Why You Wake Up Anxious For No Reason - Dr Russell Kennedy

Chris Williamson 0:00 Why is anxiety so common in the modern world? Of all of the different emotions, even all-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 0:06 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 0:06 ... of the negative ones, why does this seem to be the one that people are zeroing in on?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 0:10 I think it's uncertainty. You know, w- we've all, we've grown, our, our, our, our species has grown in uncertainty, but now we're so distracted by our phones. The, the wherewithal we, we would have used to be able to deal with the uncertainty in the past, all our, our cache is full. We don't have a whole lot of extra room. So when ex- uncertainty comes up, and anxiety can sometimes be described as uncertainty intolerance because so many of us as children, if you had trauma, if you had wounding, if you had stuff that was unrepaired, that uncertainty becomes unbearable. So rather than just sort of sit in uncertainty, we (laughs) , we worry about it.

Chris Williamson 0:49 Talk to me about why uncertainty is a fuel, a potent fuel for anxiety.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 0:56 Well, I think there is a lot of uncertainty in our childhoods, especially with my dad. Like, I grew up with a dad who had schizophrenia and bipolar, and he was never abusive or violent, but he would lose his mind, and for a young boy and a young teenager, seeing your father lose his mind ... And my dad was the one of the two of us that was really kind of loving and connected when he wasn't psychotic.

Chris Williamson 1:21 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 1:21 You know, my little joke is my mother was neurotic and my father was psychotic, so my own psyche didn't stand much of a chance, right? So, I think it's just understanding that, um, you know, u- uncertainty is something that we don't tolerate well as, as people, especially if you had a lot of uncertainty in your childhood.

Chris Williamson 1:39 Hmm. I'm trying to draw the link between what anxiety is-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 1:46 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:46 ... uh, what, what, what its function is, and uncertainty. Can you try and sort of fold these things together for me?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 1:52 Yeah, sure. Well, I think uns- uh, anxiety isn't one thing. It's actually two things, and I talk about this in my book. It's basically the state of alarm that's held in your body and this worrisome, the warnings, what-ifs, worst-case scenario your mind comes up with. So, each one energizes the other in something I call the alarm anxiety cycle. So, the short version is you had a trauma that's too much for you to bear as a child. It got pushed into your unconscious mind, and because the body is a representation of the unconscious mind, the body keeps the score, and that trauma gets stored in your body. And it sort of has this rrr, rrr nature of it, and through this process called interoception, the brain is always reading the body. So, if the brain reads this sense of alarm, it's not gonna make up stories about cookies and picnics. It's gonna make up stories that are your worst fears. And as Goggins says, you know, your mind has a tactical advantage over you. So when you get this alarm and something triggers you in your internal or external environment, you're likely to go back into this worst-case scenario thing and to try to make sense of it. I think people worry because what worry does, in my opinion, is it makes the uncertain appear more certain. Now that certainty can be abhorrent. We don't want that certainty, but in our brains, w- we get that little dopamine hit from, "Oh, I'm on the right track. This makes sense. If my daughter doesn't come home, oh, did she get hit by a car?" That makes sense in your brain. You get a little shot of dopamine.

Chris Williamson 3:19 Okay. So you're-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 3:20 So worry becomes addictive.

Chris Williamson 3:21 ... you're collapsing the potential options of what could have happened by coming up with small windows of potential certainty in your mind.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 3:33 That, that are completely consistent with, with what you've been scared of in the past.

Chris Williamson 3:38 That's interesting. There's a ChatGPT screenshot. I follow a few, uh, ChatGPT Instagram accounts. These are people getting interesting insights from, uh, ChatGPT. Uh, this one was, "Give me one truly deep novel out of distribution and mind-blowingly simple insight about humans that only very few or none of us are wa- are aware of. It cannot be generic, vague, be flashy, or slop corporate stuff." That's a pretty good prompt.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 4:04 Sure.

Chris Williamson 4:04 As prompt engineering goes, that's pretty good.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 4:06 Sure.

Chris Williamson 4:07 "Humans never genuinely pursue happiness. They only pursue relief from uncertainty. Happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct whenever uncertainty briefly disappears." I haven't been able to stop thinking about that. It's so funny that you said uncertainty is the, is one of the key drivers. I haven't been able to stop thinking about that.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 4:24 Because what was the uncertainty in your childhood? You know, you were bullied. That was one. So, when we go back to that place, the thing is, the amygdala in our brains has no sense of time. So, when we hear someone being bullied, we may go into this bodily state that was the same as the bodily state we had when we were eight years old and we were being bullied. And then that alarm comes up in our system, paralyzes our prefrontal cortex, so we start thinking emotionally rather than rationally. So not only do we make more worries (laughs) when we're lit up, but the rational part of our brain that would tell you, "Hey, those worries, they're never gonna happen," that gets shut off. So we get double-whammied. So the thing about uncertainty there, I think, is just that uncertainty is one of those things that, that triggers us emotionally, and if you didn't get repair when you were younger-

Chris Williamson 5:14 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 5:14 ... so if you're in an environment where your parents fight or whatever and they come back and they say, "You know, Mom and Dad had a fight. It just happens that way," the, their children are probably gonna have a better, more resilient, and more capable nervous system than children that don't have any trauma, that don't have any wounding. It's not so much the trauma. It's the fact that it wasn't repaired, and if it's repaired, the child learns, "Oh, shit can go down in the hood, but I'm still okay."

Chris Williamson 5:39 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 5:39 Right? My nervous system is still okay.

Chris Williamson 5:41 Yeah, so that sounds a lot like fear of abandonment-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 5:45 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 5:45 ... in, in one form or another.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 5:48 Yeah, and I think, you know, looking also at you when, when I've listened to you talk many times and you have this, um, this people-pleasing thing for women, the white knight syndrome, right? And I think that comes from a very deep-rooted sense of abandonment, fear of abandonment.... because what we try and do, and I think what people-pleasing comes from as children is, we don't get our needs met by our parents. Our parents, for some reason, they're busy with other stuff, they have their own issues. My dad was severely mentally ill. So, we find a way to get our needs met by getting our parents' need met- needs met. So, if I meet my parent need and they throw me some crumbs, then I get this sort of imbued sense of, "Oh, you know, I am worthwhile." But it- it comes at a cost, it comes at a real cost. So, we start learning how to read our parents really, really well, and that translates to reading other people really well. So, if they're not doing well, neither are we. So, we- we're so afraid of them leaving us that we try to make them feel better. And in trying to make them feel better, we're actually trying to make ourselves feel better, but it's a loop that never closes.

Chris Williamson 6:53 Yeah, I certainly think that if you've grown up in an environment where direct communication about emotions wasn't particularly common-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 7:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 7:03 ... if people didn't say, "That thing made me feel X," if they sort of gesture toward it with shadow sentences or passive aggression or- or s- sternness or- or by storming out of a room or something like that, um ... Or actually, not even storming out of a room, because that would probably be too much of a- a- a plain signal of what's going on, "Oh, that's anger." It's always a second or third order sentence that's supposed to get you toward the thing. A lot of people will become attuned to, "Okay, I know that this thing is what was said, but what does that really mean? What does that thing with that body language, where they turned to the side, and that deep breath in before they spoke, and that side-eye thing..." So, this level of, um, obsession over micro-movements can cause people to be, yeah, uh, very detail-oriented, very focused, very empathetic. You know, because you notice in someone their, uh, attempt to hide something that they're struggling to get out. It's like, "Dude, you're not ... you don't seem ... y- you don't seem too good today. Is there anything up?" "No, no, no, I'm good." It's like, "Hey, man, like, look, you can talk to me. Like, I- I can tell that there's something wrong." "All right, yeah, you know, me and the girlfriend have been whatever." Um, uh, but on the flip side of that, the, uh, smoke alarm principle means that you're going to misdetect things, a lot of them, "Well, why was there no kiss-"

Dr. Russell Kennedy 8:27 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 8:27 "... at the end of that text? What does the no kiss at the end of that text mean? Oh, it's been this long since they replied," or, "I- I- I noticed that they- they- they didn't hug me in the same way that they used to. That was a shorter hug or a longer hug, or, you know, whether maybe this means that some catastrophe is going to occur." So, you tune up that level of attention, uh, that you pay because that was the way that you learned to interpret signals as a child. So, I can- I can totally see how that would be the case. And then if you fold that in with, you know, an anxious parent or a fragile parent or somebody that needs looking after or a distant parent, what you end up getting is a situation where you are overly receptive to- overly receptive to emotions, even ones that aren't there in other people, and then you internalize the lesson, "I'm not okay if you're not okay, that your emotions are my responsibility, and that I need to subjugate myself. I- I can't be me. I can't be sad, I can't be angry, I can't be anything, because if I am anything that isn't okay, that makes you not okay. And if you're not okay, that's a big problem because you can't handle it." And, uh, it's-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 9:31 If you're not okay, I'm not okay. That's the child.

