Speaker 1 · 0:01When it comes to losing weight and overcoming addiction, what's more powerful? Ancient wisdom or modern science? The answer may surprise you. Welcome to the Mindfulness Exercises podcast. May this be a source of inspiration and motivation in your mindfulness practice and teachings. In this episode, Dr. Judd Brewer will share with us why losing weight and keeping it off is so difficult when using willpower alone and why mindfulness might be the missing element. When we use willpower and self-control, we sabotage our odds of success. But when we lean into mindfulness and ancient wisdom, we find a new path to greater success. Dr. Judd is passionate about understanding how our brains work and how to use that knowledge to help people make deep, permanent changes in their lives. He is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist and author of two New York Times best-selling books. Dr. Judd was catapulted into international fame with a viral TED talk on habit change. As Dr. Judd says, losing weight is about far more than just calories and exercise.
Speaker 2 · 1:39I thought I would give a little bit of kind of an intro to start, and then we'll move into there's kind of a three-step process that can help people step out of, let's say, mindless eating and into using mindful eating as a practice. Now, in medical school, I learned a formula for weight loss, which was just making sure you have more calories out than calories in. That formula is correct. It was correct then. It is still correct. Yet knowing this formula doesn't actually do a whole lot. Folks are becoming overweight despite knowing these formulas. You don't have to go to your doctor to know that if you eat fewer calories and you exercise more, then you'll lose weight. We can't think our way into weight loss. The cognitive control part of our brain relies on the prefrontal cortex, which is the youngest and the weakest part of our brain from an evolutionary perspective. And in fact, this is the first part of our brain that goes offline when we get stressed. As an addiction psychiatrist, there's this saying that I learned probably in residency, and some of you may know it. It's called halt, hungry, angry, lonely, tired. When somebody is hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, they're more vulnerable to relapse, to drug use. And that also applies to the spectrum of you know, somebody's trying to make sure they don't eat sweets or eat sugared food or very processed food. Ironically, when they are hungry, their prefrontal cortex is more likely to go offline and it's harder for them to exercise willpower. In fact, in modern-day neuroscience, willpower is seen as more myth than muscle. There are actual real arguments around whether willpower is a thing at all. And we'll talk about that more in a moment. But the basic idea here is that we haven't been approaching eating from a neuroscience perspective. We've been approaching it from a heuristic, from a willpower make sense formula is correct perspective, but that perspective is not actually how our brains work. And so I'll give a little bit of a primer on how our brains actually work and then how we can tap into this, and you'll see that mindfulness plays a central role in tapping into this process. So the one slider on the brain is that we have these old survival parts of the brain, and I'll talk about this in a minute. And then we've got the new part, the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in thinking and planning. The neocortex helps us survive in a different way than the old brain for basically simulating future scenarios and trying to predict the future based on past experiences. So let's zoom in on this old survival brain, B.F. Skinner, who became famous for his studies of pigeons because he wanted to know, in general, why animals behave the way they do, how animals learn. In fact, he found that he could teach a pigeon to win a cross-court shot in ping pong for a food reward. Now, pigeons aren't particularly prone to playing ping pong, but they will play for food. And so what Skinner highlighted, and this was kind of the basis for what was described in the 50s and 60s as behaviorism that really gained a lot of popularity at that time, that we can really explain a lot of behavior based on some very simple principles. We feel good, we have an urge to eat, and then these get reinforced, feels good. So our brain lays this down as a memory and says, do that again. And so next time we see a cue, it triggers us to eat. So this can be positive cues, these can be neutral cues. Something stressful happens, we learn to eat chocolate, and so we feel better. And this reinforces that process. So very well-known process, very worked out mechanistically.
Speaker 1 · 6:19So let's take a quick pause here before we move on. And in this pause, reflect for a moment on what it feels like to hear that mindfulness may be more effective than willpower. So many of us have tried willpower and failed. So what does it feel like to hear that it's not your fault? The latest science deems willpower or self-control as largely an illusion. Letting go of that illusion opens us to the possibility there are other more effective solutions for weight loss. So let's continue and learn more about the role of mindfulness.
