Why You Feel So Anxious All The Time - Dr Russell Kennedy

1. 0:00 – 0:21

   Intro

   1. RKDr Russell Kennedy0:00

      There's this great saying that says if you abuse, abandon, or neglect a child, the child doesn't stop loving the parent, they stop loving themselves. And I think that's the start of the alarm situation because when we split from ourselves, when we start judging, abandoning, blaming and shaming ourselves as children, that model becomes the way we interact with life. (wind blows)

2. 0:21 – 6:05

   How Your Childhood Influences Your Anxiety

   1. CWChris Williamson0:21

      How did you get into studying anxiety?

   2. RKDr Russell Kennedy0:25

      Well, mostly 'cause I suffered from the damn condition myself for so long. You know, I, I grew up with a father with schizophrenia and bipolar illness, so my childhood was more than a bit chaotic. So it was really about trying to understand what was going on in my own mind because men typically don't understand what's going on. Women are so much better at explaining their emotions. I remember years ago there was this study that was done about, they put men and women in a functional MRI scanner and then they would flash words like compassion, love, that kind of... And in the women's brains, like 14 places would light up, and in the men's brain, only four places would light up. So we don't have the emotional language so much. So when I was younger, I didn't really know what anxiety was until I got into med school and then it was... then it hit me full force.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:12

      What was growing up with a bipolar schizophrenic father like?

   4. RKDr Russell Kennedy1:17

      Well, it was really... It was challenging in a lot of ways but for the first 10 years of my life, he was actually a great dad. You know, he would, you know, teach me how to ride a bike and hit a ball, and he was, uh, an award-winning baseball coach. But it... The problem was that every once in a while he would just lose it and go off and as a child, as a boy, with this guy as my hero, and then to see him up all night for four days and kind of ranting and raving, he was never abusive or violent or anything like that, but it was very destabilizing for me. And I think a lot of my anxiety stemmed from the fact that I've studied this since I've been about 16 years old, like mental illness and... because of my dad. And I saw that there was a heritable component to his schizophrenia and bipolar, so I got just completely freaked out. So what I would do is I would say, okay, if you make it to 25 and you don't show up with schizophrenia, you're probably fine. Then it was 30, then it was 35. So once I got to 35 it's like, okay, I think I miss the gene for that. But I think I developed anxiety because I saw him suffer so much and go to mental hospitals and, and just really, really be in, in bad, bad shape and I just thought, I don't want to be like that. Like I don't want to... I don't want that to be my life.

   5. CWChris Williamson2:30

      Why would seeing your dad in that way create a foundation for anxiety?

   6. RKDr Russell Kennedy2:37

      I think, you know, if you look at the, the neurochemistry of it like we have these prefrontal cortices. So I d- I did a degree in medicine and a degree in neuroscience, so I, I try to blend the neuroscience with the emotional stuff, being a clinician as well. So when you're raised in a stressful environment as a child, there's these cells in our prefrontal cortex, and our prefrontal cortex, you know, is executive function, mem- uh, he- helps our memory. It helps us really understand and formulate the world. And these pyramidal cells don't evolve that well or don't grow or metabolize very well in chronic trauma with kids. What does, unfortunately, get honed into us is these subcortical, these areas below the cortex, below our awareness, like the amygdala, um, it grows fibers that go right through the brain and, and its dendrites go really, really... They get very, very sensitized to any form of norepinephrine, dopamine. Even dopamine which is a positive, you know, everyone thinks it's positive but it really can overwhelm our brains. So I think what happens is that we get this overwhelm when we have trauma as children and instead of, you know, uh, maturing the prefrontal cortex and making us more able to roll with the punches and handle stress, we, we kind of supercharge the, the pr- the subcortical areas, the basal ganglia, the parts of us that kind of are automatic, the parts of us that would sort of fall prey to addiction. That sort of grows in us and the prefrontal cortex doesn't we don't, we don't have the neurological ability to really regulate stress when there's trauma as children. Now, there's more to it than that but it's basically shortening it quite a bit.

   7. CWChris Williamson4:20

      Does that mean then that people who perhaps went through trauma as children would have a greater predisposition to compulsive phone use in later life because they're more sensitive dopaminergically which means that it's going to be easier for apps and technology to trigger that?

   8. RKDr Russell Kennedy4:39

      Yeah, I think any kind of addiction, you know, because it, it does form a bit of... When you're anxious, when you have a tendency towards anxiety, sort of overthinking, so what we do is we escape into our heads and we ruminate and we just keep going there and I think this is sort of jumping ahead a bit but I think we actually store trauma in our bodies as well. So when you're a child and something happens to you that you can't control or is, is terrible for you, you push that down. Freud would call it repression. So we push it down into the subcortical structures, the unconscious structures, and those structures are also involved, specifically the basal ganglia, in movement in our body. So I think we stuff this trauma down into our body and rather than feel it in our body, we go up into our heads and that's another reason why I think trauma in childhood makes us more likely to be a-addicted in adulthood because these old circuits have been revved up for us, these addictive circuits. Rather than going into that place of, you know, calm and peace in our prefrontal cortex, we automatically gravitate to sort of pain relief rather than just allowing what's happening in life to happen. Like people with anxiety compulsively hate uncertainty and they will do anything to avoid uncertainty and that includes worry. So people say, well, worry does nothing. Actually, worry does quite a bit. Worry is a major distractor from this old alarm if you had trauma, especially as a child.

3. 6:05 – 10:30

   The Body’s Role in Anxiety

   1. CWChris Williamson6:05

      Where would the human physiology store anxiety in the body?

   2. RKDr Russell Kennedy6:12

      Yeah, that's a great question.

   3. CWChris Williamson6:12

      What does that mean?

