Behavioral Neuroscientist Shows You How to Break The Coronavirus Anxiety Cycle | Judson Brewer

[Music] hey everybody welcome to a very special episode of impact theory uh because of the coronavirus we're all on quarantine here so this is going to be our first ever interview filmed on skype and i cannot think of a better guess today i have joined me dr judd brewer he is the director of research and innovation at the mindfulness center an associate professor in psychiatry at the school of medicine at brown university as well as being a research affiliate for mit and i think that he has some really cool stuff to offer us in the way of the anxiety that's cropping up for a lot of people in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak um this is really historic times this is something i don't think any of us have seen in our lifetime certainly not here in los angeles um so a lot of people are dealing with the stress in different ways some of which may be not as ideal as they would like it to be so we wanted to bring somebody on um even though we're not able to film in person that can help people with that um so we are doing this special episode this is going to be unlike the normal episodes you guys are used to and that this is going to be completely unedited uh so if there are any mistakes uh dr judd this is you and i we're walking the tightrope with uh with nothing to catch us if we fall but um i'm pretty eager to get your take on what's going on um what what do you think is happening to people in terms of their mindset right now why is talking about dealing with anxiety as it relates to this so important i've had so many people say that we needed to do this episode we needed to talk about the the stress and the anxiety um so what's happening with people right now yeah you know i was just at the grocery store for the first time i left my house for the first time in probably four days you know brown had its first confirmed case over the weekend and so i've been laying low and the the shelves are relatively empty and i think that phenomenon comes where these survival mechanisms start to spiral out of control so i think that might be a good place to start is just to help us all understand like how our basic survival mechanisms work and how they spiral out of control because then that lets us get back into control so the first place to start is really understanding fear and fear responses are normal they're healthy they're adaptive they help us survive a simple example you know if we walk out into the street and we look to the side and we see a car barreling down on us jump back on the sidewalk and that fear response says hey remember what almost happened so we learned to look both ways before crossing the street so it's a very adaptive learning mechanism some time over the last million years or so our our survival brain kind of layered on this neocortex this new part of the brain that includes the prefrontal cortex the thinking the planning part of the brain planning also very very helpful for survival yet the planning part of the brain needs something really important which is accurate information right now with coronavirus we don't have we have some accurate information but we actually don't know a whole lot about you know what's the what's the time window of contagion this this and that uh so we're getting more information every day but we don't know we don't really have a lot of accurate information so if you pair fear with uncertainty your our thinking brain starts to spiral out of control in these what if what if what if scenarios and we get anxiety okay so anxiety makes our thinking brains start to go offline on top of that you add in social contagion okay social contagion is basically the pass of emotion from one person to another you know if somebody's talking to somebody else on the phone and that other person's anxious they're we're more likely to get anxious or if we talk to somebody who's panicking or if we go on social media and we see all these panic posts you know like bare shelves at the grocery store or whatever that um that social contagion we can actually catch that anywhere in the world we don't need to be six feet you know closer than six feet to somebody to catch that so social contagion might even be more contagious uh than viruses in in bacteria when you add social contagion to anxiety and that anxiety starts to spiral out that's when we get panic right and panics when our prefrontal cortex goes completely offline and we start doing things that are not helpful like buying all the toilet paper at the grocery store you know probably don't need six months worth of toilet paper and we probably didn't go to the grocery store thinking you know i'm gonna stock up on toilet paper this six months we don't do that we go to the grocery store looking for groceries and then we see everybody else you know with where there's a run on toilet paper and suddenly one thing i want to make sure that we cover today is going to be what to do about this and how we get people back to normal but i'm super curious yeah speaking to your social contagion idea how did toilet paper become the thing because i i guarantee that's not like just where people naturally go someone somewhere must have said something i think it but i actually don't know what happened i don't know when this became a thing or when people started panicking about toilet paper um so do you know how that particular idea spread i don't know what the the vector of origin was but somewhere somebody started talking about toilet paper and then other you know it spread to other people spread to other people and then suddenly it was the toilet paper meme i actually was talking to somebody two days ago and they said yeah we're actually calling it the toilet paper index you know the the stock market has a fear index well you know you can think of our consumer market being you know what's the toilet paper index but i think it just got seated somewhere and that became the meme for you know panic it's really interesting so the the notion of memes and the notion of how rapidly ideas can spread i think gives people a really clear understanding of how this stuff ramps up and how you can plant a seed in somebody's mind that then mushrooms into something because this one the the toilet paper index caught me off guard i was like what is going on of all the things to get weird about toilet paper like it just seemed like food i get i get how people are panicked buying food i even understand like sanitizer and soap but man that toilet paper is the thing that people are lining up for in grocery stores and getting in fist fights over um that one that one really caught me off guard it's so what i'm hoping we can do in this episode is plant a similar idea in people's minds and having researched you i'm pretty sure i know what the idea is gonna be um but i wanna i want people watching this to get an idea planted in their mind around how to use the um basically the habit loop triggers positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement to to realign their mind and i'm hoping that in the way that you're able to do because for people watching uh dr judd is also a specialist around addiction and has helped people tremendously there and it's it's really extraordinary the amount of impact you've been able to have with something that i never would have imagined was useful in addiction so um walk us through one what is the central idea if you were going to plant something in people's minds and have it be the