Episode: 57
The Toolkit for Healing Anxiety, Part 2
with Dr. Russell Kennedy, MD
Learn the critical difference between "coping” with anxiety and his protocol for "healing" it once and for all.
Dr. Kennedy is a neuroscientist and a medical doctor and he teaches you what most therapists get "wrong" about anxiety.
His approach is both revolutionary and effective.
If you haven’t yet listened to The Toolkit for Healing Anxiety, Part 1 then do that as soon as you listen to this one, because you can’t afford to miss out.
Listen on:
You've gotta start taking responsibility for your own body, your own alarm, and realize that it's up to you.
Dr. Russell Kennedy, MD
Featured Clips
Transcript
Mel Robbins (00:00:03):
Welcome to part two of the Anxiety Toolkit. We have a zero cost free appointment for you with Dr. Russell Kennedy. He's in the house, everybody. This is a conversation for all of us, whether you're struggling with anxiety or suddenly you have a friend or a family member who is, we are all affected by this topic, and so it is going to change your life and improve your life if you understand it and you have some simple, free tools that you can use to help yourself better face it and ultimately heal from it. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to part two of the Anxiety Toolkit and the Mel Robbins podcast. Welcome. I'm so excited. This is part two of the Anxiety Toolkit if you're brand new, I'm Mel Robbins. I'm a New York Times bestselling author and one of the world's leading experts on change motivation habits, and a lot of people consider me to be a incredible expert on the topic of anxiety, and I am.
(00:01:07):
My expertise came the hard way. I have lived with anxiety for a very, very long time, and it's only been in recent years that I learned the life-changing tools that we're talking about. In this episode today, part two of the Anxiety Toolkit. I am joined by Dr. Russell Kennedy. He's in the house, everybody. We have a zero cost free appointment for you with one of the world's leading experts on anxiety, childhood trauma, nervous system regulation. This guy's not only a medical doctor, he is a neuroscientist. How cool is that? Who has also lived with anxiety? And he is here to tell you very loud and clear. You don't just have to live with this, you don't have to cope with it because you can heal it. And just in case you are brand new, and this is the very first episode you're ever listening to, I want to welcome you and if you're brand new to the topic of anxiety, I want to welcome you to this topic too.
(00:02:03):
This is a conversation for all of us, whether you're struggling with anxiety or suddenly you have a friend or a family member who is, we are all affected by this topic, and so it is going to change your life and improve your life if you understand it and you have some simple free tools that you can use to help yourself better face it and ultimately heal from it. We're going to jump in with a question about the connection between anxiety and sleep, but first, so that all of you feel empowered and with the same base understanding, let me just give you a few quick things that we covered in part one. Number one, you're going to hear us talk about anxiety as an alarm. Dr. Kennedy's belief is that anxiety is first triggered in your childhood. Everybody's childhood. Everybody has an experience at some point where you feel separate or you feel unsafe or both.
(00:03:02):
And when you as a little person feel separate or unsafe, your nervous system signals an alarm because you're not supposed to be separate or feel unsafe when you're a little baby, baby or a little toddler or a little elementary school person. And that's a good thing because that alarm is trying to get you to go to one of the adults to get safe or to get reconnected. Now, what we're learning from Dr. Kennedy is what happens is most of us just continue to have that alarm signal during our life. So any moment where you feel like you're separate from a group or separate from your partner or separate from friends or separate from, I dunno, anything life in general where you feel unsafe, like you're going to get fired or somebody's going to break up with you or they're going to judge you, this triggers that alarm. That's where anxiety comes from. Otherwise, you are good to go and we're going to talk about sleep and anxiety with this question from Jason.
Jason (00:04:12):
Hey Mel, this is Jason. I always get anxious before I go to bed and then wake up in the middle of the night worrying about things. How do I stop myself from doing that? Thank you.
Mel Robbins (00:04:24):
Let's first talk about what are some changes or some simple things that Jason or anybody who gets anxious at night can start doing?
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:04:35):
Well, I love your little 3, 2, 1 thing three hours before and the two hours before no work, and then one hour before, no screens. That's really important because our reticular activating system, which you've talked about before, which works in our brainstem, which is the lower part of our brain that controls our body, is it wants to be active, it wants to pick out things in your environment. And if you're zombie scrolling Instagram until the moment before you go to sleep, that reticular activating system is still going. So
(00:05:09):
It will wake you up because it thinks that thousands and thousands of years ago, you needed to stay alert because there was a threat during the night. And the other thing about that particular question is what was going to bed like for you as a child? Was it safe for me? My mother worked shift work, so sometimes my mother was out three to 11, so she was a nurse. So sometimes my mother was gone and I'm there with my crazy father, but he wasn't always crazy, but there was points where it was just a little touch and go there. So evenings for me can have that sort of sense as well. So what was going on in your childhood? Not that everything is about childhood trauma. I really don't want to give that impression that everything is about it, but so much of chronic anxiety is unresolved fear and unresolved wounding.
(00:05:59):
So can you find the child in you that had a difficult time going to bed or maybe you were a bed wetter? Maybe the image of that is still imprinted on your nervous system that it's not safe to sleep because when I sleep, I wet the bed and then all hell breaks loose in the morning. So there's all sorts of physiological and psychological stuff that goes into sleep, and it's really important to be able to tease that out a little bit. I can give you generalities like shut the computer off before you go to sleep and calm things down. Keep the lights though, don't use blue light. All that kind of stuff. It's all important. But those are, again, coping mechanisms. If you really want to fix the problem and its root, find that place where it was uncomfortable, uncomfortable for you to go to bed and see if you can find that place in you. And again, not that everything is childhood trauma, but so much of it is and it is fixable. So if that's the underlying root cause, you're not going to fix it just by avoiding blue light, just by avoiding the computer, just by not working. The best thing to do is use a two-pronged approach. The last thing I want to put in there, I don't have anything against cognitive therapy. We have these huge prefrontal cortices. It's really important that we have an understanding of what's happening to us.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:07:24):
But what's more important and what often most therapy in North America specifically misses is this incredible role of the body and old trauma that's stored in the body and just virtually gets ignored by thinking that we can talk about our problems and having insight to them is going to fix them. And it doesn't.
