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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 732: Anxiety Can Be the Biggest Challenge in a Person’s Life | Dr. Russell Kennedy, Anxiety Rx
00:55:51
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- [00:01]
Podcast Host (Announcer)
This episode is brought to you by Peloton Break through the busiest time of year with the brand new Peloton Cross Training Tread plus, powered by Peloton iq. With real time guidance and endless ways to move, you can personalize your workouts and train with confidence, helping you reach your goals in less time. Let yourself run, lift, sculpt, push and go. Explore the new peloton cross training Tread plus@onepelaton.com Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast.
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Jenny Urchin
My name is Jenny Urchin, the founder
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Sponsor/Ad Voice or Co-host
of 1000 Hours Outside, and I have
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Jenny Urchin
a treat for you today. Dr. Russell Kennedy, author of Anxiety Prescription, or if you live in the US Anxiety Rx. This is a revolutionary new prescription for anxiety relief from the doctor who created it. Dr. Russell Kennedy, welcome.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
Thank you so much, Ginny.
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Jenny Urchin
I took nine pages of notes on this book because it is truly phenomenal. Can you talk about your path? Well, you. You've got a big path.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
I do.
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Jenny Urchin
I mean, you had a really hard childhood and then you went into this career of being a doctor and, you
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
know, burned me out.
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Jenny Urchin
Burning out there. Yeah. And so you're dealing with your own anxiety, your own alarm. But then you also say you've seen the rate of anxiety in young people skyrocket.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
Oh, yeah.
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Jenny Urchin
In the last 10 to 20 years. Can you talk about the change that you've seen?
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yeah, I think a lot of it is that we adults are getting more and more stressed, especially the environment that we're in, especially with the administration and United States just changing the rules every day, you know, is every day something shocking happens. And we are used as human beings to trust authority figures. That provides a structure in our universe is the authority figures. Typically, they've earned it. Not all of them, but most of them. They've earned it and we trust them. But now everyone's an authority. So, you know, you don't trust vaccines because the doctors run them. You don't. You don't trust politicians because they lie so much. And they've always lied, but, you know, it's now it's so obvious. So I've seen that the parents are the ones that are anxious and stressed and the kids, because they, the kids live in their emotional brains. They, they haven't learned yet to think, think their way into, into trauma, which, you know, we all do as, as we get older. And kids live in the emotional part of their system. You know, it's. They live in the moment and, and they read us. You know, my daughter, you know, picked up anxiety from me. I mean, I'M sure she had a bit of a genetic predisposition to it as well. But they read us, which is not to make the parents feel guilty, because if we look back, it was probably your parent that made you like the grandparent of the child that you're looking after now probably was the, one of the ones that influenced your anxiety and their parents influenced their anxiety. So it's this sort of inherited pattern that we learn. And I think because this, the adults are much more stressed now they've ever been because everything now the rules are changing so quickly. You know, 40 years ago we wouldn't have nearly this level of stress. We would always have people like me who were sensitive and anxious and you know, that kind of stuff. But now the bar is, is just slowly, slowly creeping up where just about everybody's got some sort of anxiety, depression, OCD, eating disorder, whatever it happens and the kids feel it. That's my, that was my. The long drawn out. I, the long drawn out point I was trying to make is the kids really feel us, they read us and they, and they adopt to us.
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Jenny Urchin
So there's been these major societal shifts and it's affecting the parents, which in turn is affecting the kids. And so this long term effect then from childhood is that adults are really struggling. And this book is phenomenal, this anxiety prescription, because you go through so many
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Sponsor/Ad Voice or Co-host
things that can help you and they're
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Jenny Urchin
woven throughout the book. I mean, it was just thing after thing after thing after thing. Playing sea monster with your daughter. I mean, you know, everything from that to eye contact to the power of singing and chanting. I mean, it was just thing after thing and you know, dealing with your old wounds. So I got a lot out of it. I got a lot out of it for a better understanding of anxiety and worry, but also how to deal with it. So can you talk about this big statement that you bring up in the book from Dr. Dr. Gordon Neufeld, right. And you talk about how you've learned so much from him over the years. And he says this all anxiety, all so talking about a problem that is rampant now, all anxiety is separation anxiety.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
And it's mostly, and I add on to that, it's mostly separation from yourself. It's mostly a separation that you went through when you were a child where you felt that you were inadequate, bad, unworthy. You know, that's what comes in and splits us from ourselves when we're children. And, and that split creates this tremendous amount of this physiological alarm in our body. And I'll often say that anxiety is really a feeling issue that thinks much more than a thinking issue that feels. And most practitioners treat anxiety as a thinking issue that feels. So they try and fix the thinking, but the thinking is actually just a reflection. The thinking is just the byproduct of this old alarm, and that's stuck in us, typically from childhood. So it's really understanding that that anxiety is more of an issue of alarm than it is actual worries, warnings, what ifs, worst case scenarios.
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Jenny Urchin
So can you talk about the alarm a little bit more? Because this is something I've never heard of, Dr. Kennedy, where you say it's not anxiety that hurts, it's actually the anxiety's evil twin alarm.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yes. And you can call me Russ if you want or Dr. Russ. A lot of people just, you know, but yeah, it's. I think what happens. Here's the. Here's the short version. If I can be. I don't know if I can today. I'm kind of. Kind of.
