416. The surprising neuroscience behind your anxiety

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Psychology of Your 20s, Episode 416

Title: The Surprising Neuroscience Behind Your Anxiety
Host: Jemma Sbeg
Date: May 11, 2026

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Overview

In this insightful episode, Jemma Sbeg explores the neuroscience behind anxiety—moving beyond the typical discussion of symptoms and coping strategies. Instead, she takes listeners on a deep dive into the brain and body mechanisms that produce anxiety, why anxious feelings seem so uncontrollable, and how understanding these systems can reduce self-blame and foster more effective self-regulation. Jemma’s engaging, relatable tone demystifies complex scientific concepts, and she provides practical tips grounded in neuroscience for managing anxiety in everyday life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Anxiety Feels So Serious

• Brain's Function:
  • The brain evolved not to provide calm or fulfillment, but to keep you alive. Its main job is protection, not happiness.

    "It does not care if you feel fulfilled. It doesn't care if you feel okay. It cares that you're alive." (06:26 – Jemma)

  • The system would rather overreact than underreact to potential threats—even trivial ones—because evolutionary survival required hypervigilance. (06:28)
• The Prediction Model:
  • The brain operates largely on predictions; for those with anxiety, predictions skew toward threat and uncertainty. (06:45)
  • Anxious minds become obsessed with ambiguity, filling in unknowns with worst-case scenarios to stay prepared. (07:41)

    "Your brain has become primed to look for all the things in a situation that you don't understand… and fill in those gaps with whatever will be the worst-case scenario…" (07:41 – Jemma)

2. Generalization & Threat Detection

• Fear Generalization:
  • Traumatic or stressful experiences prime the brain to anticipate similar dangers everywhere—turning specific worries into broader, life-impacting anxieties. (09:12–10:26)
  • Example: One panic attack in a supermarket can create anxiety about all supermarkets, public spaces, and even unrelated situations. (09:45)

    "One humiliating social moment can spread into anxiety around eye contact, public speaking, being perceived at all." (09:47 – Jemma)

3. Immediate Fear vs. Sustained Anxiety

• Amygdala’s Role:
  • In non-anxious brains, the fear response (via the amygdala) can be turned on and off as needed. For anxious brains, the “off-switch” is defective—fear lingers long after a threat passes. (12:19–13:29)

    "Where anxiety comes from is not the immediate fear. It is the inability to downregulate that fear." (13:35 – Jemma)

• Interoception:
  • Anxious brains overinterpret internal signals—heart rate, breathing, muscle tension, etc.—and use physical sensations as “proof” that something is wrong, fueling a vicious cycle. (13:53–15:42)

    "It becomes harder in the brain of someone with anxiety to shut down our own brain's interpretation of our own physical reactions as being evidence that something is truly wrong." (17:04 – Jemma)

4. Neurotransmitters: GABA & Glutamate

• Imbalance Hypothesis:
  • Glutamate (excitatory) and GABA (inhibitory) neurotransmitters control neural activity; anxiety may stem from excess glutamate, insufficient GABA, or reduced sensitivity to GABA. (19:33–21:02)

    "It’s not simply that we have more glutamate… it’s that we may also have less GABA, or we may be less receptive to GABA, or have an imbalance in both." (20:54 – Jemma)

• Pharmacological Interventions:
  • Medications like benzodiazepines work by boosting GABA signaling, reducing acute anxiety. (21:02)

5. Why You Can't "Just Stop Worrying"

• Attention Regulation:
  • People with anxiety have attentional systems biased toward threat, making it much harder to shift attention away from anxious thoughts. Attempts to suppress thoughts often backfire. (22:18–23:39)

    "Trying to avoid it doesn't work… when people say 'worry about it less'... that can at times enlarge our fear and make us think about it more." (23:26 – Jemma)

  • White Bear Experiment: Repressing thoughts tends to make them more intrusive, illustrating why suppressing anxiety can worsen it. (23:53-25:04)

6. Summary of the Neuroscience (Mini-Recap)

• Brain is built for survival, not fulfillment.
• Anxiety is driven by misfiring of threat detection, neurotransmitter imbalances, and inability to “turn off” fear.
• This leads to a persistent, disproportionate response to ambiguous situations, shrinking life experience. (25:14–26:16)

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Application: Turning Neuroscience to Your Advantage

Jemma provides actionable strategies based on neurological research:

1. Exposure Therapy & Experience Disconfirmation

• Building New Associations:
  • Regularly facing feared situations with positive or neutral outcomes retrains the brain’s predictions.

    "Rather than trying to completely erase all of our exposure to a trigger… show our brain that a different outcome is possible." (31:37 – Jemma)

  • The goal is not to erase anxiety but to prove catastrophic predictions false through lived experience. (32:24–34:12)

2. Verbalization & Labeling

• Say It Out Loud:
  • Articulating “I am anxious” helps create distance from the emotion and improves regulation, rather than trying to suppress it. (34:44–35:42)
  • A 2015 trial on public speaking found labeling anxiety was more effective than ignoring it. (34:44)

3. Cognitive Distancing

• Refer to Yourself in Third Person:
  • Using your name or a persona (e.g., “Kevin is feeling anxious”) creates psychological distance and reduces emotional reactivity. (36:07–39:23)

    "Noticing your anxious thoughts as coming from something beyond you that you don’t necessarily want or need to associate with." (37:14 – Jemma)

4. Humor as a Circuit Breaker

• Make Anxiety Ridiculous:
  • Give your anxiety a silly character/name (e.g., “Miranda”) and laugh at its absurd predictions. Laughter activates the parasympathetic nervous system, promoting calm. (39:23–41:28)

    "Anxiety is literally hilarious at times… the fact that it truly believes every single bad thing could happen… It’s like a child." (40:11 – Jemma)

  • Scientific Basis: Laughter stimulates the vagus nerve, releases GABA and oxytocin, dampening the stress response. (41:04–41:49)

