The Truth About Anxiety and How To Heal It: Tools for Anxiety From a Neuroscientist MD

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:00:09):

All anxiety is separation anxiety.

 

Mel Robbins (00:00:11):

What does that mean?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:00:12):

The reason why you're anxious in the first place is because you block love. So when you say, I love

 

Mel Robbins (00:00:16):

You, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. The reason why you're anxious is because you block love

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:00:23):

For yourself. Yes.

 

Mel Robbins (00:00:25):

What? I just had a huge breakthrough here. Holy shit, Russ. Hey, it's Mel and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. Okay, so today's episode is freaking fire, and speaking of fire, I got to throw some amazing celebratory fire in your direction. I got to say thank you. Thank you so much for listening, for sharing these episodes, for being as excited as I am about this thing. I started this because I just wanted to connect with you on a deeper level, and I wanted to be able for us to inspire and empower each other to create better lives, and baby, we are doing it. I also want to say thank you for being a force for good. I love the fact that you're already pouring in topic and guest suggestions. Please keep them coming because we are going to create this thing together. We are looking at the dms, we're looking at the stuff that you're leaving on the forum, on the website.

 

(00:01:24):

This is something we are building together, and it is just incredible. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay, so today's episode, hello, game changer. This is fire people. So what are we talking about? Anxiety? Yep, we got to talk about anxiety. My mission with this episode of the Mel Robbins Podcast is to profoundly, fundamentally change the way you think about and approach anxiety. By the end of this episode, you will be empowered to do way more than just survive your anxiety or try to cope with it. In just a few minutes, you are going to meet an incredible expert on the topic. His name is Dr. Russ Kennedy. He's a medical doctor. He has a degree in neuroscience, and in my opinion, he has written the book on anxiety, and so he's going to come on and we're going to talk all about the topic.

 

(00:02:22):

We're going to change the way that you think about it, that you approach it, and more importantly, Dr. Kennedy says, you can heal your anxiety once and for all. Yeah, sure. You're going to have moments where anxiety rise up and you're going to have stressful situations, but in terms of the ongoing overwhelm, nervousness, on edge feeling, he's going to teach you how to heal that. His work is life-changing and it has made a huge difference in my life, and I cannot wait for you to meet him in a few minutes.

(00:03:29):

I think if you can come out of the womb as a baby having a panic attack, that was Mel Robbins and that panic that I was, I think hardwired with in my nervous system, it only grew as I got older. In fact, you know how you go to those little camps when you're little like with the Y, or maybe you go to Girl Scout camp. I was so homesick at every single camp my parents tried to send me to, I would be sent home. In fact, there is this really infamous story about me in sixth grade. So in sixth grade at North Muskegon Elementary School, there's this huge crescendo at the end of the year, and the entire sixth grade takes over the Boy Scout and Girl Scout camp that's like 10 miles away, and everybody goes to camp for five days and four nights, and it is supposed to be the most amazing thing that happens during elementary school.

 

(00:04:22):

Everybody talks about going to sixth grade camp. Here's the thing about Mel, I was so riddled with anxiety and panic while I was there that I called my parents every single day and begged for them to come and get me. I was so out of control that the counselors actually acquiesced and said, I could go home. Now, I want you to stop and think about that. Do you know how anxious you have to be to get trained counselors to basically go, this kid is out of control. We can't handle this. We got to get her parents to come pick her up. I can't deal with this. And so I got what my anxiety wanted. I got to leave, and as I was packing up my cabin, my friends came in. They're like, where are you going, Mel? Tonight's the big scavenger hunt. It's the last night.

 

(00:05:15):

Why are you leaving? I lied to them and said, oh, my grandmother's had a heart attack, so my parents are coming. We got to go. We got to go see her. Yep, that was sixth grade male full of anxiety, and it only got worse as I got older. In fact, before every track meet or tennis match that I had to play as a varsity athlete, I had such a nervous stomach. That was the term that was used back in the early eighties. She has a nervous stomach. Well, you know how I dealt with my nervous stomach? I would stand behind like a bush next to the tennis courts and I would have this blue bottle packed in my backpack. It was a blue bottle of lanta. This is an antacid medicine that old people drink for reflux. I would chug that stuff. It got so bad that my parents would start buying that stuff by the case.

 

(00:06:08):

It was disgusting and chalky, but I chugged it. Anyway, honestly, I can't believe I'm admitting this to you right now. And here's the thing, it'll got worse. I mean, little elementary school anxiety. Mel turned into high school anxiety, Mel, and then of course I was college train wreck anxiety. Mel, I don't even want to admit half the things I did in college when I was anxious, jumping from one relationship to another or waking up every single morning with anxiety full of regrets about the night before. When I start to think about, oh my God, I feel like I need lanta right now. My stomach is starting to be like, and I laugh about it, but honestly at the time it's sad. I just didn't enjoy college. I don't even like to go to college reunions because I did not like the person that I was back then as my anxiety was just raging out of control.

 

(00:07:03):

Well, when I got to law school, thankfully the anxiety got so unbearable that I got medical help and I was finally diagnosed with anxiety, and this would've been in the early nineties, and so anxiety was not a word that people threw around casually back then. I mean, anxiety meant there was something terribly wrong with you. People didn't talk about it. If you went to therapy, you were a freak. And so thankfully for me though, this diagnosis, it was a godsend because I finally had a word and a doctor validating what I had been struggling with for my entire life for 20 years. He prescribed Zoloft. It was a complete game changer for me. It's almost like that medication acted like a ladder. You see the anxiety and all the mental spiraling that it caused, that spiraling put me in a very deep hole mentally, physically, and spiritually, and that Zoloft was like a little ladder that allowed me rung by rung to start to climb out of that hole and do the work that you need to do to start to take control of your life.

 

(00:08:12):

So I took Zoloft for 20 years. In fact, the only time I didn't take Zoloft was when our first daughter, Sawyer, she's now 23 years old. So when she was born, I had been off Zoloft. I had to taper off of it. We didn't know if you could breastfeed or whatever on that medication. They know now it's safe to breastfeed with it, but when she was born, I had such severe postpartum depression, the really scary kind where you couldn't be left alone because the doctors were afraid you were going to hurt yourself or you were going to hurt your baby. It was a terrifying eight week experience in my life. And so I'm telling you, between the 45 years of dealing with my own anxiety and on top of it, Chris and I, having kids that have had anxiety that at times were so severe that they slept on the floor of our bedroom, I just always thought, okay, I have anxiety.

