Stuck in Overthinking? A Simple Practice to Interrupt Stress, Overwhelm, and Habit Loops
Episode Notes
If discomfort sends you into overthinking, numbing, or trying to fix what you can’t control…
If certain habits feel automatic no matter how much you try to change them…
You’re not alone—and your brain is more trainable than you think.
In this episode, Dr. Alison Cook sits down with Dr. Jud Brewer—psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and New York Times best-selling author who specializes in habit change and mindfulness.
They unpack why we get stuck in these loops and a simple practice to steady your soul.
Instead of relying on willpower or self-judgment, this conversation invites you to:
- Notice your inner patterns with kindness
- Differentiate discomfort from distress
- Understand the habit loops that drive anxiety, worry, or doom-scrolling
- Apply the #1 tool to help you create real, lasting change
- Deepen your connection to God
This episode is a grounding companion for anyone navigating stress, emotional triggers, or the pull toward old coping strategies—especially in seasons that stir up more than we expect.
📥 Grab your 3 free Boundaries For Your Soul resources here
📥 Download Alison’s free printable with the five boundary tools when you sign up for her weekly email.
If you liked this episode, you’ll love:
Episode 75: Your Secret Weapon Against Stress and Anxiety
Episode 112: Navigating Anxiety
📖 Find a full transcript and list of resources from this episode here
💬 Got a question? Call 307-429-2525 and leave a message for a future episode.
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Transcript
Anxiety is probably an evolutionary bottleneck in this respect because it pulls
together fear and planning. The more we worry, the less we're actually able to plan.
We can get stuck in these habit loops of distraction where we're not learning to be
with our unpleasant experiences. And if we're constantly running away from it, we're
not going to know how to deal with things that are uncomfortable in the future.
When we get out of our own way, when it's not about us, when it's about something
much bigger than us, suddenly we've got all the strength in the world.
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Hey everyone and welcome back to this week's episode of the best of you. As we are
heading into this Christmas season, so many of us brace ourselves, not just for the
busyness, but also for the emotional undercurrents that show up around family,
expectations, the pressure to feel joy when maybe we're not feeling so joyful,
and not to mention the constant stream of hard news in the world. It's a time when
our nervous systems can run hot, our minds can spin fast, and those familiar
triggers can flare. And in those moments, we often reach for whatever helps us cope.
It could be doom scrolling, stress eating, that extra glass of wine, small attempts
to soothe the nervous system that's overwhelmed and searching for steady ground. And
today we're talking about something that I love. It's just such a life -changing
topic, a lifeline for so many of us navigating these kinds of moments. It's
mindfulness. Research consistently shows that mindfulness can reduce anxiety,
improve emotional regulation and interrupt those unhealthy habit loops by strengthening
your capacity for awareness and self -control. This is a powerful, powerful tool.
But before we get started, I want to name something up front, especially for those
of you who've been tuning into the podcast these past few years. For some of us,
the word mindfulness can carry some baggage. For some of you, it might feel too
self -focused or too secular or even at odds with Christian prayer.
And we touch on this at the end of the episode in a beautiful way. But I know
that for some of you, it can bring up images of emptying your mind or practices
you've been told to avoid. And I want to begin this episode by reframing what
mindfulness actually is and what it isn't because it's so much more compatible with
Christian prayer and forms of spiritual practices than many people realize.
Mindfulness at its core is simply the practice of paying attention. Attention without
judgment, presence, without striving, awareness, without shame.
That sounds a whole lot like what this journey of learning to walk with Jesus is
all about. In the Christian tradition, prayer has always been about turning our
attention, our awareness toward God, being fully present to the one who is already
present with us. And while mindfulness doesn't require a spiritual framework,
Christians absolutely can and do practice mindfulness in a way that enhances our
spiritual lives. In fact, countless believers throughout history of practice forms of
mindful attention through silence and solitude, through breath prayer,
through reflection and contemplative prayer. Where prayer tends to connect us to God,
mindfulness helps us notice what's happening inside of us so we can bring that
experience into an awareness of God. It helps us slow down enough to notice,
where is my body tense? What emotion is surfacing? Which part of me feels threatened
or overwhelmed? What is this moment stirring up inside of me?
