The Toolkit for Healing Anxiety, Part 1

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Speaker 1 Hey, it's your friend Mel and welcome to the anxiety toolkit on the Mel Robbins podcast.

Speaker 1 I'm so glad you're here. We are talking anxiety today, and we have questions from five listeners of the Mel Robbins podcast.
I love this topic.

Speaker 1 I am so excited to be able to bring you an appointment with one of the world's leading experts on this topic. Dr.

Speaker 1 Kennedy is a medical doctor, a neuroscientist, a best-selling author, and he is going to meet with you, unpack the topic of anxiety step by step, and he's doing it at zero cost.

Speaker 1 If you're brand new, welcome. This is an amazing, amazing episode to begin our relationship with together.
My name is Mel Robbins.

Speaker 1 I'm a New York Times best-selling author and one of the world's leading experts on motivation, change, and habits. And I cannot wait for you and I to experience this.

Speaker 1 I cannot wait for you to share this anxiety toolkit with your friends, for you to bookmark this and come back to it. This is a paradigm shifter.

Speaker 1 And as you know, the Mel Robbins podcast, we're not here to just listen. We are here to do.

Speaker 1 And there's going to be a lot that you're going to be able to do for free to empower yourself and to heal from anxiety. And I think that's going to be the biggest takeaway.
I know Dr. Kennedy's work.

Speaker 1 My life has changed because of his work. And so this is a topic, whether you have struggled with anxiety or not.
We are all impacted by this.

Speaker 1 And by understanding it in a very different way and by knowing the difference between just merely talking about it and trying to live with it or struggle with it or cope with it and actually healing it, that's where amazingness starts to happen.

Speaker 1 And I want that for you. Dr.
Kennedy and I have an incredible relationship. He comes at it from the scientific neuroscience medical side.

Speaker 1 And I come at it from lived experience and all of the research that I've done with our global audience. And so if you don't know Dr.

Speaker 1 Russell Kennedy, let me tell you about the man who is in the house for the anxiety toolkit. I'm so excited about this.
Dr.

Speaker 1 Kennedy is a medical doctor who specializes in this and childhood trauma and nervous system regulation. He is also a neuroscientist, which makes him very, very interesting as an expert.

Speaker 1 He's a certified yoga instructor, meditation teacher, and he too has struggled with anxiety. And I love his take on this.
The tools that you are undoubtedly going to learn today.

Speaker 1 are going to change your life. They have changed mine.
For 30 years, I lived with anxiety, and I am the mother of three adult children who had

Speaker 1 very serious periods with anxiety. What you're going to learn today in the anxiety toolkit,

Speaker 1 when you take these steps to heal it,

Speaker 1 there is a level of peace and confidence and clarity and happiness that you will be able to access. that I so want for you.

Speaker 1 And with that introduction, I want to open the door and welcome you in to your appointment with the renowned world leading expert on this topic, Dr. Russell Kennedy is back and in the house for you.

Speaker 1 Dr. Kennedy.
Hey, Mel Robbins, my God. So Dr.
Kennedy, I'm so glad you're back because you have made such a difference. in so many people's lives.

Speaker 1 In my life, we had an outpouring of questions and of appreciation after that first episode that you and I did together many months ago. And so thank you so much for coming back.
Happy to do it, Mel.

Speaker 1 We have so many new listeners to the Mel Robbins podcast.

Speaker 1 And there are also a lot of people out there that are experiencing anxiety for the first time, or maybe they're seeing it or worried about it in their kids.

Speaker 1 And so I want to welcome everybody to the table. regardless of where you are in the understanding or the experience with anxiety.

Speaker 1 And while we covered some of this foundational knowledge in the first episode that Dr. Kennedy and I did, which we will link to in all the show notes,

Speaker 1 I want to just rapid fire a couple questions to make sure that we're all jumping into this with the same baseline understanding as we go deeper with questions from listeners. So, Dr.

Speaker 1 Kennedy, first question.

Speaker 1 How do you define anxiety?

Speaker 2 Anxiety for me is anxious thoughts, anxious thoughts of the mind. Anxiety is not painful itself.
What's painful is the sense of alarm that's in our body, that's in our system.

Speaker 2 And it's the alarm that drives the thoughts.

Speaker 2 It's a very atypical way, especially as a doctor and a neuroscientist, to look at anxiety as more as a body issue, like old, unresolved wounding that just making sense through the mind.

Speaker 2 Because the mind is this compulsive, meaning-making, make-sense machine.

Speaker 2 So when it feels the alarm in your body from the old wounds that haven't been resolved, it makes sense of it by worrying, warnings, what-ifs, worst case scenarios. And that's what happens.

Speaker 1 Let me see if I can unpack that. So for you, you said anxious thoughts, like anxiety is sort of those spiral of thoughts, but truly

Speaker 1 the genesis of it is unresolved trauma or issues from your childhood that is stored in the body.

Speaker 2 Typically, yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay. Where does anxiety come from?

Speaker 2 It comes from that alarm in your body. Anxiety is normal, you know, anxiety over taxes, anxiety over your kids, that's normal.

Speaker 2 But if it's every day, if it's relentless, like that kind of anxiety is abnormal. That typically comes from sort of unresolved stuff from your childhood.

Speaker 2 And it's stuck in your body and in your mind to some extent.

Speaker 2 It's a bit of a, it's a tough call because when you say anxiety is in your body, of course it's in your nervous system, which is your body and your mind.