Mel Robbins (00:07:44):
Well, my personal experience is that I think it took me decades to heal because I became so good at talking about my anxiety and intellectualizing my anxiety and talking about what happened to me and how it made me feel. And all of that was helpful so that I was aware of what happened. I was aware of what I was feeling, and I also from that level, was able to come up with ways to cope, whether that was yoga or taking anxiety medication or it was getting into therapy, but I wasn't doing the work to truly heal the root cause of the anxiety. And it wasn't until I stopped fucking talking about it and I got below the neck and started dealing with the uncomfortable feelings and the stored memories in my nervous system, which is very different than talking about how you feel getting into your body and feeling that kink in the nervous system, that memory that you wish that you could forget. That is when I truly flipped the pancakes, so to speak, and started to change for real.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:09:18):
And how did that feel when you felt like you were really getting at the root cause of it? How did that for you? Oh, it's liberating for you. It's, it's
Mel Robbins (00:09:26):
Liberating and it's a paradigm shift, and I can't believe how, I don't want to make any promises, and I'm not the therapist here. We've got the medical doctor and the anxiety world renowned specialist here with Dr. Kennedy. I couldn't believe how quickly it happened when I got serious that this is not about what's going on in my head. It's about patterns of feeling that get triggered in my body that create an alarm, and then my mind gets involved and I have been attacking it in the wrong order. I have been attacking it first and only in my mind. And yes, you got to start with your mind so that you're aware that you're, that's where you're like, ding, ding, ding, dinging. Oh, it's anxiety.
(00:10:13):
But once you know what you're dealing with, get out of your head and get into your body. And when I started to feel like, oh, wait a minute, I'm not nuts in my mind, I have a nervous system that needs some support. I got to smooth it out. I got to make sure that any of the cuts in the system or the kinks or the whatever, that those are all kind of healed and I got to be able to tolerate uncomfortable feelings and not have it escalate. And I got to learn how to soothe myself, and I got to learn how to be compassionate with myself. If I can do those things, I can ride the ups and downs of any feeling and my mind doesn't screw me over. That's
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:10:54):
Exactly what you're doing. I follow. It's
Mel Robbins (00:10:56):
Shocking how powerful it's dude, it's
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:10:57):
Shocking when I follow you on your podcast, you are doing exactly that, the cold plunges, all that kind of, if you look at the way that sensation is transferred to the brain, the back part of the spinal cord, and I won't get too technical, but the back of the spinal cord, the spinal thalamic tract, the sort of group of wires that fire up to your brain hold pain and temperature and emotional pain and physical pain in the brain are handled by very similar structures. So when you go into a cold plunge and you overwhelm that pain pathway, you're giving yourself a break. And then when you're going into this uncomfortable state, because going at your alarm matching up with that child that's hurting is painful. And then when you're in this cold plunge and you feel uncomfortable and you breathe through it, that's exactly what you need to do as far as feeling that alarm child in you because it's going to hurt.
(00:11:53):
It's going to hurt. And being able to have the resilience to be able to go, you know what? This hurts, but I'm going to stay with you talking to your child. This hurts us, but I'm going to stay with you. You and I will always be together. There is no way that I'm ever going to abandon you again because I know you're there now. I know you're there now. So now I will make sure that I will never ever leave you. Now the child needs to hear that a number of times because you've been ignoring you personally. But collectively, we ignore the child for decades. So it takes a while for the child to come around. But there is this sense that we're on the right track. And for the first time for me when I started healing somatically and doing therapies like if FS and that kind of thing, and I think I'll always be in therapy because I love it so much, just understanding how it works for me so I can help other people understand how it works for them, but really being able to tolerate that pain because Bessel VanDerKolk talks about that and the body keeps the score.
(00:12:50):
He says, we're not teaching people how to get rid of their anxiety. I call it alarm. We're not teaching how to get rid of the alarm. What we're doing is we're teaching you how to acclimatize to it so that when you feel that discomfort, you don't compulsively and relentlessly go into your head for a solution that you'll never find there,
Mel Robbins (00:13:09):
Right? You need to go into your body,
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:13:11):
Stay there
Mel Robbins (00:13:11):
Where
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:13:12):
Even if it hurts,
Mel Robbins (00:13:13):
Alarm is, and you suggest putting your hand there and just breathe through it, just soothe yourself through that moment. I want to address one more thing and Jason's question.
Mel Robbins (00:13:26):
When you wake up in the middle of the night and your thoughts are spinning and you're having trouble going back to sleep, what do you suggest somebody does?
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:13:36):
Am I safe in this moment? So we talked about this the last time you and I talked, so this is something that I've used for many, many years. So you
Mel Robbins (00:13:44):
Wake up, talk to Jason. I want you to pretend Jason's here and let's coach Jason, Jason tonight. When you wake up in the middle of the night, if you do, these are the specific things I want you to do.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:13:58):
Yeah. I want you to connect with that feeling and your body, put your hand over it, breathe into it, and then ask yourself, am I safe in this moment? I know I'm freaked out. I know that there's something happening in a week or two weeks. I got to go to the dentist or I got to do this, or I got to do that. But in this moment, in this moment right now where I'm lying in my bed, am I safe? And you go, yeah, I'm safe. And then feel it like you have to associate, this is what I was saying before, is you have to connect the feeling with the thinking. That's how we heal. That's how we create new neural pathways, is we create the feeling and the feeling will sear in the thinking. So when you say, am I safe in this moment? And you go, I am safe, some people will say, I am safe in this moment rather than making it a question. But my daughter Leandra said that that's the single biggest tip that Dr. Dad has ever given her
(00:14:53):
With regard to her anxiety. Because when she was 21, she still has it a little bit, but when she was 21, she went through a really difficult time, but she said, the most important thing that you've ever told me is, am I safe in this moment? And in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night, when your mind is going nuts, you can just say, I know. Because anxiety is always about the future. It's always about the future. So if you bring yourself at the present moment, and one of the ways of doing that is with sensation, with sensation, when you touch your own chest, when you take a deep breath, when you smell an essential oil, when you sing, you're bringing yourself into the sensation of the present moment, and you're removing that focus on the future or the past or the pain of the past.
(00:15:38):
When you bring yourself into the present moment, that's the fertile ground of healing is the present moment. We don't heal when we're stuck in our trauma and we don't heal. When we're stuck in our worries, we heal in the present moment sensation of our body. That's how we heal. Now, the cognitive structures help once you, and that's what helped with me was all the cognitive behavior therapy and stuff that I did for years and years and years after I started regulating my body. It was like, oh, this is what it is. It all starts to make sense. The puzzle pieces start coming back into connection again. It's like, oh yeah, that's what I came about with. I didn't get enough attention as a child from my mother because my brother was sick with club feet or my dad was crazy, so I made myself small.
