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

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