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To heal anxiety, I believe that you really have to connect your adult self with your wounded child self and connect your mind and body back together, because that's what anxiety is. It's fundamentally a disconnection between your adult self and your child's self and from your mind and your body. So when you can connect those things back together, you start to heal your anxiety.

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Hello and welcome to the Personal Development School Podcast. I am so excited you are here. I am your co-host, Titus Gibson, along with our new special host, Mike Vizio. This is a podcast that discusses everything related to integrated attachment theory. The New attachment theory, along with the subconscious mind relationships, communication needs boundaries and so much more. Throughout this podcast, you'll see a series of episodes I upload with new information, educational tips, all about how to thrive in relationships and really master your emotional state in your life, along with special guests hosted by Mike Zito to discuss all of these amazing topics and longer form content.

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Thank you so much for being here and I really hope you enjoy this episode.

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Welcome back. Personal Development School podcast listeners and viewers. My guest today is also known as The Anxiety M.D. and he specializes in the art and neuroscience of helping people recover from anxiety disorders. He knows anxiety from the inside out as he developed his own anxiety disorder as a result of growing up with a dad with severe schizophrenia. He has degrees and advanced training in medicine, neuroscience and developmental psychology.

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He's also a certified yoga and meditation teacher and was a professional standup comedian for over a decade. In his award winning book and audio book, Anxiety Our X, he shows a practical, actionable program for anxiety relief that incorporates a combination of the latest in neuroscience, with the grounding wisdom of the body, with the ultimate goal of relieving the anxious thoughts of the mind.

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It is a unique and never before seen understanding of what anxiety truly is and exactly how it can be successfully treated. His main goal is to make sure that nobody has to suffer with anxiety, just as he did. Podcast viewers and listeners, let's welcome today's guest, Dr. Russell Kennedy. Hello, Dr. Mike. How are you? Good. How are you doing?

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Good. Good. Nice to see you. So just to start off for any of our listeners who may not have seen you before, I heard you before. Just want if you can give us a bit of your backstory. So if you're able to just tell us about your background, if you want to touch on family life, just what sort of brought you to this point now?

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Yeah, I guess growing up, as you said in the open and growing up with a schizophrenic father. So a lot of my childhood was based on chaos because he'd be fine and loving and caring and connected and silly and fun and intelligent with me and then he would go psychotic and I would lose him. So for me, childhood, it was a bit chaotic that way.

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So on one hand, I would have this loving, attentive father, and then all of a sudden he would go psychotic and he would just essentially kind of disappear, not physically, but emotionally. So that caused my own attachment, you know, worries to come up and it created an anxiety disorder in me. And that's when I went through med school with it.

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I, you know, became a yoga and meditation teacher because of it. I wrote the book because of it. So, you know, it's not like it's all bad. I think we go through a lots of traumas in our life and we think they're terrible. But this one has actually led me to a really good place of being able to help myself and help other people.

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And I was talking this morning to a book agent because Penguin Random House wants to buy the worldwide rights to my book. And I'm kind of really flattered and excited that my book is going to get out to a wider audience. That's fantastic. Thank you for sharing that and congratulations. I think you're going to thanks people with that deal.

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That's great. Thanks. So for your own anxiety, you know, we sometimes separate things for a long time and maybe don't take action right away or maybe live with it for a long time. With your own anxiety, was there like a specific catalyst or like a rock bottom moment where you're like, Enough is enough? Like I need to do something about this right now?

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Yeah, I think in 2013 when I was practicing in Vancouver, so I was being a doctor during the daytime and then I would go to do stand up at night about four or five nights a week, and I ruptured my left Achilles tendon and I was already burned out of medicine at that point. And that was kind of like the straw that broke the doctor's back, like I was done at that point.

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I knew I wasn't going back to medicine and I had to find something else. So I had to heal myself first. So I went to India. I lived at a temple there for a while. I did yoga and meditation training, you know, years before that. So I leaned on that and just tried to find different ways of kind of healing myself.

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And then a friend who is a plant medicine specialist. Psychedelics and other plants too, like, you know, just about everything about plants took me on this psychedelic journey. And in that psychedelic journey, I saw that my anxiety had much more to do with the alarm stored in my body from growing up with a schizophrenic father than it does the thoughts of my mind.

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The thoughts of my mind were basically just a byproduct of this old trauma that was still stored in my body. And basically, from that point on, I started to really focus on healing through the body and through connecting with my younger self and connecting my mind and my body together, because my mind and my body had become disconnected because I got so wrapped up in rumination and thinking that I forgot about feeling in my body.

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So

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to heal anxiety, I believe that you really have to connect your adult self with your wounded child self and connect your mind and body back together, because that's what anxiety is. It's fundamentally a disconnection between your adult self and your child's self and from your mind and your body. So when you can connect those things back together, you start to heal your anxiety.

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That's really powerful. So having said that, my next question is, I know in your early therapy days, you mentioned that and a lot of current therapies, they deal with anxiety as strictly an issue of the mind. And the popular thought is that if we fix the thinking, we fix the anxiety. But obviously, as you just explain, your approach is to get anxiety through like mind.

