Judson Brewer's 2021 book Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind is chatty and rather long for its content. The central metaphor is a "three gear" process:

• Mapping Your Mind: First Gear — identifying the stages in your "primary habit loop":
  • Trigger — the event that causes an undesired state or action to begin
  • Behavior — what the Trigger then makes happen (e.g., binge eating, panic, drinking, smoking, procrastination, worrying, arguing)
  • Reward — what follows from that Behavior (ill health, drunkness, avoidance, wasted time, strife, etc)
• Updating Your Brain's Reward Value: Second Gear — observing with genuine nonjudgmental curiosity the "felt experience of the rewards" that the undesired behavior yields, by paying attention in the present moment and developing conscious awareness
• Finding that Bigger, Better Offer for Your Brain: Third Gear — via:
  • recognizing what the actual result of the old habit is producing – aka the "Second Gear" above
  • finding something to replace that result, namely a "BBO" or "bigger, better offer" that "doesn't feed the habit loop through mere substitution of a different behavior" – something that makes for long-term happiness

So as Brewer describes it, the result is to create new healthy habits that persist. Mindfulness, curiosity, openness, and loving-kindness are often part of that new reward. Brewer recommends "RAIN":

All good, though perhaps not particularly original or surprising. That doesn't make it less valuable to practice!

(cf Come SAIL Away (2011-11-26), Mantra - Be Curious and Kind (2023-07-17), ...) - ^z - 2023-07-31