She 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. Ego?

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

Your ego is like an overprotective mother.

Okay.

It doesn't want 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 and you never- 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. So I'm not going to get into too much neuroscience. But basically, your ego is hooked into the amygdala, and your amygdala says, We're never doing that again because that hurt us, whatever was. And the amygdala never forgets. So it's basically getting into that 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. It is something that It 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 alarm.

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

So wait, but you feel the connection to the alcohol or the codeine. That's what you're saying. So this is why I get confused with the 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 happened. 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 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, 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 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.

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's the exact opposite of the way that we think about things right now.

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

Body set? What is that? That feels like weight lifting.

Well, it's like mindset, body set. What is the place in your 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. So what I'm saying is that if you go in through 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.

Hey, calm down. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Did you guys hear that? That was a wake-up call for me. Right there. You were just dropping freaking knowledge, Russ. Okay, hold on. I 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 if you 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 somatosensory cortex, the part of the brain that controls our movement and our sensation. When we activate that, we 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.

And just movement. 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. So we don't want to go into feeling town, down in our body. We don't want to stay up in our thoughts. And that's another addiction. So we get addicted to worry. And that's 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. I've gotten a couple of huge things from this. That, first of all, all anxiety results from a separation of some anxiety, some separation condition, 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. Like, 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 do 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 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 can do both. You can do both in 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-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 saved the best for last, but hold on. 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. I think I got it. I think I got it. That literally, your alarm is asking for love and reinsurance.

Absolutely.

When you go into your head, you block yourself from receiving it. Yes. 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 withdraw 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. 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. 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. 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 Kolk 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. So I will find in your body where you feel that alarm and reverse engineer it to get into the same room with those unconscious programs, and then I can change them.

Wow. 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. But 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 Director, wrote a long letter apologizing for everything. This kid has been through the Ringer. He said to me, Well, Mom, 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, 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 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. It's counterintuitive 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 programed 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 pre-funnel cortex. You can make worries.

Well, not anymore, because we now know that the second you feel the alarm go off, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, you do not go upstairs. You go downstairs. You go downstairs. Anxiety always begins with a worry. Always. It begins with a thought that is triggered by something. So if you suffer from anxiety, you wake up in the morning and your mind spins, you lay in bed at night and your mind spins, you walk into work and you feel anxious in your body. Interestingly, another major trigger is being home or going home in that moment right before your partner walks in the door. If you feel anxious when your partner is about to walk in or you're about to walk into your own home, that is a major signal that you are in the wrong relationship, that there is something incredibly off, and you either need to get into counseling, but that is one that we hear a lot about because you're walking into a situation that feels uncertain. A lot of people, by the way, had parents that were abusive or parents that were yellers. So they also are experiencing ghosts from the childhood of it's five o'clock, dad's about to come home and pour a drink, and everybody's on edge.

Write down the triggers, okay? Because having the triggers ahead of time will help you come up with a plan for how you're going to catch yourself when your mind defaults to the automatic ways that it thinks. Then what I want you to write down next to the trigger is what exactly are you worried about? Having the trigger and then what do I worry about? I worry that my boss is going to yell. I worry that my partner is going to yell. I worry that I'm going to get in trouble. I worry that my friends are going to laugh at me. I worry that I'm going to be... Whatever the it may be. Then what you're going to do is you're going to write down what I call an anchor thought. An anchor thought is something that weighs you down, and it makes you excited. Here's how the strategy works with the five-second rule. The next time you're in a situation, and let's just use the example of pulling into your own driveway or your own apartment, and maybe you've got issues with your your boyfriend or girlfriend or your roommate, and that makes you unsettled.

The second you pull in and you feel the trigger, you're going to go 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, because I want to interrupt your mind from going into the I don't like it. What if I do this? And then you're going to drop in the anchor thought of the last time that you and your roommate really got along well, or the last time that you stood up for yourself and it went fine. Or your puppy. Yeah, or a puppy or whatever. You're going to I'm so excited to deal with this. Yeah. Then you're going to get out of your car, even though your body is going to feel a little unsettled and your mind's going to raise. Go 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. If you start to be like, But what do I do? Then walk in the door. What I'm teaching you to do is to not let your mind hijack you. It's very important because there's a very tight nexus between your habit of worrying and spiraling your thoughts and the way your body starts to amp up. We want to settle your mind so we don't agitate your body. You got it?

Yeah. If you start to practice that over and over and over and over and over Use this with the nerves that you have about what you're going to do with your life. Use this when you catch yourself worrying about college applications, because worrying about the applications won't get them done. Worry about what your friends are doing won't make it happen. Worry about what you're going to be doing when you're 25 or how you're going to make money, it's not going to help you make money right now. It's only going to make you miserable. So 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, cut off that habit. That'll stabilize your body. And then go to a vision of you at the age of 25, driving a car that you think is cool and hanging out with a friend that's cool and saying yourself, I'm so excited because I know I'm going to figure it out. Because you don't need to worry about that right now. But it becomes a habit that destroys your year this year. Right I'm sitting in a hotel room in Salt Lake City. I've got about an hour before I've got to cross the street and head over to the convention center and give a speech.