Speaker 2 · 7:10Now, if we simplify this to its essential elements, this reward-based learning process has three necessary and sufficient pieces. One is a trigger, one is a behavior, and one is a result or a reward. And the idea here is that this process is set up to help us do two things to eat and not be eaten. So when we're hungry, there's the trigger, we eat some food, and assuming that it's not poisonous, our stomach sends a dopamine signal to our brain that tells us to remember what we ate and where we found it. Now I'm going to highlight this because this is really important. This is set up to help us learn where things are and what behaviors to repeat in the future. So it's really a context-dependent memory formation process. It helps us remember where food is. Think of our ancient ancestors out on the savannah. They didn't have refrigerators. They had to go find food basically every day. And they also had to avoid danger. So when they're out on the savannah, they find some food, their brain fires dopamine and says, Remember where this is. And then when they are out on the savannah checking around to make sure that there's no danger there, when they see danger, this is the not be eaten part, their brain fires this dopamine pathway and says, Hey, remember where that is and don't go back there. So to eat and not be eaten. Now, importantly, dopamine fires when we receive a reward at first, but then the dopamine firing shifts from getting it to anticipating getting it. So it basically fires as a way to urge us to go get the food in the future. And this is where cravings come in. Dopamine doesn't just fire every time we get the food, it fires the first time, and then that dopamine firing shifts from getting it because we've now remembered where it is, to motivating us to go get it. And people talk about dopamine being a pleasure molecule. Yeah, it's not. Dopamine is there to help us lay down memory. If you look at the way that it functions, we've talked about when something surprising happens. Surprise is not joy, it's surprise. It's not supposed to be pleasant, it's supposed to urge us to go do something. And what urges us to do something is the unpleasantness, the dissatisfaction in experience that says, go make this better. Because we're not at baseline, we're not at homeostatic levels. Our brain is saying, go do something to make me feel better. So that's that dopaminergic drive. When we get caught up in craving, that's where suffering happens. That's not pleasure. Now, knowing this process is really helpful in a number of different ways, which is where the food industry has actually done a great job of engineering things to be food-like that are hyper palatable and make our dopamine system fire like crazy so that we, as the potato chip commercial says, we bet you can't just eat one. Yes, because we've designed it that way. So I just want to summarize this part of the talk, suggesting that we know a whole lot about how this process works. And if we know how this process works, we can use it in ways to get people to repeat the process over and over and over. There are two systems at play here. So our body is set up for what's called homeostatic hunger. So physiologic hunger, when we physiologically need calories, our stomach rumbles and says, go get some food. Okay, so that is homeostatic hunger. When we are out of balance, our body says, go do something to get more in balance. Yet with this opera and conditioning or this reinforcement learning process, we can actually learn to eat in the absence of hunger. And this is now called hedonic hunger. Hedonic, you know, just meaning the valence. If something's pleasant, we are learn to do it again. If something is unpleasant and we learn to eat to avoid that unpleasantness, we learn to eat that way. So this, in combination with the engineering of food to be hyperpalatable and dopamine jacking, so to speak, to optimize us to crave that food more in the future. Now we've got an obesity epidemic.
Speaker 1 · 12:06Now, Dr. Judd said something very interesting a moment ago. How knowledge of the neuroscience of craving can actually help us become more aware of our experience. For example, just knowing there's a difference between homeostatic and hedonic hunger can help us better tune in to the nuance of our own hunger. In fact, loneliness and hunger light up the same parts of the brain. On the other hand, craving is often unrelated to nutritional lack and lights up areas of the brain unrelated to hunger. So it's to our benefit to question and get curious about what a physiological response feels like. Habit formation warrants a bit of questioning on our part, and mindfulness has a role to play there. But let's shift gears now and hear more about the role of mindfulness in habit transformation.
Speaker 2 · 13:15So the idea here is if we can understand the process of how our minds work, we can then start to work with our minds. And this is where mindfulness comes in. The way I like to think of mindfulness, you know, this paying attention from a mechanistic perspective, it's about helping us see when we are acting automatically, where we are reacting based on our conditioning. And instead of habitually reacting, we drive this wedge of awareness in so that we can respond with awareness. The suggestion is that if we actually bring awareness in, actually things take care of themselves. It's simply through awareness that we can actually tap into the brain. So, how does this work? The idea here is reward-based learning or reinforcement learning is not based on the behavior itself, it's based on how rewarding the behavior is. So if something's really rewarding, we're going to do it again. If it's not rewarding, we'd be starting to become disenchanted. The Buddha even described this. He said, it wasn't until I explored gratification to its end that knowledge and vision arose. So he's talking about really exploring how rewarding behavior is. In the first study that we did, this was 10 years ago now that we published this, we got five times the quit rates of gold standard treatment for smoking. But the idea is that we can give people bite-sized trainings. So we can give people 10 minutes a day of mindfulness training. They can track their goals. And importantly, we can help people