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And I heard you mention mind, body and spirit. In you go a little deeper into that for us. Like, why do you think anxiety is not an issue with the mind? Why is that sort of going the wrong way? And why do you think going into the body is what creates the real change? Yeah, it's like me saying, Don't think of a pink elephant to you.

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Your mind can't help but think of a pink elephant. So if you tell people not to worry, it's like telling them to think of a pink elephant. Like you can't just stop worrying, because otherwise, if it was as simple as that, therapy would last about 8 minutes. There's there's a YouTube video out there. And if people haven't seen it, just search Bob Newhart, Stop it.

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And it's like a six minute video where this woman comes in with this problem and he's the therapist and he just says, well, just stop it. Just stop it. Just stop doing that. You know? And if therapy was that easy, if it was such a cognitive process, we'd be able to fix anxiety and most mental disorders very quickly.

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But the issue is that most of these mental disorders start when we're children and they get grounded into the feeling part of our brain, the subcortical, the part below, the thinking mind, and we have to fix that at its root as well as the cog. I'm not against, you know, certainly the mind plays a significant role in anxiety, but it's not the ultimate cause.

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So it's one of those things where the ultimate cause is this old trauma that's still stored in your body. Potentially it could be stored in the representation of the body in the mind as well. But it's still stored in your body and it's being able to access both the mind aspect of anxiety and the body aspect of it.

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Because what I believe happens is the body has this alarm that's stored in us since we were children, and it activates the mind and the mind being a compulsive meaning making make sense machine has to do something with that, especially that that left hemisphere that really wants to know. It wants to make the uncertain a little more certain.

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So it creates this worry. And we believe the worry because we made it up and then we make the alarm in our body worse because we get afraid. And then when we make the alarm worse, we make the thoughts worse. And then it just starts this alarm anxiety cycle. So if we can see anxiety is not just a problem of the mind, it's a problem of the mind and the body.

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We can separate the two. When we separate the two, we can break the cycle and when we break the cycle, we can start to heal. So a lot of people don't even know that it's a cycle, that it's the body and the mind cycling on each other. They each make each other worse. So we can separate those two, We can break the cycle.

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We start to heal anxiety. Wow, that's amazing. Yeah. I'm thinking about the snowball going down the hill like one St Clair, and it's just getting bigger and bigger. Totally. So I guess I'd be curious. How does someone know if they have anxiety? Like we all have anxious moments and, you know, I get anxious before our podcast, but how do you know?

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How did you know you had an anxiety and what's a good way for someone to know if they have anxiety? Well, it requires, you know, metacognition, awareness of awareness. So it really requires like, do you have a lot of dread? You know, do you wake up in the morning dreading the day and constantly ruminating, thinking this could go wrong?

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That could go wrong if you're constantly living in the future because worry and anxiety is always about the future. You're constantly living in the future. It's a good sign that you probably have some kind of anxiety going on now. Anxiety and complex PTSD and all these sort of emotional dysregulation are very hard to tease out from each other, really.

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You know, it's the DSM makes these distinctions, but they're just labels, you know, So PTSD and anxiety and to some extent OCD, they're all kind of the same. They all come from the same root, which is unresolved wounds that are still stuck on you. Typically from childhood, but not always. And that's what causes the problem in the first place.

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So we can't heal a thinking problem or a feeling problem with a thinking solution. And I think that's where most therapies fall to the ground, is they try and change our thinking, but it's just too much work to constantly think positive. If you're carrying this negative energy around in your body the whole time. It's just it's like trying to remember to breathe all the time.

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It just doesn't work that way. So it's being able to understand that it's really about the body and the mind, and we have to treat both if we're going to actually make some headway with it. I was talking to Cynthia, my wife the other day, who's also a somatic trauma therapist, and she was saying, you know, these cognitive strategies like CBT and A.C.T. and stuff, they work initially, they help initially, but over the course of time, the effects of them tend to fade, whereas somatic therapy going into the body, connecting with your self, finding your younger wounded self through your own body, that tends to take longer, but it lasts like the healing lasts.

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So it's it's a little bit of both and it's just trying to find what's the combination because we are very cognitive creatures. We have these huge prefrontal cortices in the front parts of our brains that are involved in executive function and thinking and complex thinking. And I've heard it said somewhere, I used to know the author of this, but anxiety is the price that we pay for our intelligence.

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So we can think of all these, but like, you know, a goat walking around doesn't go, Jeez, I hope I don't I hope I don't get fed, you know, in two weeks. You know, I hope there isn't a thunderstorm coming in like they don't think that way. But we deal with human beings. We always we can create these warnings, whatever the worst case scenarios that basically torture ourselves and under the guise of protection.

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And, you know, that's kind of what our ego does. Our ego is always trying to think of the next step that we could protect ourselves from, especially if we had trauma as children. And that's exhausting because one of the things that I talk about is that if you grow up with a loving, caring, attuned family, you learn that life is about connection.

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But if you grow up with trauma, you learn that life is about survival and you see the world through this lens of survival all the time. And that's another way you can sort of tell if you have anxiety is if you're always wondering about your own survival. And it doesn't have to be life or death, it can just be, Am I going to fail this test?

