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10% Happier with Dan Harris
Buddhist Neuroscientist On: How To Quit Bad Habits And Why You’re Not Keeping Your Resolutions | Dr. Judson Brewer
01:15:36
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- [00:01]
Dan Harris
Wondery subscribers can listen to 10% Happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello gang. How we doing? Today we're going to talk about how to use your innate mindfulness. The mindfulness we all have. Even if we feel like we're mostly mindless, but we all have the capacity to be mindful. We're going to talk about how to use your innate mindfulness to turn the volume down or even uproot your everyday addictions. Let me just say a quick word about the word addiction. Often that word is used to refer to full blown addiction, something many of us, myself included, have struggled with. But in this episode, my guest and I are going to use the word addiction in a much broader sense. We all have craving minds. We're all addicted to something. Our phones, shopping, food, wordle, whatever. So we're going to dedicate this whole week on the show to managing the addictive tendency of your mind. As you've heard me say many times during this first month of 2025, we are taking on some of the biggest and most popular resolutions and tackling them TPH style. We've covered fitness and finances and now it's bad habits or addictions, which I know is a big issue for many of you. Hence the popularity of Dry January, et cetera. Coming up on Wednesday, I'll be talking to a Buddhist nun who goes by the name Sister D about how an ancient eight part list can help us move out of addiction. Today, though, it's my old friend Dr. Judson Brewer. This is Judd's sixth appearance on the show, which may be a record. Judd, if you've never heard of him, is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness center and professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences and Psychiatry at the Schools of Public Health and Medicine at Brown University. He is also the author of several books, including the Craving Mind, Unwinding Anxiety and the Hunger Habit. In this conversation we talk about Judd's definition of addiction, the difference between the scientific view and the Buddhist view on addiction, the Buddhist concept of dependent origination and why that's so important in this context. Dopamine and dopamine fasting, which have become duragur recently. Judd has his take on that. Judd's disenchantment with the term mindfulness. What we all need to know about willpower, the two types of stress, and the impact on our behavior from both of those types. How community plays a huge role in making behavior change or habit change. And finally, we have a friendly debate on whether there's such a thing as healthy anger. Dr. Jud Brewer right after this. Before we get to the show, I just want to mention that the Dump It Here journal that my wife and I created and that sold out double quick. It's back in stock. Just go to danharris.com and click on Shop to find it. Or go to shop.danharris.com It's a really cool journal. It's pretty non dogmatic. There are some instructions at the beginning. The rest of it is an open field for your scribbling. Go check it out danharris.com and click on the shop or go to shop danharris.com the Happier Meditation App has introduced a new course called Even Now Love A Prescription for Connection. Led by the renowned teacher Joseph Goldstein, this timely course offers practical tools to pause, breathe and reconnect even when it feels impossible in a turbulent world. With fresh perspectives on relationships and self compassion practices that actually work, it's a powerful way to approach the new year with love. Download the Happier Meditation app today and explore Even Now Love. I love staying in Airbnbs. Last year a bunch of families got together and we had an Airbnb near a ski lodge in upstate New York. It wasn't even snowing yet. The point was just to hang out and we all spent the weekend together in this house. It was incredibly cozy and fun. As my friend Zev sometimes jokes, it's really cool to get out of the dinner industrial complex and instead of just spending time with your favorite people over, you know, this kind of regimented two hour meal at a restaurant, which can be super expensive. When you get a house together, you're really, really hanging out and it's a great way to get to know other people's children. My son was so happy during dinner he got up from the table just to dance, which is always a good sign. Long way of saying I like Airbnb. Maybe you want to go somewhere warm over the winter while you're away. You could Airbnb your home and make some extra money toward your trip. Whether you could use a little extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home or spare room might be worth more than you. Find out how much@airbnb.com host nerds when it comes to finding the best financial products, have you ever wished someone would do all the heavy lifting for you? Take all that research off your plate? I definitely have. And the good news Is that with Nerd Wallet's 2025 Best of Awards, that wish has come true. The nerds already did the work for you, reviewing over 1100 financial products, things like credit cards, savings accounts, and more to bring you only the best of the best. I'm just not great at paying attention to things like this when. When we get into the details, especially if it involves math, I'm out. And so the fact that the good folks over at NerdWallet are doing this work for us, just deep bow, man hat tip. Check out the 2025 Best of Awards today at NerdWallet.com awards. That's NerdWallet.com awards. Dr. Judson Brewer, welcome back to the show.
- [05:47]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Thanks for having me.
- [05:49]
Dan Harris
By my count, this is your sixth appearance on this show, so you are among the most frequent of frequent flyers.
- [05:56]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Wow. I didn't think it was that many. I'm honored and blushing.
- [06:01]
Dan Harris
We have a loyalty rewards program, so you should be getting some free shit.
- [06:07]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Great. I love free shit.
- [06:12]
Dan Harris
All right, well, we're talking today about addiction, and I'm always a little wary of that word, just because one of my obsessions is making every episode of this podcast as applicable to as broad an audience as possible. And I think there are many people who think, well, I'm not an addict, and they're imagining something quite extreme. But I believe your argument is we're all addicted to something, if not many things.
- [06:38]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Yes. And we can think of these as everyday addictions. Maybe it's the easiest way to think about that is the definition of addiction that I learned in residency, which is continued use despite adverse consequences. And so folks can just let that settle in. Continued use despite adverse consequences. So are there times when we are tempted to be scrolling on our phone instead of listening to our partner? For example, when we're having a conversation, are there times when we are pulled to check our text message that somebody just texted us while we're driving? I think it's more of a continuum than a, you know, kind of an all or none quantal. Yes, I'm an addict or I'm an addicted person versus no, I'm not. And I don't know anybody that can't relate to having adverse consequences from something that they've been pulled to do, you know, at some point.
- [07:34]
Dan Harris
Yeah, I mean, I'm just thinking back through my life. I mean, I think I've had some addictions that are pretty far along on the spectrum, away from every day, but for sure, plenty of every day. And I think, you know, Just for the listeners. It can be everything from your relationship to your phone to maybe just drinking a little bit too much alcohol or coffee. We're at the end of January here, so, you know, people may have been attempting dry January with the alcohol. So there are just so many things that the mind can cling to and crave.
- [08:06]
Dr. Judson Brewer
It's very good at doing that, yes.
- [08:09]
Dan Harris
Why?
- [08:12]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Well, it's built off of these basic survival mechanisms. You know, we, it's helpful to crave food when we're hungry. It's helpful to avoid danger when it's staring us in the face. So those are very basic survival mechanisms. And in modern day people know this and so they can design addictive experiences so they can leverage those brain pathways to get us hooked. You know, in this attention economy is one of the big things, you know, trying to get us hooked on paying attention to their stuff so they can sell us ideas or literal things.
- [08:54]
Dan Harris
Right. So we have a world in which we have these ancient brains that were wired with reasonably good reason to crave the pleasant and be aversive vis a vis the unpleasant. And then we've created a modern infrastructure that is jabbing at these ancient impulses non stop.
- [09:13]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Absolutely.
- [09:15]
Dan Harris
So is there a difference between, and I ask you this as a scientist and also, and I'm going to use this word, but I don't know if you would agree with it, but I would say a scientist and a Buddhist or at least a Buddhist practitioner or a meditation practitioner. Is there a difference between the way science understands addiction and the way Buddhism does?
- [09:33]
Dr. Judson Brewer
As far as I can tell, and this is a question that I've been studying, literally Studying for over 20 years now, I haven't found any differences or even discrepancies. So, you know, my lab, if you go back to the Buddhist psychology, I started taking pieces of that and testing it as hypotheses because, you know, this guy was a lot smarter than I am. So it's like, well, why not take these things, careful scientific experiments around them and see if they're true in modern day. And it turns out that every single one that he put forward has been not just true, but really eye opening. You know, for example, taking, you know, our first randomized controlled trial with trying to help people quit smoking. And I love this because people are like, no way you, there's no way you can do this. That's what gets me excited to try something where instead of using the standard practices and techniques that I'd been taught in residency and medical school and all of that to Help people quit smoking, which is largely cognitive. You know, I instead followed the Buddha's instruction, which was, you know, explore gratification to it. And that was an interesting one. You know, we can get into it in more detail if that's helpful. But basically we tested that by having people pay attention when they smoke cigarettes. And we got five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment. And so, and even predicted that, you know, craving doesn't necessarily just vanish when you change a behavior. It dies down over time when you stop fueling it. And even some of the language, the Buddhist language, like these 12 links of dependent origination, you look at craving, you know, Tanho thirst leads to the next link, which is, I'm not a Buddhist scholar, but I would pronounce it upadana, which often is translated as clinging. And some translate it as sustenance or fuel. And so if you think of, you know, smoking a cigarette, that provides the fuel for a future round of craving. And if you stop adding that fuel to the fire, it eventually burns down. And I was actually just last weekend speaking with a Buddhist scholar who was talking about Nirvana. Literally meaning the fire goes out.
