Dr. Russ Kennedy On Why You're ALWAYS Anxious & How To Reduce Your Anxiety TODAY!

welcome back to their episode of the adversity Advantage I'm your host Doug bobst and today's guest is Dr Russell Kennedy aka the anxiety MD who specializes in the art and Neuroscience of helping people recover from anxiety disorders he knows anxiety from the inside out as he developed his own anxiety disorder as a result of growing up with a dad with severe schizophrenia Dr Kennedy has degrees in Advanced Training in medicine neuroscience and developmental psychology but it's not all science as he is a certified yoga and meditation teacher and was a professional stand-up comedian for over a decade in his award-winning book in audiobook anxiety RX he shows a practical actionable program for anxiety relief that incorporates a combination of the latest in Neuroscience with the grounding wisdom of the body with the ultimate goal of relieving the anxious thoughts of the mind today we discuss how to understand and heal your relationship with anxiety how to discover where your anxiety comes from we also chat about common mistakes people make when trying to reduce their anxiety we get into the difference between Stress and Anxiety we also talk about how to regulate your nervous system when you're feeling anxious as well as ways to reduce your anxiety long term and so much more so let's get this conversation going and welcome Dr Russell Kennedy to the adversity Advantage podcast Dr Kennedy welcome to the podcast I know you like to be called Russ yeah or Dr Russ like a lot of people call me Dr Russ like either way is fine yeah because I just wanted to to also preface this that you know you have a degree in Neuroscience you're a physician and you've done a lot of schooling a lot of work to get to where you are today and right now your main focus is helping people with anxiety and so many people right now are struggling with anxiety stress feeling overwhelmed feeling uncertain what are a few steps somebody can take if they're listening to this right now and they're like in the midst of an anxious moment like what are a few things that they can do to help calm their nervous system to bring them back to a normal State well one of of the things that helps my daughter the most and she told me this just the other day like leander's 37 now 36 and she said you know Dad the biggest tip you've ever given me for my anxiety her anxiety is not nearly as bad as mine was but still you know through the family and she said just telling myself am I safe in this moment you know in the middle of the day the middle of the night I know I'm worried about you know this coming up or a dentist in two weeks or a flight or whatever but am I safe in this moment and just sort of closing your eyes for a second you know maybe feeling your feet on the floor your butt in the chair you know rub your thighs like bring yourself into the sensation of the present moment because if we look at the way that the brain is structured we have this big prefrontal cortex we have this somatosensory strip behind it and if we can bring ourselves into sensation we automatically bring ourselves into the present moment because worry is always about the future so we mentally time travel into the future and then we worry about about the story that we've made while we're there so bring yourself back into the present moment ask yourself I know I'm stressed but am I actually safe in this moment look around and see that you're actually safe in this moment that's one thing the other things that I'm actually more an advocate of is you know breathing you know feeling your body really getting into the moment sensation of your body because I don't think that we can solve the problems of an overactive mind with more thinking it just doesn't work but our brain will tell you that it will our brain tells us hey we just have to worry more and all this will work out and it's just like a bottomless pit so do you believe it all in like cognitive behavioral therapy or affirmations or trying to change these like thought pattern Loops to be able to help people when they get in these moments where they're you know filled with worrisome thoughts yeah it's a good question Doug so I think that like before we were talking here I think we've got into a real reductionist model of anxiety and believe that the mind can soothe the mind I do believe in CBT I do believe in cognitive therapies because we are cognitive beings after all I just think that when we're in this state of alarm and I prefer the term alarm rather than anxiety you know I prefer if someone says hey I'm really feeling alarmed today rather than saying I'm really feeling anxious today because that words have Consciousness to them and think the word alarm has a lot more meaning and Consciousness than that so it's really about you know like I said bringing yourself into the present moment CBC does that to some extent and there's nothing wrong with understanding the neocortical the thinking side of anxiety the problem with that on the deeper level is that most anxiety chronic anxiety not day to day I'm worried about my rent whatever but chronic anxiety is mediated by those subcortical structures those you know the amygdala the hippocampus the pawns the medulla like deep in the brain stem so talking to those structures is not that helpful because none of those struck structures understand English understand language so what we have to do is we have to use feeling instead of thinking so cognitive stuff is helpful it really is it helps you understand what's going on but in the short term I prefer people going into the feeling state metabolizing that feeling State maybe using your breath self-touch whatever it is metabolize the feeling state which will bring back online your prefrontal cortex because what happens is when you're freaked out is you know this is kind of an error in our wiring when we're freaked out we lose our prefrontal cortex we lose the rational part of our brain so why are we trying to use the rational part of our brain when it's offline so bring your bring yourself back into the present moment bring yourself into the feeling state of your body breathe you know get yourself grounded get your prefrontal cortex back when you're not in survival physiology and then you can start thinking then you can start using CBT and that kind of stuff and I think that's what's helpful I just think when you're in an alarm State like panic attack or an anxiety attack you need to combat the feeling first and deal with the feeling first and then once you deal with that you know get your body into a more calm relaxed State then your mind comes back online and then you can start using the cognitive therapies so CBT is great I don't think it's a first line treatment when you're actually having you know a panic anxiety attack or it's just not as effective as you know going into your body first regulating that and then going into more cognitive aspects of this isn't real I'm making this up I do this all the time it doesn't really help when your prefrontal cortex is offline because you've lost the rational part of your brain when you go into alarm so why are we trying to use the rational part of our brain the cognitive part of our brain to soothe a subcortical primitive problem like and chronic anxiety just doesn't work for me but it helps it's one of those things that we need I know I'm rattling on here we need the body side and we need the Mind side we need both what I find problematic with most therapies is they're very good at understanding the body side giving you insights into why this is all happening but they don't really address the somatic side at all and if you don't do that you're only going to get partial healing and I definitely want to dive into like the physical Sensations that anxiety can cause and stress and how it all impacts the body I want to stay on the Mind piece because I think one of the things that I've struggled with and a lot of people