 

(00:09:11):

That's the way that it is. It's just the way that I'm wired. I hate it. I hate having anxiety, but I just have to learn to live with it. I was wrong. You do not have to hate anxiety, and you do not have to just learn to live with it. You can learn how to understand it, and you can learn simple things that will help you take control of it and change how you respond to moments of uncertainty and moments of stress. And so in my early forties, the anxiety got so crippling again because there were a lot of things going on in our life that were triggering it, that every single morning the alarm would go off and I would lay in bed for an hour and I would just stare at the ceiling. And the anxiety, it's almost like it felt like a gravity blanket pinning me to that bed.

 

(00:10:05):

And as I would lay in that bed and think about all my problems, time would tip by the kids, would miss the bus. I became a person I didn't even recognize. But I want to just tell you that I know what it's like when anxiety is ruining or running your life because when anxiety was at its worst for me, I created this thing called the Five Second Rule, and it was out of sheer desperation and fear that I created this thing. What is it? It's a brain hack, and if you ever feel overwhelmed by anxious thoughts or anxious feelings, just count backwards, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and you can interrupt those thoughts and feelings and then physically move. And ever since I invented this thing, I've been teaching the five second rule on stages around the world, and it has changed the lives of millions of people. Now, here's one of the things I want to distinguish before we bring Dr. Kennedy on in just a second.

 

(00:11:00):

A lot of the tools that I am known for and that I teach and the things that I've been researching that help with anxiety, that help with mindset, that help with mental health, I call these tools a neck up approach because they attack your mindset. They focus on your thoughts, they help you change the patterns of thought in your mind and the default thinking and the self-criticism and the worry and the procrastination and the perfectionism that can take hold. On today's episode though, we're going to go in a different direction. We're going to talk about a whole body of tools that you need that I would classify as a neck down approach to anxiety. We are going to focus on the body. We're going to focus on your nervous system. We're going to focus on thinking about anxiety as something happening in your body first, because the fact is that if you only attack from the neck up with talk therapy or using my tools, yeah, it's going to help.

 

(00:12:10):

Yes, they are an essential part of the toolkit that you need for coping. And yes, it'll make a huge difference. But what Dr. Kennedy is going to explain to you today is game changer because he's going to teach you that you can actually heal your anxiety, but you have to attack it from the neck down. You have to stop running away from the anxiety and address what's going on in your body. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about today. And we're also going to talk about how the heck do you do this? This is going to be packed with takeaways because I'm going to just make sure that it is. So Dr. Kennedy, he is the bestselling author of the book Anxiety Rx. His work is changing the lives of people around the world. He is helping people heal their anxiety in his clinical practice.

 

(00:13:01):

And you're going to want to bookmark this episode because you're going to learn so many takeaways that you're going to absolutely want to come back to this again and again, and you definitely are going to want to share this with your friends and family. In fact, you'll be trying his tools as you listen to this episode. He has a degree in neuroscience. He's a medical doctor and perhaps most importantly like me, and maybe he struggled with anxiety for decades, but using what you're about to learn in this episode, he has cured himself. So let's get him on the line. Hey,

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:13:33):

Hey, Mel Robbins. My God,

 

Mel Robbins (00:13:35):

How are you?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:13:37):

Good, good.

 

Mel Robbins (00:13:38):

Awesome. Is this thing going, guys? We're good with the recording. Okay, awesome. I am so excited. My favorite episodes are ones where I feel like I'm getting a personal therapy session that the world can listen on on.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:13:51):

How deep do you want to go?

 

Mel Robbins (00:13:53):

Well, I have a feeling that we are going to have you back over and over and over again.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:14:00):

And

 

Mel Robbins (00:14:00):

So I want to focus our conversation today on just kind of some anxiety 1 0 1, because one of the things that I was so excited to be able to talk to you about is the difference between a neck up thinking approach to anxiety versus a neck down body approach to anxiety. And I want to focus our conversation on truly getting people to have a wake up call about the way that they think about what anxiety is and isn't about what's going on in your body when you have anxiety and almost like getting somebody to go, holy shit, I got to completely upend how I've been thinking and attacking this. Does that make sense?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:15:02):

Yeah, that's what I'm good at.

 

Mel Robbins (00:15:03):

I know you are. So I've been following you for a while, and every time you post something, I go, oh my God. Oh my God, yes, yes, yes, yes. First of all, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Dr. Kennedy, I know you prefer to be called Russ, but I just got to say, dude, you're an MD and you have a degree in neuroscience and like me, you struggled with anxiety for 30 years, and so I could not be more excited to basically get a personal therapy session with you.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:15:35):

Sure. Happy to do it. Okay. Happy to do it, Mel.

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:15:49):

Well, usually they come to me with anxiety already. So I'll go into what are you feeling? What's going on? What happens to you? And usually, almost universally, they'll describe a thinking process. My husband's driving me nuts. I can't drive. I can't go past this. I can't go into grocery stores. I can't go on the bus. And usually what I'll say is, that's all in your head. That's all the story that your left hemisphere, your analytical left hemisphere is making up. Now, what do you feel in your body, in your physiology when you say you feel anxiety? And the first, almost the first thing I can get people to do is say, I'm going to change the word anxiety to alarm. Because words have consciousness to them. Anxiety doesn't have a lot of consciousness to it. A lot of people don't even understand what anxiety

 

Mel Robbins (00:16:37):

Is. Well, I agree, and I feel like it's thrown around all the time, and we think that anxiety is a nervous stomach and a lot of worry in your head about what's going to happen. And I love that you're saying that we want to start talking about the alarm that goes off in your body. And before we even talk about what that means, one other thing that I would love for you to address is what are ways in which anxiety expresses itself? And I'm going to give you an example. Sure. So I'm your classic textbook type a hypervigilant, always worried,

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:17:18):

Anxiety

 

Mel Robbins (00:17:19):