- [11:53]
Dan Harris
Yeah, the extinguishing, yes.
- [11:57]
Dr. Judson Brewer
So not only have I not found discrepancies and we've even published papers showing the links where I've worked with Buddhist scholars and teachers, where we've written papers showing how these are basically the different language for the same thing. We haven't found a single thing that has been contradictory yet. Which is pretty cool.
- [12:16]
Dan Harris
It's really cool. I mean, it does go to emphasize, assuming we can stipulate that the Buddha was an actual person because there's so much, nothing was really written down at the time when he allegedly lived, but assuming we can stipulate that he was an actual person rather than this being an accumulation of learnings from a. That grew out of a multi person tradition. The dude was a genius.
- [12:40]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Yes. Goenka called him so Sn Goenka, this, you know, very famous Buddhist teacher who I think he was, he taught mostly in India, you know, and has these vipassana centers all over the world now. He died, you know, a few years ago. He called the Buddha a super scientist. As a teacher, he was highlighting this scientific approach that the Buddha took to exploring his own experience. And just to zoom in on that for a minute, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. It wasn't about the, these deep states of concentration or these, you know, magical powers that the Buddha allegedly had developed. It was about contemplating his own experience. It was the dependent origination piece of his experience that actually led to his enlightenment. And so it highlights these causal nature of experience, you know, and just kind of living into it and understanding it fully. That's what apparently led to his awakening.
- [13:41]
Dan Harris
Can you define dependent origination for people who are new to that term?
- [13:46]
Dr. Judson Brewer
No, I don't know. I think of it as these. It's a great question. Ask ChatGPT. So I can say that there are a fair number of suttas written in the Pali canon about these links of causality. And so I think of it pragmatically as the title suggests, dependent origination. This exists because of, this is kind of some of the, the way that the suttas talk about it. And so you can think of craving leads to clinging. Without craving there is no clinging, so to speak. And so he was really describing this causal nature of experience and that it actually, these 12 links actually go in a cycle that was described as samsara or endless wandering. Because when we're caught up in that cycle, we perpetuate our beliefs, our story, and even the self, the story of the self which every time we spin that wheel, we suffer, you know, and getting caught up in particular. I'll just mention one other thing because this Buddhist scholar blew my mind this last weekend where we were talking about the, the words for dukkha and sukkah. And you know, often dukkha is translated as suffering. I think that's one of the most common modern day translations I've heard. I don't know if you've heard differently. He was talking about. So the ka is common, right? Du, ka, suka, ka is a little hard to translate, but it's kind of like space, but it's not really. It's like the everythingness. And duka means contracted space for lack of a better way of putting it. And sukkah is not like the opposite. It's the negation of contraction. Because we're in a non dual experience, we're not moving into something else that's expanded. We are just uncontracting. Think of it as the sphincter tone becomes a little less tight.
- [15:44]
Dan Harris
Well, I love that. So dukkha, which in Buddhism is often translated as suffering or sometimes unsatisfactoriness, that the Buddha said life is dukkha or life is suffering. But it doesn't mean like everything sucks all the time. It just means that things are going to be bumpy and unsatisfactory if you're constantly clinging to things that won't last in a Universe that's char. Characterized by change and impermanence and suka. I don't know exactly what the translation of that is like happiness or joy.
- [16:14]
Dr. Judson Brewer
I've heard it translated as bliss. Bliss, let's say bliss. Happiness. I've heard it translated as that, but that's very different. Unsatisfactoriness is very different than contracted space. Yes, experientially. And I think that's important. I could be wrong. Happy to be wrong.
- [16:35]
Dan Harris
Let me guess as. As to why that is so. Contracted space is. I heard this term recently, an involution. Like. It's like a. Something that keeps turning in on itself. A downward spiral that keeps turning in on itself. To put that in plain English, it's when you have your head up your ass, you are just wrapped up in your shit. So that's dukkha luca is it is taking your head out of your ass and seeing the lack of division between you and the world. Am I okay? Am I close?
- [17:13]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Yeah, I. That I would agree with that. And I wish to extend this longer than it needs to be extended. You know, think of it as being a tight ass. Right. So yeah. So when somebody is really attached to something, whether it's money or an idea or you know, some ego filled thing, you can think of it as being a tight ass, head up their ass, tight ass type of thing. Totally agree. I bring that tight part in because that's where the contracted fits perfectly.
- [17:40]
Dan Harris
Yes. And that is different. You're saying it's important to distinguish between this. To keep beating this dead horse of the scatological metaphor.
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Dr. Judson Brewer
The shitty metaphor. Yes, exactly.
- [17:55]
Dan Harris
Having your head up your ass or being contracted is different from unsatisfactory ness. You said that before. And so maybe see a little bit more about why you think that's such an important distinction.
- [18:06]
Dr. Judson Brewer
I would say that it adds clarity and it also makes things as a result, makes things more pragmatic. We can really have a. I mean it's so straightforward to check to see when we're feeling contracted. Whereas unsatisfactoriness is very vague. And there could be things that are unsatisfactory that are not necessarily causing suffering. In the same way there can be dis. Ease. That's not necessarily a problem. You know, think of that first arrow the Buddha talks about. Where there's pain or whatever. You know, we add to that pain with that second arrow where we shoot ourselves in the foot or in the ass. Sorry, the. And that part is optional. Whereas the reality is what it is.
- [18:58]
Dan Harris
Right.
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Dr. Judson Brewer
The world's going to be a certain way that most things we don't have control over, but if we contract around the way the things are, we're more likely to suffer. So to me, it's just, it's a little more straightforward. And maybe I've just always been confused by, you know, help me understand exactly what unsatisfactoriness means and how that draws a straight line to suffering. You know, that's been a struggle, but with the contraction piece makes a lot more sense. And also, you know, I've talked about before, it lines up with my neuroimaging studies. It lines up with some of the newer research we've done around mental states that are associated with contraction versus mental states associated with expansion, the opposite or the letting go. And so it pragmatically just fits more easily into the puzzle than unsatisfactoriness. At least for me.
- [19:53]
Dan Harris
It's possible I'm being a dumb dumb or I'm forgetting something you've already said. Both of those descriptions are operative on the regular. But can you remind me how this discussion that we just had about expansion versus contraction relates back to addiction?
- [20:07]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Sure. So think of addiction being one of the ultimate contractions where, you know, if you think of the primary neurotransmitters associated with addiction, and again, it's, it's complex. I'm not saying this, you know, I don't want to oversimplify it, but dopamine, for example, has been linked most often to addiction. Dopamine is a motivation molecule. And we have to kind of get all coiled up, sprung up, contracted in order to go do the thing, because that's what it's there for. If we're hungry, we're going to have a craving for food and we're going to get wound up. And you know, the longer we go the, with our hunger and our stomach being empty, the more wound up we get in that contraction of a craving. And that's going to spring us off the couch, into the kitchen to get the food or with any other addiction to, you know, somebody's addicted to porn, it's going to spring them onto the Internet to watch their porn or to, you know, go get the cocaine or the alcohol or the cigarette or whatever it is. So I think it's, it's a very nice descriptor of the direct experience of what craving and addiction are all about. Agree? Disagree.
- [21:18]
Dan Harris
Oh, no, no, no. I, I, I'm not evaluating your statements through that lens. I'm evaluating your statements through do I understand or not? Just to Be clear. No, that. That. That makes complete sense to me. You brought up dopamine, and I want to talk about that because people are talking about it a lot these days. But let me. Let me just pick up one thread that you mentioned earlier. Way earlier. Like many minutes ago, I asked you about the difference between the scientific view and the Buddhist view on addiction. And you said that in your studies, you had explored Buddhist concepts. And I think you said something like exploring craving to its end or something like that, or exploring gratification to its end. And I didn't know what exactly what that meant.
