5 NATURAL HACKS To Stop Anxiety - Dr. Rusell Kennedy

How do we deal with in the moment? Somebody's got anxiety, they're just struggling. Where do they start?

Yeah, I mean, there's short term solutions and long term solutions. So short term stuff is, you know, Huberman talks about this, Andrew Huberman, like moving your eyes back and forth. I mean, this is the basis of EMDR as well. It does have a moderating effect on the amygdala, breathing, you know, just your breath, just that whole physiological side. Think two snorts in, quick snorts in, then a long exhale starts to tell your body that you're relaxed. So if you can relax your body, your mind will just follow that. But it's much more effective to use your body to calm your mind than it is trying to use your mind to calm your body. Like saying, just relax, slow down, you're okay. That doesn't do it. So self touch, like self touch is one of those things that I have found in my practice and in my own life, just incredibly helpful. And if you look at Pascal, you know, the actor Pascal, you see him like on the red carpet, he's got his hand over his solar plexus and he talks about his anxiety. Like that's what he's doing. He's connecting. He's connecting. Essentially, when I look at that, he's connecting to the little boy in him. That's basically what he's doing. He's saying, this is a stressful environment, whatever, we'll be okay because your adult is fine. It's the child in you that's creating a lot of this issue. So what do children respond to? They respond to music, they respond to vibration, they respond to touch, they respond to something in the moment. And one of my favorite mantras that I say to myself is sensation without explanation. So when you're feeling anxious, go into your body and it's probably going to hurt. You're probably going to find a place in your throat or your chest or your solar plexus or your gut that has a lot of old pain in it. But put your hand over that and just that's the first step in kind of connecting. Now again, that's more of a long term thing, but it will work in the short term as well. So breath work, moving your eyes back and forth.

Tapping has some. And the reason I think, I don't know if tapping has this magical thing, but basically, if you look at the way the brain is structured, your brain has most somatosensory real estate for your hands and your face. So if you start tapping your hands and your face together, your brain can't ignore that. It has to bring you into the present moment sensation. And if you look at worry, it's always about the future. Worry is always about the future. So the more you can bring yourself into present moment sensation, the better you're off you're going to be. And this is the tip my daughter loves the most out of it. Because my daughter has a bit of anxiety, not nearly as much as I did, but she said, dad, the thing that you've said to me that's created the most peace in me is just saying to myself, am I safe in this moment? So it's really, and it sounds cliche, but middle of the day, middle of the night, when you wake up in the middle of the night in a panic, you're not rational. All your coping strategies that you've used, especially men, are now gone, right? So you're face on with whatever is stressing you out because you're not able to stuff it down anymore because you've been unconscious for the last three or four hours. So it's basically just sort of getting into the habit of putting your hand over your chest and just going, hey, I know I'm worried about this. I know I'm worried about my relationship, I know I'm worried about that. But in this moment, in this moment that I'm in right now, am I safe? And this works in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night. And just because those of us who have these hypersensitive nervous systems and you may not show up with anxiety, it may show up as ocd, it may show up as an eating disorder, it may show up as depression. But it's like with that hyperactive nervous system, if you can calm that nervous system down enough to be able to just say this rationally to yourself, Sensation without explanation. I can sit with it even though it hurts. Because when I sit with this pain in my chest, that is my younger self, that is the alarm. I'm learning how to metabolize it. But if every time I feel this pain in my chest, I just go up into my head and worry, you never actually deal with the problem. It's just like the kids with the phone. Whenever you feel negative, you just go to the phone. So whenever we feel anxious, we just go into our heads, which is basically the same thing. So it's learning how to use self touch, breath. Coming into the moment, starting to see that, hey there, maybe this is a younger version of me. Maybe I can sort of find this. So What I'll do with people, and I'll give you a very short version of this is, you know, say I have a guy who came around the corner on his bike and he saw the real estate sign on his front lawn, and he knew that meant his parents were getting divorced. So even to this day, when he sees that same real estate company, aside from that, it still charges him up a little bit. So I say to him, okay, where is that in your body? He says, well, it's kind of in my chest area. Okay, is it superficial? Is it deep? It's kind of like. It's kind of in the middle. It's not superficial, but it's not deep. Is it a pressure or is it a pain? It's kind of like an ache. It's like a dull ache. Does it have a color? Does it have a temperature? Yeah, it's kind of red and it's kind of hot. Like I said, I'm shortening this down quite a bit. A lot of times people won't have a color, they won't have a temperature, that kind of thing. But it's just basically getting people in and just really getting the nuances of that alarm and really finding it. You know, I have some people. It's hollow. You know, it feels like a toothache. It feels like when I hurt my toe when I was four. Like, this is what this pain feels like. Like, really drill into it. Because there is this part of our brain called the insula, the insular cortex. And the insular cortex is kind of like the top down, bottom up weigh station. So what's coming up from your body is weighed by the insula. What. What comes from your mind is also weighed by the insula as well. And I believe that the insula, when we have those.