Type, panic attacks, shortness of breath. You can literally feel the alarm vibrating through my skin. But our daughter who is 23, when she's feeling anxious or the alarm is going off in her body, she doesn't emit worry or tension. She emits frustration and anger. So what are the various ways in which anxiety gets expressed in people? Because I think there's a lot of people that struggle with anxiety that don't realize that it's anxiety that they're struggling with.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:17:58):

Yeah. Well, I think what happens, what you're describing with Sawyer is that her autonomic nervous system kind of goes into a sympathetic fight or flight response. And for her, the only acceptable response inside of her is frustration or anger, because that's how it gets expressed. Now, other people will shut down. They'll go into freeze. So sympathetic nervous system is fight, flight and freeze and fall too, but freeze mostly in that particular situation. So some people will go into this withdrawal, they'll stop moving, their eye contact disappears, their body stops kind of moving in a fluid kind of way. And it's really people display anxiety or alarm, as I should say, using my own little terminology in very different ways. And I think it's really becoming aware of it, because I have many people that send me messages saying, I didn't even know I had anxiety until I read your book. It's like, well, I don't know if I'm doing any favors there, but it really does manifest because when I was 20, I didn't know what anxiety was. I just knew that I had this impending doom, this sense of impending doom, and I didn't even know what it was. And I don't think a lot of people do.

 

Mel Robbins (00:19:12):

I agree with you. So let's go back to the basics. Anxiety 1 0 1. Okay. When you say we're going to now talk about anxiety is an alarm system in your body, and describe the alarm system to me.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:19:28):

Okay, so there's a structure in our brain. It's called the amygdala, and the amygdala is often called the fear center of the brain. It's an okay description, but it is not the best. But basically the amygdala is involved in just about every fear reaction that we have. So the amygdala will recognize something in your external environment or your internal environment, a k, a worries that alarms it. So the amygdala has a super high way down to the brainstem, which controls your body. So your blood pressure increases, your heart rate increases, your respiration increases, everything seems to go along with that. So we get this physiological change motivated mostly by the amygdala, but other factors in the brain as well. And that brings us into this state of alarm. And then what the left hemisphere does is it goes, we're alarmed. What do we have to be alarmed about? And then you start stacking, and I've heard you say this, I think it was in the five second rule about I got to get up. This is bad. That's bad. One of your boobs is bigger. All this kind of stuff. That's what I call stacking. So as soon as your body feels this sense of alarm, your left hemisphere has to do something with it. It has to make up worries and thoughts that are completely consistent with that painful sense of alarm in your system. So we start stacking up these worries, and of course, that just creates more alarm, which creates more worries, which creates more alarm. And we get caught in this alarm anxiety cycle.

 

Mel Robbins (00:20:57):

So let me see if I can unpack this, okay. Because I think this is a huge wake up call for people to learn this, that anxiety does not start typically with your thoughts.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:21:09):

Totally.

 

Mel Robbins (00:21:10):

Anxiety starts with a physical response to some kind of situation that then triggers a physiological reaction in your body designed to agitate you and designed as an alarm to get you to suddenly pay attention because your body is physically trying to get you to basically wake up from whatever you're doing and pay attention to some sort of threat or some sort of change or some sort of something. And the second thing that happens when that physical thing happens is then your mind goes, holy cow, what is around me right now that I need to pay attention to or be worried about that? Am I getting this right? So it begins in the body as an alarm system, and then the thoughts climb on.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:22:09):

I think that that's an explanation that's very simple and very accurate, I think, is that we have this thing that I describe in my book called Background Alarm, which is basically kind of old, unresolved emotional issues that are stuck in your body. My colleague Gabor Mate talks about this too. Emotions being stuck in the body, which is a construct. You can't separate the mind from the body, of course, but it's a construct and it helps people. It really helps them understand that, hey, this is actually starting from my body. And because we're so versed at speaking in words and communicating to ourselves and to each other with words, we don't get into the feeling. So if I ask you, Hey, Mel, what does it feel like when you bite into an apple? It's like, well, I don't know. I mean, so I say, what does it taste like?

 

(00:22:56):

Well, it's sweet or it's sour, it's crunchy. It's like we're so good at describing things in words, but how do you feel when you bite into that apple? That's a brand new landscape. We're not used to feeling we're in a society that values that worships the mind, and very rarely actually says, Hey, get into your body. Feel your body. And a lot of us don't want to feel our body where the fricking pain is, right? That's right. So we were retreat to our heads because it's an escape from this old alarm that's been trapped in your body probably since childhood.

 

Mel Robbins (00:23:31):

So you say that all anxiety has the exact same beginning. This really surprised me that anxiety is all triggered by the same thing.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:23:43):

All

 

Mel Robbins (00:23:44):

Anxiety comes from the singular source. What is that

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:23:48):

Separation? All anxiety is separation anxiety.

 

Mel Robbins (00:23:51):

What does that mean?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:23:52):

Well, if you drill it down, it's separation typically from yourself, but it starts with separation from your parents on some level. If you feel separate from your parents, the people that are supposed to love you, see you, hear you and love you. If you feel separate from them, it creates this alarm in our system. And then when we get this alarm in our system, our brain has to do something about that. So what we tend to do as children is first of all, blame ourselves. We can't blame our parents for what's going on in our childhood environment. So we blame ourselves and then we start taking jabs at ourselves, what I call jabs, which is basically judgment, abandonment, blame and shame. This is what we do to ourselves. This is the birth of the inner critic.

 

Mel Robbins (00:24:33):

Can you give me an example? So I find, and one of the things I want to do with the show is to take a lot of the stuff that sounds intellectual

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:24:43):

And

 

Mel Robbins (00:24:43):

Make it really digestible and understandable. So when you say separate, you're separate from your parents. Can you give us a few scenarios? Aren't all horrific abuse situations that anybody can identify with? When you say separate from your parents?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:25:04):

Yeah, there's something as simple as a parental mismatch.

