I think motivation is garbage. I always thought that was funny given that I was a motivational speaker for a long time. Here I think it's garbage. The reason why I think motivation is garbage is because it's not there when you need it. I don't rely on motivation. I do not expect to feel motivated. I do not expect to feel like doing things, and I make myself do them. That does not mean, by the way, that I have great willpower. That does not mean that I consider myself to be a disciplined person. That means that I understand the biology of how most human beings work. And the biology of how most human beings work is that you feel a sensation in your body. So let's just take an example like getting out of bed. You set the alarm the night before. I know you don't, but Most normal human beings set the alarm the night before. And when the alarm goes off, you're going to get out of bed, right? I mean, that's how it's supposed to work, because when you set the alarm the night before, you're setting it for a time where you're basically supposed to get up.

So you are making a promise to your future self in the morning that you're going to get out of bed. Well, what happens? All kinds of things happen. You go to bed, the alarm rings, and the first thing that you feel is a sensation. And for me, the sensation that I always feel in my body is something that I would call, I don't know if it's the cortisol. I don't know if it's partying. I don't know if it's menopause. I don't know if it's the fact that I have a fabulous bed and my husband's next to me, and I don't want to get out of it. I don't know if it's the fact that I live in Southern Vermont and it's freezing. I don't know. But the first sensation is, then perception. So sensation, perception, then feeling, then thought, then That is the biological chain of events that happens in a nanosecond. I know that this is what's happening. I have the feeling. I then have the perception happen, which is I look around, it's dark, Chris is next to me. I then have an emotion about it, overwhelm, frustration, like usually something negative. Then I have a thought, which is, I don't want to get out of bed.

And that for years would trigger the action I would take. And what most of us, I certainly didn't understand that sensation, perception, feeling or emotion, thinking, and then action is the chain of events. That is how you're hardwired. This is how it works. This is how it works. It wasn't until I understood that, holy cow, if I don't reverse the chain, my sensation, my perception, my emotions about things, and my thinking, all four or five of those things, actually precede what action I take. And I'm not in control of what I'm doing. My emotions and my sensations and my trauma and all of the stuff that has been running on autopilot forever, that is controlling who Mel Robbins is. And at some point, if that's working for you, fantastic. If there's an area of your life that you're not happy in, then you You got to reverse the order. Or, I guess, or and, you can go to therapy for months and months and months and do the work, and slowly but surely, you will change the way that you think, which also helps. But I find that understanding that that is the chain of events.

For those of us that have any childhood trauma, where sensation is the first thing that you feel that then triggers that whole pathway, or you have any anxiety, again, sensation of the alarm that then triggers a whole pathway of action and reaction. This is one of the reasons why you feel out of control. It's because the sensation and the wiring in your body is actually triggering this chain reaction sensation, and you don't even realize it. It's why avoiding things or freezing has become your default response to everything, because every sensation triggers the exact same thing, which leads to an action of avoidance. And the way around that is to flip that and start with taking better actions, regardless of how you feel. There's two ways around it. One is to work with a licensed therapist who can help you do the deeper work of understanding yourself and understanding your default thinking patterns and doing the work to challenge those assumptions and change the way that you think. That absolutely works if you will commit to the process of doing The second way, and you can do these together, certainly how I did it, is to look at your behaviors and understand that there is this chain, there is this order that happens in your body and reverse it.

Take a behavior Work-first approach. If you want to get in better shape, what does somebody do who is in the shape that you want to be in? Ask yourself what the behavior is, because I'll tell you, the reason why you're not taking those behaviors is because Because this chain of events in your body, from sensation to perception to feeling and emotion to thinking, is constantly telling you, I don't feel like it. I don't want to. It's not going to work anyway. I'm going to eat that thing. Yeah, I'm going to eat that thing. I'll do it tomorrow. And you can reverse it. It's funny because everyone knows how... Well, I believe 99% of people know how they should behave to become the person they want to become. They know they probably shouldn't have that, I'd know, bowl of ice cream at 2:00 AM in the morning. They know that they probably should get up in the morning and run for five kilometers. They know they probably should check in with their friends and family, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But here's the thing. You're not making your behavior decisions with your brain. You're making them with the sensation in your body.

If you don't feel like doing it, you don't do it. See, before it even gets up here, you feel it in here. And this was the thing that was revelatory for me. I was like, oh, my God. My emotions drive my entire your life. And that's why I feel out of control. And that's why I'm frustrated with myself. And that's why I can talk till I'm blue in the face about what I need to do and what I should do and what this and what that. But when push comes to shove, if I don't feel like doing it, where I'm scared or I'm scared, or I'm this, or I'm that, I don't do it. That means my emotions and the sensations in my body and the patterns that have been hardwired for a long time and the coping mechanisms that just run on autopilot, that's what's driving you. It's not up here. So So we've broken our cycle. Who has? Well, I don't know. Dude, I wake up every... I still... I know all this, and this is the other, I think, is a really important thing for you to hear, not you, Steven, but everybody watching and listening to us.

And that is that I personally feel like it's important to understand that you may never like the things you need to do, and you can still do them. I will never like getting out of bed, and I still get out of bed when the alarm rings. I don't like emptying the dishwasher, and I still do it. I don't like exercising. I still do it. I don't like eating healthy a lot of the times. I still do it. I don't like Taking a breath and centering myself. When I really want to just scream at my husband, and I still do it because I let my emotions and my anxiety and my trauma responses and my fears run my life for far too long. I would rather be in the daily, I don't know if you call it a battle or you just call it, I'm just in a daily dance with myself to constantly come back to alignment and peace and showing up as the person that I want to be rather than how I may feel in the moment. One of the things I did want to speak to you about is about how we know what we want and how we set goals.

