 What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health. So if you're like somebody like me who is actively trying to improve your mental health, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And boy, do I have a treat for you today. All right. So I had the honor, the pleasure of sitting down with the psychologist, author, neuroscientist Dr. Judson Brewer. All right. He has done two TED talks because he is actually one of the leading experts on habit forming. So today we talk a little bit about healthy and unhealthy habits during the coronavirus outbreak if you're struggling with anxiety. But he has also written a book called The Craving Mind and he has developed a few apps to help people with their mental health as well as like smoking, weight loss, and anxiety. All right. But one of my favorite things about this conversation is we dive into some of the science behind it because Dr. Judd Brewer isn't just a psychologist. He actually develops different methods and he does scientific research to back them up. He does clinical trials and we discussed that a little bit in this interview. So if you struggle with anxiety, make sure you watch this entire interview. I will also be uploading it to the podcast. It'll be next Wednesday's episode, but because a lot of people are stuck at home, a lot of people are experiencing anxiety, I wanted to get it out now. And do me a favor. If you know anybody struggling with anxiety, please share this video with them because YouTube isn't really distributing these coronavirus videos because they're trying to stay diligent and prevent any type of misinformation. But the problem is, is that anything tagged coronavirus, they kind of shove it down to the bottom of the list. So please, please, please share it. If you find anything in this that's beneficial. All right. Anyways, let's hop into the interview. All right. So today I am with Dr. Judd Brewer. How are you doing today, Judd? I'm good. How are you? Pretty good. Pretty good as well as I can be. But yeah, we're going to be talking about the anxiety aspect of the coronavirus outbreak going on. A lot of people at home, working from home, trying to practice social distancing. So can you tell the wonderful audience a little bit about your work and especially around like, it was what, a year or two ago, you released the Unwinding Anxiety app. So talk to me a little bit about your work and what's going on. Yeah, sure. So I'm an addiction psychiatrist. I'm also a neuroscientist and I'm the director of research at the Brown University's mindfulness center. I also founded a startup company called Mind Sciences, which actually develops digital therapeutics, which is just a fancy term, perhaps. And so my lab's been studying both the neurobiological outcomes and like the neural mechanisms of mindfulness for a long time. And we've also been looking at how we can create evidence-based digital therapeutics to help people anywhere, anybody that has a phone, basically. And so we first created one for smoking after we had done a study with mindfulness training, showing that it was five times better than gold standard treatments and helping people quit. Then we did an app called Eat Right Now where we found a 40% reduction in craving-related eating. And then we, yeah, I think a couple of years ago we launched this Unwinding Anxiety app. And actually we just finished a couple of clinical studies on it. One was literally just published. It's not even in press yet, but it was accepted for publication a couple of weeks ago on physician anxiety. Yeah, it was interesting because, you know, physicians, well, I can speak for myself, you know, we tend to be a pan in the ass. And so in particular, we're not really taught good coping skills in medical school. You know, there's the thing about armoring up, you know, just, you just got to suck it up. And our job is to help other people not help ourselves, which isn't great because then we end up burning out. You know, just watch on, if you watch movies or television shows about doctors, you never see them going to the bathroom, right? They're always helping people. So we did this study just to see if they would use this app and we got a 57% reduction in clinically validated anxiety scores, which was gangbusters. And then so we did a replication study because all, you know, science really needs replication. We did a randomized controlled trial with people with generalized anxiety disorder. So this is folks who basically wake up anxious and they're anxious all day and they go to sleep anxious. And in this randomized control trial, we compared the unwinding anxiety app to basically that plus standard, you know, medication people going to see their doctor and whatnot to just them usual care where they're going to see their doctors and whatnot. And we got a 63% reduction in clinically validated anxiety scores, much, much better. I think then the, in the control group was only about 15% reduction. Now the control groups anxiety went down a little bit, which is good because you would hope the clinical care is doing something, but it was, you know, 15% compared to 63. That's a no brainer. Yeah. I talk about this with my audience. I actually got into mindfulness myself because I have a generalized anxiety disorder. I'm also a recovering drug addict. So I can't take Xanax