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Sponsor/Ad Voice or Co-host
I'm here to listen today.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
I'm here to just talk it today. So what happens, I think, is we experience a trauma that's too much for us to bear when we're children. And depending on how sensitive you are, because all my chronic anxiety peeps, they were all born sensitive, all of them. And if you're a really sensitive person and you grow up in an environment where there's love and care and attention, you'll be fine. You'll be great, actually. But if you. A highly sensitive person, but if you grow up with trauma and pain, then we take that on, we take it into our body. And I believe what happens is this. We experience a trauma that's too much for our little minds to bear. We can't handle that in our conscious mind. So we stuff it down into the unconscious mind, the lower levels of the brain. You know, people call it the reticular activating system, the amygdala, whatever you want to call it, but it gets stuffed down into that. And as the body is a representation of the unconscious mind, eventually that trauma gets offloaded into the body as a way of. As a. As a way of putting it sort of out of sight, out of mind, but it's always there. And then what we. What we do is we feel this alarm. We're not particularly aware of it. We know that we're worried. We feel like, oh, you know, my finances and my rent's coming up. I've got this exam coming up. We have these cognitive explanations of our worries, but really they're just a reflection and A manifestation of this alarm that's held in our body. And I'll go one step further. There's a part of our brain called the insular cortex. It's very deep in the center of our brains, and basically it's constantly reading the body. So if your body has what I call background alarm, the alarm that's stored in your system from the background of your life, that insular cortex sends a message through the rest of your brain. We're not safe. So your sympathetic nervous system. I know I've got a lot of terms in here. So your fight or flight nervous system, it's on hair trigger. It's always ready to go. It's always ready to go. And then when your mind is that fractured, not only do you make more worries trying to make sense of things, but because you paralyze the rational prefrontal cortex with all the. The stress chemicals, not only do you make more worries, initially, you lose the part of the brain that would say, hey, these worries, they're a little bit ridiculous. So they just seem so real. So that's. That's the combination that happens. That's how childhood trauma turns into the body keeps the score.
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Jenny Urchin
And there's just these alarms that are going off. You talked about one of them about the trumpet.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
Oh, yeah.
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Jenny Urchin
I mean, that's a. Probably a pretty good example, right, where it's like. Well, anybody else would hear the trumpet. Like, in our home, my dad plays the trumpet, and he would say this, but he's not. You know, he struggles a little bit with it sometimes, but, you know, he loves it. And so in our home, it's like a little bit of an endearing thing. But in yours, you know, is all these bad memories associated with it. So where someone else might be like, oh, the trumpet, whatever, to you, it was an alarm.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
It was. And it was, you know, you can't play the trumpet quietly. You know, he would get mutes to put on the end of it and that kind of stuff too. But it's one of those. Those instruments that you just. It's. It's not called the trumpet for no reason. You know, it's a loud instrument. And what I had done was I had coupled the sound of the trumpet with my dad, and. And when he would go through manic periods, because he was bipolar and schizophrenic, by the way, not. Not a great combination. When he would go through manic periods, he would play that trumpet at 3 or 4 in the morning. You know, we're trying to sleep, but, you know, if you're, if you've ever, if you've ever been manic or been around someone that's manic, you know that nothing is a bad idea when you're manic. Nothing. So playing the trumpet at four o' clock in the morning seems fine. So my brain has coupled the trumpet with stress. So I go through, I go through an age regression when I hear the trumpet. It takes me right back to that 12 year old kid with a dad who's been up for four days playing the trumpet and I don't know what the f. I'm doing and I'm scared.
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Jenny Urchin
Yeah, you wrote his behavior was too erratic for me to develop any sense of security. So then this alarm goes off. And I would love to dive a little bit more deeply into the, the sentence where you said, this is actually a feeling, a feeling issue and it's got to be resolved with a feeling solution. And so much of the time we're focusing on the thinking because it is kind of like paired with worry and the anxiety and you're like, you're thinking, thinking, thinking. But you say that this, the, the feeling is very powerful. And you gave a really good example. The example was if you're really hot, you know, you're like, you gave an example with your daughter. So, oh yeah, we're trying to get outside, right? They're like, oh, I'm so hot.
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Sponsor/Ad Voice or Co-host
Or we're in Michigan.
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Jenny Urchin
Like, I'm so cold. And you're like, you can't really think your way out of that.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
You, you can make little things. This is what I said in the book. I said, you know, Leandra and I were in Las Vegas in 1996. She was 10 years old, so. And Leander doesn't tolerate heat well. So we're in this trolley. It's the first time we've ever been to Las Vegas. We're in this trolley going down the strip in August and it's like 40 degrees. And she's looking at me like, how the hell did you get me into this situation? And I said, okay, just imagine that you're in a cold swimming pool. Like you're in a cold, cold swimming pool. And she closed her eyes and she did it for a second. And then about, you know, 45 seconds later, she goes, nope, not doing this anymore. And you know, we got off. So your mind can adjust things to a certain point. Point. But really if you want to change the program, you have to change it at the level that it's created and it's created at a very Feeling based level. So if you don't change anxiety at a feeling based level, you're always going to be trying to think positive, which is a tr. A tremendous task to try and think positive. Especially my little saying is it's very, very difficult to think in opposition to how your body feels.
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Jenny Urchin
Yeah, I mean, you're just constantly fighting against yourself. So you have all of these different ways that we'll get into some of them. But the book is called Anxiety Prescription in all sorts of different ways of how to address this on a feeling level. But can we also talk about worry? Because I think they're related, you know, the anxiety and worry and you talk about that. The biggest challenge in life is dealing with uncertainty. And I think we are in such a day and age talking about parental anxiety going up where there's a lot of an uncertainty. I mean, we feel it with a child that's about to graduate high school. It's a lot of uncertainty. How do you guide them? You know, we're in this world with AI, the jobs are changing. So can you talk about the seductive quality of worry?
