--:-- Mel Robbins: Hey, it's Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay, so today's episode is freaking fire. And speaking of fire, I got to throw some amazing celebratory fire in your direction. I got to say thank you. Thank you so much for listening, for sharing these episodes, for being as excited as I am about this thing. I started this because I just wanted to connect with you on a deeper level. And I wanted to be able for us to inspire and empower each other to create better lives. And baby, we are doing it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I also want to say thank you for being a force for good. I love the fact that you're already pouring in topic and guest suggestions. Please keep them coming because we are going to create this thing together. We are looking at the DMs. We're looking at the stuff that you're leaving on the forums on the website. This is something we are building together and it is just incredible. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. So today's episode, hello, game changer. This is fire people. So what are we talking about? Anxiety. Yep. We got to talk about anxiety. My mission with this episode of the Mel Robbins podcast is to profoundly, fundamentally change the way you think about and approach anxiety. By the end of this episode, you will be empowered to do way more than just survive your anxiety or try to cope with it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: In just a few minutes, you are going to meet an incredible expert on the topic. His name is Dr. Russ Kennedy. He's a medical doctor. He has a degree in neuroscience. And in my opinion, he has written the book on anxiety. And so he's going to come on and we're going to talk all about the topic. We're going to change the way that you think about it, that you approach it. And more importantly, Dr. Kennedy says you can heal your anxiety once and for all. Yeah, sure. You're going to have moments where anxiety rises up and you're going to have stressful situations. But in terms of the ongoing overwhelm, nervousness, on-edge feeling, he's gonna teach you how to heal that. His work is life-changing and it has made a huge difference in my life and I cannot wait for you to meet him in a few minutes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Now, the interesting thing about anxiety is that I am considered one of the world's leading experts on anxiety. And I'm what you call a life-tested expert because my expertise has been earned the hard way, the painful way. And that is by living through and struggling with anxiety for almost 45 years. The truth is, when I really think about my past, I don't ever remember a time when I wasn't nervous or feeling on edge or anxious or somewhere other than the room that I was currently standing in. I think if you could come out of the womb as a baby having a panic attack, that was Mel Robbins. And that panic that I was hardwired with in my nervous system, it only grew as I got older.
--:-- Mel Robbins: In fact, you know how you go to those little camps when you're little, like with the Y, or maybe you go to Girl Scout camp? There is this really infamous story about me in sixth grade. So in sixth grade at North Muskegon Elementary School, there's this huge crescendo at the end of the year. And the entire sixth grade takes over the Boy Scout and Girl Scout camp that's like 10 miles away. And everybody goes to camp for five days and four nights. And it is supposed to be the most amazing thing that happens during elementary school. Everybody talks about going to sixth grade camp.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Here's the thing about Mel. I was so riddled with anxiety and panic while I was there that I called my parents every single day and begged for them to come and get me. I was so out of control that the counselors actually acquiesced and said I could go home. Now, I want you to stop and think about that. Do you know how anxious you have to be to get trained counselors to basically go, "This kid is out of control. We can't handle this. We got to get her out of here. Get her parents to come pick her up. I can't deal with this." And so I got what my anxiety wanted. I got to leave.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And as I was packing up my cabin, my friends came in. They're like, "Where are you going, Mel? Tonight's a big scavenger hunt. It's the last night. Why are you leaving?" I lied to them and said, "Oh, my grandmother's had a heart attack. So my parents are coming. We got to go. We got to go see her." Yep. That was sixth grade Mel, full of anxiety.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And it only got worse as I got older. In fact, before every track meet or tennis match that I had to play as a varsity athlete, I had such a nervous stomach. That was the term that was used back in the early 80s. "She has a nervous stomach." Well, you know how I dealt with my nervous stomach? I would stand behind a bush next to the tennis courts. And I would have this blue bottle packed in my backpack. It was a blue bottle of Mylanta. This is an antacid medicine that old people drink for reflux. I would chug that stuff. It got so bad that my parents would start buying that stuff by the case. It was disgusting and chalky, but I chugged it anyway. Honestly, I can't believe I'm admitting this to you right now.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And here's the thing, it only got worse. I mean, little elementary school anxiety Mel turned into high school anxiety Mel. And then of course I was college train wreck, anxiety Mel. I don't even want to admit half the things I did in college when I was anxious, like jumping from one relationship to another or waking up every single morning with a hangxiety full of regrets about the night before. When I started to think about, "Oh my God, I feel like I need Mylanta right now. My stomach is starting to be like..." And I laugh about it. But honestly, at the time, it's sad. I just didn't enjoy college. I don't even like to go to college reunions because I did not like the person that I was back then as my anxiety was just raging out of control.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, when I got to law school, thankfully, the anxiety got so unbearable that I got medical help and I was finally diagnosed with anxiety. And this would have been in the early 90s. And so anxiety was not a word that people threw around casually back then. I mean, anxiety meant there was something terribly wrong with you. People didn't talk about it. If you went to therapy, you were a freak. And so thankfully for me, though, this diagnosis, it was a godsend because I finally had a word and a doctor validating what I had been struggling with for my entire life for 20 years. He prescribed Zoloft. It was a complete game changer for me. It's almost like that medication acted like a ladder. You see the anxiety and all the mental spiraling that it caused, that spiraling put me in a very deep hole mentally, physically, and spiritually. And that Zoloft was like a little ladder that allowed me rung by rung to start to climb out of that hole and do the work that you need to do to start to take control of your life.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So I took Zoloft for 20 years. In fact, the only time I didn't take Zoloft was when our first daughter, Sawyer, she's now 23 years old. So when she was born, I had been off Zoloft. I had to taper off of it because we didn't know if you could breastfeed or whatever on that medication. They know now it's safe to breastfeed with it. But when she was born, I had such severe postpartum depression, the really scary kind, where you couldn't be left alone, because the doctors were afraid you were going to hurt yourself, or you're going to hurt your baby. It was a terrifying eight week experience in my life.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And so I'm telling you, between the 45 years of dealing with my own anxiety, and on top of it, Chris and I having kids that have had anxiety that at times were so severe that they slept on the floor of our bedroom. I just always thought, "Okay, I have anxiety. That's the way that it is. It's just the way that I'm wired. I hate it. I hate having anxiety, but I just have to learn to live with it." I was wrong. You do not have to hate anxiety and you do not have to just learn to live with it. You can learn how to understand it. And you can learn simple things that will help you take control of it and change how you respond to moments of uncertainty and moments of stress.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And so in my early 40s, the anxiety got so crippling again, because there were a lot of things going on in our life that were triggering it, that every single morning, the alarm would go off and I would lay in bed for an hour and I would just stare at the ceiling. And the anxiety, it's almost like it felt like a gravity blanket pinning me to that bed. And as I would lay in that bed and think about all my problems, time would tick by. The kids would miss the bus. I became a person I didn't even recognize. Now I go into this story in great detail in episode three of the Mel Robbins podcast called "Motivation is Garbage." But I want to just tell you that I know what it's like when anxiety is ruining or running your life.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Because when anxiety was at its worst for me, I created this thing called the five second rule. And it was out of sheer desperation and fear that I created this thing. What is it? It's a brain hack. And if you ever feel overwhelmed by anxious thoughts or anxious feelings, just count backwards, five, four, three, two, one, and you can interrupt those thoughts and feelings and then physically move. And ever since I invented this thing, I've been teaching the five second rule on stages around the world and it has changed the lives of millions of people.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Now, here's one of the things I wanna distinguish before we bring Dr. Kennedy on in just a second. A lot of the tools that I am known for and that I teach and the things that I've been researching that help with anxiety, that help with mindset, that help with mental health. I call these tools a neck up approach because they attack your mindset. They focus on your thoughts. They help you change the patterns of thought in your mind and the default thinking and the self-criticism and the worry and the procrastination and the perfectionism that can take hold.
