Your work centers around one skill that everybody on the planet needs to learn how to spot and master. What is it?

My work really is about identifying avoidance and overcoming avoidance. That is it.

Why do we need to do that?

Because avoidance is rubbing us from our best life. It's keeping us prisoners of our own thinking and our own behavior, and that keeps us in our own mental jail.

I know that you are a specialist in CBT therapy. We're going to get into that. But I want everybody to hear your background.

Mel, it's interesting. People come to me and they want me to get rid of their fever. They say, No, Dr. Luana, get rid of my anxiety. But the problem is really not anxiety. It's what we do when we are anxious. And what we do is we avoid. And let me tell you this. I learned this first when I was 15, and I moved in with my grandmother. So I've lived in a little city, Gorenadou, Valadades in Brazil, and I moved into Belarizon. I just became terrified of people. My brain would just scream that people were not going to like me, that they think I'm different, that I come from a small town, that I'm not enough. And so my grandmother noticed that. She's like, Why don't you bring friends over? I'd be like, Oh, no, I just have to study. I need to really study. I started to just avoid people, anything related to people. I didn't make friends. I started to feel lonely. I was really anxious. And my brain just was failing me. My grandmother, this woman is incredible. She has no college training. She doesn't know at that point, CBT was nothing.

Cognitive behavior therapy wasn't really in Brazil, specifically didn't exist. She one day said to me, Luana, let's go to the mall. I want us to eat Chinese food. Now, before I move to my grandmother, there were times in our lives that we didn't have food. And so this idea of having Chinese food in a big town, my grandmother was so excited. I get this little tray. I still remember this. My hands are so excited, this Chinese. I could smell the Chinese food. And she says to me, Do you see that gentleman there, the elder gentleman? Let's go talk to him. And my stomach, Mel, dropped. I was like, No, I'm not talking to him. What are you talking about? Do you know that anxiety in your pit of your stomach, just turning? And I was like, I can't do this. I just can't do this. And she's like, We're going to talk to him. And so we sat and she did all the talking. And at that point, I didn't want the Chinese food anymore, let's be clear. You have no appetite.

I had no appetite.

She just kept doing this. We did it again and again. I don't remember how many times, but I remember that eventually I could talk to people. Eventually, people weren't scary anymore. Eventually, I made friends. I realized in graduate school, like later, 20 years later, I realized that my grandmother was doing what's called exposure therapy. She realized I was avoiding. I was avoiding strangers. She forced me, that's how I felt, out. She would tell you that she just helped me approach. But she taught me to go against that avoidance, to go towards the things that matter. And I'm telling you, if she didn't do that, I probably would have developed social phobia. I probably would be stuck in Brazil still. And so that's why I think avoidance is so powerful. It rubs us from the lifestyle we want. And there's a ton of science behind that. But I learned that from my grandmother.

I have my jaw on the floor. And the reason why is I don't think anybody has really shown this spotlight on the topic of avoidance and how it's everywhere in our lives. And we'll dig into the way that we all avoid. But I'm having this moment where I'm going, holy cow. I remember when Brené Brown first gave that Ted talk about vulnerability, and the whole world was like, What? Vulnerability is a superpower? The way you just explained avoidance as something that anxiety triggers or uncomfortable situations trigger and that it's not these feelings of being anxious or scared or whatever that's the problem, it's really what we do with it. And avoiding is the main thing we do. You're right.

Yeah, that's what we do. And we do it all the time. We rationalize our way into avoidance. I'm not going to ask for this raise because I just haven't worked hard enough, or I am not going on this date because I just have to work harder at work. So it's not that I'm afraid of dating. No, no, no, no. It's just because if I work more, it's better. And it's everywhere, right? It's robbing us from our lives. And no one is talking about avoidance. I'm so glad that you cut onto that mail because that's right. People are talking about the fevers. That's how I think about it.

The fevers or fears?

Fevers. Fevers?

What do you mean by fevers?

I think about anxiety, the stress as a fever, a high fever. Nobody likes to be me included, right? But that is not the real infection that we are facing. The infection maintaining the fear is avoidance, right? And so we've been fighting anxiety. Anxiety is biologically adaptive up to a point. It's what we do. And if what we do is walk away from the things they're meaningful, if what we do is avoidance, then we're rubbing ourselves from our best lives.

Holy cow.

You're absolutely right. I'm just going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, because there's somebody really close to us and our family who has had this massive uptick of anxiety happen. And it has been so debilitating that this person has actually taken an entire week off of work. And I've been thinking that's actually the opposite of what you should do, because if you are scared that you're going to have a panic attack at work so you don't go to work, you're making the anxiety bigger than you. Avoiding that thing or avoiding the situation that may happen makes the fear bigger.

That's exactly right. This is a great example of this person because the instinct, and it's biologically driven, is to go away. So you're start to worry about having a panic attack. I've worked to lots of people that have panic attack. And so your work, you have this horrible panic attack, and then your brain basically now is saying, Well, work can lead to panic attack, so I'm going to stay home. But what you're doing is you're actually training your brain to be scared of work because now you're linking work with a panic attack. And let's be honest, there was no link there. Correct. Panic attacks can come out of the blue. But then if you take a whole week out of work, then what are you doing? You're basically trying to take away anything that is potentially going to trigger anxiety. But the minute you step out of your house, you can't avoid for long. You're going to come out with a baseline anxiety so high that now you're almost guarantee that you're going to have a panic attack at work because you've been so afraid of it. You're inducing that fight, flight, or freeze. The opposite of avoidance is approach.

Now, just do it the way Nike tells us to do. It doesn't work with anxiety. You can't tell somebody that's having panic attacks. Just go work, right? But can you drive towards work? So you're not going to work for a week. Okay, I'm with you.

Yep. Okay. I've been in this boat, too, where the anxiety has been so debilitating that I've actually had anxiety so bad that it built and built and built up inside me when I was a second year law student that I convinced myself that there was no way that I could get on a plane and go to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I had landed a summer job, and be able to live and work on my own. And I talk about avoidance. I called that law firm and told them that I had had a family emergency and I had to not come. This was two days before I was supposed to get on the plane. And so I have done this over and over and over and over again in my life. And I can't wait until you unpack all the forms of avoidance. But you're right, you do link up this act of, Oh, my gosh, if I just don't do it, then I'm going to be okay. But you actually make it worse.

That's exact. I wish I knew you then. Because, see, there's two pieces of avoidance that we're talking about. They're beautiful. The first one is the perception of threat. You've flown many times before in your life, but now your brain convinced you that that flight was a threat, a perceived threat, not a real thing, just a perception. And so then the long term cost of avoidance, the prices that you pay, think about this. You did not go in a summer internship that I bet you worked really hard, Mel, to get.

I.

Imagine that was a big ticket. And your brain just in that moment said, playing equals lion, not going to do it. And then we have to find a way out. So you created an emergency. And that's avoiding. You've retreated. You avoided by retreating from something that was so meaningful.

Yeah, I have done that over and over and over again. I think that's why I feel so just sad for this person in our life who is doing this right now. Because I'm thinking to myself, this is going to create the opposite impact. So you said that your grandmother forcing you to just go to the mall and sit with that person. And slowly, she was doing what you now practice, which is exposure therapy. You're an expert in CBT. And you just said that that experience of not being allowed to avoid something that you were scared of, but being shown that you could face it, that it changed the trajectory of your life.

100 %.

So what happened after that thing that your grandmother did?

So after my grandmother forced me, I started to think about life. There's two things she did for me, actually. Let me just add the second one. So one was push me to approach instead of avoid. The second one was at 16, she gave me The Alchemist by Paulo Coelio to read. I'm sure you've read The Alchemist, right? And she did it because the narrative of my brain was growing up poor, single mother, my mom fighting so hard to get us somewhere. And I should tell what everybody listens to is my grandmother was not really my grandmother. She was the mother of my stepfather who started to date my mom. And they came from a different socioeconomic status. She had a different view of the world. So she gave the alchemist because one day I was sitting with her for coffee, and I said, I really don't know what's going to be in my life. I want to eventually pursue a medical degree or I want to do this. But my mom is never going to be able to pay for college. So what happened? And the alchemist shifted my perspective. How? There's a sentence in the book that says whenever you want something, the whole universe conspires in having it.

My grandmother basically said to me, Listen, you are responsible for the narrative in your brain. You can believe what your brain is telling you, or you can change the narrative in your brain. I was like, Well, if I and she forced me to push it, what would you want? I said, Well, eventually I want to become an exchange student. Eventually, I want to get to the US. She's like, You're responsible for creating that. And somehow those conversations, my grandmother would sit with me every day and have coffee and have those conversations, I started to believe that just maybe I could do it, that maybe I could by approaching and changing the topic. And eventually I became an exchange student. I came to the US. I spoke no English. It was disastrous in the first six months. And then I wanted to stay. My stepdad is like, You have to go back to Brazil. So I went to Brazil for a year and then eventually got my way back to the US and did undergraduate in college. And every step I have to carry avoidance will knock on the door. So when I tell my story, people are like, Oh, it's so incredible, so bold.