   4. RKDr Russell Kennedy6:14

      It's a great question, you know, and my colleague Gabor Mate talks about this too, you know. It's really hard to divide the mind and the body. Like, it- it's an academic kind of distinction between the two. There's a part of our brain called the insular cortex, and the insular cortex is kind of like the mediator between the mind and the body. So, the mind has an idea, it gets sort of translated into bodily sensations. Those bodily sensations also come up through the insular and get translated into s- into thoughts and processes. So, I believe that when we're young and we have a trauma that's too much for us to bear, that insular cortex records the bodily sensations of that trauma. So for me, in my book, I talk about how I stored my trauma in my solar plexus, and I only found this because I did LSD. You know, there was a point in 2013 where I, you know, I didn't feel like life was worth living anymore. I had to live in a 10-hour panic attack every day. So, a friend of mine took me on a trip through LSD, and on LSD, once all the lights and disorientation stopped, I got this message, and I still don't know where it's from, that my anxiety, what I called my anxiety, was actually a state of alarm that was held in my body from this old trauma of growing up with a schizophrenic father. So, I devoted the book and my own healing into, okay, if this alarm is in my body, how do I bring this out? How do I find it? Because I do believe that that alarm is a version of my younger self. I believe that when we get traumatized as children, part of us stays stuck in that trauma for the rest of our lives, and I think the insular has something to do with that, superior temporal gyrus. I think there's a lot of pre or subcortical circuits that get engaged and reinforced as children. And that body sensation that you feel now when you're anxious, quote-unquote anxious, or I like to call alarmed, is probably the exact same feeling that you had when you were going home from school and you didn't know if your mom was going to be drunk or your dad was going to abuse you or whatever. It's probably the exact same feeling now that you felt back then. And this is where kind of the amygdala comes in too because the amygdala has no sense of time. So, when we record trauma through the amygdala, because the amygdala never forgets and it remembers everything that ever hurt you, so we record that. We don't know if it's in the body, if it's in the mind. It becomes this philosophical argument. So it's, it's kind of a construct that I use with people saying, "Okay, this trauma is stored in your body. Where do you find it?" Some people find it in their throat, other people find it in their chest, or for me it's in my solar plexus. Strangely enough, I see patterns with people, like people had to grow up too fast and look after their family, they feel it across their shoulders. Or women especially who grow up with a narcissistic or overly demanding mother have it in their throat. Like these are little things after dealing with hundreds and hundreds of people with anxiety, I- I see these little alarm patterns with people, and then I believe that alarm pattern is your younger self asking for your attention. And I, you know, Andrew Huberman talks about grief being a motivational state. I believe that anxiety is also a motivational state. It's motivating you to connect with that younger part of you that got traumatized and that trauma never got resolved. But the problem is what we do is we go into our heads and we start worrying and ruminating, which actually gives us more of the problem. So I didn't start healing until I started going, okay, and for a neuroscientist and medical doctor, to start going into your body because it sounds so woo and it sounds so, so out there, but it's really after 30 years of, you know, EMDR, CBT, psychotherapy, it's the only thing that really made a real difference for me is going into my body, as well as using cognitive therapies as well. So you need both, and I see in our society, we- we worship the mind so much that we believe that these, that the mind can heal the mind, and I think Huberman said that as well. We can't use the mind to heal the mind. We need the body to come along, and I think that's, that's the folly of a lot of cognitive therapies, is they believe that if we just change your thinking, you'll change your feeling. And what I like to say is you can't feel your way out of a thinking, or you can't think your way out of a feeling problem.

4. 10:30 – 18:39

   Why is Modern Society Plagued with Anxiety?

   1. CWChris Williamson10:30

      Why do you think the current modern world seems to be plagued with anxiety? Is it concept creep? Are people using the word anxiety to refer to something which isn't anxiety? Have we got a preponderance of this due to detachment from nature, too much time in technology, poor sleep and wake cycles, blah, blah, blah?

   2. RKDr Russell Kennedy10:49

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson10:49

      Like how do you see the contribution to this?

   4. RKDr Russell Kennedy10:52

      All that stuff. I mean, I think, um, I've done a lot of work in developmental psychology with Gordon Neufeld who wrote a book called Hold On To Your Kids with Gabor Mate, and he says that all anxiety is separation anxiety. And I add on to that, and it's mostly separation from yourself, because what I think happens is when we're children, and most of chronic anxiety starts in childhood. Not- not everything is trauma, but it certainly plays a role, and I think there is just more trauma in the world. So I believe that something happens to us as- as children that we can't handle that gets repressed down, as Freud would call it, into our subconscious mind, into these subcortical structures, and as the body is a representation of the unconscious mind, we can find these traumas in our body if we look for them. And I think there is so much separation in the world now. If you look at US politics, it's a great example of us and them mentality, and when we get stressed, when we start secreting norepinephrine and adrenaline, we start looking for certainty, especially if you had trauma as a child, but in general, human beings start looking for certainty. So this us them mentality, if you're not with me, you're against me, really flourishes, which increases the separation, which increases the global sense of anxiety, because all anxiety truly is separation anxiety, and it's mostly separation from yourself.Because, just to take it a little further, I think what happens is when we get traumatized as children, we split from ourselves because we have these parents, and we can't see them as- as at fault because they're looking after us. So, the only person left to blame is yourself. There's this great saying that says, "If you abuse, abandon, or neglect a child, the child doesn't stop loving the parent, they stop loving themselves." And I think that's the start of the alarm situation, because when we split from ourselves, when we start judging, abandoning, blaming and shaming ourselves, what I call JABS, we start taking jabs at ourselves as children. That model becomes the way we interact with life, in general. So, we have this... or you could also call it the inner critic. We have this inner critic that's chronically keeping us off balance and separate from ourselves. And while we're separate from ourselves, that's when anxiety just thrives.

   5. CWChris Williamson13:09

      It seems like... I had Jessica Baum on the show.

   6. RKDr Russell Kennedy13:13

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson13:13

      She wrote Anxiously Attached.

   8. RKDr Russell Kennedy13:14

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson13:14

      Uh, and that was interesting. You know, attachment theory is kind of, uh, trendy at the moment-

   10. RKDr Russell Kennedy13:19

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson13:19

       ... I suppose.

   12. RKDr Russell Kennedy13:20

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson13:20

       Uh, and learning about how patterns that you learn to cope with discomfort as a child, uh, are modeling, perhaps, for, uh, the way that you will cope with that in future. So, when you get into a relationship with somebody, that's not a million miles away from a tight, close personal relationship that you might have had with a parent. And then if you have fears of abandonment, because that may have been the way that you were, uh, made to be quiet as a child, or whatever it might be, uh, th- those will start to come back up. It is beginning, for me, to press over the line away from evidence-based and, like you said before, like into the woo.

   14. RKDr Russell Kennedy14:03

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson14:03

       And it seems like straddling the line between those two is, uh, kind of a delicate one. I- I'm hyper-attuned. Like, my woo radar is so sensitive.

   16. RKDr Russell Kennedy14:15

       Yeah. For sure.

   17. CWChris Williamson14:15

       So, for me to be... I- I- I got that. I understood from Jessica, and I understand why it would be the case from you, but moving it a little bit further forward into, uh, the- the stress or the- the anxiety's held in the shoulders, and it's attached with this, and it's held in the chest, and it's attached with this. That verges closer toward like horoscope stuff for me.

   18. RKDr Russell Kennedy14:35

       Oh, yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson14:36

       And, uh-

   20. RKDr Russell Kennedy14:36

       Oh, for sure.

   21. CWChris Williamson14:38

       That is where, um, I imagine that there'll be some people that go, "Ah, you know, this just, this doesn't seem a little bit evidence-based enough." And yet you're somebody that's gone through whatever, like two, three degrees, three decades of- of learning about this stuff, and this is where you've arrived. Like do you-

   22. RKDr Russell Kennedy14:52

       This is where I come back to, yeah.

   23. CWChris Williamson14:53

       Yeah. Do you-

   24. RKDr Russell Kennedy14:54

       Yeah.

   25. CWChris Williamson14:54

       Do you feel inside of yourself a little bit of a contradiction at all, or- or- or the- the evidence-based m- medical side of you, um, coming into conflict with the- the hol- more holistic side of you?