But something happened this morning where I caught myself going down a rabbit hole. I started worrying about something. Then the worries became even bigger, and I realized I'm doing that thing. I'm doing that thing where I am causing myself a lot of pain because I them catastrophizing. So many of us struggle with this. You may struggle with this, where your mind is constantly defaulting to what's going to go wrong, or you're always dwelling on problems that haven't happened yet. And so I thought, why don't I just jump on the mic while I have a little bit of time here and explain what just happened to me? Because I know you're going to relate to it. So here's the deal. So I wake up and I roll out of bed and I start my normal morning routine and I pick up my phone. And one of the reasons why I picked my phone is because our oldest child, our daughter Sawyer, who's 24 years old, is in the middle of a solo backpacking trip on the other side of the world. This is something she's wanted to do for a long time. It's really well planned out.

And of course, because I'm her mother, because I worry, I am tracking her location. And we're all on WhatsApp, we're in a family group text. Right now, she is in Australia, and she had planned as part of her itinerary that she was going to go on a couple solo hikes.

Cue the worry.

I got my 24-year-old daughter, backpack on her back in a country she's never been to. Obviously, it's relatively safe, but that does not prevent me from coming up with all kinds of fantasies in my mind about what could go wrong. And so I've been pretty good. I've been really good. I have been able to to just enjoy from afar and not become a stalker. But something happened that caused me to spiral this morning. She summited this mountain in Australia to see a sunrise two days ago, and I haven't heard from her. I go to track her location, and I'm like, Where is she? It's rainbow wheeling, so I can't quite see where she is. I know she's okay because she posted something on social media. But I woke up this morning and I immediately looked at my WhatsApp. There was no message from her in the family group chat. There was no message from her directly to me. I then went to Instagram. I looked in the DM's. There was no DM from her, and I started to panic. And what did my mind think? I'm almost embarrassed to tell you. Why don't you just step in my shoes for a minute?

What do you think Mel Robbins was thinking, knowing that her daughter had summited a mountain alone? It's like a five-mile hike up. She started at 4:00 in the morning to see the sunrise. We saw the photos of the sunrise. Haven't heard from her since. What do you think my mind is thinking right now? It's been 48 hours. She's on the other side of the world. Oh, I'm not thinking, Oh, I bet she met some friends, and she's out having fun. Or maybe her phone died. Or you know what, Mel? Maybe she's so busy that she doesn't have time to talk to you because the whole point of her trip is not to keep you posted of her whereabouts. It's for her to go out and have this incredible experience and to grow and to discover and to be brave and to explore. That's not what my mind thought. Nope. You know what my mind thought? She's dead. She fell off the mountain after taking the sunrise photo. The woman is dead. Then I thought, No, no, no. Maybe she got kidnapped. Then I thought, Oh, no. She was sexually assaulted on the side of the trail.

This is disgusting, I know. But do not tell me that you don't do the same thing, that your mind goes dark. I'm talking gruesome scary horror movie, dark, like in a nanosecond. Here's the thing. I know that this is a terrible thing to do. I know that this causes me pain. I bet you do it, too. I know you do, in fact, because I've seen the DMs that you write to me, whether it's you are worried about your money, and you're constantly worried about something bad happening with your money, or getting fired, or forgetting about something for your kids. And that's where your brain is constantly settling. And here's what we're going to do today, because we're all guilty of this. There is so much research around the fact that worry is so painful in your life. Worry is a habit. This is a really, really bad spiral to get into. It causes you a lot of pain. It causes you a lot of stress. It can certainly bring on anxiety. And if you already struggle with a little bit of anxiety, it can make it a lot worse. It doesn't help with your confidence.

And one out of three people, according to research, struggle with constant worrying. And so what I want to share with you today is a six-word sentence that I use all the time in these moments when I catch my mind spiraling. And it really helps, and it It really helps me because it stops that freight train of bad and negative and catastrophic thoughts. Here's the six words. You ready? This is what I say to myself, What if it all works out? As I'm standing this morning in my underwear, I don't even have a bra on this morning, and I've already visualized my daughter falling to her death off of cliff in the middle of nowhere in Australia. I'm brushing my teeth, and I'm starting to notice my anxiety rising. It's 6:15 in the morning here, and I have inflicted self-torture on myself before I've had a glass of water or a cup of coffee. This is completely unnecessary. And I catch myself. And this is what I want to teach you to do, because you need to start catching yourself. I think you and I can agree that we can't control anything that's happening outside of us, right?

But we can certainly control our reaction to it. I'm standing there in my underwear. I'm visualizing my daughter's death or the fact that she's been kidnapped and adducted. I notice the stress rise, and I say to myself, Mel, what if it all works out? What if it all works out? I mean, you can't argue with that, right? What if it all works out? Because in this moment where you're worried about getting fired, or you're worried about forgetting something for your kids, or you're worried about what will happen if the people that you love the most are going to die before you can say goodbye, or this one happens for me a lot. I'll be sitting on a plane and it's taking off, and I suddenly spiral and think, If this plane crashes, I'm not going to see my daughter's wedding. I'm not going to meet my grandkids. I'm not going to get to do all this stuff that What do I really want to do in my life. In that moment where I'm in the negative, What if this? What if that? What if the other thing? And I feel the pain rising, and I feel the stress rising, and I feel the self-inflicted torture coming on, I simply drop in those six words, What if it all works out?

