--:-- Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to part two of the Anxiety Toolkit on the Mel Robbins podcast. Let's go.
--:-- [Intro music fades in and out]
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome. This is part two of an Anxiety Toolkit that I've created for you at zero cost. I'm thrilled that you're here. I'm Mel Robbins. I'm a New York Times bestselling author and one of the world's leading experts on change, motivation, and habits. And today we are joined by none other than Dr. Russell Kennedy. He is back. He is in the house waiting for you. Dr. Kennedy, welcome back.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Thank you, Mel Robbins.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Now you've got a free appointment today. So pull up a chair and get ready to change your life. Dr. Russell Kennedy is one of the world's leading experts on anxiety, childhood trauma, and nervous system regulation. And one of the things that I love about Dr. Kennedy is he's not only a medical doctor, he is a neuroscientist. How cool is that? And he also has lived with anxiety. So he brings both the medicine, the science, the research, and his own experience. And he's here to tell you something very loud and clear. You don't have to just live with anxiety. You don't have to cope with it because you can learn how to heal it. Isn't that right, Dr. Kennedy?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Now, before we jump into it, I just want to welcome you in case you're new, both to the Mel Robbins podcast or to the topic of anxiety. This is a conversation for all of us. Whether you're struggling with anxiety or you suddenly have a friend or a family member or one of your kids who is struggling, every single one of us is affected by this topic. And so this conversation today is going to change your life and it's going to improve your life because it will help you understand anxiety and you will leave with very simple, powerful, free tools that you can use to help yourself or people that you love face it and ultimately heal from it.
--:-- And in just a second, you're going to hear a question from a listener about anxiety and whether or not it's impacting your ability to sleep. But before we do that, I just want to make sure that in case you haven't heard part one, I give you just a couple quick points as we jump into this part two of the conversation.
--:-- Number one, Dr. Kennedy refers to anxiety as an alarm in your body. Number two, Dr. Kennedy's belief is that all anxiety is first triggered in your childhood, where you have a moment where you feel separate or unsafe, and your nervous system then signals that alarm. Because when you're little, you're not supposed to feel separate or unsafe. And what we're learning from Dr. Kennedy is that what happens is that as you become an adult, that alarm starts to signal more and more. Anytime you feel separate from a group or separate from your partner or separate from friends or anytime where you feel unsafe. And that's where anxiety comes from. Those moments of separation. That's what triggers the alarm.
--:-- All right, Dr. Kennedy, are you ready?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: I'm ready.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Awesome. Let's jump in with this question from Jason.
--:-- [Audio clip plays]
Jason: Hey, Mel, this is Jason. I always get anxious before I go to bed and then wake up in the middle of the night worrying about things. How do I stop myself from doing that? Thank you.
[Audio clip ends]
--:-- Mel Robbins: Let's first talk about what are some of the changes or simple things that Jason or anybody listening who gets anxious at night, what can they start doing? And what do we need to know about sleep and anxiety, Dr. Kennedy?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: So there's all sorts of physiological and psychological stuff that goes into sleep. The best thing to do is use a two-pronged approach. Two hours before, no work. And then one hour before, like no screens. And that's really important because our reticular activating system, which you've talked about before, which works in our brainstem, which is the lower part of our brain that controls our body, it wants to be active. And if you're zombie scrolling Instagram until the moment before you go to sleep, that reticular activating system is still going. So it will wake you up.
--:-- And the other thing about that particular question is, what was going to bed like for you as a child? Was it safe? For me, my mother works shift work. So sometimes my mother was out three to 11. She was a nurse. So sometimes my mother was gone, and I'm there with my crazy father. But he wasn't always crazy, but there were points where it was just a little touch and go there. So evenings for me can have that sort of sense as well.
--:-- So what was going on in your childhood? Not that everything is about childhood trauma. I really don't want to give that impression that everything is about it. But so much of chronic anxiety is unresolved fear and unresolved wounding. Can you find the child in you that had a difficult time going to bed? Or maybe you were a bedwetter. Maybe the image of that is still imprinted on your nervous system that it's not safe to sleep because when I sleep, I wet the bed and then all sorts of hell breaks loose in the morning.
--:-- So there's all sorts of physiological and psychological stuff that goes into sleep. And it's really important to be able to tease that out a little bit. I can give you generalities, like shut the computer off before you go to sleep and calm things down. Keep the lights low. Don't use blue light. All that kind of stuff. It's all important. But those are, again, coping mechanisms. If you really want to fix the problem at its root, find that place where it was uncomfortable for you to go to bed and see if you can find that place in you.
--:-- And again, not that everything is childhood trauma, but so much of it is and it is fixable. So if that's the underlying root cause, you're not going to fix it just by avoiding blue light, just by avoiding the computer, just by not working. The best thing to do is use a two-pronged approach.
--:-- I don't have anything against cognitive therapy. It's really important that we have an understanding of what's happening to us. But what's more important, and what often most therapy in North America specifically misses, is this incredible role of the body and old trauma that's stored in the body. It just virtually gets ignored by thinking that we can talk about our problems and having insight into them is going to fix them. And it doesn't.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That makes so much sense. I would love to ask you, Dr. Kennedy, for specific advice and a strategy for that moment when you wake up in the middle of the night, your thoughts are spinning, you're having trouble going back to sleep. What exactly should you do?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Am I safe in this moment? So we talked about this the last time you and I talked. So this is something that I've used for many, many years. So you wake up. We talked to Jason. So I want you to pretend Jason's here and let's coach Jason. So Jason, tonight, when you wake up in the middle of the night, if you do, these are the specific things I want you to do.