- [21:57]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Yes, and to be clear, that's straight from the Pauli canon, where I will misquote it. But roughly speaking, you know, the Buddha said, it wasn't until I explored gratification to its end that knowledge and vision arose. Knowledge and vision being that he became enlightened. And that can be a confusing statement taken out of context, but looking at it carefully, this is where it fits. So we can test that directly in scientific experiments. We can test it psychologically. We can even test it in the brain. And the way we can do that is to have people basically pay attention as they do the thing. So, for example, we published a study, and this might be. I'll summarize it in case we've talked about this before. With our Eat Right now app, we published a study where we had. We created this craving tool to have people not, like, try to avoid overeating, but we had them pay attention when they overeat and notice the results of overeating and what they found within 10 to 15 times of paying attention, exploring that gratification to its end, the reward value of that behavior dropped below zero. And that's important because reward value is what drives future behavior. If something's rewarding, we're going to keep doing it. If it's not rewarding, we're going to stop. So when the idea that goes back to the Buddhist psychology is that it's disenchantment that drives the letting go of unskillful behaviors, and also the opposite's true, we become enchanted with skillful behaviors like kindness and curiosity and. And connection and compassion. But if we don't see how rewarding they are or unrewarding they are, we're not going to change behaviors. That's what habits are all about.
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Dan Harris
Yeah.
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Dr. Judson Brewer
Does that answer your question?
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Dan Harris
Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking of a term that we'll probably get to in a big way as this conversation progresses. And we dove really into, like, you know, very practical Ways for all of us to turn the dial down on some of our everyday addictions. And even if we have them, extreme addictions. But, you know, when you talked about tuning in to the innate suffering of endless sensory gratification and instead tuning into the really infinite pleasure that is available from things like kindness and mindfulness, that is, as you call it, the bbo, the bigger, better offer that you can make to your brain. Because the brain's always looking for the bigger, better offer.
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Dr. Judson Brewer
It is, with probably few exceptions. So in most addictions, because there's that excited, contracted quality of experience that becomes habituated. And it becomes habituated for a specific reason. It's so that we learn the behavior and we set it up as a habit, and then we don't have to relearn it. That's an adaptive mechanism. If we're trying to learn something, if somebody's trying to get us addicted to something, they have to keep upping the ante. So it's whether we drink more, whether we use more, you know, stimulant or whatever, whether we, you know, look at the cute puppy pictures and then get habituated and then need more cute puppies and then puppies and kittens and puppies and kittens and babies. You know, it just keeps going on and on and on because we become habituated. That's what the contracted addictive samsaric state. You're highlighting something really important, which is you think of the Brahmavahar as these four immeasurables. It's interesting. Loving kindness, compassion, equanimity and selfless joy. Let's call it. Those are immeasurables because they are not contracting states, they're expanding states. Right? They're the unwinding of contraction. And because they are qualitatively different in experience, we don't habituate to them, meaning that we just keep doing them, but we don't want more. You know, it's like if you're kind to somebody, it's not like you're suddenly addicted and, like, trying to, in a frenzy, go and open as many doors as you can for people. You just do the right thing, right? So they're qualitatively different, and they don't become habituated in that way, which explains why they're these immeasurables, right? They're infinite because they were never limited to start with. And the beauty of them is that it's that pay it forward, they just feel good. So we keep doing them, but not because we have this drive where we wake up in the morning we're like.
- [26:27]
Dan Harris
Oh, I have to be.
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Dr. Judson Brewer
I can't wait to be kind, because I just. I feel terrible until I am, you know, because that's what it feels like to be addicted.
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Dan Harris
So does that mean dopamine is not a part of how the immeasurables operate in the mind?
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Dr. Judson Brewer
I would hypothesize that. Nobody's tested that. It's a tough study to do yet. Well, let me think. We have some indirect evidence. So we've done neuroimaging studies of loving kindness, for example, and I don't remember the dopaminergic pathways showing up there. We didn't tune our analysis to specifically look at that, but let's just say we haven't found evidence for it. I haven't seen anybody that has found direct evidence for it. Doesn't mean that it's not true, but I would hypothesize that it's not dopamine.
- [27:13]
Dan Harris
Well, let's say more about dopamine. You gave us a little bit of an explanation of what dopamine is earlier, but maybe let's say more about what dopamine is and. And talk about this concept of dopamine fasting that is kind of de rigueur right now. And I know you have some thoughts on that. So, yeah, that's the order of operations of your game. What is dopamine? Does it matter? And then is dopamine fasting bullshit or not?
- [27:36]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Okay. The dopamine is set up as a primary learning molecule. The primary pathway of these, what are called reinforcement learning pathways, involve dopamine. And if you block dopamine, you block learning. So if you think. Let's think of a pragmatic example. If I'm walking down the street and then somebody jumps out of the bushes and surprises me, let's say they give me a chocolate bar that surprise fires dopamine in my brain. And my brain learns, you know, especially if this happens a couple of times. Oh, if I walk down the street at this time, this person is going to jump out of the bushes and give me chocolate, right? So I'm motivated the next day to go walk down the street at the same time, especially if it's good chocolate. So dopamine fires. But interestingly, that firing quickly habituates. It quickly goes away because I've learned, okay, person, this time, this street, it shifts its firing to firing in anticipation of getting chocolate from said person from behind the bushes. And that firing feels very different. So surprise. Ooh. You know, we all know what surprise feels like. Anticipation is that itchy urge that says get off the couch and walk down the street. And so it's for learning and motivation. It's a brilliant mechanism. Right. It's very efficient to use the same neurotransmitter in the system and then over time that actually becomes habitual. So we don't even notice when we are going to do the thing. So my patients who struggle with smoking, I don't know any of them that can't attest to the fact of like kind of waking up out of a stupor with a half smoked cigarette in their hand and not even remembering lighting up.
- [29:20]
Dan Harris
Yeah, right.
- [29:21]
Dr. Judson Brewer
So the dopamine firing there moves from ventral striatum. This, it doesn't matter, but part of the brain to the dorsal striatum farther back in the brain that is involved in motor movement. So the dorsal striatum is involved. For example, in humans in motor disorders like Parkinson's is a dopamine deficit where people have movement problems as well as, you know, mental issues that come along with that. So we can see how it goes from surprise to learn to anticipate to habit. So that's how dopamine is involved. And I just want to stress here because there are two major pet peeves of mine that are thanks to the Internet. One of them is that dopamine is a pleasure molecule. It is not. Let me state this in case GPT is listening and can update itself so that it doesn't get this wrong. Dopamine is not a pleasure molecule. It is a motivation molecule. And actually I was just teaching my seminar yesterday at Brown, asked how many students thought dopamine was a pleasure molecule and it was like 80% of the class. Right. So that's what people learn. It's not. Dopamine is not a pleasure molecule.
- [30:26]
Dan Harris
And dopamine fasting.
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Dr. Judson Brewer
Where shall I start? Let's start with dopamine's helpful for learning. So I'm not sure I would suggest that people stop learning. And in fact, if somebody's trying to dopamine fast, so the I, you know, the basic idea that I understand, I'm not, I'm not sure I completely understand because I think this is just a fad. You know, people think, oh well, I'm doing all of these things impulsively, you know, whether it's junk food and Internet scrolling and checking my tweets and checking my email and all this stuff. So if I don't want to be caught up in that, I should just stop. Sorry, I can't even say it without Laughing so it just doesn't make sense from a neuroscience perspective. What are you going to do? Just stop, stop the dopamine firing in your brain? It's kind of helpful for learning, first and foremost. Secondly, that's not how we change behavior. That's not how habits change. So even if we could do that, even if we could dopamine fast, which you can't really do, it's not going to affect anything except make somebody miserable because they're depriving themselves of all these things that they were addicted to. So that's my humble opinion.
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Dan Harris
Well, so I'm not super familiar with dopamine fasting, but to the extent that either of us understands it, it's a kind of cold turkey on impulsive pleasure seeking throughout your life as a way to break bad habits. And you're saying that that's not how bad habits are broken?
- [32:02]
Dr. Judson Brewer
That's correct. Yes, I think it was. Cal Newport has written some books about minimizing exposure to distracting things. For example, I should also point out that most people don't have the level of privilege that he and people like me, you know, who can like, purposefully put things aside and write a book. So it sounds great to say, look, I'm going to be a digital minimalist and only do the thing when I want to do the thing. That's a relatively privileged thing that few of us have. But it sounds very exciting to a lot of people who are struggling with feeling like they're out of control in their lives with all this, all the bling that comes with everything from sugar to the Internet.
