch:
And I'm Dr. Christof Koch. Thank you very much.
Heather Berlin:
Thank you.
Anxiety can make us feel like we’re trapped in our brain. So how do we open the door and gain freedom? This week in the inaugural episode of Science of Perception Box podcast, Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch invite Dr. Judson Brewer to delve into the roots of anxiety, its impact on our perception, and how curiosity can be the key to lasting change.
Dr. Judson Brewer studies the neural mechanisms of mindfulness. He is the Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, where he’s also an Associate Professor at the School of Medicine. Dr. Brewer is a leading expert in the science of self-mastery and breaking habits. His books include Unwinding Anxiety, The Craving Mind, and The Hunger Habit.
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
Dr. Christof Koch is Chief Scientist for the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation and the current Meritorious Investigator and former President of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Join us for new episodes every Thursday. Follow the show on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever podcasts are found.
Love the show? Write us a review on your podcast app, or tell a friend about the show.
Join renowned scientists Dr. Heather Berlin and Dr. Christof Koch on the Science of Perception Box, where they delve into the Perception Box—a powerful metaphor created by Elizabeth R. Koch, that reveals how our beliefs, biases, and neural wiring shape our reality and define how we experience the world.Through captivating conversations with expert guests like psychiatrist Dr. Judson Brewer, anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher, and journalist Michael Pollan, the show explores how the Perception Box expands in states of awe, curiosity, and love, and contracts during fear, anxiety, or anger.From mindfulness and romantic relationships to psychedelics and human connection, each episode uncovers transformative insights into unlocking greater awareness, fostering curiosity, and reshaping how we perceive the world.New episodes drop every Thursday on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow the journey and redefine your reality.
Don’t call yourself “a writer,” just write. Ryan Holiday on how the labels you give yourself can hold you back.
Who would you be without all the labels and identities you’ve collected over the course of your life?
Ego, titles, and societal expectations often shape who we think we are—or who we think we should be. Author, and for simplicity's sake, bookstore owner, Ryan Holiday explains the simple question “What do you do?” can turn into a trap, making us cling to roles that don’t really define us. But what happens when you let go of these labels? What if, instead of focusing on the identity of being a writer, you focused on the act of writing itself?
As Holiday got older, he learned that being busy “doing the verb” is far more valuable than obsessing over the noun. It’s easy to get caught up in trying to fit into the “right” categories and titles, but that often means copying, comparing, and losing sight of what really matters.
About Ryan Holiday: Ryan Holiday is a bestselling author, marketer, and one of today’s leading voices in modern Stoicism. He’s known for taking ancient wisdom and making it relatable and practical for everyday life. Before becoming an author, he led marketing at American Apparel. Now, he writes about strategy, self-discipline, and leadership, weaving history into real-world advice.
When a group of first responders were asked to confront the Perception Box question, "What need inside of yourself have you been neglecting?", their raw and honest responses were deeply moving and sparked profound reflection.
This series (a collaboration with Jubilee Media) is designed for communities with shared experiences to spark deeper self-understanding and connection by sharing their answers to specially selected Perception Box questions. This highlights the power of vulnerability and the importance of creating safe spaces for honest conversations.
“I feel like I had to lose my sight to fully gain my vision.” John Furniss on how becoming blind led him to drug abuse, rehab, woodworking, and finally, to a fulfilling life.
John Furniss, also known as the Blind Woodsman, opens up about his journey from a difficult past to finding peace and purpose. After losing his sight as a teenager, John struggled for years to accept his new reality, battling inner turmoil and substance abuse along the way. It wasn't until he discovered woodworking through a vocational rehab program that he found a way to channel his creativity and start healing.
Woodworking became more than just a skill for John; it allowed him to bring the designs he imagined in his mind to life. This craft also led him to meet his wife, Annie, who has been a constant source of love and support. Through his work and his relationship, John found a sense of belonging and a new way of seeing the world. He reflects on how losing his sight actually helped him gain a clearer vision of who he is and what he’s meant to do, ultimately finding peace in embracing his true self.
About John Furniss:
John Furniss, known professionally as The Blind Woodsman, is a skilled woodworker, author, and disability advocate recognized for his meticulous hand-turned creations. After losing his sight at 16, John faced significant challenges adapting to life with total blindness. In his 20s, he found his passion for woodworking through a class designed for the blind, which led to the development of his unique craft.
Today, John’s work has been featured on platforms such as Good Morning America and The Kelly Clarkson Show. He and his wife, Anni, who is also an artist, use their social media platforms to share their work and raise awareness about disability and mental health. John’s expertise in woodworking and his contributions to the art community have established him as a respected figure in his field.
Kaelynn Partlow shares her story about life with autism, ADHD, and dyslexia, and how finding the right diagnosis helped her embrace her neurodivergent identity.
Kaelynn Partlow, an author, autism advocate, and registered behavior technician, shares her own experiences living with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and more. She talks about how these diagnoses shifted her self-perception from feeling "stupid" to understanding her unique challenges and strengths.
Kaelynn opens up about the misunderstandings neurodivergent people face and the difficulty of connecting in a world that often doesn't accommodate different ways of thinking. She also shares her fears—like wondering if her social difficulties will ever improve—and how she copes with loneliness, especially when not focused on work.
Through it all, Kaelynn emphasizes the value of recognizing your own strengths, even when it’s hard. By taking on challenges and thriving under pressure, she found new opportunities, from public speaking to creative writing. Her story shows that growth often comes from facing fears and redefining success on your own terms.
About Kaelynn Partlow:
In 2015, Kaelynn Partlow joined Project Hope Foundation as a Registered Behavior Technician. She is now a Lead Technician, providing services to middle and high-school-aged clients and contributing to staff training development.