meme that that takes over now in this sort of crisis state what is that idea that you would plan the idea that i would plan is really to understand how our minds work so we can keep our prefrontal cortexes online that's one i'm going to plant two the second one is find what i call the bigger better offer and there are bigger better offers than fear and anxiety and panic they don't actually feel good so if i could just plant start planting the seed around kindness a connection and calm they actually all feel better in our brain and my lab's actually done research around this um so those are the bigger better offers we're going to help guide ourselves toward and the the secret ingredient for that is awareness okay so i think that is there's there's some really interesting things that people are going to need context around um they're used to hearing ideas around mindfulness um kindness connection that sort of drifts into outer space in a way that i don't particularly resonate with um the way that you are able to bring that down um for people make it accessible i think starts with the first idea you wanted to plant now dude this was when i started learning about you i was like whoa like you i have come at this from a very unscientific standpoint but the thing i always tell people is if you want to understand how i got out of this feeling of hopelessness that i was in in my early 20s it was i had to research the brain how it actually works because for me being able to imagine the brain and the idea that i'm obsessed with getting people to understand is you're having a biological experience because you're having a biological experience i highly recommend getting your mind around some of the biology so this notion of being actually understanding the brain process i think is is really important and i'd love for you to walk people through what are some of the basics that if they understood they'd begin to have an easier time wrangling their thoughts yeah so i've been studying this for a couple of decades now and the more i study the simpler it gets so the one thing i want to start with is telling people you don't have to be brain surgeon to understand this stuff you don't even need to be a neuroscientist like i am to understand this stuff anybody can understand this and and we can actually uh get this out there in ways that people can really see significant changes whether it's addiction or anxiety or eating or whatever so the basic process let's start with survival right so three steps or three elements of a habit loop that that's really set up to help us survive a trigger a behavior and a reward so let's start with uh positive reinforcement that you mentioned so you see food right out on the savannah our ancient ancestors they see food that's the trigger they eat the food that's the behavior and then their stomach sends this dopamine signal to their brain that says remember what you ate and where you found it so that's that brain reward and we can talk about what reward actually feels like later but that from a brain perspective that's the reward that's positive reinforcement so we remember where to go get food same thing is true with negative reinforcement you know you're out on the savannah looking for food saber to tiger comes at you if you run away that behavior you know helps you survive that's your reward and so that negative reinforcement says hey avoid that part of the savannah in the future so it's actually a relatively simple process so habits are actually really helpful so think about this setting up habits every morning if we had to relearn everything from walking to putting on our clothes to making breakfast and making coffee to eating and talking you know we'd be exhausted by breakfast so setting up these habits is actually really important i think of it as set and forget our brains set a habit say okay this is good thing for survival and then we forget about the details okay so that's the first step in terms of understanding how this process works three elements trigger behavior reward positive reinforcement is we do more of the things that make us feel good like eat food and then we do fewer of the things that make us feel bad you know we avoid things that make us feel bad like avoid things that are dangerous that's the first part does that make sense yeah definitely so in this context i one thing going back to how the brain works that i found really interesting is you've talked about how so this is often called operant conditioning if i'm not mistaken yeah and i forget the guy's name but somebody won a nobel prize for showing that this this goes back all the way evolutionarily to sea slugs so you want to talk about something that is is just baked into the the the foundation of how our mind works um is is really important so give people an understanding so what's going on now in the context of covid19 how how is this mechanism working against people yeah so let's focus in on anxiety because that's what we're seeing a lot of right now so anxiety can actually get reinforced in a negative reinforcement loop through operand conditioning so if we're afraid if there's fear that's the trigger the behavior is worry and that worry helps us feel like we're doing something right we not might not know what to do but at least our mind is doing something the problem is that worry doesn't actually feel that good it doesn't get things done and it actually starts to make our prefrontal cortex go offline so we can't think and worry can start to trigger more anxiety so if we're anxious that triggers worry and that worry transfers more anxiety you we can start to see how that spirals out of control i think of this is like going over the event horizon into that black hole of anxiety it's just it's really hard to pull yourself out and so now when people find themselves in this loop what are some of the things that they can do so you've got a whole book obviously called unwinding anxiety or an app excuse me how do you help people begin to unwind like and and how did you come up with that phrase because as somebody who's dealt with anxiety i would say literally of all the words you could choose that is the perfect one so why unwinding well you know i don't know anybody that's never been anxious in their life and i've been treating anxious patients for a long time and you know i i have plenty of anxiety myself so it feels like we actually get all wound up in anxiety and it literally feels that way it's like it's tight there's studies showing that people report most that anxiety is kind of this tightness in their chest and so when we get all wound up you know what winds us up it's that worry you know worry is that thing that's like tightening it down and down and down and down so it just felt like the right term for that app it's like oh yeah we're all wound up how can we unwind it's not fix or change or ignore that's not what we're doing the only way we can work with this is to work direct you know the only way out is through you know you've probably heard that phrase so the only way out of anxiety is actually through it and as we go through it we can talk about what that means it actually helps us unwind so that we don't you know those habitual mechanisms of getting wound up don't actually they're not as sticky anymore not as not as contracted i think we do need to touch on how you go through um this is probably the right time to talk about awareness as well a quick definition on what awareness is how we achieve it and then how we use that to go through anxiety i