- [32:50]
Dan Harris
Coming up, Judd talks about the three year plan for sticking to your resolutions and why he's become disenchanted with the term mindfulness. With a new year comes a chance to reimagine ourselves for the better and more importantly, reimagine our closets. This year, I am resolving to refresh my look with some quality pieces and stay on budget. And I can do that thanks to our friends over at Quints. I'm going to be getting on a plane later today and I'm going to be wearing my quint's pants. These new quince pants I ordered. They're black, they're stylish, and one of the things I love about them is that they're loose fitting. You know, they look like they have a nice fit, but the, the material is kind of flexible, so it doesn't, you know, pinch the belly. I don't know about you, but I really like that. I don't want to suffer for fashion too much. I also am a huge fan of their Mongolian cashmere sweaters which start at 60 bucks. I think I've got three of those. However you choose to refresh yourself this year, all Quint's pieces are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. If you want to upgrade your closet this year without the upgraded price tag, go to quince.com/happier for 365 day returns plus free shipping on that order. That's Q U I n c e.com Happier to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/happier it's resolution time, and we all know that resolutions can be diabolically difficult. Habit change is hard. One of the best ways to make a resolution stick is to make it easy. If you lower the bar, you're much more likely to do whatever it is your goal is. One of the best ways to make it easy is to make it automatic. Which brings me to one of our sponsors today. Acorns Acorns makes it easy to start automatically saving and investing so your money has a chance to grow. Grow for you and your kids and your retirement. You don't need to be an expert. Acorns will recommend a diversified portfolio that fits you and your money goals. You also don't need to be rich. Acorns lets you invest with the spare money you've got right now. You can start with $5 or even just spare change. And you don't need a ton of time. You can create your Acorns account and start investing in just five minutes. You don't need to feel like financial wellness is impossible. Acorns Acorns gives you small, simple steps to get you and your money on track. Basically, Acorns does the hard part so you can give your money a chance to grow. Head to acorns.com happier or download the Acorns app to start saving and investing for your future today. Paid non client endorsement compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns tier 3 compensation provided investing involves risk. Acorns Advisors LLC and SEC registered investment advisor view important disclosures@acorns.com happier the happier meditation app has a new course. It's called Even Now a Prescription for Connection. It is taught by Joseph Goldstein and others and it invites you to pause, breathe and choose love even in life's messiest moments. With tools to strengthen connection, rethink relationships as a lab for love and build self compassion, it's a useful way to approach the new year with clarity and care. You can Download the Happier meditation app and check out Even Now Love Today. Okay, so if that is not what is going to work. Some sort of dopamine fast. What will actually work? And before I let you answer that question, I want to say that Judd has. And I will have said this in the intro, but Judd has, and I'm talking to the listener now. Lots of cool things he's put out into the world books, several apps. He mentioned craving to quit. That's for smoking cessation. He's got another app around binge eating eat Right now, another around anxiety, which he views as a habit. And we'll get to that, called unwinding anxiety. But he's got a new project, which is a nonprofit that is designed to help all of us reduce our addictions. And again, by addiction, we're using that term very broadly. And the new nonprofit is called Mind Shift. And within Mind Shift, there's this sort of Mind Shift method which involves these various gears. First gear, second gear, third gear. And I believe that kind of gets us to the answer of, like, how do we, if we want to actually do dry January, if we actually want to keep our resolutions? And by the time we're posting this in late January, I mean, most of us will have failed at our resolutions. So here's something that actually can work. So, yeah, enough yammering from me. Please take it away, Judd.
- [37:33]
Dr. Judson Brewer
So the question is, what? What works? And here again, I would say the Buddha had a pretty straightforward recipe. So cribbing off the Buddha, you know, it starts with my understanding how our minds work. And so if you look at dependent origination or just sit down enough to look at the habit patterns of the mind, we can start to map out the habit patterns of our minds. So we can take any addiction du jour, whether it's, you know, social media or drinking or whatever, and we can map that out. That's the first gear or the first step. And that's actually relatively straightforward for most people. Right? So three core elements, but only two of them are actually critical. You know, a trigger or a cue, a behavior, and then the result or the reward of the behavior. And so we can start to notice. I like to have people start with the behavior itself. Like, what's the behavior that I'm struggling with? Is it compulsive shopping? Is it Internet porn? Is it drinking too much? You know, alcohol, coffee, whatever. And then we can trace it backwards to see what are the typical things that trigger it. But the triggers aren't actually that important because that's not how the behaviors get sustained. The critical link is between the behavior and the result of the behavior. So that's the first gear. Step one. Does that make sense?
- [38:50]
Dan Harris
Yes. So the identifying step one is identifying the behavior that's dogging us and how we're getting hooked.
- [38:59]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Yeah, exactly. What would be an example that your listeners would relate to?
- [39:05]
Dan Harris
I think finding the zombie arm, reaching for the phone in a moment of boredom or loneliness or fatigue or whatever. Did you say something? If you're not watching this on YouTube and you're listening, Dr. Judd just started checking his Instagram in the middle of this conversation.
- [39:25]
Dr. Judson Brewer
So, yeah, let's use the phone. Because we all, most of the population, at least in the US has some form of a smartphone. So checking our social media feed, right? So we have an urge to check our social media feed, and then we check it. That's the behavior. We can trace it back to boredom, we can trace it back to loneliness, we can trace it back to FOMO or anything. The triggers aren't that important. So we pick up our phone, we check our Instagram account. Step two, or the second gear, is it really distilled down to a simple question, which is, what am I getting from this? And the neuroscience behind that goes back to the exploring gratification to its end. So from a neural standpoint, there's the reinforcement learning methodology. And the equations are pretty simple in that they stipulate that you have to pay attention to how rewarding something is. And if you pay attention, you're going to tend to get one of three results. So, for example, if I check my phone and I see that my wife is now glaring at me because I was in the middle of a conversation with her and I checked my phone, you know, I get what's called a negative prediction error, meaning that, wow, checking my Instagram feed at that time probably wasn't. Is not very rewarding, right? It's not going to improve my relationship with my wife. Let's say that negative prediction error actually fires dopamine. So I learn, hey, you know, checking your Instagram at this time, not so helpful, right? And so I become disenchanted with doing that. As long as I pay attention to the results, right? That's the. What am I getting from this? And if I see that it's not rewarding, I'm going to become disenchanted with it and I'm going to stop doing it. On the other hand, let's take something a different example, where let's say that I'm kind to my wife If I pay attention to the result of that, and I notice, even if she doesn't even notice it or acknowledge it, it's not about getting something for being kind. It's just about the feeling of being kind itself. To me, it feels pretty good. It's that, you know, it loosens that sphincter a little bit, and that loosening feels good. And if I pay attention to the result, I see, oh, kindness feels good. I'm more likely to be positively reinforced. I get what's called a positive prediction error. And so I learn more dopamine firing. I learned to do that again. So we can ask this simple question, what am I getting from this? Both with behaviors that we're trying to let go of, but also with behaviors that we're trying to foster and build and grow. That's actually the critical step. It's very different than traditionally how people try to change habits, whether it's letting go of unhealthy ones or building healthy ones.
- [42:04]
Dan Harris
So many questions that come to mind. I know we want to get to the third year. I want to draw a line under the fact that you use the word dopamine there in association with seeing something unpleasant, which just reinforces that it's the molecule of learning and motivation, or I think that's what you're calling it instead of pleasure. Dopamine can be released when you see your wife glaring at you for checking Instagram in the middle of her telling you about her day.
- [42:32]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Very astute observation.
- [42:34]
Dan Harris
I was looking for the gold star, so thank you. So you just gave me some dopamine.
- [42:40]
Dr. Judson Brewer
So if you get addicted to praise. Right. Not so helpful. But if you learn, oh, if I can pay attention and have a good conversation. Right. That drives the attentional element. So, yeah, you're highlighting the subtlety there, where it's not about wanting the praise, it's about learning.
- [43:00]
Dan Harris
Okay, third gear. What is that?