In 2021, Kaelynn was featured on the Netflix series Love On The Spectrum. She has also been a guest on numerous national podcasts and has published several articles, offering insights from an autistic perspective.
With a large following on various social media platforms, Kaelynn uses her reach for autism advocacy, connecting with millions globally. In addition to her online work and role at Project Hope, she is an international public speaker, passionate about sharing tangible strategies for best practices when interacting with individuals on the autism spectrum
Your brain is wired to repeat the familiar. Change this wiring, and it will change your life.
Nicole Vignola, a neuroscientist and organizational psychologist, explains how deeply rooted beliefs can limit our potential and keep us trapped in patterns of thought. These perceptions, often shaped by our upbringing and environment, aren’t necessarily our own—but they can be changed.
Nicole shares how the brain’s natural biases, like negativity bias and confirmation bias, reinforce these limiting beliefs. However, with the right approach, it’s possible to reshape our mental patterns. By practicing metacognition—observing and naming our thoughts—we can start to rewire our perception and create new, empowering narratives.
Our brains are capable of change at any age. By focusing on small wins and challenging automatic thoughts, we can break free from old beliefs and begin using a mindset that better serves ourselves and our futures.
About Nicole Vignola:
Nicole Vignola is a neuroscientist, author and corporate consultant. With a BSc in Neuroscience and an MSc in Organizational Psychology, Nicole works with companies and individuals worldwide, educating them on the science of human optimisation, health and longevity, and how to enable employees to perform better in their daily lives and in turn, bring peak performance to the workplace. Recent clients include Lloyds Bank, Makers Mark and Smeg Ltd.
Expanding your worldview starts with understanding your brain. Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman explains.
David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford and host of the Inner Cosmos podcast, explores how our brains shape the reality we experience and why we often accept our perceptions as the only truth. From a young age, we develop our understanding of the world based on limited experiences and biases, which can lead us to form narrow views about what's true.
Eagleman explains that our genetics and life experiences wire our brains in unique ways, meaning that each of us sees the world a little differently. He introduces the idea of "perceptual genomics," which looks at how slight genetic differences influence our perception of reality. He also discusses how our brains naturally create in-groups and out-groups, a tendency rooted in evolution that affects how much empathy we feel for others.
To overcome these biases, Eagleman suggests that we start by recognizing our own prejudices, understanding the tactics of dehumanization, and connecting with others through shared interests. This approach helps us appreciate the diverse realities others experience, ultimately contributing to a more empathetic and understanding society.
About David Eagleman:
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University and an internationally bestselling author. He is co-founder of two venture-backed companies, Neosensory and BrainCheck, and he also directs the Center for Science and Law, a national non-profit institute. He is best known for his work on sensory substitution, time perception, brain plasticity, synesthesia, and neurolaw.
Challenging the loneliness stigma can change your life. Here’s how to start.
From a young age, many of us are taught that being alone means something is wrong, leading to negative thought patterns that reinforce feelings of isolation. Kasley Killam, author of The Art and Science of Connection and an expert in social health, explains how these perceptions of loneliness can shape our experiences and influence our lives.
According to Killam, this stigma around loneliness can trigger a stress response in the body, affecting both mental and physical well being. However, by challenging these narratives and reminding ourselves of how much control we really have, it’s possible to redirect our mindsets. It also helps, she says, to understand the difference between individualistic and collectivist cultures, and how each one can influence the way we interpret and discuss our feelings with others.
For those who have struggled with loneliness or felt trapped in a cycle of negative thinking, this perspective can help us break free. By shifting our thought patterns, we can transform our relationships, enhance our sense of connection, and improve our overall well-being.
About Kasley Killam:
Kasley Killam is a social health expert, author, and advocate focused on strengthening connections and enhancing community well-being. With a background in behavioral science and public health from Harvard University, she is a leading voice on the impact of social relationships on mental and physical health.
As the founder of Social Health Labs, Killam collaborates with organizations to develop innovative solutions for combating loneliness and social isolation. Her work has been featured in major publications, and she is a sought-after speaker on the importance of social well-being in creating healthier, more resilient communities.
Ever wonder why your partner goes Tasmanian Devil in traffic jams while you just shrug? Or why you have such a hard time setting boundaries with parents when your sibling has no problem saying "hell no!" Everyone has something that triggers panic or turns their blood cold…and it all starts with the story you made up about yourself when you were too young to know the difference…your Perception Box Seed Story.
A group of LGBTQ+ individuals courageously answered the Perception Box question, "Who or what have you left behind on your journey to become who you are today?" Their honest and insightful responses were deeply moving.
This series (a collaboration with Jubilee Media) is designed for communities with shared experiences to spark deeper self-understanding and connection by sharing their answers to specially selected Perception Box questions. This highlights the power of vulnerability and the importance of creating safe spaces for honest conversations.
How has Kel Mitchell navigated self-doubt, isolation, and the desire to “hit the off button”? He says it’s all faith, community, and personal forgiveness.
After his debut on Nickelodeon, Kel Mitchell began a life-long career as an actor and comedian. He got married, started a family, and basked in professional success. However, behind the scenes, he faced intense personal hardships that pushed him to the brink, testing his resilience and strength in ways he never imagined.
Kel guides us through the lowest points of his life, showing us how faith in himself and his religion helped him rebuild and achieve a fulfilling existence. He reminds us that blessings can often be hidden in hardships and that mistakes play a crucial role in shaping who we are.
By expressing his pain and opening up to others about the things he was struggling with, he was able to find unity, community, and support from those who had experienced similar drawbacks. Mitchell stresses the importance of understanding others, and how deep relationships can change – and even save – lives.
