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Surprising Signs of Anxiety and How to Heal It | The Mel Robbins Podcast

Ready to level up? ⬆️🚀 https://bit.ly/takecontrol2023 👈 Sign up for my FREE 3-part science-backed training, Take Control with Mel Robbins! It’s designed specifically to help you step back into excellence, take ACTION, and create the life you deserve 🌟 — Today’s episode is a continuation of our exclusive two-part series with world-renowned medical expert, Dr. Russell Kennedy ( @theanxietymd ) Is #anxiety impacting your ability to sleep? Tired of the negative loop of thoughts in your mind? Is anxiety affecting your kids? Is it #genetic? Are there surprising signs of adult anxiety? Did your parents struggle with it, and you never knew? How do you break generational cycles? Dr. Kennedy answers these questions and so many more. You’ll also learn what most #therapists get "wrong" about anxiety. If you are looking for more free resources and support, I’ve got you! I have a brand new, free 3-part training called "Take Control with Mel Robbins." This training will provide you with the coaching, structure, and support you need to hit reset, take control, and level up your life. It features 3 brand-new training videos, two hours of research-backed curriculum taught by me, and a detailed 21-page workbook. Plus, you’ll be taking the course with over half a million other students around the world. All at zero cost to you. Why? Because you deserve it, and it’s my way of thanking you for being here with me. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. So why not take advantage of this opportunity? Sign up for free at https://www.melrobbins.com/takecontrol now. Xo Mel In this episode, you'll learn: 00:00 Intro 04:11 What do you do when your anxiety creeps in at night? 07:28 Here’s where most therapeutic approaches get it wrong. 07:47 I couldn’t believe what happened when I started facing my anxiety. 11:06 Cold plunges teach your body to be uncomfortable and still be okay. 12:51 This approach doesn’t eliminate the alarm, and yet you still heal. 13:26 Use this strategy when you wake up in the night with anxiety. 16:46 Living with social anxiety? Dr. Kennedy explains why. 21:24 Not sure what your nervous system has to do with anxiety? Listen here. 24:19 Dr. Kennedy’s #1 tool to move you into rest-and-digest pretty quickly. 25:25 Use these two tools to move yourself out of the freeze response. 27:55 Look at your alarm this way, and your mindset towards it changes, too. 31:27 So how do you start breaking the cycle of anxiety in a family? 38:30 For those of us who grew up in the “I’ll give you something to cry about.” 40:42 What are signs that your parents were actually struggling with anxiety? 45:25 This is why you have a hard time slowing down. And me too! 49:37 Here’s what your life can look like once you heal your alarm. 57:31 Here’s the neuroscience behind why essential oils help calm your body. 59:32 Dr. Kennedy shares his tips for playing “the right way.” 1:02:02 Have this where you can see it to remember your partner’s vulnerability. — Follow Mel: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melrobbins/ TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@melrobbins Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/melrobbins LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melrobbins Website: http://melrobbins.com​ — Sign up for Mel’s newsletter: https://melrob.co/sign-up-newsletter A note from Mel to you, twice a week, sharing simple, practical ways to build the life you want. — Subscribe to Mel’s channel here: https://www.youtube.com/melrobbins​?sub_confirmation=1 — Listen to The Mel Robbins Podcast 🎧 New episodes drop every Monday & Thursday! https://melrob.co/spotify https://melrob.co/applepodcasts https://melrob.co/amazonmusic — Looking for Mel’s books on Amazon? Find them here: The Let Them Theory: https://amzn.to/3IQ21Oe The Let Them Theory Audiobook: https://amzn.to/413SObp The High 5 Habit: https://amzn.to/3fMvfPQ The 5 Second Rule: https://amzn.to/4l54fah

Mel RobbinshostDr. Russell Kennedyguest
Apr 13, 20231h 7mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 4:11

    Intro

    1. MR

      Welcome to part two of The Anxiety Toolkit. We have a zero-cost, free appointment for you with Dr. Russell Kennedy. He's in the house, everybody. This is a conversation for all of us. Whether you're struggling with anxiety or suddenly you have a friend or a family member who is, we are all affected by this topic, and so it is going to change your life and improve your life if you understand it and you have some simple, free tools that you can use to help yourself better face it and ultimately heal from it. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to part two of The Anxiety Toolkit and the Mel Robbins podcast. (laughs) Welcome. I'm so excited. This is part two of The Anxiety Toolkit. If you're brand new, I'm Mel Robbins. I'm a New York Times bestselling author and one of the world's leading experts on change, motivation, habits, and a lot of people consider me to be a incredible expert on the topic of anxiety, and I am. My expertise came the hard way. I have lived with anxiety for a very, very long time and it's only been in recent years that I learned the life-changing tools that we're talking about in this episode today, part two of The Anxiety Toolkit. I am joined by Dr. Russell Kennedy. He's in the house, everybody. We have a zero-cost, free appointment for you with one of the world's leading experts on anxiety, childhood trauma, nervous system regulation. This guy's not only a medical doctor, he is a neuroscientist, how cool is that, who has also lived with anxiety, and he is here to tell you very loud and clear, you don't just have to live with this. You don't have to cope with it because you can heal it. And just in case you are brand new and this is the very first episode you're ever listening to, I wanna welcome you. And if you're brand new to the topic of anxiety, I wanna welcome you to this topic too. This is a conversation for all of us. Whether you're struggling with anxiety or suddenly you have a friend or a family member who is, we are all affected by this topic, and so it is going to change your life and improve your life if you understand it and you have some simple, free tools that you can use to help yourself better face it and ultimately heal from it. We're gonna jump in with a question about the connection between anxiety and sleep, but first, so that all of you feel empowered and with the same base understanding, let me just give you a few quick things that we covered in part one. Number one, you're gonna hear us talk about anxiety as an alarm. Dr. Kennedy's belief is that anxiety is first triggered in your childhood, everybody's childhood. Everybody has an experience at some point where you feel separate or you feel unsafe, or both, and when you as a little person feel separate or unsafe, your nervous system signals an alarm because you're not supposed to be separate or feel unsafe when you're a little baby baby, or a little toddler, or a little elementary school person, and that's a good thing because that alarm is trying to get you to go to one of the adults to get safe or to get reconnected. Now, what we're learning from Dr. Kennedy is what happens is most of us just continue to have that alarm signal during our life. So, any moment where you feel like you're separate from a group or separate from your partner or separate from friends or separate from, uh, I don't know, anything, life in general where you feel unsafe like you're gonna get fired or somebody's gonna break up with you or they're gonna judge you, this triggers that alarm. That's where anxiety comes from. Otherwise, you, uh, are good to go. And we're gonna talk about sleep and anxiety with this question

  2. 4:11 – 7:28

    What do you do when your anxiety creeps in at night?

    1. MR

      from Jason.

    2. NA

      Hey Mel, this is Jason. I always get anxious before I go to bed and then wake up in the middle of the night, uh, worrying about things. How do I stop myself from doing that? Thank you.

    3. MR

      Let's first talk about what are some changes or some simple things that Jason or anybody who gets anxious at night can start doing?

    4. RK

      Well, I love your little three, two, one thing. Three hours before, you know, then the two hours before, no work, and then one hour before, like, no screens, and, uh, tha- that's really important because our reticular activating system, which you talked about before, which works in our brain stem, which is the lower part of our brain that controls our body, is it's... it wants to be active. It wants to pick out things in your environment, and if you're zombie scrolling Instagram until the moment before you go to sleep, that reticular activating system is still going.

    5. MR

      Mmm.

