The One You FeedHow to Manage Your Hunger Habit with Dr. Jud Brewer
In this episode, Dr. Jud Brewer discusses how to manage your hunger habit through updating reward values and other important strategies. He emphasizes the significance of mindfulness in navigating emotional eating and changing behaviors around eating. Dr. Brewer offers several practical strategies and valuable perspectives for individuals seeking to address unhealthy eating habits or addictions.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Discover the power of updating reward values in habits for lasting behavior change
- Uncover the neuroscience behind habit formation and how it influences our daily choices
- Learn the art of mindful eating as a powerful tool for effective weight management
- Overcome food addiction by cultivating awareness and taking control of your eating habits
- Understand what it means to become disenchanted with unhealthy eating patterns
- Explore effective strategies for updating reward values in habits to create positive change in your life.
To learn more, click here!
That's really what it's about, is what I'm doing causing suffering. And if it's not causing suffering, then it may not be worth judging yourself for right.
Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is doctor Judson Brewer, also known as doctor Judd. He's an American psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and author. He studies the neural mechanisms of mindfulness and has translated research findings into programs to treat addictions. Judd also founded an app based digital therapeutic treatment program for anxiety, overeating, and smoking. He's Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University's Mindfulness Center and Associate professor in Behavioral and Social Scientists in the Brown School of Public Health and in psychiatry at Brown's Warren Albert Medical School. Today, doctor Judd and Eric discuss his book The Hunger Habit, Why We Eat when We're not Hungry and How to Stop.
Hi, jud Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
I think this is your third or fourth time on the show, so I am always happy when we get a chance to talk. And we're going to be discussing a new book you have called The Hunger Habit, Why we Eat when We're not hungry and how to stop? And this seems to be a topic of perennial interest among people because I think in our modern world, right, it's really really easy to overeat, Right, we have a problem of abundance, not scarcity anymore. Right, Yes, absolutely, So we'll get into that in a second, but before we do, let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do well.
To me, in a nutshell, it's about whatever we put energy into and that energy is going to grow wherever we're directing it. And so in my personal life, if I feed, you know, greed, for example, it's going to grow. If I feed kindness, that's going to grow. And I see that in my own life. And this is directly relevant to basically all the work I do as an addiction psychiatrist and a researcher as well, because the idea is to help people feed habits that are going to be helpful for them and for others as well.
Yeah, So I want to start with your book with a statement that you make at some juncture, and I don't quite know where you make it, but to me it sort of summarizes the whole approach of the book, which is, you say, when it comes to changing habits, whether letting go of old ones or developing new ones, it follows one path in one path only changing reward value. So say more about what do you mean by changing reward value and why do you see this as the primary way to intervene in habit change.
So to me, the dominant paradigm for the last century, if not hundreds of years, has been this idea around willpower and self control. You know, there's a relief carved into the Parthenon in Athens, I think in Greece that depicts a rider and a horse, and the horses the passions, the rider's reason, and the idea is that there's this age old debate about, you know, how do we control our passions? Can we basically think our way out of problems? And that is still the dominant paradigm when it comes to changing eating habits today. It's all about, you know, use your willpower. It's a great marketing and retention strategy for companies because they can tell people, you know, use our die and it's your fault if you fail. So that sets people up to feel like there's something wrong with them and also unfortunately gives them the wrong impression that they need more willpower in whoever it is that telling them, you know, whatever, the diet jejoor is is correct from a neuroscience standpoint, I don't know how else to put this, but willpower is not even part of the equation. And so I mean, I'm not kidding like when we run our analyses for behavior change, and it's not just us. These are formulae that have been tried and true. Back to the nineteen seventies. There are two researchers named Riskerla and Wagner who came up with this basic formula and it's still used today. So this is a non controversial, very good model that has a lot of explanatory power for how habit forms and how habit changes. And it has nothing to do with willpower, So what does it have to do with It has everything to do with reward value. And so that's why I say that's so critical because from a neuroscience standpoint it's pretty clear, But more importantly, as a clinician and from a pragmatic standpoint, we can actually watch that behavior change through targeting reward value.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. Listener, while you were listening to that, what resonated with you? What one thing to feed your good Wolf comes to mind? If the thing that came to your mind was more time for stillness, or you've tried meditation before and you really haven't liked it, then I want to give you a quick tip that might make it better for you. And it's simply to stop expecting that you're not going to have thoughts. Nearly everyone has this expectation that they're going to sit down and meditate and they're going to stop having thoughts. And when they stop having thoughts, that means they're doing it well. But no one does that, and so we end up feeling like we're failing all of the time. Every three seconds, fail again and failed again. We develop a relationship with meditation that is aversive. So if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find it relaxing, check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf dot me slash Calm. In it, I walk you through my process to engage with meditation in a new way, and a lot of people have found it really helpful, that's goodwolf dot me slash calm. And so when we say reward value right, we're basically talking about our brain's way of ranking how enjoyable or unenjoyable something is, yes, right. Reward values the fancy way of saying essentially that yes, yeah.