5. Physical & Neurological Circuit Breakers

• Slow Down:
  • Deliberately slow your actions (walking, eating, relaxing the jaw) to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. (43:47–44:19)
• Activate the Anterior Cingulate Cortex:
  • Mindfulness and grounding techniques (such as 5-4-3-2-1 sensory exercises) help shift attention away from anxious ruminations. (44:59–45:12)
• Forward Movement:
  • Physical activities, especially walking or moving forward, use “bilateral stimulation” (same mechanism as EMDR) to signal to the brain that you’re escaping/handling a threat, which can quiet anxiety. (49:57–53:49)

    "Walking is like the most simplest way… Motion, direction, momentum stops you from just stewing in the fear, neurologically, psychologically, and physically." (52:44 – Jemma)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Your brain is not built to be calm. It is not built to be fair. It's especially not interested in your sense of fulfillment at all." (06:13 – Jemma)
• "The anxious fallacy that the more I worry, the more it must be true." (08:43 – Jemma)
• "In the brains of people with anxiety… the [fear] switch can be turned on just as quickly, but it cannot be turned off." (13:24 – Jemma)
• "It’s not you, it is all these systems… all this neurological stuff going on." (17:22 – Jemma)
• "Trying to avoid it doesn't work… when we are given instructions to suppress a thought… our level of fear towards that thought increases." (24:48 – Jemma)
• "We're basically trying to set up our anxiety in a sting operation—to prove that it's a liar." (33:09 – Jemma)
• "The opposite of anxiety is not peace, it is laughter." (39:39 – Jemma)
• "If you are finding yourself stuck in an anxious spiral, one of the most underrated things you can do is to simply get up and walk." (53:09 – Jemma)
• "Being able to reapply logic to our anxiety when anxiety likes to remove all logic is so, so helpful." (55:33 – Jemma)

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Important Timestamps

• [04:07] Introduction to the neuroscience of anxiety
• [06:13] Why the brain is wired for survival, not fulfillment
• [07:41] Anxiety as learned uncertainty and the prediction model
• [10:23] Fear generalization and the spread of anxiety
• [12:19] Difference between fear and sustained anxiety; the malfunctioning “off switch”
• [13:53] Interoception and the brain’s reading of internal states
• [19:33] The roles of GABA and glutamate
• [22:18] Attentional bias and why anxious brains can’t “just stop”
• [23:53] White Bear Experiment and the rebound effect of thought suppression
• [25:14] Mini-summary of the neuroscience so far
• [31:07] How to rewire the anxious brain (exposure)
• [34:44] Labeling and verbalizing anxiety
• [36:07] Using third-person and cognitive distancing
• [39:23] Humor and laughter as psychological circuit breakers
• [43:47] Relaxing the jaw and vagus nerve hack
• [44:59] Mindfulness and grounding techniques
• [49:57] The neurological logic of forward movement

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Conclusion

Jemma Sbeg’s episode offers a compassionate and empowering look at anxiety. By exploring the brain’s survival mechanisms, the chemistry of fear, and practical neuroscience-based strategies, she reframes anxiety as less of a personal failing and more of a physiological process—one that can be understood, managed, and, with practice, lessened. The actionable tools provide listeners with concrete ways to “play the same game” as their brain, fostering self-acceptance and reducing the power of anxiety over daily life.

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For anyone seeking to understand or manage their anxiety, this episode is a science-backed, warm, and practical resource—making the invisible, often mystifying processes of anxiety finally make sense.

Transcript

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[Guest or Co-host]

foreign.

[Gemma Spake]

Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode. Today we are going to talk about anxiety, but not in the usual way

that we normally talk about anxiety or not in the usual way that anxiety

is spoken about generally. We are going to do instead a complete and in depth look into the neuroscience behind why anxiety happens, why it lingers, why it continues to be this, like, frustrating, sometimes like uncontrollable part of life. I think knowing the intricacies behind anxiety

and understanding the neuroscience behind the reactions that are going on in our brain

is honestly sometimes the most important step in becoming less anxious because you start to like, distance yourself from the feelings. You start to remove personal blame. You start to understand the systems better and you, you are able to apply logic and this information to your feelings that I think counteracts the, I don't

know, counteracts the illogical nature of anxiety.

That's what's been really helpful for me and I think just being able to explain what I'm feeling, how I'm feeling,

why I'm feeling, whatever I am puts this distance between me and my anxiety.

So that's what we're going to do today. From talking about the function of different brain areas to neurotransmitters, cell networks, the neuroscience of fear, there is a lot to cover that is honestly, well, as a little bit of a psychology nerd,

you guys know this. I find it so fascinating, not typically spoken About. So, without further ado, let's get into

the neuroscience behind your anxiety. Firstly, why does anxiety feel so serious? Even if we rationally know, even if we consciously know, like the world isn't ending, like, I'm going to be okay, this thing is actually not a threat, why does our brain still take it to the extreme? Anxiety feels so serious because your brain is not built to be calm. It is not built to be fair. It's especially not interested in your sense

of fulfillment at all.

It's. It doesn't care if you're happy. First and foremost, it is built to protect you. It does not. It does not care if you feel fulfilled. It doesn't care if you feel okay.

It cares that you're alive.

That the system, your brain system, the system behind your anxiety, would rather overreact

and protect you than underreact and have something terrible happen.

One of the most useful ways neuroscientists now explain this is through prediction, a

prediction model of anxiety. Our brain predicts more than it reacts.

So much of what your unconscious brain

is doing throughout the day is essentially

just like constantly, constantly making predictions about

what is likely to happen next.

It consumes a large part of our unconscious mind. In anxiety or amongst people who have anxiety, those predictions become more tilted towards threat and uncertainty.

Whereas with someone who doesn't have anxiety,

those predictions are more realistic and they're easier to dismiss. Which, if you are somebody who is anxious, probably feels literally impossible.

I don't think I've ever been able to dismiss an anxious thought in my life without observing it, interrogating it, overthinking it.

But this is what, this is what happens in the minds of people without anxiety. They don't have the same, what we call learnt uncertainty. This is something that, a paper in

2022, I think it was published in 2022, describes where essentially, if you have

anxiety, your brain has become primed to look for all the things in a

situation that you don't understand, all the

things that you aren't certain of, and

fill in those gaps with whatever will

be the worst case scenario so that you can prepare.

