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BITESIZE | How to Break the Anxiety Cycle | Dr Russell Kennedy #667
00:20:56
A lot of people are struggling with anxiety at the moment, especially in a world that often feels out of control.
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- [00:00]
A
Before we get into this week's episode, I am really excited to share that I am bringing my Thrive Tour Transform your health and Happiness to Canada and Europe this September and November. It's a live, interactive, uplifting show that over 20,000 people came to last year across the UK and Australia. I'll be sharing powerful stories, life changing insights and simple tools that will inspire you to feel better, think clearer and live with more intention and joy. To get your tickets right now and see all of the dates and venues go to Dr. Chatterjee.com forward/live. I really hope that you can join me. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite size your weekly dose of positivity and optimism Optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 370 of the podcast with physician and neuroscientist Dr. Russell Kennedy. Russell's core message is that it's often more effective to use the body to calm the mind than the mind to calm the body. And in this clip he explains why anxiety may have less to do with our thoughts than we realize and shares practical strategies that could help us begin breaking the anxiety cycle.
- [01:28]
B
I feel for you. Like if you have anxiety, I know what it's like. I know what it's like to feel like this is never going to get better. I'm going to have this for the rest of my life. And I'm here to tell you that it's not. That's not true for a lot of people. They won't believe that, but it's not true. You don't have to live like this. And I really want to change the way that anxiety is understood and, and treated. And I think if it sort of starts to overtake your life, like if you're waking up every morning and you're starting to worry, what I call the three W's of worry warnings, what ifs and worst case scenarios. And they kind of accelerate. If you're waking up with it every day, if it's a constant factor in your life, then we've got to do something. Anxiety is a part of human existence. You know, you're going to get anxious about your money, you're going to get anxious about your kids. That's just natural. But if it's chronic, you know, if your natural response is to get really worried and get into your head and start chewing things up in your brain, I call it chewing on glass, you're just gonna get worse. Your anxiety is just gonna get worse. So it's really a matter of can I ground myself in my body and realize that a bit of anxiety is just part of human existence. But if it's part of your daily, like if you wake up with it, that's kind of a sign that there's probably something more there.
- [02:44]
A
Now I think when many of us think about anxiety, we think about one thing. I'm feeling anxious right now. But you're saying that there are these two components?
- [02:55]
B
Yeah, well, I think we're addressing the mind, you know, so I have this concept in anxiety that I call the alarm anxiety cycle. So I think there's this state of alarm that's stored in our body and in our mind too, because you can't separate the mind and the body, but it's stored from old traumas that are unresolved. And this alarm is in us. And the mind reflects that trauma. Because the mind is a compulsive, meaning making, make sense machine. So when it feels this old trauma in our body, it's got to do something with it. So it makes up a what if, a warning, a worst case scenario to kind of make sense of the angst that we're feeling. And then we believe that trauma, we believe that worry because we made it up. And then that creates more alarm in our body and then it just gets in this cycle, this alarm anxiety cycle. So we're trying to treat the symptom, which is the thought, which is the worry as the cause. If you think better, you will feel better. But it's really difficult to think in opposition to how your body feels. It's just a constant uphill battle.
- [03:55]
A
So let's talk about this anxiety in our mind and alarm in our bodies. Because I think this really gets to the core. I think of your message that it's these two separate things that we conflate together.
- [04:11]
B
Yep, that's exactly what it is. And when we conflate the two together and we don't see them as separate entities, it's very hard to treat it. So we can treat it through the alarm. You know, one of the ways is finding the alarm in your body. And me, it's in my solar plexus, putting my hand over it, breathing into it, and just to go woo right off the top, I believe that that alarm is my younger self, is my wounded self that watched my schizophrenic father just sort of slowly collapse until he eventually committed suicide. And then there's the anxious thoughts of the mind that go along with this feeling of alarm in the body. So if we can separate them into two entities, we have a way of breaking the cycle. But if we don't see it as two separate entities and just try and treat the thoughts. The little analogy that I draw is like if you're in a rowboat and there's a hole in the rowboat, it's filling up with water. You can bail water out and drop that water level down a little bit to make yourself feel better. But unless you go under, unless you patch that hole in the hull, which is fixing the alarm in your body, you're always gonna be bailing water. So it's really the separate, the anxious thoughts of the mind are different than the alarm in the body, but they energize each other. So if we can learn how to separate the two, see them as two separate entities and attack them both, we can break the cycle. And when we break the cycle, then we start really feeling like we have control over the cycle rather than the cycle controlling us.