or value or anything like that. So I was taking I can't even remember what the original one was, but anyways, it was only doing so much for me, right? And I can't, you know, just up my dosage or anything like that. So I heard about mindfulness and the benefits and the science behind it helping with reducing anxiety. And that has taken, you know, that has taken up that, that kind of gap that the medication wasn't filling. Um, so can you, can you discuss a little bit about like the science from what we've found for mindfulness? Because to my understanding by my very little understanding of the brain, we got our limbic system that houses the amygdala that freaks out. Yeah. How does mindfulness affect that? Yeah. So maybe I could even illustrate this with the patient case that I've been seeing. He's been working with me for about six months. So kind of use this as a vignette and then we can talk through how, you know, how our brain works that way. So I had a patient who was referred to me for general, well, he was actually just referred for anxiety. I didn't know what the story was, but when he walked in the door, he looked very anxious and he was also actually about 180 pounds overweight. And when he sat down and I took his history, he described how over, you know, recently he had developed this real fear of driving where to the point where he'd have panic attacks while he was driving on the highway. The way he described it was that he felt like he was in a speeding bullet to the point where he couldn't drive on the highway anymore. In fact, he was anxious just coming to my office, driving there a couple of miles where he didn't even need to drive on the highway. So let's take that as an illustration of, you know, the problem with our, I don't see the problem with our brains, but, you know, how our brains work. So fear is a good survival mechanism and fear can help us learn. So if we almost step out into the street and, you know, we see the car coming at us, then we step back in the sphere responses, hey, remember to look both ways before crossing the street. And we form a habit, hopefully, of looking both ways to the point where we don't have to remind ourselves to look. And it only takes three elements, trigger a behavior and a reward. So if the trigger is that we see a car coming at us, the behavior is to not step into the street, the reward is that we survive, you know. So that's survival. Yet if we start worrying about the fact that we could have gotten hit by a car, or could have, you know, so think of my patient, it wasn't that he got in any accidents. It was that he was thinking, oh, maybe I will get in an accident. So that fear had actually turned to anxiety. It's like the fear of the fear. And he was, he was worrying about getting in accidents. And that's, it's an interesting point of panic disorder is that it's not just about having panic attacks. You know this, I'm sure, but I'm guessing some folks don't, that it's not about having panic attacks. It's about worrying that you're going to have a panic attack to the point where it affects your life significantly where, for example, for this guy, he didn't drive anymore and so on and so on. So he had panic disorder because he was getting in this negative spiral where the thought of getting in a car accident led him to avoid driving. That was the behavior. And that would help him avoid having those unpleasant feelings of, oh no, I meant get in a car accident. So there's a great example of how our brains work in terms of having fear being a helpful survival mechanism, moving to anxiety and worry. Now, let's, let's place this in the current context because there's, there are other pieces here at play. So on top of, so think of that as like our survival brain, right? Reward based learning or reinforcement learning is that trigger behavior reward thing. On top of that, you know, I don't know, million years, whatever, a while ago, we developed this neocortex, this, you know, new brain literally. And part of that's the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in thinking and planning. So at some point, our ancient ancestors learned to start planning about things. So the thing that you need for planning for your thinking brain to work is you need accurate information. Today, we don't have enough information to plan for the future. So our brains start spinning out on these worry habit loops doing what if, what if, what if, because, you know, they can't fill that in with information, right? We simulate behavior based on previous experience. Well, none of us have had an experience with a pandemic before, right? The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, everybody either died from the pandemic or, you know, died from old age. So none of those folks are around to give us, you know, like here, here's what we did. And it's probably different back then anyway. So not a lot of information that we can draw from our previous experience. And we don't have a lot of information about this virus that we can draw from. So contrast that to the seasonal flu, seasonal flu still kills a lot of people, right? It's not, it's not a benign thing. Yet we don't freak out over it because we have a lot of information on how to manage it. So we've got a lack of a history with pandemics, fortunately, for us not having them, but