start to learn the difference between homeostatic and hedonic hunger. And so we developed this tool to help them start to bring awareness to their embodied experience so they could start to differentiate when they were actually hungry versus when they were driven to eat by emotions, when that hedonic hunger was coming in. If we actually apply these principles, if we look at reinforcement learning and we target reinforcement learning using mindfulness, and again, we're going to get into the specifics of how we do that, we can actually get pretty strong and significant results. And this doesn't just apply to eating, this applies to any habits. The first step is we've got to be aware of what's happening. If we're not aware, we can't work with it. And the second step, this is really straight from the suttas, you know, exploring the results of the behavior, exploring gratification to its end, basically, asking questions like what do I get from this? Again, we'll get into this. And then the third step is stepping out of these habit loops. So just to give you a sense of this first step, it's probably the easiest step. Map out, you know, what's the trigger, what's the behavior, what's the result. We put together a free habit mapper that anybody can download as PDF, print it out, use. I use it with my patients. I think it's mapmyhabit.com. So you can just download that or direct people there if you want to encourage them to do the habit mapping piece. Here's somebody mapping out her habit loop around eating. Trigger uncomfortable feeling, behavior, eat something that temporarily diminishes the feeling. Reward, still have to deal with the unpleasant feelings plus the sugar headache. I can clearly see how I got caught in this habit loop trying to escape difficult feelings with food, but that ultimately it doesn't work. Okay, let's move to step two. So once we map out our habits, the next step is around working with them. So you map out the habit of here's my trigger, here's the behavior. What do you get from this? You're gonna feel into your direct experience, not in a thinking way, but in a feeling way, because our thinking brains do not hold a candle to our feeling bodies. Our feeling bodies are what drive behavior. What do I get from this? And you're gonna feel into your experience, you're gonna describe what you get. What does it feel like when you overindulge? Whether it's eating, you know, maybe eating junk food, eating too much, whatever you overindulge in. This is something that we can actually embed right into these tools to measure the change in reward value. And what this means is basically current reward values based on the previous reward value. If we don't pay attention, this is zero, and we just keep doing the same thing. If we pay attention, we can get a positive or a negative prediction error. That's the error term. Positive prediction means let's use an example of somebody, let's say I like chocolate cake, and I go to a bakery and it's a new bakery. I see some chocolate cake, it looks good. I eat that chocolate cake and it is amazing. It's the best chocolate cake I've ever had. I get a positive prediction error, meaning my brain expected it to be so rewarding, but it was better. My brain lays down this reward value, says, hey, go back to this bakery and eat this cake again. If I eat the cake and it's not that good, my brain's like, eh, I get a negative prediction error. It's not as good as expected, and so I'm less likely to go back and less motivated to go back to that bakery. So, long story short, we can actually embed this right into our Eat Right Now app, where we first have people imagine eating so either a type or an amount of food. And what that does is it's projecting the future based on past experience. It brings back the reward value from whatever we've laid down previously. Then we ask people how much are you craving it? If they crave it more, it suggests that it's got a pretty high reward value. If they bring it up and they go, they may not have that high of a reward value. And then we have them pay attention as they eat. So they go through a mindful eating exercise, and we can take all of this together to measure how quickly they change behavior based on this change in reward value. Here's a study that we did with 38 individuals, and we found that within 10 times of somebody paying attention as they mindfully ate, that reward value dropped below zero, as in below not eating. There's another study of a thousand people in a community sample where we actually found again five, 10 craving tool uses not very long before it drops below zero, and we get a shift in behavior. So I hope that gives you a good sense for this second step, which is really to focus on how rewarding a behavior is. The good thing about this is when we really pay attention, we can't unlearn these things. We can't unsee these things. I think of this as the Santa Claus effect. Sorry to be Christian-centric here, but if you imagine for anybody that takes your kid to Santa Claus and they reach for the beard, and you go, no, because you know as soon as they grab the beard, the gig is up. You can't unsee that. You can't pretend that Santa Claus is real anymore. This is true for our brains as well. And so if we understand the process and understand the mechanism, we can say, okay, let's do a mindful eating exercise, use a raisin or whatever, as a way to help people pay attention, really pay attention, or we can do mindful eating of something that we might overindulge in so that we can start to feel out that pleasure plateau. That's one exercise I have people do, is like people talk about like Brooklyn pizza. Brooklyn pizza is like the best pizza I've had. Really, really good. And so what I have people do when they're they're like, I just eat a bunch of it, I have them pay attention with each bite and map out the pleasure plateau. Is this bite better than, same as, or worse than the last one? And you can actually map this out. And we start to plateau and then we start to go off the other end. And it's not like it's going to magically change the taste of Brooklyn style of pizza. We might even enjoy it more. Yet we don't overindulge because our body knows when to stop. Because it's like I've had enough, and this doesn't taste as good anymore.
