Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - A New Model for Solving Anxiety with Dr Russell Kennedy #370

Episode Date: June 13, 2023

If you ever feel anxious, whether that’s a low-level worry, a sudden fear, or full-on panic, can you sense where it’s coming from in your body? Perhaps your chest feels tight, or your gut feels uneasy. Or, perhaps, you have no idea. My guest on this episode, believes that understanding where this feeling lives inside your body is the key to treating anxiety – for good. Dr Russell Kennedy is a medical doctor, neuroscientist, and someone who suffered with crippling anxiety for over 30 years. He is the author of Anxiety RX: A New Prescription For Anxiety From The Doctor Who Created It and has recently launched MBRX, an online course to help people permanently heal their anxiety. Russell insists anxiety isn’t a disorder of the mind. Our worries are merely a symptom that keeps us in our heads and away from the real problem. He favours the term ‘alarm’ and says we need to find where the alarm is in our bodies. This alarm is a physiological pattern that’s been left by events in our past, usually in early childhood. It signals to our brain that we aren’t safe – and so our mind gets to work trying to think us out of danger. Russell shares his own journey through anxiety. He talks about how growing up with a father who was schizophrenic and bipolar, left alarm signals, imprinted in his body. And, for over 30 years he searched for relief from his anxiety. But nothing worked.   In Russell’s view, most treatments for anxiety, including medication and CBT, fail in the long term because they don’t address the root cause. For Russell, healing starts by finding out where anxiety lives inside your body and he walks you through how exactly you can start doing that.   We also discuss the simple things that parents can do to help their kids grow up feeling ‘seen, heard, loved and protected’. And, we also discuss the value of activities like breathwork, meditation and yoga, and also some promising therapies such as Internal Family Systems and Somatic Experiencing.   Russell’s core message has the potential to be transformative - that it’s more effective to use the body to calm the mind, than the mind to calm the body. Given how prevalent anxiety is now across society, I think this is a profoundly important conversation. I hope you enjoy listening. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://www.exhalecoffee.com/livemore https://www.vivobarefoot.com/livemore https://www.boncharge.com/livemore https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/370 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

I feel for you. Like if you have anxiety, I know what it's like. I know what it's like to feel like this is never going to get better. I'm going to have this for the rest of my life. And I'm here to tell you that it's not. That's not true. You don't have to live like this. And I really want to change the way that anxiety is understood and treated. Look at this model and use it for yourself and find if it works for you. Because I haven't found a person yet that this hasn't helped them. Hey guys, how you doing? Hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. If you ever feel anxious, whether that's a low-level worry, a sudden fear, or even full-on panic, can you sense where it's coming from in your body?

Perhaps your chest feels tight, or your gut feels uneasy, or perhaps you have no idea. Well, my guest today believes that understanding where this feeling lives inside your body is the key to treating anxiety for good. Dr. Russell Kennedy is a medical doctor, a neuroscientist, and someone who suffered with crippling anxiety for over 30 years, and he wants to make sure that no one else has to go through what he went through. He's the author of AnxietyRx, a new prescription for anxiety from the doctor who created it, and has recently launched MBRX, his online course to help people heal their anxiety for good. Now Russell insists that anxiety is not a disorder of the mind. Our worries are merely a symptom and one that keeps us in our heads and away from the real problem. He instead favours the term alarm and says we all need to find out where that alarm is located inside our bodies.

This alarm is a physiological pattern that's been left there by events in our past, and it signals to our brain that we aren't safe. Now in our conversation, Russell shares his own journey through anxiety. He talks about how growing up with a father who was schizophrenic and bipolar left alarm signals imprinted in his body, And for over 30 years, he searched for relief from his anxiety, but nothing worked. In fact, in Russell's view, most treatments for anxiety, including medication and CBT, fail in the long term. And he thinks this is because they don't address the root cause. This is because they don't address the root cause.

Now for Russell, healing starts by finding out where anxiety lives inside your body. And during our conversation, Russell walks you through how exactly you can start doing that. We also discuss the simple things that parents can do to help their children grow up feeling seen, heard, loved and protected. And we also discuss the value of activities like breathwork, meditation and yoga, and also some promising therapies such as internal family systems and somatic experiencing. Russell's core message has the potential to be transformative, that it's more effective to use the body to calm the mind than the mind to calm the body. And given how prevalent anxiety is now across society, I think this is a profoundly important conversation. I hope you enjoy listening. And now, my conversation with Dr. Russell Kennedy.

Anxiety is on the rise these days, massively, all over the world. But I think one of your core messages is that the way we're trying to deal with anxiety is not getting to the root cause. Yeah. So what are we doing wrong? Well, I think we're addressing the mind, you know. So I have this concept in 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, but it's stored from old traumas that are unresolved. And this alarm is in us 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 thought, which is the worry

as the cause. And as you know, if someone has an infection and they have a fever, we can give them acetaminophen. It'll bring down their fever, but it does nothing for the underlying cause. So it's really about how do we find the true underlying cause of anxiety, which I believe is the state of alarm that's in our body from old unresolved trauma.

And that's how we fix it at its root cause instead of just dancing around trying to think better. If you think better, you will feel better, but it's really difficult to think in opposition to how your body feels. It's just a constant uphill battle. Okay. A couple of things there. Anxiety alarm cycle, right? That sounds like two separate things, anxiety and alarm. Now, 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. So I want to dive into that. Before we do that though, can we just sort of understand what is anxiety? Are anxiety rates truly going up,

or are we just saying that we've got more anxiety? I mean, how do you see this problem? Well, I think we are more aware of anxiety. As the stigma for mental health issues comes down, we're more likely to be able to say to our friend, yeah, I'm feeling anxious. And I don't actually like the term anxiety. I prefer the term alarm because if you're out for lunch with a friend of yours and you said, I'm feeling anxious, if they don't have anxiety, they probably don't know what you mean. But if you say, hey, I'm really feeling alarmed today, everybody's been alarmed. So you can relate to what this other person's saying. I like that. And also, let's just also expand out this continuum, right? Because at what point do we say we've got anxiety? Because

let's say, I don't know, I'm nervous before having a podcast conversation, for example, right? I could say, colloquially, I'm a little bit anxious about the podcast, but does that mean I've got anxiety? I think if it sort of starts to overtake your life, like 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. You know, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 practice and the sort of patients I've seen over the years, I don't know, let's take, if I think about practice and the sort of patients I've seen over the years, I don't know, 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? Absolutely. 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? 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? 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, 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. So it stacks. It stacks on top of each other. Okay. So stories, 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, and we're going to talk about all those practical things later on for sure. You're saying going 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, 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 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 a watermelon. Like how big is it? And then does it have a color? Does it have a texture? Does it have a temperature? Because really what we're doing, and we can talk about this later, is 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 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 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 good at rationally figure things out.

And so not only does the alarm create this, like 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. 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, you're just kind of bailing water. You know, I would prefer that when you get in, when you're sitting at 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? Can I breathe into it? There's 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, 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, well, a couple of things really. Number one,

what is it doing to the body when you do that? 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 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. Yeah. It's a bit like, I think there's a huge similarity here, but it's a bit like, I don't know, meditation, right? For those people who engage with meditation regularly and it works for them. And I don't know, meditation, right? For those people who engage with meditation regularly and it works for them, and I fully appreciate that not everyone manages meditation, at least not immediately when they're trying, right? Then it's not really about those 10 minutes of meditation.

It is on one level, but if the other 23 and a half hours of your day, okay, sure, you're sleeping, but you know what I mean, are full of stress and reactivity and pressure, it's kind of like, yeah, okay, it's great that you meditate for 10 minutes, but what we're hoping to do by the regular practice of the meditation is learn to just have that slight detachment. So in life, when something stressful happens, can you just detach a little bit and be the observer? Yes.

And I've certainly experienced that in my own life. The more you practice in a calm setting, for me, it's first thing in the morning each day, this practice of solitude, the more then you start to feel you can make a choice when those stressful things happen. It didn't happen immediately. It happens with time. And I reckon, Russ, that if you had asked me seven or eight years ago, where do you feel it in your body? I would be like, what's he talking about? What do

you mean feel it in my body? What on earth does that mean? But I'll tell you one thing, look, I would never consider myself someone who's been anxious, right? But one thing I've noticed as I have probably at least for five years now prioritized the practice of solitude every morning. So I see it as my early warning system, right? I see it as when I'm calm and present in the morning and I feel a tension. And for me, it's in my upper right back. And I've done it enough times to see what's going on. It's basically for me, it's like, oh, there's too much going on. There's pressure. There's emotional stress in my life. And for me, when I feel it, it's like, okay, you're near your stress threshold at the moment. What actions can you take? Can you reduce any work at the moment? Can you, you know, make sure you have a proper lunch break, stay and go for a

walk in nature? You know, can I take remedial steps? Because that's my early warning system. It's my alarm sign saying, hey, listen, if you don't, you're possibly going to get triggered. You're possibly going to be in a reactive mode. Does that make sense? It's not quite the same as, I don't think it's quite the same thing, but it's quite similar, isn't it? Yeah. So I would say that your alarm, you carry your alarm in your upper right back. So what I would do is I would say, okay, the next time you get that, rather than immediately going, okay, I'm going to reduce my workload. I'm going to take an easier route to work or trying to change the logistics of it. It's like, can you sit in that discomfort of your back?

It's like, can you sit in that discomfort of your back? Because if you learn how to acclimatize, and Bessel van der Kolk talks about this in The Body Keeps the Score, we're not getting people to get rid of their anxiety. We're getting them to acclimatize to that sensation. I call it alarm. I don't know if he uses that term. But when you acclimatize to that sensation

and you can learn how to sit in it and stay with it, you don't immediately have that sense that, oh, I have to go up into my head and fix this. I can sit with it. So when the alarm comes up in you, you don't necessarily feel like you have to fix it in your head. You can actually sit there with it. So basically what you are advocating for is something that actually is quite alien to much of Western culture. 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, most of us. 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 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. 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. 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. In your book, and I think one of your Instagram posts, you talk about this idea that actually the body is experiencing your environment first.

So the alarm is happening first. Yeah. And then the mind gets involved to put a story on it. Yes, absolutely. Without a doubt. So let's just unpack that. Sure. Because a lot of the time,

let's take that 42-year-old lady in her office. Okay. Right? She will probably say something like, I am nervous. I am feeling anxious because my boss has called me in for a meeting. Right? So in her head, it's all in the mind.

It's like, there's a situation in my external world that's about to happen. That's why I feel anxious. So where does alarm fit in here? Because that sounds like a pretty compelling narrative. And it's true. And it's true. And the mind is right a lot of the time, but we give it so much credibility. We don't look into the body and decide, okay, what would be a better use of my time? Should I spend my whole day freaking out in my head that this is going on? Or should I kind of ground myself in my body? Should I find the alarm in my body? And the program that I've just released is all about finding the alarm in your body and then working on that first. So once we ground ourselves in our body, we find the

alarm, we soothe the alarm, which is really our younger child. Then we regain our prefrontal cortex blood flow back. So we regain our prefrontal, we gain our executive functions, and then we can think of a better solution rather than trying to, when we're in an alarm state, use our brain because our brain isn't all there. We've lost, we've gone into survival limbic brain. You're a neuroscientist as well as a medical doctor, as well as a long-term sufferer or former sufferer of anxiety. Yeah, we can get into that. Sure. We'll definitely get into that. So neuroscientifically then,

you mentioned survival state or survival modes, right? Can you explain to us as simply or as complexly as you want, what is going on in the brain when you say survival modes? So when we get afraid of something, and it can be something that's happened to us physically or even just in our mind, we create this survival state where we start secreting cortisol and we start secreting epinephrine,

norepinephrine in the brain, which revs us up, which is like drinking a bunch of caffeine. So the brain starts going at 100 miles an hour and it wants to know, like, especially the left hemisphere, it wants to know a solution to this particular problem, but there is no solution. So it just keeps going, going, going. So the epinephrine and the norepinephrine and the cortisol keeps rising, which puts us in this survival state, which again, shuts off the prefrontal cortex and the premotor which again, shuts off the prefrontal

cortex and the premotor area. So what is the prefrontal cortex? Prefrontal cortex is the front part of our brain that has a lot of our executive functions, planning, deciding how you're going to work things and just understand your understanding of the world. Your personality is also in there. So if someone yells at you, some people will yell back. Some people will decide that it's like, well, no, obviously you're really upset about something. Can we talk about this? So your prefrontal cortex is kind of the executive. It makes the decisions for you. It helps rational and logical decision-making, doesn't it?

