Unwinding Anxiety

What if anxiety isn’t just a mental flaw to fix, but a habit your brain has learned—and can unlearn? In Unwinding Anxiety, neuroscientist and psychiatrist Dr. Judson Brewer reveals a radical rethinking of how anxiety forms and persists. He argues that anxiety is not simply an emotion to suppress or a disorder to medicate. It is, at its core, a habit loop fueled by fear, uncertainty, and reward-based learning. If you can understand how that loop works, you can rewire your brain from the inside out.

Brewer contends that anxiety becomes addictive precisely because it offers false rewards—the temporary illusion of control through worry, distraction, avoidance, or overthinking. Over time, the brain confuses these unhelpful behaviors with survival mechanisms. To untangle that cycle, he teaches a method grounded in neuroscience and mindfulness: mapping, awareness, and curiosity. These deliberately replace anxiety’s impulsive reactions with what he calls the “gears” of change—three systematic steps to move from anxiety-driven habits to mindful freedom.

The Anxiety-Habit Connection

Drawing on both clinical research and stories from patients such as “Dave” and “John,” Brewer shows that anxiety operates through the same reward-based learning circuits as addictions like smoking, eating, or scrolling social media. In traditional survival learning, the brain associates a cue, behavior, and result—what Brewer calls the habit triangle of Trigger, Behavior, Reward (TBR). This works well when avoiding predators or finding food. But in modern life, the primitive brain misfires: fear plus uncertainty creates anxiety, which we learn to relieve through habits like worrying, procrastination, or control-seeking. These temporary rewards feel productive but actually reinforce the problem.

Through dozens of real-life examples—like his patient John drinking nightly to numb work stress or Dave avoiding highways because of panic—Brewer shows how awareness changes the game. When you can map your mental loops, you can see that “worrying” isn’t solving anything; it’s a mental behavior that makes your brain feel rewarded by avoidance. Over time, your brain learns that anxiety itself is its own fuel source.

From Medical Insight to Mindful Practice

Brewer’s journey from treating addicted patients at Yale to unlocking his own panic attacks anchors the book’s human dimension. During his residency, he began meditating daily and realized mindfulness could regulate the fear-driven parts of the brain better than medication alone. Later, at Brown University, he tested mindfulness-based interventions through apps like Unwinding Anxiety and Craving to Quit; clinical trials showed dramatic reductions in anxiety and smoking cravings. His signature phrase captures his relentless curiosity about the brain: “I scienced the shit out of it.”

But science alone isn’t what heals. What changes lives is awareness paired with compassion. Brewer insists that habit change isn’t about willpower—it’s about seeing clearly. When you observe your anxious behaviors with curiosity, you stop judging them, start understanding them, and naturally lose interest. As one participant wrote, “Smoking tasted disgusting once I actually paid attention.” Awareness, he emphasizes, resets your brain’s reward system far more effectively than self-control.

Moving Through the Three Gears

The first step, or First Gear, involves mapping out habit loops—identifying what triggers your anxiety, what you do next, and what result follows. This replaces confusion with clarity. The Second Gear is awareness: seeing what you actually get from a behavior. Brewer calls this “hitting the big red reward-reset button.” When you feel the disappointment or fatigue of an old coping mechanism, your brain begins to devalue it. Finally, the Third Gear introduces the “Bigger, Better Offer” (BBO): an inner reward that feels naturally better than anxiety—curiosity, calm, and kindness. These internal rewards don’t rely on sugar, screens, or control. They’re sustainable because they feel good and reconnect us with our humanness.

Why It Matters

In an age of constant stimulation and uncertainty—from pandemics to social media to financial stress—anxiety has gone viral. Brewer’s research shows that traditional mental health strategies often fail because they fight evolution itself. Instead of suppressing anxiety, we can leverage the brain’s learning systems to dismantle it. He bridges ancient mindfulness with modern neuroscience to show that curiosity and compassion are not spiritual ideals; they are evolutionary upgrades. If fear plus uncertainty creates anxiety, awareness plus curiosity creates freedom.

Brewer’s central insight is both startling and liberating: anxiety is not a malfunction but a habit your brain learned to survive uncertainty. It’s the mind’s misguided attempt to help, like an overprotective bodyguard that never stops scanning for danger. The same neural circuits that help us learn positive behaviors—reward-based learning—also teach us to worry.

How Fear Becomes Anxiety

Fear itself is functional—it triggers survival responses. But anxiety emerges when the brain’s planning center (the prefrontal cortex) lacks accurate information. The result is a prediction loop of fear + uncertainty = anxiety. During the early stages of COVID-19, for example, global uncertainty caused runaway anxiety. The less information people had, the more their brains tried to imagine worst-case scenarios—leading to panic buying, insomnia, and doomscrolling.

Historically, this mechanism made sense. For early humans facing lions on the savannah, anticipation of threat could save lives. But today, the brain’s primitive “better safe than sorry” system activates for emails, stock prices, or news headlines. Our minds run endless what-ifs without resolution.

