Financial Feminist - 232. Overcoming Anxiety to Find Your Purpose with Dr. Martha Beck

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

In a world that’s constantly demanding more, learning how to quiet anxiety and reconnect with your purpose has never been more important. In today’s episode, I sat down with Dr. Martha Beck—bestselling author and speaker who Oprah calls “the smartest woman she knows”—to talk about something that affects so many of us: anxiety. But not just how it shows up in our lives—more importantly, how to understand it, move through it with kindness, and use it as a compass toward discovering your true purpose. Dr. Beck drops wisdom on the neuroscience of anxiety, the traps of our left-brain-dominated society, and how small acts of kindness (toward ourselves!) can lead to massive transformation. From her radical year of living without lies to the science of shaking out stress, this episode is filled with both aha moments and practical tools to move from panic to peace. Dr. Beck’s Links: Website: https://marthabeck.com  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themarthabeck/  Book: “Beyond Anxiety”: https://marthabeck.com/beyond-anxiety/  Beyond Anxiety Exercises & Toolkit: https://marthabeck.com/exercises/  Beyond Anxiety Deep Dive [12 month course]: https://wildercommunity.com  Read transcripts, learn more about our guests and sponsors, and get more resources at https://herfirst100k.com/financial-feminist-show-notes/232-overcoming-anxiety-to-find-your-purpose-with-dr-martha-beck/ Looking for accountability, live coaching, and deeper financial education? Check out our exclusive community! Join the $100K Club: https://herfirst100k.com/100k-pod Our favorite travel and cash-back credit cards, plus other financial resources: https://herfirst100k.com/tools Not sure where to start on your financial journey? Take our FREE money personality quiz! https://herfirst100k.com/quiz Special thanks to our sponsors: Squarespace Go to www.squarespace.com/FFPOD to save 10% off your first website or domain purchase. Rocket Money Stop wasting money on things you don’t use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to RocketMoney.com/FFPOD. Quince For your next trip, treat yourself to the luxe upgrades you deserve from Quince. Go to Quince.com/FFPOD for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Netsuite Download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at NetSuite.com/FFPOD. Masterclass Get an additional 15% off any annual membership at Masterclass.com/FFPOD. Indeed Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com/FFPOD. ZocDoc Visit Zocdoc.com/FFPOD to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. ResortPass Visit Resortpass.com and use code FFPOD to get $20 off your first ResortPass experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anxiety is something that so many of us are familiar with, whether it's clinically diagnosed or not. And the world we live in isn't making it much better. Today we're breaking down exactly what anxiety is and how we can find peace. Dr. Martha Back is a New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and coach. She holds three Harvard degrees in social sciences,

and Oprah Winfrey called her one of the smartest women I know. When you betray yourself to keep the peace, you start a war within yourself. There's no getting around it. Her latest book, Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose, was an instant New York Times bestseller. I can't say to someone, be calm, and have them just automatically be able to do that. You can't do that. But I can say to someone who's in a stressed state, be kind.

We sat down with Dr. Beck to talk about her work in the way of integrity, where a practice of cultivating authenticity upended her life in ways she couldn't have imagined. When we try to fight our anxiety to calm down, to do something positive, it just gets more frightening in there. But what we really wanted to talk to Dr. Beck about is her new book, Beyond Anxiety. The ways we can find more peace in our lives to overcome stress, both personal and money related, and the practices that have changed her and her clients' lives for good.

Anxiety has been called the inner pandemic and the way it makes people react to each other is really mentally ill, even for people who are of sound mind. Today, Dr. Beck is sharing how anxiety actually works in our brains, why punishing ourselves is actually the least effective form of treatment we can do when it comes to working through anxiety and fear. And I also asked her what her incredible clients like Oprah know about success that the average

person doesn't. Dr. Beck is an incredible teacher and a total delight to listen to. You're not going to want to miss this episode. But first, a word from our sponsors. I want to highlight some of our incredible podcast sponsors and the deals before we get into the rest of the episode, because we like saving you money on this show. This episode of Financial Feminist is sponsored in part by Squarespace, Rocket Money, Gusto, Quince, Indeed, Masterclass, Zoc.net Suite, and ResortPass. Build a beautiful website to get your message out into the world with Squarespace. Go to squarespace.com slash ffpod to save 10% off your first website or domain purchase.

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spas, cabanas at top hotels and resorts with no overnight stay required. So the way ResortPass works, they partner with luxury hotels. There's no membership, there's no hassle, and you can just buy a day pass to this hotel. So I've done this in Mexico. I've done this in New Orleans. I'm about to do this in Arizona. Basically, you sign up for ResortPass, you pay a small fee for a day pass, and you get access to the entire hotel's facilities. So Christine and I did this in Mexico. We got a ResortPass at a really, really nice hotel for way less than the overnight price.