Again, we're in that part of the year now where everybody's thinking. We've talked a little bit about how one changes themselves, but then even knowing what direction to aim at is a whole challenge in and of itself. How does one know at 30 years old in my life what real goals I should be aiming at? Because part of the concern I've had is I wonder if I'm driven or being being dragged. What do you think? Don't know. I don't really know the difference. Bullshit. You know. No, I don't. You are the most driven person I know. Why? I don't know. I'm going to ask you. Just give me this part for my interview. Well, this is something- Why? Why are you the most driven person I know? Why are you? Me? Yeah. Well, I think I was out running something for a very long time. Sounds like being dragged. Is it? I genuinely have sat here with hundreds of people, and every single time they explain their motivation to me, I go, Sounds like you're being dragged by shame, your father's opinion of you, insecurity, whatever. That's a negative way to say it. I mean, I feel like- That's why people don't like it.

It's so powerless. They sound like they're attached to the back of the lorry and it's flying down the motorway. Well, if you recognize that's what it is, you suddenly become powerful. Yeah, and you can drive. Yes. So for me, if I put it through the lens of the bad things that happened, it would probably be just like out running. Like a psychiatrist once said to me, It's very interesting to me that when this incident happened in the fourth grade and this kid climbed on top of you while you were sleeping. You are in a state when you're sleeping where you are completely supposedly safe. I'm not sure, Mel, your nervous system ever reset get back to a place of feeling safe. And then the hypervigilance of having a caregiver who is always very erratic with their personality also made me feel always on the move, always on the move, always on the move. If you're on the move, nobody can catch you. And so slowing down, if you put it in that context, becomes unsafe. However, if you look at a lot of our experiences growing up, most of us get a lot positive attention when we achieve.

And so we become, whether you want to say driven or dragged, it's probably just a matter of whether or not you're in control of it. A lot of us are driven by the desire to want to feel seen, the desire to feel loved, the desire to get the accolades, which is why so many of us feel driven to achieve, because it's tied into a sense of self-worth. It's tied into a sense of being loved, being seen. For me, I think I was probably, to use your words, dragged since I wasn't in control of it. But more and more, I feel profoundly driven. I often think people need to be dragged to a place where they realize that it's failed them, that something has failed them, for them to then take stock and decide to become a little bit more intentional and to take hold of the steering wheel. Because in my situation, I was 100% dragged to thinking that I needed a million pounds of six-pack, a girlfriend, and a ranger of a sport. Then upon getting those things, it was almost a bit of an existential crisis. Like, What the fuck am I doing here?

What failed me and why did I come to this part? Then in that moment, I could really take stock of what my own intrinsic drivers were and then do things a little bit more intentionally and aligned with, disassociated from the thought that any of these things would validate me at some deeper level. I think a lot of this that we're talking about isn't conscious decisions that anybody's making. That there is so much conditioning and programming that happens that we are unaware of as we're growing up and as we're moving through young adulthood, that you don't even realize how much you avoid stuff or how much you're coping by being busy or you're coping by drinking too much, or you're chasing stuff because you feel a deep sense of self-loathing. And that most of the decisions, at least this is for me, We're all reactions. Just again, like just trying to do the best that I can, but not really in control of anything. And until, I really believe this, until you can drop into your body and just calm down your nervous system and not be reven that internal engine so much. But to be able to just...

This is not a technical term. I feel like I've smoothed out nervous system by doing traditional talk therapy, guided MDMA therapy with my husband, EMDR, all of the behavioral activation therapy, which is leading with a behavior-first approach and start acting like the person you want to be. Let them. Let them. How do you describe what anxiety is?

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

Well, I agree. I feel like it's thrown around all the time, and we think that anxiety is like a nervous stomach and a lot of worry in your head about what's going to happen. And I love that you're saying that we want to start we're talking about the alarm that goes off in your body. And before we even talk about what that means, one other thing that I would love for you to address is what are ways in which anxiety expresses itself. And I'm going to give you an example. Sure. So I'm your classic textbook type A, hyper vigilant, always worried, anxiety type. Panic attacks, shortness of breath. You can literally feel the alarm vibrating through my skin. But our daughter, who is 23, when she's feeling anxious or the alarm is going off in her body, she doesn't emit worry or tension. She emits frustration and anger. Sure. What are the various ways in which anxiety gets expressed in people? Because I think there's a lot of people that, quote, struggle with anxiety that don't realize that it's anxiety that they're struggling with.

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

I agree with you. So let's go back to the basics. Anxiety 101. When you say we're going to now talk about anxiety as an alarm system in your body, and describe the alarm system to me.

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

So it has to make up worries and thoughts that are completely consistent with that painful sense of alarm in your system. So we start stacking up these worries. And of course, that just Which creates more alarm, which creates more worries, which creates more alarm, and we get caught in this alarm-anxiety cycle.

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

Totally.

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

I think that that's an explanation that's very simple and very accurate, I think, is that we have this thing that I describe in my book called background alarm, which is basically old unresolved emotional issues that are stuck in your body. My colleague, Gabor Mathe, talks about this, too, emotions being stuck in the body, which is a construct. You can't separate the mind from the body, of course, but it's a construct, and it helps people. It really helps them understand that, Hey, this is actually starting from my body. And because we're so versed at speaking in words and communicating to ourselves and to each other with words, we don't get into the feeling. So if I ask you, Hey, Mel, what does it feel like when you bite bite into an apple? It's like, Well, I don't know. I mean, so I say, What does it taste like? Well, it's sweet or it's sour, it's crunchy. It's like, We're so good at describing things in words. But how do you feel when you bite into that apple? That's a brand new landscape. We're not used to feeling. We're in a society that values, that worships the mind, and very rarely actually says, Hey, get into your body.

Feel your body. And a lot of us don't feel our body because that's where the freaking pain is, right? That's right. So we retreat into our heads because it's an escape from this old alarm that's been trapped in your body probably since childhood.

So you say that all anxiety has the exact same beginning. This really surprised me that anxiety is all triggered by the same thing. All anxiety comes from the singular source. What is that? Separation.

All anxiety is separation anxiety.

It's What does that mean?