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Am I going to have enough money? I might do that. And to some extent, anxiety is normal for human beings, like it's normal. But if it's every day, if you wake up with that, every day or it shows up every night when the sun comes down, that's not normal. That makes a lot of sense. I just something you mention I was really interested in hearing the answer to so when you do the reprograming of thoughts through CBT and whatnot, you're saying that has a little bit more faster results.

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You might get quicker results from that, but the somatic route takes a little longer, but it's longer lasting. How long would you say? Like, I'm sure it's different for everyone and depending on how much time you're putting in, but how long would you say it takes to sort of make some real headway with using somatic and body work for healing?

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Anxiety really depends on the depth of the trauma. You know, like if you've got a lot of emotional, physical, sexual abuse of the child, it's going to take a lot longer than, you know, if you didn't have that same level of abuse as a child. So and it also depends on your level of sensitivity, too, because most people with anxiety disorders were kind of born sensitive.

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You know, we're very sensitive to adrenalin and cortisol in our system. So it takes a lot longer for us for the excitement of anxiety to calm down. And I use this example with my daughter because when my daughter was four years old, I was in med school. We used to play this game together called Sea Monster, and I talk about this in the book.

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So she'd run into the room and she'd say, Sea monster. And I would draw up all my books or whatever, whatever I was doing and just become the sea monster a chaser around the house. And she'd scream. And in a combination of fright and delight. So I'd wind up her sympathetic nervous system. I'd wind up her fight or flight nervous system because I'm the sea monster and I'm chasing her out.

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But then about 5 minutes later, we'd have a little cuddle together and her parasympathetic rest and digest relaxation nervous system would kick in. So I was teaching her. I didn't know about this at the time, but I was basically teaching her that you can go really high into sympathetic fighter flight, but within 5 minutes you can come right back down.

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But we anxious people don't tend to be able to do that once we get up into that high range of sympathetic, high adrenaline activity in our minds and bodies. It takes us really a really long time to come back down. Right? Right. That makes a lot of sense. And you sound like a really fun dad. Oh, I was pretty silly.

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Yeah, I guess. The Iliad or this afternoon, actually, she. She works for me now. She's my PR agent, so it's. It's kind of like The hangover. I hope you have some some fun times there. Yeah, she's great. I heard you say that all anxiety is separation. Anxiety. Can you look into a little further what that means? Why would anxiety be in separation?

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Anxiety? Yeah. That's a quote from Gordon Neufeld, who's kind of like my mentor in developmental psychology. And he says, all anxiety is separation, anxiety at the root of anxiety is a separation either life or death or separation from money, or it's a separation typically, I add the separation from your self. So basically what happens in my little scheme is that as a child, you experience a trauma that's too much for you to bear.

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And it depends on, you know, it depends on the child. Like some children are very sensitive. I was very sensitive. So a relatively small trauma that people would kind of think, well, that's not such a big deal to me or to someone with a sensitive nervous system. It is a big deal. So it overwhelms my nervous system when I was child.

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So what happens then is we push it down into the unconscious mind and then from the unconscious mind, because the body is a representation of the unconscious mind, we store that trauma in our body and then that allows harm in our body. That alarm energy in our body fires up the thoughts of our mind and creates this alarm anxiety cycle that I was talking earlier on about.

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So when we're younger and we experienced trauma, say your father's an abusive alcoholic, and so you get this trauma in your system that you don't know what to do with, so it gets stored into your body. And what happens is that you keep pushing it down and then you can't get away from it. You know, it becomes so much a part of you that you can't escape.

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So that's what causes this sort of inescapable part of anxiety. So I think what we do is we stuff down our emotional trauma into our physical body and we're not aware of it. So it stays there and then we assume it's the mind that's causing the problem when it's actually more this, this or that wounding. That's kind of I don't know.

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I don't want your original question was I had a path to go there and then I kind of lost it. It was about all anxiety being separation anxiety. Right. Okay, now I know where I was going. Yeah. So basically that travel, when we look at our parents, we can't see our parents as flawed because we need them for survival.

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So when there's a problem in our when our in our environment, children blame themselves. And there's a great quote that says, you know, when you abuse, neglect or abandoned a child, the child doesn't stop loving the parent, they stop loving themselves. And that's where the split starts. And then we create something that I call jobs, judgment, abandonment, blame and shame towards ourselves as children.

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Right. And that splits us when we're judging. Abandoning, blaming and shaming ourselves were split. And that split causes a tremendous amount of alarm in our system that gets perpetuated because we keep taking jabs at ourselves. And that's why anxiety is so hard to treat because it's such a habit that we get involved with that we can't seem to stop it.

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And the other thing is when we start treating it with just try to fix the mind that doesn't touch the underlying problem. The little analogy that I draw is like, you're in a rowboat, there's a hole in the boat, it's filling up with water so you can bail water out of the boat, make yourself feel better because it drops the water level, but you're not doing anything for the underlying cause.