    6. RK

      So, it will wake you up because it thinks that, you know, thousands and thousands of years ago, you needed to stay alert because there was a threat during the night. And the other thing about that particular question is, you know, what was going to bed like for you as a child? You know, was it safe? You know, for me, my mother worked shift work, so sometimes my mother was, was out 3:00 to 11:00. So, she was a nurse, so sometimes my mother was gone, you know, and I'm there with, you know, my crazy father, and like, but he wasn't always crazy, but there was points where it was just a little touch and go there. So, um, evenings for me can have that sort of sense as well, so what was going on in your childhood? Not that everything is about childhood trauma. Like, I, I really don't wanna give that impression that everything is about it, but so much of chronic anxiety is unresolved fear and unresolved wounding. So, what was, you know, can you find the, the child in you that had a difficult time going to bed? Or maybe you were a bed-wetter. You know, maybe the, maybe the, the image of that is still imprinted on your nervous system-

    7. MR

      Mm-hmm.

    8. RK

      ...that it's not safe to sleep because when I s- when I sleep, I wet the bed, and then all sorts of, you know-... all hell breaks loose in the morning. So there's all sorts of like physiological and psychological stuff that goes into sleep, and it's really important to be able to tease that out a little bit. I can give you generalities like, you know, shut the, shut the computer off, you know, before you go to sleep, and calm things down, keep the lights low, don't use blue light. All that kind of stuff. It's all important. But those are, again, coping mechanisms.

    9. MR

      Mmm.

    10. RK

      If you really wanna fix the problem at its root, find that place where it was uncomfortably- un- uncomfortable for you to go to bed and see if you can find that place in you. And again, not that everything is childhood trauma, but so much of it is, and it is fixable. So if that's the underlying root cause, you're not gonna fix it just by avoiding blue light, just by avoiding the computer, just by not working. You know? The best thing to do is use a two-pronged approach. And the last thing I wanna put in there, I don't have anything against cognitive therapy. We have these huge prefrontal cortices. It's really important that we have an understanding of what's happening to us.

    11. MR

      Yes.

    12. RK

      But what's more important, and what often most therapy in North

  3. 7:28 – 7:47

    Here’s where most therapeutic approaches get it wrong.

    1. RK

      America specifically misses, is this incredible role of the body and old trauma that's stored in the body, and just virtually gets ignored by thinking that we can talk about our problems and having insight to them is gonna fix them. And it, it doesn't.

    2. MR

      Well, you know, my personal experience

  4. 7:47 – 11:06

    I couldn’t believe what happened when I started facing my anxiety.

    1. MR

      is that I think it took me decades to heal, because I became so good at talking about my anxiety and intellectualizing my anxiety and talking about what happened to me and how it made me feel. And all of that was helpful so that I was aware of what happened, I was aware of what I was feeling, and I also, from that level, was able to come up with ways to cope, whether that was yoga or taking anxiety medication or it was getting into therapy. But I wasn't doing the work to truly heal the root cause of the anxiety. And it wasn't until I stopped fucking talking about it-

    2. RK

      (laughs)

    3. MR

      ... and I got below the neck and started dealing with the uncomfortable feelings and the stored memories in my nervous system, which is very different than talking about how you feel.

    4. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    5. MR

      Getting into your body and feeling that kink in the nervous system, that memory that you wish that you could forget, that is when I truly flipped the pancake, so to speak, and started to change for real.

    6. RK

      And how did that feel, like when you, when you felt like you were really getting at the root cause of it? Like how did that feel for you?

    7. MR

      Oh, it's liberating.

    8. RK

      It is? Totally.

    9. MR

      It's liberating. And it's-

    10. RK

      Yeah.

    11. MR

      ... it's a paradigm shift. And, and it... I can't believe how like, I don't- I don't- I don't wanna make any promises, and I'm not the therapist here. We've got the medical doctor and the, uh, anxiety world-renowned specialist here with Dr. Kennedy. I couldn't believe how quickly-

    12. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    13. MR

      ... it happened. Like, when I got serious that this is not about what's going on in my head, it's about patterns of feeling that get triggered in my body that create an alarm, and then my mind gets involved, and I have been attacking it in the wrong order. I have been attacking it first and only in my mind. And yes-

    14. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    15. MR

      ... you gotta- you gotta start with your mind so that you're aware that you're d- Like, that's where you're like, ding, ding, ding, ding. "Oh, it's anxiety."

    16. RK

      Yeah.

    17. MR

      But once you know what you're dealing with, get out of your head and get into your body. And when I started to feel like, oh, wait a minute, I'm not nuts in my mind. I have a nervous system that needs some support. I gotta smooth it out. I gotta make sure that any of the cuts in the system or the kinks or the whatever, that those are all kinda healed. And I gotta be able to tolerate uncomfortable feelings and not have it escalate. And I gotta learn how to soothe myself, and I gotta learn how to be compassionate with myself. If I can do those things, I can ride the ups and downs of any feeling. And my-

    18. RK

      And you are.

    19. MR

      ... mind doesn't-

    20. RK

      You're doing-

    21. MR

      ... screw me over.

    22. RK

      That's exactly what you're doing. And when I follow you-

    23. MR

      It's shocking how powerful it is, dude. It's shocking.

    24. RK

      ... on your p- When I, yeah, when I follow you on your podcast, you are doing exactly that. The cold plunges, all that kind of... If you look at the way that sensation

  5. 11:06 – 12:51

    Cold plunges teach your body to be uncomfortable and still be okay.

    1. RK

      is transferred to the brain, the back part of the spinal cord, and I won't get too technical, but the back part of the spinal cord, the spinothalamic tract, the- the- the sort of group of wires that fire up to your brain, hold pain temperature. So, and emotional pain and physical pain in the brain are handled by very similar structures. So when you go into a cold plunge and you overwhelm that pain pathway, you're giving yourself a break. And then when you're going into this uncomfortable state, because going at your alarm, matching up with that child that's hurting is painful.

    2. MR

      Mmm.

    3. RK

      And then when you're in this cold plunge and you feel uncomfortable and you breathe through it, that's exactly what you need to do as far as feeling that alarmed child in you, because it's gonna hurt. It's gonna hurt. And being able to have the resilience to be able to go, "You know what? This hurts, but I'm gonna stay with you," as talking to your child. "This hurts us, but I'm gonna stay with you. You and I will always be together. There is no way that I'm ever gonna abandon you again, because I know you're there now. I know you're there now. So now I will make sure that I will never ever leave you." Now, the child needs to hear that a number of times, because you've been ignoring them-...not you personally, but collectively. We ignore The Child for decades, so it takes a while for The Child to come around. But there is this sense that we're on the right track. And for the first time for me, when I started, you know, healing somatically and doing therapies like IFS and, and that kind of thing, and I- I- I think I'll always be in therapy because I- I love it so much, just understanding how it works for me so I can help other people understand how it works for them. But really being able to tolerate that pain, 'cause Bessel van der Kolk talks about that in The Body Keeps the Score. He says, "We're not

  6. 12:51 – 13:26

    This approach doesn’t eliminate the alarm, and yet you still heal.

    1. RK

      teaching people how to get rid of their anxiety." I call it alarm. We're not teaching how to get rid of the alarm. What we're doing is we're teaching you how to acclimatize to it-

    2. MR

      Mm-hmm.

    3. RK

      ...so that when you feel that discomfort, you don't compulsively and relentlessly go into your head for a solution that you'll never find there. (laughs)

    4. MR

      Right. You need to go into your body-

    5. RK

      Stay there.

    6. MR

      ...where the-

    7. RK

      Even if it hurts.

    8. MR

      ...alarm is, and you suggest putting your hand there.

    9. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    10. MR

      And just breathe through it. Just soothe yourself through that moment. I wanna address one more thing, uh-

    11. RK

      Sure.

    12. MR

      ...in Jason's question.

  7. 13:26 – 16:46

    Use this strategy when you wake up in the night with anxiety.

    1. MR

      When you wake up in the middle of the night-

    2. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    3. MR

      ...and your thoughts are spinning and you're having trouble going back to sleep, what do you suggest somebody does?