And here's what happens. It stops the spiral. That's the first thing that happens. What if it all works out? You just hit the brakes on the locomotive of worry. The second thing that happens is because it's a question, What if it all works out? You actually pause for a second and consider it. And what you realize when you stop for a second and you pause and you consider, What if it all works out? Is You don't actually know what's going to happen, do you? You're just choosing to make yourself believe that something terrible has already happened. But the truth is, in this moment, you don't know. And so it is a fact, a logical fact, that it could all work out. And in fact, based on the research, this is amazing. I want to throw some research at you. Let me find this. You can hear me flip through my papers because there's a lot of really interesting stuff. There is a study at Penn State where they looked at chronic worrying. And the average person has three to four major worries a day. Okay, what if I get fired? What if What if I'm not happy?

What if my marriage ends? Will I find love and have children? What if I don't make the money? What if this? What if that? What if the other thing? All these worries. Every single one of us, you and me, we have at least three or four of them that causes stress or make us feel some level of pain. According to this Penn State study, 91% of those worries are completely false. It's self-inflicted torture. I think you and I both know that. Here's the other really interesting thing. You know the other 9% of the worries that do happen? The outcome is almost always way better than you expected. Period. The outcome is way better than you expected about a third of the time. What does this mean? This means that you going, What if it's a disaster? What if this happens? What if she's fallen off a cliff? What if I never hear from her again? What if she doesn't... What if it all works out. See, you don't know, do you? You don't know if you're getting fired. You don't know if you're going to run out of money. But you can rely on the research that 91% of the time it doesn't happen, and a third of the 9% of the remaining, it's way better than you thought.

And that leaves you with a 6% chance that something might happen. Here's how I look at this. If something bad happens, I will deal with it then. Why do I need to torture myself now when I don't even know if something amazing Something is happening or something bad is happening. And so what if it all works out is a way for you to catch yourself? Because you and I inflict so much pain, and it is pain. It's pain when you do this to yourself. It was painful to stand in the bathroom here in Salt Lake in my underwear, brushing my teeth, thinking about my daughter's death. And it's completely ridiculous. It's not like, Give me a break, Mel. Give me a freaking break. I know all our fans right now in Australia and New Zealand are like, Oh, she's fine. That is ridiculous, Mel. It is so fabulous. People do this all the time. They hike that trail. It's wide. It's this. It's that. I know the mountain you're talking about because she went up for the sunrise. You're completely ridiculous. That's why you need this six-word sentence, what if it all works out? Because it will interrupt the spiral.

It's so easy to catch somebody's anxiety. I wanted you, Chris, to address some of these questions, because the first question was, do you ever catch my anxiety when I get anxious?

No.

Break down what you do. If I start getting anxious, like I did on Sunday, or I have throughout our 24-year marriage, what do you do? Because you have this superpower of being able to remain calm. And the thing that I find the most validating is, even though you don't feel anxious, you are able to validate my reality of being anxious, even though you're not in the same reality.

Touch is huge, right? What do you mean touch? Meaning being able to hold your hand or being close and upfront and personal to what you're experiencing, just Just pulling what you're feeling out of your mouth. That act of inviting you to describe what's going on, to give detail to it, and to almost not let up, to keep pulling a thread. Like, what else is going on? What else is there? What else are you feeling? I think maybe part of the reason why I don't get triggered by it in that moment is because I've seen it work so effectively that once you get it all out- Like barfing. It dissipates.

It may not just extinguish itself, but it will go away. So technique number one is to give somebody a hug or hold their hand, center them with physical touch. Yeah.

Okay. Sit up close in front of them. Make sure that you have as much eye contact as you can have physically with that person.

And then the second thing you do is give people the questions that you might start asking the person in your life that's feeling anxious.

Well, I would start with, Tell me about your anxiety right now. What are you feeling? What's happening? Not only physically in your body, but of course, emotionally. I mean, those are the two main pillars.

And then you keep going and anything else. And he does that over until I'm literally... Like the tank is completely empty. You know what else I've noticed, and I think this is a really important thing, is that you don't respond to what comes out of my mouth.

No answers. You cannot provide any direction or guidance or go for the solve.

Why?

Because there is no solve, particularly when you're in the acute moment. There is no... Nothing is going to resolve that right there and then, even if you have the most best idea ever.

What is it that you've observed when you get somebody back to zero and in the moment? What do you observe in the person?

People coming back to right now and how that in and of itself is such a power powerful grounding mechanism. When you're right here, you're out of your head. You're not thinking about yesterday or tomorrow or wherever the source of that anxiety may be coming from. You're present to your physical space and surroundings. And that, I think, has been must. I know it has a profound effect on calming it, not necessarily extinguishing it, but certainly calming.

I think that's your superpower. I really do. You are the most grounded, calm person in my life. I wonder if it's the years of having a meditation practice and being a practicing Buddhist that has trained that skill in you.

I've never sat down to think about where it comes from necessarily, but yes, in Buddhist tradition or practices, completely just being an observance and the act of deep listening, not just opening your ears, but really listening for what is being said, That's right up a Buddhist alley for sure.

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-year-old 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 overth.

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 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 a 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 Kari. 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. And 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 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 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 soothe them. But we have this alarm that goes off in 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-scroll 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 people. 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 it's 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. And 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 your life, Mel?