We got unlimited tacos, unlimited margaritas. We were sitting poolside the entire day, and it was absolutely incredible. However you're feeling, ResortPass lets you enjoy your day your way. Visit ResortPass.com and use code FFPod to get $20 off your first ResortPass experience. ResortPass.com, code FFPod. I like to ask people, what's your definition of victory for this particular podcast, this episode? That's a great question. I think it's really actionable advice, and I think it's having everybody listening feel very seen and heard,

but then they also have a path forward. So how do we make them feel seen and heard, and then how do we give them the next steps after this episode to go out and change their lives, make a positive impact? A worthy challenge. Let's do it. Amazing. Well, and I feel like that's a perfect transition into the actual episode because I feel like that's the mission of your entire work, is to give people the tools to be able to create their best lives and their best selves. So tell me, why is this work so important

to you? And why is this something that you started doing years and years and years ago? It's important to me because I think I'm a bit neurodivergent on the sensitive side and had a lot of emotional, psychological struggle to overcome. I had a lot of sadness, I had a lot of anxiety, I had a lot of anger. Every negative thing you could feel seems to have gone through my system at one time or another. And I remember walking around when I was about 18 and just shouting a line from a play I'd heard, which was, teach me how to be happy. By the time I was 19, I'd really decided that it was the only reason for me to stay alive. I hope that's not a trigger for anybody out there, but I really couldn't see any point in just living to like achieve and then die with a lot of money. It was like

if I can't help people come home, if I can't help people feel joy and love and warmth and protection and happiness, I have no reason to be here. And my life's been pretty one-focused since then. It looks weird. I scattered around and did a lot of weird career things, a lot of weird family things. But you're absolutely right. It's like an arrow pointing to that target. Help people learn to be happy.

One of the questions we like asking guests is their first money memory. And I think that actually might be very interesting to ask you to dictate the rest of your work. So do you remember the first time you remember thinking about money? I do, I was probably six or seven and I was absolutely obsessed with art.

I drew and painted all the time, colored. I did not like crayons, they were not, they lie, crayons do. They look these beautiful, intense colors, but then you put them on the page and they are ridiculously lame. So I found out about oil paint and I thought, how long would it take me to buy four tubes of oil paint, red, yellow, blue, and white, which is what you need, and a small canvas and a brush. And I was making 10 cents a week by doing my chores around the house,

and I figured out how much it would take, and I saved for about a year. And then, God bless them, my siblings found out what I was doing, and they bought me the paint and the brush and the canvas. And ever since then, it's been like, follow your heart, do what you long for, save up your money, and then expect miracles. Because it's always happened that way. I don't know if you know this, I also have an artistic background, but in performing arts, so theater, music.

Like, did not know that. This was not the plan, Martha, to be a financial expert. This was not the plan. It wasn't much, I'm the freaking life coach. Hello. There you go. These are the fun things. You get older and you realize,

oh, I actually am interested in that. Okay, so before we get into your new book, I want to take a little bit of time to talk about your previous one, which is called The Way of Integrity, which in so many ways feels like a precursor to the book now. You talk about this sort of awakening you had by practicing the principle of no longer telling lies.

Can you take our listeners through some of that story of your year without lying? Yeah, oh yes. So, I'm very serious when I said I would do anything to feel better. And by the time I was 29, I was still, I was struggling with a lot of things. I just had a child with a disability with Down syndrome. I was exhausted trying to fulfill the roles that my Mormon background had given me and then also my Harvard education, which things do not go together, may I say. And neither one of them was really made for women. So I completely forgot the question now. I got so

excited telling you that. No, that's great. What was the year without lying like? What did you discover? So, I kept looking and looking and looking for instructions. And one thing I found in all these wisdom traditions was the idea that the truth will set you free. So I thought to myself, all right, I'm just going to take that literally. I'm going to not tell any kind of lie for any reason at all for at least a year. It was the year I turned 29. And I made that resolution at a New Year's Eve party and everyone there went pale and said, don't, don't do it, you will blow up your life. And I did. I found that I wasn't telling

many lies about, I wasn't doing tax evasion or anything like that. I was lying the way women are taught to lie, which is, and there's research on this, to make other people happy. That was one of my major ways I thought that I would help make other people happy. And now I was in this true thing and I started, people would say, I miss you.