No, I was scared shitless a lot of the times. Bottom line. I wanted to avoid when I was at Sunnie Buffalo. My mentor was really tough on me, actually. I wanted to apply to the Harvard internship in Mass General Hospital in Boston. I went to the State students don't get in. I remember sitting in my office crying as I write this application letter thinking, Maybe I should just apply somewhere else. Maybe I'm not.

Good enough. There's the narrative in your head again.

100 %. I remember that time. I was like, You know what? If I don't apply, I remember my grandmother, if you don't try, you don't know. And so I applied. I shared this in the spirit of like, We can't get rid of anxiety. I know everybody wants to, but we can't. What we can get rid of is avoidance. That we can get rid of.

And then what happens in your life when you get rid of avoidance?

I'm sitting here with Mel Robbins. That's what happens. Can you believe that? Can you stop that? No, I just don't. I want you to know this. It means so much to me. It's just the 10-year-old, I have tears in my eyes, the 10-year-old me would not believe that I'd say, Mel Robbins, I mean, you're such an icon. You inspire so many. I've seen you fight at once in your life, maybe not with a vocabulary, but I've seen that as I listen to your books and I see a podcast now, it's so successful. That's what happens when we don't let the narrative in our brain run our lives. You get to meet Mel Robbins. And how cool is that?

Well, and I get to meet you. How cool is that? And you went on to become an associate professor at Harvard. You didn't just get the internship program in Psych at Mass General. You went on to become an associate professor, a published author, the founder and chair of an incredible association around anxiety. And you're just getting started, in my opinion.

Thank you. It does feel that way. It's interesting. For the last 10 years, I spent all this time in message channel taking CBT out of the Ivory tower in the streets.

Okay, what does that mean?

So I created a program that I work with community organizations when I train paraprofessionals, so people with no education on skills and not therapy on CBT, but digested as skills. For example, I work with ROCA in Boston who works with young men coming out of prison.

Oh, fantastic.

Okay. And I've actually taken CBT and created a training program that we can get an entire organization to cool off and apply skills in everyday. So these young men are not going to talk to therapists like me, but they are going to talk to their peers. And if their peers knows the brain, knows how to regulate it, and can teach them skills, we actually had a story of a young man that didn't shoot somebody, decided not to shoot somebody because he basically paused and said, If I shoot somebody, he reframed them. He said, If I shoot this person, I'm back in jail like my father and my grandfather. That's incredible. Can you imagine? Well, our skill shows that if you actually practice the skills that you and I are talking about today, that these young men are 65 % more likely to get a job. Now, if they're employed, they're not back in prison.

Correct. And they have a community, and they have structure, and they have respect from people around them, and they have a sense of pride. Being a former lawyer for legal aid doing criminal defense work, it was painful to just see the recidivism rate and the rejection that people face after they serve time. And that's incredible. I want to back up a second and talk about CBT. Let's do it. So for anyone listening that's like, CBT, is that that non-high marijuana stuff? No, that's CPD. Cbt. You're the professor in this. Explain what CBT is.

Cognitive behavior therapy or CBT is a widely studied therapy that's action-oriented, and it's really designed to change what we say to ourselves, how we behave, and how we feel.

Can you explain to everybody the sequence of what happens? What is the order? Is it like that something happens outside of you, you have a sensation, then you act, or you have a thought? What is the chain that we want to become aware of if we're going to apply the skills you're going to teach us today?

Such a great question, Mel. Because the first thing, if we're going to apply any skills, we need to create a pause. And in that pause, we need to do a couple of things. First, we need to understand what was the situation that triggered any thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. I actually call this the thoughts, emotions, and behavior cycle.

Okay, thoughts, emotion, behavior cycle. Can we take the example of you waking up and not wanting to get out.

Of bed? Yes, absolutely. So any situation, I woke up, my brain started to spin and basically said, What if Mel Robbins doesn't like me? It was the first thought I had this morning, I have to just be honest with everybody listening. No, I mean, the anxious brain never quiet down, right? And so that thought, What if she doesn't like me, led to an emotion, which for me was a little anxiety and heart-poundling. My heart pounds pretty strongly. And then my behavior was the third component was wanting to just stay in bed. I was like, Maybe I just want to stay in bed. And you asked, What is the sequence? Well, it depends the entry way. For me, it was a thought. She's not going to like me, it'd be anxious, and then I wanted to behave a certain way. But they ping-pong-pong, right? If I lay in bed a little longer, I bet it would have gone this way. Yeah, maybe I didn't bring the right outfit. The outfit makes a difference. She's so powerful. She's really not going to like me. What if I say the wrong thing? And those thoughts would go really fast, the anxiety would shoot up, and then the covers would come over.

And then by the time I got out of bed, my baseline anxiety would be so high that I'd be having trouble thinking. That trouble thinking would be interpreted as, Oh, see, you do have a problem with anxiety, and now the avalanche. And so it's a ping-pong. And it's so fast. And that's why that pause is so important. Whenever the anxiety happens, this is a trick that I can share with everybody that you can use and you can do it right now. How do you pause is the question, right? Take a piece of paper and literally write down your thoughts, link them to your emotions, link them to specific behavior. What do you want to do? And this is why. What we know scientifically is that writing activate the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex, the part that helps us organize, execute, right? It's the center of the brain. That's the critical part of the brain. It is always competing for energy with our amygdala, the fight, flight, or freeze part of the brain. So when one is on, the other one tends to quiet down. So if you're in your anxious brain, get out of there by writing your thoughts, emotions, and behavior cycle.

Just that little trick alone, I've seen hundreds of patients stop their anxiety cycle and their avalanche by creating that pause.

Let's take the example of being afraid to go into work that you are worried that something's going to happen. Your boss is going to be a jerk, or you're going to have a panic attack, or you're going to screw up that huge sales meeting that you have. And so you have that feeling.

Of just, I.

Need to not go, that avoidance that we're going to talk a lot about today. So what do you do in that instance?

So a couple of things here. The first one, I would write down the specific thoughts. Okay. A lot of our anxiety is fed through what we're saying to ourselves. We started to have heart-pounding. We've been talking about heart-pounding. If I came home from a jog and my heart was pounding, I'd be like, okay. But if I'm sitting here getting ready to work and my heart pounds, your brain wants to make sense of it. So then it starts to create a narrative about their heart pound. But it's just a heart pound. That's all it is. So we pause. Okay, I'm going to mess up the sales meeting. I'm going to have it up. That's what I'm going to do. Okay, once we pause, then we want to be able to ask questions of our thoughts, right? Let's interrogate. Let's become lawyers together. Okay. What is the evidence that you have right now that you're going to mess it up?

I've messed.

It up before. Okay. How many times have you messed it up, Mel? Twice. Twice. How many presentations have you given to this team? A hundred. A hundred. Okay, so based on that, what's the probability they're going to mess it up? Two %. Two %? Okay, so maybe you are going to mess it up. There's two % chance. If you mess it up, what is the worst that will happen?

I'll be embarrassed.

Have you been embarrassed before?

Yes.

Have you been able to tolerate being embarrassed?

Yeah.

It sucks. I'm with you. It sucks. So the worst case scenario, is you're going to be embarrassed. There's two % chance.

What if they fire me?

When was the last time they fired you?

They haven't fired me. I'm still employed.

Oh, really? That's amazing. So maybe they'll fire you, but sounds like the probability is small as well.

Yes.

But there is a small probability. Yes. Now, has anybody in this company ever being fired on the spot? Like, you messed up, you're embarrassed, fired?

Well, they've laid people off, but I don't think, not that I know of.

It sounds to me like your brain is basically saying, I'm going to be embarrassed, and then they're going to fire me on the spot, and I'm going to be humiliated, and I'm going to be in the corner all alone.

Yes, which makes me want to avoid it.

Of course it does. I would, too. I mean, it feels awful to do that. But what is the probability really, Mel? That all those events are going to happen in that sequence?

It's very, very small.

So what can you say to yourself based on your performance in the past that might change the narrative in your brain right now?

That I've been nervous before, and I've shown up and done a good job in the presentations.

And when you say that to yourself, how does it feel?

Like I don't believe it.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Because that anxiety has that grip on you.

And when we just start to change our perspective, shift our thinking, we don't believe right away because there's so much history of the anxiety-driven thoughts. So I don't need you to believe it. What I need you to do is be able to say that to yourself over and over again. And I need you to show up now. I need you to approach.

To approach? You know what I love about this? I love that you said, I don't have to believe it.

You don't have? Because it's impossible, too. Your brain is anxious, and everybody thinks CBT, we're trying to just force people to have positive thoughts. That does not work. Let me say that again. Positive thoughts alone does not work. We have to reframe. We have to rewire our brain, and it takes time to rewire our brain. It can be overnight, but it's the first step towards a better life, right? I mean, if we talk to our best friends the way we talk to ourselves, to be clear, we'd have.

No friends. That's so true. That is so true. Can we unpack avoidance? Because it's not just an anxiety response. I'm thinking about the number of conversations that people avoid, the number of situations that people avoid, the number of experiences that people want to do. I can think about one for myself, where my daughter, Sawyer, and Chris have both gone skydiving. Our son.

Is.