I just immediately had this image of being on the front yard of our house in Michigan, and 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 I'm using because the sun's up, but you see the moon, and you know that the sun's about to set, and we are playing games. We're playing base 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. Like, 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 all the way to my heart. It's like this... Definitely for sure, the heart.

So 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, weird, 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. Oh, I didn't know that. We don't know. 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 our sympathetic. 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 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 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. And one of the things that you have recommended 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 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. Totally, you can work it on your own. But if you have big T trauma, doing this on your own can retraumatize. 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 time. 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's 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 they're seeing her 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. The two forms of anxiety are over functioning and under functioning. Now, neither one is better or worse. They're just patterns. And the cool thing with patterns is once you can spot them and talk about them and you understand them and unpack them, you can start to create mindfulness and a little bit of distance between the things that trigger your anxiety and that coping mechanism kicking in. Because for me, when I get into the mode of do, do, do, plan, plan, plan, I got it, I got it, I got it, I drive myself into the ground. I burn out. And that's exactly what happened this weekend. Six weeks of basically going into hyper drive mode as a way to cope with all this uncertainty led me to crash because I'm terrible at asking for help. And my husband, I'll have to ask him how he copes with his anxiety because he has a really amazing way of staying calm. So over functioning anxiety is do, do, do. It's giving advice instead of asking for help. It's assuming responsibility for things that aren't necessarily your responsibility. It's managing everybody else's emotions. And I am the master at this.

And the other form of anxiety is underperforming. And as I was thinking about this, one of my three kids has this form, and I never would have thought it, given their personality. Underperforming is when When instead of thinking through your issues, you start asking for tons of advice. You push the responsibility to other people to solve your issues. You withdraw, you become paralyzed. And The reason why it's important to really think about what anxiety you have, and what I want you to do is in the comments, I want you to write down, are you a over functioning, overperforming anxiety person, or are you a under functioning, underperforming? And what happens when you are over functioning is I rob the people around me of supporting me, of being responsible for themselves, of helping out. I robbed myself of the support that I need and deserve. And if you say If you find the pattern too long of either under or over functioning, you will drive yourself into the ground. Again, you got to express these emotions because burying has never worked in the history of time. And so what I want you to do is, again, write in the comments, what is your pattern when you feel anxious?

Do you over function or under function? And the solution today is very simple. I just want you to recognize the pattern. And for you over functioners, when you recognize yourself going into that mode, take a pause, get into your body, ask yourself, What do I need help with? And who can I ask for help? And what am I taking on that I don't need to take on? And how can I get myself into this moment? And ground yourself. And if you are an under functioner, same thing. Recognize when you're spinning and asking for advice or overthinking or paralyzed, instead of problem solving and getting into action.

I hope that helps.

I'm so glad I got to take you on the walk with me in Yolo. I'll see you tomorrow. We're going to talk about sleep and anxiety with this question from Jason.

Hey, Mel. This is Jason.

I always get anxious before I go to bed and then wake up in the middle of the night worrying about things. How do I stop myself from doing that? Thank you. Let's first talk about what are some changes or some simple things that Jason or anybody who gets anxious at night can start doing.

Well, I love your little three, two, one thing. Three hours before, then the two hours before no work, and then one hour before no screens. That's really important because our reticular activating system, which you've talked about before, which works on our brainstem, which is the lower part of our brain that controls our body, it wants to be active. It wants to pick out things in your environment. And if you're zombie scrolling Instagram until the moment before you go to sleep, that reticular activating system is still going. So it will wake you up because it thinks that thousands and thousands of years ago, you needed to stay alert because there was a threat during the night. And the other thing about that particular question is, what was going to bed like for you as a child? Was it safe? For me, my mother works shift work. So sometimes my mother was out 3:00 to 11:00. So she was a nurse. So sometimes my mother was gone, and I'm there with my crazy father. But he wasn't always crazy. But there was points where it was just a little touch and go there. So evenings for me can have that sense as well.

So what was going on in your childhood? Not that everything is about childhood trauma. I really don't want to give that impression that everything is about it. But so much of chronic anxiety is unresolved fear and unresolved wounding. So can you find the child in you that had a difficult time going to bed? Or maybe you were a bed wetter. Maybe the image of that is still imprinted on your nervous system that it's not safe to sleep because when I sleep, I wet the bed and then all sorts of all hell breaks loose in the morning. So there's all sorts of physiological and psychological stuff that goes into sleep. And it's really important to be able to tease that out a little bit. I can give you generalities, like shut Get the computer off before you go to sleep and calm things down. Keep the lights, though. Don't use blue light, all that stuff. It's all important. But those are, again, coping mechanisms. If you really want to fix the problem at its root, find that place where it was uncomfortable for you to go to bed and see if you can find that place in you.

And again, not that everything is childhood trauma, but so much of it is, and it is fixable. So if that's the underlying root cause, you're not going to fix it just by avoiding blue light, just by avoiding the computer, just by not working. The best thing to do is use a two-pronged approach. The last thing I want to put in there, I don't have anything against cognitive therapy. We have these huge prefrontal cortices. It's really important that we have an understanding of what's happening to us. But what's more important, and what often most therapy in North America specifically misses, is this incredible role of the body and old trauma that's stored in the body and just virtually gets ignored by thinking that we can talk about our problems and having insight to them is going to fix them, and it doesn't.

