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

Author Dr. Judson Brewer explains how he became interested in psychiatry as a medical student. He realized that helping his patients understand how their minds work helped to empower them to work on their own mental health problems in a proactive way, rather than simply being medicated. Ironically, as a medical student, Brewer began experiencing terrible panic attacks due to high stress, shift work, and the uncertainty he faced in his job every day. Brewer learned how to manage his anxiety using mindfulness and awareness of his discomfort, and he realized that these approaches could also help his psychiatric patients. Brewer defines anxiety as a kind of harmful habit that people can learn to identify and change. He has a “less is more” approach, emphasizing simple, science-based tools that have been proven effective in scientific studies. He hopes the reader finds his book to be a “useful and pragmatic guide” to working with their own habit of anxiety (xiv).

In Part 0, Dr. Brewer provides the reader with the neuroscience of how the brain produces anxiety, and how it can inadvertently become a habit.