Turned 18 and he wants to go skydiving. And I feel this pull of wanting to do it, but I am scared shitless of doing it. And I can feel the avoidance in my body. It's not anxiety. It is like a wall. But I feel like this avoidance topic, can we blow it open so that anybody listening who's like, well, I don't have anxiety, but you're avoiding something. So talk to us about what avoidance looks like, what are surprising symptoms or ways that people avoid things.

I'm definitely going to talk about avoidance in a second. But before I wanted to commit to go skydiving with me. Come on, Mel. We can do it. Me? Yeah, we can do it.

All right. You're invited to Oakley's 18th birthday skydiving party. I'm going. Okay. I'm going to go because I don't want to miss out on life.

So the only reason I went there is this. So I learned I had a fear height hike in Yosemite National Park. I had no idea. My whole life I just said I didn't like roller coasters. I wasn't avoiding roller coasters. I just didn't like roller coasters. Who needs to go on roller coasters? Anyhow. But I was hiking. I get to the end of Yosemite National Park, and you have to hold to these cables, right? And I just start to cry. I was like, There's no way I'm going to fall. The whole hype phobia just came in. And I spend time. And my professional career is getting people to approach, not avoid. And I was like, Okay, I can't do this. And so I started my own hierarchy, and I started by doing chairs and the stairs and then going to the roof of my house. And then I got to the top of it, which was skydiving. I was so terrified, and I avoided for a while. Eventually, my friends is like, You know what to do. So she took me skydiving, and I went three times in a row in the same day. And this is the trick.

That's the only way to overcome the fear of heights is that you have to train your brain to just do it over and over again. And now I love skydiving. It's so fun. Really? I am not joking.

So could you go back to Yosemite now and be with those cables?

100 %.

Because what I always used to say is I'm not afraid of heights. I have this feeling that I'm falling. That's exactly.

What a fear of.

Heights is. And that's what I don't like.

Yeah, but that's just biology, Mel. That's just biology. And it's the same biology behind avoidance. So you asked me about avoidance. So avoidance is anything that we do or don't do in response to athreat. That is designed, so there's a perceived threat that is designed. So there's a perceived threat that's designed to bring our anxiety, discomfort, you name it, down fast, but it keeps us stuck long term.

Huh.

So let me unpack this for us. Please. I call it the three hours of avoidance. You either retreat, react, or remain. If we retreat, what do I mean by that? It's what you're doing about skydiving. You have this thought, and you're like, I'm just going to move away. Retreating is moving away from the discomfort. That's that flavor of avoidance. People retreat when they get an email that they don't like, they don't read that email. My husband does this all the time. He puts an email on the other screen. He's like, I'm just not going to look at that. We retreat by not having conversations with people. We're not head. We are thinking, we are ruminating. We're moving away from discomfort. For some of us, avoidance is reacting. That's how I avoid. Whenever something threatens me, perception of threat, an email about somebody that I don't like or conflict. I go. I go towards that. I move towards that discomfort because I feel so anxious. So I write an email really fast. I can't believe you said that, and I press send. And then I'm stuck on email jail, because now I just reacted without thinking.

And that's avoidance. I'm avoiding discomfort.

I don't know if I understand that. I understand the retracting, right? But I don't understand the reacting. Can you give me another example?

I'm giving you several examples. So reacting as a form of avoidance, something happens and you have discomfort. Okay, give an example, Dan Harris, I was just recording with him last week, and he gave a great example, personal example. He said, Whenever I feel threat, the way he reacts with anger.

Oh, yes. I yell at my dog when he's barking too much. I'm like, Ah.

That's it. Because your dog barking is creating some discomfort in your body. That discomfort in your body, basically, you have to attack the discomfort so you feel better. Responding to email, anger, grabbing a drink too fast, have a bad day, and just going to-.

Oh, so is having a smoke, a vape, hitting a joint, pouring a drink that is reacting?

Yes. And it's funny. We can slice and dice the hours of avoidance. But you're basically trying to move moving towards discomfort and in reacting versus retreating, you're moving away. Let me do the third one, and then we can unpack a couple of examples. But the third one is remain. This is the deer in the headlight. It is staying in a situation when you know it no longer works. You're in a job you dislike, but the fear of another job just makes you so paralyzed that you stay. Stay in a relationship that you don't like, right? It's frozen. So the remain of a voice, you're frozen in place, you know it's not working, right? But you're not going towards this comfort or moving away. You're just literally frozen.

Wow. So what I love about this is that this for anybody that feels like, well, I don't have anxiety, what you do have are moments every single day where your emotions get triggered and you're uncomfortable. That's it. And what I'm gathering from this conversation is that your work is really about creating a baseline of people of emotional peace.

That's a hundred % it.

That when you are uncomfortable, when you're triggered, when you're afraid, when your emotions go bananas, literally, that is the moment that we all seek to avoid and avoiding, wow. So is drinking or smoking, would that be more of a retreat?

That falls more in a retreat. So you're moving away. You're trying to take that discomfort away. So it's absolutely a retreat. But I love what you said, Mel, because that is it. We all want to be comfortable all the time. Let's be clear, comfortable all the time. There's nothing meaningful there. And if we are completely uncomfortable, completely out of our comfort zone, we don't fight, flight and freeze, and we're stuck. So what I want to create is a comfortably uncomfortable world, a world that you're just enough out of your comfort zone towards the things that matter the most, and that you're fighting the real enemy here, which is avoidance. And we're avoiding microwave, right? We just turn on the TV and them out. We go on social media and those little moments. That's what I love, your five-second rule, because that's the same idea. In five seconds, you can choose to go towards a life that matters, or you can choose avoidance. And it's a choice.

You're right, it is. Because we do avoidance on autopilot. And there is a big lie that we're telling ourselves because you said that we do it because we're uncomfortable and that in order to live the life that we want, we've got to be willing to be uncomfortable. But I believe if you're really honest with yourself, you'll see that avoiding the hard stuff, avoiding the things that you fear, avoiding taking a risk, that's actually more uncomfortable because you know that you're selling yourself short. You know that you are feeling stuck. I would think that sitting alone in your apartment with no friends as a teenager was way more uncomfortable than sitting with that dude the first time with your grandmother.

A hundred %. I love that you said it's a lie. It is a lie because the discomfort that we feel facing things is so much less than this monster that we create in our head of what they would be like. I bet when we go skydiving and you come off of that plane, you're going to be like... I landed. I was like, This is the best orgasm ever. This is better than anything else. Really? I have this video, and I was like, Oh, my God, I'm so embarrassed at this video. But it is true because it's so liberating to overcome a fear. It's true. And you're right. Once you're out of that plane, the discomfort, and you feel some fear jumping out, but then out of the plane, your whole system cries down and you're like, Oh, my God, I'm living my best life. And that's what I wish for everyone, that they find their little corners of avoidance, overcome it so they can show up. Are you being your best self? And if you're not, it's because you're avoiding.

Why do we do this?

We're biologically wired to avoid. So the brain is amazing, right? It cannot differentiate real threat from perceived threats. Our brain is wired to do what? To predict and protect. That's what our brain is doing. It's protecting us from danger, and it's predicting and it's predict based on past information. So your family member who is having some trouble with avoidance and work, the brain is using the perception of work as danger as something really bad, like it's a lion.

So it's predicting. It's predicting. And then it's making a call on how to protect you based on its prediction.

That's it. And that call is avoidance, right? So instead of going on fight, flight or freeze because there is actually a lion, that's why I coined the three R's of avoidance because it's the same biology of fight, flight or freeze, but it's a perceived threat.

One of the things that I love about you, Dr. Kennedy, is you are the loudest voice out there telling people you can heal anxiety, that you're not stuck feeling this way. You don't have to live your life feeling triggered or out of control or overthinking or on edge. And for somebody that is really struggling with anxiety, that seems impossible. In fact, our first question comes from a woman named Carrie, and it is a question from a woman who is extremely successful, and I'm sure she's hiding her anxiety, but it's gotten to the point where she just can't handle it anymore. So let's take a listen to Carrie.

Hey, Mel.

I'm a 53-year-old woman creative.

Leader.

With, to the outside world at least, a so-called great career, I guess you'd say, but with crippling.

Anxiety and exhausting overthinking.

Traveling.

Accompanied.

By panic attacks. What the heck? I've had.

This.

Issue for 30 years.

And all the.

Guided meditations and mindfulness training pods in the world.

Aren't helping.

So what steps can I take to stop this, to heal and find a new peace before.

I chuck.

In the towel.

And just barricade myself.

In at home. Thanks for everything. Bye. I really relate to Carrie.

Because I.

Know that I have been somebody with what they call high functioning anxiety for most of my life. That anxiety, a lot of times, lights a fire underneath me and that worried energy, that nervous energy, that mind that is constantly thinking 15 steps ahead has helped me be very innovative and creative and to take risks in business. But it's tortuous because you're just always nervous about something and on edge.

Here's the thing, and this is true with you too, is that the anxiety drives you to succeed. A lot of people with anxiety are really intelligent. We get very, very good at thinking. We go into our heads. We've been doing it since we've been five years old. Of course, it's like going to the thinking gym every day. We get very good at thinking. We get very good at accomplishing things. The problem is that underlying trauma, that I could hear in her voice for sure, is driving her too much. You went through this too. You realized, Look, I can't... This isn't sustainable going this way. The solution for her would be to find that little version of herself and see her, love her, protect her, show her that she's connected. What we do is we find where the alarm is in your body. With her, I would say, when you get into these anxious phases that I call alarm, and that you brilliantly call alarm all the time, I watched your one on healing childhood trauma, and you only used the term anxiety once or twice, which I just loved.