    4. RK

      Am I safe in this moment? So we t- we talked about this the last time you and I talked. So this is something that I've used for many, many years. So you wake up-

    5. MR

      Well, you talk t- talk to Jason. So just, like-

    6. RK

      Yeah.

    7. MR

      ...I want you to pretend Jason's here.

    8. RK

      Okay.

    9. MR

      And let's coach Jason. So Jason, tonight when you wake up in the middle of the night, if you do, these are the specific things I want you to do.

    10. RK

      Yeah. I want you to connect with that feeling in your body, put your hand over it, breathe into it, and then ask yourself, "Am I safe in this moment? I know I'm freaked out. I know that there's something happening in a week or two weeks, or I gotta go to the dentist, or I gotta do this, or I gotta do that. But in this moment, in this moment right now where I'm lying in my bed, am I safe?" And you go, "Yeah, I'm safe." And then feel it. Like, you have to associate... This is what I was saying before is, like, you have to connect the feeling with the thinking. That's how we heal. That's how we create new neural pathways, is we create the feeling, and the feeling will sear in the thinking. So when you say, "Am I safe in this moment?" and you go, "I am safe," some people will say, "I am safe in this moment," rather than making it a question. But my daughter, Leandra, said that that's single biggest tip that, uh, Dr. Dad has ever giv- (laughs) given her-

    11. MR

      Mm.

    12. RK

      ...with regard to her anxiety, 'cause when she was 21... She still has it a little bit, but when she was 21, she went through a really difficult time. But she said, "The most important thing that you've ever told me is, 'Am I safe in this moment?'" And in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night when your mind is going nuts, you can just say, "I know..." 'Cause anxiety's always about the future. It's-

    13. MR

      Right.

    14. RK

      ...always about the future. So if you bring yourself into the present moment... And one of the ways of doing that is with sensation, you know, with, with sensation. When you, when you touch your own chest, when you take a deep breath, when you smell an essential oil, when you hum, when you sing, you're bringing yourself into the sensation of the present moment, and you're taking, you're removing that, that focus on the future or the past, or the pain of the past. When you bring yourself into the present moment, that's... The fertile ground of healing is the present moment. We don't heal when we're stuck in our trauma. We don't heal when we're stuck in our worries. We heal in the pr- the present moment sensation of our body. That's how we heal. Now, the cognitive structures help. You know, once, once you... And that's what helped with me, was w- all the cognitive, you know, behavior therapy and stuff that I did for years and years and years, after I started regulating my body, it was like, "Oh, this is what it is. This is th-" It all starts to make sense. The puzzle pieces-

    15. MR

      Mmm.

    16. RK

      ...start coming back into connection again. It's like, "Oh, yeah." Like, that's what I came about with, with I didn't get enough attention as a child from my mother. So because my brother was, was sick with club feet or my dad was crazy, so I made myself small, so now it's like, "I gotta be seen."

    17. MR

      Mm-hmm.

    18. RK

      But again, there's part of me that hates being seen. (laughs) So it is this real dichotomy that I go back and forth of. So now I accept that. I accept that that little boy in me needs the attention, and I give it to him, and I don't need it so much from the outside. And I think that's,

  8. 16:46 – 21:24

    Living with social anxiety? Dr. Kennedy explains why.

    1. RK

      that's when you know you're s- you're starting to heal is, like, you don't need so much attention from the outside and you are more connected in your relationships to other people, because when you're in this dissociated alarmed state, you're in survival mode. And in survival mode, the social engagement system that all humans have is shut off. You know, eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, body language. It gets shut off when we're o- when we're alarmed. So no wonder we don't wanna go to a party. No wonder we have social anxiety.

    2. MR

      Mm-hmm.

    3. RK

      No wonder we can't connect with our spouse or our kids, because evolutionarily, we are built, when we're in alarm, that connection isn't what we're looking for. We're looking for safety. So it's very hard to be warm and connected to your spouse or your kids or whatever when you're in alarm. And a lot of people feel so guilty about that. It's like, "I, I..." And they question their relation... "Am I in the right relationship?" It's like, you probably are, but you're just dissociated, so you can't love yourself, so you're not gonna love another person, so your relationships are gonna suffer. And as you quoted the Harvard study, relationships are the most important feature in recovering from any illness of any kind.

    4. MR

      So is it normal for people to wake up in the middle of the night and-

    5. RK

      Yes.

    6. MR

      ...like, wh- why?

    7. RK

      Not always.

    8. MR

      Why is that a normal thing?

    9. RK

      N- n- not every night, but we've all had periods in our... Like, the dark night of the soul, l- I write about it in the book.

    10. MR

      In terms of people that wake up, though, in the middle of the night-

    11. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    12. MR

      ...is that a symptom or a sign that you might have anxiety?

    13. RK

      Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I- your reticular activating system, you know, your sympathetic nervous system, um, isn't shutting off....you're not going into parasympathetic

    14. MR

      Oh.

    15. RK

      And, and here's the reason for that. I mean, you're asking me, like, brilliant questions. So as a child, espec- and I see this a lot with my alcoholic patients, or my, my, my pa- patients who had alcoholics as parents, things would go along fine for a while, and then there'd be a massive blowup. And then there'd be this sort of rapprochement. The, the alcoholic would say, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," and give you all this stuff. And then there would be this period of quiescence again, this quiet again, and then it would blow up again. So, what a child's nervous system will do is it'll say, "I am not gonna let myself relax because I know the shit's gonna go down again. So I'm-"

    16. MR

      Mm-hmm.

    17. RK

      "... gonna keep myself in this hypervigilant state, this sympathetic activated state." So when you're in that sympathetic activated state, you start thinking, "It's safer for me to keep myself at this level of activation all the time," and then you can't sleep. You don't eat well. There's... It, it just screws up your entire life when you can't move yourself into parasympathetic. I remember the, the quick story that I'll tell you is that I used to get massages from, um, my favorite massage therapist who now, who's now retired, and sometimes I would walk out of her studio feeling so relaxed that I would have a panic attack, because when I was relaxed as a child, that was exactly the time I got smashed in the face by my, my dad, not, not physically, but he would be going into depression or going into mania or going into psychosis. So, there was this thing with me, it's like, "Don't get too happy. Don't let your guard down because this is all going to shit in, (laughs) in the near future." And it could be like a year before he would have another episode, but I was always every day, and that's a metaphor for a lot of us with anxiety is we ha- we keep ourself in this hypervigilant state thinking that we're protecting ourselves. And Bre- Brené Brown talks about that too. She says, you know, we, we, we, we're expecting that, that... We rehearse that thing in our mind, getting that call from the school that the child, your child's been hurt or injured or whatever, we do that every day and it never happens, but we punish ourselves. We punish our body when we do that because it doesn't prepare you for anything. No matter how often you get that, you practice that phone call from the school, you're still gonna have to react to it.

    18. MR

      (exhales)

    19. RK

      So, there is... There... Chapter 62 in my book is about when it's not safe to feel safe, and that's one of the reasons why people have such a hard time healing from anxiety is because when I get people feeling (laughs) better again, they don't trust it because it goes back to that place, "Well, when I felt safe as a kid, I got blindsided."

    20. MR

      I wanna try to connect the dots, particularly on this question about sleep because we're getting so many questions from listeners who are having trouble sleeping.

    21. RK

      Sure.

    22. MR

      And you've said a couple things that I wanna try to connect. First of all, you have said that, um,

  9. 21:24 – 24:19

    Not sure what your nervous system has to do with anxiety? Listen here.

    1. MR

      all anxiety begins from a moment where you feel separate or unsafe typically during childhood.

    2. RK

      Yes.

    3. MR

      And that any time from that moment forward that you feel separate or unsafe-

    4. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    5. MR

      ... it's going to kind of trigger that same stress path of-

    6. RK

      Alarm.