--:-- I want you to connect with that feeling in your body. Put your hand over it, breathe into it. And then ask yourself, am I safe in this moment? I know I'm freaked out. I know that there's something happening in a week or two weeks. I got to go to the dentist or I got to do this or I got to do that. But in this moment, in this moment right now where I'm lying in my bed, am I safe? And you go, yeah, I'm safe. And then feel it.
--:-- This is what I was saying before. You have to connect the feeling with the thinking. That's how we heal. That's how we create new neural pathways. We create the feeling, and the feeling will sear in the thinking. So when you say, am I safe in this moment? And you go, I am safe. Some people will say, I am safe in this moment, rather than making it a question.
--:-- And in the middle of the night, when your mind is going nuts, you can just say, I know, because anxiety is always about the future. It's always about the future. So if you bring yourself into the present moment, and one of the ways of doing that is with sensation. When you touch your own chest, when you take a deep breath, when you smell an essential oil, when you hum, when you sing, you're bringing yourself into the sensation of the present moment and you're removing that focus on the future or the past or the pain of the past.
--:-- When you bring yourself into the present moment, that's the fertile ground of healing. We don't heal when we're stuck in our trauma. We don't heal when we're stuck in our worries. We heal in the present moment sensation of our body. That's how we heal.
--:-- Now, the cognitive structures help. After I started regulating my body, it was like, oh, this is what it is. It all starts to make sense. The puzzle pieces start coming back into connection again. It's like, oh yeah, that's what I came about with. I didn't get enough attention as a child from my mother. So because my brother was sick with club feet or my dad was crazy, I made myself small. So now it's like, I got to be seen, but there's part of me that hates being seen. So it is this real dichotomy that I go back and forth of.
--:-- So now I accept that. I accept that that little boy in me needs the attention and I give it to them and I don't need it so much from the outside. And I think that's when you know you're starting to heal. You don't need so much attention from the outside and you are more connected in your relationships to other people.
--:-- Because when you're in this dissociated alarm state, you're in survival mode. And in survival mode, the social engagement system that all humans have is shut off. Eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, body language — it gets shut off when we're alarmed. So no wonder we don't want to go to a party. No wonder we have social anxiety. No wonder we can't connect with our spouse or our kids. Because evolutionarily, we are built when we're in alarm, that connection isn't what we're looking for. We're looking for safety.
--:-- So it's very hard to be warm and connected to your spouse or your kids when you're in alarm. And a lot of people feel so guilty about that. They question their relationship. Am I in the right relationship? You probably are, but you're just dissociated. So you can't love yourself, so you're not going to love another person. So your relationships are going to suffer. And as you quoted the Harvard study, relationships are the most important feature in recovering from any illness of any kind.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So is it normal for people to wake up in the middle of the night? Not every night, but why is that a normal thing? We've all had periods in our life, the dark night of the soul. But let me back you up a minute. In terms of people that wake up in the middle of the night, is that a symptom or a sign that you might have anxiety?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Oh yeah, absolutely. Your sympathetic nervous system isn't shutting off. You're not going into parasympathetic rest. And here's the reason for that. I see this a lot with my patients who had alcoholics as parents. Things would go along fine for a while, and then there'd be a massive blow up. And then there'd be this sort of rapprochement. The alcoholic would say, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. And then there would be this period of quiescence again, this quiet again, and then it'll blow up again.
--:-- So what a child's nervous system will do is it'll say, I'm not going to let myself relax because I know the shit's going to go down again. So I'm going to keep myself in this hypervigilant state, this sympathetic activated state. So when you're in that sympathetic activated state, you start thinking, it's safer for me to keep myself at this level of activation all the time. And then you can't sleep. You don't eat well. It just screws up your entire life when you can't move yourself into parasympathetic.
--:-- I remember a quick story that I'll tell you. I used to get massages. And sometimes I would walk out of her studio feeling so relaxed that I'll have a panic attack. Because when I was relaxed as a child, that was exactly the time I got smashed in the face by my dad. Not physically, but he would be going into depression or going into mania or going into psychosis. So there was this thing with me. It's like, don't get too happy. Don't let your guard down because this is all going to shit in the near future. And it could be like a year before he would have another episode, but I was always every day.
--:-- And that's a metaphor for a lot of us with anxiety. We keep ourselves in this hypervigilant state, thinking that we're protecting ourselves. Brene Brown talks about that too. She says we rehearse that thing in our mind, getting that call from the school that your child's been hurt or injured. We do that every day and it never happens. It doesn't prepare you for anything. No matter how often you practice that phone call from the school, you're still going to have to react to it.
--:-- And that's one of the reasons why people have such a hard time healing from anxiety. Because when I get people feeling better again, they don't trust it. It goes back to that place where when I felt safe as a kid, I got blindsided.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, you know, my personal experience is I became so good at talking about my anxiety and what happened to me and how it made me feel. And all of that was helpful so that I was aware of what happened. I was aware of what I was feeling and I was able to come up with ways to cope, whether that was yoga or taking anxiety medication, or it was getting into therapy. But I wasn't doing the work to truly heal the root cause of the anxiety. And it wasn't until I stopped talking about it and I got below the neck and started dealing with the uncomfortable feelings and the stored memories in my nervous system, which is very different than talking about how you feel.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: And how did that feel? When you felt like you were really getting at the root cause of it, how did that feel for you?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, it's liberating. And it's a paradigm shift. It is totally. I couldn't believe how quickly it happened. I have been attacking it in the wrong order. I have been attacking it first and only in my mind. And yes, you got to start with your mind so that you're aware. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding — oh, it's anxiety. But once you know what you're dealing with, get out of your head and get into your body.