But.

Getting into the alarm in her body, which basically that alarm is a remnant of your younger self. The part of our brain, the amygdala that encodes this has no sense of time, so that when we encode these traumatic memories, when we recall them, it doesn't feel like they're coming from the past. It feels like they're happening now. She probably has an unresolved trauma of some kind or traumas that are coming up in her body, and temporarily guided meditations, breathing, all that stuff will help you. But the key out of this, and I hope everybody gets this today, if you have chronic anxiety, you have a child in you that is suffering, that is struggling. And all the guided meditations, all the breathwork, all the yoga isn't going to heal that. What heals that is actually going in, finding that child, finding that child, seeing their eyes in a picture or even in your mind's eye, looking at them, showing them that they are seen, heard, loved, and protected in a way now that they didn't get back then. And that's how we heal the root cause of this as opposed to just helping people cope.

Because basically, most of the things that are out there today help you cope, and there's nothing wrong with coping. It's just to heal. We have to solve this at the root cause, which is this typically, this unresolved wounding, typically again from childhood, that's still in you, that's still activated. And until that child feels seen, heard, loved, and protected, you're always going to be anxious.

So Dr. Kennedy, thank you for going into so much depth, just out of the gate here. And I want to hit the pause button so we can hear a word from our sponsors and so that everybody can just take a breath and digest what we just talked about. Maybe you want to find a photo of your younger self while we're listening to our sponsors. But when we come back, we're going to dig even deeper into Carrie's question. So don't go anywhere. Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins. And this is the anxiety toolkit on the Mel Robbins Podcast. So all of a sudden this visual came to mind. And I want to see if we can maybe tease this out into some specific steps that somebody might be able to take even on their own today with the support of your expertise. Because you described in my mind the three layers that somebody has to go through to address this chronic on edgeness, this stress, this panic attack that Carrie is talking about. And the first level is self-awareness, right? So there may be a large number of people that are listening to this from around the world, because at this point, we're reaching 200 countries, 17 million people in five months, Dr.

Kennedy. There's a lot of people that are thinking for the first time, Huh, I wonder if I have anxiety. And so listening to podcasts, reading books, watching videos or watching this show on YouTube, and having the self-awareness that maybe.

This.

Is something called anxiety that you're dealing with. And what are some of the surprising signs, Dr. Kennedy, that people should be looking for that they may not know could actually be anxiety?

Well, one of the big ones that people don't really realize is constantly looking for external validation, constantly looking for love and attention outside of yourself. When you get it, it's amazing. But when you don't get it, you get into that loneliness phase. There's a study done, I can't remember how long ago, and I don't remember the exact, but basically it was they took women and they gave them an electric shock, not a big electric shock, and it was voluntary. Then they had three scenarios. One where the woman was alone, one where her hand was held by a stranger, and one where her hand was held by her partner. Now, to shorten this up, basically, the brain has to work really, really hard if you're lonely. When she was alone, 12 places in her brain lit up. We don't have to go into orbital, frontal cortex and all that stuff, but 12 places in her brain. When she was held hands with a stranger, eight places in her brain lit up. When she was holding with her partner, four places. Only four places needed to come online to reassure her. It just shows that power of human connection.

But if we're constantly looking for validation outside of us, that is a sign of anxiety, typically. My book, Anxiety Rx, is about anxiety, but really it's about childhood trauma. For me, it showed up as chronic anxiety. For some people, it shows up as depression. Other people, it shows up as eating disorders, personalities, personality disorders. But all of it, it comes from some unresolved childhood wounding. It will make itself obvious. For me, when I was a child, my brother had orthopedic issues, my dad was schizophrenia. A lot of people know about that who watch my channel. A lot of my mother's attention went to my brother and my dad. I had this sense like, Hey, what about me? What about me? I have this drive to be seen, and that's why I'm on the Mel Robbins podcast. There's a drive in me that needs to be seen and validated. But there's also a part of me that was bullied in school that hates crowds and hates attention. For me, that's what causes... You can have people that are highly accomplished and they're driven by their anxiety, but it's a treadmill. Eventually, after a couple of divorces or something that happens in your life that you can't control, then it comes out and then it's unmanageable.

It's one of the things that I see people is looking for love in all their own places. All these things, addictions. Addictions are another one of those things that the reason why I think people take drugs or alcohol or whatever is when they're in that acute phase in the brain and the GABA receptors are all lit up and you feel calm and peaceful, I think that's one of the times that people actually feel connected to themselves. It's ironic, it's odd, but in general, like anxiety, and here's one of those things that you're so great at soundbites, anxiety occurs because you block love for yourself. That's really what happens. One of the things that drugs and alcohol do is they take away some of those blocks. They make you feel connected to yourself.

It's so true. I've never thought about it that way.

People with anxiety and addiction hold hands. They are so close together. They both come from childhood wounding. The alcohol or the drug or whatever allows people to feel connected to themselves. I just had a surgery like three weeks ago, and they were putting me under and they put the mask on my face. As I went under, because general anesthetics are dissociative, they separate from. As I was going under, I'm saying, Okay, I love you, Rusty. I love you, Rusty. I love you, Rusty. Rusty is my name for my 12-year-old self that suffered at the hands of his dad, who wasn't abusive or violent, but just crazy. I just kept saying, I love you, Rusty. I love you, Rusty. I love you, Rusty. It was just a nice way to go under. I think that's what ketamine and these psychedelics, I think it's just a way of getting connected to yourself. Because that's how you heal, is you become connected to yourself. It doesn't come from outside of you. But we have to have that love from outside of us as well, of course. As you talk about, the biggest relationship is the relationship you have to yourself.

As cliché and woo and all that stuff as it sounds, and as a neuroscientist and a medical doctor, sometimes want to have a seizure when I talk about this because it's just so non-scientific.

But.

Love and healing is non-scientific. We can't reduce it down to something that we can reproduce in a science lab, and that's what heals us. So science will help us cope. But I haven't seen really science help us heal. I'm going to get one more thing out of all the incredible advancements we've made in neuroscience in the last 15 years, and they have been amazing. Very few of those advancements have actually led to different clinical outcomes when you're sitting with a patient. That's one of the things that I'm disappointed about in science a little bit. But science is very helpful at helping us cope. Physiological side is a bunch of things that really help us cope. But to heal, it's an inside job. You really have to learn how to connect with that younger, wounded part of you. And if you don't, you'll always have alarm. You'll always be anxious.

I'd say the one exception is the exciting research in the area of all these psychedelics. But I think you just pointed out the reason why this is the biggest breakthrough, because when you have a guided therapeutic experience with a ketamine or an MDMA or psilocybin, you have the ability to reconnect and join in with yourself and repair what you say is the original cause of anxiety, which is a situation in childhood.

Where you felt.

Separate from the caregivers, whose only job was to make you feel safe and loved and looked after and cared for. And so I want to go back to... I have this vision of there are these three phases as I'm listening to you speak. There is the phase of self-awareness and awakening and this wake-up moment where you're like, Holy cow. Maybe the overthinking and the obsessiveness with achievement, maybe feeling on edge all the time. Maybe this isn't the way I'm meant to feel. Maybe this is anxiety. So there's this first phase of self-awareness and the wake-up moment. And then there's the second layer going a little bit deeper where you make an attempt to cope, whether that's through therapy or it is through breath work or you mentioned meditation or exercise, the gazillion different things that you and I have both done for decades in order to cope with our anxiety, which for me meant trying to turn it down a little. And then there's a third and deeper phase, which is what you are teaching everybody. And that third phase is healing it and going deep and getting to the root cause, which you have so beautifully taught us is separation and feeling separate from others and feeling separate from yourself.

And when you feel separate, you don't experience love, you don't experience safety. And so what I want to know, Dr. Kennedy, going back to Carrie's question, is there a simple series of steps that anybody who's listening today that's like, Holy cow, I have anxiety, or I'm tired of coping and talking about anxiety. I want to go deeper and start the work of healing it. You mentioned, inner child. Should we go back and get a photo of ourselves from when we were eight years old? Give me three things to do today to start that.

Work.

To go and reconnect with the part of ourselves that has been separate since childhood.

There's a lot of woo woo, inner child stuff. People get really fired up by this concept of inner child. I find the people that get the most fired up by the inner child, Oh, that's a bunch of crap or whatever, are the ones that have the most childhood woundage because they don't want to go back there.

That's right. I do have to admit, anytime anybody uses those two words, inner child, I'm like, I roll. Sounds so stupid. But as a neuroscientist and a medical doctor who specializes in this, what the fuck are you talking about when you say inner child?

Yeah. It's the remnant. For the science people, it's the amygdala-based remnant of the trauma. So for you, for your car accident, when you rolled on the ski trip, your amygdala coupled the sound of crunching snow with trauma. Now, whenever you go to the mailbox and you hear crunching snow, your amygdala coupled that sound with the trauma. So your body will feel exactly now when you're on your way out to the mailbox as you did back then.

