Judson Brewer
The book descriptor is what drew me in – ‘train your brain to heal your mind’. in “Unwinding Anxiety”, Dr. Judson Brewer attempts to do this with a three act structure – set up, confrontation, resolution. In this context, identifying the triggers, understanding the why behind the cycles and updating the brain’s reward networks, and then tapping into the brain’s learning centres to break the cycles.
The book begins on point with the dictionary definition of anxiety – ‘a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome’, born when our brain doesn’t have enough information to predict the future. Fear + Uncertainty = Anxiety. An early example of the author’s mother-in-law manifesting anxiety in the form of snapping (irritability) was something I could relate to (in my own behaviour!)
In the first part, the book also covers why the typical weapons against habits don’t work- willpower, immediate substitution, environment priming, and mindfulness. In the second part, I found the idea of changing behaviour by addressing ‘the felt experience of the rewards’ useful. This is different from thinking our way out of a behaviour, something that has failed for me in the past. Another reinforcement was about how reliving the past doesn’t really fix it, what we have is the present. In this section, the twenty one day habit-building timeframe is also debunked. The third section has useful frameworks like RAIN (Recognise, Allow/Accept, Investigate, Note) and a little part on meta worry – worrying about the next time you’ll worry. A final useful bit was not focusing on the ‘why’ of the anxiety, but instead on resolving it.
While the title says anxiety, I felt that a lot of the book was about addiction and bad habits (smoking, overeating, alcoholism etc) and the habit changing methods that you would find in other books like The Power of Habit, or Atomic Habits. If it’s specifically anti-anxiety tips that you’re reading this for, I am not sure how useful it would be. It is arguable that anxiety is a habit, and what works for changing other habits can work for this as well. Somehow, I think that might be a superficial cure, and we don’t really know how to fix the real problem yet.
