Anxiety Expert: It's In Your Body, NOT Your Mind - Dr. Russell Kennedy

Anxiety is an issue of the physiology of the body from old unresolved wounds than it is the psychology of the mind. I think through interoception, I think the mind is constantly reading the body. If you had some sort of trauma that's not resolved, that you couldn't talk about, that you couldn't share with someone, it builds up inside of you, and then your mind just reflects that. And we worship the mind so much in our society. We believe that the mind is the cause of anxiety and the mind is the expression. Like, we talk to ourselves in words, we talk to ourselves in language. But if you look at the structure of the brain, you know, the prefrontal cortex and the subcortical structures, none of those subcortical structures understand language. They're all feeling based. And that's where a lot of these programs get put into us as younger people. So anxiety is much more of a feeling disorder than it is a thinking disorder.

All right, my friend. Mr. Russ, Mr. Kennedy. Dr. Kennedy.

How you doing, Connor?

It's good to have you here. We go way back, Vancouver, and it's been really, really cool to see your work around anxiety, which you've been doing for a long time.

And I like to say, you know, I knew you before you blew up. I knew you before you hit it big. You know, it was interesting because I remember talking with you, this has got to be like six years ago, around anxiety. And I was like, man, this is such a topical thing, and your approach is so unique. And I kind of had this notion of, like, this is going to do really well, you know, people. People really. And it's going to do really well because it's serving so many people who are just immersed, you know, in sort of like an anxious soup on a daily basis for multiple reasons. And so I'm excited to talk about this topic of anxiety.

So let's begin with your defining moment. So tell us a story about a defining moment in your life that made you who you are today.

Yeah, I think there's a few. I mean, I think when you first asked me that, it's like, I think my father's suicide was probably a real defining moment because it was. There was such a conflict around that because he had been suffering with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder for, you know, 15, 20 years before that. And his suicide was kind of a relief. But it was also, you know, a real sadness in me, too, because the thing about my dad is, yes, he could be bipolar and crazy and psychotic, but he could also be very loving, warm, attentive. Playful, so. But he got less of those things as he, as his disease progressed, as he got older. So his suicide and I found his body, it was like, you know, and my brother was there too. And I just said, well, that's it for dad, right? And there's. Even when I say that now, there's this sort of rush in my chest is like, how did I process that at the time? Like, I was trying to get into medical school and that kind of thing. And then I found I got into medical school five months later, I got the letter saying you were admitted to medical school. And I so badly wanted to show him that letter, you know, and he wasn't around anymore for that. But I also realized that his suffering was over because he really suffered so much. I mean, we suffered with his family too. So that was one real defining moment in my life. And probably one of the reasons I'm a caregiver and a doctor is because I could never really help my dad. So that was one. The next one was in 2013 when I ruptured my left Achilles tendon because like the arrogant doctor that I was, I injected myself with cortisone and lidocaine because it worked once. You know, it's like the, the longest yard when they throw the ball and the other guy's nuts. You know, it's like, work once should work again. So I injected my left Achilles tendon and it ruptured. And then that was the straw that broke the doctor's back. So in 2013, left medicine and started really doing this anxiety thing full time because I was just so tired of living every day in a ten hour panic attack. And I thought, I've got to find a different way. And that's when I did psychedelics and looked at different ways of healing my anxiety. Went to India, lived at a temple there for a while. Just every possible angle that you could think of attacking anxiety, I did. And then I wrote about it in the book. So it really gives people a first hand knowledge of, you know, like, I know how you feel. You know, I know what it's like to be suicidal with anxiety. That's when I broke, when I ruptured my Achilles tendon. I was, you know, I was thinking, am I going to follow the same path as my dad?

How old were you when. When he took his own life?

I was 26 and he was 52.

52, yeah. So. So he was a young father to be relative.

Yeah, I mean, I think he had me when he was 25.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting. And I Mean, maybe just say a little bit more about what that was like for you because I can hear the complexity of it. Right. You can see, and I think a lot of people can relate to this, you know, even if their circumstances are different. But I think a lot of people can relate to seeing a parent who's suffering, who's struggling and you know, whether it's with some type of cancer or some disease, and there's this notion of like, well, you don't want to lose them and you also don't want them to suffer. And so can you just talk a little bit about what it was like to deal with the complexity of that loss where I would imagine you probably missed having him around, but at the same time it was like, well, at least he's not in pain anymore.

Yeah, yeah. And he was also causing a lot of disruption to the family too. And I laugh about it because it's kind of like my defense mechanism. But, you know, he would shoplift like crazy. Like my little joke, we have this story in Canada called Eaton's. We used to have this department store and when he died, I went through his closet. He had all these belts and like five of the same belt. Like it was just, it was a sport for him, you know. So my joke was that he single handedly put Eaton's out of business, you know, so there was, there was a lot of pain around, you know, his behavior as well, and embarrassment and that kind of thing too. So it was difficult for us as a family to be able to really, you know, and I think there's a lot of shame around it too. And I think one of the reasons, another one of the reasons I became a doctor was to kind, kind of, in a way, kind of erase the embarrassing parts of his life in a way. Now I'm kind of over that now, whatever over that means. But there was this sort of sense of atonement, you know, and on some level, the book is that way too. Because the book wouldn't have been written if I didn't have a father who suffered so badly with mental emotional illness. The other thing too was that it was gradual, you know, so when I was 10 years old, yeah, he would have a period where he would be either manic or depressed or whatever for a month, you know, and then say When I was 17 or 18, it would be like two or three months. And when I was 24 or 25, it would be like half the year. So it just became. And schizophrenia is like that. It tends to, you know, it tends to get worse as you get older? Not always. Whereas bipolar is. Can kind of stay, you know, within that sort of up and down realm. But schizophrenia tends to get worse as you get older. So there was embarrassment. You're right. There was so many complex. And there still is. Like, there still is. And I think a lot of my anxiety was a, am I going to turn out like him? That was probably the main reason why I got anxious. And I talked to the men in my practice and that kind of stuff, too, who have a father who's impaired in some way, either addicted or a mental illness or the sufferer of abuse or whatever. The men tell me it's really hard to trust that this male figure, this dominant figure in your life is there for you, because often the addiction will take them away. And I think the mental illness took my dad away from me. So it was this sense that, okay, I can't trust love, because whenever I love my dad, he would go, you know, nuts, and I would lose him on some level. So that was a big thing. And there is only love and fear. So, you know, this is. Dr. Kennedy, get into a bit of the philosophical thing. So if you can't trust love, your life's going to get filled up with fear. That's what's going to happen. And that's what happened with me. So I was really deathly afraid. And I used to tell myself, okay, you make it to 25. Most schizophrenia will show up by 25, so you're okay. So I made it to 25. I was okay, and then I did 30. I was just finishing med school at 30. I started a little bit late, and I still wasn't. And I thought, man, if you can finish med school and you haven't gone psychotic yet, you're probably not going to. But it took until about 35, and once I was 35, it's like, okay, I'm probably not going to get that. But instead, I developed an anxiety disorder. And I think a lot of what I see in anxiety in men is covering up something else. Like they can. They're, A, not really aware that what they have is anxiety, and then B, they don't really know what to do with it because it has been sort of a salve, you know, or at least a layer of the onion that prevents them from feeling that deep grief, that deep loss. So, you know, I see that much more in men. Women are much more open to talk about what makes them anxious. Men are just. They kind of just think it's going to go away, and it Does. I mean, there is this diurnal. If you look at neurochemistry, like there is this diurnal or varied chemistry in our brain where at points where we feel horrible and other points will feel good. And I think that what happens is that you sort of, you know, you focus on the points where you feel good and then where the points you feel bad, men typically will start, you know, some kind of addiction. You know, I read your book. It's amazing. I love your book. Porn, alcohol, you know, anything. And then basically your respect for yourself drops. And then this whole cascade of things where you just. You take out the underpinnings of what keeps you safe and you do it yourself. And then there's the self reproach of that and this little acronym that I have called jabs. You know, when you judge, abandon, blame, and shame yourself, you'll never get out of that loop, you know, unless you become aware of it. Which, you know, which is another thing I really loved about your book was just the awareness around it. Like, this is normal. It's normal not to want to be vulnerable. Because, you know, when you get vulnerable, you get smacked down sometimes. And that can be. Dan Siegel talks about that. The most vulnerable time for your brain is like when you're being vulnerable and then someone smacks you down. That's the most vulnerable period that you could possibly, possibly be in. So that's where our intimate relationships, you know, suffer. Because we want to be vulnerable. We want to be open with our partners, but if they don't take it well, which as you point out in your book quite accurately, sometimes they don't. You know, there is this saying, like the women's like, well, why don't you be more vulnerable? Why don't you be. And then you are. And then you get your pee pee smacked, you know, so it's just like, you know, it's. Yeah. So it's this conundrum that you point out quite aptly in the book is that, you know, there's this vulnerability and we need to express this stuff or else it just rots us from the inside. Or we're finding a way to kind of heal ourselves and connect with ourselves. And I think that's my theory of anxiety, is that it's your younger self that's basically in your body that's resonating through your mind. And if you can find that younger version of you and see them, hear them, love them and show them they're protected and you'll always be with them, then you take away the Alarm. And the alarm is what speed the anxiety. So then things kind of. You have at least a shot at healing when you do it that way.

