How to break habit loops and reduce anxiety with Dr. Jud Brewer

Podcast episode originally published on January 11, 2023

Anxiety can behave like a learned habit, and that changes how you approach it. Sharecare Chief Medical Officer Dr. Jud Brewer joins Dr. Kristen Holmes, Global Head of Human Performance, Principal Scientist at WHOOP, to explain why worry can feel briefly rewarding, how that reward keeps the loop alive, and what to do when stress starts spilling into sleep, eating, or everyday decisions.

In this episode of the WHOOP Podcast, Brewer draws on his work as a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and author of Unwinding Anxiety to separate stress from anxiety, map the cue-behavior-reward cycle behind worry, and show how curiosity, kindness, and body awareness can help change deeply ingrained patterns. If you want a practical framework for habit change that goes beyond willpower, this conversation gives you one.

For Brewer’s full explanation of the anxiety habit loop, watch Episode 204 of the WHOOP Podcast on YouTube.

What is the difference between stress and anxiety?

Stress usually has a clear trigger. Anxiety is more often a feeling of unease about uncertainty, especially uncertainty tied to the future.

Brewer’s distinction is useful because people often treat the two words as interchangeable. In his framing, stress tends to arise in response to a defined demand, such as a deadline, a difficult conversation, or a major task that still needs to get done. Once the demand passes, or once you address it, the stress response can settle.

Anxiety behaves differently. Brewer defines it as a feeling of nervousness, worry, or unease about an uncertain event or outcome. That can make anxiety harder to pin down, because the trigger is often vague. You may feel tense, keyed up, or mentally busy without being able to point to one concrete event that caused it.

He also makes an important distinction between planning and worrying. Planning is a forward-looking process that helps you make decisions. Worrying is repetitive mental activity that feels productive in the moment but often leaves you less clear, less settled, and less capable of reasoning well.

Brewer gives that distinction memorable language in the conversation:

“Worrying is kind of like planning on steroids minus the useful part.”

That framing matters in daily life. If you mistake anxiety for a task that can be solved through more thinking, you can easily end up feeding the very loop you want to shut down. If you recognize that you are in worry rather than planning, you have a better chance of stepping out of it before it takes over your attention, your behavior, and eventually your sleep.

What you should take away

• Stress usually follows a clear precipitant, such as a deadline, a demand, or a known challenge
• Anxiety centers on uncertainty and often shows up before you can identify one specific external cause
• Planning helps you decide what to do next, while worrying keeps you mentally occupied without delivering the same clarity
• Separating stress from anxiety gives you a more accurate starting point for changing the pattern

Why can worry become a habit loop?

Worry becomes a habit loop when anxiety itself turns into the trigger, worrying becomes the behavior, and brief relief becomes the reward. That loop can repeat even when worrying never solves the original problem.

Brewer explains this through negative reinforcement, a basic learning process built on three elements: a trigger, a behavior, and a result. Fear is a useful survival signal when something dangerous is happening right now. Planning is also useful because it helps you prepare for the future. The problem comes when the brain blends fear with future thinking. You start reacting to imagined future threats as if the mental activity itself were helping keep you safe.

In that state, the brain can learn that worrying “works” because it creates a temporary sense of control. You feel like you are doing something. Even a small feeling of action can be rewarding enough to reinforce the behavior, so the next anxious feeling triggers more worry.

Brewer also notes that the more anxious and worried you become, the harder it is to use the prefrontal cortex well. The part of the brain you need for thoughtful planning becomes less available as the loop intensifies. So the behavior that feels like problem solving can reduce your ability to solve anything.

This framework shaped Brewer’s work on anxiety treatment. In the conversation, he says that medication helped about 1 in 5 patients show significant symptom reduction, while a randomized controlled trial of his app-based anxiety intervention helped about 1 in 2 people with generalized anxiety disorder and produced an average 67% reduction in anxiety symptoms. Whether you focus on the exact numbers or the mechanism, the takeaway is the same: if anxiety is behaving like a habit, habit-based treatment logic makes sense.

Brewer summarizes the loop this way:

“The feeling of anxiety triggers the mental behavior of worrying, which then gives us the result. It makes us feel like we’re in control, or at least we’re doing something.”