Yeah. But if we lose that, which we do when we secrete all this cortisol and epinephrine and norepinephrine in our brain, we lose access to that rational part and fall back into the more primitive limbic emotional brain, which isn't that great at communicating with people, at connecting with people. So we develop this fear response and we're not really present in our brains. really present in our brains. So when you go into your body and you regulate your body first, say you practice the breathing techniques, you regulate your body first, then the cortisol shuts off, the norepinephrine shuts off, and you get your prefrontal cortex back when you go, oh, geez, I don't know why I got so upset about that. So this, I guess, a practical example for people, road rage, right? When someone has cut you up and we hear these stories all the time about the most seemingly irrational things that people do when they're cut off, whether it's chasing someone,

getting out of the car, making threats. And that really, for many people at least, would be their prefrontal cortex going offline and Absolutely. And their primitive emotional brain. And that would be the amygdala, would it? The amygdala has a big part of that too. And basically the insula again, like how my body feels. So it's almost like, you know, the James Lang theory of emotion. It's like, if my body is really upset, my mind will take that because it's your feeling state that dictates your thinking state more than your thinking state dictates your feeling state. And that's why anxiety, depression, all these things are so pervasive and so prevalent and so difficult to treat because the body changes so

much more slowly than the mind. Yeah, I think they're also difficult to treat and get to the root cause because we are a mind-led society. We are a thinking-based society. Now we are a distraction-based society where any time there's any discomfort, we can just pull out the smartphone. Totally. Right. So we go back into our minds consuming. I put a post out on Instagram maybe a couple of weeks ago, which kind of blew up. And I was literally saying, you can't be consuming content all the time, even good content, even good podcasts or inspiring stuff, because you can't spend your whole life in your mind. You need to allow your inner thoughts to come up, not even inner thoughts, inner feelings, I guess, right? So the culture, the way society is structured,

the devices we have access to now, how much do you think that's playing a role in these rising rates of anxiety? Incredibly. I mean, we're a very dopamine-driven society now, right? Immediate gratification. And if you can go on your smartphone and visit Thailand and Singapore and whatever in 10 seconds, it's very difficult for another human being to be able to compete with that.

And even more so in our kids. So we have this social engagement system that's in our brain. So eye contact, tone of voice, prosody of voice, which is kind of like the lilting nature of your voice, body language, facial expressions. These are all things like you and I right now, we're in the middle of this because we're reading each other, but the kids aren't getting this face to face. They're getting face to screen and it's not maturing the social engagement system. And the social engagement system is what allows you to soothe other people, but also soothe yourself. So we have a whole generation of kids growing up who don't get that social engagement system matured in their body. So when

they go off to university, they've been using their phone as a distraction, but once they go to university, the phone stops working and a lot of them will collapse. So it's really, how can we get the most out of that social engagement system, which is basically facial expressions, eye contact. You know, when you're with your kids, really, you know, play a game around the table. Like, what's my face doing right now? Am I angry? Am I happy? Am I sad? Because we are wired, biologically wired for understanding faces, reading faces. There's a complex called propopagnosia, which is basically the inability to read faces. And it's from strokes and that kind of thing too. We see faces in everything and we're losing that with our kids

because our kids aren't getting the face-to-face contact simply because the iPads and stuff are taking the time away and they're getting more involved with the iPad because the iPad's exciting. And they're getting more involved with the iPad because the iPad's exciting. You know, when you're young, you're absorbing information so quickly and you want to. But that's what you're originally talking about is overload. And we're teaching our kids to overload their brains. I mean, given how prevalent rates of anxiety are now, right? In your book, you've been very open about your own story. I definitely want to talk about that today. But you grew up in an era where there weren't these easy distraction tools, at least not in the same way, right? Yet you're suffering,

or you have suffered with paralyzing anxiety for much of your life. or you have suffered with really paralyzing anxiety for much of your life. Absolutely. What would you forecast now then for 20 years time, given that the early childhood years are so important, given how much stress parents are under these days, and that despite their best intentions, a lot of the time they're unable to give the kids

the presence, the attention that they want to. And given the fact that anywhere you go now, you see kids heads into smartphones, heads into iPads. What would your forecast be for rates of anxiety in 15 or 20 years when these kids become adults? kids become adults. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1. AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system,

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is a lot of therapy is almost this sort of semi-spiritual connection between therapist and patient. And if you haven't built that structure in your brain to be able to read other people, to be able to interact with other people, you're not going to be able to respond to therapy that well either. So it's really going to be this sort of snowball effect where we're not building the structures that would allow someone to connect. So we're going to develop this that would allow someone to connect. So we're gonna develop this society that's getting more and more disconnected and we're seeing it now already.

So it's like, how can we be more connected to our kids? Like show your kids a lot of facial expressions, show your kids a lot of touch, a lot of I love yous. I know this sounds very standard, but a lot of families don't get it. And it's very hard to give what you didn't get yourself. Yeah. This SES, the social engagement system, it's been eroded everywhere. I'll give you one example in my own life where I, my son is now 12 and he gets a bus to his secondary school. And if I'm ever dropping him off at the

bus stop in the morning, you see, let's say there's 10 kids waiting for the bus. I didn't see anyone talking anymore. I literally see all 10 kids on their smartphone looking and, you know, engrossed in their own world. Now, you could make a case they're texting their friends and they're, sure, right? I get that. But we can say for certain that 20 years ago, those same kids waiting to get their bus to school wouldn't have had that option. Sure, maybe someone had a Sony Walkman and was listening to their latest CD, right? I get that. So I'm not saying suddenly it's got worse.

But I think you would have had more social engagement, chatting, laughing, asking, did you watch that last night? Have you heard this album or whatever? We're getting more and more isolated. You know, on a wider scale, walk around any park now, any city now, any town center. And look, don't get me wrong, I love listening to podcasts when I go walking.

Sure. Right? Many people will be listening to this right now as they're on a walk. Hopefully, yeah. But if you take it out of the sort of micro and sort of zoom out to the macro, what we're seeing now across society is people with their headphones on, engrossing their own worlds, physically occupying the same space maybe as someone else, but mentally they're a million miles away. So that whole social engagement system piece that you're talking about, it's really not getting nourished. Look, childhood is important, right? You're making

a strong case in your book and your work that actually how we develop as children, the trauma we experience or don't experience, the love, the eye contact, the presence we experience or don't experience is hugely influential at determining what happens when we're adults, right? So talking about parenting is always tricky because a lot of people feel very guilty, right? When they hear and go, oh, wow, I didn't do that with my kids. I wish I'd done that with my kids. And just to be completely open, if I knew what I know now when my kids were even younger, I would have parented differently. I'd like to think I've done a pretty good job. I've certainly done the best that I can. And I'm continuing to try and improve things as I learn more. But certainly, I could go back and go,

wow, had I known this, I would have done that very differently. So I don't think this is, it's never about blaming parents. It's about empowering parents. But I guess the question I want to ask for young parents who are listening, Russell, and are thinking, okay, and they're thinking, how can I best apply this to my kids so that they don't develop anxiety or addictions when they're older? What would you say are some of the important things parents can do with their young children? Eye contact, touch, lots of I love you's. There's this thing that I get parents to do. You can do it with young kids, teenagers will revolt, but putting your hand over their heart and then putting your hand on their back and just staying there and just being with

them. You know, I have two grandkids and every time I see them, they only live 15 minutes away. So it's a lot. They call me Paco. That's, I don't know how I got this name, but that's what they call me Paco. And it's like, I will say to them, and I do this with them. I put my hands over their heart and I say, you know, Paco loves you and Paco is here for you. One's five and one's three, but I've been doing this with Abby, who's the older, the girl, since she's been like two or three years old. And the other night, my daughter phones me up and she says, you know, I was putting Abby to bed and she said, I know Paco loves me. And I know Paco's here for me. And she's, you know, five. So I think just showing them that

you're there for them is, and being there with eye contact and touch is so important. So much of our somatosensory cortex is devoted to our hands and our face. So if we can really use touch with our kids as well, it tends to soothe them. It tends to start building that social engagement system. For people who are not familiar with that term, what's the somatosensory cortex? So there's a strip that goes down each side of our brain and it's contralateral. So what I feel in my right knee will be felt in the left side of my brain. So there's a motor strip. So there's a part, if I want to move my right hand, this part of the motor strip, which is just a strip of the brain, will light up and it'll allow me to move my hand, right?

And then the sensation strip is right beside it. So anything that touches my right hand will light up that sensation strip. So the motor strips in front and the sensation strip is behind it. And the more we can engage like our fingers and our face, and this is why I think tapping helps people because there's so much real estate in your brain devoted to your hands and your face. And this is why I think tapping helps people because there's so much real estate in your brain devoted to your hands and your face. So if you touch your face, you know, and sometimes what I'll do to people is I'll say, look, cross your hands across the midline and then just rub your cheeks. And I know this looks really creepy, but rub your cheeks, like don't do it at the Tesco or whatever, but you know, just, just when you're alone, if you're, if you're struggling, if you're

suffering, cause this will bring you into the present moment. And when you're in the present moment, you can actually make some logical, reasonable decisions. But if you're in your head and basically worry is always about the future and trauma is always about the past. So we spend very little time in the present moment. And one thing I wanted to just go back to quickly about kids is it's really important. I learned this from Gordon Neufeld, a developmental psychologist. It's really important, this concept called bridging. So when you drop your kid off at school or whatever, you say, I'm really looking forward to watching that Lego movie with you later and having popcorn. I'm really looking forward to picking you up here at 3.30 and we're going to go for ice cream. You always bridge the next

connection. You never just say, hey, see you later. I'll pick you up at 3.30. There's always a bridge to the next connection and something that they like. Okay. This is really interesting. I've not heard. It's called bridging. I've not heard this in this context before, right? So you never want it. So you're saying don't, let's, okay, you drop your kid at school and let's say school finishes at 3.30. You're saying, don't just say, see you at 3.30. Why is it better to say, see you at 3.30 so that we can go and play football in the park together? Yeah, exactly. Why is that better?

There's just so much more emotional resonance in that. And for a child, it's like, oh, there's connection there. I'm not just getting picked up. I'm not just going to sit in the back with my iPad. There's connection there. We're going to do something together. We are going to be connected together. What about for adults, right? I'm thinking about when I, let's say my wife and I, and let's say I'm going to go off and record a podcast or something or go and work or whatever. So you're saying it's better to not just say, see you later, honey, darling, whatever people want to call their other halves or their partners, right? You would say it's actually better for the signals you're sending your brain

to actually go that one step further. To bridge the next connection. Yeah. I really like that. I can kind of see why that's so beneficial. I'll tell you one thing that my wife and I have always done with our kids, and I still do it today really, is when we're putting them to bed, I think we both do it or whoever's putting them to bed, we might do it separately, but we always say, you're happy, you're safe, you're loved. And they repeat it back.

And I haven't really thought about it for a while because it's just something that we do. It's just the pattern, the daily pattern, right? But now when I hear you talking about the importance of the messaging you're sending your kids and really that feeling of safety, because ultimately if we get, if we drill right down to the core of your message, or certainly for me, it's, we didn't get that feeling of safety as a child. And therefore, all kinds of adult behaviors come as a consequence of not feeling safe. So therefore, as a parent, as much as we can, if we can send our children signals of safety, that's going to reduce the likelihood of problems in the future. Do you agree with what I've just said? Yeah. Yeah. And I would add to that, if you can,

rub their back when you say that, because they're young enough now that they'll take that. Really supercharge that thing with some touch as well. And the prosody in your voice. I would also switch up the order that you put it in sometimes, just because it will become so rote after a while that their brain kind of just sort of doesn't really bring it in. So change the order of it, you know, rub their back. If you can like make a little bit of eye contact with them, like really bring in a number of different things so that their nervous system really gets this sense that, oh yeah, they really are there for me. Yeah. You know, and it's like, you know, Abby, it's like Paco, Paco, I know Paco loves me and I

know Paco's here for me. Yeah. And you've got to believe that that is going to, it's going to matter right now, but I can imagine when they're older, let's say they're in their 20s and something happens that, you know, an adverse situation happens, you've got to believe that that feeling of safety and security is going to help them manage in the future. There's going to be other inputs as well, for sure, but it's going to make a difference. I really like what you're saying about touch. And I want to talk about the vagus nerve shortly, because there's a really beautiful chapter in your book where you write about the social engagement system. You write about the vagus nerve shortly because there's a really beautiful chapter in your book where you write about the social engagement system you write about the vagus nerve and the ventral aspects and the dorsal aspect which I'd love to talk about

but just to sort of finish off on touch for a moment I don't think I've said this on the podcast for a few years now but I remember clearly maybe five years ago I was making this documentary for BBC television and I was at John Moores University in Liverpool and I was interviewing someone called Francis McGlone, Professor Francis McGlone, who's one of the leading touch scientists, probably globally. And he was explaining to me and showing me about what he calls these CT afferent nerve fibers. So basically when they are stroked, he was showing me how actually it starts to reduce cortisol in the body. And essentially, I won't go into all the detail, but essentially the message I took from that was that safe, affectionate, wanted touch is very, very powerful. It changes

the brain. It changes your hormones. It reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol. And just that knowledge instantaneously changed my behavior with my kids. Because back then, I remember, spontaneously changed my behavior with my kids. Because back then, I remember, like my kids would often say at bedtime, oh, daddy, can you stroke me? You know, back then, you know, I was mega busy and you're trying to get bedtime done so you can get onto your work. And I was like, wait a minute, Ranga, what are you doing? They're sending you a signal, they want to be stroked. And literally that meeting with Professor Francis McGlowe, and I think maybe in 2017, changed my bedtime practice with my kids, where now, even I was doing this last night, years on now in 2023, I'll always try and stroke them

on their back in the minutes leading up to sleep. And when I was reading your book last night and reading that section on the vagus nerve, I was like, oh, it just reminded me of how important this stuff is. So could you talk to me about the vagus nerve a little bit and how nourishing our vagus nerve is important in helping us manage anxiety? Yeah, so the vagus nerve is a 10th cranial nerve.