This awareness doesn't replace prayer, but it allows us to invite more of God's
presence to be with us in whatever we're experiencing.
It allows us to experience more of God's presence with us. And here's why today's
conversation matters. We are living in a time of constant triggers, anxiety,
overconsumption, stress eating, doomscrolling, numbing behaviors, emotional spirals. The
brain falls into habit loops when we're overwhelmed. And for many of us, those loops
are rooted in fear, stress or trying to self -soothe the best way we know how.
Mindfulness helps us interrupt those loops. It gives us tools to notice what's
happening in real time instead of getting swept away by old patterns. It helps us
learn to respond rather than react. And that's something every one of us needs right
now. And that brings me to today's guest. Dr. Judd Brewer is one of the leading
voices and
love about Dr. Judd's work is that he makes something as profound as mindfulness
incredibly practical. He breaks it down and helps us understanding what's happening in
the brain when we get hooked, whether it's by anxiety or doom scrolling or social
media or people pleasing, and he teaches us how small moments of awareness can
actually help us change those habits. So today, we're going to explore what
mindfulness actually is, how it helps us approach these triggers, especially during
stressful seasons and why our brains get stuck in habit loops and how curiosity and
small shifts in attention can help us create lasting change. And lastly,
we'll talk about how mindfulness can expand our practices of prayer, helping us to
gain access to an even deeper sense of God's loving, powerful presence right in the
middle of our struggles. This is such a rich and beautiful and encouraging
conversation and I am thrilled to bring you my conversation with Dr. Judd Brewer.
Judd, I'm thrilled to have you on the podcast today. I'm just such a big fan of
your work and all that you're doing to help us understand mindfulness. Can you help
us understand first off, right? You're at the start what it is and maybe what it
isn't. Yes. So let's start with what it isn't. It isn't a judgmental stance on
life. You know, so it's really, there are two main components, awareness and
curiosity. And I would also add that with the curiosity, there's an attitude of
kindness. So this kind curiosity, if we could put it that way, that helps us meet
whatever we're being aware of in a different way than what we often habitually do,
which is judging our experience, whether it's judging ourselves, judging others,
judging the world. And so does it not only apply to awareness of myself?
Can we also apply mindfulness to our awareness of others? Absolutely. Oh,
interesting.
Gotcha. So it's different from maybe a sort of focus only on the inner life,
although that's part of it. It's not, so for example, meditation, right, where you're
trying to um that yeah flesh that out a little bit because i think that's a
misconception even i have absolutely well often you know meditation is seen as you
know the proverbial navel gazing or however you know however it's seen but really
it's about bringing awareness and seeing relationality so seeing our relationship with
ourselves which is internal but also seeing our relationship with others and with the
world, which is external. And I would even go as far as saying that's an artificial
distinction between internal and external. It's really about being aware of everything
in an ongoing flow. And it's, you know, to say internal and external,
it can be helpful to make distinctions at times and it can also develop official
dichotomies that can get in the way. Can you give me an example of even in a
moment like right now?
I'm aware we had some technology difficulties hopping on right.
And I've learned over time to be present to what's happening and what's real Versus
flipping into self -shame or self -judgment. Can you give me,
is there a form of mindfulness that speaks to even a moment like that,
a moment right now where I have some inner noise and there's a way I can be kind
toward what I'm noticing versus judging what I'm noticing. Yeah, absolutely.
So let's say that something isn't going as planned. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And when something isn't going as planned, we can get in the habit of judging
ourselves. We can get in the habit of judging some piece of technological equipment.
We can get in the habit of judging other people. We can bring awareness in and see
how we are kind of going down those spirals of the judgment,
internal, external, whatever, equipment. And we can also, so it helps us be able to
recognize that. And then also helps us be able to kind of meet that with this
curious awareness. So for example, you know, if something isn't working, like a
technological glitch in a podcast, we can We can go, oh, crap.