struggle with is maybe it's just like you know some initial ruminating thoughts like oh my gosh uh am I gonna be home in time for dinner or is this girl gonna say yes or no to me when I ask her out or is this person going to look at me the wrong way when I go into the gym like stuff like that and it doesn't really get to the body yet because the level of anxiety is so low right so do you think in those moments where you're not getting the physical Sensations you're not like feeling tightness in your chest you're not feeling like a Head Rush or anything like do you think it's helpful to try to use some like you know Behavior or some you know some thought Tools in those moments so that you can kind of stop it in its track before it gets to the body and if so like what are your thoughts on how to do that well the thing is Doug it's already in the body right I think the big fallacy is that we believe that the thoughts create the anxiety in the body when it's really the anxiety in the body it's your physiology which is usually coming from old you know old wounding old unresolved in your system that imperceptively is what's charging up the thoughts you believe the thoughts are actually at the root cause of the thing because we're trained to think in language so when we think oh my God I can't pay my rent I'm really anxious it makes me more anxious what's more true is that your body was probably had some alarm in it already that you weren't aware of that it's already kind of charging up your brain to think these thoughts and then the brain thinks I just thought these thoughts up out of the blue and really if you're going into the gym and you're worried what are they going to say check your body because I can guarantee you that's where it started it doesn't come from your mind and that's the big thing I think that's why we haven't been able to heal anxiety or really help a lot of people with anxiety because we're still treating it like a mind-based problem when really and the mind has a lot to do with it absolutely but the root cause I believe that it's the old trauma stored in the body that creates the worried thoughts of the Mind than it is the worry thoughts of the Mind creating this trauma in the body so we're trying to fix the wrong thing and I think that's the reason why psychiatrists psychologists you know all these therapists aren't really getting a lot of long-term success with anxiety if you look at the stats you know people do well for the first three to six months of therapy three to six months of CBT and then a year later they're back pretty much to the same level of anxiety that they were and you mentioned that anxiety can be also described as being an alarm and it's like used for survival right how can somebody know like I know you've mentioned that at the root of anxiety most the time it's you know unresolved trauma how can somebody know that it's that versus like like a lifestyle thing where you know maybe they're just not making enough money to pay the bills or they're having hard relationships with their family like all these things that are causing like anxiety in the moment and that digging back into their past you know and looking at the relationship with their parents isn't necessarily going to help put more food on the table so like how does somebody know the difference I think it's the degree of anxiety that you struggle with we all have struggles with anxiety you know my son's 19th birthday was yesterday and and he was supposed to be home at 5 30 and you know he didn't call us Texas whatever we thought his school ended at 2 30 so we're thinking okay well three hours both his mother and I are kind of semi panicking trying to reach him turns out it's class didn't end until 5 30 right so we had this whole thing built up in our minds of like how scary this was and I think there is just general anxiety in the world also though we are in a society that has this low level of anxiety alarm angst in it already so it's so much easier for the brain because the brain just to make sense meaning making machine so if you've got this low-grade alarm that's sitting in your system it doesn't have to be from childhood trauma can just be from just the society we live in it's going to start creating these negative thought patterns and because you made those because you made the thoughts up you believe them like you know we believe that he was hit by a car or whatever like there's part of you that believes this stuff right because it makes sense and the Brain loves making sense so I think we really have to look at what's the true root cause of anxiety where are we going wrong with trying to fix it so there's day-to-day anxiety that we all get but if I look back with people like people will say well you know I have low blood sugar and that's why I have anxiety it's like yeah that'll rev up your system a little bit for sure thyroid problems let's rev up your system a little bit too but most commonly people will have Trauma from their youth and it may not be abuse it may not be neglect it may not be whatever but it's trauma just from the world that we live in today and that trauma gets put into our bodies and then we use that trauma to make up all these stories that create these negative scenarios in our mind which only just create more trauma so it's not that I believe that everything is childhood trauma but I think that there is we do have this sense of trauma in our system and I just don't think that we pay much attention to the body we try and fix it with the thoughts because we worship thoughts in North America we worship the mind and we believe the mind can heal the mind and Andrew huberman says it's not true and and I believe them it's not true we we need the body to help heal the mind too so I think it's trying to get out of this mindset that everything can be fixed with changing your thought patterns because it can't you know and there are some people that have had severe trauma that have severe anxiety there's other people that have had relatively little trauma but still suffer from you know relatively little anxiety but it's still uncomfortable and everybody to some extent is feeling some anxiety in the world today like krishnamurti said that it's no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society and Gabor mate's latest book The Myth of normal talks about this at length so it's like we are alarmed creatures it's just so normal for us to be in this high-paced you know uh Instagram zombie scrolling fast like this this this world that our brains can't take it we've got Stone Age brains in a digital world and it's starting to show the cracks are starting to show and so with all that said you mentioned that there's this like low level of anxiety that exists in the world today and I'm all about like providing people some tools that they can use to control the controllables what are a few things that maybe you do for yourself what are a few things that you encourage your kids to do do your patience on a daily basis on a weekly basis to help them create like a buffer between them and and the anxiety so that they don't end up in full Panic every day well anxiety at its core is really a mind-body disconnect it's a bunch of things but it's a mind-body disconnect so what happens is sometimes we have trauma in our body that's stored in our body from old things and we want to get away from that trauma so we zip up into our mind we overthink we ruminate we do all this sort of stuff and when we go into our heads and expect our heads to be able to solve all the problems we separate from our body so anything that joins your mind and your body back together breath will do this yoga will do this Tai Chi will do this breath work like actual you know doing this sort of hyperventilation procedure self-touch does this essential oils sometimes will bring you you know if you look at a boxer what they do is they put this smelling salt in it and bang they're back into their body you know because they're almost