now tough now. And we also are still learning about how dangerous this thing is and getting good testing kits out there and even learning like, what is the spread of this disease right now in all the countries across the world. So you add, you add that uncertainty into this fear response and that's where we get increased anxiety. On top of that, we never before, you know, before the advent of the internet and things like social media, you could spread a physical contagion through touch, through sneezing, through things like that. But if you kept your physical distance, you wouldn't catch it. Here, somebody can sneeze on your brain anywhere in the world, right? With social contagion. So social contagion is just literally the spread of emotion or affect from one person to another. So if we go on social media, every time we scroll, each time we scroll, it's like walking into a possibility of being sneezed on. You never know if somebody's social media post is going to be a freak out or a non freak out media post. So the more we scroll, the more we are exposing ourselves to that social contagion. When you add social contagion to anxiety, you get panic. Right? Yeah. So now, you know, this is, and you can even think about it in the grocery store. I think about this, a friend mentioned this to me a couple of days ago. He said, yeah, I called the toilet paper index. So the stock market has a fear index, which not surprisingly has surpassed the fear index of the 2008 financial meltdown. So everybody's much more afraid. We see this in the stock market going nuts. And there's this toilet paper index where you go to the grocery store with your grocery list, and you don't think about, yeah, maybe it'd be a good idea that I stock up on nine months of toilet paper, right? Nobody does that. We don't even have space for it. It's not necessary. So we're like, okay, I'm going to get whatever. And then we look around and some guy is grabbing all the toilet paper and suddenly our prefrontal cortex goes offline and this scarcity thing kicks in and says, oh, no, I have to get as much toilet paper as I can as well. We're not thinking it's just our reactive panic rate going into panic mode. Yeah, I've noticed that. So something mindfulness has helped me out a lot with is kind of noticing what my own brain's doing. And right before this whole thing kicked off, I started noticing people start to hoard things and I had a very set plan, you know, we make our grocery list, but seeing others doing that behavior, it's almost just like, am I missing something? Like, should I be doing this too? Should I be stocking up for, you know, the Armageddon, right? And those of you who watch this will be putting a description in the description down below. Judd's been uploading daily on his YouTube channel. And you mentioned this a little bit about the social contagion. And my question is, here's something that I've been dealing with with my own anxiety is I'm trying to find that balance between checking social media, right? For updates on what's going on, while also recognizing that some of the virtual sneezing is happening as well, because there's no way to really filter that. So what are your solutions around that, staying informed while not catching all the anxiety being thrown around? Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because I just posted one of these five minute update videos on my Dr. Judd YouTube channel around getting addicted to news. And so there's one other piece here that's helpful to know around the neuroscience where, so let's say you check the news, nothing new happened, nothing new, nothing new, nothing you knew, and then bam, big headline, right? What does that sound like? Pull the lever on the slot machine, pull the lever on the slot machine, pull the lever on the slot machine, suddenly you win. So to our brain, checking the news is just like going to a casino. And it gets that dopamine jackpot that at random time that some new news hits. So it's really important for us to keep that in mind. And the way we can work with that's actually relatively simple. If we know that we're just jacking our dopamine system by constantly checking the news, then we can step back and say, okay, I'm going to check the news twice a day or something reasonable, because we don't really need to check the news more than once or twice a day. It's not going to affect us on some grand scheme. And if something crazy happens, somebody will probably call us and tell us. So if we titrate that, then every time we check the news, we're going to get some new news and then we'll get used to having, it's not going to be a big dopamine hit because we're habituated to seeing some new news because we haven't checked in a while. And news does update itself on a 24-hour cycle. So checking once or twice a day is really all that's necessary for the vast majority of us. So that can help kind of smooth out that dopamine as compared to that intermittent reinforcement. We can also, and this is where mindfulness comes in specifically, we can also ask ourselves, well, what do I get when I'm constantly scrolling? Because that's our brain basically looking for food. And I talked about that more in my video. But we can ask ourselves, what do I get after I went on the news? Well, I feel itchy or restless if I didn't get that new news