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
Sure. So a lot of us with anxiety and stress grew up with uncertainty in our childhood. And we will avoid uncertainty at almost all cost, even to the point where we accept a horrible worry in place of uncertainty. So what worry does is worry makes the uncertain appear more certain. So if you have, say, you know, a pain in your stomach and it's been there for a month, you think, oh my God, you know, oh, it could be stomach cancer like my Uncle Bob. That's what it is. Right. And then your anxiety goes through the roof because now you have a reason to believe it. So but initially, when you make sense of your worry, when you make sense of your situation by creating a worry, you get a little dopamine hit in your brain because your brain says, oh, you're on the right track, this might be right. It has no real response to, oh my God, this is a terrible thing. All it wants to do, all your brain wants to do is get out of that uncertainty. So one of the ways we get out of uncertainty is we worry about the thing. If your daughter's out, you know, past 10 o', clock, you worry about it. You worry and worry and worry. And then when she comes home, when you hear a key in the door, you get this tremendous rush of positive chemical. So what were you doing just before you had that tremendous reward? You were worrying. So we get addicted to worry. Because what worry does is it makes the uncertain appear more certain. And we Hate uncertainty almost more than anything else. So that's how worry becomes addictive.
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Jenny Urchin
Yeah, a habit. I've actually never read anything about this. Worrying is often seen as preferable than staying with uncertainty. And then you talk about how it actually has a purpose. Like, people are like, oh, it's useless to worry. And you're like, no, worry is distracting us and distracting us away from that alarm.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yep. So, and I think this is how it starts. I think when you're young and say your dad's an alcoholic and he's on a binge, or your, you know, is a narcissist and she shuts herself in her bedroom for three days, the only place that you have to go as a child at that point is your mind. You know, you can't escape the situation. You're too young. You don't have enough power in the situation. So what we do is we learn how to go up into our heads in a kind of sort of dreamlike way to avoid the pain that we are storing in our. In our tummies, in our. In our hearts and our chest. So this becomes a. A coping strategy to avoid uncertainty is to go up into your head. Because when you go up into your head, you no longer have to feel that. That worry, that pain, that alarm that's in your body. And it's a very seductive, addictive process. But the problem is, when you become an adult, you keep that same process until the wheels fall off. You keep worrying to escape this pain in your. In your. In your body, this alarm. And I'm saying, you know, the. The answers you seek are in the cave you fear to enter. It's. So it's a matter of turning around and facing that alarm, finding it in your body, putting your hand over it, breathing into it, staying with it, and showing yourself. I don't like this feeling, but I can. I can tolerate it. I don't have to escape into my worries. And once you do that and you learn, oh, worries are optional. If I face this directly, I don't need to worry now, I've shortened that a lot. There's a lot of pain involved in getting to that.
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Jenny Urchin
Right.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
But it's really about being able to feel that alarm and not like it, but be able to tolerate it and say, this is pain for a purpose. I can deal with this. Because now I'm metabolizing the root cause of my anxiety, which is this alarm in my body, as opposed to just going up into my head and just kicking the can down the road over and over and over.
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Jenny Urchin
Again, this is such an interesting book, Russ, because like you say on the subtitle, like, this is the prescription for anxiety relief from the doctor who created it. Because you're walking through your own issues. You're like, eventually your father did take his life and there was all of this upheaval. And you say, I cannot tell you the number of times in my life I was sure I was dying of something. You know, I was doomed. I lived that way for 40 years. What a relief to trade that alarm for faith you wrote. So that's, I mean, that's a different part of the story where you're talking about just changing your, your beliefs about things. Faith is one of the most powerful antidotes to worry. And having faith amid uncertainty, and even embracing uncertainty as the spice of life is worries undoing.
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Jenny Urchin
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Jenny Urchin
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- [19:52]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
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Jenny Urchin
So something else that comes up. So besides this worry and coming out of this childhood where you got these deep seated alarms is you have this compulsive pattern to care for others before yourself.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yeah, that started because my mother kind of made me a bit of a surrogate spouse. So I'm sort of the oldest boy in the family. My dad was, was at some points quite functional, but at a lot of points quite not functional. So I think every household needs kind of a male lead. So my mother kind of artificially kind of raised me into that position. And I do have this sort of caregiving nature to start with. So I kind of took the ball and ran with it and became kind of a caregiver at that point. A lot for my mom, you know, she took care of me a lot too but, but you know, I'm a 13, 14 year old guy making my mom laugh because that, that was her, you know, that was the way that she, her nervous system was regulated. So I learned how to make her laugh. That was, and that's one of the reasons I became a professional stand up comedian. I'm sure. And I also learned to look after other people, which is one of the reasons I became a doctor. So sometimes I wake up going, is any of these things that you do actually you, or are they all coping strategies?
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Jenny Urchin
What, what a spot to come to. But you stuck with it until you ruptured your Achilles tendon.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yes. Yeah, that was the straw that broke the doctor's back. I was in a, a practice in Vancouver where we would deal with kind of semi emergencies, not really bad emergencies, but an urgent care clinic. And I could see 30, sometimes 50 people in six hours. Because it was, it was what? Yeah, because it was, it was in the downtown Vancouver. It was like birth control prescriptions and you know, if you had a laceration on your finger, I can put a stitch through a laceration in like five minutes. Like it doesn't, I can do these things really, really quickly. But I was burning out, you know, I was really, really burning out because I got really good at doing the job that I needed to do, but there wasn't a lot of reward in it. It was a lot of young people that didn't really have a whole lot wrong with them. And I dealt with a lot of anxiety, people with anxiety. So I got really good at diagnosing anxiety, treating anxiety and, and looking at it in myself. And seeing how are these people different than me? And they weren't, they really weren't. So I could relate to them. And I think that's one of the reasons why they would come back and see me so often is they knew that I knew how they felt. They, that that's one thing about anxiety is you feel completely alone. You feel like, you know, my husband's fine, my wife's fine, like why do I have this tremendous worry all the time? And it's hard. And we sort of put ourselves down and we keep ourselves in this sort of position of being defective on some level. And really it can be a superpower when you learn how to use it. But if you don't know how to use it, that alarm, that compulsion, that compulsion to think all the time just sinks you, just exhaust you and it sinks you in the long run. I don't know.