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

Can you give me an example? So I find, and one of the things I want to do with this show is to take a lot of the stuff that sounds intellectual and make it really digestible and understandable. So when you say separate, you're separate from your parents. Can you give us a few scenarios that aren't all horrific abuse situations that anybody can identify with when you say separate from your parents?

Yeah. There's something as simple as a parental mismatch.

What does that mean?

Well, it's a term. I don't know if I heard it or I made it up, but it's basically I see a lot... Most of my patients, clients, whatever you want to call them, are female, and a lot of them have issues with their mom. So they felt separate. They felt this mismatch from their mother. They felt like, We're not connected. I love my mother. She loves me, but I like Bach, and she likes punk rock. And just in different parts of our lives, they're very different. And that parental mismatch, I think it might be a Nicole Lepere term, actually. This parental mismatch causes a tremendous amount of alarm in a child's system because you want to belong to a parent. You really want to feel like you're connected to your parent. And if you don't have that an internal sense of attachment. It's very alarming to our system. And that alarm gets lodged in our body. And then that's what usually mediates the worries as we get older. It also mediates that thing I call jabs, which is judgment, abandonment, blame, and shame. We do that to ourselves. Yourself. So when we're listening to our own thing, it's like, Okay, how am I judging myself here?

You wake up in the morning, as you say in high five habit, you wake up in the morning with anxiety or alarm, as I like to call it, and then you start thinking, you start stacking all these negative scenarios videos on top of yourself to make sense of it. When really what you should do, and this is out of your book, is I'm feeling anxious. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, into my body. Find a place in my body, find a place in my breath, find a place that feels safe in my body. And some people don't feel safe in their body, and we do something with that first, but really, breath. Everybody's pretty much safe in their breath. Go 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, into my body, out of my head. Because what that does is it gives a sense of control. It takes energy away from those ruminating thoughts, and it puts it where it belongs, because maybe that alarm is your younger self that's asking for your attention. And as a medical doctor and neuroscientist, I want to have a seizure sometimes when I talk about the ethereal nature of this. But really, from a practical sense, when you're anxious, find the alarm in your body.

Okay, so how do you do that? So let's just take a scenario right now. Let's just say, and it could be anything. It could be that you are sitting in the pickup line at school and you see somebody that you have beef with, and you start to feel like this wave hit you because you don't want to talk to that person or that person makes you nervous. Right. Situation we can all relate to.

Totally.

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

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

So go into your body. Feel it. See if you can put your hand over that area.

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

It's, Fuck, why am I feeling this? I don't want to feel dread. And then I feel like I just want to hide from it or try to fall asleep. And I know that it's just my body reacting to all this change. It's some stored experience that is coming up. I've been working so hard on not freaking out when I feel it, but turning toward it. And as a medical doctor and a neuroscientist and somebody who has struggled with anxiety for 30 years, why is turning toward this alarm the answer in that moment? What would happen? Tell me What happens when you turn toward it and you put your hands on your chest or you go, Oh, thank you. You're just trying to protect me because you're scared to death that you now live in Vermont and you have no friends and you're very far away from your kids and you're going to live alone here on this mountain and be even more lonely. I get through this whole catastrophizing, which only make it worse, versus, Welcome this bullshit in. I don't want to. I just don't want it to be there, Russ.

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

This really is becoming therapy, isn't it?

Well, I'll give it a try.

Yeah, when you started talking about the mismatch with the mom, I'm like, I hope my mother doesn't listen to this episode because I even feel guilty for admitting that we are a mismatch or are a mismatch. Sometimes my mom calls me Mellie, and friends of mine call me Mellie. Friends of mine called me Mellie.

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

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

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

What does that even mean?

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

I don't want to sit with it. That's why.

Exactly.

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

Well, it's sublimating it.

What is sublimating? That is a big word. What is sublimating it?

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

So I've taken the negative alarm alarm or the alarm in my body, and I have channeled it in a direction so I don't have to feel it.

Yes.

And when you said, What if the alarm is trying to help you? What the hell did you mean by that?

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

God, that's so true.

That's the problem. Yeah, we won't do it for ourselves. We'll do it for our pets.

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

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

All the time.

Yeah, but you don't do it for yourself.

No. I think that this is the singular biggest mistake that society has made around understanding anxiety. I just had a huge breakthrough here. Holy shit, Russ. Good. Okay, so let me just see if I can give this back to everybody listening. Sure. It's the fact that you're scared of the alarm or you can't tolerate it and you don't understand what it's trying to ask of you that makes it worse.

Yes.

If you were to realize that any tension or fear or scary feeling in your body is an alarm system. From your child. From your inner child asking you for reassurance or love or attention, and you just gave yourself that reassurance or love or attention, the alarm would turn off. Is that what you're saying?

Totally, yeah, because it's been an adaptation for you, too. You got to remember that the ego thinks it's protecting you by firing- I I don't understand what the ego is.

That's too intellectual for me. I will have you back to talk about the ego. But the second anybody says ego, I'm like, Oh, this is somebody who's way smarter than me. I don't want to try to figure out what the hell an ego is. We will have you back because we all need to know what the ego is. However, I just want to stay on this because I think this is a groundbreaking idea that I want everybody who either has some level of situational or generalized anxiety or love somebody who has situational or generalized anxiety. At this moment in time, that would be every human being on the planet. I want you to understand that we have been taught that we're supposed to attack it from the neck up with the thinking first, and that's one of the things you need to do to cope, but the real heart of healing your anxiety, which you claim you've done, and I want to hear about that. I don't mean to use the word claim like, I don't believe you.

I claim that I have gotten so much better.

Well, you're a medical doctor, so you can say that. I feel like I understand anxiety. I still hate it, and I need to have a different relationship with it. You do. I need to, and everybody needs, for the sake of your kids, the people that you love, for yourself, you need to understand this a alarm system in your body and the fact that it desperately needs you. You need to take a neck-down approach to listening to the alarm and diffusing it in a way that, wow, it's So over time, if you do this, the alarm doesn't go off as much?

