Book Summary: Unwinding Anxiety by Dr. Judson Brewer
It’s been over a year since I finished Dr. Judson Brewer’s book, Unwinding Anxiety, but I keep returning to it because it’s so valuable. Dr. Brewer is a habit expert, and it turns out anxiety hides in our habits. But there’s good news: we can form new habits, and that applies to anxiety too.
Let’s begin with defining anxiety:
Fear + Uncertainty = Anxiety
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Fear + Uncertainty = Anxiety 〰️
Anxiety is a habit loop – it’s worrying about your worry.
Building a consistent breathwork practice has reduced my anxiety and thought loops, and I use Brewer’s tool on my worst days (the week before my period).
Step One: Map the anxiety triggers
Many of us have experienced an anxiety loop. Dr. Brewer’s extensive research has shown that the loop begins with a trigger, influences behavior, and creates a result. The first task is to notice your anxiety triggers.
Have you ever felt this one?
Trigger: Feel anxious about XYZ event
Behavior: Worry (ruminate on what’s wrong, what could go wrong with XYZ event
Result: Feel more anxious about XYZ event
Insert meeting, moving, a health diagnosis, an ailing parent, school assignment, or anything else into XYZ. The event triggers anxiety, which causes worry, results in more stress and strengthens the loop.
Here is my most common map:
Trigger: Week before my period, my hormones change. I feel out of sorts.
Behavior: Question not feeling normal, and I loop the thought, “what is wrong with me?”
Result: Worry more about worrying about not feeling normal
Jot down one or two of your most common anxiety maps.
Step Two: Work with, not against, your brain’s reward system
Dr. Brewer says our habits get more ingrained if the brain associates a reward with them, even if our reward values have become skewed over time.
Skewed rewards can look like this:
Worrying feels good because it feels like you are “doing something” about it
Feeling anxious about the news helps you “empathize with those in need”
Snacking at night distracts from the day’s unread emails
Feeling wrong about something you said produces a thought-out apology
Rewards for anxiety can be beneficial – even comforting.
But skewed rewards produce and contribute to higher cortisol in the body, making us feel bad.
We can empathize with those in need without inundating ourselves with the news. We can enjoy the treat until we are full. We can apologize to someone without feeling anxious for saying it in the first place.
For this exercise, imagine carrying a flashlight with you for a week.
Anytime you feel your anxiety arise, shine the flashlight inward. Notice your triggers and jot them down. When you start this, you may be unable to identify the trigger. Good news! That is the trigger.
Trigger: Feeling anxious in the chest
Behavior: Look for trigger according to Dr. Brewer’s book
Result: Become more anxious that you can’t find it
It doesn’t need to be groundbreaking or complicated.
After jotting down one or two anxiety maps, get familiar with the brain’s rewards for these maps. Dr. Brewer says to notice how you feel as the result of your anxiety becomes clear. Using the same example above, the result of not knowing where my anxiety stems from makes me feel crappy at the moment. Instead of accepting that the trigger is unknown as I start this exercise, I feel even worse at the moment. Perhaps this anxiety stems from perfectionism, a skewed reward my brain has used to help me achieve goals. Now, I have learned to become disenchanted with this skewed reward.
In fact, Dr. Brewer suggests anytime we are in a “why habit loop” where our mind is spinning off “why is this happening” questions, we simply state: “why doesn’t matter.”
Step Three: Upgrade your rewards
Once you have identified your anxiety maps and existing reward values, move to step three to update your rewards. Dr. Brewer doesn’t want us to swap carrots for chips when we are anxious (although not a wrong choice); he wants us to get to the root of the habit and update the reward.
“The only sustainable way to change a habit is to update its reward value,” writes Brewer.
Here you introduce the healthy habits you’ve heard about elsewhere, like mindfulness and breathing. But the trick is to reinforce these habits by noticing the rewards that come with them.
Just as we observed the skewed rewards from the anxiety habit loops, we notice the positive rewards of engaging in these new habits.
Try these new healthy habits:
Curiosity: This is incredibly effective, and I cannot recommend it enough. When I am in an anxious loop, I get obsessed with finding the reason behind it. The quickest path to alleviating it is to use curiosity. It’s difficult to be curious and judgmental simultaneously and getting curious shifts us away from worrying about worries.
Say out loud to yourself, “Hmmmmm!” to ignite your curiosity
Where do you feel sensations in your body?
What color and texture are these sensations? If you don’t know, take a guess.
Keep curious by stating, “I wonder what is present for me now...”
Breathing: I can’t recommend breathwork enough since I am launching a breathwork business. Breathwork immediately reduces anxiety by dropping into the body and out of the monkey mind.
Practicing consistent breathwork is the key to regulating your nervous system
Noting: Practice labeling what experience is predominant in your mind and body moment-to-moment using your senses. Labeling each moment’s experiences brings you to the present moment and out of the future. You can practice labeling out loud.
Feeling: I am experiencing tightness in my chest and dryness in my throat.
Hearing: I am hearing cars on the street pass by, honking loudly.
Seeing: I am seeing people rush around in front of me at the airport.
Touching: I feel the warm socks around my feet.
In practice, engaging in healthy habits and reinforcing their positive rewards looks like this:
Trigger: Feeling anxious in the chest
Practice new habit: I am curious about this sensation in my chest. It feels warm, located on the left side, almost like a fire. Hmmm, it has the color of burnt red. Hmmm, I notice there are thoughts about an upcoming move. I wonder what else is present for me. Oh, I notice there are multiple thoughts popping in about this upcoming meeting.
Result: Feel more in my body, less in my head... A slight decrease in worry.
Notice and enjoy the new reward, a slight decrease in worry, and an increase in curiosity. Reinforce this healthy habit by becoming aware of anxiety reduction, even if it’s two percent.
Unwinding Anxiety helps us work with our brains, not against them.
In summary, Dr. Brewer quotes Ijeoma Umebinyuo’s Three Routes to Healing:
You must let the pain visit
You must allow it to teach you
You must not allow it to overstay