This is why your anxiety can become

so all consuming, because it is focused on ambiguity, it is obsessed with uncertainty

and the possibility of threat.

And that is always going to be there. It is a fact of life that's part of being alive. But our brain can't help but fixate on it. This helps explain why your brain becomes like obsessed with certain thoughts, sensations or themes or what ifs, the very things that it cannot Solve or cannot know

for certain are the things that it becomes most obsessed with.

It is not because those things are

objectively the most important part of reality.

It's not that they're more likely to happen. It's not that they're more common. It is just this, this anxious fallacy

that the more I worry, the more it must be true.

The truth is, is it's just that your brain has assigned these hypotheticals as important to think about. More because they are scary, more because they are things that you can fixate

on because there are so many possibilities, less because they are likely to happen.

The other thing that this threat detection system is built to do is generalized

based on past experiences.

Being the machine that it is, your brain is a machine. Once you may have experienced one dangerous or distressing situation, it becomes easier for your brain to then assume that every

situation has the possibility of morphing into that worst case scenario.

This is what is often referred to as fear generalization. And it is why anxiety tends to grow and expand over time. You know, you can have a panic attack in a supermarket once and then

over time as your brain begins to

expect this fear in more and more situations now you start to dread going into any supermarket, going into anywhere that's public, going anywhere that, where there are like people around you. You know, one humiliating social moment can spread into anxiety. Around eye contact, public speaking, being perceived at all. One scary bodily sensation can generalize into the fear of exercise. Fear around caffeine, heat, crowds, even excitement. These like it sounds irrational, right? That that fear could spread so rapidly, but it's, it may be irrational, it's

not random, it's fear generalization.

Now this is where anxiety gets really irritating because it's, because it starts to

reach all these like broader aspects of life that shouldn't be scary.

Like why do I have this reaction? The same reaction to getting a cup

of coffee as I would being chased by a tiger.

Well, you know, from the outside, yes,

ordering a coffee is trivial, but from

the inside, these small moments encompass multiple anxiety inducing aspects and multiple moments of ambiguity. It might involve being watched, speaking whilst you're feeling shaky, making a mistake, feeling trapped in the queue, noticing your heart rate, you know, worrying that you'll panic, that you'll blush, freeze that, people will judge you. To the conscious, rational part of you, it is just a quick interaction. You are just ordering a coffee. But really the brain is not only. It's not just computing the objective event, it's computing the meaning behind the event and the meaning and the Harm or

the anxiety of past experiences.

And it's sending in the whole army. It thinks that every situation could become

the worst thing ever.

When we feel this sense of anxiety,

our bodies and minds react in a

way that basically makes it as easy as possible to get away, to notice more, to be more alert, to stay on guard, to fight back. From the body's and the brain's point of view, this is useful. Putting us into this activated state is useful because if something dangerous does happen out of this hypothetical situation we've created,

it's best to be prepared.

But when there's a false alarm, and

if you have anxiety, it's constant false alarms, this bodily reaction starts to feel disproportionate and starts to really dominate over all other feelings.

This is where the distinction between immediate

fear and sustained anxiety becomes really interesting. A 2020 or 20 2003, I think, actually 2003 review published in the European Journal of Pharmacology, looked at evidence from

animal and human studies and basically was

trying to figure out, like, why is this overreaction happening?

Essentially what they found was that in the brain of somebody without anxiety, the amygdala, the switch that turns off the amygdala and turns off the fear response is just as receptive as the same

switch getting turned on.

So basically, yes, their fear may spike

in similar ways to us, their anxiety may spike to similar things, but it can be turned off just as quickly, meaning that sensations are allowed to kind of transpire, occur, and then we're able to move on.

In the brains of people with anxiety, in the amygdala, amygdalas of people with anxiety, that switch, that same switch can

be turned on just as quickly, but it cannot be turned off.

So a lot of people think that it's the on switch that's broken, right?

The amygdala is more receptive, more reactive.

That is definitely true in some situations. But really where anxiety comes from is not the immediate fear.

It is the inability to downregulate that fear. It is the inability to turn off that fear. Another really important idea here is about interoception.

And this is basically the brain's ability

to sense and interpret what is happening inside your body and react accordingly.

The American neuroscientist Arthur Craig, he talks about this in that same paper, or

one, I think, one published very soon after.

And he argues that the brain is

not just mapping what is happening outside the body, it's also mapping what's happening inside the body. So it's also thinking about heart Rate,

breathing, temperature, pain, muscle tension, nausea. And it's using that information to actually help construct our emotions about our external

environment as well and how we should react.

Essentially, it's a two way street.

Yes, our emotions control our bodily reactions. Our bodily reactions control our emotions.

The thing is, when we're anxious, our bodily reactions triggered by our anxiety are really confusing because a lot is going on in everything is like on full speed. And so our brain getting locked into

that two way bidirectional relationship and stream

of information takes this as evidence that

something must actually be going wrong.

It takes that as evidence that our irrational emotions must be onto something, meaning that it continues to further stimulate us,

continues to further activate the stress response.

Essentially what's happening is something freaks you

out based on past experiences or based on an irrational fear.

Your body is unable to turn off

that sensation, that initial sensation of anxiety,

that initial sensation of, yeah, fear and being scared and tension, meaning that the

body starts to take, your mind starts to take those bodily sensations as fact that something is actually going wrong.

I'm hoping that you guys are kind

of seeing the cycle here, right? Or just this like downward spiral where

it becomes so difficult to interrupt these signals and say, actually no, everything is okay, we are fine. Because it just. The evidence that something is wrong is just as internal as it is external. Or the evidence that things are okay is a lot weaker compared to this

internal bodily signal that everything is actually on fire. Talking more about the neuroscience of this,

that same researcher, Dr. Craig, expanded on

this idea in a 2009 review published in Like a neuro, I can't remember the name but a neuroscience journal.