Chris Williamson 9:33 It's the most- it's the most common pattern.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 9:35 And it becomes a pattern, too. And- and there's that Freudian repetition compulsion as well. So, what was familiar to you in your childhood, human beings equate familiar- familiarity with security. So, what was familiar to you in childhood, you will unconsciously reproduce in your adulthood. So, I would see this when I was a family doctor. I would see people who had alcoholic parents pick (laughs) alcoholic partners, and they knew consciously-

Chris Williamson 9:59 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 10:00 ... "What am I doing? What am I doing?" I had this one woman who was ... I- I write about it in the book. She's s- really brilliantly attractive and had all this attention from men, but she would only pick the abusive alcoholics. So ... And then she would come in and she would say, "I did it again. I picked another one." And it just, that- that repetition compulsion, I think, really runs our lives, e- especially if you grow up in- in uncertainty, you know? You- you look for certainty, you look for safety, and that feeling of alarm that's in your system, the confirmation bias that your brain has-

Chris Williamson 10:34 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 10:34 ... it's always looking for a reason. And it will always find one.

Chris Williamson 10:37 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 10:37 Like, Brené Brown says that, like, "Don't go looking through the world for reasons why you don't belong, 'cause you'll always find them."

Chris Williamson 10:44 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 10:45 What are some ways that uncertainty might show up in people's lives that they might not notice it straight away? You know, you-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 10:53 Yep.

Chris Williamson 10:53 ... uncertainty with, "My child was an hour late getting home from school."

Dr. Russell Kennedy 10:58 Uh-huh.

Chris Williamson 10:58 Like, that's kind of a- a- a- maybe an obvious one. What are some of the- the less obvious ways that uncertainty can creep in and could sort of chip away at that anxiety response?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 11:07 I think hypervigilance, hypervigilance in women and irritability in men. I see s-

Chris Williamson 11:13 Explain those- explain those two terms for me.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 11:14 So- so, hypervigilance is what c- all the possible permutations. "What could happen? What could happen? This could happen." More of a female response than a male response, but there's both. So, women tend to start looking at all the different possibilities. Men tend to, and this is a gross generalization, they tend to get activated. And often with men, anxiety, uncertainty, intolerance shows up as irritability. And because irritability is so much more accepted in our society than anger or rage, that becomes the path of least resistance for a lot of men, is they just become these irritable- irritable people. And I s- hear that from wives all the time of the guys that I work with who are anxious, like, "He's always cranky. He's always irritable."

Chris Williamson 12:01 Hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 12:01 And it's like, well, that's his pathway out. That's his way of trying to discharge energy out.And the same with blame, and I think one of the reasons why our society is suffering so much these days is because blame actually feels good. If you look at the neuroscience of blame, you're taking yourself out of the default mode network, this sort of constant, err, err, you know, negative self-appraisal, negative self-evaluation-

Chris Williamson 12:25 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 12:25 ... and you're putting it out onto somebody else. And when you do that, your amygdala drops i- in energy, your, uh, HPA axis drops, you just... your cortisol drops, you just feel better. And then so you get this thing in the States where the Democrats hate the Republicans and both go back and forth, but it feels better than just staying in your own default mode network, which is likely lit up by the uncertainty.

Chris Williamson 12:49 Mm. Uh, two things (clears throat) th- that makes me think of. First off, I found out from Scott Barry Kaufman that Seligman's learned helplessness theory hasn't replicated.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 13:01 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 13:01 It's been replication crisis-ed. So f- for the people who aren't aware, Martin Seligman, uh, either analyzed or actually conducted experiments where they shocked dogs, uh, in cages, and over a period of time, when the dogs realized that they couldn't do anything about it, uh, they just curled up in the corner and allowed the shocks to be there even though in future, they were able to do things that could stop it from happening. So, they had this sort of externalized locus of control, "I can't enact any change in my environment," and this was used to be ported across onto humans. I think they did it with rats and stuff too. Uh, turns out that's not true.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 13:35 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 13:35 Turns out that humans have... Th- it's... You come into the world being hopeless, and you have learned hopefulness as opposed to learned helplessness. And, uh, Scott's position is, look, if you feel like getting yourself into a positive sum, optimistic, I can do this mindset is always an uphill battle. That's not some personal failing-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 14:01 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 14:01 ... of yours. This isn't some individual curse that's been bestowed only on you. This is a built-in feature of being a sensitive human being.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 14:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 14:13 And it's a permanent battle for the rest of your life for you to learn hopefulness, but learned helplessness is something that seems to not be so true.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 14:25 Well, and I think what it shows up with in humans is victim mentality, because I haven't met anybody with a significant anxiety disorder that didn't have an underlying victim mentality. They'll deny it, but if you look at their behavior, if you look at the way they look at the world, and that victim mentality kind of paralyzes

Dr. Russell Kennedy 14:43 us. And, and I think it's also involved with this default mode network. This is what I... What I do every day is I read about two hours of study, uh, two hours of neuroscience, and I'm, I'm putting together this theory of anxiety that it really is this default mode network that's at the, at the hub of all of it. And when you're locked in that default mode network, which is basically what your brain does, like, in a daydreaming state or when you're not in the, the central executive network, when you're not actually focused on a task, your brain will default into this repetitive, reproducible kind of self-awareness. But the self-awareness is typically negative. There's part of the default mode network, known network, that really looks at how negatively you look at yourself. And it's like the, the inner critic is part of this default mode network. So, if you're not actively involved in something, and you're going, and you're just driving somewhere, and your brain is going into default mode, it may go into, like, "You're not a very good person. You can't do this. Why are you trying to do this? You're never gonna succeed." And while we stay in that default mode network, we kind of live our lives, and I lived my life like this for many, many years in this sort of default autopilot state. I would go to movies, I would go on to social events, I was anxious as hell. I could, I could fake it, and a lot of anxious (laughs) people are really good at faking it. But we're stuck in this kind of default loop where we can't get out of it. So, I'm learning more ways that we actually become aware that we're in this default loop because there is a feeling to it. There is an alarm feeling to it. And how do we get ourselves out of it? And on top of that, we have to actually spend some time in the default mode network where we learn all these negative things about ourself, or we can actually change it. We have to accept that default mode network. We have to accept that that's what happened to us, and it keeps getting replayed like a broken record in our heads so that we can actually feel it and stay with it and then process it. And once we process it, it's not... We're not locked into it anymore. There was a lot there. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 16:45 No, it's, uh, I'm just thinking about the sort of... this link between uncertainty, which again, is after... It's so funny, ChatGPT marionetting me. This is the beginning-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 16:55 Yep.

Chris Williamson 16:55 ... of the AI takeover, by the way.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 16:56 Right. Oh, I know.

Chris Williamson 16:56 ChatGPT infecting me with a really cool idea that I can't stop

Chris Williamson 17:00 thinking about.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 17:00 Sure.