   26. RKDr Russell Kennedy15:06

       Absolutely. Yeah. And this is, this is part of the whole, you know, separation of mind and body, which is really at the heart of what anxiety really is, is we get this mind/body separation. And, yeah, it's been hard for me, because if you look at neuroscience, and even Joseph LeDoux, who's a, you know, a pioneer in neuroscience, hardcore neuroscience, he wrote this book called Anxious that I love, that I've read five times and still don't understand. But- but basically, he says that, you know, despite these tremendous advances we've made in neuroscience in the last 20 years, it really hasn't moved into the clinical realm very much. Really, psychotherapy, healing, therapy is really this connection between the therapist and the client, patient, whatever you want to call it, and that we really can't explain scientifically. We can go through, you know, prefrontal cortex, pyramidal cells, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis being kind of maybe at the heart of worry, at the heart of like rumination and that kind of stuff, but how does that transpose into clinical help, clinical work? So, I think that's where we're kind of stuck these days, is we- we have this urge, like I was saying just a few minutes ago, we have this urge for certainty. And when we look at stuff that's like evidence-based, what has that really done? Like, I look at it like, what has evidence-based stuff really done for emotional healing? Or what has science really done from... It- it's shown us the pathways, it's shown us the places in the- in the brain that sort of light up with these different things, but it hasn't really translated into actual practical, you know, work to help people heal. So, that's where- that's where I get kind of thrown off balance a little bit is, like, what has science got to do with emotional healing? Not a lot, from what I've found. You know, I've done the- the CBTs, I've done a lot of the- the- the, um, the evidence-based work, and it really didn't do much for me. And I get messages from people every day going, "I did CBT for two years and it didn't..." You know, it- it helps. And I think a lot of the cognitive stuff, what I found with my own healing, is that once I did the inner work, once I did the connection with myself, these cognitive things started to make sense to me as I came out, as I- as I started to heal. But going into healing, I found that it really was this kind of connection I had with my therapist, connection I had with myself, just really- really connecting with myself. And of course, as a medical doctor and neuroscientist, this does sound very woo to me, and it's very uncomfortable for me to go on a big podcast like yours and say that anxiety is held in the body more than the mind, because it- it- it really goes against my- my traditional allopathic medical training. But in my experience with my- my clients, patients, and myself, it's really been the thing that- that's h- held sway and helped me heal is developing this connection with myself, using the alarm sensation in my body to perhaps reverse engineer getting into those unconscious programs that started when I was very young, and being able to change them around a bit. Because trying to use the conscious mind to change these unconscious subcortical basal ganglia programs is virtually impossible. Now, we can use the prefrontal cortex and that can help us move as we're getting through it, but it's not, as I see, a mechanism- a mechanism for healing in and of itself.... so I think we need some sort of somatic approach mixed with the cognitive evidence-based stuff before we really start to heal, or at least that's been the case with me.

5. 18:39 – 31:29

   How to Uproot Decades-Old Trauma

   1. RKDr Russell Kennedy18:39

   2. CWChris Williamson18:39

      That makes sense. One of the things that I've got in the back of my mind is, if we have had these particular pathways laid down for so long, 20, 30, 40, 50 years-

   3. RKDr Russell Kennedy18:51

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson18:51

      ... in some cases, uh, they are so deep that you can't access them consciously. They have been reinforced, you know, that myelin is, is, fuck it, it's down there, right?

   5. RKDr Russell Kennedy19:02

      Absolutely.

   6. CWChris Williamson19:02

      Like, it, it, and, and I think I'm right in saying that you can't ever break existing myelin sheaths. You can only overlow, uh, uh, overlay new thought patterns. Is that right?

   7. RKDr Russell Kennedy19:15

      Yeah. I mean, I think that, that, you know, there's so much about the brain we don't understand, but I think that's true. And I think, you know, using the amygdala as an example, the amygdala remembers everything. Now people will tell me all the time, "As a child, I don't remem- I don't have any childhood memories. I can't remember." And I say to them a lot, I said, "No, you have memories. You're just not able to retrieve them." Because the part of our, our brain that retrieves memories is prefrontal. And if we, if we lose access to that prefrontal cortex, we lose access to the ability to remember. So, one of the ironic things is that I will drag people into their, into their alarm, slowly, and I'll titrate them. So, say someone will have this alarm in their throat. I'll say, "Okay, just close your eyes. You know, ground yourself in your body. Feel your butt in the chair, relax your shoulders, relax your jaw. Now let's go into this feeling. You know? Just bring up a, bring up a trauma from your past. Don't pick the worst trauma of your life, but pick a trauma from your past that perhaps still bothers you. Keep your jaw relaxed, keep your shoulders relaxed, just stay present with that, and in your mind's eye, just see if you can go into the, the is-ness of that feeling. Now, is there a place in your body that kind of lights up, that maybe it's an ache or a pain or there's a, a pressure sensation?" And then I'll get them to find that area of alarm in their body. And then once we find that alarm, for me, like I said, it's in my solar plexus, "Put your hand over it. Kind of breathe into it. Allow it to be there." Because I do believe, and this is where it gets really woo, that that sensation of alarm is your younger self. It is something that-

   8. CWChris Williamson21:02

      What, what do you mean when you say that, when you say it is your younger self?

   9. RKDr Russell Kennedy21:06

      I think there's an aspect of our younger self that gets encoded into our body. Now, maybe that's through the insular cortex, you know, maybe it's through the basal ganglia, the movement system, but I believe there's a part of that trauma that goes into our body and gets held there. And perhaps what happens is there's too much energy for that child to hold it, so it gets repressed into the unconscious mind. And as Bessel van der Kolk talks about in The Body Keeps the Score, the, the mind is, is represented by the body. So, if there's a representation of your body in your unconscious mind, we can use that sensation in your body to kind of reverse engineer and go back one step and find those programs in your unconscious mind. And this is basis of Hakomi, somatic experiencing, that kind of, like, somatic kind of therapy. And I think when we do that, when we see that alarm and we're able to find that younger version of ourselves, like sometimes what I'll do is I'll say, "Do you have a picture of yourself when your parents divorced? Around the age..." And then I'll get them to put that, that picture up behind their mirror and talk to that picture. And this is, again, it's getting really woo, right? So, you talk to that picture and then you look at yourself in the mirror and you talk to yourself in your present day term because that child, because the amygdala has no sense of time, is still stuck there. So, when you show that child that they're not stuck there, you bring them into p- engagement, present day engagement, and then you look at yourself, showing that child that you are actually this 38, 48, 58-year-old person, and then go back to the child, and this is mirror. This is really difficult for people to do, but it really makes a huge difference. It's one of the modalities that I use with my patients that really helps them show that child that they're not stuck back there anymore, because there's part of the amygdala that when we get into alarm or anxiety, that gets transported back to that same place and time that that trauma was occurring.

   10. CWChris Williamson23:01

       Is that what you call the alarm anxiety cycle?