I want to share one other example for those of you who haven't heard the first episode that we did with Dr. Kennedy. And there's a second coupling that happened for me, which is I was molested by an older kid during a sleepover in the fourth grade. And when I woke up the next morning, I felt in every cell of my body that something was very wrong. And what happened is the trauma, and now you're saying, inner child and the base of the amygdala coupled the experience of waking up after being a victim and the feeling that something's wrong with mourning. And ever since I've been in fourth grade, I wake up every morning, and the morning itself triggers me to feel exactly the same way as a 50-year-old woman that I did when I was in the fourth grade and had woked up that morning. That's what you're saying, right?

Yeah. And about that, when you came downstairs and your mom was making pancaes and she said, How did you sleep, honey? And you saw the other kid, if you had a chance at that point, if there was a magic wand where you went over to your mother and said, Hey, I've got to talk to you about something, and you went to a different room and then you talked about what happened and she sued you, it's not your fault. You rubbed your back. That probably would have mitigated this whole thing, because if we have this love and attention, this bubble that I call it, from our parents and caregivers, we are protected. So everyone has trauma in childhood. There's no way of avoiding. But there's a difference between trauma and trauma. Trauma is when the event actually changes your nervous system, so it gets stuck in the on position. It's like if you're on a railroad and the old time switches they used to have on the railroad. Normally, if you go along, you've got good enough parents, you have a reasonable childhood, you go along the track, the track is straight, and you just mature.

Now, if you get trauma in there, it's like one of those railway switches that switches you off track. So it takes you into this mode of protection as opposed to this mode of growth. So if you keep going on the track, you're in a growth mode, you feel safe. As Einstein said, it's the world a safe place, you feel safe. But when we have this trauma and it's not resolved at the time, that switch gets thrown and our nervous system changes. Again, I don't like using the word permanently because we can move it back. But the amygdala never forgets. There's always a remnant of that. So what we have to do is go back, find that child at that age, younger self, inner child. I usually use younger self because it doesn't turn people off so much. But find your younger self, give them the love and support now that they needed back then, because again, the amygdala has no sense of time. So we can use that fact that the amygdala has no sense of time to connect with that grade four and give her what she needed back then. That starts to heal the root cause.

Then we can pull the switch back. But the older we get and the more that thing gets ingrained, the harder that switch is rusted into the on position. Every time the train goes down that track and we experience something like that, like we wake up, it goes off that track. It goes into that protection mode rather than the growth mode of going straight ahead. So if we go back, we find the switch, we heal that younger version of ourselves. Again, I know how flaky this sounds, and as a neuroscientist, it's really difficult for me to talk about the younger self in a child. But I know after suffering from 30 plus years of crippling anxiety in myself, this was the only thing that allowed me to heal, was to go back. I'm a yoga teacher, I've done all this stuff. I've done it all, and nothing really helped. Like you, I have morning anxiety or alarm. It wakes me up, I feel it, and then I justThe big thing about having the alarm is don't add thoughts to it. Allow the alarm to be there. Go in a sensation. Use your breath. Use the grounding that you're around.

If you're lying in your bed, feel the grounding, feel the support, feel your body, even if it's uncomfortable, and then go back and find that younger version of yourself. So you're asking for a step-wise thing. Basically, when people get anxious, they go into their heads and they start overthinking. That's the trap because you'll never get out of that. You'll never get out of that overthinking because the mind will tell you. The mind says, Hey, we have the answer with more thinking. It's like, Well, I thought anxiety was a problem of overthinking. It's like, No, it's not. Just keep thinking. That doesn't work. What you have to do is go into your body. Now, the problem is your body feels alarmed. Why am I going to go down into my body when it feels alarmed? That's why we have things like internal family assistance therapy, somatic experiencing, psychotic to some extent, to make you feel safe in your body again. Because once you feel safe in your body again, then you have the platform. When you're feeling anxious or, as I like to say, alarmed, go, Where in my body do I feel this? Where is it?

For me, it's in my solar plexus. I talk about that in the book. But find where the alarm is in your system. Some people it's in their throat. Some people it's across their shoulders. But see if you can put your hand over it and just make a mental connection with that alarm and see if you don't feel better almost instantly. Now, it's not going to take it away, but there is a sense. When I first started doing this, it's like, Hey, this is the first time in 30 years that I'm actually on the right track. So when you feel anxious, don't go into your head. Go into the sensation of your body, even if it hurts. Find that alarm. Find where it is. Because I drill down with people. It's like, does it have a shape? Does it have a color? Does it have a temperature? I really drill down in there because there's a part of our brain called the insula, the insular cortex that's like the mediator between the thinking brain and the feeling body. And that insula, I think, will be, in the next few years, really important in changing this old pattern so that when we feel it in our body, we can go back, feel the exact same way that we did back at the time, you with crunching snow and me in the mornings as well, and go, Okay, there is a different path.

I can actually flip the railway switch back over to the growth part and get out of protection. So it's really about connecting with that feeling of alarm in your body because that feeling of alarm in your body is your younger self.

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. Yes. And that there is a tight connection between anxiety and addictive behavior. Can you explain that and help us understand that?

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

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

Your ego is like an overprotective mother.

Okay.

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

Is the ego the same thing as the alarm?

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

See, I'm already confused.

Yeah, I know. I'm not going to get into too much neuroscience. 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. It's basically bypassing that ego because the ego is so overprotective that it will not let you go back into your old alarm.

So the ego is thinking.

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

Okay. But let's talk about the connection between anxiety and addiction. Okay.

So basically.

We.

Need something.

To.

Help us through this... This is this alarm.

Wait a minute. I think I just got it. Hold on. Let me see if this is the answer. You're ready? Is addiction typically somebody's coping mechanism for the alarm. For example, you reach for alcohol because it drowns out the alarm. You reach for porn or drugs, or stress, or whatever because it-.

The work achievement.

Yes. Got it. Okay, I got it. So if somebody is struggling with addictive behavior, whether it is alcohol or cigarettes or vaping or it is any of that stuff, you are more than likely not addressing the root issue, which is the anxiety and alarm that's continuing to go off in the background.

Yeah.

And on top of that, basically the ego is very powerful. It doesn't want to let you go back into that. So the only way that you can feel love, connection, whatever, is alcohol, is codeine, is cocaine, whatever you're addicted to.

Wait, but you feel the connection to the alcohol or the coding. That's what you're saying. This is why I get confused with ego, because I'm like, I don't give a shit about the ego. The alarm and then what makes sense to me is that addiction mutes the alarm.

Totally.

And that you become bonded and connected to, for me, it was stress. For my husband, it was a daily weed habit. And that addiction is what's muting the alarm. This is really cool. So where does mindset come in? Because there is so much out there about mindset and mental wellness. And it's interesting because this conversation with you makes me desperate for a different word than mental health. Because even the word mental health makes me go neck up, makes me think thoughts, makes me go to just what's going on in my mind. And what you've taught me today is a game changer, because what you've taught us all is that no, no, no, no, no, no, all mental health issues start in the body, and they start with this reaction that happens in your body to stored trauma or to a.

Threat.

Or to uncertainty. And then that signals our minds, and our minds then start spinning thoughts. And if we don't address this alarm system in our body, which has a purpose, which is there to protect us, which is supposed to agitate you, but we exacerbate it, we try to mute it. If we don't learn how to turn inward and heal all of this in our body and turn toward this alarm and soothe ourselves and love ourselves and give ourselves the reassurance and the support or whatever it is that we didn't get in childhood or what we need in that moment, that is actually the beginning of all healing. That's what I'm getting from you.

Yeah, and that's exactly what it is.

So I would love to- Why do we call it mental health then? Can we come up with a different word that would actually signal you that when you're struggling with depression or you're struggling with anxiety or you're struggling with addiction issues, that it's not a mental health issue, it is a body something? I don't even know how to describe this because it seems- Well, it's the exact opposite of the way that we think about things right now.

It is the opposite. I'd love to come up with a better term than body set.

But I think that's- Body set? What is that? That feels like weightlifting.

Well, no. Well, it's like mindset, body set.

What.

Is the place in your body? Can you regulate your body? Because if you regulate your body, your mind will get regulated. If you regulate your mind, your body might.

Get.

Regulated. What I'm saying is that if you go into the body, your body is much more likely to relax your mind than your mind is to relax your body because you can say, Hey, relax.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Did you guys hear that? That was a wake-up call for me. Right there. You were just dropping, fricking, and knowledge, Russ. Okay, hold on. I'm going to state this again. And now I have menopause brain, and so I've just forgotten what I said. You said something like, if you regulate your body, it will regulate your mind. But ifmuch more effective. To try to regulate your mind, right? You say it because you're the one who said it.

Yeah. It's much more effective to regulate your body first, which will automatically regulate your mind, than to try and regulate your mind to regulate your body. Because your mind lies to you all the time. Your body never can.

Is this why exercising is such an effective thing to do when it comes to anxiety and focus?

Partly.

But there's something beyond exercise. There's something within the somatic, sensory cortex, the part of the brain that controls our movement and our sensation. When we activate that, we're able to start getting into the sense of the body and out of the rumination of the mind.

And so by activating that, is that what you're saying? You can activate that part by doing the exercises you've already talked about in terms of locating where the alarm is and then finding a neutral part in your body, breathing into it.