So what would a simple example be if I slam my hand in the door, low reward value, higher reward value, not slamming my hand in the door. And the same is true for food. In fact, we have a lot of evolutionary mechanisms built in so that we'll actually have natural preferences for calorie dense foods. For example, so if if we eat some broccoli versus some chocolate cake, our brain is very very likely to prefer the chocolate cake just because it's saying, hey, there are a lot of calories here, you know, let's pack those in. And the idea is that our body is constantly preparing for famine, and so it wants to pack the calories in. In fact, opulence was a sign of prosperity back in the day.
And so the idea then is that if I can train my brain or reteach it so that it begins to count the full cost of the negative behaviors that I engage in, I will naturally seek them less.
Yes, And I would say the brain will train itself even if we help orient it in the right direction.
One of the things that I know about people who have dealt with food issues, so to speak, right is that they're very aware on some level of the costs. They're very aware of the fact that they don't feel good about it, that they often feel worse afterwards, and that's not changing their behavior. Is it because they're not accurately connecting all the dots in a systematic way? Would you say that's the primary thing that's kind of missing.
There generally speaking?
Yes.
And what I see the most is that people get stuck in this, you know, trying to think their way out of the problem, so they think, you know, it's back to the willpower piece. But on top of that, they also get stuck in these self judgmental habit loops where they're judging themselves and they think that the judgment is going to kind of give them a swift kick in the pants and that's going to actually help them change behavior as well. It's what they're feeding. They're feeding energy to you know these thinking processes, and they're feeding energy into judging themselves rather than taking that energy and putting it in a place that's actually going to affect behavior change, which is in the feeling body.
Right, Because it does seem I got this idea from you, but I think I've also heard it other places and in different ways. Right, that judgment, in many cases stops our ability to learn. Right, we're so wrapped up in shame and judgment that we're not actually able to use the parts of our brain that learn well, and so thus we're not actually learning. And that's what we're trying to do here, right, We're trying to teach the brain that it's value judgments far as whether this is a good behavior that I should keep doing or behavior I should do less of those aren't getting updated.
Yes, And I think the way you said it is perfect where it's we get wrapped up, Because when we get wrapped up in judgment or shame or blame or whatever or guilt, those all feel closed down, they feel contracted. And I like the language that Carol Dwakius is here. She talks about fixed versus growth mindset. And so when we're judging ourselves we're in a fixed mindset, and we're not actually in the arena of learning, which is a growth mindset. We're in the opposite so here it prevents us from actually opening and growing from our experiences.
It makes me think of I don't know if you're familiar with her work, Mayasavolitz, who's written about addiction, and you know, she brings forward a theory of addiction that aligns with what you're saying here, which is that essentially many people think of it almost as a learning disorder, meaning that for the average person, right as they go along and their experiences of negative consequences from alcohol or drugs start to grow, they naturally do less of it. But for the addict that learning doesn't seem to take place. Right It just seems as if the previous reward value of drugs equals good, regardless of what's happened since, remains almost locked in place. And that makes me think a little bit of a phrase from twelve step programs, you know where I got sober, And it was basically the idea that you know, we're unable with sufficient force to bring to mind the humiliation and suffering of even a week or a month ago, Yes, And I think what your book does is lay out sort of almost a learning plan for the brain so that it can start to update these reward values, to update these senses of what is working for us and what isn't in a way that is more effective than maybe randomly hoping that eventually it happens.
Absolutely, And the idea there is it starts with learning. If we don't know how our brain works, how can we possibly learn to work with it? And so the plan starts with like, here's how your brain works, and learn how your brain works. And it's not like you have to learn it down to every single neural sinopse, but we can learn some of the basic principles pretty quickly.
Excellent, So let's let's go into that in just a second. But let's for a moment talk about something you say early on in the book, and you say, though the wires connecting their brains to their stomachs have been crossed with their emotional wiring. You're describing people who are having problems, you know, maybe eating more than they want, and worse, they seem to be walking around much of the time with their brains disconnected from their bodies.
Say more about that yes.
So we have this very basic survival mechanism that is about hunger. It's called homeostatic hunger. And so if we are low end calories of our stomach's empty, our brain says, hey, do something about this, you know, and we are motivated to get some food you know that's been at play, that's evolutionarily conserved all the way back to the sea slug you know. So this is a very well known process, and the process itself at a high level is called positive.
And negative reinforcement.
And the way it works is that our ancient ancestors who didn't have refrigerators, didn't have live in abundance, had to remember where food is. And the way to remember that is to learn where food sources were. And so they would be out foraging, they'd find the food, and then their stomach would send this dopamine signal back to their brain and say, hey, here's the food.
Remember where it is.
