The SECRET To Improving Self-Esteem & MASTERING Confidence! | Ellen Vora

We need those wounds and we need those nooks and crannies. It expands our capacity for empathy. It expands our capacity for connecting with other people. So I think we don't want to be necessarily fully healed, whatever that is.

I think you gotta have a dream.

The school of Greatness, really.

Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes.

How do people integrate healing in their life and not just have a kind of a moment of a release?

Yeah, yeah.

I'm asking a lot. In one.

Let's tackle it. So I think that we're in this moment right now. It's a psychedelic renaissance, and we've had a few waves of this, and we're in one right now. And I generally find it to be really hopeful. It's something I'm excited about as a psychiatrist. I see the limitations in my field, the limitations of how we're approaching mental health right now, and I think we have room for improvement. Psychedelics are hopeful in that it's very much a paradigm shift. It's giving people a kind of. It's deep work sometimes. It's a deep release. It can be an emotional purge. It can be shadow work. It can be sort of like your defenses are down, child healing and all that stuff, all of that. Some of the medicines are empathogenic, so you can really sort of see situations from a place of more compassion, more understanding, more gentleness to yourself. So you can sometimes look at painful things and you don't put up your defenses and sort of rigidly wall it off. You can explore, tiptoe into difficult topics. So all of that is great. And I think what we'll learn, because a lot of us are sort of naive as we enter this space, is we're pretty attached to the big experience. We're like, let me go do the ayahuasca in the jungle or have a workshop or whatever. Zero's dose and have a big journey. And it's a piece of the puzzle for sure. And we come away from it being like, well, that was such a big experience. That's clearly going to change my life. But the work is in the integration. It is the journ. And we were joking about it when I got back from 11 ceremonies in Brazil. 11?

For how long? A week? Two weeks?

A week?

That's a lot of ceremonies, isn't it?

I think it is.

Usually do like two or three or something.

There's a lot of different traditions, and in this tradition it's twice a day. And so it was heavy duty. I didn't know any better.

Right, you just did what they told you to do. And you showed up. Yeah.

And I got back and I was like, telling my partner, this changes everything. Everything. I have a new worldview. I have a new outlook. I'm going to be a different person. I'm going to show up differently. And that's when we got into the habit of always very intentional about integration, that you had the big experience, but that is the tip of the iceberg. And then you journal about it. You write down your thoughts, you process in therapy with your partner. We have a lot of integration community circles where we get together with other people doing this work, and we talk through our experiences and get feedback on it. And that's what actually galvanizes it and allows you to start to make real changes in how you show up day to day.

Yes. What was the root underneath the thing that made you such a jerk?

Why am I a jerk?

Oh, that you needed to integrate the actual healing.

Yeah. We're gonna go really real right away. Let's do it.

You want us to be surface here. The school of greatness.

I think for me, it's a mother wound.

Okay. Not you as the mother, but your mother. Yes.

Yeah. And for me, it comes down to. I think that. I think my mom and my sister were more naturally simpatico. They were just compatible in their temperaments, and I was a little different. And I think that that has informed me my whole life. Am I likable? Am I worthy of love? And that's the core wound.

You thought, am I worthy of love? Throughout your life, it was kind of underneath, Whether you were thinking it or subconsciously. That was the. The belief.

And it drives a lot of behavior, is to convince yourself in the world, see how worthy of love I am. You know, you seek that validation, but underneath that is always the deep questioning of it.

Am I. Yeah. Am I worthy of love?

Yeah.

Do you think that's a fear most people have?

I can't speak for most people. I've seen it certainly in a lot of my patients, but not everybody. And I think that there's a variation on this, for me at least, which is likability. And its. You know, I, at this point, very much take for granted worthiness of love. I've done a lot of healing overall, But I can feel fully worthy of love if somebody really knows me. But a lot of people don't really know me. And in that echelon of relationships, I'm like, am I likable? And so that's like a more superficial wound, but that's there Too.

Do we need to be liked or worthy of other people's loves or understood by other people to love ourselves fully?

Oh, certainly not. And it often gets in the way. Right. When we're trying to live our lives by like, you know, are we pleasing those people? Are we getting this approval? What we do is we systematically betray ourselves.

Yes.

And that's a big problem.

This is what I did for 15 years in relationships now.

Yeah, yeah.

It was never about them. It was always about me betraying myself.

And why do you think you fell into that pattern?

It was all, I mean, I still have it on my phone. It was the, all the inner child stuff. I mean, my therapist had me put this on here like almost a year ago, a photo myself. So this is probably around like five or six, you know, I don't know if the camera can see it, but I've talked about this many times. Yeah, the little Lewis. So the inner child work for me was really powerful because I've talked about this many times. But I was sexually abused when I was 5 and then I left home at 13. Parents were always. It felt like I don't want to tell a story that's bigger, but it felt like there was anxiety at home frequently, consistently. There was not a stability of love and there was not a model of my parents fully loving each other because they, it felt forced, like they had to be there because of the kids. And then when they got out, when they got divorced when I was around 16, I was the youngest of four then they both were like free and happy. And so it's kind of like marriage. Trapped, abandoning yourself to try to please the other person. Giving up what you want to make the other person happy. And I feel like I kind of repeated that subconsciously and attracted certain partners that I felt like I wanted to, I guess heal my parents relationship in my own relationship and try to fix it. And then in that fixing process, I attracted a certain personality type that did not accept me. They didn't accept me. They wanted to change me. And then I felt stressed and anxious because I couldn't be myself without them being upset with me. And so. And then I had this. Dr. Ramany came on, the narcissist psychologist who talks about psychiatrist who talks about narcissism that I attracted narcissistic personalities because I was an athlete. I was so committed to making it work that I would do whatever it takes giving up myself to make them happy. I would try to buy peace. That would leave me feeling stressed and anxious and always frustrated and resentful of the relationship and then questioning everything. This has been an unpacking of a long time now, but it's been an incredible journey of integrating that awareness. You talk about having an experience and then integration and really creating healing from those things. So for me, it's been a journey of. This is why I kind of mentioned this beforehand, talking about, like, these ayahuasca and psychedelics. I'm sure there's some benefit to them, but what I think is if someone can actually sit across from someone else like this and have their eyes connected and open their heart fully, you can start to really be cathartic and start to heal and reveal yourself, as opposed to doing some big experience or some purging of some type of. I'm sure there's benefit to it. But then eventually you got to sit across from someone else and you got to share your shame. Eventually, I feel like you have to say, these are all the things that I'm insecure and shameful about. And if anyone ever actually knew that I was sexually abused as a kid, no one would love me. You got to share that fear, I think in order to realize, oh, people actually still love you and accept you with that. And you have to love yourself no matter what, because it doesn't matter if the world loves you if you don't learn to love yourself. So all this was an unpacking for many years for me. But. But it's been. But it's been me willing to say, I take full responsibility, accountability for every area of my life. And even if the stuff I didn't, wasn't responsible for, happened, I'm still gonna say, how can I benefit from those things and take responsibility for the rest of my life? So that's been a beautiful journey. But I don't know. If I didn't do ayahuasca or any of the medicines, maybe it would have been helpful. But I also feel like eventually got to do the other work too. The scary work. Not where you're in a world by yourself and like drugs, but like the actual, vulnerable, real world work.

Yeah.

I don't know. You've experienced this and you've been a therapist for a long time, so you tell me.

Let me reflect on a couple of things you said there. So one thing is, thank you for sharing this. So I think that when there's parents in their tension in their relationship, but are kind of putting on a happy face and saying, like, everything's okay.

No, it's not. But you feel it's not.

I think it Messes with the child brain messes. Well, children, all humans, but including children, are incredibly sophisticated social creatures. They pick up on everything. They sense it. So it's very gaslighting. And it's kind of a mind mess up to be like, well, here's what I'm sensing. But without the language, we don't have the faculties to articulate that as children. You sense it, you feel it, but then you see the smiley face, and it really confuses your sense of reality. You start trusting your perception. And that's very tricky to grow out of in adulthood because in childhood you're trying to learn which way is up, which way is down, what is anything in the world. And when you feel tension and you see a smile, it confuses your sense of, like, do I perceive reality accurately? I also think that these are the.

People I'm supposed to be trusting the most. And if they're not in a good relationship or they're not happy or they're passive aggressive, can I trust them? Is it me? Is it. You don't know what it is.