Anxiety’s Social Contagion

Anxiety spreads like an emotional virus—a phenomenon psychologists call social contagion. One person’s fear triggers another’s. In 2020, panic over toilet paper shortages or volatile stock markets mirrored viral transmission of emotion. Brewer likens this effect to sneezing on someone’s brain: your words and worries infect others’ anxiety circuits faster than logic can stop them. Understanding this helps you avoid “catching” others’ fear, and instead become a calm presence that interrupts the storm.

The Cost of Uncertainty Overload

In the age of the internet, we suffer from what Brewer—and behavioral researchers like Alexander Chernev—call choice overload. Too much information doesn’t make us informed; it paralyzes decision-making. The brain’s reward systems thrive on clear cause-and-effect feedback. When everything is uncertain, anxiety fills the gap. Modern life, with its endless notifications and contradictory “facts,” hijacks our attention and primes us for chronic restlessness—what Brewer calls the “epidemic of anxiety.”

After mapping anxiety to the brain’s learning systems, Brewer expands the insight: anxiety doesn’t just cause bad habits—it is a bad habit. Using humor and stories from his psychiatry clinic, he shows how addiction operates on mundane levels: checking your phone twenty times an hour, binge-watching shows, or refreshing news feeds are simply polished versions of the same feedback loop that drives drugs or alcohol.

Reward-Based Learning Gone Rogue

In ancient brains, reward-based learning ensured survival: hunger triggers food-seeking, which releases dopamine, teaching you to eat again. But in modern environments engineered for instant gratification, this mechanism has become hijacked. Social media delivers variable rewards (likes, alerts) that mirror gambling’s intermittent reinforcement. Brewer quips that our smartphones are “advertising billboards we pay to carry.” The food industry adds calculated sugar and crunch to hook dopamine loops. Even so-called normal habits like online shopping exploit this pattern—instant click, instant dopamine, long-term regret.

The Anxiety-Addiction Loop

Most bad habits stem from emotional discomfort. Anxiety becomes the trigger, and your “behavior” is whatever numbs that feeling—eating, scrolling, drinking, or overplanning. The “reward” is temporary relief. But since the root anxiety remains, it resurfaces, fueling the same loop. One of Brewer’s patients, John, drank nightly because work stress made him anxious, which made him procrastinate, which made him more anxious. When John finally mapped this pattern—anxiety → procrastination → guilt → drinking → anxiety again—he was able to quit cold turkey. Awareness exposed the illusion of reward.

Engineered for Dependency

Brewer warns that the modern world is purpose-built to create addictive experiences. Intermittent rewards plus immediate availability form a perfect storm for compulsive behavior. Casinos, Instagram, delivery apps—they all capitalize on what neuroscientist B.F. Skinner first codified decades ago: random rewards are more addictive than predictable ones. Recognizing this manipulation lets you reclaim your agency. As Brewer writes, “Your smartphone is not neutral—it’s training your brain.”

Traditional self-help urges you to grit your teeth, use willpower, and “just stop.” Brewer dismantles this myth with neuroscience: the very brain region responsible for willpower—the prefrontal cortex—is the first to shut down under stress. When you’re anxious, your rational control center is offline. Trying harder just strengthens the habit loop.

The Four Common Fails

• Willpower: unreliable because stress, fatigue, or hunger deactivate your brain’s executive control network.
• Substitution: replacing cigarettes with candy or worry with puppies only creates new loops.
• Priming your environment: helpful but flawed; you can’t remove anxiety the way you hide ice cream.
• Mindfulness: not as a relaxation trick but as training to recognize habit loops in real time.

Brewer compares failed strategies to telling a drowning man to “swim harder.” They rely on reasoning while ignoring the survival brain’s reflexes. True change, he shows, starts not with control but with curiosity. When you “don’t just do something, sit there,” you engage awareness rather than avoidance.

From Fixing to Seeing

Through mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work, Brewer reframes mindfulness as nonjudgmental awareness—a way of observing impulses without feeding them. This awareness lets you catch automatic reactions before they spiral. Awareness doesn’t fight the behavior; it reveals it. Neuroscientifically, awareness restores communication between the prefrontal cortex and older emotional circuits. Practically, it feels like stepping out of autopilot mid-flight.

The first gear in Brewer’s model is simple yet transformative: map your mind. Before you can change a habit, you must see it clearly. This process identifies the trigger, behavior, and reward that perpetuate your anxiety. Once illuminated, these loops lose their unconscious power.

Seeing the Loop Changes the Loop

When John came to Brewer for help with alcoholism, he drank to silence his anxiety about unfinished work—creating multiple interlocked loops. Mapping them out made the invisible visible: anxiety → procrastination → guilt → drinking → anxiety. Simply seeing this architecture brought relief; he quit drinking and repaired his marriage. Awareness ignited the first spark of change.