 

Mel Robbins (00:25:08):

What does that mean?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:25:09):

Well, it's kind of a term, I don't know if I heard it or I made it up, but it's basically, I see most of my patients, clients, whatever you want to call them, are female. And a lot of them have issues with their mom. So they felt separate. They felt this mismatch from their mother. They felt like we're not connected. I love my mother, she loves me, but I like Bach and she likes punk rock. And just in different parts of our lives, they're very different. And that parental mismatch, I think it might be a Nicole Lapper term actually, this parental mismatch causes a tremendous amount of alarm in a child's system because you want to belong to a parent. You really want to feel like you're connected to your parent. And if you don't have that internal sense of attachment, it's very alarming to our system.

 

(00:25:56):

And that alarm gets lodged in our body. And then that's what usually mediates the worries as we get older. It also mediates that thing I call jabs, which is judgment, abandonment, blame and shame. We do that to ourselves. So when we're listening to our own thing, it's like, okay, how am I judging myself here? You wake up in the morning, as you say, in high five habit, you wake up in the morning with anxiety or alarm as I like to call it. And then you start thinking. You start stacking all these negative scenarios on top of yourself to make sense of it, when really what you should do, and this is out of your book, is I'm feeling anxious, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, into my body, into my body, find a place in my body, find a place in my breath, find a place that feels safe in my body.

 

(00:26:38):

And some people don't feel safe in their body, and we do something with that first. But really breath, everybody's pretty much safe in their breath. Go 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 into my body out of my head. Because what that does is it gives a sense of control. It takes energy away from those ruminating thoughts, and it puts it where it belongs because maybe that alarm is your younger self that's asking for your attention. And as a medical doctor and neuroscientist, I kind of want to have a seizure sometimes when I talk about the ethereal nature of this. But really from a practical sense,

Mel Robbins (00:27:13):

So how do you do that? So let's just take a scenario right now. Let's just say, and it could be anything.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:27:22):

It

 

Mel Robbins (00:27:22):

Could be that you are sitting in the pickup line at school and you see somebody that you have beef with and you start to feel like this wave hit you

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:27:37):

Because

 

Mel Robbins (00:27:38):

You don't want to talk to that person or that person makes you nervous. Situation. We can all relate to

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:27:44):

Totally

 

Mel Robbins (00:27:45):

In that moment, sitting in the front seat of your car and you feel the alarm go off. How do you locate the damn thing everywhere at this point? Yeah.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:27:56):

Well, sometimes it's everywhere. I mean, it feels like it's, I think, and as I was saying earlier, we're so used to communicating with ourselves in words. We don't really think to look at the alarm in our body. So what I would say is, as you look at this person that kind of triggers you a little bit, feel your butt in the car seat. Relax your shoulders, relax your jaw. If you're not driving, close your eyes for a second. Just take a breath in and a nice slow breath out and go, where in my physiology do I sense this? Imagine this person. It's like, okay, well, I feel this sort of kind of ache in my upper chest, and maybe it's the size of an apple or whatever. It feels like it's a pressure. It feels like it's radiating up to my neck. That's your alarm. So put your hand over your alarm in the high five habit, high five your heart, high five, that part of your alarm because, or jumping right into it. I believe that that is your younger self asking for your attention. And typically what we do is we push it away. We go into our heads. So go into your body, feel it, see if you can put your hand over that area.

 

Mel Robbins (00:29:01):

Well, what if I don't want to? What if I'm literally like, I don't like this feeling. So I'm sitting here listening to you, and I really love your work because you are trying to get us all to go to the source of what's triggering mental health issues, which is stored experiences and the alarm in your body and your inability to tolerate or understand what's happening when it goes off. So I have recently had this experience where I'm waking up and I get these waves of anxiety. And what's interesting is that this is not new for me. I mean, I've struggled with anxiety for 30 years, but we have just recently had a number of huge changes in our life. And I now live in a different state, in a very small town. And when I wake up in the morning, in the middle of all this change, my alarm is not on the nightstand next to me.

 

(00:30:10):

It begins in my ankles, and it's like a hot lava wave that goes from my ankles up, my legs, all the way up my stomach, and then it solidifies in my chest. And as soon as I feel this wave, my immediate thought is not, oh, I want to feel the alarm. It's fuck, why am I feeling this? I don't want to feel dread. And then I feel like I just want to hide from it or try to fall asleep. And I know that it's just my body reacting to all this change. It's some sort of stored experience that is coming up. And I've been working so hard on not freaking out when I feel it,

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:31:03):

But

 

Mel Robbins (00:31:04):

Turning toward it. And as a medical doctor and a neuroscientist and somebody who has struggled with anxiety for 30 years, why is turning toward this alarm, the answer in that moment? What would happen? Tell me what happens when you turn toward it and you put your hands on your chest or you go, oh, thank you. You're just trying to protect me because you're scared to death that you now live in Vermont and you have no friends and you're very far away from your kids, and you're going to live alone here on this mountain and be even more lonely. I get through this whole catastrophizing, which will only make it worse, versus welcome this bullshit in. I don't want to, I just don't want it to be there. Russ.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:31:49):

Yeah, I get it. I get it. What if it's not bullshit though, Mel? What if it's little? Mel, did you have a nickname when you were a little girl?

 

Mel Robbins (00:31:57):

This really is becoming therapy, isn't it?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:31:59):

Well, I give it a try.

 

Mel Robbins (00:32:00):

Yeah. When you started talking about the mismatch with the mom, I'm like, I hope my mother doesn't listen to this episode. I even feel guilty for admitting that we are kind of a mismatch or are a mismatch. Yeah. Well, sometimes my mom calls me Melly and friends of mine call me Melly. And yeah, friends of mine called me Melly.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:32:20):

Is there a name that you relate to as a child, a nickname that you relate to

 

Mel Robbins (00:32:26):

In many ways? I think Mel, because I still feel very much like a child at times, and I still feel like that vulnerable kid, and I still feel like the person that's on the outside at I feel separate. That word separate makes a lot of sense for me. There's a feeling that I have in life that I'm observing what's happening, but I'm not a part of it.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:32:53):

And just because you've kind of given me permission here, I mean, you've spent a lot of your life outrunning your anxiety, and it's worked for you, Mel. You're very successful. It is worked for you. I see this with a lot of very intelligent people. They can intellectually kind of outrun their anxiety.

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:11):

What does that even mean?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:33:12):

It means that you keep yourself so busy that you don't get a chance to sit with that alarm in your body.