(00:16:28):
So now it's like I got to be seen, but again, there's part of me that hates being seen. So it is this real dichotomy that I go back and forth of. So now I accept that. I accept that that little boy in me needs the attention and I give it to 'em, and I don't need it so much from the outside. And I think that's when you know you're starting to heal is like you don't need so much attention from the outside, and you are more connected in your relationships to other people because when you're in this dissociated alarm state, you're in survival mode and in survival mode, the social engagement system that all humans have is shut off, eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, body language. It gets shut off when we're alarmed. So no wonder we don't want to go to a party.
(00:17:14):
No wonder we have social anxiety. No wonder we can't connect with our spouse or our kids because evolutionarily, we are built when we're in alarm. That connection isn't what we're looking for. We're looking for safety. So it's very hard to be warm and connected to your spouse or your kids or whatever when you're in alarm. And a lot of people feel so guilty about that and they question the relationship, am I in the right relationship? It's like you probably are, but you're just dissociated. So you can't love yourself, so you're not going to love another person. So your relationships are going to suffer. And as you quoted the Harvard study, relationships are the most important feature in recovering from any illness of any kind.
Mel Robbins (00:17:56):
So is it normal for people to wake up in the middle of the night and
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:18:01):
Yes.
Mel Robbins (00:18:03):
Why
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:18:04):
Is that a normal thing? Not every night, but we've all had periods in the dark night of the soul. I write about in the book.
Mel Robbins (00:18:11):
In terms of people that wake up though in the middle of the night, is that a symptom or a sign that you might have anxiety?
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:18:18):
Oh yeah, absolutely. Your reticular activating system, your sympathetic nervous system. I isn't shutting off. You're not going into parasympathetic rest. And then here's the reason for that, and you're asking me brilliant questions. So as a child, and I see this a lot with my alcoholic patients or my patients who had alcoholics as parents, things would go along fine for a while and then there'd be a massive blow blowup, and then there'd be this sort of reproach ma, the alcoholic would say, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. And give you all this stuff. And then there would be this period of quiescence again, this quiet again, and then it'll blow up again. So what a child's nervous system will do is it'll say, I am not going to let myself relax because I know this shit's going to go down again, so I'm going to keep myself in this hypervigilant state, this sympathetic activated state.
(00:19:10):
So when you're in that sympathetic activated state, you start thinking, it's safer for me to keep myself at this level of activation all the time. And then you can't sleep, you don't eat well, it just screws up your entire life when you can't move yourself into parasympathetic. I remember the quick story that I'll tell you is that I used to get massages from my favorite massage therapist who's now retired, and sometimes I would walk out of her studio feeling so relaxed that I'll have a panic attack because when I was relaxed as a child, that was exactly the time I got smashed in the face by my dad, not physically, but he would be going into depression or going into menial or going into psychosis. So there was this thing with me, it's like, don't get too happy. Don't let your guard down because this is all going to shit in the near future.
(00:20:07):
And it could be like a year before he would have another episode, but I was always every day, and that's a metaphor for a lot of us with anxiety, is we keep ourselves in this hypervigilant state thinking that we're protecting ourselves. And Brene Brown talks about that too. She says, we were expecting that. We rehearse that thing in our mind, getting that call from the school that your child's been hurt or injured or whatever. We do that every day and it never happens, but we punish ourselves. We punish our body when we do that because it doesn't prepare you for anything. No matter how often you get that you practice that phone call from the school, you're still going to have to react to it. Chapter 62 in my book is about when it's not safe to feel safe. And that's one of the reasons why people have such a hard time healing from anxiety is because when I get people feeling better again, they don't trust it because it goes back to that place where when I felt safe as a kid, I got blindsided.
Mel Robbins (00:21:03):
I want to try to connect the dots, particularly on this question about sleep because we're getting so many questions from listeners who are having trouble sleeping, and you've said a couple things that I want to try to connect. First of all, you have said that I
Mel Robbins (00:21:24):
All anxiety begins from a moment where you feel separate or unsafe typically during childhood, and that anytime from that moment forward that you feel separate or unsafe, it's going to kind of trigger that same stress path of alarm in your body. And then that's going to send your thought spiraling, which makes that response of going into an alarm whenever you feel stressed or unsafe. Second nature, like unconscious. And so for those of you that are new to this discussion and you're having trouble sleeping, I personally believe that after the last three years and the unprecedented amount of uncertainty and change and
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:22:23):
Separation
Mel Robbins (00:22:23):
And separation and separation, yes, that we've all experienced that most of us are in that hypervigilant state waiting for something bad to happen. And now that people are getting laid off and the economy is starting to take a turn, that that very familiar alarm loop is getting triggered for a lot of people and they may not even realize it. And so if you are finding that, wow, I do have a lot of trouble sleeping, or wow, in the last year, I wake up all the time in the middle of the night and I'm just constantly worried about this stuff. What Dr. Kennedy has explained to you is that it goes back to this original alarm of feeling unsafe. And that's why in the middle of the night, lying there thinking about your bills or whether or not the next round of layoffs are coming or how your kid is doing because they're not doing well, putting your hand wherever the tension is and saying, I am safe for asking, am I safe in this moment? That's the first step because what you're teaching us, Dr. Kennedy, is you're teaching us how to start to repair the root cause of it, right? Yeah. Am I getting this
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:23:44):
Right? Yes, absolutely.
Mel Robbins (00:23:47):
Is there anything else you would recommend? Because we get a lot of questions technically about sleep. Do I get out of bed? Do I lay in bed? How do I go back to sleep? And since it is absolutely tied to this alarm and the way that it makes the mind spin and the inability for so many of us to allow ourselves to feel good, to allow ourselves to slow down, to trust that it's going to be okay, is there anything else that you would recommend that we do in that moment?
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:24:18):
Well, breath physiological sigh will help. So twon in and a long slow exhale.
Mel Robbins (00:24:27):
So did you get that everybody? It's two sniffs in
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:24:31):
And then a long slow exhale.
Mel Robbins (00:24:36):
What does that do?
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:24:37):
Well, it starts to move you into parasympathetic very quickly. So it blocks that sort of sympathetic chain, that chain reaction of feeling, thought, feeling, thought, feeling, thought. As soon as you start moving your body into a parasympathetic state, your state, your state will determine how you think. So the state of your body determines how your mind thinks.