And he focused on another part of

the brain called the anterior insula. That is a brain region he argued is especially important for turning raw bodily

signals into conscious subjective feelings. His claim is that people with anxiety may have a dysfunction in this region, meaning that like we were talking about with that mind body connection, anxious feelings are more physically persuasive because we find it harder that the insular finds it

harder to argue or disentangle ourselves from what it sees as physical proof.

Basically, it becomes harder in the brain of somebody with anxiety to shut down our own brain's interpretation of our own physical reactions as being evidence that something is truly wrong. What I'm really trying to get at here is it's not you, it is all these systems.

It is all this neurological stuff going

on that means that we cannot separate a thought from a feeling. We cannot separate as well our emotional

experience from, from our anxiety and from

what's going on in our bodies.

A 2004 study carried out by researchers

from the University College London looked into this a little bit closer. They kind of wanted to figure out whether this was really, you know, the

crux of why people are anxious or why some people have debilitating anxiety and some people don't.

The researchers put 17 participants into an

FMRI scanner and they asked them to do a heartbeat detection task.

Essentially, they said, we're not going to

take your pulse in the usual external way.

What do you think your heart rate is per minute? Essentially, how good are you at counting

your own heart rate and figuring out your own pulse?

Most interestingly, people who were, who got

a more accurate number, who were like, yep, I think my heart rate is around 72 beats per minute, 49 beats per minute.

It didn't matter if it was high or low.

They were more accurate in their assessment, reported stronger negative emotional, emotional experiences.

What this paper essentially suggests is that your brain monitors your body closely to determine how scared it should be. So if your brain is highly tuned to internal changes, small shifts in heart rate, small shifts in breathing tension, in any way that becomes more psychologically meaningful to it in an anxious state, that means that the body constantly feels like there is and the brain constantly feels like there is ample evidence internally that

something is going wrong.

Again, this is all because your mind would rather interrupt your peace 10 times unnecessarily than miss one thing that might have hurt you.

That is why anxiety often feels bigger than the situation itself.

And all of these neurological processes, all of these anatomical areas, are all trying to keep that process going so that you survive going even deeper into the

neuroscience behind your anxiety. We also, obviously, at some point, need

to talk about the role of certain neurotransmitters, specifically two neurotransmitters, GABA and glutamate. If you've been listening to this podcast

for a while, you would have heard me talk about these so much.

The two GS, these two chemical messengers

basically control alongside a bunch of other things, but they are a big part of how reactive or regulated your brain is.

In very simple terms, glutamate is what

helps neurons fire and communicate.

It gets them all excited, it stimulates them. GABA is the main inhibitory neurotransmitter, meaning it helps to quiet or deep dampen neural activity. It just, it calms everybody down. I always think about them as like,

good cop and bad cop in a

way, like glutamate or like this. I think about them as like, glutamate is the fun, exciting aunt who like gives the kids all the sugar, RS them up with games, with candy, is

like getting them all excited. And then GABA is like the responsible parent who then has to like get everybody ready for bedtime and do like the grown up job. Research on anxiety disorders has argued that

it's not simply that we have more

glutamate, more of that excitatory neurotransmitter in our system.

It's that we may also have less gaba, or we may be less receptive to gaba, or have an imbalance in both.

Which is why drugs that boost GABA signaling and the way that GABA can be received, like benzodiazepines, reduce acute anxiety because the theory goes, they're balancing out the neurochemical reactions.

This is another thing your anxiety may come down to. Of course, all of these things are

kind of happening at the same time.

So it's not like these are different

explanations, they're all combined.

But sometimes what it does come down

to on top of these other elements is just differences in your brain chemistry

that increase or decrease your sensitivity to certain neurotransmitters that go on to shape how you feel in response to the world. It's, I just think it's so fascinating that we have this intense emotional experience,

that being our anxiety.

And then when you start to understand it through a neuroscientific lens, it all makes sense. It all makes sense why it all feels so uncontrollable because there are things operating behind the scenes that can't be brought into your control that you do not have conscious say over that just

leave you responding to the consequences or outcomes of the imbalance or of the lack or excess of activity.

You'll probably know the frustration.

If you have anxiety and you were

listening to this episode, you have definitely

had somebody tell you just to stop

worrying about it or to simply stop thinking about it. What people without anxiety don't realize is that that would mean going against

like everything that your brain in particular is programmed to do.

Like, you do not have the same efficient top down attentional control that the

average person without anxiety has.

Instead, you have a different attentional system, one that is stimulus driven, threat driven. Basically for you, it is a lot harder to to ignore the scary thoughts,

to ignore the scary situations, because anxiety

is not only making the threat seem bigger, it's reducing your capacity for calm, it's reducing your capacity for goal directed focus and rationalization. And it's also this weird conundrum Whereby

in order to address our anxiety like

we have, you know, trying to avoid it doesn't work. Like when people say worry about it

less, think about it less.

Well, that actually can at times enlarge

our fear and make us think about it more.

I feel like by now I feel like we all know about this, this

very famous experiment, like the white bear experiment. You might also know it as the white elephant experiment.

To give a refresh. This was an experiment very famous in the 80s, where a researcher

told a

bunch of participants, whatever you do, don't

think about a white elephant or don't think about a white bear. Every time you think about it, ring

the bell, ring the bell. As soon as this thought has intruded. He also told a bunch of participants like, here is a list of things

you can think about. You can think about the white bear.

You can also think about this and this and this.

Whatever you want to think about, you have complete permission to do it.

When people were told to think about

the bear less, when people were told

not to think about it, it became a fixation point, right? It became this obsessional thing because why

are we not allowed to think about it?

What's wrong with this thing?

What's bad about thinking about it? That means that we can't do that and your brain begins to like run away with it. It's the same with your anxiety. Study after study shows when we are

given instructions to suppress a thought, to ignore a stimulus, to ignore a thought,

our level of fear towards that thought increases firstly.

But also we just think about it in excess of if we'd just been

allowed to think about it casually all along.

And because of this, anxiety becomes a

self perpetuating cycle that's really difficult to break, making our initial fears worse and worse and worse.