    7. MR

      ... alarm in-

    8. RK

      Yeah.

    9. MR

      ... your body, and then that's gonna send your thoughts spiraling, which makes that response of going into an alarm whenever you feel stressed or unsafe second nature, like s- unconscious.

    10. RK

      Yes.

    11. MR

      And so, for those of you that are kinda new to this discussion and you're having trouble sleeping, I personally believe that after the last three years and the unprecedented amount of uncertainty and change-

    12. RK

      And separation.

    13. MR

      ... that we've-

    14. RK

      And separation.

    15. MR

      And separation, yes, that we've all experienced, that most of us are in that hypervigilant state, waiting for something bad to happen. And now that people are getting laid off and the economy, uh, is starting to take a turn, that that very familiar alarm loop is getting triggered for a lot of people, and they may not even realize it. And so, if you're finding that, "Wow, I do have a lot of trouble sleeping," or, "Wow, in the last year, I wake up all the time in the middle of the night and I'm just constantly worried about this stuff," what Dr. Kennedy has explained to you is that it goes back to this original alarm of feeling unsafe. And that's why in the middle of the night lying there thinking about your bills or whether or not the next round of layoffs are coming or how your kid is doing because they're not doing well, putting your hand wherever the tension is and saying, "I am safe," or asking, "Am I safe in this moment?" that's the first step because what you're teaching us, Dr. Kennedy, is you're teaching us how to start to repair the root cause of it, right?

    16. RK

      Yeah.

    17. MR

      Am I getting this right?

    18. RK

      Yes, absolutely.

    19. MR

      Is there anything else you would recommend? 'Cause we get a lot of questions technically about sleep. "Do I get out of bed? Do I lay in bed? How do I go back to sleep?" And since it is absolutely tied to this alarm and the way that it, it, it makes the mind spin, and the inability for so many of us to allow ourselves to feel good-

    20. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    21. MR

      ... to allow ourselves to slow down, to trust that it's gonna be okay, is there anything else that you would recommend that we do in that moment?

    22. RK

      E- well,

  10. 24:19 – 25:25

    Dr. Kennedy’s #1 tool to move you into rest-and-digest pretty quickly.

    1. RK

      breath, you know? Physiological sigh will help, you know? So two sniffs in (sniffs) and a long, slow exhale. (exhales)

    2. MR

      So did you get that everybody? It's two sniffs in. (sniffs)

    3. RK

      (sniffs) And then a long, slow exhale. (exhales)

    4. MR

      What does that do?

    5. RK

      Well, it- it starts to- to move you into parasympathetic very quickly.

    6. MR

      Mmm.

    7. RK

      So, it- it blocks that sort of sympathetic chain, that chain reaction of feeling, thought, feeling, thought, feeling, thought. As soon as you start moving your body into a parasympathetic state, your state depends ... Your state will determine how you think. So, the state of your body determines how your mind thinks.

    8. MR

      That's so true.

    9. RK

      So-

    10. MR

      Well, we've all had that experience of being stressed before going for a walk or exercising, and after you're done exercising or going for a walk outside, you're like, "I feel so much better."

    11. RK

      Well, yeah. You know, after- after Warren's death there, you know, when Chris took you out to paddle ball, last thing you wanted to do, right, was move.

    12. MR

      Oh, my God, it's so true.

    13. RK

      Because there's tremendous inertia to- to anxiety, alarm. You know,

  11. 25:25 – 27:55

    Use these two tools to move yourself out of the freeze response.

    1. RK

      there- there is this freeze state that we go into. We don't want to do that. But when you force yourself to get into a different ... And that's exactly what happened. You got into a different state in your body, and as that state changed, your thoughts changed. So, we worship the mind in this society, thinking the mind can fix everything. But it's more related to how your body feels. You will think exactly the way your body feels, and it's very difficult. It's like pushing a rock up a hill when you're feeling anxious or depressed to go, "I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy."

    2. MR

      (laughs)

    3. RK

      Because you don't feel happy. And if you ... And you can change it. Like, gratitude is one of those things that actually does start neurochemically changing y- y- the chemicals in your brain that allow you to start flipping the switch over to the other side. But you have to use that almost like five, four, three, two, one. Like, start gratitude first, and then five, four, three, two, one, go to paddle board or go to the beach, or go-

    4. MR

      Mmm.

    5. RK

      ... like, go somewhere.

    6. MR

      Mm-hmm.

    7. RK

      Because as you point out, the more we stay frozen, the more the brain thinks there is something dangerous.

    8. MR

      Mmm.

    9. RK

      And we start secreting cortisol, we start secreting adrenaline, and- and it supports whatever we think. So, if we think we're afraid, your brain will support you. It'll say, "Yes, you're afraid." If you think, you know, you lean into your- the balls of your feet and you go, "I'm gonna go and ask that person to- to coffee or whatever," when you lean in there and you go at what scares you, your brain starts creating your own sort of endogenous, your own brain's natural morphine. It starts creating dopamine, and it tells you you're on the right track. You're on the right track. And that changes your physiology. So, it's really this balance between physiology and psychology. But our s- our physiology is so- is so deep, it- it- it creates so much of an influence on our psychology that we're not even aware of. And that's my biggest point is, like, why aren't we in therapy paying attention to our physiology as much as our psychology? Because if you just think about it, as you say, because if you look at it from a neuroscience point of view, there's- there's the part, and I won't get too technical, but there's the- the neocortex, the- the- the new brain, the- that all humans have that's basically, uh, the fantastic thinking memory, all this kind of stuff. And then there's the deeper structures in our brain, you know, the amygdala, the brain stem, that- that have no concept of words. Your body has no concept

  12. 27:55 – 31:27

    Look at your alarm this way, and your mindset towards it changes, too.

    1. RK

      of words. Its language is feeling.

    2. MR

      Mmm.

    3. RK

      And if the trauma is stored in your body, and the body's language is feeling, you have to change that trauma with a feeling. Just changing your thinking will not do ... Well, it won't do much. It will help you. It will help you. There's no doubt. It will help you cope, but it will not help you heal.

    4. MR

      Can we- can we get technical for just a minute?

    5. RK

      Sure.

    6. MR

      So, when it comes to sensation and feeling, whether it's the pit in the stomach or the kind of getting tense in your chest or it's a wave-

    7. RK

      Right.

    8. MR

      ... that you might feel, are you saying that all of that feeling or sensation that is something that's happening in your nervous system-

    9. RK

      Yes.

    10. MR

      ... channels up through the brain stem, which has no access to words-

    11. RK

      Yes.

    12. MR

      ... and then it gets converted into some kind of explanation-

    13. RK

      Yes, absolutely.

    14. MR

      ... by the prefrontal cortex?

    15. RK

      And other parts, too. Memory parts, too.

    16. MR

      So-

    17. RK

      Yup, yup.

    18. MR

      So, it's like almost like a game of telephone-

    19. RK

      Yup.

    20. MR

      ... where your nervous system is feeling something and sending, through the parts of the brain that have no language, a message. And the prefrontal cortex is interpreting it.

    21. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    22. MR

      And it's interpreting it as unsafe danger. And you're saying that we have to learn how to feel the sen- the sensation and deal with the sensation before the prefrontal cortex is allowed to make it mean something.