think would be really really useful i'm terrible with it with definitions awareness is a really tough one you know it's kind of like we all have this faculty of being aware of stuff um but i'm not sure how i could scientifically define it beyond you know uh when we're awake and aware of something we're aware when we're unconscious we're not aware uh so you know pragmatically speaking hopefully that's at least a good enough working definition it's not even a definition but a working description of what what awareness is it's like you know a little so with what i find is the the big breakthrough moment for somebody and i am very much speaking from my own experience here is um when i hear a word and i feel like i know what it means and yet there's still a disconnect for me in that experientially i'm hearing somebody talk about awareness is a perfect example i'm hearing somebody talk about it and i don't i don't feel what they're trying to convey but i know what the word means so i'm now i'm really lost and so this is this is an idea that i'm not sure i'll be able to articulate but let me give it a shot so um there there is a god i'm gonna try something that may not be useful for people but it is how my mind has connected things so um there are games where video games where it's more about the rhythm in which you press the buttons than that you press the buttons in a certain order and the slight variation so if anybody ever plays a fighting game they'll understand this there's a there's a certain rhythm that if i were to just tell you press you know the buttons in this sequence the move wouldn't happen but if you get the rhythm of the exact sort of spacing between that then you get something same with music right it's the space between the notes there's there is this same thing with words where the words are meant to convey a feeling that that there's uh there's an activity and action behind the words so i think what people need to understand about awareness you are going to have to do some work that i'll say that exists at a physical level to actually understand the definition so i'm going to give you how i would define it experientially through meditation but if i'm going astray of what you mean jump in and stop me so i did not understand what people meant by awareness until i started trying to meditate when i started trying to meditate i realized that okay i'm sitting here i'm thinking stuff of course i'm awake i'm aware and conscious like you were saying it as the sort of antithesis to being unconscious but i don't get it i'm not having whatever experience people wanted me to have and then when i got into mindfulness meditation around what do you hear right now and recognizing that when you're not thinking about what you're hearing you're just hearing it that's mindful awareness and i was like oh because i could now i get at a bite like i have the chills i have at a body level i understand now what you're saying where i am i am literally just here with the rain i use rain because when i meditate um i put over the ear headphones on and i listen to the sounds of nature nine times out of ten it's going to be the sound of thunderstorm and what i find is when i'm completely present with the sound of the rain then i'm actually in what i'll call an alpha wave state when i am not noticing the sound of the ring it's there for sure but i'm not i'm not there with it it isn't sort of the only thing i'm experiencing then i know that i'm i'm drifting i'm sort of not aware even though i'm awake and i'm conscious and all that i'm having thoughts but i'm not i'm not aware of the way i think you mean it now does that get pretty close i think that's great and i think one differentiation you're pointing out to people experientially is there's awareness and there's attention right so our attention can wander to you know maybe our mind we get lost in thought like daydreaming or you know something else um so there's a tension that can be over here and so that means we're not aware right here so you know if you're meditating and you're listening to the sounds of nature and your mind drifts off into a thinking pattern you're not aware of that sound and so i think that awareness and attention piece uh applies here as well but i think you've described it beautifully and and like you're saying this is really ineffable it's hard to really define what awareness is uh but we all know it because we're you know it's we're conscious of things and when we're conscious we're uh or mindfully or consciously aware that's the awareness that we're talking about here yeah so i wanna i wanna bring that home for people because for them to go through your process of unwinding the anxiety they have to translate i think this was certainly true for me with dealing with anxiety you you have to learn to translate an intellectual idea into a body experience which by the way i've heard you often refer to when somebody gets it into their body yeah as wisdom and i think that's really interesting yeah i think of that as like concepts so up in our head concepts in the service of embodied wisdom so our thinking brain doesn't actually hold a candle in terms of what drives a action it doesn't hold a candle to our feeling body because those feelings are where urges and cravings and things like that come from so we can understand something intellectually but it doesn't actually affect behavior until we have this embodied wisdom where like we know this in our bones no that makes sense okay so now hopefully we've gotten people a little bit closer to awareness um how do we go through anxiety what does that mean yeah so just as an example in our own wedding anxiety app we have a three-step process and the first step is to map out these habit loops around anxiety but somebody could do this with anything you could do with panic you can do it with any habit that you're that anybody's struggling with so if we're not aware of these habit loops that trigger the behavior and the reward we're just going to keep acting them out automatically unconsciously not aware right so the first step is to just become aware oh there i'm stuck in my habit loop again let's use worry as an example oh there i'm worrying again you know all there i'm worrying the next step is really about hacking into our brain's reward based learning system and the way that this works is that our brain stores a hierarchy of values of different behaviors i'll use chocolate as a simple example okay so if i have if i eat some broccoli my brain stores a certain reward value for that and then if i eat chocolate my brain stores a different reward value for that and because chocolate is more densely packed with calories from a survival perspective my brain's gonna be like chocolate dude and so let's say broccoli milk chocolate for me when i compare milk chocolate to dark chocolate no-brainer dark chocolate and then it's like 70 okay i like 85 percent better does it have sea salt does it have cayenne pepper you know what brand is and all this stuff so i've got this very nuanced hierarchy of dark chocolate in there but basically my brain when given a choice it's going to pick chocolate over broccoli okay so this reward hierarchy is actually set up in a part of our brain called the orbital frontal cortex not that important but if anybody wants to know some of the neuroscience here and that part of the brain is always deciding when given two choices what should i do and it's going to pick the one that's more rewarding so from that perspective we bring in awareness and we