One of the things that you said in there, and there's many things that stood out to me, but one of the things that really anchored in is the statement, when you can't trust love.

Fear takes over. And.

That hit me. I mean, I really. I think that was just sort of profound in the sense that when I think about most spiritual traditions, therapeutic traditions, they're all kind of saying some version of that, right? Some iteration of when you can't trust love, or if you don't trust love, or if love is scary, or if it's the thing that you don't want to go near or it's the thing that you think has hurt you or you're wounded by, then fear is what takes over. And I see that to be so true for so many people. So I just wanted to pause and, like, earmark that, because I could hear my listeners being like, oh, like, that's a. That's a line right there, man. Like, that's a T shirt. So. But I want to. I want to pivot, because I think what, you know, in. In some ways, what you were talking about with. With, you know, when you can't trust love, fear takes over. It sounds very true for, you know, your story and your life. And I appreciate you being very honest and forthcoming about your experience. And, you know, some of the things that surrounded your relationship with your father, because they're complex. You know, our relationships with our parents are complex. And it does sound like, in part, that anxiety, you're, like, unearthing that that anxiety was coming from things that maybe you weren't letting yourself feel. And I know for myself, there's been times in my life where I felt that anxiety. And what was underneath that was I needed to cry, you know, or I needed to let some rage out. You know, I needed to go outside of my garage and just let loose on the punching bag because I was storing in something. And it's like, well, what's this anxiety? It's like, well, actually, it's a manifestation of something that's deeper that needs to emerge. So am I. Am I articulating what you've been saying accurately?

Yeah. And when you were talking, it was like, one of the things that I used to do, I don't do so much anymore, but is car screaming. Like, you know, we used to live in Vancouver, so I would drive through, you know, Kitsilano.

Go.

Go to the park there and just car scream, you know, it just gets it out. The other thing that I do sometimes is I watch YouTube videos of dogs being rescued. And that puts me into tears every time because I know there's part of me that has to let that out because if I don't let it out, it's just going to rot me from the inside. And, and what it does is it just starts feeding your thoughts, like it just feeds these negative thoughts and will create thoughts that are completely consistent with how your body feels. So if your body is feeling upset, stressed, angry, whatever, your mind, which is just a make sense, meaning making machine, will take that through this process that Dr. Stephen Porges calls interoception, where the mind is constantly reading the body. It's very difficult to think in opposition to how your body feels. There is this sort of positive psychology thing which works for the first 1.6 seconds, it actually works. And as long as you keep it up, you can sort of maintain the facade. But really what you're trying to do to heal is go in and find that younger version of yourself and see them, hear them, love them, show them they're protected. And it is. That's the source of, I think, just about all mental illness, emotion, depression, eating disorders, OCD is this sense that we weren't connected enough as children. And sometimes your parents were okay, but you were just born a sensitive child. And I think that boys are born more sensitive than girls. I just think that that's our nature. We die earlier, we get sick earlier. 102 girls are born, or 102 boys are born for every hundred girls. Just the way nature makes it. And then by the age of 18, two of those boys have jumped off a cliff or got into a car or whatever. So it evens out at 18. And then from 18 on, women outnumber men.

It's interesting because I think one of the things that stands out for me in terms of what you're saying, and I do think that there's research around this, I can't cite it or quote it off the top of my head, but I do remember hearing somewhere that men, men feel more intensely and women feel a wider gamut. And so I think that that is from my work in working with men and working with couples with my wife and working with women, that does seem to be, on average, true. I would say that it's, you know, I would say that it's largely true that men seem to feel much more deeply and intensely. Maybe not deeply is not the right word, but intensely. And then women tend to sort of cycle through a wider gamut of emotions in, you know, in a specific hour or day or week. So let's, let's pivot a little bit to anxiety. Let's, let's go straight at the, the, the beast. Sure, sure. What would you say are the most common myths about anxiety? Because I see a lot of content about it and some of it I'm like, this is nonsense. But what are some of the myths that you see floating around out there?