been knocked out so it's really anything that joins your mind and your body back together and Neuroscience backs this up I mean there's a place in our brain called the pre-motor area like just behind our prefrontal cortex but before the motor and sensory strip in the brain and there's a lot of Our intention gets made there in that pre-motor area so if we can work on connecting the mind and the body together through and it doesn't necessarily have to be exercise but the best way of doing that that I have found and my patients have found is starting to match your body with your breath and this is what yoga is great at like it's just like breathe in breathe out matching your body and your breath is one of the best ways of alleviating anxiety in the acute setting now you don't want to be doing this kind of thing in the grocery store you know that kind of thing you're going to look a little bit weird but just putting your hand on your chest you know just really connecting with yourself feeling your breath feeling your breath moving through your nostrils feeling it bring in your air huberman also talks about the physiological side you know two quick Snips in through your mouth three that was three and then a long slow exhale do five rounds of that I guarantee it'll slow you down that kind of thing so all these things you know I mean but the underlying thing is matching your mind with your body don't just sit in your brain going this isn't real this is not going to happen I'm not going to lose my job you know that's basically just putting you on a hamster wheel you're never gonna get off of have you found though some like common themes of people that you've seen where they're able to have a healthy relationship with anxiety on a day-to-day basis of things that they do like maybe it's you know eight hours of sleep exercise an hour a day they drink x amount of water x amount of time on the screens like have you seen any common themes amongst the people you work with all those things you just mentioned yeah if you look at all those things you just mentioned they're all addictive screens are addictive sleep can be addictive there's a lot of things that can be addictive and it's basically can you get some balance in those areas and that's really what it kind of comes down to because when your mind and body are out of connection you will create some alarm in your system and that alarm will get read by your brain in this process called enteroception where your brain is always reading your body and if there's alarm in your body your brain has to do something with that especially the left hemisphere especially the the left hemisphere that's this analytical linear logical it feels that negativity and it goes okay how can I make sense of this okay well I'm worried that my son isn't home yet I'm worried that my tax bill is going to be huge I'm worried that you know my relationship isn't going as well as I want so your brain will after the fact make sense I I call your brain an accessory after the fact because if you're feeling alarm in your body your brain will make up a reason for it and then you'll blame it on your brain when really the ultimate cause is this old alarm energy that's stored in your body and that you don't even see and so taking this now down a slightly different path but along the same theme we've talked about like what somebody can do to make sure that they're managing anxiety in a healthy way like in the near term even in in the long term making sure you have that mind-body connection I think a lot of people Russ are unaware that they're even feeling anxious or they have this chronic low-level anxiety because of the world we live in and then of these people a lot a lot of people have a hard time developing some self-awareness around this right they're not maybe they're not engaged in personal development or maybe they're just so busy they don't have time to like to pay as much attention how does somebody know that they're struggling with this stuff how does somebody know they're actually experiencing anxiety and it's not just like regular stress I mean the biggest sort of hidden feature is how are your relationships like do you feel I remember doing this joke once on stage years ago it's like okay people ask me all the time like should I stay with my current partner or should I go and the joke that I used to tell was something like this was basically okay when you come around the corner and you see their cars in the driveway in their home how do you feel right are you like oh man I'm really glad they're home I'm looking forward to them or do you think I should just drive I should just keep going so look at your relationships look at your relationships if your relationships are struggling if you're often dissociated if you're often anxiety when you're in anxiety you can't connect like if we actually look at the neurophysiology of this social engagement system that all human beings have eye contact tone of voice prosity voice body language all this kind of stuff like you and I right now if you're a collected I look you in the eyes I look at your body language you know I feel comfortable with you that kind of thing so we're not exercising our social engagement system because we're alarmed like when you're in survival physiology this part of our neurology gets shut off because back you know seventy thousand years ago if you and I were in a tribe and we were being chased by a warring tribe I'm not going to go hey Doug how's it going with the wife when we're running away like I are you feeling happy and you're unfulfilled in your relationships no so what happens is that social engagement system gets shut off when we're alarmed and when that social engagement system gets shut off we can't connect to other people and what heals us what truly helps us heal from anxiety is feeling connected to ourselves especially our younger self that we kind of Judge abandon blame and shame if we had trauma and other people so if we can't connect you know if we feel distant if we've got to go to the pub every night if we feel distant from our partner chances are anxiety is at the hell now you can have depression you can have OCD you can have a bunch of other stuff but chances are addiction and anxiety like we were saying are kissing cousins you know the reason why we're addicted is because we're anxious the anxiety has shut off our ability to connect with each other it's a fundamental human need to be able to be connected so what do we do have a few drinks hey you're my best friend I love you man like we're connected then you know people take opiates opiates charge up you know morphine charges up this part of our brain that makes us feel relaxed and want to connect with other people now if you've had trauma in your background those circuits are shut down so you can't connect with someone and when you can't connect with someone you feel anxious so then you take this drug then you feel good now you can get connected again but it's only short term because it's the drug is doing it rather than you so what I tell people to do to heal is that try and improve your relationships try and stay more conscious because I get people to look at you know it's like I don't know if I have anxiety and I've had people write me on my Instagram page and say I didn't know I had anxiety until I read your book I get that all the time because people just have this low level of angst because I do believe the world is more stressful and just to throw in a quick other point and I think that's why our children are so stressed as well it's not that we're bad parents it's just that the level of stress in our environment is so high parents aren't home anymore they're out working the kids need that support from the parents in order not to be stressed but the parents are out working so the kids have to connect with each other and that's not a lot of stability either so that and then what they do is they go on their screens which also you know bringing this full