Speaker 2 So it's really finding that place of unresolved wounding, that trauma that still sits in you, because that's the engine of what's driving your thoughts.

Speaker 2 So rather than thinking of anxiety as a thought-based process, it's actually a feeling-based process that's only kind of reflected by the mind.

Speaker 2 But we assume that it's the mind because we're so fixated on the mind in our society. So it's really a body-based issue, but we focus on the mind and we try and fix it through the mind.

Speaker 2 And that's why people are in therapy for 30 years and they're not getting a lot better.

Speaker 1 That was so succinct, what you just said. What really went funk for me was when you said anxiety is a feeling issue, but our mind tries to make sense of what we're feeling in our bodies.

Speaker 1 And we try to change or fix the thoughts in our mind with our mind. And what you're saying, which to me is revolutionary is, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 Let's, let's, let's forget the mind for a minute and let's drop into the body and let's talk about the feelings that are triggering this spiral of thoughts.

Speaker 1 Is that a good summary?

Speaker 2 That's a great summary.

Speaker 1 You know, I've spent the better part of my lifetime living with all of this

Speaker 1 unrest and unease and on-edgeness in my body. And I have tried for decades to make make sense of it, to calm it, to soothe it, to heal it through my mind.
And

Speaker 1 it is a

Speaker 1 revelation to realize, whoa,

Speaker 1 it really starts with thinking about the body.

Speaker 1 And so I want to ask you one more question, and then we're going to kind of jump into the questions for the listeners, which will allow us to go really deep into this topic.

Speaker 1 If anxiety begins, which I agree with you, with this sort of stored experience in your nervous system, this this stored experience and these feelings that get triggered in you.

Speaker 1 How do you know if what you're experiencing your life right now is anxiety versus just day-to-day stress versus overwhelm?

Speaker 2 I think if it's chronic, like if you're looking at your life, if you wake up in the morning and you're going, oh my God, I've got this, this, this, and this, which you've talked about.

Speaker 2 before on the podcast, like waking up with this sense of dread.

Speaker 2 That's a sign that things aren't quite right and anxiety is one of those things i get messages from people all the time that say i didn't actually know i had anxiety until i read your book it's like well i don't know if i'm doing you any favors as far as that kind of stuff goes but but really though i get that all the time because i think that we just we live in our minds we live in our bodies this just becomes normal and unless it rises above this kind of critical mass where we're like uncomfortable almost all the time,

Speaker 2 then we think, well, there's something going on. And now with with Instagram, with all this stuff, like everything's trauma now, everything's trauma.

Speaker 2 And I watched your episode about healing childhood trauma. And I really want to dive into that as well, because it's so important.

Speaker 2 Because the quick version is, you probably had trauma as a child that was unresolvable for you as a child. Now, what happens is when we get trauma as children, we blame ourselves.

Speaker 2 There's a great saying that says, if you abuse, neglect, or abandon a child, the child doesn't stop loving the parent. They stop loving themselves.
And then that starts the split.

Speaker 2 And then we start judging, abandoning, blaming, and shaming ourselves from that point forward. And that split causes this sense of alarm that gets lodged in our body.

Speaker 2 And then because we don't want to feel that alarm in our body, we go up into our heads, which is the only place that a child can go because they're pretty powerless in their environment, and they overthink.

Speaker 2 And that's a temporary escape. And then we train ourselves as children to overthink because that's the only safe place is in our minds.

Speaker 2 And then when we get older, go through a couple of divorces, you know, you get in a car accident, accident, whatever, that stuff tends to come right back up again.

Speaker 2 That's really the basis of where this global anxiety kind of comes from in people is it's this unresolved trauma.

Speaker 2 So if your parents love you and you've got, you know, a supportive family and you're attuned and connected and quote unquote securely attached, you can go through traumas like we all do in childhood and they won't impact your nervous system to create this permanent change or

Speaker 2 I I don't like using the word permanent because it makes it feel like it's hopeless, but it creates a permanent change in your nervous system.

Speaker 2 And trauma is anything that changes your nervous system, that stucks your nervous system in a pattern that doesn't allow you to get out of that trauma.

Speaker 2 And then we just get into this loop or this alarm in our body.

Speaker 2 We make sense of it by making horrible thoughts in our mind, warnings, what ifs, worst case scenarios, which of course makes the alarm of the body worse, which of course makes the thoughts worse.

Speaker 2 And we get caught in this alarm anxiety cycle. And unless we see it, we can't get out of it.
Wow.

Speaker 1 One of the things that I love about you, Dr. Kennedy, is you are the loudest voice out there telling people you can heal anxiety, that you're not stuck feeling this way.

Speaker 1 You don't have to live your life feeling triggered or out of control or overthinking or on edge. And for somebody that is really struggling with anxiety, that seems impossible.

Speaker 1 In fact, our first question comes from a woman named Carrie. And it is a question question from a woman who is extremely successful.

Speaker 1 And I'm sure she's hiding her anxiety, but it's gotten to the point where she just can't handle it anymore. So let's take a listen to Carrie.

Speaker 3 Hey, Mel. I'm a 53-year-old woman, a creative leader with, to the outside world, at least, a so-called great career, I guess you'd say.

Speaker 3 but with crippling anxiety and exhausting overthinking.

Speaker 3 Traveling accompanied by panic attacks, Oh, what the heck.