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Jenny Urchin
It does. You know, you're, you're the anxiety doctor and the anxiety patient.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
I am.
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Jenny Urchin
All at the same time.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
I put that in there too, I think.
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Jenny Urchin
Yeah, that's, I read it right out of the book. And so then you feel like you're, there's self abandonment, but it's also really difficult because this is a part of your identity. So you just see that this childhood trauma and all of these ups and downs, they have long lasting consequences in your life. And then a lot of times people will equate familiarity with security. This is one of the things you write about in the book. So even though it's dysfunctional, it's familiar, so they're sticking with it. And you have these different, you know, great with. What's it called when the, each letter represents something else.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yeah. Oh yeah.
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Jenny Urchin
Acronyms, Alarms, abuse, loss, abandonment, rejection, mature too early and shame. So then you, you really address the feelings part of this. Like, you know, it will be really hard and a lot of effort to think your way out of this. These alarms are, have become a part of your body. And so can you talk about how especially in today's day and age, like kids are attaching to their parents anxiety, but then also there's just so much less face to face time. And the face to face interactions are really powerful for affecting how we feel.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yeah, and I think that's especially true with kids. You know, they do live in their emotional brain so much. If you see a kid in the grocery store, you'll see them go through eight emotions within like 15 or 16 minutes. You know, they, they, they do that. We learn as adults to sort of Put a damper on that, you know, which is good and bad, I think, in a lot of ways. But I think kids really respond well to touch, to eye contact, to. To the. To the real essence of who we are as human beings, which is connection. And that's. You know, I was just. Sometimes I'll watch like, Tony Robbins, you know, thing. And he gets people moving. He gets the emotion going. He gets everything. The emotion is so important, you know, because if you're just sitting there in this sort of collapsed state trying to change your mind, it's very difficult to do that. But if you bring your body into it, if you bring emotion into it, it starts becoming so much easier. There's a part of our brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, and it's part of the brain that really directs where we're going to go. So when you are feeling, like, anxious or depressed and you've got your covers up to your chin, it's like, I'm not even going to get to the shower, you know, because I just. I just don't have the energy or I don't have the wherewithal to move. That's the anterior cingulate cortex's problem because it's not. It's not as strong as it needs to be to kind of make you go, okay, we've got to do this. We got to go. We got to go. And that's what anxiety and depression does to us, is it basically weakens that part of the brain. And this is why. Mel Robbins. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. It actually works. If you look at the neurochemistry of it, it's just moving. Like movement is so critical and so critical for kids. Kids love yoga. Like kids. I'm a yoga teacher as well. Kids love playing downward dog, the cat, they love that stuff. The more we can get the kids into their bodies and the more we can get them out of their heads, the more they learn, hey, it is actually safe in my body. I can actually stay here. Because the body is the ultimate source of grounding. We're not grounded. We're not reassured by our thoughts. We are reassured by the feeling we have in our body. And safety is a feeling state. It's not a thinking state.
- [27:47]
Jenny Urchin
Wow. What a different way to look at all of this. And it does make sense when you explain it, but it is not how things are typically dealt with. I mean, a lot of times, and you say you're not anti medication, but, you know, so very clear, I'm not anti medication. I believe the traditional Medical model. But then a lot of times it's not working and it's not addressing this part of how you feel, how your body actually feels. So if we stick with the screens for just a minute more because we're trying to really balance out screen time here. You say face to face interactions are powerful, but they are being replaced by face to screen interactions. And anxiety and alarm in our children are increasing while at the same time empathy and is decreasing. So can you talk about, okay, you can look at your kid, you can look at your spouse, you can even look at your dog.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yeah, yeah.
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Jenny Urchin
And you can even look at yourself in the mirror.
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Dr. Russell Kennedy
Exactly. That's a little more tense, that's a little more challenging. You know, looking at your dog increases your oxytocin and his oxytocin, her oxytocin by like 30 fold. Like, it just increases it so sharp, sharply.
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Jenny Urchin
Yeah.
- [28:57]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
And it's really important to understand that we are feeling beings first and then we're really in the society getting taught to think, you know, go, go, go, work harder, work smarter, do this. It's all about the thinking. And really very little emphasis is on feeling. And the reason why we work so hard is we want to feel better. So, yeah, we're actually doing the thing to prevent us from getting the thing that we really want, you know, and you need a balance, of course, of, you know, work and play and that kind of thing. But, but play is really important as well. Play gets us into this emotional part of our, our system that we kind of lose as adults. And play is, is regenerative, just as sleep is regenerative, just as tears are. Tears are really regenerative. Tears change the structure and function of the brain. So if we can. And this is why, I think, this is the reason why I think men take their lives so much more often than women do, is because we took tears away from boys very, at a very young age. And if you're a man listening to this, it doesn't mean that you have to go into a puddle of tears around your, your wife or your partner or whatever. Often for men, I will sort of do this thing called, hey, go out and do some car screaming, get in the car, go drive to a remote area and just start screaming and then see if the tears come from there. Because I know when I have tears, it doesn't so much come from sadness as it comes from frustration. So I will, I will cry out of frustration 10 times more than I'll cry out of sadness. And I think a lot of men are like that. But if we just access that because the external environment hasn't changed, your wife is still leaving or your dog is still died. But there's something in the internal environment that tears do. They change your perception of the event. And if you block tears, you're actually blocking one of nature's biggest adaptations to change and pain. And again, I think that's why men struggle so much, as far as, you know, suicide goes, is because they just don't see any way out.