Mel Robbins (00:25:01):
That's so true. Well, we've all had that experience of being stressed before going for a walk or exercising. And after you're done exercising or going for a walk outside, you're like, I feel so much better.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:25:12):
Well, yeah, after Warren's death there, when Chris took you out to paddle bowl, last thing you wanted to do right was moved. Cause there's tremendous inertia to anxiety alarm.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:25:25):
There is this freeze state that we go into. We don't want to do that. But when you force yourself to get into a different, and that's exactly what happened. You got into a different state in your body, and as that state changed, your thoughts changed. So we worship the mind in the society thinking the mind can fix everything, but it's more related to how your body feels. You will think exactly the way your body feels, and it's very difficult. It's like pushing a rock up a hill when you're feeling anxious or depressed to go, I'm happy, I'm happy. I'm happy because you don't feel happy and you can change it. Gratitude is one of those things that actually does start neurochemically changing the chemicals in your brain that allow you to start flipping the switch over to the other side.
(00:26:13):
But you have to use that almost like 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Like start gratitude first and then 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go to paddleboard or go to the beach or go somewhere. As you point out, the more we stay frozen, the more the brain thinks there's something dangerous and we start secreting cortisol, we start secreting adrenaline and it supports whatever we think. So if we think we're afraid, your brain will support you. It'll say yes. You're afraid. If you think you lean into the balls of your feet and you go, I'm going to go and ask that person to copy or whatever. When you lean in there and you go at what scares you, your brain starts creating your own sort of endogenous, your own brain's, natural morphine, it starts creating dopamine and it tells you you're on the right track, you're on the right track, and that changes your physiology.
(00:27:05):
So it's really this balance between physiology and psychology, but our physiology is so deep, it creates so much of an influence on our psychology that we're not even aware of. And that's my biggest point is why aren't we in therapy paying attention to our physiology as much as our psychology? Because if you just think about it as you say, because if you look at it from a neuroscience point of view, there's the part, and I won't get too technical, but there's the neocortex, the new brain that all humans have. That's basically the fantastic thinking memory, all this kind of stuff. And then there's the deeper structures in our brain, the amygdala, the brainstem that have no concept of words. Your body has no concept of words, it's language is feeling. And if the trauma is stored in your body and the body's language is feeling, you have to change that trauma with a feeling. Just changing. Your thinking will not do well. It won't do much. It will help you. It will help you. There's no doubt it will help you cope, but it will not help you heal.
Mel Robbins (00:28:15):
Can we get technical for just a minute?
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:28:17):
Sure.
Mel Robbins (00:28:18):
So when it comes to sensation and feeling, whether it's the pit in the stomach or the kind of getting tense in your chest or it's a wave that you might feel, are you saying that all of that feeling or sensation that is something that's happening in your nervous system channels up through the brainstem, which has no access to words, and then it gets converted into some kind of explanation?
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:29:01):
Yes, absolutely.
Mel Robbins (00:29:02):
By the prefrontal cortex
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:29:04):
And other parts too. Memory parts too. Yep.
Mel Robbins (00:29:07):
So it's like almost like a game of telephone where your nervous system is feeling something and sending through the parts of the brain that have no language, a message, and the prefrontal cortex is interpreting it and it's interpreting it as unsafe danger. And you are saying that we have to learn how to feel the sensation and deal with the sensation before the prefrontal cortex is allowed to make it mean something.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:29:50):
Yes. Your mind is a compulsive meaning making make sense machine. So when it feels something in your body, it has to make sense of it, especially the left hemisphere, left hemisphere, analytical, verbal, literal. It has to make sense of it so it makes sense of it with words and it gives you words stories that are typically pretty painful because they're consistent with the alarm feeling in your body. If you're feeling great, if you're walking down the streets, it's a sunny day, everything's going great, your thoughts are going to be pretty darn good. But if you're feeling anxious, if you're feeling alarmed and you've got a dentist appointment a week later or whatever, you're going to fixate on that dentist appointment because it makes sense to your brain. It's like, we feel bad, what do we have to feel bad about? And then we do that stacking that I was talking about the last time we talked about we start stacking so every negative thing in your life at that point, oh my relationship without going, oh, I've got taxes.
(00:30:47):
Oh, I've got to do my account. All that stuff stacks on top of each. So when it does that, it just changes. It keeps you in that negative state. So it's really about, okay, I'm in this. I'm anxious, like we were saying earlier, okay, where is that in your body now when you start finding the anxiety in the alarm in your body, now you're starting actually to get the root cause because in your head, you will never solve it. You will always be caught in your head, you will never get out of your head. Always have to go into your body. Go ahead.
Mel Robbins (00:31:17):
We have a question from Lena that is about breaking the chain of anxiety.
Lena (00:31:26):
Hey Mel, my name is Lena. My father passed his anxiety to me and the rest of my siblings growing up. I'm trying to not let my children adopt being short-tempered and anxious like many people in my family are, how can I break this generation cycle of anxiety and uneasiness and start healing?
Mel Robbins (00:31:47):
Before we jump into answering her question, let's take a quick pause for our sponsors and we're going to tackle whether or not anxiety is genetic and how to spot it in your parents when we return. Hey, it's Mel and I wanted to jump into the middle of that podcast episode you were watching to make sure you knew about a free opportunity that I created for you. It's a new three part training called Take Control with Mel Robbins. It is packed with science. It is packed with action. It's exactly what you need right now. I know that you are tired of feeling like you're in survival mode. You're tired of merely coping, and it is time to tap back into your excellence and power again. Let me coach you, let me guide you on the steps that you need to take in order to level up and start executing. It's going to feel so great to start winning again. All you got to do is click on the link right there in the caption. It's mel robbins.com/take control. It is free. It is for you, and you need to be in it. Now let's go back to the podcast.
Lena (00:32:56):
Hey Mel, my name is Lena. My father passed his anxiety to me and the rest of my siblings growing up. I'm trying to not let my children adopt being short-tempered and anxious like many people in my family are, how can I break this generation cycle of anxiety and uneasiness and start healing?
Mel Robbins (00:33:17):
Healing? That was Lena, who's a listener of the Mel Robbins podcast, and she had a question about how you recognize anxiety in your parents, especially when people don't talk about it. We're here with Dr. Russell Kennedy. So Dr. Kennedy is anxiety genetic?
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:33:34):
No, the short answer is no. There are mental illnesses, and I put that in quotation marks that do seem to have a bit more of a genetic component to it, like schizophrenia and bipolar. But anxiety in and of itself is not genetic. We haven't really isolated anything that would say this is the anxiety gene or anything like. What I do think that we have genetically is a tendency to be sensitive. So if you are born sensitive, which everybody I see with anxiety, everybody I've ever consulted with anxiety is a sensitive person. You are a sensitive person.
Mel Robbins (00:34:09):
How do you know if you're a sensitive person?