Well, my personal experience is that I think it took me decades to heal because I became so good at talking about my anxiety and intellectualizing my anxiety and talking about what happened to me and how it made me feel. And all of that was helpful so that I was aware of what happened. I was aware of what I was feeling. I also, from that level, was able to come up with ways to cope, whether that was yoga yoga, or taking anxiety medication, or it was getting into therapy. But I wasn't doing the work to truly heal the root cause of the anxiety. It wasn't until I stopped fucking talking about it, and I got below the neck and started dealing with the uncomfortable feelings and the stored memories in my nervous system, which is very different than talking about how you feel. Getting into your body and feeling that kink in the nervous system, that memory that you wish that you could forget. That is when I truly flipped the pancake, so to speak, and started to change for real.

How did that feel? When you When you felt like you were really getting at the root cause of it.

How does that feel for you? Oh, it's liberating. It is. It's liberating. It's a paradigm shift. I can't believe how... I don't want to make any promises, and I'm not the therapist here. We've got the medical doctor and the anxiety world renowned specialist here with Dr. Kennedy. I couldn't believe how quickly it happened. When I got serious that this is not about what's going on in my head, it's about patterns of feeling that get triggered in my body that create an alarm. And then my mind gets involved. And I have been attacking it in the wrong order. I have been attacking it first and only in my mind. And yes, you got to start with your mind so that you're aware that you're doing... That's where you're like, ding, ding, ding, ding, started to feel like, Oh, wait a minute. I'm not nuts in my mind. I have a nervous system that needs some support. I got to smooth it out. I got to make sure that any of the cuts in the system or the kinks or the whatever, that those are all healed. And I got to be able to tolerate uncomfortable feelings and not have it escalate.

And I got to learn how to soothe myself. And I got to learn how to be compassionate with myself. If I can do those things, I can ride the ups downs of any feeling. And my mind doesn't screw me over.

That's exactly what you're doing.

It's shocking how powerful it is, dude.

It's shocking. When I follow you on your podcast, you are doing exactly that. The cold plungees, all that. If you look at the way that sensation is transferred to the brain, the back part of the spinal cord, and I won't get too technical, but the back part of the spinal cord, the spinal thalamic tract, the group of wires that fire up to your brain, hold pain and temperature. So So emotional pain, physical pain in the brain are handled by very similar structures. So when you go into a cold plunge and you overwhelm that pain pathway, you're giving yourself a break. And then when you're going into this uncomfortable state because going at your alarm, matching up with that child that's hurting is painful. And then when you're in this cold plunge and you feel uncomfortable and you breathe through it, that's exactly what you need to do as far as feeling that alarmed child in you because it's going to hurt. It's going to hurt. Being able to have the resilience to be able to go, You know what? This hurts, but I'm going to stay with you. It's talking to your child. This hurts us, but I'm going to stay with you.

You and I will always be together. There is no way that I'm ever going to abandon you again because I know you're there now. I know you're there now. So now I will make sure that I will never, ever leave you. Now, the child needs to hear that a number of times because you've been ignoring, you not personally, but collectively. We ignore the child for decades. So it takes a while for the child to come around. But there is this sense that we're on the right track. And for the first time for me, when I started healing somatically and doing therapies like IFS and that thing, and I think I'll always be in therapy because I love it so much just understanding how it works for me so I can help other people understand how it works for them. But really being able to tolerate that pain because Bessel van der Kull talks about that in The Body Keeps the Score. He We're not teaching people how to get rid of their anxiety. I call it alarm. We're not teaching how to get rid of the alarm. What we're doing is we're teaching you how to acclimatize to it so that when you feel that discomfort, you don't compulsively and relentlessly go into your head for a solution that you'll never find there.

You need to go into your body where the alarm is. Stay there. Where the-even if it hurts. Alarm is, and you suggest putting your hand there and just breathe through it. Just Soothe yourself through that moment. I want to address one more thing in Jason's question. When you wake up in the middle of the night and your thoughts are spinning and you're having trouble going back to sleep, what do you suggest somebody does?

Am I safe in this moment? We talked about this the last time you and I talked. This is something that I've used for many, many years.

So you wake up- Talk to Jason, so just like, I want you to pretend Jason's here. Okay. Let's coach Jason. So Jason, tonight, when you wake up in the middle of the night, if you do, these are the specific things I want you to do.

Yeah. I want you to connect with that feeling in your body. Put your hand over it, breathe into it, and then ask yourself, Am I safe in this moment? I know I'm freaked out. I know that there's something happening in a week or two weeks. I got to go to the dentist, or I got to do this, or I got to do that. But in this moment, in this moment right now where I'm lying in my bed, am I safe? And you go, Yeah, I'm safe. And then feel it. You have to associate. This is what I was saying before, is you have to connect the feeling with the thinking. That's how we heal. That's how we create new neural pathways, is we create the feeling, and the feeling will sear in the thinking. So when you say, Am I safe in this moment? And you go, I am safe. Some people will say, I am safe in this moment, rather than making it a question. But my daughter, Leandra, said that that's the single biggest tip that What Dr. Datt has ever given her with regard to her anxiety, because when she was 21, she still has it a little bit, but when she was 21, she went through a really difficult time.