And it's called positive reinforcement. Same would be true for you know, if they see, you know, where all the tigers hang out, and they said, okay, let's avoid that area, and they would learn, you know, okay that area is, you know, don't go there. Unless you want to become lunch and that's called negative reinforcement. The crossing of the wires comes when that mechanism is still at play. But we learned to eat food not because we're hungry, but because of a mood. And so, you know, for example, how many times have we gone to birthday parties as kids and our parents, you know, they're like, okay, why don't you not eat breakfast and lunch so you'll be starving for the cake and the ice cream. You know, probably the opposite where they're like, let you know, let's give them a healthy meal so that they'll eat less of the sugar. But then you know, kids start to eat ice cream and cake because they're having fun, and ice cream and cake taste good, and so they learn to eat because of the celebration.
And then on top of.
This, we learn to eat when we're sad or bored or lonely or frustrated or angry or all these things. And so this food mood relationship starts to shift for a lot of people. This is where these unhealthy habits come in from. You know, like eating when we're actually hungry, that homeostatic hunger to eating, you know, when we're not hungry, but because of any sort of emotion that we might have. That is so common now that there's a term that's actually a misnomer, but it was designed specifically to help researchers study this phenomenon. It's called hedonic hunger. So in contrast to homeostatic hunger, which is, you know, getting us back in balance, handenic hunger just means we're eating out of emotion, you know, that mood food relationship, and that's where the wires get crossed.
Okay, so up till now, we've sort of laid out that there's this mismatch happening, that we are beginning to eat for reasons beyond just hunger, and that our reward values are not updating. So let's talk about a piece of chocolate cake, right, because a piece of chocolate cake for different people is going to be different things. Right. It's probably going to be delicious for most people, right. I Mean there's some people that don't like it, but I don't even let them listen to the show. So assuming that now I'm kidding, but assuming that a piece of chocolate cake is fairly delicious, right, and it's going to be delicious partially for the reasons you laid out before, meaning that our bodies are sort of wired up to want that sugar and fat. So where does this go from and in what cases do you start to think about this starts to become problematic versus sort of a default human behavior of enjoying sweet and fat.
Really good question, and I don't know if there's a clear line, So I think we can start at the far end. Simple definition of addiction that I learned in residency was continued to use despite adverse consequences. There's a controversial topic around can people be addicted to food? A lot of people are arguing, well, if you look at this simple definition of addiction, you know, if somebody is eating and their adverse consequences, that would fall into the definition. So on one end of the spectrum, when people are consuming food not because they're hungry, but because of a mood or any other reason and it's causing adverse consequences, you could say, okay, that falls into the category far into the spectrum where there's addiction. And then you know, in the grayer zone is when people are you know, just they might pick up a piece of candy or something because it looks good, but they're not particularly hungry. But they stop at one piece, whereas somebody else, you know, they see a bull of M and m's or something like that, and they're going to eat the whole thing.
Yep.
I talk in the hunger habit about my own gummy worm addiction, where I was literally eating entire bags.
Of gummy worms, you know, in one sitting.
So some of this really is partially our own feeling about how problematic it is, right. I mean, again, on the extreme ends of things, right, it becomes fairly obvious. You know. We might all say, you know, a heroin attic like me that has hepatitis c in, weighs one hundred pounds, right, and keeps doing drugs even though he's looking at going to jail for a long time. That's pretty easy to just be like, Yep, that's clear, clearly problematic, right, you know, but you get in to that middle ground, right. I had a conversation. I was talking with my doctor this morning, and he practices in a relatively affluent area, and he was saying, you know, he's like, I have conversations all day long, day after day about people and their alcohol use, right, and these are people who are fully functioning people. Right, They're not going to necessarily fit lots of definitions of alcoholism. And again, I know that the scientific community is moving even away from that as a way of defining the problem. But these are the people that are going to be in the middle area, right. Their consequences, their adverse effects are going to be a little bit more mild. They're going to probably be if they're physical. They're a little bit further down the road. And I often find this to be the really tough place for people because I know a lot of people who have stayed in a relationship to substances alcohol or marijuana as an example, in this middle ground for a long long time time because the adverse effects don't ever seem to get bad enough for them to really go about making a change. So it seems like some of this is by nature self diagnosed, right.
Absolutely, And I think there are ways that we can put our thumb on the scale a little bit.
And so you're.
Highlighting, you know, there are all these these memes around. You know, you have to get rock bottom for whatever it is, you know, whether it's alcohol or social media, yep, to become disenchanted and that is true for a lot of people, and for a lot of people, you know, for example, I think of cigarettes is the slow burn, because you know, somebody can smoke cigarettes for twenty or thirty years and not get lung cancer or not get emphysema for all that period of time. That's a really unfortunate rock bottom to hit. And at that point it's too late. You can't really reverse emphysema or in lung cancer is really tough to treat. So here that is very challenging for people where they see, you know, and you can think of cigarettes and alcohol as things that aren't critical for survival certainly, you know, cigarettes are the easiest ones to look at because some people are like I need a drink to be able to function socially. So food, on the other hand, is even more challenging because we all have to eat to survive. Yes, and we can come back to this if you want, But it gets really interesting where, you know, does everybody have to hit rock bottom, because somebody might never hit rock bottom, if you know, if they're at an unhealthy weight but not a terribly unhealthy weight. You know, it's kind of like where somebody smoke cigarettes but they haven't quite gotten emphysima yet. So we can put our thumb on the scale a little bit there and actually help people, you know, double click on what they're eating habits are now, and it can actually help to accelerate the process of change.