have to help ourselves see really clearly how rewarding is this behavior right now so let's use uh let's use cake or smoke let's use cake as an example we tend to lay down the reward value of cake early in life right every birthday party we go to we're going to reinforce that value of cake and we're going to add not just to the taste of cake but we're going to add friends fun presents you know party all this stuff so that gets laid down and that composite reward value gets stored and it goes up and gets reinforced every time every party we go to so by the time we're 40 and our brain's like dude don't think about it there's cake just eat it right and so that reward value for when we were five is still playing out now and we can't you know we're like well why can't i just stop eating cake you know we can't think our way out of a bad habit that's not how our brains work we have to update the reward value so here you know we have to ask ourselves bring conscious awareness in and ask ourselves hey how rewarding is this right now not intellectually but in an embodied feeling i'll give an example with uh with smoking for example so with my patients in my clinic who want to quit smoking i have them smoke and they look at me like doc i thought it was you know aren't i supposed to quit smoking the point there is i have them smoked but i have them pay attention when they smoke and they realize that smoking actually tastes like you know it doesn't taste very good uh that's what all the vaping stuff aside so they've kind of bypassed that piece uh which is why vaping's so addictive we can talk about that later but with cigarettes they realize oh this really doesn't taste that good i remember a guy who was he'd been smoking 40 years and i had him smoke uh consciously and he came back and he's like i can't believe i never noticed this before we calculated it out he had reinforced that process 293 000 times right so it was totally unconscious for him until it became conscious as soon as it's conscious whether it's cigarettes or eating three pieces of cake when we're not hungry when we're stressed if we bring awareness to that our brains can actually see how rewarding is this not that rewarding it doesn't take willpower doesn't take effort it simply takes awareness right so as that reward value drops it because they're doing consciously right they are telling themselves so this actually tastes gnarly they're not telling themselves anything they're simply tasting right my patients come in and they know that they're supposed to quit smoking they don't tell themselves oh this should taste bad because that that doesn't actually land in their experience so how do chocolate cake which really is tasty yeah there's nothing wrong with chocolate cake but tell me does the fourth piece taste as good as the first no but it's still fun yeah and then what happens afterwards stomachache sometimes so maybe not i want well i want to make this as as difficult as possible so that people don't write it off because i actually think it is super super powerful so what i want to know is how you get people and and i think it's in your line of questioning i think you're answering it but um when you take something that is actually pleasurable are you you're just trying to find that part of it that isn't pleasurable so for instance if i ate as much cake as was pleasurable i would i mean what one reasonable size pieces i wouldn't go crazy but like one piece reasonable side piece a day maybe twice a day would be pretty easy if i did one early and then one late now over time it's going to have consequences inflammation and stuff like that but i don't know without sort of thinking my way through it if i would ever reduce its value yeah and we can't think our way into changing behavior so if we could do that we would just remind ourselves that you know smoking is the worst thing we can do for our health and nobody would ever smoke but that's not how it works so what we have to do is actually feel into it and i think you're bringing up a really good point this is awesome which is this is not to try to convince ourselves that cake or whatever is bad is to help us see the natural consequences i'll give an example with an experiment that one of my friends did for her phd thesis really briefly she was doing a chocolate experiment where she was feeding people chocolate as she was scanning their brains with a pet scanner her name is dana small she's a food researcher at yale and she what she did was she would have people pick their favorite chocolate and then she would feed them right and she would just have them rate how good is this and so of course you know i'm getting spoon-fed my favorite chocolate this is awesome and she'd keep feeding them and feeding them and feeding and you can imagine how that rating changed right okay it's still okay and then they're thinking what the hell did i sign up for this is terrible by the end of the experiment same chocolate they're like uh this is awful get me out of here so we all have these reward value set points right and this is not the chocolate is bad or we should tell ourselves to stop eating chocolate it's simply that when we bring conscious awareness in we can see where we need to stop and with cake for example it's not just the the taste of it it's everything that comes with it so for example my my uh folks we have a we have an app called eat right now and folks that are come to use that program they're really struggling with losing weight or you know sugar addiction or whatever and what we have them do is look at all of the results right just like with a birthday party we bring together cake plus party plus this plus this in the same way when we're in our mid-40s or whatever and we're looking at cake and we're saying i ate this because i was stressed i wasn't even hungry so it's not just the taste of it right really paying attention a lot of people don't actually pay attention it doesn't taste that great when we're not hungry when we're stressed it's just there to do something and distract us one of my patients said you know it's about numbing out so if we pay attention you know it might taste good for a couple of bites but if we're not hungry that satisfaction is going to go down pretty quickly and then there's the guilt there's the gut bomb there's all that stuff so it's bringing our awareness to the results of that behavior which is actually step two of this of this process so you know i hope that makes sense in terms of this is not about demonizing any behavior it's simply about helping us tap into our natural body's wisdom which knows hey i'm not hungry why are you eating this you know if you're stressed let's do some stress reduction as compared to eating cake because it doesn't fix the cause of the stress one thing i'd love to talk about is so i'm sure some people watching right now are thinking um covet 19 my anxiety my fear there's no reward mechanism here but i've heard you talk about this so what is the reward mechanism how does it fall into a habit loop cycle when it's something that seems so inherently negative right so this is probably where the planning mind just got tipped a little bit so planning helpful right like we talked about but when we don't have enough information that planning literally tips into worry and worry is not helpful because worrying you know makes us more stressed more anxious makes our prefrontal cortex go off on and we can't actually plan when we're worried but there's this fine line where it's like this rager's edge where