- [30:55]
Jenny Urchin
Yeah. And you talk about all of these things in the book. So so many from just relaxing the jaw to the tears. Tears have a soothing activity on the nervous system, on the world that we live in, which, like you said, is really focused on the thinking is. Is causing a lot of people to feel awful. One of the other things that you said about the screens was that if you struggle with alarm. Okay, so this is going to be a lot of people.
- [31:24]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Right.
- [31:24]
Jenny Urchin
The numbers are going up.
- [31:25]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Sure.
- [31:26]
Jenny Urchin
If you struggle with alarm, the risks of social media outweigh the benefits because we artificially distract from pain by clicking for the next hit of dopamine. And then you say this.
- [31:37]
Sponsor/Ad Voice or Co-host
This is a word I've only heard
- [31:38]
Jenny Urchin
one time from this woman named Dr. Judith Joseph, who wrote a book called High Functioning Depression. And I had never heard this story before. But you have it in your book. You say, I see so many people with smartphone induced ania.
- [31:52]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Andhedonia. Yeah, it's one of those medical sort of words. Yeah, it just means inability to feel pressure, to feel pleasure. To feel pleasure. Yeah, that's what I meant to say.
- [32:06]
Jenny Urchin
That's a really big deal, actually. Say it again. It's pronounced and hedonia. Now, I never heard of it before, but you can see how people in this day and age, like, never feel good. And so this is like they don't have interest. It's like they've become blah, you know, gray, there's no color to them and they're. It's smartphone induced.
- [32:30]
Sponsor/Ad Voice or Co-host
Yeah.
- [32:31]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Well, if you can go to Thailand and then to your favorite hobby and then to cute dog pictures within 10 seconds. Why would you not do that? Because, especially, especially if you have this old alarm stuck in your system and you want relief from it. Like, my wife will tell me, like, she, she knows when I go through periods, like, my mom passed away about two months, months ago, and she knows when I go through periods of. Of alarm which are not nearly as bad as they used to be. For sure that I will start at bedtime zombie scrolling Instagram. And she knows that, that when I start zombie scrolling Instagram at night that I've, there's something going on inside of me that I am trying to distract myself from. And that's, I think one of the reasons why social media is so, so pervasive in those of us who have a tendency towards anxiety, depression, eating disorders, personality disorders, whatever. Is that it? It gives us a distraction from this alarm that's sitting in our body. But again, we're just kicking it down the road. We're not really doing anything to resolve the root cause and the source of that alarm, which would be self connection. In fact, we're, we're kind of distracting away from ourselves. But it, but it works temporary, temporarily. And it's kind of like an addiction. Addiction gives you short term relief, but long term pain, same thing. Yeah.
- [33:55]
Jenny Urchin
I mean who wants to have smartphone induced anhedonia, lack of interest, pleasure or enjoyment in life. It's actually an important thing to think about for parents as well when we're making these decisions with our kids. So you say if you struggle with alarm, the risks outweigh the benefit.
- [34:12]
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- [34:56]
Jenny Urchin
Robotics, engineering, art techniques, all while kids
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- [35:36]
Jenny Urchin
our real everyday life.
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- [36:30]
Jenny Urchin
so one of the things you also talk about is, and I could see this, like, especially if you're growing up and you're the one that's the standing, you have to be the comedian. You know, you're having to grow up too soon, right? You're having to do these things that, you know, other kids don't have to do. Is you end up with this inability to receive.
- [36:48]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yeah, that's a huge one.
- [36:50]
Jenny Urchin
Yes. You say you lose the ability to read your own self and get your own needs met. And in fact, I really like this one because I've started to not let go of hugs with my kids.
- [37:00]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yes, good one, good one.
- [37:01]
Jenny Urchin
I told them I learned about it from this book. So can you talk about some things that we could start to change there, why it matters?
- [37:09]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Well, I think a lot of us with anxiety didn't get our needs met when we were younger. So we learned, hey, I'm not going to get. I'm not going to get fed emotionally from mom or dad. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give to them in the hopes that they will throw me a few crumbs of attention in return. Which is often what happens. Which is often what happens. But what happens then is that we train ourselves that Little bits of connection are okay and, and bigger bits of attention may be off putting on some level. I know with my mother, you know, she grew up in a family during the war in Glasgow. And this is a story that I often tell is they weren't a very connected family. So my mother was, they had five kids. My mother was the middle. There was two boys older, two boys younger, and one of the older boys was going to fight the Germans in North Africa. And my mother, who was about, I guess 10 or 11 at the time, went to give him a kiss on the cheek goodbye. And he recoiled in horror at the idea that you would have some sort of warmth or affection within your family. And that's often, you know, that's often a story I'll tell about how we just, we lose this ability to be warm and connected. We can't receive because receiving was either painful as a child or we didn't get enough of it. So we learned, okay, I don't need, I don't need anything. We become this lone wolf mentality. If I'm not going to get this, I'll people please to get a little bit of it. But I'm not, I'm not going to try to get warmth and connection because it always fails. So after a while you learn how to manipulate other people to give you little crumbs of affection and that becomes, that becomes your normal in a way. And this is where people pleasing comes in. So we, we, we have this very difficult time receiving because that receiving wasn't comfortable when we were younger or it wasn't there. So we just learned, oh, I don't need, I don't need attention, I don't need to be coddled. I don't need, I don't need to be treated in a, in a very kind way because I didn't get that as a child. And I'm just going to make sure that I don't, I don't have to do that. And it really sets this emotional tone for our lives in that if you can't receive, you can't give honestly either. And then life becomes a bit of a transaction. And you know, I've been married three times, so I can tell you that, you know, it's not that I was a bad husband in many ways, but I, I would, I would, would kind of emotionally detach because I, I felt, I, A, I didn't feel that comfortable being very close to one person because that, I didn't get that as a child. And B, I was used to being in Control of, you know, what I gave to them. And I would people please. And I would give. And that's another reason that made me a good doctor is I was. I would really look after my patients well. But by the same token, I would not look after myself very well.