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or go to suicidepreventionlifeline.org.
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Kel Mitchell is a two-time Emmy Award-nominated actor, producer, comedian, and youth pastor hailing from Chicago, Illinois.
Mitchell executive produced and appeared in the new iteration of the beloved Nickelodeon series All That, bringing him full circle to the original award-winning show that was his big break. All That was Nickelodeon's longest-running live-action series, with 171 episodes across ten seasons from 1994 to 2005. The franchise paved the way for a number of successful spin-offs, including Kenan & Kel, The Amanda Show, The Nick Cannon Show, and the feature-length film Good Burger, all of which cemented Mitchell's impact on pop culture.
A two-part visualization to help you gain distance from any overpowering emotion so you can respond to the true need of the moment with something closer to calm.
Harvard physician Aditi Nerukar explains how to rewire your brain’s stress response to live a more resilient life.
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “pressure makes diamonds,” this video is for you.
Harvard physician Aditi Nerurkar was working 80 hours a week, and, despite what she was telling herself about resilience, the stress was taking a major toll. She explains how there are two different kinds of stress, aptly named “adaptive” and “maladaptive.” But how can you tell the difference between the two?
Dr. Nerukar explains that healthy, adaptive stress moves your life forward, while unhealthy, maladaptive stress wears you down and diminishes your productivity. When experiencing maladaptive stress, you may find yourself plummeting closer to burnout, or a complete shutdown. To combat these consequences, Dr. Neurkar offers two easily achievable methods for resetting your brain in high-stress situations.
Whether you're navigating a demanding job, balancing multiple life roles, or simply looking to improve your stress management, this information can help you thrive without compromising your well-being. Remember to slow down, take deep breaths, and regularly check in with yourself to ensure your stress remains healthy and manageable!
Neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor explains the 4 key ”characters” of the brain, and how understanding each can expand your perception of yourself, and the world, forever.
At age 37, neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke that would take her eight years to fully recover from. This is how it changed her understanding of the brain.
In this interview, Dr. Jill draws a map of the human brain, explaining how it is comprised of four distinct modules, each serving a unique role in function and personality. This combination of cognitive and emotional components gives rise to the multidimensional characters within each of us.
Are you looking to be more rational, more creative, more forgiving, or perhaps less rigid in your thinking? Dr. Jill suggests that by becoming aware of the four modules of our brains, we can consciously choose to engage specific parts. This awareness allows us to harness the true power of our brains and shape who we want to become, ultimately fostering less anxiety, more inner peace, and a vastly more purposeful life.
Carrie Berk reveals how she transformed her struggle with anxiety and internet fame by changing her perception and finding her true voice as a writer.
Carrie Berk, author, journalist, and social media influencer with nearly 4 million TikTok followers, shares her journey through anxiety, internet fame, and personal growth.
Amid the pandemic and sudden online fame, Carrie faced intense anxiety, receiving harmful threats from strangers and grappling with the pressures of social media. Sharing her most vulnerable moments, including her first heartbreak at sixteen, Carrie emphasizes the importance of authenticity. Through therapy and self-discovery, she learned that while she couldn’t switch off her anxiety, she could change her response to it.
Carrie’s story is a perfect example of the resilience it takes to be a young person in today’s social climate, and proves how powerful self-confidence and inner strength can be.
This group of people who have experienced homelessness were asked the Perception Box question, "In moments of deep solitude, what major concerns and questions about YOU tend to dominate your thoughts?" Their honest answers were deeply moving and insightful.
This series (a collaboration with Jubilee Media) is designed for communities with shared experiences to spark deeper self-understanding and connection by sharing their answers to specially selected Perception Box questions. This highlights the power of vulnerability and the importance of creating safe spaces for honest conversations.
In this episode, a group of formerly incarcerated individuals was asked the Perception Box question, "What are you most afraid is true about you?" Their candid responses were incredibly moving and thought-provoking.
This series (a collaboration with Jubilee Media) is designed for communities with shared experiences to spark deeper self-understanding and connection by sharing their answers to specially selected Perception Box questions. This highlights the power of vulnerability and the importance of creating safe spaces for honest conversations.
Jewel says denying the truth cost her years of her life. This is how she shifted her perception to see truth more clearly and regain her strength.
“My number one job was to be a happy, whole human — not a human full of holes.” Jewel Kilcher, singer-songwriter, and visual artist, opens up about her childhood, the start of her career, and what makes Jewel, Jewel.
After being discovered during a coffee shop gig in the 1990’s, folk singer Jewel began the life-long endeavor of being a performer. Jewel went on to gain worldwide recognition for her talent and creativity. But who is she at her core? What are her greatest fears, her deepest aspirations?
In this interview, Jewel shares the personal struggles and triumphs that have shaped her, the importance of truth on her life and well-being, and the lessons she's learned along the way. Through this conversation, Jewel offers an up-close look into her journey, revealing the experiences and hard-won insights that have shaped her as both an artist and a person.
Experience Jewel’s latest exhibit at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Portal: An Art Experience by Jewel ► https://crystalbridges.org/calendar/the-portal-an-art-experience-by-jewel/
About Jewel:
Jewel Kilcher, known mononymously as Jewel, embodies the quintessential story of resilience and artistic integrity. From her humble beginnings in the rugged landscapes of Alaska to her rise as a multi-platinum recording artist, Jewel's journey is a testament to the transformative power of art. Homeless at 18, she honed her craft performing in coffee shops, blending folk, pop, and country influences with her ethereal voice and introspective songwriting.
Her debut album, "Pieces of You," captured hearts worldwide, achieving remarkable commercial success while delivering profound, soul-stirring messages. Beyond music, Jewel's talents extend to poetry and acting, with her literary works and performances reflecting her deep empathy and authenticity.