And when we do that, our mind, you know, whether it's judging ourselves,
judging the experience, judging whatever, that kind of closes us down and puts us in
this kind of constricted, contracted, frustrated mindset, which ironically makes it
harder to step back and problem solve, you know. And so there we bring flip that
oh no or oh crap to oh okay this you know this piece of technology isn't working
what um how you know and it opens us to be able to see all the possibilities much
more readily than if we were just locked into you know that you know must be that
or must be that that's really that's really at the heart of it is to is to bring
this playful curiosity even when things aren't going.
how society is collectively getting trained to use their phones.
Cornell West describes it as these weapons of mass distraction, right? And so all
over the place, whether it's my students at Brown University or people on the
streets or people in restaurants or just all over the place. People are just
constantly, you know, they're captured, their attention is captured by their phones.
And what I'm seeing is that when something unpleasant is happening, so somebody has,
it could be as simple as boredom, that I, you know, student might have some boredom
or a patient might feel anxious. And then this phone promises a distraction that
makes that, you know, they can temporarily distract them from that unpleasant
sensation or the emotion or the thought and we can get stuck in these habit loops
of distraction where we're not learning to be with our unpleasant experiences so
there you know there can be something that's uncomfortable and if we're constantly
running away from it we're not going to know how to deal with things that are
uncomfortable in the future. If we can't deal with them now, even if it's boredom
as a very minor example. So here, you know, I'm not seeing people learning to lean
into difficulty. I'm seeing more and more that people are being trained to go,
you know, be distracted by this shiny object, whether it's cute pictures of puppies
on Instagram or whatever.
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So how does that work? We're going into the holidays.
How does that work in a social gathering
where you're going to be, let's say, for example, at a family dinner or tough stuff
in the news,
a tough topic comes up. Or I guess these are two different things, but, you know,
even, you know, just news headlines themselves, right? How do we learn to stay
mindful, stay present without just going into sort of that distract,
avoidant, or fight, you know, even a fight -flight response, right? Because it strikes
me that what you're describing is the opposite of a fight -flight response. It's
staying present. Yes, it is the, well, yeah, I would say it's the opposite. It's
hard to say because fight -flight is really so instinctual.
This is, it's a different time scale. Interesting. So it's important just to be able
to distinguish those. So, you know, we're going to, if we put our hand on a hot
stove, we're going to, we're going to move that the way before the signal even
reaches our brain, right? It just is arcs through our spinal cord. Yep. And when
somebody has, you know, a fight, flight response, they're going to be reacting faster
than conscious awareness because we don't have time to sit back and process. You
know, you have, you got to move literally. And after that,
you know, in the after effect of that, we can learn. and that's really where
mindfulness comes in where we can start to first recognize how we are habitually
reacting in life so let's use the holidays just you know something might feel
uncomfortable and if our automatic reaction has been to you know turn away from the
discomfort one of my students I was just a couple of days ago in a seminar that
it
this is the first level of where awareness can be helpful. And I'm going to use
the word curiosity here because mindfulness is a concept. Let's just get right at
the, you know, so that people aren't confused or misinterpret at concept. Let's just
get right at the raw material here. So the raw material is curiosity.
And so if we can notice that we are habitually reacting and we have a habit loop
around turning away from discomfort, right? Because we don't know how to deal with
distress, right? This is where the distress comes in when we can't handle discomfort.
There's an eye in there, if that makes sense. Yeah. So it helps us recognize these
habit loops and then helps us be able to
that you know versus the experience so for example i work a lot with patients with
anxiety and i've had one person come in and say i feel like anxiety is deeply
etched in my bones that's how identified she was with her anxiety and so the idea
here is to see that i'm a person who has feelings thoughts sensations of anxiety
and just to be able to make that differentiation helped her distinguish between
discomfort I have discomfort versus distress where I am distressed the difference
between have and I am. Yeah, I am experiencing anxiety is different than I am an
anxious person or so this is where and I don't want to take a rabbit trail here,
but I do want to run this past you because my listeners are very familiar with
parts work because my background is in IFS.
And it strikes me from what you're saying. There's some overlaps because IFS is
teaching us to get curious about, for example, that anxiety as a part of me versus
as something I'm overtaken by. So there is some overlaps with mindfulness.
Maybe even you might say IFS is a specific form of it. I'm not sure. They're not
the same. But that's some overlap that I'm hearing there. Does that? Absolutely.