That's why yoga is so effective because it brings you into your body. Anxiety at its root is really a mind-body disconnect. We go up into our heads and we stay in our heads because we don't want to go down in our body because that's where the pain is. We don't want to go into feeling town down in our body. We want to stay up in our thoughts. That's another addiction. We get addicted to worry. And that's why it's so hard to treat anxiety just by trying to fix thoughts because we're addicted to thinking already. We don't need any more thinking. We need a lot more feeling, but we don't want to feel because that's where the freaking pain is.

Wow. So I've gotten a couple of huge things from this. That first of all, all anxiety results from a separation of anxiety that have some separation experience or feeling separate from other in childhood.

And self.

And self. But what you just said too, was really interesting, which is our response to that alarm or that feeling of being separate from self or separate from others or attacked by others or whatever, is that we actually do separate from ourselves. Anxiety and the alarm system, the way that most of us respond to it is to separate from our bodies, go up in our heads. And the way to quiet the alarm and ultimately turn it off is to come back and join in with yourself and come back to where the alarm is sounding off in your body and then find a neutral or safe space in your body where you can draw your attention and breathe into back and forth and back and forth. And that when you quiet the alarm and when you go toward it and soothe your own body, that is the step that you need to take if you want to heal this. And that the thinking is part of the toolkit. What would you recommend as some sentence that we could say, if we're trying the tools, we go into our body, we're soothing ourselves, is there something that people could say or repeat to themselves that you find is effective with the more neck-down approach?

Absolutely.

What would you say?

Basically this. Am I safe in this moment? Am I safe in this moment?

I know.

I've got a presentation to do on Friday. I know I've got a big tax bill. I don't know... I don't know how I'm going to pay for it. My mom is sick. But am I safe in this moment?

Why a question? Because I like saying, I am safe. I am okay. You could do both. You could do both ways.

I find that people with anxiety, though, this is the thing about saying I love you in the mirror, is that people don't allow that in. The reason why you're anxious in the first place is because you block love. So when you say, I love.

You- Whoa, whoa.

Whoa, whoa. The reason why you're anxious is because.

You block love?

For yourself, yes.

What?

You're separated from yourself. That's exactly what it comes down to. That's what anxiety, our alarm really is. It's a separation. And this is what I do. We didn't get into my little intuitive thing here.

We're going to in a minute. Hold on. We say the best for last, but hold on. Okay, keep talking about the fact that when you have this alarm going off, you are blocking... Just say it again. I'm processing hyper-processing now. I'm just like, Oh, my God, I think I got it. Ii got it. I think I got it. That literally your alarm is asking for love and reinsurance.

Absolutely.

And when you go into your head, you block yourself from receiving it.

When.

You go into your body and you breathe into the alarm and soothe yourself, you are actually giving yourself love.

Yes. Holy shit.

And a lot of people with anxiety, they're uncomfortable with love in the first place. I'll give you a very quick example from my own life. So my dad, before I was 10 years old, was this wonderful guy. He was so connected to me and nurturing, taught me how to hit a ball, play chess, all this stuff, very, very connected to him, and I loved him greatly. And then as I got to be a young teen and his schizophrenia got worse and worse and worse and it became suicidal and a bunch of other things, I withdrew from him because to see him in horrible depression was just too painful for me. I blocked my love for him because it was just too painful to feel it. That you can't block love from a parent without blocking love on some level to everyone. There's a reason why I've been married three times. This is one of the things. When you find the blocks that you have to loving yourself, this is how you heal. This is basically my little intuitive gift is I can tell people where their blocks are to loving themselves. And then when you remove those blocks, the anxiety, the alarm just fades away.

So this is really going at the root cause protocol as opposed to just trying to make you think better.

Wow.

So how do you help people find that place where they've blocked love?

Well, I go through their body. What I believe the short version of what I believe happens to you is as a child, you experience an overwhelming stress. It's too much for your conscious mind to handle, so you stuff it down. Freud would call it repression. You stuff it into the unconscious and the body keeps the score, just like Bessel Van der Kutx says. So because the body is a representation of the unconscious mind and the unconscious mind is where.

These old.

Damaging programs are stored, they'll show up in the body. I will find in your body where you feel that alarm and reverse engineerings near it to get into the same room with those unconscious programs, and then I can change them.

That's pretty cool. I think my biggest takeaway, and I keep saying this because clearly every 10 minutes I have a life-changing takeaway from this conversation. My biggest takeaway is the connection between the alarm that goes off and the love that you're not allowing yourself to receive. Totally. And that it's beautiful to think that loving yourself is the way you cure anxiety. And what a beautiful thing. And it reminds me of something pretty amazing that my son, Oakley shared with me. I said to him the other day, I was like, Dude, one of the things I love about you is that you, more than almost anybody I have ever met, are just so comfortable with yourself. You really seem to like yourself. Now I should preface this by saying that this is a kid that really struggled. Three different schools before he was done with eighth grade, severe dyslexia, got so severely bullied at a camp that we had to pull him out of it. And the director wrote a long letter apologizing for everything. This kid has been through the wringer. And he said to me, Well, Mom, he said, I realized... And he said, This happened during quarantine.

During quarantine, when I got to hang out with you and dad, and my two older sisters, all four people who love me, I just started to realize, just because other people pick on me or hate me doesn't mean I have to hate myself. I could actually just like myself. I could really just allow myself to love myself. And I got to be honest with you, from that moment, I can really almost pinpoint that during the pandemic, like this kid's chronic anxiety was gone, he developed this very positive attitude. And it all began from this insight around, Hey, if the world is not giving me the acceptance and the love that we all are seeking, maybe I can just give it to myself.

Yeah.

It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. I never thought about meeting the alarm of anxiety with acts of self-love.

Yeah. And it's counterint, on some level, because when you're anxious, you don't feel loving. Basically, your social engagement system is shut off. You're in survival mode. So when you're in survival mode and survival physiology, you go into the emotional part of your brain, which is evolutionarily programmed to look for threat. And if there's no threat in your environment, if you're just lying there in bed with the sheets up to your neck, you will find threat because you can make it with your big prefrontal cortex. You can make worries.

Well, not anymore, because we now know that the second you feel the alarm go off- 5-4-3-1. -5-4-3-1. Do not go upstairs. You go downstairs. You go downstairs. Now, so I love to leave people in action. Obviously, everybody. There will be links, not only to Russ's book, Anxiety Rx, there will be links to his social media accounts. You will find all kinds of resources in the show notes. But I want to leave people in action. Sure. This is one of those incredible conversations that really changes how somebody thinks about a massively overwhelming topic like anxiety and mental health. Now what I want to do is leave people in action with one simple new practice or habit that I want everyone to try every day for the next seven days. And what is the exercise that you want each one of us to practice for the next seven days so that we can start to use the tools that you have been researching and changing lives with? What's the one thing you want us to do?

Can I do two?

Yes. As long as it doesn't involve the ego.

Okay, fair enough.

Fair enough. Okay, well, that's it. That's the end of that. All right. The first thing that I would say is what I said earlier. Am I safe in this moment? Or, I am safe in this moment? Because this moment is all we ever have, right? Thing about anxiety is it always projects you into the future. If you bring yourself back to the moment, and this has worked for me, it saved my ass a number of times in the middle of the night when all my defenses are down and I think the world is horrible. I am safe in this moment. I am safe and really feel it, too. I am safe in this moment.

Is there anything we should do with our hands or with our... Do you want us to close our eyes? Do you want us to.?

You can do the high five your heart.

If you want. Okay. Which is putting your heart right in the center of your chest. Take a deep breath. I'm safe.

If you find - I'm safe.

Okay. What else could you do?

If you find your alarm, if you know where your alarm is, track the alarm. When you feel anxious, go into your body and say, Where am I feeling this? Is this in my belly? Is this in my chest? Is it in my throat? Put your hand over the place where you feel your alarm and breathe into that.

There is.

A little.

Thing, too, that I've taken from Andrew Huberman about the physiological sigh. Physiological sigh is something that humans do, and animals do it, too, to calm themselves. And it's usually one quick sniff through your nose and then another one, and then a long, slow breath out through your mouth. Now, with my anxiety people, I modify that. So basically, this is the process that I do when I get into alarm, is I take three breaths through my nose really quickly. At the top, I hold it for about three to five seconds, which shows me that I'm in actually control of my breath. My breath isn't controlling me. Then I close my teeth and I breathe out through my teeth and make a hissing sound like...

I'm going to try this.

Ready?

And as I do that, I imagine a tire that's overinflated just deflating in front of me. That's my mental image.

All right, let me try this. Hold on a second. We're going to all do... I think we should do this one. We're going to do two. So everybody, number one, is one time a day if you notice an alarm in your body, and that could be tension, it could be frustration, it could be anger, it could be anxiety, it could be that worries starting to grip you. I want you to find where that alarm is. I want you to put your hand where the alarm is, and I want you to breathe into it. Okay? And then you can add, I'm safe in this moment. So that's number one that you're going to practice. Anytime you feel the gripping, the tension, the frustration, the overwhelm, the alarm is signaling. Remember, that's an alarm asking for love. And you're the one that is going to provide the love and reassurance that you need. So that's number one. The second one is, let's try this breathing thing. Okay, if you want to see it, go to our YouTube channel because we have video episodes uncut of these podcast interviews that are amazing because they're a lot longer and they're behind the scenes.