Chris Williamson 17:01 Um, uh, uncertainty, anxiety, I'm just trying to add in worry. Like, what worry is-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 17:08 Right.

Chris Williamson 17:08 ... as a part of that? Is it, uh, uh, uh, markedly different? Is it importantly different to anxiety and uncertainty in some sort of a way from a neuroscience perspective? Why do we worry? Why do some people worry more than others?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 17:21 I think what happens is that we have this alarm in our system. So, we have this trauma that's too much for us to bear. I don't like using the word trauma too much, but we have this wounding, typically from our childhood, that's too much to bear. Typically, anxious people are sensitive, so there's this, this wounding, this alarm that lights up in our system that we're not even aware of, and that's what I... One of the first things that I treat people with anxiety is I say, "Get out of your head. The worries that are there... The only reason the worries are there is they're trying to pull your attention away from this alarm that's stuck in your body." That is one of the functions of worry. So, the worries tend to have to get worse and worse and worse and more intense to keep up their ability to keep you out of that alarm in your body. And really, once you see that alarm in your body is a version of your younger self, and believe me, as a medical doctor and a neuroscientist, it sounds so woo and I want to have a bit of a seizure when I say this-

Chris Williamson 18:15 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 18:16 ... but really, that alarm is this unresolved part of...... you that didn't get the repair that you needed when you were younger, and that energy is still stuck in you, and it's still reverberating through your mind. So anxiety, one more thing, anxiety is these worries of your mind and then this alarm in your body, and they link together.

Chris Williamson 18:34 Mm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 18:35 And I think they link together through the default-mode network to just sort of put a pin into it.

Chris Williamson 18:39 Mm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 18:39 And when we, when we realize that we're in this default-mode network, we can separate the thoughts of our mind from the feeling of our body and realize, put your hand over it, feel it, really feel that alarm, because that alarm is the younger version of you, and it's driving your anxiety. If you get rid of your, your worrisome thoughts, you're, you're still gonna be worried 'cause you're still gonna have this alarm in your system. But if you actually heal the alarm that's in your body, you're healing the root cause of what's creating the worries and the, and the separation from yourself in the first place.

Chris Williamson 19:09 Interesting about the fact that if we are distracting ourself, if the worry allows us to get a brief piece of respite, uh,

Chris Williamson 19:19 you know, why does rumination feel good? How is this serving you? That's a-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 19:22 Oof.

Chris Williamson 19:22 ... like, a great question for people to ask.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 19:24 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:24 It's like, hey, are your thoughts running away? Are you always thinking about this, this slight that occurred, this, this mean or nasty thing? Are you always worried about whether your partner really cares about you or, you know, you're, you're on this sort of cycle, repeated? You have to ask yourself a question. Okay, I, I understand this doesn't feel good. You don't like it. You're being tortured by your thoughts. But just for a mo- a moment, imagine w- ... in what ways is this useful to you? In what ways is this, is this helping you? Because it's doing something.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 19:54 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 19:55 And it is distracting you. Uh, it is giving you a sense of certainty. I don't know if my mum's health is actually going to be okay. Well, if I imagine all of the ways that it could be horrible, because we have a negativity bias, so you ver-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 20:10 Sure.

Chris Williamson 20:10 ... rarely think about the ways that it's gonna be good. But imagine all of the ways that it's going to be horrible, the uncertainty goes away.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 20:15 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 20:15 Um, but it's interesting to think that-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 20:16 But it comes right back ag- It boomerangs.

Chris Williamson 20:18 Of cour- But you're self-reinforcing, right? You're, you're reinforcing-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 20:21 Absolutely.

Chris Williamson 20:21 ... the fear because you're ... The certainty helps to remove the uncertainty, but it reinforces the fear.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 20:30 Yeah. So you have to redouble your worries to try and catch up, to try and get ahead of the original fear that you, the, the original alarm that you had.

Chris Williamson 20:39 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 20:39 So that's why worries tend to get worse and worse and worse and worse, because they, they, they, they serve a purpose. They distract you away from the ultimate cause of your anxiety, which is this alarm that's stuck in your body. And then you do that since you were a child, because when you, when we're children, we can't escape. If we have an abusive parent, if we have an alcoholic parent, if we have a parent who's severely mentally ill, we can't get out of there. So we are trapped in that, and I think part of us, when we go through these anxious phases, goes through this emotional time travel where the amygdala, which has no sense of time, takes us back to that eight-year-old that's walking home from school wondering if Mom's gonna be drunk. And if we realize that this is a feeling issue more than a thinking one, because we're, we're so, we're so left-hemisphere-driven in this society. We think that we can think our way out of a feeling problem, and we can't. And Huberman talks about that too, like, you can't fix the mind with the mind. You have to actually use the body to fix the mind, at least the subconscious mind, because that's ... The subconscious mind is what's running the show in the first place. So if you get to the root of the problem, you don't have to worry anymore, because you've actually solved the root of the problem, which is this unresolved alarm, which is the younger version of you that didn't get the attention and connection and repair that they should have.

Chris Williamson 21:55 Surely though, people who are going through y- you get some sort of anxious stimuli, uh, uh, a, a, a child doesn't come home, uh, for one hour, that is going to induce anxiety regardless of whether or not your inner child has been-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 22:11 Totally.

Chris Williamson 22:11 ... has been healed. So I, I'm trying to work out the difference between, this is something from your past that is unresolved, and it is existing in the body, and this is a situation which induces anxiety. And let's say, for instance, that you had perfect childhood.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 22:28 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 22:28 You did ru- rupture and repair with your parents very well. Uh, you were made to feel safe, you were made to feel reassured, and you were soothed when you were sad and all of those things. And then you go through a messy breakup with your partner, and you're worried when your, uh, son or daughter goes over to your partner's house about whether or not they're being fully taken care of with their new stepdad or stepmom or something. Like, that is going to induce anxiety, especially if it's over a protracted period of time, regardless of what happened in your childhood.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 22:58 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 22:58 So I'm trying to sort of work out the, I had a pretty great childhood, and this d- this doesn't seem like y- Dr. Russ is talking to me. Uh, I'm trying to sort of parse that bit now.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 23:06 No, perfect. Yeah. Uh, I think that ... And, and what I usually use in this sc- scenario is combat veterans. So combat veterans that go through the same firefight, the ones that will show up with PTSD are the ones that had the childhood trauma most of the time.

Chris Williamson 23:23 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 23:24 So i- it's, it's almost like the seed is set when you're younger. If you're younger and you have repair, if you have stable, you had a stable childhood, when you go through that breakup, you're unlikely to really completely lose it, or it's going to be time limited. You know, you're gonna go through a really difficult time for two weeks or a month or whatever, rather than if you did have that track in your system from old unresolved wounds. 'Cause I don't wanna make everything into trauma, because it's not, but if you had that preexisting kind of discrepancy in your nervous system, you're much more likely to take things harder, and you're much more likely to worry longer and worry more intensely than those that had that sort of balance in their childhood.

Chris Williamson 24:07 Yeah.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 24:07 But I don't wanna make everything into childhood tr- trauma, because it's not.

Chris Williamson 24:10 Okay.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 24:10 You know, it, it's, it's just ... But it's a huge feature in, in chronic anxiety.