Speaker 3 I've had this issue for 30 years, and all the guided meditations and mindfulness training pods in the world aren't helping.

Speaker 3 So, what steps can I take to stop this, to heal, and find a new peace before I chuck in the towel and just barricade myself in at home? Thanks for everything. Bye.

Speaker 1 I really relate to Gary

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 I know that I have been somebody with what they call high functioning anxiety, but it's torturous because

Speaker 1 you're just always nervous about something and on edge.

Speaker 2 Here's the thing, and this is true with you too, is that the anxiety drives you to succeed. A lot of people with anxiety are really intelligent.
So we get very, very good at thinking.

Speaker 2 We go into our heads. We've been doing it since we've been five years old.
And it's like going to the thinking gym every day. So we get very good at thinking.
We get very good at accomplishing things.

Speaker 2 The problem is that underlying trauma,

Speaker 2 I could hear in her voice for sure

Speaker 2 is driving her too much.

Speaker 2 And you went through this too. You realized, look, this isn't sustainable going this way.

Speaker 2 So the solution for her would be to find that little version of herself and see her, love her, protect her, show her that she's connected. And what we do is we find where the alarm is in your body.

Speaker 2 So with her, I would say, you know, when you get into these anxious phases that I call alarm, and that you brilliantly call alarm all the time.

Speaker 2 I watched your one on healing childhood trauma and you only used the term anxiety once or twice, which I just loved.

Speaker 2 But getting into the alarm in her body, which basically that alarm is a remnant of your younger self, the part of our brain, the amygdala that encodes this has no sense of time.

Speaker 2 So that when we encode these traumatic memories, when we recall them, it doesn't feel like they're coming from the past. It feels like they're happening now.

Speaker 2 So she probably has an unresolved trauma of some kind or traumas that are coming up in her body. And temporarily, guided meditations, breathing, all that stuff will help you.

Speaker 2 But the key out of this, and I hope everybody gets this today, if you have chronic anxiety, you have a child in you that is suffering, that is struggling.

Speaker 2 And all the guided meditations, all the breath work, all the yoga isn't going to heal that.

Speaker 2 What heals that is actually going in, finding that child, finding their eyes in a picture or even in your mind's eye, looking at them, showing them that they are seen, heard, loved, and protected in a way

Speaker 2 now that they didn't get back then. And that's how we heal the root cause of this, as opposed to just helping people cope because basically most of the things that are out there today help you cope.

Speaker 1 Exactly. I think that's why Carrie's so frustrated.
She's saying she's just coping. You know, Dr.
Kennedy, I got to thank you for going into so much depth right out of the gate.

Speaker 1 And let's hit pause real quick. We need to hear a word from our sponsors.
Plus, I think we've gone so deep, so quickly that let's just take a breath and digest what we talked about.

Speaker 1 And maybe Carrie and you listening, maybe you want to find a photo of your younger self so that you have it in front of you when we come back because we're going to go even deeper into Carrie's question and the specific layers to healing when we return.

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Speaker 1 Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins.
This is the anxiety Toolkit on the Mel Robbins podcast, and we're sitting here with the renowned Dr.

Speaker 1 Russell Kennedy, answering a question from a listener named Carrie, who has a great career, very successful on the outside, but is struggling on the inside, as she puts it.

Speaker 3 With crippling anxiety and exhausting overthinking,

Speaker 3 traveling accompanied by panic attacks.

Speaker 1 What the heck. Just hearing Carrie's voice, I just so relate to how frustrated she is, Dr.
Kennedy. And Dr.
Kennedy says that you don't have to just cope with anxiety. You can heal it.

Speaker 2 And there's nothing wrong with coping.

Speaker 2 It's just to heal, we have to solve this at the root cause, which is this, typically, this unresolved wounding, typically again from childhood, that's still in you, that's still activated.

Speaker 2 And until that child feels seen, heard, loved, and protected, you're always going to be anxious.

Speaker 1 So all of a sudden, this visual came to mind, and I want to see if we can maybe tease this out into some specific steps that somebody might be able to take, even on their own today, with the support of your expertise.

Speaker 1 Because you described, in my mind, the three layers that somebody has to go through.

Speaker 1 to address this sort of chronic on-edgeness, this stress, this panic attacks that Carrie's talking about. There's this first phase of self-awareness, and then there's the second layer where you

Speaker 1 make an attempt to cope.

Speaker 1 And then there's a third phase, healing it and getting to the root cause.

Speaker 1 And the first level is self-awareness, right? So there may be a large number of people that are listening to this from around the world, because at this point we're reaching 200 countries,

Speaker 1 17 million people.

Speaker 1 And there's a lot of people that are thinking for the first time, huh? I wonder if I have anxiety.

Speaker 1 And so listening to podcasts, reading books, watching videos or watching this show on YouTube and having the self-awareness that maybe

Speaker 1 this is

Speaker 1 something called anxiety that you're dealing with. And what are some of the surprising signs, Dr.
Kennedy, that people should be looking for that they may not know

Speaker 1 could actually be anxiety?

Speaker 2 Well, one of the big ones that people don't really realize is constantly looking for external validation. Oh.
Constantly looking for love and attention outside of yourself.

Speaker 2 And when you get it, it's amazing. But when you don't get it, you get into that loneliness phase.

Speaker 2 And there's a study done, I can't remember how long ago, and I don't remember the exact, but basically it was they took women and they gave them an electric shock, not a big electric shock, and it was voluntary.