hit. Or even if I did, that excitement can kind of be jarring as well. And if we look at our experience and we're like, what did I get from this? Oh, it doesn't feel great to spend a bunch of time on the news. That actually taps into our natural rural-based learning systems in our brain. And the way those work, and you know this, but your listeners may not, is that our brains are always looking for what I call the bigger, better offer. And these are all relative. It's not like there's some absolute scale of biggest, bestest offer. For you and me, our bigger, better offers might be different based on all the rule words that got set up in childhood and throughout our lives and whatnot. So for example, if at your birthday parties when you were a kid, you always had chocolate cake, and I always had vanilla cake, I might rank vanilla cake over chocolate cake, and you might rank, you think I'm crazy, well of course there's chocolate cake, but that's because your five-year old brain was like locking that in as a reward. And that just gets perpetuated through the rest of our lives. So we have to help our brain see how unrewarding these behaviors are, like constantly checking the news, which opens up that space for the bigger, better offer. And importantly, we can't just say, okay, this doesn't feel very good. It's really, we've got to find the bigger, better offer as well. So this is where things like mindfulness come in. Instead of checking the news, we can replace that with things like kindness, with things like curiosity. So even in the moment that we have an urge to check the news, we can get curious about what that urge feels like in our body. And we can replace that craving to check the news with curiosity, because it feels better. It's just a matter of grooving that as a habit. And we groove it as a habit simply by seeing that curiosity feels better than getting stuck in a news junkie habit loop. Yeah. So on top of that, like you were talking about these kind of healthy habits that we can develop right, right before this pandemic really started building up in the United States. I actually, you know, I've been rebuilding my meditation practice. And I started doing a lot more loving kindness. Do you think that could help? Because right now I see a lot of just this kind of individual kind of tribal instincts kicking in, like I got to protect my family and stock up for my family. And where this is the time where we need to be this like kind of cohesive help one another unit. How do you think like even loving kindness meditations might be able to help with that kind of stuff? See my big smile. Yeah. I literally just an hour ago wrote my next video that I'm going to record tomorrow. And that is about there was this viral video. I'm terrible with names by I'm not a video but a poem by a woman. I think it was Kitty of Mara off to look it up where she wrote this beautiful, beautiful poem around, you know, basically, this is an opportunity for us to heal the world. And I was so inspired by that that I wrote about this, you know, this, this notion that I learned in, in college about thought shift, refreeze. And I won't go into all of it and people can watch the video. But basically, here's an opportunity that's been created for us to thaw out of our old ways and shift into new ways. But there's got to be enough pressure to keep us in that new spot before we freeze again. You know, so think of the pandemic as thawing that leaf out of the in the ice of the pond. This, if we pay attention and practice kindness and like loving kindness and meditation and this woman in her poem talked about prayer that absolutely deserve to me, these are all serving the same purpose. That helps blow that leaf to a different spot. So when the pandemic's over and we refreeze, we free refreeze somewhere else. And I end the video with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. who talks about, you know, this, this love for each other that is going to be the salvation of our civilization. And so, you know, that's, I can't speak highly enough about how important it is for us to really take some time to practice things like loving kindness meditation and see that it is a no brainer that it is a bigger, better offer to be kind and connected rather than tribal and divisive. And we've got to do that enough that when our old pressures come back when this is over that we can't imagine ever going back and being mean to each other. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think it's helped me out a lot because we're all a lot of us are not only anxious, but that fear can also turn into anger and frustration and everything. I was just I swung by the gas station yesterday and I saw somebody very frustrated with the situation because they're kind of changing things. But I found within myself, I was like, you know, thank goodness for these employees who are putting themselves out there interacting with multiple people a day because my natural instinct wants to get frustrated and take that out on someone. But loving kindness meditations for me has helped me be a little bit more empathetic. But real quick, I want to touch on this. So I just finished reading your your book for a second time and everybody needs to go check it out. It's called The Craving Mind, right? And, and yeah, I was I was thinking about