--:-- And when I started to feel like, oh wait a minute, I'm not nuts in my mind. I have a nervous system that needs some support. And I got to be able to tolerate uncomfortable feelings and not have it escalate. And I got to learn how to soothe myself. And I got to learn how to be compassionate with myself. If I can do those things, I can ride the ups and downs of any feeling.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: I follow you on your podcast. You are doing exactly that. The cold plunges, all that kind of stuff. If you look at the way that sensation is transferred to the brain, the back part of the spinal cord, the spinothalamic tract, the group of wires that fire up to your brain, hold pain and temperature. Emotional pain and physical pain in the brain are handled by very similar structures.
--:-- So when you go into a cold plunge and you overwhelm that pain pathway, you're giving yourself a break. And then when you're going into this uncomfortable state, because going at your alarm, matching up with that child that's hurting, is painful. And then when you're in this cold plunge and you feel uncomfortable and you breathe through it, that's exactly what you need to do as far as feeling that alarm child in you. Because it's going to hurt. It's going to hurt.
--:-- And being able to have the resilience to be able to go, you know what, this hurts, but I'm going to stay with you — as talking to your child. This hurts us, but I'm going to stay with you. You and I will always be together. There is no way that I'm ever going to abandon you again because I know you're there now. I know you're there now. So now I will make sure that I will never, ever leave you.
--:-- Now, the child needs to hear that a number of times because you've been ignoring you — not you personally, but collectively. We ignore the child for decades. So it takes a while for the child to come around. But there is this sense that we're on the right track. And for the first time for me, when I started healing somatically and really being able to tolerate that pain, Bessel van der Kolk talks about that in *The Body Keeps the Score*. He says, we're not teaching people how to get rid of their anxiety — I call it alarm. We're not teaching how to get rid of the alarm. What we're doing is we're teaching you how to acclimatize to it so that when you feel that discomfort, you don't compulsively and relentlessly go into your head for a solution that you'll never find there.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Right. You need to go into your body where the alarm is. And you suggest putting your hand there. Stay there, even if it hurts. And just breathe through it. Just soothe yourself through that moment.
--:-- This feels like a good place to take a quick break and process what we just heard. And when we come back, we've got more of your questions and more in this incredible Anxiety Toolkit with Dr. Russell Kennedy. Stay with us.
--:-- [Break for sponsors]
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins, and this is the Anxiety Toolkit on the Mel Robbins podcast. And we are sitting here with the renowned Dr. Russell Kennedy. So let's just jump right back into it.
--:-- I want to try to connect the dots, particularly on this question about sleep, because we're getting so many questions from listeners who are having trouble sleeping.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Sure.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And you've said a couple things that I want to try to connect. So for those of you that are having trouble sleeping after the last three years and the unprecedented amount of uncertainty and change and separation that we've all experienced, if you're finding that you do have a lot of trouble sleeping, or you wake up all the time in the middle of the night, and you're just constantly worried about this stuff, what Dr. Kennedy has explained to you is that it goes back to this original alarm of feeling unsafe.
--:-- And that's why in the middle of the night, lying there, thinking about your bills, putting your hand wherever the tension is and saying, "I am safe" or asking, "Am I safe in this moment?" That's the first step because what you're teaching us, Dr. Kennedy, is you're teaching us how to start to repair the root cause of it, right? Am I getting this right?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yes, absolutely.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Is there anything else you would recommend? Because we get a lot of questions technically about sleep. Do I get out of bed? Do I lay in bed? How do I go back to sleep? And since it is absolutely tied to this alarm and the way that it makes the mind spin and the inability for so many of us to slow down, to trust that it's going to be okay, is there anything else that you would recommend that we do in that moment?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Well, breath. The physiological sigh will help. So two sniffs in and a long, slow exhale.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So did you get that everybody? It's two sniffs in, and then a long, slow exhale. What does that do?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Well, it starts to move you into parasympathetic very quickly. So it blocks that chain reaction of feeling-thought, feeling-thought, feeling-thought. As soon as you start moving your body into a parasympathetic state, your state will determine how you think. So the state of your body determines how your mind thinks.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That makes so much sense, Dr. Kennedy, the way that you just put it, that your state in your body then triggers how your mind thinks. And you know what? I just realized that since this is part two of the Anxiety Toolkit, in case you haven't listened to that yet, and you don't know what the term parasympathetic means, let me just give that definition really quickly again, Dr. Kennedy.
--:-- So what Dr. Kennedy has taught us is that you have two parts to your autonomic nervous system. There's the sympathetic, which you're going to hear us call alarm or fight or flight or freeze. And then you have the second part, the parasympathetic nervous system. That's the resting, relaxed, reset, calm state that you can be in. And Dr. Kennedy and I are kind of using a short form. We basically refer to the sympathetic, the fight or flight, as an alarm or feeling unsafe. And then we refer to the parasympathetic state as being relaxed, being in reset, being calm.
--:-- And Dr. Kennedy is teaching you how to recognize when you're in alarm. And now healing requires us to learn how to switch back into a relaxed state. And again, after this, you can go back to part one of this toolkit and listen and learn all about that.