circle the screens don't engage our social engagement system either like we need this face-to-face play When We're Young we need loving caring interactions with the people that love us to make this social engagement system rev up and mature and work so that's why we have this epidemic of social anxiety is because these kids typically were stuck on screens their parents were working they didn't have a chance to mature their social engagement system so who wants to go to a party when the software in your brain for connection doesn't work you know it's like if you invited me to go curling because your curling team needs an extra player I'm not going to be too crazy about that because I'm not a curler but if you say hey I'm short one guy for a softball game I love softball and I'm good at softball so I'm going to play that so we're really not allowing our social engagement system especially in our children but it's true for adults too to develop and that's why when you say how do you know if you have anxiety look at your relationships yeah that's definitely a good marker right of whether or not you're struggling with anxiety because typically when you're struggling with anxiety you'll take out things on other people and your relationships will be irritability yep yeah negatively impacted and I also do want to to clarify and you can I'd love to hear your thoughts on this that I think like some anxiety and stress is good for you right like you need this is like your fight or flight system they'll like alert you when like something's off or you need to do something like it gets you to go to a certain place but in your understanding like what's the difference between like Stress and Anxiety because I think often you know people kind of interchange them well stress is you know if you have a healthy reaction to stress you will be motivated to do something about that stress if you're anxious you tend not to be motivated to do it and withdraw and when you withdraw like if you stop paying your taxes that [ __ ] gets worse right like so it's a case of you know mobilization if you're stressing you can mobilize yourself good but if you are anxious or depressed and you get stressed it's very difficult to mobilize yourself and that creates this vicious cycle that you just keep you know bear tearing yourself deeper and deeper and deeper into a hole so it's really when I get stressed can I do and can you do something about it there are people in jobs where it doesn't matter how hard they try or whatever they still don't get that passing grade which is incredibly stressful for people so when we lose control and I think that we've lost a lot of control in our society in general that creates a lot more alarm in our system which of course creates more anxiety and the whole thing just loops around so really it's a motivational State you stress it's been termed you stress UE stress that has been termed like yeah we need that we need that to boost up our cortisol or our norepinephrine in our brain just to get us going right but stress and they show this with studies with monkeys you know if you don't give an outlet like a practical Outlet like if you stress an animal and you don't give them a way to escape they get learned helplessness and they turn into victims they will just literally stop moving and I think that's what happens in depression and to some extent with anxiety as well I think people after a while just give up and they're they don't leave their house you know they have a panic attack in a grocery store so now they can't go into grocery stores like I just see people live just narrow and narrow and narrow and narrow because they can't do all these things because they had some sort of panic attack or anxiety attack while they were doing it and then that becomes like a hard challenge right because then like their life gets significantly harder and it's unfortunate that's all happened and then on the other side of that they continue to blame you know other things in their life for them not being happy and in the reality which makes sense I mean they can make it make sense you know I'm upset because you know my wife and I aren't getting along well it's more like your wife and I aren't getting along so that's why you're upset and then you're blaming it on something else like we're so good human beings at just blaming that isn't the problem that isn't the real problem you know and then we get stuck in that you know we assume okay it's our relationship okay it's our kids you know that's not the issue no it's actually if we're really not going to go too philosophical it's a relationship to yourself it's really that's what it comes down to anxiety is always a separation from self always always always and so like as we now let's start to like peel it back a little bit because we've identified like how to manage low-level anxiety how to manage some tools that you can utilize when you're feeling a bit emotionally charged we talked about how to know if you have anxiety the difference between anxiety and stress and you've touched on like the root cause of it explain and you're the best of your understanding like like why does our childhood and things that we learned as kids how does that impact our ability to self-regulate as adults well the way I kind of describe it to most people is we have this neocortical structures the neocortex is the new brain you know which is what makes us uniquely human and now we have these subcortical structures that are below that thinking brain that are more like the feeling brain and the subcortical structures communicate in feeling and the cortical structures communicate in language now it's really important to understand that as your brain develops if you are subjected to a tremendous amount of stress those subcortical structures will develop a pattern of protection rather than a pattern of growth so let's just take riding a bike for example we usually learn how to ride a bike when we're kids right and once you learn it it's in there same kind of thing with with anxiety and stress if you grow up in an environment where there was abuse loss abandonment stress rejection your subcortical structure is the amygdala hippocampus brain stem we'll start looking at the world with the eyes of protection but if you get your needs met as a child and you're well loved and you attuned and connected your brain develops the way it should in this sort of growth pathway so these subcortical these deep structures that maybe didn't develop the right way or developed a sense of protection when you're very young stay with you for your whole life what we think on top of those structures is highly influenced by what those structures are doing so we generally are less resilient than most people because those underlying subcortical structures didn't form in a way that made us feel that we were we were solid and we feel like we could accept growth and embrace growth we looked more for protection and if you look at DNA studies if you look at epigenetics if you have an air of protection you are going to make proteins that Foster that protection you're going to start making a lot more cortisol a lot more epinephrine a lot of pro-inflammatory cytokines which is the reason why you know people who have difficult childhoods often show up with inflammatory disorders way earlier than most show up with rheumatoid arthritis in their 40s rather than their 80s this kind of thing so we have to be aware that this effort these ways we grow up and the efforts that we make to make ourselves feel better cognitively if we don't go under and deal with the feeling aspect of it as well we're really just painting over something that's you know got a bunch of cracks in it and that's I think how we heal is that we go to the subcortical structures we start using feeling to go back use neuroplasticity in our favor and start changing those subcortical programs from ones of protection to ones that will accept growth and then our thoughts get better