So I feel like I've given you

a lot of information. This is the neuroscientific side of this so far. Just to give you a little mini

summary, your brain is built to protect you, not to fulfill you.

All it cares about is your survival.

There are certain areas in the brain that are in control of your survival

and of detecting things that may threaten your survival.

In people with anxiety, these areas aren't always operating properly and that creates longer, a longer ongoing sense of fear towards ambiguous situations.

There is also the combined changes in neurotransmitter levels that kind of explains this a little bit.

And also this inability to down regulate your fear or to rationally interrupt your fear and say, hey, this actually isn't that important.

This actually isn't going to happen and to believe that.

And so all of this shrinks our

lives significantly, to say the least. I want to break down how we can take those neuroscientific principles, though, and

apply them in the opposite direction.

Knowing what we know about the neuroscience behind anxiety, how can we kind of

take that knowledge, flip it on its head, and do better for our anxious feelings?

[Carlos King]

Foreign.

[Ruler Representative]

Health Awareness Month and we talk a lot about how important it is to

[Gemma Spake]

get help on this podcast.

[Ruler Representative]

I know it's so easy to talk ourselves out of therapy for so many reasons. It's too expensive, it's too difficult. We don't know if we will find the right person. But this is what Ruler was made to fix. Ruler makes accessing quality mental health care affordable, with sessions costing an average of 15 with each insurance, you can sign up and find a great therapist in as little as five minutes and have an appointment as early as the next day. So turn off the talk track that's keeping you from progress and head to ruler.com that's r u l a.com to find a therapist the easy way.

[Kia Gaines]

Welcome to my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way, with me, your host and your favorite therapist, K. Gaines. And in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking Trip Fontaine, Ryan Clark. Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing and we're still chasing it. And we don't know when we done

[Guest on Learn the Hard Way]

enough because people scoreboard wide life becomes about wins and losses.

[Kia Gaines]

Steve Burns. Dustin Ross. Cause you find it important to be a good person while you're here on earth. Are you a good person because you're afraid?

[Carlos King]

Because that's two different intentions, bro.

[Kia Gaines]

Absolutely.

[Carlos King]

And that's two different levels of trust. I want you to just really be a good person.

[Kia Gaines]

Join me, Kia Gaines, as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure and purpose on my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way. Open your free iHeartRadio app search learn the Hard Way and listen Now.

[Emily Abadi]

Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurdle with Emily Abadi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Layla Edwards.

[Gemma Spake]

If A boy can do it. I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain.

[Guest or Co-host]

It's hard to be in spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't belong. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it.

[Emily Abadi]

And Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ledecky.

[Olympic Athlete]

The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals.

At our level, at this scale, like, being able to fail in front of the entire world, Like, I can do anything. I can do anything.

[Emily Abadi]

Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up, even when it's hard. Listen to Hurdle with Emily abadi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports.

[Michelle McPhee]

Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated, polygamous sect.

[Gemma Spake]

We were God's chosen kingdom on earth.

[Michelle McPhee]

He felt destined for greatness. So when a swaggering Armenian business catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world, he doesn't look back.

[Narrator or Interviewee]

Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets meeting the president of Turkey.

[Michelle McPhee]

I'm Michelle McPhee, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across.

[Narrator or Interviewee]

When Jacob met Levon, this went to a billion dollar fraud.

[Michelle McPhee]

But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire

[Gemma Spake]

survive the largest tax investigation in American history?

[Interviewee]

You need to tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me?

[Narrator or Interviewee]

Jacob told Lavon. You're ruining my life.

[Michelle McPhee]

Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Superhuman Podcast Narrator]

Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the Enhanced Games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year.

[Superhuman Podcast Participant]

Within probably 10 days, I'd put on £10. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth.

[Superhuman Podcast Narrator]

Listen to Superhuman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Gemma Spake]

Essentially, what I'm saying is that as

much as our brain is pushing us to have a certain reaction to fear

and ambiguity, there is a way that we can rewire our brains away from anxious thoughts, knowing what we now know about the Underlying neuroscience, we basically have to teach our brain new connections, new

connections between ambiguous science situations and the expected fear.

And we do that by creating new

associations between the things that we fear

and what we think or what we

know the outcome will be.

Basically, rather than trying to completely erase

all of our exposure to a trigger,

rather than trying to avoid something that

scares us at all costs, all we need to do is show our brain that a different outcome is possible. Remember, your brain is just a machine that learns through repeated patterns, repeated exposure, through repetition.

The more that you associate this thing

that you fear with something that is

positive, the more that it learns to expect that in the future. And it changes the x to Y

prediction model that it's operating on.

We need to have experiences. If you're going to use neuroscience to

battle against your anxiety, you need to

be focused on having experiences that contradict your anxious predictions. Because basically, meaning, you have to go

further into the belly of your anxiety. In psychology, we call this exposure therapy. I'm sure you've heard it.

Essentially, what it's saying is, if we assume every, for example, social interaction will

always be unbearable, the most powerful way we can rewire that situation is by

going into those feared situations and proving

to ourselves that that catastrophic outcome is

not going to happen or will not happen as often as we expect it to, Basically saying, your brain, my brain,

you brain, you are lying to me.

These predictions are false.

We're basically trying to set up our anxiety in, like, a sting operation to prove that it's a liar by going into the room, going into the space,

getting on the plane, standing up in

front of the people

and undoing that

prediction that everything is going to go terribly and providing proof that it's not.

You know, if you fear speaking up

in front of others because you think that everybody's going to judge you, everybody's going to notice how anxious you are, everybody is going to reject you.

A way to kind of set up

that prediction and to prove that it's

false is to go into those situations more and more and more to prove

that, like, that doesn't happen every time.

That actually, that rarely happens, the prediction model is false. The new learning isn't necessarily, this is

always going to be fine, or I'm always going to feel confident or there is nothing to fear.

The new learning is simply that, like,

I can be in that fearful situation.

A, it's probably not as likely as

I thought, but B, I will survive regardless.

There is also evidence that how you

engage with the fear matters as well.