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:18):

I don't want to sit with it. Why?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:33:20):

Exactly, exactly.

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:21):

Why do you think moving to Vermont where there's nothing to do is so fucking terrifying? I can't run to target to make my anxiety go away. I feel like I'm addicted to negative stress and this addiction to negative stress is what I've done to numb my anxiety.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:33:39):

Well, it's it,

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:42):

That is a big word. What does subliming

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:33:43):

Mean? Okay, sure. Sorry. You've taken this energy and you've found a way to make it work for you.

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:49):

So I've taken the negative alarm or the alarm in my body,

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:33:54):

And

 

Mel Robbins (00:33:55):

I have channeled it in a direction so I don't have to feel it.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:33:59):

Yes.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:00):

And when you said, what if the alarm is trying to help you,

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:34:04):

What

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:05):

The hell did you mean by that?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:34:07):

What if it's little Mel? What if it's, it's the younger version of you saying, Hey, I need some attention. And then when you say, fuck off, I don't want to feel you. Literally, if you had a child come up to you in a grocery store and they were crying and they had their hands up in the air to pick them up, would you push them away? Would you go see ya? Fuck off? No, you wouldn't. You'd pick that damn child up. But we won't do it for ourselves. Problem.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:34):

God. That's so

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:34:35):

True. Yeah. We won't do it for ourselves. We'll do it for our pets. Wait, yeah, you're

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:39):

Right. You're absolutely right. If somebody else had an alarm going off in their body and they were freaking out or worried or sad or upset or needing attention or reassurance, you would give that to them. But

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:34:58):

Without hesitation. I'm sure with Sawyer and Oakley, you do that all the time.

 

Mel Robbins (00:35:02):

All the time,

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:35:03):

But you don't do it for yourself.

 

Mel Robbins (00:35:05):

No. And I think that this is the singular biggest mistake that society has made around understanding anxiety. I just had a huge breakthrough here. Holy shit, Russ. Good. Okay. So let me just see if I can give this back to everybody listening. Sure. So it's the fact that you're scared of the alarm or you can't tolerate it and you don't understand what it's trying to ask of you that makes it worse. And if you were to realize that any tension or fear or kind of scary feeling in your body is an alarm system that from your child, from your inner

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:35:56):

Child

 

Mel Robbins (00:35:58):

Asking you for reassurance or love or attention, and you just gave yourself that reassurance or love or attention, the alarm would turn off. Is that what you're saying?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:36:14):

Slowly? Yeah, because it's been an adaptation for you too. You got to remember that the ego thinks it's protecting you by fire.

 

Mel Robbins (00:36:21):

I don't understand what the ego is, but that's too intellectual for me. Have to have you back. I'll have you back to talk about the ego, but the second anybody says ego, I'm like, oh, this is somebody who's way smarter than me. I don't want to try to figure out what the hell an ego is and we will have you back because we all need to know what the ego is. However,

 

(00:36:39):

I just want to stay on this. I think this is a groundbreaking idea that I want everybody who either has some level of situational or generalized anxiety or loves somebody who has situational or generalized anxiety. And at this moment in time, that would be every human being on the planet. And I want you to understand that we have been taught that we're supposed to attack it from the neck up with the thinking first. And that's one of the things you need to do to cope. But the real heart of healing your anxiety, which you claim you've done, and I want to hear about that. And I don't mean to use the word claim. I don't believe you.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:37:27):

I claim that I have gotten so much better, but yeah, my God.

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:32):

Well, you're a medical doctor, so you can say that I feel like I understand anxiety. I still hate it, and I need to have a different relationship with it.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:37:41):

You

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:41):

Do, and I need to, and everybody needs for the sake of your kids, the people that you love for yourself. You need to understand this alarm system in your body and the fact that it desperately needs you, and you need to take a neck down approach to listening to the alarm and diffusing it in a way that, wow. So over time, if you do this, the alarm doesn't go off as much.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:38:12):

No, yeah, that's true. It's not as intense and you're not compulsively running up into your head when you feel the alarm. So if I had a motorcycle in my front yard, I used to work merge as a dock, and it's like I don't,

 

Mel Robbins (00:38:26):

It does emerge. Mean? Emergency.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:38:28):

Oh, emergency. Yeah.

 

Mel Robbins (00:38:29):

Okay. So you used to work in the emergency room as a doctor? Yeah,

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:38:32):

I delivered babies. I did the whole general thing. Okay.

 

(00:38:37):

Now, if I had a motorcycle in my parking yard, that's why I bring up motorcyclists is because I used to see bad accidents with motorcycles. I don't condone motorcycles. I think they're fun, but they're dangerous. Anyway, sidetrack. So if I had a motorcycle in my front, I've never ridden one before. So if I had a motorcycle in my front driveway and I had 50 books on how to drive a motorcycle, ride a motorcycle, and then I go out to the motorcycle, I sit on it and I go, no, you know what? I got to go back and I got to read a little more about how the brakes work. And then I got to, until you get on that fricking motorcycle and ride it around and maybe fall off a few times, which is the same thing with the emotion. As soon as you get on the alarm, you start actually feeling better. When you said about that thing about the person in the school drop off, as soon as you put your hand over that place of alarm, you will feel instantly better. I'm not saying it's going to take it from a nine to a two, but it's going to take it from a nine to a four because you're actually, from a consciousness perspective, you are actually going at the root source of the problem, which is this little child in you that says, I don't like this person. And it's not this person. It's basically, I don't like someone from my past that this person reminds me of, or

 

Mel Robbins (00:39:45):

I don't like the feeling that I have in my body when I see this person. And this is a familiar feeling from my past.

