~3 min read

TL;DR. Anxiety behaves like a habit loop — cue, behavior, reward. Mindfulness works by turning curiosity onto the reward itself, which weakens the loop and the anxiety with it. Neuroscience-backed and directly applicable to everyday habits.

Mindfulness as a Cure for Anxiety

I’ve been working this past year as the graduate advisor for LCS (Latinxs in Computer Science) at UIUC. The main project I’ve been leading with LCS is the professional development and wellness colloquium, aimed at improving students’ general career and personal life. I believe that career development and well-being are strongly interrelated.

We had the honor of hosting neuroscientist Professor Judson Brewer from Brown University, who shared his groundbreaking research on mindfulness as a tool for anxiety reduction and habit formation.

I hope you learn a lot from the talk, just as much as I did!

Below is the original description we used when we advertised the talk.

LCS - Mindfulness: A cure for Anxiety with Dr Judson Brewer

Latinxs Computer Science Club (LCS) hosts the Professional development and Wellness Colloquium – aimed at improving students’ general career and personal life:

Judson Brewer, MD, PhD Director, Research & Innovation, Mindfulness Center Brown University & School of Public Health

“How to use novel discoveries in neuroscience to improve well-being and habits.” Tuesday, September 8, 2020 6:30 PM

Jud Brewer MD PhD (“Dr. Jud”) is a thought leader in the field of habit change and the “science of self-mastery”, having combined over 20 years of experience with mindfulness training with his scientific research therein. He is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences and Psychiatry at the Schools of Public Health & Medicine at Brown University.

He also is a research affiliate at MIT. A psychiatrist and internationally known expert in mindfulness training for addictions, Brewer has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for habit 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 EEG neurofeedback. He has trained US Olympic athletes and coaches, foreign government ministers, and his work has been featured on 60 Minutes, TED (4th most viewed talk of 2016, with 14+ Million views), the New York Times, Time magazine (top 100 new health discoveries of 2013), Forbes, BBC, NPR, Al Jazeera (documentary about his research), Businessweek and others. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, American Heart Association, among others.

Dr. Brewer founded MindSciences to move his discoveries of clinical evidence behind mindfulness for anxiety, eating, smoking and other behavior change into the hands of consumers (see www.drjud.com for more information).

He is the author of The Craving Mind: from cigarettes to smartphones to love, why we get hooked and how we can break bad habits (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). Follow him on twitter @judbrewer.

I also uploaded the talk to my personal youtube channel.

Follow LCS!

If you want to follow us at LCS here are some useful links:

LCS website: http://latinoscs.web.illinois.edu
facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/LCSillinois
facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/latinocomputerscienceclub
youtube page: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB40buA2ZnFGM9yCBF0IepA

If you’d like to cite this post:

@misc{miranda2020mindfulnessanxiety,
  author = {Miranda, Brando},
  title  = {Mindfulness as a Cure for Anxiety},
  year   = {2020},
  month  = {October},
  howpublished = {\url{https://brando90.github.io/brandomiranda/2020/10/18/mindfulness-as-a-cure-for-anxiety.html}},
  note   = {Blog post}
}