The Wall Street Journal: New Strategies for Calming Your Pandemic Anxiety

Overview

The Wall Street Journal featured Dr. Jud’s research on how anxiety becomes a habit in a piece exploring new approaches to pandemic-era stress. The article highlights the central argument of his New York Times bestselling book Unwinding Anxiety: that anxiety is not just an emotional state — it’s a learned behavior that follows the same reward-based habit loop as smoking or overeating.

Dr. Jud’s research at Brown University shows that worry provides a short-term sense of control — your brain feels like it’s “doing something” about a problem — which reinforces the anxious behavior. Over time, this creates a self-perpetuating cycle where the brain defaults to worry as its go-to response to any uncertainty or discomfort. The more you worry, the more your brain learns to worry.

The breakthrough is that the same neuroscience that explains how anxiety habits form also reveals how to break them. By bringing mindful curiosity to anxious sensations — rather than trying to suppress or reason them away — you can help your brain update its reward value for worry and naturally release the pattern.

Key Takeaways

• Anxiety operates like any other habit: It follows a trigger-behavior-reward loop where worry temporarily reduces uncertainty, reinforcing itself over time through the brain’s reward-based learning system.
• Willpower and rationalization don’t work for anxiety: Telling yourself not to worry engages the prefrontal cortex, which is already compromised by stress. The more you fight anxiety, the stronger it can become.
• Curiosity disrupts the anxiety loop: Dr. Jud’s clinically proven approach uses mindful awareness to help the brain recognize that worry doesn’t actually deliver the relief it promises, allowing the habit to naturally unwind.

Read the full article in The Wall Street Journal

Related Resources

• Unwinding Anxiety — Dr. Jud’s New York Times bestselling book on breaking the anxiety habit loop
• How Anxiety Becomes a Habit — The neuroscience behind why your brain gets stuck in worry
• Mindfulness Exercises — Practical tools for building the awareness that breaks anxiety cycles
• The Craving Mind — Dr. Jud’s earlier book on the science of craving and addictive behavior