--:-- Mel Robbins: On today's episode though, we're gonna go in a different direction. We're going to talk about a whole body of tools that you need that I would classify as a neck down approach to anxiety. We are going to focus on the body. We're going to focus on your nervous system. We're going to focus on thinking about anxiety as something happening in your body first. Because the fact is that if you only attack from the neck up with talk therapy or using my tools, yeah, it's gonna help. Yes, they are an essential part of the toolkit that you need for coping. And yes, it will make a huge difference. But what Dr. Kennedy is going to explain to you today is a game changer because he's gonna teach you that you can actually heal your anxiety, but you have to attack it from the neck down. You have to stop running away from the anxiety and address what's going on in your body. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about today. And we're also going to talk about how the heck do you do this? This is going to be packed with takeaways because I'm going to just make sure that it is.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So Dr. Kennedy, he is the bestselling author of the book, *Anxiety Rx*. His work is changing the lives of people around the world. He is helping people heal their anxiety in his clinical practice. And you're going to want to bookmark this episode because you're going to learn so many takeaways that you're going to absolutely want to come back to this again and again. And you definitely are going to want to share this with your friends and family. In fact, you'll be trying his tools as you listen to this episode. He has a degree in neuroscience. He's a medical doctor. And perhaps most importantly, like me and maybe you, he struggled with anxiety for decades. But using what you're about to learn in this episode, he has cured himself. So let's get him on the line.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So Dr. Kennedy, I've been following you for a long time online. I love your work and I'm so thrilled to be talking to you and to be able to introduce you to everybody. So on the topic of anxiety, where do you want to start?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Well, first of all, I think people have anxiety wrong. Really, anxiety of the mind is really a state of alarm that's stuck in our body. And that alarm is usually from childhood, usually from unresolved traumas that we had that our parents or caregivers didn't shepherd us through. So it's this old state of alarm that's actually stuck in our body that revs up the thoughts. So it's not really a thinking process. It's more of a feeling process. And we have to fix anxiety by fixing the feeling, not necessarily focusing on the thinking.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, that sounds like what traditional medicine and interventions have gotten wrong, that we focused all the attention on thinking, which can help. But actually, in order to heal and get it completely under control, you got to focus on the body. So tell me about your background, though, because you first realized you had anxiety when you were in medical school.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah, I mean, I think I felt uneasy before that. I mean, I grew up with a dad who was schizophrenic and bipolar. So my childhood was pretty chaotic. He was never abusive or violent or anything like that. But there was a point where I really kind of stopped trusting him. So it created a tremendous amount of alarm in my system. And so I became a rescuer. I kind of rescued my mom with humor. I rescued my dad in a lot of ways by looking after him from the time I was about 13 years old. So really for me, I've been a rescuer most of my life. So it was just a natural state of events that I would go in and become a doctor.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: And so I did my pre-med in neuroscience because I love neuroscience. And I focused my practice a lot in anxiety. And then I went and did a lot of extra work in developmental psychology, because I believe most anxiety, most mental illness, if you will, starts in childhood. So I really learned about how the brain develops, how 80% of our brain develops by the time we're five years old, and how different aspects of trauma in a child manifests as alarm in the adult, because that allows me to try to track back, find that alarm, bring it up to the surface, and you got to feel it to heal it. So bring it up to the surface and then allow people to process through it rather than just fix your thinking.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. I just want to stop and make sure that everybody heard takeaway number one. The sentence you just said was really interesting. You said your approach to dealing with this alarm is to bring it to the surface and then allow people to process through it rather than just fix your thinking. And so the big takeaway that I've gotten already in this conversation is this, that most anxiety and most mental illness starts in our childhood. And that's due to the fact that 80% of our brains develop by the time we're five. And your work, Dr. Kennedy, is helping us as adults to connect the adult anxiety that we're feeling now to all those experiences that we had, like even before we were five years old, like experiences of early childhood that are stored in our body. That's my huge takeaway: that anxiety, mental illness, it begins in childhood.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So before we talk about how you heal the alarm in the body, can we just back up for a minute? Because you were diagnosed with anxiety when you were in medical school and you have been on this long journey of focusing on what I kind of call the neck up approach, attacking the thoughts. You've done tons of modalities that have led you to where you are now. So for the benefit of everybody listening, can you please explain everything that you have done to come up with this approach?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. Psychotherapy, CBT, ACT, LMNOP, whatever. There's just so many things. I spent probably hundreds of thousands of dollars on therapy. And then I went, I did ayahuasca, LSD, MDMA, all those kinds of things to really help me understand what my mind was doing. I became a yoga and meditation teacher. So I got certified in that. And I tried, and I lived in a temple in India. Like I tried to see anxiety from more perspectives, basically, than anyone else in the world. And then I took all that information and I kind of chopped it down into what do people need to know and how do they heal?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Because what we're doing now is we're trying to fix thinking with more thinking. We're trying to change the thoughts. And you have to do both. You have to have some sort of thought-changing ability. But you have to also include the body as well. And I think what most therapies miss is this link with the body. The body has tremendous amounts of wisdom in it. And if we can bring the body up, because the body will never lie to you, but your mind lies to you all the time. So we need both. We need cognitive therapy, but we also need some somatic therapy. And I think on some level too, the psychedelics are going to play a big role in getting us past this protective ego that allows us to go into our trauma so we can feel it, so we can heal it. So I think the big thing is realizing that anxiety, what you're calling anxiety in your mind, is really a state of alarm in your body. And that's really it. So we have to heal it from your body.
--:-- Mel Robbins: When a patient comes to you, how do you describe what anxiety is?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Well, usually they come to me with anxiety already. So I'll go into, "What are you feeling? What's going on? What happens to you?" And usually, almost universally, they'll describe a thinking process. "My husband's driving me nuts. I can't drive. I can't go past this. I can't go into grocery stores. I can't go on the bus." And usually what I'll say is, "That's all in your head. That's all the story that your analytical left hemisphere is making up. Now, what do you feel in your body, in your physiology, when you say you feel anxiety?" And the first thing I can get people to do is say, "I'm going to change the word anxiety to alarm," because words have consciousness to them. Anxiety doesn't have a lot of consciousness to it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I agree. And I feel like it's thrown around all the time. And we think that anxiety is like a nervous stomach and a lot of worry in your head about what's going to happen. And I love that you're saying that we want to start talking about the alarm that goes off in your body. And before we even talk about what that means, one other thing that I would love for you to address is what are ways in which anxiety expresses itself? And I'm gonna give you an example.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So I'm your classic textbook type A, hypervigilant, always worried, anxiety type. Panic attacks, shortness of breath. You can literally feel the alarm vibrating through my skin. But our daughter, who is 23, when she's feeling anxious or the alarm is going off in her body, she doesn't emit worry or tension. She emits frustration and anger. So what are the various ways in which anxiety gets expressed in people? Because I think there's a lot of people that struggle with anxiety, that don't realize that it's anxiety that they're struggling with.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah, well, I think what happens is that her autonomic nervous system kind of goes into a sympathetic, fight or flight response. And for her, the only acceptable response inside of her is frustration or anger, because that's how it gets expressed. Now, other people will shut down, they'll go into freeze. The sympathetic nervous system is fight, flight, and freeze, and fawn too, but freeze mostly in that particular situation. So some people will go into this withdrawal, they'll stop moving, their eye contact disappears, their body stops moving in a fluid kind of way. And people display anxiety or alarm, as I should say, in very different ways.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: And I think it's really about becoming aware of it. I have many people that send me messages saying, "I didn't even know I had anxiety until I read your book." It's like, well, I don't know if I'm doing you any favors there, but it really does manifest. When I was 20, I didn't know what anxiety was. I just knew that I had this impending doom, this sense of impending doom. And I didn't even know what it was. And I don't think a lot of people do.