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

Okay, so you used to work in the emergency room as a doctor.

I delivered babies. I did the whole general thing. Now, if I had a motorcycle in my front yard, that's why I bring up motor cycles, is because I used to see bad accidents with the motor cycles. I don't condone motor cycles. I think they're fun, but they're dangerous. Anyway, sidetrack. If I had a motorcycle in my front, I've never ridden one before. If I had a motorcycle in my front driveway, and I had 50 books on how to drive a motorcycle, ride a motorcycle. And then I go out to the motorcycle, I sit on it, and I go, No, you know what? I got to go back, and I got to read a little more about how the brakes work. Until you get on that freaking cycle and ride it around and maybe fall off a few times, which is the same thing with the emotion. As soon as you get on the alarm, you start actually feeling better. When you said about that thing about the person in the school drop off, as soon as you put your hand over place of alarm, you will feel instantly better. I'm not saying it's going to take it from a nine to a two, but it's going to take it from a nine to a four because you're actually, from a consciousness perspective, you are actually going at the root source of the problem.

Which is this little child in you that says, I don't like this person. And it's not this person. It's basically, I don't like someone from my past that this person reminds me of.

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

Yeah.

So for example, if you had a chaotic parent or an unpredictable parent or a mentally ill parent or an absent parent, this goes back to your original point. When you have a parent that you can't either connect with or that is unpredictable or that makes you feel invisible or not safe, that alarm system in your body develops as a child. And that is what you're saying when you say all anxiety has resulted because of separation anxiety as a child, when you feel separate or unsafe or unseen or not heard or not loved or invisible in your home, that original experience that you probably don't remember. Yeah. That encoded your body when you were tiny.

Yeah.

And any time then, from that point forward, any time you again felt invisible, or you felt attacked, or you felt unloved, that alarm got even stronger. And so now it's this automatic response in your body to those situations where you feel separate. Am I getting this?

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

Again, you're way smarter than me, so you got to tell me the story. Okay, so it's basically- Is this a Greek myth class that I skipped in college? Yeah. Okay.

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

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

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

Go ahead, please.

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

I'm like, Don't make eye contact. Get on the phone. Make a fake phone call. Avoid. Avoid. Turn shoulder. Turn shoulder. Holy shit. Are they close? I'm like, What?

Run away.

Run away.

To quote a Monty Python thing. So basically, what we're doing is we're trying to intellectualize the alarm that we're feeling in our body. And the solution isn't in our minds. The solution is in our body, which is why so many people have a hard time healing from anxiety because we're trying to use more thoughts to combat overthinking.

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

Getting Getting at the root cause.

Getting at the root cause.

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

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

Sure.

And what I now realize after years of having kids with anxiety and reading so many books about this subject that I should have a PhD and being in years of therapy myself is that if a child... Let's take my son. Our son, Oakley, when he was little, he was constantly picked on at school. So of course, he felt nervous in the morning before he had to head into school.

Sure.

Plus, the kid had dyslexia and ADHD, all of which was not diagnosed. So he's heading into a full day in a classroom where he physiologically, neurologically is incapable of doing what is going to be asked of him. And so his body, before entering that situation, sounds an alarm. Totally. And when the alarm sounds and the physiological changes happen, guess what physiological feeling he has? His stomach starts to rumble because as the physiology of the alarm changes and the chemistry in his digestive tract changes, he starts getting butterflies that feel like pterodactals. And then all of a sudden, instead of just giving himself a hug and going, It's going to be okay. Today's going to be an okay day. I can face this. Instead of reassuring himself, he goes into his head and says, Oh, my God, my stomach. I think I'm going to puke. I can't go to school. Holy holy... And he ramps himself. We were dealing with panic attacks with this kid, where he would literally bang his head on the kitchen island. I don't want to go to school crying. He would force himself to... He would get so worked up, he would actually throw up.

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

Yeah. 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. Could be anything. I mean, give me a couple. There's a long I guess, 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 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.

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 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 me 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 this 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, yoga bag over your shoulder, standing at Thinking Cup. What did you order? Probably aniced oak milk 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?

Like, proud of myself for doing it.

Awesome. There's your confidence anchor. Anytime you feel nervous, you're going to count backwards, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 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. And when you start to practice this confidence anchor, at some point, you're going to find yourself walking down the street and there's the studio. And as that wave, because remember, it's automatic. That automatic response comes up because you're about to do something new. You get to choose whether your brain says no or yes. Using the confidence anchor in this research from Harvard in the five-second rule, you can flip that moment from one of stress to one that's something awesome because you have the power to make your brain say yes. I'm excited to do that, and I'm going to walk in today, and I'm going to sign up for that relaxing yoga class And I am going to imagine how great I'm going to feel in my hot, amazing light blue yoga tights as I sip that oak milk latte and walk out a thinking cup as my reward for getting it done.

And that, my friend, is how you use science to conquer your fears and create the life that you love. And I have a feeling, Cameron, and I have a feeling for you listening to us, too, that this little technique is not only going to help you tee up and knock off one thing after another that you're afraid to do or nervous to do, whether it's jumping on a plane or walking into a yoga studio or asking somebody out or working on your side hustle. I think what it's actually going to do is not only get you in action, I think it's going to help you reprogram your mind, because I don't think you realize, Cameron, how much feeling on edge and nervous is a default for you and how much it's actually holding you back and robbing you of the happiness you deserve. Just in a lot of the stories, there's the comment that we hear about your husband in that relationship. I feel like so much of our community are women that are very growth-focused. And they oftentimes struggle with anxiety, but they really struggle with this burning desire to want more from life.