--:-- But I think you've probably had that experience of being stressed out in your life, and then you get up from your desk and you go outside and you take a walk or you exercise and all of a sudden you feel better.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Well, yeah. After Warren's death, when Chris took you out to paddle ball, last thing you wanted to do, right?
--:-- Mel Robbins: You're so right about the fact that I didn't want to do anything. And if you don't know what Dr. Kennedy's referring to, basically one of my favorite uncles, my uncle Warnie, died very suddenly a couple of weeks ago. And on the day that I learned about his death, I went into an alarm state where I just kind of froze. I had this malaise come over me. I was so overwhelmed by the news. And my husband, Chris, and I had had this preexisting double date to go play paddle tennis here in Southern Vermont with some friends of ours. And I just didn't want to go. I was paralyzed.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Because there's a tremendous inertia to anxiety, alarm. There is this freeze state that we go into. We don't want to do that. But when you force yourself to get into a different state — and that's exactly what happened — you got into a different state in your body. And as that state changed, your thoughts changed.
--:-- So we worship the mind in this society, thinking the mind can fix everything, but it's more related to how your body feels. You will think exactly the way your body feels. And it's very difficult, like pushing a rock up a hill, when you're feeling anxious or depressed to go, "I'm happy, I'm happy, I'm happy" because you don't feel happy.
--:-- And you can change it. Like gratitude is one of those things that actually does start neurochemically changing the chemicals in your brain that allow you to start flipping the switch over to the other side. But you have to use it almost like five, four, three, two, one. Start gratitude first, and then five, four, three, two, one, go to paddle or go to the beach or go somewhere.
--:-- Because as you point out, the more we stay frozen, the more the brain thinks there's something dangerous. And we start secreting cortisol. We start secreting adrenaline. And it supports whatever we think. So if we think we're afraid, your brain will support you. It'll say, yes, you're afraid. If you lean into the balls of your feet and you go, "I'm going to go and ask that person to copy" or whatever, when you lean in there and you go at what scares you, your brain starts creating your own natural morphine. It starts creating dopamine. And it tells you you're on the right track. You're on the right track. And that changes your physiology.
--:-- So it's really this balance between physiology and psychology. But our physiology is so deep. It creates so much of an influence on our psychology that we're not even aware of. And that's my biggest point. Why aren't we in therapy paying attention to our physiology as much as our psychology?
--:-- Because if you look at it from a neuroscience point of view, there's the neocortex, the new brain that all humans have, that's basically the fantastic thinking, memory, all this kind of stuff. And then there's the deeper structures in our brain, the amygdala, the brainstem, that have no concept of words. Your body has no concept of words. Its language is feeling. And if the trauma is stored in your body and the body's language is feeling, you have to change that trauma with a feeling. Just changing your thinking won't do much. It will help you. It will help you cope, but it will not help you heal.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Can we get technical for just a minute?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Sure.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So when it comes to sensation and feeling, whether it's the pit in the stomach or the kind of getting tense in your chest, are you saying that all of that feeling in your nervous system channels up through the brainstem, which has no access to words?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And then it gets converted into some kind of explanation by the prefrontal cortex. And other parts too, memory parts too.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So it's like almost like a game of telephone.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Where your nervous system is feeling something and sending through the parts of the brain that have no language a message. And the prefrontal cortex is interpreting it as unsafe, danger. And you're saying that we have to learn how to deal with the sensation before the prefrontal cortex is allowed to make it mean something.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yes. Your mind is a compulsive, meaning-making, make-sense machine. So when it feels something in your body, it has to make sense of it. Especially the left hemisphere. Left hemisphere, analytical, verbal, literal — it has to make sense of it. So it makes sense of it with words that are typically pretty painful because they're consistent with the alarm feeling in your body.
--:-- If you're feeling great, if you're walking down the street, it's a sunny day, everything's going great, your thoughts are going to be pretty darn good. But if you're feeling anxious, if you're feeling alarmed and you've got a dentist appointment like a week later, you're going to fixate on that dentist appointment because it makes sense to your brain. It's like, we feel bad. What do we have to feel bad about? And then we do that stacking that I was talking about the last time we talked. We start stacking. So every negative thing in your life at that point — oh, my relationship is not going, oh, I've got taxes, I've got to do my account — all that stuff stacks on top of each other. So when it does that, it just keeps you in that negative state.
--:-- So it's really about, okay, I'm anxious. Like we were saying earlier. Okay, where is that in your body? Now you can start. When you start finding the anxiety, the alarm in your body, now you're starting actually to get the root cause. Because in your head, you will never solve it. You will always be caught in your head. You will never get out of your head. You always have to go to your body.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It's so true. You will never get out of your head.
--:-- Dr. Kennedy, we have another question. And it's from a listener named Lena. And it's about breaking the chain of anxiety. And here's a quick preview of it.
--:-- [Audio clip plays]
Lena: Hey Mel, my name is Lena. How can I break this generation cycle of anxiety and uneasiness and start healing?
[Audio clip ends]
--:-- Mel Robbins: Now, Dr. Kennedy, we have to take a quick break for our sponsors so you can think about her question. And when we come back, we will play Lena's full question. And then we're going to tackle whether or not anxiety is genetic and how you can spot it in your parents. Stay with us.
--:-- [Break for sponsors]
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. My name is Mel Robbins. I'm here with the renowned Dr. Russell Kennedy. This is part two of the Anxiety Toolkit, and we are jumping back in with a question from a listener named Lena.