and I know that was me when I when I started healing from anxiety I just noticed that my thoughts were better and all the cognitive work that I did do you know all the all this talk therapy psychoanalysis that I did do then it really started to make sense once I regulated my body once I regulated those subcortical structures that were mediating all of this and I was in a much more grounded place then it's like oh of course that's why I do this of course that's why I do that then it started to make sense that it all started to glue together but I think what we do in the society is we start thinking okay if I change your thinking if I change the way you think about something I'm I'm going to fix your anxiety but the problem's deeper it's subcortical and it's beyond like none of those subcortical structures amygdal hippocampus pons medulla none of them understand language they only understand feeling they speak and they speak in the language of feeling so we have to change the feeling with a feeling we can't just you know talk ourselves into healing anxiety it doesn't work that way so what does that process look like because I mean I think some people because of the extent of their anxiety and also coupled with the fact that we're used to getting things fairly quickly in life because we live in this instant gratification world we want some of this stuff to happen and heal overnight when in reality it just doesn't work like that I mean some people have been living with this for decades and decades or people had a childhood where it was traumatic for 5 10 15 20 years what's the healing Journey look like and typically like how much time and I mean I know it's going to be different for everybody but how much time should somebody expect for something like this to take well it depends on the level of trauma and it also depends on the level of sensitivity so I don't believe that we are born or born anxious I don't think there's an anxiety Gene but what I do believe is that we are and what may be genetically mediated is our temperament like if you look at my brother and I my brother is kind of like whatever happens you know I'll just go with it you know it's not a big deal whatever you know whereas I'm like okay what's going on like we have to fix this we something's got so I'm of the two of us the more sensitive to the environment than my brother is and because I was born sensitive into a family with a fair amount of trauma you know it kind of molded the way I am you know my brother's not anxious so it's funny we grew up in the same kind of dysfunctional household with a schizophrenic father who was never abusive or violent by the way he was just crazy which is very um it's very disturbing when you're a child to see your dad go psychotic and lose lose control of reality so my brother isn't like he isn't anxious but I would classify myself that I am so it would be like when people say well I want to fix this you know really quickly it's like okay they had this great video of and I think it's got like you used to have 25 million views I think it's got way more than that now but it was called The Backwards bike I don't know if you've ever seen this video on YouTube but basically this engineer made a bike so that when you turn the handlebars to the left the wheel goes to the right right so people could not he would take people out of the audience and say nobody could ride this bike so what he did was he tried to teach himself to ride this bike and it took him eight months to ride the bike now I also I believe I want to get this right I think he also had a son who was around 10 or 11 and his son learned how to ride the bike in about three months but it took him eight months to be able to learn that when I turned the handle this way that I've got to lean this way because normally when you turn your handle this way you lean into the turn and everybody falls off the bike so that's the analogy that I draw these old programs these old subcortical implicit they call implicit programs in our neurology are in there quite deeply so no matter what someone tells you about rapid response therapy or whatever the laws of physics and neurophysics still apply like you're not going to change a system's firing pattern overnight it just doesn't work that way I've seen people change considerably after psychedelics you know but still they're still working on those underlying firing patterns too so psychedelics are kind of like you know the atomic bomb for Psychotherapy it's kind of like a last resort and it does help some people but it can actually make other people's worse so so it's like you're not going to forget how to ride a bike overnight so you're not going to heal your anxiety overnight and it's going to be a slow burn it's going to be a long journey just like anything else in life that you pursue so let's talk about like how somebody can begin to do this so it's like talk about some steps somebody can take because somebody might be listening to this and I hope someone's listening to this yeah me too right they might be 30 40 50 years old and then maybe throughout their course their childhood they did a bunch of drugs or it's just been so much time or they don't really remember and they're like I don't remember what happened in my childhood like how am I supposed to figure this all out like how can somebody start this this self-discovery process to begin to unpack where all this comes from so that they can bring things full circle and begin to heal it I think it's really making an intention towards awareness of your youth because 90 plus percent of this starts when you're a child so look around and like I said earlier look around at your relationships are you happy are you connected to your relationships do you feel is love safe is it safe that's a question that I asked just about everybody is is it safe to love because you know for me I love my dad greatly and you know he would up until probably 13 or 14 he was great and then he started to sort of get more and more mentally ill until he finally committed suicide when I was 26. but I think it's it's one of those things about looking at your relationships and and how close are you connected and how do you trust love are you trusting of love because if you don't trust love I can guarantee you that happened in your childhood people don't just all of a sudden Have This brilliant childhood and then at 25 say oh you know I can't be connected to people I can't love I'm having a hard time connecting with my partner or whatever so I guess it's really looking at your connections and are they good you know do you have loving connections and I mean most of the time we all have loving connections some of the time but most of the time do you feel connected to your to your kids to your thing or you know do you rely on an animal for your love because some people do some people don't trust people so they go to a dog or a cat and that's who they trust for their love and that's problematic in and of itself too so it's learning how to reconnect to yourself and there are different ways of doing that but I find that adopting some sort of somatic healing is probably a good place to start rather than starting with the traditional kind of CBT talk therapy that kind of stuff that's kind of the icing on the cake that's later on really it's developing a real internal connection to yourself and being able to trust and receive love because a lot of us with anxiety don't receive we don't receive very well and the reason why we don't heal is because we don't allow ourselves to receive specifically love and so how does somebody take that knowledge that they've now learned let's just say that like for example you got somebody listening to this and they're like oh like I can see my relationships are have been negatively impacted I can see that I'm kind of feeling like blocked off to love if you're saying that you know we need to go back and look at like our childhood and some of the trauma that's there like how does