So it comes out of the brainstem, sort of the lowest part of the brain, and it runs down beside your throat, which is why chanting, singing, anything that creates some vibration in your voice box, in your larynx, will calm that vagus nerve. There's a branch of the nerve

called the recurrent laryngeal branch of the vagus nerve. So when we sing, that's why people, when they sing and they come out of the vagus nerve. So when we sing, that's why people, when they sing and they come out of the choir or whatever, they just feel so good because the vagus nerve is getting stimulated. So the vagus nerve is the biggest nerve in the parasympathetic, the rest and digest nervous system. So there's the sympathetic fight or flight, classically called fight or flight or the accelerator. And then there's the parasympathetic, which is kind of rest and digest and it's the break. The biggest nerve is the 10th cranial nerve, which is the vagus nerve. Now, 80% of those fibers

are efferent. They go from the body to the brain. So only 20% go from the brain to the body. So it's really constantly reading your gut, your heart, your throat. It's reading your system. So if you can calm your system, if you can calm your breathing, you can calm your throat by like vibration. There's this thing that Dr. Peter Levine does about the creator of somatic experiencing therapy, where he has this thing where he says he gets people to do this enunciation called voo. So he will get them to sit down, feel their butt in the chair, take a deep breath in. Vu. And you can feel the vibration in your throat and you can even make it go lower.

Like Vu. I don't know if there's something special about Vi or whether like Mu would work if like you did it as a cow or something. You know, I think that there's just something about that vibration that stimulates that vagus nerve. And it kind of tells your brain, hey, we're okay. You know, because if you're in a stressful situation, you're not going to be in this kind of, and I think that's where yoga, you know,

the whole, I think that's what it comes in. Well, we've been, you know, I say we, I and I guess people within Indian families from our parents would always be told that when you say a mantra just before you're eating your foods or when you say, it's not just the word, it's the vibrations, right? It's what it's, you know, I can remember my grandma saying, you know, it changes every cell in your body, right? Now, as a kid, I'm not sure how much you believe of that. You know, growing up in a mind culture, you think, okay, you know. But what's interesting for me is that you're now talking

about this kind of stuff from a neuroscientific point of view. As to actually, whether it's OM or what Peter Levine talks about, when we hum, when we say certain words, it changes what the stimulation through the vagus nerve. Yeah, yeah. And it feeds back into the brainstem, the lowest part of your brain

that kind of controls your body and your autonomic nervous system. And that starts a positive feedback into your body, as opposed to the negative feedback, which is my gut's tense. There must be something wrong. And then again, your brain goes up and says, well, what's wrong? And you just go, well, I've got my taxes due and I've got to make this plane flight. Your brain is always going to be able to find reasons why you're stressed. Yeah, what's really interesting is that you said 80% or so of the signals are going from the body to the brain. And only 20% is from the brain to the body. Yes.

And I think that really fits with what we were saying earlier on in this conversation about this alarm anxiety cycle, right? That the alarm is initially felt in the body. Yep. Then it goes up to the brain and we start to put a story onto it. So let's, you know, see if we can just take a step back for a minute and actually sit with that alarm in our body. Yeah. It's interesting, you know, Russ, you have suffered with crippling anxiety throughout your life, right? And I know that's one of your big goals here is to go, look, it took

you 30 years to get on top of this. You don't want everyone else to have to also wait for 30 years. So I wonder if you could share some of your journey, especially around what did you think your anxiety was? How did it show up initially? What did you try and do that was so, I guess, unsuccessful for many years? And what was the breakthrough when you thought, oh, I'm tackling this the wrong way? This is actually the root cause. So if you could just walk us through some of that, I think that'll be really illuminating. Yeah, sure. My father was schizophrenic and bipolar. So he was also very loving and caring and generous. So I had these mixed signals as a child that my dad would be very connected with me and very, you know, he was very like physical and gave me lots of hugs and touch and reassurance and that kind of thing. And then he would go

manic for four days, you know, stay up for four days playing the trumpet. I still hate the trumpet. And, and yeah, it's, that's another, we could do a whole podcast on how Dr. Kennedy hates the trumpet. Although the trumpet, I'm guessing vagus nerve, would that have done anything? Absolutely. Parasympathetic. That's why people chew pens. That's why people, a lot of reasons why people smoke is that anything sort of in this area, that's why kids pick their nose when they're nervous because they're trying to self-soothe. They're trying to stimulate that vagus nerve because it does work, right? So that all these oral activities does kind of put us more into

that parasympathetic thing. Just on a side note, I don't want to get in the way of your story. I remember I spoke to Ewan LaCour a few weeks ago on this show, and he's considered the godfather of natural movement. He's also developed this breath hold work meditation practice, which I was talking about. But I don't think we spoke about it on the show, but Ewan will often say that one of the best ways to work on your breath control is playing a wind instrument, like a clarinet or trombone or the flute or whatever, because you're learning to manage your diaphragm, you know, you're pursing your lips over the reed or whatever it might be. So I just wanted to tie that in because I think it's really interesting, especially when we're thinking about our children and what we can do for them to help them perhaps.

And vibration too, like music is vibration as well. So you're creating this vibration and you also have this instrument that's attached to you in a way that's also creating vibration, which is also stimulating that vagus nerve, which is also giving you this sense that things are okay. You're sending a message to the sense that things are okay. You know, things are, things are okay. You're sending a message to the brain that things are okay, even if they're not, even if you're, you know, at the dentist or even if you're anticipating, you know,

some kind of negative something happening in your life. This, when you, 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. So, and that's a big premise of the book too, is like, how do we find this? So getting back to the original story. So I was really stressed and anxious about, you know, inheriting bipolar or schizophrenia. Cause I, I had a little bit of, my mother's a

nurse. I had a bit of a medical background. Even as a teenager, I was reading medical books about mental illness. I didn't think there was any way in the world I'd become a doctor because I was a solid C minus student. I was terrible. And then there's a great story about that, about how I met one of my teachers as his attending physician in emergency. And I said, hi, Mr. Colvin, I'm Dr. Kennedy. And he go, Rusty? And it's like, yeah. And he looked at me like, how did you, you know, cause I, I, I got your essays. I got, they were terrible. Like they were brutal. How did you become a doctor? It's like surprise to me too, you know, but we're going to do something for you.

So it's really funny how the trauma of growing up with my dad made me feel like I was stupid because I didn't try in school. I'm sure I had some kind of ADD or ADHD as well. So I just really didn't have any confidence. And the other thing about me, if we're going to talk about that, is that my brother was born with orthopedic issues. My dad was schizophrenic. So, and my mother was a registered nurse

and she made most of the money for the family. So there wasn't a whole lot of love and affection left for me. And because of, I didn't want to stress my mother, I made my own needs really small so that, you know, my brother could get the attention, My dad could get the attention. So that's why now I love getting attention, but I also fear it at the same time. I fear the connection as much as, as much as I really want it to. So right now, as I get more popular, it's been really difficult for me because

on one hand it's like, Hey, here I am, you know, and I was a standup comic for 15 years. And on the other hand, I'm like, I don't know if I like this. I don't know if I like getting this attention. So it's really a very kind of strange time for me. And I still get anxious. Like you mentioned this earlier on, I still get anxious, but I don't give the alarm any credibility anymore. I know it's in my body. I know it's a signal basically that my younger self, that boy that in my book, I talk about seeing his dad being taken away to the mental hospital. He still lives in me. So if I could put my hand over it, if I can connect with him, I actually get back to the source of me and then I'm okay. But it's, I think what I spent, you know, this is the other part is I spent thousands and thousands of dollars on like CBT and I'm not down on CBT. I think what I spent, this is the other part, I spent thousands and thousands of dollars on CBT.

And I'm not down on CBT. I think we're hugely cognitive creatures. We need to understand what's going on. But my issue with therapy is that nobody is really addressing the body in the mainstream. It's all how to change your thoughts. CBT is the gold standard of anxiety therapy. I think CBT is helpful, but I don't think it'll ever heal you.

I think it'll allow you to cope a little better, but it's not gonna heal you. You don't heal from anxiety until you heal the root cause, which is this alarm that's stored in your body. And unless you deal with that, you're always gonna be bailing water. You're always gonna be trying to use cognitive methods to make you feel better.

And again, it's a lot more effective to use the body to calm the mind than it is to use the mind to calm the body. That was quite the rant there. It's really, really interesting. Lots of threads to pick up on. Firstly, let's go back about 20 years or so. What kind of things or experiences in life would make you feel anxious? What would go through your mind at that time? How would you try and manage it? Yeah.

And how would you then compare that to the present day? Okay. So a lot of my anxiety showed up as health anxiety. And I think a lot of people with health anxiety had a parent who was either addicted or sick. So they had this witness to them that life isn't easy, life isn't safe. Their illness could get you at any time. So when I see my own anxiety people, patients, whatever you want to call them, with health anxiety, a lot of them had a parent who was also sick or addicted. And when you say health anxiety, what do you mean by that?

What is it? How does that show? Preoccupied, you know, so if I had, you know, I used to do a joke. I used to do a joke about this on stage, but I was a doctor and a hypochondriac, which is a bad combination, right? So it's like, you know, if I had a headache for more than two days, I'd assume that I've got a glioblastoma. So it's like I would go down and I would get a CT scan of my head. I could order it right at the hospital.

They would give it to me. I was a doctor, no waiting. If I had sort of trouble with my stomach, I would get an ultrasound, that kind of stuff. And I would just get all these tests to try and reassure myself. So let's just pause on health anxiety. It's something we see a lot these days. so let's just pause on health anxieties it's something we see a lot these days and many people would say that because there's so much information out there now because you can google any symptom so let's say yeah the headache right right um it's very easy if you've got a headache for a day or two to go on google and look at the differential diagnosis and one of those things will be a brain tumor. Absolutely.

Now, very, very rare. Okay. Most headaches, just to be clear, are not brain tumors. And when you go and see your doctor, they will ask questions to look for what we call red flags. Okay. You know, there's nothing alarming in this history that makes us think about that. But I guess I'm trying to get to the point of managing symptoms versus root cause. In your view, do you think that people who suffer with health anxiety,

is it because of all this information out there? Or do you think actually for those people who do suffer, actually there's a deeper issue, which means when they get exposed to that information, they go to worst case scenario. Would you go as far as saying if you had a very stable, loving childhood where you felt very secure in yourself, you felt you had present, attuned parents? I know many of us feel we didn't have that, but if you did have that, do you feel then the chances of getting health anxiety, even when exposed to all this information are dramatically reduced? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I think we're building when you love your kids and you feel loved and protected, seen, heard, loved and protected as a child, you build both capacity

and resilience in your nervous system. So you can handle a headache, you know, you won't go to worst case scenario. The worst part about Googling your symptoms is you're already losing, like I said earlier, you're losing your rational brain, right? So you're operating only from your limbic brain. So you won't see, you know, benign headache. You will see brain tumor and it will go brain tumor, brain tumor, brain tumor. And then you primed your brain just to see that more and more. Of course, of course.

And then it just becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy. And that's why anxiety can't be solved by changing your mind alone. As you were talking then, Russell, there's such a powerful paragraph in your book, right? I think it's at the start of part three,

Awareness of Self, right? If you don't mind, I'd like to read it to you. I think it really speaks to what you just said and it speaks to the critical importance of the early years. Yes. Which is a theme that keeps coming up on this show. Yeah.

I had Dr. Gabor Mate on for the fourth time recently. We had a really powerful conversation. I listened to it. It was great. Enjoy it? Yeah. Yeah. And it was, again, I always say this because I always, as a parent myself, it's just trying to get that balance of making people aware of the reality, but you don't want them to feel guilt or blame themselves. But we can't really

change things unless we accept where we are. We accept the reality of how the human brain, the child brain develops, right? But I thought this was brilliant, right? You wrote, we humans have two main drives, the drive to physically survive and the drive to emotionally connect. If you grow up in secure attachment, you learn that life is about connection. If you do not grow up in a secure attached environment, you learn life is about survival. That I think just sums it all up. Yeah, I think so too. It shapes the way we view the world. It shapes the way we view the world. It shapes the way we experience the world.

Is it connection we're after or is it survival? And then on top of that, you know, when you're in survival and your social engagement system has been shut off, you can't connect because the software for connection, this is where social anxiety comes from. So the software in our brains for connection has been shut off because we, from an evolutionary perspective, when you're in survival mode, when you're in fight or flight, 60,000 years ago, you weren't running from a warring tribe saying to your friend, like, hey, Bill, how's it going

with the wife? You're not going to do that because you have no ability to connect emotionally at that point. You're in survival mode. So if what we need most is connection to calm the nervous system and we won't allow it, or the connection part of our brain has been shut off or shunted, or I took the rail system up here, the rail system has been switched over to survival rather than connection. We don't have access to the part of us that would actually make us feel better and heal. So we have to ground ourselves in our body,

bring that prefrontal cortex back online, and then be able to re-engage that social engagement system and then connect as well. And that's how we heal long-term. We can feel better by telling ourselves, this is, I'm overreacting. Of course, it's not a brain tumor or whatever, but to really get to the point of this

and teach yourself again when it happens again, because it's going to happen over and over and over and over again. Teach yourself. It's like, oh, I went up into my mind last time, didn't go so well. I'm going to go into my body this time. I'm going to regulate.

And again, it's practice. Like we were saying earlier, you can't just sort of, you can do the one-offs, the breathing, but if you can teach your nervous system that to build capacity, to build resilience, to use some breathing techniques, to do some meditation if you can, which is often really hard for anxious people.