   11. RKDr Russell Kennedy23:03

       E- absolutely. So, what'll happen is, so we'll feel this alarm in our system. Say we get stressed. Like, we're doing okay in general, and then we have a breakup or whatever. So, that alarm will light up in our system. Now, the brain, through this process called interoception, which you probably heard of before, is constantly reading your internal and external environment. So, it reads this alarm that's in our system, and because the alarm is disquieting and painful and uncomfortable, the mind, being a compulsive, meaning-making, make-sense machine, has to do something with that. So, it makes up worries, it makes up these, you know, what-ifs, worries, warnings, all these things that make sense of this alarm. This is mostly subconscious, below your, your level of conscious- and you're just doing it automatically. And then you blame the worries for the pain, but it wasn't the worries. The worries are the byproduct of the pain. The pain is actually this alarm that's been stored in you since you were a child, and then when you, you know, when you think those worries, the alarm gets worse, the alarms gets aggravated, which of course makes the worries worse. And on top of that, we start creating cortisol and epinephrine in our system, norepinephrine in the brain, and that paralyzes the rational parts of our mind. You know, um, Patricia Goldman-Rakic, um, out of Yale University did this study that showed that when we're stressed that we shut off the prefrontal cortex, so we go, we fall back into these emotional subcortical areas. So, if we have an addiction-You know, if we have something that- that is really powerfully emotionally negative that we encoded as a child, we will fall back into that because our prefrontal cortex has been paralyzed by dop- by the catecholamines. Dopamine, norepinephrine, uh, and basically what happens is we fall back into this old state, which I believe is a remnant of our younger self. So, to heal that, we have to go back and find that younger self and show them that they're not back there anymore.

   12. CWChris Williamson25:03

       So, a little while ago, I did something that was like a- a big job and it was, like, I knew that it was- there was a lot of pressure and everything was going great, and then partway through, um, I realized that my blood sugar was dropping, so I'm sat down, I'm having this conversation. My blood sugar's falling through the floor and as I'm doing it, uh, this sort of inner monologue comes up and I've done a good bit of self-work over the last few years, right?

   13. RKDr Russell Kennedy25:27

       Yep.

   14. CWChris Williamson25:27

       So I- I had got myself to a stage where my inner voice is significantly better than it was. Still got a lot of work to do, but significantly better than it was.

   15. RKDr Russell Kennedy25:35

       (laughs) .

   16. CWChris Williamson25:36

       It was pretty- it was pretty toxic, it was pretty nasty.

   17. RKDr Russell Kennedy25:38

       Sure.

   18. CWChris Williamson25:38

       And, uh, I'm partway through this thing and as my mind goes blank because I've run out of bloo- blood sugar, uh, this voice comes out of nowhere and it starts saying, "You were never supposed to be here. You know that you fluked this. You're boring, no one cares about what you've got to say." Uh, "You don't deserve this. Everybody's gonna laugh at you. Nobody likes you. You're gonna be found out. You've always been a fraud. You are a fraud." And I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where are you coming from?" Like, "Who's this?" Uh, and as I'm sat there and this sort of voice is going on in the back of my head, thankfully because I've done, whatever, like, thousands of hours of this stuff, I was able to carry through pretty much on, um... The same way as you can drive and have an argument with your partner at the same time, right?

   19. RKDr Russell Kennedy26:20

       Right.

   20. CWChris Williamson26:20

       Like, the driving doesn't take up that much e- energy.

   21. RKDr Russell Kennedy26:23

       Sure.

   22. CWChris Williamson26:23

       Uh, my performance probably wouldn't have been so good as if I'd been able to be present, but my point being that I was able to keep going and- and it- it literally wouldn't, no one would have even noticed, right? No one in the room even noticed what was going on. Uh, however, in the back of my mind, I had this and I was like... I- I reflected on it a lot. It was really s- a profound, uh, thing to happen to me and it's the first time that it's happened in quite a while. Uh, and I'd convinced myself that I'd got rid of a lot of whatever that is, you know, the voice of a critical teacher, critical parent-

   23. RKDr Russell Kennedy26:51

       Sure.

   24. CWChris Williamson26:51

       ... critical friend, like whoever that was. Um, I'd convinced myself that that didn't exist anymore, and then what I realized was that maybe under situations of intense, uh, pressure, stress, gravity, um, there is a recession receding, um, there is a retreat back into, not something that necessarily feels comfortable, but something that feels familiar. And one of the most familiar things that I think I can remember is having this really negative, critical, toxic, awful inner voice, uh, and I thought, "Oh, it's still there-"

   25. RKDr Russell Kennedy27:34

       Yeah.

   26. CWChris Williamson27:34

       "... sometimes."

   27. RKDr Russell Kennedy27:35

       Yeah. And I think, you know, this is where kind of psychedelics come in too, because, you know, people that have done psychedelics will see that critical inner voice because what psychedelics do is they- they separate the conscious, uh, the- or they- the separation from the conscious of the unconscious is now gone, so the conscious and the unconscious are- are basically... And the separation from us and our environment goes away too. Now, there's an area in your brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. Now, that area is- is bolster- bolstered up by meditation, they found, and it has a mediating influence on the amygdala. So, this is why they think maybe meditation helps. So, I think the work that you've done has kind of maybe- maybe bolstered up this area, anterior cingulate cortex, and that's kind of calmed your amygdala which allowed you to have the curiosity, the luxury of curiosity, because usually when we get stressed like that, we're not curious. We're it, we're in it, you know? And there's another part of our brain called the posterior cingulate cortex that's around the same area that they think may have something to do with self-referential thought. So, when you're saying these negative things about yourself, that may got, uh, been encoded in you long, long ago and the posterior cingulate is part of that default mode network. So, when we go, when our brains aren't foc- actively focused on a task, we fall back into this default mode network and if there's a lot of this negative energy sitting in there that we haven't metabolized or we haven't worked through, it'll come up. So, that's why when we get stressed, we get kicked, you know, in the balls when we- (laughs) when we need it the most, when we need that- that energy the most, we go into those subcortical structures. We fall out of our prefrontal cortex and we fall down into basal ganglia, we fall down- down into the amygdala, these unconscious programs that were put into us when we're children. And if that, if you had significant childhood trauma, that groove, that- that's a 12-lane superhighway that goes right into the negative. Mm-hmm.

   28. CWChris Williamson29:31

       And then, of course, the negative thoughts go and then we do this process called stacking. Um, I- I coined this term called stacking, which is basically when your- when your body's alarmed, when your system is alarmed, you start thinking, "Oh, I've got this tax that- oh, my son's not doing well. Oh, and the money's coming up." Just, like, we stack things because they have the same kind of resonance with how we're feeling. So, it's very- it's very difficult to think in opposition to how your body feels, which is why- why positive psychology is- is a lot of work. Like, it's- it's like if your brain all of a sudden decided that you had to consciously breathe every time. You know, you- you can't just keep up that positive feeling or that positive thinking all the time, because it's exhausting. You- you wouldn't be able to do anything else. So, uh, as- as Huberman says, you know, we can use the body to- to calm the mind and in fact the body is a much better facilitator of calming the mind than the mind is a facilitator of calming the body. So, I think that's where I think a lot of the somatic work is- is going... My wife's a somatic trauma therapist, so we're talking all the time about how do we use the body to kind of bring people back into their prefrontal cortex, to bring them back into present day? And one of the ways we do that is sensation.

   29. RKDr Russell Kennedy30:44

       ... you know, I have this thing where I get people to cross their fingers, ac- across their wrists, across the midline, and then rub their face. Now, it looks very creepy. It looks very creepy.

   30. CWChris Williamson30:52

       (laughs) It looks really weird.
6. 31:29 – 34:29

   The Human Intolerance to Uncertainty

   1. RKDr Russell Kennedy31:30

   2. CWChris Williamson31:31

      Thinking about the cycle that you go through and where it ends up in the mind, wh- what's the reason that we want to explain whatever the problem is? Is this just closing the loop? Is this just that we have an aversion to uncertainty? Is that really what's going on?