- [40:18]
Jenny Urchin
Yeah, that's why you say the inability to receive is devastating.
- [40:23]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
It is. Because that's what. At least the anhedonia. Because after a while you think, what the f am I doing? You know, if I'm not going to feel good anyway, what am I doing?
- [40:32]
Jenny Urchin
Yeah, there's no point to anything.
- [40:34]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yes, absolutely.
- [40:36]
Jenny Urchin
So you say, pay attention. Who releases a hug first? So all my kids, like, what are you doing? I'm not letting go. But the defensive detachment is actually a thing where you really used to wanting to leave someone before they leave you.
- [40:52]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Totally. Yeah. Defensive detachment is one of the reasons why. One of the big reasons why relationships break up is because, you know, you'll have, you know, often the avoidant and the anxious attachment style will come together. So the avoidant, you know, is fear of being engulfed and the, the anxious one is. Is fearful, is afraid of being abandoned. So they start this dance over and over and over again. And it's really like understanding what your natural sort of attachment style is because it will really inform you as to how you react in a fight and how you actually interact with your children as well. Because it's. I was, you know, avoidant for a long time. So even with my own daughter, I would get to a point where, you know, I would have. It was just too much. It was too much connection. I love her so much that it would become overwhelming for me because I didn't. I never felt that overwhelming love as a child. So, you know, when I feel it for her, it's very unfamiliar for me.
- [41:54]
Jenny Urchin
It is a wild thing how much these childhood experiences can just have such a long term effect. You actually wrote in the book, you know, this is why you want to read the book. Because childhood is such a critical age to feel cared for, loved and supported. And you say, look, often if you've got horrendous parents, they also had horrendous parents. And you know, it's important to kind of look and see what their childhood was like. But still you have these situations that are in your body and they're there for life. And so the book is really helping people to figure out how to deal with them. It's called Anxiety Prescription or Anxiety Rx and it's already in its second edition, which is fantastic. You do say it's never too late. You say, one of the saddest things to me is when people who are out of touch with their feeling bodies assume it's too late in life for it to be any other way. So, so many things to consider in terms of starting to make a change and to deal with the unfamiliar so that you can have a more fulfilling life. Because you said this, you can't harden your heart to one person without compromising your ability to love all people.
- [43:04]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yep.
- [43:05]
Jenny Urchin
So you talk about how, what, one of the biggest, perhaps the biggest sin of an unworthy parent is that they engender a mistrust of love.
- [43:14]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yeah, that's what I had. Yeah, I mistrusted the love because it wasn't consistent and, you know, with my. And my dad was never abusive or violent or mean to me, but he would go off in psychosis or, or deep, deep depression. So for a child who, who was connected. And this is one of the things that I, I talk about my dad is my dad can be very warm and playful and funny, and he was very, very intelligent. Teach me how to play chess and play pool and, and, and ride a bike and hit a ball and all that kind of stuff. But he could also be exceedingly distant when he was emotionally sick. So for a child who doesn't really know the difference, all of a sudden it's like, I have this warm, attentive, loving dad. I have this kind of, you know, attentive mom, you know, within her own framework as well. You know, she. It wasn't like she was cold, but she just didn't really know how to connect that well. Then I had this dad who really did know how to connect, and then all of a sudden, he would just vanish into mental illness. So, you know, I think that was almost worse because when you have a parent who's consistently difficult towards you, you learn how to armor up. But when you have a parent who's really warm and kind and connected at some point and then completely distant in another, that's devastating for a child because you don't even know what's going to happen. So my view of love, you know, my view of love was, you know, armor up, you know, be careful because you're going to get hurt, which isn't a great way to go to life through life, by the way.
- [44:45]
Jenny Urchin
Yeah. But it does also show the power of this book and what you've learned because that is such an emotional roller coaster and you just don't know. You don't know who's Gonna show up the next day, like what your dad's gonna be like. I mean, I. I can't imagine all of the turmoil there. And then you and your brother are the ones who find him, right? Yeah, there's that too.
- [45:07]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yeah.
- [45:08]
Jenny Urchin
So it's a testament to the power of what you've written in this book because it's. You have been able to really help yourself. I'd love to talk about the playing. The playing part. So there's all sorts of ways that you can help yourself, and you talk about them in this book. Self touch and exercise. Exercise helps metabolize the adrenaline that would otherwise stay circulating in our systems. But you talk about playing creativity, and you write this because we're trying to play more. Engagement in play is one of the most healing and most underrated modalities. What do we need to know?
- [45:42]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yeah, well, the thing about trauma is it creates this state called tonic immobility, which means that your brain is going a thousand miles an hour, but your body's frozen. And typically, it's a throwback to when you were a child. You were in a situation where things were going down in the hood and there wasn't anything you could do about it. So it's kind of the analogy I draw is it's kind of like having your foot on the gas and the break at the same time. So we get into this state of tonic immobility, and the physiology behind it is that the parasympathetic nervous system, the nervous system of rest and digest that calms you down, is supposed to be opposed by the sympathetic nervous system, which is fight or flight. So when the fight or flight nervous system comes on, the parasympathetic goes off. And when the parasympathetic, the relaxed one, comes up, the fight or flight one goes down. Now, in trauma, those two get activated at the same time. Now, the other thing that activates both at the same time is play. Especially like if you're playing on a sports team or something like that. So you're entering the same arena where the trauma was ingrained in you. But in this event, you are creating a positive emotional feeling as opposed to a negative one. So it's entering the same playground, essentially, that caused the problem when you were younger, but you're now doing it in such a way that it feels good to you, and you feel like you're processing it and you're moving through it. So that's why play. That's my. That's Dr. Kennedy's version as to why play is so Effective. There's other theories as well, but I think that co activation reminds us of the time of when we went through trauma and we couldn't escape. But when we play a game, we actually can escape. And it sort of shows our unconscious mind. You're not trapped in this. You actually have some agency.