some of the practices and developing those healthy habits for doing this. And I was remembering how hard it was for me to start practicing mindfulness at first. And so when you originally did your first kind of intervention was with smoking, and you put yourself through two hour meditations to see how how it felt to get through these, you know, cravings or these urges to do something. So so yeah, what is your best advice for people who don't want to be stuck with their thoughts while trying to meditate? Because you I have never in my life done a two hour meditation. So I want to hear from you like what tips you have to get someone started? Yeah, I wouldn't recommend it. That was that was torture. And the reason I did two hours is because that's the half life of nicotine. And I really and I hadn't smoked myself. So I really wanted to know what it was like to be deprived. And, you know, certainly as I have a lot of privilege as a white male to be I would deprive myself of moving and that restlessness to get up was really unbearable for me. And so I you know, I can't say that that's exactly like craving for a cigarette. But I certainly could put myself in in my patients and my study participants choose more easily there. But I think there are other ways to do this. The point for me to kind of suffer like that was to understand and learn the mechanisms of how mindfulness actually works. And from that study, we actually learned that the informal mindfulness practices work better than the formal mindfulness practices. So there after that, we developed our apps based on those data to say, Okay, let's start teaching people informal practices. And let's even start before that and teach people how their minds work. Because that's, you know, I kind of grown up in a in a terravada Buddhist meditation, I shouldn't say growing up, but I started learning meditation through a terravada tradition. And it was very scientifically focused. But I didn't quite understand what some of these things, you know, what they were talking about. But it was only when I started linking up my scientific understanding of how the mind works with what they were actually talking about, you know, thousands of years ago, that it actually made sense why we meditate. And we meditate, you know, the mechanism basically there is so that we can change our relationship to our thoughts and emotions. It's not to rid ourselves of thoughts or emotions. And this is something I struggled for 10 years on meditation retreats. As you probably remember, I wrote about that in my book. I swept through t shirts in the middle of winter trying to meditate because I was trying, trying, trying, because that's what how I got into medical school is just trying. And then I learned that's not about that at all. It's about tapping into these natural rewards and the reward system in our brain. In fact, we just put out on my website, the my Dr. Judd website, I don't know if it's on the YouTube channel as well, a short seven minute animation that explains how reward value in our brain works and how we can actually hack into that process to change habits like eating and smoking. And it doesn't take very long for that reward value to drop in our brain when we see that overeating doesn't feel good when we see the smoking taste like crap. And also when we can replace that with loving kindness and curiosity. So those pieces really came together for me mechanistically to help me see that, Oh, it's really these informal practices teaching people how their minds work and then giving these them these informal practices as these bigger, better offers. And that's where, you know, it shows in the data, you know, our unrunning anxiety app is getting a 57 to 63% reduction in anxiety. So for the audience, can you explain kind of the difference between formal and informal? Like, what do you mean by when you say these informal practices? Oh, yeah, thank you. So I think of informal practice being like if somebody's smoking a cigarette, they pay attention as they smoke that cigarette, right? So they're paying attention when they they light up when they take that drag, when they draw it into their mouth, when they draw it into their lungs, we're actually making a vaping app now too, which is going to be important for helping that not be an emergent epidemic. So, you know, we really have them pay attention as they do that behavior. So everybody has to eat. And if people are struggling with overeating or streps eating or sugar addiction, they can do the same thing with eating. It's like pay attention as you eat. And they're these simple things like check in with yourself after every bite and ask, is that enough? Is that enough? And you can probably describe this, you know, really well that like, it's really easy, much easier to stop eating when we pay attention because we check in and we're like, yeah, I'm actually good. I'm full. Yeah, no, absolutely. So I actually went through the Eat Right Now program a couple years ago. And recently, so one of my goals for 2020 was to drop 50 pounds. I'm down 20 pounds so far. And thank you, thank you. And I remember I was learning about like these different diets and everything like that. And some of them were just off the wall. I was like, wait a second, I can use the tools I learned from Eat Right Now. And a lot of it, you