Chris Williamson 24:15 How many people do you think mislabel other emotions as anxiety, or how many people mislabel anxiety as other emotions? Like, how many people are actually-... angry, but they say that they're anxious, or how many people are frustrated but they say that they're anxious, and how many people are anxious but say that they're angry and say that they're bitter, or say that they're tense or whatever?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 24:37 Yeah, I think everybody. I think we are not, as Jordan Peterson says, we're not transparent to ourselves. We have severe blind spots. That's why we need therapists. I'm, I heard you talk about this too, in that you can do all the, you know, the meditations and the breath works and all that kind of thing. But if you don't have somebody else there to kind of say, "Hey, this is kind of a thought," that could be, you know, be aware of fleeting thoughts. This is kind of a thought that comes up a lot, you know, and it's, it's kind of your subconscious giving you a little clue. But I do believe a lot of quote unquote anxiety is unresolved grief. There's a whole... Unresolved grief is huge, actually, for anxiety. And it just, it gets stuck in your body, and it just never really gets processed because every time we go into that feeling of anxiety, or more correctly alarm, we shoot up into our heads and start to worry, because it works. And it works in this sort of short-natured kind of place that doesn't really provide you with any resolution of the alarm. You have to fix the alarm to fix the anxiety. And, and I think we're in this society where we believe that we can heal everything with cognitive therapy, and that's why I think somatic therapy is so important, not that you can do one or the other. I think that you need to do both. You need to, to do bottom-up and top-down, and I think in our society, we're so rigid on top-down understanding, oh, if you have the insight as to what happened to you as a child, the pieces will just go back together.

Chris Williamson 26:05 Mm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 26:05 It doesn't work that way, in my opinion.

Chris Williamson 26:08 What way does it work, then?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 26:09 I think we need both. So we need to, to allow ourselves to feel that alarm, find it first, and this is what I do with all my anxiety people is I say, "Okay, think of something that really troubles you, th- that causes you a lot of anxiety." Don't think the worst-

Chris Williamson 26:24 Let's, let's go-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 26:24 ... okay.

Chris Williamson 26:24 ... let's get, let's go through this, but let's go through it at a, a pace where people at home can, uh, sort of follow along.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 26:30 Sure, okay. So I would get you to pick, uh, an event in your life that causes you anxiety. Not the worst event of your life, but something that causes you some anxiety.

Chris Williamson 26:40 Something recent from childhood?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 26:42 Doesn't matter.

Chris Williamson 26:43 Okay.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 26:44 And you don't have to share it with me, but what I would do is go, okay, see if you can bring that to mind right now. So maybe close your eyes, relax your shoulders, relax your jaw, and just in your mind's eye, see if you can really experience that fear, that anxiety. Now, scan your body, somewhere between your chin and your pubic bone, and see if there's an area that feels like painful or pressure, or nausea or hot or cold. Is there sort of a place between your chin and your pubic bone that feels kind of intense? And where is that? So kind of solar plexus area. So would that be kind of superficial or deep?

Chris Williamson 27:37 Deep, I'd say.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 27:37 Deep, okay. Would it have a temperature? Would it be cool or hot or...

Chris Williamson 27:43 Hot.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 27:44 Hot. And what about a color? May not have a color, but first, first impression, is there a color there?

Chris Williamson 27:51 Red.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 27:51 Red. And is there a sensation that comes along with it? Is it prickly, or, uh, is there something that, that you feel that it just feels odd in that area?

Chris Williamson 28:04 Tight, like a twisting.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 28:06 Tight, tight, okay. So what I would suggest, and I'm shortening this quite a bit, is this sort of deep, hot, red tight is where you hold your alarm. And I would suggest that when you get worried about something, that this area lights up. But because we get so focused on the thoughts, we start trying to fix a feeling problem with a thinking solution. So what I usually do is get people to put their hand over that area and breathe into it, and just stay with it for a second, and see if it provides you with some comfort just putting your hand over it. Because the woo-woo part of it is that's younger Chris, that's the part of you that had something that wasn't quite resolved when you were younger, and again, not everything is trauma, but you're a sensitive person. Sensitive people often down, you know, sort of download stuff into their body and it shows up there, and then we get, we get into this illusion that we can solve it by thinking about it. It's really, no, it's not a, a thi- it's not a thinking problem. It's a feeling problem. So, so often, the bottom-up approach is to can we really allow ourselves to feel that hot, red sensation, and notice that our mind is gonna go nuts trying to pull us out with worry, trying to start saying, "Oh, let's do this." Uh, you know, or you could, or this could be a reason, that could be a reason, because it's a childhood coping mechanism to leave the alarm and go into your mind. A lot of people that I see and have been in therapy for many, many years, they don't even know they have alarm in their body. They just assume it's in their mind, and that's the reason why they haven't gotten better is because you're not treating, you're treating a symptom. The worries are a symptom. The alarm is the underlying cause. So we need to start treating the alarm in the system, and then the worries just don't have anything to feed them anymore, and you break what I call the alarm anxiety cycle, 'cause each one worsens the other.

Chris Williamson 30:13 What is, how, I mean, uh, how healing is it to bring up a painful memory in a safe way, put your hand over the space and breathe into it? Is that, over time, is that gonna get rid of it? Is that the way it works?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 30:29 It'll help. It'll help for sure. There is things that I create for my anx- anxious people, and they're called hypno-meditations. So what I do is I take your particular alarm...... and we feed that to you in a way that we get you into this relaxed state, relax your jaw, you know, feel the surface, uh, pushing up on you with equal and opposite force that you're pushing down on it. The surface is supporting you. Now, can you feel that area and allow it to be there? And then, often what I will do is I'll take people into the best part of their lives. What was the time that you felt amazing, you felt great? It's like, "Well, I was..." You know, maybe when you first started club promoting or something like that, you really felt like you were on top of the world. Now, there's a feeling sense that goes along with that. So what I would do with you is I'd say, "Okay, grab that feeling sense that felt really good, close your eyes, relax your shoulders, relax your jaw, just really get into that feeling sense of 'This is really amazing, I'm really loving this.'" And then we go back into that place in the solar plexus, that red-hot place, and we sort of go back and forth between the two. So, a lot of people say, "Oh, you have to sit in your pain." It's like, no, you don't. Actually, you can really make yourself worse if you have that sort of mandate for yourself, "I've got to just sit in there, you know, and, and, and deal with it." And really, you need a way out. You need a way to change it. So often I will get people to breathe into it, to put some pressure over the area. Sometimes tapping over it makes a difference. So, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to change the brain's representation of that alarm, which is held in what's called the insular cortex. The insular cortex is a part of the brain that kind of maps the body onto the mind, so it also links into the default-mode network. So, if your body has this sense of alarm, it goes up to your brain, enters the right side of the brain first, right insula, and the right insula sends a message to the default-mode network, "We're in trouble." And then this whole default-mode network thing, machinery starts up, and it goes into this loop, and part of the default mode has this sort of self-appraisal, self-worrying part of it. It's protective, but it... So you get into this loop, and that's why I call it the (imitates alarm) . And anybody who's dealt with anxiety, and I know you have, and it's stuck around for hours at a time, you're in this kind of autopilot loop in, that I believe is in the default-mode

Dr. Russell Kennedy 32:48 network, and we need to pull you out of that default-mode network, and we do things by improving your anterior cingulate cortex, which, you know, I call the Goggins Cortex because it's the self-discipline cortex. It's the ability to say, "Hey, you right now are drowning in worry, and what we need to do is we need to change your focus from internal to external." And this is what I was saying earlier about why we're in such difficult ch- uh, shape in the world, because when we sh- when we put our focus externally, it feels good, when we blame somebody else, but we're just creating more alarm in the long run. So what's really finding this alarm when you're, when you're, when you're worried, realize that this is, is coming from your body. It's not coming from your mind. Your mind is a symptom. It's not the underlying cause. So we can help fix some of those symptoms, but you're never gonna heal from anxiety ju- just by fixing your mind.

Chris Williamson 33:43 How would you advise people who are going through an anxious moment to better deal with it? Because, you know, it sounds like, uh, bringing up something from the past, relaxing your jaw, feeling the ground pressing up with equal force to your pressing down on it. These are things that you do when you're in a good place-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 34:02 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:02 ... and sane, uh, but what about when those thoughts come careening into consciousness and you didn't choose them? Like, the bully has come and found you on the playground as opposed to you going and finding him?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 34:13 Absolutely, and that takes practice. The thing th- that makes anxiety so difficult to recover from is there's nothing that really helps it right away. Like, if there was something that helped it right away, we would just do that. But I find, you know, breathing exercises, um, physiological sigh is really great, going outside, moving your eyes back and forth, it, it dampens the amygdala response. Getting into your body, trying to move your attention from internal pain to something external, like you can observe. But again, it's not b... Especially if you've, you've worn this anxious groove for decades sometimes, it's not gonna feel better right away. So that's why I make these meditations for people so that they get into their, their unconscious mind, their subconscious mind, and we start changing things at a deeper subconscious level, at the level that the anxiety itself is encoded.