Yeah, that it's an issue of the mind. I think that anxiety is much more an issue of the physiology of the body from old unresolved wounds than it is the psychology of the mind. I think through interoception. I think the mind is constantly reading the body. And if you had, you know, an abusive father, an alcoholic father, if you had some sort of trauma that's not resolved, that you couldn't talk about, that you couldn't share with someone, it builds up inside of you. And if you, if you don't have a way of allowing that to go, it will build up more and more in your body and then your mind just reflects that. And we worship the mind so much in our society. We believe that the mind is the cause of anxiety and the mind is the expression. Like we talk to ourselves in words, we talk to ourselves in language. But if you look at the structure of the brain, you know, the prefrontal cortex and the, and the subcortical structures like the amygdala, the pons, the medulla, brainstem, none of those subcortical structures understand language. They're all feeling based. And that's where a lot of these programs get put into us as boys, as younger people and girls. And we're not going to access those just using the conscious cognitive parts of our mind. So we have to change the body as well. So anxiety is much more of a feeling disorder than it is a thinking disorder. Now of course, the mind plays a huge role in it, but we worship the mind. In this society, we're much more adept at, you know, if I say, Connor, describe an apple to me, you can tell what's sort of semi round, it's kind of red, it's this. But if I say, how do you feel when you bite into an apple? You know, that's, that's a lot harder for us to kind of conjure up. So we're much more, you know, emotionally versed in language than we are in the actual emotion itself. So we get used to explaining things and coming back to what you were saying before about women, the more vocabulary, emotional vocabulary you have, the more able you have, the more able you are to diffuse that emotion. Men typically don't have that emotional vocabulary. And if we can't explain, like, I'm feeling frustrated, I'm feeling lost, I'm feeling alone, I'm feeling hollow like that. Those are all kind of female centric terms, you know, man, it's like, I feel frustrated, I'm angry. You know, it's. It doesn't. We have like, you know, four words where women have 14. And Lisa Feldman Barrett, in her book How Emotions Are Made, talks about this. The more emotion words you have, the more emotionally literate you are. Now, I don't know if it's chicken or the egg, but I always thought a great app would be just every day looking at a new emotion word and trying to break it in, because there are nuances in emotion that men don't tend to see. And I think we're wired that way. I just think we're wired to look at things more than we are to look at people. And I think people, women look more at people than they do at things. Hmm.

I would agree with that entirely. What would you say if I asked you what the purpose of anxiety is?

I think it's just to point you towards your younger self. You know, to point you towards your younger, wounded self. I mean, it's the same thing with ocd, same thing with eating disorders. It's the same thing with depression. It just points you to your younger self. All these things express differently. Like OCD is different than depression. But basically the underlying root cause is usually childhood emotional trauma. That's, that's unresolved. You know, I did a lot of work with Gordon Neufeld over at the Neufeld Institute there in, in Vancouver. And it's really, you know, 80% of your brain developments before the age of five. So if you have a healthy, attached, attuned parent or caregiver, your brain structures are going to develop in the best way. Now, if you have parents who are traumatized themselves or not attached to you, and parental mismatch is a huge issue with people. Their parents were okay, but they always just felt like, ah, I didn't really feel like my mother understood me or whatever. And Nicole Lepera talks about that too, like this emotional, parental mismatch. And that's traumatic for a child. And I, you know, sometimes I want to have a seizure talking about trauma, because it's such a common word that's. Used. But trauma to me is anything that dysregulates your nervous system permanently. So anything that causes a permanent dysregulation in your nervous system is trauma. And I think we're all traumatized as trauma children. But if you have a connected, attuned, attached parent that helps you process it, you actually become emotionally stronger with the trauma after you've dealt with it because you've had this help rather than just stuffing it down, rather than just not dealing with it or having a life that's not difficult at all, because we all have trauma. It's just, did we have caregivers? Did we have people that help us metabolize that trauma? And if you do, then your brain learns, hey, we can go through some shitty things, but we can handle it. Whereas if you go through trauma and you don't have that, you learn that the trauma is an endless cycle of pain that you will recreate upon yourself as well. Like, if you feel traumatized in your body, you will traumatize yourself in your mind. You will judge, abandon, blame, and shame yourself. And that inner child part of you constantly does that to you, and you can't heal. It's like having a scab, and you just keep picking the scab over and over and over again. You just can't heal while you keep judging, abandoning, blaming, and shaming yourself.

It's interesting because I think the way you're describing the purpose of anxiety. There's two things. There's two things I want to say. One, I've heard some of my audience, just people in general, you know, the notion, because there's a lot of people that say, you know, everybody has trauma, right? Gabor Mate said that and whatnot. And I think. I think that's hard for some people to.

Really let in, you know, this notion that everybody's had trauma, everybody's had traumatic events. Because I think historically we've looked at trauma as car accident, you know, this big sort of acute thing, which I think our definition of trauma has expanded, of course. But how do you. How do you talk to people who are like, ah, not everybody has trauma. Like, I don't have trauma, I haven't had trauma. You know, what would you. You say to those folks who hear that and are just like, man, I can't get on board with that. Like, that just sounds dramatic.

Well, it's sometimes, like, if I'm talking to a more sort of, shall we say, philosophical audience, I will use the term inner child. Sometimes I tend to shy away from it, and then I'LL often use your younger self because that's usually when I talk to doctors or talk to sort of professionals. That's something they'll understand. But the people I find that object the most to the inner child statement are the ones with the most inner child wounding. So it's literally that inner child stuff is just a bunch of crap. And it's like, okay, what happened to you? Right? Like, it's just the people that had like, you know, a fairly normal. Whatever that is, you know, upbringing with attuned. You know, they weren't perfect parents, but they were attached. They hear the term inner child and they doesn't even phase them. Right. That's what I've noticed. But the people that get the most upset about the inner child stuff are the ones that have the most inner child wounding. So it's just an observ, you know, over dealing with hundreds and hundreds of people with anxiety. So I think it's just understanding that the charge behind even, you know, if you have a lot of charge behind that term, there's something there. You know, like you say in your book, like, there's something there and you've got to sort of look into that. Now, often we don't have enough insight in our own selves because we do have blind spots for our own traumas. It's just the way human. The human neurology is. Is wired. So if you grow up with an alcoholic parent who's abusive, you learn to excuse that behavior. And this is why, like Freud called it the repetition compulsion. This is why I would have patients in my practice. One particular woman in particular that I talk about a fair amount on podcasts is she was a beautiful girl and had all this attached attention from men. But the only men that she would pick to be partners were abusive alcoholics. Her father was an abusive. She had a huge blind spot. And yet she was most attractive to these people. So like Freudian Freud called it the repetition compulsion. The. The compulsion to act out in your childhood when you know in your adulthood what was in your childhood. And it's unconscious, it's automatic. It's sometimes, you know, this is when I say, you know, sometimes when some of my friends, this is when I was younger and say, I met the all this girl, she's amazing. She's like just perfect. It's like, okay, now this is one of those cases where your soul mate is going to become your cellmate. Because what happens is that they. Each of you are lighting up the trauma from your childhood. And some of the most Intense relationships. And, you know, I've read your book. I know that you've had a history with a number of females in the past. You know, the most intense relationships are the ones that are often. You're lighting each other up from the past.

Trauma bonds.