   3. RKDr Russell Kennedy31:49

      Absolutely. Yeah, you nailed it. You nailed it. We have ... Human beings have a fundamental dislike of uncertainty. You know, we have this fear bias that we're born with. From an evolutionary perspective, it kept us alive thousands and thousands of years ago, this fear bias. Now unfortunately, we have Stone Age ... You know, we've still have a Stone Age brain in a digital world, so we still react like we would thousands of years ago. So it's a matter of being able to tolerate uncertainty, and that's what a lot of anxiety healing comes from, is being able to tolerate the fact that this is uncertain. And in fact, I use some of Kyle Cesio's work and I say, "This is uncertain, and I love that." You know, if you have a medical test or whatever. "This is uncertainty." So a lot of what worry does is it kind of makes the uncertain a little more certain. So if you have a headache and you think, "Oh, it must be a brain tumor." Now you've taken this sort of global headache sensation, and you've really s- specifically put it into a category that, that makes sense, and then you've, you've lowered the uncertainty somewhat. And this is one of the ... I think this is one of the reasons why we worry so much, is because worry, for that fraction of a second, you know ... And that's all we need for the amygdala is, is that fraction of a second. It provides us with a sense of relief. Now, when we believe that we have a brain tumor, of course the alarm gets worse again, and then we have to redouble our efforts to kind of worry to s- keep us in our head so we avoid feeling that alarm sensation that's stuck in our body. So ... And again, you know, it, it, it's, it's a construct. You know, we can't separate the body from the mind, but it certainly helps a lot of my anxiety patients to realize, "Hey, what if this is in the body? How can we handle this?" Because anxiety and uncertainty basically go together, so when we explain and it makes sense to us, you know ... And this is where the confirmation bias comes from. When it, when we explain something, we're going to explain it in ways we already understand. So if we, if we've been anxious all our lives, we're going to explain the worry in a, in a framework we understand, and it's a familiar friend in a way, worry. So that's one of the hardest things that I have about helping people resolve anxiety, is they look at that hypervigilance, that chronic need for certainty, as protective, so if I take that away from you and I say, "Hey, let's start really looking at how you create uncertainty in your life and how you can, you can embrace that uncertainty, like really make, make the intention to embrace the uncertainty," and al- you know, immediately that helps people feel better. Rather than going into ... So if you have two roads to go, one is embracing the uncertainty and the other is worry, start going into the, you know, embracing uncertainty.

7. 34:29 – 44:12

   Is Anxiety Manifested Differently in Men & Women?

   1. CWChris Williamson34:29

      You mentioned earlier on about some of the potential issues that men have when it comes to understanding and voicing emotions.

   2. RKDr Russell Kennedy34:35

      Right.

   3. CWChris Williamson34:36

      Is there anything interesting or different about the ways that anxiety manifests for men versus women?

   4. RKDr Russell Kennedy34:45

      Yeah, I think that women have much more of an emotional language, so they can, they can get a, a sense of it, like what's happening with them. They have much more of an emotional intelligence in a way. Men, uh, it often shows up in, uh, anger, antagonism, um, annoyance. You know, I have the man, M-A-N, manoyance, uh, mantagonism, uh, manger, uh, mangxiety. You know, so like me when I was, you know, heading into med school and I felt this, you know, depersonalization, derealization, all that kind of stuff, and I was like, "What the (censored) is happening to me?" And the only thing I could go back to is, is just, you know, my breath and, and just kind of trying to center myself as best I could, but it was a losing battle because I was in this, this fight with anxiety. Like I, I had this imposter syndrome as well, like can I get through medical school? Like did they make a mistake when they admitted me to medical school? All that kind of stuff. So it was, it is one of those things that I think that we look at uncertainty and we look at our lives in this framework from our chi- from our childhood, and to, to move away from that is basically what we need to do to heal, but there is that familiarity in that uncertainty that we kind of keep going back to. We're, we're ... In a way, we're addicted to uncertainty and, and we continue to create it. So you see people who pick the same partners over and over again. You know, "My last partner was, you know, m- abusive," or whatever. It's like, why do you keep picking the same person, like the same person, different haircut. Like why is this happening? So ... And I, I find a lot of people get into these intense relationships, and the relationship is so intense at the start because both of them are reactivating their old childhood wounding, you know, and that's why it's so, that's why it's so passionate. So I don't know if I answered your question there. Kind of went off a little bit, but ...

   5. CWChris Williamson36:36

      Uh, I had the director of relationship science from Hinge, Logan Ury, on the show. She was fascinating. And, um, she talked about sparks in relationships, and she mentioned that a lot of the time people kind of look for the spark. Perhaps it's, I don't know, given to us through media, through Disney movies, and stuff like that, or perhaps it's just some archaic Renaissance sense of what romance is supposed to be. Um, and sometimes people have a concern that they don't find a spark with the person that they're with, and she really blew my mind because she says, "People don't understand that some other people are just sparky."Everybody around them feels like that. The checkout cashier feels like that, the mechanic feels like that, the person that serves them the Starbucks feels like that, their partner feels like that, their parents feel like that. They're just able to induce spark in other people. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they are any more or less appropriate for you as a long-term partner. And spark, a lot of the time, I think, comes... can come from conflict, you know. There, there is this belief that passion should rear its head in a number of different ways, and I certainly know that I have a relatively peaceful disposition which has wound up some ex-girlfriends because if something, uh, that they feel like I should be riled up about and, and should kick off about doesn't elicit a response from me, what they see that as is, uh, me not caring enough. Just to kind of round off what you said at the very beginning about the men and women thing, have you got any idea how much of that is restricted by culture, and how much of that is a biological heritable, um, sex split with regards to the fundamental capabilities of men and women? You've mentioned that women seem to have a greater capacity for emotional, like linguistic rationality-

   6. RKDr Russell Kennedy38:25

      Right.

   7. CWChris Williamson38:25

      ... uh, understanding. They're able to do those terms. How much of that... Have you got any idea about whether or not that's something that's embedded within us?

