Life Style Psychiatry Presents October Webinar: Unwinding Anxiety: Can Insights from the Science of Habit Change Help How We View and Work with Anxiety?-View Presentation

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Video Summary

Dr. Jud Brewer, a renowned psychiatrist and mindfulness researcher, presented on anxiety habits and habit change through mindfulness and reinforcement learning. Highlighting limitations of medications for anxiety, he emphasized the role of habit loops—triggers, behaviors, and rewards—in maintaining anxiety and related behaviors like overeating. Dr. Brewer shared how mindfulness encourages curiosity and awareness, enabling patients to recognize habitual anxiety patterns and disrupt them by questioning the rewards of such behaviors. His lab developed app-based programs delivering brief, evidence-based mindfulness training, achieving significant anxiety reductions (57%) and high remission rates (64%) in clinical trials, including challenging populations like physicians. Neuroimaging revealed mindfulness deactivates the brain’s default mode network, associated with self-referential worrying. Dr. Brewer outlined three habit change steps: awareness of habits, exploring the behavior’s reward, and substituting more rewarding alternatives like curiosity instead of worry. He discussed emerging work integrating AI as a personalized teaching assistant to augment therapy, improve comprehension, and provide just-in-time interventions. The programs prioritize scalability while preserving human interaction. Dr. Brewer advocates combining mindfulness-based training with medications as complementary, emphasizing brain-based understanding to empower patients. He invites collaboration on ongoing research, including targeting individuals with low interoceptive awareness, and offers resources such as the "Going Beyond Anxiety" program. The talk underscores leveraging neuroscience and technology to democratize effective anxiety treatments beyond traditional therapy.

Keywords

Dr. Jud Brewer

anxiety habits

mindfulness

habit loops

habit change

reinforcement learning

default mode network

AI in therapy

Going Beyond Anxiety program