    23. RK

      Yes. Your mind is a compulsive meaning-making make sense machine. So, when it feels something in your body, it has to make sense of it. That, especially the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere, analytical, um, like verbal, literal. It has to make sense of it. So, it makes sense of it with words, and it gives you words, stories, that are typically pretty painful 'cause they're consistent with the alarm feeling in your body. If you're feeling great, if you're walking down the street, it's a sunny day, everything is going great, your thoughts are gonna be pretty darn good. But if you're feeling anxious, if you're feeling alarmed, and you've got a dentist appointment, like, a week later or whatever, you're gonna fixate on that dentist appointment because it makes sense to your brain. It's like, when you feel bad, what do we have to feel bad about? And then, we- we do that stacking that I was talking about the last time we talked about. We start stacking, so every negative thing in your life at that point, "Oh, my relationship with..." Going, "Oh, I've got taxes. Oh, I've gotta do my account-" You know, all that stuff stacks on top of each other. So, when it does that, it just changes y- it keeps you in that negative state. So, it's really about, okay, I'm in this. I'm anxious, like we were saying earlier. Okay, where is that in your body?... now you can start, when you start finding the anxiety and the alarm in your body, now you're starting actually to get the root cause.

    24. MR

      Hmm.

    25. RK

      Because in your head, you will never solve it. You will always be caught in your head. You will never get out of your head. You always-

    26. MR

      We have a question.

    27. RK

      ... have to go to your body. Go ahead.

    28. MR

      We have a question from Lena.

    29. RK

      Okay.

    30. MR

      That is about breaking the chain of anxiety.

  13. 31:27 – 38:30

    So how do you start breaking the cycle of anxiety in a family?

    1. NA

      My name is Lena. My father passed his anxiety to me and the rest of my siblings growing up. I'm trying to not let my children adopt being short-tempered and anxious like many people in my family are. How can I break this generation cycle of anxiety and uneasiness and start healing?

    2. MR

      Before we jump into answering her question, let's take a quick pause for our sponsors, and we're gonna tackle whether or not anxiety is genetic and how to spot it in your parents when we return. Hey, it's Mel, and I wanted to jump into the middle of that podcast episode you were watching to make sure you knew about a free opportunity that I created for you. It's a new three-part training called Take Control with Mel Robbins. It is packed with science. It is packed with action. It's exactly what you need right now. I know that you are tired of feeling like you're in survival mode. You're tired of merely coping, and it is time to tap back into your excellence and power again. Let me coach you. Let me guide you on the steps that you need to take in order to level up and start executing. It's gonna feel so great to start winning again. All you gotta do is click on the link right there in the caption. It's melrobbins.com/takecontrol. It is free. It is for you, and you need to be in it. Now, let's go back to the podcast.

    3. NA

      Hey, Mel. My name is Lena. My father passed his anxiety to me and the rest of my siblings growing up. I'm trying to not let my children adopt being short-tempered and anxious like many people in my family are. How can I break this generation cycle of anxiety and uneasiness and start healing?

    4. MR

      That was Lena, who's a listener of the Mel Robbins podcast, and she had a question about how you recognize anxiety in your parents, especially when people don't talk about it. We're here with Dr. Russell Kennedy. So, Dr. Kennedy, is anxiety genetic?

    5. RK

      No. The short answer is no. There are, there are mental illnesses, and I put that in quotation marks, that do seem to have a bit more of a genetic component to it, like schizophrenia and bipolar. But anxiety, in and of itself, is not genetic. We haven't really isolated anything that would say this is the anxiety gene or anything like that. What I do think that we have genetically is a, a tendency to be sensitive. So if you are born sensitive, which everybody I see with anxiety, everybody I've ever cons- consulted with with anxiety, is a sensitive person. You are a sensitive person.

    6. MR

      How do you know if you're a sensitive person?

    7. RK

      'Cause you have anxiety. No. (laughs) It's, well, because you feel everything, and then the other part about feeling everything as a sensitive person is to survive, it's kind of like autism in a way. To survive, you have to start shutting off your connection, because it's just too much.

    8. MR

      Mmm. Mm-hmm.

    9. RK

      And I think that's what happens when you're born sensitive, is you learn ways of protecting yourself, because your home life doesn't give you the love and attention that you need. Now, you could have good parents who are loving and caring, but just because we are more sensitive, we just need more love. I need more love than my brother.

    10. MR

      Right.

    11. RK

      Like, it's just, he is more, he, he's not as sensitive as I am. So, so your parents could have been fine in a way, but if you are sensitive and you need more love, what you will do is if you don't get it, you will start going to the dark side. You know, "Use your force. Use the Force, Luke." You know? So it's, it's, it's important to understand that you need more love, and you have to start really giving that to yourself without this becoming like a, you know, pity party. Like, oh, everyone has to love each other, hold hands, sing Kumbaya. No. It's really something that you learn how to give love, compassion, and attention to yourself.

    12. MR

      Well, it's like learning to feed yourself, for crying out loud.

    13. RK

      Yeah.

    14. MR

      Like, it's that basic.

    15. RK

      It is.

    16. MR

      So how do you break this cycle of anxiety in a family?

    17. RK

      Well, s- first you start breaking the cycle in yourself. So you start realizing that this anxiety I feel is actually this alarm in my body. I'm gonna pay attention to that, because that is my younger self. And I have many, many people contact me and say, "Oh, my 15-year-old daughter is so anxious. Can you see her? Can you see her?" And it's like, "No, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna fix you first." It's like Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer. He doesn't fix the dog, he fixes the parent. So that's what I work on with people. As I work on the parent, I show the parent how to heal themselves, and then that energy just seems to translate into the children.

    18. MR

      Mmm.

    19. RK

      They start saying, you know, "Hey mom, you seem more connected." Because she is, because she's not in that alarm state where she can actually give love and attention to her kids so those kids can get filled up and feel safe, and then that gets handed down from generation to generation. So anxiety isn't sort of genetic, but we are born sensitive, a lot of us. If your mother or father was anxious, which mine was, um, both my parents actually were quite anxious, you will start seeing that a- and almost be operantly conditioned to create that anxiety, because you feel it in them. So, a lot of the kids that I, th- or people that refer their kids to me are because they are anxious themselves, and they feel helpless and powerless to help themselves, let alone help their kids, and then they feel horrible that they've kind of transferred this anxi- anxiety gene, quote-unquote, to their kids. And it's really about heal yourself first.... and then your kids will come along. Your kids will start feeling that. So it's not about the kids. It's about the adults a lot of the time. So that's, so for, for Athena, it would be, okay, how do we find your alarm? How do we find the best time in your life? How do we start changing that pattern, that automatic pattern of negativity and irritability in you first? And then you're more available to your kids. And when you're more available to your kids, your kids don't feel so alarmed themselves, and you start healing that whole generational cycle.

    20. MR

      Anxiety in a family-

    21. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    22. MR

      ... is not about the kids. It's about the adults.

    23. RK

      Yes.

    24. MR

      And you help kids that have anxiety by addressing and healing the anxiety in the adults in that family.

    25. RK

      99% of the time, yeah.

    26. MR

      So Dr. Kennedy, what are surprising signs of adult anxiety, particularly for that generation of our parents who never talked about this? Prozac was not even invented yet.

    27. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    28. MR

      That was not a generation of expressing feelings. So

  14. 38:30 – 40:42

    For those of us who grew up in the “I’ll give you something to cry about.”

    1. MR

      how, that was the see, uh, you know, be h- be seen and not heard generation. It was, you know, shut up and pull up your big girl panties.

    2. RK

      I'll give you something to cry about?

    3. MR

      Yeah, I'll give you something to cry about. No, I'm, I'm dead serious because-

    4. RK

      (laughs) No, I am too. Yeah.

    5. MR

      My mom recently said to me, "You know, never even occurred to me that I had anxiety."

    6. RK

      Hm.

    7. MR

      "Because maybe I didn't wanna feel all that stuff."

    8. RK

      Exactly.

    9. MR

      "Maybe I'm afraid to, to, like, go talk to a therapist and open that all up. Like, we didn't talk about our feelings. And so it didn't occur to me until recently that, gosh, you know..." My mom clearly had a lot of trauma in her childhood and felt invisible, and I've never looked at her and been like, "The woman has anxiety." S- so what are the surprising signs that your parents may be dealing with anxiety, it's just never been talked about in your family?