Trauma bonds. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, and it's interesting because my mentor, Dewey Freeman, I love him, and he's got a very profound model of attachment. And one of the things that he says is that the foundation of a relationship is being able to go through a hard time and come out the other side okay? Plain and simple. Right? You're a kid. You fall off your bike, you scrape your knee, you go through a hard time, you come out the other side okay. Your parent comforts you. They're like, you're okay if you go through that hard time and your dad comes out and says, what the fuck is wrong with you? Stop being a little bitch and stop crying. Which is hard. But some of us hear that, right? Yeah, I heard some stuff.

Your stepdad. Yeah. Right.

And so what happens is that what we. What we learn is it's not okay for me to go through a hard time or I have to go through a hard time and be okay on my own. And that in itself is very, you know, creates isolation, and we psychologically move to a more insular place. But done over time, that is traumatic. Right. Whether it's acute in that moment or over time. And so I think, you know, one of the things that I appreciate about what you're saying to just sort of close this loop on this and we'll come back to anxiety, is we have to be able to look back at our past. Because I hear a lot of men and some women say, why do I have to talk about my past? Why do I have to talk about my family? Why do I have to talk about my upbringing? And I'm like, well, those are the places where you learn the foundation of can I go through a hard time and come out the other side okay or not? Because if I can't, my, as you've been talking about so articulately, will send signals constantly of, am I okay? Can I go through this hard time? Is my world okay? Or am I screwed? Should I be terrified? Should I be in fear? And so a lot of us learn to live, unfortunately, in this place of anxiousness simply because we didn't get the foundation or learn the basic principles of I can go through a hard time and be okay because there's other people supporting me.

What's your thoughts on. On that piece, Millions.

I think what happens when we get that, you know, buck up, don't be a little bitch, is we lose faith in the world. We lose faith that, like, when we're children, we're six, seven, eight years old, we have kind of this blind faith that the world is going to look after us. And then when we have trauma that's not resolved, we lose that faith. And then what happens is we become like an Alpha Children and men are typically like this. It's like, okay, everything is up to me now. Now everything is up to me. So if everything is up to you and you don't, you can't have faith in anyone else, you're going to live a pretty tough life because there are going to be times where you just can't cope or you just can't deal with what's going on. And regaining a sense of faith in the world is so important in your own healing. Because if you don't accept help and you're an Alpha child, and the thing about Alpha children is we do. It does work. It does have the illusion of working. If you're intelligent, you like, I was intelligent, so I went and I became a medical doctor. So I sublimated that pain into something that. That works for me, but it only works for so long, and then that particular program that I'm running is not going to help me. So when I'm in a really tough time, it's like, can I just have faith? And this is something I've had to learn over the last, typically the last five years, just having faith in other people, people that I don't have to do it all myself. And it's really important that you can just develop this sort of sense of, okay, and I can wait. That's the other thing about, you know, uncertainty intolerance. Basically, anxiety is uncertainty intolerance. You can't tolerate uncertainty. You can't sit with it and just say, this is uncertain. And not only just sitting with uncertainty. Can I embrace uncertainty? Can I embrace that my relationship is uncertain, that I'm not getting along well with my wife, that we are looking at the potential of divorce? Can I embrace that uncertainty? Because if you can't embrace that uncertainty, it's always going to be your master, right? And not just accept it. People are like, oh, well, you've got to accept this. And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, no, embrace it. Because when you embrace uncertainty, your brain will support you in that it'll start secreting endogenous opioids from the from the periaqueductal grain, your brain stem and start secreting dopamine because you feel like, hey, I'm on the right track. And the little analogy that I draw is, you know, say you're at a party or something, you see somebody you're interested in in him. So if you start walking over there and leaning on the balls of your feet and you're moving forward, your periaqueductal gray will secrete all sorts of opiates. Like, it's protecting you from potential rejection or whatever, but you will still do it. And dopamine is like, I'm on the right track. I'm doing this. And it's the whole thing about, let's do this. That exactly encapsulates the opiates and the dopamine. That's what you need to get over that hill. Otherwise, if you go on your heels and you think, oh, you know, she's way out of my league. You know, she rejected a friend of mine. Like, I'm not. Like, your brain will also support that. So your brain will also support it will start secreting cortisol and epinephrine in there as a stress response. So whatever you decide to do, whatever, your brain will support you. If you're going to go for it, your brain will support you. It'll secrete chemicals that support you. If you go back on your heels, literally go back on your heels, your brain will start secreting cortisol and epinephrine, which will reinforce every negative thought that you have, and it will make it seem like those negative thoughts are truly real when they are not. So, you know, getting back to the original thing, the amygdala never forgets. So if you are out there and you hurt yourself and your stepdad comes out and says, you know, don't be a little bitch. That's trauma like that, you. You will have an emotional residue left in your system from that. Now, whether or not you can process that, and it's cumulative. You know, if that happens to you every week for a few years, that's going to create a huge problem. If it happened once, it's still going to be traumatic. It's still going to change your nervous system. So it's one of those things that the amygdala never forgets. But we can overwrite those programs. But to overwrite those programs, we have to go back and visit them. So as Daniel Siegel says, the brain is an organ that is anticipatory, and it has anticipation. This is his term, anticipation for the past. I can't remember exactly how he said it, but it's he. So whatever happened in your past, your brain will anticipate that again. So if you're 45 years old and you cut yourself on the lawnmower and you come up and your wife's at the. She comes out on the thing and says, are you okay? You're going to go back to that time. It's like you're expecting your wife to say, buck up, you little bit. Right. There's part of your amygdala that will encode that emotionally. It's not conscious, and it's really these emotional. These deep subcortical structures that house these emotional programs that are very dangerous. And we can't just heal those problems just by talking about them. Like, insight is the popcorn of psychotherapy. It'll help you knowing why these things happen. But unless you go under, unless you actually find those old traumas and go back and find the child that experienced that trauma and show them that they're seen, heard, loved, and protected, you're always going to be at the effect of it.

Yeah, it's like, we have to heal. A lot of the work that I do with men is healing those moments where you either learned or experienced that you couldn't go through a hard time and come out the other side. Okay, either, because no one was there. Right. You witnessed your parents getting divorced and you felt helpless.

You.

You know, you watched a parent be abusive to the other person, to the other parent, or to you, or to a sibling. And, you know, there was no one there to support you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We, you know, thousands and thousands of examples. But, but the repair, as you're saying, I love that notion of, like, insight. What did you say? Insight is the popcorn of psychology or.

Insight is the popcorn of psychotherapy. It comes from a book called A General Theory of Love that was written by three psychiatrists. It's. It's a really good book. That's what they say. And coming from psychiatrists, because basically the Western model of psychiatry with psychotherapy is cognitive. They may ask you, okay, well, where do you feel that in your body? But that's as far as they go. They don't go any deeper than that. It's like, where do you feel that in your body? And even then, for psychotherapists, that's not even. That's the antithesis of how they were trained. So it's all cognitive. So like I said, the cognitive stuff can only. You can only change. So Much cognitively, it's the language of where these programs are structured is feeling in the body. And that's how you have to change them.