 

(00:39:55):

So for example, if you had a chaotic parent or an unpredictable parent or a mentally ill parent or an absent parent, this goes back to your original point. When you have a parent that you can't either connect with or that is unpredictable or that makes you feel invisible or not safe, that alarm system in your body develops as a child. And that is what you are saying when you say all anxiety has resulted because of separation anxiety as a child, when you feel separate or unsafe or unseen or not heard or not loved or invisible in your home, that original experience that you probably don't remember, that encoded your body when you were tiny. And anytime then from that point forward, anytime you again felt invisible or you felt attacked or you felt unloved, that alarm got even stronger. And so now it's like this automatic response in your body to those situations where you feel separate. Am I getting this?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:41:21):

Yeah, totally. Yeah. And what happens is when we feel the alarm, we go up into our heads to escape it. We feel this alarm in our body. It's like, I don't want to feel this. So we go up into our heads and we try and think, well, what could this? We analyze, we go into this, we have this just fixation, this left hemisphere of fixation on figuring stuff out, which basically just creates more of a problem I talk about in my book about Ulysses and the Siren Island. So Ulysses

 

Mel Robbins (00:41:49):

Is, again, you're way smarter than me, so you got to tell me the story.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:41:51):

Okay. So it's

 

Mel Robbins (00:41:52):

Basically, is this like a Greek myth class that I skipped in college? Okay.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:41:56):

Yeah. It's not English stuff. I had much rather write a physics exam than an English exam. But anyway, so it's basically Siren Island. So there's these beautiful women on this island, and what the sailors will do when they hear these beautiful women singing is they'll run their ships, the ground, and then they'll try and swim to these sirens and the sirens turn into monsters and kill them, hack them apart, whatever they want to do. So basically that's your thoughts. Your thoughts are like siren island. Your thoughts are trying to suck you into going, Hey, we have the answer. We have the answer. When all they have is more problem, you're not going to solve anxiety, which is basically a problem of overthinking with more fricking thinking, it's not going to work

 

Mel Robbins (00:42:34):

Well. Okay, so can I ask you a question? Why the hell if there is an alarm system wired in our body? Why is our brain not able to go? It's just an alarm system. Just give yourself a hug and take a deep breath. Thank it for trying to protect you next. Why do we not just automatically say that? Why do we kill ourselves in our own minds with our thoughts?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:42:55):

Because we don't understand it's there in the first place. We don't understand

 

Mel Robbins (00:42:58):

The alarm.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:42:59):

Yeah, we don't understand that it's our younger self asking for our attention. So we feel pain. And like any organism, we withdraw from pain, it's like the motorcycle that is on the front. If I don't get on that motorcycle and ride it around, maybe fall off a couple of times, I'm never really going to learn how to acclimatize to that emotion, that alarm, Bessel VanDerKolk talks about that in the body, keeps the score. We're not teaching people how to get rid of their anxiety. We're teaching them how to acclimatize to it. And then I add onto that and stop adding thoughts to it. Because as soon as you add thoughts to the alarm, A, you're getting out of the problem, and B, you're just making it worse.

 

Mel Robbins (00:43:39):

Yeah, go ahead, please.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:43:41):

So basically we get in this thing what I call the alarm anxiety cycle. So something triggers us, say, we're in that lineup, we see this person that we don't like, and then we go, oh, why don't I like this person? I should really try and make an effort. I should really? And it's like, well, no, no, she did this or he did that.

 

Mel Robbins (00:43:58):

I'm like, don't make eye contact. Get on the phone, make a fake phone call. Avoid avoid turn shoulder. Turn shoulder. Holy shit. Are they closer? I'm like, what?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:44:07):

Run away. Yes, run away to quote a mondy python thing. So basically what we're doing is we're trying to intellectualize the alarm that we're feeling in our body. And it's not, the solution isn't in our minds, the solution's in our body, which is why so many people have a hard time healing from anxiety because we're trying to use more thoughts to combat

 

Mel Robbins (00:44:28):

Overthinking. My big takeaway right now so far is that all the thinking that we reflexively do about the feelings in our body makes the alarm louder. And that we have to learn to stop going above the neck and thinking about what's going on. And we need to train ourselves to go below the neck into our bodies and turn toward the alarm and give ourselves the reassurance and the soothing or whatever it is that the alarm is asking for in that moment. And then if you do that, you are now taking step one on the path of truly, what would you call it at the root, calming, curing your anxiety,

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:45:21):

Getting at the root cause,

 

Mel Robbins (00:45:22):

Getting at the root cause.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:45:25):

That's exactly what it is. You're getting at the root cause, which is the alarm. The thoughts are not the cause. The thoughts are a symptom. So the thoughts are just the byproduct of this alarm that's stuck in your body. Now, thoughts do cause anxiety. There's no two ways about that. But I think where the mismanage is, where the mistake is, is that

Mel Robbins (00:45:52):

The feeling starts before the thought, because every one of us knows a kid that can work themselves up into a panic attack because they think they're going to throw up.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:46:01):

Sure.

 

Mel Robbins (00:46:02):

And what I now realize after years of having kids with anxiety and reading so many books about this subject that I should have a PhD and being in years of therapy myself, is that if a, let's take my son. So our son, Oakley, when he was little, he was constantly picked on at school. So of course he felt nervous in the morning before he had to head into school. Plus the kid had dyslexia and a DHD, all of which was not diagnosed. So he's heading into a full day in a classroom where he physiologically, neurologically is incapable of doing what is going to be asked of him. And so his body before entering that situation sounds an alarm.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:46:54):

Totally.

 

Mel Robbins (00:46:55):

And when the alarm sounds and the physiological changes happen, guess what? Physiological feeling he has, his stomach starts to rumble because as the physiology of the alarm changes and the chemistry in his digestive tract changes, he starts getting butterflies that feel like pterodactyls. And then all of a sudden, instead of just giving himself a hug and going, it's going to be okay, today's going to be an okay day. I can face this. Instead of reassuring himself, he into his head and says, oh my God, my stomach, I think I'm going to puke. I can't go to school. Holy. And he ramps himself. We were dealing with panic attacks with this kid where he would literally bang his head on the kitchen island, I don't want to go to school crying. He would force himself to, he would get so worked up, he would actually throw up.

 

(00:47:49):

I mean, it was horrible. And I now can see that all of the interventions that were being done with this kid, with therapists, which were all about just change the channel upstairs, and then he would turn to them and say, but sometimes when I changed the channel, it takes me to a channel I don't want to watch. So what if I change the channel of my thoughts and I get another bad thought? Even he was reacting against it, but nobody taught us that what the kid needed was a hug, validation, reassurance in that moment physically to get the alarm to quiet.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:48:32):

Yeah. Yeah, you nailed it. So I think that's part of it is that especially with kids, especially with children, it's so important that they feel you, that they feel seen, heard and loved. Touch is such a valuable thing with kids. It's just so amazing. My wife, Cynthia, is a somatic trauma therapist. She deals mostly with people that have pre-verbal trauma before the age of seven years old, so they don't have a story about it. Right. Wow.