Speaker 2 And then they had three scenarios, one where the woman was alone, one where her hand was held by a stranger, and one where her hand was held by her partner.

Speaker 2 Now, to shorten this up, basically the brain has to work really, really hard if you're lonely.

Speaker 2 So when she was alone, 12 places in her brain lit up. We don't have to go into orbital frontal cortex and all that kind of stuff, but 12 places in her brain.

Speaker 2 When she was held hands with a stranger, eight places in her brain lit up. When she was holding hands with her partner, four places.
So only four places needed to come online to reassure her.

Speaker 2 So it just shows that power of human connection. But if we're constantly looking for validation outside of us, that is a sign of anxiety, typically.

Speaker 1 That makes a lot of sense. I mean, that's exactly what I would do.
And I think that's what Carrie is doing too, and most people with anxiety.

Speaker 2 You know, my book, Anxiety RX, is about anxiety, but really it's about childhood trauma. For me, it showed up as chronic anxiety.
For some people, it shows up as depression.

Speaker 2 Other people, it shows up as eating disorders, personality disorders. But all of it, it comes from some sort of unresolved childhood wounding.
It will make itself obvious.

Speaker 2 For me, when I was a child, my brother had orthopedic issues. My dad was schizophrenic.
A lot of people know about that who watch my channel.

Speaker 2 A lot of my mother's attention went to my brother and my dad. So I had this sense like, hey, what about me? Like, what about me? I have this drive to be seen.

Speaker 2 And that's why I'm on the Mel Robbins podcast. There's a drive in me that needs to be seen and validated.

Speaker 2 But there's also a part of me that was bullied in school that hates crowds and hates attention. So you can have people that are highly accomplished and they're driven by their anxiety.

Speaker 1 Like me and Carrie, it's a double-edged sword.

Speaker 2 But it's a treadmill. Eventually, after a couple of divorces, you know, or, or something that happens in your life that you can't control, then it comes out and then it's unmanageable.

Speaker 2 One of the things that I see with people is

Speaker 2 looking for love in all their own places, you know, all these things.

Speaker 2 Addictions are another one of those things that the reason why I think people take drugs or alcohol or whatever is when they're in that acute phase in the brain and the GABA receptors are all lit up and you feel calm and peaceful.

Speaker 2 I think that's one of the times that people actually feel connected to themselves.

Speaker 2 It's ironic. It's odd.
But in general, anxiety occurs because you blocked love for yourself. That's really what happens.

Speaker 2 So one of the things that drugs and alcohol do is they take away some of those blocks. They make you feel connected to yourself.

Speaker 1 It's so true. I've never thought about it that way.
Maybe that's not what Carrie is struggling with, but there are so many people who have anxiety and turn to substances for relief from it.

Speaker 2 Anxiety and addiction hold hands. Like Like they are so close together.
They both come from childhood wounding. And the

Speaker 2 alcohol or the drug or whatever allows people to feel connected to themselves. And I think that's what ketamine and this of these psychedelics.

Speaker 2 I think it's just a way of getting connected to yourself because that's how you heal is you become connected to yourself. It doesn't come from outside of you.

Speaker 2 But we have to have that love from outside of us as well, of course.

Speaker 2 And, you know, as you talk about the biggest relationship is the relationship you have to yourself and as cliche and woo and all that stuff as it sounds.

Speaker 2 And as a neuroscientist and a medical doctor, I sometimes want to have a seizure when I talk about this because it's just so non-scientific.

Speaker 2 Love and healing is non-scientific. We can't reduce it down to something that we can reproduce in a science lab.
And that's what heals us. So science will help us cope.

Speaker 2 But I haven't seen really science help us heal. Out of all the incredible advancements we've made in neuroscience in the last 15 years, and they have been amazing.

Speaker 2 Very few of those advancements have actually led to different clinical outcomes when you're sitting with a patient.

Speaker 2 So that's one of the things that I'm kind of disappointed about in science a little bit. But science is very helpful at helping us cope.
But to heal, it's an inside job.

Speaker 2 You really have to learn how to connect with that younger, wounded part of you. And if you don't, you'll always have alarm.
You'll always be anxious.

Speaker 1 I'd say the one exception is the exciting research in the area of all these psychedelics, but I think you just pointed out the reason why this is the biggest breakthrough, because

Speaker 1 when you have a guided therapeutic experience with a ketamine or an MDMA or psilocybin, you have the ability to reconnect and join in with

Speaker 1 yourself

Speaker 1 and repair.

Speaker 1 what you say is the original cause of anxiety, which is a situation in childhood where you felt separate from the caregivers whose only job was to make you feel safe and loved and looked after and cared for.

Speaker 1 I want to go back to, you know, I have this vision of there are these three phases as I'm listening to you speak.

Speaker 1 There is the phase of self-awareness and awakening and this kind of wake up moment where you're like, holy cow, cow, maybe the overthinking

Speaker 1 and the

Speaker 1 obsessiveness with achievement, maybe feeling on edge all the time. Maybe this isn't the way I'm meant to feel.

Speaker 1 Maybe this is anxiety, you know, so there's this first phase of self-awareness and the wake up moment. And then there's the second layer going a little bit deeper where you

Speaker 1 make an attempt to cope, whether that's through therapy or it is through breath work, or you mentioned meditation or exercise, the bazillion different things that you and I have both done for decades in order to cope with our anxiety, which for me meant trying to turn it down a little.