Right. So for example, somebody could bring awareness in to recognize that part of
that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, which allows me then to tolerate the presence of it without
being overtaken by it. I'm curious, I want to touch on a lot of your work is
focused on addiction. Is that, is that right? Addiction and anxiety. Yeah.
And what have you learned about, you talk about habits, right? What have you learned
about these behaviors and why we get so hooked in the first place?
Because it strikes me that the instinctive response is the, you know, kind of the
first response. And then it's almost like you said, the mindfulness comes after when
we can come back to. So why do we get so hooked in the first place? Yes.
It's a great question. And it really boils down to these very strong evolutionary
learning processes that were set up or evolved to help us find food and remember
where it is and also avoid danger. So, for example, you know,
B .F. Skinner became known in the 50s for this concept of operating conditioning or
positive and negative reinforcement. And if you think about those processes, they're
very basic where, you know, three elements are necessary and sufficient, where,
let's think of our ancient ancestors, you know, they see food in the woods or in
the savannah. That's the trigger. The behavior is that they eat the food. And then
from a neuroscience standpoint, there's a reward, meaning that there's a dopamine
spritz in their brain. And I want to be very clear about this because reward can
be interpreted different ways. So to the brain, there are these reward circuits,
meaning the dopamine fires as a way to help somebody learn. So they're truly,
these reward circuits are set up to help us form memories. So we remember where the
food is, so we can go and get it again. We also remember where the danger is so
we can avoid it in the future. And those are the two flavors of reinforcement
learning. Positive reinforcement. Go do that again. negative reinforces.
be erroneous that this is where there's this is where there's a dopamine hit of
reward. So go back to it. Yes. Yes. And in fact, it's not something that is
genuinely giving me true relief. Is that right? Is that right? And yes,
absolutely. So let's take two examples. One is if you look at food and another
example is experience. So in modern day, we've had both food and experience be
really designed to be hyper -palatable, meaning, you know, we hear all this stuff
about hyper -processed food, which is hardly food anymore. The hyper -processed thing
that has calories that gets us addicted, that's really how these things became hyper
processed is because they get us hooked to eating them more. And the same is true
for social media, even news feeds now. They've been hyper processed to be hyper
palatable and also addictive. So there are a number of, we don't have to go into
all of the, there are a myriad different ways in which those, their elements brought
together to make them more and more addictive. But But that's, you know, a very
common example. And now I'll bring something more nuanced, which I never learned in
medical school or residency, but was probably the most important thing that I missed,
which was, or that none of us were taught, is that even experiences like anxiety
can be driven in that same reinforcement process. And Thomas Borkevaca psychologist
wrote in a two -page very humble paper back in the 1980s suggested,
he suggested that anxiety could be driven through negative reinforcement. And this got
buried in the Prozac lead because Prozac came out and everybody thought, oh, great.
You know, depression and anxiety solved with one pill. Yeah. Turned out not to be
the case. No. Not even close. And so his suggestion was that the feeling of anxiety
triggers the
that, it gives us a feeling of control. Yes. And I'll add one more,
which is that if people worry all the time and they solve a problem,
they're very likely to associate those two because they're worrying all the time.
And so they make this false association that worrying equals problem solving, but
it's that correlation that does not equal causation problem there where they're
correlated but not causal and the way I start you know exploring that with my
patients is to say well have you ever solved a problem when you weren't worrying
yes do you solve more problems when you're not worrying yes so yeah but it's just
when somebody has for example as somebody has generalized anxiety disorder and they're
worrying literally all the time the likelihood that they're going to be worrying when
they solve a problem is pretty high. Sure. It makes perfect sense.
So how do we knowing in some ways I don't want to, I don't want to say
negatively, but we're sort of working against to some degree these ways in which
we've been conditioned for a variety of reasons. So how do we begin to change those
pathways and how is mindfulness a part of that? Yes. That's the million dollar
question. That's the million dollar question. And it's not just a pill. And we've
learned so many things about, you know, and I think to some degree, these are
skills we have to learn, right? There's no, there's no easy button for it.