--:-- [Audio clip plays]
Lena: Hey, Mel. My name is Lena. My father passed his anxiety to me and the rest of my siblings growing up. I'm trying to not let my children adopt being short-tempered and anxious like many people in my family are. How can I break this generation cycle of anxiety and uneasiness and start healing?
[Audio clip ends]
--:-- Mel Robbins: So how do you break this cycle of anxiety in a family?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Well, first you start breaking the cycle in yourself. So you start realizing that this anxiety I feel is actually this alarm in my body. I'm going to pay attention to that because that is my younger self.
--:-- And I have many, many people contact me and say, "Oh, my 15-year-old daughter is so anxious. Can you see her? Can you see her?" And it's like, no. What I'm going to do is I'm going to fix you first. It's like Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer. He doesn't fix the dog. He fixes the parent. So that's what I work on with people. As I work on the parent, I show the parent how to heal themselves. And then that energy just seems to translate into the children. They start saying, "Hey, mom, you seem more connected" because she is. She's not in that alarm state where she can actually give love and attention to her kids. So those kids can get filled up and feel safe. And then that gets handed down from generation to generation.
--:-- If your mother or father was anxious, which mine was — both my parents actually were quite anxious — you will start seeing that and almost be operantly conditioned to create that anxiety because you feel it in them. So a lot of the kids or people that refer their kids to me are because they are anxious themselves and they feel helpless and powerless to help themselves, let alone help their kids. And then they feel horrible that they've kind of transferred this anxiety gene, quote unquote, to their kids.
--:-- And it's really about heal yourself first, and then your kids will come along. Your kids will start feeling that. So for Lena, it would be, okay, how do we find your alarm? How do we start changing that pattern, that automatic pattern of negativity and irritability in you first?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: And then you're more available to your kids. And when you're more available to your kids, your kids don't feel so alarmed themselves and you start healing that whole generational cycle.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Anxiety in a family is not about the kids. It's about the adults.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And you help kids that have anxiety by addressing and healing the anxiety in the adults in that family.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: 99% of the time, yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So, Dr. Kennedy, is anxiety genetic?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: No. The short answer is no. There are mental illnesses, and I put that in quotation marks, that do seem to have a bit more of a genetic component to it, like schizophrenia and bipolar. But anxiety in and of itself is not genetic. We haven't really isolated anything that would say this is the anxiety gene or anything.
--:-- What I do think that we have genetically is a tendency to be sensitive. So if you are born sensitive, which everybody I see with anxiety, everybody I've ever consulted with, with anxiety is a sensitive person. You are a sensitive person. How do you know if you're a sensitive person? Well, because you feel everything. And then the other part about feeling everything as a sensitive person is to survive. You have to start shutting off your connection because it's just too much.
--:-- When you're born sensitive, you learn ways of protecting yourself because your home life doesn't give you the love and attention that you need. Now you could have good parents who are loving and caring, but just because we are more sensitive, we just need more love. I need more love than my brother. He's not as sensitive as I am. So your parents could have been fine in a way. But if you are sensitive and you need more love, if you don't get it, you have to start really giving that compassion, love and attention to yourself.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, it's like learning to feed yourself for crying out loud. Like it's that basic.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: It is.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What are signs of adult anxiety, particularly for that generation of our parents who never talked about this? Prozac was not even invented yet. That was not a generation of expressing feelings. That was the be seen and not heard generation. Shut up and pull up your big girl panties. I'll give you something to cry about.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. I'll give you something to cry about.
--:-- Mel Robbins: No, I'm dead serious because my mom recently said to me, you know, never even occurred to me that I had anxiety because maybe I didn't want to feel all that stuff. Maybe I'm afraid to go talk to a therapist and open that all up. Like we didn't talk about our feelings. Nobody was going to do anything about it anyway. And so it didn't occur to me until recently that, gosh, you know, my mom clearly had a lot of trauma in her childhood and felt invisible. And I've never looked at her and been like, the woman has anxiety. So what are the surprising signs that your parents may be dealing with anxiety?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Alcoholism. That's a big one because they didn't have the open dialogue that we have now. So it wasn't okay. You know, mental illness had a tremendous stigma and it still does. It still really does. So there's this resistance to actually admitting you have a problem because that child in you or in them that is loud and painful. It's easier in a way to just keep stuffing that child down because it's not talked about. I don't want to be different than anyone else. We just accept our nervous system as this is what we're stuck with. And this is the way it's going to go. It's been like this for 10 or 15 years.
--:-- I've seen so many people that say I've been in therapy for like 5, 10, 15 years. And yeah, I mean, I feel a little bit better, but I'm not really getting there. When you look at therapy costing $150 an hour, you know, it's pretty frustrating for people. It's pretty out of reach for people.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So alcoholism was one. What are the other signs?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Irritability. People, parents that are chronically irritable, not connected, just not feeling connected to a parent.
--:-- Mel Robbins: My mother is very warm and caring at points and very cold and distant at others. I think that's kind of like the British way in a lot of ways. And so for a child, it's like, hey, sometimes you're rubbing my back and we're feeling connected and other times you're cold as ice. So in a way, that's almost worse than being consistently one or the other. If she was consistently cold, I would learn how to protect myself from that. If she was consistently warm, I wouldn't need protection in the first place. So a lot of us kids had emotional dysregulation in our parents that we didn't recognize. So sometimes they'd be nice and connected and other times they'd be off the deep end. And I think irritability is one way of doing that.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Hypervigilance, hyperorganization, you know, these things that show up in our parents because they didn't have a way of expressing it. They didn't know, or they went to therapy. A lot of people go to therapy and they've been in there for five years and they feel terrible because it's like, it helped me at first. But now I'm just feeling just as bad as I always have. And I'm just spent, you know, $40,000 on 10 years of therapy. And it's because they're not addressing the root cause.