Chris Williamson 35:08 Mm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 35:08 Because these superficial things, like when I see people, uh, on Instagram about, "Oh, do this breathing technique for anxiety," or, "Do this tapping technique," now, it works, but in a way, we're kind of dangling people over the gates of hell because we're giving them these instantaneous little bouts of relief, but we're never really dealing with the underlying cause, which is this alarm that's stuck in our system. That's why... And that's why anxiety is so hard to treat. The other way, the re- reason why it's so hard to treat is because since you were a child, the worry has seemed to be protective for you. The worry, when you go into your head, you don't feel the alarm in your body so much.

Chris Williamson 35:44 Mm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 35:44 So, you train yourself to worry, and it becomes your coping strategy. So, when I (laughs) when I try and help heal, heal you from anxiety... I sound like a really... "I heal you from anxiety."

Chris Williamson 35:54 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 35:55 When, when I help heal anxiety, I'm kind of taking away your special friend, because your special friend... When you were a child, worry was all you had. Going into your head and escaping the alarm in your body was all you had. So there's a real resistance for people to actually heal from anxiety, and that's what I, I find so kind of frustrating, but I tell people when I work with them, "You're not gonna want to do the meditations, you're not gonna wanna..." And, and especially when people start feeling better, they stop doing it. So it's, it's really something... You want to do these meditations, you want to do this connection with yourself while you're still feeling okay. When you're, when you're impaired by the anxiety and the alarm, the amount of benefit you're gonna get...... from doing these techniques is relatively minimal, and then it's gonna seem like nothing I do is gonna help me. Because breathing will help you in an acute crisis, for sure, but it's not really gonna take it to the point in five minutes where it's like, "Oh, I feel so much better."

Chris Williamson 36:54 Well, you don't make battle plans during war, right? You try to construct some sort of battle plans-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 36:59 I like that.

Chris Williamson 36:59 ... beforehand. Yeah, w- one of,

Chris Williamson 37:01 one of my favorite quotes of yours about, uh, we're addicted to uncertainty, and this is part of that, part of that cycle, right? It's a cope, it's a, a way to do this. Alain de Botton's got this fucking smasher of an insight where he says, uh, "In childhood, if a parent stops loving a child, the child doesn't stop loving the parent. The child s- stops loving itself."

Dr. Russell Kennedy 37:23 Loving themselves, yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:24 Yeah.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 37:25 And then that goes into the default-mode network. Because there's a part of the default-mode network called the posterior cingulate cortex, and that's thought to be involved in self-referential thought. So, if your childhood wasn't that great, and children tend to blame themselves, they stop loving themselves, and they create all sorts of reasons why they're not lovable, that sticks in that posterior cingulate cortex. And then so when you default into that, and then that's your go-to, your, your unconscious go-to is to tell yourself that you, you're, you're-

Chris Williamson 37:56 You deserve this.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 37:56 ... you deserve it, you're a piece of crap, nothing's gonna happen, you're not worthy, you know, that's, if that's your default, it's gonna be really difficult for you to kinda live a healthy life, and it's, the thing with me is I've lived in my default-mode n- network most of my life, and I've, I really felt like I've wasted so much of my life in this sort of (growling sound) default mode, like sitting in a movie theater just so anxious that I can't, I can barely keep, keep it together. And so, I kinda see my role in the world in, i- in, is sort of being a trailblazer. It's like I, I went, I went ... I'm the sacrificial lamb. I figured this out. I've used my background in developmental psych and, and neuroscience and medicine to kinda go, "I kinda figured this out." It's really stuck in your default-mode network, which, you know, here's the funny thing. It's like people say, uh, you know, anxiety or alarm is stuck in your body, trauma's stuck in your body. Now, it may actually be stuck in the brain's representation of the body.

Chris Williamson 38:52 Mm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 38:52 But still, for all intents and purposes, it's in the body. So, when we realize that this is, this is the true cause, this is the root cause of what anxiety truly is, is this alarm that's in the body, we have to fix this alarm. We have to fix this bottom-up alarm. We can do top-down strategies as well, because I noticed that after I did a whole whack of somatic therapy and I started being really grounded, all of the stuff that I learned (laughs) in cognitive therapy made perfect sense to me.

Chris Williamson 39:19 Mm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 39:20 But until I, I got out of the, you know, the lion's den of being in alarm all the time, I wasn't able to have the wherewithal to kinda see what I was doing wrong and the fact that I was so addicted to my own worry. And I think there's biochemical reasons why we get addicted to worry. Dopamine, I think, the periaquaductal gray in the brain, secrets like endorphins and enkephalins. We get rewarded. If we scare the crap out of ourselves, we actually get, in the brain, we get rewarded for that.

Chris Williamson 39:46 Mm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 39:46 So, it's, it's, it's, that's, and that's another reason why it's so hard to heal from anxiety. But you can do it. You just have to do it the right way.

Chris Williamson 39:56 What do you make of the role of talk therapy, traditional talk therapy? Someone's feeling anxious-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 40:02 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 40:03 ... they're gonna go in and, and, and sit down and, and say, "I feel anxious all the time, and I don't know why, and I ... let's talk about what's going on in my life and what went on in my past."

Dr. Russell Kennedy 40:13 Yeah. I think there's a limited amount of benefit you get. I think it's valuable, but I don't think it's gonna heal you. It's the same with, like, science-based therapy. When I see science-based therapy anywhere, I think, "Okay, coping strategy."

Chris Williamson 40:27 What's science-based?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 40:27 Because really-

Chris Williamson 40:28 I've not, I've not heard of that.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 40:29 Oh, science-based therapy? It's, it's quite common in, ironically, in the mental-health field. You know, CBT is the gold standard, what we're talking about, in anxiety therapy. And CBT, in my practice, doesn't have a whole lot of penetration. It helps. It really is ... I find it really helpful for victim mentality. CBT is one of the best things for victim mentality. But again, unless you go at the, the alarm, unless you go at this somatically, unless you feel it, unless you allow yourself to go back and visit that time that you were, you know, abused or abandoned or neglected ... I have this, uh, acronym I call ALARM. I got through med school with, uh, with acronyms, and it's called ALARM. So, if you experience abuse, physical, emotional, sexual abuse, loss, loss of parents, loss, uh, divorce, uh, abandonment is the A. R is rejection or bullying. M is anything that made you mature too early, so if you had to become the man of the house or the woman of the house too early. And then the S is for shame. And these things, if they're not repaired, form this state of alarm in your body, and that alarm in your body is what's actually creating the worries, the what-ifs, the worst-case scenarios in your mind as a way of protecting you from the alarm. So, if you go right at the alarm, you're healing the source of the problem, and this is what psychotherapy doesn't really do. Like how have you found CBT as far as your anxiety?

Chris Williamson 41:52 Uh, we haven't been working on anxiety all that much.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 41:55 Okay.

Chris Williamson 41:55 I'm actually now doing ACT-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 41:57 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 41:57 ... therapy as well, which is interesting. Um, it's a, uh, I- I certainly like the fact that it feels practically applicable.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 42:08 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 42:08 Um, one of the issues that I had with twice-weekly psychotherapy for a year was I left feeling like I had lots of insights but also lots of open loops-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 42:20 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 42:20 ... and no kind of direction, uh, for how to move forward. Uh, the problem with CBT is that it is a fucking ton-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 42:30 Lot of work.