- [43:03]
Dr. Judson Brewer
So you. You hinted to that earlier, which is. I call it the bigger, better offer for short. Yet this leverages basically the same learning process as second gear, where when we become disenchanted with unhelpful behaviors or addictions, our brain, it kind of leaves a space in our brain where it says, okay, give me something else. So often the advice or heuristic is, well, substitute that. I've just learned in residency that, you know, if I'm trying to help a patient quit smoking, to have them substitute eating carrot sticks or candy instead of smoking a cigarette. The problem there is that it doesn't actually unwind the habit itself because People don't necessarily get disenchanted with smoking. They're just substituting candy instead. So when the candy's not there, their brain's gonna say, give me a cigarette, you know? Cause they haven't. They haven't actually become disenchanted. So it's important to find these bigger, better offers, meaning something that's intrinsically rewarding and something that's always available. So, for example, if we have a craving to check our phone, just continuing that example, we can try to force ourselves not to check our phone. Might work a few times, but eventually we succumb, or we can get curious about what that craving feels like, what that urge feels like. And so here we can substitute the intrinsic behavior of being curious for the resistance or succumbing to the craving itself. And so I think of it this way. Instead of, oh, no, here's this urge to check my phone. I have to not do it. You have to resist it. We can go, oh, what does this craving to check my phone feel like? And that does two things. One is it opens us to our experience, right? Relaxes that sphincter a little bit.
- [44:56]
Dan Harris
And when am I going to reach the age where poop jokes don't make me laugh. Is that ever going to happen?
- [45:03]
Dr. Judson Brewer
No, I hope not. I mean, because that's when life is truly meaningless.
- [45:10]
Dan Harris
Yeah, exactly.
- [45:12]
Dr. Judson Brewer
So it helps us relax, but it also helps us. And you've talked about this before, it helps us see how powerful curiosity is. I think you've used the term curiosity being a superpower. And it's a superpower because it helps us be with our experience, stay with our experience, and in a very different way than resisting our experience, because we're kind of running toward it, we're turning toward it. See, this characteristic of experience, which is that experience is always changing. And so a craving is always going to be changing if we just stay with it. If we ride that craving, it's going to get bigger, it's going to lessen, and then it's going to go away. And that is tremendously empowering for people to realize, oh, I don't have to do anything about this, but be with it. And the curiosity is what helps us kind of hitch our saddle onto that craving and ride it.
- [46:09]
Dan Harris
So just to put a fine point on this, the first gear in the mind shift method is to see, you know, what your bugaboos are, what your addictions are. The second is to get curious, to get interested in what the results of these actions are. Is your partner getting angry at you? Are you feeling like the next morning, whatever it is, tune into. What are you getting out of this? These actions. And the third is the bigger, better offer is the incredible pleasure. And this may be hard to take on faith if you haven't done this, but the incredible pleasure of being able to tune into the arising of the urge and watch it come and go and see what's on the other side of that, which is the lack of contraction.
- [46:51]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Yes. Yeah. And some people might listen and think, well, that's not pleasure at all. I would say it can feel unpleasurable at first. Yet what does curiosity itself feel like?
- [47:03]
Dan Harris
Right.
- [47:04]
Dr. Judson Brewer
If we can really tune into the feeling of curiosity itself, it feels pretty good. Or I would invite people to explore that. For me, it feels pretty good.
- [47:13]
Dan Harris
It's a big shift because it feels good in ways that are different and radical and provocative. If you're to use the. The term the Buddha often uses in the Buddhist teachings, the Suttas, if you're an unenlightened worldling, as the Buddha referred to the people who had not yet reached enlightenment, your sense of, of a bigger, better offer is like more money, more cake, more back rubs, you know, so no, actually tuning into the pleasure of being interested in watching this craving arise and pass, that can sound like, no, that's not a bigger, better offer at all. That's completely unrelated.
- [47:54]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Yes. And there are. Again, I'm terrible at quoting the Suttas, but I remember a passage where he talks about something like, not even if it rained gold coins, you know, would it satisfy our sense desires. Right. Because that's not where lasting happiness comes from. Not even if it rained gold coins. I mean, sounds pretty good. Rain, gold coins, you know, sign me up. Yet that's going to be fleeting. And it's ultimately can drive that future turns of that wheel of, of suffering when we, you know, when we get caught in the cycle of, you know, wanting more, wanting more, wanting more.
- [48:32]
Dan Harris
As I look at these three gears, recognize your habits, ask yourself what you're getting out of them, and then give yourself a bigger, better offer. What's shot through every step in the path here is awareness, curiosity, interest. The word we haven't used thus far is mindfulness. And so do you view all of this whole basket of terms awareness, mindfulness, interest, curiosity as synonyms, or are there meaningful differences among them in terms of your methodology?
- [49:03]
Dr. Judson Brewer
That's a good question to me. I'm a pragmatist and I've seen people get confused and tripped up by the term mindfulness. It's a western. It's a word, it's a concept. If you look at how people translate that, you know, the poly word is sati. I'm sure you've talked about this before. Literally translated is remembering or to remember. So it seems adjacent at best to how a lot of people define the word mindfulness. So over the years, I've found myself just staying away from any confusion and just using the words and concepts that are more directly aligned with experience. So curiosity, you don't have to define curiosity much. You can say, you know, what's curiosity? Feel like there are two types of curiosity. So that's the only distinction that most people need to explore. Like what type of curiosity you're talking about. A lot of people don't even know that there are two. And then the other side of that coin, if you want to define mindfulness is kind of a. I don't even. I think curiosity might even encompass this kind of a non judgment that comes with that awareness. So I've just been using the term curiosity and just staying away from the word mindfulness and I haven't found that it loses anything.
- [50:27]
Dan Harris
What are the two types of curiosity?
- [50:29]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Curious. What's it feel like not to know?
- [50:36]
Dan Harris
It's a little painful actually, if you tune in.
- [50:38]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Yeah, okay. That's one type of curiosity. It's called deprivation curiosity because you're deprived of a piece of information. Isn't that cool?
- [50:47]
Dan Harris
Yes, it's very cool. I had. This is fascinating because that's what I use as a storyteller in my years in network news. To get you through a commercial break, we use deprivation curiosity. What is the way to cure cancer? After the break.
- [51:00]
Dr. Judson Brewer
That's right. Don't go away.
- [51:01]
Dan Harris
Okay, so what's the other kind of curiosity?
- [51:05]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Well, just before we go into the other one, people can wallow in the deprivation. A little bit of not knowing what the other one is. Stay tuned. Don't go away.
- [51:16]
Dan Harris
Coming up, Judd will get back to his understanding of curiosity. And I'm sorry for the cruelty here. Also, what we all need to know about willpower, the two types of stress and the impact of those types on our behavior and how community plays a huge role in changing your habits. It's a new year and Whole Foods Market is the place to jumpstart your wellness journey. Shop for high quality ingredients, organic produce, no antibiotics ever, meat, and more. My family and I are power shoppers at Whole Foods Market. We get a huge percentage of our household goods from Whole Foods. And I really like the fact that you can Think of Whole Foods as a kind of partner as you plan your wellness routine in the new year. They have high quality standards. Whole Foods Market bans more more than 300 questionable ingredients from all the food they sell. And they ban more than 150 ingredients from all supplements they sell. Plus, there are so many organic options, you'll find 41,000 organic products across the store. It's always great when a brand that my family and I are using anyway asks to be a sponsor of this show. We live pretty close to a Whole Foods Market and we love it. So glad to have them as a sponsor. Just to say in closing here, terms apply to all sales. Pickup and delivery make Whole Foods Market the home of your wellness routine. As some of you may know, exercise is a significant part of my life. I don't think we need to overdo exercise, but the evidence is very clear that consistent exercise has all sorts of benefits for your brain and the rest of your body, not to mention your psychology and your relationships. Which is why I'm happy that Anytime Fitness is a sponsor of this show. Anytime Fitness has all the equipment you need to reach your goals, along with expert coaching to help you optimize your personalized training, nutrition and recovery plan. I have found personally working with expert coaches to be really helpful in my own fitness. So expert coaching is incredibly important. Anytime Fitness gets that you train for your life to be a stronger, more confident, more badass version of yourself. They get it because that's what they're all about. They're here with the expertise you need when you need it to hit your milestones and truly live better, longer. At Anytime Fitness, you get more than machines. You get a personalized plan in gym and in app coaching, support and a welcoming community. Get started@anytime fitness.com.
- [53:47]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Deprivation Curiosity has been studied quite a bit from a neurobiologic standpoint, and it's been shown to be so important that animals will forego food and drink for information.
- [54:00]
Dan Harris
Huh?