But she said, The most important thing that you've ever told me is, Am I safe in this moment? And in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night, when your mind is going nuts, you can just say, I know... Because anxiety is always about the future. It's always about the future. So if you bring yourself in at the present moment, and one of the ways of doing that is with sensation. With sensation, sensation, when you touch your own chest, when you take a deep breath, when you smell an essential oil, when you hum, when you sing, you're bringing yourself into the sensation of the present moment, and you're removing that focus on the future or the past or the pain of the past. When you bring yourself into the present moment, that's the fertile ground of healing is the present moment. We don't heal when we're stuck in our trauma. We don't heal when we're stuck in our worries. We heal in the present moment sensation of our body. That's how we heal. Now, the cognitive structures help. And that's what helped with me was all the cognitive behavior therapy and stuff that I did for years and years and years.

After I started regulating my body, it was like, Oh, this is what it is. It all starts to make sense. The puzzle pieces start coming back in the connection again. It's like, Oh, yeah. That's what I came about with I didn't get enough attention as a child from my mother because my brother was sick with club feet or my dad was crazy. So I made myself small. So now it's like, I got to be seen. But again, there's part of me that hates being seen. So it is this real dichotomy that I go back and forth of. So now I accept that. I accept that that little boy in me needs the attention, and I give it to him. And I don't need it so much from the outside. And I think that's when you know you're starting to heal. It's like you don't need so much attention from the outside, and you are more connected in your relationships to other people. Because when you're in this dissociated alarm state, you're in survival mode. And in survival mode, the social engagement system that all humans have It gets shut off. Eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, body language.

It gets shut off when we're alarmed. So no wonder we don't want to go to a party. No wonder we have social anxiety. No wonder we can't connect with our spouse or our kids. Because evolutionarily, we are built when we're in alarm, that connection isn't what we're looking for. We're looking for safety. It's very hard to be warm and connected to your spouse or your kids or whatever when you're in alarm. A lot of people feel so guilty about that. It's like, And they question their relationship. Am I in the right relationship? It's like, you probably are, but you're just dissociated. So you can't love yourself. So you're not going to love another person. So your relationships are going to suffer. And as you quoted the Harvard study, relationships are That's the most important feature in recovering from any illness of any kind.

So is it normal for people to wake up in the middle of the night? Yes.

Why is that a normal thing? Not every night, but we've all had periods that aren't the dark night of the soul I write about in the book.

In terms of people that wake up, though, in the middle of the night, is that a symptom or a sign that you might have anxiety?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. You Your reticular activating system, your sympathetic nervous system isn't shutting off. You're not going into parasympathetic rest. And here's the reason for that. And you're asking me brilliant questions. So as a child, and I see this a lot with my alcohol patients or my patients who had alcoholics as parents, things would go along fine for a while, and then there'd be a massive blow up, and then there'd be this rapprochement. The alcohol would say, I'm sorry, I'm so and give you all this stuff. And then there would be this period of quiescence again, this quiet again, and then it'll blow up again. So what a child's nervous system will do is it'll say, I am not going to let myself relax because I know this shit's going to go down again. I'm going to keep myself in this hypervigilant state, this sympathetic activated state. So when you're in that sympathetic activated state, you start thinking, it's safer for me to keep myself at this level of activation all the time. Then And you can't sleep. You don't eat well. It just screws up your entire life when you can't move yourself into parasympathetic.

I remember the quick story that I'll tell you is that I used to get massages from my favorite massage therapist who's now retired. And sometimes I would walk out of her studio feeling so relaxed that I have a panic attack because when I was relaxed as a child, that was exactly the time I got smashed in the face by my dad, not physically, but he would be going into depression or going into menia or going into psychosis. So there was this thing with me. It's like, Don't get too happy. Don't let your guard down because this is all going to shit in the near future. And it could be like a year before he would have another episode. But I was always every day. And that's a metaphor for a lot of us with anxiety is we keep ourselves in this hyper vigilant state thinking that we're protecting ourselves. Brené Brown talks about that, too. She says, We were expecting that. We rehearsed that thing in our mind, getting that call from the school that your child has been hurt or injured or whatever. We do that every day, and it never happens. But we punish ourselves.

We punish our body When we do that, because it doesn't prepare you for anything. No matter how often you practice that phone call from the school, you're still going to have to react to it. So chapter 62 in my book is about when it's not safe to feel safe. And that's one of the reasons why people have such a hard time healing from anxiety is because when I get people feeling better again, they don't trust it because it goes back to that place where when I felt safe as a kid, I got blindsided.

I want to try to connect the dots, particularly on this question about sleep, because we're getting so many questions from listeners who are having trouble sleeping. Sure. You've said a couple of things that I want to try to connect. First of all, you have said that all anxiety begins from a moment where you feel separate or unsafe, typically during childhood. Yes. And that any time from that moment forward that you feel separate or unsafe, it's going to trigger that same stress path of alarm in your body, and then that's is going to send your thoughts spiraling, which makes that response of going into an alarm whenever you feel stressed or unsafe, second nature, like unconscious. For those of you that are new to this discussion and you're having trouble sleeping, I personally believe that after the last three years and the unprecedented amount of uncertainty and change- And separation. And separation, yes, that we've all experienced. That most of us are in that hyper vigilant state waiting for something bad to happen. And now that people are getting laid off and the economy is starting to take a turn, that that very familiar alarm loop is getting triggered for a lot of people, and they may not even realize it.