But if you can build some resilience and capacity in that nervous system, you learn, you start going on a positive reinforcing snowball as opposed to the negative one, which will just ruin your life. So as I mentioned, I wouldn't say I'm an anxious person at all. But there's something you just said which really resonated about when you're in survival modes, you don't want to connect. You can't connect. But if I'm ever going through some stress or feeling stress or coming across as stressed, or there's something emotional that's, let's say, happened with my mom, who's been pretty sick this year. Right. Mine too. First of all, I'm sorry to hear that. But she'll say to me,

in those moments, I struggle to receive love. Yeah. Right. So in those moments, I struggle to receive love. Right? So in those moments, if she wants to show me that she loves me and she's there for me and wants to hug me, she will say that I don't want to receive it. How would you interpret that? Well, it's not that you don't want to. I think you would want to, but the software in your nervous system won't allow it. So it's just, and this is the same with social anxiety.

When people want, there is a party that they're outside of and they want to go in and experience it. But because they're in such alarm, they've shut off that ability to make eye contact, to be comfortable with people. So they feel awkward. So why would they want to go into a place that's going to make them feel even more awkward? Plus, here's the thing about anxiety. At its fundamental core, anxiety is rejecting love and it separates you from yourself. So when you reject love or push

love away, the only thing you're left with is fear because there is only love and fear. or push love away, the only thing you're left with is fear because there is only love and fear. The only energies that we have is love and fear. So if you are in fear, you push love away. If you're in love, you can push fear away. So the more you connect with yourself, the more, you know, it sounds kind of, you know, the more you love yourself, the more you can connect with the younger version of you. And here's something you and I were talking about that I really wanted to bring in, is that the parts of you that you don't like, like the parts of you as a child that you didn't like, that you kind of grew up and separated from, those parts need connection. And it's those parts that are causing your alarm in the first place. And it's also those parts that you're most likely to reject, keep rejecting. in the first place. And it's also those parts that you're most likely to reject, keep rejecting.

So if you can find a way of loving, accepting, and embracing the parts of you that you didn't like as a child that you separated from, you can start healing your anxiety because it's really about connection. Anxiety is a mind-body disconnect, and it's also a disconnect of your adult self from your child self. So in the program I just created, it's all about connecting the mind, the mind, the body, and the adult self with the child self. Because when you do that, you go in and you take away the alarm because the alarm is there as a message from your child to say, hey, I need help. I need help. I need help. I need help. So if you're in a grocery store, if you're in Tesco and a child comes up to you, like three or four years old with their hands up in the air, like, pick me up.

I've lost my parents or whatever. You're going to pick that kid up, but you won't do it for yourself. So when you separate from yourself like that, anxiety is the only place you can go. And then we don't trust love. And that's what happened with me. What I was telling earlier with my dad, when he would go manic or bipolar or depressed or whatever, it was like, I would love him so much.

And then I would lose him to this. So after a while, after this happened, five, 10, 15 times, I just unconsciously decided it's not safe to love. Because when you love someone and they're hurt, you feel the pain so much more. So what with me was like, it's not safe to love. So I'm going to push love away. There's a reason I've been married three times, right? I pushed love away. And to this day, it's still hard for me to kind of accept that. Now, I know that if I put myself in, like,

if I do the voo or the om or whatever, I put myself in a relaxed state, I have no problem accepting love. But if I'm in that alarmed, anxious state, the software is offline for me to connect. So in trying to do it, I just get frustrated, which of course makes me more anxious. So it's really, again, it's much better to use the body to calm the mind than it is to try and use the mind to calm the body. And it's really, again, it's much better to use the body to calm the mind than it is to try and use the mind to calm the body. And that's really, I think, fundamentally anxiety is rejection of yourself. So here's the point that I wanted to make, because I know it's a long one, but the parts of you that you reject, the reason you became narcissistic or the reason you became aggressive

or whatever was because you didn't get those needs as a child. There's nothing wrong with you. It's basically you're rejecting the parts of you that had to adapt to your childhood environment. So if you had to adapt to your childhood environment by being aggressive, you learned that that got you out of a particular situation. Or if you learned to withdraw from love, you go back to that. It's kind of like your go-to, but that actually just reinforces the anxiety.

So if you can accept that part of you, and this is another thing that I see with women who started having sex when they were like 12, 13, 14 years old, that they have so much guilt over and so much shame. And I would say, you know, the reason why you started having sex when they were like 12, 13, 14 years old, that they have so much guilt over and so much shame. And I would say, you know, the reason why you started having sex so early is because you weren't getting your needs met in your own family of origin. Because if you were getting your needs met in their own family, you wouldn't feel the need to go outside of it and start having sex too early. So that's, you know, and I have this acronym that I use for alarm, you know,

it's basically uses the word alarm. So abuse is the, is the first one, loss, you know, and I have this acronym that I use for alarm. You know, it's basically uses the word alarm. So abuse is the first one. Loss, major loss, divorce of appearance, death, abandonment, if you felt like abandoned. Rejection, which is the R, which is like bullying or neglect. And then M is the mature too early. So anything that made you the man of the house too early, the woman of the house too early, that creates this alarm that gets stored in your body that fuels your anxious thoughts.

And then the anxious thoughts fuel more of the alarm. And then you're caught in that cycle and you'll stay in there for the rest of your life unless you find a way out. So powerful, Russell, honestly, so, so powerful. What I often say to my patients is, this is not who you are, it's who you became. Who you had to be.

Yeah. Yeah. It's who you had to be. And it's a defensive adaptation that worked. At the time, but doesn't work anymore. Until it no longer works. Yeah. You get in your twenties, thirties,

you go through a divorce or two, it's like, hey, this withdrawal thing ain't working anymore, right? I love what you're saying about accepting all parts of you. This is something I've very much learned through IFS, Internal Family Systems, which I've done on and off for many years. I spoke to the founder, the creator, Dr. Dick Schwartz on this show, maybe about a year ago or

so, had a wonderful conversation with him. And it's really about accepting all these parts that live within us. It's understanding that they're just trying to help you, you know? And what's really interesting is as you say this, you, like me, have got a proper bona fide scientific background, right? You've been to medical school like me. I've got an immunology degree. You've got a neuroscience degree. Yeah, we're talking about stuff, very holistic stuff that actually, for many years, probably wouldn't have come out of a medical doctor's mouth. It's not really how we're trained, right?

So it's really fascinating. And then, you know, I love talking to people from different disciplines, but I think it's so important. So although this is considered a health podcast, I intentionally don't just talk to health experts. Because for me, you can't separate health and life. I think we've tried to, oh, this is health. And oh, is it about life, living life, philosophy, or is it about health? It's like, I don't know the difference. Just as you can't separate mind and body, you can't separate health and life. And so relating to this, I remember chatting to Robert Greene. Robert Greene was talking about this kind of acceptance that we all need, that we have all emotions within us. You may not consider yourself jealous, but you have jealousy within you. We all have it within us. If the

conditions are right, if you're not in a good state and the certain conditions are right, you have the ability to feel jealous, to feel envious. We may not want to admit that, but we have to accept that all of those things live inside of us. And then I remember chatting to the Oscar winning actor, Matthew McConaughey. And I always remember this because he said, right, when I'm playing another role, when I'm, I always thought that actors had to get into character. Okay. I thought they had to imagine, okay, what would that person do in that situation? And I'm not saying they don't have to do that. I'm certainly no skilled actor. okay, what would that person do in that situation?

And I'm not saying they don't have to do that. I'm certainly no skilled actor. But one thing he said to me is, no, when I'm playing a role, I'm not trying to imagine, I'm trying to find that part inside of me. And I thought, wow, that's IFS. That's everything we're talking about. It's understanding that we have everything, that rich tapestry of emotions within us, but we reject some of them. We feel

guilt about them, shame about them, but we have to almost accept that that lives there as well. And we almost have to talk to it and make peace with it. Now, how do people actually do that, Russell? Because it's okay to talk about it from a theoretical perspective. As I mentioned, IFS I found incredibly helpful personally. Have you got some sort of practical guidance to people as to how they can start to make peace with these various parts that live inside of them? Yeah. First of all, I want to say, all right, all right, all right. My throat's a little rindy, so my Matthew McConaughey impression isn't as good as I would like it to be. But it's really finding those parts. It's finding the parts. And you can go back academically in your mind and say,

what parts of me, because I was a very disorganized child, right? So the part of me that I don't like or get along with that well is the disorganized part. It's like, no, it's not so much about accepting that part. It's about embracing that part. So I think we get into this. There's all this stuff out there like, oh, you have to accept yourself. It's like, no, you have to embrace yourself. What's the difference? I think acceptance is more passive.

It's more like, okay, yeah, it's part of me. It's there. I allow it to be there. more like, okay, yeah, it's part of me. It's there. You know, I, I allow it to be there, you know, but embracing is, you know, thank God I had that disorganized part of me because it made me adapt in a way that I know how to handle disorganization now because I embrace that part of me. And now it's like, when I, when I forget stuff or whatever, which I do a lot, um, I don't get down on myself anymore. It's like, oh, that's Rusty again. You know, like that's him. And what did you get? Like what came out of that? What came out of your,

you know, accommodation to that? Because clearly you're an adaptable creature, you know, even though, you know, if you became aggressive or whatever, it didn't really work out for you in the long run, but at least you were able to adapt. You didn't collapse. You didn't go self-taught. It helped you survive your childhood. It absolutely did. We're talking now about thoughts

and rationally going back and understanding this is what that did for you. And of course, we've spent a bit of time in this conversation talking about the importance of not getting too tied up in thoughts, but also experiencing the body. So I know nothing is really black or white. It's not, it's either thoughts or it's the body, right? Both are clearly important, but something like journaling, for example, I wonder what your take is because journaling, if you have the right

questions, can be very helpful in helping you understand your history. But that's not a body-based approach. That's more of a mind-based approach. But there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, it does help. And the thing about your writing brain is different from your speaking brain. So when you write something down about your childhood, it'll come out in a different way than it would if you were telling someone. And I think when you see that sort of different picture, it kind of provides a more 360 degree view of that particular time in your life. So I think that's why journaling is so important.

But I can find the disorganized part in me. I can find disorganized Rusty in me. It's in my solar plexus. It's just to the right. It feels sharp. It feels hollow. It feels painful because I would go to the house without my shoes as a child. And it's funny because my daughter does exactly the same thing. So it's really about finding that place in your body because I do believe that we can reverse engineer the parts of us that we reject or abandon as a child, if we go into those parts, we can find them in our body. Okay. I really, I want to make sure that this conversation

is really practical and helpful for people. Because I know how many people suffer with anxiety. Absolutely. And struggle with it or feel that the approaches they've got are limited at best. And I know your whole approach is saying at the moment, listen, you're just trying to get rid of symptoms. You're just trying to manage. Let me help you get to the root cause. And I want to really talk about this alarm signal in the body, right? So in the moment of anxiety, back to the 42-year-old lady in the office, right? In that moment when she is feeling anxiety, you want her or him, whoever it might be, to just take a pause if they can

and try and locate where is this in my body, right. So if on the assumption that they can find it, right. So which most people can actually, because we've never, yeah, we've, the thing is we've never been trained to look for it in our body. We, we get so sucked into our heads. And the other bonus about being in your head bonus in quotation marks is that you don't have to feel that anymore. You know, so what's happened is something's lit up in your body. An old trauma has lit up in your body. You've gone into your head and you're trying to fix it through your head. So the reason why you're in your head is because you don't want to go back down there into your body. And I'm saying the only way to heal it, the only way to feel better is to locate it in your body and embrace it.

Okay. So she's in an open plan office, right? And she's heard this conversation and she's like, okay, I'm going to do what those guys were saying on that podcast, but people are around me. So would you say, find a quiet space if you can? Yeah. Or could you even do it at your desk? You could do it at your desk. Do it at your desk. So you're just a bit of quiet and you're just trying to, what is it? You're trying to find some tension? What is it you're trying to find? Because I imagine some people will say, I don't know what you mean. What do you mean it's in my body? I have no idea what that actually feels like. Yeah. And it's a very common sort of thing,

but it's easier to find than you think. Because like I said, I think we go into our heads. We don't even consider going into our body. The number of people that said, oh, you know, when I show them, it's like, oh, yeah, it's in my throat. Or, yeah, it's in my heart. Yeah. They're, like, surprised to find it. Now, the thing about that is that, okay, it is, the alarm is your younger self. And maybe that part of you wants to stay hidden. and maybe that part of you wants to stay hidden. So sometimes when I work with people and they can't find their alarm, it's because that unconscious child doesn't want to be found.

Like they don't want to be found, but most of us do. When we say our younger, you know, our inner child, a younger version of ourself doesn't want to be found. I think, or are we effectively saying, for whatever reason, that part of you, in order to survive, you buried it deep down. And then went into your head. And you went into your head. Exactly. You're not yet, and I think yet's a very important word there.

You're not yet, or that part is not yet ready to come out and present itself. But it will. With continued practice, it will. Yeah. Or sometimes it comes out immediately. Like I work with people that will start crying immediately as soon as I say, where do you feel that? It's like, oh, it's in my upper chest. It's like, okay, temperature, color, size. I go through the whole thing. And they start crying because this, okay, temperature, color, size. I go through the whole thing and they start crying because this is the first time, I get a little emotional about this. This is the first time they found it in their body.