Speaker 1 And then there's a third and deeper phase, which is what you are teaching everybody. And that third phase is healing it.

Speaker 1 and going deep and getting to the root cause, which you have so beautifully taught us, is separation and feeling separate from others and feeling separate from yourself.

Speaker 1 And when you feel separate, you don't experience love. You don't experience safety.
And so what I want to know, Dr. Kennedy, going back to Carrie's question, is is there a simple series of steps?

Speaker 1 That anybody who's listening today that's like, holy cow, I have anxiety. I want to go deeper and start the work of healing it.
What do you do?

Speaker 1 Can you give me and Carrie and everyone listening who thinks or knows that they have anxiety, give us three things, Dr.

Speaker 1 Kennedy, that we can do starting today that work to go and reconnect with the part of ourselves that has been separate since childhood?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's a lot of like woo-woo inner child stuff. Like people get really fired up by this concept of inner child.

Speaker 2 And I find the people that get the most fired up by the inner child, oh, that's a bunch of crap or whatever, are the ones that have the most childhood wounding because they don't want to go back there.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 I do have to admit, anytime anybody uses those two words, inner child, I'm like, oh, I roll. Me too.
Sounds so

Speaker 1 stupid.

Speaker 1 But as a neuroscientist and a medical doctor who specializes in this, what the fuck are you talking about when you say inner child?

Speaker 2 Yeah, the science people, it's the amygdala-based remnant of the trauma.

Speaker 2 So for you, for your car accident when you rolled on the ski trip.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. You know, and for those of you who don't know what Dr.

Speaker 1 Kennedy is referring to, my mom and I got into this major car accident where we slid off the road and rolled the car as we were driving up to a ski resort when I was really little in Michigan.

Speaker 1 And it was a very traumatic experience. And the first time Dr.

Speaker 1 Kennedy was on, I was telling him that now decades later, whenever I hear crunching snow, I immediately remember what it felt like to be in the car.

Speaker 1 It's a trauma response that's personal to me and that traumatic incident.

Speaker 2 There is your amygdala coupled the sound of crunching snow

Speaker 2 with trauma. Yes.
So now whenever you go to the mailbox and you hear crunching snow, your amygdala coupled.

Speaker 2 that sound with the trauma. So your body will feel exactly now when you're on your way out to the mailbox as you did back then.

Speaker 1 I want to share one other example for those of you who haven't heard the first

Speaker 1 episode that we did with Dr. Kennedy.
And there's a second coupling that happened for me, which is I was

Speaker 1 molested by an older kid during a sleepover in the fourth grade.

Speaker 1 And when I woke up the next morning,

Speaker 1 I felt in every cell of my body that something

Speaker 1 was very wrong.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 what happened is the trauma, and now you're saying inner child and the base of the amygdala coupled the experience of waking up after being a victim and the feeling that something's wrong with morning.

Speaker 1 And ever since I've been in fourth grade, I wake up every morning and the morning itself triggers me to feel exactly the same way as a 50-year-old woman that I did when I was in the fourth grade and had woke up that morning.

Speaker 1 Is that, that's what you're saying, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And you came downstairs and your mom was making pancakes and she said, how did you sleep, honey? And you saw the other kid.

Speaker 2 If you had a chance at that point, if there was a magic wand where you know you you went over to your mother and said hey you know i've got to talk to you about something and she's and you know you went to a different room and then you you talked about what happened and she soothed you it's not your fault you rubbed your back

Speaker 2 that probably would have mitigated this whole thing wow because if we have this love and attention from our our parents and caregivers we are protected so everyone has trauma in childhood like there's no way of avoiding but there's a difference between like drama and trauma Trauma is when the event actually changes your nervous system.

Speaker 2 So it gets stuck in the on position. It's kind of like if you're on a railroad and the old time switch, you know, the switches they used to have on the railroad? Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2 So normally, you know, if you're, you go along, you've got good enough parents, you know, you have a reasonable childhood, you go along with the track, the track is straight and you just mature.

Speaker 2 Now, if you get trauma in there, it's like one of those railway switches that switches you off track. So it takes you into this mode of protection as opposed to this mode of growth.

Speaker 2 So if you keep going on the track, you're in a growth mode, you feel safe. But when we have this trauma and it's not resolved at the time, that switch gets thrown and our nervous system changes.

Speaker 2 Again, I don't like using the word permanently because we can move it back, but the amygdala never forgets. There's always a remnant of that.

Speaker 1 So what can someone like Carrie or me or anyone listening do to put the switch in the right direction so we don't feel so anxious all the time? Oh, wait, hold on, Dr. Cooney.

Speaker 1 I think we are all going to benefit from what you're about to say. And I'm looking at the time.
And so I want you to hold that thought because we will answer that question after the break.

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Speaker 1 Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins, and this is the anxiety toolkit on the Mel Robbins podcast.
I'm here with Dr. Russell Kennedy, who is a world-renowned expert on anxiety.

Speaker 1 And he says that all anxiety is rooted in unresolved trauma from childhood. We are unpacking a question from a listener named Carrie.
And right before the break, Dr.

Speaker 1 Kennedy, you said that that the childhood trauma that makes anxious people like me and Carrie and perhaps you listening to us get stuck feeling anxious and on edge all the time has to do with our nervous system getting stuck in a state of being on alert.

Speaker 1 Now, Carrie tried coping with it through mindfulness. And I want to replay her question though.