And also some of these things work. Right. Yeah. So let's use the example of
anxiety because that's what we've, my lab's been studying the most recently, but
we've done studies where this applies to smoking. We got five times the quit rates
of gold standard treatment for smoking, for example. So just showing that this
applies to other things. We, if you look at anxiety, there is,
and you look at any habit, these habits form through this process of reinforcement
learning that you and I have been speaking about. And there's actually a very simple
formula that was developed back in the 1970s by these two researchers last names
were Raskorla and Wagner. And this Raskorla Wagner formula is still in play today.
My lab still uses it. And the idea is that once we set up a habit,
by definition, it is something that we do automatically. And I just want to be
clear that most habits are actually helpful. So this isn't to demonize habits, you
know, imagine, imagine trying to live your life having to relearn everything you've
learned in your life every day. You know, we'd be exhausted before breakfast, you
know, we'd have to relearn how to walk, put our clothes on, make breakfast, and all
that stuff. So most habits are really helpful. So this is a good survival mechanism,
yet some of them get in the way. Anxiety is probably an evolutionary bottleneck in
this respect because it pulls together fear and planning.
So fear in the present moment is helpful, right? Because it helps us learn. And
planning in the present moment is also helpful planning for the future. But you
can't be afraid of the future in the sense that when we worry about the future,
we don't have control over it right now. So it actually, the research is pretty
clear on this. The more we worry, the less we're actually able to plan and,
you know, problem solve for the future. So it's this evolutionary bottleneck that
comes in. So going back to your question of how do we, how does mindfulness come
in here, if you look at that equation, for any habit to change, you have to bring
awareness back in to update the reward value. And the reason for that is, if
something's rewarding, we're going to do it again. Right. And if something's not
rewarding, it opens up that space for change. Let's use an everyday example. Let's
say that I have a certain reward value in my mind for mango habanero truffles,
which is true. Okay. My mother -in I love it. Yeah, these great mango habanernera
truffles at the holidays from the Seattle area, and they are delicious. Let's say a
new chaklariti opens up in my neighborhood, and I go in and I eat,
they have mango habinerd truffles. And I'm like, great, let me try one of those. If
I eat one, and it's just like mind -blowingly good, I get what's called a positive
prediction error, meaning that that was better than expected. I had a certain
expectation that it probably wasn't going to be as good as the ones that I get at
Christmas. And it was better than expected. So I get this dopamine spritz in my
brain and I learn this is a good chocolate. Go back and eat and get chocolates
there again. On the other hand, if they taste like cardboard, I get what's called a
negative prediction error, which said, where my brain's like, yeah, not as good as
expected. I also get a dopamine spritz and I learn don't go back there again.
Notice how there's learning on both sides. Yeah. And critical for learning, one
ingredient awareness. I have to pay attention. If I'm on the phone and I eat one
of those and, you know, my wife says, hey, how is the chocolate or G? I'm like, I
don't know. I just I don't remember what it tasted like. So I haven't changed that
reward value or that expectation when I haven't paid attention. So that's where this
comes in. And I want to highlight something. Notice how willpower has nothing to do
with this. Yeah. Nothing is critical because everybody, you know, if somebody's trying
to stop overeating, if somebody's trying to stop worrying. You know, there's, I don't
know if you ever saw this Bob Newhart skit from the 70s called Stop It. It's
amazing. It's hilarious. We'll post it. It's an amazing clip. It's incredible. But
back in the 70s, he was highlighting the problematic nature where there's all this
emphasis on cognitive therapies, like they were going to solve all our ills, just
like present. And the idea is we can't think our way out of a paper bag. And if
you look at it now from a neuroscience perspective, nobody knew this in the 70s.
Neuroscience was a very young field back then. If you look at it from a
neuroscience standpoint, this isn't about thinking. In fact, the parts of our brain
that are associated with cognitive control and willpower, you know, willpower is more
myth than muscle, but those go offline when we get stressed at or anxious. So at
best, we don't have access to these resources. At worst,
they're more myth than muscle. So wherever somebody is on that spectrum, you know,
that's not, that's not what I would go to to help somebody work with anxiety as an
example. That is so helpful. And I think what you're saying there, dovetails,
again, it's different, but what I found so powerful coming out of being trained in
more of a CBT area when I discovered IFS. Because I was like, oh, this actually
helps me. Yeah. And, and, um, interesting, Interesting, isn't it? Because I can think
about the, I know the logic. The logic is, you know, but that doesn't help me in
the moment. Right. And if you look at it, our feeling body is much stronger than
our thinking brain. Yeah. So logic is helpful to, you know, solve a logic problem.
