- May
- 25
- 2021
Is awareness a critical ingredient for behavior change? Psychological and neural mechanisms of mindfulness for breaking bad habits
Description: We are all vulnerable to craving. Whether it’s a compulsion to constantly check social media, overeat, smoke, excessively drink, or any other behavior, we may find ourselves uncontrollably repeating. Why are bad habits so hard to overcome? Is willpower more myth than muscle? Can we learn how our minds work, and even tap into this very process to find a key to conquer the cravings we know are unhealthy for us and foster our natural capacities for awareness and kindness? Drawing on his clinical work, research studies and development of next-generation therapeutics for habit change, Dr. Brewer will discuss the underlying behavioral and neurobiological mechanisms of why habits are formed and how mindfulness can paradoxically tap into these very processes to uproot them. He will also discuss how we…
About Speaker
Jud Brewer MD PhD is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences at the School of Public Health and Psychiatry at the Medical School 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 behavior 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 source-estimated EEG, and is currently translating these findings into clinical use (see www.drjud.com for more information). He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, presented to the US President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, foreign Parliaments, trained US Olympic athletes and coaches, and foreign government ministers and has been featured on 60 minutes, at TED (4th most viewed talk of 2016 with over 16 Million views), in the New York Times, Time magazine (top 100 new health discoveries of 2013), Forbes, Businessweek, NPR, National Geographic, and the BBC among others. 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) and Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind (Avery/Penguin Random House, 2021). Follow him on twitter @judbrewer.