Not just the outcome. And that brings me to, like, our

practical tips for dealing with an anxious mind.

And the number one thing you can do, other than exposure is to simply verbalize what you are feeling rather than

keeping it stuck inside of your mind to fester. In 2015, they did this randomized control trial with people who were afraid of public speaking.

And these people were assigned to basically

get up in front of a room and talk.

And they were either asked to label their anxiety or to ignore it, meaning they were asked to either explicitly put

their feelings and their fears about what was going to happen into words, or

they were just going to have to do exposure and get up in front

of people and see what happened.

What they found was that people who were able to say, this is an

anxious feeling, I'm scared here, my physical symptoms of anxiety are coming, are really derived from this fear and not from the fact that this situation is actually harmful.

They did better almost every single time. Essentially, they were able to rewire their fear not necessarily by suppressing their anxious thoughts, but actually by bringing the anxious thought more into their focus, being able to approach it and also see that

it was a liar, see that it

wasn't true, and see that it was

something that operated beyond what they consciously and deliberately wanted to do.

So that's one of the best things you can do if you are feeling

anxious is just literally say, I am anxious.

I know it goes against so much of how we think.

We're meant to process our emotions, which

is to avoid them and to not acknowledge them. This is saying do the opposite. This is saying, go in deeper.

Tip number two relies on a similar cognitive distancing technique.

And it essentially says, what I'm essentially going to tell you to do is to learn how to relate to your thoughts as mental events beyond you, rather

than facts that are coming from within you.

In a really interesting series of studies

from 2014, researchers found that using your

name or a non first person pronoun or somebody else's name during an anxious moment was an incredible form of emotional regulation. Basically, the first level of cognitive distancing

from your anxiety would be saying, I'm having an anxious thought.

The second level, the level that they

found was saying, gemma is experiencing an

anxious thought or saying, giving your anxiety a completely different name, basically labeling the

part of you that felt anxious as something that was operating outside of you. So Kevin is making me feel anxious. Kevin's having a really bad day today. Brian is really trying to get me stirred up.

Noticing your anxious thoughts not as just

coming from you but from something beyond you that you don't necessarily want or you don't have to necessarily associate with. So, like, when you feel fear being

like, oh, instead of thinking, oh my

God, I feel, I feel fear.

This is coming from me. This is intuition. Being like, oh, that's Miranda again.

That's Miranda being.

Being such like an asshole. Miranda's just like, really getting on my nerves at the moment. It stops you. The reason this works is because it stops you from completely embodying the thought as your own and puts the blame or assigns the blame to an outside source. Why this works is because it stops. Well, it doesn't completely stop, but it interrupts that body mind connection that says, if fear and anxiety is coming from me internally, it must mean that it's saying something important. It must mean that it's giving me some kind of signal, cue hint about

the state of the world around me. It must mean that I should be scared. Because of course, we trust ourselves and

we trust our own feelings the most. And above all others, obviously, if you

are, if you're anxious or if you are somebody with anxiety, we know from this research and from the neuroscience, we've

already spoken about that that connection and

your ability to interpret those physical sensations

is providing false evidence for things that

aren't actually occurring or that aren't actually as dangerous as you think they are.

So assigning the anxious thought, assigning the corresponding bodily sensations to an outside force, to a Kevin or a Brian or Miranda, this anxious little character that occasionally

comes and visits you and makes you

feel terrible interrupts that to your brain.

Logical assumption that to feel anxiety must mean that something is wrong because it is coming from you. And who could you trust more than yourself?

This is kind of similar to my

third tip, which is to bring in humor. Labeling your anxiety as Brian or Kevin

or Miranda makes it kind of funny

compared to, like, the intensity of the feeling. The opposite of anxiety is not peace, it is laughter.

I don't know who said that, but

they were a very, very wise individual.

When our anxiety is bad, everything feels really serious because we know our mind is taking this as a life or death situation. That makes it difficult to laugh, so it makes it difficult to make it

feel less serious than it is. But adding back in the ridiculousness of the situation snaps you out of the anxiety cycle much quicker than a lot of other techniques.

And honestly, like, anxiety is literally hilarious at times. Like, it is hilarious how ridiculous and dramatic it is. Like the fact that it truly believes every single bad thing that could happen in the world could and will and is currently happening to you. The fact that it genuinely wants you to believe that is really funny. It's like a child. Our anxiety is like a little petulant child. And there's increasing evidence that laughing at

the absurdity of our anxiety firstly helps by taking that nervous energy and turning

those bubbles of fear into, like, feelings of excitement. It secondly helps because of that psychological distancing. But when speaking about neuroscience, the third way that laughter helps is that it actually activates the parasympathetic nervous system.

Like I said, the opposite of anxiety is not peace.

It is laughter. Because when we laugh, it stimulates laughter, literally stimulates the vagus nerve. This is the primary component of our

parasympathetic nervous system, the system that calms

us down and shuts off our anxiety. Activating that nerve, activating that system shifts us into a state of rest and

recovery rather than alertness. This one 2018 Japanese paper also found that just hearing laughter can improve stress, anxiety, cortisol levels.

Literally.

Watching a comedy show, watching your favorite sitcom. I'm currently rewatching Girls, which is like, I find that so funny.

Watching Funniest Home Videos.

Is that still a thing?

Like, no, but anything like that will,

like, neurologically calm you down.

If you can laugh.

That is a mental and emotional circuit breaker.

It is a way for your parasympathetic

nervous system to say, why would I

be laughing if I wasn't safe? Like, this is again, you playing psychological

warfare back at your anxiety. Your anxiety wants to throw all these delusional, ridiculous situations at it, take the

ridiculousness of it and laugh at it.

Laughter as a circuit breaker works because it is something that, yes, triggers our parasympathetic nervous system. It also triggers gaba.

It triggers oxytocin.

Basically, imagine anxiety is like this toy train on, like, a circular track. It's going round and round and round. It's getting faster and faster and faster.

We all know the feeling.

