How Anxiety Hides in Your Habits

Before trying tips to lower your anxiety, a new book encourages you to understand your anxiety routines

When anxiety strikes, we can ward it off better if we take a moment to contemplate the habits that feed it. Zivica Kerkez/Shutterstock

I don’t know about you, but I’m a little tired of reading the same tips over and over about how to calm down and destress. I want other options besides slowing my breathing when my chest feels heavy, or questioning the worst-case scenarios running through my head.

That’s why psychiatrist Judson Brewer’s new book “Unwinding Anxiety“ is so refreshing. Yes, it has tips—but they come later in the book. In fact, his main point is that tips alone won’t help those of us who struggle with anxiety.

Brewer shows how anxiety exists inside the habits of our everyday lives—and habits are sticky. Habits like shallow, tense breathing don’t go away just because we tell ourselves to breathe. As crazy as it sounds, our brain is attracted to these anxiety habits because they create some sense of reward.

Implementing tips and tools skips an important step, Brewer argues. Before we can try to change anything, we have to spend some time observing our anxiety-related habits. Only then—by showing our brain viscerally how unrewarding these habits are—can we move on to actually creating new ones.

“Unwinding Anxiety” offers a three-step process to help you do exactly that, backed up by Brewer’s extensive habit research. While many wellness books can feel overwhelming, his approach is reassuring in its simplicity and engaging enough to feel like it just might work.

Step 1: Map Out Anxiety Habits

If you struggle with anxiety, it’s likely that anxiety has become a habit for you, Brewer writes. Many of our habits were meant to help us reduce stress or satisfy emotional needs, he says. Unfortunately, many of these efforts are short-term only, and don’t always benefit us long-term. Eating comfort foods may be one example. Our habits exist in loops that consist of a trigger, a behavior, and a result. For example:

Trigger: Feel anxious Behavior: Eat something sweet Result: Be distracted from anxiety

Sometimes anxiety can trigger a habit loop, but it can also be the result in a habit loop:

Trigger: Feel unmotivated at work Behavior: Read news Result: Feel anxious about the state of the world

But the most pernicious anxiety-related habit is this basic pattern, which many of us fall into, where anxiety reinforces itself:

Trigger: Feel anxious Behavior: Worry (ruminate on what’s wrong, what could go wrong, etc.) Result: Feel more anxious

What reward could we possibly get out of a self-perpetuating anxiety cycle? Well, Brewer says, the act of worrying can sometimes feel good—or at least better than just sitting with our anxiety. Worrying sometimes (rarely) allows us to come up with solutions, which makes it seem productive. We think we’re solving problems. Some of us are afraid we’ll be unprepared for the future if we don’t worry, and worry gives us a sense of control, even when all we do is churn through the same fears over and over.

Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind, by Judson Brewer, was published by Avery, an imprint of Penguin Books USA, in March 2021.

One of the studies Brewer contributed to (currently under peer review), explored the effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction among a group of doctors. The intervention used an app to help doctors become aware of worry habit loops. For the doctors, this awareness reduced their burnout and cynicism.

“The only sustainable way to change a habit is to update its reward value,” writes Brewer. That means taking a fresh look at how a habit is affecting us now. And we need to do this over and over, each time we repeat the habit in our daily life, until our brain updates its reward value and stops being drawn to the habit.

What does this mean in practice?

Once you’ve identified your habits that support anxiety, you need to be mindful when they occur. If you’re anxious and you start worrying about the future, make a mental note; observe the tightness in your chest, the lump in your throat, how little you get done at work that afternoon.

The good thing about this approach is that moments of anxiety become an opportunity to learn about yourself, not something to be afraid of, and not a failure in your quest for calm. (Self-judgment, apparently, seems to go hand-in-hand with anxiety.)

If you have trouble being aware of habits in real time, you can also look back on your day or your week to see the effects of a particular behavior. If your anxiety made you snap at your partner, how did that feel? Rather than analyzing it, just try to re-experience it in your body.

Over time, Brewer suggests, our brain will naturally become disenchanted with our anxiety habits without us having to use so much willpower, allowing more space for new habits to form.

Step 3: Create New Habits

This step is where most other advice begins: the healthy habits and behaviors that we want to engage in. But it makes sense that there isn’t much room for these new behaviors until our brains detach from the old ones.

Brewer suggests a variety of mindfulness-related behaviors that you could insert into your habit loops when a trigger arises, many of which may be familiar to you already:

• Curiosity and mindfulness: Rather than judging yourself for being anxious, or getting obsessed about where your anxiety is coming from, just get curious. What does it feel like, and where? How does it change? Brewer even recommends saying “Hmmm!” out loud to yourself, to encourage that sense of curiosity.
• Breathing: Tune in to the breathing sensations in your body. Breathe into places where anxiety shows up, and breathe out anxiety. See how things change.
• RAIN: This is a mindfulness practice where you Recognize and relax into the present moment; Accept and allow it to be there; Investigate your bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts; and Note what is happening.
• Noting: This is a practice of labeling what experiences are predominant in your mind moment to moment, including any of your senses (hearing, touch, sight), thinking, or feeling.
• Loving kindness: The practice of sending kind, caring thoughts to people, including yourself, and feeling that sense of warmth in your body.

To reinforce these habits, Brewer suggests you can apply techniques from step 2—but this time, instead of observing the detrimental effects, you observe how good it feels in your body to be curious or generate loving feelings.

Brewer is a habit expert—much of his research has focused on smoking and eating disorders. Although his book is about anxiety, the overall framework could apply to many habits in our lives. His insights reveal why so many of our good intentions to exercise, meditate, and otherwise improve don’t translate into action. Brewer gives us tools we can use to work with our brains, rather than have our brains work according to anxiety-creating habits.

Kira M. Newman is the managing editor of Greater Good. Her work has been published in outlets including The Washington Post, Mindful magazine, Social Media Monthly, and Tech.co, and she is the co-editor of The Gratitude Project.  This article was originally published in Greater Good online magazine.