Yeah, and we're gonna go towards the latter part of this show. We're gonna go deep into how do you deal with anxiety, how do you move through it? Some practical stuff, because I think that's very important. I want to talk first though, about do you feel like kids or the younger generation are more anxious than ever before? Because I see a lot of conversation and data out there about how, you know, on the one hand I think it's a little ambivalent, where it's like, oh, the younger generation is so soft. And on the other hand, you see research of just the spiking rates of anxiety within our youth. And so I'm curious to see if you think that that's true. How can you come.

I think that there's just an energy that we have now that we didn't have back in the 60s and 70s or 80s. There's just the parents, the environment is more separate. Covid certainly didn't help it. I mean, Dr. Neufeld says all anxiety is separation anxiety. And I believe that. And I believe ultimately add on to that, it's like. And it's separation for yourself. So I think the parents are more stressed. Like, I get parents virtually every day on Instagram, say, can you talk to my 15 year old son? Can you talk to my 14 year old daughter? It's like, well, I'll work with you first. Because they're probably reading that energy from you. So that's the first thing.

The second thing, I'm sure they love that.

Oh, yeah. But you know what? I get messages when I do work with them, I get messages from them like three, six months later saying, you know what, My son is so much better now. It's like, yeah. And we didn't do any work with her son at all. It's like, what? Cesar Milan, the dog whisperer, he works with the owners, he doesn't work with the dogs. Right. So I think it's really understanding that there's this place. I think that they're coming into a world energetically. And sometimes my medical neuroscientist side wants to have a seizure when I talk about the energy of the world. But I think there's an energy now. And I think also the kids are just more stressed. And the other thing about that is we have this thing called the social engagement system in our minds and bodies. And it's eye contact, tone of voice, prosody of voice, body language and facial expression. So this is how we interact with people and this is what we mature when we're younger. So if we're playing hockey or, you know, when someone scores a goal, we see that they're elated. You know, we see in their face that they're elated. Or, you know, everybody, we lose a huge championship and everybody's like down and, you know, in the locker room and it's just a bad place to be. But our brains are taking all that in as emotional fodder as information.

Now that, that builds and matures this social engagement system in our brains and our bodies. So when we need to soothe ourselves or we need to soothe someone else, we draw on that social engagement system that we learned. Now if we aren't getting this in our kids, if our kids aren't learning that they're not getting enough face to face, you know, they're not getting enough emotional face to face connection. And this is why the screens are so toxic now, because we can't mature our social engagement system through a screen. It has to be in person. So I think that's one of the other reasons, the last thing is that there's no boredom anymore. Like, boredom is the birthplace of creativity. So when you were born, when we were young and there wasn't, you know, there wasn't Instagram, there wasn't a smartphone, you had to freaking deal with it, right? And, and you had to go and find something to do. But now there's no boredom, so there's no creativity. So we're getting into this place where whenever someone feels bad, a child feels bad, if they have access to an iPad, they just go to the iPad. So you never actually get to learn how to metabolize negative emotion because you're always putting a band aid on it as soon as it arises. So that's why I think we're getting this thing like, well, the younger generation is soft and in a way they kind of are because they've never really had to deal with boredom. They never had to deal with negative emotion because as soon as they get into negative emotion, say they're rejected by a friend or whatever, they just distract into the screens. So we never really get. It's like trying to play ice hockey and you don't know how to skate. You just can't do it. It's just, you're gonna going to be really, really difficult for you. So I think those are the three main reasons why our kids are experiencing really high levels of anxiety. I think we're in a more anxious world for sure. The parents are feeling it. The screens are taking away our connection time and we're not maturing our social engagement system and we're just not creating people that are resilient because they never learned how to deal with negative emotion. Because they just, every time they get negative emotion, they go into the problem.

It is. And I think what you're saying is, I think everybody can agree with for the most part because they probably do it themselves.

Oh yeah.

You know, it's just like when you're getting a conflict with your partner, you know, the, the average person is.

Is going to utilize the distractions that culture is providing us, that society is providing us. And they are abundant.

Right.

There are more distractions. Distractions are the. Just a different version of a pill that you can take in the moment. Right. Checking your social media when you're in conflict with a partner is a kind of like digital pill that you can take to maybe feel better by simply avoiding the thing that you're feeling in that moment. Right. It's a wonderful, wonderful distraction. But like you're saying, I do think that it's incredibly detrimental for the younger generations and it's something that my wife and I have talked extensively about with raising our son done. Because I remember when I worked at the Apple store before I started mantalks, you know, I was, at one point I was working in the store and then I, you know, moved up the chain and became a district leader. But when I was working in the store, I'll never forget the amount of parents that would push, you know, the little carts, what do you call them, the strollers. I think I should know this. I have a child push would push the strollers into the store with like a two year old holding an iPad, playing on the iPad, and they'd be so proud, you know, like, oh, look how great my kid is with the iPad. And I'm like, oh my gosh, you know, like play that out. You know, when that kid's at dinner, when that kid's, you know, just using the iPad all the time, they don't have to have social interaction all of a sudden. And the.

The detriment that that can have on that child's capacity to develop social skills, social cognition, social intelligence. It's like, and then, and then the robustness. Because sometimes being in a social environment is hard. There's rejection that you can feel people, you can see their emotions, you know, in their eyes, in their body language. Your body feels what they're feeling quite often, whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, you're tuned into to it. And so that can be quite taxing. And so I just think it's a very interesting time from your perspective. We're going to just pause on this one for one more question. I want to keep going.

What do we do? What do we do to support our children, to support the future generations knowing that the problem is likely to get worse, AKA AI.

Right.

The problem's likely to get worse than it is to get better. How do we deal with this?

More FaceTime, you know, and more physical touch.

Like a lot Apple FaceTime.

Not Apple FaceTime. Yeah, exactly. They even hijacked that.

Right? They got it.

It's got right into the language already.

Yeah. Emotion, emotional connection. Physical connection. Face to face. Like one of the things that I sort of suggest for my, my parents of young kids is, you know, play a game around the dinner table. Like, what, what's my face doing? Happy? Am I sad? Am I frustrated? Like, what's going on with my face? Because there's a place in our brain that's specifically designed to focus on faces. And if you have a stroke in that area, you don't recognize faces anymore. It's called propopagnosia. So it's one of those things that we are specifically designed to look at faces. And if we don't have enough face to face contact, I do believe that it creates a sense of alarm in our system. We are, you know, cultural, social creatures. We need this. But the thing is that dopamine driven, immediate gratification brain. More, more, more, more, more. It's very seductive. So if you have a chance to sort of, you know, stare into the eyes of your partner or go on this new video game you just bought, you know, chances are you're going to lean towards the video game because the serotonin doesn't have the same pull, you know, and this is, I mean this is a gross generalization, but serotonin is kind of like the present day present mom. Like when you're watching a sunset, it's like, this is amazing. I'm just loving being here. I'm loving the taste of, you know, a sip of wine or whatever you're in that moment, that's serotonin. But it's like anything extra personal, anything outside of your reach is dopamine. And it's so, and we're getting, it's so seductive and talking about kids, if you look at frame rate changes, like scene rate changes, if you look at the Bugs Bunny Roadrunner commercial or the cartoons of the 1970s and 80s, there would be about seven, eight seconds where the coyot would be walking along a path. Now, if you look at the cartoons that the kids watch, it changes every one and a half to two seconds. Like, the frame rate, the scene rate changes. So what we're doing is we're teaching kids. It's like, don't pay attention to this thing because another thing is going to come along that's way better than this, right? And I think that's. That's true. Like, sometimes I'll even notice that, like, I'll be on social media, like, scrolling Instagram. Zombie scrolling Instagram, which is one of my little kind of dissociative practices. And I'll look at a post and I'll go, did I see this post?

