Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #407 BITESIZE | 3 Practical Strategies to Reduce Anxiety | Dr Russell Kennedy

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Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 370 of the podcast with medical doctor and neuroscientist Dr. Russell Kennedy. Russell's core message is that it's more effective to use the body to calm the mind than the mind to calm the body. And in this clip, he shares practical strategies to help manage anxious feelings. to help manage actress feelings.

Starting point is 00:01:47 If you're waking up every morning and you're starting to worry, and what I call the three W's of worry, warnings, what ifs, and worst case scenarios, and they kind of accelerate. If you're waking up with it every day, if it's a constant factor in your life, then we've got to do something. Anxiety is a part of human existence.

Starting point is 00:02:03 You know, you're going to get anxious about your money. You're going to get anxious about your money. You're going to get anxious about your kids. That's just natural. But if it's chronic, you know, if your natural response is to get really worried and get into your head and start chewing things up in your brain, I call it chewing on glass, you're just going to get worse. Your anxiety is just going to get worse. So it's really a matter of, can I ground myself in my body and realize that a bit of anxiety is just part of human

Starting point is 00:02:30 existence. But if it's part of your daily, if you wake up with it, that's kind of a sign that there's probably something more there. I think when many of us think about anxiety, we think about one thing, I'm feeling anxious right now. But you're saying that there are these two components. Well, I think we're addressing the mind, you know, so I have this concept and anxiety that I call the alarm anxiety cycle. So I think there's this state of alarm that's stored in our body and in our mind too, because you can't separate the mind and the body, this state of alarm that's stored in our body and in our mind too, because you can't separate the mind and the body, but it's stored from old traumas that are unresolved. And this alarm is in us.

Starting point is 00:03:09 And the mind reflects that trauma because the mind is a compulsive meaning-making makes sense machine. So when it feels this old trauma in our body, it's got to do something with it. So it makes up a what if, a warning, a worst case scenario to kind of make sense of the angst that we're feeling. And then we believe that trauma, we believe that worry because we made it up. And then that creates more alarm in our body. And then it just gets in this cycle, this alarm anxiety cycle. So we're trying to treat the symptom, which is the thoughts, which is the worry as the cause. If you think better, you will feel better, but it's really difficult to think

Starting point is 00:03:45 in opposition to how your body feels. It's just a constant uphill battle. So let's talk about this anxiety in our minds and alarm in our bodies. Because I think this really gets to the core, I think, of your message, that it's these two separate things that we conflate together. Yep. That's exactly what it is. And when we conflate the two together and we don't see them as separate entities, it's very hard to treat it. So we can treat it through the alarm. One of the ways is finding the alarm in your body. In me, it's in my solar plexus, putting my hand over it, breathing into it. And just to go right off the top, I believe that that alarm is my younger self, is my wounded self that watched my schizophrenic father just sort of slowly collapse until

Starting point is 00:04:35 he eventually committed suicide. And then there's the anxious thoughts of the mind that go along with this feeling of alarm in the body. So if we can separate them into two entities, we have a way of breaking the cycle. But if we don't see it as two separate entities and just try and treat the thoughts, the little analogy that I draw is like if you're in a rowboat and there's a hole in the rowboat, it's filling up with water. You can bail water out and drop that water level down a little bit to make yourself feel better. But unless you go under, unless you patch that hole in the hull, which is fixing the

Starting point is 00:05:08 alarm in your body, you're always going to be bailing water. So it's really the separate. The anxious thoughts of the mind are different than the alarm in the body, but they energize each other. So if we can learn how to separate the two, see them as two separate entities and attack them both, we can break the cycle. And when we break the cycle, then we start really feeling like

Starting point is 00:05:27 we have control over the cycle rather than the cycle controlling us. So let's take a real life example. Maybe that might be helpful for people to sort of think their way through or feel their way through this anxiety alarm cycle that you're talking about. So I don't know, let's take, if I think about

Starting point is 00:05:46 practice and the sort of patients I've seen over the years, let's imagine a 42-year-old lady who's at work in her office and is feeling really, really anxious about their job role, about the way that their boss is treating them perhaps, and they're struggling to function because of that anxiety. Does that work for you, that example? All right. So let's, for that individual, how would you talk them through this? So I would say, try to move into your body, like find the alarm in your body, because what happens is when we're feeling quote unquote anxious, we tend to attribute the cause to our mind. Our mind goes and our mind is trying to solve it as well, but it's an unsolvable riddle because the reason you're anxious is there is no obvious answer. If there was an obvious answer, you wouldn't be anxious. So go into your body, find where do I feel this?