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I agree with you. So let's go back to the basics. Anxiety 101. When you say, "We're going to now talk about anxiety as an alarm system in your body," describe the alarm system to me.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Okay. So there's a structure in our brain. It's called the amygdala. And the amygdala is often called the fear center of the brain. It's an okay description, but it's not the best. But basically, the amygdala is involved in just about every fear reaction that we have. So the amygdala will recognize something in your external environment or your internal environment, aka worries, that alarms it. So the amygdala has a superhighway down to the brainstem which controls your body. So your blood pressure increases, your heart rate increases, your respiration increases. Everything seems to go along with that. So we get this physiological change motivated mostly by the amygdala, but other factors in the brain as well. And that brings us into this state of alarm.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: And then what the left hemisphere does is it goes, "We're alarmed. What do we have to be alarmed about?" And then you start stacking. And I've heard you say this, I think it was in the five second rule, about "I got to get up, this is bad, that's bad," all this kind of stuff. That's what I call stacking. So as soon as your body feels the sense of alarm, your left hemisphere has to do something with it. So it has to make up worries and thoughts that are completely consistent with that painful sense of alarm in your system. So we start stacking up these worries. And of course, that just creates more alarm, which creates more worries, which creates more alarm, and we get caught in this alarm-anxiety cycle.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So let me see if I can unpack this, Dr. Kennedy. When I talk about anxiety, I use these two examples, and they're really, really helpful. So I want to bring them into the conversation to help people understand the concept that you feel an alarm first, and then that your mind stacks thoughts on top of it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So there's a big difference, everybody, between situational anxiety, which is when that alarm in your body is triggered by a specific thing that's happening around you. That's different than generalized anxiety. Generalized anxiety is when that alarm is going off all the time in the background.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So situational anxiety, here's an example, because it's very useful and helpful and lifesaving to have situational anxiety. Let's say you and I are driving down the road. We're having a great time. We're heading somewhere awesome for dinner, talking up a storm. And out of nowhere, oh my God, this truck comes swerving into our lane. What do you feel? Well, holy cow, that alarm system waves through your body and it needs to because it's got to wake you up. You can't be talking to me while you're driving the car and a truck is flying. You got to react. And the second that that alarm goes off in your body and your heart races and your armpits sweat and you go like this, your mind wakes up and then your mind starts stacking thoughts. Literally, we're talking nanoseconds. It is what's going on. "Truck, move, swerve, boom, bah, bee, bah." It is just looking for thoughts related to what's happening to explain this alarm and what you should do in reaction to it. Amazing. That alarm system just saved your life because it stopped you from talking to me and it made your brain sit up and pay attention so that you could react to what was happening.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Right. Now, here's what's interesting about situational anxiety. Let's go back to that same moment. The truck is now pulled back into its lane. We have safely pulled back into ours. We've nervously laughed at one another. And now that the situation is over, so is the alarm. Your body starts to rest. Your mind is no longer spinning. We go back to our conversation, all is well. That's why situational anxiety is a good thing. It can make you perform better. It helps you concentrate.
--:-- Mel Robbins: But now, Dr. Kennedy, I want to talk about this example. And please, when I'm done explaining it, let me know if this is right. Generalized anxiety is horrible because basically you have that same feeling of the alarm that you feel when the truck is pulling into your lane, only you're just in your day-to-day life. So I remember once I was standing making coffee in my kitchen and all of a sudden I felt this enormous wave of anxiety. And just like the example of the truck, the second that that alarm goes off, your mind snaps into attention and starts stacking thoughts. But here was my problem. There was nothing wrong. And so as my mind snapped to attention and started to stack thoughts, because there was nothing in the kitchen that made any sense as to why I'd have an alarm, it turned it back at me. "Something's wrong. Someone's mad at you. Today's going to be terrible. You really screwed something up. This is terrible. Maybe you're sick. Maybe you're going to have a heart attack. Maybe something's wrong with Chris. Maybe somebody died and that's why the alarm's gone." The thoughts just start spinning, which makes the alarm worse.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's why learning how to silence that alarm that's in the back room that can be triggered at a moment's notice with nothing that should be triggering it, that's what your work is about. And that's the difference between a situation that triggers you and an alarm being important and having a generalized situation where you're on edge all the time. How's that as an explanation, Dr. Kennedy?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: I think that that's an explanation that's very simple and it's very accurate. I think that we have this thing that I describe in my book called Background Alarm, which is basically old, unresolved emotional issues that are stuck in your body. My colleague Gabor Mate talks about this, emotions being stuck in the body, which is a construct. You can't separate the mind from the body, of course, but it's a construct and it helps people. It really helps them understand that, "Hey, this is actually starting from my body."
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: And because we're so versed at speaking in words and communicating to ourselves and to each other with words, we don't get into the feeling. So if I ask you, "Hey Mel, what does it feel like when you bite into an apple?" It's like, "Well, I don't know." I mean, so I say, "What does it taste like?" "Well, it's sweet or it's sour. It's crunchy." We're so good at describing things in words. But if I ask, "How do you feel when you bite into that apple?" That's a brand new landscape. We're not used to feeling. We're in a society that values, that worships the mind and very, very rarely actually says, "Hey, get into your body, feel your body." And a lot of us don't want to feel our body because that's where the freaking pain is. So we retreat into our heads because it's an escape from this old alarm that's been trapped in your body probably since childhood.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay, great. Did you get that, everybody? From this point forward, Dr. Kennedy is saying that when it comes to that alarm in your body, or the anxiety that you or a loved one may be dealing with, he is saying we must begin with a neck down approach of addressing the stored experiences in your body. And that when you do traditional talk therapy, you take a neck up approach, you should combine this neck down approach with it if you want to heal it. That is so cool.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay, Dr. Kennedy, we have to take a quick break so we can hear a short word from our sponsors. But when we come back, I have to ask you about something that you believe that truly shocked me. And don't go anywhere, everyone, because this is going to surprise you, too. And we're going to be right back.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Now I want to pivot and talk about something that you believe that really surprised me. You believe, Dr. Kennedy, that all anxiety is triggered by the exact same singular source for all of us. So what is the source of all anxiety?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: All anxiety is separation anxiety.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What does that mean?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Well, if you drill it down, it's separation typically from yourself, but it starts with separation from your parents on some level. If you feel separate from your parents, the people that are supposed to love you, see you, hear you, and love you. If you feel separate from them, it creates this alarm in our system. And then when we get this alarm in our system, our brain has to do something about that. So what we tend to do as children is, first of all, blame ourselves. We can't blame our parents for what's going on in our childhood environment. So we blame ourselves. And then we start taking jabs at ourselves, what I call jabs, which is basically judgment, abandonment, blame, and shame. This is what we do to ourselves. This is the birth of the inner critic.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So I find, and one of the things I want to do with this show is to take a lot of the stuff that sounds intellectual and make it really digestible and understandable. So when you say separate, you're separate from your parents. Can you give us a few scenarios that aren't all horrific abuse situations that anybody can identify with when you say separate from your parents?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah, there's something as simple as a parental mismatch. What does that mean?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Well, it's kind of a term. I don't know if I heard it or I made it up, but it's basically, I see a lot of, most of my patients, clients, whatever you want to call them, are female. And a lot of them have issues with their mom. So it's, they felt separate. They felt this mismatch from their mother. They felt like, you know, we're not connected. I love my mother. She loves me. But, you know, I like Bach and she likes punk rock. Just in different parts of our lives, they're very different. And that parental mismatch causes a tremendous amount of alarm in a child's system because you want to belong to a parent. You really want to feel like you're connected to your parent. And if you don't have that internal sense of attachment, it's very alarming to our system. And that alarm gets lodged in our body. And then that's what usually mediates the worries as we get older. It also mediates that thing I call jabs, which is judgment, abandonment, blame, and shame. We do that to ourselves.
