Can You Unlearn Anxiety? with Judson Brewer

Week 2 of Mental Health Awareness month: Anxiety is close to everyone’s experience, either because you’ve had it or someone close to you has. Does your brain accidentally teach itself to stay anxious by looping on the same fears? Is anxiety helping you perform better, or does it make everything harder? Is it possible to unlearn worry the same way you learned it? Join Eagleman with Dr. Jud Brewer, who suffered with anxiety as a young man… and then became a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies anxiety and developed a very different approach to its treatment.

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More Information:

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

Judson Brewer. The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love – Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits.

Brewer, J. (2019). Mindfulness training for addictions: Has neuroscience revealed a brain hack by which awareness subverts the addictive process? Current Opinion in Psychology, 28, 198–203.

Brewer, J. A., & Roy, A. (2021). Can approaching anxiety like a habit lead to novel treatments? American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, 15(5), 489–494.

Brewer, J. A., Worhunsky, P. D., Gray, J. R., Tang, Y.-Y., Weber, J., & Kober, H. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(50), 20254–20259.

Garrison, K. A., Santoyo, J. F., Davis, J. H., Thornhill, T. A., IV, Kerr, C. E., & Brewer, J. A. (2013). Effortless awareness: Using real time neurofeedback to investigate correlates of posterior cingulate cortex activity in meditators’ self-report. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, Article 440.

Garrison, K. A., Scheinost, D., Worhunsky, P. D., Elwafi, H. M., Thornhill, T. A., IV, Thompson, E., Saron, C., Desbordes, G., Kober, H., Hampson, M., Gray, J. R., Constable, R. T., Papademetris, X., & Brewer, J. A. (2013). Real-time fMRI links subjective experience with brain activity during focused attention. NeuroImage, 81, 110–118.

Roy, A., Hoge, E. A., Abrante, P., Druker, S., Liu, T., & Brewer, J. A. (2021). Clinical efficacy and psychological mechanisms of an app-based digital therapeutic for generalized anxiety disorder: Randomized controlled trial. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(12), Article e26987.

Taylor, V. A., Moseley, I., Sun, S., Smith, R., Roy, A., Ludwig, V. U., & Brewer, J. A. (2021). Awareness drives changes in reward value which predict eating behavior change: Probing reinforcement learning using experience sampling from mobile mindfulness training for maladaptive eating. Journal of Behavioral Addictions, 10(3), 482–497.

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