Chris Williamson 42:30 ... of homework.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 42:31 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 42:31 Bro, it is ... Anybody that think ... I- if you think that you've been consistent with your training in the gym-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 42:37 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 42:37 ... uh, and you know, you've been training for a decade or so, three, four, five days a week, push+pull, legs split, uh-... try and do a month of CBT and see if you stay compliant, because the sessions are shorter, but it is... Like, when I looked at m- the reminders on my phone-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 42:52 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 42:53 ... I had, (laughs) like, this-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 42:55 It's a bully.

Chris Williamson 42:55 Oh, dude, this absolute cathedral of, like, uh, uh, orchestra of bullshit, uh, going on. Uh, most of it, you know, not bullshit-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 43:04 Yep.

Chris Williamson 43:04 ... like, it's good-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 43:04 Yep.

Chris Williamson 43:04 ... and important, and I had to do it. But you end up looking at your day as being this sort of series of bits of cognitive, uh, interjections that you're having to do to yourself, right? Which, and, and this may be the price that you need to pay, the brain is a slippery-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 43:20 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 43:20 ... negatively predisposed bastard, and perhaps this is the volume of effort and, and consistency and work that you need to put in. Um, but holy fuck. Like, yeah, if you're going through... It's like, "I'm going through a bit of a tough time. I would really like to alleviate that." It's like, "Hey, here's 15 things you need to do every single day." It's tough. So, uh, I, I'm still on with it, pivoted slightly from CBT to ACT, but-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 43:44 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 43:45 ... uh, I'm, I'm on with it.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 43:46 Yeah. And again, I think it's really about this default-mode network. I've done a ton of research on this, um, going to AI and saying, "Okay, how does the habenula react with the default-mode network?" Habenula, uh, Huberman talks about too, like the dis- disappointment nucleus, right? So it, it knocks off, it slows down the s- serotonin and the dopamine in your brain. So dopamine is involved in movement. You don't have dopamine, you have Parkinson's. So when you don't have movement, when you don't have dopamine, you lose your motivation, and you also freeze, like physically freeze. So when you're in your bed and you can't move and you can't get out, and I've heard you talk about this too, that's the habenula. It's- it's- it's freezing you in this state that you can't move, and then (laughs) , and then you're kind of pinned to the bed with all these negative thoughts. And really, it's-

Chris Williamson 44:39 That's the shittest version of sleep paralysis ever.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 44:42 Totally. And then being able to say, like for me, what's really, really helped me is going, "Okay, I'm frozen right now. It might be my habenula." You know, it's nice not to-

Chris Williamson 44:52 (laughs) I always think that. I always think-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 44:53 But-

Chris Williamson 44:53 ... when I'm frozen that it's my habenula.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 44:55 But it's fun because, uh, you know, and this is what I talk about, because a lot of what I talk about is kind of healing from the spirit side. I mean, I know a lot about neuroscience. I l- I know a lot about the default-mode network, the insular cortex, and I think the insular cortex is gonna play a huge role in healing anxiety as we go through life, that we're not really even... T- tip the- the- the scale on how big the insular cor- The insular cortex is basically what maps the body onto the brain. And the posterior part of it deals a lot with physical pain. The anterior part of it deals with a lot of emotional pain. It also has a direct link into the default mode and, and the amygdala. So it kind of gets you into this... If you feel this alarm, this is what I'm saying, if you feel this alarm in your system, this insula, through interoception, picks it up, says, "Okay, we're in danger. Let's shut everything down." So it shuts everything down through the default-mode network, and then you stay in that default-mode network. And that's... And then you loop in these, the posterior cingulate, part of the thing, I don't wanna get too complicated because, but I love this stuff, it starts feeding you all this negative shit about yourself, and then you get trapped in there. So, this is why things like the anterior cingulate, gratitude, meditation, doing the hard things, you know, the Goggins nucleus, the ACC-

Chris Williamson 46:11 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 46:11 ... anterior cingulate. The anterior cingulate can actually recognize, "Hey, you are stuck in the default mode right now. You need to get out and go for a walk."

Chris Williamson 46:19 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 46:19 "You need to do something differently." And, yeah-

Chris Williamson 46:22 That's why action is a good antidote-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 46:24 Totally.

Chris Williamson 46:24 ... to anxiety.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 46:25 It takes you right out of default mode.

Chris Williamson 46:27 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 46:27 As soon as you, as soon as you connect... And this is one of the other things that I say, and this is a little more woo, is that anxiety, all anxiety is separation anxiety. It's- it's, and it's mostly separation from yourself. It's separation of your adult self from your child self. The adult doesn't wanna go back and visit the child because the child holds all of the pain, and it's a separation of your mind from your body. So you wind up living life neck-up. You're living l- you're living your life in the default-mode network, which is not fun. So, it's understanding that when you can connect with that younger version of you, you connect with the part of you that's alarmed. And when you heal the alarm, you he- actually heal the underlying cause of the anxiety so that the, the worries aren't there so much anymore. Or, in my case, they still come, but I just don't give them any credibility anymore. And I think that's one of the things about healing anxiety that most, um, programs, most university programs, they're almost all cognitive. There's very little about the somatic part of it, because it's very difficult to, to reduce s- the somatic part of it, the emotional somatic part of it, into something that can be reproduced and studied.

Chris Williamson 47:34 How effective is medication?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 47:36 Well, it's, it depen- I mean, it's, some people do very well on medic- uh, medication, um, some people don't. A lot of people get side effects. So I, I've prescribed antidepressants thousands of times, and, you know, I wasn't so concerned about them when they, they didn't work. It's, it's when they did work, because a lot of people will just stay on the medication. I have nothing, I have nothing against medication, but I think in this environment, as a medical doctor, we're not trained in, you know, trauma, we're not trained in psycho- And we don't have the time for it either. So it's more likely... My, my uncle is Scottish, and he calls it the order of the rotating pen. So if you go into a, you know, your doctor's office with complaints of anxiety or depression or what sound like that, you're probably gonna walk out of there with a prescription, which... And I don't know if there's much totally wrong with that, but the medical profession doesn't have the time, and they don't have the training or the inclination to really go into the deeper parts of it. I had this patient in, uh, when I was in Vancouver, downtown Vancouver, who came in with recurrent urinary tract infections. And, and all... My Spidey senses told me that she had significant sexual abuse in her past.So energetically, she's more predisposed to getting these chronic- now, I can't bring that up in a, in a, in a, you know, 15-minute interview. But I was able over the course of time to say, "Hey, you know, you should look into, you know, something there. There might be something in your past that's causing some sort of, maybe some weakness in this area," you know, and she never did. But it is one of those things that, for me, what was difficult about, about being a medical doctor is constantly just masking symptoms, you know, giving people something for their acid reflux-

Chris Williamson 49:18 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 49:18 ... when I could see that so much of their physical, physical issues were emotionally driven, and that's ... Being a family doctor, you see, you know, the same (laughs) kind of illnesses, fibromyalgia, migraine headaches, um, irritable bowel syndrome, run through families. And there is this thing called visceral hypersensitivity. I think Dr. K talked about this too when you had him on. And, uh, uh, there are people, and I think through the insula ... I know I'm going on here. (laughs) Through the insula, I, I think that some people are, they just feel their bodies more, and they just feel the pain in their body, and they feel the alarm more, and they're much more likely to develop anxiety, depression, eating disorders, OCD, all this sort of stuff because they, they just feel more.

Chris Williamson 50:01 Uh-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 50:01 Sorry, I just babbled there.

Chris Williamson 50:02 No, dude, it's fascinating. I'm, I'm ... This is a-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 50:04 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 50:04 ... fucking seminar I've got, uh, going on. It's lovely.