somebody begin to see where this all came from well sometimes like you don't have to actually go back into your childhood and look at it you can just take something that really troubles you now and then search for it in your body you know and I do this with people all the time it's like someone will say I'm deathly afraid of public speaking you know and I'll talk to them and say okay we'll close your eyes relax your jaw I'm speeding this up quite a bit feel the energy of the ground that you can put your feet on feel the chair pushing up on you feel secure feel safe relax your shoulders again let your jaw go and then let's just bring you into a room where in your mind's eye you're just about to address 400 people now keep relaxed you know keep keep your jaw relaxed keep your shoulders relaxed keep your breathing so you're at the podium there's a bunch of people awaiting you to speak what lights up in your body where do you feel that and people will say I have this squeezing sensation in my throat and I'll say well how big is it it's like oh it's about the size of my fist uh does it have a temperature yeah it feels really hot there's like sort of and I'll say there's a hot squeezing fist shaved thing in your throat it's like yeah yeah anything else associated with it yeah it kind of goes down into my heart it feels like it's sort of squeezing my heart as well okay good so does it radiate to any other points of your body yeah sometimes it goes into my back or whatever so the more I can drill down on the somatic sensation of this the more I'm getting into premotor areas some other sensory areas that may have held those traumas because I'll ask them and said do you have a problem when you were younger talking in front of people it's like yeah when I was in grade seven I had to do a talk in front of the group and I said something stupid and everyone laughed at me and they talked about it for the rest of my time in in Junior School so it's like finding that place and then I say okay well let's put our hand over that place that place in your throat and let's just connect with it let's just allow it to be there let's just sort of see it sometimes and sometimes people get like Sensations memories images of that child you know can you see that little you know 13 year old who is can you see what she was wearing it's like yeah I was wearing this this purple sort of jumpsuit can you see her eyes can you look in her eyes and some points people will start tearing up at that point because this is a part of them that they've abandoned because it hurt so that's what we do when we're younger when we get hurt we kind of push those things aside we push that entity that that child in US aside and we bury them and I think it gets buried first in our unconscious mind because Freud called this repression gets first buried into our unconscious mind and as the body is a representation of the unconscious mind it gets offloaded into the body because we don't want to consciously have to worry and feel this anymore but the triggers of it are always around so when this woman got asked to do a speech in front of a bunch of people she may not have been aware of you know her grade seven experience but it was certainly affecting her and when we when I took her into a bit of a trance that's exactly what the root cause of it was so the short version of that is I got her to fully accept that little 13 year old girl in the purple jumpsuit with the glasses and see her love her and protect her and then that slowly eroded her fear of public speaking now again I'm shortening this quite a bit but that's basically what happened So within a situation like that would you recommend somebody like doing that exercise that like it seems like you like an introspective combined with like focusing on the breath present moment like on a daily basis once they've discovered they have something that's stuck there or only when they're facing that thing that scares them the former the more you can practice it the better off you're gonna be so if I said hey Doug you know um in three months here like April 1st I am going to take you to the basketball court if you can make three out of ten foul shots I'm going to give you five million dollars are you gonna start practicing the day before no I'm in practice like I'm gonna actually end the interview I'm gonna end the interview right now and I'm Gonna Leave exactly so that's what I mean about you know you have to make this connection with this younger version of yourself and some days it'll come easy some days it'll be like oh yeah I really felt like I connected with that that younger part and I realized how woo-woo this sounds coming from a medical doctor a neuroscientist but this is the only thing that he'll be I went through all sorts of scientific kind of things and this was really what made a difference so it's really finding that younger version of yourself that was hurt and going back and seeing them hearing them loving them and protecting them and showing them that they're not stuck back there anymore like I am not you know a 12 year old watch watching my father be hauled into an ambulance because he's completely lost his mind right now this part of me in me that still is that right but I can now that I've done work on that and I brought that part of me into belonging into like it's okay you know you're you're safe with me I've taken them this is one thing about the amygdala the amygdala has no sense of time so it basically my amygdala Froze that moment like people like where were you on 9 11 same idea amygdala does that so it froze that moment in my mind of them putting my dad into the ambulance to hauled him off to the mental hospital that got frozen in My Mind by the amygdala and then when I see something like an ambulance or whatever or somebody even to this day being put into an ambulance part of me gets a little jolt of fear because I go back to that same place because there is a theory that says that if you go through trauma as a child that part of you gets stuck in that trauma now if you had a trauma like that now let's just say that I'm watching my dad out the window being hauled into this you know strapped up and hauled in and my mom comes to sit beside me and puts puts her arm around me and says hey you know what this sounds really bad but we've been through this before he's gonna be okay he may have to spend a week or two in the hospital but he'll be fine right now if you have an attuned parent like that the the energy from that trauma gets dissipated right then and there but if there's no one around and you're the only person there the only response you have is to dissociate stuff that down into your unconscious and then it just finds a place in long-term storage in your body until 40 years later you decide to bring it out and and try to heal it yeah absolutely you know we talked about how anxiety and fear can also I think are I mean they're pretty much identical twins right in many ways actually they're not here's the difference I mean they are they are it depends on who you talk to Doug for me like I've been studying this stuff for many years so the difference between anxiety and fear is what I my little saying is the difference between anxiety and fear is five seconds so if you can wait five seconds that's anxiety if you can't wait five seconds that's fear so I'll give you an example so you are walking down the street and there are people approaching you with guns and knives that's fear because you don't have five seconds but if you're up in your bedroom on the 34th floor of your condo worried that if you go out someone's gonna attack you with guns and knives you can wait five seconds and that's anxiety so there is a difference and physiologically there is a difference too so it's really important to understand that there is a difference between fear and anxiety and I think the more we can distill anxiety down to its Essence which is what I try and do in the book The Better therapies we're