And sometimes it does transmute into a focus or an anger on their relationship. So for your relationship in your marriage, what is that trajectory been like and how have you healed that? So now it's in support of your dreams, but rather than being a place where you're projecting. Yeah, it's a fabulous question. So in context, I've been married for 25 years. We literally celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, three weeks ago. And it's been up and down. And one of the gifts of my marriage is that Chris and I have found ourselves at different times in very different roles in our marriage. And so we have It had been at times where we were without kids and we were both working and we were making about the same amount of money. And then we got into a mode where we had kids, and our kids are now 22, 21, and 16 years old, where he was the lead. I was the more traditional, I have a job, but your money is our money, my money is my play money situation. Then we got into a point, which was 12 years ago, where my husband wanted to pursue a dream of going into the restaurant business.

It had always been his dream. Now, look, I grew up working in restaurants, and I think one thing that will cure you of wanting to own one is working in restaurants. Yeah, that's true. That's so true. I'm like, Okay, let's see how this goes. And he and his best friend, to their credit, they wrote a business plan. They raised a little bit of money. They quit their corporate jobs. They opened a little pizza joint outside of Boston, Massachusetts. The first one was a home run. And so like complete fucking idiots, we cashed everything out. 401k's, the We have a 529 plans for the kids. We then took out a home equity line because that's free money. We leverage credit cards. We shoved it all in to expand the restaurant business, and then 2008 hit. Housing crisis hit the United States. We found ourselves, like Everybody else upside down. The liens hit the house, 800 grand in debt, maxed out home equity line, maxed out credit cards. I never, ever thought that at the age of 41 with three kids under the age of 10, I I could not be able to buy groceries. Friends and family had invested, and the restaurants were still open, and they were doing everything that they could to try to make it work.

I didn't want anybody to know. And this was absolutely the rock bottom moment of my life. I was drinking myself into the ground. I would wake up every single morning. I became a person I didn't recognize. I would literally hit that snooze button four times because I could not face a day. My kids would miss the bus every morning. I was that harried mom that was racing to school, throwing them out of the car, forgot the lunches, forgot the forms. That was the beginning of the day. Hiding from my friends, pissed off at my husband. I would start drinking at three o'clock in the afternoon to numb it all. I was unemployed. It was a fucking nightmare. And my problems felt so big that I just started circling the drain. Why bother? I know how this ends. We lose the house. We get divorced. I hate you. It's your fault. Because the truth is, it's so much easier to be angry than it is to be afraid. And so here's the thing that I want to really focus on. You know what to do. We all do. Knowing what to do is the easy part.

I knew it wasn't Chris's fault. It's not like he started the business to fail. I know I knew the restaurant business is a bitch, and most restaurants fail. I knew I needed a job. I knew I needed to talk to my friends. I knew I needed to stop drinking. I knew I needed to be nicer to him and stop... I knew I needed to exercise. We all know what to do. It's the how. How do you make yourself do it when you feel scared or anxious or alone or beaten down or ashamed? All of it. That was my struggle every day. And I I got out of that mess by sheer luck. I think it was divine intervention because the story is so stupid. There's no other explanation. Literally, I was watching television one night. It was a Monday night outside of Boston, Massachusetts. I was having a moment where I was having a pep talk with myself. I don't know if you've ever been that low where you're like, All right, that's it. Tomorrow morning, it's the new you, Mel Robbins. You've got to pull this shit together. You have got to look for a job.

You've got to stop Chris, if you're going to drink, start at eight o'clock. Don't start at three. You know, like literally... You're like drunk pep talk. Exactly. I'm like, I'm totally drunk. I have four Manhattan's in at this moment. Melvin, I got this. I got this. I got this moment. And then tomorrow morning. You are going to get your ass out of that. You're not going to hit that. That's too much. Then all of a sudden, honest to goodness, this is what happened. A rocket ship launches across the television screen at the end of the commercial, and those four Manhattan's gave me a crazy ass idea. I said, Mel, tomorrow morning, you are going to launch yourself out of bed like a rock. You are going to move so fast, woman. You're not going to be in that bed when that anxiety hits. You are going to be on your way. Now, that was it. That was the moment. I always say you're one decision away from a totally different life. One decision away. The next morning, Tuesday morning, this is when everything changed. The alarm goes off. And then this is something I want everyone to understand.

There's a five-second window of hesitation where you start to think about what you need to do. And this five-second window of hesitation defines your whole life. It determines how much money you make, how happy you are, how healthy you are, whether or not your relationship is amazing. It's a moment of hesitation that's a habit where you start thinking about what you need to do. And I am here to give you the secret to all to receive your change. If you move within that five second moment of hesitation, you beat your subconscious brain and you take control. And I didn't know this at the time. I mean, come on. I had invented this while I was drunk on Manhattan's. I now know the science. But here's how it works. So that alarm went off. And this is how I would test this. Set your alarm 30 minutes earlier tomorrow morning and do it 30 minutes earlier on purpose, because when that alarm goes off, you're going to be pissed off and full of resistance. Just like when you stand in front of the mirror and you're about to high five yourself, you're going to feel resistance.

The resistance to getting out of bed is the exact same resistance that you feel standing in front of the mirror. It's the exact same resistance you feel when you are speaking up at work Or when you're drawing a boundary or when you're putting down the donut or where you're pushing yourself away from your computer to go meditate. Resistance anywhere is the same as resistance everywhere. So if you can learn how to beat it in one area of your life, you can do it everywhere. So the alarm alarm goes off. And you'll notice in that moment when an alarm goes off, this moment of hesitation starts where you consider whether or not you feel like getting out of bed. And for me, I'd start thinking, I don't want to. I don't give a shit that I thought. How's this going to help? It's cold. It's February. I don't want to. All you do in that moment when you feel the resistance kick in is count backwards, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. That's it. Do not count up, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It doesn't work. You have to count backwards, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Because when you start counting backwards, it requires focus.

That shuts off the subconscious brain and awakened your prefrontal cortex. The part of the brain you use when you take the SATs, when you're present, when you're acting with confidence and courage, it gives you immediate control. By the time you get to one, you now have a fucking shot.

Move.