--:-- So when we're listening to our own thing, it's like, okay, how am I judging myself here? You wake up in the morning, as you say in *The High 5 Habit*, you wake up in the morning with anxiety or alarm, as I like to call it. And then you start thinking, you start stacking all these negative scenarios on top of yourself to make sense of it. When really what you should do, and this is out of your book, is: I'm feeling anxious. Five, four, three, two, one, into my body. Into my body. Find a place in my body. Find a place in my breath. Find a place that feels safe in my body. And some people don't feel safe in their body. And we do something with that first. But really, breath. Everybody's pretty much safe in their breath. Go 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, into my body, out of my head. Because what that does is it gives a sense of control. It takes energy away from those ruminating thoughts. And it puts it where it belongs. Because maybe that alarm is your younger self that's asking for your attention.
--:-- And as a medical doctor and neuroscientist, I kind of want to have a seizure sometimes when I talk about the ethereal nature of this. But really, from a practical sense, when you're anxious, find the alarm in your body.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. So how do you do that? Let's just take a scenario right now. Let's just say, and you know, it could be anything. It could be that you are sitting in the pickup line at school and you see somebody that you have beef with and you start to feel like this wave hit you because you don't want to talk to that person or that person makes you nervous. Situation we can all relate to.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Totally.
--:-- Mel Robbins: In that moment, sitting in the front seat of your car and you feel the alarm go off, how do you locate the damn thing? Because it's everywhere at this point.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. Well, sometimes it's everywhere. I mean, it feels like it's everywhere, I think. And as I was saying earlier, we're so used to communicating with ourselves in words, we don't really think to look at the alarm in our body, right? So what I would say is as you look at this person that kind of triggers you a little bit, you know, feel your butt in the car seat, relax your shoulders, relax your jaw. If you're not driving, close your eyes for a second, just take a breath in and a nice slow breath out and go, where in my physiology do I sense this? Imagine this person. It's like, okay, well, I feel this sort of ache in my upper chest. And maybe it's the size of an apple or whatever. And it feels like it's a pressure. It feels like it's radiating up to my neck. That's your alarm. So put your hand over your alarm. Like in *The High 5 Habit*, high five your heart. High five that part of your alarm. Or jump right into it. I believe that that is your younger self asking for your attention. And typically what we do is we push it away. We go into our heads, right? So go into your body, feel it. See if you can put your hand over that.
--:-- Mel Robbins: But what if I don't want to? What if I'm literally like, I don't like this feeling. So, you know, I'm sitting here listening to you and I really love your work because you are trying to get us all to go to the source of what's triggering mental health issues, which is stored experiences and the alarm in your body and your inability to tolerate or understand what's happening when it goes off. And so I have recently had this experience where I'm waking up and I get these waves of anxiety. And what's interesting is that this is not new for me. I mean, I've struggled with anxiety for 30 years, but we have just recently had a number of huge changes in our life. And I now live in a different state in a very small town. And when I wake up in the morning in the middle of all this change, my alarm is not on the nightstand next to me. It begins in my ankles and it's like a hot lava wave that goes from my ankles up my legs all the way up my stomach and then it solidifies in my chest. And as soon as I feel this wave, my immediate thought is not, "Oh, I want to feel the alarm." It's, "Fuck. Why am I feeling this? I don't want to feel dread." And then I feel like I just want to hide from it or try to fall asleep. And I know that it's just my body reacting to all this change. Like it's some sort of stored experience that is coming up. And I've been working so hard on not freaking out when I feel it, but turning toward it.
--:-- And as a medical doctor and a neuroscientist and somebody who has struggled with anxiety for 30 years, why is turning toward this alarm the answer in that moment? Like, what would happen? Tell me what happens when you turn toward it and you put your hands on your chest or you go, "Oh, thank you. You're just trying to protect me because you're scared to death that you now live in Vermont and you have no friends and you're very far away from your kids. And you're going to live alone here on this mountain and be even more lonely." Like I get through this whole catastrophizing, which only makes it worse, versus welcome this bullshit in. Like I don't want to. I just don't want it to be there, Russ.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah, I get it. I get it. What if it's not bullshit though, Mel? What if it's little Mel? Did you have a nickname when you were a little girl?
--:-- Mel Robbins: This really is becoming therapy, isn't it?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Well, I give it a try.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah, when you started talking about the mismatch with the mom, I'm like, I hope my mother doesn't listen to this episode because I even feel guilty for admitting that we are kind of a mismatch. Or are a mismatch.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah, well, my sometimes my mom calls me Mellie and friends of mine call me Mellie.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And yeah, friends of mine called me Mellie.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Is there a name that you relate to as a child, a nickname that you relate to?
--:-- Mel Robbins: You know, in many ways, I think Mel, because I still feel very much like a child at times. And I still feel like that vulnerable kid. And I still feel like the person that's on the outside looking at, I feel separate. Like that word separate makes a lot of sense for me. Like there's a feeling that I have in life that I'm observing what's happening, but I'm not a part of it.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. And, you know, just because you've kind of given me permission here. I mean, you've spent a lot of your life outrunning your anxiety, right? And it's worked for you, Mel. You're very successful. You know, it's worked for you. I see this with a lot of very intelligent people. They can intellectually kind of outrun their anxiety.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What does that even mean?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: It means that you keep yourself so busy that you don't get a chance to sit with that alarm in your body.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I don't want to sit with it. That's why.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Exactly.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Why do you think moving to Vermont where there's nothing to do is so fucking terrifying? Like I can't run to Target to make my anxiety go away. I feel like I'm addicted to negative stress. And this addiction to negative stress is what I've done to numb my anxiety.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Well, it's sublimating it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That is a big word. What does sublimating mean?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: You've taken this energy and you found a way to make it work for you. So I've taken the negative alarm or the alarm in my body and I've channeled it in a direction so I don't have to feel it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yes. And when you said, "What if the alarm is trying to help you?" What the hell did you mean by that?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: What if it's little Mel? What if it's the younger version of you saying, "Hey, I need some attention." And then when you say, "Fuck off, I don't want to feel you." Literally, what if you had a child come up to you in a grocery store, and they were crying, and they had their hands up in the air to pick them up? Would you push them away? Would you go, "See ya. Fuck off?" No, you wouldn't. You'd pick that damn child up. But we won't do it for ourselves.
--:-- Mel Robbins: God, that's so true. Yeah, we won't do it for ourselves. We'll do it for our pets. You're right. You're absolutely right. Like if somebody else had an alarm going off in their body and they were freaking out or worried or sad or upset or needing attention or reassurance, you would give that to them. But you don't do it for yourself.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: No. And I think that this is the singular biggest mistake that society has made around understanding anxiety.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I just had a huge breakthrough here. Holy shit, Russ. Okay, so let me just see if I can give this back to everybody listening. So it's the fact that you're scared of the alarm or you can't tolerate it and you don't understand what it's trying to ask of you that makes it worse.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And if you were to realize that any tension or fear or kind of scary feeling in your body is an alarm system from your inner child asking you for reassurance or love or attention, and you just gave yourself that reassurance or love or attention, the alarm would turn off. Is that what you're saying?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Slowly, yeah, because it's been an adaptation for you too. You got to remember that the ego thinks it's protecting you by firing.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I don't understand what the ego is. That's too intellectual for me. So I will have you back to talk about the ego. But the second anybody says ego, I'm like, "Oh, this is somebody who's way smarter than me. I don't want to try to figure out what the hell an ego is." So we will have you back because we all need to know what the ego is. However, I just want to stay on this because I think this is a groundbreaking idea that I want everybody who either has some level of situational or generalized anxiety or loves somebody who has situational or generalized anxiety. And at this moment in time, that would be every human being on the planet. And I want you to understand that we have been taught that we're supposed to attack it from the neck up with the thinking first. And that's one of the things you need to do to cope. But the real heart of healing your anxiety, which you claim you've done, and I want to hear about that. I feel like I understand anxiety. I still hate it. And I need to have a different relationship with it. And everybody needs to. For the sake of your kids, the people that you love, for yourself, you need to understand this alarm system in your body and the fact that it desperately needs you. And you need to take a neck down approach to listening to the alarm and diffusing it in a way that, wow.