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That hole is still there. So unless you go deep under and patch that hole in the rowboat, which is basically fixing the alarm in your body, and you do that by connecting your adult self with your child self and connecting your mind and your body, then you actually solve the problem at its source as opposed to just try to fix your thoughts.

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Don't think of a pink elephant. Right? Right. That makes a lot of sense. I know you mentioned anxiety and addiction. Being cousins. Yeah. What is the connection between addiction and anxiety? They both start from the same root cause, which is usually unresolved childhood trauma. So we can't seem to connect to ourselves in a holistic way, in an adaptive way.

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So the way chemicals often work, alcohol, drugs, whatever is they make us feel good, make our bodies feel good, and that allows us to connect with ourselves. But it wears off, right? So we keep needing to go back to the addiction to whatever drug or alcohol or whatever we use to gain that false sense of connection again. But it never last because of course your body's going to get rid of the alcohol, it's going to get rid of the drug so it never last.

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So we're constantly craving this chemical that makes us feel connected. And the classic example is the guys that go out and they have a bunch of beers and say, I love you, man. Like, that's the only time they can actually share that because their body feels relaxed enough from the alcohol that they can actually connect to themselves, which allows them to connect to other people.

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Right? Right. I think I had that relationship with my friends and my. Yeah. Teens and early twenties. Yeah, sure. We would always go out for drinks and be best buds, but I don't think we ever once like my partner actually, like, got to know each other and right beers, feelings, all that stuff and that's true for a lot of men.

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I mean, as men we are trained from a very young age to compete with each other, right? So now it's like, okay, well now you're in your thirties, you kind of semi made it in your in your career or whatever. And you're still got that mentality that you have to compete with other men. And if you have to compete with another man, you're not going to be vulnerable to that other man because it's basically I have in the back of my mind that I have to remain better than you.

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And if I tell you that I'm, you know, having problems with my wife or with my work or whatever, that's vulnerable, we see that as weakness, right? So it's like it's this catch 22 and that we need male friendships as we get older, but because we've been so indoctrinated to be competitive with each other, we can't actually let down our guard enough to be able to be truly connected to each other.

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And that's why I think men's groups are wonderful and they're starting to to spring up all over the place because it actually gives men this ability to connect with each other. Because I do think that we lean on our females way too much. Way too much. Yeah. Manuscripts of our are sure. I know in one of your videos I learned a new term that I never heard, and that was intro reception.

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And for anyone listening who hasn't heard of A.S. before, what is the importance of this word and how it relates to anxiety? Yeah, it comes from Dr. Steven Porges, who who came up with the poly bagel theory. But there's interception and external perception. So it's basically the term that we use for the brain detecting things outside of us or inside of us.

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So A.S. is how we detect things that are inside of us. So this is what I'm talking about with the alarm in our body is that our mind through interception is always reading the body. So there's this old alarm that stuck there from your old trauma as a child. It's going to reflect through your mind. So your mind is always reading the body to see if they're safe.

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So if there's something in your body that tells you, hey, we're not safe, the mind is going to come up with reasons for that. And that's basically what worry is. So that's what interception is. It's basically the mind constantly reading the body for cues of safety. Okay. That makes sense and distress. So we know that you have your own podcast, you have an episode entitled You Can't Sink Your Way Out of a Feeling Problem.

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Yeah, Part of the description says when we're anxious, automatic urges to figure a way out of the feeling. But what if the problem with anxiety is too much thinking to start with? Basically, you can't fix overthinking with more thinking. You must learn to feel your way out. So I myself have been known to be an overthinker. I'm sure those people who are going to be listening to this, who relate, Can you briefly let me and my audience know why can't you think your way out of a problem?

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Well, because if the problem was solvable by thinking, you would have solved it like 40 years ago or 40 minutes ago or whatever. It's the same thing about that. Bob Newhart, clap about stop it. Right. Like, if you knew the solution, you could just let it go. The thing is, our brain constantly tells us that that it can find a solution, but it can't because if it if it could, it would have found it a long time ago.

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So we just keep hammering away at the same door, thinking we're going to open it, but it never opens. So what we do is because the door doesn't open is we just knock harder. We just take more and more and more and we just create more stress for ourselves because we intuitively know that we're not getting any worse.

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So this is rumination. This is basically just how we ruminate on things, believing that it will somehow magically turn up with a solution. And very rarely does it ever give us a solution. Rumination. It's just it's a constant, self-perpetuating negativity. It just tells you that it will solve the problem, but it never does, and it really does rob you out of your sort of daily joy, like when you're trying to be present with things, but you have that going on in the background, like it's really hard to enjoy yourself and kind of, yeah, it keeps you in your head and you know, life isn't in your head.

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You know, I have clients that are dreadfully afraid of death and I say, you know, I don't think you're afraid of dying so much as afraid of living because you're not actually allowing yourself to do anything that may involve risk or anything like that. And to live, you really have to stay in your body. And that's why people say, you know, as I get older, time goes by so quickly.

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And I think a lot of that is because we spend a lot of it in our head and there's no real grounding in your head. You know, the grounding is in your body. So it's the ability to kind of stay present in your body, even if it feels uncomfortable. And this is true with the kids these days, too, because they're so addicted to their screens, they never have to deal with any negative emotion.

