Judson A. Brewer, MD, PhD

Going Beyond Anxiety: Can Insights from the Science of Habit Change Help How we View and Treat Anxiety?

Judson Brewer, MD PhD, is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and professor at Brown University. A psychiatrist and internationally known expert in mindfulness training for addictions. Brewer has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for behavior change, including both in-person and app-based treatments for smoking, emotional eating, and anxiety. He has also studied the underlying neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI, and source-estimated EEG. His TED talk, entitled “A simple way to break a bad habit” has been watched over 20 million times. He is the author of The Craving Mind: from cigarettes to smartphones to love, why we get hooked and how we can bread bad habits (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), the New York Times best-seller, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind (Avery/Penguin Random House, 2021) and The Hunger Habit: why we eat when we’re not hungry and how to stop (Avery/Penguin Random House, 2024)

Reading List

Brewer J. (2019). Mindfullness training for addictions: has neuroscience revealed a brain hack by which awareness subverts the addictive process?. Current opinion in psychology, 28, 198-203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.01.014

Brewer, J.A., & Roy, A. (2021). Can Approaching Anxiety Like a Habit Lead to Novel Treatments?. American journal of lifestyle medicine, 15(5), 489-494. https://doi.org/10.1177/15598276211008144

Geo, M., Roy, A., Sharkey, K.M., Hoge, E.A., Liu, T., & Brewer, J.A. (2022). Targeting Anxiety to Improve Sleep Disturbance: A Randomized Clinical Trial of App-Based Mindfulness Training. Psychosomatic medicine, 84(5), 632-642. https://doi.org/10.1097/PSY.0000000000001083

Roy, A., Druker, S., Hoge, E.A., & Brewer, J.A. (2020). Physician Anxiety and Burnout: Symptom Correlates and a Prospective Pilot Study of App-Delivered Mindfulness Training. JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 8(4), e15608. https://doi.org/10.2196/15608

Roy, A., Hoge, E.A., Abrante, P., Druker, S., Liu, T., & Brewer, J.A. (2021). Clinical Efficacy and Psychological Mechanisms of an App-Based Digitial Therapeutic for Generalized Anxiety Disorder: Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of medical Internet research, 23(12), e26987. https://doi.org/10.2196/26987