Yeah, yeah. And I think so. My friend and colleague will sue. He has this saying. I'm going to butcher this quote, but he says something to the effect of psychedelics are not just agents for healing trauma, but they are here to help make spirituality palatable to a starving Western world. And I think that's why I'm most hopeful about psychedelics, to open you up. To open you up to basically a sense of like, maybe we don't fully understand this world just yet. Maybe there is something beyond what meets the eye, something that defies our concept of time and space and material reality. And I think that when it comes to that shadow work, it's not the only path there. But I do see some of my patients access a degree of release that's. It's just hard to get in other venues. And it's. And I think that in certain sense, in the same way, alcohol kind of gives us, like, a license to be like, oh, like, I, you know, I was crazy. And then the next day it's like, I don't even remember it. And it's like, okay. But I think that psychedelics sort of give us permission to really go deeper. I know for me, when I lost my mom, I grieved. I had no trouble diving into grief, and I grieved in such a big way. And yet when I go into a psychedelic ceremony, it's like, I open up this portal and the grief flows. 10x. Anything that I was able to release More? Yeah.

Wow, that's great.

And so if I knew a way to access that without these medicines, I'd be all for it. But I think that in certain ways, whether it just gives us permission or if it actually helps us access it, I'm not sure. But it's part of the reason I don't throw away these medicines. I think that they have a role.

What I'm hearing you say is you have to integrate it afterwards. You can't just have the experience and think you're healed or you're whole or you figured it out.

Yeah.

Because we've got to integrate it.

10%, 90%.

Yeah. So 10% is the medicine or the moment, but the 90% is actually the hard work. It's funny because I remember thinking after the first five months of therapy last year, a year of therapy, by the way, was probably the best gift I've ever given myself.

Yeah.

The best gift I could have given myself. Because emotional accountability is such a powerful tool that I don't think a lot of people are aware of. And I. And I done therapy in, like, seasons of life, but not a full year long. Yeah. And I'm committing to another year because I want to see, like, all right, was this just one year a fluke or whatever? But what does two years look like? And I think the integration. Because I remember thinking, like, okay, do I continue this or not? And I was like, I really want to integrate this. And it came up as I got into a new relationship later, I remember thinking, oh, I really need the emotional accountability, because I might have fallen back into old patterns had I not continued to integrate. And the integration happened only when I was able to be courageous, when I was living in a fear. That's when it happened. When I felt like something, like, there's an anxiety feeling. Am I going to repeat a pattern? Am I going to be like my parent, whatever, as opposed to falling back. I leaned into that anxiety, in a sense, and just spoke with 100% honesty and courage. And then on the other side, like, 24 hours later, I'm like, okay, I feel more peaceful now as opposed to being, like, stuck. So it's been a constant, and I'm sure it'll be a lot more integrating this year as well as I get deeper in our relationship. But I don't know. It's one of the greatest gifts I gave myself.

Yeah, I agree with that.

How much? 90% integration. How long does someone need to integrate something until the anxiety goes away.

Oh, I make no guarantees that then goes away. Six Month plan. I think that it just depends. We're working through different degrees of depth and you might go different places. And I don't think it follows a perfectly temporal path. Like, I had a ceremony many years ago that I might be in the shower, you know, this week, and I'd be like something like some synapse, just connected. And now I understand something. And it took five years to cook.

Yes.

So I don't think it does behave along those lines.

What do you think then prevents people from fully healing their mind and body?

Well, part of is what we're going to talk about with this book, that I think we are going about it wrong for the most part. And I think that it's maybe not something that we solve in one lifetime. And I'm not sure it totally is the goal. Like, I think that we need those wounds and we need those nooks and crannies, that it actually enriches our lives. It expands our capacity for empathy. It expands our capacity for connecting with other people. So I think we don't want to be necessarily fully healed, whatever that is.

Interesting.

I don't think it's the goal. I think it's really wonderful to integrate all parts of ourselves, to stare at our shadow, to at least bring our shame into the light of day, and to find venues to connect with other people where we can show up perfectly, authentically raw, vulnerable ourselves and have reflected back to us. I see you and I still accept you.

Yes.

And I think that that is deeply therapeutic to our nervous system to have that experience.

It's 100% true. When eight years ago I opened up for the first time, I went to a workshop that got me to open up about sexual abuse. For 25 years, I held on to the secret, the shame. I was five years old when it happened. And when I started to go to elementary and when you're five and you're sexually abused or you're raped, you don't. At least for me as a boy growing up in Ohio, there was never, like, talk about it, you know, there wasn't on TV or something of like, okay, if you're a young boy and this happens to you, here's what you do next. I never saw this. And then when you get into like, elementary school and middle school, and I remember being a very affectionate young boy, like, I'd put my arm around, like my classmates or like teammates, and then they would push me off at different times. Not everyone, but they'd push you off and call you names, almost like it was wrong. To be affectionate with someone. And so I thought, like, oh, I could never share this with my friends, because if I even just put my arm around a guy, they're going to make fun of me and call me names. So how could I let them know that this happened to me when I'm not even accepted for just being playful? Yeah. So I just held onto it for a long time. And when I finally talked about it in a workshop, and I've talked about this publicly many times, finally talked about in a workshop, I had a fear of telling my family. I remember thinking, okay, I told these kind of, like, strangers in this emotional intelligence workshop, and I'm never gonna see them again. Right. Maybe I will, but maybe not. They, you know, they all accepted me. Yeah. But then I was like, but my family, will they accept me? You know? And I remember talking to a therapist friend at the time saying, I'm really scared to share this with other people because what if my family doesn't accept me? Just like you were talking about reflecting it, sharing your shame and having someone reflect and accept you. I said, I don't know what to do. She said, call each one of them one by one because they were around the country. Call them and ask them this question first before you tell them, and make sure you feel comfortable with their response. I was like, what's the question? She said, ask them, is there anything I could ever say or do that would make you not love me? And if they say yes, there are things that make me not love you, Then maybe don't tell them. Right? Then maybe wait to tell them. But if they say no, there's nothing you could ever do or say that make me not love you, then they're giving you permission to share that. And I called each one of my family members and told them, and it was the most like, healing experience for them to receive my shame. And also, what tends to happen when one person's vulnerable is someone else opens up their vulnerabilities. I learned something about each one of them I had no clue about. So our bond connected even stronger, which is even more healing for them and more healing for me. And I think that's a powerful thing that a lot of people are not willing. I was one of them for 25 years. I was not willing to reveal myself because I was so afraid of what people would think about me or judge me or make fun of me or not accept me or not love me if they knew the shame. And I'm trying to share more of this because I want people to open up. They don't need to tell the world like I do on a big platform. But it's the inner relationships that we have with people, the close relationships that are the most meaningful, that we tend to hide ourselves sometimes. And I feel like we've got to learn how to make this more acceptable for people.

Three part response.

Yes.

So one is, I think the reason that strategy is so smart to open with, like, is there anything I could do that would make you not love me? Is that everyone's going to pretty much say, like, no, of course not to that question. But if you hadn't asked that, they might have been like, I can't. This is not okay, or they push back or whatever. And I think that it's almost like a neuro linguistic programming. Like you've just created this sort of like, well, you just committed to that. So here we go.

Yeah.

And I think you're absolutely right that when you share something vulnerable, it makes it safe for somebody else to share something vulnerable. It's like this wave that we can bond more. It creates kind of a, like a virtuous cycle of vulnerability and authenticity and making it safe to just be, be ourselves with each other. And I also think that with family, for anyone who's listening to this and they're like, okay, I'm gonna go try this. I'm gonna share my shame with family members. I think family, it's so important because like, we can go to the men's retreat and share, you know, we can do that. And people are like, nature in the woods.

And then hug it out and cry.

But then what Family Scary regress around our families. And we, you know, people, people say like, you know, your family members are the ones who push your buttons because they're the ones who put them there. And we all get very triggered. We're all in a little tight knot with our family members. And so I usually go into family interactions with an intention of radical acceptance. And I really believe in the kind of Marshall Rosenberg nonviolent communication idea of like, give someone an opportunity to meet your needs. Give someone an opportunity to enrich life. Yes, but. And don't obligate them. And like, no expectations. And so if I'm like, I'm showing up vulnerably, here's some shame. Family member, can you hold this? And like, just rock it. And sometimes they can. And that's awesome. And sometimes that's not where they're at. That's not where our relationship is at. And I come away from that.

So you can't expect them to.

Yeah. And it doesn't mean I'm like, my healing journey is not abbreviated by that or rested there. It's really just like, okay, so that is the limitation of this relationship right now. And I accept that. And that's where this person is at. And I accept that. And they might be able to show up more evolved or emotionally intelligent in other pockets of their life, but not with me, because of all the history, because we're both so regressed around each other.