know, was just slowing down and recognizing when I'm satisfied because the disconnection from my brain to my stomach is massive. My brain says I'm starving and my stomach only needs X amount for me to feel satisfied. And when I try to, you know, encourage people to give my infillness a try, it's through those informal practices. Because a lot of people think of somebody sitting on a retreat for, you know, sweating through t-shirts where it's really just slowing down. And that curiosity that you talk about a lot, like, huh, what is that this feeling? Because sometimes my hunger is actually boredom, right? Or other sensations are wanting to avoid what I'm currently dealing with. But going back to like even the anxiety and all this coronavirus anxiety, what mindfulness has helped me with is turning towards what I'm feeling rather than away from it. Because have you, I don't know if you've discussed this in one of your YouTube videos yet, but right now do you think there's a tendency to just avoid what's happening in our minds and our bodies, trying to distract ourselves? Like, I'm sure Netflix traffic has spiked in. Yes. Yeah. So everybody's internet slowing down because everybody else is watching Netflix. Yeah. Can you speak to some of the benefits of turning towards and just kind of getting curious about what we're feeling and everything? Because I went through the unwinding anxiety app too. And I believe you discussed a little bit about that as well. Yeah. So have you heard the phrase, the only way out is through? Yes. Okay. So the only way out is through. And I think that's a beautiful description of what mindfulness is about. So our habitual reaction, trigger behavior reward, if there's something unpleasant, we avoid it. And the reward is that we don't have to face it. So like my patient who had panic and he would get really anxious thinking about driving on the highway, he just stopped driving on the highway. That was, you know, that was his avoidance mechanism. So for all of us that have fear and worry, you know, we can look to see what are all the things that we're doing to avoid those situations. So the first thing there is to know, okay, this is just a natural part of how our brains work. Like we shouldn't beat ourselves up over this stuff happening. And it's really important to see that it just is self-perpetuating. It gets us stuck in these habit loops, procrastination being the big one. So if we can notice that, then we can start to substitute procrastination with that bigger, better offer. And the bigger, better offer is turning toward our experience. This is where curiosity is a superpower. I wrote an article about this on my website, you know, there are different types of curiosity. And there's this interest type of curiosity, as compared to the deprivation. So deprivation curiosity is like, Oh, what was that person's name? I got to know, you know, there's that itchy, that's, that's basically negative reinforcement. It's just like addiction. I have to know when we get our, when we know it's like getting that fix and then we're, you know, done until the next time we don't know. So I'm not talking about deprivation curiosity. I'm talking about interest curiosity, which is this natural wonder and wide-eyed curiosity that we have children model this much better than adults. So if we get curious, that's the through. The only way out is through. So if we avoid, we don't get out because we're actually just getting stuck more and more. But if we turn toward, that's through. And we realize, Oh, these are just body sensations. These are just emotions. These are just thoughts. They aren't going to kill me. A thought is not going to, I've never died from a thought. I don't know anybody that has. I don't know anybody that's died from a just, you know, a feeling of anxiety. It feels like you're going to die. And you know, when I've had panic attacks, it's felt like it felt like I was dying, but proof I haven't died from a panic attack. So the only way out is through as we turn toward our experience, bringing curiosity and kindness to our own direct experience, we learn, Oh, here's a habit loop. Oh, it's not going to kill me. And that in itself is tremendously empowering. Because we don't need to turn to Netflix to make us feel better, right? What happens if our internet is slow because everybody else is watching Netflix? I need something to make me feel better. Give me my Netflix fix, you know? So we're, you know, the only way out is through. If we turn toward this, we have these resources always available. There's no shortage of curiosity. You know, it's not like there's no run at the grocery store on curiosity. Right. Right. In fact, curiosity is contagious. You know, when a little kid's curious about something, suddenly everybody else is, Oh, what are you looking at? Oh, and it feels good. It feels so much better than being anxious. When I think about my mindfulness practice, I always think of just resilience. I've been able to handle more since developing a practice. Because since I keep going through, right, instead of trying to avoid it, I can, I can deal with more. And I know you both got to go soon. So I wanted to talk about that beautiful neurotransmitter oxytocin that you discussed on your channel the other day, because a lot of people are stuck at home with each