Speaker 1 Because she asks you a very specific question and we all want the answer.

Speaker 3 What steps can I take to stop this, to heal and find a new peace before I chuck in the towel and just barricade myself in at home?

Speaker 2 So what we have to do is go back, find that child at that age, younger self, inner child. I usually use younger self because it doesn't turn people off so much, but find your younger self.

Speaker 2 Give them the love and support now that they needed back then, because again, the amygdala has no sense of time.

Speaker 2 So we can use that fact that the amygdala has no sense of time to connect and soothe her give her what she needed back then

Speaker 2 and that starts to heal the root cause so then we can pull the switch back but the the older we get and the more that that thing gets ingrained the harder that switch is rusted into the on position so every time the train goes down that track and we experience something like that like we wake up it goes it goes off that track.

Speaker 2 It goes into that protection mode rather than the growth mode of going straight ahead. So if we go back, we find the switch, we heal that younger version of ourselves.

Speaker 2 And again, I know how flaky this sounds. And as a neuroscientist, it's really difficult for me to talk about the younger self, inner child.

Speaker 2 But I know after suffering from 30 plus years of crippling anxiety myself, this was the only thing that allowed me to heal was to go back. I'm a yoga teacher.
I mean, I meditation teacher.

Speaker 2 I've done all this stuff. I've done it all.
And nothing really helped. And like you, I have morning anxiety or alarm.
It wakes me up. I feel it.
And then I just, the big thing about having the alarm

Speaker 2 is don't add thoughts to it. Like allow the alarm to be there.
Go in a sensation, you know, use your breath. Use the grounding that you're around.

Speaker 2 If you're lying in your bed, feel the grounding, feel the support, feel your body, even if it's uncomfortable. And then go back and find that younger version of yourself.

Speaker 2 So you're asking for sort of a step. Yes.
So basically, when people get anxious,

Speaker 2 they go into their heads and they start overthinking. And that's a trap because you'll never get out of that.

Speaker 2 You'll never get out of that overthinking because the mind says, hey, we have the answer with more thinking. And it's like, well, I thought anxiety was a problem of overthinking.

Speaker 2 It's like, no, no, it's not. It's not.
Just keep thinking. And that doesn't work.
So what you have to do is go into your body. Now, the problem is your body feels alarmed.

Speaker 2 So why am I going to go down into my body when it feels alarmed?

Speaker 2 And that's why we have things like internal family systems therapy, somatic experiencing, psychedelics to some extent, to make you feel safe in your body again.

Speaker 2 Because once you feel safe in your body again, then you have the platform. So when you're feeling anxious, or as I like to say, alarmed, go, where in my body do I feel this? Where is it?

Speaker 2 For me, it's in my solar plexus. I talk about that in the book.
But find where the alarm is in your system. And some people, it's in their throat.
Some people, it's in their across their shoulders.

Speaker 2 But see. if you can put your hand over it and just sort of make a mental connection with that alarm and see if you don't feel better almost instantly.

Speaker 2 Now, it's not going to take it away, but there is a sense when I first started doing this, it's like, hey, you know, this is the first time in 30 years that I'm actually on the right track.

Speaker 2 So when you feel anxious, don't go into your head, go into the sensation of your body, even if it hurts. Find that alarm, find where it is, because I drill down with people.

Speaker 2 It's like, does it have a shape? Does it have a color? Does it have a temperature?

Speaker 2 Like I really drill down in there because there's a part of our brain called the insula, the insular cortex, that's kind of like the mediator between the thinking brain and the feeling body.

Speaker 2 And that insula, I think, will be in the next few years, really important in changing this old pattern so that when we feel it in our body, we can go back, feel the exact same way that we did back at the time, you with crunching snow.

Speaker 2 and me in the mornings as well and go okay there is a different path i can actually flip the railway switch back over to the growth part and get out of protection.

Speaker 2 So it's really about connecting with that feeling of alarm in your body, because that feeling of alarm in your body is your younger self.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 Carrie, myself, anybody who has anxiety, the pathway to healing is to connect with the younger self, the part of you that felt separate. But can we go into specific tools, Dr.
Kennedy?

Speaker 1 Because I think the second that you start talking younger self, a lot of us check out. Do I print out a photo of when I was little?

Speaker 1 Do I make that photo my screensaver, which I kind of feel like maybe I should? How exactly do we start?

Speaker 2 So that's me at three.

Speaker 1 Oh my gosh. Oh,

Speaker 1 Rusty.

Speaker 2 Yep. That's Rusty.

Speaker 1 So for those of you who are listening to this and not watching this podcast on YouTube, Dr. Kennedy just held up the homepage of his phone and there was a photo of him that's three years old.

Speaker 1 It just made my heart go, oh my God.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's pretty cute.

Speaker 1 So what does it do

Speaker 1 if you do that for yourself?

Speaker 2 Well, that's the start, right? That's the big thing because the child in us needs this love and support so much that it creates all this alarm to get our attention.

Speaker 2 And yet as adults, we push the alarm away.

Speaker 2 So it's kind of like, I think I might have mentioned this in the last, you know, podcast that we did, is that if a child came up to you with their hands up in a grocery store, like they lost their parents, of course you would sue them.

Speaker 2 But we have this alarm that goes off in our system, which is essentially the younger version of us going, hey, pick me up. pick me up.
I need some attention. I need some love.