Of course. How does someone begin to release shame, whether they can? And can you release shame without having to tell other people?

Yeah. Yeah. So I think for anybody who somehow has not yet done their Brene Brown required reading, must see tv. Like, you have to watch the TED Talk. You have to read the books. She is the patron saint of vulnerability and shame, and she's a national treasure. And we just need to know that she really made that conversation so accessible. So that's step one. But I think that you can do a lot of shame release just in your own heart. It's really, like, for me, I'll have shameful memories, and I'll speak them out loud to myself. I'll write them down in a journal. I'll just look at them and be like, that makes me so. You know, my heart rate increases when I think about that. It's shame. Right. You sort of flush. You feel so like, oh, it hurts. It's painful to think about it, but it's weird. Humans are so weird in that we think, no, no, no, no, no. And then if you just go past that barrier, you get to the other side of it, and you're like, here's what happened. And I'm still ultimately an inherently lovable person. I'm a person out here in the world, flawed, but doing my best. And that's all we can expect of ourselves, and that's enough. And then you can speak it kind of. I just always picture, like, a flashlight. You just want to shine the flashlight on the shame, and somehow it doesn't hold up anymore. It really proliferates in the dark.

It does. And the more I speak about it, the less it affects me, the more I take my power back by communicating it. Like, the first six months of me talking about sexual abuse, I was stuttering, I was sweating. And now it's. I don't want to normalize it like, it was nothing, but I can talk about it with a sense of normal heart rate. Like, I'm just talking about a cup of coffee, in a sense, because I've continually shined the light on it as opposed to kept it a secret in the dark and been afraid of it and insecure of it. What would you say is the biggest anxiety you have right now in your life?

So this book is a labor of love. I'm proud of it. It's also imperfect, right? Like I wrote it as a mom with unpredictable childcare in a pandemic. Like, you know, if I was a full time writer and like was a monk on a mountaintop, like I would have done all this extra research and interviews. But this was like the realistic labor of love I could manage. And basically I think you have like.

30 pages of research in the back. Citations.

That was a word count issue at 1. But releasing something like this into the world we live in right now, that's hyper polarized, that's contentious. Where we have so much conversation happening on the social media platform where controversy generates, you know, it really feeds into the algorithm. And so right now, you know, I'm not here to say like cancel cancel culture. I think that's a conversation. Like it's also accountability culture. There's a lot of good reckoning that comes from that. But we do, of course, we feel disconnected from the human being on the other end. And I am sensitive. Like that's why I'm a psychiatrist. That's why I'm interested in anxiety as a topic. Like I feel everything. I'm paper thin skin really. And so it's like I'll feel all of that energetically and I've got my clearing practices and I've got ways that I process it, but I feel it. And so releasing this into the world, I'm proud of it and I'm psyched to spread this message. And I do feel like if it helps a handful of people, I'm psyched. Like that's the goal. But there will. I'm not playing it safe in the book either. I say controversial things, I have unpopular opinions about things. I put it in there not to make waves, but just because I think these are conversations we need to be having. I'm not saying my approach is the gospel, but I want a nuanced both and conversation about tricky gray area topics. But it's gonna ruffle some feathers and I'm terrified of people coming at me and being like, this is harmful. And I'm also really ready for the pearl in that feedback. You know, anytime somebody's like, this is harmful, often there's a seed of truth to that and I learn from it, but it's still I lose sleep for a few days.

But you create context before everything and say, like, this is not the only solution. Like, there's here's a research that's showing this and here it' work for people I've worked with. Right. You're not just like, this is the only way. Yeah.

I mean, maybe I need that disclaimer at the top of every page.

I know the feeling. But I think if you have that at least the context setting before each one of the controversial, I guess, topics, it's interesting. I was. And I don't know if this will resonate in any way, but I took a year of public speaking class, like 13 years ago, 14 years ago. I was terrified of speaking in front of two, three, five people. I could not stand up in front of a small group and speak for a minute without being nervous. I could not speak in front of a large group without being nervous. It was just a nervous thing. I met a professional speaker who gave me some mentorship and he's like, you need to join Toastmasters and go every single week until you're not afraid anymore to stand in front of a group of peers that are there to give you positive feedback so you can take on the negative, you know, the critics. And so I did that and it helped tremendously. And then I went and started speaking, like, my brand started to build and I started to build an audience or whatever. And so I started getting paid speaking gigs for years and on bigger and bigger stages. It was probably seven years in to speaking, like, getting paid a lot of money to, like, speak in front of audiences. I remember still feeling, like, insecure and nervous within like 24 hours or the day of. And I remember calling my coach at the time and saying, I don't know why I'm still nervous. Like, I shouldn't be nervous anymore. I've been training for like a decade now. I've been doing this. This is the thing I do. Why am I still nervous? And he said, because you're still worried about what people think about you. You're still thinking about, are they going to judge me? The insecurity and fear of other people's opinions is making you nervous. Know that they are going to judge you. Like, they're going to criticize you. Know that you're gonna mess up. You're not gonna say the joke the right way. You're gonna forget a line you wanted to say in your speech and stop thinking about you being perfect and start focusing on service of other people. And I think, was you going to this launch, thinking about. I know the book's not 100% perfect. It can always be improved, and maybe this and this. But if it continues to serve people, then that's. That's what matters. And I think if you do that, continue to, like, don't even put anything on you. This is done. You've made it. It's out there. Say, the whole intention is to serve and help people. It doesn't matter what they say about it. You know what I mean?

It absolutely does resonate. I needed that. There's this one other caveat I'll put out there, which is, as a physician, I feel like training to become a medical doctor. It's. You sort of get really trained to be judicious and be cautious and think about har. Like, first to no harm. And I think you can play it safe. Well, this is really at the heart of the book. Right. I think that in certain ways, conventional psychiatry, as it stands right now, is actually doing some harm, sometimes in actively intervening in a way that's harmful, sometimes in lack of helping people in ways that we need. And so this book is really intended to improve upon that and to do less harm, help people where they need it. But there are unintended consequences, always. And there are just pockets of this where, if I could hold the hand of every reader and watch where they take something just a little too far or, like, go, you know, like just a little subtle misstep here or there. I can be like, no, no, no, no, no.

This is what you really meant.

Yeah. Like eat well, but not orthorexia. Well.

Right.

So I think that there's potential to cause harm, and that's where I really lose sleep.

What's the most controversial thing in here?

There's plenty in your mind.

What are you the most anxious about in your Anatomy of Anxiety book?

Yeah, there's two. No, there's three. So we can go in whichever direction you think.

Go ahead.

One is just my attitude towards psych meds. One is my attitude towards body positivity. And then one is just kind of encouraging people to not be so scared of the sun. So we can go in any of those directions.

I think people live in a lot of anxiety when the sun's out because of, like, skin cancer or, like, it's not wrinkles or. What is it?

It's not that, like, fear of skin cancer and wrinkles is causing anxiety. It's that lack of sunshine because we've been so trained to fear the sun and to slather sunblock. I Think lack of not just vitamin D, but these other less measurable aspects of how we benefit from the sun is in contributing to our anxiety.

Interesting.

Yeah. So I'm here to just say, like we can rethink that a little bit. It's not to say go whole hog in that direction. It's finding a balance. And skin is such an interesting. It's quick to evolve. It's basically if populations of humans migrated from an area near the equator to an area further from the equator. Those genes that control where the melanin in our skin sits in the skin cells, it quickly changes because there's such a delicate balance between the importance of vitamin D, which is really more of a hormone than a vitamin, and the risk of skin cancer. And evolution's not messing around with this. It really always wants to strike the right balance and. But evolution, even if it works quickly, is still not so quick. So we're living in a moment right now where we're a little bit not striking the perfect balance. And I think a lot of us too extreme.

Right? Yeah.

And I think like if you are fair skinned, descended from people from Northern Ireland, and you're living on the equator, you want to be more concerned about melanoma than vitamin D deficiency. But if you're African American, you're living in Chicago, you probably want to be more concerned with vitamin D deficiency and everything else that goes along with sun that can't just be supplemented with a vitamin D curve than worried about melanoma. So I think that this message of fear of the sun, the harmful rays of the sun, is doing many people a disservice, but perhaps most of all people with melanated skin.

Okay. And what about body image or body positivity? Where does the anxiety lie within that?