 

Mel Robbins (00:48:59):

How do they know they have trauma before the age of seven?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:49:03):

Because they feel in their body, because they feel alarmed every day. And they don't know why, because they haven't encoded it to a point where they can see the amygdala never forgets. The amygdala encodes everything, birth trauma, everything. It encodes everything, but we don't have the retrieval mechanism to pull it back up. So we think we have no childhood memories, which is a bit of a semantic thing because we do have childhood memories. We just can't retrieve them. That's the problem. And there's a whole reason for that that I put on Instagram about how the hippocampus gets paralyzed, but I don't want to get too much into that. But basically with Oakley, it's getting him into his body into a safe place. So you practice with him. This is what I do with, I know he's older now, but this is what I do with parents is I put your hand on your child's heart, then put your other hand on their back about the same level as your front hand and just sit there with them and just allow their nervous system to regulate and just allow them to feel it and create this safe place in your body.

 

(00:50:05):

This is the next place that I'd like to go with this little interview that we're doing is finding people say, I don't want to go into my body. It's like, I understand that.

Mel Robbins (00:50:31):

Okay, so hold on, let's walk through this. So you just reached up, and for those of you listening, we put uncut episodes of our podcast in long form up on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/mel Robbins. You'll be able to watch him do this, but he just put his hands, right? Kind of like if you wore a pair of glasses, you'd put your hands kind of under where your glasses are, along your cheeks. And so when you said the way that you could practice this, so here's a takeaway for how you could practice this. You just got what I would call the love sandwich, hands on the heart, hands on the back, and just hold somebody

 

(00:51:09):

When they are having an alarm go off in their body until you can feel them slowly start to have the alarm turn off and the clinical word being their nervous system starts to regulate again. They're in their body, they're in their safe space. But you also talked about this second tool where you locate a safe place in your body, and for you, it was sort of right here alongside your nose. I was trying to think of another one. Other than the heart, there have been times where I've kind of tucked my hands under my armpits. It's almost like a mini hug

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:51:47):

Almost.

 

Mel Robbins (00:51:48):

I dunno what it is that I suppose that it's, or I could put my arms, I could give myself a hug kind of thing. But so you could pick anywhere in your body, your stomach. For some people like deep breathing. What are some other places that patients of yours have selected in the past to get people an

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:52:04):

Idea? Oh, it's all over. But basically I get them, where's a safe place in your body? And a lot of them will say, I don't feel safe. And I'll say, well, where's a neutral place? It's like, well, my right knee feels like there's no feeling in my right knee. It's like, okay, let's go into this pain of your heart from this recent breakup that you've gone through. Now let's go and just bring our attention into that right knee and then go back into this. I'm doing this quite a bit faster than I

 

Mel Robbins (00:52:29):

Normally, but when you say bring your attention to your right knee, if I'm doing this exercise with you, does that mean that I've got kind of my eyes closed and I'm mentally working my way down to my knee?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:52:42):

So

 

Mel Robbins (00:52:43):

You're mentally kind of locating your attention at your knee? Okay, got it.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:52:46):

Yeah, that feels either safe or neutral, right?

 

Mel Robbins (00:52:49):

Yep.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:52:50):

So what we're doing is we're basically training your unconscious mind that this pain that you're feeling in your heart is not all of you. Because what'll happen is the amygdala has no sense of time. So when you get triggered, you'll go back, you will turn into that 11-year-old, and then basically what we need to do is train your amygdala. Like, no, I'm not back there. I'm not 11 years old anymore. I'm actually my age that I am now. You go into that right knee that's neutral. Or if there's, for me, I go into the sinuses. So when I get alarm, I wake up with an alarm every day, but I don't give it that much credibility anymore. And then I go into this place in my sinuses

 

Mel Robbins (00:53:30):

Where it's like, do you actually touch it or do you just feel it?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:53:32):

I touch it. Yeah, I touch it and I can do it a little bit. Now, I might get a little zone when I do this, but basically, and what I do is I can locate the alarm in my solar plexus. I talk about this in the book.

 

Mel Robbins (00:53:48):

Where are the solar plexus?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:53:50):

Oh, it's right where your ribs meet, right? Where the bottom part of the sternum,

 

Mel Robbins (00:53:53):

The breast. Oh, gotcha. Okay.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:53:54):

So that's where I have my alarm from growing up with my schizophrenic dad. So I will go into that alarm. I will try and intentionally give it love and attention, and then I'll go up into my sinus area that feels safe, and then I will go back into that place that feels uncomfortable. So the thing is, there's a theory that says when you experience a trauma as a child, part of you stays locked at that age for the rest of your life, part of you. So what I'm trying

 

Mel Robbins (00:54:24):

To do at times, I feel like all of me,

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:54:26):

And it can be very overwhelming because it's unconscious, Mel, it's not something that we consciously feel. We actually get transported through the amygdala to that time and through the insula. The insula is kind of like the place in our brain that kind of translate the body into the mind and the mind into the body. It's kind of like the weigh station. So I believe that we actually create this body memory, and I think the insula has something to do with this. And then we feel exactly the same way in our bodies now as we did when the trauma was occurring, which of course brings up all sorts of old memories, all sorts of old panic, and then we want to make sense of that fear

 

Mel Robbins (00:55:05):

Stories, all of it. You're right. I want to take another scenario. So I have a really good friend that is in the middle of a massive kind of venture capital pitch,

 

(00:55:21):

And she is doing presentation after presentation to raise a ton of capital for this super cool thing she's launching, and she is a ball of knots. She has the alarm going off all the time. The stakes feel high. And I realize part of creative energy, part of being successful, part of the kind of motivation that can drive somebody during a very successful time in the adrenaline that shoots through you, that's part of what happens when things are high stakes. How do these tools help you be more successful in those moments where you're at bat, and this is a big game you're playing, and that kind of adrenaline rush and alarm in your body is going off all the time. How do you use these tools in those moments?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:56:22):

Well, you practice them first. There's a little thing that I talk to people about all the time. If I said, Hey, Mel Robbins, December the first, I'm going to take you to the basketball court and I'm going to give you 10 foul shots, and if you make three of them, I'm going to give you $5 million. Now, would you start practicing foul shots the day before?

