RAIN Exercise

When anxiety hits, most people do one of two things: they fight it or they run from it. Neither works very well. Fighting anxiety turns into a tug-of-war with your own mind. Running from it (through distraction, avoidance, or numbing) only teaches your brain that anxiety is something dangerous — which feeds more anxiety.

There’s a third option, and it’s the one I teach in my clinical practice and research: you can meet the anxiety with curiosity. The RAIN exercise is one of the most effective, structured ways to do this.

What Is the RAIN Exercise?

RAIN is a four-step mindfulness technique that gives you a clear, repeatable process for working with difficult emotions. The acronym stands for:

• R — Recognize what you’re feeling
• A — Allow the experience to be present
• I — Investigate with curiosity
• N — Nurture yourself with self-compassion

What makes RAIN powerful is that it works with your brain’s natural learning systems rather than against them. Each step maps onto the neuroscience of habit change that my lab has been studying for over two decades. When you Recognize a feeling, you’re stepping out of autopilot. When you Investigate with curiosity, you’re giving your brain updated information about what anxiety actually feels like — which is how reward-based learning works in reverse.

Follow along with the guided video below.

The Four Steps of RAIN — A Walkthrough

Step 1: Recognize

The first step is simply naming what’s happening. This sounds basic, but it’s remarkably powerful. When you’re caught in an anxiety spiral, you’re often so fused with the experience that you can’t see it clearly. Saying to yourself, “Oh, this is anxiety” or “I’m noticing worry right now” creates a small but critical gap between you and the emotion.

This is the same “noticing” skill that we build in mindfulness exercises. It’s the moment when autopilot disengages and awareness comes online. Without this step, the anxiety habit loop runs unchecked — trigger fires, worry kicks in, and you don’t even realize it’s happening until you’re deep into the spiral.

Step 2: Allow

Allowing means letting the experience be there without trying to fix, change, or push it away. This is often the hardest step, because everything in your brain is screaming at you to do something about the discomfort.

But here’s the key insight from my research: when you try to make anxiety go away, you’re actually feeding the habit loop. The attempt to escape discomfort is the habitual behavior — and the brief relief you feel from distraction or avoidance is the reward that reinforces it. Allowing interrupts this cycle. You’re telling your brain, “I can be with this. I don’t need to run.”

Allowing doesn’t mean approving or enjoying the experience. It just means giving it space to be there. Think of it as holding the emotion the way you’d hold a hot cup of coffee — you feel the warmth without gripping it.

Step 3: Investigate

This is where the real change happens. Investigation means getting genuinely curious about what you’re experiencing. Not intellectually analyzing it — that’s just more thinking. I mean turning toward the feeling in your body and asking: What does this actually feel like right now?

Where do you feel anxiety in your body? Is it a tightness in your chest? A knot in your stomach? A buzzing in your hands? What happens when you get close to that sensation — does it stay the same, or does it change?

This step leverages curiosity, which my research has shown to be the key mechanism in habit change. When you bring genuine interest to a difficult experience, your brain’s reward system gets updated information. The feeling isn’t as overwhelming as your brain predicted. The discomfort is workable. Each time you investigate, you’re training your brain that anxiety doesn’t require an emergency response — and that weakens the habit loop from the inside out.

Step 4: Nurture

The final step is nurturing yourself with kindness. After you’ve recognized, allowed, and investigated the difficult emotion, you offer yourself the same compassion you’d naturally give a close friend.

This might sound like: “This is hard, and I’m doing my best.” Or it might be a simple hand on your heart. The specific form doesn’t matter — what matters is the quality of warmth and self-kindness.

Nurturing is not self-indulgence. It’s actually a powerful counterweight to the self-judgment that so often accompanies anxiety. In my clinical experience, many people have anxiety about their anxiety. They judge themselves for worrying. That self-judgment becomes another trigger, firing up yet another habit loop. Nurturing breaks that cycle by replacing judgment with care. A loving-kindness meditation can help develop this capacity.

When to Use the RAIN Technique

RAIN is versatile. You can use it:

• In the moment: When anxiety strikes, run through the four steps mentally. It can take as little as 60 seconds once you’ve practiced.
• As a formal sitting practice: Set aside 10-15 minutes, close your eyes, and work through RAIN with whatever is most present for you.
• As a debrief tool: After a stressful event, use RAIN to process what happened and what you felt. This prevents the experience from getting stored as unprocessed emotional residue.

The technique is especially powerful when combined with Dr. Jud’s sitting meditation practice, which builds the foundational awareness that makes RAIN more accessible in difficult moments.

RAIN and the Habit Loop

In my framework for understanding anxiety and habits, RAIN maps directly onto the gear system I describe in Unwinding Anxiety:

• Recognize is part of first gear — mapping your habit loops. You can’t change what you can’t see.
• Investigate is second gear — getting curious about what the habit actually delivers. This is where your brain updates its reward value.
• Nurture provides the “bigger, better offer” of third gear — replacing the old habit with something genuinely more rewarding than worry or avoidance.

This is why RAIN works where willpower fails. You’re not gritting your teeth and trying to stop being anxious. You’re giving your brain exactly what it needs to learn its way out of the pattern.

The RAIN exercise is one of the most accessible mindfulness practices for working with difficult emotions. Each step — Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture — helps you step out of reactive habit loops and respond with curiosity instead of autopilot. My research shows that this kind of curiosity-based approach is more effective than willpower for lasting change.

Explore all of Dr. Jud’s guided mindfulness exercises and learn how anxiety becomes a habit. For a deeper dive into using curiosity to break unwanted habits, see Unwinding Anxiety.