Jewel's commitment to social causes, including mental health advocacy and her foundation, the Inspiring Children Foundation, underscores her dedication to making a positive impact. In a world often dominated by transient fame, Jewel stands out as a beacon of enduring creativity and compassionate leadership.
Alyssa and her ex-boyfriend Trey have successfully transitioned from lovers to best friends. But can she recreate that same dynamic with her most recent ex, Adal? Alyssa, Trey, and Adal dive deep into their pasts and their relationships with each other by answering a series of thought-provoking Perception Box questions. Watch their honest reflections, uncover their perspectives on love and friendship, and discover what the future holds for this unique trio.
What happens when men shed their armor and embrace their emotions? Men from diverse backgrounds share their stories of overcoming trauma, redefining masculinity, and finding strength in vulnerability. This is a must-watch for anyone seeking deeper connections and understanding.
Emma and Nick both swiped "yes" in person. Now that they have a chance to get to know each other and themselves more deeply by answering Perception Box questions, are they compatible?
Arielle & Ella met on a Nectar dating show. Was it meant to be, or are they destined to be just friends? They will find out when they get to know their true selves and each other by answering Perception Box questions.
Participants are invited to sit down to ask each other Perception Box questions to see if two strangers could sit down and get vulnerable with one another.
This powerful episode features a group of individuals with disabilities opening up about their deepest fears and struggles. Their experiences highlight the unique challenges they face, from concerns about independent living to mental health struggles and navigating social stigma, and ultimately how they can relate to one another.
Michael Oher gained widespread recognition through Michael Lewis's book "The Blind Side" and its film adaptation, which depicted his difficulties in early life and time playing college football. After attending the University of Mississippi, he played in the NFL for the Baltimore Ravens, Tennessee Titans, and Carolina Panthers, winning the SuperBowl with the Ravens in 2013.
Shaka Senghor spent 19 years in prison, 7 of them in solitary confinement. This is how he found true freedom.
Watch the full video here.
Watch what happens when this group of strangers bravely share their unspoken truths. Will these women find connection in the unexpected? Could sharing your secret be the key to unlocking a powerful sense of belonging?
Curious about tools for fostering deeper self-awareness? Check out the latest episode of Tea for Two by Nectar. Former high school sweethearts, Diane & Justin, use Perception Box questions to explore their individual needs and communication styles. Great insights for anyone in a relationship, whether personal or professional.
Hailey and Travis first met on the Nectar channel, now they are going on their first date and things get deep.
Do you ever feel like you have something to prove?
Scientific experts explain how each person's perception is skewed by various factors such as beliefs, biases, and narratives.
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A collection of interviews dedicated to sharing unique perspectives and challenging our preconceived notions.
Jim Lee, President, Publisher, and Chief Creative Officer of DC Comics tells us how his childhood obsession with Superman changed his life.
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Explore how overcoming the limiting beliefs that hold us back, can expand the possibilities of our perception, and open us up to new ways of seeing and being seen.
The Osbournes was MTV’s biggest show – and it almost cost Jack Osbourne his life. Here’s how his family’s reality TV fame stole his childhood, and how he’s been able to heal since.
Meet Jordan and Rana. These two undergrads have been in an exclusive situationship, but are ready to confront where their relationship is going and what might come next.
Tea for Two explores how daters show up in a relationship by first taking a look at their relationship with themselves. Through a series of Perception Box questions, Tea for Two questions, and challenges, these daters get to know each other and themselves on a whole new level. This allows them to dig deeper, uncover more meaningful connections, and figure out if they are ready to be in this relationship.
This is how rejection made executive producer and director Julie Plec an undeniable leader.
Creator of the popular series “The Vampire Diaries,” Julie Plec is proof imposter syndrome never goes away, no matter how big you make it. The writer and producer answered our questions about self-doubt, getting “blacklisted,” and how we can alter our perceptions to better appreciate our successes.
About Julie Plec:
Julie Plec is a creator, showrunner, executive producer and director, most notably responsible for the complete Vampire Diaries Universe (The Vampire Diaries, The Originals, and Legacies), which spanned thirteen years and more than 300 episodes of television.
Plec is co-creator and co-showrunner of the upcoming series Vampire Academy, based on the popular book series, which recently wrapped production in Spain and is debuting September 15, 2022, on Peacock. She is also co-creator of the new series Dead Day, along with her Vampire Diaries partner Kevin Williamson, which was recently picked up to series at Peacock as well, and executive producer of Girls on the Bus, which was picked up straight to series at HBO Max.
Plec is creator and executive producer of Legacies, which recently aired its fourth and final season on the CW, along with serving as an executive producer of Roswell, New Mexico, which recently aired its fourth and final season on the CW as well. In addition, Plec served as executive producer of The Endgame, starring Morena Baccarin and Ryan Michelle Bathé, which recently aired on NBC.
She is currently under an overall deal at Universal Television, where she and Emily Cummins, president of her production company, My So-Called Company, are developing projects across all platforms for the studio. Plec and Cummins recently announced a new project at Peacock, Clifton, along with a slate of several other projects in development.
Along with directing multiple episodes of The Vampire Diaries, Legacies, and Roswell, New Mexico, for which she also directed the pilot, Plec directed an episode of the CW’s hit series Riverdale, and most recently directed an episode of her new series Vampire Academy.
Plec developed and executive produced Containment, which aired as a limited series on the CW in 2016.
She got her start as a television writer and co-executive producer for the series Kyle XY, which she produced for the show’s three-year run. Other television credits include Dawson’s Creek, on which she collaborated with creator/executive producer Kevin Williamson, and The Tomorrow People, on which she collaborated with fellow executive producers Greg Berlanti and Phil Klemmer.