Yeah, well, we're in a beautiful moment with that movement. Right. It's speaking power to diet, culture and all of that sort of like patriarchal toxicity of making us kind of be at war with our own bodies and try to mold ourselves into an image that's not necessarily appropriate for our bodies. And I love that. The spirit of that I'm all in favor of, but it still ends up being this kind of both and thing where we've swung a little too far. And now what's happening is it's sort of a coddling enabling message, which is like you're addicted to that processed food, like go treat yourself. And I think what I see in my practice, I just want people to be well. And sometimes that easy food causes the hard life. And someone can be like, I embrace the principles of body positivity. I eat whatever I want, I don't worry about my weight. Okay, okay. But then they're suffering from polycystic ovary syndrome or endometriosis or insulin resistance and everything that goes along with that. A shortened lifespan ultimately and certainly an impact on their quality of life. And that's where I think we're getting it just slightly wrong, is that this was all supposed to be about living a fulfilling life. And we need to figure out how much effort do you put in. And for some of us who are really out of balance, we actually have to put a decent amount of effort into creating enough physical health and balance that our physical health can recede into the background. And it just creates the foundation for our fulfilling life. And for some people, they're too all in on that. Right? And then the meal prep and the obsessive and the skipping meals with friends and socially isolating, it becomes a part time job. And it's the self care itself that stands in the way of the fulfilling life. I think in body positivity movement right now it's actually the cavalier attitude towards it doesn't matter, eat whatever you want that's actually getting in the way of the fulfilling life. And so, and I think that it's speaking truth to the patriarchy, but in the process it's sort of actually being the biggest champion to the processed food industry.

I hear you there. What was the first one you said?

The first one was? Psych meds.

Psych meds, yeah.

That's a big one.

So what I'm hearing you say is psychedelics. There's a lot of these research coming out saying the benefits of psychedelics being used for treatment and some relaxing of the stress, anxiety. It's funny, I was just watching a video of this popular YouTuber who was smoking marijuana for a year and decided two weeks ago to go off marijuana. And he was like, it's probably the hardest thing I've ever done is to have the withdrawals from just marijuana. This isn't some like hard narcotic or something, which, you know, which is probably even harder, you know, to get off of like heroin or something. But he was like, I'm the most irritable person. He was like, I'm apologizing to all his friends. I'm so sorry. I've been so angry and short tempered and this and this and I don't know how much longer it's going to take, but it's been a couple, two or three weeks. And he's like, I feel like a mess. And I'm like, so what is the balance? You know, should we be. Is there other ways to get to that place without needing these things? Because then they can become addictive and needing them all the time, oh, it's giving me release. Let me just stay on them.

Cannabis itself is a really tricky one because it's one where there are. There's absolutely no one size fits all approach. And I see people who it enhance, like they go deeper into their life, they get more mindful with it, they bring intention to it, they make it sacred. It's seldom, you know, it's more of like a once a week or less often thing. And for some of my patients, it's allowed them to go through menstrual cramps without taking other medications or, you know, so there's. It can be a better sleep aid. It can prevent some, you know, if it ends up meaning that you don't drink as much, maybe there's fewer traffic fatalities or less domestic violence. So it has its place. But I tend to think that anybody who's smoking daily, it's not serving them and it ends up numbing us out and taking us out of our lives. And then I see it impacting happiness and anxiety levels and it is tough to quit and in not quite the same physiologic dependence way as like say heroin, but it has a way of insidiously getting in and sort of this vine that kind of grows around our life and then it's hard to extract ourselves from. From it. So I have the utmost sympathy for anybody struggling with that. But I just encourage everyone to be really intentional about how do you come to this substance? Is it bringing you deeper into your experience? Is it checking you out?

And what is the root cause of most people needing to take a substance? Like what's the root? On why someone has gotten to the point of like, I need to take this to feel better. How can they just get to the root and feel better?

Here's a rough draft. Thought is I think that human beings have certain fundamental human needs. They're not high tech, but they're not how our modern life is structured. We have need for connection and community. I think we have need for nature. I think we have some degree of need for meaning and purpose in our lives. And that can take the form of spirituality. Doesn't have to. And I think that we actually need to be nourished. And that is, that has so many different dimensions. Like we need good water, we need what we get from sunshine. We need nourishing food. And so I think we live right now, like, you know, it's. It's. It's booze and it's social media and it's devices and it's social isolation and we're worker bees and these inhumane working conditions. And like, basically, we're not only not getting these needs met, but then we're sort of getting assaulted with all these things that just leave our nervous system totally frayed. And so it's understandable that we're reaching for something. Most things we get addicted to. It kind of gives us that original grounding, connected feeling of, you're safe. I always think about breastfeeding. I think so much of addiction is like, how do you feel? Like a babe nursing in your mother's arms, getting your need for nourishment, getting that little opiate hit that actually happens in breastfeeding milk. Feeling safe, feeling protected, feeling loved. And I think so much of us are trying to get back to that feeling, and we need it all the more when we really not getting that feeling, getting that need met.

Yeah. Holistic. That's what you talk about, the holistic approach to psychiatry. Right. And not the traditional approach, but the holistic approach. What's the difference between what you call true anxiety and false anxiety?

Yeah. So in my training, it was the dsm, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual. And it's like, here are the diagnoses. Is it generalized anxiety disorder? Is it panic disorder? With or without agoraphobia? And always in medicine, you're thinking, how does this change management? And that categorization, classification, I've realized in the way I approach mental health and anxiety in particular, doesn't change my management at all. It's really designed to kind of keep gatekeep. You know, it's a little bit here to sway you. Maybe if it's panic, you go towards cbt. If it's generalized anxiety disorder, if you meet the threshold, if you have enough symptoms that you qualify for a diagnosis of clinical anxiety, then you've unlocked medication. And since I'm not doing a lot of prescribing of medication, I have no need to gatekeep. And so if someone comes in and tells me they have this objective experience of anxiety, like, done, there's our diagnosis for the foreseeable future, and there's nothing I need to gatekeep because there's no risk in anything I'm going to be recommending. And I see a classification system that makes a lot more sense as false anxiety and true Anxiety, False anxiety is our avoidable, unnecessary, preventable anxiety. That term false can be triggering for some people because it feels invalidating. It's like, what are you talking about, false anxiety? Like, it feels quite real and the suffering and the experience of it is no less real. But false speaks to the fact that there is a path out that's relatively straightforward. And this has to do with the ways our physical body gets out of balance. Whether it's from a blood sugar crash, we're inflamed, chronically sleep deprived, we're micronutrient deficient, maybe we're drinking too much strong coffee that day, maybe we're coming down from alcohol every day and our GABA is getting glued, converted into glutamate. We can talk about the neuroscience of that. But so there's all of these just seemingly benign aspects of modern life that are tipping our body into a stress.

Response that if you just, okay, don't drink or cup up the coffee, get eight hours of sleep, do this, you'll probably have less anxiety.

We avoid a lot of anxiety that way. So we trip ourselves into these stress responses. And it's really mundane stuff. But that stress response feels synonymous with anxiety and panic. And so I think false anxiety is something to just take stock of. Do an inventory of all the ways that you might be getting physically out of balance. See what you can do to shift things gently back into balance and then walk out of that less anxious. And then what remains after you've really taken care of a lot of that false anxiety is our true anxiety. And that's purposeful anxiety. And that's not something to medicate away. We couldn't if we wanted to. It's not a nuisance, it's not something to pathologize. It's something to really slow down and embrace and honor and heed.

What are some of the main true anxiety things that people go through?

Yeah, everyone's a little different. Some people, it's more like a communication from our body, from our inner knowing that's telling us something's really not right here. Pay attention to this and it could be a relationship that we're in. It could be something to do with our work life, it could have something to do with our community or the world around us. Some people feel true anxiety on a very global scale, right? Like people that their life mission is around climate change or is around, you know, you name it. Like any of these big things where we need more people sort of shouting from the rooftops like, we need to make changes here. And some people's true anxiety just speaks to, like, they need to call their grandma more often. And so it's really just something to slow down and listen to. And it's here to tell us, like, look at this problem. The anxiety itself is not the problem there. It's really just the body sort of like putting up a flare and saying, like, please slow down and take a look at this. And then once we have listened to it, honored it, heeded that message and taken some steps accordingly, it really transmutes that feeling. It's not an uncomfortable anxiety. It's like a feeling of purpose, which is a very different kind of charge.

Would you say there's a framework of figuring out what anxiety you have or how to know where your anxiety is coming from?

Yeah, So I say low hanging fruit first. You start with a false anxiety. You kind of just figure out where you're out of balance.

Take inventory. Okay, I get four hours of sleep a night. I drink five cups of coffee a day.

I something to look at.