    10. RK

      Alcoholism. (laughs) That's a big one because, you know, they didn't, they didn't have the open dialogue that we have now. So it wasn't okay. You know, mental illness had a tremendous stigma, and it still does. It's, it still really does. So there's, there's this, um, resistance to actually admitting you have a problem because that child in you, or in them, that is loud and painful, it's easier in a way to just keep stuffing that child down because it's not talked about. "I don't wanna be different than anyone else." So we, we just accept our nervous system as this is what we're stuck with, and this is the way it's gonna go. It's been like this for 10 or 15 years. I've been, I... So many people that say, "I've been in therapy for, like, 5, 10, 15 years, and yeah, I mean, I feel a little bit better, but I'm not really getting there." When you look at therapy costing $150 an hour, you know, it's pretty frustrating for people. It's pretty outta reach for people.

    11. MR

      Let me ask you another question 'cause I wanna back you up-

    12. RK

      Yeah. Yeah, go ahead.

    13. MR

      ... 'cause I do think the surprising symptoms are something we gotta talk about.

    14. RK

      Oh. Sure.

    15. MR

      So, and I'd love to kinda tick

  15. 40:42 – 45:25

    What are signs that your parents were actually struggling with anxiety?

    1. MR

      off some-

    2. RK

      Sure.

    3. MR

      ... because I think this is a big wake-up call. I mean, our parents didn't talk about their feelings-

    4. RK

      Yeah.

    5. MR

      ... because it didn't matter if they did.

    6. RK

      Yeah.

    7. MR

      It wasn't normalized. Nobody was gonna do shit about it anyway. And if you were, uh, struggling with alcohol, you're a bum, and if you, like my great-grandmother, were bipolar, you were institutionalized and given shock treatments. And you would just, quote, "go away" for a couple weeks, and you were called mean. And so I wanna talk about, what are the signs that may surprise you-

    8. RK

      Yeah.

    9. MR

      ... that your parents have anxiety and you didn't even know it? So alcoholism was one, but what are the other signs?

    10. RK

      Irritability. People, parents that are chronically irritable. Um, not connected, just not feeling connected to a parent. You know, my mother is very warm and caring at points and very cold and distant at others. I think that's kinda, like, the British way in a lot of ways. And so for a child, it's like, "Hey, you know, sometimes you're rubbing my back and, and we're feeling connected, and other times, you're cold as ice." So in a way, that's almost worse than being consistently one or the other. If she was consistently cold, I would learn how to protect myself from that. If she was consistently warm, I wouldn't need protection in the first place. So we're, a lot of us kids had emotional dysregulation in our parents that we didn't recognize. So sometimes they'd be nice and connected, and other times they'd be off the deep end. And I think irritability is one way of doing that, hypervigilance, hyper-organization, you know, these things that, that show up in our parents because they didn't have a way of expressing it-

    11. MR

      Mmm.

    12. RK

      They didn't know, or, or they went to therapy, and a lot of people go to therapy and they, they, they've been in there for five years and they feel terrible because it's like, "I've been in therapy. I've been in this, you know, CBT thing, and it's, it's really, it helped me at first, and, and, but now I'm, I'm just feeling just as bad as I always have, and I've just spent, you know, $40,000 on 10 years of therapy." And it's because, you know, they're, they're not addressing the root cause, and I think hypervigilance shows up, I think irritability, um, drug abuse, um, and I'm not talking, like, you know, cocaine or whatever. It's, you know, prescription drugs, that kinda stuff that, that people need to kinda cope.... because like I said, when we go into survival mode, we become very inaccessible, both to ourselves and to other people. And when we're warm and connected to ourselves, we can extend that out to other people. A lot of people are more connected to their pets than they are to their spouse, because they see their pet as safe. They don't see their spouse as safe, because their spouse reflects some of the, the, the crimes of the parent, in a way. So, it's really... It's very interesting to see how anxiety shows up, how childhood trauma shows up in people. And it's usually emotional dysregulation of some kind, where they can't connect. And another way of connecting that doesn't look like it is the people pleaser, is the mom who's doing, making cookies for everybody and doing all this stuff, and, and appears so connected, 'cause we're very good. Like, an- anxious people are very smart. We know how to present, uh, an image that appears connected, but really isn't. But people can feel it. People can feel your authenticity when you're connected.

    13. MR

      Um, the point that really struck me there was, uh, somebody who is just so loving and kind with an animal-

    14. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    15. MR

      ... and cold with other people.

    16. RK

      Yeah. 'Cause they didn't trust their parents. Their parents didn't, didn't establish that people are safe. My dad didn't establish that he was s- even though my dad was really kind and loving and playful and great, uh, at many, many times. In fact, most of the time that I spent with him was good. But it's like when you get that one bad experience with a dog, it takes a thousand good experiences to kind of, uh, erase it a little bit.

    17. MR

      So true.

    18. RK

      So, it's really important. Again, our brains, we have a fear bias. We are evolutionarily programmed to focus on fear. And another thing that I got from one of your, your podcasts recently is, you know, and I said this a lot, is whatever you focus on, you get more of. So, if you focus on your anxiety, you'll get more anxiety. If you focus on gratitude, you'll get more gratitude. You'll see more B- you'll see more Broncos around, is basically what it comes down to.

    19. MR

      So, we have another question from Becky.

    20. RK

      Okay.

    21. MR

      Let's play that one.

  16. 45:25 – 49:37

    This is why you have a hard time slowing down. And me too!

    1. MR

    2. NA

      My comment was about anxiety and how you, like, get your train of thoughts kind of to slow down. Like, you get so anxious, you can't stop thinking about the worst that's gonna happen, and how do we, like, calm that anxiety and get it all to, like, relax some? Like, sometimes it's not even realistic things, but you just get anxious and you can't get it to stop. What are some tools? We need those.

    3. MR

      Okay, so you're in a situation, and you're overthinking and your mind is spiraling and you're in that worst case scenario loop. Tools to get that moment under control?

    4. RK

      Go, go into your body. Get out of your head. You're not gonna find a solution in your head. It's not there. You know, uh, stop looking for peanut butter at the hardware store. Y- you're, you're not gonna find it there. You're not gonna find a solution in your head. But now, whatever you focus on, you get more of. So, if you start focusing on your thoughts, of course you're just gonna get more thoughts, and that's just gonna be a- an endless self-fulfilling cycle. So, consciously, you have to realize, "What happens to me when I feel anxious? Where do I feel this anxiety? And can I train myself to go, 'Oh, there's that pain in my chest again. There's that pressure in my solar plexus. There's that lump in my throat.' That's a sign that I'm starting to go into alarm. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go into my body." And this is one of the other times where I- I, you know, I get people to draw on the best times of their life. You know, change that feeling state. Go back-

    5. MR

      Can I ask you a question real quick?

    6. RK

      Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.

    7. MR

      Um, so I want to go right to the moment-

    8. RK

      Okay.

    9. MR

      ... that the thoughts are spiraling-

    10. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    11. MR

      ... and you realize you're trapped in this worst case loop. Should somebody do the psychological sigh to-

    12. RK

      Physiological sigh, exactly. Yes.

    13. MR

      ... just do that to stop?

    14. RK

      To start, yeah.

    15. MR

      Okay.

    16. RK

      You gotta, you gotta break the cycle, right?

    17. MR

      Or-

    18. RK

      So, that's a great way of breaking the cycle.

    19. MR

      ... use the five-second rule, five, four, three, two, one-

    20. RK

      Absolutely.

    21. MR

      ... to just stop the cycle?

    22. RK

      That's another one, yeah.

    23. MR

      Is there another one to stop that spinning of thoughts?

    24. RK

      Breathing is probably the most effective.

    25. MR

      Okay.