Say more about that, what sort of things might you focus on? I mean, the one that comes to mind for me is sometimes the worst part part of these behaviors is how they make us feel about ourselves, about our own self efficacy. That that's one very clear, sort of internally definable thing. What are some of the things that we might do that help people see it a little more clearly.
Well, a lot of it starts with helping us step back from you know, trying to think our way out of the problem and feel our way into our experience. So if we feel our way into our experience. Let's use overeating as an example. When I have somebody really recall the last time they overeate. You know, often for people the easiest scenarios or holiday meals, you know, there's been a lot of abundance and they've often you know, had some alcohol, which will you know, make it easier to be disinhibited. Then they just overeat nobody's come back and said, Wow, it felt great to overeat. You know, it's usually oh I felt so terrible and then that was just physically, and then on top of it, they feel guilty and all of that. Yes, so we've actually developed what I call a disenchantment database already, most of us, for most of our lives, we've been collecting this information. And it's a gold mine where we can look back on those experiences and ask, you know, how did that go? You know, like not in an intellectual way, but in a feeling way, like how did I actually feel after I overindulged? And we can feel into that, and that helps us become disenchanted with doing the behavior, because our brains are really set up to predict future outcomes based on past experience. And so if we imagine, you know, we're at the next holiday meal and we imagine, okay, what's it going to be like when I do this, We're we're calling our previous experiences, and if we can recall what it was like and we're like, oh, that didn't feel so good, we're suddenly more motivated to not repeat that behavior because we are disenchanted with it and all of that comes from just a recollection of what happened in the past.
So when you use the phrase disenchantment, you're basically meaning I start to see the not good sides of this behavior. In essence, right, I'm beginning to update my reward value and say, oh, this actually isn't quite as wonderful as it seems, because I have my own personal data that says when this is done, I really feel lousy. That's kind of what you mean by disenchantment, absolutely, And so you know, I think this gets to the question I sort of asked earlier and sort of keep sort of circling, and you even say it yourself. You said, it's very easy for our brains to forget what it feels like to overeat discounting that for the remembrance of positive things past, right, it tasted so good, right, And so it does seem that for some reason our brains have a difficult time building that disenchantment up, or for some reason we tend to focus more on the positive and don't remember what comes a little further down the road. So what are some of the tools you recommend for starting to build up this disenchantment, right, Because in essence, that's sort of what we're saying, right, If you become disenchanted with the behavior, if you actually fully see that and you update your perceptions of good versus bad on this as a behavior. I don't mean morally, I mean in your own experience, right, you will naturally cease to do less of it. So, you know, how do we start to connect the dots? You know, as we said earlier, that most people have some degree of disenchantment with these things, but that disenchantment hasn't gotten to the point that it's turned into real change yet. So what are some of the ways we connect that dots or help grow that disenchantment.
One of the key areas that I have people focus on is just really feeling into their experience and keeping it simple, because often people they'll get stuck in their heads and that isn't where the behavior change happens. So I have them really just focus on if you just overeate, for example, what does it feel like if you overate yesterday? Can you recall what that felt like? And the more we can recall that and keep that memory fresh, the simpler it's going to be, because we're not going to be focusing on You know, there are lots of ways that our brains will try to distract us. For example, where they'll say, oh, remember, it was such a good time. You know, there were all these people there, or you had a great conversation, or this or that. All of those can be true, and you know, it's not like it changes that information, but we're focusing on the wrong thing because our brain's like, no, it was a good time, you had a good time. Maybe we did have a good time. How good of a time did our body have? And so we just really focus there and it's kind of asking the body, hey, how'd that go for you? Was it as good as I remember? And then the body says, you know, actually I felt like crap. So we can remember that when we zoom in and focus on those details.
All right, now, let's pause for a quick Goodwolf reminder, and this one is on meditation. If while you're meditating your mind wanders, you probably, like most people, treat that as a moment of failure, like, ugh, my mind wandered again. But let's flip that and instead treat that as a moment of celebration, because in that moment, your mind actually woke up and you were mindful of the fact that your mind wandered. So it's a win. So if we can flip that right on its head and say, oh, good job, brain, we actually make it more likely that a our brain is going to do it more often because we're training it, and b that we're going to enjoy it more. And specifically, it's about how to make you not dread meditation so much and actually find it relaxing. Check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf dot me slash Calm. I was thinking about this idea through the lens of twelve step programs because I often spend a lot of time thinking about, like, what is about twelve step programs that when they do work, they do work right, And there's lots of data out there about how effective they.
Are or aren't.