- [47:32]
Jenny Urchin
That is fascinating. I heard someone talk about how often the things that we play and especially as kids, they're like survival things like, you know, and like, I don't want to get chase, someone's chasing me. I mean it's actually kind of terrifying. Hide and go seek. Like, you know, I'm gonna. No, I can't find any of the people that I care about. You know, they're all hidden. That's really fascinating. Engagement in play is one of the most healing and most under rated modalities. So that's in the book. And also just the. I mean, I think this is an interesting part to bring up because talking about your own childhood and it being so rough.
- [48:10]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Not all the time, Jenny. You know, like my family had some really good times too. You know, I don't want to make it look like I had this, you know, horrendous, you know, everyday childhood. It's just that, you know, every six to 18 months my dad would wind up in the mental hospital. But in between those times there was actually some really good times. But as I was saying before, that in a way can almost make it worse because, you know, you can experience the, the nice part about being a family and then it all breaks apart and then that happens over and over and over again.
- [48:42]
Jenny Urchin
Yeah.
- [48:42]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
So you can see why after a while I kind of mistrusted love because it was always broken by some sort of catastrophe. And I think that's one of the reasons why we worriers have such a hard time with calm and peace. Because when we were younger, that calm and peace was always exploded by some sort of, you know, trauma. So we learned, our brains learn that safety is always exploded by trauma. It could be 18 months later, but still our brains learn, our little child brain learns that safety. Maybe we can't trust it because it always ends with trauma.
- [49:17]
Jenny Urchin
Yeah, something's coming. So you have some good parts of childhood. Overall though, it is this inconsistent.
- [49:25]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Inconsistent, I would say for sure.
- [49:27]
Jenny Urchin
Unstable experience. So that could lead you to be a victim.
- [49:31]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Oh yeah. And I was.
- [49:33]
Jenny Urchin
This is not fair.
- [49:34]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
I was up until last Tuesday, you know. No, I was for a long time. I was for a victim for a long. And I don't think, I don't Think you can suffer chronic anxiety without being a victim, without having a victim mentality, because it just keeps reinforcing over and over. And a lot of people object to that term. But really you are victimizing yourself. When you're allowing yourself to, to go into these warnings, what ifs and worst case scenarios and ruminate in there, you are victimizing yourself. And the more you victimize yourself, you create the chemicals of that which is norepinephrine, epinephrine, cortisol. These chemicals in your brain make you want to hide, makes you want to freeze behind a tree, makes you feel like you're being chased by something. Whereas if you lean into it, if you lean forward, and this is what I tell people about public speaking is like lean it. Don't think, oh, this is go bad. This go. Just tell yourself this is going to go great. This is going to go lean on the balls of your feet, lean forward, you know, do the Superman pose if you want, like, like backstage in the bathroom or whatever. Like you need to change your brain physiology and brain chemistry and then you will float into the person that you're supposed to be. But if you stay victim, that cortisol, that epinephrine, that norepinephrine is going to keep you in this frozen state and you're not going to act your best when you're in that frozen state.
- [50:56]
Jenny Urchin
It's pretty intriguing. You say it is rare that I see anyone with chronic anxiety that is not recreating a victim state in their youth. Yep, it's a big statement. And you say we get addicted to the chemicals of stress. One of the things you say is get a little mad about it. You say don't rage. But that's an interesting feeling because you
- [51:16]
Sponsor/Ad Voice or Co-host
know, in a, in a home where
- [51:17]
Jenny Urchin
let's say you're the one that's being dependent upon, you're dependent on to, to be the man of the house. Like, you can't get mad.
- [51:24]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Nope, exactly. Right. That's exactly what happens. And this is more true with women than with men. But it's, it's actually the same is like women keep pushing their anger down. And anger is a protective emotion. Anger is there to tell you that some something is violating your values or your boundaries. Now often if you take anger away from a child, you leave them defenseless. You create a victim mentality. When you don't allow your child to be angry, you start creating a victim mentality in them because they are trying to protect themselves and you are taking it away from them.
- [51:58]
Sponsor/Ad Voice or Co-host
Wow.
- [51:59]
Jenny Urchin
Wow. It's just thing after thing in this book that you are exposed to that you probably didn't know. I mean, I didn't know. And it was just interesting. Like, you talk about that as a family doctor. You just would see these patterns in families.
- [52:12]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yes.
- [52:12]
Jenny Urchin
And there. This is the book that has the solution to start to change them. I thought it was wonderful. My friend Nicole has got the first. She sent me a picture of it because I sent her a picture of mine. She's got the first edition that's red, and I've got the newest edition that is blue, and it includes this anxiety toolkit right off the bat. I love that you got a toolkit right off the bat. Like, if you are struggling, here's a toolkit. But then all the information is woven throughout. And there's so many of the things that we didn't touch on. Like even the thing about how your face is the only place in the human body where the muscles are attached directly to the skin.
- [52:48]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yeah.
- [52:49]
Jenny Urchin
Like relax your jaw. When people talk about that, I've always been like, oh, whatever. But that is an interesting thing to know about the talk. The information about the vagus nerve being connected to your voice box, you know, and how when you're.
- [53:02]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
That's why.
- [53:02]
Jenny Urchin
Oh.
- [53:03]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Or, you know, singing, humming. That calms you down through your vagus nerve. Yeah.
- [53:08]
Jenny Urchin
So interesting. I learned so much, Russ. It's a fascinating book. Can you talk to people about what you offer, like, on your website? Because you have a course, is that right?