Chris Williamson 50:07 I'm interested in how much people can actually undo chronic anxiety. You know-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 50:11 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 50:11 ... you've got these learned patterns. You've got these very, very well laid down, uh, commonly accessed areas of thought. Uh, I've heard about epigenetic activation and, and-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 50:24 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 50:24 ... and the expression of genes, uh, being turned on because of stresses in the environment. Maybe it was in childhood, and then you've, you've worsened it through adulthood. And a lot of people live with this as their reality. You know, they just look at this as their reality. How much can you actually reverse or undo, uh-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 50:46 Change?

Chris Williamson 50:47 ... this kind of reality? Yeah.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 50:49 It's almost like, you know, those hypnosis shows where you see people go, and then the guy takes up, the hypnotist takes up 30, 30 people and eventually winds up with 10 to do this, to do the show? Like, some people are just more, um, subcortically or unconsciously, uh, amenable to movement. Some people are more rigid in, in their, in their patterns, and some people can surprisingly be moved, but we have to try. We, we can't just do this from a cognitive lens, ju- ... All the therapy, the talk therapy in the world doesn't really get at these deeper subcortical unconscious programs that have been in there since we were younger. So it's all about doing the right thing, and this is one of the reasons why I get really on my soapbox is that traditional therapy for anxiety helps you cope, but it really doesn't help you heal, and we really have to show people how they heal themselves, and they heal themselves by reconnecting adult self to child self and mind to body. That's how we heal. And I think there's a tremendous amount of, of healing that can occur with that. I've seen people with crippling anxiety, crippling health anxiety. They'll never be fully rid of it, but their lives are so much more livable now.

Chris Williamson 52:08 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 52:08 They're not constantly being tortured all the time. And I think you have to go at it the right way, and that's kind of why I was so excited to talk to you is that I think we're going at it the wrong way. We're believing that if, if we worship the mind, we can change the mind with the mind, and it doesn't really work that way. We need to actually get in there and start moving the subconscious mind around. And some people are much more amenable to that than others, but we have to try. We have to get in there and give them a chance. And this is, uh, where I believe psychedelics play a role as well, in that we are actually getting into these below the cortex non-verbal areas of the brain that we can start changing, because this is, this is basically what psychedelics do is they paralyze the default mode network. So if your default mode network is telling you you're a piece of shit and you take this, you know, psilocybin or whatever it is, and all of a sudden that voice is gone, it's like, oh my God, this is a br- uh, this is a brave new world in here. Like, how does this ... It's like the movie The Sixth Sense. Like, once you've seen it once, you can't see it again 'cause you know that he's dead all the way through it. Sorry. Spoiler alert for a-

Chris Williamson 53:13 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 53:13 ... 30-year-old movie. But it's really important that, that we're, we're not doing the right therapy for people. Talk therapy is valuable, no question about it, but unless you go and get the alarm in the system, that's truly what's, what's, what's causing the anxiety in your mind is this alarm, this old unresolved wounding that's stuck in your system, in your body, or your brain's representation of your body. This is the core, and if we don't treat this, we're just basically coping for the rest of our lives, and people feel like they're broken. People feel like, "This is a life sentence. I am never getting out of this anxiety."

Chris Williamson 53:47 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 53:48 So once you start showing them that there is a way out and they start gaining some agency, they may still be anxious for another year or so, but at least they know they're on the right track.

Chris Williamson 53:57 Is it necessary to heal our past, or can we just move beyond it? Can we just, like, forget it and move on?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 54:04 That's kind of like the Joe Dispenza thing. It's like, there's no past, we just change the future, right? I think like everything, there's a combination of both. I think it's coming to terms with the self-reproach that we hold for that child who was abused, abandoned, neglected, whatever, because there is this sense in us that it was our fault, and if that child's, uh, you know, at fault, we're gonna blame that child. We're gonna separate from that child. And how do you think that child ... If that child (laughs) is in charge of the alarm, how do you think they're going to react? They're gonna get more alarmed.So it's really treating the younger version of you, and then once you show the younger version of you that you, adult you, is there to help them, and you start seeing some progress in that, and some connection in that, because all anxiety is separation anxiety. So if we have that connection within ourselves and we start feeling like, "Oh, I may not be perfect right now, I still go through anxious periods, but I'm on the right track. Like, I know I'm not just sort of going to therapy for an hour a week and trying to..." And t- I used to have this joke when I did stand-up about, uh, you know, if you had a leak in your house, and you had a plumber come by every week, and five years later that leak was still going, would you still, still keep paying that guy?

Chris Williamson 55:17 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 55:18 So it's really about doing the right type of therapy. I'm not against cognitive therapy; we need it. We have these huge prefrontal cortices. But unless we come at it from bottom-up as well, which isn't rewarded in academia, which really isn't understand- understood by science, we're not actually helping people heal. We're helping them cope and there's, you know, but again, helping them cope sometimes is dangling over the gates of hell, because you're not really showing them how you actually get out of this. You're just showing how to deal with it while you're in it.

Chris Williamson 55:47 How does anxiety show up differently for men and women?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 55:51 Men, as I said earlier, often it will show up as irritability. Uh, in women it's, it's usually rumination. Women usually get into this real rumination, they really have this negative self-view, they echo their ... If they had a parent who criticised them in some way, that goes on loop, over and over. Uh, women are notorious for replaying conversations over and over and over from 20 years ago. Uh, men, it shows up more with irritability. It shows up with the inability to really feel. And Lisa Feldman-Barrett wrote this, this great book called How Emotions Are Made, and in that book she says the more emotion words you know, the more emotionally literate you are, and the more balanced your, your, your psyche is. And I, I think there's some truth to that. Men don't know a whole lot of emotion words. Women know a ton of emotion words. So as Dr Kay was saying, we have to get men into their bodies. We have to get them into the feeling part of it. And the other thing that I think is really valuable for men is to start embracing tears, as, you know, as alarming as that's gonna be. I, I mean you don't have to do it in front of your woman, for sure. I have this thing (laughs) I call car screaming. So I try and have some tears about every six months. And, and it just doesn't come. Like it's really hard for me to, to, to get into some tears. So I will watch, um, sad dog vi- dog videos. Or the other thing I'll do is ca- what I call car screaming. So (laughs) I go into my car, and I go to a remote area, and I just start screaming. And I don't cry out of sadness; I will cry out of frustration. Like if I'm really frustrated, and I think m- a lot of men are like this, is that when you get to that frustration point, and you've been pushing it down and pushing it down and pushing it down, you really have to release it, through your body. And it, and it's gotta be something that you, you feel like you have some agency or some control over. So I just-

Chris Williamson 57:41 Yeah. I know a bunch-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 57:42 Yeah?

Chris Williamson 57:42 ... I know a bunch of people-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 57:43 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:43 ... who don't seem to cry when they're sad, don't seem to cry, uh, sometimes when they're sad, rarely when they're happy, but a ton of times when stuff gets overwhelming.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 57:55 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 57:55 It's like oh, this, this, this catastrophe has occurred, uh, and the response is to cry.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 58:01 And it's usually stacked up with-

Chris Williamson 58:02 That's when, that's when the emotion comes out.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 58:03 ... yeah. It's usually stacked up. It's usually, it's like one frustrating thing is that, but once you get three or four in there, that's usually what tips them over. And the thing about tears is they're adaptive in the brain. The reason why I think ... This is, uh, like a hard truth. The reason why I think men kill themselves much more often than women do, is women have tears. So your dog has still died, you're still getting a divorce, but for some reason those tears change your perception, your subjective perception of what you're going through, and make it easier on you. And if you can't have that, it's, I think it just bubbles up to the point where it just overwhelms your brain completely, and the only way out you see is suicide. And suicide isn't so much about wanting to die; it's, it's basically trying to do anything you can to escape the pain.