And so if you're finding that, Wow, I do have a lot of trouble sleeping, or, Wow, in the last year, I wake up all the time in the middle of the night, and I'm just constantly worried about this stuff. What Dr. Kennedy has explained to you is that it goes back to this original alarm of feeling unsafe. And that's why in the middle of the night, lying there, thinking about your bills or whether or not the next The amount of layoffs are coming or how your kid is doing because they're not doing well, putting your hand wherever the tension is and saying, I am safe, or asking, Am I safe in this moment? That's the first step Because what you're teaching us, Dr. Kennedy, is you're teaching us how to start to repair the root cause of it, right? Yeah. Am I getting this right?

Yes, absolutely.

Is there anything else you would recommend? Because we get a lot of questions technically about sleep. Do I get out of bed? Do I lay in bed? How do I go back to sleep? And since it is absolutely tied to this alarm and the way that it makes the mind spin and the inability for so many of us to allow ourselves to feel good, to allow ourselves to slow down, to trust that it's going to be okay. Is there anything else that you would recommend that we do in that moment?

Well, breath. Physiological sigh will help. So two sniffs in and a long, slow exhale.

So did you get that, everybody? It's two sniffs in.

And then a long, slow exhale.

What does that do?

Well, it starts to move you into parasympathetic very quickly. So it blocks that sympathetic chain, that chain reaction of feeling thought, feeling thought, feeling thought. As soon as you start moving your body into a parasympathetic state, your state will determine how you think. So the state of your body determines how your mind thinks.

That's so true. Well, we've all had that experience of being stressed before going for a walk or exercising, and after you're done exercising or going for a walk outside, you're like, I feel so much better.

Well, yeah. After Lauren's death there, when Chris took you out to Paddle Bowl, last thing you wanted to do, right, was move because there's tremendous inertia to anxiety, alarm. There is this freeze state that we go into. We don't want to do that. But when you force yourself to get into a different, and that's exactly what happened, you got into a different state in your body. And as that state changed, your thoughts changed. So we worship the mind in this society, thinking the mind can fix everything. But it's more related to how your body feels. You will think exactly the way your body feels. And it's very difficult. It's like pushing a rock up a hill when you're feeling anxious or depressed to go, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy, because you don't feel happy. And you can change it. Gratitude is one of those things that actually does start neurochemically changing the chemicals in your brain that allow you to start flipping the switch over to the other side. But you have to use that almost like 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Start gratitude first, and then 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go to paddle board or go to the beach or go, go somewhere.

Because as you point out, the more we stay frozen, the more the brain thinks there's something dangerous, and we start secreting cortisol, we start secreting adrenaline, and it supports whatever we think. So if we think we're afraid, your brain will support you. It'll say, yes, you're afraid. If you think you lean into the balls of your feet and you go, I'm going to go and ask that person to copy or whatever, when you lean in there and you go go at what scares you, your brain starts creating your own endogenous, your own brain's natural morphine. It starts creating dopamine, and it tells you you're on the right track. You're on the right track, and that changes your physiology. So it's really this balance between physiology and psychology. But our physiology is so deep. It creates so much of an influence on our psychology that we're not even aware of. And that's my biggest point is, why aren't we in therapy paying attention to our physiology as much as our psychology? Because if you just think about it, as you say, because if you look at it from a neuroscience point of view, there's the part, and I won't get too technical, but there's the neo cortex, the new brain that all humans have.

That's basically the fantastic thinking, memory, all this stuff. And then there's the deeper structures in our brain, the amygdala, the brain stem that have no concept of words. Your body has no concept of words. It's language is feeling. And if the trauma is stored in your body and the body's language is feeling, you have to change that trauma with a feeling. Just changing your thinking will not do... Well, it won't do much. It will help you. It will help you, there's no doubt. It will help you cope, but it will not help you heal.

Can we get technical for just a minute?

Sure.

So when it comes to sensation and feeling, Whether it's the pit in the stomach or the getting tense in your chest, or it's a wave that you might feel, are you saying that all of that feeling or sensation that is something that's happening in your nervous system channels up through the brainstem, which has has no access to words.

Yes.

Then it gets converted into some explanation. Yes, absolutely. By the prefrontal cortex.

And other parts, too. Memory parts, too.

It's almost like a game of telephone, where your nervous system is feeling something and sending through the parts of the brain that have no language, a message. The prefrontal cortex is interpreting it, and it's interpreting it as unsafe danger. You're saying that we have to learn how to feel the sensation and deal with the sensation before the prefrontal cortex is allowed to make it mean something.

