Book SummaryUnwinding Anxiety, by Judson Brewer

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Unwinding Anxiety

Anxiety is sneaky. It lives in our thoughts and habits, and it can show up as a stomachache or a 3 a.m. Netflix binge. But according to Dr. Judson Brewer, there’s a reliable way to recognize and dismantle anxiety and the harmful habits it spawns. In Unwinding Anxiety, Brewer argues that you can defeat anxiety with mindfulness—the practice of paying close attention to the present moment without analyzing or judging it. Brewer walks through the neuroscience of anxiety and mindfulness and provides a set of practical techniques you can use to improve your life by overcoming anxiety and other unwanted habits.

Brewer (MD and Ph.D.) is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who researches mindfulness—how it affects the brain and how it can be used to treat habits and addictions. He’s given a TED Talk on habit change and...

Unwinding Anxiety Summary Part 1: The Habit of Anxiety

Before we get into Brewer’s practical advice, it’s important to consider the theoretical context for his recommendations. Brewer’s guidelines for overcoming anxiety are based on his definition of anxiety as a habit loop. In order to understand how to break the cycle of anxiety, we first have to understand how a habit loop works and how anxiety in particular spins off into other habit loops.

What Exactly Is Anxiety?

Brewer never formally defines anxiety—in fact, he argues that it’s hard to define, and that you might not even realize you’re experiencing it. That’s because it can show up with explicit symptoms like worrying, a racing heart, jittery sensations, or panic attacks—but it can also manifest as seemingly unrelated physical complaints like stomachaches or as behavioral issues like overworking. But still, it seems worth knowing exactly what we mean by anxiety before we set about trying to treat it.

In Emotional Intelligence, author and psychologist Daniel Goleman offers a more in-depth definition of anxiety that might help us here. According to Goleman, anxiety is [chronic...

Unwinding Anxiety Summary Part 2: Breaking the Cycle

Once we understand how anxiety functions as a behavioral cycle, we can see that the solution to anxiety is breaking the cycle that creates and reinforces it. Brewer says this requires three steps:

1. Recognize your anxious patterns as they arise.
2. Pay close attention to your behaviors and their results so that you can determine whether any given behavior truly helps your situation.
3. When you notice unhelpful behaviors, replace them with more useful and rewarding ones.

Be aware that these steps aren’t strictly linear. When you’re first learning to work with anxiety, you’ll need to take them in order because each step builds on the one before it: You can’t deconstruct a behavior loop (step 2) that you haven’t even noticed (step 1), and you can’t replace behaviors (step 3) until you’ve determined whether they need to be replaced (step 2). But because behavior change is an ongoing practice, you’re never really “done” with this process, and it’s completely normal (and necessary) to move back and forth between the steps.

Step #1: Recognize Your Anxious Patterns

You can’t solve a problem you haven’t noticed yet, so the first step to treating anxiety...

Unwinding Anxiety Summary Part 3: Mindfulness and Curiosity Practices

Now that we’ve covered the theory behind dismantling our anxious behavior loops, we’ll delve into some specific practices that can help us through the three steps. First, we’ll look at a fundamental tool for mindfulness, and then we’ll explore some practices for cultivating curiosity and expanding mindfulness throughout your daily life.

Mindfulness 101: Watching the Breath

One basic mindfulness tool—and the core of many meditation practices—is paying attention to the breath. Brewer recommends that when you notice yourself getting anxious—or are about to do some other behavior you’d rather change—you should pause and become aware of your breathing. Pay attention to the physical sensations of breathing (such as its length, depth, and so on), and focus on the part of your body where you most feel the breath.

Brewer argues that watching the breath breaks the anxiety habit loop and automatically replaces it with mindful curiosity. In other words, if you watch your breath whenever you start to feel anxious, then instead of feeding the anxiety by engaging with it—through worrying, coping behaviors, active avoidance, and so on—you instead relate to your anxiety as a...

Unwinding Anxiety Summary Part 4: Troubleshooting

Now that we’ve discussed the whys and hows of mindfulness as an anti-anxiety technique, we’ll end by looking at some of the obstacles you might encounter while trying to work with anxiety.

First, Is Anxiety Ever Beneficial?

To start with, Brewer points out that some people are uncomfortable with the idea of completely getting rid of anxiety, believing that a little anxiety is a necessary motivator. He dismisses this idea, arguing that the research it’s based on has been debunked and that many elite athletes and other performers appear totally relaxed when at their best.

Why We Resist Change

This desire to hold on to a little anxiety is part of what psychiatrist David Burns calls outcome resistance—his term for when therapy fails because on some level patients don’t want to change even though they think they want to (this is opposed to process resistance, where therapy fails because patients want to change but are unwilling to do the necessary work).

Burns argues that when beginning treatment (whether through formal therapy or self-help), you first need to...

Shortform Exercise: Unwind Your Anxiety Loops

Brewer argues that anxiety comes from habit loops—and that many of our unwanted behaviors start off as attempts to cope with anxiety. In this exercise, you’ll map out one of your own anxiety loops.

Describe a situation where you’ve experienced anxiety. What was the situation? What were your symptoms?