   8. RKDr Russell Kennedy38:32

      It's hard, it... You know, it's really hard to tell. I think men kind of police ourselves when we're younger, you know. You don't cry when you're hurt, you know. And I think that that really starts forming a pattern of behavior, and then you add into that the com- the, the natural competition that men have with each other, which I believe is evolutionary. Like, you, you compete and then the... You know, it used to be the strongest got to mate and procreate the species. Now, I think that it creates this environment among men where they can't talk about their vulnerability, and I think there is a difference between victimhood and vulnerability. And I think men, they kind of get turned off by both, but I think it's... They're, they're more likely to accept someone who's being vulnerable, you know. Like, if I said to my friend, "Hey, you know what? I'm really having a problem with my wife right now. Like, I don't know if we're gonna make it. It's really, it's really hurting me. Like, it's really troubling me." Man, another man will take that 100 times over me going, "Oh, I don't know what's happening. Like, she's not... We're not having sex anymore. We're not..." Like, there is that kind of the difference between victim and vulnerability, and I think that's what we're wrestling with as men right now. Because women are saying, "We want our men to be more vulnerable." It's like, "Well, do you?" You know, you look at, you know, Rollo Tomassi's work and that kind of thing about how you don't show vulnerability to your, to your wife. You don't show vulnerability to your girlfriend. And it really is that fine line, that dance between, okay, how much of this is vulnerable and how much of it is victim. Because I think victim turns everybody off. And, and we're, we're vulnerable is kind of like, okay, we can kind of access that. So I think men, um, just don't know how to do either, really. We don't know how to be vulnerable because the whole thing gets fired into the same trashcan of like, no, I can't show weakness, because men see sharing emotions as weakness. And I know now, now... I'm 62 now. I'll be 62 in a, a few days. And it's like, I'm really able to tell my male friends, "Hey, you know what? I love you." You know, "You've been great for me." You know, "I love what you... I love the influence you have in my life." When I was 30, there's no way I could have done that, you know. And I think, I don't know what the change is. Uh, as we get older, I think we just start seeing the sort of kind of BS competitive mentality that we have with other men, and we're already struggling as men. We're already kind of second class citizens in the world right now, the way the pendulum is swinging, you know. And we look at, you know, mass shooters are men, rapists are men. Like, you know, um, the patriarchy, all this kind of stuff. And I think in general, you know, we're all suffering. I mean, everyone's suffering. Men, women, we're all suffering. And I think men just assume that everyone else is suffering and just like, "Well, I gotta suck it up. This is the way I've been conditioned." Um, "I don't have the emotional language to be able to express this in a way that's gonna get me the reaction that I want." And a lot of times, like when you... when I... Because a lot of my male friends through the years have always kind of come to me. I'm kind of like the guy on the road trips that everybody comes to when they're having problems with their wives or their girlfriends. And it's hard for them to share because they don't have the language for it. They know the emotion is in them. And I try and say, "Well, can you just get in touch with that emotion? Can you feel that emotion in your body and allow it to be there, and allow it to process rather than going into our heads?" Because if you look at some of the studies, you know, men are much more likely to kill themselves. They're much more likely to use alcohol. They're much more likely to, to become violent. And I think that's all sort of, you know, pushing off the energy of just this angst that we have that we can't relate with each other. And it's really, can we develop this, this relationship with each other that it's like, okay, we're all suffering right now. We're all... And in a way, I look at the, the, the sort of the, the backlash against men as a way that we can use to kind of come together in a way, and can you find this vulnerability in you, and can you be able to share it? Because, you know, Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote this book called How Emotions Are Made, and she talks about, you know, just how men and women fundamentally don't understand emotion, and how men just kind of... they don't have the emotion words. And there's also this, uh, evidence that the more emotion words you know, um, the more emotionally intelligent you become. And men typically aren't that great at emotion words, you know. We have like the seven basic emotions, and that's kind of what we stick with because I think we've been policed, like I said...... by other men for our whole lives. There is a certain code of conduct that you, you have as a male, and, and being vulnerable or sharing really isn't in that code of conduct. The other thing, the last thing I'll, I'll put into this is, you know, it's really frowned upon for men to have tears. And one of the things that Gordon Neufeld, my developmental psychology guru, talks about is like tears are adaptive. Tears help the brain resolve issues that you can't resolve. So, if you're getting a divorce or if your pets just died or whatever, you can't change that. Like you, there's, there's things you can't change. So, what women do is they cry and it changes the brain, brain-derived, um, growth factor. It creates all these ways that we can resolve it. But men can't. We, we shut off our ability to cry, which basically shuts off our ability to manage, you know, big emotions, to manage big energy, and then it gets shoved into alcohol abuse, porn, um, you know, ex- violence, you know? That's the way... It's gotta go somewhere. The energy's gotta go somewhere.

8. 44:12 – 51:14

   How Many People Misdiagnose Anxiety?

   1. RKDr Russell Kennedy44:13

   2. CWChris Williamson44:14

      How many people, potentially especially men, but people overall, do you think are chronically anxious and are giving it a different term?

   3. RKDr Russell Kennedy44:25

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson44:26

      Uh, saying, "I'm always stressed all the time," or, "I'm always tired all the time," or, "I'm always angry or frustrated all the time." Um, how much of that do you think is that and how much of that do you think could be explained by anxiety?

   5. RKDr Russell Kennedy44:39

      Well, I mean, ani- I love to use the term alarm rather than anxiety because that's what I... I think that's what it is. It's a state of alarm in our system, and the anxiety is just the byproduct. The anxiety is just our mind's way of kind of taking this alarm through interoception and going, "I'm gonna make sense of this alarm by making it worry about it." So, I think there's... You know, we all have anxiety. Like, anxiety is just a part of, of life in general. But when you have chronic anxiety, when you're chronically worried, when your amygdala is chronically firing, it creates a lot of problems because you will start seeing the world through the eyes of threat, because that's what it does. Like, when you create epinephrine and cortisol in your system, your brain, from an evolutionary perspective, starts to preferentially look for threat. And if there's no threat in your environment, if you're just lying there with your covers tucked up to your chin and there's no threat in your environment, you will make one up, and that's where worry... And you, I, I heard you talk about this in, in one of your podcasts about, you know, your episodes of depression, you know? Where you just s- you can't even get to the shower. I've been there. I know exactly what that feels like. And that paralysis, you know, it comes from just not being able to metabolize typically old trauma. Not that everything is childhood trauma, but, you know, most, 90% of the people that I see, their anxiety results from childhood trauma. So, it's being able to understand that, being able to connect with yourself rather than split with yourself, and just understand how the brain and the body work to be able to kind of metabolize some of that trauma. Allow the uncertainty, embrace the uncertainty, allow it to be there, breathe through it. You know, um, Huberman's thing about the physiological sigh, you know? Just the two sniffs in (sniffs) and then long slow breath out. Now, with my anxiety peeps, this is what I do with them. I, I get them to do it three times because there's the alveoli that Huberman explained really beautifully, uh, about the size of a tennis court if you stretched out the, the surface area of the lungs. Now, what I get them to do, because classically with anxiety what people do is they start slowly, slowly, slowly breathing shallower and shallower and shallower, and that sends a message up to your brainstem like, "Hey, we're in danger." So, what I do with people is I take, get them to take three big sniffs in like (sniffs) and then hold it at the top, three to five seconds, and then close your teeth (hisses) and breathe out. And while you make that hissing sound through your teeth, you, you just imagine like an overinflated tire just kind of collapsing again. And I do this for people that have white co- coat syndrome with blood pressure, you know? I walk up to them, I take their blood pressure. It's sky-high because the doctor's taking their blood pressure. I do a few rounds of this and their blood pressure comes down like sometimes 50 or 60 points. So, it really is something that I've added on to the physiological side. So, three, three breaths in through your nose (sniffs) really deep, opens up the alveoli, and then you, you almost load the CO₂ by holding your breath, and then you blow it out (hisses) . And that, if I do that too many times, my- I'll start zoning out 'cause this, this is what I use to kind of calm myself, but it really, really works. Like, it's really, really helpful. And also, it gives people a sense there's something they can do, you know? There... Because the thing about anxiety is you never know when it's going to end. I remember in 2013 when I ruptured my left Achilles tendon and I was suicidal 'cause I was in, I was in a 12-hour panic attack every day, like every single day. And I thought... And this is where my friend took me on the LSD trip 'cause I was just in the-

   6. CWChris Williamson48:22

      Hang on, you went on an LSD trip whilst you were still in your moon boot from a ruptured Achilles?