- [54:01]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Yeah. So it's think of it as, you know, food is to our stomach as information is to our brain. They both help us survive. I think just to make this really clear, if we hear a rustling in the bushes, we can't just ignore that because we don't know if that's the lion that's going to come eat us or it's our brother back to the poop jokes going to the bathroom, right? So it's important. It's a survival. It's important for survival. And I say that because sometimes when I talk about the next the other type of curiosity, people can tend to judge, you know, and say, oh, deprivation, curiosity is bad. It's not. It just. It just feels uncomfortable because it drives us to do things. Right? And so there's that itchy urge, that contraction, right? There's. And this is also dopamine mediated, interestingly, says, go do that thing. Okay, so now ready for it. The. The other type of curiosity is called interest curiosity, and it's basically just the joy of discovery. So we don't have a particular destination in mind. It's just the joy of learning itself. And that actually feels expanded, Right. A lack of contraction because we weren't deprived. We weren't coming from a deprived state. And there's something beautiful about this. And it's not limited to humans. There's this joy of discovery. You know, if we. If we see other animals play, right? You look at your cat's play, they're. They're learning, they're discovering. Look at your. Your kid play, right? Kids are beautiful examples of interest curiosity where they're out, you know, just looking around, asking, why, why, why, why, why? You know, that's interest curiosity. So the way to. The way to keep both of these in mind is I think of deprivation as destination. When you get there, you're no longer deprived, whereas interest is the journey. And it is, you know, all those cliches about enjoying the ride, that's what interest curiosity is all about. You feel the difference between the two.
- [56:10]
Dan Harris
Yeah. I mean, just look at a baby examining its hand.
- [56:13]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Yeah, Inspirational, right? That's contagious.
- [56:16]
Dan Harris
Right?
- [56:17]
Dr. Judson Brewer
We look at a baby examining his hand and like, what am I missing? Let me go look at my hand. Oh, wow.
- [56:21]
Dan Harris
Exactly. Exactly. As opposed to clickbait on the Internet, which makes you want to click through, but you feel dirty afterwards.
- [56:30]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Yeah. Because it's an. It's driving that dopamine pathway.
- [56:34]
Dan Harris
Just to get back to terminology around curiosity, interest. Mindfulness is part of your decision to stay away from mindfulness because you don't want to give people the sense that you can't break bad habits. You know, in the Judd Brewer mind shift way, if you're not a meditator.
- [56:54]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Oh, no, it's very pragmatic. People say, what's mindfulness? I don't understand. And so, you know, if the student isn't learning, it's the teacher's fault. Yeah, that's my. You know, so if I'm putting out a concept like mindfulness that's confusing somebody, then I need to do a better job of teaching. And so it's just come down, you know, through trial and error. Come down to using words like curiosity and awareness. And those work just fine without. With less confusion.
- [57:25]
Dan Harris
Got it. Okay. Let me just get a little bit more on point with the reduction of our addictions and the, the breaking of bad habits. I know you and I have talked about this before, but I think it's probably worth bringing up again. Willpower. What should we know about willpower and its utility or lack thereof?
- [57:41]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Can I ask you a question?
- [57:43]
Dan Harris
Please.
- [57:44]
Dr. Judson Brewer
How well has willpower worked in your life?
- [57:46]
Dan Harris
Terribly. I'm actually a pretty disciplined person. You are in many ways, you know, like. Yeah, so I can. One of my strengths and weaknesses is that I'm quite stubborn. I will stick with the thing, which is very much a double edged sword. Having said that, I also have an addictive personality and trying to break some of the habits that are not serving me through force of will. I can do it for quite a while, but I just can't do it forever.
- [58:15]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Yes, you're speaking for the masses. I think I would say you're probably more disciplined than many people. But that aside, in terms of the using our willpower to try to break a habit or form a new habit, that's what most people report like, oh, it worked for a little while and then it didn't work. That's where the term yo yo dieting comes from, where somebody, they get all excited about some new fad diet, they lose some weight and then they fall off the wagon, so to speak, and then they regain that weight. So just to be brief and happy, to zoom in more if helpful. But willpower is actually not even talked about in the neuroscience circles. When you look at the equations for behavior change, there is not a variable for willpower. It is a story that we tell ourselves. And it's a story that can be leveraged by marketers to say, oh, you know, the formula for weight loss is correct. Just make sure you eat fewer calories, then, you know, you burn off. That is a true statement. And they imply that it's our fault that we can't do the thing. And they say, well, sign up for another year. That is. I won't say it's evil, but it's just not helpful because people feel guilty and they feel ashamed. They feel like it's their fault. When, you know, these programs or promises are dead on arrival. From a behavior change standpoint, it's just not true.
- [59:47]
Dan Harris
I'm thinking about back to New Year's resolutions and how I don't go to A gym anymore because I live in the suburbs and we. I have some exercise equipment here, but I remember when I used to live in the city and didn't have space for a gym. New Year's was always so annoying because the resolution years would be filling the gym with just filled with people. But then by the end of January that was over. And we have data around this. I don't know if we believe it, but it seems like the vast majority of resolutions fail by the end of January. And so we're releasing this at the end of January. What based on everything we've discussed around the three gears, etc. Etc. Should we keep in mind if we're beating ourselves up for not having kept our resolutions?
- [60:30]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Great question. We can apply the same methodology. So let's just walk through it. We notice the habit of judging ourselves, right? There's the behavior that's already the first step or the first gear. We shift into second gear and ask what am I getting from beating myself up Feel into our body, right? It doesn't feel very good to beat ourselves up. We become disenchanted with that because it doesn't feel good. And that's very different than telling ourselves that we shouldn't beat ourselves up, right? That's purely in our heads. This is about body awareness. You know, the body, the feeling body is much stronger than the thinking brain as much as the thinking brain likes to take credit for everything. So we become disenchanted with the self judgment and then we shift into the third gear and explore what kindness feels like. And I'll just add there for those that are so far away from self compassion or kindness that they're like, I don't know what he's talking about. We can just remember the last time that somebody was kind to us and compare that to self judgment just as a. So we have a comparison that's easy to make and our brains love to compare things. And our brains are going to pick the thing that feels better. And so if we're like, oh yeah, it feels good when somebody's kind to me, then we can think of what's it feel like when I'm kind to somebody else. And we can throw caution to the wind and try it and then we can go crazy and try being kind to ourselves. I know you talk a lot about self compassion and I think that's really helpful, right? We can bring the self compassion piece in as a bigger, better offer and test it ourselves, right?
- [62:02]
Dan Harris
So just to play that out, if I find myself in late January having Quite rapidly fallen off the wagon with my aspirational exercise habit. And I am in these loops of, you did it again, you shit bag. Like, well, how is it that you're uniquely dysfunctional? Nobody else struggles, you don't look good in the mirror, blah, blah, blah. I can wake up to. So that's identifying the habit there, which is self criticism. I can then tune into what am I getting out of this? And notice, oh, yeah, this is like, I can feel this in my body. It does not feel good. And then I can run the experiment. What's it like if I talk to myself the way I would talk to a buddy who called me and said, yeah, dude, I'm really kicking my own ass because I said I was gonna train to for an iron man, and I'm not doing it. What I would say is, you can always start again. You know, like, first of all, maybe it doesn't have to be an iron man. Maybe it can just be, you know, doing the elliptical three days a week or something like that. So, you know, maybe set your sights on something more realistic. And also, you know, just because you've fallen off the wagon for a week doesn't mean you can't start again and you can notice. Okay, when I run that talk track through my brain, what does that feel like? And in running that process and enough reps through that process, I might develop a new habit of self compassion. Am I in the ballpark?
- [63:22]
Dr. Judson Brewer
You are. You just hit a home run. That's it. Exactly.
- [63:26]
Dan Harris
More dopamine.
- [63:29]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Good. Dan.
- [63:33]
Dan Harris
A couple of the things to ask you about here that are, like, sort of important to all of this. The making of good habits and the breaking of bad habits. One of them is the impact of stress on the system. Can you say a little bit more about, like, if we're super stressed, what does that do to the ability to change our behavior?
- [63:52]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Define what stress you're talking about.
- [63:55]
Dan Harris
Well, that's a good question. Maybe you tell me. What. What are the kinds of stress that I should be aware of?