I don't. Oh, and then there's a part. Oh, yeah. Okay. So you don't encode the post. Like, you encode a tiny bit of it, and then you're on to the next one. So we're kind of teaching our brains, and I think this is affecting people's memories. Like, people in their, you know, they start getting 40s, 50s, and I'm losing my memory. It's like, well, how often do you zombie scroll Instagram? Well, quite a bit. Well, you're teaching your brain not to pay any attention to the nuances of anything. Anything. And then. So that's basically the definition of losing memory is like, memory is the nuances of the experience. Like, just getting into it. If you write an exam, you want to know the nuances of whatever the professor is going to ask you. But if you're losing that for the. For the sake of going to the next. The next image, like, we're just teaching people, we're teaching our brains. We're conditioning our brains to not pay attention to the present moment. And dopamine is rule in our lives. And it's the Molecule More, which is an excellent book as well, just about how we're driven by dopamine. You talk about that with porn. Like, it's basically this. There's no. There's no emotional investment, right? It's just automatically there. And it's just so dopamine driven. And it always wants more. So there's always. It has to. The porn has to get a little different, a little different every time. A little time. So it just, like, it just keeps building on itself. And it's such a huge issue. And that's why I think meditation is so important. That's why just sort of connecting emotionally. That's why physical touch is just even touching yourself. Even, you know, like jokes aside, but, you know, even, you know, finding the alarm in your body, which we can maybe talk about in a few minutes, and just putting your hand over that area and just connecting with it, that serotonin that allows us to go, okay, I can feel safe. Because one thing about dopamine is we live in our heads. And there's no, there's no sense of time in your head. Like the amygdala has no sense of time. There's no sense of time in your head. It's in your body. So if you spend all your time in your head, that's why people say when they get older, it's like, oh, I feel like the last 10 years have raced by. It's like, yeah, because you've lived in your head the whole time. You haven't actually gone into your body and actually felt anything.

It's, it's very interesting because as you're talking, I remember watching an interview with Mr. Beast, who is one of the, the, he's got the biggest YouTube channel, he's got the most subscribers on YouTube. And the interviewer was asking him about one, like a couple of the tips that made him very successful. And one of the things that he talked about was how they upped the transition rate on their episodes. And so when you watch his, you know, some of his most successful episodes, what you'll notice is that it's transitioning constantly. You know, you're like, you're, you're watching this and he's talking and then it's switching to somebody else and they're in a different situation and it's like every three or four seconds they're switching. It's like, it's very hard for me to watch because I find it sort of jarring and disheveling. And I'm like, this is almost like disorienting because it seems like it's using this change of frame and change of transition to almost like mesmerize the audience. And what's fascinating is that I learned all these sort of, I heard him talk about all these tactics and I'm like, I'm not going to do any of those things when I put out YouTube content. So I'm just going to like, I'm just going to put out a 12 minute video of me talking and whoever listens is going to tune in because I just find that more effective. And it's, I think I think there is this kind of revolt against some of that stuff that is hijacking our brain. And last thing I'll say is I remember researching, we really try and not let our son watch any, any tv. He never uses iPad, never goes near a phone. But every once in a while, you know, he's, we just need 10 minutes of something. And so I've been very conscious of researching all the shows that have that high transition rate that are for kids. And for whatever reason, he has just gotten into two things. Number one, watching rally car racing with me. And so usually that has like a, you know, you watch a rally car and it goes through like 12, 15 seconds and then it'll change and you'll see a new rally car and it'll FL. Follow it. And the other one, which I still got a crack at, I still so kicks me. But watching planes take off and land. And so if he's going to watch tv, he's like watching real life things happening. He's not watching the cartoons, he's not watching the blippi or you know, whatever it is, Coco Melon, where the frame rate's just changing constantly and you know, tripping them out and just getting them out. Rush. So I would say to all the parents that are out, out there and just the human beings that are out there.

Look at how this impacts your life in terms of what are you watching, what are you consuming, where there's that constant change happening that's trying to hook you in. So, okay, let's talk about two more things and then we're gonna switch into what do we do? How do we deal with this?

Sure.

So you talk about anxiety not being a feeling. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, anxiety is a thinking. Anxiety is putting words together in a sentence that have emotional significance to you. So the example that I'll often use is if when I was practicing, say I had a 15 year old boy and a 15 year old girl in my office and I go in and I go, sarah, you might be pregnant. She'll freak out, right? Her body will go into fight or flight, all that kind of stuff. Now if I go in to the boy and I say, hey, Jake, you might be pregnant. Pregnant. He'll just laugh, right? There's no emotional significance to that. He doesn't pay any attention to it. But what we do is we create our own worries based on our own fears. As Dan Siegel says, the brain's an anticipation of the past. So we create our own fears and because we created them, we believe them and then that just creates this alarm, anxiety cycle. And we just get locked in that cycle where the alarm in our body from old, typically from old unresolved wounds, wounds, fires up the anxiety in our mind, and the anxiety in our mind fires up the alarm in our body, and we get caught in this cycle and we don't even realize we're in this cycle. So anxiety is the thinking component of that anxiety alarm cycle. Alarm in the body from the old unresolved wounds is a much bigger player. But as I said before, because we are so mind oriented, we assume the mind is the root cause of the problem. On top of that, when we start secreting epinephrine and cortisol in our system, we paralyze the prefrontal cortex and premotor areas. So we lose the ability. Not only do we make more threats in our mind, we make up more shit in our minds, but the part of our brain that would kind of rationally look at those things and say, hey, that really isn't a major deal is shut off. So we get more threats. And then we also, in the infinite wisdom of our brain, we believe those threats because the part of our brain that would tell us that those threats aren't real is offline. So that's what I mean about sort of getting your body under control. Because once your body gets under control, then your prefrontal cortex comes back, then you can see things clearly. And the example that I often use is like, have you ever been freaked out about something and the next day go, why did I get so upset about that? Chances are the state of your body was in a deep state of alarm, so you paralyzed your brain. And then we try and use our brain that's paralyzed to solve our problems, but until your body's regulated again, you're not going to be able to have that prefrontal premotor area back to be able to solve the problem in the first place. So it just causes more frustration and pain and more worry. Going back to what you were saying about dissociation and the kids in the frame rate is that you're creating short term.