going to have for it because it's not all wrapped up in fear and shame and all this other stuff we just get it on its own we find out what it is which is really basically the state of alarm that's locked in our body that's probably been there since we were children and then the mind being a meaning making machine just makes a worry and then the worry makes the alarm arm worse in the body and then the alarm makes the worry worse and we get caught in this alarm anxiety cycle and some of us never get out of it so one of the other tips that I give people is when you're really alarmed do you have to think like can you just feel the alarm can you just sit with the alarm and allow yourself to feel it because it's when you add thoughts to it that's when it becomes a runaway train that's when it becomes impossible to manage because it's kind of like having a fire and you're trying to let the fire just smolder itself out but you keep throwing matches on it and the matches are your thoughts so if you can learn and that's one of the biggest tips that I give people like if you can learn to feel the alarm in your body which is what some people call anxiety but feel the alarm in your body without compulsively adding thoughts to it eventually you'll be able to metabolize this fear and eventually you'll be able to move through it but if every single time you feel this fear you go into your head you never actually metabolize this you never change it because as every time you it comes up you just go into your head and make up a worry which takes you in a completely other different direction I've heard anxiety or the alarm you call it best to find I learned this actually from a psychiatrist of mine back in the day it's like trying to jump out of a burning building that's not on fire right yeah that's a good one yeah I haven't heard that and um one of the things that helped me and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this is like riding the wave because what I would do is I would get these physical Sensations I used to have severe panic attacks I'm talking I went to the emergency room I went to at one point in my 20s when I was as fit as could be I went to a Cardiologist because I thought there was something wrong with my heart so that's how much panic I had of course yeah what would happen is similar to what you described in that I would start to get these physical Sensations which were normal I think in some ways about whether my nervous system was overworked based on my workload and my lack of sleep or I was maybe excited about a presentation that I was giving and these feelings were all normal and what I would do is I would panic and I'd be like oh my God my heart's racing so what would happen I would get even more anxiety my heart would race even more then I'd be like oh my gosh I'm having a heart attack and that would be true with you know if I got tingliness in my hands oh my gosh my hands are tingling and all my then then my hand would then go numb like it just creates this downward spiral quick and the thing that helped me the most was getting good at not giving in to those feelings and just accepting it that it was part of what was going on and just riding the wave and what I noticed was it was kind of like an exposure therapy for me that the more I did it the less that stuff bothered me and eventually I just you know stopped getting physically responsive to the anxiety so like what are your thoughts on uh what I just said I think this is common for a lot of people yeah I think it is too yeah I think it's what you're describing is operant conditioning and then Extinction which is basically once the the stimulus doesn't create the same level of stress in your system anymore so yeah when we get like we were saying earlier when we get into survival panic mode the part of our rational thinking mind gets shut off because from an evolutionary point of view we didn't need our rational mind when we were running from you know a predator or or a warring tribe and to this day we're still like that when we get really revved up and Afraid we lose our ability to be rational so that's why it's very difficult to talk your way out of a feeling problem as as far as that kind of thing goes so yeah it's staying in the feeling and this is where Cynthia this is where my wife would kind of come in and say yes stay in the state of alarm but don't stay in there too long what she does with people is like okay take the girl that I I had who the public speaker girl when she got this alarm in her throat right she'd say okay stay with that alarm let's just allow it to be there which is not trying to add thoughts to it that just allow it to be there this alarm that's kind of going in and going down into your chest it's hot and that kind of thing Now where is a place in your body that feels safe or at least neutral and again I'll shorten this again and people say oh my right hand my right hand feels quite neutral it's like okay let's really focus and draw our attention as deeply as I can as you can into that right hand like just really feel the finger see if you can feel the skin on the hand really sense that feeling in your hand it's like okay okay now if you if you're comfortable can we go back into that alarm that's in your throat and people go yeah okay so okay so in front of the class this is coming up this alarm is there can we just sit with that again it's like yeah you know is that bearable it's like well it hurts but I like I can handle it okay now let's move back into your right hand again that neutral part of your right hand again can you do that yeah yeah I can I can I can feel my hand I can stay there so what you're doing I hear all these people saying you have to sit with it like systematic desensitization but the thing is when people have had severe emotional physical sexual abuse they can't resolve it on their own no matter how long they sit with it it just gets worse and worse and worse and worse so what we have to do is provide a counter Vortex to that we have to provide another place where they can go and that operantly conditions again the brain to say hey this feeling of being in front of this class where I'm freaking out is not all of me because at the time it does feel like all of you and then when you get taken over by this it does feel like all of you so then when you start showing yourself hey actually this isn't all of me I can move over here too then you kind of break its spell in a way and that's what that's about the basketball analogy that's what I would do is I would get you to go into this you know pick a Trauma from your your past find a place in your body that doesn't have that and then just go back and forth oscillate between those two things because you're teaching your unconscious mind it isn't this black powerless vacuous hole anymore that you had when you were 12 or 5 or whatever you know that's we're kind of giving a lobotomy to that old program because once you're in it it has a tendency to suck you into it and then on top of that it creates thoughts that keep you sucked in it so if we use your feeling if we use your sensation and we move you into a different part of your body that feels I mean if you can use something that feels good that's even better but a lot of people when they're that revved up you know basically get finding something neutral is the best we can do and then just going back and forth between the two and then practicing that on a daily basis so that you start teaching yourself hey when I get triggered into this alarm State there is a way out I've had a way out I know that there's an Escape Route because typically what happens is when we get triggered back into that thing we become 13 year olds and there is no way out and it just Cycles on itself and then we add thoughts which prevents us from getting out of it so I hope that made sense for sure for sure and I definitely think yeah if somebody's been through a ton of trauma and abuse it's going to be that you're gonna