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So if they feel bored, if they go for us straight or whatever, they just go and zombie scrolling cigaret, which I do as well. But it's one of those things that I think that kids growing up now don't ever have to learn how to metabolize and process and work through negative emotion because all they need to do is just go distract, but they never really learn how to deal with it.

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And I was you know, the analogy that I draw is I had a motorcycle in my in my front driveway and I read 500 books on riding a motorcycle until I actually get on that motorcycle and ride it, you know, until I actually get into that emotion and just allow it to to go through me and maybe fall off a couple of times.

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I never really learned how to ride that motorcycle. I never really know how to ride that emotion, ride that feeling, because I go out to the motorcycle and I think, Oh, you know what? I'll just read another book on the brakes because I need to know the brakes. Now. You've got to go in there. You've got to feel it.

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You got to feel it to heal it. And that's why I think you can't solve a feeling problem with a thinking solution. You have to actually feel it and process it and allow yourself to work through it, which I believe is what the kids there aren't doing because they're so focused on their screens. Right. That makes sense. How are you ever going to know what's going on inside of you if you're just externally focused and being constantly entertained?

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And then to the point that you shut your screen and you go right to bed. So there's sort of inner reflection, there's no getting to know sort of what's going on inside. Yeah, hopefully that changes somehow for the better in the near future. So what are your YouTube videos? It's entitled How Responsible Are You for Others Emotions? And you ask viewers to reflect on who in their lives they feel emotionally responsible for.

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And you mentioned the term staying in your own garden. Can you expand on this phrase a bit that you used about staying in your own garden? And ultimately, who are we emotionally responsible for? Well, ultimately, you're only emotionally responsible for yourself. Now, you can make an argument that you're responsible for your children as well, but it's a slippery slope because our children have their own path as well.

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And I think as parents, we often look at our children and when they suffer, when they struggle, like it's our fault. And as Neufeld says, there is no parenting without guilt. So it's really to the point of understanding that there's the children have their own path. So, you know, you're only really emotionally responsible for yourself. And ironically, when you take responsibility for your own emotions, your children benefit from it.

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And I think as children, often if we had a parent who was narcissistic or overly demanding or mentally ill, we start taking responsibility for them at a very young age. So what we do is we read our parent like that was the thing with my dad as I had to read him really closely, like, is he going into mania?

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You know, is he going to be up for four days playing the trumpet or is he going to go into a horrible depression? So I was always constantly reading him. So I got very good at reading other people, which made me a fantastic doctor. But I was very bad about reading my own body because all of my energy went into reading other people, people pleasing, whatever you want to call it.

00;27;33;05 - 00;27;52;09

And when you lose connection with your own self, things really start to go badly because inside of you there's a child with their hands in the air going, What about me? What about me? What about me? And if you keep pushing that child away to look after other people, which a lot of people do and I did for a long time, eventually that will catch up to you.

00;27;52;09 - 00;28;09;12

And mental, physical, emotional illness for sure. And there's a difference in letting someone know you're sort of there to support them and you know you're not going to leave them or anything. But it's hard for you to sort of go in and take on their problems and try to try to solve them or else you're just going to create kind of your own suffering in a sense.

00;28;09;15 - 00;28;29;10

Yeah. And I'm like that with my daughter, too, because. Because she'll call me, because Leandra has some anxiety in her life as well. She has that sensitive disposition that I have. She doesn't struggle with anxiety nearly as much as I did, but we have this conversation and I say, Do you want fixing Dad? Like Doctor, Dad, or do you want listening, dad?

00;28;29;13 - 00;28;44;00

And a lot of times she just wants listening, Dad. So that's a little thing that we've come up with in the last three or four years because my natural inclination as a doctor and a father is to fix her issues when she talks to me about it. So now I just ask her, Do you want doctor, Dad, or do you want listening that?

00;28;44;00 - 00;28;59;08

And it works really well. That's really, really great because I kind of come from a house where you were just told what you should be doing and shouldn't be doing. It was never. Okay, let's you know, you could talk about your feelings and I'll just sit here and listen. So having that option, because sometimes you are looking for advice.

00;28;59;08 - 00;29;15;00

You know, you're you've been on this earth longer than your daughter, so you probably have some good advice, but there's times where you just really want advice. And if you get advice, you almost feel like worse than you did before at the disconnection. And a lot of parents, you know, and Nicole, the paradox about that too, like parental mismatch.

00;29;15;02 - 00;29;38;05

So it's just like the way that you, your language of being connected is different than your parent's language, of being connected. Even though you love each other, you can't quite connect on that level. And that's really traumatic for a lot of children. So it's really understanding like getting into what your child needs now. They don't know when they're young, but when they become adults, you can ask them like, what do you need right now?

00;29;38;05 - 00;30;06;04

Do you need me to listen or do you need me to sort of help you sort through the situation? And that's in and of itself, just asking that question is connecting. That's really I agree. So, you know, in today's sort of day and age, things seem a little bit crazy and uncertain in the world. It seems like more and more people are struggling with anxiety and even like teens and even like elementary school kids even, Oh, is this because of all the uncertainty we've had in the last three plus years or even more than that?