But you know, you can walk into a room anywhere in America and find millions of people who have gotten sober as a result of them. So they worked to some degree, and it's what worked for me. And I looked at it and I thought, you know, in some ways, the fact that we sit there and tell each other's stories about what it was like and how difficult it was is almost a to use your terminology an ongoing disenchantment discussion. It's a way in which we are sort of helping each other update our disenchantment. You're helping me remember my own disenchantment.
Absolutely, And I think that's where community can be very, very helpful, where we're not only helping provide the environment for somebody to do that recollection out loud, but we're bearing witness yep.
So we reflect on our bodies, and that being one way, I mean that makes sense to me. I mean I like sweets, right, so I will tend towards perhaps eating sweets a little more often than would be ideal. Perhaps, But what I have internalized is I deeply hate how it feels when I've eaten too much, Like, for whatever reason, for me, it's a very visceral, deeply unpleasant and uncomfortable experience. And so that's actually one I don't do that often because for whatever reason, somehow in my mind that learning linked up and I was like, that is an awful, truly to me, for whatever reason, one of my least favorite feelings. You know, In some way it seems like I was able to tune into that aspect of my body.
And that's a beautiful example of the simplicity of this process of change, where tuning into our bodies, you know, this very wise body is going to be on stronger than our thinking brain. And that's that's really I'm not saying it's easy, but it is simple because it's as simple as tuning in like you're describing.
So in addition to sort of as you're saying, pay more attention to our body, you have another line you say, which is awareness is everything when it comes to behavior change. You let that sink in. Awareness is everything when it comes to behavior change. So what we're trying to do then is tune into our experience of eating in this case, and you've got something called the craving tool, which is I think, another way of sort of connecting these dots. Do you want to walk us through what that is and what the core questions are in the craving tool?
Sure, So the craving tool is really there as an awareness tool to help us see very and feel more importantly, feel very clearly what the results of our eating behaviors are. So you know, there are two ways that we can approach it, depending on how we eat. One is if we're eating food that's you know, that's not very healthy. For example, for me, it was gummy worms. Or if we're eating an amount of food that's you know, it's like overeating or over consuming, or eating when we're not hungry or both. For me, it was over consuming gummy worms. Then we can start to pay attention to the process, and so we keep it pretty simple, where it's just having people pay attention as they eat whatever the food is, and so paying careful attention to what it tastes like, what it feels like in their stomach, and then also importantly paying attention to the emotions afterwards. You know, for me, when I eat a bunch of sugar, I tend to get a sugar rush and a crash, and I can be pretty moody afterwards. So being able to really see clearly what the results of the eating behavior are, those results help us develop that disenchantment database.
You know.
That's what the craving tool is really for, is to help us really connect the dots between whatever the behavior is and whatever the result is with.
You and your gummy worms, right, was that primarily what you noticed was the sugar crash was primarily the thing that you felt into and made you realize that this behavior wasn't one you want to continue engaging or are there are other elements of it that you were able to key into.
There was so much there, you know, where I would feel this urge, this out of control urge to consume, and then I would basically eat them as fast as I could and eat all of them so they'd be out of the apartment, and then, you know, and then sleep really poorly and feel bad about doing it and feel bad about being out of control, and then you know, wake up the next day a little bit relieved because I didn't have gummy worms in the house that day until.
Until I got some more. Yeah.
So there was a lot there to pay attention to, including just how good did they taste themselves? You know, when I started paying careful attention, I realized that for me, gummy worms were kind of this sickly I best described them as like this petroleum product.
It was just like this off suite.
Where my brain's like, I want more, but it just doesn't taste right, and it's kind of I can't remember the last time I had a gummy worm, because it's been years now, but I can still remember what my body's reaction was was.
Like, eugh, this just does not taste very good.
And do you think that all those things started to influence your perception of the taste. Did you start to actually pay closer attention to what they tasted like? I mean, you know, I guess I'm kind of curious whether your taste shifted as the rest of your consciousness shifted, or whether you simply hadn't been paying enough attention to the taste to begin with.
Yeah, it's a good question. It's certainly the latter, where I hadn't been paying enough attention to what it tasted like in the first place. And I think maybe my taste shifted a little bit as I started paying attention. As a kid, it was like anything sugary tasted good. But I could probably eat sugar, you know, breakfast, lunch, and dinner and still function just fine. I can't do that anymore, and so there are many more consequences that come from an all sugar diet now than when I.
Was a kid.
Yeah, that's interesting. I think that's a sobering thing that happens to many of us, right, with many different things. Is you know, what used to be somewhat consequence free as children or as young people just isn't anymore. And again, so there's an example of needing to update our reward values, right, because suddenly these things have a downside that certainly I couldn't sense before when I was younger. Absolutely, there's something else that you discuss while you're discussing the craving tool that I thought was really interesting. And the second question in there is how content do I feel? Right, you talk about the fact that you know, on one hand, we could use the word, you know, satisfied, how satisfied do I feel? But you say that satisfied and content might seem like the same thing, but they're not right. And that asking people that question very specifically as to whether they were content versus satisfied actually really helped to get clearer on disenchantment. Say more about that.
