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

Why is anxiety so common in the modern world? Of all of the different emotions, even all-

Yeah.

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

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.

Talk to me about why uncertainty is a fuel, a potent fuel for anxiety.

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.

Mm-hmm.

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.

Hmm. I'm trying to draw the link between what anxiety is-

Mm-hmm.

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

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.