Speaker 1 · 21:19So let's pause quickly here to reiterate the mindfulness exercise Dr. Judd has just described. Exploring gratification to its very end, observing what it feels like to overindulge. The next time you eat anything, ask yourself with each and every bite, at what point is this no longer gratifying? For many of us, this exercise might best be done alone, while eating at a much slower pace than we're used to. Take your time, chew your food, and notice when the flavor starts to wane, or when the stomach begins to feel full. Where's the shift between pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant? Allow what you sense in your body about your present moment experience to guide your next move. In the moment, you may decide to put the fork down or just take one more bite. But the next time you may decide not to eat at all, or not to eat that particular item. There's no right or wrong, but by exploring and getting curious about the reward value of our behavior, we may just find it's not so rewarding after all. And as Dr. Judd says, once we learn that, we cannot unsee it. This is what leads to behavioral change.
Speaker 2 · 23:03Let's jump right into this third gear. And I think of third gear as finding that bigger, better offer. I talk a lot about this in the Unwinding Anxiety, but the idea is we got to give our brains something better if we become disenchanted with the old. So here, if we look at awareness and that attitude of curiosity, what I would suggest is that actually that curiosity is the perfect substitute behavior. Because one, it is intrinsic. And two, we can always tap into it. We don't become habituated to curiosity. It never gets dull by its nature. And so, as an example, when we have an urge to eat, we can get curious. Huh, what does that urge feel like? And we can make that a mindfulness practice. Where do I feel in my body? We can do some noting practice. Is it tightness? Is it tension? Is it burning? Is it whatever? And in that moment, we're shifting from being caught up in that craving to feeling into the natural reward of curiosity itself. And in the process, we're stepping out of the habit loop. So that's really what this third step is all about. We're stepping out of the habit loop.
Speaker 1 · 24:36As Dr. Judd speaks here about replacing reactivity with curiosity. Well, isn't that what mindfulness is about? Not just in terms of habit change or weight loss, but in terms of how we all live our lives. There's a fascinating paper on curiosity and what's known as the self-discrepancy gap. This is the gap between how we perceive ourselves and how we ideally like to be. And as it turns out, the more curious we are, the more we close this gap between the perceived actual self and the ideal self. So when we think back to willpower, our attempt at self-control is perhaps an attempt to get closer to this ideal self. But it fails. Willpower situates us in a battle against the self. Curiosity and mindfulness behave differently. We slow down. We question. We explore. We become better connected to the self. So what might that look like for you? To become curious versus reactive. And what might that require from you? Some of us need a daily, formal mindfulness practice as a reminder. For some of us, it might look like slowing down, inserting a pause more often. Perhaps question what it is that helps keep you mindful as we listen to Dr. Judd's conclusion.
Speaker 2 · 26:27So our typical eating pattern is trigger behavior results, where we see the cake, we eat the cake, and then we feel stuffed, or we feel this is if we overindulge, you know, we feel guilty. And so we go to the diet mentality where we say, see the cake, force myself not to eat the cake. We could not eat the cake. This is aligned with our goal, but it still feels depleting. What this suggests is that with awareness itself, that one ingredient, we can see the cake, we can get curious about what that urge feels like. And so here it's non-depluting because curiosity itself is actually energizing. If you look at the seven factors of awakening, you can think of that second factor investigation. You can liberally translate it as curiosity. This actually leads to energy where we can then get curious and then we don't eat, not because we're forcing ourselves not to, but because we're seeing the result, we're becoming disenchanted. And in the process, we develop the bigger, better offer of curiosity itself. I love this phrase, the only way out is through. So instead of trying to crush or run away from our cravings, we turn toward them and we get curious about them. And it kind of illuminates, oh, wait, this isn't so bad. So I'll have folks set a timer when their craving comes on, because often people think, oh, this is gonna last forever. Of course, no cravings ever lasted forever, or they would still have it. I think the record is 13 minutes. So somebody timed their craving. And when they saw, oh, it's 13 minutes, they're like, wow, I thought it was gonna be an hour. So when we turn toward it and explore the craving with curiosity, we see, oh, it's actually these physical sensations not so bad. And we can learn relatively quickly to ride out just about any craving. And the more we ride one out, the more empowered we become because we can see, oh, these are just physical sensations, these are just thoughts, these are just emotions coming and going, which is also a metaphor for this whole path for all of our practices. So just to bring all of this to a close, what I would suggest is that we actually have this ancient learning system based on helping us survive. We know a whole lot about this, and curious awareness may be that substitute that we've all been looking for rather than willpower or some other forced-based methodology.
Speaker 1 · 28:56As Dr. Brewer said earlier, bring awareness in and things take care of themselves. Maybe that's easier said than done, but we're here to provide you with all the tools you need for mindful living. You can also find Dr. Judd's behavior mapping tool at mapmyhabit.com. It's wonderful use as a mindfulness exercise. Whether for overeating, smoking, or any habit you're interested in exploring and transforming.
