THE UNWINDING ANXIETY WORKBOOK
Practical Exercises to
Break the Cycles of Worry and
to Heal Your Mind
DR JUDSON BREWER
THE UNWINDING ANXIETY WORKBOOK
also by judson brewer, Md, PHd
The
Hunger Habit Unwinding Anxiety also by dr judson brewer
THE UNWINDING ANXIETY WORKBOOK
The UNWINDING ANXIETY Workbook
PRACTICAL EXERCISES TO BREAK THE CYCLES
OF WORRY AND FEAR AND HEAL YOUR MIND
JUDSON BREWER, MD, P h D
WORRY AND FEAR TO HEAL YOUR MIND DR JUDSON BREWER
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First published in the United States of America by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House in 2025
First published in Great Britain by Vermilion in 2025
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To my wife, Mahri, who has taught me so much over the years
Contents
Introduction • xi
chapter 1
Anxiety Goes Viral • 1
chapter 2
The Birth of Anxiety • 7
chapter 3
Habits and Everyday Addictions • 13
chapter 4
Anxiety as a Habit Loop • 19
Part I
MAPPING YOUR MIND: FIRST GEAR
chapter 5
How to Map Your Mind • 29
chapter 6
Why Your Previous Anti-Anxiety (and Anti-Habit) Strategies Failed • 39
chapter 7
Why Performance Anxiety Is a Trap • 47
chapter 8 A Brief Word on Mindfulness • 55
chapter 9
What Is Your Mindfulness Personality Type? • 61
Part II
UPDATING OUR BRAIN’S REWARD VALUE: SECOND GEAR
chapter 10
The OFC: How Your Brain Makes Decisions • 69
chapter 11
Stop Thinking • 75
chapter 12
Retrospective Second Gear: Learning from the Past • 81
chapter 13
Fixing the Chocolate Fix • 89
chapter 14
How Long Does It Take to Change a Habit? • 95
Part III
FINDING THAT BIGGER, BETTER OFFER FOR YOUR BRAIN: THIRD GEAR
chapter 15
The Bigger, Better Offer • 105
chapter 16
The Science of Curiosity • 109
chapter 17
Using Curiosity to Lean Into Discomfort: Change Doesn’t Have to Be Scary • 115
chapter 18
What’s Good About Rainy Days? • 121
chapter 19
All You Need Is Love • 125
chapter 20
The Why Habit Loop • 131
chapter 21
Noting Practice • 137
chapter 22
Evidence-Based Faith • 143
chapter 23
Anxiety Sobriety • 149
Appendix: Behavioral Tendencies Quiz • 155
Acknowledgments • 159
Introduction
Ihave scienced the sh*t out of anxiety. As a behavioral neuroscientist, I have dedicated decades of research to understanding why habits form, and how we can break free of them. As a psychiatrist, I have tested and tweaked tools to help people implement meaningful change in their lives. As a person, I’ve had my own share of anxiety, ranging from anxiety- driven, bodyexploding irritable bowel syndrome to full-blown panic attacks. And this isn’t to say that I am now anxiety-free— I still have anxiety show up for me on a regular basis. But I now know how to manage my anxiety, to relate to it differently. And this has made all the difference.
A word of warning: If you are hoping this workbook or my Unwinding Anxiety book or for that matter any other book is going to rid you of anxiety, unfortunately you will invariably be disappointed.
This isn’t how anxiety (or our brain) works. We have no “anxiety switch” that can be fl ipped off — oh, how we all wish there were such a thing! The good news is that once you learn how and why anxiety shows up and how you might inadvertently be stoking it, you can learn how to manage it when it appears and not feed it, so it doesn’t last as long or show up as often.
I wrote this workbook to serve as a companion for Unwinding Anxiety, the book I published in 2021. Unwinding Anxiety spells out all the details, the science, and the methods for breaking free from anxiety habit loops. Think of this workbook as your trusty mule, or if you are a Star Wars fan, your R2-D2 sidekick: it will help you carry the load on your journey into wisdom. Reading a book— understanding concepts— doesn’t get you very far. Wisdom comes only from experience. You have to do the work, put concepts into practice, in order to develop wisdom.
HOW TO USE THIS WORKBOOK: PUTTING KNOWLEDGE INTO PRACTICE
The chapters in this workbook parallel those in Unwinding Anxiety. If you’re reading Unwinding Anxiety, you can read a chapter, reflect on the chapter, and then open this workbook to work through your thoughts in the spirit of that chapter. I’ll summarize the main points of each chapter in Unwinding Anxiety, followed by suggested tips and tools that you can use to put these concepts into practice in your everyday life.
There are many prompts and questions in this book that can help you journal through your anxiety. If you like to journal, journal
away— but don’t get caught in the trap of thinking that just because you have an insight and write it down, this will magically change your life. You have to put those insights into practice. You have to test them out to see which nuggets are truly golden and which are fool’s gold, promising you an end to suffering but not delivering, leaving you looking for more.
Ready to get started? Let’s dive in!
Anxiety Goes Viral
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety rates have skyrocketed, with a 3.9 percent increase in reported psychological distress since 2018. As we acknowledge this rise in anxious feelings, it’s important to recognize that anxiety can manifest itself in incredibly diverse and often sneaky ways. It’s a shape-shifter, showing up not just in the form of worry or fear, but sometimes as physical symptoms, as avoidance behaviors, and even in the subtleties of everyday decisions and reactions. In college, my anxiety manifested itself as irritable bowel syndrome. For others, it ranges from constant worry to full-blown panic attacks.
Remember, anxiety is defi ned as “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.”
It is important to be able to see and feel the difference between the feeling of worry and the mental behavior of worrying. We’ll get into this more in subsequent chapters, but make sure you bookmark this in your brain now: a feeling is not a behavior.
EXERCISE 1: HOW DO YOU DISTINGUISH FEELINGS FROM BEHAVIORS?
A feeling is a subjective experience or emotional state, while a mental behavior is an action that stems from one’s thoughts, feelings, or internal/external prompts. For example, anxiety is a feeling, while worrying and procrastinating are behaviors. In the grid below, write down different feelings and mental behaviors.