- [05:36]
A
So let's take a real life example. Maybe that might be helpful for people to sort of think their way through or feel their way through this anxiety alarm cycle that you're talking about. So I don't know, let's take, if I think about practice and the sort of patients I've seen over the years, let's imagine a 42 year old lady who's at work in her office and is feeling really, really anxious about their job role, about the way that their boss is treating them, perhaps, and they're struggling to function because of that anxiety. Does that work for you, that example?
- [06:15]
B
Absolutely. Right.
- [06:16]
A
So let's, for that individual, how would you talk them through this?
- [06:21]
B
So I would say trying to move into your body, like find the alarm in your body. Because what happens is when we're feeling anxious, we tend to attribute the cause to our mind. Our mind goes, and our mind is trying to solve it as well. But it's an unsolvable riddle because the reason you're anxious is there is no obvious answer. If there was an obvious answer, you wouldn't be anxious. So go into your body, find, where do I feel this? I know I'm feeling anxious right now. Where do I feel that in my body? Rather than going into your head. Because as soon as you go in ahead, you've lost the plot because you're just gonna stay in your head, it's just gonna get worse. It's very rare that all of a sudden your mind just goes, oh, well, here's the solution, I'm not anxious anymore.
- [07:00]
A
Okay, So I think this is such an important point, right? What does that Mean go into your body and not stay in your head. What does staying in your head look like for that individual? Tell me, what normally happens when people stay in their head?
- [07:15]
B
It just gets worse. So in your example, my boss is gonna fire me. My boss doesn't like me. My boss's wife doesn't even like me. I mean, I was over there for dinner three weeks ago, and they just. So it just. So you see how it just goes. It stacks on top of each other.
- [07:31]
A
So stories, you know, we're putting meaning onto this.
- [07:33]
B
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [07:35]
A
And it's almost running away with itself.
- [07:37]
B
Totally.
- [07:37]
A
You're saying in that moment, if you can, once you've learned the skill of how to do it, you're saying, going to your body, you've already mentioned that you store the alarm in your solar plexus.
- [07:51]
B
That's where it is for me.
- [07:52]
A
But I think for a lot of people, they don't know, what does that mean? It's in my body? Right.
- [07:57]
B
Well, they've never looked for it. That's the whole premise of my approach, is that when we get into our heads and we start worrying, we don't feel the need to go into our body because our mind is telling us that it has the answer, when all our mind has is just more of the problem. So what I'm saying by getting into your body is, okay, close my eyes. If I can think about this, this whole thing with my boss, sometimes what I will do, I'll work with people and I'll say, okay, think about your boss walking into your office right now and say, you're fired. That job you did on the project was unacceptable and you're fired. Now scan your body. I'm speeding this up quite a bit, but basically I put people into this sort of relaxed, semi meditative state. And then I put them into their trauma and I go, okay, scan your body. And they'll say, oh, in my throat I feel this sort of hot. And I'll ask them, is it hot or cold? How big is it? Size of a grape? Size of a baseball? The size of a watermelon. How big is it? And then does it have a color? Does it have a texture? Does it have a temperature? The insular cortex, which is part of the limbic brain, it makes an emotional signature of your trauma and it shows up in your body. And I think your body feels exactly the way now when you're worried about your boss that it did when you were 10 years old and your mom came in and said, what are you doing? You can't do that. You're not good enough to do that. And we make this emotional signature through the insula, through the part of the brain that sort of translates the body to the mind and the mind to the body, which is called the insular cortex. We make an emotional signature. And our body feels exactly the same way now as it did back when we were 10 years old with all the wherewithal we had when we were 10 years old. So of course we're gonna start making up these stories that a child would kind of make up. Because worrying is very childlike when you look at it. When you look back on it, you go, why did I worry about that? That just seems so ridiculous. One of the other reasons why is because we paralyze the premotor areas and the prefrontal cortex. Because we move into survival physiolog, Survival brain, which really isn't all that good at rationally figuring things out. And so not only does the alarm create this, like this survival physiology in our brain, which makes us look for more threat, we also paralyze the part of our brain that say, this is really nothing to worry about. So we get double whammied. And that's why the brain just keeps going. Because the brain wants to solve the problem, but the problem's really unsolvable at the level that you're looking at it.