it's like okay let me plan but then when we when we tip that into worry where it's like oh maybe i missed something you know or maybe i should just think about this one more time it's like you know you plan a trip to the airport which nobody's going to be doing anytime soon but if you plan a trip to the airport it's good to check that twice make sure you haven't you know missed anything but if you go and you check it three times and four times and 18 times and you know there's going to be a level of diminishing returns where you're starting to think oh you know what if uber goes on strike or what you know we're thinking about all these crazy things that are not going to happen so there's this tipping point where planning is helpful it tips into worry the worry itself has this reward of feeling like we're doing something you know maybe i'm gonna catch something that i missed before and that's kind of like the lottery maybe one time in a hundred we do catch something we're like oh yeah i forgot this well that sends this huge dopamine spritz in our brains like winning the you know winning the jackpot you know on the slot machine and our brains like oh yeah you should do this all the time no worry is not helpful so when um you're dealing with a crisis like we're dealing with now where there really are consequences if you don't take it seriously and this is where when i'm talking to people i'm always like oh like you need to take it seriously but you also need to calm down like you need to center yourself you need to laugh still like how do you help people like if you were going to give instruction on how to begin to break themselves out of that cycle in this context where yo you do need to pay attention yo you do need to take this seriously um but at the same time like we want to help people manage that stress and anxiety and keep it in a useful place if you had like a couple you know steps or tips tricks however you want to think of it like what should people be doing i would say there's a simple three-step process that ends in you know what did they say in world war two uh keep calm and carry on right which is you know when london was getting bombed all the time by the luff off or whatever they um you know they had to keep calm and carry on because they didn't know you know their lives were literally in peril so there was real danger there so here step one map out habit loops around anxiety so that we can actually see how our minds are spinning out of control if we don't know how our minds work we're never going to be able to work with them so that's step one right uh trigger behavior reward map out the anxiety habit loops map out the worry habit loops knock out the map out the panic habit loops step two is is actually relatively simple but it's the one that our brains don't want to see which is really ask yourself drop in your direct experience when you do something that is you know a worry habit loop when you're in the middle of where you ask yourself what am i getting from this and like you pointed out it's relatively straightforward we don't get much from worry so we have to be able to feel that feel into that and really see wait this really isn't helping right now then our brains need to be able to compare that to something else that's where this bigger better offer comes in so step three is helping ourselves see what's the bigger better offer so for example go go into the bigger better offer um neurologically what is that i've heard you talk about how the the mind is sort of always looking for the bbo i found this so interesting it really hit me as immediately recognizable in my own experience yeah so the bbo is basically anything that feels better so we talked about that getting wound up in anxiety we can all feel what that contracted closed down feeling feels like right in our own direct experience and anxiety feels closed down so compare feeling fear to in your own experience right now what does fear feel like compared to joy does it feel more closed or more open definitively more close and which one feels better joy all day long okay so we're not all gonna necessarily be joyful right now now compare fear to calm which one feels better call okay and what does calm feel more expanded yes i don't know that that's the word i would have used but yeah and that's not choices yes yeah so calm feels better than fear so our brains got this fear lower on the bbo list calm higher on the bbo list how about connection when you feel connected with others yeah which one feels better amazing connection for sure okay so let's just choose calm and connection bbo is compared to fear anxiety and panic right that's a no-brainer okay so what we need to do is remind ourselves and really feel into what calm and connection feel like and i actually just so um i just put out a video this morning on youtube so i'm putting out daily videos to help people with with coronavirus anxiety and i was in a conversation uh yesterday on a podcast or something where somebody was asking me you know what are some practical tips that you could do and it occurred to me we have these two my wife and i have these two very furry cuddly cats and so i was thinking wow cuddling feels so much better than being anxious and so i did a short video this morning on tips to help us spread calm as the contagion rather than fear right let's let's let connection be that new infection so to speak and so i just on camera my cat was game um you could actually hear him purring so i just demonstrated okay what's it feel like when you cuddle with a being you know if you're if your spouse and you are together you know you cuddle with your spouse if you live alone you can cuddle with your pets um if you don't have pets we can actually i just made up this yoga move called the the hug pose where we can just go like spread our arms wide and then we can just hug ourselves right so that that physical connection actually feels pretty good so there are these bigger better offers that are out there right now one thing i would like to add is you know hopefully a silver lining here could be people could go out and adopt or foster pets right now because you know i don't know of them as coronavirus vectors right so if anybody's listening to this and has thought about fostering a pet especially dogs that need this go out foster a puppy adopt a pet and cuddle right you can you can quarantine yourself with your pet it's okay and that's almost certain that they they prove that dogs are not vectors for covet 19. people should look that up don't take my word for it but um look it up definitely heard that that uh is true and most things don't jump from um animals to humans anyway obviously covet 19 being an exception but for the most part that doesn't happen so um that's really interesting talk to me um go a layer deeper into isolation so if you the worst punishment that a human being can have is to be isolated you actually see fractures in people's psyches if they're isolated long enough which i cannot believe is true uh but does seem to be actually true even people in um solitary confinement in prison would rather be around murderists rapists than to be completely isolated i legitimately that just seems shocking to me um so what is it about isolation what's going on in the brain that would actually be really interesting and then in this time period um i think that the pet thing is huge fostering for anybody that didn't hear the distinction between adopting and fostering fostering would be a temporary replacement of course if you