Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

Content Warning: This guide discusses anxiety, depression, and addiction.

1. “I had a lightbulb moment when I realized that one of the reasons so many people fail to see that they have anxiety is the way it hides in bad habits.”

By referring to anxiety as something that can “hide” in our everyday behaviors, the author piques the reader’s curiosity about the connection between anxious reactions and habit loops. This passage helps the author make a strong connection between anxious feelings and habitual behavior, and encourages the reader to read on to discover how to untangle these connections in their own mind.

“We all get anxious—it’s a part of life—yet how we deal with it is critical. If we don’t know how anxiety shows up or why, we might get caught up in temporary distractions or short-term fixes that actually feed it, creating bad habits in the process (have you ever eaten ice cream or cookies when you’re stressed?).”

Dr. Brewer normalizes anxiety by calling it a “part of life.” In this passage, he advances his theme on Knowledge, Empowerment, and Self-Healing by arguing that when people understand how their anxiety is manifesting, they will be able to address it in a meaningful, lasting way.

“Notice how fear itself does not equal anxiety. Fear is an adaptive learning mechanism that helps us survive. Anxiety, on the other hand, is maladaptive; our thinking and planning brain spins out of control when it doesn’t have enough information.”

In this useful passage, the author differentiates between fear and anxiety, noting that anxiety is the more harmful of the two because it causes stress without helping to solve a problem. This passage explains why the human brain is wired to feel fear and how this evolution can be easily misused to create anxious habit loops.