--:-- I think hypervigilance shows up. I think irritability, drug abuse. And I'm not talking like cocaine or whatever, it's prescription drugs, that kind of stuff that people need to kind of cope. Because like I said, when we go into survival mode, we become very inaccessible both to ourselves and to other people. And when we're warm and connected to ourselves, we can extend that out to other people.
--:-- A lot of people are more connected to their pets than they are to their spouse because they see their pet as safe. They don't see their spouse as safe because their spouse reflects some of the crimes of the parent in a way. So it's really very interesting to see how anxiety shows up, how childhood trauma shows up in people. And it's usually emotional dysregulation of some kind where they can't connect.
--:-- And another way of connecting that doesn't look like it is the people pleaser. The mom who's doing and making cookies for everybody and doing all this stuff and appears so connected because we're very good. Like anxious people are very smart. We know how to present an image that appears connected, but really isn't. But people can feel it. People can feel your authenticity when you're connected.
--:-- Mel Robbins: The point that really struck me there was somebody who is just so loving and kind with an animal and cold with other people.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. Because they didn't trust their parents. Their parents didn't establish that people are safe. My dad didn't establish that he was, even though my dad was really kind and loving and playful and great at many, many times. In fact, most of the time that I spent with him was good. But it's like when you get that one bad experience with a dog, it takes a thousand good experiences to kind of erase it a little bit. So it's really important. Again, our brains, we have a fear bias. We are evolutionarily programmed to focus on fear.
--:-- And another thing that I got from one of your podcasts recently is, and I said this a lot, is whatever you focus on, you get more of. So if you focus on your anxiety, you'll get more anxiety. If you focus on gratitude, you get more gratitude. It's basically what it comes down to.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I love that tool. Instead of focusing on anxiety, try to switch your focus to what you're grateful for. Let's switch gears and go to another question from a listener named Becky. How do we calm that anxiety and get it all to slow down? You get so anxious, you can't stop thinking about the worst that's going to happen. And sometimes it's not even realistic things, but you just get anxious and you can't get it to stop. What are some tools? We need those.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Go into your body. Get out of your head. You're not going to find a solution in your head. It's not there. You know, stop looking for peanut butter at the hardware store. You're not going to find it there. You're not going to find a solution in your head. But now, whatever you focus on, you get more of. So if you start focusing on your thoughts, of course, you're just going to get more thoughts. And that's just going to be an endless self-fulfilling cycle.
--:-- So consciously you have to realize what happens to me when I feel anxious, where do I feel this anxiety? And can I train myself to go, oh, there's that pain in my chest again. There's that pressure. There's that lump in my throat. That's a sign that I'm starting to go into alarm. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my body. And this is one of the other times where I get people to draw on the best times of their life. Change that feeling state.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Can I ask you a question real quick?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah, go ahead.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to go right to the moment that the thoughts are spiraling. And you realize you're trapped in this worst case loop. Should somebody do the psychological side or the physiological side?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Physiological side, exactly. Yes. Just do that to stop.
--:-- Mel Robbins: To start.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Okay. You got to break the cycle, right? So that's a great way of breaking the cycle.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Use the five second rule. Five, four, three, two, one to just stop the cycle?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Is there another one to stop that spinning of thoughts?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Breathing is probably the most effective.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: You know, we don't realize that we're in anxiety. We can sit in anxiety for hours and not realize that we're in it. So if you don't realize you're in it, you just feel it. You just feel this terrible feeling. You can't change it. So you develop this awareness. Okay. This is my alarm coming up. That's your first thing.
--:-- So at that point, five, four, three, two, one, get out of the house, put my shoes on, go to the gym, go somewhere, do something to break that cycle. Because if you don't break that cycle, you're going to sit there and ruminate and ruminate and ruminate. And rumination has tremendous inertia to it. Like once you start getting into negative thoughts, you don't feel like doing anything. It's like when Warren passed away and you didn't want to go anywhere. You don't want to do anything. Physiologically, we go into the vagus nerve shut down and that shuts us down. We need something outside of ourselves.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Five, four, three, two, one is awesome, by the way, because it just, it really, it's like, okay, after you've done it a bunch of times, you go, okay, you have to change your state. And one of the best ways of changing your state is changing your body. And one of the best ways of changing your body is starting to move.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yes. So, you know, I can sit there and I remember being in med school with the covers up to my chin, like I can't get into school today. And I always did, but it was like, you just wake up and you're in this panic. Like I can't get in there today. And I didn't have five, four, three, two, one back then, but it was just like, okay, I have to move. And giving myself a reward to move. Like, okay, I'm going to get a nice, cool glass of water. Now that wasn't appealing, but it was just something to break that cycle. Because if you don't break that cycle of rumination, it will just run roughshod over you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What is it like to live without anxiety? And the reason why I ask this question is I think so many of us have lived in an alarm state for so long. We don't know what it's like to be able to turn it off. So what is available to everybody if they start to do the work in their bodies?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: A direct access to a repeatable process where you can find peace. Maybe not right away. Maybe it takes you five minutes. Maybe it takes you 10 minutes. But at least you're on the right track. At least you're not, you know, I used to feel like I was a bubble in an ocean because wherever the ocean went, wherever my emotion went, I was taken with it.