   7. RKDr Russell Kennedy48:26

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson48:27

      (laughs) Well-

   9. RKDr Russell Kennedy48:29

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson48:29

       So, I ruptured mine two years ago, but I didn't, I didn't take a ton of psychedelics and lie on the couch. And maybe I should have done that. The, the recovery would have gone quicker.

   11. RKDr Russell Kennedy48:36

       Well, I'm not... See, here's the thing. Like people say, "Do you, do you need to take psychedelics to heal?" It's like, no. You know, actually with anxiety, I think psychedelics i- on some level are contraindicated because anxiety is about trying to maintain control of your environment, right? And then as soon as you take psilocybin, ayahuasca, LSD, um, any of this, any of the, uh, psychedelics, you're blown apart, you know? So, it took me about two years to recover from ayahuasca. So, from 2013 to 2015, I was getting up every day at like 1:00 in the afternoon, barely eating. I lost like 30 (thirty) pounds. Like, I'm normally about 180 if I'm in fighting shape, and I went down to 153.... you know, and it's just, you know, just the way that your, your body can work against you if you're-

   12. CWChris Williamson49:22

       Were you struggling... What, what was going on there? Were you struggling to integrate? What was happening?

   13. RKDr Russell Kennedy49:25

       Yes. Yes. And, and my anxiety actually got worse, but I had this gift of saying, "Okay. Start working on this, you know, this sense of alarm in your body. Start working on this place in your solar plexus." And, and slowly over the course of time, I started realizing that that place in my solar plexus was the, the child in me, was the boy in me that didn't get seen, heard, loved, and protected like he needed. So, you know, to go into the woo atmosphere a little bit is like I had to see, hear, love, and protect that child, you know, that was watching his dad be taken away to the mental hospital. Like I had to find him. And that's really... that really began my healing journey. And I think that, that, that's really understated because we, we use the mind so much in psychotherapy and that kind of thing. We believe the mind can heal the mind, and it can to some extent, but you also need this somatic focus, and you also need this focus on yourself, especially if you had trauma as a kid because you separate. As I was saying earlier, you separate from your own self. And that's all sep- all anxiety is separation anxiety, so we separate from ourselves and that's what creates the alarm. So to, to, to relieve the alarm, what we need to do is reconnect with ourselves. That makes perfect sense. And Bessel van der Kolk s- talks about that too. You know, he says, you know, "We're not teaching people how to get rid of their anxiety. We're basically teaching you how to acclimatize to that sensation so that you don't relentlessly and compulsively add thoughts to it." Because then you get caught in that alarm anxiety cycle that you can't get out of because you can't see. And I love the saying, "You can't see the label from inside the bottle," 'cause that's exactly what it is. When you're anxious, your prefrontal cortex, your ability to kind of be curious and see is gone, so all... You are the anxiety. And people who have anxiety know exactly what I'm talking about.

9. 51:14 – 1:06:42

   Things to Do to Begin Healing

   1. RKDr Russell Kennedy51:14

   2. CWChris Williamson51:14

      I understand what we're talking about here to do with the state changes that we could go through, thinking about how it feels within the body, maybe doing some sort of breath work, perhaps getting outside into nature, some fresh sunlight into the eyes, some fresh air, looking up through trees at chaotic patterns, you know, a bunch of-

   3. RKDr Russell Kennedy51:30

      Yep.

   4. CWChris Williamson51:31

      ... uh, rejuvenative practices that may be able to help people to get out of what it is they're doing. When it comes to going from state to trait over time, when it comes to trying to make a real lasting impact to ingrained anxious patterns, what moves the needle the most in your experience?

   5. RKDr Russell Kennedy51:51

      I think a combination of somatic therapy and probably internal family systems work. You know, parts work.

   6. CWChris Williamson51:58

      You're gonna have to explain what both of those things mean.

   7. RKDr Russell Kennedy52:00

      Okay. So, somatic experiencing is, is a, uh, a mode of therapy, uh, invented by Dr. Peter Levine, and it's basically going into the body, finding the source of trauma and seeing if you can localize it in the body. Like I said, for me, it's in my solar plexus. Making a, uh, a connection with that part of the body, because again, as the body is a reference of the unconscious mind, if the unconscious traumas are stored there, it manifests in a certain part of the body, and we can use that part of the body to kind of reverse engineer and get back into those unconscious programs, the unconscious programs that are running the anxiety in the first place. So, that's one thing. The other thing is, is called pa- parts work, internal family systems. It's a therapy, uh, that, that really takes your background and says, "Okay." So, for me, uh, when I was in grade three, I was bullied quite a bit in grade three. So, there's part of me, there's a bullied part in me, and then there's a part of me that protects that bully part, and it protects that bully part by being hypervigilant, by worrying, by trying to control my environment. So, internal family systems work says, "Okay. Can I ta-" And this is getting woo, I realize it, but it makes a difference. It really has helped me and it's helped so many people. But it's like, can I talk to the part that's protecting the bully part? This is where it gets a little complex. But really what, what we're doing is we're, we're d- dicing down into where is the trauma really? Like where is this trauma that's being held in our system? And we can divide it up into like the bully part, the part, the, the part that was ignored, the part that wasn't protected. You know, I see women who were abused by a family member and their mother didn't believe them. You know? So, all these parts start coming up and then when we use the body as a way of kind of tracking back into the root cause of the unconscious mind rather than just talking to it, it's kind of like talking to someone through, through a door. You know, they can generally get your tone of voice. They know roughly what you're talking about, but you're not making any real changes. So, I believe a combination of somatic therapy, uh, internal family systems therapy, that's what's really helped me a lot. And of course, I mean, the psychedelics helped me understand the root cause of where my anxiety came from in the first place, which is the state of alarm that's held in my body that I call background alarm because it's alarm that's not resolved that comes from your background. And until we resolve that engine that's creating the anxiety in the first place through interoception, we don't... We, we can, we can cope, but we don't heal, and that's why some of my posts are with like cognitive therapies. It'll help you cope, absolutely. And, and, and I'm a big fan of cognitive therapies in a lot of ways, but unless you go back in, unless you make friends with that part of you that was bullied or abused or abandoned when you were a child, and this is where it gets woo, I agree, but again, what has, what has science really given us in the therapeutic model that's made a big difference? Not a lot. So, I'm, I'm straddling that. As you said earlier, I'm straddling this kind of, you know, neuroscience medicine thing with this kind of woo, okay, healing comes from this interpersonal connection.... and it's been that way for 50 years. Real healing comes from your interpersonal connection with your therapist and your family and learning how to connect with yourself because if you can't connect with yourself, if you're split from yourself, your relationships are always going to be transactional. I've been married three times. You know, I wanted to say this earlier on. I've been married three times. The last time, Cynthia, who's a somatic trauma therapist, um, there wasn't a whole lot of sparks at the front. There wasn't a whole lot of, "Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god," um, but there was this sense of just this, "This is the right person for me." Like, this is really... And I'm not sure if I was just exhausted because I was like 50 at the time or whatever, but it's just like, "This, this is the right person for me." And we get into this environment where it's like, "Oh," because my previous relationships have all been like, "Oh my god. This is amazing," and, and the whole, uh, cascade of, of oxytocin and all that kind of stuff, it just, it just numbs your brain not to see there's a lot of red flags here, you know? And this is, this isn't a place that you really want to go. So, this has been the most comfortable, rewarding relationship I've ever been in, and I think that comes from just knowing myself and knowing, yes, the, the, the, the women who are a little bit off balance, there's a, a real... I have a real draw to those women. Absolutely. Because I want to heal them or fix them or whatever I want to do. But I also know now, using my prefrontal cortex, that's probably not the best thing. Y- you know, if you're out for dinner with someone on a, on like a Bumble date or whatever it is, and they drink a bottle of wine at dinner, probably a red flag, but because she's so pretty, I'm just going to ignore that. Like, I just, I'm just gonna let it go by. So-

   8. CWChris Williamson56:48

      The sparks can hide an awful lot of-

   9. RKDr Russell Kennedy56:50

      Oh.