Yeah, So when my lab studied this, we were really looking for the language that was going to capture the right experience, and what we found was a lot of people will say, oh, yeah, I felt satisfied after that meal, you know, because there was something satisfying about, you know, eating when you're hungry. And when we double clicked on that and ask people, well, how content do you feel? That helped to bring out of the noise of satisfaction. When somebody had overeaten, for example, you know, their body just didn't feel that good, they didn't feel that content. So the contentment gets into this embodied experience more than satisfied does satisfied. You know, we probably had a lot of people still stuck in their heads. Does that make sense?
It does. The other thing that I think contentment does is it to me, it brings together both the physical elements of how I feel after I ate, but also the emotional elements, right, and it points me towards aiming for a better experience, right, an experience that's better than just satisfied.
Right.
To me, it intuitively makes sense. I was fascinated to see that, you know, your lab had figured that out. And that's one of the things that I love about reading your work is all of this stuff. You guys have a fair amount of data supporting that these things work.
Yeah, it'd be hard for me to write a book and feel comfortable about writing that book if I didn't have actual research behind it. And by research I mean like not just reading the Internet or reading other people's work, but actually doing the research myself. So I feel pretty confident, you know, because I've seen this in my clinic, and so i can write about those stories, and I've also seen it in my research, and I can write about you know, our peer reviewed research studies.
We jumped over this earlier a little bit, we sort of alluded to it, but I'd like to kind of go back and hit it a little bit more directly. Right in an earlier process in this overall thing, right is you call it mapping your food habit loops, right, and you really talk about getting clear on three things, the why, what, and how? So say more about what each of those are and what this mapping looks like.
Yes, so the mapping helps us start to see what's driving the eating behavior. So that's the why why am I reaching for food? The what? What am I reaching for?
You know? Is it?
You know, like why am I eating? Am I hungry?
Or am I bored?
Lonely, sad, angry, frustrated, whatever. If we're eating because of an emotion, we tend to reach for comfort food, right, That's where that term comes from. And so you know, these hyper palatable, hyper processed foods are these things that kind of give us that. You know, it's the modern day soma if you think of the eldest Huxley, this pill that people take that just gets them to you know, numb out. Basically, food is like that for a lot of people. I've had patients describe, you know, eating to numb themselves. And so you know, what am I reaching for is the type of food or amount of food even and then the why, what and how how am I eating? Am I eating just to shove it down?
You know?
For me it was the cumming worms. But I've seen this so many times where people are just eating as quickly as they can because they're trying to make that unpleasant feeling go away. They're trying to get that numbing to take effect as quickly as possible as compared to haying attention as they eat.
So that's the why, what, and how?
Yeah, you mentioned in the book this idea of eating mindfully. I love that you make a little joke about it, right, because those of us who have been exposed to mindful eating have sometimes been exposed to it in ways that seem extraordinarily tedious and silly. I think you joke about like mindful eating doesn't mean like spending ten minutes to get to know a raisin, right, which most of us don't have time for. But something you said that really struck me was that mindful eating doesn't mean I have to eat slower. It means I have to be aware of how I'm eating. And that struck me as a lot more of an approachable way to get to it, right, So say more about that.
Yes, a lot of us don't have the luxury of eating a raisin slowly for ten minutes, right, So here we can embody the principle and understand the concepts and then use those concepts to develop wisdom through our own experience. And so, you know, if somebody only has ten minutes to eat a meal, well, they can pay attention as they eat that meal. It's compared to you know, scrolling through their social media on their phone or doing something or reading a book or doing something else. They can also pay attention to the amount of the food that they eat. They can pay attention to the results of you know, if they eat you know, crappy food versus you know, mentally processed types of foods. So we can pay attention to a lot of different aspects of food. But it doesn't take a lot long time to do that. That's the basic principle there.
Yeah, I think many of us may not have the luxury of spending ten minutes on a raisin, nor the desire, right, you know. I always go back and forth with this in my mind because I seem to have a little routine worked out for myself. It is often I have breakfast while I read something I enjoy, and the part of me that's trained in mindfulness and meditation says, well, that's that's a bad idea. You shouldn't be doing that, and yet it seems to be something I so genuinely kind of enjoy and the fact that, like, you know, I know what my breakfast is, and it is what it is. It doesn't change. But I've just kind of been like, you know, a lot of different things to worry about in life for me, this one I'm going to just choose to say, eh, this one's okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, Well you're highlighting something important, which is it's not about you know, looking at this and giving ourselves rules like I have to eat everything and mindfully, you know, and not do anything else. You're highlighting I know, the amount of food and the type of food that brings me nourishment. I'm assuming you're not just eating a bowl of fruit lips or something.
O the sugar, that's right.
What was the Calvin and Hobbs that Calvin always had sugar coated chocolate bombs or chocolate coated sugar bombs or something like that.
They'd always have ones where like after you to eat it is like teeth would be battering.
Yeah. That was such a great cartoon.