Move. That's how you change behavior. In habit research, it's called a starting ritual. It's a little brain hack. It's a form of metacognition that you can use as a tool to push yourself to do the things that scare you or that you're avoiding. Or 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, pull yourself away from the rosé if you're trying to do whole 30. Pull yourself away or 75 hard, which I, for some fucking reason, signed up for. What is that? I'm going to say seven, which is why I'm so angry right now. I'll tell you that in a minute. But here's the thing about the five-second roll. I didn't know it then. But I went on to use it in secret for three years. I then was invited to give a talk where I blurted out at the end of the talk because I have no idea how to end the talk. That talk that I'm talking about is a TEDx talk that now has 27 million views. If you watch it, you'll see me have a 21 minute long panic attack on the stage. At the end of the... It was the first speech I'd ever given.

Wow. I forget how to end it. It was about career change. It was not about the five second rule. I blurted out, oh, by the way, there's this thing I do. I call it the five second rule. You got to move within five seconds or your brain kills it. Thank you very much. I was so disassociated The anxiety was so bad. I've got this massive neck rash. And I even give out my email address. That's how out of it. I'm so obsessed with that. I haven't cleaned up the inbox yet. No, still. And literally, a year goes by. You gave out your email address. And nothing happens. And then they put it online. And then another year goes by. I don't even know it's online. And it gains a million views. And people start to write to me. And I'm like, oh, were you in San Francisco? And they're like, no, it's online. I'm like, it's online? Wow. That's how the five-second rule got out, by mistakes. So when I say this is like God, the universe, whatever you believe or don't believe in, it's like, okay, this crazy woman is ballsy enough to stand on a stage and tell people, if you count backwards from five, it'll change your life and actually mean it.

I do. Pediatricians around the world now use it to help kids interrupt the thoughts that cause anxiety. Veterans organizations are using it to help reframe programs associated with PTSD. We know of more than a 111 people who have stopped an attempt at suicide by counting backwards and asking for help. This shit works. And I'm telling you that the obstacles that you're facing in your life are real. The shit that you've survived in your life, it's big and it's real. The trauma that you're still trying to heal is real. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and high-fiving yourself in the mirror will not change those It changes you. And that changes your ability to face those things, to take responsibility for what happens next, and to heal, and to go create a life that makes you happy. Yeah, it's almost as if it suspends time for a moment. Even though you're counting and creating time, it suspends the time so that you can be like, Oh, I'm not that thought that I have, or, I am not the trauma that I experience. It really does create that very brief moment of just like, oh, like shining the light on it so it doesn't control you anymore.

For people-pleasing, like you were talking about, like see somebody left you on red, or somebody's ghosting you, or you're doing what we all do Rewriting the text, putting in an emoji to make sure that it's softened and like, do they like me? You're like, Okay, wait a minute. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. What the fuck am I doing? Like, honestly, don't manage somebody's reaction. Manage your truth. Manage the tone in which you say it, and that's it. If I have to choose between being liked and respected, I will choose being respected all day long. And the number one person that you want to have respect you is you. When you stop acting authentically, when you start editing yourself or couching yourself or silencing yourself, you are no longer respecting yourself. So it goes back to the secret to all relationships. Your relationship with yourself is the foundation for every relationship you have. When you start to treat yourself with the respect and the celebration and the acknowledgement and the support that you need and you deserve, everything in your life changes because you change. It starts with you. That was so beautiful. That was powerful.

I want to go back to Kari's question and talk about specific tools that you can use to start to address this now that we know what we're dealing with. We'll be right back. Hey, Mel.

I'm a 53 woman, a 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 piece before I chuck in the towel and just barricade myself in at home. Thanks for everything. Bye. Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins, and that was a listener of the Mel Robbins podcast named I'm Kerry. Today, we are talking Anxiety Toolkit. How do you heal from it? We're here with the world-renowned Dr. Russell Kennedy, and we've been talking about how all anxiety begins in childhood, which is why if you're ever going to heal it, you're going to have to go back to those moments in your past and in your childhood that were painful when you felt unsafe or separate. I promise that we would take Kerry's question and now dive into tools. What are specific tools that we can use, Dr. Kennedy, to truly start to heal this? Do you print out a photo of yourself when you were little and you make that your screen saver, which it feels like we should?

How do you start? Oh, my gosh.

That's me at three.

Rusty.

Yeah, that's Rusty.

For those of you who are listening to this and not watching this podcast on YouTube, Dr. Kennedy just held up the homepage of his phone, and there was a photo of him that's three years old. It just made my heart go, Oh.

Yeah, he's pretty cute.

So what does it do if you do that for yourself?

Well, that's the start, right? Because there's so much resistance to going back to visiting. That's the big thing because the child in us needs this love and support so much that it creates all this alarm to get our attention. And yet as adults, we push the alarm away. So it's like, I think I might have mentioned this in the last podcast that we did, is that if a child came up to you with their hands up in a grocery store, like they'd lost their parents, of course you would sue them. But we have this alarm that goes off on our system, which is essentially the younger version of us going, Hey, pick me up. Pick me up. I need some attention. I need some love. And instead, we go to the Internet and zombie-scrolling Instagram or go into our addictions or whatever, and we push that child away. So the child just gets louder. The alarm just gets louder and louder and louder. But there is a resistance to going back. So the adult doesn't want to go back and visit the child because the child holds all their pain. And the child has a real mistrust of us as adults because we've been ignoring their alarm for 30 years.

So it's really important that we start slowly and you make that connection. So when you say get a picture, that can be really triggering for So sometimes I just say in your mind's eye, picture yourself at any age as a child that you want. Picture what you're wearing. Picture yourself maybe at a happy time in your life. For you, it was like skiing or something like that. Picture yourself in this happy place. And that way you start making that connection. Because just to go in and you're going to blow your brains out if you go back in and you go right to the child, go right to the trauma. So go to a place that you felt good. I use this a lot when I work with people is, what was the best time in your life? What was the best time in your life, Mel?