--:-- And the thing about starting to find that peace in your body is you kind of go down below the surface of the waves and you kind of look up. This is the image that I get anyway. I look up and I can kind of see that hazy blue when you're under the water and you're looking up, I can see the waves there. And you can create this sense of separateness, ironically, from the alarm, where this isn't all of me. Because when you were a child, it was all of you. Like when you were in your trauma as a child, there was no way out. There wasn't, you'd look everywhere and there was no way out.
--:-- But as an adult, you can look and you can start seeing, you know what? I feel you alarm. Like I feel you there. And I know that you're my younger self. But I can see that there is a sense of separateness there that I don't have to completely be taken over by this. Now at the same time, the paradox is that alarm is your younger self. So you want to be attached to it. So can you see the alarm with this sense of curiosity? Because when you look at something with curiosity, you take a lot of the emotion out of it. That's really interesting that I've got this sense of alarm in my solar plexus, that it feels heavy and sharp and purple. Wow, that's really interesting.
--:-- Because when you look at it with curiosity, you're changing your psychological mindset towards it. And when you start changing it in any way, it starts making that cycle easier to break. So when you get caught in rumination and thought, you can start going into your body, even if it hurts initially, because you are on the right track and your ventral tegmental area, the part of your brain that secretes dopamine, will start telling you you're on the right track.
--:-- And I think that's when we start healing. We start to get this sense of power over the alarm because we have been prisoners of it for so long. And in a way, we are prisoners of our younger child. If we don't pay attention to them, they will make us miserable together. So when you start paying attention to that and you start knowing, hey, I'm on the right track, dopamine starts going in your brain. When you're on the right track with something, you get all these feel good chemicals. And then you have a sense that you are no longer this passive bubble in the ocean anymore. You have something that you can tap into that's in all of us.
--:-- This power, and we see this a lot with people that have had spontaneous remissions from cancers and from horrible diseases. They feel this power in them that they didn't know was there, but they just feel it. They just feel that power. And I think what happens when we have trauma as children is we lose faith in that power. We lose sight of that power. So when you connect with your younger self again, you can have access to that power that's in all of us. And you get into that state. And when you start healing from anxiety and you start realizing, hey, it is actually safe to feel safe, there's a tremendous feeling of rush of, man, I suffered from this for so long. Why did I wait so long to do this?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, I know for me personally, it happened a lot faster than I expected it to. And the experience for me is emotional peace. Like there's a level of steadiness. There's a calmness, confidence, like it's all available to you. But most adults are incapable of handling the feelings and the sensations that are rising up in their bodies, which is why they act in ways that feel very toxic or abusive or confusing. And it's why we do that and then regret it.
--:-- And the whole solution to all of this is this three-layered approach we've been talking about today. First, you got to become aware that you have this alarm that it's getting triggered in your adult life and that there's stuff that went down when you were a kid that needs your attention and needs your healing. And then there is the coping with it. Therapy is amazing if you can afford it. And all the modalities are incredible and help you to cope and breathing and meditation and yoga and walks in the woods and lots of things that both Dr. Kennedy and I recommend. And it will help you cope and it will help the anxiety dissipate. But if you really want to dismantle the alarm, you got to go a layer deeper, which is in your body, finding the source of the alarm, repairing yourself and that little person inside of you that felt alarmed, and then taking care of yourself by staying in your body and becoming aware of when the alarm goes off.
--:-- It's remarkably powerful what you're talking about, Dr. Kennedy. And I think that you really hit the nail on the head. I mean, there's superficial things we can do, the physiological sigh, breath work, grounding, just feeling your butt in the chair, feeling your feet on the ground. Like there is something psychologically about being grounded. It does help us for sure. Touch, touching yourself, touching other people. Temperature, feeling, going through those extremes of temperature, cold, heat, whatever.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Temperature is one of those ways that we can access the deeper structures in our brain too. Smell, if you have an essential oil that you love, like lavender or chamomile, carry it with you if you're struggling. Smell is one of those things that it's the only sense that doesn't get processed by the thalamus. The thalamus is kind of like this central switchboard of the brain. Smell goes right into our emotional brain. So if you have something that smells good, it will change your state right away.
--:-- There is this thing also about moving your eyes back and forth, side to side, sort of the basis of EMDR. And it does show that if you move your eyes back and forth, back and forth, not up and down, but back and forth, it does decrease the activity in the amygdala.
--:-- Now, all those things are coping strategies. To heal, you've got to find the alarm. You've got to find the trauma. You've got to find your younger self. You have to have faith in yourself. Because I think it's trauma. When we get traumatized as children, we lose faith in the world. And when we lose faith in the world, we start believing everything is up to me. And if you're a seven-year-old and you think everything's up to you, life's going to be very anxious. You're not.
--:-- And finding that power inside of you, there's this power inside all of us that we lose with trauma. It's finding that again. It's really important. Having gratitude for the pain, having gratitude for the alarm because that's your conduit to your healing is that alarm. So as much as you bemoan having it, it's actually a beacon to your younger self. Be grateful for that sense of alarm because you have a pathway now to find that child.