end up falling in love with your dogs as much as i love mine and maybe it does become a permanent home but that that's really interesting are there things beyond that that we can do to get out of that so just to recap isolation what's going on in the brain and then beyond pets is there anything that we can do to feel more connected uh over the internet i don't know anything yeah so it's interesting you mentioned solitary confinement because to really kind of torture and i really feel like it's torture uh for solitary confinement to work to fracture people's psyche they can't have any contact right so no you know they they try to you know talk to people through the cells and all this they it's just like complete silence they have to be with themselves so in the brain i don't know all of the specific ins and outs of that i'm not sure that people have done fmri studies with people who have been in solitary confinement but what i what i can say is it's you know it's pretty clear that as you're pointing out that social isolation is really challenging the nice thing here is we have this thing this double-edged sword called the internet and so on one hand it can spread social contagion in a negative way on another hand it can spread social purell so to speak or brain sanitizer in a positive way so we can stay connected with others through texting each other calling each other on the phone getting on skype like we're doing and just having these face-to-face interactions and i think the face-to-face is really key here there's something really different about having a conversation with somebody on the phone than having it with them face to face a lot of that probably has to do with most communication actually happens non-verbally you're nodding your head right now so i've just you've just communicated with me non-verbally right now you're smiling so all this stuff um so the the fact that we've got skype and zoom and all these teleconferencing and video conferencing pieces is really helpful i actually run a live group every week for the people using our apps and we use zoom to tell it to video conference and it's really connecting people connect from all over the world and to be able to to answer questions and interact with people literally face to face even if they're in europe or in australia or whatever is is really really helpful yeah so um i've always been shocked when my wife and i first got together obviously boyfriend and girlfriend at the time she was living in london i was here in la and all we had was phone call and email and this is in the days of long distance and i was poor so doing phone calls was we did it rarely so it was mostly email and when skype and video calls came out i was like i can't believe how impactful this is makes a huge difference if i'm able to see her or anybody for that matter or just hear them it's really interesting have you done vr with other um people i have not but i would now you're peaking my curiosity dude i'm telling you right now do it it is crazy so i did a version with just like a samsung phone so it was really low quality but it was um it was filming i think oh one of the um the cirque du soleil and so there was this character from oh and they start really far away in the background and they just keep walking closer and closer and closer to the camera until they're you literally feel like you need to back up because the sense of presence is so real i was really surprised by how impactful that was i think that's a really good piece of advice for people is just if you've got somebody that you can video with do it i'm going to ask you a curveball question so let's say that somebody unfortunately finds himself in this position they're a sort of social isolationist they because they're bumping into people all the time they don't even think about it so they they don't have a network of friends they don't have somebody that they can call and hang out with on a video call does reading help that's a great question thank you for the curveball let's see how i do so there i would say if we can connect with the characters in the book like if it's a really good novel it's a there's a feeling of connection there where it's like oh and i don't know about you but when i read a really good book it feels pretty darn good so that that's the first thing i would say is you know if you're reading a book don't read a book about covet 19 [Laughter] because there probably isn't one because nobody's written the book yet but i would say read a really good book where you can really relate to the characters and in that sense we're gonna start to fire off these brain systems that are around you know really around like being able to put ourselves in other people's shoes and i i'm get i would guess that that absolutely can foster connection as well but it's an experiment that people can try for themselves yeah it's one that so i was thinking about this like um i've often thought about because i don't feel compelled to be around people which i think would surprise people but i find especially at i don't know called the last 10 or 15 years of my life i have felt very introverted which wasn't necessarily true when i was growing up i definitely would have identified as an extrovert as a kid but as i got older i found myself retreating more and more into my imagination and so i thought like would i really like break if i were isolated long enough and i've i don't know why but like thought what if i were like tom hanks and um oh man i'm blanking on the movie lost uh no where he he is the island lost on the desert island we are both blanking on the name of this right now i cannot believe it i've seen this movie so many times it's so good uh but anyway he's on the desert island by himself and would i over time break would i be able to talk to an inanimate object or something like that i thought i really feel like i would because when i'm reading a book i get so immersed in that world and i'm it it really makes me want to know why isolation is so hard is it what you're talking about is it projecting yourself into somebody else's shoes um you know what what are the mechanisms is it the emotional change because there are things from the outside that are taking you on this emotional roller coaster because you're getting input from the outside i don't know but for me reading books even more even though i am definitely a movie guy over books i would say reading has an intimacy that nothing else has and so the good news is if you have even if you don't have books in your house if you have an internet connection you'd be able to get into a book and i have a feeling at least in the short term that it would be a pretty viable way to solve whatever that pain is that's created through isolation which is my big concern so when i think about like what's gonna freak people out and this admittedly is probably just a blindness that i have um i don't get freaked out by um the disease itself there's even though we don't know a lot about it there just seems way too much data like i would say most people probably pay it at one to one and a half percent fatality rate you see some people saying even lower even if it was insane and it was five percent which it is not but even if it was 95 survival rate right so i that one doesn't freak me out but the thought of people having to isolate themselves the thought of like the economic disaster that could happen from that that's where i worry about people i'm really beginning to wind themselves up as you're saying and having a hard time