- [10:20]
A
Okay? So if you stay stuck in the mind with more thoughts, with more stories, it's very hard, you're saying, to actually change things.
- [10:30]
B
You can't. I mean, you can change it. You can start saying, you know, my boss likes me. He's given me this really great job evaluation only a week ago. You can go into that, but again, you're just kind of bailing water. You know, I would prefer that, that when you get in, when you're sitting at your desk and you're freaking out, it's like, okay, I feel this in my throat. Okay, can I put my hand over my throat? Can I breathe into it? There's Andrew Huberman talks about this, the physiological sigh. Two sniffs in and a long exhale. And with me, with my anxiety pews, the anxiety people I work with, I do this sort of modified version of it. I do it three times, really deep, expanding my chest hold for about two or three seconds, and then close my teeth and breathe out through my teeth and really elongate that exhale. And as I hear that hissing sound that I'm making myself, I imagine a tire, an over inflated tire, just relaxing. So it looks like this so I'm stressed. I'm sitting at my desk, I'm freaking out. It's like hold relaxing my shoulder, relaxing my jaw as I breathe out, elongating my exhalation. And I can't do it too many times or I'll start zoning myself out because this is what I do to calm myself down. And that's a much better use of your time and energy than trying to figure it out through your head. You're never going to solve it through your mind.
- [11:51]
A
So if someone does that breathing practice number one, what is it doing to the body when you do that? And I guess following on from that, is that something people can do in the moment when they're feeling that alarm in their body?
- [12:10]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And if you practice it when you're not, this is the big thing with people. This is the difference between the people that heal and the people that just manage. If you practice it when you're not feeling anxious, if you start getting into a practice of even five minutes a day, doing that when you're driving or just when you're sitting, just feeling your butt in the chair, feeling your shoulders relax, feeling your jaw relax yourself, a felt sense that you're okay and training that. So when you actually go into the game, when you go into that stressful situation, you've taught your autonomic nervous system this process that will relax it. When you tell yourself things are okay, you want to believe it, you want to go into that feeling because it feels so much better. But it's much more effective to use the body to calm the mind than it is to use the mind to try and calm the body. And that's a big premise of the book, too, is like, how do we find. It's like you're numbing the symptoms, but the root cause, this sort of childhood pain, not to sound like a broken record, is still there. Can we move the body? Can we change the body? And in some way, that woman sitting at her desk, if she puts her hand on her chest or finds the alarm in her system and breathes into it, she's changing her body reaction. So when we change that, we break the spell a little bit of the alarm. And when we break the spell of the alarm and we're out of our heads because we're not in our worry anymore, because we're now in our body, it really breaks that sort of automatic cycle that we were in before that we didn't even know we were in.
- [13:47]
A
What you are advocating for is something that actually is quite alien to much of Western culture. I see it with my kids now at school. You know, everything is about the mind and thought and thinking. That's been me for much of my life, of course, which is why I'm so drawn to silence and stillness and time without listening to stuff or looking at stuff. Right. It's been something that I think I've only managed to do or experience, I would say, over the past few years after doing therapy and working through various states. Right. Because it's not easy when you're used to thinking all the time. It's very hard to just sit there and try and be still, because thinking
- [14:38]
B
becomes a way of avoiding. Here's the way I think what happens is that we develop this state of alarm in our body. We don't want to live there. We don't want to feel that. So what we do instead is we go up into the worries of our mind. People say that worry doesn't do anything. It absolutely does do something. It takes us away from this pain, typically childhood that's stuck in our body, and then we're ruminating up in our heads, because the more we can stay in our heads and dissociate into our heads, the less we have to go down and experience that old alarm that we don't even realize is there most of the time.