 

Mel Robbins (00:56:38):

No.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:56:39):

No. You'd start shooting foul shots every day, right? So that's what I mean is like, okay, so what I would do with her, the short version, is I probably find her alarm and work on that first. But what I would do with her is I would say, okay, where is this alarm in your body? I find it. Can you put your hand over it? Can you breathe into it? Can you do this? Can you practice this a number of times a day so that when you need it, when you're going into that boardroom, you can do a two minute thing in the bathroom where you put your hand over your alarm, you breathe into it, you regulate your body, you relax your shoulders, you relax your jaw, close your eyes, you go into this place that you've practiced a number of times, and then you can come back out in a regulated state as

 

Mel Robbins (00:57:21):

Opposed now from a scientific standpoint, from what's going on in your mind, why does this matter?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:57:30):

Well, because you want to be able to train yourself to regulate your own nervous system is basically what it comes down to. And people with anxiety don't, didn't have a parent that regulated their own nervous system. So they have to do it themselves and nobody's coming to save you. I see that with people all the time. No one's coming to save you. You have to do this for yourself. And therapists can help, doctors can help, whatever. But unless you do it for yourself, it's not coming from place that's really going to dissipate that alarm. And I see this with a lot of people. It's like I think we have this unconscious belief when we have parents that didn't quite meet our needs, that eventually that parent's going to come back.

 

Mel Robbins (00:58:07):

I keep waiting, is going

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:58:08):

To look after us. We don't do it for ourselves. We don't do self-care for ourselves because we assume that parent is going to come back. This isn't conscious, this is all unconscious. We assume that parent's going to come back and take care of us. So why do we have to do it? And I'm sure that's what we said to ourselves at the time, why do I have to do this? And that's a lot of it is that you've got to start taking responsibility for your own body, your own alarm, and realize that it's up to you. It's that child in you that wants you back. It wants to connect with you. And if you are pushing it away all the time, that child is either going to shut down and you're going to go into depression or it's going to go into this fight flight mode where you're always anxious. And with you, Mel, bringing it back to you is that this is how you would outrun the anxiety and every success that you would have would kind of put a little anesthetic on that anxiety.

 

Mel Robbins (00:59:04):

Well, part of the reason too is that you get a lot of positive attention when you're achieving. And I started marrying achievement with worthiness and being safe and being connected. And so when I would be still, there was achievement that your worth is attached to something outside of you.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:59:24):

Totally.

 

Mel Robbins (00:59:25):

And whenever I wasn't doing something or going after something or being really busy, I didn't feel worthy. The alarms were going off. One of the other things, I have got a couple rapid fire things that I want to get in here because I'm addicted to your Instagram account

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:59:43):

And

 

Mel Robbins (00:59:43):

You can follow Russ at the Anxiety md. But the couple of things that I want to ask you about, number one, what is the difference between coping with your anxiety and healing it?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (01:00:00):

Okay, so coping with your anxiety is mostly a top-down thinking process. You learn thinking strategies that help you deal with it. This anxiety isn't real. I'm over exaggerating, whatever that is. Healing it is going back to that child that's in you, that alarm child in you and giving them the ability to be seen, heard and loved by you, by adult. You now child, you is going to resist that because child U has been ignored by adult you for a very long time. So it takes a while before you start building that bridge back together again. So that's how you heal. You heal by finding that child in you. With you, it's the 11-year-old with that sleepover. It's like going back to her, talking to her, sitting beside her and saying, look, that must've been really hard for you. It must've been awful for you. And then see what she says.

 

(01:00:53):

She may not talk back to you for a month or two months or six months, but eventually she will. And then when you develop that bridge, that conduit to her, that's when you heal and you're not just sort of, and the analogy that I draw is that you're in a rowboat, there's a hole in the rowboat and it's filling up with water. Now you can do cognitive therapies and I have nothing against cognitive therapies. I think they're helpful, but it's basically like bailing water out of that boat. So what you really need to do is go underneath, patch the hole in the hull, which I believe is the old alarm, which is the old wounded version of you as a child. Find that child, show them that they are seen, heard and loved by you, high five them in the mirror. Whatever you need to do, find that child and heal them. And then you heal at the root cause of it. You're not just bailing water by trying to change your thoughts. You're actually getting to the root cause of what's causing your anxiety, which is really a state of alarm

 

Mel Robbins (01:01:49):

And the inability to understand it or to tolerate it or soothe it. You also had this post that I was like, oh, that's interesting where you said that you rarely see anyone with chronic anxiety who is not addicted to something and that there is a tight connection between anxiety and addictive behavior. Can you explain that and help us understand that?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (01:02:15):

Sure. So I'm going to mention the E word here and I hope you don't shut off

 

Mel Robbins (01:02:18):

Ego. I won't even understand it. Can you explain it without the ego? What's that?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (01:02:23):

Your ego is kind of like an overprotective mother,

 

Mel Robbins (01:02:26):

Right? Okay.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (01:02:27):

It doesn't want you to go and play on the swings. You might fall off. It doesn't want you to talk in front of people because when you did that, when you're in grade six, people laughed at you and

 

Mel Robbins (01:02:34):

You is the ego the same thing as the alarm?

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (01:02:38):

It's related to it through the amygdala as well.

 

Mel Robbins (01:02:40):

See, I'm already confused.

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (01:02:42):

Yeah, I know. So I'm not going to get into too much neuroscience, but basically your ego is hooked into the amygdala and your amygdala says, we're never doing that again because that hurt us, whatever it was. And the amygdala never forgets. So it's basically bypassing that ego because the ego is so overprotective that it will not let you go back into your old alarm.

 

Mel Robbins (01:03:07):

So the ego is thinking

 

Dr. Russell Kennedy (01:03:09):

Yeah, more or less. Yeah. It is something that it talks to us with thinking.

 

Mel Robbins (01:03:15):

Yeah, okay. Okay. But