and so going back to that pleasure loop of having some way to emotionally connect with something um as a way to lower that books seem like the sort of great equalizer absolutely absolutely and i and i think there's one other piece that we can even add to that and i love your idea about books i hadn't thought about that it's brilliant this fear of the future anxiety is about fear of the future and so if we think about you know you brought up a couple of things like oh what about economic collapse what about this you know and our minds spiral out of control right they wind up more and more and more the more out in the future we get because the less and less certainty we have so the idea there is this comes you know i learned so much from my patients one day at a time right if we notice that our mind spiraling out say hey take a deep breath ground yourself in your experience you know use a short mindfulness practice let your prefrontal cortex come back online and say hey do i need to worry about six months right now i don't know what six months are going to look like let's start with today and if today even seems overwhelming let's start with what needs to happen this next hour so we can take or this next minute or this next moment right so we can take it moment by moment and that will help us stay grounded in actionable stuff because we have accurate information for this moment like do i need to eat something do i need to drink something do i need to relax do i need to cuddle my pet you know what do i need right now we know that and we can say okay let's take it this moment let's take it this hour let's take it today and then we'll worry about tomorrow tomorrow or not worry about tomorrow we'll plan for tomorrow as tomorrow comes talk to me sort of from the trenches as somebody who has spent a lot of time seeing patients what does i find that looking at the extremes or looking at when the brain is sort of broken and gone into like a whole another place helps us sort of view where we're at through a different lens what does this look like the anxiety the worry the isolation what does that look like when it's taken to the extreme in a person what are what are some real life obviously abstracted but real life stories you've encountered and what did people have to do to come back one thing i'm thinking of is i have a patient who suffered from severe panic so the extreme of anxiety is panic right where and it's interesting panic disorder is only a disorder when we it's not about the panic attacks themselves it's about worrying about having panic attacks in the future and when we start worrying you know that's when things go out of control so just to give an example i had a patient who was about 40 when he came to see me and it's like i've only been seeing him about six months now i guess um and he was describing he was visibly shaken when he came into my office and you know i sat sat him down got his history and he was describing he said you know when i drive in my car down the highway i feel like i'm in a speeding bullet so he was this freaked out there's that extreme he was this freaked out about driving to the point where even driving to my office which was just a couple of miles away not even on the highway he was visibly shaken the other thing i noticed about him was that he was extremely he was very very obese he was about 180 pounds overweight so with him that there's an extreme i just sent him home with our own wedding anxiety app and i said okay just map out your habit loops just start there he came back two weeks later and he's like oh i lost 14 pounds i was like what i thought we were talking about anxiety but this is where we can learn from the extremes he's like oh yeah i would eat because i was anxious and i realized that doesn't actually help the anxiety so i stopped doing that right he became disenchanted and not excited to have that stress eating anymore long story short over the next six months he lost 97 pounds whoa his hypertension went back to normal blood pressure reins he had a fatty liver that was back to normal and get this i was walking out of class one day this was like a month ago or a little bit longer so walking out of class one day at the school of public health at brown and it's on a it's in downtown providence on south main street so i walk out into the courtyard and this car pulls up to the curb and the guy rolls down the window and i look over and it's my patient and he's got this big smile on his face goes hey dr judd i was like you're driving and he's like oh yeah i'm an uber driver now did not see that one coming that gave me the chills i know i know so he mapped he learned how his mind worked and he started working with it and the way he talks about it when i see him now is he says i'm in version 2.0 i'm in version 2.0 like he's he's he's so he even came in the other day and said wow you know i feel so like i feel normal for long periods of time it feels strange because he just never experienced what it feels like to be normal he just anxiety was how he identified with his experience so there's an extreme where it goes from panic disorder where you can't drive to becoming an uber driver all from mapping out how his mind worked and losing a bunch of weight too as an assignable the being in a speeding bullet thing that is really interesting to me that is um that reminds me of how i ended up getting more and more anxious as time went on because i i think in metaphors so much i think in visual imagery which i'll often convert to words so i would say something like that to myself right like man this isn't a car that's like being in a speeding bullet now you have imagery that escalates so you go from i'm in a car and it is traveling fast and you really should take it seriously because it is you know i mean it is probably the most dangerous thing everybody does any you know any average day but once you go oh this is like a speeding bullet now it gets scarier you've actually given yourself the imagery the words to help you escalate at a neurological level you hardwire that and now just through sheer repetition and now it's like you're feeding your own sort of escalation protocol and i find that the de-escalation protocol is very much the same it's it's finding a new way to reframe what you think of so for him like if you just think about it in simple terms obviously i'm going to skip a bunch of steps but if you think about the story he told himself from this is a speeding bullet bullets kill i'm gonna be killed by this beating bullet two this is an economic opportunity i'm gonna thrive because of this it's like the they are the same thing they are the same act all he has done is reframe it and that's why i'm so obsessed with this notion so i don't know how much you know about my story but um impact theory was born out of working in the inner cities a lot i'm like these people are really bright but what are they doing like they're living their life in a way that does not make any sense they're caught up in gangs i worked with many former drug dealers um gang members people that have been arrested for violent crimes and i was like dude you're like a normal person you're so rad you're so bright so how on earth is it that you look at the world like in this weird ass way and i was just like oh man this is a frame of reference problem and so just trying to like get them to and the punch line of frame of references it is all encompassing and it's not one thing you have a frame of reference for everything and it creates like this almost