- [15:13]
A
One lady, I was reading it on your Instagram this morning, was saying that was one of the most profound things she's ever learned, that in that situation of anxiety, to feel the alarm. And I think she was saying. And I didn't get this in your book, but she was saying, I think she heard you talk about it on a reel. She put her hand on where the alarm was. One hand. The other hand she put on her leg. And she said she has never had anxiety to the same level since then. Right. So I'm fascinated by you and your approach because you're a formally trained medical doctor, you're a trained neuroscientist, and you're someone who suffered badly. When you say a sense of awareness was one of the most powerful tools, perhaps we could relate that to your ABC framework. What does that mean, and why was it so powerful?
- [16:02]
B
Mostly awareness of the alarm. It's the alarm in your body that's causing the thoughts of your mind. The thoughts of your mind aren't the originator of your anxiety.
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A
Okay, so A for awareness.
- [16:12]
B
Yep. So you're aware of, like, how does your alarm feel? Just get really into the nuances of it.
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A
Okay.
- [16:18]
B
And then go into B, which is body and breath. So Go into your body, go into your breath, you know, and then touch as well. Like if you can do that. So body and breath is B. And then C is a compassionate connection to that child, you know, So A is awareness. Hey, I'm starting to feel that feeling in my thighs or whatever it is, that alarm in my system. Go into my body, go into my breath, connect with that alarm. And then in that connection, which that alarm is your younger self. In that connection, you can feel that younger version of you. And then that's where you heal. That's when you make a healing shot at your anxiety as opposed to just coping with it.
- [16:55]
A
This actually goes beyond anxiety, doesn't it? Of course. Because we could, as you mentioned, if we practice those ABCs, that will help you. If you have phone addiction, right? Smartphone addiction, social media scrolling addiction, it could be that as you develop this awareness, you can catch it. Before you know it, you're stuck in Instagram for two hours. You could tune in and realize that you're actually feeling lonely and that you feel it in one part of your body and go through that ABC process.
- [17:26]
B
Absolutely.
- [17:27]
A
It could be before you start binge eating sugar, right? If you can build up that awareness and just that little pause to really go, what am I feeling here? Is it physical hunger? Is it emotional hunger? Where is it coming from? Where is it in my body? It's so universal, what you're saying. You've mentioned lots of tools in our conversation today. And for that person who is struggling with anxiety, who feels that everything they've tried so far has only had limited use, is there one thing you'd recommend that they think about doing? Is there one practice? You'd say, this is where you need to start.
- [18:09]
B
This is the one tip that. Cause Leandra, my daughter, has gone through some anxious periods in her life, and this is the one tip that she said, look, dad, when you get on Dr. Chatterjee's podcast, you have to tell people this. It's like, okay, Lee, I'm glad that we got it. So it's basically when you're feeling anxious, just saying to yourself, and this is the middle of the day, the middle of the night, am I safe in this moment, in this moment that I'm in right now? Like, I don't. I may have the dentist in four hours, or I may have an exam or whatever, but in this moment that I'm in right now, am I safe? Because anxiety is always about the future, worry is always about the future, and trauma is always about the past. So if you can say I'm safe in this moment and just really feel the safety in the moment. That for her was the biggest tip that I've ever given her. As far as her anxiety goes, it is a bit of a cognitive thing, I agree, but it is something that's really helped her. And she said, dad, you have to tell them this. You have to say, and this is especially good for in the middle of the night when you wake up and you're panicked about something. It's like, I know I'm worried about this, this and this, but in this moment that I'm in right now, when I'm looking around at the walls of my room, am I safe? And you can also phrase it in the form of a statement, I am safe in this moment. So that is what I would leave people with, is because if you live in the present moment, there's no anxiety in the present moment. Anxiety is your mental interpretation and your body's interpretation of anxiety and fear. If you can bring yourself into the present moment, then because anxiety is always about the future or past trauma. When you bring yourself into the present moment and assure yourself that you're safe, then you're safe.
- [19:46]
A
Hope you enjoyed that Bite Sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest. If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my Bite Sized Friday email. It's called the Friday five and each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity articles or books, books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good. To get you ready for the weekend, you can sign up for it free of charge@drchatterjee.com Friday 5 Hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.