In this deeply insightful episode of our podcast, we explore the often-hidden challenges melanoma patients and survivors face—stress and anxiety. Living with melanoma or surviving it is a testament to strength, but it comes with its own set of emotional hurdles. To shed light on this critical issue and offer some groundbreaking strategies for coping, we are honored to have Dr. Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, a leading expert in mindfulness and stress reduction, and the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University.

About Our Guest

Judson Brewer, MD, PhD
Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center, Brown University, School of Public Health

Jud Brewer, MD PhD, is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in Behavioral and Social Sciences at the School of Public Health and Psychiatry at the Medical School at Brown University. He also is a research affiliate at MIT. A psychiatrist and internationally known expert in mindfulness training for addictions, Brewer has developed and tested novel mindfulness programs for behavior change, including both in-person and app-based treatments for smoking, emotional eating, and anxiety.

He has also studied the underlying neural mechanisms of mindfulness using standard and real-time fMRI, and source-estimated EEG, and is currently translating these findings into clinical use (see www.drjud.com for more information). He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, presented to the US President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, foreign Parliaments, trained US Olympic athletes and coaches, and foreign government ministers and has been featured on 60 minutes, at TED (4th most viewed talk of 2016 with over 17 Million views), in the New York Times, Time magazine (top 100 new health discoveries of 2013), Forbes, Businessweek, NPR, National Geographic, and the BBC among others. 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 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) and the New York Times best-seller, Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind (Avery/Penguin Random House, 2021). Follow him on twitter @judbrewer.