Relief when you give your kid an iPad. IPad. But you're creating this kid who now wants that iPad over and over and over again, and it won't make your life miserable. So it's just like that's what anxiety does to us. It basically gives us our own worst fears. And then we paralyze the part of our brain that would tell us that that's not real. So we believe our own worst fears. And as Dr. Phil says, how's that working for you? That's not going to turn out well.

I love that example. And I almost feel the need to just say to the parents that are out there, I am not shaming you for giving your kids iPads at all. You know, like, how you want to parent is how you want to parent. I think it's just alarming for me sometimes when I see the overusage of that.

So can you just come back to this notion of the alarm? I know you talk a lot about this in the book. You have this beautiful acronym acronym. Can you just talk about? Because I think for a lot of people, they feel anxiety kind of as an alarm, right? It's like, okay, I feel anxious. And that's almost like an alarm bell going off saying like, I need to be aware of something or I need to protect myself from something. And so can you just go into that?

Yeah, well, that's, that's what I tell people is like, you're. When you're anxious, quote, unquote, anxious. And I don't really like the term anxious because it doesn't really have a lot of cause consciousness to it. You can go over with someone and, you know, say, I'm feeling really anxious, and they won't have a clue of what you're talking about. But if you say I'm feeling really alarmed today, everybody's been alarmed. So you kind of know, like, everybody's been alarmed. So you can kind of relate to that in a way. So it's really understanding that it's the alarm in your body that's probably stuffed down there from, you know, years and years ago. That's the nidus. That's the focus, and that's what's cueing your brain to have all these negative thoughts. And we attribute the thoughts to the problem when the thoughts aren't really the problem. So it's really. Can you regulate this place in your body? And you can do it in the short term with like, breathing exercises and putting your hand over it and that kind of thing. But really it's the alarm is your younger self. Like, that's, that's the, that's the issue. The alarm is your younger self asking for your attention. And sometimes I get people and I'll say, look, that alarm is like a child in a grocery store with his head, hands, you know, like, holding up to you, like, pick me up. And you're like, well, I'm an adult now. I was bullied as a child. You know, you were bullied I don't really want to deal with you, so I'm just gonna push that away. And of course, the child is just gonna get louder and louder and louder. The alarm is just gonna get louder and louder and louder and create more worries in your mind. And you just. Unless you deal with the root cause. And the little analogy that I like using is like, you're in a row rowboat. It's got a hole in a hull, and it's filling up with water. And you can use cognitive strategies and breath techniques and that kind of stuff to bail water out of it. As the water level drops, you'll feel a little better. But unless you go under and actually patch that hole in the hull, unless you go in, find that child, find that alarm, see them, hear them, love them, protect them, show them that they're okay. Don't be afraid to go back into your old pain, you got to feel it to heal it kind of thing. Then you can start metabolizing this thing at its root cause as opposed to just bailing water by going to therapy. And some people will go to therapy because it kind of, you know, it gives them the excuse that they're doing something right, but they're, you know, inside is the popcorn of psychotherapy. Like, there's only some. I have people that come and see me who have had anxiety for years, and they say, I've been in therapy once a week for 20 years, and I'm not a whole lot better. And I say to them, well, you know, if you had a leak in your house and you had a plumber come by every single week, and that guy charged you 200 bucks a week, week, and 20 years later, that leak was still going. Would you keep paying that guy?

Yeah, stop paying that damn plumber.

Yeah, exactly. It's just like, so try something new is basically all I'm saying is read the book, take the program, whatever. Try something new. Because the premise that you're operating on the anxiety comes from your mind, is not accurate. It's reflected by your mind, for sure. Absolutely. No question, your mind plays a huge role in it anxiety. But your mind is not the source of the anxiety. It's the old trauma that's stored in your body. And I know that sounds kind of woo and whatever, but, you know, it's just. I get messages from people every day saying, this is the first time someone's explained anxiety in a way that really makes sense to me because every book out there is basically change your thoughts. You know, you're thinking negatively. You ought to think more positive. And of course that will help for about 1.6 seconds until you have your next positive thought. But it's so hard, hard to keep thinking in opposition to how your body feels. If your body's holding this stuff that's got to come out, it'll come out in depression, anxiety, eating disorders, ocd, all this stuff, alcoholism, it's got to come out somewhere. So if you go with the root cause, if you find this child in you that, you know, one up to their stepdad and they said, you know, stop crying, you little bitch. Like they. If you don't go back and find that kid and show them that, like, look, I'll look out after you. And again, it's like that loss of faith. We lose faith. And when we lose faith, especially as men, women too, but we just start thinking that everything is up to us and then we can't deal with it because we're not equipped to deal with it. And it's just overwhelming. So we have to find some sort of addiction to sidetrack because we just don't have the emotional vocabulary and the emotional intelligence to be able to deal with it. If you think that you can handle everything yourself, and that's a very big male trait and it's a very big reason why men kill themselves is because there is no way out if you adopt that.

Yeah, I remember hearing somebody say that suicide is the ultimate form of self destruction. And oh man, I can't remember his name is escaping me right now. I quote him in the book he wrote, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. There we go. David Foster Wallace, who actually took his own life. And he described suicide as. He has this brutal yet profound quote where he talks about, which is, you know, pretty much like David Foster Wallace in a nutshell. Right? Just like brutal and profound. But he says, you know, the real reason why people end up taking their own lives is because they can't escape the thoughts in their own head, the voice in their own head. Which is why so many men, you know, and this is obviously, you know, this is going to be, you know, hard for some people to hear, but he says this is why so many people, so many men shoot themselves in the head, is to actually stop the voice that is going on. And I really appreciate what you're saying because I think that in our modern culture and specifically within psychology and therapy, there often is so much emphasis put. And in the self development and personal development industry, there's so much emphasis on changing thoughts, on altering mind frame, on altering mindset. And focusing in on the thing that is more about the symptom than the actual root cause. And I remember reading Stephen Porges and Polyvagal Theory, and he, you know, talked about how there's, in the polyvagal nerve, there's 80% of the wiring is up into the brain, and 20% of the wiring is down into the body. And so you're like, wait a Second, if there's 80% of the information is traveling up from the body into the brain, doesn't that mean that there's a tremendous amount of information that's, that's going to the brain from the body, body versus the other way around? And so I think that was kind of a revolutionary discovery in some way because I think for a long time within the health industry, within the psychological industry, we had the perspective that the brain just controlled the body, right? That the body just listened to the brain versus, like, oh, maybe the brain actually is taking this substantial amount of input from the body. And so when we're dealing with anxiety, anxiety, it's less about these ruminating thoughts that we're trying to escape from, and it's more about what's actually happening for me at a somatic level. So what do you, what do you tell people? How do you support people when they're saying, when I feel anxious, what do I do? Like, where should I even begin? Because I think what you're saying is, is true, but it's big, right? It's like, you know, that's your younger self. So how do we deal with, in the moment, somebody's got anxiety, 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 thing. Two snorts in, quick snorts in, then a long extra 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 to try and use your mind to calm your body. Like saying, just relax, slow down, you're okay. Like, 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 a children respond to, 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 step thing, but it will work in the short term as well. So breath work, you know, moving your eyes back and forth. These, you know, tapping has some, you know, and the reason I think I don't, 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, 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 this. 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, 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 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's still. Still charges them 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. In my chest area. Okay, is it. 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? 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 waistcoat station. So what's coming up from your body is weighed by the insula. What come. What comes from your mind is also weighed by the insula as well. And I believe that the insula, when we have those experiences, like, 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, and you're at a childhood, that emotional signature gets locked into 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 close your eyes? Can you see the child's eyes? Can you see your eyes when you're seven? 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. 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 works like it really does. Like, I was in therapy for 35 years and I did EMDR, I did, you know, ACT, CBT, LMNOP. I did everything and nothing really made a difference. It's 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, it 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 might 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, the, the feeling is like, oh, well, what if this happens again? Or you know, et cetera, et cetera. And, and that we need to get into touch with what we're experiencing somatically within the, 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 I think as, 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, 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.