Okay, so let's, so that lady, she's in her office, right? Yeah. She's felt anxious. She has taken a beat. She's either gone to the bathroom or the quiet area or just sitting at her desk and she's found it, let's say in her stomach. Okay. Okay, what is she to do then?

So I would put your hand over your stomach and then I just say, okay, can you really feel the skin on the palm of your hand? Can you really feel the skin over your stomach? Where is the sensation? Is it superficial? Is it deep or is it somewhere in the middle? Can you find it? Can you put your other hand on top of it? There's no hardcore recipe for this,

but basically what you're doing is you're consciously and physiologically trying to connect with that sensation because that sensation is your younger child, younger self asking for your attention. So when it starts getting the attention, it can be very emotional, but it's also very calming. Just about everybody, when I show them where their alarm is, or they find their alarm and they put their hand over it, or they breathe into it, or they just acknowledge this presence, will start to get emotional because it's like, this is what I want. This is what the child, the child in me has always wanted to be seen, heard, loved, and protected. And then you can actually say to that child, I see you. I hear you. I will love you and I will protect you. I will never go anywhere. You and I will always be together. We have to, there's no way that I can ever leave you. So what will that do in that moment? So in

that moment, then instead of, you know, the first method, the common method is more thoughts. Let me grab another coffee, get me a chocolate bar, whatever it might be, these distraction strategies, these soothing strategies to help us feel better. You're saying to take a pause, feel where it is. Let's say it's the stomach. You're saying, well, put your hand on the stomach, breathe into it, stroke it. So you're self-soothing yourself. Absolutely. Then what? Just allow it to be there. Don't push it away. Allow it to be there because it is the younger version of you asking for your attention and show it that it's seen, heard, and loved, and you're never going to leave it. And this is something that I would say, do this at home before you get into the office situation. Find your alarm. This is what my book is about, is find the alarm because you know, because it usually shows, for me,

it shows up in exactly the same place every time. Okay. How can you find the alarm if you're not feeling anxious? So what I mean by that is, let's say as part of your morning routine, you think, okay, I want to work on what Russ has been teaching me right I want to work on finding that younger version of myself soothing it

I get that you can do that in the moment yeah maybe challenging depending on what's going on but if you can take a beat take a pause

you can do it in the moment but if you wake up are you saying people with anxiety often will wake up worrying anyway? They'll feel tension. So if you then, instead of going to your phone first thing in the morning, if you sit with yourself, do some deep breathing, really start to pay attention to your body rather than the latest news headlines, you're going to experience a bit of

tension somewhat. You know, like what I said before, I experience occasionally this right-sided, upper-back tension. Yeah, for sure. So it's the same thing. It is the same thing. And I think it's just, it's finding it in your body. And if you look for it, it's not usually that hard to find. Now, some people will find it in two places. Like I've, you know, I've a lot of people that had two traumas, you know, where, you know, say a parent died when they were younger

and then their stepdad was terrible to them or whatever. There may be two places. It may be that their stepdad was here because they could never say, I don't like this guy. And the original pain was kind of in their heart space area. Now I know this is like, sometimes it's a medical doctor and neuroscientist. I want to have a seizure because this sounds so woo, like it's, but out of 35 years of

me going to every possible therapies, you know, CBT, ACT, LMNOP, everything that I've done, this has been the most effective way of finding it. So the thing about when you go into your body, here's the thing. So I'm, I'm deciding now I'm going to go into my body, even though it's uncomfortable, but now I've, I've actually redirected the train from my thoughts into my body. So I'm not paying much attention to my thoughts anymore, which we're just making it worse, right? The boss is going to fire me or whatever.

So I'm out of my head, which is a win in and of itself. And then I'm actually addressing the root cause of the problem. So it's twofold. The benefit of going to your alarm rather than going to your thoughts is twofold. It gets you out of your head, for one, so you stop the worrying part. And then you're actually paying attention to the part of you that's really hurting. And that's the child in you. And I guess, like anything, what you practice, you get better at.

Absolutely. So if you practice every morning or every day or four times a week, if you practice getting out of your mind into your body, it's going to make it more likely and easier in the moment to kind of deal with it. Like I mentioned before about meditation, you practice it enough. Then in life, when someone cuts you up, instead of being in reactive mode, then in life when someone cuts you up instead of being in reactive mode you can actually create that space and go oh wow this is going on i could do this or i could do something different i guess that's coming into the mind again no it is it is but it's actually you've given yourself enough space so you you haven't regressed into your survival brain yeah you've actually practiced

this this functional prefrontal cortex exercise so that when you need it, it's there. So the little analogy that I draw, and I've, I've used this a number of times. I said, okay, Rangan, I'm going to take you to the basketball court first day of September. And if you can make three free throws out of 10, I'm going to give you $10 million. Now, well, are you going to start practicing, you know, the day before, or are you going to wait and just think, oh, I can make three free throws easy. No, you you going to start practicing the day before? Or are you going to wait and just think, oh, I can make three free throws easy? No, you're going to start practicing it.

By the time we get to the beginning of September, you will have thrown thousands of free throws so that you know out of 10, you'll make three. And that's basically what I'm saying is that you have to practice this stuff because then it's there for you when you need it. It's the same thing about women who take self-defense training. If they are attacked, they're a million times more likely to be able to react because they've created this program in them already than if they just depend

on their wherewithal when they get attacked. So when you have something, when you've actually trained your conscious and unconscious mind to do something, you feel more in control. It's like driving, right? Yeah. It's the same thing whereby when you're learning to drive, you have to think about the clutch, the gears, how does it all move, the coordination. And then now when we drive to work, we're dreaming about all sorts of things, and what's on the radio, and do we like the tune that's on?

We're not thinking about that. And so if anyone was ever going to chase you in your car, you're in your car, you're going to be thinking about where do I go? What's the route? You're not thinking about the mechanics of driving. It's the same kind of thing, right? Yoga. Yoga for many people helps to take them out of their mind and into their bodies. Is that why you feel, or is that potentially one of the big benefits of yoga? Because a lot of people, Bessel Vanneke, when he came on the show, was talking about how powerful yoga can be for people who've had adverse childhood experiences, who have parts of themselves stuck in their childhood still. Are you a fan of yoga? I'm actually a registered yoga teacher.

still, you know, are you a fan of yoga? I'm actually a registered yoga teacher. So it's, I think the, and it doesn't have to be yoga. It can be Tai Chi, it can be Qigong. It's basically matching your breath and your movement so that you are now bringing your mind and your body back into connection. So I used to do this thing where I would just kind of do this. It looked like, like a Kung Fu thing, but I, it was just all free form. But it would make me feel so much better because I was trapped in my head. I lived neck up for like, you know, 40 years of my life in this sort of anxious mess. And the thing about yoga is, again, it's about the breathing, it's about the movement and that's, but any kind of physical movement that you are conscious of, I mean, it's just not flailing around, but just being really aware. What about running? There's a bit of a controversy there because you will start creating endogenous opioids

from the periaqueductal gray in your brain. You will start in the brainstem. There's a part of our brain that secretes natural opioids. Okay. So what's the problem with that? Well, because it's a way of soothing the symptom as opposed to going to the root cause of the problem. And when you soothe the symptom, this is the same thing about giving people antidepressants, which is another thing. All of a sudden now you've taken their anxiety

or depression down to a point where they can manage it and who wants to go back into their old wounds if they're feeling better? So the thing about running in that sort of runner's high kind of thing is that you're kind of in a way medicating it away, but you're not actually going at the root cause. I mean, that is really, really interesting. So when you talk about getting out of your mind, getting into your body, movement, of course, is a great way to do that. If you go for a walk around the block, you just feel differently. Nothing actually has

changed. You just feel differently at the end of that movement. Now, I get it. Yoga, Tai Chi, Qigong, these kind of, I guess, slower, conscious, intentional movements where you're matching up your body and your breath. I can totally see how that will start to integrate you from the inside. And I think what you just said about running there is really, really interesting. In fact, I think a good way to talk about this would be through the lens of addiction, right? So, you know, Gabor Mate will say, not why the addiction, why the pain? Yes. I guess you would say, not why the anxiety, why the pain?

Why the alarm? Why the alarm, right? Similar kind of approach. And again, a lot of similar messaging that I talk about, you talk about, Gabor, Bessel, Nicole Lepera, is that when we create a separation in childhood, in our core, we basically spend our whole lives trying to repair that gap. And that can show up as anxiety, but it can also show up as addiction. So my question is, what's the relationship between anxiety and addiction? Because it seems like- They're cousins. They're cousins.

A lot of it is the same root cause, right? It is. For many people. But then relating to what we've talked about exercise, one thing I've noticed is that a lot of people who would say they were addicted to something, let's say alcohol or drugs, it is uncanny how many of them now have a form of addiction to exercise or endurance sport. Now, if you ask a lot of those people, I can't speak for everyone, but the people I have spoken to, they will say, yeah, but at least this one is serving me. It's helping me. It's not, you know, this is a healthy addiction.

Yeah, it's a sublimation of it. Yeah. But are you saying that actually that is still not really dealing with the root cause? You're just sort of transferring onto something else. I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth. No, no. You're nailing it. You're nailing it. It's like when people say, no, I run, I run. And then I say to them, well, what are you running from? And that stuns them for a minute because it's like, no, this is what I do. So again, it's like medication. It's like you're numbing the symptoms, but the root cause, this sort of childhood pain, not to sound like a broken record, is still there, which is what we sometimes do when I give people an SSRI for, you know, an antidepressant. You drop the

pain down from the anxiety from a seven to a two, but you're doing nothing for the underlying cause. In fact, you're actually delaying that person's willingness to go into it because it's the pain that makes us change as human beings. So it's easier to stay taking something and feeling better. That's one of my issues with antidepressants is that, you know, some people like some people really need them. Absolutely. But a lot, they're over prescribed for one, like as doctors, we don't have that much time to spend with people. So the order of the rotating pen is my uncle Colin would say, you know, it's like, it's easier to give someone a prescription than it is to say, okay, what kind of abuse did you go through? The ACE study, right? Adverse childhood experiences.

That was all the rage in the nineties in medical school after that big thing came out. And now 50% of medical students graduating have never heard of the ACEs. You know, I think back to my early years as a GP and I can still remember, I can visualize being in that room that I was in and the sun would come in in the late afternoon. And I can still remember certain patients with anxiety who would keep coming back and you just felt powerless because you had an SSRI, you had diazepam, and then you'd have some patients who were used to taking the diazepam and you were told, yeah, but you can't put this on repeat prescription. You don't want people

getting addicted and you're liking this. Back then, because I didn't have the knowledge and awareness I have now, I felt really stuck. This has always been my frustration with a lot of the way we practice these days as doctors. For all the benefits, and there are many, there are many things we're just not good at. And I would say anxiety is one of those things. I would agree with you wholeheartedly. And of course, there are some great therapists who who if we're lucky enough to be able to refer to who can help people, but I wouldn't have thought medical doctors are particularly good.

The approach you are advocating for is not the same approach, I would say, as most conventionally trained psychiatrists. Not at all. So number one, why is it so different? And number two, what would critics of your work say? Well, the critics of the work would say that, you know, it is a mind issue. And of course it is a mind issue. It's not just that I'm saying that everything is the alarm in the body, but I'm saying that the alarm is what's driving the

thoughts of the mind, especially that left hemisphere that wants to know, it wants to make up a reason why you feel this way. So it's really about trying to find the true root cause rather than just medicating the symptoms. So I think that's what we're trained to do as doctors is we're trained to medicate the symptoms. And a lot of the reasons is that we don't, we're not trained in trauma.

Medical doctors aren't trained in trauma at all. So they don't, they may see that, okay, one of my patients was like physically abused as a child. So that's why they're coming in with depression. They may see the objective view of that, but they don't know what to do with it. Like they really don't know what to do with it. And to try and train medical doctors who are basically very reductionist, right? It's like,

okay, you have a heartburn, so you get a proton pump inhibitor. Okay. That's just, that's how we do it. And it works and it works. Until it doesn't. Well, until it doesn't. And then something else comes out, right? So then we've cut out too much of your stomach acid. You're not digesting food as well or whatever. And then you've got to be soil deficient. Then you've got to be, exactly. So it's one of those things

that as soon as you start treating something with medication, it's like whack-a-mole, something else will come out. Now, I don't have anything against medications because they are amazing. But I think what we do is we rely on the medication, and especially psychiatrists because they have the hardest patients to treat, the most resistant.