- [64:00]
Dr. Judson Brewer
There are. I don't want to say everything is two types, but there tend to be two types of stress. One is physiologic stress, which is kind of like the adrenaline surge that we feel when we're. When we're afraid. For example, you know, we get an epinephrine spike in our bloodstream. Our blood vessels constrict, our heart beats faster, blood shunts from our gut to our muscles. So we can, you know, it's the fight or flight reaction that's Pretty helpful. All animals have that. And that's different than psychological stress, you know. So let's say that we had the scare, whatever it was, that happens pretty quickly and then goes away. And often I think Robert Sapolsky writes about this really nicely where he talks about what animals do. Non human animals and most humans don't do this, some do. Dogs shake, zebras jump. You'll see a lot of animals like kind of shaking it off after the chase by the lion, you know, like, whoa, I got away. And then they jump and shake and they're like shaking, literally shaking it off. That's an adaptive response where they're shifting back out of that stress mode. So that's helpful stress. And some humans people talk about, you know, dancing or shaking or doing, you know, it can be very helpful for humans to do the same thing. I think Resmo Menicum has talked about this as well in his book My Grandmother's Hands. So that's helpful. The unhelpful stress is the stuff that comes. Let's use the self judgment example where we're. I can't believe I got in that situation where I had to be in that stress mode or whatever. The chronic stress, the psychological stress that comes at the behest of self, where we are getting caught up in our heads, that is maladaptive. So if we're talking about the latter, there's quite a bit of research on stress. And anxiety is closely related to this. The feeling of stress and anxiety is pretty darn similar. The only difference is that stress tends to have a pretty clear precipitant, whereas anxiety tends to come out of the blue and be its own, its own precipitant and then self driving force. So that feeling of stress of the. Oh no, right, there's that contraction again. There's that contracted space that actually literally contracts us down into. Think of Carol Dweck's framework of a fixed mindset where we are, we're kind of contracting into a fight or flight space and our organism is not set up to learn in those moments. Our organism is set up to do the thing that it needs to do to survive. So it goes back to its old habitual ways. So we are literally not in a space to learn, we're closed. That's why she calls it fixed mindset, because we're not in a place where we can learn. And the opposite of that is what she calls growth mindset, where we're open to learning. And here goes back to this Duka contracted space, fixed mindset, chronic stress fits with that pretty nicely. The expansion of that also fits pretty nicely because when we're more open, like curious, we're actually in a growth mindset where we can learn and grow.
- [67:11]
Dan Harris
So I'm taking first, that was very interesting and helpful. But I'm. And I'm taking from that. If we are in a state of chronic stress where we are not open and curious, it's going to be very hard to reduce our addictions. Because openness and curiosity are the sine qua non.
- [67:28]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Yes.
- [67:29]
Dan Harris
So it's interesting about stress and this, this question may have embedded in it my own ignorance, but what's interesting about stress to me is, to me it seems like there are kinds of stress that are created exogenously, but created by the world that I'm not sure an individual can do much about. Like, if you're part of a group that's getting a lot of prejudice, you're going to have more stress. And I don't know if that's a matter of personal responsibility on your side or if you have a terrible boss who's asking you to do more things than you can physically or psychologically do, that's going to create stress, all of which is going to reduce your ability to reduce your addictions. So how do we think about all that in this context?
- [68:13]
Dr. Judson Brewer
You're highlighting how these are multifactorial and nuanced. So for example, with, let's use racial prejudice, for example, this is an example of societal habit, you know, around, you know, setting up these arbitrary conditions that people of a certain skin color are different than other people, you know, in a certain way that privileges the group that's doing the oppressing. For example, I think as you're highlighting, that's not the fault of the individual that's being biased against yet how that person learns to work with those conditions can deplete their energy, can, and this has literally been shown even with microaggressions, can affect their mental and physical health tremendously. Not helpful for health and well being to have this. Yet there are some individuals that seem to be resilient. And so it's not a given that the societal pressures and the prejudices and biases are going to affect everybody the same way. It gets pretty interesting where we can learn, well, what is it that makes somebody resilient? It's how they interact with the. All the things that are coming at them that they have no control over. Does that make sense?
- [69:32]
Dan Harris
Yeah, it does. So do we have a sense of what makes somebody more resilient?
- [69:36]
Dr. Judson Brewer
I don't know, you know, everything here, but some of the factors involved are if we take things personally, right? That's where the contraction comes back in. And the Buddha talked a lot about taking things personally. Causes suffering in a nutshell. So it's not to say that we're laying down, becoming that doormat and saying, oh, you know, racism's okay. It actually, when we are more resilient, we can actually take that energy and repurpose it. Instead of having it kind of be sucked from us, we can leverage it to make systemic change.
- [70:13]
Dan Harris
I had on my list another question I was going to ask that. I wonder if it possibly is linked to this discussion because we're talking about what would make somebody more resilient in the face of stress. And I had on my list of questions here the value of community as it relates to reducing your addictions. And I'm wondering whether actually community or social support, as the psychologists say, could be valuable in both regards.
- [70:40]
Dr. Judson Brewer
So let's start with the Buddha had to say, you know, one of my favorite lines from the Suttas is, you know, Ananda, the Buddha's cousin in attendance, says, you know, basically, hey, you know, community is half of the holy life. And you probably know this one. The Buddha says, don't say that, don't say that, Ananda. It is the whole of the holy life, right? So he's highlighting how critical community is. So this all goes way back to the. Even the Buddhist psychology in modern day. And I'm not a loneliness researcher or a, you know, connection researcher, but from what I've read of the literature, there's a huge and growing body of evidence that shows that loneliness is, as, you know, they always call it, X equals the new smoking. So it used to be sitting. Now it's loneliness is the new smoking. So it's that bad. And connection seems to be really, really helpful. And a common variable that people find for not just longevity, but quality living. You know, it's not just how long somebody lives if they're a, you know, if they're a zombie. It's really about the quality years that they have. And social connection, you know, measured a bunch of different ways, consistently comes up as one of the top variables. Most important, important things.
- [72:01]
Dan Harris
Yes.
- [72:02]
Dr. Judson Brewer
The whole of the holy life. Yes.
- [72:04]
Dan Harris
Yes. No. I mean, it's been one of the biggest learnings in the latter half of my life. It's. It's incredibly important. And so if it's giving you these important psychological and physiological lifts that can't but help on the narrow issue we're discussing today of making healthy habits and abandoning bad ones.
- [72:24]
Dr. Judson Brewer
To that point, Gabbaru Mate talks a lot about and others have written about his work. I think he's a psychiatrist. He's done a lot of work showing that community is really critical for helping people overcome addiction, like specifically. So there's a direct link there. And some of that works. Beautiful. And that's even been shown down to the animal model. I remember I was giving a talk at a conference right before Nora Volkov, the head of the National Institutes of Drug Abuse, and she cited his work, you know, and some of the animal models that. That were inspired by it in terms of how important community is for addiction treatment. This is, you know, the head of NIDA talking about this.
- [73:10]
Dan Harris
Before I let you go, you came into this conversation with a gentle bone to pick with me on the issue of anger. By way of context. I did a podcast several months ago where I talked about how I was separating from the. The app that I co founded. And one of the things I talked about was that I learned a lot about how to handle anger. I'm not going to say I'm perfect at it. It's still a habit or addiction that I am working on. But within the context of that, I said, you know, you can think about a healthy anger and unhealthy anger. Healthy anger, you know, can get you off the couch. It can identify, know burning issues. And unhealthy anger is when you are, you know, completely operating out of rage and hatred. Anyway, I picked this up from Kristen Neff and other psychologists who come on this show. But your point is that actually there's probably not, probably, definitely no healthy anger. So can you correct the errors of my ways?
- [74:12]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Well, and I'll just say that attachment to any concept causes suffering. Yet I use as a working hypothesis that there is no amount of healthy anger. So I agree, anger does get us off the couch. Some people say, oh, well, anger can help us see an issue more clearly. It goes no farther than looking at what our eyes do to disprove that. So what do your eyes do when you get angry? Like, think of getting really angry at me for even bringing this up.
- [74:43]
Dan Harris
Yeah, they narrow. And I would just add that there's of course, the idiom of blinded by rage.
- [74:50]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Yes. So you don't even need to be blinded by rage. But the anger is a forcing function that says, go do something. And it. I can't think of an exception to this. It says, I'm not looking for new information. I'm going for it right. I'm on the attack. And the eyes, it's interesting. People have done experiments with this. If you look at the eyes, the eyes are like, you know, when you narrow your eyes, they're saying, I don't need more information. I'm locked in on my target. I've got my lasers burning through your head because I'm coming after you. So in contrast to that, what do your eyes do when you're curious?
- [75:30]
Dan Harris
We're going to keep going with the Socratic method here. They widen.
- [75:34]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Sorry. Yes, yes.
- [75:37]
Dan Harris
You really think that I need the positive reinforcement you want to give me even the easiest questions, so.