The circuit breaker, the laughter, whatever your circuit breaker is, is like a kid

disconnecting a piece of the track, flooding

the system with oxytocin, flooding the system with gaba. Like, turning it all down, switching off the batteries. I read this fantastic article from the psychologist called Dr. Lucas, who wrote about the three neurological circuit breakers that are best for anxiety. These are a, stimulating GABA and oxytocin by forcing ourselves to slow down the. Forcing ourselves to walk slower, eat slower, sleep more, therefore resetting ourselves. That's the first great circuit breaker B is a parasympathetic circuit breaker. So like laughter, but also like relaxing your tongue and your jaw. I don't know if you've heard about this, but letting your mouth and jaw go slack is like a biological cheat code for relaxation.

Like one of the first nodes or points of your vagus nerve is like

right below your ear towards your jaw. All signals go past this point. Like all activating signals have to flow through this point to tell your body to speed up and get stressed and get anxious.

So if you reduce tension around that

origin point of your vagus nerve, it is like the equivalent of holding down the on and off button on your phone or your computer for like 5 seconds.

Like it is a literal like, like you have a circuit breaker, you have

an off switch like in your body that you can activate. And the final circuit breaker that Dr. Lucas talks about is ones that activate your anterior cingulate cortex. Basically the part of your brain that communicates between the conscious and the unconscious, instinct and executive functioning. We can power on that part of the brain that lets us interrupt unconscious and nonsensical thoughts by simple mindfulness exercises, by doing grounding exercises, by refocusing our attention and asking our attention to focus only on the present.

So watching raindrops down a window, slowly eating and savoring a meal, doing a

body scan, the 5, 4, 3, 2,

1 sensory technique, basically refocusing your attention

outwards, only focusing on what's going around you and really sinking into that stops

you from getting pulled inwards.

Those are your circuit breakers, circuit breakers that have that work through your vagus nerve, circuit breakers that work through neurotransmitter release, circuit breakers that work through turning

on the parts of you that can

down regulate Foreign

[Ruler Representative]

Health Awareness Month. And we talk a lot about how important it is to get help on this podcast. I know it's so easy to talk ourselves out of therapy for so many reasons. It's too expensive, it's too difficult. We don't know if we will find the right person. But this is what Ruler was made to fix. Ruler makes accessing quality mental health care affordable. With sessions costing an average of 15 with insurance, you can sign up and find a great therapist in as little as five minutes and have an appointment as early as the next day. So turn off the talk track that's keeping you from progress and head to ruler.com that's r l a.com to find a therapist the easy way.

[Kia Gaines]

Welcome to my new podcast Learn the Hard Way with me, your host and your favorite therapist, K. Gaines. And in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month. I'm bringing over over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests. I'm talking Trip Fontaine, Ryan Clark. Sometimes when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing and we're still chasing it. And we don't know when we done

[Guest on Learn the Hard Way]

enough because people scoreboard wide life becomes about wins and losses.

[Kia Gaines]

Steve Burns. Dustin Ross. Cause you find it important, important to be a good person while you're here on Earth. Are you a good person because you're afraid?

[Carlos King]

Because that's two different intentions, bro.

[Kia Gaines]

Absolutely.

[Carlos King]

And that that's two different levels of trust. I want you to just really be a good person.

[Kia Gaines]

Join me, Care Gaines, as we have real conversations about healing, growth, fatherhood, pressure, and purpose on my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way. Open your free iHeartRadio app search learn the Hard Way and listen Now.

[Emily Abadi]

Life throws hurdles big and small. The question is, how do you conquer them? On Hurdle with Emily Abaddi, we sit down with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness, professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions to talk about the challenges that shaped them and the mindset that keeps them going. From the WNBA standout Kate Martin and rising hockey star Laila Edwards.

[Gemma Spake]

If a boy can do it, I don't see why a girl can't. Like, I've never understood that. Like, it didn't make sense in my brain.

[Guest or Co-host]

It's hard to be in school spaces that no one looks like you, but don't ever feel like you don't belong. Don't let that be the reason you don't do it.

[Emily Abadi]

And Olympic champs Gabby Thomas and Katie Ledecky.

[Olympic Athlete]

The ability to show a gold medal to someone and have their face light up and smile, that means the world to me. And that's what motivates me to win more gold medals at our level, at

this scale, like, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can. Like, I can. I can do anything.

[Emily Abadi]

Because resilience isn't just about winning. It's about showing up even when it's hard. Listen to Hurdle with Emily abadi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of

[Michelle McPhee]

iHeart Women's Sports, Jacob Kingston grew up in an isolated, polygamous sect.

[Gemma Spake]

We were God's chosen kingdom on earth.

[Michelle McPhee]

He felt destined for greatness. So when a swaggering Armenian businessman catapults Jacob into an extraordinary world. He doesn't look back.

[Narrator or Interviewee]

Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets meeting the president of Turkey.

[Michelle McPhee]

I'm Michelle McPhee, and this is one of the most shocking criminal conspiracies I've ever come across.

[Narrator or Interviewee]

When Jacob met Levon, this went to a billion dollar fraud.

[Michelle McPhee]

But with two kings from entirely different worlds, just how long can their empire survive?

[Gemma Spake]

The largest tax investigation in American history.

[Interviewee]

You need to tell me what you know. Is somebody coming after me?

[Narrator or Interviewee]

Jacob told Lavon. You're ruining my life.

[Michelle McPhee]

Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Superhuman Podcast Narrator]

Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque, others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year.

[Superhuman Podcast Participant]

Within probably 10 days, I put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth.

[Superhuman Podcast Narrator]

Listen to Superhuman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Gemma Spake]

Finally, if you really want to trick

the neurological mechanisms of your anxiety to

switch off for a few minutes, it's going to sound cliche, but any kind of specifically forward movement will literally trick

your brain into calming down.

Now, this idea is kind of borrowed

from principles of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy. Emdr. It's everywhere at the moment. It's highly effective. This is most effective for people who are experiencing ptsd.

However, the mechanism behind it is really

interesting and can also be applied at a more basic general level.

At a basic level, EMDR or this eye movement therapy, involves something as simple as walking forward, and it uses what

we call bilateral stimulation.