That is why simple awareness can be so powerful. Once you can see the loop as a loop, you stop confusing the reward with the outcome. Brief relief is not the same as lasting resolution.

If you want to hear Brewer walk through the worry mechanism in his own words, watch the full episode on Youtube.

What you should take away

• Worry can become habit-forming when anxiety triggers repetitive thinking and that thinking creates brief relief
• Negative reinforcement follows a simple structure: trigger, behavior, and result
• The temporary feeling of control from worrying can be rewarding enough to keep the loop going
• Anxiety treatment can improve when it targets the learned loop rather than only the surface feeling

How do you map a habit loop and change its reward value?

The first step is to write the loop down. The next step is to pay close attention to what the behavior really gives you.

Brewer uses a very practical exercise with patients: identify the trigger, the behavior, and the result. That can be enough to reveal a pattern that felt invisible before. In one example from the conversation, a patient with panic disorder learned to see the loop clearly: the trigger was thinking he might get into a car accident, the behavior was avoiding highway driving, and the result was temporary relief from panic. Once the loop was visible, it stopped feeling like a mysterious personal flaw and started looking like a learnable pattern.

The same logic applies outside panic. Brewer described another patient whose anxiety regularly triggered eating. By the time the patient came in, he had severe health problems tied to weight, including hypertension, fatty liver disease, and obstructive sleep apnea. What changed the pattern was not a new rule or a stronger burst of discipline. It was the realization that stress eating failed on its own terms. The food did not resolve the anxiety, and it created more health anxiety afterward.

That shift is central to Brewer’s model. He points to the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region involved in assigning reward value. If you slow down enough to notice what a behavior feels like during and after you do it, the brain can update the value it assigns to that behavior. In reinforcement-learning terms, that is a prediction error. If the reward is worse than expected, the brain starts to downgrade the behavior.

Brewer says his team has seen this change happen quickly in overeating. In research tied to his Eat Right Now program, participants learned to pay attention while they overate, rather than zoning out during it. He reports that the perceived reward value can fall below zero after a surprisingly small number of repetitions. That fits with a broader WHOOP resource on behavioral change, which also emphasizes identifying triggers before trying to change routines. The same principle shows up in eating-related habit conversations such as Podcast 157: Dr Hazel Wallace Talks Nutrition and Habit Formation.

Brewer puts the mechanism plainly:

“It only takes 10 to 15 times for somebody to pay attention as they overeat for that reward value to drop below zero.”

The practical question he recommends is simple: “What am I getting from this?” You do not need a long personal history to answer it. You need honest attention in the moment. If the behavior keeps promising relief and repeatedly delivers agitation, fatigue, regret, or more craving, the brain can learn from that.

What you should take away

• Mapping the trigger, behavior, and result can turn a vague problem into a specific, changeable loop
• The most useful question during a habit is, “What am I getting from this?"
• Reward value changes when you pay attention closely enough to see the real outcome of a behavior
• Stress eating, avoidance, scrolling, and other relief-seeking behaviors often weaken once the brain learns their actual payoff

Why do curiosity and kindness help break unhealthy patterns?

Curiosity helps you observe a habit without immediately reacting to it. Kindness helps the brain stay open enough to learn from what it sees.

Brewer returns to curiosity throughout the conversation because it changes the quality of attention. If you approach anxiety with fear or self-criticism, you often reinforce the same tight mental pattern that keeps the loop running. If you approach it with curiosity, you create a small gap between the feeling and the behavior. That gap is where new learning happens.

Kindness matters for a related reason. Brewer argues that many people add a second habit loop on top of the original one: self-judgment. They feel anxious, then they criticize themselves for being anxious. They overeat, then they criticize themselves for overeating. The judgment does not improve learning. It creates more distress and makes it harder to see the habit clearly.

His language here is especially useful because it turns kindness from a vague virtue into a practical intervention. A brain in a harsh, judgmental mode is less receptive to change. A brain in a curious, kind mode can update. That idea also connects to other WHOOP conversations on performance and mental state, including Podcast 137: World-Renowned Sports Psychologist Dr. Jim Loehr on Mental Performance, where emotional state shapes execution and recovery.