--:-- And play. It's so important to adopt play because when you play, you start changing that autonomic nervous system and that autonomic nervous system runs your life. So the more you can play, the more you can regulate that autonomic nervous system, that sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system, the easier life is going to be, the more connected you're going to be to yourself and maybe more importantly to others, because we need others because loneliness is killing us. Separation is killing us.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Give me your top three recommendations for play that you give to your patients.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Well, I often ask people like what did you do when you were a teenager? Some people say I rode my bike, I played chess, I did this. So things that you liked when you were a kid, chances are you'll still like now. So there's no sort of global thing that I suggest to people. Ideally it would be something that's fun that doesn't really have a winner and a loser kind of thing. And Gordon Neufeld, who's my sort of mentor in developmental psychology, talks about that with kids. It's so important to have play just for play's sake. There is no winner. There is no loser.
--:-- And one of the things that I really recommend for parents is playing around the dinner table with facial expressions. Like, how am I feeling when I make this face? How am I feeling? Because then you're actually maturing their social engagement system. You're maturing the part of their brain, facial expression, body language, eye contact. You're improving the part of their brain that allows them to soothe others and soothe themselves. So it's important to do this in a playful way. And that's really, once we start really adopting play in our day-to-day life, then we start regulating our nervous system in a way that you don't have to academically go back and find the trauma.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Amazing. Dr. Kennedy, anything else?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: I think it's really being compassionate for yourself. I have this process called ABC. So A is awareness, as you say, be aware what anxiety or alarm feels like in your body. B is for body and breath. So go into your body, go into your breath. Physiological sigh is great. Getting grounded in your body. And then C is compassionate connection for yourself. And specifically that younger version of yourself. So if you do that each time that you have anxiety or alarm, you will start training your nervous system to focus on something that will heal you, instead of focusing on your thoughts, which are only going to make you worse.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Dr. Kennedy, you are such a gift. Thank you for giving us so much time and so many tactics and just pouring into us. And one thing I wanted to just say is that when we were talking about the younger self, I had this image of my husband. He tells the story about how he had asked somebody, had forgotten his mitt and it was a game day. So he had to book it home because nobody was at the game. He gets home and here he is in his baseball uniform and he can't get in the house. Nobody's left it on lock form. So he has to go around the side of the house and climb up this trellis so he can get onto the balcony outside of his parents' bedroom. And the trellis is full of bees because the trellis is covered with flowers. So he's climbing up this thing and he's getting stung. Then he gets onto the porch on the second floor and he goes up to the French doors in his parents' bedroom and he goes to open them up and they're locked. So he ends up punching through one of the panes of glass and cutting his hand and then dripping blood across the hardwood floors that had just been refinished as he's walking in his cleats.
--:-- And I have this image of him because there's a particular image of him in this blue and white baseball uniform. He's probably in the fourth grade. He's got kind of long blonde curls. And it's very useful to me to look at the man I've been married to for 26 years in those moments where I get really pissed off or irritated or annoyed and visualize that kid in the baseball uniform just trying to do his best and feeling like nobody's there to support him. That was really helpful. I think that's really going to help me show up.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: I recommend that for couples to have a picture of your partner when they were like seven, eight or nine around the house. And then when they start going off for what you think is a seemingly trivial matter, look at that picture because that's who you're dealing with.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I feel bad for Chris because I know he was a latchkey kid and didn't feel supported. So that must have been a very difficult situation for him because I think he would learn to be overly self-reliant.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yes. When you're overly self-reliant, you don't allow love in. You become an alpha child, what I call an alpha child. And you think that everything is up to you. And again, if you're a child and you think everything is up to you, and because you're a child you don't have the ability to deal with this stuff, it's going to be tremendously alarming. And then it's going to stick in your body.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow, there is so much more. We're going to talk about every three months now. We'll have a check-in. I'll write your prescription. I will see you again in three months. Please do. Love you, Mel. You're amazing.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: You're amazing, Dr. Kennedy. Thank you so much for being here.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And for helping us bring everybody all of these tools and resources at zero cost. I also want to highlight something else that's available to you. In addition to all of the resources in the show notes, I just launched a free three-part training that is video-based. It has a workbook. I do this every single spring for all of our followers online. And now for you, our podcast listeners, this one is called Take Control with Mel Robbins. More than a quarter of a million people have signed up from around the world. We have people represented from over 200 countries in this training. You're going to love it. And it will help you step by step by step apply not only what you just learned from Dr. Kennedy, but it will go even deeper into helping you figure out your next move and simple science backed mindset tools that you can use to start moving forward on them. Again, you can find that at Take Control with Mel Robbins, which is melrobbins.com slash take control or just check the link in the show notes.
--:-- Dr. Kennedy, thank you.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Absolutely.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing this. This is one of those toolkit episodes that I know is going to just explode online. And please share this with people. If you don't know how to explain what your anxiety feels like, this podcast episode can be that surrogate to help other people in your life understand what you're feeling and going through and to better support you. If you've got somebody that's really struggling that won't listen to you, maybe they'll listen to Dr. Kennedy. Send them this toolkit. When you do that, you are part of a wave of positive change around the world and you have no idea how just one podcast episode can change the trajectory of somebody's life. So thank you in advance for sharing this generously. Thank you for being here and spending your time with me.
--:-- And in case nobody else tells you, I want to tell you that I love you. I believe in you. And I do this because I not only believe in your ability to create a better life, I know you can do it. And I know you deserve to. And I hope every time you listen to one of these episodes and you do something with it, you start to believe it too. Alrighty. I'll see you in a few days.
--:-- Oh, one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.