So essentially, when you walk forward, when

you do some kind of forward movement,

the rhythmic way that your brain tracks movement from side to side, and the optic flow that it experiences from stuff moving past you, going past you, gives you the psychological sense that you are overcoming something. So essentially, if your anxiety is all in your mind, like, actually, let me explain this differently. When your anxiety is actually fear based, so something is actually going wrong. When you're experiencing fear, your brain wants you to run away, wants you to fight, wants you to pursue some kind

of forward movement away over or through the problem.

So what it will want you to do is to run away. It will want you to fight, maybe it will want you to hide, but mainly it wants you to pursue some

kind of like, I Am leaving this

situation kind of movement when it knows

that you are experiencing that. When your brain feels that you are running away, feels that you were escaping,

it will slowly turn off some of

your anxiety because the anxiety or the

fear is no longer needed because it's already prompted you to do what you do or to do something that is

going to help you in that situation.

That is the. That is like the mechanism behind fear.

And when there is an actual threat, when we're experiencing anxiety and the threat

isn't real, we can still activate that

same natural, biological, psychological way of, of

activating calm by again, going outside and

walking, riding our bike, going to a

boxing class, stimulating that same optic flow, that same bilateral stimulation that would ordinarily

tell our brain that we are doing something about a fear stimulus, but is now telling our brain that we are doing something about this anxiety or this.

This thing that is triggering our anxiety. Literally. Walking is like the most simplest way of way to do this.

And I know it sounds silly to

be like, you're feeling anxious, go on a walk. But like, motion, direction, momentum stops you from just, like stewing in the fear neurologically, psychologically, and physically. If you are finding yourself stuck in an anxious spiral, one of the most underrated things you can do is to

simply get up and.

And walk.

Not on a treadmill outside, get up

and walk around your house, get up and do some kind of physical movement.

Same way that, like doing jumping jacks,

doing mountain climbers, any kind of physical movement calms down the body when we

are in a kind of like, anxious spiral.

Because it's just staying like, I'm doing something about it. Like, it's okay. You can calm down like you can. We can turn that off now because I'm listening. It's basically like I've listened to the

siren, turn off the siren. We are doing our escape protocol.

So these are just some of the

ways that we can take what we know about the neuroscientific principles and origins of anxiety and kind of twist them in our favor. I think anxiety makes it feel like our brain is not our friend and not our own.

And knowing these strategies or having these strategies teaches us how to play the

same game that our anxiety is playing back at our anxiety, or it's teaching

us how to learn the quirks and patterns and kind of idiosyncrasies of our

anxiety and to emulate them ourselves and kind of play them back. Like, it's definitely like a bit of a psyop.

Obviously, there are so many things that

we didn't mention here.

And there are so many ways or there's so many factors contributing to our

anxiety that have nothing to do with neuroscience and that have no neuroscientific basis at all. But I think if your main focus right now is gaining more of a scientific explanation and understanding of your anxiety, this is a really great place to start. Understanding the neurotransmitters, understanding your brain's attentional regulation systems, understanding the different parts of

your brain that are involved in basically creating anxiety creates distance. I know some people will be like,

well, that's just over intellectualizing. I know that some people will think

that this is an excuse for not feeling your feelings. I still think that it's good to feel anxious.

And like I said, it's a dangerous game to suppress or avoid your anxiety.

But I like, I still think it's very, very valuable. But at the end of the day, being able to say like, this feeling

is not one that I have complete ownership over.

Being able to reapply logic to our

anxiety when anxiety likes to remove all

logic is so, so helpful.

And I think it's why.

Yeah, I don't know. I just think that teaching the neuroscience

of anxiety is something that we should be doing more rather than just obsessing and only focusing on the emotional side

of it, on only focusing on the physical side of it, only focusing on

the social side of it.

Like, you cannot understand why you behave the way you do in certain social

situations, why you behave the way you

do in work situations or any number of situations.

If you don't understand, like the framework

and the pillars and the systems along

which your anxiety is kind of running and influencing your behavior. So I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I know it was a little bit ranty at times, it kind of all over the place, but it was when I get into the science, like, I, I get so into it.

[Guest or Co-host]

So.

[Gemma Spake]

But again, I really do hope that you enjoyed this episode. I hope that you learned something from

it and that, you know, it just

helped you understand you and your brain a little bit better as you go through an anxious moment or kind of a more anxious period of life.

So with that being said, I think

we're done for the day.

Be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very, very soon.

[Robert Smigel]

Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy not quite on Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week. My guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs. Banter.

[Acapella Group Member]

Where did your group perform?

[Gemma Spake]

We do some retirement homes.

[Robert Smigel]

Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shankar, a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast A Slight Change of Plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans.

I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change.

We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes.

[Podcast Announcer]

You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance, and then there's your body having its own program.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Listen to A Slight Change of plans on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sanjanah Bhasker or Tyler McCall]

Why are we all so obsessed with romance? On the Radio 831 podcast? Join us, Sanjanah Bhasker and Tyler McCall as we unpack all the trending tropes, buzzy adaptations, booktok drama and celebrity love stories with hot takes and sharp guests. Each episode digs into what these stories reveal about desire, fantasy, identity and how we love. Now Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Joey Dardano]

I'm Joey Dardano and on my new podcast, Hope From a Hypocrite, I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with thoughtful solutions.

[Gemma Spake]

Psych.

[Joey Dardano]

I'm a comedian. I'm not qualified to give good advice. Join me and my comedian friends as we riff, rant and recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to man. This is Help from a Hypocrite. The worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help from a Hypocrite Wednesdays on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Saigon Narrator]

This is Saigon, the story of my family and of the country that shaped us.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

From iheart Podcasts. Saigon. You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam, one city, a divided country and the war that tore America apart? This is for Vietnam.

[Vietnam Protester]

They're pouring petrol all over here.

Freedom for Vietnam.

There's a fire coming to this country and it's going to burn out everything.

[Dr. Maya Shankar]

Listen to Saigon on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Podcast Announcer]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.