Speaker 2 And instead, we go to the internet and zombie scroll Instagram or go into our addictions or whatever. And we push that child away.
So the child just gets louder.

Speaker 2 The alarm just gets louder and louder and louder. But there is a resistance to going back.
The adult doesn't want to go back and visit the child because the child holds all their pain.

Speaker 2 And the child has a real mistrust of us as adults because we've been ignoring their alarm for 30 years. So it's really important that we start slowly and you make that connection.

Speaker 2 So when you say get a picture, That can be really triggering for people. So sometimes I just say, in your mind's eye, picture yourself at any age as a child that you want.

Speaker 2 You know, picture what you're wearing.

Speaker 2 Picture yourself maybe at a happy time in your life. You know, like for you, it was like skiing or something like that.
Picture yourself in this happy place.

Speaker 2 And that way you start making that connection. So go to a place that you felt good.
And I use this a lot when I, when I work with people, is what was the best time in your life?

Speaker 2 What was the best time in your life, Mel?

Speaker 1 I just immediately had this

Speaker 1 image of being on the front yard of our house in Michigan. And there were all kinds of kids around.
And it was a beautiful summer night.

Speaker 1 It's my favorite time of night, dusk, when the twinkly stars first start to come out. And it's kind of confusing because the sun's up, but you see the moon.
And we were playing games.

Speaker 1 Like we're playing bass and statue and tag and

Speaker 1 like just

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 moment right there with my brother and a bunch of other kids in the neighborhood running around being kids in the front yard of our house in Michigan where I grew up.

Speaker 2 Okay, so close your eyes and really get into that image.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 I will. And I want you listening to do this with me.
If you're not driving a car right now and you can just stop, like take your hands off the keyboard. put the dishes down,

Speaker 1 sit down on a bench if you're walking your dog, and just stop for a minute. And let's

Speaker 1 do this together.

Speaker 2 Relax your shoulders, relax your jaw.

Speaker 2 Nice breath in and out. Just really see if you can drink in the emotion of that.

Speaker 2 Where do you feel that in your body?

Speaker 1 Oh, I kind of feel it from my cheeks all the way to my heart. It's like this sort of

Speaker 1 like,

Speaker 1 definitely like right, like for sure, the heart.

Speaker 2 So this, you know, this is something I would add to high-fiving yourself in the mirror is go back to the best time in your life.

Speaker 2 When you're high-fiving yourself in the mirror, because then we're getting your insulin involved, we're getting your brain involved in this whole feeling state, because the feeling state is what changes us.

Speaker 2 We can change our thoughts at a dime, but.

Speaker 2 The feeling state is what changes our nervous system.

Speaker 2 So when you do the high-five habit, when you're high-fiving yourself in the mirror, recall the best time in your life and just try and see if you can really get a felt sense of that.

Speaker 2 Now, what I will do with people who have suffered trauma is I will take them, once I have them grounded and once they trust me and stuff, I will take them into their trauma and then I will take them into the best time in their life.

Speaker 2 So with you, I might do, and we're shortening this considerably for the podcast, but for you, I might say, okay,

Speaker 2 if you feel safe enough that we talk about that kid waking up with that kid on top of you

Speaker 2 and getting into that feeling.

Speaker 2 Now, where do you feel that in your body?

Speaker 1 Like right in the gut.

Speaker 2 Is this okay, Mel, to go into this?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Okay. Okay.
Like I immediately like went from like the heart being full to like,

Speaker 1 like right in the gut and the ankles, weird, the ankles.

Speaker 2 So what I would do is I would go back and go, okay, now go back to that feeling of dusk. You can see your house, you're playing, playing statue.

Speaker 2 It's fun.

Speaker 2 You feel calm, peaceful,

Speaker 2 happy.

Speaker 2 Now let's go into your gut. Let's go into that sensation again of, you know, waking up with that kid on top of you.

Speaker 2 If it's okay to stay there for a second,

Speaker 2 and then lovingly go back up into that place in your chest, in your throat, where you felt really peaceful and happy playing with your brother.

Speaker 1 It's amazing because I feel the gut. like pulling me down.

Speaker 1 Like the, it's easy to drop into the gut. Yep.
And the bad experience, it's hard to pull yourself from that

Speaker 1 back up into this experience that I can feel that's positive. Is that normal?

Speaker 2 That's absolutely normal. We're wired that way, Mel.
We're wired to pay more attention to fearful situations than pleasurable ones. Because in our evolution, that's basically what kept us alive.

Speaker 2 So we have to heal this at a feeling level. You know, we can talk about that kid on top of you for the rest of your life without really changing it too much.

Speaker 2 You might get a better understanding of it cognitively, but to really change that sensation, we have to use another sensation because that's the language of trauma is sensation. It's the body.

Speaker 2 So we use that good feeling that you have, and then we just, we go back and forth. We oscillate between back and forth.
And

Speaker 2 it starts weakening. that power, that negative feeling in your body that you associate with being a victim, with being helpless.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I love when you say you're talking about play because trauma activates both the sympathetic, the fight or flight, and the parasympathetic, the rest and the digestive at the same time.

Speaker 2 Because we're so confused. We don't know.
Yeah. Because once you get up to a certain point in sympathetic activity, your body can't handle it anymore.
So it shuts down. So we go into parasympathetic.

Speaker 2 We don't go into pleasant parasympathetic, but we go into shutdown parasympathetic. And then it goes back and forth and back and forth.