Okay.

And that sometimes we also need that with ourselves. 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 the deal falls through, or I can't pay rent, or whatever it is that we conceptually think is causing the deep anxiety. So I really appreciate that.

That.

Do you.

Is there a difference between anxiety and stress, like, within the brain? Are they relatively similar?

Is the jury still out on that?

Yeah, I mean, it's really hard because, you know, we have functional MRI scans and that's it. But even functional MRI scans are like 10 to 15 seconds behind, and the amygdala acts, you know, within 0.4 of a second. So we're kind of drawing interpretations from FMRI scans and stuff. So our imaging is amazing, but it's still in the moment, kind of falls short a little bit. So I think it's really about how do we understand overwhelm. And I think what anxiety is is basically our own thoughts. Start. It's like Siren Island. Ulysses, so he's on his boat and. And he's with his sailors, and they get him to strap him to the mast because they know when they go by Siren island, there's all these beautiful women with these beautiful songs. And what happens is the men steer their boat onto the rocks, and then the beautiful sirens turn into horrible monsters and kill them. So I say that the thoughts are kind of like the Sirens. They're very seductive. Like, your brain is telling you we can think our way out of this because. Because as children, that's all we had. You know, if you're a powerless and helpless child, all you have is to go into your head and kind of, you know, make up an imaginary story or whatever. So it becomes a habit. So we go into our heads as a way of soothing ourselves, which works when we're a child. But as we get older, we don't realize that we're adult now. We don't actually have to add thoughts to the feeling. We can just sit with the feeling itself. And like I said, if it's, you know, horrendous, like, get the some help. But we can learn how to soothe ourselves. We can learn how to heal ourselves. And in that, especially with anxiety, because anxiety has a lot to do with just being out of control, as you're saying. So if you start learning and teaching yourself, hey, you know what? We went out of control, but now I'm connecting with my younger version of myself. I'm connecting with my body. I learned, like, Oh, I can actually handle this. I can actually deal with this. I don't have to go into my head because that's one of the biggest tips that I tell people. People, like, people say, what's the one thing that you could tell people that'll make a huge difference in their anxiety? It's like, feel it in your body, but don't add thoughts to it. And just because your mind is going to over here, it's going to be like, hey, we can think our way out of this. We could think our way out of this. Just keep thinking. It's like, no, that's a trap. Basically all you're going to do is just drill yourself into more anxiety. So really it's about just sort of finding the source of it in your alarm and, and just being able to tolerate that sensation. And I think, you know, Besser van der Kolk talks about that, you know, the body keeps the score. It's like we're not teaching people how to get rid of their anxiety, we're teaching them how to acclimatize to the sensation basically of alarm. Alarm's kind of my term. We're teaching them so that they don't freak out every time this alarm comes up and have to go into their head and worry because it's this alarm anxiety cycle. So if we can break that cycle cycle, if we can just break it apart where we can allow the alarm to be there without compulsively adding thoughts to it, then we start metabolizing it. Now that can be, if you've had pretty severe trauma, that can be very difficult. So that's when you need some help. But basically that's how you heal, is you separate the alarm in your body from these horrible warnings, what ifs, worst case scenarios that your mind creates. Same with depression, the same with shooting yourself in the head. It's like stopping that internal voice that probably started when you were very young because I wanted to sort of put this in there. So what I believe, the short version of what I believe is when you were younger, you experienced a trauma that was too much for your little mind to bear. You stuffed it down into the unconscious, right? Freud would call it repression or suppression. And then as the body keeps the score, the body is a representation of the unconscious mind. It finds a home in your body, long term storage. Now what we're doing is we're going back and we're finding that alarm that's in your body body so that we can reverse engineer your healing, so that we can go through the unconscious we can allow ourselves to feel those same things, process them now in a way we couldn't back then. And then we bring it into our conscious mind. Like, oh yeah, I used to be like that. I used to have. That was a problem for me. So that's basically how we reverse engineering healing through a somatic perspective.

I love it. I love it and I really enjoyed this conversation. I think we're almost up for our time today. Two things that we'll wrap with. Number one, is there anything that you want people to know about anxiety that we didn't talk about? And then for people who are wanting to check out your book, check out your program, where can they go?

Yeah, as far as anxiety, just realize that we kind of do it to ourselves. And it's not to be self blaming or whatever, it's just realizing that you have more control over your thoughts. But you can't actually control your thoughts directly. You have to go through your body first, get your prefrontal cortex back at your premotor cortex back. Then you can deal with it. So don't try and deal with your anxiety while your body is in an activated state. You just don't have it. We did touch on that, but it's such an important point. And as far as, you know, people getting a hold of me at the anxiety md, not the anxiety doctor, but at the anxiety md the anxiety MD is my website. It's, you know, if you google the anxiety md it's I'm easy to find. My book is called Anxiety Rx. My program is called you'd mind Body Prescription for permanent anxiety Healing. It's affordable. I have a little issue with the business of trauma. You know, like asking people to pay three or $4,000 for, you know, helping them with their trauma. You know, I have an issue with that. So it's $100. It's not $97. It's two payments of 50 if you want to break it up over a couple of months. And I just want to get my work out there as much as I can because I think that the current traditional model of anxiety is not accurate. And I think a lot of people are paying a lot of money in therapy and it's not really helping them, it's helping them cope. But you know, to really heal, you've got to go back, you got to feel it to heal it. You got to go back and find that child and show them they're seeing, heard, loved it and protected. That's really the, as ethereal and woo as that sounds after 35 years. That's the only thing that made a difference for me.

Love it, nailed it. Appreciate it. For everybody that's out there listening, man it forward. Share this conversation with somebody that you know will enjoy it, that could use it, that could use the information and the conversation that we dug into. And don't forget to subscribe to wherever you are listening to this, whether you're on YouTube or Spotify or Apple Music, wherever you are, don't forget to subscribe. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.