Yeah, whatever. I'm eating processed foods all day. So you start to take inventory of these things and say, okay, I'm only going to have one cup of coffee or whatever it is, sleep seven, eight hours, and then see how I feel after a week of doing these action steps and then also taking anxiety. But how you are taking inventory of the true anxiety, how do you really take inventory of that when it's more of the inner knowing, you know, intuition. Listening to your intuition, it's tricky, right? If you're so anxious, it might be loud to listen to it.

You know, I mean, psychedelics have a role in this, but it doesn't always have to be that. But anything that actually lets us bring reverence to the act of. I'm slowing down. I'm listening to what's alive in me, in my heart, in my unconscious. And basically I'm really exploring that and I'm open to that message. And in our daily lives, most of us steamroll over that. Right. You know, some people have a journaling practice or meditation practice, but we need to slow down and listen. And so, yeah, I think it's harder to make a formula for it because we're all a little bit different. But many of us are caught up in our, you know, this is our capitalist society where time is the commodity and we're just hustling and grinding and going, going, going. And that's not compatible with having a good relationship with our children. True anxiety. We need more spaciousness in our lives.

So you did 12 years of schooling, and then you've been a psychiatrist for 10 years.

Yeah.

What would you say are the three greatest lessons you've learned in the last, I guess, 20 plus years of studying and practicing this work?

It's number one. Most important, it's the humility. It's to never get dogmatic. And I have learned that lesson so many times. What do you mean by that? I get confident of like, okay, I figured it out. I understand. I take a functional medicine approach to psychiatry. I'm solving everyone's life in this way. And then I'll have a patient whose experience just totally kicks me in the teeth.

Didn't work. Whatever you share with them didn't work.

Had to be the opposite approach. And so, you know, I guess it took 50 of those times to just be like, no dogma here. Always approach every single patient like it's a brand new experiment and there's learnings I bring to it, but I'm really open to understanding how individual it is each time.

Okay, that's one.

Let's call this in my process of kind of unlearning the miseducation from my conventional training. And I'm really in a debt of gratitude to my conventional training. I am so grateful to be a mechanic who understands when I lift up the hood of the body, I know what everything is and how it works. I wanted that education. I knew it since I was a kid. I wanted to understand the body because I wanted to be able to fix my own car, basically. And now I fix other people's cars, and that's great, too. I love it. I find it satisfying work. But I did need to unlearn certain things. And I remember one day I was in the OR on my surgery rotation, and we're sitting over an appendectomy. We're kind of like, you know, in the process, it's a few hours surgery. And I'm thinking, like, this guy who's done nothing but, like, appendectomies and removing people's gallbladders for the last 15 years of his life has probably given this some thought. So I was like, why do you think people get appendicitis? And his response was, we don't ask why, we just cut, really. And as like a Jewish New Yorker, I was like, all I do is ask why. That's all I'm interested in is why, how, like, you know, and because it's that idea of, like, going upstream and, you know, rather than just pulling people out of the river. Like, why are. Who's Throwing them in, what's happening here? And I believe that the body generally works. You know, menopause is kind of not awesome, and knee joints are not amazingly well designed, but most. Most of the time, the body's pretty well designed. And so I feel like things don't have to happen. They're happening because a genetic predisposition, an environmental trigger, and then here we are. And so I just realized that conventional medicine is not that interested in the why. And so that's why I didn't really fit in that model. And functional medicine, for me was like, it was mind blowing to realize that, oh, yeah, you want to do root cause resolution rather than symptom suppression. And once I saw that, I could never unsee that. And now it seems crazy to me, the idea of approaching a problem from, well, let's suppress this symptom and then problem solved. Not at all. And heartburn is a really interesting example where it's like, okay, you have heartburn. So in conventional medicine, we'll give an antacid. We'll say, let's just make less stomach acid, and then it won't bubble up into your esophagus and it won't burn. And problem solved.

Just don't eat the bad foods that are causing this. Right.

Heartburn, in particular, it's an interesting one where not only does that of course not solve the fundamental root cause of the problem, but it actually contributes to it in some cases really well. So heartburn is usually due to some degree of increased intra abdominal pressure. So are you pregnant? Are you obese? These are reasons you might be sort of upward pushing motion, but sometimes it's something called sibo, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, and you just have too much of the wrong bacteria where it doesn't belong in the small intestine. Taking antacids suppresses our stomach acid, and our stomach acids actually pretty critical to dealing with the bacteria we ingest and getting in.

And so now if you're killing that, then it's.

You've exacerbated the original problem. And so functional medicine is asking, well, why is the acid getting into your esophagus? And okay, why increased abdominal pressure? So why increased abdominal pressure? And why don't we address that at the root rather than suppressing the symptom and potentially even exacerbating the original problem?

Okay, so that was number two. What was the third thing?

What are we even listing right now?

That was the three biggest things you've learned in 20 plus years of school.

And, yeah, a third, learning. There's something bubbling in my mind right now around love, but I'm not really sure what the answer is. But I think that when I was applying to join the Columbia center for Psychoanalysis, I wrote my essay about, like, I love my patients, which in psychiatry is a big no.

No, really.

And so, you know, it's sort of like boundaries. Boundaries, professional, neutral, all this kind of stuff. So that didn't really sit well. It wasn't received well. But it's actually, you have to know your audience. Psychoanalysts didn't want to read an essay about loving your patients. But what I've realized now is that this work that I do, it's sacred. And when I have a relationship with a patient, they matter to me, I matter to them. It's a real relationship in both of our lives, it follows a different contract than other relationships. You know, it's not family. It's not a friendship. It's a different kind of. It's totally sacred. And to just show up to that, like, more and more, bringing the utmost meticulous integrity to it, and to just completely honor that someone is entrusting me. And that's sometimes heavy because first, do no harm, and you want to help. And sometimes it's. You're dabbling in unknowns and gray areas.

And people are probably sharing things with you they've never shared with anyone, too.

Yeah, it's an honor.

Even their spouses, their family, like, they're telling you stuff they've never told anyone.

It's a privilege. I hold it so sacred. Yeah. And so they really matter to me. And I dare say I love my patients, and that's part of what makes my job fulfilling.

I feel like when you bring love to a session as a therapist, you allow for healing, the environment of healing, to occur faster. I think as a closed bishop, like this clinical, like, no, you know, not showing that much love. Even the energy of love you can feel versus someone just listening to you and asking questions. So I feel like it's almost a responsibility to help someone heal faster, to open your heart to, like, being curious about your patient or, you know, maybe not loving them, but having love for them in some way.

I think that's very astute. And I think that, like, what I really think I'm doing in a session with a patient, it's like there's two valences, and up here we're talking da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Here's what's on my mind. Here's what I think about that. Here's the ailment in my physical body. Here's the functional medicine solution to that. But that's a distraction. And what's really happening, you got a drop in your heart, it's underneath. Right. There's this energy and exchange valence happening down here where it's, you know, I jokingly refer to it as witchcraft, but, like, I just am basically trying to certainly be in a. In a vibration of love, because that's a more healing vibration. But also I am channeling something that is far bigger than me. And I think that, like, you know, it goes in the humility category, but basically, I don't think I'm doing all that much. I think I have learned how to make myself be a channel or a portal to very powerful energies in the universe that move through me and help heal my patients. And I maybe sort of direct that energy a little bit. And that's something that I'm still relatively novice at, but that's really what I've come to do most of all.

How do you deal with the anxiety of talking to a bunch of people who are stressed out or dealing with pain, Three, four, five, seven clients a day, or however many it is? How do you then not bring that with you and carry the pain and stress and anxiety with you?

Yeah, this is what's so broken about our modern medical system, where a physician is a provider and sort of like patients are coming through on a conveyor belt. And it's just like see a patient churn it out, prescribe meds. And what I've realized is that to do this work well, I'm not seeing seven or eight patients a day. I'm seeing like two, three. And then there's a big regrouping energetically that happens afterward. And I integrate it, I process it. I do weird hippie clearing practices. And like, I need to reset my energy to show up 100% for the next person.

Yeah, and for your kid, your husband, like your friends and family.

It's very inefficient, but it's the only way I know how to do it.

Well, I feel like it'd be so interesting to be a therapist because. Especially if you're very empathetic because you give your whole heart and soul to the person for however long you're with them. And it's hard to compartmentalize and just shift right into the next thing five minutes later. Okay, on the next thing, and someone just telling me about being all this trauma, and I just compartmentalize it. What happens when we compartmentalize Things in our life in general, and we don't fully allow them to come in and out and flow.