other and everything. And I'm sure tensions can run high. Yeah. But can you talk about the beauty of oxytocin and how we get some of that? Yeah, I'm looking for my prop here. My cat was just next to me. I was going to demonstrate it, but I will pretend that my cat is here. So I actually, so I, I'm not an oxytocin expert. So I'm going to caveat that. But what I do know, the little that I do know is that we get this oxytocin release when we connect with people. I mean, that's the one line summary of my lay person and my lay neuroscientist understanding. I'm sure there are many oxytocin experts that could speak much more eloquently about this than I can. But I would say, oxytocin, whatever the neurotransmitters are that are going on or that are firing when we're connecting, it sure feels good. You know, when I cuddle with my cat, that was the YouTube video that I put out a couple of days ago. You can actually hear on the video that my cat was purring, which was so cute. But it was just, I was just so joyful recording that video because here I had this loving being in my arms. As you know, as I was, as I was recording this video, boy, it felt so much better to be connected and you know, just cuddling for a few minutes with a furry being. So we can cuddle with cats, dogs, whatever. We can cuddle with our family members. And if tensions are running high, we can take a moment, take our own poles and just give each other a hug and remind each other, oh yeah, this is hard for all of us. We're all in this together. And I'm going to make a plug. If we don't have pets, we can foster a puppy, right? You don't have to make a long-term commitment for anybody that's a commitment fobe. Just foster a puppy for a couple of weeks and see what it's like. They don't carry coronavirus. They need help. They love to be loved. So it's a total win-win. We can jack our oxytocin. We can jack all of those good feelings by being generous and kind and helpful. And maybe we'll even fall in love with it in, you know, whatever. But don't worry, you can give it back in two weeks. That's the beauty of fostering and these animals need help. So I just want to make a plug for any of your peeps. Yeah. Go foster a puppy or I don't know if you can foster cats. I know people that foster puppies. But anyway, adopt a cat, foster a puppy, you know, find something furry and cuddle. Yeah, there we go. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time, Judd. And can you let everybody know what you have going on? I know you have been working extremely hard as well as a lot of other people right now, because a lot of us are struggling mentally. So I'll link everything down in the description. But can you tell us what you have going on? Yeah, so every day, at least five days a week, probably six days a week, I'm going to try to put out a short five minute video that's really on a timely topic like, okay, what's everybody struggling with today? So on one, you know, the first one was about, I wrote this New York Times article about social contagion and anxiety and all that. So that short video was the summary of that. Then I posted a video about Cud and the benefits of connection. Then I talked about why the next one was about why we get addicted to the news and what we can do about it so we don't become news junkies. The one I just put out was they're all blurring together. Well, there are more. So basically, I'm going to be doing that as much as I can. I'm also doing open office hours for anybody that wants to join on Zoom once Mondays at noon Eastern time. That's also on my YouTube channel and they'll be announced. So if people subscribe to that, they'll get all the updates. I've got a bunch of informational animations and videos on my website, drjud.com. And then of course, if anybody wants to play with the apps, they can go to my websites or the website for the anxiety programs unwindinganxiv.com. I think the company is giving people like a 30% discount right now. So they can just go to the website and get a discount. So those are the main things. I'm sure there's other stuff, but those are the main things. I'd love to just try to be as helpful as I can right now. These YouTube videos are one of the main ways that I'm trying to do that in a very timely manner. I love it. Awesome. So thank you so much for your time. And yeah, we'll talk soon. And remember everybody, everything will be linked down below. Thanks, Judd. Thank you. All right, another big thank you to Dr. Judd Brewer. And again, make sure you check the description down below. I will provide links to Dr. Judd's YouTube channel, his book, and all that kind of stuff as well as his website. So make sure you check that out, show him some love. And again, do me a favor, please share this video with a friend over on Facebook, Twitter, whatever you use, baby. All right. But anyways, that's all I got for this video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe and read that notification bell. And a huge, huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon, as well as everybody who supports the channel by buying my mental health books at the rewiredsoul.com. And all my ebooks and audio books are on sale right now. You can get 25% off by using the code Rewired at the rewiredsoul.com slash shop. All right. Thanks again for watching. I'll see you next time.