But you should see Russ' face when he does it. He looks like he's about to rage on somebody, and he's actually deflating like a tire and taking control of things. Now I'm going to look completely ridiculous as I breathe in three times and then I clench my teeth and his out like a tire.

Ready?

Let me do it first again because there's a few parts to it. The first thing is three breaths in through your nose so quickly.

And.

Then at the top of that, you hold your breath for about three to five seconds. And then you close your teeth. And as you exhale, slowly exhale, you make a hissing sound. And as you make that hissing sound, you imagine a tire deflating.

Okay, I'm going to do this.

You're ready? Ready. Okay.

I want you to elongate that. So the whole thing about the physiological sigh is that you're creating a long exhale. That's what really relaxes us, is the long exhale. So when people say take a deep breath, really what you need to do is just take a long exhale. So again, it's like three breaths in, hold.

And then...

I'm going to try it again. See if I.

Can get longer. If you feel your lungs out, Mel, like what- Okay. -i can really feel them up.

Okay, here we go. Wow. What's interesting about that is it requires so much focus that you can't really think about anything else.

Totally. That's one of the other things that it takes you off your worries. Exactly.

And you do feel this relaxing and collapsing feeling inside you.

Yeah. Wow.

Okay. Relax your shoulders, relax your jaw. There's stuff to it. I'll make a YouTube video about this or whatever, or I'll put it on my Instagram.

Awesome.

Basically, it's really about expanding your lungs, because when you expand your lungs, you send a message up to your brain that you're okay. Because when you get stressed, the stress starts breathing you. You aren't breathing for yourself. The stress will start breathing you. So it's really important that you do the three breaths in, hold and then breathe out with a sss and really elongate that exhale. The more breath you take in with the sniffs, the easier it is to have that nice long exhale.

Wow.

All right, so Cameron, I'm really excited. I'm going to teach you how to create and use what I call a confidence anchor, not only when you're about to fly and you're nervous, but for any single situation where you're nervous to do something. Okay, are you ready? Yeah. Awesome. It's super cool. And for you listening, I.

Want you to just.

Hold that situation that you're nervous about. So maybe you're nervous to give a presentation at work, or maybe you have a son or a daughter who is getting recruited for a sport, and now there's all these big team matches coming up and they're starting to get nervous. This confidence anchor is exactly what you need. So step number one is you're going to think about this situation that makes you nervous, okay? And we've already talked about that, Cameron. It's this flight to Portugal. Step number two is come up with something about this situation that actually makes.

You excited.

So describe for me, Cameron, what are you excited to do when you get to Portugal?

I think the thing that I'm most excited for is to see my sister. I haven't seen her in a couple of months. She's been in London. I don't know. When I think about Portugal, there's a lot of things I'm excited for, but probably the biggest thing is just to spend time with her.

I.

Love it.

That's perfect. Perfect.

Okay, great.

So.

You now have something related to the situation that makes you nervous that you're actually excited about, okay? Now, number three is the most important part. Number three is now that you have something that you're excited about, I want you to close your eyes and we're going to bring it to life. I want you to imagine the moment that you lay eyes on your sister for the first time in several months. And I'm imagining... Are you imagining the airport or a cobblestone street? What is the scene? Describe with your eyes closed? What is she wearing? What happens? Describe it for us.

Well, first of all, she's probably... I don't know. She's probably mad that we're late about something. But when when I think about it, we're in probably, like Lisbon, where we're going to land and probably right outside the first glance of a new city, somethings like that is always really exciting when you leave an airport, I think that's the best part about flying is getting to somewhere you're anticipating seeing. So I picture that. I picture her standing there probably in some black sweater because that's usually what she's wearing. And I think seeing her face, reacting to my mom, me, and my brother, that's going to be the best part because I know even if she won't admit it, she does miss us a lot.

Awesome. And who is she going to hug first?

100 % my mom.

Okay, awesome. And how.

Amazing- I'll probably be last.

And as you stand there and watch her in her black sweater with Lisbon in the background hugging your mom, what are you feeling?

Like a sense of comfort, a sense of of wholeness and just a really good feeling to have us all together during a really hard time of the year. It's going to be really special.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's your confidence anchor. That moment that you just described in detail, the black sweater, Lisbonne in the background, her reaction as she sees you, her hugging your mother first, the wholeness, the comfort, all of that that you just felt in your body, that is your confidence anchor. Now here's how you're going to use it. From now until that moment happens, the millisecond that you feel any nerves or any fear or any negative thought come up related to this thought, you're going to close your eyes. You can use my five-second rule to interrupt the worries. Just count backwards with me.

Five, four, three.

Two, one.

Three, two, one.

That is a starting ritual that will signal to your brain that you're not going to think about a plane crash. You are starting to think about something else. Then you are going to bring to the forefront of your mind that image, that feeling that you just described, and that is how you drop a confidence anchor on these bullshit nerves and worries that have been hijacking your life. That's what a confidence anchor is. You're using your own excitement about something that normally makes you nervous to shatter the grip that fear and nerves has on your body and your mind. That's what you're going to do. When you head to the airport on the way to the plane, you are going to use this same confidence anchor. When you get on that plane and your thoughts go, Uh-oh, you're going to go, Nope, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and you're going to drop that confidence anchor. When you.

Take off.

In the middle of the night and the pilot says, We might experience a little bit of turbulence, because pilots often say that, you're going to drop that confidence anchor and you're going to come back over and over and over again to this image of your sister and the black sweater and Lisbon behind her and her hugging your mother. That's exactly what you're going to do. And you're going to be shocked because this is a technique that they studied at Harvard Business School called reframing performance anxiety was the name of the study, reframing performance anxiety. And it's a way to flip moments that make you nervous into moments that make you excited and to keep control of your mind, body, and spirit so that your fears don't hijack and torture you.

Wow.

What do you think?

I mean, it makes sense because I think in the moments of panic, the last thing I'm doing is thinking about anything that brings me happiness. It's always the darkest feelings, the heaviest emotions versus even just closing my eyes just now. I feel so different sitting here. I feel like even thinking about that moment makes me happy. And I'm excited to use it because I know I'm going to be anxious all next week, week after.

So you want to know why this works?

I do. It seems too good to be true. Honestly, it seems too good to be true.

Well, the reason why it works is because it taps into your body's automatic systems. If you look into the neuroscience on this, scientists call this autonomic response that basically your nervous system has an autonomic response to stressful situations. Like if you're a normal person like me, you just say, Oh, yeah. If we're in a stressful situation, we automatically feel all kinds of things. What I want you to understand is that when we're in situations that make us nervous, everybody, whether you're giving a speech or you're going into an interview or you're on a first date or you're running a track meet or you're getting on a plane or you're breaking up with somebody or you're going in for a job interview, it is going to be automatic that your nerves take over because you're about to do something that makes you stressed out a little bit. It's requiring you to feel... It makes you feel a little bit vulnerable. But here's the cool thing. Even though you have this automatic response because you're right, there's no way over the next five weeks you're not going to feel anxious, because that's the autonomic response that your body has to this stressful thing.

But here's the cool thing. Cameron, you can control this. So here's the secret. The secret is understanding that your body's reactions to fear, so your automatic reaction to a fearful situation is the exact same as your body's automatic response to an exciting situation. And we're going to use this truth that your body's automatic reaction to fear is the same as your body's automatic reaction to excitement to your advantage. So tell me about a situation that makes you excited, like just something in your day to day life. Okay, give me a situation that makes you excited.

In my day to day life that makes me excited?

Well, how about this?

Who's your favorite musician?

I really like the Lumineers.

Okay, great.

Guess what?

The Lumineers are playing a private concert at the new private venue at the Fenway Park. You, my friend, not only have front row seats, you're going to meet them before the show. Okay. It's five weeks out. How do you feel?

Jittery a little bit. Kind of the same feeling I would have if I was playing a big soccer game or running an important race when I was younger, like the clammy hands, the pit in your stomach.

Yeah. Dude, we're walking into this venue. You're walking up to the front row. How are you feeling?

My heart's beating fast. I'm going a million miles an hour. I don't know, probably feeling like.

Really on edge. Yeah. The usher is coming up to be like, okay, they're ready to meet you. How are you feeling?

I'm like, okay, let me collect myself. Yeah, probably really flustered and I don't know, like a little bit anxious, probably.

So it sounds like a situation like that where you're about to meet your favorite band, which I would say is that a positive or a negative experience?

Yeah, that would be amazing. I mean, a positive one, obviously.

Well, it sounds very similar to the way that you experience the thought of flying to Portugal.

Yeah, I guess that's true.

Yeah. You want to know the only difference? When you're in a situation that's positive that makes you excited and you're about to meet the luminaires, your brain is telling you're excited. Your brain is telling you the jitters in your stomach are butterflies, and that's a good thing. Your brain is telling you your hands are clammy and your heart is racing because something good is about to happen. The only difference between that and what you experience as you think about flying to Portugal is what your brain is saying about the flight. When you start to experience butterflies in your stomach as you are about to board the flight, your brain is going, Uh-oh, there's something wrong. This is negative. The plane's going to crash. You're experiencing in your body, Cameron.