--:-- So over time, if you do this, the alarm doesn't go off as much.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: As soon as you put your hand over that place of alarm, you will feel instantly better. I'm not saying it's going to take it from a nine to a two, but it's going to take it from a nine to a four because you're actually from a consciousness perspective, you are actually going at the root source of the problem, which is this little child in you that says, "I don't like this person." And it's not this person. It's basically, "I don't like someone from my past that this person reminds me of." Or, "I don't like the feeling that I have in my body when I see this person. And this is a familiar feeling from my past."
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah. Wow. My head is spinning. I'm learning so much from you. I think I'm getting this, Dr. Kennedy. But I want to make sure that everybody listening is getting this too. So let me explain back what I think you're trying to teach us. And you can tell me if we've got this, okay?
--:-- So this alarm is actually very familiar to us because as a kid, there was a moment where you felt separate from your parents. You described it as this parental mismatch, which I really liked because it gave me the space to see that, even though your parents may have tried the best that they could, it just didn't work for you. But the problem is when you can't connect, when there's this mismatch, you're alone as a kid and it actually makes you feel unsafe. And so when you have a parent that you can connect with or they're unpredictable or they make you feel invisible, that alarm system in your body develops as a child. And that's why it's so familiar to you when you feel it as an adult.
--:-- And this point that you keep talking about, that anxiety results because of separation anxiety as a child, I think I get it now. Because as a child, there were times where you felt separate, unsafe, unseen, not heard or not loved or invisible in your own home. And that original experience, which we probably don't remember, gets stored in your body when you're really, really little. And then from that point forward, because it's in your body, anytime that you feel invisible or you feel attacked or you feel unloved, it just gets stronger. This is why middle school sucks, isn't it? Because you're always feeling unsafe or alone or separate. And so it becomes almost this automatic response in your body. Anytime you feel separate as an adult.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah, totally.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You know, I actually just think I had this experience. I was invited to go to a trunk show that somebody was hosting at their home. And I walked in and it was lovely. Everybody there was super nice to me, but they were all already good friends. And so I'm the newcomer stepping into a tight friend group. And I immediately felt that alarm. I felt uncomfortable being there. And I realize now it's because that experience of feeling separate from others was triggered by walking into a room of people that know each other really, really well, and I'm the new person.
--:-- So the thing that's interesting about that, Dr. Kennedy, is that that's not really something I would say is anxiety. But what I'm learning from you today is that any moment where you feel separate, it could be super subtle, you're the outsider, you're not connecting, that's gonna trigger that alarm. And when you know that all you gotta do is notice it and maybe put your hand on your heart or just reassure yourself in that moment, you're gonna get stronger and stronger. That's so cool. I guess that's how you could actually start to feel like you belong to any room that you walk into because you belong to yourself.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah, and what happens is when we feel the alarm, we go up into our heads to escape it because we feel this alarm in our body. It's like, "I don't wanna feel this." So we go up into our heads and we try and think, "Well, what could this be?" We analyze, we go into this fixation, this left hemisphere of fixation on figuring stuff out, which basically just creates more of a problem. You're not going to solve anxiety, which is basically a problem of overthinking, with more freaking thinking. It's not going to work.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, OK, so can I ask you a question? Why the hell if there is an alarm system wired in our body, why is our brain not able to go, "It's just an alarm system. Just give yourself a hug and take a deep breath. Thank it for trying to protect you. Next." Why do we not just automatically say that? Why do we kill ourselves in our own minds with our thoughts?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Because we don't understand it's there in the first place.
--:-- Mel Robbins: The alarm?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yep. We don't understand that it's our younger self asking for our attention. So we feel pain and like any organism, we withdraw from pain. We're not teaching people how to get rid of their anxiety. We're teaching them how to acclimatize to it. And then I add on to that and stop adding thoughts to it. Because as soon as you add thoughts to the alarm, A, you're getting out of the problem and B, you're just making it worse. So basically we get in this thing I call the alarm anxiety cycle. So something triggers us, say we're in that lineup, we see this person that we don't like and then we go, "Oh, why don't I like this person? I should really try and make an effort. She did this. Don't make eye contact, get on the phone, make a fake phone call, avoid, avoid, turn shoulder, turn shoulder. Run away!" To quote a Monty Python thing. So basically what we're doing is we're trying to intellectualize the alarm that we're feeling in our body. And the solution isn't in our minds. The solution's in our body, which is why so many people have a hard time healing from anxiety because we're trying to use more thoughts to combat overthinking.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Here's my big takeaway right now so far: all the thinking that we reflexively do about the feelings in our body makes the alarm louder. And that we have to learn to stop going above the neck and thinking about what's going on, and we need to train ourselves to go below the neck into our bodies and turn toward the alarm and give ourselves the reassurance and the soothing or whatever it is that the alarm is asking for in that moment. And that if you do that, you are now taking step one on the path of truly curing your anxiety.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: That's exactly what it is. You're getting at the root cause, which is the alarm. The thoughts are not the cause. The thoughts are a symptom. So the thoughts are just the byproduct of this alarm that's stuck in your body. Now thoughts do cause anxiety. There's no two ways about that. But I think where the mistake is, is that we believe the thoughts originate before the feeling. The feeling starts before the thought, because every one of us knows a kid that can work themselves up into a panic attack because they think they're going to throw up.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Sure. So our son Oakley, when he was little, he was constantly picked on at school. So of course he felt nervous in the morning before he had to head into school. Plus the kid had dyslexia and ADHD, all of which was not diagnosed. So he's heading into a full day in a classroom where he physiologically, neurologically is incapable of doing what is going to be asked of him. And so his body before entering that situation sounds an alarm. And when the alarm sounds and the physiological changes happen, guess what physiological feeling he has? His stomach starts to rumble because as the physiology of the alarm changes and the chemistry in his digestive tract changes, he starts getting butterflies that feel like pterodactyls. And then all of a sudden, instead of just giving himself a hug and going, "It's going to be okay. Today's going to be an okay day. I can face this," instead of reassuring himself, he goes into his head and says, "Oh my God, my stomach, I think I'm going to puke. I can't go to school." And he ramps himself up. We were dealing with panic attacks with this kid where he would literally bang his head on the kitchen island. "I don't want to go to school," crying. He would force himself to throw up. He would get so worked up, he would actually throw up. I mean, it was horrible.
--:-- And I now can see that all of the interventions that were being done with this kid, with therapists, which were all about just change the channel upstairs. And then he would turn to them and say, "But sometimes when I change the channel, it takes me to a channel I don't want to watch. So what if I change the channel of my thoughts and I get another bad thought?" Like even he was reacting against it, but nobody taught us that what the kid needed was a hug, validation, reassurance in that moment physically to get the alarm to quiet.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah, you nailed it. So, you know, I think that's part of it is that especially with kids, it's so important that they feel you, that they feel seen, heard, and loved. Touch is such a valuable thing with kids. It's just so amazing. My wife, Cynthia, is a somatic trauma therapist. She deals mostly with people that have pre-verbal trauma before the age of seven years old. So they don't have a story about it, right?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. How do they know they have trauma before the age of seven?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Because they feel it on their body. Because they feel alarmed every day and they don't know why. Because they haven't encoded it to a point where they can... See, the amygdala never forgets. The amygdala encodes everything, birth trauma, everything. It encodes everything. But we don't have the retrieval mechanism to pull it back up. So we think we have no childhood memories, which is a bit of a semantic thing because we do have childhood memories. We just can't retrieve them.