In the early part of her career, Plec worked with both Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson during the run of their hit Scream franchise. She also co-produced Berlanti’s directorial debut film, The Broken Hearts Club.
Your emotions do not reflect an irrefutable truth. Psychologist Kristen Lindquist explains how important that is for connecting across cultures.
When it comes to obtaining an objective understanding of the world around us, emotions may not be as reliable as we think, explains Kristen Lindquist, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Lindquist explores the concept of "affective realism," a term that describes how our feelings shape our reality, both of which are influenced by cultural nuances. She unravels the connections between emotions, culture, and the brain, challenging the notion that our emotional experiences always mirror objective truths.
About Kristen Lindquist:
Kristen Lindquist, PhD. is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research seeks to understand the psychological and neural basis of emotions, moods, and feelings. Her on-going work uses tools from social cognition, physiology, neuroscience, and big data methods to examine how emotions emerge from the confluence of the body, brain, and culture.
Robert Waldinger is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and Zen priest. He is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where he directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development. His TEDx talk on this subject has received nearly 44 million views, and is the 9th most watched TED talk of all time. He is the co-author of The Good Life with Dr. Marc Schulz.
Scott Barry Kaufman talks to Robert Waldinger about the secret to a happy life. Robert shares the recent findings of The Grant Study, which is the longest scientific study of happiness ever conducted. It’s been ongoing for more than 80 years now, and has had high profile participants like US President John F. Kennedy. Robert and Scott get into the details of how they continue to conduct research and how to make sense of both the new and old data. Sure enough, what the study has found consistent is the power of connection. They also touch on the topics of psychodynamic therapy, defense mechanisms, attachment, and psychological research.
Website: www.robertwaldinger.com
X: @robertwaldinger
The divisive gold/blue dress that almost broke the internet in 2015 is a relatable example of how a Perception Box works. How each of us having our Perception Box, own subjective reality, affects the way we experience the world.
Expert James Fadiman explains how psychedelics have the power to expand consciousness, enhance creativity, and deepen our connections to the world.
James Fadiman, a distinguished figure with over six decades in psychedelic research, examines the profound impact psychedelics have on consciousness, creativity, and connectivity.
Fadiman shares insights into how these substances shift perception, offering perspectives that challenge and expand our understanding of reality. He also delves into the scientific underpinnings of psychedelics, their therapeutic potential, and the societal benefits of fostering deeper empathy and open-mindedness. Highlighting the importance of integration post-experience, Fadiman sheds light on the transformative power of psychedelics to not only alter individual consciousness but also to enhance community bonds and personal relationships.
Through a focus on responsible use and the expansion of human awareness, Fadiman's expertise offers a compelling view into the capacity of psychedelics to redefine our interaction with the world and ourselves.
About James Fadiman:
Dr. James Fadiman is a leading scientific expert on the use of psychedelics for personal exploration, healing, and transformation. He has been researching, writing and lecturing on the topic for more than fifty years. His research focuses on exploring the potential of psychedelics to help individuals achieve a more meaningful, balanced and enlightened life. He has written numerous books on the topic, such as The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide and Your Symphony Of Selves, and is widely considered to be one of the most influential figures in the field.
There are three kinds of memory that all work together to shape your reality. Neuroscientist André Fenton explains.
Neuroscientist André Fenton discusses the intricate relationship between memory, perception, and reality, shedding light on the complexity of human cognition.
Fenton believes memories are not fixed but are continually modified by our experiences and mindsets.
This, in his mind, underscores the importance of humility and empathy in acknowledging the fallibility of our memories and the need to consider different perspectives in our quest for truth.
About André Fenton:
André Fenton, professor of neural science at New York University, investigates the molecular, neural, behavioral, and computational aspects of memory. He studies how brains store experiences as memories, how they learn to learn, and how knowing activates relevant information without activating what is irrelevant. His investigations and understanding integrates across levels of biological organization, his research uses genetic, molecular, electrophysiological, imaging, behavioral, engineering, and theoretical methods. This computational psychiatry research is helping to elucidate and understand mental dysfunction in diverse conditions like schizophrenia, autism, and depression. André founded Bio-Signal Group Corp., which commercialized an FDA-approved portable, wireless, and easy-to-use platform for recording EEGs in novel medical applications. André implemented a CPAP-Oxygen helmet treatment for COVID-19 in Nigeria and other LMICs and founded Med2.0 to use information technology for the patient-centric coordination of behavioral health services that is desperately needed to equitably deliver care for mental health. André hosts “The Data Set” a new web series on how data and analytics are being used to solve some of humanity’s biggest problems.
Nothing is real and everything is an illusion. Neuroscientist Heather Berlin explains why that’s not exactly a bad thing.
Neuroscientist Heather Berlin likens each person's perception to a unique box shaped by their own experiences. Perception, Berlin explains, arises from a blend of internal expectations and external sensory input, creating a subjective experience.
Berlin believes our mental state can also profoundly affect our perception; a pessimistic mindset might skew it negatively, for example. The brain filters information, relying on preexisting schemas that can lead to cognitive biases. She notes that these biases can be altered through changing inputs over time, which can expand our empathy.
Understanding perception's illusory nature empowers us to shape our experiences and find joy despite life's challenges.
About Heather Berlin:
Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist, clinical psychologist, and associate clinical professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. She explores the neural basis of impulsive and compulsive psychiatric and neurological disorders with the aim of developing novel treatments. She is also interested in the brain basis of consciousness, dynamic unconscious processes, and creativity. Clinically, she specializes in lifespan (child, adolescent, and adult) treatment of anxiety, mood, and impulsive and compulsive disorders (e.g., OCD), blending her neural perspective with cognitive-behavioral therapy, mindfulness, and humanistic approaches.