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:34:11):
You have anxiety? No, well, because you feel everything. And then the other part about feeling everything as a sensitive person is to survive. It's kind of like autism in a way to survive. You have to start shutting off your connection because it's just too much.
(00:34:29):
And I think that's what happens when you're born sensitive, is you learn ways of protecting yourself because your home life doesn't give you the love and attention that you need. Now, you could have good parents who are loving and caring, but just because we are more sensitive, we just need more love. I need more love than my brother. It's just he's not as sensitive as I am. So your parents could have been fine in a way, but if you are sensitive and you need more love, what you'll do is if you don't get it, you will start going to the dark side. Use the pole loop. So it's important to understand that you need more love and you have to start really giving that to yourself without this becoming a pity party. Like ohm, everybody has to love itself. Hold hands, seeing Kumbaya. No, it's really something that you learn how to give love, compassion, and attention to yourself.
Mel Robbins (00:35:25):
It's like learning to feed yourself for crying out loud. It's that basic. It's so how do you break this cycle of anxiety in a family?
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:35:36):
Well, first you start breaking the cycle in yourself. So you start realizing that this anxiety I feel is actually this alarm in my body. I'm going to pay attention to that because that is my younger self. And I have many, many people contact me and say, oh, my 15-year-old daughter is so anxious. Can you see? Or can you see her? And it's like, no, what I'm going to do is I'm going to fix you first. It's like Caesar Milan, the dog whisperer. He doesn't fix the dog, he fixed the parent. So that's what I work on with people. As I work on the parent, I show the parent how to heal themselves, and then that energy just seems to translate into the children. They start saying, Hey mom, you seem more connected because she is, because she's not in that alarm state where she can actually give love and attention to her kids so those kids can get filled up and feel safe.
(00:36:23):
And then that gets handed down from generation to generation. So anxiety isn't sort of genetic, but we are born sensitive. A lot of us, if your mother or father was anxious, which mine was, both my parents actually were quite anxious, you will start seeing that and almost be awkwardly conditioned to create that anxiety because you feel it in them. So a lot of the kids or people that refer their kids to me are because they are anxious themselves and they feel helpless and powerless to help themselves, let alone help their kids. And then they feel horrible that they've kind of transferred this anxiety gene to their kids. And it's really about heal yourself first and then your kids will come along. Your kids will start feeling that. So it's not about the kids, it's about the adults a lot of the time. So for Athena, it would be, okay, how do we find your alarm? How do we find the best time in your life? How do we start changing that pattern, that automatic pattern of negativity and irritability in you first, and then you're more available to your kids. And when you're more available to your kids, your kids don't feel so alarmed themselves and you start healing that whole generational cycle.
Mel Robbins (00:37:45):
Anxiety in a family is not about the kids, it's about the adults.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:37:50):
Yes.
Mel Robbins (00:37:51):
And you help kids that have anxiety by addressing and healing the anxiety in the adults in that family
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:38:03):
99% of the time. Yeah.
Mel Robbins (00:38:05):
So Dr. Kennedy, what are surprising signs of adult anxiety, particularly for that generation of our parents who never talked about this, Prozac was not even invented yet. That was not a generation of expressing feelings. So how that was the be seen and not heard generation. It was shut up and pull up your big girl panties.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:38:40):
I'll give you something to cry about.
Mel Robbins (00:38:41):
Yeah, I'll give you something to cry about. No, I'm dead serious because
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:38:44):
No, I have too. Yeah.
Mel Robbins (00:38:45):
My mom recently said to me, never even occurred to me that I had anxiety because maybe I didn't want to feel all that stuff.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:38:57):
Exactly.
Mel Robbins (00:38:57):
Maybe I'm afraid to go talk to a therapist and open that all up. We didn't talk about our feelings. And so it didn't occur to me until recently that, gosh, my mom clearly had a lot of trauma in her childhood and felt invisible. And I've never looked at her and been like, the woman has anxiety. So what are the surprising signs that your parents may be dealing with anxiety? It's just never been talked about in your family?
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:39:34):
Alcoholism, that's a big one because they didn't have the open dialogue that we have now. So it wasn't okay. Mental illness had a tremendous stigma, and it still does. It still really does. So there's this resistance to actually admitting you have a problem because that child in you or in them that is loud and painful, it's easier in a way to just keep stuffing that child down because it's not talked about. I don't want to be different than anyone else. So we just accept our nervous system as this is what we're stuck with and this is the way it's going to go. It's been like this for 10 or 15 years. So many people that say, I've been in therapy for like 5, 10, 15 years, and yeah, I mean, I feel a little bit better, but I'm not really getting there. When you look at therapy costing $150 an hour, it's pretty frustrating for people. It's pretty out of reach for people.
Mel Robbins (00:40:33):
Let me ask you another question. I want to back you up because Go ahead. I do think the surprising symptoms are something we got to talk about, and I'd love to kind of tick off some because I think this is a big wake up call. I mean, our parents didn't talk about their feelings because it didn't matter if they did, it wasn't normalized. Nobody was going to do shit about it anyway. And if you were struggling with alcohol, you're a bum. And if you like my great-grandmother were bipolar, you were institutionalized and given shock treatments and you would just go away for a couple weeks and you were called mean. And so I want to talk about what are the signs that may surprise you that your parents have anxiety and you didn't even know it. So alcoholism was one, but what are the other signs?
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:41:31):
Irritability, parents that are chronically irritable, not connected, just not feeling connected to a parent. My mother is very warm and caring at points and very cold and distant at others. I think that's kind of like the British way in a lot of ways. And so for a child, it's like, Hey, sometimes you're rubbing my back and we're feeling connected, and other times you're cold as ice. So in a way that's almost worse than being consistently one or the other. If she was consistently cold, I would learn how to protect myself from that. If she was consistently warm, I wouldn't need protection in the first place. So we're, a lot of us kids had emotional dysregulation in our parents that we didn't recognize. So sometimes they'd be nice and connected, and other times they'd be off the deep end. And I think irritability is one way of doing that. Hypervigilance, hyper organization, these things that show up in our parents because they didn't have a way of expressing it.
(00:42:34):
They didn't know or they went to therapy. And a lot of people go to therapy and they've been in there for five years and they feel terrible because it's like, I've been in therapy, I've been in this CBT thing, and it's really, it helped me at first, but now I'm just feeling just as bad as I always have and I've just spent $40,000 on 10 years of therapy. And it's because they're not addressing the root cause. And I think hypervigilance shows up. I think irritability, drug abuse, and I'm not talking like cocaine or whatever, it's prescription drugs, that kind of stuff that people need to kind of cope. Because like I said, when we go into survival mode, we become very inaccessible both to ourselves and to other people. And when we're warm and connected to ourselves, we can extend that out to other people. A lot of people are more connected to their pets than they are to their spouse because they see their pet as safe.
