Two antidotes to anxiety
Psychiatrist, professor, and mindfulness teacher Jud Brewer recently spoke with Ezra Klein about how we learn (and can unlearn) habits, including anxiety. Of note is Brewer’s emphasis on curiosity and kindness as antidotes to worry and fear. These mental practices are particularly effective when they are pointed towards the experience of anxiety (the way an anxious thought pattern actually registers, or feels in the body).
On curiosity:
Jud Brewer
So if I’m feeling anxious, I can just feel into my body and ask myself, OK, where do I feel this anxiety more strongly? For a lot of folks, they feel it in their chest. Sometimes I’ll feel it in my — if I’m stressed, I’ll feel it my shoulders, or my jaw, or even in my eyes tensing. And then I can get curious and say, OK, where do I feel it more, on the left side or the right side of my body? And then my brain goes, well, I don’t know. Let’s explore. Is it more on the right side or the left side? The answer doesn’t matter, but that little hmm is that indication that we’re starting to get curious as we explore our body sensations. That’s what I mean by injecting a little bit of curiosity.
Ezra Klein
So you’re not talking about distracting yourself from the issues. If I’m sitting around worrying about finances, you’re not saying think to yourself, ha, how do octopi think? [LAUGHTER] You’re saying be curious about this experience in this moment.
Jud Brewer
Yes, because that’s what’s most relevant. Bringing curiosity into that feeling of anxiety helps us not avoid it, because as we’ve talked about avoidance doesn’t actually work. It not only helps us not avoid it, but it helps us start to see that anxiety — well, for example, is just these felt physical sensations. So it’s not this scary thing that we have to run away from. And in fact, we can start to develop our tolerance for this unpleasantness. And the curiosity can help us be with that to the point where we can realize, oh, it’s actually — these physical sensations, while they might not be pleasant, are not something that I can’t work with.
On kindness:
Ezra Klein
So let’s go to this last point as we wrap up here, which is kindness. You talk about kindness as a bigger, better offer. You talk about it in context of both anxiety and in meditation. That seems like a big leap. You go from worrying about something to kindness. What do you mean there?
Jud Brewer
There are two aspects. One is I see a lot of folks who have habit loops around self-judgment. So they’ll judge themselves for a number of reasons. We’re really good at doing this in the West, in fact. And so when somebody is judging themselves, there’s that self-flagellation is for some reason rewarding. We don’t need to go into all the details, but let’s just say people get stuck in those loops. So if somebody is working with self-judgment or just noticing that they’re judging themselves, I have them pay attention to what it feels like. When you judge yourself, does it actually feel good? Does it feel closed down? Does it feel contracted? Typically, the answer is yes. And then I can say, well, how does that compare to when you’re kind to yourself? And they notice, well, kindness feels better. It feels more open and expanded. So the commonality between kindness and curiosity is that both feel more open. They both feel more expanded than judgment and anxiety, say. And in fact, my lab has done research showing that that is indeed the case. Both feel better and both are more open. So if you think of the broad category of things that make us feel open and expanded, kindness and curiosity are these two main flavors, if you want to think of it that way.
Klein and Brewer also discuss the difference between this approach and the “normal tendency” of the brain, which is to run away from discomfort. Brewer offers the metaphor of surfing—riding the feeling through its crest and observing how it changes, peaks, and eventually abates. This awareness can help us to break unhealthy habits (e.g. worrying, smoking, overeating) that help us hide out from bad feelings.
Even better: replacing habitual turning-away behaviors with mindfulness, curiosity, and self-compassion helps us build resilience for the next time we go through something hard.