You know Steve-O. Now meet Steve Glover, as the professional stuntman talks to us about pain, insecurity, and never finding contentment.
In this deeply personal and revealing interview, Steve Glover, better known as Steve-O, the daredevil entertainer known for his jaw-dropping stunts and unflinching willingness to face pain, shares the untold story of his journey from a childhood craving for attention to becoming an icon of wild antics and extreme performances.
Opening up about his struggles with alcoholism, the relentless pursuit of fame, and his battles with feeling 'not good enough', Glover offers an introspective look into the complexities behind the laughter and the screams.
With raw honesty, he discusses the pivotal moments that shaped him, the drive to document his existence through stunts, and the liberating power of sharing the secrets he once vowed to take to his grave.
This interview is not just a glimpse into the life of a professional idiot; it's a candid exploration of human vulnerability, the cost of fame, and the ongoing quest for self-acceptance.
About Steve-O:
Steve-O (a.k.a. Stephen Glover) was willing to do whatever it took to become famous, even if it meant stapling his ball sack to his leg. After failing miserably at the University of Miami and couch-surfing with friends, he decided that in order to further his goal of becoming a stuntman he would enroll in Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College. But it was his relentless attention whoring that ultimately led to working with Johnny Knoxville on a new stunt-based reality show called Jackass.
In 2000, MTV aired the first season and the rest, as they say, is history. Since then, he's had continued success, as a New York Times best-selling author with the release of his memoir, 'Professional Idiot', as well as establishing himself in the world of stand-up comedy. With fourteen years of sobriety under his belt, Steve-O shows no signs of slowing down.
Former SNL star @JayPharoah answers our most challenging questions about life, self-esteem, and changing his mind.
Jay Pharoah is known best for his impressions, but he’s got a lot more going on. The actor, comedian, and rapper sat down with us to talk about embracing triumphs, overcoming setbacks, forgiveness, and the way all of it shapes who you are.
About Jay Pharoah:
Jay Pharoah is an actor and stand-up comedian. With six seasons as a cast member of NBC's Saturday Night Live, Pharoah is best known for his wide array of uncanny celebrity impressions, including President Barack Obama, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Stephen A. Smith, Kanye West and Chris Tucker, as well as his recurring character, school principal Daniel Frye.
Over 250 million records sold and more than 70 platinum hits later, @JasonDerulo sits down with us to talk about goals, insecurities, and why he still doesn’t feel like he’s “made it.”
Jason Derulo's career flashed before his eyes when he broke his neck in 2012. Despite fearing the worst, he used positive self-talk and daily routines to recover and create hit songs like “Marry Me” and “Talk Dirty.” Overcoming childhood insecurities, he emphasizes the power of self-improvement. Now a global superstar with 250 million singles sold, Derulo prioritizes family time since becoming a father in 2021.
Cindy Gallop answers our questions about sex, identity, and why we need to stop giving a damn.
Cindy Gallop, the founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, answered our questions about self-worth, the weight of other people’s expectations on women, and hope.
She shares her mission to normalize and destigmatize conversations about sex, including the negative consequences of using pornography as a substitute for sexual education.
Cindy hopes for a world where we’re all unburdened by societal judgments and true equality is achieved.
About Cindy Gallop:
Cindy Gallop is a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, whose background is over 30 years in brand-building, marketing and advertising — she started up the US office of ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York in 1998 and in 2003 was named Advertising Woman of the Year.
She is the founder and CEO of IfWeRanTheWorld, co-action software launched in beta at TED 2010 and subsequently written up and taught as a Harvard Business School case study, which enables brands to implement the business model of the future — Shared Values + Shared Action = Shared Profit (financial and social).
She is also the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn – ‘Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference’ — a social sextech platform designed to promote good sexual behavior and good sexual values, which she launched at TED 2009, and for which she has just raised $2 million to build out MLNP.tv as ‘the Social Sex Revolution’.Cindy recently partnered with AARP on their Disrupt Aging initiative to challenge and change ageism.
Cindy has also published ‘Make Love Not Porn: Technology’s Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior’ as one of TED’s line of TEDBooks.
You can follow her on Twitter @cindygallop.
He co-created one of TV’s funniest shows. He still felt like a failure in his 30s. This is comedian Neal Brennan’s story about conquering toxic self-talk.
We all tell lies to ourselves about ourselves, usually in the form of vicious inner criticism. Neal Brennan, seasoned comedian and one of the brilliant minds behind “Chapelle’s Show,” confronted his inner critic on video for our entertainment.
Despite being instrumental in one of the most successful comedy shows of all time, there was a time when Brennan didn’t think he had much to show for himself, especially not as a solo entertainer. The eventual demise of “Chappelle’s Show” led him down a dark path of self-doubt and, then, rediscovery.
Brennan worked 12-step programs, ventured into the world of psychedelics, and even tried magnetic brain manipulation to break out of his despair. Now, he has a new perspective on the value of going it alone. Turns out, it isn’t quite so bad.
About Neal Brennan:
Three-time Emmy nominated writer, director, producer, and standup comedian Neal Brennan has become a force in the comedy world. An across-the-board talent, Neal has found success in almost every creative vein in the comedy landscape. Hailed by The Hollywood Reporter as “Hollywood’s Comic Whisperer” and lauded by The New York Times as having a “hip-hop and Frontline aesthetic,” he has collaborated with top talent both in front of and behind the camera for three decades.