(00:43:35):
They don't see their spouse as safe because their spouse reflects some of the crimes of the parent in a way. So it's really very interesting to see how anxiety shows up, how childhood trauma shows up in people, and it's usually emotional dysregulation of some kind where they can't connect. And another way of connecting that doesn't look like it is the people pleaser is the mom who's doing, making cookies for everybody and doing all this stuff and appears so connected. We're very good, anxious people are very smart. We know how to present an image that appears connected but really isn't. But people can feel it. People can feel your authenticity when you're connected.
Mel Robbins (00:44:18):
The point that really struck me, there was somebody who is just so loving and kind with an animal and cold with other people.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:44:33):
They didn't trust their parents. Their parents didn't establish that people are safe. My dad didn't establish that he was safe, even though my dad was really kind and loving and playful and great at many, many times. In fact, most of the time that I spent with him was good. But it's like when you get that one bad experience with a dog, it takes a thousand good experiences to kind of erase it a little bit.
Mel Robbins (00:44:56):
So true.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:44:56):
So it's really important. Again, our brains, we have a fear bias. We are evolutionarily programmed to focus on fear. And another thing that I got from one of your podcast recently is, and I said this a lot, is whatever you focus on, you get more of. So if you focus on your anxiety, you'll get more anxiety. If you focus on gratitude, you'll get more gratitude. You'll see more broncos around is basically what it comes down to.
Mel Robbins (00:45:21):
So we have another question from Becky. Play that one.
Becky (00:45:25):
My comment was about anxiety and how you get your train of thoughts to slow down. You get so anxious you can't stop thinking about the worst that's going to happen. And how do we calm that anxiety and get it all to relax? Sometimes it's not even realistic things, but you just get anxious and you can't get it to stop. What are some tools? We need those.
Mel Robbins (00:45:55):
Okay, so you're in a situation and you're overthinking and your mind is spiraling and you're in that worst case scenario. Loop tools to get that moment under control,
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:46:10):
Go into your body, get out of your head. You're not going to find the solution in your head. It's not there. Stop looking for peanut butter at the hardware store. You're not going to find it there. You're not going to find a solution in your head, but now whatever you focus on, you get more up. So if you start focusing on your thoughts, of course you're just going to get more thoughts, and that's just going to be an endless self-fulfilling cycle. So consciously, you have to realize what happens to me when I feel anxious? Where do I feel this anxiety? And can I train myself to go, oh, there's that pain in my chest again. There's that pressure in my solar plexus, there's that lump in my throat. That's a sign that I'm starting to go into alarm. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my body, and this is one of the other times where I get people to draw on the best times of their life, change that feeling state. Go back.
Mel Robbins (00:47:03):
Can I ask you a question real quick? Yeah, go
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:47:04):
Ahead. Yeah.
Mel Robbins (00:47:06):
So I want to go right to the moment that the thoughts are spiraling and you realize you're trapped in this worst case loop. Should somebody do the psychological side,
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:47:22):
Physiological side? Exactly, yes.
Mel Robbins (00:47:25):
Just do that. To stop.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:47:26):
To start. Yeah. You got to break the cycle, right? So that's a great way of breaking the cycle.
Mel Robbins (00:47:31):
Use the five second rule. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Absolutely. Just stop the, that's another,
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:47:35):
Yeah.
Mel Robbins (00:47:36):
Is there another one to stop that spinning of thoughts?
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:47:40):
Breathing is probably the most effective. Just being aware first of all, because a lot of times what'll happen is because our frontal cortex gets impeded by survival physiology, we don't realize that we're in anxiety. We can sit in anxiety for hours and not realize that we're in it. So if you don't realize you're in it, you just feel it. You just feel this terrible feeling, you can't change it. So you develop this awareness, okay, this is my alarm coming up.
(00:48:13):
That's your first thing. So at that point, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, get out of the house, put my shoes on, go to the house, go to the gym, go somewhere, do something. Do something to break that cycle. Because if you don't break that cycle, you're going to sit there and ruminate and ruminate and ruminate and rumination has tremendous inertia to it. Once you start getting into negative thoughts, you don't feel like doing anything. It's like when Warren passed away and you didn't want to go anywhere. You didn't want to do anything. Physiologically, we go into the vagus nerve shut down, and that shuts us down and we don't want it. So we need something outside of ourselves. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 is awesome by the way, because it really, it's like, okay, after you've done it a bunch of times, you count, okay, you have to change your state. And one of the best ways of changing your state is changing your body. And one of the best ways of changing your body is starting to fricking move.
(00:49:02):
So I can sit there, and I remember being in med school with the covers up to my chin. I can't get into school today, and I always did, but it was like you just wake up and you're in this panic. I can't get in there today. And I didn't have 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 back then. But it was just like, okay, I have to move. I have to move. And giving myself a reward to move like, okay, I'm going to get a nice cool glass of water. Now. It wasn't that appealing, but it was just something. It was something to break that cycle. If you don't break that cycle of rumination, it will just run rough shot over you.
Mel Robbins (00:49:37):
What is it like to live without anxiety? I think part of, and the reason why I ask this question is I think so many of us have lived in a alarm state for so long, we don't know what it's like to be able to turn it off. So what is available to everybody if they start to do the work in their bodies,
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:50:01):
A direct access to a repeatable process where you can find peace, maybe not right away. Maybe it takes you five minutes, maybe it takes you 10 minutes, but at least you're on the right track. At least you're not. I used to feel like I was a bubble and an ocean because whatever the ocean went, wherever my emotion went, I was taken with it. And the thing about starting to find that peace in your body is you kind of go down below the surface of the waves and you look up, this is the image that I get anyway. I look up and I can kind of see that hazy blue when you're under the water and you're looking up, I can see the waves there. And you can create this sense of separateness ironically, from the alarm where this isn't all of me, because when you were a child, it was all of you.
(00:50:52):
When you were in your trauma as a child, there was no way out. You'd look everywhere and there was no way out. But as an adult, you can look and you can start seeing, you know what, I feel you alarm. I feel you there, and I know that you're my younger self, but I can see that there is a sense of separateness there that I don't have to completely be taken over by this. Now at the same time, the paradox is that alarm is your younger self, so you want to be attached to it. So can you see the alarm with this sense of curiosity? Because when you look at something with curiosity, you take a lot of the emotion out of it. It's like, that's really interesting that I've got this sense of alarm in my solar plexus that it feels heavy and sharp and purple.