And they're trained in a very pharmaceutical model. So I don't expect them to kind of embrace this. Some of them do. I get messages on Instagram from psychiatrists saying, you know, I give your book to patients. Like I've never actually looked at anxiety this way ever before. And it's really helping me understand

because, and it's one of the things that says, I feel so much better treating my anxiety patients now because I feel like I'm actually doing something. Yeah. You mentioned before that you had done lots of CBT and you never found it actually truly helped you. I just want to make sure we're being inclusive here in this conversation,

because I think all therapists and healthcare professionals are trying their best, right? We've all been schooled in certain schools of thought, right? And then we practice based upon what we have learned. And you're often required to practice in the way that you have been taught, which there's benefits of that, but there's also real limitations of that when you feel that there's another way. So let's say for a CBT therapist

who may be trying to help someone retrain their thoughts, are you saying it has no use or are you simply saying it has a partial use? It's going to help the mind, but let's also tackle the body at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, I think when you start believing that changing the mind alone is going to heal people, it's a very slippery slope. There may be, you know, five or 10% of the population that really respond

extremely well to CBT. What I see with CBT is it works quite well initially, but then the old ego in us, the old overprotective ego that doesn't like change and feels that the worry is protecting us slowly kind of chips away at us. So a year after CBT, and I see people come in, it's like, I spent $3,000 on CBT and it seemed to be helpful, but I'm actually worse now than I was a year ago because slowly the CBT kind of wears off. My wife, Cynthia, she's a somatic trauma therapist. So she said to me something the other day, it's like CBT seems to work initially reasonably well, but it doesn't stick. Whereas somatic therapy doesn't, it takes a while to start working, but it's more long-term. So I think we need both. Like I said, we are

cognitive creatures. So it's not that I'm against CBT by any means at all, but I would love it if the CBT therapist sort of took a little sort of side training in somatic therapy and just like, where do you really feel that in your body? Where does it really come up? And this is all part of parts work as well. Like, where do you find that child, that child that was bullied? Can you find that part of you?

Because this is one of my issues with somatic experiencing therapy is that they rely basically, virtually all of it on feeling, right? And internal family systems kind of gets into the child part or the different parts of us, but they don't really dive and drill down into, okay, where do you feel it? Is it the size of a grape? Is it a cantaloupe? Is it a watermelon? Is it hot? Is it cold? Is it sharp? Is it dull? They don't go into the, and that's what I would

love to see. I would love to see SE, this is just Dr. Kennedy's version. I would love to see SE be a little more parts oriented. Like, okay, you feel that in your body where, you know, when you were being abused by your dad, you know, where is that part in you? Like, can we drill down into that? And with IFS and, you know, when they say, oh, I have a I have a bullied part. Okay, now where do you feel that bullied part? And really drill down into that feeling because I do feel that that insular cortex, which is getting more and more implicated in emotional illness, we're seeing it. I think in the next five or 10 years, we're really going to see this insula playing a massive role in healing and in just mental illness in general. But I would love to see IFS get really drilled down into the body.

And I would love to see SE go a little more into parts. Now I'll probably take some heat from that, but. When I spoke to Dr. Dick Schwartz on this podcast about a year ago about IFS, internal family systems, we ended up doing a real-time session that I wasn't expecting to do. And I just went with it because I thought, you know what, let's just do it. And we can always take it out in the edit if I feel too uncomfortable with having it out there. But people found it really, really helpful. But I'm pretty sure

that the first thing Dick asked me was, where do you feel that? What does it feel like? So I think with all these therapies, they're sort of interpreted and practiced in slightly different ways, aren't they? Certain IFS therapists, I'm sure will go really deep into the body. Maybe others won't so much, but that's the same with all therapies. It's kind of everyone practices. You can go to 10 different medical doctors, frankly, and get 10 different approaches because we all interpret things slightly differently. We all have a different view. We've all got different experiences of what worked before with certain patients. So I think just trying to be a bit more inclusive is always going to be helpful for all of us rather than saying this therapy is really good, that therapy is

problematic. Because as I say, all say all therapists or doctors or healthcare professionals i really do believe are trying yeah to do the best that they can based on what they've learned one thing i really want to ask you russell is we're talking about unresolved childhood trauma. Typically, yeah. Right? Or unresolved childhood experiences that then get stored in the body. And unless we go and process them and deal with them, they will show up in all kinds of behaviors

such as anxiety or addiction or- Or personality disorders or eating disorders. It's all, the root is almost always the same. It's unresolved childhood trauma. And the train may go off in a different track. You may go, I went down the anxiety route. Some people may go down an eating disorder route. Some people may develop OCD. So it's all the same route. It's all that same separation from yourself. Because first of all, before I was like, I love IFS. I think it's very effective. And I think it's great for anxiety. Same with SE. I

love SE as well. And CBT definitely has a place too. I don't want to seem like I'm down on them, but I think it's really important to let's get at the root cause of this and let's really drill down into the root cause because that's what's really helped me and that's what's really helped my patients. So I think it's really important to understand that what happened when you were a child is you experienced adverse childhood experience of some kind. And it depends. This is a really good point. It depends on how sensitive you are. Like everybody I see with anxiety is really, they were born with a very sensitive nervous system.

And if you're born with a sensitive nervous system and you get a loving, caring family, you'll be fine. If you're born with a sensitive nervous system and you experience trauma, that's when we get into problems. So we experience a trauma that's too much for our little minds to bear. So we step it down, Freud would say, repress it, suppress it, whatever, into our unconscious mind. So it gets it out of that sort of day-to-day conscious mind. And then as the body is a representation of the unconscious mind, the pain that's in the unconscious mind that isn't resolved finds long-term storage in the body. So that's what I believe happens. Now, this is a schematic thing.

You can't separate the mind from the body. But it is a really helpful construct because I do have people saying, that concept of having alarm in my body was really, really helpful for me because a lot of people blame themselves. They think there's something wrong with them. But basically your nervous system adapted

in the way that it had to, to help you survive. And it did work. Worry did work initially when you were younger, but as you get older, it's like addiction. It's like something that initially provides you with some relief, but in the longterm causes more problems. So initially conscious can't handle it, drops into the unconscious, which drops into the body and it stays there until we bring it up. And that's what I'm saying about medication, different types of therapy. Unless you get into that alarm, unless you find it, unless you bring

it out, unless you welcome it, embrace it, start dealing with it as your younger self, you're always going to be treading. you're always going to be bailing water. When I think about these themes, and I think about the sort of patients that have come in regularly to see me over, what, 20, 21 years, something like that now, I think about IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, massively on the rise. Absolutely. I think, again, it's something that we as medical doctors have been pretty average at best at treating. A lot of it's symptom control, like trying to give things antispasmodic medication

to relieve the symptoms. And then on my know, on my own journey as a physician, the first thing I really got into was the power of nutrition. This is many years ago. And then, so suddenly you see things, you see everything through the nutrition lens. Yes, of course. Yep. And so I would get reasonable benefits with patients with IBS changing their diets, helping them make changes for sure. But as I observed more, as I understood more, and I really studied the patients who really healed, not just short-term got some resolution from their symptoms, the patients

who really actually got to the root cause and moved beyond it so that it was no longer controlling their life. And I've been saying this publicly for years, that IBS, the primary issue for me is stress. It is not food. I'm convinced of it if I think about what I've observed. And it really fits in with what you're talking about, right? Where is that alarm in your body? Well, for many of us, it's in our guts.

It's in our abdomen. For you, it's in your solar plexus. So from your perspective, what's the relationship between what you're talking about and Irritable Bowel Syndrome? Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. called The Thrive Tour, Be the Architect of Your Health and Happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going

to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life, and I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour. I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease

emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal and as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three-question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much this has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel.

Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three question journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. This is one of my favorite topics. So I'm going to tell a little story. When my daughter was about four, we used to play this game called Sea Monster. So Sea Monster, I was in medical school when Leandra was four.

And she would come into the room and she would yell out, Sea Monster. And me being the aforementioned Sea Monster would throw my books aside and I would start chasing her around the house as a sea monster. Now she would freak out. She would scream in delight and get really, really hyped up. Like her sympathetic nervous system, I would just wind her right up. But then when we finished, we would go on the couch and we would have a little cuddle. And then I could feel her alarm coming down. Now I didn't know all this stuff back then. I didn't know what I was doing, but really what I was doing was I was showing her,

look, you can fire your sympathetic nervous system up in a fight or flight and get really highly activated. And then within five minutes, I can bring you right back to a normal state. Now, those of us with anxiety never really learned how to go back down again. We go up and it takes, say with anxiety, it takes like 20 minutes to come back down. In a normal kind of nervous system, it takes maybe five minutes to come down.

So I didn't know it, but at the time I was training her nervous system, her autonomic nervous system, that she could get really activated and then be really calm really quickly after it. And what I think happens in irritable bowel syndrome is you get this co-activation, and this happens in trauma too with children, is that they get this immediate sympathetic reaction, fight or flight reaction, if they're being abused or abandoned or whatever. And then they get this parasympathetic reaction, which is kind of like when a cat captures a mouse or corners a mouse, that mouse will go into what we call dorsal vagal shutdown. Name doesn't matter, but it shuts its blood pressure down.

It shuts its pulse rate down. It plays dead. So we get this, when we get traumatized as a child, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic are active at the same time. And as you know, when one is up, the other is supposed to be down. And when your parasympathetic is up,

you're the sympathetic supposed to be down. But I think what we learn when we're traumatized as children is you get this co-activation. So both the sympathetic and the parasympathetic are active at the same time. And if you look at the bowel, so some parts of the bowel are parasympathetic are active at the same time. And if you look at the bowel, so some parts of the bowel are parasympathetic, they've shut down.

Other parts are fired up. So of course you're going to get pain because the bowel doesn't know what the hell it's doing. So that, and same with fibromyalgia. So when we fire up the sympathetic nervous system, the muscles get tense. When we do the parasympathetic, they get relaxed. So we're getting, we're giving the muscles and the bowel very different influences and very different responses

from our nervous system. So of course it's gonna, and then when we get confused, one of the things about the brain is when it gets confused, often it will default to pain. So people can actually teach themselves. It's called neuroplastic pain. So people can actually teach themselves to have pain. This is where a lot of back pain comes from. And I think, you know, getting into a bit of another topic, I think

that when you have a lot of emotional pain, a lot of times it will get put into your body. And it's more socially acceptable to have a physical pain than it is to have an emotional pain. So people will suddenly get back pain, but really what they have is an unresolved, real painful childhood. And it shows up have is an unresolved, real painful childhood. And it shows up and that's why we do, and you know this, we do scans, we do everything. And it's like, I have this horrible pain and we look at it. Like some people, you do an x-ray and their back looks like it's just a dog's breakfast and they're fine. And other people have this horrible pain and you do an MRI or CT and it's pristine. It's perfect. Yeah. I did a wonderful episode with

Howard Schubiner on pain, all about this. And it's again, it speaks to how many different labels we give people. Irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, pain, let's say, let's say chronic back pain. And of course, right, I get it that every situation is different and individual, but a lot of the time, these seemingly so-called diseases actually have the same root cause. And I'm going to share this story because I just hope it helps someone maybe reflect on their own life. But IBS is so common. I don't know the latest stats in the UK, but it is so common.

More women than men, very, very common, physically debilitating, socially awkward and embarrassing. And I always remember this case of this young lady who came to see me and she basically had suffered with IBS or what had been diagnosed as IBS for many years. The medication didn't work much. She was getting really, really frustrated. She ended up training in nutrition, which is not an uncommon story, right? And learnt how different nutritional strategies could help her. And they did, but they weren't fully getting

to the root cause. And I remember when I saw her in my clinic and I spent time doing what we call a timeline and going through her whole life story. And oh man, it was just so fascinating. Essentially, when she was around 12 or 13, she actually grew up in Baghdad in Iraq right and she was telling me she had a really happy childhood her dad was really calm attentive you know take them out on weekends and then she said the Iraq war started and suddenly we were getting bombed every day. And she said, I remember one night waking up and my dad came screaming and said, come on, we've got to go and get into the bomb shelter. And she basically said overnight, her dad changed, worried, anxious, shouting all the time. And then when I tried to really

unpick when did her symptoms start, it was very soon after that, right? And by going through that with her, she really got it. It's like, oh my God, she never saw the connection, right? But I'm convinced. I know that's what ultimately was the root cause of the symptoms. And until we go and manage and retrain that nervous system, all we're ever going to do is symptom suppression. And that taught me a lot, actually, Russell. It taught me the value of doing a timeline, a whole patient's life story. me the value of doing a timeline, a whole patient's life story. It taught me just how much emotional trauma can influence our guts and IBS symptoms. But it also taught me about perception and narrative and how as a kid, as a kid at secondary school in the 1990s, believing all

the stuff the newspapers were saying about the war and the need to go in. And, you know, look, I don't want to make this political. But I just thought, oh, this is the other side. These are happy families getting on with their lives. And this young girl, literally, because of, you know, the Western decision to go and invade and start dropping bombs, her whole life and her family dynamics changed. And it was a real wake-up call to me to go, what else are you believing here that may have a... I always say everything's got multiple

stories around it. We're often just seeing one side of it. So I know quite a lot there, but I think really interesting to reflect on for us. Any comments on what I've just said? Yeah. I mean, what I would do with her is I'd say, do you have a picture of yourself at 12 before the war started? And can you go back and connect with that little girl who didn't have that stress, who didn't have that problem? Can you feel her in your system now? And then, you know, do you have a picture of yourself after like 13 or 14? And can you go back and converse with her and say, look, it's okay. We're okay. We're safe. Because the amygdala has no sense of time. It will record everything and anything that's ever hurt you. So when you experience the same thing now, so if she experienced some sort of uncertainty,

maybe, you know, a near miss car crash or something like that, her amygdala will take her right back to that place at 12 where she's being rushed into a bomb shelter. And we will feel like a 12-year-old, but we know that we are not 12. We know that we're adults, but we feel like we're 12. And that incongruity between how we know that we're adults, but we feel like we're 12. And that incongruity between how we know that we're adults, but we feel like we're a child makes us feel really helpless and powerless because we go back again through the insula.

