Dear Friends,
If you have ever told yourself to just stop worrying and watched it not work, here is why: willpower was never built for the job.
I sat down with Dr. Jud Brewer, a neuroscientist at Brown University who trained as an addiction psychiatrist at Yale. His TED talk on breaking habits has been watched close to forty million times, and his book Unwinding Anxiety spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His thesis is that anxiety behaves like a habit, not a disease.
Jud found this first with smokers. Every habit, anxiety included, runs on the same loop: a trigger, a behavior, a reward. A restless feeling shows up. You worry, because worrying feels like doing something. The worry gives you a flicker of control, and that flicker is the reward that trains your mind to start the loop again, sooner, next time. Fighting the loop does not loosen it. Fighting it feeds it.
So instead of telling smokers to use willpower, Jud told them to keep smoking — and to pay close attention while they did. The taste. The smell. The feeling in the chest. They started coming back and telling him, “Doc, how did I not notice this before? These cigarettes taste like crap.”
Nothing about the cigarette had changed. Their attention had. That shift produced five times the quit rate of the standard treatment.
He turned the same move on anxiety. When the restless feeling shows up, the worried mind asks, “NO — is this going to last all day, is something terrible about to happen?”
Jud’s instruction is to flip the NO to WHAT.
“What is this feeling, exactly? Where do I feel it in my body?”
That turn, from running away to looking closely, loosens the loop.
I have been telling patients some version of this for most of my career: the mind is a tool you use, not a boss you obey. I did not expect to hear it back from a scientist with an fMRI scanner. But Jud said it almost word for word, unprompted:
“I would say it’s probably one of, if not the most important skills to learn. Because if we don’t have control of our minds, if we don’t train our minds so that we can control them, they’re going to control us, and things don’t end well when that’s the case.”
He has the data behind it, too. In a randomized controlled trial of his Unwinding Anxiety program, anxiety dropped sixty-seven percent in people with generalized anxiety disorder, against fourteen percent for usual care.
Curiosity Will Conquer Fear Even More Than Bravery Will
There is a practice below this letter for the next time the buzzing starts. But the idea underneath it is the one I want you to keep. Jud closed our conversation with a line from the Irish poet James Stevens:
“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.”
If anxiety is fear of the future, that is the whole instruction. Get curious about the feeling instead of fighting it, and the feeling loses its grip.
Jud writes his own newsletter, Inside the Curious Mind, if you want more from him directly.
Food for thought.
Today’s Practice: Abdominal Breathing
A simple thing to take with you from this week’s conversation.
Sit in a chair. Put your hand over your belly button. Breathe from from the abdomen, without filling your whole chest. Watch your hand rise and fall while your chest stays still. Do it for thirty, sixty, ninety seconds, four or five or seven times a day, every day, until you are really good at it.
Then, when the worry loop starts — when the buzzing shows up and the mind wants to race — you go to your abdominal breathing, and you take back control of your own being. Curiosity asks, “What is this feeling?” The breath gives you a steady place to ask it from. Try it for a week. And if you do, write back and tell me how it lands.
Golden light,
Dr. Richard Louis Miller
In this episode — Dr. Jud Brewer, a Brown University neuroscientist and Yale-trained addiction psychiatrist, joins Richard to lay out a habit-loop model of anxiety. From his own residency panic attacks to the smoking-cessation work that produced five times the standard quit rate, to a randomized trial of his anxiety program, the throughline is one mechanism: pay attention to what a behavior actually does, and the brain stops finding it rewarding. We close on a thirty-second practice for the next time anxiety shows up.
Guest: Dr. Jud Brewer — Director of Research and Innovation, Brown University Mindfulness Center. Author of The Craving Mind (Yale University Press, 2017), Unwinding Anxiety (Avery, 2021, New York Times bestseller), and The Hunger Habit (Avery, 2024). His TED talk has roughly 40 million views combined. More at drjud.com.
Chapters
00:00 — Opening: the epidemic of anxiety and depression
01:56 — Jud’s own anxiety story
06:46 — Choosing mindfulness as a career in 2006
11:38 — Coke Enders and the academic-hazing pattern
15:10 — Reinforcement learning: pay attention as you smoke
20:28 — The anxiety habit loop
23:28 — The default mode network and the posterior cingulate cortex
25:49 — The mind is a tool, not the boss
29:46 — Richard’s Vipassana origin with Goldstein and Kornfield
31:07 — Conscious breathing and five-finger breathing
32:42 — Anxiety travels in clusters
34:40 — If these tools work, why are we prescribing
36:42 — Could this be taught in high schools
38:19 — Going Beyond Anxiety: the AI-paired digital therapeutic
41:52 — Mid-episode break
43:32 — Curiosity will conquer fear: flip the NO to WHAT
45:27 — Feelings are just feelings
47:15 — Off-air closing
Choice quotes
“I would say it’s probably one of, if not the most important skills to learn...”
— Dr. Jud Brewer, 30:47“Here’s the most important thing I never learned in medical school. This goes back to the Borkovec paper, which is that anxiety could be driven like a habit through negative reinforcement.”
— Dr. Jud Brewer, 20:43“We actually got a 67 percent reduction in anxiety in people with generalized anxiety disorder. This was relative to 14 percent in the usual-care group...”
— Dr. Jud Brewer, 38:29 (Caveat: this is the Unwinding Anxiety RCT, Roy et al. 2021/JMIR 2022, N=65 — distinct from the 5x smoking-cessation figure above; don’t conflate.)“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.”
— James Stevens, quoted by Dr. Jud Brewer, 45:14“I detoxed 1,500 people in a 10-year period, and never had to hospitalize a single one, and never had an adverse effect.”
— Dr. Richard Louis Miller, 11:57 (The Coke Enders/Wilbur Hot Springs detox story — referenced on-air, not unpacked; full version is a standalone piece.)
Resources mentioned
drjud.com — Jud’s hub
Unwinding Anxiety (book) and app
The Craving Mind (Yale UP, 2017)
The Hunger Habit (Avery, 2024)
Inside the Curious Mind — Jud’s Substack
@dr.jud on Instagram
Further reading
Richard’s recent conversation with journalist Robert Whitaker touches the same territory from the medication side (link the episode page once it’s live — Brewer referenced recognizing the same pattern in his own patients when Whitaker came up on-air).
A note on working together
For those who feel drawn to working together more directly, I offer a limited number of one-on-one sessions.
These are not traditional therapy sessions. They are quiet, practical conversations focused on calming the mind, easing anxiety, and working with simple tools that support steadiness in daily life.
We move at a thoughtful pace. We work with what’s present. We focus on what helps.
My New Book
The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.
A few words from the front of the book:
Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.
— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming AbyssPutting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.
— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco
It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.
My Other Books
Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking
Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out
Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances
Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca
Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)