- [53:18]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Yeah, I have a course called your mind body prescription for permanent anxiety healing, or MBRX. I created it back in 2023. And then my daughter loves it and she said, dad, it's getting a little antiquated now. Like the videos. Like, the video camera that I filmed it with wasn't like 4k or anything, so we just redid the whole course. So I went through all the stuff that I've learned in the last three years, which is a lot, and I revamped all the videos and I just totally turned into MBRX 2.0. And there's also meditations in there because it's really important with the meditations to get into that sort of unconscious, deeper layer of your brain. I can tell you about how to heal your anxiety until the day is long, using your thinking. It will help a little bit, but it won't heal you. What will heal you is actually getting into those lower structures of your brain that moderate your body and mediate this alarm in your system. So when you calm the root cause of your anxiety, which is this alarm in your body, the worries just fade.
- [54:24]
Jenny Urchin
Or.
- [54:25]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
This is what happens with me when I get really stressed and I get alarmed. I will get the worries. I just don't believe them anymore. That's the thing, like, the worst part of worrying is that you believe, oh, this could be cancer. When you believe that, of course it's gonna, you know, but when you think, oh, this could be cancer, it's like, yeah, no, I don't think so. And then you just move on. Right. So I think MBRX is a great program. It's. I think it's like a hundred dollars. Like, the. The reason I do this is I don't want people to suffer with anxiety the way that I did. I don't do this to make money. This is. This is the reason why I do this. I want. I. I priced it at about a hundred dollars so that most people could. Could afford it. And it would. It would start to spread. Like, the. The ideas will start to spread. I am probably doing a practitioner program in April. So the therapist. Because I have so many therapists who are in my Instagram account, because you're not. You're not trained how to deal with anxiety out of a master's degree. It teaches you a very cognitive model, their ideas. If you fix the thoughts, the anxiety will go away. And that's not what happens. I did that for 30 years. It did not happen. So there's so many therapists that I sort of show this is the route to do it. There's nothing wrong with cognitive therapies. It's just that unless you ground the body first, there's nothing really for the mind to hold on to, and you have to really ground that. When you ground the body, you just start feeling like, oh, this bad thing is happening. But I'm okay. I'm still okay. Like, no matter what happens, I'm safe. And the same thing about, you know, I have this meditation that says, I am safe in this moment, because this moment is all we ever have. You can worry about your tax bill at the end of April, or you can worry about this dental work that you have to get done or this surgery coming up. But in this moment that you're in right now, you are safe, and all we have is this moment. So if you're safe in this moment, you're actually safe.
- [56:23]
Jenny Urchin
Yeah. You say that's your favorite strategy for the middle of the night, Russ? Absolutely. What a book. You say anxiety can be the biggest challenge in a person's life. But you wrote this book as a way to turn your dad's pain and suffering and the suffering of your mother and your brother and you into something for good. And you sure have. It is phenomenal. It's called Anxiety Prescription or Anxiety Rx, depending on where you live. You can go to the anxietymd.com and I'll put all the links in the show notes to get your program there and to learn more. And also, like you said, follow you on social media if, if you can deal with it because what did you say? If you're struggling with. I read it earlier. You're like, it might not be worth it to be on the social media, but if you are, I'll make sure. I'll put the links there. If you struggle with alarm, the risks of social media might outweigh the benefits.
- [57:10]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Well, I'll tell you what I do. You're winding this up beautifully and I hate to interrupt, but what I do is I set my. When I'm going through a tough time, I will set my iPhone timer for 15 minutes and I get 15 minutes on social media and as soon as it goes off, I have to stop. And that, that, that makes me make the most out of social media because it's so easy just to start drifting into. Yeah, knitting. Knitting videos or puppy videos or whatever this is. I'm going to make the most of this 15 minutes. And when it goes off, that really helps me. And, and, and thank you, Jenny. This has been one of the best interviews I've ever done. Like, you really know your stuff. I really appreciate talking with you today.
- [57:45]
Jenny Urchin
Well, thank you. It's been such an honor. I think the book is fantastic. It's really life changing and especially since, like you said, the rating of anxiety in young people has skyrocketed in the last 10 to 20 years, we always end our show with the same question. What's a favorite memory from your childhood that was outside.
- [58:01]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Oh, let's see. Outside. Favorite memory. Actually, I just sort of went through this the other night playing road hockey under the street lights knowing that, you know, we couldn't see the ball anymore more, but we would still, we would still just keep playing. I was just walking my dogs like three nights ago and, and this is the first time I've seen road, like kids don't play in the street anymore. So this is the first. So I just sat there with the dogs and just sort of drank it in because this is playing hockey or road hockey under the street lights knowing that there was no way it was going to go past another 10 or 15 minutes because we couldn't see anything. Even though we had street lights when we had to go in, it was just such a bittersweet, sweet memory. So it was really. It was really nostalgic and really lovely to see these kids out in the street playing road hockey under the street lights.
- [58:53]
Jenny Urchin
Yeah. Do you know my book is called until the Street Lights Come On?
- [58:56]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Nice.
- [58:57]
Jenny Urchin
It's right there.
- [58:59]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Oh, there we go.
- [59:00]
Jenny Urchin
It's about how that's how life used to be. Right. It was like that was your signal to go in, and you had a lot of freedom, and there was a lot of joy in that freedom. Russ, an honor to meet you. The book is fantastic.
- [59:09]
Sponsor/Ad Voice or Co-host
I highly recommend it.
- [59:10]
Jenny Urchin
Anxiety prescription by Dr. Russell Kennedy. Thank you for being here.
- [59:14]
Dr. Russell Kennedy
Thanks so much, Ginny. And. And you honestly did such a. Such a great job. I. I've probably done three or 400 podcasts in the last five years, and this is one of the best interviews I've ever done. So give your. Give yourself a pat on the back. It was really, really nice talking with you.