--:-- But basically with Oakley, it's getting him into his body, into a safe place. So you practice with him, putting your... This is what I do with parents: put your hand on your child's heart, then put your other hand on their back about the same level as your front hand and just sit there with them and just allow their nervous system to regulate and just allow them to feel it and create this safe place in your body. Because this is the next place I'd like to go with this little interview that we're doing. It's finding us. Like people say, "I don't want to go to my body." It's like, I understand that. So how can we do that? Well, we find a place in our body that's either safe. With me, it's my breath around my nose because I used to do a lot of meditation. And then what we do is we feel the alarm and then we go into this safe place and then we go back into the alarm.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay, so hold on a second. Before you teach us how to find a safe space in our own bodies, I want to make sure that you guys heard that love sandwich thing because that was really cool. So you just put your hand on your child's heart and then you put your other hand on their back at about the same level as your front hand. And then all you do is sit there with them and allow their nervous system to regulate and allow them to feel your hands on their body and you allow them to feel it. And this creates this safe space in your kid's body that is so cool.
--:-- And, you know, Dr. Kennedy, you were just about to show us. And for those of you that are not watching on YouTube, what he did is he basically put his hands up on his cheeks. So imagine where sunglasses rest on your cheeks. Put your hands right there, your fingers right there. And he was pressing on that. That happens to be where Dr. Kennedy's safe space is. Okay. And so you can see this on our YouTube channel because we put up uncut versions of all of our podcast episodes. Just go to youtube.com slash Mel Robbins and you can watch him do this.
--:-- But, you know, I want you to walk us through this second tool of locating a safe place in your body because it might... I don't particularly feel safe in my cheeks, Dr. Kennedy. So how do we do this? What are some other places that patients of yours have selected in the past to give people an idea?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Oh, it's all over. But basically I get, "Where's a safe place in your body?" And a lot of them will say, "I don't feel safe." And I'll say, "Well, where's a neutral place?" It's like, "Well, my right knee feels like there's no feeling in my right knee." It's like, "Okay, let's go into this pain of your heart from this recent breakup that you've gone through. Now let's just bring our attention into that right knee and then go back into this." I'm doing this quite a bit faster than I normally do.
--:-- Mel Robbins: When you say bring your attention to your right knee, if I'm doing this exercise with you, does that mean that I've got my eyes closed and I'm mentally working my way down to my knee? So you're mentally kind of locating your attention at your knee.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Okay, got it. Yeah, because that feels either safe or neutral, right? So what we're doing is we're basically training your unconscious mind that this pain that you're feeling in your heart is not all of you. Because what will happen is the amygdala has no sense of time. So when you get triggered, you will go back, you will turn into that 11 year old. And then basically what we need to do is train your amygdala, "No, I'm not back there. I'm not 11 years old anymore. I'm actually my age that I am now." You go into that right knee that's neutral. Or if there's... for me, I go into the sinuses, right? So when I get alarm, I wake up with alarm every day. Right. But I don't give it that much credibility anymore. And then I go into this place in my sinuses.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You actually touch it or do you just feel it?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: I touch it. Yeah, I touch it. And I can do it a little bit now. I might get a little zony when I do this, but basically. And what I do is I can locate the alarm in my solar plexus. I talk about this in the book.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Where is the solar plexus?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Oh, it's right where your ribs meet. Right where the bottom part of the sternum.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, gotcha. Okay.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: So that's where I have my alarm from growing up with my schizophrenic dad. So I will go into that alarm. I will try and intentionally give it love and attention. And then I will go up into my sinus area that feels safe. And then I will go back into that place that feels uncomfortable. So the thing is, there's a theory that says when you experience a trauma as a child, part of you stays locked at that age for the rest of your life.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Part of you, right? At times I feel like all of me.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. And it can be very overwhelming because it's unconscious, Mel. It's not something that we consciously feel. We actually get transported through the amygdala to that time and through the insula. The insula is kind of like the place in our brain that translates the body into the mind and the mind into the body. It's kind of like the way station. So I believe that we actually create this body memory. And I think the insula has something to do with this. And then we feel exactly the same way in our bodies now as we did when the trauma was occurring, which of course brings up all sorts of old memories, all sorts of old panic. And then we want to make sense of that. So we worry.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You're right. I have another scenario that I want to run by you, Dr. Kennedy. But first, I have to take a quick break so we can hear a short word from our sponsors. Everyone, please hold on. We're going to be right back.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to take another scenario.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Sure.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So I have a really good friend that is in the middle of a massive venture capital pitch. Okay. And she is doing presentation after presentation to raise a ton of capital for this super cool thing she's launching. And she is a ball of knots. She has the alarm going off all the time. The stakes feel high. And I realize part of creative energy, part of being successful, part of the kind of motivation that can drive somebody during a very successful time and the adrenaline that shoots through you, that's part of what happens when things are high stakes. How do these tools help you be more successful in those moments where you're at bat and this is a big game you're playing and that kind of adrenaline rush and alarm in your body is going off all the time? How do you use these tools in those moments?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Well, you practice them first. There's a little thing that I talk to people about all the time. I said, "Hey, Mel Robbins, December the 1st, I'm going to take you to the basketball court and I'm going to give you 10 foul shots. And if you make three of them, I'm going to give you $5 million. Now, would you start practicing foul shots the day before?" No. No, you'd start shooting foul shots every day, right? So that's what I mean. It's like, okay, so what I would do with her, the short version is I'd probably find her alarm and work on that first. But what I would do with her is I would say, "Okay, where is this alarm in your body? I find it. Can you put your hand over it? Can you breathe into it? Can you do this? Can you practice this a number of times a day so that when you need it, when you're going into that boardroom, you can do a two minute thing in the bathroom where you put your hand over your alarm, you breathe into it, you regulate your body, you relax your shoulders, you relax your jaw, close your eyes, you go into this place that you've practiced a number of times, and then you can come back out in a regulated state."
--:-- Now, from a scientific standpoint, I know one reason why this is really important when you're a high achiever. And that is based on research out of UCLA, we wrote about this extensively in *The High 5 Habit*. Dr. Judith Willis has discovered that when your alarm system is going off in your body, it impairs your cognitive functioning.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What does that mean?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: That means if you get all freaked out before this board pitch that you're supposed to do, your alarm system is not going to help you think clearly, you're going to forget what you wanted to say. You're not going to process as quickly. So it is critical for you to walk into these high stakes moments with the highest brain functioning. It's critical that you actually know how to quiet that alarm. But based on your research and your work, Dr. Kennedy, why does this matter?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Not only for people that have generalized anxiety, but it matters for everybody, including high achievers. Because you want to be able to train yourself to regulate your own nervous system. And people with anxiety didn't have a parent that regulated their own nervous system. So they have to do it themselves. And nobody's coming to save you. I think I see that with people all the time. No one's coming to save you. You have to do this for yourself. Therapists can help, doctors can help, whatever. But unless you do it for yourself, it's not coming from a place that's really going to dissipate that alarm.
--:-- I see this with a lot of people. I think we have this unconscious belief when we have parents that didn't quite meet our needs. We don't do self-care for ourselves because we assume that parent is going to come back. This isn't conscious. This is all unconscious. You've got to start taking responsibility for your own body, your own alarm, and realize that it's up to you. It's that child in you that wants you back. It wants to connect with you. And if you are pushing it away all the time, that child is either going to shut down and you're going to go into depression, or it's going to go into this fight flight mode where you're always anxious.
--:-- And with you, Mel, bringing it back to you, this is how you would outrun the anxiety. Every success that you would have would kind of put a little anesthetic on that anxiety. Part of the reason too, is that you get a lot of positive attention when you're achieving. I started marrying achievement with worthiness and being safe and being connected. Achievement means that your worth is attached to something outside of you. Whenever I wasn't doing something or going after something or being really busy, I didn't feel worthy. The alarms were going off.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Totally. Before we go, there are a couple quick questions I want to try to rapid fire. Number one, what's the difference between coping with anxiety and healing it?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Coping with your anxiety is mostly a top-down thinking process. You learn thinking strategies that help you deal with it. "This anxiety isn't real. I'm over-exaggerating," whatever that is. Healing it is going back to that child that's in you, that alarm child, and giving them the ability to be seen, heard, and loved by you, by adult you. Child you is going to resist that because child you has been ignored by adult you for a very long time. So it takes a while before you start building that bridge back together again. That's how you heal. You heal by finding that child in you and then see what she says. She may not talk back to you for a month or two months or six months, but eventually she will. When you develop that bridge, that conduit to her, that's when you heal.