I believe her body probably feels the same way now if she experienced that near-miss car crash that she did when she was being rushed into the bomb shelter. So can we understand the body's reaction to it? And I wanna tell you this other story is like I have three dogs, Buddha, who's 14. They're all Labradoodles. Riley, who's five. Riley's a maniac. And Ellie, who's two, who's also a maniac, but she's two. So she's supposed to be a maniac.

So Riley, he doesn't like other dogs. And we don't know why, because he's had a, you know, he had a good puppy hood, you know, he had a good like upbringing and all that, but he doesn't like other dogs. So when another dog is coming, he will start getting into this sort of, not a crouch, but down a little bit. And his tail slightly elevates at the back. Now, what I do with him is I just, I touch his tail, I push his tail down. And as soon as I push his tail down, he breaks out of it. So we get into this body state, right? And if you interrupt that body state, which is, I believe, why yoga, why these things work, when we interrupt that conditioned emotional signature body state, we can start being open to other possibilities. But if I didn't touch his tail, when that dog got closer, he would eventually lunge at that dog.

So it's like, 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, which is the same kind of thing as when I tap Riley's tail down. 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. When we use the word trauma, we often think about these big events. You know, I just mentioned a bomb shelter and a war. You know, We've mentioned abuse, right? But clearly not everyone has those major trauma events in life. And you're drawing a strong link between our childhoods and our experience of anxiety as adults. So can you just help me and help us

broaden our thinking on this? What might people have experienced that's not what's called big T trauma, but could still be impacting them and causing anxiety? Yeah. Here's a really interesting thing. So when I see someone who's had a good childhood, they come to me and they have a good child and they have chronic anxiety, I'll always ask them the same question. Were you separated from your parents before you were five years old? Was there a hospitalization? Did your mother have to stay in hospital after you were born or whatever? And the number of people that come back and say, oh my God, I talked to my mom. She said they went away for, my mother had to go for an immigration thing.

When I was three years old, she went for a month. I don't even remember it. So there's this massive separation that she experienced as a child, but because her memory system, her implicit memory system was active, but her explicit memory system, I probably shouldn't go into that, but-

No, you can do, feel free. Well, implicit is body memories, basically. That's the short version of it. So she has a body memory of when she was three years old and her mom was away for a month, but she doesn't consciously remember that her mom was away for a month. She has a huge issue with separation, which now we go back. But when she came in to see me with chronic anxiety, she said, you know what, my parents, and they were good parents. They were great parents. But because of that separation that she didn't even remember, she has deep separation anxiety. So we go back and we find it. So it manifests in different ways. And it depends on how sensitive your nervous system is. I have a very sensitive nervous system. So

even the slightest thing when I was a child would send me up. Some people, my brother is a lot more resilient than I am. So it's one of those things that a small, I would see people in my practice that would have like the death of an uncle or something like that. And they had attuned, connected parents that would do okay. I'd also see people who had a death of their goldfish that would completely collapse. So it depends on how sensitive your nervous system and how much, like I said, how much resilience, how much capacity was built in your nervous system from an attuned, attached connection with your parents.

So if you have that resilient, because 80% of your brain development is before the age of five. So if you, before the age of five, have attuned, attached parents to you, you're much more likely to be resilient to stuff later on. So big T, little T trauma doesn't matter so much because you've already built this resilient nervous system. But very

small thing, if you have a sensitive nervous system, very small things like a separation you didn't even know about. I've had people who, who their parents went on a week long vacation when they were two years old, set them into this. So, you know, it's really interesting when I look back like the different things, but it's really a combination of, you know, it's really interesting when I look back, like the different things, but it's really a combination of your sensitivity. And it's almost like a physics equation, you know, like sensitivity, how sensitive you are on a scale of one to a hundred, and then the trauma, how much of the trauma was. There's going to be a lot of guilt coming up right now, I'm sure for a lot of people. So let's really make sure we give some practical tips because of course, if someone's got a child above the age of five now,

or they're adults, right? They may think back to things now. I go, oh man, I didn't know, but that's happened. What can I do now for that child? Or what can that adult, that former child now adult, what can they do? And I've got, perhaps to make this really practical, I've got two people in mind at the moment. One is to do with a child I know who was separated from his mum just for a few hours in hospital when he was very young, under the age of one. And he's a teenager now.

Okay. Right? So, you know, if you're under the age of one, I'm assuming there's no conscious memory of that separation. But of course, it could be stored. Well, your hippocampus doesn't develop until you become 18 months. So your hippocampus is kind of like... So what does that mean? What's the practical implication? Is that a good thing then, that it hasn't developed till 18 months? I think in a lot of ways it is, but your

amygdala will still record it. So that's the thing about the hippocampus and the amygdala. So it's interesting when we look at memory, and this is why a lot of people tell me, it's like, I don't have any childhood memories. Well, cortisol and epinephrine will paralyze the hippocampus. Now the hippocampus is a structure in our brain that records memory. It kind of time date stamps the memories. It's more like, that's what it does. Whereas the amygdala remembers the emotional component, but doesn't have any idea of what time it occurs. The hippocampus will tell you, this happened when I was seven. This happened when I was 12. So if that kid is now a teenager, what can the parents do with that teenager to stop this being adult anxiety and causing issues in relationships and all sorts of things later on in life? Can anything be done now as a teenager? And if so, what?

As a teenager and as an adult, it's like building that social engagement system again. You build it for yourself. You can also build it if your parents are still alive. It's building that sense that you are safe. So you don't necessarily have to go back to the event and process it. necessarily have to go back to the event and process it. It's another way that you just build resilience in the nervous system. You keep focusing on eye contact, love and care, presence, safe affectionate touch, doing things together. That's all you can do at this point. That will help build some capacity and resilience so when the old alarm does come up, they have a place to metabolize it. Whereas before, they're kind of defenseless. If you're treading water and you're exhausted, you're not going to

be able to all of a sudden just swim to shore. Okay. So that makes sense. And the other example I had in mind, and I guess I wonder how you'll answer this, given that you've had personal experience of this. I don't know what age your dad's got breakdown and was taken off, I think, for about three months when my friend was, I think, around 10 or just under 10. Okay. So, you know, massive separation when a parent is sectioned. For that sort of scenario, what can that person who's now an adult do? Go back and find your 10-year-old self. Show them they're seen, heard, loved.

I mean, I'm shortening this down quite a bit, but show them that they're seen, heard, loved, and protected, that 10-year-old. Go back. And sometimes I'll do this thing called commiserating. So you sort of make an image of that 10-year-old. If you have a picture, that's even better. And you say to them,

it must've been really hard for you when your parent got put in the mental hospital. Just see if they say anything back. Now, I know this is getting kind of woo, but this sort of commiserating, it must've been really hard for you when you were being bullied at school. It must've been really hard for you when mom and dad told you they were getting a divorce. Because you're trying to make that connection with that part of you that was really hurt at the time it was so that you can change it. We can change it now. The amygdala, because it has no sense of time, we can use that to our advantage so we can

go back and change it. And a lot of times, like for me going back and talking to Rusty, he didn't know I became a doctor. He's still stuck in his 12-year-old self watching his dad being taken off the hospital. So I show him all the things, like when we went through London, just the last few days, I brought him with me.

I said, this is amazing. Yeah, isn't this amazing? It's like Buckingham Palace and St. James, all these places that we saw. I bring him into that. I bring him into my present life because he doesn't know that I become quote unquote successful. Yeah. I mean, this stuff works. It's just, it's just, but it's so antithetical to how you and I were trained though.

I get it. But if you, if you know, as I did yesterday and this morning, if I go into your Instagram feed and look at what people are commenting from reading your book, from maybe signing up to your course, from the posts, the reels you put out. It is truly profound. People are saying, wow, I have been struggling with this for years. You know, that's kind of, you've helped me now understand, you know, even that recognize the alarm. One lady, I was reading it on your Instagram this morning, was saying that was one of the most profound things she's ever learned, that in that situation of anxiety, to feel the alarm. And I think she was saying, and I didn't get this in your book, but she was saying, I think she heard you talk about it on a reel. She put her hand on

where the alarm was, one hand. The other hand she put on her leg. And she said she has never had anxiety to the same level since then, right? So I'm fascinated by you and your approach because you're a formally trained medical doctor, you're a trained neuroscientist, and you're someone who suffered. Badly. Badly. Almost suicidal on a few occasions. For me, in many ways, it makes you even more of an expert. I think that's my biggest qualification, actually, is just suffering for 35 years. Yeah, because you can come to it from clinical research, by chemistry of the brain, and lived experience, right? Whereas I think a lot of the time,

it just comes from one of these parts. So what does the research say? And look, if we were great at healing anxiety with the tools that we had, let's be honest, we wouldn't be having this explosion, right? But clearly the approach, the exclusively mind-based approach or pharmaceutical approaches that we have been trying to adopt are clearly limited. Something you said in the book was absolutely profound, was this, one of the most powerful tools for you in your healing journey was not doctors, therapy, or medications. It was a sense of awareness. And I want to just finish off this conversation talking about that awareness and

perhaps we could relate that to your ABC framework that I think is really practical for people. And maybe it's quite a nice way to sort of close down this conversation. Yeah, absolutely. So when you say a sense of awareness was one of the most powerful tools, what does that mean and why was it so powerful? Mostly awareness of the alarm. It's the alarm in your body that's causing the thoughts of your mind. The thoughts of your mind aren't the originator of your anxiety. So before that, you thought it was your thoughts. Yes, absolutely. You thought, I am my thoughts.

Until LSD. Yeah. So as we're closing, I don't want to, but LSD actually showed me, this is, this is when I was suicidal, like in 2013. I had just left medicine and I was suicidal. And my friend said, look, you know, you need a different view of life. So he took me on an LSD trip. And in the, on that LSD trip, I saw that my anxiety, what I called my anxiety of my mind was actually this sharp purple density in my solar plexus. And I don't know exactly how I got this or whatever, but it's like, oh, this is the source. This is the problem. So ever since then, I've kind of gone, okay, how do I heal this? I can still work on the cognitive CBT stuff. I can still work on that, but it's being aware that this, this is the root cause of my anxiety. So that's what I was shown is like, this is the root cause of my anxiety. So this is what I have to deal with. So I put my hand over it. I breathe into it. I realize it's there because

you can't change anything that you're not aware of. So that awareness. And as I got into it, you know, it got more nuanced. It's sharp. It's hollow. It feels lonely. Like I go into this whole thing with it and it's like, okay, that's where you are. And there is this initial sense that I'm on the right track. Psychedelics, not intentionally, but just the way the podcast schedule has kind of formed over the last few weeks and months, it's amazing how many times psychedelics have come up. I know it came up in my conversation with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. It came up with Dr. Gabor Mate. It even came up with a conversation with neuroscientist Dr. Anil Seth recently. And so I just want to say at this point,

because I think it's really important that there are downsides to psychedelics. There are certainly risks. They're not a panacea. They have to be done with great care and attention in control settings. And of course, in many countries, they are still illegal. So I think it's really important to acknowledge all of that. It's also important to acknowledge that very reputable institutions like imperial and london johns hopkins in america are doing really good quality studies in control settings so i just think it's very important because it keeps coming up but i don't want people to this to be normalized as in i'm just going to go and hang out on my mates on a Friday night and do this. Right. So that being said, you found that you were in a desperate state as well,

weren't you, when you agreed to do this? Because I know I've read your story. You were quite scared. I was afraid of any of that stuff. I've lived a fairly conservative life as far as that kind of stuff goes. And psychedelics screwed me up for two years. I will never do them again. And psychedelics screwed me up for two years. Like they, I will never do them again. And it wasn't like I got some huge, you know, thank you, Lord revelation that I was healed. I didn't get any of that.

So what I got from psychedelics was this almost academic learning that, hey, your anxiety has nothing really to do with your mind and everything to do with your body. That's what I got from psychedelics. I didn't get some sort of healing or instantaneous thing. It was nothing like that. So this is where the interest is. You had, you know, it screwed you up for two years afterwards.

Absolutely. So that's important. First of all, how did it screw you up? And then secondly, I'd like you to comment, if you don't mind, on can people get that realization then that anxiety is not all in your mind, that there's an alarm in your body first, and then you create a story in your mind. Can you get that realization without taking psychedelics?

Well, that's what I hope. And I even say that in the book, like I kind of took one for the team, right? So it's like, I took one for the team. So I went in there, it was horrible. Like it was very frightening. It was very scary. I don't recommend psychedelics like as a, as a anywhere near a first line or especially a recreational thing. But for some people, I do think that it provides them with some, some kind of sense of relief and some, you know, if you look at the, the way it works is it kind of paralyzes the default mode network in the brain and the default mode network, the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex. I don't want to use too much language,

but it's maybe a thought that that's where our self, I have this acronym I call JABS. I know I'm kind of rattling here, but JABS stands for judgment, abandonment, blame, and shame. And this is what we do to ourselves as children because we blame ourselves. There's a great saying that says, when you abuse, neglect, or abandon a child,

they don't stop loving the parent. They stop loving themselves. And that's what happens when we get that conscious problem. So then we start judging, abandoning, blaming, and shaming ourselves as children. And that creates a tremendous amount of alarm in our system. And we keep doing it, which doesn't allow the alarm to heal. So that's the thing about psychedelics is that they paralyze that ego, that sort of inner critic in a way, and you get to see who you really are. And that's, I think that's when you, when you, when you close the door on that, you see that you're really just this vibration and then they get to move on, but you're really just this vibration in the world.