   10. CWChris Williamson56:51

       ... uh, discontent and, and problems below that.

   11. RKDr Russell Kennedy56:54

       Without a doubt. And I think that's true with men. I think, I, I... Men, I think, we are much more susceptible to fall into that addiction habit. Women, because they have that language reference, because they're able to talk to, talk to their friends about issues, they have a bit of a, a valve release. They have a bit... But we don't, as men, typically. So, we have to find our own way and we're also trained to be, you know, the masters of our own destiny. We don't share our, our problems. And I think that that just builds up and builds up and builds up, and unless we develop the emotional language and the ability, mostly, just to connect with that boy who didn't have a father or was abused by a father or had a mother that was inundating, you know, just connecting with that child, going back and finding him. As woo as that sounds, it's really been the critical feature in my own healing, coming from a medical doctor and neuroscientist. Yeah. I mean, I've used medicine and neuroscience as much as I can, but it really comes down to how much of a connection can you make with yourself, and specifically, that younger version of yourself, 'cause he is still in there. She is still in there. And, and I think one of the reasons why anxiety is such a motivational state is because he or she, the child in you, is like, "Hey, we want attention, and what we're gonna do is we're gonna force alarm through your system until you get the message." Unfortunately, men often don't get the message and they live their whole lives in this quiet desperation.

   12. CWChris Williamson58:15

       For all that I can have my concerns about woo and stuff like that-

   13. RKDr Russell Kennedy58:19

       Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson58:19

       ... one of the most recent trips I took on psilocybin, which was just a mild dose, nothing crazy-

   15. RKDr Russell Kennedy58:24

       Sure.

   16. CWChris Williamson58:25

       ... uh, maybe halfway through, something like that, uh, I had this vision of myself as a child. And I had a, a bit of a rough childhood with bullying in school and feeling lonely. I was an only child as well, so I was kind of socially outcast and, and, and, and isolated, uh, and sort of looked at this child as myself and realized probably... I, I'd rationally realized it and logically realized it before, but for the first time ever felt it emotionally, that that child deserved sympathy, that I felt sorry for that child. I felt proud of the fact that he'd been able to go through the things that he'd gone through. I felt, um, like I wanted to protect him, like I should be proud of him, uh, and, and mostly like he deserved sympathy. Whereas previously, I'd felt shame or embarrassment about the fact that I'd... uh, even though you don't choose the things that you go through as a child-

   17. RKDr Russell Kennedy59:15

       Right.

   18. CWChris Williamson59:15

       ... um, maybe there was shame around the fact that I know that other people had worse things happen to them just than like, a lot of bullying.

   19. RKDr Russell Kennedy59:21

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson59:22

       You know, I wasn't sexually abused by a parent.

   21. RKDr Russell Kennedy59:25

       Yep.

   22. CWChris Williamson59:25

       Like, what have I got to whine about? I think that's another part of the male coping strategy that-

   23. RKDr Russell Kennedy59:29

       Yep.

   24. CWChris Williamson59:29

       ... that we're so averse... Some of us are so averse to a victim mentality, that we will bear more responsibility than we need to a lot of the time. Uh, and yeah, I looked at this version of myself sat in front of the, the drawers in my old bedroom back in Newcastle, and I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, like, "I should really, really feel sorry for you." Like if I knew a child that was going through that now-

   25. RKDr Russell Kennedy59:54

       Mm-hmm.

   26. CWChris Williamson59:54

       ... I'd go up to them and I'd say, "Come here." Like, I'd want to give them a hug, I'd want to tell them they were awesome, I'd want them to feel secure and safe and, and like they belong and like they're competent and capable. Uh, and that was the first time that I'd ever felt that. So-

   27. RKDr Russell Kennedy1:00:06

       Mm-hmm.

   28. CWChris Williamson1:00:06

       ... you know, for all that my woo radar is concerned about-

   29. RKDr Russell Kennedy1:00:10

       Yeah.

   30. CWChris Williamson1:00:10

       ... about that, I, and I, I also agree with you that it seems like in a... Uh, BetterHelp are one of the sponsors of this show, I think that the therapy that they do is fantastic and, uh, eh, eh, almost everybody could benefit from working with a licensed professional counselor. And yet, there seems to be an upper bound with some of the strategies that people go through. You know, CBT, I had Donald Robertson on, this stoicism and CBT guy who's phenomenal, um, and, and CBT, really, really successful at, at, uh, dealing with stuff. But it still does feel like there is maybe a little bit of a ceiling that people can, c- uh, w- won't break through, and I wonder whether, um, you know, a, a combination of a more holistic, um, internal family systems approach, the somatic stuff, uh, to open yourself up. Uh, I mean, when you think about what you're doing with, uh, MDMA psychotherapy-
10. 1:06:42 – 1:08:19

    Where to Find Dr Kennedy

    1. CWChris Williamson1:06:42

       think that you've got a- a fantastic, um, demeanor about you that's sort of clinical with the- the holistic. I- I very, very much appreciate it. I love how peaceful you are as well. Uh, wh- where should people go if they want to check out your YouTube and- and the other stuff that you do online? Where should they head?

    2. RKDr Russell Kennedy1:06:56

       The Anxiety MD, like that's all my... that's my website, that's, uh, my Instagram. The Anx- not The Anxiety Doctor, The Anxiety MD, and that's the easiest, easiest way to find me. And then my book is on Amazon. It's called AnxietyRx. It's, uh, it's funny, you know, this book, uh, took two years to sell 10,000 copies, and in the last eight weeks, it sold 15,000 copies. So it's really starting to get... So I really appreciate, Chris, I can't tell you how much I appreciate being on your show and being able to expand my work because my- my goal is to have people not have to suffer with anxiety the way I did for 30 years. That's my goal. And- and I- and I take a bit of what happened with my dad and I take that into my own life because if I can take that pain that I suffered with him and sublimate that and translate that into something that's positive for everyone, that's really what I want to do. I really want to get this message out to people that a combination of somatic, maybe a little woo, and cognitive therapy is really what finally gets you over the hill or past that ceiling, as you say. So, thanks again.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:07:57

       Russell, I really appreciate you. Thanks, mate.

    4. RKDr Russell Kennedy1:07:59

       Thanks.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:08:00

       What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks, and don't forget to subscribe. Peace.

Episode duration: 1:08:19