--:-- The analogy I draw is that you're in a rowboat, there's a hole in the rowboat and it's filling up with water. You can do cognitive therapies and I have nothing against them. I think they're helpful, but it's basically like bailing water out of that boat. What you really need to do is go underneath, patch the hole in the hull, which I believe is the old alarm, the old wounded version of you as a child. Find that child, show them that they are seen, heard, and loved by you. High five them in the mirror, whatever you need to do. Find that child and heal them. Then you heal at the root cause of it. You're not just bailing water by trying to change your thoughts. You're actually getting to the root cause of what's causing your anxiety, which is really a state of alarm, and the inability to understand it or to tolerate it or soothe it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You also had this post that I was like, oh, that's interesting. Where you said that you rarely see anyone with chronic anxiety who is not addicted to something. And that there is a tight connection between anxiety and addictive behavior. Is addiction typically somebody's coping mechanism for the alarm?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yes. For example, you reach for alcohol because it drowns out the alarm. You reach for porn or drugs or stress or achievement. It can work.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Got it. Okay. I got it. So if somebody is struggling with addictive behavior, whether it is alcohol or cigarettes or vaping or any of that stuff, you are more than likely not addressing the root issue, which is the anxiety and alarm that's continuing to go off in the background.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. And on top of that, the only way that you can feel love, connection, whatever, is alcohol, is codeine, is cocaine, whatever you're addicted to.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Holy cow. Okay, this is a big idea. What you're basically explaining is that the reason why it's hard for me to feel love is because I am so bonded to being a workaholic, to achieving, to being busy, that I am bonded to that addiction. And that's what's blocking my ability to just be loved. Whoa.
--:-- That's so interesting because I can also see with my husband, who used to have a daily weed habit that he speaks very openly about, no longer has that habit, that he was numbing that alarm in his body with the weed. So he was bonded with the weed and the numbing sensation he became addicted to, which blocked his ability to feel love from himself, from anybody else. That is so true.
--:-- So I suppose that if you don't address this alarm system in your body, you're going to always remain bonded to the things you're doing to try to drown the alarm system out. I'm just processing in real time, which is why I'm slowing down here. If you don't learn how to turn inward, slow down, feel all the crap you don't want to feel and slowly turn off this alarm, you will never experience what it's like to love yourself. It all begins by going inward when you hear this alarm instead of reaching for the joint or burying yourself in work or running to Target or picking up the bottle of wine. You need to learn how to hear that alarm and then give yourself the love and support that you never got as a kid. Holy shit, that's what I'm getting from you.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. And that's exactly what it is. Can you regulate your body? Because if you regulate your body, your mind will get regulated. If you regulate your mind, your body might get regulated. What I'm saying is that if you go into the body, your body is much more likely to relax your mind than your mind is to relax your body. Because you can say, "Hey, relax," but your mind lies to you all the time. Your body never can.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Did you guys hear that? That was a wake up call for me right there. You were just dropping fricking knowledge, Russ. Okay, hold on. I'm going to state this again. And now I have menopause brain, so I've just forgotten what I said. You said something like your body, if you regulate your body, it will regulate your mind. But if you regulate your mind...
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: It's much more effective to regulate your body first, which will automatically regulate your mind, than to try and regulate your mind to regulate your body.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Is this why exercising is such an effective thing to do when it comes to anxiety and focus?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Partly. Anxiety at its root is really a mind-body disconnect. We go up into our heads and we stay in our heads because we don't want to go down in our body because that's where the pain is. We don't want to go into feeling town, down in our body. We don't want to stay up in our thoughts. And that's another addiction. So we get addicted to worry. That's why it's so hard to treat anxiety just by trying to fix thoughts, because we're addicted to thinking already. We don't need any more thinking. We need a lot more feeling, but we don't want to feel because that's where the pain is.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. This conversation has been transformative for me. I have received a few priceless gifts from this. The first one is that all anxiety results from this original experience of separation anxiety. You use that term "parental mismatch" and feeling mismatched is the root cause of our anxiety as an adult. Whoa.
--:-- The second thing that I'm just sitting here spinning my mind around is that the solution is love. You've got to learn how to go into your body and just love yourself, reassure yourself, make yourself feel safe. The irony of this is I'm also realizing, my God, most of us have done the opposite. I mean, that's what I did. I've been separate from my body. I've been neck up for as long as I can remember. I don't even have many memories from childhood because I was never truly in the room that I was in. So I wasn't there to make memories, which is very common when you've experienced a lot of anxiety or trauma in your childhood.
--:-- I'm just sitting here realizing that when you can quiet the alarm, when you can feel it rising up and your mind starts to stack and look for that threat that's not there, you can turn toward yourself. You can soothe yourself. That's the step that we all need to take.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: If you want to heal it, yes, the thinking part, the talking part, it's part of the toolkit. It's a very important part for your mindset. But my recommendation is that we have to go neck down first because that alarm lives in the body. It is stored in the body. It is remembered by the body. When we go neck down first, then we've got a shot at truly healing.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's amazing. So one other question I wanted to ask you, because it is important to be able to cut off your thoughts. The Five Second Rule has helped millions of people with their anxiety, and it's certainly helped me by interrupting those old thoughts. But I also know that we need to replace the thoughts. Do you have anything that you could share with us that you find to be an effective neck up approach, some sort of saying or reassuring sentence that you could repeat to yourself after you calm your body down?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Absolutely. Basically this: "Am I safe in this moment? Am I safe in this moment?" I know I've got a presentation to do on Friday. I know I've got a big tax bill. I don't know how I'm going to pay for it. My mom is sick. But am I safe in this moment?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Why a question?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Because I like saying "I am safe. I am okay." You can do it both ways. I find that people with anxiety, though, this is the thing about saying "I love you" in the mirror: people don't allow that in. The reason why you're anxious in the first place is because you block love.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The reason why you're anxious is because you block love? For yourself?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What? You're separated from yourself. That's exactly what it comes down to. That's what anxiety or alarm really is. It's a separation.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: And this is what I do. This is my little intuitive thing here. We're going to get into it in a minute.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Hold on. I think I got it. That literally your alarm is asking for love and reassurance.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Absolutely.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And when you go into your head, you block yourself from receiving it.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: When you go into your body and you breathe into the alarm and soothe yourself, you are actually giving yourself love.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yes. Holy shit. And a lot of people with anxiety, they're uncomfortable with love in the first place. I'll give you a very quick example from my own life. My dad, before I was 10 years old, was this wonderful guy. He was so connected to me and nurturing, taught me how to hit a ball, play chess, all this kind of stuff. I was very, very connected to him. I loved him greatly. Then as I got to be a young teen and his schizophrenia got worse and worse and became suicidal and a bunch of other things, I withdrew from him because to see him in horrible depression was just too painful for me. So I blocked my love for him because it was just too painful to feel it. You can't block love from a parent without blocking love on some level to everyone.
