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)