    26. RK

      You know? Um, just being aware, first of all, because a lot of times what'll happen is... Because our frontal cortex gets, uh, impeded by survival physiology, we don't realize that we're in anxiety. We can sit in anxiety for hours and not realize that we're in it. So, if you don't realize you're in it, you just feel it, you just feel this terrible feeling, you can't change it. So, you develop this awareness, "Okay, this is my alarm coming up."

    27. MR

      Mm-hmm.

    28. RK

      That's your first thing. So, at that point, five, four, three, two, one, get out of the house. Put my shoes on, go to the house, go to the gym, go somewhere, do something. Like do something to break that cycle, because if you don't break that cycle, you're gonna sit there and ruminate and ruminate and ruminate. And rumination has tremendous inertia to it. Like, once you start getting into negative thoughts, you don't feel like doing anything. It's like when Warren passed away and you didn't want to go anywhere, you didn't want to do anything. Physiologically, we go into the vagus nerve shutdown, and that shuts us down. And we don't want it, so we need something outside of ourselves. Five, four, three, two, one is awesome, by the way, because it just, it really... It's like, okay, after you've done it a bunch of times, you kind of, okay, you have to change your state. And one of the best ways of changing your state is changing your body, and one of the-

    29. MR

      Yeah.

    30. RK

      ... best ways of changing your body is starting to frickin' move.

  17. 49:37 – 57:31

    Here’s what your life can look like once you heal your alarm.

    1. RK

    2. MR

      What is it like to live without anxiety? 'Cause I think part of... And the reason why I ask this question is I think so many of us have lived in a alarm state for so long, we don't know what it's like-

    3. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    4. MR

      ...to be able to turn it off.

    5. RK

      Yeah.

    6. MR

      So, what is available to everybody if they-

    7. RK

      Well-

    8. MR

      ...start to do the work in their bodies?

    9. RK

      Uh, a direct access to a repeatable process where you can find peace, maybe not right away. Maybe it takes you five minutes, maybe it takes you 10 minutes, but at least you're on the right track. At least you're not... You know, I used to feel like I was, you know, a, a bubble in an ocean, because whatever the ocean went, wherever my emotion went-

    10. MR

      Mmm.

    11. RK

      ...I was taken with it. And the thing about starting to find that peace in your body is, you kinda go down below the surface of the waves and you kinda look up. This is the image that I get anyway. I look up and I can kinda see, you know, kind of that hazy blue when you're under the water and you're looking up?

    12. MR

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    13. RK

      I can see the waves there, and it's... You can create this sense of separateness, ironically, from the alarm, where this isn't all of me, because when you were a child, it was all of you. Like, when you were in your trauma as a child, there was no way out. There wasn't... You'd look everywhere and there was no way out. But as an adult, you can look and you can start seeing, "You know what? I, I feel you, alarm. Like, I feel you there, and I know that you are my younger self. But I can see that there's, there is a sense of separateness there, that I, I don't have to completely be taken over by this." Now, at the same time, the paradox is, that alarm is your younger self, so you wanna be attached to it. So, can you see the alarm with this sense of curiosity? 'Cause when you look at something with curiosity, you take a lot of the emotion out of it. It's like, "Hmm, that's really interesting, that I've got this sense of alarm in my solar plexus, that it feels heavy and sharp and purple. Wow, that's really, that's really interesting." Because when you look at it with curiosity, you're changing your sort of psychological mindset towards it, and when you start changing it in any way, it starts making that cycle easier to break. So, when you get caught in r- you know, rumination and thought, you can start going into your body, even if it hurts initially, because you are on the right track and your, your ventral tegmental area, the part of your brain that secretes dopamine will start telling you, "You're on the right track." And, and I think that's when we start healing, we start be- get this sense of power over the alarm, because we have been prisoners of it for so long, and in a way, we are prisoners of our younger child. If we don't pay attention to them, they will make us miserable (laughs) together. So, when you start paying attention to that and you start knowing, "Hey, I'm on the right track," like dopamine starts going in your brain. When you're on the right track with something, you get all these sort of feel-good chemicals, and then you have a sense that you are no longer this passive, you know, bubble in the ocean anymore. Like, you, you have something that you can tap into that's in all of us. I mean, this power... And, and we see this a lot with people that have had spontaneous remissions from cancers and from horrible diseases and stuff. They feel this power in them that they didn't know was there, but they just feel it. They just feel that power. And I think what happens when we have trauma as children is we lose faith in that power. We lose sight of that power. So, when you connect with your younger self again, you can have access to that power that's in all of us, that, just that sense of peace. You know, uh, uh, I think in the Bible, like, they call it the, the, the peace that passeth all understanding, and you get into that state. And when you start healing from anxiety and you start realizing, "Hey, it is actually safe to feel safe," there, there's a tremendous feeling of, of rush, of, "Man, I suffered from this for so long. Why did I wait (laughs) so long to do this?"

    14. MR

      Well, I know for me personally, it happened a lot faster than I expected it to, and the experience, for me, is emotional peace.

    15. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    16. MR

      Like, there's a level of steadiness. There's a calmness, uh, confidence, adv- Like, it's all available to you. And I think when people really resonate, particularly with either the way that I move through life in the last year or two, or how our son, Oakley, has this just steadiness, this presence, that, uh, that's emotional peace that you're experiencing. And everything that you talked about related to the fact that so much of this is about the separateness or the unsafe feeling that we all experienced at some point during childhood, and how the alarm sounds now that we are adults. But there's this emotional immaturity in most adults, meaning they are just children trapped in adult bodies who are incapable of handling the feelings and the sensations that are rising up in their bodies, which is why they act in ways that feel very toxic or abusive or confusing, and it's why we do that and then regret it. And the whole solution to all of this is this three-layered approach we've been talking about today. It's first, you gotta become aware-

    17. RK

      Aware, yeah.

    18. MR

      ...that you have this alarm....that it's getting triggered in your adult life, and that there's shit that went down when you were a kid that needs your attention and needs your healing. And it has everything to do with you learning how to make yourself feel connected and safe and taken care of. And then there is the coping with it, which are the bazillion strategies on TikTok, which by the way, um, a lot of it is horse shit-

    19. RK

      (laughs)

    20. MR

      ...and so you gotta be very careful. Yeah, it may go viral, but in the coping realm, therapy is amazing, if you can afford it. And all the modalities are incredible in... and help you to cope, and breathing, and meditation, and yoga, and walks in the woods, and lots of things that, that, you know, both Dr. Kennedy and I recommend. And it will help you cope, and it will help the anxiety dissipate. But if you really wanna dismantle the alarm, you gotta go a layer deeper, which is in your body, finding the source of the alarm, repairing yourself and that little person inside of you that felt alarmed. And then taking care of yourself by staying in your body and becoming aware of when the alarm goes off before it hits your mind, and feeling your way through these things. It's remarkably powerful what you're talking about, Dr. Kennedy.

    21. RK

      And I think that that's, that's really... You kinda hit the nail on the head. I mean, there's, there's superficial things we can do, you know, physiological sigh, breath work, grounding, just feeling your butt in the chair, feeling your feet on the ground. Like, there is something psychologically about being grounded. It does help us for sure. Touch, you know, touching yourself, touching other people. Um, you know, temperature, feeling... you know, going through those extremes of temperature, cold, heat, whatever. Temperature is one of those ways that we can access the deeper structures in our brain

  18. 57:31 – 59:32

    Here’s the neuroscience behind why essential oils help calm your body.

    1. RK

      too. Smell. You know, if you have es- an essential oil that you love, like lavender or chamomile or whatever, carry it with you if you're struggling. Smell is one of those things that it's the only sense that doesn't get processed by the thalamus. The thalamus is kind of like this central switchboard of the brain.

    2. MR

      Hmm.

    3. RK

      Smell goes right into our emotional brain.

    4. MR

      Hmm.