(00:51:39):
Wow, that's really interesting because when you look at it with curiosity, you're changing your sort of psychological mindset towards it. And when you start changing it in any way, it starts making that cycle easier to break. So when you get caught in rumination and thought, you can start going into your body, even if it hurts initially, because you are on the right track and your ventral segmental area, the part of your brain that secretes dopamine will start telling you you're on the right track. And I think that's when we start healing. We start get this sense of power over the alarm because we have been prisoners of it for so long. And in a way, we are prisoners of our younger child. If we don't pay attention to them, they will make us miserable together. So when you start paying attention to that and you start knowing, Hey, I'm on the right track, dopamine starts going in your brain when you're on the right track with something, you get all these sort of feelgood chemicals, and then you have a sense that you are no longer this passive bubble in the ocean anymore.
(00:52:42):
You have something that you can tap into that's in all of us. I mean this power, and we see this a lot with people that have had spontaneous remissions from cancers and from horrible diseases and stuff. They feel this power in them that they didn't know was there, but they just feel it. They just feel that power. And I think what happens when we have trauma as children is we lose faith in that power. We lose sight of that power. So when you connect with your younger self, again, you can have access to that power that's in all of us, just that sense of peace. I think in the Bible, they call it the peace that passeth all understanding and you into that state. And when you start healing from anxiety and you start realizing, hey, it is actually safe to feel safe, there's a tremendous feeling of rush of, man, I suffered from this for so long. Why did I wait so long to do this?
Mel Robbins (00:53:42):
Well, I know for me personally, it happened a lot faster than I expected it to. And the experience for me is emotional peace. There's a level of steadiness, there's a calmness, confidence. It's all available to you. And I think when people really resonate, particularly with either the way that I move through life in the last year or two, or how our son Oakley has this, just steadiness this presence that's emotional peace that you're experiencing and everything that you talked about related to the fact that so much of this is about the separateness or the unsafe feeling that we all experienced at some point during childhood and how the alarms sounds now that we are adults. But there's this emotional immaturity in most adults, meaning they're just children trapped in adult bodies who are incapable of handling the feelings and the sensations that are rising up in their bodies, which is why they act in ways that feel very toxic or abusive or confusing. And it's why we do that and then regret it. And the whole solution to all of this is this three layered approach we've been talking about today is first you got to become aware,
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:55:24):
Aware, yeah,
Mel Robbins (00:55:25):
That you have this alarm, that it's getting triggered in your adult life and that there's shit that went down when you were a kid that needs your attention and needs your healing, and it has everything to do with you learning how to make yourself feel connected and safe and taken care of. And then there is the coping with it, which are the bazillion strategies on TikTok, which by the way, a lot of it is horseshit, and so you got to be very careful. Yeah, it may go viral, but in the coping realm, therapy is amazing if you can afford it and all the modalities are incredible and help you to cope and breathing and meditation and yoga and walks in the woods and lots of things that both Dr. Kennedy and I recommend, and it will help you cope and it will help the anxiety dissipate. But if you really want to dismantle the alarm, you got to go a layer deeper, which is in your body, finding the source of the alarm, repairing yourself and that little person inside of you that felt alarmed. And then taking care of yourself by staying in your body and becoming aware of when the alarm goes off before it hits your mind and feeling your way through these things. It's remarkably powerful what you're talking about, Dr. Kennedy.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:56:59):
And I think that that's really, you can kind of hit the nail on the head. I mean, there's superficial things we can do. Physiological, sigh, breath work, grounding, just feeling your butt in the chair, feeling your feet on the ground. There is something psychologically about being grounded. It does help us for sure, touch, touching yourself, touching other people, temperature, going through those extremes of temperature, cold, heat, whatever. Temperature is one of those ways that we can access the deeper structures in our brain too. Smell, if you have an essential oil that you love, like lavender or chamomile, rather carry it with you if you're struggling, smell is one of those things that it's the only scent that doesn't get processed by the thalamus. The thalamus is kind of like this central switchboard of the brain.
(00:57:45):
Smell goes right into our emotional brain. So if you have something that smells good, it will change your state right away. There is this thing also about moving your eyes back and forth side to side, sort of the basis of EMDR. And it does show that if you move your eyes back and forth, back and forth, not up and down, but back and forth, it does decrease the activity in the amygdala. Now, all those things are coping strategies to heal. You've got to find the alarm, you've got to find the trauma. You've got to find your younger self. You have to have faith in yourself
(00:58:16):
Because I think as trauma, when we get traumatized as children, we lose faith in the world. And when we lose faith in the world, we start believing everything is up to me. And if you're a 7-year-old and you think everything's up to you, life's going to be very anxious. You're not. And finding that power inside of you that power that the people that had the spontaneous remissions from cancers and multiple sclerosis and all those sort of things, there's this power inside all of us that we lose with trauma. Finding that, again, it's really important, having gratitude for the pain, having gratitude for the alarm, because that's your conduit to your healing is that alarm. So as much as you bemoan having it, it's actually a beacon to your younger self. Be grateful for that sense of alarm because you have a pathway now to find that child and play. It's so important to adopt play because when you play, you start changing that autonomic nervous system and that autonomic nervous system runs your life. So the more you can play, the more you can regulate that autonomic nervous system, that sympathetic, parasympathetic nervous system, the easier life is going to be more connected. You're going to be to yourself and maybe more importantly to others because we need others, because loneliness is killing us. Separation is killing us.
Mel Robbins (00:59:32):
Give me your top three recommendations for play that you give to your patients.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (00:59:37):
Well, I often ask people, what did you do when you were a teenager? Some people say, I rode my bike, I played chess, I did this. So things that you liked when you were a kid, chances are you'll still like now. So there's no sort of global thing that I suggest to people. Ideally, it would be something that's fun that doesn't really have a winner and a loser
(00:59:59):
Kind of thing. And Gordon Neufeld, who's my mentor and developmental psychology talks about that with kids. It's so important to have play just for play's sake. There is no winner. There is no loser, there's nothing there. And one of the things that I really recommend for parents is playing around the dinner table with facial expressions. Like, how am I feeling when I make this face? How am I feeling? Because then you're actually maturing their social engagement system. You're maturing the part of their brain, facial expression, body language, eye contact. You're improving the part of their brain that allows them to soothe others and soothe themselves. So it's important to do this in a playful way, and that's really, once we start really adopting play in our day-to-day life, then we start regulating our nervous system and in a way that you don't have to academically go back and find the trauma.
Mel Robbins (01:00:53):
Amazing. Dr. Kennedy, anything else before I wrap up?