Brewer’s “bigger, better offer” idea follows naturally from this. Once the brain sees that worry, self-judgment, or numbing behavior feels unrewarding, it looks for something better. Curiosity can be better. Kindness can be better. Even pausing and feeling the body for a few seconds can be better. The replacement sticks when it feels better in direct experience, not when it merely sounds virtuous in theory.

Brewer makes the learning principle explicit here:

“Our brains learn from sweetness. So if we’re bitter on ourselves, if we’re constantly judging ourselves, we’re actually closing ourselves down from learning.”

That point changes how you think about habit change. Many people assume change requires pressure, shame, or force. Brewer’s framework says the brain changes more reliably when it feels safe enough to notice, update, and choose again.

Holmes and Brewer go deeper on self-judgment, curiosity, and behavior change in the full episode on Youtube.

What you should take away

• Curiosity creates the mental space needed to see a habit before you act on it
• Self-judgment can become its own reinforcing loop and make behavior change harder
• Kindness helps learning because the brain updates more easily in an open, less defensive state
• New habits last longer when they feel better in direct experience than the behavior they replace

How can body awareness improve sleep and reduce anxious thinking?

Body awareness helps because anxiety often registers physically before it turns into full mental spiraling. Sleep improves when you can notice those signals early and avoid feeding them with more worry.

Brewer recommends a body scan, sometimes called a body sweep, as a way to rebuild familiarity with your internal state. The practice is straightforward: move your attention through the body and notice sensations without trying to fix them. That can sound basic, but his point is deeper. Many people live at a distance from their bodies, especially when stress, pain, or discomfort have taught them to tune out physical signals.

The body scan reverses that habit. Instead of reacting automatically to a sensation, you start learning what it feels like. You can distinguish hunger from craving, tension from panic, or physical activation from the story your mind quickly attaches to it. Over time, that skill gives you earlier access to the loop, which means more choice.

Brewer also recommends the practice at night. Worry often ramps up as external demands drop away, and bedtime gives the mind room to start rehearsing uncertain futures. In the conversation, Brewer says worry contributes to sleep disturbance so consistently that the National Institutes of Health includes dedicated sleep-disturbance measures. He also says his team found that targeting anxiety through their program improved both anxiety symptoms and sleep disturbance.

For WHOOP members, this is the point where physiology can make the pattern easier to see. WHOOP does not diagnose anxiety, but it can show how periods of high mental strain may carry into the night through changes in Sleep, Recovery, heart rate variability, and resting heart rate. If you want a structured way to tag routines and compare them with physiological trends, Podcast No. 64: How the New WHOOP Journal Works explains how behavior logging fits into the WHOOP app.

Brewer ties the sleep connection to the mechanism directly:

“Worry contributes to sleep disturbance so much that the National Institutes of Health even has specific measures about that.”

The broader message is simple. When you get better at sensing what is happening in the body, you interrupt the jump from sensation to story. That can calm the nighttime cascade that otherwise keeps you mentally active long after you want to be asleep.

To hear Brewer explain body scans, anxious thoughts, and sleep in more depth, watch the full episode on Youtube.

What you should take away

• Body awareness helps you catch anxiety earlier, often before it turns into a long chain of worried thinking
• A body scan can improve your ability to distinguish sensations, cravings, tension, and emotional activation
• Worry is closely tied to sleep disturbance, especially when it shows up during the pre-sleep window
• WHOOP data can help you see whether stressful periods are carrying into Sleep and Recovery, even though physiology alone does not diagnose anxiety

How can you use stress productively without feeding more worry?

Stress becomes useful when you identify the real demand and choose the next needed action. It becomes less useful when you keep chasing relief without deciding what the moment calls for.

Brewer’s practical question is, “What do I need right now versus what do I want?” That shift matters because stress often pushes people toward immediate relief. You may want the feeling to stop. You may want distraction, food, scrolling, or another quick exit. The more useful move is to ask what the situation requires.

Sometimes the answer is action. If the stress is tied to a task, doing the task may resolve it. Sometimes the answer is recovery. If you have been stuck in a constant to-do-list loop, a short pause may be the needed intervention. The value of the question is that it interrupts automaticity. It moves you from reflex to response.