I love the way Chinese medicine thinks about these things. They really understand that it's this interconnected web and there's energy flowing in between. Chi flowing and like if you compartmentalize or if you push trauma like a bunch of junk into a closet and then like close the door and like stuff it all in there, it just creates this like blockade in the energy flow. So then your qi is sort of flowing and then it like hits the blockade. It's like, what do we do here? And that stagnation, it creates pain, it creates symptoms, creates illness. And so really anywhere we have that kind of blockade, we actually need to work on, on taking away the blockade. Can we let the energy flow freely everywhere? I think compartmentalization can be helpful in discreet short term circumstances. But I think overall we need to integrate and let it all be interconnected.

Right, interesting. So you may need to compartmentalize to get into the next thing during the day, but then eventually you have to learn how to like let it flow.

I think so some way. I think so.

What do you think? Should people be thinking about if they realize like there's some type of pain, there's some type of anxiety maybe for me, I felt like this heart palpitations at times. Like the anxiety would boil up into like physical pain in my chest or my throat when I knew that I was out of integrity with my boundaries or out of alignment with who I am with my vision mostly in relationships. And abandoning myself was probably the biggest thing. When I would abandon myself over and over again pretty much daily to try to please someone else, I would feel the pain, I feel the anxiety in my chest, in my throat clenching. If someone's feeling anxious, what would be the first three things they could do from a holistic point of view to really start helping them to heal?

Quick 50 part answer to that. So I think that it reminds me of what you were talking about earlier with your childhood home. And I think that anybody, any child of sort of like whether it's trauma, whether it's divorce, anywhere where you intuited as a kid, like this is a house of cards that might fall down and my survival would be at stake. Or you just care about the well being of the other people. So you figured out how to be keenly attuned to other people's needs, other people's triggers, and to basically make sure that you're not the source of the problem. You don't get to be the source of the problem. You don't get to have your meltdown downs. You're the source of the solution, and you keep things calm and you just, like, you know, gray rock yourself so that they can survive, so that in turn, you can survive so that you don't lose that fundamental hearth, your basic trust and security in the world. And so that is a reasonable coping strategy. I'm not like, blaming children for figuring that out. I think it's actually pretty savvy. But then in adulthood, we need to figure out, like, okay, that was adaptive then and has now become maladaptive. And so I think that this, you know, there's no way for me to hear you describe it this way and not think about chakras. And maybe I'm going a little too hippy dippy for your audience, but bring it. So, you know, these are energy vortexes in our body.

Seven chakras, right? Is that what it is?

Yeah, I think about that. I think that's right. Seven. That's correct. And so, you know, this has to do with speaking our truth, and this has to do with love. And I think that compassion also. Everything, you know, and so self love. And I think that bringing up Marshall Rosenberg again, he has this true yes and true no paradigm where it's like, we go through our life and you bump into somebody and they're like, oh, hey, I haven't seen you in 15 years. Let's get coffee next Thursday. And what you feel instantly is, oh, God, I'm busy. I'm stretched thin. I have no bandwidth. I'm promoting this book. Any leftover time I want to give to my own healing and spending time with my daughter and end of story, this is low priority. That's what goes through your mind very quickly. What you hear your mouth speak is.

Yeah, I'd love to do it here. Yeah, let's see if we can make it happen.

You're a neighborhood or mine. Yeah. So we're giving our false yes all the time. And the world conditions us also, I think, especially women, especially children of trauma, like. But basically we're conditioned constantly to people please. To not disappoint people, to solve other people's problems. And so we see to be unselfish. Yeah, yeah. And so. And selfish is an interesting concept to unpack. But so basically, we're giving our false yes. And every time we do that, first of all, it doesn't end well. You know, we either flake at the last minute or we get stretched too thin and we are burned out. Or, you know, I love the one where it's like, we go, but we resent the other person. Which, if you ever were like, but.

You'Re the one who's going, yeah, yeah, you're resenting yourself and the other person own it.

And then, like, if you were the person on the other side, you wouldn't want someone to say yes to you and then later resent you for it. So it's just. It's not cool. And so. And then. But more importantly, we systematically silence our truth. It's every time a little betrayal of the self. And so we get, you know, throat chakra imbalance from that because we just keep silencing what is actually our truth. That I think when we don't speak our truth in some form, some arena funky things happen in the throat chakra. And so. And I think that, you know, you're saying in your relationship, result, the throat.

Felt like someone was strangling me.

Yeah.

Different times. And again, none of these partners were bad people. They're all, you know, they're people. And I chose to silence myself, you know, so I don't put blame on anyone.

Well, you learned to silence yourself through, you know, it was an adaptation in childhood, and now you're moving.

It's crazy. Okay, so that was part of the explanation for the process for learning to heal yourself. Was there anything else there that you.

Were gonna share or remind me the way you phrased it?

I like that. First few things people should start to do if they're feeling stress, pain, anxiety, on how to start really healing themselves.

Yeah. So let's get into brass tacks. So I think that anybody who's struggling with anxiety, start with false moods and realize, how do you do with caffeine? It's not a fun one. And I'll make any friends with this one. Nobody likes this, because caffeine is our savior and is our one true friend in the world. It's not inherently bad. Coffee has antioxidants and magnesium. It's associated with lower risk of type 2 diabetes and Parkinson's and suicide. Not inherently bad. But bio individuality, we're all different. And some people are rapid metabolizers. And they can have the espresso after dinner and go straight to bed. No muss, no fuss. And some of us, people like me, are slow metabolizers. And if I have a coffee at brunch, then I'm effectively on cocaine that day. Don't sleep for a week, basically. Know yourself. And even if the world is telling you coffee's great if you're sensitive and it makes you tremulous and it makes you sort of like prone to spiral. When something stressful happens, life is always going to show up with a stressor. So maybe it's not the right substance for you. Psa. Don't ever go off it precipitously. You always want to go off very gradually because it's a real drug with a real withdrawal. So there's, you know, we'll have irritability and fatigue and headaches if we go off of it too quickly. And I do want to just point out, when it comes to coffee, we feel so good when we drink coffee because it's the antidote to its own withdrawal. It gets credit for relieving us from a state that it actually created originally.

Interesting.

And so we just bear that in mind as we celebrate and like lift coffee up.

King of the world.

But it's like, yeah, it kind of created the problem, it's solved. And so that's one thing to look at. Blood sugar is a huge thing to look at. And, and that's as simple as just recognizing in the modern food landscape, a lot of us are on a blood sugar roller coaster because our diet is refined. Carbohydrates and coffee drinks that are actually milkshakes and rosette all day, bosses all day. Yeah, yeah. So we are, you know, our blood sugar spikes and then our body chases that with insulin and then it crashes. And our body has a system of checks and balances to deal with that blood sugar crash. We release cortisol and adrenaline. It communicates to the liver to blood break down our storage of glycogen or starch that it keeps there, that restores normal blood sugar, saves the day. And that's great. But a side effect of that is that it was a fire of alarm, fire in the body. So we're in a stress response. And that can feel synonymous with anxiety and panic, feeling easily overwhelmed, or when you're asleep, waking up throughout the middle of the night. So just keeping your blood sugar stable is a profoundly impactful change you can make. And there's like the definitive solution, which is eating a blood sugar stabilizing diet for some people, retraining their metabolism with things like intermittent fasting, and for anybody who's just like overwhelmed by that conversation is like, show me somewhere easier to start. You can do something like a spoonful of almond butter or ghee or coconut oil or even a handful of nuts at regular intervals just to give you a safety net of blood sugar. So it Blunts any crash, and that's a big one. Alcohol. Nobody likes that conversation. But it's interesting the way it works. It gives us a rush of gaba, which is a neurotransmitter we're not really talking enough about. We talk about serotonin, everybody knows about that. But GABA is the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in our central nervous system, and it's the one that tells us, like, it's going to be okay. And I think GABA is an endangered species of modern life. There's so much about modern life that's an assault on our gaba all the way from alcohol and benzodiazepines, things like Xanax and Klonopin, to the fact that when we have dysbiosis in our gut and we've maybe lost some of the beneficial bacteria, we can lose certain Bacteroides species that help us manufacture gaba. So we might even just not even have the gut bacteria to have enough of GABA in our bodies to feel calm. So alcohol gives us a rush of gaba, and then our body doesn't care whether or not we're relaxed. It just wants us to survive.

So how bad is alcohol when it comes to anxiety?