    5. RK

      So if you have something that smells good, it will change your, your state right away. There is this thing also about moving your eyes back and forth, side to side, sort of the basis of EMDR. And it does show that if you move your eyes back and forth, back and forth, not up and down, but back and forth, it does decrease the activity in the amygdala.

    6. MR

      Hmm.

    7. RK

      Now all those things are coping strategies. To heal, you've gotta find the alarm, you've gotta find the trauma, you've gotta find your younger self. You have to have faith in yourself-

    8. MR

      Mm-hmm.

    9. RK

      ...because I, I think as trauma... When, when we get traumatized as children, we lose faith in the world. And when we lose faith in the world, we start believing everything is up to me. And if you're a seven-year-old and you think everything's up to you, life's gonna be very anxious. You're not... And finding that power inside of you, that power that, that the people who had the spontaneous remissions from cancers and, and multiple sclerosis and all those sort of things, there's this power inside all of us that we lose with trauma. Finding that again, it's really important. Having gratitude for the pain, having gratitude for the alarm because that's your conduit to your healing, is that alarm.

    10. MR

      Mm-hmm.

    11. RK

      So as much as you bemoan having it, it's actually a beacon to your younger self. Be grateful for that sense of alarm because you have a, you have a pathway now to find that child. And play. It's, it's so important to adopt play because when you play, you start changing that autonomic nervous system, and that autonomic nervous system runs your life. So the more you can play, the more you can regulate that autonomic nervous system, that sympathetic, parasympathetic nervous system, the easier life is gonna be, the more connected you're gonna be to yourself and maybe more importantly to others because we need others 'cause loneliness is killing us, separation is killing us.

    12. MR

      So, um,

  19. 59:32 – 1:02:02

    Dr. Kennedy shares his tips for playing “the right way.”

    1. MR

      give me your top three recommendations for play that you give to your patients.

    2. RK

      Well, I, I often ask people like, "What did you do when you were a teenager?" You know, some people say, "I rode my bike," "I played chess," "I did this." So things that you liked when you were a kid, chances are you'll still like now. So that's kind of... There's no sort of global thing that I suggest to people. You know, ideally it would be something that's fun that doesn't really have a winner and a loser-

    3. MR

      Mm-hmm.

    4. RK

      ...kind of thing. That... You know, and Gordon Neufeld, who's my sort of mentor in developmental psychology talks about that with kids. It's so important to have play just for play's sake. There is no winner. There is no loser. There's no... there's nothing there. And one of the things that I really recommend for parents is playing around the dinner table with facial expressions, like, "How am I feeling when I make this face? How am I feeling when..." Because then you're actually maturing their social engagement system.

    5. MR

      Mm-hmm.

    6. RK

      You're maturing the part of their brain, you know, facial expression, body language, eye contact. You're, you're improving the part of their brain that allows them to soothe others and soothe themselves. So it's important to do this in a playful way, you know? And, and that's really... Once we start really adopting play in our day-to-day life, then we start regulating our nervous system and in a way that you don't have to academically go back and find the trauma.

    7. MR

      Amazing. Dr. Kennedy, anything else before I wrap up?

    8. RK

      I think it's really being, you know, compassionate for yourself. I have this process in the book called ABC. So A is awareness, as you say, being aware what a- anxiety or alarm feels like in your body. B is for body and breath. So go into your body, go into your breath, physiological sigh is great, getting grounded in your body. And then C is compassionate connection for yourself and specifically-

    9. MR

      Mm-hmm.

    10. RK

      ...that younger version of yourself. So if you do that each time that you have anxiety or alarm, you will start training your nervous system to focus on something that will heal you instead of focusing on your thoughts, which are only gonna make you worse.

    11. MR

      Amazing.

    12. RK

      So, as Forrest Gump would say, "That's all I got to say about that."

    13. MR

      (laughs) Dr. Kennedy, you are such a gift. Thank you for giving us so much time and so many tactics and just pouring into us and... Um, one thing I wanted to just say as a thank you is that when we were talking

  20. 1:02:02 – 1:07:36

    Have this where you can see it to remember your partner’s vulnerability.

    1. MR

      about the younger self, I had this image of my husband, and he tells this story about how he had asked, uh, h- somebody... He had forgotten his baseball mat- mitt, and it was a game day. And so he had to book it home because nobody was at the game. And he gets home and here he is in his baseball uniform and he can't get in the house. Nobody's left it unlocked for him. And so he has to go around the side of the house and climb up this trellis so he can get onto the, um, balcony outside of his parents' bedroom, and the trellis is full of bees-

    2. RK

      Hmm.

    3. MR

      ... because the trellis is covered with flowers. So he's climbing up this thing and he's getting stung, and then he gets onto the- the kind of porch on the second floor, and he goes up to the French doors in his parents' bedroom, and he goes to open them up and they're locked. So, he ends up punching through one of the panes of glass and cutting his hand and then dripping blood across the hardwood floors that had just been refinished as he's walking in his cleats- (laughs)

    4. RK

      Right.

    5. MR

      ... to get his (inaudible) . And I have this image of him because I... There's a particular image of him in this blue and white baseball uniform. He's probably in the fourth grade. He's got kind of long, blonde curls. And it's very useful to me to look at the man I've been married to for 26 years-

    6. RK

      Mm-hmm.

    7. MR

      ... in those moments where I get really pissed off or irritated or annoyed and visualize that kid in the baseball uniform just trying to do his best and feeling like nobody's there to support him.

    8. RK

      Yeah.

    9. MR

      That was really helpful. I think that's really going to help me show up, uh-

    10. RK

      And I recommend that for couples too. Like, have a picture of your partner when they were like seven, eight, or nine around the house.

    11. MR

      Mm-hmm.

    12. RK

      And then when they start going off for what you think is a seemingly trivial matter, look at that picture because that's who you're dealing with, you know? And I feel bad for Chris because I know he was a latchkey kid and didn't feel supported. So that must have been a- a very difficult situation for him because I think he would learn to be overly self-reliant.

    13. MR

      Yes.

    14. RK

      And in that- in that, there... When you're overly self-reliant, you don't allow love in. You know, you- you become an alpha child, what I call an alpha child, and you think that everything is up to you. And again, if you're a child and you think everything is up to you, and you know because you're a child that you don't have (laughs) the ability to deal with this stuff, it's going to be tremendously alarming and that... It's going to stick in your body.

    15. MR

      Wow. There is so much more we're going to talk about. (laughs) Dr. Kennedy-

    16. RK

      Every three months, every three months, Mel, we'll- we'll have a- a check-in. I'll see... I'll write you a prescription. I will see you again in three months.

    17. MR

      Please do. All right, everybody, let's give it up for Dr. Kennedy in the house.

    18. RK

      Woo!

    19. MR

      Thank you, thank you, thank you. I love you, Dr. Kennedy.

    20. RK

      Love you, Mel. You're amazing.

    21. MR

      I love doing this at zero cost for everybody because you know what, everyone? When you can find some peace and you can stop laying awake at night staring at the ceiling, spinning those thoughts about stuff that doesn't really matter, you know what you got room for? Inspiration, happiness, your goals, the ability to focus on things that matter to you. Dr. Kennedy, thank you, thank you, thank you. I am sure we will have you back multiple times, and I cannot wait to see the response to this episode. Thank you for sharing it. Thank you for listening to it. Thank you, everybody, for applying this to your life. Please let us know how it's going. If you have more questions for me or Dr. Kennedy, please keep putting them in the comments. Please DM me your videos on Instagram. That's how we're getting all of this texture. Please, uh, comment on YouTube. And in case nobody else tells you, I want to tell you that I love you. I believe in you. And I do this because I not only believe in your ability to create a better life. I know you can do it, and I know you deserve it, and I hope every time you listen to one of these episodes and you do something with it, you start to believe it too. Alrighty, I'll see you in a few days. Oh, one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. (instrumental music)

Episode duration: 1:07:36

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