I just immediately had this image of being on the front yard of our house in Michigan. There were all kinds of kids around, and it was a beautiful summer night. It was that time of night where it's not quite dark, but it's not quite daytime. It's my favorite time of night, dusk, when the twinkly stars first start to come out, and it's confusing because the sun's up, but you see the moon, and you know that the sun's about to set. We were playing games. We're playing bass and statue and all kinds of just tag and just that moment right there with my brother and a bunch of other kids in the neighborhood running around being kids in the front yard of her house in Michigan, where I grew up.

Okay, so close your eyes and really get into that image. See your brother, see your house. Relax your shoulders, relax your jaw. Nice breath in and out. Just really see if you can drink in the emotion of that. Where are you feeling in your body? Where do you feel that in your body?

I feel it from my cheeks It's all the way to my heart. It's definitely for sure the heart.

This is something I would add to high-fiving yourself in the mirror is go back to the best time in your life when you're high-fiving yourself in the mirror, because then we're getting your insulin involved, we're getting your brain involved in this whole feeling state, because the feeling state is what changes us. We can change our thoughts at a dime, but the feeling state is what changes our nervous system. So when you do the high five habit, when you're high fiving yourself in the mirror, recall the best time in your life and just try and see if you can really get a felt sense of that. Now, what I will do with people who have suffered trauma is I will take them once I have them grounded and once they trust me and stuff, I will take them into their trauma, and then I will take them into the best time in their life. So with you, I might do, and we're shortening this considerably for the podcast, but for you, I might say, okay, if you feel safe enough that we talk about that kid waking up with that kid on top of you and getting into that feeling, now, where do you feel that in your body?

Is this okay, Mel, to go into this?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Right in the gut. I immediately went from the heart being full to right in the gut and the ankles. We're the ankles.

What I would do is I would go back and go, Okay, now go back to that feeling of dusk. You can see your house, you're playing, playing statue. It's fun. You feel calm, peaceful, happy. Now, let's go into your gut. Let's go into that sensation again of waking up with that kid on top of you. If it's okay to stay there for a second. Then lovingly go back up into that place in your chest, in your throat, where you felt really peaceful and happy playing with your brother.

It's amazing because I feel the gut pulling me down. It's easy to drop into the gut. And the bad experience, it's hard to pull yourself from that back up into this experience that I can feel that's positive. Is that normal?

That's absolutely normal. We're wired that way, Mel. We're wired to pay more attention to fearful situations than pleasurable ones, because in our evolution, that's basically what kept us alive. So in healing this, we have to heal this at a feeling level. We can talk about that kid on top of you for the rest of your life without really changing it too much. You might get a better understanding of it cognitively, but to really change that sensation, we have to use another sensation because that's the language of trauma. It's sensation. It's the body. So we use that good feeling that you have, and then we go back and forth. We oscillate between back and forth. And it starts weakening that power, that negative feeling in your body that you associate with being a victim, with being helpless. And here's the other thing about... I love when you say you're talking about play, because the way this comes in is trauma activates both the sympathetic, the fight or flight, and the parasympathetic, the rest and the just at the same time. Because we're so confused. We don't know. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Because once you get up to a certain point in sympathetic activity, your body can't handle it anymore.

So it shuts down. So we go into parasympathetic. We don't go into pleasant parasympathetic, but we go into shutdown parasympathetic. And then it goes back and forth and back and forth. And a lot of us with anxiety, that's what happens during the day. We go into this place where our body just gets exhausted, so we feel okay. We don't feel that tremendous anxiety anymore. And then once we get rested in the parasympathetic, then the sympathetic comes back online and we go right back into anxiety again. So the The thing about play, and play is so important for healing, is it's another thing that activates both the parasympathetic and the sympathetic activity at the same time. So trauma activates coactivation, they call it. So trauma activates parasympathetic and sympathetic simultaneously. So does play. But play allows you to start metabolizing. So when you're in coactivation, when you're parasympathetic and your sympathetic is active at the same time, it's like having your foot on the gas on the break at the same time. When you're in play, you start realizing, Hey, you know what? This sensation is actually okay. It doesn't have to fire me right into the trauma.

So that's why play... One of the reasons why play is so important in healing trauma is because we get that felt sense of activation of both the parasympathetic and the sympathetic at the same time in a safe place, because play is safe and it's fun.

Okay, so going back to Kari. Number one, it was very clear to you as an expert and a medical doctor and a neuroscientist that she's dealing with stored trauma. Step one is recognizing that. Then the next thing she needs to do is to recognize that thinking keeps you in the coping and that this is really going to be about dropping into your body and learning how to reconnect and heal in your body. One of the things that you have recommended is is that we think about this as younger self-work, and that you can go back to positive times and feel that good sensation, that if you're ready for it, printing out a photo of yourself or putting it on your phone so that you are reconnecting with that version of you where you started to feel separate or unsafe or scared, and that that is a way to start this process. Is there anything else that you would recommend that Kari think about?

Yeah, you have to do it slowly. You have to start... Because the thing is, when we go into our alarm, we don't want to go in there. It feels painful to go in there. So do it slowly. If you have a real significant trauma, emotional, physical, sexual abuse, you probably need a therapist, and maybe a somatic therapist to help you get into this place because it's not for amateurs in a way. If you have big trauma. If you have trauma that's manageable, absolutely, you can work it on your own. But if you have big T trauma, doing this on your own can be traumatized. So you need someone else there. You need someone there who you wish was there at the time of the trauma. And that person is you. That person is you. It's like, you can go back. We can use our amygdala. We can use that sense that we are not locked in We can go back and find that what I have on my phone. I can look at his eyes. I can imagine his eyes, too. And there's a great song by Peter Gabriel that I listen. We're getting into Dr.