--:-- So when you find the blocks that you have to loving yourself, this is how you heal. This is basically my little intuitive gift: I can tell people where their blocks are to loving themselves. When you remove those blocks, the anxiety, the alarm, just kind of fades away. This is going at the root cause protocol, as opposed to just trying to make you think better.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. So how do you help people find that place where they've blocked love?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: I go through their body. What I believe happens to you is as a child, you experience an overwhelming stress. It's too much for your conscious mind to handle, so you stuff it down. Freud would call it repression. You stuff it into the unconscious. The body keeps the score, just like Bessel van der Kolk says. Because the body is a representation of the unconscious mind and the unconscious mind is where these old, damaging programs are stored, they'll show up in the body. So I will find in your body where you feel that alarm and reverse engineer it to get into the same room with those unconscious programs, and then I can change them.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. That's pretty cool. I think my biggest takeaway, and I keep saying this because clearly every 10 minutes I have a life-changing takeaway from this conversation. My biggest takeaway is the connection between the alarm that goes off and the love that you're not allowing yourself to receive.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Totally.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And that it's beautiful to think that loving yourself is the way you cure anxiety. What a beautiful thing. It reminds me of something pretty amazing that my son Oakley shared with me. I said to him the other day, "Dude, one of the things I love about you is that you, more than almost anybody I have ever met, are just so comfortable with yourself. You really seem to like yourself." I should preface this by saying that this is a kid that really struggled. Three different schools before he was done with eighth grade, severe dyslexia, got so severely bullied at a camp that we had to pull him out of it. The director wrote a long letter apologizing for everything. This kid has been through the ringer.
--:-- He said to me, "Well, Mom, I realized just during quarantine. When I got to hang out with you and Dad and my two older sisters, all four people who love me, I just started to realize just because other people pick on me or hate me doesn't mean I have to hate myself. I could actually just like myself. I could really just allow myself to love myself." I got to be honest with you, from that moment, I can almost pinpoint that during the pandemic, this kid's chronic anxiety was gone. He developed this very positive attitude. It all began from this insight: if the world is not giving me the acceptance and the love that we all are seeking, maybe I can just give it to myself.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I never thought about meeting the alarm of anxiety with acts of self-love.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah, and it's counterintuitive on some level because when you're anxious, you don't feel loving. Your social engagement system is shut off. You're in survival mode. When you're in survival mode and survival physiology, you go into the emotional part of your brain which is evolutionarily programmed to look for threat. If there's no threat in your environment, if you're just lying there in bed with the sheets up to your neck, you will find threat because you can make it with your big prefrontal cortex. You can make worries.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, not anymore because we now know that the second you feel the alarm go off, five, four, three, two, one, you do not go upstairs. You go downstairs. I love to leave people in action. Obviously, everybody, there will be links not only to Russ's book, *Anxiety Rx*, there will be links to his social media accounts. You will find all kinds of resources in the show notes. But I want to leave people in action.
--:-- This is one of those incredible conversations that really changes how somebody thinks about a massively overwhelming topic like anxiety and mental health. I want to leave people in action with one simple new practice or habit that I want everyone to try every day for the next seven days. What is the exercise that you want each one of us to practice for the next seven days so that we can start to use the tools that you have been researching and changing lives with? What's the one thing you want us to do?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Can I do two?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yes. As long as it doesn't involve the ego.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Okay, fair enough. The first thing that I would say is what I said earlier: "Am I safe in this moment?" Or "I am safe in this moment." Because this moment is all we ever have. The thing about anxiety is it always projects you into the future. So if you bring yourself back to the moment, and this has worked for me, it saved my ass a number of times in the middle of the night when all my defenses are down and I think the world is horrible. "I am safe in this moment." Really feel it too. "I am safe in this moment."
--:-- Mel Robbins: Is there anything we should do with our hands or with our... Do you want us to close our eyes?
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: You can do the high five your heart, which is putting your hand right in the center of your chest. Take a deep breath. "I'm safe." If you find your alarm, if you know where your alarm is, track the alarm. When you feel anxious, go into your body and say, "Where am I feeling this? Is this in my belly? Is this in my chest? Is it in my throat?" Put your hand over the place where you feel your alarm and breathe into it.
--:-- There is a little thing too that I've kind of taken from Andrew Huberman about the physiological sigh. The physiological sigh is something that humans do and animals do it too, to calm themselves. It's usually one quick sniff through your nose and then another one, and then a long, slow breath out through your mouth. With my anxiety people, I modify that. This is the process that I do when I get into alarm: I take three breaths through my nose really quickly. At the top, I hold it for about three to five seconds, which shows me that I'm actually controlling my breath. My breath isn't controlling me. Then I close my teeth and I breathe out through my teeth and make a hissing sound. As I do that, I imagine a tire that's overinflated, just deflating in front of me.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So everybody, number one is one time a day, if you notice an alarm in your body, and that could be tension, it could be frustration, it could be anger, it could be anxiety, it could be that worry is starting to grip you. I want you to find where that alarm is. I want you to put your hand where the alarm is. I want you to breathe into it. The second one is, let's try this breathing thing. The whole thing about the physiological sigh is that you're creating a long exhale. That's what really relaxes us is the long exhale. So when people say take a deep breath, really what you need to do is just take a long exhale. So again, it's like three breaths in, hold, and then...
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: [Demonstrates the breathing technique]
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. What's interesting about that is it requires so much focus that you can't really think about anything else.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Totally. That's one of the other things. It takes you off your worries.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And you do feel this sort of relaxing and collapsing feeling inside you.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. Well, thank you so much for my personal therapy session. For everybody listening, I hope you got a lot out of it. This has been a game changer. The alarm-love connection is blowing my freaking mind. It's going to change instantaneously how I approach moments of alarm in myself or the people around me. I think it's going to bring a greater level of compassion. You made me smarter today. I feel more equipped to really help myself and help other people that I deeply care about through these moments where life knocks you down or the fear takes over. I can't thank you enough.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Thank you, Mel. The Five Second Rule and The High 5 Habit, those are books that I've listened to over the last year and I love them. I think they really help me. When I get helped, I am able to turn my little brain on and help other people as well. So it's a ripple effect, Mel. You help me. I help you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Awesome. Awesome. All right. We're going to have you back.
--:-- Dr. Russell Kennedy: Oh, thanks.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Thank you. Dr. Kennedy in the house, people. Holy smokes.
--:-- [Transition to Mel's solo reflection]
--:-- Mel Robbins: Full disclosure, I had never talked to that guy ever. I just knew from his Instagram account that he had knowledge to share. Even though he and I agree on so many things, I too have called anxiety an alarm for the last five years. I understand somatic therapy. I have experienced the power of it. I teach it. It's incorporated in all the work that I'm doing. However, I had never heard that all anxiety is the result from separation as a child. Wow.
--:-- But the thing that really blew my mind is understanding that this is really about love and loving yourself. That when that alarm goes off in your body and you feel the grip or the tension or the overwhelm, that alarm is not a signal to run away or to numb or to be scared. It's actually an alarm from a part of you that needs reassurance and love right now. That's it. No one else is going to come and give that to you. One of the most beautiful things about hearing from Dr. Kennedy is that you have within you the power to love and soothe yourself. Like any skill or any muscle or any habit, it gets easier and easier the more you practice it.
--:-- I really mean it when I say I want you to practice what we talked about for the next seven days. In particular, I want you to pay attention to when that alarm sounds in your own body this week. Again, it doesn't have to feel like the rattled tidal wave that I feel in the mornings. It might feel more like anger gripping you or frustration overtaking you or perfectionism getting its stranglehold. Anytime that you start to feel that grip, that's the alarm. Instead of freaking out or reaching for numbing it or going up into your thoughts, I want you to go to where the alarm is. I want you to put your hands there. I want you to take a deep breath. That's all I want you to do this week.
--:-- This is an opportunity for you to turn toward yourself, to create a deeper connection with yourself, and to feel more empowered to help people around you that are also struggling. I cannot wait to hear your comments and your thoughts about this episode. Please, please share this with anybody that you think would benefit from hearing this life-changing information. Remember, it comes down to loving yourself. That's what this is about. That was the huge takeaway for me: holy cow, I have spent 50 years trying to run away from the fact that all I needed was more love for myself. I hope that in some small way this will save you the heartache that I caused myself for those 50 years, now that you have the understanding and tools that I didn't have until now.
--:-- Alrighty, thank you, thank you, thank you for being here. In case nobody else tells you today, I want to tell you that I love you, I believe in you and your ability to create a better life for yourself. I love being a part of your life with The Mel Robbins Podcast. Alrighty, till next time. Thank you.