impenetrable um [Music] force field of intellect i don't know how to explain it you're just seeing the world from such a weird vantage point that everything seems dangerous or a threat like there was one guy and i'm telling you this is one of the most extraordinary human beings i've ever met in my life i am so desperate to either make a movie about his life or have him write a book or something crazy life story but this guy super bright if you challenged him there's actually like a socrates quote or something i forget who said it but it's like may i never mistake criticism for an attack and he mistook criticism like if you said he was doing something wrong you invalidated his whole existence and he wanted to fist fight right then and there and watching it from the outside was so bizarre because you're like dude he said that uh don't like wipe the sanitizer off your hands you have to let it dry naturally because it will protect um you know the the food that we're preparing and for him that was just like we have to fight we have to fight right now and i'm like what is happening it was so strange so yeah frame of reference like getting people to see in in what's going on with like even i'm hesitating to use the words crisis because that is a frame of reference right as of right now if you haven't gotten sick it's like to exist in crisis mode to be framing it like that you're just you're gonna ratchet it up and so this is where i sketch out and i talked about this earlier but i want people to take it seriously i i told my employees to work from home about eight or nine days before um the mayor of los angeles started like implementing things to keep people at home it's like hey it it struck me as self-evident that that was going to be a great way to go about it but i didn't want people to think that i was panicking so it's like getting that nuanced frame of reference of understanding that hey for sure take it seriously sanitize don't shake hands don't hug the social distance wherever you can but don't make it worse with your frame of reference amen brother [Music] and and i think one thing you're pointing out is related to some of the neural imaging just some of the brain imaging research that we've done with experienced meditators for example so a lot of meditation as you know from your own direct experience is about learning to not take things personally right so when we feel something as an attack we close down just like we close down with fear and anxiety it's a survival mechanism but when we close down we're not open to learning right carol dweck talked about fixed versus growth mindset we have to be in growth mindset to learn so if we can learn that being close to criticism is actually painful it physically feels painful and at the same time it doesn't open us to learning if we can start to see wait a minute this is not a threat right and we this is where awareness comes in wait a minute is this really threatening right now is somebody physically or whatever threatening me oh no they're not they're actually trying to help we can bow to that as a teacher and say oh oh i have this reaction can i learn from this and then that automatically opens us to growth mindset and all of this is about learning to take things less personally so that we can keep our prefrontal cortex online and thinking and taking things seriously but not personally no man that's really really good advice um where can people connect with you and get a litany of that kind of stuff uh website where can they find your app all that good stuff yeah so my website's dr judd.com drjud.com and we have a youtube channel that is just i think drjud as well so people can subscribe to that again i'm putting out daily short videos to help people understand this stuff so they can subscribe to get the latest on those they can hit me up on twitter at brewer at j-u-d-b-r-e-w-e-r and then the app that we talked about most was the unwinding anxiety app so i think that's just unwinding anxiety.com we have an eating app called eat right now and i think that's it go eatrightnow.com and then we have a smoking app uh soon to also be a vaping app um for it's called craving to quit um so they can people can find all of those through my website doctorjudd.com or look at the go to directly to those websites and i think our company is is so mission the the folks that run the company i mostly just do research they're so mission oriented i think they're even giving people a big discount on the unwinding anxiety app right now to just try to you know help people whenever they can so um i think that's the best place to connect with me i might have missed something um i wrote a book but it's just it's about craving called the craving mind but it's not as critical as this other stuff right now where we're we're all in this together very cool and if you were gonna have people um make one change or do one thing that would help them have the biggest impact on their um fear and anxiety right now during covet 19 uh what would you have them do i would say connect so let's spread connection rather than contagion or whatever you know what let's have connection be infectious um so connect with others whether it's on skype whether it's on a phone call whether it's offering well wishes on social media but don't you know don't spread the panic don't spread anxiety even if you think you're being helpful take a pause ask yourself is this post helpful is this gonna you know and if you're like well i'm spreading i'm helping people see that the grocery stores are empty don't do that you know probably not that helpful um if you're showing people that the grocery store shelves are full that's helpful and that also spreads calm so let's spread calm and connection uh rather than than some of the panic that we're seeing going around love it man all right guys thank you for joining us for this very special episode of impact theory i hope that you got a lot of value from dr judd i think that his information and his knowledge is really powerful he's actually going to be teaching a class at impact theory university for us which i'm super excited about i think that he's got tremendous ideas i think his apps are really extraordinary in terms of helping people get real results which is of course how i judge everything i will echo his words in this time man finding ways to bring things down and find that calm creative space which i think exists for all of us no matter what's going on is super important if you've been taking cold showers like i suggest this is that moment right in the midst of heightened anxiety and heightened fear to actually be able to center yourself and be calm in these moments this is exactly what you've been practicing for so um long may that continue uh connection man i did not expect that to be the answer when we're talking about covet 19 but there you have it connect with each other over the internet and find ways to get that connection whether it's reading a book or just um sending some love and i love that he made it um about something that's positive um you know giving somebody a well done on social media it puts you in a different frame of reference uh something positive and uplifting i think that's super important all right guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be a legendary take care if you're feeling anxiety there's actually a place from which you can just feel it right and and be actually indifferent to it or anything else you could be feeling first you can notice that anxiety isn't even that unpleasant