Chris Williamson 58:50 That's interesting. Do you think it's a blessing or a curse to feel things very deeply?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 58:54 I remember you saying that. Uh, um, well as Jordan Peterson says, "I think the only way out is through." I really do think that you have to get to know yourself and allow yourself to feel, because so much of anxiety basically is not allowing yourself to feel. There's a little meme that says, you know, "Overthinking is underfeeling." So if you can't feel yourself, and this is consistent with my theory of alarm, if you can't feel yourself, you're gonna have to do something to just try and discharge that energy, and that comes typically from overthinking and rumination, which gives you the illusion that you are hiding from this alarm, but you're not. It is one of those things that, that just, you're dangling yourself over the gates of hell, and it's understanding that you really have to allow yourself to feel this stuff. And this is why therapy is so important, especially for men, and especially in men's groups, where you can feel this through your body and see other men feeling the same thing. Because it's, the, the crisis with men now is so massive, and then it just gets stuffed down and stuffed down, and there's so much self-reproach and there's so much negativity towards men that, that, you know, men use the internet to sort of hurt themselves, because there's just so much negativity out there about men. And if you don't have a way of releasing that, either through play ... Sports is great. Play is another, play is another great way of releasing trauma, because when you're traumatized as a child, you activate both your parasympathetic, your shut-down nervous system, and your activated nervous system at the same time. And there's not really a whole lot of other ways in the world that that happens. So when you go into play, you're doing the same thing. You're doing that same co-activation. The sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system are both active at the same time, and you get a chance to sort of reprocess that old sort of slush fund of stuff that never got processed. So play, tears, you know, being emotionally open.Here's another thing that I've, I've heard, uh, on, on the podcast. Your thinking brain, your writing brain, and your speaking brain are three different brains. So if you can journal, if you can say it out loud, and you can think it, you're kind of s- spreading out the, the trouble into different areas. And a lot of what happens is that, that these disparate parts of our brains start running the show. So the more links you can get between these two, all these things, the more sort of a, a buffer that you have. So journaling I think is great. I think speaking is great. When you get these things out, I think you had a guest on there too saying, I think it was Paul Conti, like when you get it out-

Chris Williamson 1:01:30 Mm-hmm.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 1:01:31 ... it's, it's out, but if you can get it out and you can write it out and you can think it out, that's, you're sort of, you know, hedging your bets and getting the most sort of objectivity on the thing that's really troubling you, as opposed to just trying to go at it with speaking.

Chris Williamson 1:01:47 Let's say that someone is listening to this and thinks, "This is me being described down to a T. I've given it a crack with a bunch of other bits and pieces, and some have worked a little, but it kind of still feels like my anxiety runs me as opposed to me running my anxiety." What would be your prescription for them?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 1:02:07 I would go to traumahealing.org and look at somatic therapy specifically. I use a version of somatic therapy and some internal family systems work. Um, I'd like to work a little more with psychedelics, but it's not legal yet, so that's, that's an issue. But this sort of talk therapy thing, you're not broken. You basically just don't have the right therapy. And the environment, the, the society is telling you that, "Oh, go to therapy, go to therapy. It's gonna help you." Well, talk therapy probably isn't gonna help you that much. It'll help you cope, but it's not gonna help you heal. So it's finding something that gets into that somatic root. If you're a man, see if you can find a men's club. There, there's, there's all sorts of men's retreats that go out, and often for men, that's a better introduction to expressing your feelings than going to a typically female therapist. Because the, there's a lot that gets lost in translation there, and men don't have the, the verbal acuity to talk about emotions the way that women do. So they feel like they're playing basketball without arms, right? And I've heard that ha- that there too. So it's really if someone's listening and go, "Yeah, this, this anxiety, actually, yes, it is, it is my body. It is the alarm in my body," we have to address that alarm in your body. So I have a course that I, that I created. I make it $97. Like I, uh, my business people say, "You should charge a ton of money." And I, I don't want to because I, like you, I don't have a lot of material desires. I wanna get my work out to as many people as possible, because I think this alarm anxiety cycle is at the root of 90% of anxiety out there. And if people are just getting therapy for the alar- the anxiety part, the mind part, they're just kind of dangling themselves over the gates of hell, and they're not really getting at the root cause. And of course they're gonna feel like they're broken and they're, they're never gonna get fixed because you're not actually getting at the root cause of the problem. You're treating a symptom, you know? So if you, you have a, an infection and you have a fever, you can treat the fever with Tylenol or s- you know, but it's not gonna do anything for the underlying infection, which is kind of the analogy that I draw with this, is that you really have to go in there and allow yourself to feel the old trauma. You don't have to go in and dissect it completely. And this is what people ask me. It's like, "Well, do I have to know where my trauma comes from? Do I have to talk about it?" It's like, no, you don't, but you do have to have a sense, like what I was talking to you about before with that sort of, the red, um, deep, tight place in your chest. We do have to come into, to bear with that. We do have to feel that. And when we feel that, we can get connected with the part of us that got the wounding in the first place. And

Dr. Russell Kennedy 1:04:50 I have, I've got one more thing. I have this acronym that I call Should. So this is what you should have got when you were younger. So you should have been seen, you should have been heard by your parents, you should have been open to. Your parents should open to you and, and, and make it okay to express your needs and have, and to see that their needs are expressed. Should have been understood, loved, and defended. So seen, heard, open to, understood, loved, and defended. This is what you should have got when you were younger. You can give that to yourself now. If you find your alarm, you're actually finding the younger version of yourself. So see them, hear that child, open to them, understand them, love them, defend them. If your parents didn't show an interest in knowing you and understanding you, you probably won't have a big interest in knowing and understanding yourself. And if you, and then you're so, you're so at risk of codependency because you never really got to know who you were. What you did was you got to give other people what you perceived they needed, and you probably got pretty good at it too, and then you get rewarded for that. So we're sort of operantly conductive-

Chris Williamson 1:05:52 And this just shows it's just people pleasing absolutely codependency. Absolutely. And that codependency makes you lose even more of yourself, separate even more from yourself. The alarm goes up even more, and then you kind of redouble your efforts at trying to help other people, uh, when you really need that connect with yourself. If you don't connect with yourself, you're not gonna heal from anxiety, just period.

Chris Williamson 1:06:13 Heck yeah. Dr. Russell Kennedy, ladies and gentlemen, uh, the course that you mentioned and everything else that you've got going on, where should-

Dr. Russell Kennedy 1:06:19 Oh, sure.

Chris Williamson 1:06:19 ... people go to check that out?

Dr. Russell Kennedy 1:06:20 Yeah, uh, my website, um, theanxietymd.com. That's my, my Instagram as well, @theanxietymd.com. Everything is the an- anxie- not the anxiety doctor, but the anxiety MD, and it's really about trying to look at anxiety in a completely different way 'cause the way we're, we're doing it now isn't working.

Chris Williamson 1:06:42 Plus new book.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 1:06:43 But, and the new book came out. Yeah. So the new book came out in September 17th. So AnxietyRx, um, sold over 100,000 copies so far, which I'm pretty happy about that, um, highest rated anxiety book on amazon.com as far as I know when I checked about a month ago. Uh, I think it has an 82% five-star rating, which for, for a self-help book is pretty good. And, uh, it just gives people a, a very different idea of what their anxiety is so that they have some sense that they're not fighting this indomitable giant and not making any progress at all. And anxiety makes us feel weak, and, and that goes into the default mode network as well. It just sort of works. "You're weak. You're never gonna get out of this." And it's like, no, you're actually not weak. You're actually pretty strong. You have to do everything that everyone else does, you know, raise your kids, go to school, but you gotta do it with 100 pounds of fear on your back. And, you know, you need to give yourself a lot more credit and connect with yourself because that's really what soothes the alarm, and it's the alarm that causes the anxiety. We're, we're in this society that we believe that, that it's the anxiety is the thoughts. The thoughts are just a symptom. They're just the, and they're the obvi- they're the tip of the iceberg. So we can see the thoughts quite clearly, but we don't see the alarm that's underneath it that's feeding it.

Chris Williamson 1:07:57 Heck yeah. Russ, I appreciate you. Until next time.

Dr. Russell Kennedy 1:07:59 I appreciate you. Thanks so much. (instrumental music)

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