And what you think you are is really just a mental construct. It's not actually who you are. So I think that's what psychedelics do. And I think that they provide that sense that I am not my thoughts. I am not this child who was abandoned. I am not this thing. I am energy. Yeah. Russell, as you said that, I can't tell you what just happened in my body. Like I felt a tingling when you said about being abandoned as a child, you don't stop loving your parents, you stop loving yourself. It's just so powerful. And I think many people would have heard that and felt it. I felt it. There's something that deeply rings true about that,

that I think many of us can feel. And again, it doesn't have to be big T trauma, just little things or because all parents are doing the best they can based on what they know, based on their circumstances. Absolutely. Right. And every situation has multiple interpretations. So this is not about blame in any way. It's just acknowledging that many of us stop loving ourselves as kids. Yeah. And it's hard to give what you didn't get. So I see parents who weren't really affectionately loved as children, who are overly affectionate with their children, which could be another problem, like helicopter parents. Like they don't let them do,

they don't let them go in the swings. They don't let them do that. So, you know, we can go overboard with all these things. So there's no parenting without guilt, as Gordon Neufeld says. And it is one of those things that, you know, and here's the other thing that I really like to point out is every child has their own path. You can, as a parent, you can shepherd them, but you can't protect them

from the pain, you know, and maybe their pain, like maybe my anxiety pain was what got me here today. You know, like I feel really fulfilled in my life now because I've done what I really wanted to do. And if I didn't have all that anxiety, I wouldn't have done any of this stuff. So that's a mind story, right? It is actually. So you've reframed your life experience to it now being a good thing? Well, I don't know if it's a good thing. Like if you said I had a magic wand and I could, you know, have a normal dad, I would probably pick that, you know, but the fact that I've taken the, you know, the horrible analogy or whatever, lemons and made lemonade. I don't like that thing at all, but you know, it's just the best thing that comes to my mind at this point is I think that every, this is the point is that your child

has their own path. You know, if they get sick, it's not, and you know, with your son, you know, it led you to a different place. So a lot of the things that we think of are horrible or bad are actually something that's really good for us. Like I thought, you know, getting into medical school was the best thing that ever happened to me when it actually could have been the worst thing that ever, because it really fired up my anxiety. But it also led me to a place where it's like, okay, can I help myself? And in helping myself, can I help other people? Because I always say, I don't want you to have to suffer with anxiety the way that I did for 35 years. Yeah. I mean, everything, there's pros and

cons, aren't there? There's good things, there's bad things, like very few things in life, maybe unconditional love from your parents, right? But very few things apart life, maybe unconditional love from your parents, but very few things apart from that, I think are either all good or all bad. Most things there's upsides, there's downsides and learning to be able to see that I think is powerful. But also, you know, this idea that you've reframed that story in your mind, but that's only been possible because you've spent so long sitting with that alarm in your body, being able to experience that feel, understand where it comes from, quieten the system down, re-regulate your nervous system so that you can now write different stories about your life.

Let's just go back to the ABC. We're on A for awareness. Just before we move on, I wanted to say something here. So when you get into your alarm, this is what I'll do with people sometimes is I'll say, what was the best time? What was the best time in your life? Right. And I think, I don't know if you talked about this earlier, but it's like, if you find the best time in your life, how did that feel in your body? Like when you first met Vedanta, I don't know how you pronounce your wife's name. That's brilliant. Yeah. Okay. Done your homework. Okay. Yeah. When you first met your wife, you know, and you were courting and it was like, man, she really loves me. I really love this woman.

You know, where do you feel that in your body? You know, just, is it coming into your chest? Like, where does it come into? I'd say it's in my heart. Okay, good. Yeah. And is it like, is it warm or cold? It may not have a temperature to it, but...

Yeah, it's warm. It's soothing. Okay. So the next time you get that pain underneath your right arm or into your right back, I want you to go back and forth between those two sensations. So this is what I do with people

when I change their perception of their alarm. So you have the alarm and then you go back into what was the best time in your life. Like, so you, you pendulate between the two emotions and that kind of weakens the negative. It weakens the alarm because you start seeing that the alarm isn't all of you. Cause when you were a child, the alarm was all of you. You didn't, you were powerless. You didn't have any escape, but now you do. Now what you can do is you can take that alarm and you can go, okay, I remember the time that I was at the waterfall and it was just so wonderful. And I was there with my friends and everything felt so good. And then go back into the alarm, go back into, I go back into my solar plexus. Okay. It was terrible watching my dad suffer like that,

like really terrible. And then I go back into the place where I'm swimming with my friends. And then I go back into the alarm and I go back and forth between the two. And that starts to change my perception of the alarm, that it isn't something I have to be afraid of or run away into my head all the time. I love that idea that it's not all of you. Exactly. As a child, it was all of you. That's the thing. There was no way out as a child. And we still feel that way when we have anxiety, that there is no way out. The amygdala tells us that we're still trapped in that five, seven, 12, 15 year old, but we're not. We're adults. And we can look back and go, okay, I have this place. I have this place in me that I can go to, to assuage the

negative part. So we can go back into ABCs unless you have something that you want to follow. Okay. So A for awareness. Yep. So you're aware of like, how does your alarm feel? And, you know, a lot of this, we don't have time to go into, but it's basically what happens before you feel the alarm. Like I have one person that says, you know, when I look at my alarm, which was also in their solar plexus, just before my alarm, I feel this tingling in my thighs. It's like, okay, can we get into that sensation? It's like, yeah, okay.

I've never really felt this before, but I know before my alarm comes up, I get this tingling in my thighs. So the analogy that I draw is you're piloting, you know, a 787 Dreamliner and you're 500 miles away from a storm. And if you just unconsciously keep going, you're going to go into that storm. But if you make a turn around that. So now what I told him is like, okay, when you feel that tingling in your thighs, you still have enough prefrontal cortex left online that you can actually make a conscious decision. Because once it goes into the alarm state, it's really hard to pull yourself out of it. It's like you're in the middle of the storm. You can't really do much about it. So I track back

and that's into the nuances of what I'm talking about, but we track back what happens before you feel this particular alarm in your body. And if you can train yourself to really get in tune with this, and this is what I use a lot with couples. Before you guys get into a fight, where do you feel what happens in your body? And then if you can really tune into that, then you don't necessarily have to go into the fight because typically what I see people who, couples that get into arguments and bad arguments is that, you know, their nine-year-old is arguing with their partner's nine-year-old and that's not going to go well. So in my house, I have a picture of Cynthia when she's nine years old. And it's like, that's who you're arguing with. I look at that picture. It's in our kitchen. It's like, that's who you're

arguing with right now. Do you really want to argue with a nine-year-old? I mean, that is so good. Like, that is such a good way of thinking about it. How many arguments? Because ultimately, as you said, the amygdala has no memory, right? Just triggers you. We know that most relationship blow-ups. Are the two children, like... Yeah, are you reverting back? My pain and your pain have now locked together. Yeah. That is such a good thing to actually, or it's such an innovative way,

just having a picture of your partner as a child, and that's who you're arguing with. And vice versa, right? Does she have one of you yes yes so it's so much easier it's so much easier to be able to be kind and and sort of get out of that when when you see your partner as a nine-year-old you go okay this is who i'm arguing with like if i have a picture of myself here um that i i don't know if i'll be able to get all the other stuff, but that's, that's me as a three-year-old. So that's who I talk to. Yeah. And who wants to fight with him? Yeah. And who can fight with him? So that's, and that's the thing. So when you see,

when I see her as a nine-year-old and I re it's so much easier for me to go, why don't I just go give her a hug and say, yeah, you know what? You know, maybe I wasn't too crazy about that, but we can work this out. Yeah, I love that. Rather than just following, because otherwise you're in that 747 and you're 10 minutes out of the storm and you're not going to avoid it. Are we still on the A? Yes, we're still on the A. Still on the A?

So awareness. So be aware of what your alarm feels like. Just get really into the nuances of it. Okay. Really drill down into it. And then go into B, which is body and breath. So go into your body, go into your breath, and then touch as well, if you can do that. So body and breath is B. And then C is a compassionate connection to that child. So A is awareness. Hey, I'm starting to feel that feeling in my thighs or whatever it is, that alarm in my system. Go into my body, go into my breath, connect with with that alarm and then in that connection which that alarm is your younger self in that connection you can feel that younger version of you and then

that's where you heal that's that's when you make a healing uh shot at your anxiety as opposed to just coping with it this actually goes beyond anxiety of course't it? Of course, because we could, as you mentioned, if we practice those ABCs, that will help you, let's say, with your partner. It will help avert a possible disagreement, stroke arguments. If you have phone addiction, smartphone addiction, social media scrolling addiction, it could be that as you develop this awareness, you can catch it before you know it, you're stuck in Instagram for two hours. You could tune in and realize that you're actually feeling lonely and that you feel it in one part of your body and go through that ABC process. It could be before you start binge eating sugar, start binge eating sugar, right? If you can build up that awareness and just that little pause to really go, what am I feeling here? Is it physical hunger? Is it emotional hunger? Where is it coming from? Where is it in my body? And that's what I love is the universality of it. The book is

called Anxiety Treatment, right? Or do you call it Anxiety Rx? I call it Anxiety Rx, but I found that Rx doesn't mean, it means prescription in North America, but across the world, Rx doesn't have a lot of it. Well, I know it from a shorthand from medicine that it's treatment, but yes, Anxiety Rx, right? But it's so universal what you're saying. Oh russell i've i feel we've just opened the door on so many other threads now so maybe we can have a part two conversation today because this has been this has been uh i think really wonderful and i'm sure very helpful for people a couple of things if people want to connect with you or go, I want to go deeper into your work.

You've obviously got the book, which you just mentioned, Anxiety Rx, which you self-published. It's incredible how well it's doing as a self-published book. 45,000 copies and counting right now. Yeah. Well, congratulations. That's no mean feat when you don't have a publisher behind you, when you've just done it all yourself. And I think that speaks to how powerful your message is. You've also just launched this online course. What's the online course for? It's called Your Mind-Body Prescription. Everything's got prescription. Your Mind-Body Prescription for Permanent Anxiety Healing. So it's fairly short. It's under two hours. There's seven videos and two meditations.

One of the meditations is how you find your alarm. I put you into this relaxed state. I get you to think of the things you worry about, maybe a traumatic event from your childhood, not of course the worst one, and then finding the alarm in your body. And then there's a yoga nidra that actually addresses the mind-body disconnect

and addresses the adult-child disconnect as well. And then there's three sort of exiting videos that say, these are likely what's going to happen to you as you start to heal. Because when you start feeling better, when you start feeling calm, there will be a sense that this isn't safe. This isn't familiar because a lot of us have never felt safe or felt calm. So that's the old ego and the ego is very tenacious and it'll come back. So it's almost like my biggest issue with helping people heal from anxiety is I can get you feeling better, but can you tolerate it? How good can you stand it? Are you able to tolerate feeling good? Because a lot of people, when they were younger, and this is especially true with alcoholic families,

is that there's a big blowout. It's a big alcoholic blowout. And then the alcoholic is very like, oh, I'm so sorry. I'll never do it again. I'll never do it again. And then there's a period of calm and then it blows up again. So what happened, and it doesn't have to be alcoholism, but it can be a lot of things. With my dad, it was mental illness and I could never really relax because I always knew he was going to go off the rails again. So for me, calm meant that something was coming, right? So chapter 62 in the book is when it's not safe to feel safe. A lot of us didn't feel safe feeling safe because it was always followed by some sort of calamity.

So it's really learning how to trust safety and trust love for yourself, which is, you know, basically that's life. Yeah. You've traveled a long way to come on the show all the way from North America. I very much appreciate it. Is there anything that you feel you want to say to my audience that you've not had a chance to say yet? Yeah. I feel for you. Like if you have anxiety, I know what it's like.

I know what it's like to feel like this is never going to get better. I'm going to have this for the rest of my life. And I'm here to tell you that it's not, that's not true. For a lot of people, they won't believe that, but it's not true. You don't have to live like this. And I really want to change the way that anxiety is understood and treated. So that's my goal is to really get out there and influence psychiatrists, influence CBT therapists, influence all sorts of therapists into, look, look at this model and use it for yourself and find if it works for you. Because I haven't found a person yet that this hasn't helped them. And for that person who is struggling with anxiety, you've mentioned lots of tools in

our conversation today. And for that person who is struggling with anxiety, who feels that everything they've tried so far has only had limited use. I know you shared lots of tools today, but is there one thing you'd recommend that they think about doing? Is there one practice you'd say, this is where you need to start?

Well, the one practice is finding the alarm in your body and seeing it as your younger self and healing it. Now, 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 don't, 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? 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. 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 you can, if you live in this,

in the present moment, 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, then you're safe. Love it. Really, really powerful. I want to thank your daughter personally for encouraging to share that. I know it's going to be helpful. I've read the comments on your Instagram page,

how many people find that particular exercise helpful. Russell, I appreciate everything you're doing in the world. I appreciate the book. I appreciate the message you're trying to share. That's coming on the show. Thanks for having me. It's been really wonderful. Thank you so much.

That's coming on the show. Thanks for having me. It's been really wonderful. Thank you so much. Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. As always, do think about one thing that you can take away and start applying into your own life. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five.

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