Neal’s most recent one-man show Neal Brennan: Unacceptable enjoyed a sold-out run in NYC in 2021 with The New York Times offering “Brennan starts off with a regular joke format before turning toward introspection as he exposes his doubts, neuroses and vulnerabilities. And he remains very funny as he does so.” Neal’s critically acclaimed first off-Broadway one-man show 3 Mics also enjoyed a sold-out NYC run in 2016 with musician John Legend serving as Executive Producer with Paste Magazine gushing “It will floor you in the best way possible.” In a break from traditional standup comedy, 3 Mics saw Brennan alternating between three separate microphones; one for traditional stand-up, one for one-liners, and one for short confessional monologues covering everything from managing his depression to his difficult relationship with his father. Both one-man shows were taped as stand-up specials and premiered on Netflix to much fanfare and critical acclaim.
Neal co-created Comedy Central’s legendary Chappelle’s Show, for which he received three Emmy nominations. Together, Brennan and Dave Chappelle wrote and produced virtually every sketch on the show themselves. A longtime writing partner of Chappelle, Neal was a standout speaker in his televised Mark Twain Prize ceremony, wrote on his Emmy-winning 2016 Saturday Night Live hosting turn, and co-wrote the cult hit feature Half Baked. Neal also served as a Creative Consultant and on-air correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, for which he was personally picked by Noah to be his final guest. He was Executive Producer on Chris Rock’s special Chris Rock: Tamborine, Consulting Producer on Ellen Degeneres’ special Relatable, and collaborator with Seth Meyers on his White House Correspondents Dinner speech. In addition to standup, writing, directing, and producing, Brennan has also directed popular commercials for Sprite, Netflix, Best Buy and Nike.
The Osbournes was MTV’s biggest show – and it almost cost Jack Osbourne his life. Here’s how his family’s reality TV fame stole his childhood, and how he’s been able to heal since.
About Jack Osbourne:
Jack Osbourne is well known for participating in reality TV shows with his celebrity family, like The Osbournes and Ozzy and Jack’s World Tour. Jack has also overcome and dealt with great difficulties in his life, such as dyslexia, drug addiction, an MS diagnosis, depression, various medical scares in his family, and more. His ability to bounce back from these challenges has served as inspiration for others undergoing difficulties in life. Jack uses his platform to advocate for people living with MS.
Jim Lee, President, Publisher, and Chief Creative Officer of tells us how his childhood obsession with Superman changed his life.
Jim Lee is synonymous with DC Comics now, but when he was first charting his path, his family pushed him towards medical school. In this interview, Jim shares how he reasoned with his parents and bought time to pursue his dream of being a comic book artist over the span of a gap year.
About Jim Lee:
Jim Lee, a world-renowned comic book artist, writer, editor and publisher, is currently Chief Creative Officer of DC (DC) and Publisher for the company.
Known for his incredibly detailed and dynamic artistic style, Lee is one of the most revered and respected artists in American comics. A veritable legend in the industry, he has received numerous accolades and recognition for his work, including the Harvey Special Award for New Talent in 1990, the Inkpot Award in 1992, and the Wizard Fan Award in 1996, 2002 and 2003.
Shaka Senghor spent 19 years in prison, 7 of them in solitary confinement. This is how he found true freedom.
The way Shaka Senghor tells his story, he found himself incarcerated long before he officially went to prison for second-degree murder, and he experienced freedom long before completing his sentence at the age of 38.
Senghor ran away from home and got drawn into the crack cocaine trade at the age of 14. After a series of traumatic events, he felt trapped in a narrative that dictated his life could only lead to limited outcomes: an early grave or a prison cell.
In our intimate interview, Senghor shares the three "keys" that transformed his perspective on life and have enabled him to live as a genuinely free man today.
“The Blind Side” only told part of Michael Oher’s story. Now, he tells us the rest.
You might know Michael Oher as the subject of “The Blind Side,” the 2009 movie starring Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw. The film was based on the true story of Oher, a young Black football player, who gained a second chance at life after being adopted by white parents.
But Oher’s version of the story is a lot different, and it starts long before the Tuohys entered the picture.
In this interview conducted with our partner Unlikely Collaborators, Oher paints a picture of the crack epidemic in the ‘80s and ‘90s, a broken and tumultuous family, and a young boy determined to climb out of it.
About Michael Oher:
Michael Oher gained widespread recognition through Michael Lewis's book "The Blind Side" and its film adaptation, which depicted his difficulties in early life and time playing college football. After attending the University of Mississippi, he played in the NFL for the Baltimore Ravens, Tennessee Titans, and Carolina Panthers, winning the SuperBowl with the Ravens in 2013.
Michael has also written two books: I Beat The Odds and When You’re Back’s Against The Wall, which detail his struggles and successes in life, imparting wisdom on how to overcome adversity. Michael has also contributed to the book Blindsided, where he outlines his experience of early-stage CTE, how he walked away from the NFL, and his urgent recommendations to reform football and make it a safer sport.
Built from the material of your beliefs (aka, the bullshit you tell yourself and collect from those around you over the course of your life), the Perception Box™ has the power to distort your reality and leave you feeling isolated, disconnected, and fearful. By asking sometimes contradictory but always consequential questions, we’ll show you how to understand and work with your Perception Box—how to overcome the limiting beliefs that hold you back, expand the possibilities of perception, and invite in new ways of seeing and being seen.
A guided body awareness mediation to help you get out of your head and into your body. Learn to tune into your body for a heads up on what you’re feeling before you explode. It’s literally your friend on the inside.
Simple, easy, and faster than chasing down that driver that cut you off.