I think it's great for a couple hours and then it's really destructive. And so I'm here to say there's no dogma, right? It's always the act of radical self love. But I think most of us benefit from at least being informed about, like, physiologically what's happening. Physiologically, what's happening with alcohol is our body sees that relaxation and thinks this puts us at risk of not being sufficiently alert or vigilant or cautious in if a threat were to occur. If a leopard comes around the corner, we're going to be too buzzed to care. So it thinks must restore homeostasis, and it converts that GABA into a neurotransmitter called glutamate, which is excitatory. And that's why, after you've had a few drinks that second half of the night, you're tossing and turning, you're not sleeping well, you're irritable. The next day, you're picking a fight with your partner. It's the glutamate effect. So it's worth at least knowing that. And then anytime you're deciding whether or not to have a drink, you just make that decision consciously from a place of self love. Sometimes the act of self love is to say, I'm not drinking tonight. And sometimes it's to have whiskey you need and you just have to make that choice. Eyes wide open.

Yeah, go ahead.

And then let's just say there's a lot of things we can do, but nutrition is a biggie. And that gets into a whole conversation about how to strike that balance. But we right now have a conversation around nutrition that's very focused on the nos like go gluten free and dairy free and sugar free. And did you know about the industrially processed vegetable oils? And those are a hidden source of inflammation. And I'm all for that conversation. I could have it all day. But we also need to focus on deeply nourishing our bodies. We need to kind of eat the way our great great grandmothers ate, where there was an understanding of balance and nutrient density and how do we get sufficient healthy fats and the micronutrients like B12 and folate. And so if you want to heal your anxiety, it's really about how do you give your body that juicy nourishment so that you have all the raw materials that allow your brain to function well?

Yeah.

And then sleep is a big one.

Absolutely. We've had a few sleep experts on here. I love those. Radical self love. There's also a book, I think called Radical Honesty. I'm not sure if that was by a therapist as well. But like being radically honest with yourself and other people, I believe may cause a momentary feeling of stress or let down or disappointment. But overall, you'll feel proud of yourself for being honest. It's interesting, as I started dating my current girlfriend, I after a couple months of kind of hanging out and dating, I told her, I'm always going to be honest with you and you're not going to like it. And I've said this in every relationship beforehand, but no partner I've had has been able to handle my honesty. And I was like, I don't know if you're going to be able to handle it because I've seen a pattern where no one's been able to handle my honesty. You're not going to like what I have to say. You're not going to like the things I believe. There may be certain things you don't like. And so as she would ask me certain questions about just like life and relationships and the future. What do you believe in this and this? I go, do you want me to tell you the truth? Because I don't think you're going to like it. She's like, yes, she's been able to hand, like hold the truth right which makes me trust that I can continue to be more and more honest, but the more radically honest I am, and when you be with someone who can receive it, then I feel like I'm not abandoning myself. I'm not abandoning myself. I'm not betraying myself because I can speak my truth and someone can receive it, but it's hard for people to receive the truth. Why is that?

Yeah, I think. Well, let me push back a tiny bit. I don't have all the answers on this one, but I always see it in terms of the sort of, like, in the yoga tradition, there's the yamas and the niyamas, and there's this idea of there's satya, truthfulness, but then there's also ahimsa, non harming, non harming, non harming. And that I really think of it as like, those two always need to be. You don't ever just go all into one without a dose of the other.

Sure. Well, being. Yeah. Having some context when you're speaking the truth and not trying to be like, not being like, you suck or something, but, like, here's my truth and being finessing certain things, but being honest at the same time.

I think what's partly what's challenging about honesty is that we. When goals are not aligned. Right. And part of what we're all playing at, sometimes unwittingly, is I want to achieve my goal. And in order to get there, I need you to keep believing this thing that's not completely true. And, like, say, in a relationship, I don't want to make any assumptions at all, but something that comes up a lot is, like, somebody wants to marry the other person. And if they knew that that wasn't like, that we weren't marching towards that, maybe this is an opportunity cost and they'd get out and start anew with somebody else. And this person's like, I have no idea if this is headed towards marriage. I just don't know. But in a sense, you almost have to keep up that lie by omission to, like, have it continue. Because your goal is like, well, I don't know, but I want to keep finding out.

Yeah, maybe. Yeah.

And so I think it gets so tricky, but it's something I haven't mastered. I like what Eckhart Tolle has to say about how the ego sort of like, really resists honesty. Like, I always find that this comes up when I need to apologize for something, when I need to be accountable for when I messed up. And why is it that my ego is like, Dragging its heels, heading towards this apology, and be like, no, no, no, don't say it. And then you say it, and it's rupture and repair and everything's better afterward. And it's softer and it's more tender and you can connect and you feel like, wow. Like there's a feeling of self efficacy with it. And yet somehow every time, my ego is still consistent. And so.

Because you don't want to rupture. Yeah, it's not fun.

The rupture's scary. It's scary. Yeah. But it almost always ends well in the right partnership. But that itself is interesting because if rupture doesn't go well, there's your answer. Right.

That's a filter explosion and blow up.

But a lot of us do carry some fear of abandonment and fear of loss. And so even if something needs to end, we still scary. We don't want it to be today.

I was resistant in pretty much every relationship to end things when I knew that I probably should end it. I was afraid of it. I was scared of it.

More fear of hurting the other person or just losing the person.

Hurting the other person? Yeah, hurting the other person. The other person, like, being angry at me.

Yeah. So even the fear of hurting another person is sometimes pure compassion for the other person's experience, and sometimes it's fear of that person having a judgment towards you.

Both. Yeah. I had, like, the extremes of both, but I would at least communicate. I'd be like, listen, I don't know why we're like, if we're supposed to be together. It wasn't like I was, you know, not saying anything, but I'd be like, should we be together? I don't know. But then it would be like this anxious, sad conversation. I was like, well, actually, everything's okay then. I didn't have the courage to really say what I needed to say.

Yeah.

And so it was challenging.

Well, there's also this thing we have a cultural understanding of, like, that. I think Hollywood informs us on this, that if it's right, if it's like the one, that there's going to be this high chemistry experience. Sometimes that's true, but I think sometimes high chemistry actually just belies the fact that your schemas and life traps and trauma line up with their schemas, life traps and trauma. And then you sort of lock and key on the bad stuff and it generates high chemistry.

That's how I felt in the previous relationships. Most previous ones. Yeah.

And that burns very bright and then burns out and burns out and it often doesn't end. It's not pretty. And in a way, sometimes the right relationship generates low chemistry initially and we take that as an indication of like meh, not really feeling it. Let me get out. But it actually could be an indication of you're showing up with healthy boundaries and a very accurate assessment of. We don't yet know if this is the right relationship.

You just met for the first week. How are you supposed to know?

Yeah, but there might be reason to continue to try to find out. And so I think many of us actually need to decouple high chemistry from it's the one.

Yes, I think so too. Because there's a lot of people that have high chemistry and then they end up not working out or getting a divorce or whatever. So if that's not the solution, what is the solution? I've always been. Not always. In the last year I've realized that for me, my thesis is love is not enough. That love alone is not enough. You need the right values aligned. You need the right vision aligned. And you need the right lifestyle aligned. Aligned. It doesn't need to be 100% perfect and everything the same, but it's got to be in alignment in those areas. Otherwise there will be some type of letdown, breakdown, you know, challenge that is unnecessary than if you were in an aligned relationship of those three things. And you probably have more wisdom on this than I do, but that's just from my personal experience.

Experience. To me, the sine qua non, like the kind of without which not for a relationship that's worth investing in. It's. For me, it's personal. But there needs to be good communication.

Yes.

And then there actually needs to be an openness to growth. And I think if you have those two things, you can take on the world. Because any challenge, any difference in opinion, any stressor, that's putting the relationship in a crucible. If you can communicate about it well, which is a big.

Without screaming or reacting or making someone wrong or judging.

Yeah, but like all that violent communication is sort of like you. You know, it's more like, well, like here's what's alive in me, here's my experience.

So communicating effectively. Consciously conscious communication, which so many of.

Us fall into what was modeled for us by our parents. And we get real stuck in that, especially if we're sleep deprived or stressed or worked. You have a kid, you know it. There's so many things that make it even harder, but the openness to growth. You know, I find my partner and I Maybe, like, we grow in this sort of, like, staggered way. So, like, you know, I went to Brazil and 11 ayahuasca ceremonies came back. I'm all wise now, young thing, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

But a kind of like, will you come with me on this journey? Like, I think that there's something here to keep exploring.

Yes.

And if both people are game that you can take on the world.