I use it in my habits that matter course as a teaching tool because there's so much brilliant wisdom in Calvin and Hobbes.
Absolutely. Yeah, so that's it in Nutell. You know, you're not eating the sugar coated chocolate bombs for breakfast. And so if you have a ritual that you really enjoy and it's not causing suffering, you know, that's really what it's about, is what I'm doing causing suffering. And if it's not causing suffering, then it may not be worth judging yourself for right or saying oh I should be just reading this book or eating my you know, my breakfast. Yeah, good, good enough.
Good enough.
Yeah.
We've kept most of our focus to this idea of learning to update our value rewards hierarchy.
Right.
But there are some other things, particularly as we get later into the book, that you talk about, and you know, one of them is learning to deal with when we face setbacks.
Right.
I think this shows up in a chapter under you know, looking back to move forward. But you know, when I've coached people on behavior change, right, one of the things I always say is, there are inevitably going to be times that we don't do or do the behavior that we're trying not to do. Like, it's largely inevitable, it's totally normal, Right, It's going to happen, and if we don't realize that, we're likely to end up with you know, I think you call it the fuckets often right in this book, right, which is where we make a small mistake and we throw everything away. But the other thing I was really struck by in your book is how powerful retrospectives, how powerful looking back on what can I learn? Right? I always count to people like what can we learn? But the thing that you said that I thought was really interesting was that we can actually use the retrospective as a way of updating our values hierarchies, right, we can look back even if we don't catch it in the moment, and still go back. And I thought that was a really interesting framework that sort of shows us even when we quote unquote make a mistake and I'm not even sure I love that phrasing, but that there's always ways to profit from that.
Yeah.
Well, there are a couple of things here. One is that often when we're in the middle of it, when we're in the middle of the dust storm, we can't see and we can't see clearly, so it can be really challenging to learn from an.
Experience when we're caught in the middle of it.
When the dust settles, we can look back and we can see all of the damage that's been done, for example, so that it's much easier to see, oh, yeah, that was problematic, that didn't go so well. And it also gives us the opportunity to be at a palm or safer place to look back as well, where we've developed some balance and equanimity, and we can lean into that and say, oh, Okay, that didn't go so well. What can I learn from this? And I would argue that we could we could actually take a radical view here and say there is no such thing as a setback. I'll say that again, there's no such thing as a setback if we're learning from that. Why am I saying that? Because often we learn more from when things haven't gone well than when they have gone well. And so if we're open to the learning, then is it a setback while we've learned And maybe we've learned more from that quote unquote setback than if we hadn't had it. So here we can approach everything in life from this growth mindset. I guess where we're learning from, whether things go sideways or go forward. And with the retrospectives, we've probably had a lot of times where things have gone sideways or backwards where we haven't actually mined the gold from that, where we haven't looked back and said, you know, what exactly were the consequences of that?
How well did that go?
So we've got this gold mine where we don't have to go back and repeat all of these experiences. We can simply go back and recall them and ask, you know, if we can really feel into the experience, that's the key piece. Once we can truly feel into that, that's when we know we can mind that gold.
Yeah, yeah, I love that idea that there's you know, no such thing as a setback, right, And I think part of the reason that that is so important, and it gets to something we talked about earlier, and you actually talk about in some chapters that are even a little bit later than this, is getting back to how we relate to our experience and how we relate to ourselves, right, And normally our looking back, right is just chastisement of ourselves. It's just judgment of ourselves. It's just self loathing of ourselves, which means that we're actually not really learning from it, right. And so the beauty of being able to approach it as a learning is that often that can be the way that we can set aside, you know, the self loathing and the chastisement and vice versa. Right, they sort of feed each other, you know, you talk about kindness and curiosity, right, And I think your work, Carol Dweck's work, Kristin Neff's w work have all you know, driven home for me a like it's just better to be in a brain that is kind to itself, Like that's just a better experience. But really how critical that actually is in getting better and improving.
Yes and kindness can be seen in the same way that we've been talking about changing eating habits. We can look at our old habits of self judgment, of guilt, of shame, of whatever, and see where they fall on that reward hierarchy relative to kindness. You know, to our brain, it's a no brainer. Kindness wins every time. So we can imply the same principles that we've been talking about eating to kindness and fostering that as a healthy habit as well.
So this idea of looking back reminds me of a quote I love from He was a leadership writer arre in Venice, but he says, true understanding comes from reflecting on your experience. I love that is how we actually get de or understanding, And you know, I think that it's one of the things I encourage people a lot, Like, you know, listening to a show like this is like really valuable, But what's more valuable is to actually stop and go, well, how is what I just heard actually apply to my life? Like, let me think very directly about like what did doctor Judd talk about? How does that apply to me in my life? Versus just sort of hearing it?
Yeah, I love that because that reminds me of this idea of concepts in the service of wisdom. So you and I can talk about these concepts and we can talk about, you know, how people's lives might have been changed, but ultimately somebody listening, their life isn't going to change until they put these concepts into practice and through their own direct experience. That's how they're going to develop wisdom. That's the only way we can develop wisdom is through our own experience.