obviously want to talk to a medical provider yeah you need like if you've had sexual abuse and physical abuse and all that kind of stuff you almost always need a therapist to kind of help regulate that nervous system it's very hard to deal and resolve if not impossible severe trauma on your own I don't think we heal in isolation got it yeah for sure 100 and with all that said you think like the best thing somebody can do when they're feeling we've already kind of I think touched on this a couple times but just to bring everything back full circle the best thing somebody can do when they're feeling dysregulated is to sit with the feelings for a short period of time and then get connected to their body and their breath even if it hurts like that's the thing because it will hurt you know like that's the thing like people say oh just connect with your body and it'll pass it may not pass it may still be freaking painful right but just stay with it and then move outside of it and then what you can do even before that if you want to use a cognitive thing which a lot of people do want to use use that am I safe in the moment so it would look like okay I'm freaking out about something am I safe in this moment that's your first maybe your it's the easiest it's the fastest kind of go-to am I safe in this moment you know connecting you you know with your sensation and really seeing yes you know what I am actually safe in this moment my mind's kind of taken away but if that doesn't work then move into where you feel the pain in your body and then find a place in your body that doesn't feel pain and then pendulate between those two things go back and forth and that after a while while that pendulation part may not work right away once you practice that and here's the thing people won't practice it like when you're at home and you're feeling feeling okay and you just had dinner it's like I don't want to go back into that old paint so that's why people don't heal is because you have to actually do some work you actually have to bring back that old pain and metabolize it so that when it comes up again you're practiced like you know what to do you're not just sort of every time it takes you it just holds your head underwater and you can't escape you need to practice this this sort of cognitive as well as this somatic Escape program so that you know and you teach your unconscious mind those subcortical structures I was talking about earlier on that this pain isn't all of you and once you see it once you break the cycle it's like The Wizard of Oz you know you pull back the curtain once you see the trick it's very hard for that to keep tricking you every time and then and then I guess the last thing I want to ask on this is there a specific like Cadence that you recommend for like the breath and like do you recommend like box breathing you talked about like the physiological Psy earlier what is like a the Cadence you recommend for people to be able to like feel as safe as they can in their body when they're going through A Moment Like This well typically I think the physiological side is the most effective and the quickest you know what I do with most of my anxiety peeps is it is I have a variation on the physiological side so instead of two Snips in and one long breath out I I get people to do three sniffs in because I really want them to expand their chest wall because when your chest wall expands there is this sort of message that gets sent up to your brain that says hey we're okay as your chest wall constricts because that's what happens when we're stressed there's a message that gets sent up that we're in danger so it's like this it's like hold at the top and then I get people to close their teeth and then breathe out through their teeth making a hissing sound and try and elongate your exhales I'll do this again so I'll give people so they'll understand and you repeat it again hold and while you're hissing you imagine a tire an over inflated Tire like deflating in your mind's eye now I used to use this for people whose blood pressure would go up and I would go as a medical doctor there are some people when you start taking their blood pressure it's called White code syndrome their blood pressure goes up through the roof because they know that you're taking their blood pressure so I used to use this for people who had white coat syndrome and it would drop their blood pressure like 50 or 60 points that's what I use I find physiological size helpful and just making your exhalations longer than your inhalations but that little procedure is what I find helps me the most and helps my anxious peeps the most because it also involves opening up the chest wall as well so three Snips in hold then just try and elongate that you know make that exhalation last as long as possible I just do I've done two cycles of it now and I can feel my brain kind of fade a lot because I'm used to doing this like this is what one of my meditation things is so this will kind of Zone me out a little bit so well that's a good place for us to end the end the combo and I think this has been awesome Russ and that I think a lot of people are gonna get tons of value from this and they're going to want to connect with you they're going to want to get your book where's the best place for people to connect with you and learn more about what you're doing then also to get the book probably Instagram at the anxiety MD all my stuff is the anxiety MD not the anxiety doctor the anxiety MD and that's my website www the anxiety MD it's my Instagram it's my Twitter and then the best place to get the book is probably Amazon you know they seem to have the farthest delivery or region and they sell I mean the books sold in the last four months it sold 20 000 copies and in the previous like you know year and a half it sold 10 000 copies so it took you know 20 months to get to 10 000 and then it took four months to get to thirty thousand so it's it's really starting to take off which I'm happy with because that's really what I want I really want people to understand that there is a very different way of looking at understanding treating and healing anxiety Then Psychiatry or psychology or whatever will tell you from the people that are trained in the academic sort of University institutions because to get a grant for a university training you have to quantify exactly how this works we don't know how somatic healing works it's the only thing that ever helped me heal from anxiety after like 35 40 Years of anxiety and it's not that somatic therapy is the BL and end all it's the only thing but you have to include the body and the healing of the mind if you don't include some kind of somatic therapy your anxiety is not going to heal or at least it's not going to heal for any length of time so yeah Mind Body Connection and I will make sure to include the links to your stuff in the show notes and for those listening what I invite you to do is to share a takeaway maybe it was something that Dr Russ said about anxiety and how to know if you have anxiety maybe it was something that he said about what you can do once you understand that you have some level of anxiety maybe it was something that he shared as far as what to do when you're having some panic and how to calm yourself down maybe it was something that he shared about his own experience with anxiety and or it was something that he shared you know in the last couple minutes of our conversation on like the power of the breath and the mind-body connection in order to bring yourself down to a place of Regulation whatever the takeaway was make sure to tag Dr Russ tag myself because we'd love to hear your feedback and we once again thank you for listening to this episode of the adversity Advantage I'm your host Dougs we'll see you next time

Channel: Doug Bopst

Views: 127,917

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Id: FUcEjlp11sc

Length: 61min 51sec (3711 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 23 2023