The thing I love about my girlfriend the most is she's probably. I would consider myself very beginner's mind. Like, I'm always interviewing, I'm always learning, I'm always researching to try to improve and find better solutions. I'd say probably, you know, I'm just committed to that. My life is about learning and growth and having a beginner's mind at all stages. And she's equal, if not more than me, which is kind of like, I've never met a partner who is as hungry for growth, which gets me very excited. There's almost times where I'm like, okay, we don't have to listen to podcasts right now, or we cannot take this workshop online. Let's just chill out and watch TV for a second. But it excites me because she wants to have that growth mentality as well, which makes me feel like, with what you're saying, the right communication and a growth mindset is really the key to, like, seeing if something can. Can grow right in a relationship.

And. And I think. I'm glad you brought up that. I think that there is growth burnout sometimes. Like, you know, anytime you even so much as, like, clean one dish, you need to be listening to a podcast. It's like, you know, maximize all your.

Time for, like, learning.

And I think that, like, you know, coming back to Chinese medicine or really it's a Taoist principle like the Yin and Yang. And we're in a moment in time in the west where we are obsessed with the Yang. That's the masculine doing active sun energy, productivity. And we really devalue the Yin. And that's this more feminine receiving, non doing, resting moon energy. And even when we are into yin, sometimes it's actually in service of Yang. It's like, I'm gonna meditate so I can be more productive. It's like, no, that's. That's Yang in yin's clothing. And I think that we do actually need to find balance. And it's important to recognize, since we're living in such a cultural obsession with Yang, most of the time, the balance is actually towards Morgan. And so sometimes you do dishes in silence. Sometimes you take a car ride and it's just music. Yeah.

Nothing.

Yeah, nothing.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Can I do one detour back to psych meds? Because I feel. I feel like, incomplete on. I was just like, I have a controversial view on psych meds and then just left it at that.

Sorry, go ahead.

I think that it's quite likely that many people watching, listening right now take a psychiatric medication. So it's so important for me to represent them and basically say, my approach here is not against psychiatric medications. I think that I've had patients helped by them. I start patients on psychiatric medications from time to time. Like, there's no dogma against that. But I think 99.9% of psychiatrists, that's their main tool.

It's just saying, okay, you've got this challenge. Let's just prescribe you something.

And sometimes it goes well, and that's great. And if it's gone well for you and you're like, this has helped me, there's no shame in that. Don't need to overthink that or look back like, consider yourself one of the lucky ones and go forth. But I think that I'm here to say I'm aware of the many, I would say millions of people who have not been sufficiently helped by mental health as it stands. Whether they started a med and it helped initially and then the effect waned, or they've tried every medication and nothing really helped, or they're on something and they have to get off of it for one reason or another, another medication contraindication or family planning considerations, and they're struggling to get off. So there's a lot of people whose needs aren't being met by psychiatry as it stands. And for them, I'm here to say there's reason to be hopeful. There's so many other ways to ascend this mountain. And so there's nothing against psych meds here. But if it's not, if it hasn't been the solution for you, like, come on this journey with me. There's so many other things we can do to get you to a place where you feel well, where you're able to achieve a fulfilling life.

Yeah. What's the prescription you need to give yourself for this next year? Is it do nothing and rest more? Is it take on something? Is it look into something and pull back the curtain? What's the.

Yeah. So a big part of it is slowing down and spaciousness. I want to just fully savor this precious moment with my daughter, who's 6 right now, and it's just this is. This is it. Like, this is the main course, and it's as good as it's ever going to be. I feel like at a certain point, she's a teenager, and we look at all these people who have complicated relationships with their parents, and I see that through such a different lens now that I am a parent. I'm like, oh, no, I'm going to be the parent. And this is the most important person in the world to me. Are we going to have a good relationship? So I really want to slow down and be present for that as much as possible. And I think what you brought up around releasing whatever pushback I get on the book, whether it's like, you know, sometimes it'll just be like, angry people being angry, haters hating, you know, and, like, that's easier to release but still gets me off balance. But sometimes it's really useful feedback that still hurts to hear. And I think to be able to take that and integrate the pearl buried in the feedback, but to not need to feel like what's happening here has anything to do with how people evaluate me, that I have put a labor of love, a decade of practice, a lot of perspectives, insights, and learnings, and put it out into the world and hopefully help some people and that. That's enough. And I can let it be at that.

Yeah, that's great. How can we turn anxiety into a superpower?

Yeah, so we have such a cultural attitude towards, like, don't be so sensitive. And, you know, it's like, whether you can't tolerate gluten or crowds or loud noises, we shame ourselves for that. I'm so sensitive. If you're sensitive in one way, you're sensitive in every sense of the word in my book. And that's an obvious superpower. Like, the same people that can't handle gluten in crowds are also really attuned to other people. They're sensitive to other people's needs. They're the ones that pick up on the body language and the micro expressions and realize, like, someone's not feeling heard or someone's not getting their needs met. And I think that they're intuitive. And when we need that so sorely right now in the world, we need people with their finger on the pulse who can sense, like, here's how we as a species need a course correction. And so I think, like, we all need to not be shaming the sensitive folks or the anxious folks are being too sensitive. I think we need to shut up and listen to what they have to say, because I think that they're here in a sort of prophetic capacity.

Right. I love this. I hope people get the book, the Anatomy of Anxiety. Understanding and Overcoming the Body's Fear Response. I think this type of work is some of the most important work we all should be learning throughout the rest of our lives. At different seasons of life, we're going to be dealing with different stresses or anxieties. What would you say is the root cause of all fear?

So, ostensibly it's the fear of death and of losing the people we love. But I think, like, maybe, and I'm not saying I'm certain about this, but I'm increasingly curious about the fact that that ostensible, ultimate fear is an illusion and that the fear of death and losing someone, that might not be the whole story of what's happening here with existence. I don't know. But I get a lot of meaning and comfort from the idea that there might be something just slightly less comprehensible happening.

Overcoming the body's fear response. It's hard to create a meaningful life consistently when we're in an anxious state. In a fear state, it's much easier to feel and create a loving environment and relationship from a place of love and peace than fear, stress, and anxiety.

Yeah.

So I think it's something we all want to get back to if we're not there right now or want to stay in. In that state as much as possible. So make sure you guys pick up a copy of the Anatomy of Anxiety. Highly recommend this powerful stuff from Ellen Bora. A couple final questions for you. Where can we go and support you? Where can we follow you? Where can we support you the most?

Yeah. So I'm lanvoramd on the various social platforms. Like, you know, I spend most of my time on Instagram, but I have a couple of very awkward boomer videos on TikTok as well. And then my website is ellenvora.com and you can buy the book wherever you buy books. Awesome. I'm a big supporter of local books workshops, but whatever is easy.

Okay, cool. This is a question I ask everyone at the end called the Three Truths Question. So imagine a hypothetical scenario. It's your last day on Earth, and for whatever reason, you've accomplished all of your dreams and goals of how you want to live your life, and you have created more content and books. But for whatever reason, when you die, you've got to take that stuff with you or it goes somewhere else. But we don't have access to your content and information. This interview is gone. This book is gone. Nothing's here. But you get to leave behind three lessons to the world. Three things you know to be true from your life experiences that you would share. What would you say are those three truths for you?

I think number one is actually to reconnect to your intuition and really learn to trust that. Which I think telescopes out into just trusting in general a bit more. I think number two is to prioritize community and, you know, to introverts hearing that and they're like, no, like it's in whatever form and quantity is the right balance for you, but it needs to be connection to other people, animals, paths, but that the relationships are really everything. And then I think the third is to live a life connected. And I mean that in many senses of the word. Connected to other people, connected to our intuition, connected to meaning and purpose, connected to our intention, to making our contribution. It doesn't have to be grand, it doesn't have to be intimidating or daunting. It's just what lights you up is the right contribution to be making. But stay connected to that.

I love that. I gotta acknowledge you, Ellen, for a moment for putting yourself out there. I think it's challenging and scary sometimes to put ourselves out there. And you did it so beautifully in this book and with all the praise and potential criticism that you have, I know that this is a big jump for you. So I really acknowledge you for using your life's work and putting it out and packaging it in a way where we can understand the scary parts about our life. I think anxiety stresses so many of us where it holds us back from joy, love, peace, connection. The things that you talked about are meaningful. So for you to use 20 plus years of studying this and applying it and share with us here is such a beautiful gift. So I really acknowledge you for the gift. Final question. What's your definition of greatness?

It's fulfillment. And that is individual. It's whatever that means to you.

Awesome, Ellen. Thank you so much for being here. Appreciate it.

Thank you. You have to decide. You are worth it. I'm worthy of love. I'm worthy of a phenomenal relationship. I'm worthy of success even. I'm worthy of wealth or health. I'm worth it. And that probably is at least 80% of manifesting. And many people manifest with a thought not really worthy.