Yeah. But logic doesn't solve emotional issues, right? And Reward value gets set up
as a feeling. It doesn't get set up as a logic problem. If it did,
all my patients would have quit smoking the first time I told them to stop smoking.
A hundred percent. I know I shouldn't smoke, right? How often have we? So just a
quick example. Let me see if I'm hearing you correctly, practically. I had never
been on TikTok. I discovered it. And it's like crack. I've never seen anything like
it. And I've noticed, and is this kind of what we're saying, I don't go, but I've
noticed, I'm like, some part of me, but despite all logic, if I'm stressed out to
click on that app feels like relief. And so I can't talk myself out of that with
logic. But what I might do, and I'm wondering if this is, is become aware.
What is going on in that moment that I want to push, click on that app? There's
something pulling me and it almost always is my own distress,
wanting a relief. I am getting a hit of dopamine. That's not untrue.
I'm curious if I'm saying this correctly. I don't have to talk myself out of that
by saying, no, this is bad for No, no, no, it, in some way there is a hit of
dopamine I'm getting, but if I can become aware, it allows me to make a different
choice and bring more of my,
finish that for me. What is, I'm aware that that's working, but I'm not sure why.
Ish. Yes. So here, and I diagram this, we did a series of studies a couple of
years ago now. We published these.
example, that we're worrying. And often people don't think of worrying as a behavior,
but it's a behavior, right? It says mental behavior. Some people are so habituated
to worrying. They don't even notice that they're doing it just because it's
automatic. It's a habit. So the first step is being able to recognize that we're
worrying. The second step is to leverage this reinforcement learning process that you
and I've been talking about by asking a simple question, which is, what am I
getting from this? So if we take this to your TikTok example, right, where TikTok
is the algorithm is dialed in so much that it is like the most, it's,
it's a more safely guarded secret than like the Colonel Sanders secret recipe for
KFC. You know, it's like this is this is buried in the vaults of wherever because
they did such a good job of algorithmically addicting people. And there was even one
of the ongoing lawsuits against TikTok where the, I think it was the Attorney
General of Kentucky, their documents were accidentally unredactable,
like where they could redact the redaction. And I think it was NPR that broke the
story where they found that the people are saying, you know, we can dial in, we
know exactly how long it takes to addict somebody. And it's like as few as 30
videos. It's a very short period of time where they're that good at that. So it's
not about telling ourselves, oh, TikTok's addictive, because we know it is. It's
about asking ourselves this simple question. What do I get from going on TikTok? And
that then gets to this piece where I think of this is we can develop these
disenchantment databases where if we're enchanted with something,
we're going to keep doing it, right? Because the reward value is high enough that
we keep doing it. If we become disenchanted, it's much easier to say, you know, why
would I do that? It's just, I'm just not into that anymore. And that's where asking
that question brings online or curiosity. We can go, oh, what am I getting from
this? Right. And It's not that TikTok is inherently bad, you know, like there are
plenty of entertaining short videos that whatever, I don't really, you know, whatever
people get, you know, are into in TikTok, there are lots of different things.
They'll, they'll get on TikTok. But if we find that we're spending every, you know,
two hours a day or five hours or eight hours a day scrolling on TikTok, or we're
turning to that as our distress tolerance, you know,
or avoidance mechanism. It's not a distress tolerance mechanism. Then it falls more
into the unhelpful spectrum. And so if we ask, what am I getting from this? And we
feel into our direct experience and we see, oh, you know, every now and then a few
TikTok videos, fine. But if I'm, if this is my ruling my life now, not so good.