Kennedy's world a little bit. Every morning, I do this meditation that I make for myself. And then on top of that, I end it all by listening to Peter Gabriel's song In Your Eyes. So he has two versions. One is a lie, one is a recorded, which is about five minutes, and one is a lie version. And he talks about In Your Eyes, and it's about in your eyes as a child, the light, the peace. I am complete. I see the vision of a thousand doors. I see my divinity. I see my connection with myself. And I look at that little picture of me that's here on my phone while I listen to that song. And the lyrics of that song are so powerful. If you imagine All my instincts, they return. All your instincts return when you connect with that version of yourself that was hurt and in pain. That's what happens. And that's how you heal from anxiety and alarm. We could cope all we want. But if you want to heal, you have to find that child in you, and you have to show them that they're seen, heard, loved, and protected.

And one of the ways that I do that every day is I start my day with that song, Looking at Him. And I use different pictures of me, but that's the main one because it's on my phone, and it's right there already.

Wow. There's three questions you can start to ask yourself in the moment when the anxiety comes up. Instead of pushing the anxiety down, you can be friendly. It. And you can ask three questions. You can say, Okay, what do I notice about the anxiety? So where does it live in my body? Would you want to do it with me right now? Sure. Okay. Sure. Are you connected to the anxiety in this moment? Not this moment. But is there something else? I'm familiar with it, so I'm more than that. Is there anything else that might be up right now that's a protector part that you're like, I want to talk to? It's interesting. Now that we're talking about it, I feel a little anxious. Okay. I'm so programmed to run that staying still, which is what this new house in Southern Vermont represents, this real quiet place, I feel tingly all over right now. Okay. So is it tingly, a desire to run, and then this little anxiety right back in the background. Completely. Okay, cool. Could we ask the tingliness and the desire to run to maybe just go in the go out on the patio and have a coffee or have a cup of tea and just take a minute just to give us a little space to talk to the anxiety?

Would that be okay with them?

Sure. Okay. So just taking a moment to check in. You can close your eyes if you want. You can breathe whatever you need, but just check in gently with the anxiety and ask, where is it in the body? It's right here. Right in your chest? Yeah, like gripping Like that. Gripping. Any other ways you would define it? Colors, shapes? It's like hands like this. And I'm also really warm under my armpits, but I'm not sure if that's menopause shit happening or what. Okay. And then right here. Tight, warm. Does it have an age or a gender? Oh, female and older. Older. Older. Okay. Older than you are now? Yeah. I think. I don't know. I don't think of myself as 50s. No, but is it like when you say older, like 80s or? I feel like these witch hands. It's really fucking. Whichy. Yeah. Whichy. Okay, cool. Whichy. Anything else that you notice about it? As I talk about it, it's like pulls back a little. What do you know about it? It's familiar. Does it have any stories or a visual that attach to it? More like the first words that came to mind is, I don't like this.

I don't want to be here. Okay. That's the problem.

The part that's coming in that's saying, I don't like this.

I don't want to be there, is another part. It's a protector. Would that protector feel safe enough to go have some tea for a moment? I'll send that protector outside the office. Yeah. And I want to thank that protector and just let that protector know that I've totally got you and I'm not going to take anxiety to anywhere that they don't need to go. Really high level right here. We're not going to go anywhere we shouldn't go today. Okay? I just want to thank that protector for coming in and just say, Have a tea But thank you so much for speaking up. Thank you. So with a little bit more permission, just to talk to this part, what is the part, the anxious part, need? The first thing that came up was a hug, reassurance that I don't have to do this on my own. Yeah. Does that part of you does it know that you are here, that you're yourself, that you're a resourced, undamaged self?

Does it know that you're here?

I think so. And the reason why I say it like that is because I think one of the things that I've been struggling with for so long because of workaholism and being busy and on the move as my go-to protector. As long as long I'm on the move, I'm going to be okay as long as I'm busy. I have had a deep feeling of loneliness. Yeah. So the part- Yeah. Being in a quiet place up here makes me feel really lonely.

Okay.

Thank you for saying that. How do you feel I feel towards the part? I feel sad towards her. Tired of feeling lonely. I get it. It's painful. So she knows you're here, and you have some compassion for her. I don't want to put the words in your mouth. Sure. Yeah. Okay. Beautiful. If she wasn't in such an extreme role of doing, doing, and anxious, anxious, what else would she be doing? She'd be hanging out with her friends. Hanging out with her friends? Okay. She'd be doing fun shit. I don't know. Going for a hike. Going for a hike. Okay. Would you be there, self? Yes. Okay. In your own mind's eye, can you just take a moment to just visualize taking her by the hand or however it visualizes for you, however it comes to your vision? Taking her on that hike, see who is around, see whatever comes up. You can tell me whatever comes up, whatever you want to share. I can totally see it. Totally. There's a black bear that is out with her cubs up there. And so I just see us walking down the path, and there's the black bear.

How does she feel with you on the hike? Happy that I'm there. Yeah. And is there anything that you want to say to her on this hike? I'm not going anywhere. Can you make a commitment to her right now that when you notice her, you can just take her by the hand and go on the hike and remind her that you're not going anywhere? When you say notice her, are you talking about when that feeling comes back? Is that what you mean? Yeah. When the anxiety starts to come in, can you just let her know? I am not going to let you be there alone. Right. And make a commitment maybe that you'll just take her on that hike. Maybe even literally, maybe even literally, go for a hike with her. Totally. Beautiful. How does she feel now? Just to close it out, how does she feel? I think some of the protectors have come back in. Okay. That's okay. They're welcome back. They're welcome back now because- They're like, I don't want to go to high. That's okay. They're welcome back. I want to thank them for stepping aside for the time that they did.

They did a beautiful job. They are welcome back. We can always ask them to step aside when there's some space. But right now, it's okay. They can come back. You now have what you have right now, Mel, is direct access from self to the part. It's so beautiful to witness. You have direct access from your adult-resourced internal parent self to the part of you that's so protective and anxious. And you've given her a full media alert that you are available to her when she needs you. Major step forward. Hey, it's Mel. Thank you so much for being here. If you enjoyed that video, by God, please subscribe because I don't want you to miss a thing. Thank you so much for being here. We've got so much amazing stuff coming. Thank you so much for sending this stuff to your friends and your family. I love you. We create these videos for you, so make sure you subscribe.