Speaker 2 And a lot of us with anxiety, that's what happens during the day. We go into this place where our body just gets exhausted.
So we feel okay. We don't feel that tremendous, you know, anxiety anymore.

Speaker 2 And then once we get rested in the parasympathetic, then the sympathetic comes back online and we go right back into anxiety again. So play is so important for healing.

Speaker 2 Another thing that activates both the parasympathetic and the sympathetic activity at the same time. Trauma activates co-activation, they call it.

Speaker 2 Trauma activates parasympathetic and sympathetic simultaneously. So does play.

Speaker 2 But play allows you to start metabolizing.

Speaker 2 So when you're in coactivation, when you're parasympathetic and your sympathetic is active at the same time, it's like having your foot on the gas and the break at the same time.

Speaker 2 When you're in play, you start realizing, hey, you know what? This sensation is actually okay. It doesn't have to fire me right into the trauma.

Speaker 2 That's why play, one of the reasons why play is so important in healing trauma is because we get that felt sense of activation of both the parasympathetic and the sympathetic at the same time in a safe place because play is safe and it's fun.

Speaker 1 Okay, so going back to Carrie, number one, it was very clear to you as an expert and a medical doctor and a neuroscientist that she's dealing with stored trauma.

Speaker 1 And step one is kind of recognizing that.

Speaker 1 And then the next thing she needs to do is to recognize that thinking keeps you in the coping and that this is really going to be about dropping into your body and learning how to reconnect and heal in your body.

Speaker 1 And one of the things that you have recommended is that we think about this

Speaker 1 as younger self-work and that you can go back to positive times.

Speaker 1 and feel that good sensation, that if you're ready for it, printing out a photo of yourself or putting it on your phone so that you are reconnecting

Speaker 1 with that version of you where you started to feel separate or unsafe or scared, and that that is a way to start this process. Is there anything else that you would recommend that Carrie think about?

Speaker 2 Yeah, you have to do it slowly. Because the thing is, when we go into our alarm, we don't want to go in there.
Like it feels painful to go in there.

Speaker 2 do it slowly if you have a real significant trauma you know emotional physical sexual abuse you probably need a therapist and maybe a somatic therapist to kind of help you get into this place because it's not for amateurs in a way if you have big trauma if you have trauma that's manageable absolutely you can work it on on your own but if you have big t-trauma doing this on your own can re-traumatize.

Speaker 2 So you need someone else there. You need someone there who you wish was there at the time of the trauma.
You know, and that person is you. That person is you.
It's like you can go back.

Speaker 2 We can use our amygdala. We can use that sense that we are, we are not locked in time.
We can go back and find that, like what I have on my phone. I can look in his eyes.
I can imagine his eyes too.

Speaker 2 And that's how you heal from anxiety and alarm. We can cope all we want.

Speaker 2 But if you want to heal, you have to find that child in you and you have to show them that they're seen, heard, loved, and protected.

Speaker 2 And one of the ways that I do that every day is I start my day looking at him. And I use different pictures of me, but that's the main one because it's on my phone and it's right there already.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 1 Let's go to another question. We get a lot of questions about anxiety and sleep.
In fact, the next listener is somebody named Jason, and his anxiety is starting to creep up at night.

Speaker 1 And it's not only impacting his ability to fall asleep, but then he wakes up in the middle of the night and his mind is racing and he can't go back to sleep.

Speaker 1 And so let's let's listen to this question and then talk about tools.

Speaker 6 Hey, Mel, this is Jason.

Speaker 6 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?

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Dr. Kennedy, here's what I want to do.
I want to give the remaining four questions the service that they deserve.

Speaker 1 And we covered so much about the younger self-work and there's already so many takeaways that Dr. Kennedy, we're going to turn this into two episodes.
Sure.

Speaker 1 And I want you listening to take everything that you've learned today. And there's a lot.
You have learned about the three phases. You've learned about self-awareness.

Speaker 1 You've learned that coping is important, but that's where a lot of us get stuck. And we've started to scratch the surface on what it means to heal.

Speaker 1 And if you felt inspired by the meditation that Dr. Kennedy walked me through, where he took me back to remembering a time in my life that was a really awesome memory where I was playing.

Speaker 1 I want you to spend some time in the next day or two bringing yourself back to that place.

Speaker 1 If you feel inspired like I feel inspired, I feel very inspired to print out a photo of myself in the fourth grade and put it on the home screen of my phone, pin it up in my office, because I think it's going to shift the way that I relate to that alarm inside of me because what I've learned today is that alarm is an anxiety.

Speaker 1 That alarm is the fourth grade Mel reaching her hands up and saying, please, somebody help me. Please reassure me.
Please tell me I'm going to be okay.

Speaker 1 Having that physical photo is really, really, really going to help. So Dr.
Kennedy, we're going to continue this. Okay.

Speaker 1 It's going to be part two of this, and we're going to answer four more questions from listeners. We're going to keep on going.
going, and I promise you, part two will be released in a couple days.

Speaker 1 So hit the subscribe button, and this next part of the conversation will be there waiting for you the second it drops.

Speaker 1 I do this because I love you, and I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to take these steps to heal,

Speaker 1 to find peace.

Speaker 1 to feel safe and confident and energize again. You deserve that.
All right, Dr. Kennedy and I will be back right here waiting for you in your feed in a couple days.

Speaker 1 Oh, one more thing. It's the legal language.
This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes.

Speaker 1 It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.

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