Judson Brewer

Jud Brewer, MD, PhD (“Dr. Jud”) is a New York Times bestselling author and thought leader in the field of habit change and the “science of self-mastery,” having combined over 25 years of experience with mindfulness training with his scientific research. He is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences and Psychiatry at the Schools of Public Health & Medicine at Brown University. He is the author of “The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love, Why We Get Hooked, and How We Can Break Bad Habits,” “Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind,” and the forthcoming book “The Hunger Habit: Why We Eat When We’re Not Hungry and How to Stop.”

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Judson Brewer: Ending Worry Addiction and Unwinding An...

Do you have a habit you just can’t break no matter how hard you try or how badly you want to? Renowned addiction psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and bestselling author Judson Brewer—or Dr. Jud, as he’s widely known—has helped millions of people find freedom from excessive worry, overeating, cigarette smoking, and many other challenging behaviors. In this podcast, Tami Simon speaks with Dr. Jud about his life-changing books—The Craving Mind, Unwinding Anxiety, and most recently, The Hunger Habit—and his compassionate and respectful approach to habit change. 

Enjoy this empowering and “aha!-inducing” conversation about breaking the cycle of anxiety; the process of negative reinforcement; fear of the future vs planning for the future; the three elements of a habit loop: trigger, behavior, reward; the pros and cons of distraction; distress tolerance—a survival skill for our times; changing the reward value of a behavior; karma and reinforcement learning; exploring gratification to its end; the brain as a smoke detector; recalibrating the nervous system after trauma; the concept of dependent origination; the superpower of interest curiosity; hedonic hunger vs homeostatic hunger; paying attention to your “pleasure plateau” when it comes to food; awareness as the key ingredient for behavior change; the mantra “What’s this?”; and more.

Note: This episode originally aired on Sounds True One, where these special episodes of Insights at the Edge are available to watch live on video and with exclusive access to Q&As with our guests. Learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

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Just One Question | Gabor Maté: What Keeps Me from Be...

Why do some of the most hardened people—lifers on death row, people who’ve killed—turn out to be, underneath it all, remarkably sensitive? Physician and trauma expert Dr. Gabor Maté has spent decades working with addicts and prisoners, and he’s found a pattern that upends how we usually think about cruelty and compassion.

Dr. Gabor Maté is a physician and bestselling author whose work on trauma and addiction has shaped how millions understand pain, illness, and healing. He’s the author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, When the Body Says No, Scattered Minds, and, with his son Daniel, The Myth of Normal.

In this conversation, Tami and Gabor explore:

  • Why compassion is wired into us from birth and what shuts it down
  • The neuroscience of care, drawing on affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp’s research on emotional systems
  • What Gabor has witnessed firsthand working with lifers and people on death row
  • The difference between “orchid” and “dandelion” temperaments, and why high sensitivity can become either a liability or a gift
  • Why genes linked to addiction may really be genes for sensitivity

This one’s for anyone trying to understand the roots of cruelty, or working through their own compassion fatigue; toward others, or toward themselves.

Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Gabor Maté titled “Gabor Maté: Healing Principles to Embody in a Traumatized World”

Just One Question | Adyashanti: Is It an Awakening If ...

Is a spiritual awakening only real if it completely rearranges your life? That’s the question Tami Simon puts to Adyashanti in this episode, and his answer digs into something a lot of seekers wrestle with: the gap between a powerful glimpse of clarity and the ongoing work of actually living from it.

Adya, the American-born teacher behind books like The End of Your World and Falling into Grace, walks through why those temporary tastes of awakening are real, even when they fade, and offers a surprisingly practical way to hold onto what they revealed without grasping at them. Then he does something rare: he tells the story of his own first major awakening, a moment he describes as feeling like a nuclear explosion going off inside him.

Here’s what we cover:

  • Why a fleeting shift still counts as a real awakening, even if it doesn’t stick
  • The two (seemingly contradictory) pieces of advice Adya gives people chasing a past peak experience
  • How the first awakening can feel like a “freebie,” while everything after asks you to participate consciously
  • Adya’s own account of the night everything fell away and the still, small voice that told him, “This isn’t all of it. Keep going.”

And there’s so much more. Listen to the entire conversation from this Insights At the Edge episode, “Waking Up: What Does It Really Mean?” 

Kimberly Ann Johnson: “Becoming a Sexual Alchemi...

What if aging isn’t the slow closing of your erotic life, but the doorway into its most alive season?

This week, Tami Simon speaks with Kimberly Ann Johnson—sexological body worker, somatic experiencing practitioner, birth doula, and author of the new Sounds True book Erotic Seasons: Tuning In to the Rhythms of Women’s Sexuality and Spirituality—about what she calls erotic sovereignty, and the sentence that closes her book: the female body is its own spiritual path.

Join Tami and Kimberly to explore:

  • Erotic sovereignty—your relationship to your own life force, and why it stays with you across every season
  • Why the goal isn’t a more regulated nervous system, but a more responsive one, and what it means to run more charge
  • The four erotic seasons—maiden, mother, virgin, crone—and the surprising reason virgin comes after mother
  • Why hormonal transitions are “wet clay”: golden opportunities for repatterning that our culture teaches us to rush past
  • Menopause as a death rehearsal, and the life review that arrives decades before we expect it
  • Hot sex and warm sex—widening the range beyond adrenaline, and learning the language of the pause
  • “Hormones are gods”: the collective endocrine system, and why living intergenerationally may be the original hormone therapy
  • Becoming a sexual alchemist—arousal as healing energy, and why care is the whole ethic

Whether you are 25 or 75, Kimberly offers a map for meeting your body’s changes as thresholds rather than losses.

Please note: this episode includes candid discussion of sexual abuse and sexual wounding, including Kimberly Ann Johnson’s own experience.

Listen now, and meet your body as the path. →

This conversation offers genuine transmission, not just concepts about awakening, but the palpable presence of realized teachers exploring the growing edge of spiritual understanding together, and it originally aired on Sounds True One.

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