Brewer also shares a personal example that makes the principle feel concrete. During his commute by bicycle in New Haven, Connecticut, drivers would honk at him, and he would arrive at the hospital agitated. He began treating the honk as a cue to practice loving-kindness, offering a brief phrase of goodwill to the driver and to himself. Over time, the commute stopped reinforcing anger and started reinforcing steadier attention.

That story is a reminder that habits do not only live in eating, smoking, or worrying. They live in how you react to small daily frictions. Brewer’s commuting example also pairs well with WHOOP content on goal adherence, including Podcast 205: Expert Tips for Sticking with Your New Year’s Goal, because consistent behavior change often depends on how you handle ordinary stressors, not dramatic turning points.

Brewer’s question is short enough to use anywhere:

“What do I need right now versus what do I want?”

That question can change the tone of a day. It can turn stress from a signal that sends you into habit into a signal that helps you choose the next right behavior.

For Brewer’s full discussion of stress, kindness, and everyday behavior change, watch the full episode on Youtube.

What you should take away

• Stress is easier to use well when you ask what the moment requires rather than chasing immediate relief
• The question “What do I need right now?” can interrupt stress-driven automatic behavior
• Small recurring situations, such as commuting or inbox overload, are often the best places to practice new habits
• Repeating a kinder response to routine stress can reshape the reward attached to that situation over time

The bottom line

• Stress usually has a clear trigger and endpoint, while anxiety centers on uncertainty and often drives repetitive thinking about the future
• Worry can become a habit loop when anxiety serves as the trigger, worrying becomes the behavior, and temporary relief acts as the reward
• Mapping a habit into trigger, behavior, and result is one of the fastest ways to make an automatic pattern visible
• The brain updates habits by revising reward value, which is why honest attention to what a behavior really gives you can weaken the loop
• Curiosity helps you observe a feeling without immediately reacting, and kindness helps the brain stay open enough to learn
• Body awareness can reduce anxious spiraling by helping you notice physical sensations before they become long chains of worried thought
• Sleep often worsens when worry becomes active at night, and WHOOP data can help show whether that mental strain is carrying into Sleep and Recovery
• Productive stress management starts with asking what you need right now, then choosing the next action that fits the real demand

Frequently asked questions about things discussed in this episode

How does WHOOP help you see when stress is affecting sleep?

WHOOP helps you see stress-related sleep disruption by surfacing the downstream physiology in Sleep, Recovery, heart rate variability, and resting heart rate. If a stressful period starts showing up as lower Recovery, a higher resting heart rate, or more fragmented sleep, WHOOP gives you a consistent record of that pattern over time.

What does WHOOP measure that can reflect the carryover from anxiety?

WHOOP measures signals such as sleep duration, sleep stages, heart rate variability, resting heart rate, respiratory rate, and overall Recovery, which can reflect the carryover from anxious periods. Those signals do not diagnose anxiety, but they can show whether mental strain is affecting how your body is recovering.

How can WHOOP help you spot habit loops over time?

WHOOP can help you spot habit loops by pairing daily physiology with repeatable behaviors and routines. When you log patterns consistently and compare them with Sleep and Recovery trends, it becomes easier to see which behaviors keep promising relief and which ones support better recovery.

What does WHOOP Recovery tell you during stressful periods?

WHOOP Recovery gives you a daily view of how prepared your body appears to be for strain after accounting for recent sleep and physiological load. During stressful periods, lower Recovery can be a useful prompt to look at sleep timing, routine, mental load, and whether stress is spilling into nighttime physiology.

How does WHOOP handle mental health information such as anxiety?

WHOOP records physiological and behavioral information, and clinical diagnosis still belongs with a licensed clinician. If anxiety symptoms are persistent, disruptive, or worsening, WHOOP data can support pattern awareness while treatment decisions stay with a qualified healthcare professional.

What can WHOOP members do if they notice a pattern between stress, late eating, and poor sleep?

WHOOP members can use that pattern as a cue for experimentation rather than self-judgment. A consistent link between stress, late eating, and weaker Sleep or Recovery is a strong reason to adjust the evening routine, log the change, and watch whether the physiology improves over the next several nights.

When worry starts to feel automatic, WHOOP data can help you see whether that pattern is showing up in your nights, your recovery, and the routines you repeat every day.