Starting point is 00:06:40 I know I'm feeling anxious right now. Where do I feel that in my body rather than going into your head? Because as soon as you go in ahead, you've lost the plot because you're just going to stay in your head. It's just going to get worse. It's very rare that all of a sudden your mind just goes, oh, well, here's the solution. I'm not anxious anymore. Okay. So I think this is such an important point, right? What does that mean, go into your body and not stay in your head? What does staying in your head look like? For that individual, tell me what normally happens when people stay in their head. It just gets worse. So in your example, my boss is going to fire me. My boss doesn't like me.

Starting point is 00:07:15 My boss's wife doesn't even like me. I mean, I was over there for dinner three weeks ago and they just hated me. So you see how it just goes. Like it stacks on top of each other, right? So stories, you know, we're putting meaning onto this. Absolutely, absolutely. And it's almost running away with itself. Totally. You're saying in that moment, if you can, once you've learned the skill of how to do it,

Starting point is 00:07:38 you're saying go into your body. You've already mentioned that you store the alarm in your solar plexus. That's where it is for me. But I think for a lot of people, they don't know what does that mean? It's in my body, right? Well, they've never looked for it. That's the whole premise of my approach. Is that when we get into our heads and we start worrying,

Starting point is 00:07:59 we don't feel the need to go into our body because our mind is telling us that it has the answer when all our mind has is just more of the problem. So what I'm saying by getting into your body is, okay, close my eyes. If I can think about this, this whole thing with my boss, sometimes what I will do, I'll work with people and I'll say, okay, think about your boss walking into your office right now and say, you're fired. That job you did on the project was unacceptable and you're fired. Now scan your body. I'm speeding this up quite a bit, but basically it's, I put people into this sort of relaxed semi-meditative

Starting point is 00:08:29 state and then I put them into their trauma and they go, okay, scan your body. And they'll say, oh, my throat, I feel this sort of hot. And I'll ask them, is it hot or cold? How big is it? Size of a grape, size of a baseball, the size of of a watermelon. How big is it? And then does it have a color? Does it have a texture? Does it have a temperature? The insular cortex, which is part of the limbic brain, it makes an emotional signature of your trauma and it shows up in your body. And I think your body feels exactly the way now when you're worried about your boss that it did when you were 10 years old and your mom came in and said, what are you doing? You can't do that. You're not good enough to do that. And we make this emotional signature through the insula, through the part of the brain that sort of

Starting point is 00:09:13 translates the body to the mind and the mind to the body, which is called the insular cortex. We make an emotional signature and our body feels exactly the same way now as it did back when we were 10 years old with all the wherewith it did back when we were 10 years old, with all the wherewithal we had when we were 10 years old. So of course, we're going to start making up these stories that a child would kind of make up because worry is very childlike. When you look at it, when you look back on it, you go, why did I worry about that? That just seems so ridiculous. One of the other reasons why is because we paralyze the premotor areas and the prefrontal cortex because we move into survival physiology, survival brain, which really isn't all that

Starting point is 00:09:49 good at rationally figure things out. And so not only does the alarm create this survival physiology in our brain, which makes us look for more threat, we also paralyze the part of our brain that say, this is really nothing to worry about. So we get double whammied. And that's why the brain just keeps going because the brain wants to solve the problem, but the problem is really unsolvable at the level that you're looking at it. Okay. So if you stay stuck in the mind with more thoughts, with more stories, it's very hard, you're saying, to actually change things.

Starting point is 00:10:24 You can't. I mean, you can change things. You can't. I mean, you can change it. You can start saying, you know, my boss likes me. He's given me this really great job evaluation only a week ago. You can go into that. But again, you're just kind of bailing water. You know, I would prefer that when you get in, when you're sitting at your desk and you're freaking out, it's like, okay, I feel this in my throat. Okay, can I put my hand over my throat? at your desk and you're freaking out, it's like, okay, I feel this in my throat. Okay. Can I put my hand over my throat? Can I breathe into it? There's, um, Andrew Schuberman talks about this, the physiological side, two sniffs in and a long exhale. And with me, with my anxiety peeps, the anxiety people I work with, I do this sort of modified version of it. I do it three times,

Starting point is 00:11:01 really deep, expanding my chest, hold for about two or three seconds, and then close my teeth and breathe out through my teeth. And really elongate that exhale. And as I hear that hissing sound that I'm making myself, I imagine a tire, an overinflated tire, just relaxing. So it looks like this. So I'm stressed. I'm sitting at my desk. I'm freaking out. It's like, hold, relaxing my shoulder, relaxing my jaw as I breathe out, elongating my exhalation. And I can't do it too many times where I'll start zoning myself out because this is what I do to calm myself down. And that's a much better use of your time and energy than trying to figure it out through your head. You're never going to solve it through your mind. So if someone does that breathing practice, number one, what is it doing to the body when you do that?