00;30;06;06 - 00;30;29;08

More than I think? Yeah. I think basically because we are dopamine driven organisms as human beings and we live, we get more and more choice, we get more and more options every day with technology that we're into this sort of dopamine overload. And so we get into this immediate gratification situation. And immediate gratification is fun, but it's not satisfying.

00;30;29;08 - 00;30;56;19

It's like eating junk food. It'll satiate your hunger temporarily, but it's there's really no nutritive value in it. So we're kind of losing that. We're losing the nutritive value in human connection because we're going to this. It's like if we look at the new work done in A.I., they're coming out with A.I. girlfriends and boyfriends now so that, you know, you talk to your phone like it's your surrogate girlfriend and it's talk because it uses A.I., it talks back to you and that kind of thing.

00;30;56;26 - 00;31;20;28

So we're getting more into this artificial kind of plastic interaction with with with our lives rather than our real emotional sense, because we're in a society that that abhors negative emotion. And we have, like I said, we have to learn how to metabolize that negative emotion and we don't just push it away and immediate gratification and dopamine is kind of what pushes it away and kind of serotonin.

00;31;20;28 - 00;31;41;06

And this is a gross generalization, but serotonin is kind of like the the present moment chemical. You know, it's like when you're watching a sunset and you just really there's no plans. You're just happy to be in that position. That's kind of serotonin. And then when you're looking on the Internet, you know, at Amazon, looking at new golf clubs, that's dopamine, right?

00;31;41;06 - 00;32;01;06

So it's one of those things that we're a very dopamine driven society, which is very much immediate gratification, which is almost, you know, we need it, but it's like junk food. It's not going to it's not going to give you any nutrition. It's going to just sort of satiate your hunger temporarily until the next time you need another hit.

00;32;01;08 - 00;32;26;23

Right. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So in one of your recent videos, you mentioned that you got banned from Instagram. Yes. Naughty, naughty. Well, no one knows. No one knows. They can't even tell me what I did. But I'm not political. I'm not sexual. I'm not really controversial. I mean, I guess the most controversial stuff that I talk about is that anxiety has more to do with your body than your mind, which may ruffle a few feathers in the in the sort of the cognitive therapy world.

00;32;26;26 - 00;32;44;08

Right. But in general, I'm pretty you know, I don't know why they would they would find some reason to to block my account. I mean I and we still don't know why I mean I back on now but it's one of those things I mean, I created a new program to call it your mind body prescription for permanent anxiety healing.

00;32;44;08 - 00;33;07;23

So the ban couldn't have come at a worse time as far as that kind of stuff goes. But the sales of that are doing well. I've almost got 1000 people signed up in just over a month. That's amazing. Oh, it's awesome. The reason I brought it up, too, is not just to wag my finger at you. Well, as you said in your video, you almost ended up taking Instagram for banning you because it helped you deal with uncertainty.

00;33;07;23 - 00;33;33;05

Tolerance like building your uncertainty, tolerance while waiting and not knowing exactly what's going to happen and just sort of sitting in that. How does that help in lessening anxiety? Well, it gives you waiting tolerance like you learn how to just wait. And often actually the last two years, just waiting has been one of the the most beneficial things for me because I've been pretty proactive through my life.

00;33;33;05 - 00;33;50;23

Like I've become a stand up comic and a yoga teacher or an author, all these sort of things very proactively. But I'm kind of pushing the river to use a psychological term rather than just waiting, you know? So, so often in the last couple of years, I've just waited trying to book hotel or whatever, and it's not working out.

00;33;50;23 - 00;34;14;14

It's like, well, I've got to I've got to find a buyer, I've got to find a place. It's like, no, just wait, you know? And often something better has come up. So I'm kind of learning through operant conditioning and kind of just from life in general, that waiting and learning how to wait is truly a superpower because often something better comes about, you know, sometimes you wait too long and there's all the rooms are booked, that kind of stuff too.

00;34;14;20 - 00;34;38;27

But often just waiting. And we anxious people don't get a lot of practice in waiting. We don't like uncertainty, so we just automatically take make that choice really quickly because we hate the uncertainty. But that really does a disservice in the long run. A It teaches us not to learn how to deal with uncertainty and B, we wind up making premature decisions that often, you know, causes problems in the long term.

00;34;39;03 - 00;34;59;18

So switching over to a kind of lifestyle, things we like to sort of ask, guess what they're doing on a daily routine level. Are there any sort of non-negotiables that you have? Dr. Russell Like a ritual or routines that you do every day that keep you grounded and in a good place? Yeah, I think zombie scrolling Instagram. Oh yeah, that's what I do that every day because I you know what?

00;34;59;18 - 00;35;18;17

Going back to that thing of, of the benefit of being banned on Instagram is that I didn't have to answer comments or stuff because I tend to answer just about everybody who sends me messages, which takes me a couple of hours a day. So so that's kind of a ritual that that I do that's maybe not that great for me, but it it helps other people and it helps me in that way.