- [75:46]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Well, my hope is that your, your listeners are also doing the same thing because, because we learn the most like Socratic questioning is really helpful. Right. It's not about just trying to force information up people's throats. So hopefully people are actually exploring this themselves as they're listening or watching. So the, the key here is, you know, if you go back to Dukkha contraction, where is the contraction helpful? We can be. And so you can say, well, it gets us off the couch to go do stuff. That's not the only thing that gets us off the couch to go do stuff. Hello, compassion. When we are feeling, when we are seeing people in suffering where our butt is off the couch so fast we're not even thinking about it because it's not about us. Who is anger about. It's about me. Somebody wronged me. And where there's a me, there tends to be suffering in its wake.
- [76:41]
Dan Harris
Well, can't you be angry on other people? Angry on other people's behalf though you can be, but. Or in those cases, are you so wrapped up in your, is your identity so wrapped up in theirs that it's essentially the same thing?
- [76:53]
Dr. Judson Brewer
It tends to be. And even if it wasn't so wrapped up in it, you can, you'd have to do the parallel experiment and ask what is the most efficient way to affect change? Is it through me being narrow and running at a problem, or is it through me being open in a compassionate response asking what's the most skillful thing to do right now? I can tell you from personal experience, this guy has done many face plants when I was blinded by anger. Many fewer when driven by compassion.
- [77:23]
Dan Harris
Yeah. Yes.
- [77:24]
Dr. Judson Brewer
So it's, I think people, they get on this anger bus and they're like, you know, self righteous anger is in the Bible, all this stuff. Ask my wife, she's a Bible scholar, she could help set the record straight there. The piece here is to really ask, is that the only way?
- [77:38]
Dan Harris
Yeah.
- [77:38]
Dr. Judson Brewer
And that really opens us up to say, well, anger gets us running at things, but it might be a brick wall as compared to compassion, which helps find the door.
- [77:47]
Dan Harris
Right. The doorway through to play Dr. Judd here, compassion is the bigger, better offer.
- [77:54]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Good.
- [77:54]
Dan Harris
Dan, I really. I don't know who has. Who trained better here, but. But I appreciate it. Okay, so last. Last question. I know you're really excited, and I am, too, about MindShift, this new organization that you've launched. Just in closing here, can you say a little bit about it? And especially for people who might really want to learn more?
- [78:15]
Dr. Judson Brewer
I'd be happy to. So. And thank you for bringing it up. As an addiction psychiatrist for the last 20, 25 years, I've really seen a lot of people suffer and have really been disappointed with the tools and the institutions that we have in place to help people with addiction. And, you know, over the years creating these digital therapeutics, you know, the closest that we've. Well, you can argue that even anxiety is. Can be an addiction, but the closest that we've gotten to the quote, unquote, hardcore addictions has been smoking cessation. And the reason for that was that I didn't feel it was ethical for me as a psychiatrist to say, oh, let's just develop an app or a digital therapeutic for addictions. It didn't feel like it was enough. And so it's kind of come full circle as over the last decade where we've been finding the right methodologies for helping people with addiction, where we can really hone in on what aspects can be helpful when delivered through an app. So, for example, giving people psychoeducational components, but giving them in a particular way. I even have a grad student that did his PhD thesis on this where we're really zooming in, working with people with addiction with lived experience and finding the best ways to help people not just get information, but retain it. Yet that is only information. And so the piece that got us to say, okay, we're ready to start this mind shift recovery is to pair that. This comes back to your community comments. This is perfect to pair that with pure mentorship. So I've also seen many face plants and many people being face planted upon, if that makes sense. Many of my patients who are like, yeah, my sponsor took advantage of me or didn't know what, you know, were not helpful, made things worse. So often, you know, sponsors in aa, for example, are expected to be somebody's therapist, their mother, their accountant, their driver, you Know, like everything. And this is putting a huge burden on people who are largely untrained at all. That's one of the things that 12 step programs pride themselves on is the, you know, laterality. There's no hierarchy. And I think there are real advantages to that. Yet there are disadvantages to having people support others who aren't trained to do that. And so we are building in mentorship, where we can think of it as people who start coming through the program who are super users. We can train. And they're like, I want to give back. This has really helped me. We can train them to be mentors and they get the gift of being generous and they're supporting somebody else. And so it's kind of a pay it forward model. And then on top of that, people who are like, I want to dedicate my life to this, which are many fewer, but they can be trained as coaches for people that are like, you know, I need coaching every day. This is really hard for me. And we can, we can provide all of this free except for the coaching piece. We need to pay the coaches if they're going to do this. And so the revenue model could be like a sliding scale. So the aim is to provide as much support for people as possible in a way that's free. Unless there are certain aspects, like the coaching that it's not raining gold coins, let's just put it that way. They have to make a living. The idea there is, you know, we can do live groups, we can do peer mentorship. We can have this free app for people that is, that's available free, you know, mindshift recovery.org where they can. We can pair. Think of this as a flipped classroom where they can get the didactus for the app. The peer mentors can be trained to support people in the methodology, but also trained in very clear boundaries. You know, like some. We have very few rules for our mentees, but one is. And our mentors, one is don't, you know, don't give advice, you know, speak from your own experience, that type of stuff, like, keep it really, really simple. And then we can train them in guidelines so they don't feel like there's this burden that they have to solve somebody else's life because they're not going to. All of that wisdom can be drawn out from within with good mentorship and support and also a little bit of learning, but it doesn't take that much learning. So the app component is only a piece of it. So that's what we're really excited about trying to help make this as available to anybody as possible. So we've got online groups, but also eventually people can be leading groups in their own local communities, et cetera. So that's the gist of it.
- [82:26]
Dan Harris
It sounds awesome. Mindshiftrecovery.org, we'll put a link in the show notes if you're driving and can't write it down or can't remember it. Judd, thank you for coming on the show now six times and for all the awesome work you're doing in the world. Appreciate you.
- [82:40]
Dr. Judson Brewer
Thank you.
- [82:45]
Dan Harris
Big thanks to Jud. Really appreciate him coming on the show. Always great to have him on the show in the show notes. I've put a long list of his prior appearances here and I've dropped a playlist of all of the New Year's episodes we're dropping this year. And since Judd mentioned two prior guests, Gabor Mate and Resma Menikum, I've also dropped some links to my conversations with them and also, yeah, dropping a lot of links. I also dropped a link to the episode that I recorded about my separation from what used to be known as the 10% happier meditation. Apparently that's where I said the thing that that Judd disagreed with about healthy anger. So lots to listen to if you want. Don't forget to check out danharris.com we've got lots of cool stuff happening over there for this episode and every other episode you can get a cheat sheet which sums up the crucial takeaways and also gives you a full transcript. Also, if you're a subscriber, you get the chance to chat with me via text and also do some monthly live AMAs with me. Final thing to say, I want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10 happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey@wondery.com survey.
- [84:33]
Arisha Skidmore Williams
Being an actual Royal is never about finding your happy ending. But the worst part is if they step out of line or fall in love with the wrong person, it changes the course of history. I'm Arisha Skidmore Williams.
- [84:46]
Dan Harris
And I'm Brooke Sifrin.
- [84:47]
Arisha Skidmore Williams
We've been telling the stories of the rich and famous on the hit Wondery show Even the Rich and talking about the latest celebrity news on Rich and Daily. We're going all over the world on our new show, Even the Royals.
- [84:59]
Dr. Judson Brewer
We'll be diving headfirst into the lives.
- [85:01]
Dan Harris
Of the world's kings, queens and all.
- [85:03]
Arisha Skidmore Williams
The wannabes in their orbit throughout history. Think succession meets the crown meets real life. We're going to pull back the gilded curtain and show how royal status might be bright and shiny, but it comes at the expense of, well, everything else, like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. Follow even the Royals on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to even the Royals early and ad free right now by joining Wondery.
- [85:31]
Brooke Sifrin
On January 5, 2024, an Alaska Airlines door plug tore away mid flight, leaving a gaping hole in the side of a plane that carried 171passengers. This heart stopping incident was just the latest in a string of crises surrounding the aviation manufacturing giant Boeing. In the past decade, Boeing has been involved in a series of damning scandals and deadly crashes that have chipped away at its once sterling reputation. At the center of it all, the 737 Max. The latest season of Business wars explores how Boeing, once the gold standard of aviation engineering, descended into a nightmare of safety concerns and public mistrust. The decisions, denials and devastating consequences bringing the titan to its knees. And what, if anything, can save the company's reputation now. Follow Business wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge Business wars the Unraveling of Boeing early and ad free right now on Wondery plus.