Brewer emphasizes not to jump ahead to fixing. The urge to “solve” your anxiety is itself a habit loop (trigger: seeing the problem; behavior: rushing to fix; reward: temporary relief). Instead, slow down and watch the pattern form. He references The Karate Kid’s Mr. Miyagi—“Wax on, wax off”—to show how patient, repetitive observation builds mastery before action.

Why Simplicity Matters

Mapping aligns with the principle that clarity reduces fear. The unknown breeds anxiety; known patterns breed empowerment. Brewer’s clinical programs and apps leverage this insight with simple reflection tools that teach users to recognize loops in real life—during meetings, cravings, or relationship stressors. This self-observation sparks hope, turning confusion into curiosity.

Once you can see your loops, the next step—Second Gear—reeducates your reward system. Behavior persists only as long as it feels rewarding. Brewer calls this the art of disenchantment: recognizing, through direct experience, that compulsive behaviors aren’t actually satisfying.

Hitting the Reward Reset Button

For example, one woman trying to quit smoking reported, “It tastes like chemicals.” Another noticed that stress-eating left her bloated, tired, and sad. These aren’t intellectual insights—they’re physical ones. Awareness feeds new data to the brain’s orbitofrontal cortex, which updates the behavior’s “reward value.” Over repeated practice, the old habit drops in desirability as the brain reorders its priorities.

Brewer’s team confirmed this in clinical trials: 10–15 repetitions of mindful awareness caused the craving’s perceived reward value to plummet to near zero. Participants then naturally reduced smoking and overeating without forcing themselves. The brain’s “prediction error”—expecting pleasure but finding disappointment—powered change.

Learning from Experience, Not Effort

Disenchantment works when you stop analyzing and start observing. Thoughts like “I shouldn’t eat this” keep you in your head, but feeling your body’s reaction (tightness, exhaustion, regret) rewires learning at the emotional level. Brewer advises practicing “short moments, many times” to reinforce this new awareness across daily contexts—each repetition grooves the brain like a new trail replacing an overused one.

The final step, Third Gear, replaces anxious reactions with something that truly feels better: curiosity. Brewer names this the Bigger, Better Offer (BBO), an internal reward based on open awareness, not external relief. Curiosity transforms fear into fascination—an evolutionary upgrade for the modern mind.

The Science of Curiosity

Neuroscience shows curiosity lights up the brain’s dopamine circuits, driving exploration rather than avoidance. Psychologists Jordan Litman and Paul Silvia distinguish two types: deprivation curiosity (the restless need to know) and interest curiosity (the joy of discovery). The first is anxious and closed; the second is open and rewarding. Sustained change relies on cultivating the latter. “Curiosity feels good,” Brewer explains, “so your brain wants more of it.”

Practicing Curiosity in the Body

Brewer teaches a two-minute exercise: when you feel anxiety, locate its sensations—tightness, heat, clenching—and softly inquire, “Hmm, what does this feel like?” By paying attention without judging, the sensations often dissolve. Curiosity brings the prefrontal cortex back online, restoring calm. One participant reported, “A wave of panic lost its power the moment I got curious about it.”

Finding Sustainable Rewards

Unlike external BBOs like desserts or distractions, curiosity doesn’t habituate. You don’t need more curiosity to feel curious—it’s infinitely renewable. Brewer’s “RAIN” practice (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Note) harnesses this quality, teaching you to meet urges with observation rather than resistance. Over time, curiosity becomes your default habit—a self-reinforcing source of peace.

As anxiety begins to unwind, Brewer turns inward to the qualities that sustain change: kindness, growth mindset, and faith built on evidence. Once curiosity opens the door, compassion and confidence keep it open. He reminds readers that learning the mind is a lifelong practice, not a one-time fix.

From Judgment to Loving Kindness

Brewer’s patient with binge-eating disorder discovered that guilt after eating was triggering more binges. Introducing loving-kindness meditation helped her replace self-criticism with gentle goodwill—“May I care for myself with kindness.” Instead of forcing control, she learned to slow down, feel fullness, and eventually enjoy a single slice of pizza. Kindness, Brewer found, deactivates the same brain regions associated with compulsive self-judgment (the posterior cingulate cortex). In his own life, he replaced road rage with sending blessings to honking drivers—arriving at work with joy instead of resentment.

Growth Mindset in Practice

Drawing on Carol Dweck’s research, Brewer reframes failures as “FGOs”—F***ing Growth Opportunities. Fixed mindsets close down learning with “I can’t,” while growth mindsets open to “What can I learn?” Patients who approached slips or relapses with curiosity instead of shame progressed faster and stayed sober longer. As Brewer notes, you can’t fail if you learn.

Evidence-Based Faith

Faith, he emphasizes, isn’t blind optimism but data-backed confidence. His lab’s evidence—63 percent reduction in Generalized Anxiety Disorder through digital mindfulness, five times higher quit rates for smokers—proves the brain can rewire itself. But the most compelling evidence comes from your own experience: each time you meet anxiety with curiosity, you gather proof of your brain’s capacity to change. Brewer calls this “evidence-based faith”—the scientific version of trust.