The exact.

Same physical and physiological symptoms. When you meet the luminaires is when you meet the luminaires as when you board a plane, and the only difference is what your brain is saying about it. And so the reason why a confidence anchor works is we are going to shut your negative brain down and drop this confidence anchor right on it like a sledgehammer, and we're going to replace your narrative that something's wrong with, Holy shit, I'm about to see my sister. This is so exciting. It's as exciting as meeting the Lumineers. And when your brain starts to say the butterfly's are positive, you won't escalate into a panic attack. You will have taken control. How cool is that?

That's pretty cool.

So do you have any questions about the confidence anchor and how you're going to use it? It just.

Honestly seems still a little bit too good to be true. I don't know. I can just conquer all my fears just by flipping the way I'm thinking.

There's a scientific reason why this works. So they researched this at Harvard Business School, and what they did is they put people in control groups and put them in situations that made them nervous. They put one group into a control group where they had to run a track meet. Another one had to sing karaoke. Another one was in a debating competition. They taught one group of people to use this reframing tool where you think about something related to the track meet or the debating competition or karaoke that you're excited about. And so this group was taught to say, I'm excited. I'm excited to run this meet. I'm excited to get up there on the stage and conquer my fears. I'm excited to go and debate because I've prepared. The people who use this simple reframing tool outperformed the people who didn't. They felt less nervous and there's a scientific reason why. Earlier, we talked about the fact that there are these automatic responses that our body has to situations that are exciting or stressful. In our case, Cameron, we talked about the luminaires. And how that's exciting, meeting the luminaires and getting on a plane to Portugal, which used to make you nervous.

Just talking about those two situations created an automatic response in your body, didn't it?

Yeah. That automatic.

Response is nothing more than a series of chemicals firing and messages firing between your brain and your nervous system. The reason why you and I get butterflies is because when the brain sends a message down to your nervous system that, Holy cow, we got to get on a plane, or, Holy cow, the luminaires are about to walk in. Your nervous system goes, Oh, got it. And immediately starts changing up the chemicals in your body. Adrenaline fires. The blood races to your head and to your heart. That's why your heart starts pounding. That's why your thoughts start to race. Now you get butterflies because the signal in your brain going to your gut just changed the chemicals in your digestive tract. That's why we all get butterflies.

That's it.

And so in the situation with the luminaires, you flipped your thoughts. I'm excited to meet them.

And so.

That explains all the reasons why you have all these changes going on in your body, why your heart is racing, why your butterflies are in your stomach. This automatic response doesn't scare you because you're thinking positive thoughts when it comes to the lumenirs. Now, when you get on the plane and your brain signals to your stomach that something's up and your heart starts to race because the blood goes to your heart and the butterfly start to flutter in your stomach because the chemical structure just changed in your digestive tract. If you have negative thoughts about the plane, a couple of things happen. You start to get scared of the automatic response in your body. And more cortisol starts to flood your brain, which is the stress hormone. And once that happens, what they found at the Harvard Business School study, is that the cortisol interferes with your brain's ability to do whatever you had prepared to do. This is why most of us, when we stand on a stage, go blank. It's because we have an automatic response. Our brain goes, Oh, shit. We get scared of our racing heart because we think it means that the plane is about to crash or about to screw something up.

The cortisol floods our brain, and we forget what we prepared. When the cortisol floods your brain, you forget about seeing your sister. You forget about all the exciting things. You forget about all the research that you did that shows that traveling by commercial airplane is the safest way to travel, period.

That's why this matters. And it's more than just thinking positive thoughts.

It's critical that.

You come up with the thing you're excited about before you get into the situation. Because once your thoughts start to race and you're like, Oh, my God, I'm going to screw up this test, or, Oh, my God, I'm going to screw up this interview, or, Oh, no, the plane, you've already lost control. You have to come up with this exciting anchor and this confidence anchor before you start to get nervous. Got it?

Yeah.

Any other questions?

It just makes so much sense. I always have taken the approach of calm down cam, making myself to be the bad guy and not really reframing it in any way, just letting myself soak in all the stress and anxiety and just reprimand myself being like, what the heck? Why are you not just calming down? There's a six year old that's bouncing around and it's like, Oh, I love when the plane goes up and down. And it's like, why can't I be like that six year old?

Let me tell you why. This is excellent, Cameron. Let me tell you why you can't be like that six year old because I love this analogy. The six year old's brain is not attaching negative thoughts to the plane bouncing up and down. As far as the six year old is... I'm not sure this is exciting. That's why they're not panicking. And so the reason why in the history of telling yourself to calm down, you have never been able to calm down, is because you are dealing with an automatic response in your body. Let's go back to the science. When you get into a situation that makes you nervous or that makes you stressed out or makes you afraid or that makes you excited, those are states in your body of high agitation. Those are states of alertness. Those are states when your blood starts pumping and your brain starts paying attention and everything aligns because you're about to do something that makes you excited or fun or nervous or afraid, and so you go into a state of being hyper-alert. That state of high agitation is one that you can't calm down like that. That's not calm down like that.

What we're doing when we teach you to create a confidence anchor and to use excitement to reframe what you're feeling is we're taking a state of high agitation from the negative to a state of high agitation in the positive. We're actually using the automatic response in our body to our advantage, and we're just tricking our brain to believe that we're actually excited because our brain doesn't know the difference. Your brain is like the six year old. Your brain actually doesn't know the difference between excitement and fear. That baby that's bouncing is feeling the heart racing and then the bubbles in her stomach. It's just that your brain is framing it in the negative. Because your brain knows that excitement and that fear feels the same, that lumineers, that meeting the luminears and being on an airplane feels the same, you can use that to your advantage and trick your brain in a moment where you would normally be nervous to actually think you're excited. The reason why this matters, Cameron, is because when you're on that plane, if you can come back over and over and over to your confidence anchor, and if you can close your eyes in a moment of turbulence, and you can imagine your sister, and you can start to say out loud, and this is important, you've got to say to yourself, I'm so excited to see...

What's your sister's name?

Ciana.

I am so excited to see Ciana. I'm so excited to see Ciana. I cannot wait for Ciana to hug my mom. I cannot wait for this. If you come back to that confidence anchor, you are going to flip your brain into believing that you're excited about that moment and you will no longer be afraid. It's a way to gain control. You know what? You want to do something really cool? Because your confidence anchor is related to what you're doing, it's really believable. Because when you are there hugging your sister, it means the plane made it and there's nothing to be worried about. That's why this works. When you imagine before a test, yourself walking out of there going, Yes. It actually makes you excited to take it. When you imagine yourself nailing the interview, it makes you excited to walk into it because your brain doesn't know the difference between a state of fear or a state of excitement and now you know a simple trick, backed by research from Harvard, to take control of your mind and take control in situations where nerves normally derail you.

Yeah, it's amazing. I think that was always in the back of my head during our conversation was if I'm still... I feel fear in a lot of different areas of my life, not when I'm just in the air. So when I'm on the ground, how can I use this tool to ground myself even if I'm not sure the outcome of it?

I love this. Okay, great question. I want you to take out a notebook, and you're going to write down any single thing that makes you nervous. It could be anything. I mean, give me a couple.

There's a long list, probably. But off the top of my head, something that I don't know, I really wish that I could beat the fear on is I recently moved. I'm not that far, but there's a really nice yoga studio on my street that I pass every day. And I just always think I need to be a part of a community of 20 somethings that are like-minded that... I've always loved yoga. I've loved the community it brings, but I cannot bring myself to sign up and I can't bring myself up. I just constantly think about the day I have to show up for my first class, and it makes me way too anxious to even go.

This is an excellent example, and by the way, incredibly common and very relatable. So I'm really glad you shared it. So you're going to do the exact same thing. We're going to create a confidence anchor. Because what I hear is I hear you want to do it. I hear it pulling you and the nerves are keeping you back. So name something you're excited about. Can you pick a coffee shop in your neighborhood that you love to go to and it's going to be your treat to get a nice latte when you're done?

Yeah.

Do you.

Want to name it? Yeah, I do.

It's called Thinking Cup.

I love Thinking Cup. Now, you're going to close your eyes. What color yoga tights are you wearing? Oh, God.

Maybe like, I have these really nice light blue ones that I always like to wear.

I love it. And as a treat because you went to this relaxing yoga class in your light blue tights, sweatshirt tied around your waist, like you're holding your yoga bag over your shoulder, standing at Thinking Cup. What did you order?

Probably, I think, an icing, oatmeal, latte.

Love it.

How do you feel? Yeah.

As you're walking out of the thinking cup, having just completed that class and treating yourself to that, how do you feel right now?

I'm proud of myself for doing it.

Awesome. There's your confidence anchor. Anytime you feel nervous, you're going to count backwards five, four, three, two, one to interrupt the nerves and create that starting ritual, and you're going to drop that confidence anchor. And what's going to happen is it's going to slowly retrain your mind that you're not nervous about joining that yoga studio. You're actually excited.

Hey, it's Mel. Thank you so much for checking this video out. And if you like this one, I have a feeling you're going to like this one too. I'll see you there.