Yes. Your mind is a compulsive, meaning-making, make-sense machine. So when it feels something in your body, it has to make sense of it, especially the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere, analytical, verbal, literal, it has to make sense of it. So it makes sense of it with words, and it gives you words, stories that are typically pretty painful because they're consistent with the alarm feeling in your body. If you're feeling great, if you're walking down the street, it's a sunny day, everything's going great, your thoughts are going to be pretty darn good. But if you're feeling anxious, if you're feeling alarmed, and you've got a dentist appointment a week later or whatever, you're going to fixate on that dentist appointment because it makes sense to your brain. It's like What do you feel bad. What do we have to feel bad about? And then we use that stacking that I was talking about the last time we talked about. We start stacking. So every negative thing in your life at that point, Oh, my relationship is all going, Oh, I've got taxi. Oh, I've got to do my... All that stuff stacks on top of each So when it does that, it just changes.

It keeps you in that negative state. So it's really about, okay, I'm in this. I'm anxious, like we were saying earlier. Okay, where is that in your body? When you start finding the anxiety in the alarm in your body, now you're starting actually to get the root cause, because in your head, you will never solve it. You will always be caught in your head. You will never get out of your head.

Any pattern of behavior or thinking that you start to repeat becomes a habit. Habits are just patterns. It's all that they are. And so I had a life experience because of one incident where I would wake up every single morning and feel like something was wrong, and I couldn't put my finger on it. And the more that you wake up and think something's wrong, the more your brain is going to find reasons why something might be wrong. And so I developed this chronic state of feeling on alert, feeling this sense that I got to be aware. Fight or flying? Yes. In clinical terms, my sympathetic nervous system got switched on, and I had no idea how to turn it off. And If you don't know how to calm your nervous system down, to flip off the sympathetic nervous system and flip on the parasympathetic nervous system, which is your calm, grounded, resting nervous system, you will forever struggle with focus, with being present, with the ability to think clearly and make good decisions. You will constantly talk about the fact that you feel anxious, and that comes from your nervous system, always being on edge and being in fight or flight.

I didn't know any of this. I was just a nervous kid with a nervous stomach. Every camp that I went to, I got sent home because I was too homesick. Oh, yeah. I mean, I was just... I mean, you know how homesick you have to be for trained counselors to actually call your parents and go, we got a problem here. She can't stay here. Like, she is out of her mind. When you say out of your mind, what are the physical symptoms or verbal symptoms of that? Oh, my gosh. Complete disassociation. So I would be at camp, like literally, sixth grade camp. So at the end of sixth grade year, and I feel bad for little Mel Robbins. I feel bad for her because, here's this experience, sixth grade camp, where the entire school for four nights goes away to a camp, just the sixth grade. It's supposed to be the culmination of your sixth grade year. And I am so freaked out that something bad is going to happen. That I, of course, escalate things in my own mind. I don't even feel like I'm at camp. I feel like I'm walking on a movie set.

I don't feel like I'm on Earth. I feel like I'm on a spaceship somewhere looking down all the time. I feel like I I might throw up because my stomach is rattled because when you're anxious and you can't focus your thoughts, you tend to not eat. And so that, of course, upsets your stomach. It's not that something bad is going to happen. It's that you're screwing up the chemistry in your stomach by not eating because you're so nervous, which only makes it worse. And as your mind is scrambling, thinking something bad is going to happen and then your stomach is hurting, then you start to think, oh, my God, I'm going to throw up. And then you start to think, well, if I throw up, something bad is going to happen. And then the kids are going to laugh. It just becomes this spiral train wreck. And that is the state that I lived in. And so you learn how to cope. It becomes your new normal. But that was basically my life, constantly feeling like something bad was going to happen, constantly feeling like I wasn't really present, constantly lying or fibbing about how I felt or what I was thinking because I didn't want people to judge me.

It was awful. And then you come When you're going through college and you've got to make that choice in life as to which direction you're going to go in. It seems quite... Choice. I love the choice. Yeah. Yeah. Well, how would you define it? Panic. Panic, yeah. Yeah. Because I didn't know what I wanted to do. Yeah. Because I had only ever lived in survival mode. So did you not take a pause to listen to who you were and what your calling was? Take a pause. When you have anxiety, your whole mode of living is if I'm on the move, no one can catch me. If I am on the run, I'm safe. And so what's interesting is that I think the only time in my life that I have actually slowed down was during the pandemic. Does that sound familiar? Yeah, of course. Yeah. You had no choice. Yeah. And one of the hardest things, which became one of the greatest realizations, is truly coming face to face with myself and realizing that even though I have done all this work to heal trauma, even though I have done extraordinary things in terms of my own thinking patterns.

That there was a level to which I was still on the run. That I was darting off to a coffee shop or darting off to Target or darting off to an airplane. And all of this That's racing around kept me from having to truly stop and stand with the woman in the mirror and just be still and figure out, well, what do I really want? How do I really want to feel? You talk about the topic of distraction and procrastination, and it's rarely in this context, but it sounds like a form of distraction, distracting yourself from taking a moment to confront thyself and yet to really ask some of those questions, which I guess if you're in a fight or survival state, the answer to some of those questions might be maybe illuminating to a vulnerable, to an extent which will make you feel vulnerable and unsafe, because those are pretty existential questions to ask yourself, to look yourself and say, who am I and what do I want? And how do I get it? It's much easier, as you say, just to be swept by the tide. And that's the It's a form of short term defense.

It feels like a short termist will just get to tomorrow. Some people go through their lives doing that. Oh, I was. I was. I think that there's also layers of healing on issues. And so when I remembered the initial incident and I started to string together, holy cow, all of this is connected in a really interesting way. 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.