You know, shape up your little bits or whatever, I believe that feeling in your body gets translated to the insula. And the insula creates this emotional signature in your body. And whenever you face that same kind of thing again in your adulthood, that emotional signature gets locked in your body as well. And you feel exactly the same way when you're seven now. And then the thoughts will come that are completely consistent with that as well. So if you can find that place in your body, and then that's what we do is we find it. It's like, okay, can you put your hand on it? Can you. Can you close your eyes? Can you see the child's eyes? Can you see your eyes when you're seven? You know, I have this thing on my phone which is basically me when I'm three. I don't know if it'll come up. I hope that. Yeah, that's me when I'm three years old. Right. So that's the thing on my phone. So I check in with him every day now. It sounds kind of, you know, like woo and all that kind of stuff, but it fucking works. Like it really does. Like I was in therapy for 35 years and. And I did EMDR, I did ACT, CBT, LMNOP, I did everything and nothing really made a difference until there's two types of therapies that really helped me. Internal family systems and somatic experiencing. And I also did psychedelics. But psychedelics actually put me back a little bit. I think that they gave me the intellectual stuff that I needed to develop my theories and that kind of stuff. But emotionally I wasn't quite right for two years after ayahuasca. So not a panacea. I think the way we're going to go with therapy in the next few years is psychedelics, internal family systems and somatic experiencing. I think that's where we're going to go with therapy. But I think people in this dopamine driven, immediate gratification society believe that if I just do ayahuasca or if I just microdose psilocybin, that my problems are going to go away. And it's just. This just doesn't work that way. You really have to do the work and find that child. And sometimes your stresses are so big. Emotional, physical, sexual abuse. Then you need some help. Like admit that you need some help and go and get some help. Because you won't deal with this on your own. You will not be able to process this on your own. Anyway, that was a long rant. Sorry about that.

No, no, it's good, it's good. Just on the last piece there.

I.

Think a lot of what you've been sort of saying and driving home with people is that anxiety while you be feeling it in the moment. The causality is almost always somewhere in the past.

Yeah.

And that it's trying to get us to pay attention to either a feeling that needs to emerge that is past oriented or, you know, or is about the future. Right. The feeling is like, oh, well, what if this happens again? Or you know, et cetera, et cetera. And that we need to get into touch with what we're experiencing somatically within the body. And that when we can do that, we have a higher chance of understanding what's actually going on and being able to move through it. And finally, the really big piece is that it's relational. That oftentimes the people that I've seen and worked with that have anxiety.

It.

Becomes the disconnector, it becomes the thing that makes them feel like they are alone. And as you've been talking and talking about how these sort of past based experiences, right, your younger self, your inner child.

Have gone through these experiences of, in the language that I would use, going through a hard time and not being okay, that in those moments where you're feeling anxiety, what you need is a reminder that you can go through that hard time feeling anxious with somebody else there or you know, in conversation with you and be okay. And that sometimes we also need that with ourselves. Right? I almost hear you talking about the younger self as like, we need to remind that younger version of ourselves that's showing up, that's saying like, I don't know if I'm going to be okay if I ask that woman out, if I fail at this conversation, if, you know, the deal falls through or I can't pay rent or like whatever it is that we conceptually think is causing the like deep anxiety. So I really appreciate that.