00;35;18;19 - 00;35;36;19

But I think really focusing on getting into my body, especially when I don't feel good, like if I wake up, if I'm a bit of a laugh because it's not like I'm anxiety free. I'm just a million times better than I used to be. So I still get the feeling of alarm, but I can tolerate it now. And you know Bessel Bender Cook in the book The Body Keeps the Score.

00;35;36;19 - 00;35;56;25

It talks about that. He says It's not that we're getting people to get rid of their anxiety. We're basically building up a tolerance so that they don't compulsively have to go into their head and chronically come with all these warnings, what ifs, their worst case scenarios. So for me, I guess my my daily practice is to connect with my younger self.

00;35;56;28 - 00;36;15;12

And, you know, a lot of great things are happening right now. So I'm bringing Rusty, my younger self along with me and telling him, Isn't this great? You know, that we're getting these offers from Penguin Random House and the program is doing so well, the Mind body program and be our it's just bringing yourself together I think is something that I do every day.

00;36;15;12 - 00;36;33;23

It's just focus and I have a picture of my younger self too. And one of the rituals that I that I do often, but not every day anymore because I'm get busier, is listen to Peter Gabriel's song In Your Eyes and look at a picture of myself when I'm younger because I believe that he is actually singing that song to his younger self.

00;36;33;25 - 00;36;59;18

And it's very powerful. The liberation, I find, is really really powerful because it really does create this unconscious, what I call subcortical below the thinking mind into the feeling mind, because music will do that, bring us into this connection with our younger self. So I love that song and I love making that connection with my younger self. And I have lots of people that that send me messages just about every day.

00;36;59;18 - 00;37;16;02

But that's one of the most important things that they do now, is they connect with their younger self through that song and it makes a big difference. It really does well for definitely to try that. So the live version is as more of a liberation. It's like 11 minutes and 34 seconds long, but it has a lot more meaning to it.

00;37;16;05 - 00;37;36;00

You know, the five minute version, the sort of recorded version, still has meaning to it. So I sometimes I'll if I don't have a lot of time, I'll alternate between the two, you know. But I find the live on Spotify or whatever you listen wherever you listen. It has a few sentences before he actually starts the song. It kind of, you know, really highlight the fact that he's talking to his younger self.

00;37;36;04 - 00;37;56;28

He doesn't say it in so many words. But, you know, if you look at the lyrics and I did a whole podcast on breaking down that song as to as to why it connects with your younger self so much. Wow, that's fantastic. Thanks for sharing that tip. Yeah. So in your your book that you wrote, Anxiety Rocks, a New Prescription Relief for the doctor who created it.

00;37;57;05 - 00;38;12;14

And you mentioned you wrote it so people don't have to suffer as you did. So people get to finally understand and move away from negative rumination and worry and move towards a sense of peace, of comfort in your own skin, which is what we all really want at the end of the day. And I struggle with that most of my life.

00;38;12;14 - 00;38;34;23

And, you know, it feels good to be a lot further ahead than I was before. So I just want to know, in your journey, you're now on podcast, Dr. Engine Chatterjee Mel Robbins podcast, Massive audiences. Does it ever like blow you away or stop and think like, wow, like, I can't believe what I'm doing now compared to how you used to be kind of in your anxious periods?

00;38;34;29 - 00;38;53;20

Yeah, I mean, I think it's certainly different now for sure. I enjoy that process, but there is still a part of me and I think it's just wired it to me of always looking ahead. You know, sometimes I tell the story about when I got my medical degree and the day of graduation, they give you this this degree in your hand.

00;38;53;25 - 00;39;12;12

This has the parchment paper. And I remember the feel of the parchment paper hitting my hand. And then the dean of medical admissions, you know, saying at MIT, okay, which is basically, I admit you to the the Brotherhood or whatever, the sisterhood. And I remember that parchment paper hitting my hand and going, okay, what's next? Okay, what's next?

00;39;12;12 - 00;39;40;05

It took me ten years to get that degree right. And it's like in one second I'm like, okay, I got that. What's next? So there's there's a part of my personality that's very much like that. So it's learning how to kind of, you know, enjoy it and stay with it rather than always looking for the next thing, which I think is is a feature of a lot of anxious people, is that we we don't stay with good feelings as long as we should, and we don't stay with the bad feelings as long as we should either.

00;39;40;12 - 00;40;00;25

And that sounds kind of counterintuitive with anxiety, but it's learning how to stay with the feeling without adding thinking to it. Because when you as soon as you add thinking to the negative feeling, you've lost it like you can't. You're gone into baling water rather than going under and sealing the hole in the boat. Right? Right. Okay. We're slowly coming to the end of today's podcast.

00;40;00;26 - 00;40;21;02

But before we leave, Doctor Russell, I was wondering if somebody finds themselves feeling really deeply anxious. Is there any tool or tip you could share with us as something they can do to sort of feel some relief? Yeah, This is the one that my daughter likes the most, and she told me this a couple of years ago. She said, You know, out of all the things that you've taught me about anxiety, this is the one thing that I really hold on to.