Orin Davis earned the first doctorate in positive psychology, and is a self-actualization engineer who enables people to do and be their best. As the Principal Investigator of the Quality of Life Laboratory, he conducts research on flow, creativity, hypnosis, and mentoring. Dr. Davis consults for companies from startups to multinationals on hiring strategies, culture, innovation, and employee well-being. He is the author of Team Flow: The psychology of optimal collaboration.
Scott Barry Kaufman talks to Orin Davis about the new science of flow. A lot of people are familiar with the concept of flow, but according to Dr. Davis, the experience of it is not very common. They discuss Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work and how Dr. Davis is expanding the research of flow by studying it at a group level. Dr. Davis talks about how we can increase the chances of experiencing flow for both individuals and teams. Orin and Scott also touch on the topics of microflow, hypnosis, absorption, positive psychology, and self-actualization.
Website: https://qllab.org/
X: @DrOrinDavis
Robert Sapolsky is professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and a research associate with the Institute of Primate Research at the National Museum of Kenya. His research has been featured in the National Geographic documentary "Stress: Portrait of a Killer". At age 30, Robert received the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant. He is author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, A Primate's Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone and Monkeyluv. His latest book is called Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.
Scott Barry Kaufman talks to Robert Sapolsky about life without free will. Humans like the idea of having control over their lives, but Robert asserts that free will is just an illusion. Life beyond free will may sound unpleasant, but Robert explains the profound consequences of this belief in reforming the justice system, meritocracy, and education. Robert and Scott also touch on the topics of philosophy, quantum physics, mindfulness, grit, and responsibility.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/robertsapolsky/
For over 40 years, Bob Mankoff has been the driving force of comedy and satire at some of the most honored publications in America, including The New Yorker and Esquire. He is the founder of Cartoon Collections, parent company to CartoonStock.com, the world’s most successful cartoon licensing platform. For twenty years as Cartoon Editor for The New Yorker, Bob pored over thousands of submissions each week, analyzing, critiquing, and selecting each cartoon. In 2005, he helped start the “New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.” Bob is the author of numerous books, including his New York Times bestselling memoir, How About Never – Is Never Good For You?: My Life In Cartoons.
Scott Barry Kaufman talks to Bob Mankoff about the psychology of humor. Looking back at his illustrious career as a cartoonist, Bob talks about his early beginnings and the people he's mentored in the field. He explains the anatomy of a joke and reveals his all-time favorite cartoons. While humans are creative creatures, Bob believes that using AI and technology can further augment our intelligence and humor by opening up worlds of possibilities.
Website: www.bobmankoff.com
X: @BobMankoff
Joseph Goldstein is a co-founder and the guiding teacher of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) along with Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg. He is one of the first American vipassana teachers and has been teaching Buddhist meditation worldwide since 1974. A contemporary author of numerous popular books on Buddhism, his publications include Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, One Dharma, Insight Meditation and others.
Scott Barry Kaufman talks to Joseph Goldstein about Buddhism and the impermanence of life. Being too attached to the self can bring suffering. However, this doesn’t mean that we need to forego our identities or self-care. Joseph explains that enlightenment can be achieved when the mind is free from clinging. He talks about the different states that can help us realize the insight of impermanence and selflessness. Scott and Joseph also touch on the topics of mindfulness, compassion, creativity, and wisdom.
Website: www.dharma.org
X: @onedharma
Dan Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. Dr. Siegel is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute. He’s authored numerous articles, chapters, and books including the New York Times bestsellers Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human and Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence. His latest book is called IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity, and Belonging.
Scott Barry Kaufman talks to Dr. Dan Siegel about expanding the notion of the self. Modern culture has taught us that the self is all about individual identity and personal experiences. But Dr. Siegel posits that who we are is not limited to the brain or body. He argues that the self is not isolated, it’s composed of our relationships to other living beings and to the natural world. This expanded view of the self has important implications for the trajectory of humanity. Dan and Scott also touch on the topics of consciousness, neuroscience, quantum physics, and the flow state.
Website: drdansiegel.com
Instagram: @DrDanSiegel
Michael Slepian is the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Associate Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia University. A recipient of the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science, he is the leading expert on the psychology of secrets. He’s authored more than fifty articles on secrecy, truth, and deception. Michael’s research has been covered by The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, BBC, The Wall Street Journal and more. He is the author of The Secret Life of Secrets.
Scott Barry Kaufman talks to Michael Slepian about the psychology of secrets. Everyone has secrets that they keep from others—how does this affect our relationships and well-being? According to Michael, maintaining privacy is not the most burdensome aspect. Carrying a secret all by ourselves is what weighs us down. Michael and Scott explore the different categories of secrets and we talk about when to reveal the deepest parts of ourselves and who to reveal them to. Scott and Michael also touch on the topics of personality, morality, trauma, developmental psychology and communication.
Website: michaelslepian.com
X: @michaelslepian
Monica Parker is the founder of global human analytics and change consultancy HATCH, whose clients include blue-chip companies such as LinkedIn, Google, Prudential, and LEGO. Her career has been nothing short of colorful, having been an opera singer, a museum exhibition designer, a policy director, a Chamber of Commerce CEO, and a homicide investigator. She is also a world-renowned speaker, writer, and the author of The Power of Wonder.
Scott Barry Kaufman talks to Monica Parker about the power of wonder. In today’s fast-paced world, most people fail to notice the richness of life. To become more wonder-prone, Monica encourages us all to slow down and pursue meaningful exploration. When we pay more careful attention to the world, we become more empathetic, resilient, and exuberant. Monica shares with her cycle of wonder framework and how we can be more open and present in our daily lives. Monica and Scott also touch on the topics of personality, post-traumatic growth, mindfulness, and education.
Website: www.monica-parker.com
Instagram: @monicacparker
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