Starting point is 00:11:54 And I guess following on from that, is that something people can do in the moment when they're feeling that alarm in their body? Yeah, absolutely. And if you practice it when you're not, this is the big thing with people. This is the difference between the people that heal and the people that just manage. If you practice it when you're not feeling anxious, if you start getting into a practice

Starting point is 00:12:18 of even five minutes a day doing that, when you're driving or just when you're sitting, just feeling your butt in the chair, feeling your shoulders relaxed, feeling your jaw relaxed, giving yourself a felt sense that you're okay and training that. So when you actually go into the game, when you go into that stressful situation, you've taught your autonomic nervous system this process that will relax it. When you tell yourself things are okay, you want to believe it. You want to go into that feeling because it feels so much better, but it's much more effective to use the body to calm the mind than it is to use the mind to try and calm the body. And that's a big premise of the book too,

Starting point is 00:13:02 is like, how do we find, it's like you're numbing the symptoms, but the root cause, this sort of childhood pain, you know, not to sound like a broken record, is still there. Can we move the body? Can we change the body? And in some way that woman sitting at her chair, at her desk, if she puts her hand on her chest or finds the alarm in her system and breathes into it. She's changing her body reaction. So when we change that, we break the spell a little bit of the alarm. And when we break the spell of the alarm and we're out of our heads because we're not in our worry anymore because we're now in our body, it really breaks that sort of automatic cycle that we were in before that we didn't even know we were in.

Starting point is 00:13:41 What you are advocating for is something that actually is quite alien to much of western culture totally well i see it with my kids now at school you know everything is about the mind and thoughts and thinking that's been me for much of my life of course you know which is Which is why I'm so drawn to silence and stillness and time without listening to stuff or looking at stuff, right? It's been something that I think I've only managed to do or experience, I would say, over the past few years. Yeah. After doing therapy and working through various states, right? Because it's not easy when you're used to thinking all the time. It's very hard to just sit there and try and be still.

Starting point is 00:14:32 Because thinking becomes a way of avoiding. Here's the way I think what happens is that we develop this state of alarm in our body. We don't want to live there. We don't want to feel that. So what we do instead is we go up into the worries of our mind. We don't want to live there. We don't want to feel bad. So what we do instead is we go up into the worries of our mind. People say that worry doesn't do anything. It absolutely does do something. It takes us away from this pain, typically childhood, that's stuck in our body. And then we're ruminating up in our heads because the more we can stay in our heads and dissociate into our heads, the less we have to go down and experience that old alarm that we don't even realize is there most of the time. For that person who is struggling with anxiety, who feels that everything they've tried so far has only had limited use, is there one thing you'd

Starting point is 00:15:17 recommend that they think about doing? Is there one practice you'd say, this is where you need to start? This is the one tip that, because Leandra, my daughter has gone through some anxious periods in her life. And this is the one tip that she said, look, dad, when you get on Dr. Chatterjee's podcast, you have to tell people this. It's like, okay, Lee, I'm glad that we got it. So it's basically when you're feeling anxious, just saying to yourself, and this is the middle of the day, the middle of the night, am I safe in this moment? Am I in this moment that I'm in right now? Like I may have the dentist in four hours or I may have an exam or whatever, but in this moment that I'm in right now, am I safe?

Starting point is 00:15:56 Because anxiety is always about the future. Worry is always about the future. And trauma is always about the past. So if you can say, I'm safe in this moment and just really feel the safety in the moment, that for her was the biggest tip that I've ever given her as far as her anxiety goes. It is a bit of a cognitive thing. I agree. But it is something that's really helped her. And she said, dad, you have to tell them this.

Starting point is 00:16:22 You have to say, and this is especially good for in the middle of the night when you wake up and you're panicked about something. It's like, I know I'm worried about this, this, and this, but in this moment that I'm in right now, when I'm looking around at the walls of my room, am I safe? And you can also phrase it in the form of a statement. I am safe in this moment. So that is what I would leave people with is because if you live in the present moment,

Starting point is 00:16:41 there's no anxiety in the present moment. Anxiety is your mental interpretation and your body's interpretation of anxiety and fear. If you can bring yourself into the present moment, then because anxiety is always about the future or past trauma, when you bring yourself into the present moment and assure yourself that you're safe,

Starting point is 00:16:57 then you're safe. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #407 BITESIZE | 3 Practical Strategies to Reduce Anxiety | Dr Russell Kennedy

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