00;40;21;02 - 00;40;38;14

And it's basically asking yourself, am I safe at this moment? So in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night, you're freaking out about something. And anxiety is always about the future. So it's like bringing yourself into the moment and saying, you know, I know I'm freaked out about my dentist coming up or the tax bill or whatever, but in this moment that I'm in right now, am I safe?

00;40;38;14 - 00;40;53;24

And this is really helpful in the middle of the night because you wake up because all your defenses are down in the middle of the night, you wake up into a lot of people wake up with anxiety and panic and it's just saying, I know I'm freaked out about this, that and the other thing right now, but in this moment that I'm in right now, am I actually safe?

00;40;53;27 - 00;41;11;06

And you're looking around and going, Yeah, because I think a lot of times those of us with anxiety never actually acknowledge our safety. You know, when we're feeling okay, we just take that for granted. And then when we go into anxiety again, it's like, okay, I want back here again. But you're saying to yourself, Am I safe in this moment?

00;41;11;06 - 00;41;26;07

I know my body's freaked out. I know that my mind is going to by the minute, but am I actually safe in this moment, that I'm in the moment that I am and right now my safe? It's like, yeah, you're safe in this moment. Okay, then you're safe because the moments, all you ever have. That's beautiful. I love that.

00;41;26;10 - 00;41;50;01

Okay. So you obviously touched on it before, but I know that you just released a new course. You want to just talk about that a little bit? What can people expect? Sure. It's called your mind body prescription for Permanent anxiety healing. So it's about that connecting your adult self with your child. So it's about connecting your mind and your body and going into those subcortical those structures in your brain that don't use language.

00;41;50;02 - 00;42;15;24

You know, the amygdala, pons, medulla, like the brainstem, the part of your your brain that controls your body doesn't understand language. So it's going into there's meditations in it, there's a meditation about how to find the alarm in your body, which is really important. And then there's a yoga Nedra in that, which basically once you find that alarm in your body, which I do consider your younger self, asking for your attention, how to connect with it, like how to actually do that.

00;42;16;01 - 00;42;31;22

And then there's a few videos at the end. There's nine segments to it all together, but there's a few videos at the end that say, you know, your your overprotective ego is going to want to keep you in worry because it believes that your worry has kept you safe. It's unconscious, it's automatic, it's more of a feeling thing.

00;42;31;24 - 00;42;52;04

But we have to undo that idea. That worry keeps you safe and going into your body and feeling safe in your body. Creating a grounded place in your body is how you actually create real safety. Real safety doesn't come from your mind. That comes from your body. So it's learning how to do so. The course is really about doing that.

00;42;52;11 - 00;43;18;02

And then I you know, I charge 100 bucks. It's not $97. It's not, you know, four payments of 52. It's like hundred bucks If you want to pay in two payments, it's 50 bucks a month or we want to pay in three. It's like 34 bucks. You know, it's I'm not interested in making a profit on people, you know, I want to give somebody something that will actually work, that will actually help them for something they can afford and charging them something for it.

00;43;18;02 - 00;43;36;23

Because this is what I find. I've given away meditations for free and about eight or 900 people will download the meditation and about 60 people will actually do it. So when you give someone something for free, they don't tend to value it, especially in the society that we live in now. But if you charge people a hundred bucks, that's a huge amount of money.

00;43;36;26 - 00;44;02;19

But it is something, so they tend to do it. So about 960 poor people as a couple of days ago, last time I checked, have downloaded the program and everybody has opened it like nobody has not opened it. So that's the thing. I think it's one of those things about creating this sort of fair exchange model that if you if you actually put some energy into it, even if that energy is money, there's you've got some skin in the game, so there's some urge for you to do it.

00;44;02;22 - 00;44;23;01

But if you get something for free, you know, your ego, your overprotective ego will tell you unconsciously, Oh, that's you know, that won't work. That's not going to help. You don't do that because it wants to keep you worried and it wants to keep you in that worried state because your ego believes that the worry is what's keeping you safe, when actually the worry is what's really exacerbating that old alarm sitting in your body.

00;44;23;03 - 00;44;43;04

Right. Right. Car sounds wonderful. So lastly, how can people get in touch with you or where can they find you if you want to mention yours? Well, I used to say, yeah, I used to say Instagram right at the anxiety and and now like, oh, jeez, they could just yank that away from me at any moment. So everything that I have is pretty much linked to the anxiety.

00;44;43;04 - 00;45;02;03

Empty. Not the anxiety, Doctor The anxiety. M.D. And if you Google the anxiety and all my stuff will come up. I'm pretty much splattered all over the Internet right now, so it's pretty easy to find me the website, if you're interested in the course, the websites probably a good way of finding that. And it's the Anxiety MD.

00;45;02;10 - 00;45;26;13

Twitter is at the anxiety. M.D. Instagram is the anxiety and everything is the anxiety. Empty site. Dr. Russell, thank you so much for your time. Really. Thanks. I learned a lot and I'm sure our listeners will be learning a lot too. So just thanks again for being here and good luck with your course.