Yeah.
Yeah, let's talk about something else that comes up in a couple points in the book, but you hit on it a little bit more directly near the end of the book, which is the idea of a bitigger better offer. Talk to me about what a bigger better offer means to you and how it applies to what we've been talking about.
Yes, so this is the same concept as the reward hierarchy. And so we can look at old habits like overeating or eating junk food. You know, it's the gummy worm, whatever our gummy worm habit is, and we can become disenchanted with that just by paying attention, like, oh, gummy worms don't taste that that good to me. We can also apply the same thing when we compare gummy worms to other food. So, you know, for me, it was not only discovering that gummy worms don't taste very good, but then my brain said, well, give.
Me something better.
So way high on the bigger better offer hierarchy is blueberries. You know, I absolutely adore blueberries, and I just realized recently that they actually provide this intermittent reinforcement because you never know just how sweet and next one is going to be. You know, like one could be slightly more tart and the next one could be a slightly sweeter, one could be a slightly you know, pop in your mouth a little bit more juicier versus the next one. And so it's like, if we're paying attention, it's a lottery in our mouth. Yeah, every time, you know, and to me, number you play.
When intermittent rewards those are those are pretty sticky?
Yeah?
So are you eating your blueberries one at a time?
Generally?
Yeah, if I'm starving, I maybe a couple at a time, but the best reward comes from eating them one at a time.
Speaking of my chocolate frosted sugar bombs, as part of my breakfast, I put I put my blueberries in with those, so it's maybe why I'm not getting the individual blueberry flavor.
So I love it. I love it.
But that's the principle, is you know, using the same awareness that we're using to become disenchanted with the old habits to build these new ones. You know, whether it's the habit of kindness, whether it's the habit of curiosity, or whether it's finding our blueberry equivalent.
That's great. So listener and thinking about all of that and the other great wisdom from today's episode. If you are going to isolate just one top insight or thing to do that you're taking away, what would it be. Remember that, little by little, a little becomes a lot. And a habit for me that has accrude and benefit over time is meditation. However, one of the things that gets in our way of building a steady meditation practice is that very striving.
Right.
Of course, we're doing it because we want certain benefits, but in the moment of actually meditating, we need to let striving go and focus on just being there and experiencing it no matter what's happening. It becomes not enjoyable because I'm trying to make something happen some special moment. We want to let go of that. So if you want to stop dreading meditation and actually find it enjoyable, check out my free meditation guide at Goodwolf dot me slash calm. So we're nearing the end of our time here. Is there anything that you feel like is really important to this book and to these ideas that we have completely missed. Is there anything you would like to leave us with that you feel like is really important that we either completely missed or didn't cover sufficiently.
The one thing I would say, because you know, the two key principles here are curiosity and kindness, and so we I think we've covered kindness pretty well, but I just want to just add one.
Piece around curiosity.
I think we've covered it as well to some degree, but just a pragmatic element that I've often found helpful, which is in a nutshell, when somebody judges themselves, you know, like oh I shouldn't eat that, or oh I ate too much, or oh I can't believe I did that. Again, there's that closing down quality of their experience that oh, oh no, and we can recognize that oh and that oh actually is that awakening of curiosity, And so maybe just to leave us with something very pragmatic, which is, we can awaken curiosity anytime we've got an oh no, we can use that as our curiosity bell and go oh there's oh no. So that I found very simple, very pragmatic, and a great way to awaken you know, this superpower of curiosity?
Yeah, I think it reminds me of an idea that's been on my mind a lot lately. And I interviewed I don't know if you know him, Aj Jacobs. He's a writer. He's written a bunch of best selling books where he sort of does like hilarious experiments on himself, like The Year of Living Biblically, or he wrote a book recently about puzzles, and you know, I had him on the show because I wanted to talk to him. I was like, wow, are we going to even make a show out of puzzles?
Right?
But the guy's brilliant enough, I thought. But the core idea that resonated and still sticks with me, and it's exactly what you just said, is that the minute we start reframing I mean a problem as a puzzle, it changes our whole.
View of it.
Right, And for you the oh no is the oh, there's a problem, but the curiosity is turning it into a puzzle. Like I love that you know so well. Thank you so much, Jud, I always love talking with you. I thought this book was excellent. I think it's going to be a big help to a lot of people. We have links in the show notes where people can get access to the book and to your app and all the great things you have going on around this. You and I are going to continue in the post show conversation where we are going to attempt to use your framework here to help me with my intermintent problem of playing solitaire when I should be writing. Okay, so we're going to see if these concepts actually work in the post show conversation. So, listeners, if you'd like access to that and all sorts of other great things and ad free episodes, all that One Youfeed dot net slash join you can become part of our community, and we also have monthly community meetings now, so we hope to see you there. Jud Thank you so much, my pleasure.
If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the one You Feed community, go to oneufeed dot net slash Join The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.