Dr. Russell Kennedy (01:00:58):
I think it's really being compassionate for yourself. I have this process in the book called A, B, C. So A is awareness, as you say. Be aware what anxiety or alarm feels like in your body. B is for body and breath. So go into your body, go into your breath. Physiological sigh is great, getting grounded in your body. And then C is compassionate connection for yourself and specifically that younger version of yourself. So if you do that each time that you have anxiety or alarm, you will start training your nervous system to focus on something that will heal you instead of focusing on your thoughts, which are only going to make you worse.
Mel Robbins (01:01:35):
Amazing.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (01:01:36):
So as Forrest Gump would say, that's all I got to say about that.
Mel Robbins (01:01:44):
Dr. Kennedy, you are such a gift. Thank you for giving us so much time and so many tactics and just pouring into us. And
Mel Robbins (01:01:57):
One thing I wanted to just say as a thank you is that when we were talking about the younger self, I had this image of my husband and he tells this story about how he had asked, he had forgotten his baseball met, and it was a game day and he had to book it home. Nobody was at the game. And he gets home and here he is in his baseball uniform and he can't get in the house. Nobody's left it on lock form. And so he has to go around the side of the house and climb up this trellis so he can get onto the balcony outside of his parents' bedroom. And the trellis is full of bees because the trellis is covered with flowers. So he's climbing up this thing and he's getting stung, and then he gets onto the kind of porch on the second floor and he goes up to the French doors in his parents' bedroom and he goes to open 'em up and they're locked. So he ends up punching through one of the panes of glass and cutting his hand and then dripping blood across the hardwood floors that had just been refinished as he is walking in his cleats to get his. And I have this image of him because there's a particular image of him in this blue and white baseball uniform. He's probably in the fourth grade. He's got kind of long blonde curls. And it's very useful to me to look at the man I've been married to for 26 years
(01:03:52):
In those moments where I get really pissed off or irritated or annoyed and visualize that kid in the baseball uniform just trying to do his best and feeling like nobody's there to support him. That was really helpful. I think that's really going to help me show up.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (01:04:17):
And I recommend that for couples too. Have a picture of your partner when they were like seven, eight or nine around the house. And then when they started going off for what you think is a seemingly trivial matter, look at that picture because that's who you're dealing with. And I feel bad for Chris because I know he was a latchkey kid and didn't feel supported. So that must've been a very difficult situation for him because I think he would learn to be overly self-reliant. And in that, when you're overly self-reliant, you don't allow love in. You become an alpha child. Well, I call an alpha child, and you think that everything is up to you. And again, if you're a child and you think everything is up to you, and because you're a child that you don't have the ability to deal with this stuff, it's going to be tremendously alarming and then it's going to stick in your body.
Mel Robbins (01:05:10):
Wow, there is so much more. We're going to talk about Dr. Kennedy
Dr. Russell Kennedy (01:05:15):
Every three months. Every three months now, we'll have a check-in. I'll write you a prescription. I will see you again in three months.
Mel Robbins (01:05:21):
Please do. Alright everybody, let's give it up for Dr. Kennedy in the house.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (01:05:28):
Thank you,
Mel Robbins (01:05:28):
Thank you, thank you. I love you Dr. Kennedy.
Dr. Russell Kennedy (01:05:30):
Love you, Mel. You're amazing.
Mel Robbins (01:05:32):
I love doing this at zero cost for everybody because you know what everyone, when you can find some peace and you can stop laying awake at night, staring at the ceiling, spinning those thoughts about stuff that doesn't really matter. You know what? You got room for inspiration, happiness, your goals, the ability to focus on things that matter to you. Dr. Kennedy, thank you, thank you, thank you. I am sure we will have you back multiple times, and I cannot wait to see the response to this episode. Thank you for sharing it. Thank you for listening to it. Thank you everybody for applying this to your life. Please let us know how it's going. If you have more questions for me or Dr. Kennedy, please keep putting them in the comments. Please DM me your videos on Instagram. That's how we're getting all of this texture. Please comment on YouTube and in case nobody else tells you, I want to tell you that I love you.
(01:06:28):
I believe in you, and I do this because I not only believe in your ability to create a better life. I know you can do it, and I know you deserve it. And I hope every time you listen to one of these episodes and you do something with it, you start to believe it too. Alrighty, I'll see you in a few days. Oh, one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician for professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.
Guests Appearing in this Episode
Dr. Russell Kennedy, MD
Dr. Russell Kennedy is a physician and neuroscientist specializing in anxiety treatment, blending science and mindfulness to help people heal.
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Book: Anxiety Rx
For over thirty years, I searched for relief from anxiety and saw over fifty practitioners ranging from Indian shamanic energy healers to highly accomplished psychiatrists. (I was lucky I was a doctor so I could afford to be a patient.) Have you, too, gone to extraordinary lengths to resolve your chronic compulsion to worry and are still suffering? Read on.
What makes this book different is a relentless focus on calming anxiety at its true source, which I will share with you in detail. That source is in a place most doctors and psychologists fail to explore, and that oversight is why the positive effects of most anxiety therapies tend to wear off over time.
What is in this book has changed my life very much for the better, and I know it will do the same for you.
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Podcast: Anxiety Rx
I am an anxious doctor. Or at least I WAS an anxious doctor. After literally decades of suffering from intractable anxiety, and seeing over 50 different types of healers I found my way to heal my anxiety through very unconventional (for a medical doctor at least) means.
In 2013 I was so anxious I considered suicide and a friend suggested I try LSD, and although that scared the crap out of me it showed me the path to healing. You don’t have to do LSD to heal, I took it for you! I’m a medical doctor, neuroscientist and intuitive. (I know, common combination!)
I found my way out and it is counterintuitive and very non conventional (but not scary!).
I will show you the way out too, you just have to listen to me, dammit!
Resources
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- Scientific American: How parents’ trauma leaves biological traces in children.
- World Psychiatry: the long-term costs of traumatic stress.
- Frontiers: Childhood trauma and its link to chronic illness in adulthood.
- American Psychiatric Association: What is post-traumatic stress disorder?
- New York University: Research finds yoga significantly helps relieve anxiety.
- What is somatic experiencing therapy and how can it help with anxiety?
- This is EMDR therapy and how it can help if you’ve experienced trauma.
- And this is focusing-oriented experiential psychotherapy.
- Black Female Therapists: It is possible to heal from your trauma.
- APA: The benefits of sand play therapy for adults with childhood trauma.
- The New York Times: How to add more play to your grown-up life.
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