And we become disenchanted with that. I think I call this the pleasure plateau. We
do the same thing with eating. We can do the same thing with all sorts of
behaviors. Yes. So we can find where it's fine and we can find where we're going
off that cliff of overindulgence. And then we can, the third step, just to finish
this quickly, the third step is to find what I call the bigger, better offer. And
this is where simply stepping out of doing the thing is better than being sucked
into it right so if we find that you know scrolling on instagram a couple of times
a day when we just need a mental reset is fine but when we find that we're going
to scroll on instagram instead of confronting our partner because we're you know
there's we're going to have to have a tough conversation not so fine right and we
can so we can start to dial in and see kind of get control back over where we
might be pulled to do something to distract ourselves and come back into reality and
learn to lean into discomfort. This is where discomfort does not need to become
distress. It can simply be discomfort because we learn, oh, you know,
curiosity is a superpower for this. I'll just mention one other thing, just applying
this, for example, to worrying. When we feel anxious, that feeling of anxiety could
lead us to worry, oh, no, what's going to happen? It could lead us to distract
ourselves by going on TikTok. Or we could learn to lean into curiosity and flip
that, oh, no, to oh. So let me ask you, which one feels better?
Oh, no or oh? Oh, this is interesting. I wonder what's happening here. Yes.
So powerful. So you're leveraging that same reinforcement learning mechanism.
You're leveraging it against itself. And that's where we're getting huge changes in
anxiety, for example. It's so powerful. You work with yourself. I really want to ask
you this. And if a lot of,
that is a huge bucket. So a lot of my listeners come from faith backgrounds.
And I am curious about how, and I know you've done a little study on this, I
think, how spiritual practices like prayer can function as a form of mindfulness.
Just from my own experience, what I find is some of what we're talking about can
apply in the sense of if I'm going to prayer as a sort of cognitive way to try
to pull myself up out of what I'm feeling, versus if I'm sort of going to prayer
as a way of inviting God to attune with me to what is. They function very
differently. Can you, are you comfortable speaking to that? Oh, absolutely. I'm trying
to get at in a very short amount of time. Well, I think you articulated it
beautifully. One example of this is centering prayer, which is a specific practice
that uses prayer to help people center. That's why it's called centering prayer,
but also be present. And so what it can do is help people really dial into this
strength of presence. Yeah. And that strength of presence, Talk about distress
tolerance. Yes. You know, when somebody knows that God has their back,
who needs to run away from anything? Yes.
And it's in, God has your back in it. Yes, in it. Not necessarily as an example.
Let me help you cover your eyes so you don't see it. Yes. Yes. Oh, that's such a
helpful centering prayer. That's a great connection there. I love that. And so that
is a form of bringing mindfulness into a spiritual practice. Yes. Yeah. And if you
look at many, I haven't studied every spiritual tradition out there, but if you look
at many religions, many spiritual traditions, they're going to use different language
for this experience. Yeah. Of being present, right? I love the phrase,
dying to the small self so God can,
world.
I love that. I love that. Can you let us know, let my listeners know where to
find out more about your work? I know you've written a couple of books. You've got
a lot of resources. Where can people find more information? I want to find all the
information myself. Sure. I run a program called Going Beyond Anxiety that actually
teaches these skills that we've been talking about in terms of helping people relate
to anxiety differently. I also have a website so that that's just going beyondanxiety
.com and I also have a website just Dr. Judd .com that has a lot of free resources
and also has my books on it like unwinding anxiety is most relevant to this
conversation but also wrote a book called The Hunger Habit if people struggle
struggle with eating, you know, emotional eating and that's That's just DRJUD .com,
Dr. Judd .com. Awesome. Yeah. Also write a substack, Judd Brewer dot substack.
That you can find me there. All right. We will link to all of that. I'm so
grateful for your time. I love this topic and I'm just so grateful for your work
in this space and all you're doing to bring these resources to people. So thank
you. Yeah. My pleasure. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the best of
you. Be sure to check out the show notes for any resources and links mentioned in
the show. You can find those on my website at Dr. Allison Cook .com. That's Allison
with one L .cook .com. Before you forget, I hope you'll follow the show now so that
you don't miss an episode. And I love it if you'd go ahead and leave a review. It
helps so much to get the word out. I look forward to seeing you back here next
Thursday. And remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God,
you heal others, and you stay true to your God -given self.