And I would say, okay. You know, like I couldn't lie lie and sometimes it was hard at first to figure out what to say. So anyway, I came out and told the truth about what I really felt, knew and believed. And since I was doing this in the context of a very Mormon family and community, part of that meant I left my religion. Part of that meant I left my family of origin behind. I realized I was an assistant professor at the time, but I realized I didn't like academia. So, job and career went into the hopper. Yeah, I just about abandoned everything. I had to move because we really couldn't live in the

area where we were living, given my notorious actions. Yeah, when I left the Mormon church, it was top story on the news. This was not a small thing for me to have done, right? I like to say, burn every bridge but love. I kept everything that was absolutely true to me. And that meant that I was free. And it was a really horrific experience, and it wasn't nearly as bad as if I hadn't done it. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Would you recommend it to people listening? No. Because even I'm having the thought, too, where I'm like, Jesus Christ, that sounds awful. Oh, hell no! It was radical. It was like trying to get a tan by jumping into a volcano. Don't do it. Don't anyone out there do this. It was radical. It was like trying to get a tan by jumping into a volcano. Don't do it.

Don't anyone out there do this. It was bad. But I would say, and I say in the way of integrity, try to take one degree turns in the direction of your integrity every day. Like every day do something you love that you might have not given yourself. Just a little bit. Don't praise that narcissistic person at work quite as much as you did yesterday. just a little bit. Don't praise that narcissistic person at work quite as much as you did yesterday.

Just a little turn. It's like turning an airplane one degree north every half hour. You don't even know it's turning, but you end up in a completely different place. How do you see this conversation about integrity aligning within your conversations and your awakenings about anxiety.

Okay, so here I was meditating. I mean, I really practiced what I preached, so I'd been using every method that I've written in every book, every article. And by the time I was getting to my late 50s, I was meditating for hours every day. I'd reached a place where I could bring myself to real stillness. And what I saw in that place, if you sit for hours every day, I'd reached a place where I could bring myself to real stillness. And what I saw in that place, if you sit for hours in meditation, what you see is that anxiety arises and there's nothing scary around you and the anxiety keeps worrying and it can be almost unbearable, almost unbearable. I had so much anxiety. And for months, I would sit for an hour, an hour and a half at a time and just

watch it get bigger. And then I started to see that it was doing this in the absence of any kind of stimulus whatsoever. And I started to realize I am at peace in this moment. And then I started to come home to presence. And then all my anxiety sort of collapsed like a bad souffle. So I wrote the way of integrity thinking people would have this same experience. But after I wrote it, so many people said to me, I'm in my integrity, I don't tell any lies, but I am so scared. Have you checked out the world? It's scary and we're all going to die. And I thought, oh, there's something about anxiety that makes it so convincing

that even with the absolute best of intention and attention, we can still be falsely frightened. And I wanted to know what did that. And I went looking and I found it in the brain, and I found it in our society. Two inbuilt, or well, one's inbuilt when we are born, the other one surrounds us from birth. And between them, they cause anxiety to arise

and then to spiral upward without ever going down. So, okay, when we talk about anxiety, can we talk about, you just mentioned two types. Let's talk about the first. Like how did humans even come to have anxiety in the first place? Cool. So the first. Like how did humans even come to have anxiety in the first place? Cool. So the first thing is that we all have this very primitive brain structure called an amygdala.

Actually, there's two, one on the left and one on the right. And all animals who have spines have some version of an amygdala because it's so good for survival. It basically has the job of looking for unfamiliar things and telling you that's scary. Right. The bear is coming, it's going to eat you, you need to start running. Yeah. Yeah. Stay alert, look there. And because of that, we have something in our brains called the negativity bias. I call this the 15 puppies and a cobra bias. If you walk into a room

that has 15 puppies and one cobra in it, where does your attention go? It goes to the cobra because that's gonna kill you all if you don't pay attention to it. My entire body just flooded in sweat. We're just hypothetically talking. And I was just like, nope, cobra in the corner, I am leaving and I'm saving the puppies if I can on the way out.

You just did a perfect example of how the human brain works with the negativity bias. So for an animal, it would be like, oh, snake. And then it would say, oh, it's not moving. It's just a rope. And they'd lie down on it and go to sleep. But humans, no, we're like, okay, maybe it's not a snake, but there could be a snake. There could be snakes everywhere. In fact, I am flooded with stress hormones just hearing the word snake. So immediately we go into a fear state that an animal who couldn't talk or imagine would literally not be able to sustain.

We could lie in bed at night with the dog snoring cheerfully next to us and think about the various snakes in the world, that, you know, what could happen to your health, to your finances, to your marriage, to whatever it is. In the absence of all danger, we can still be terrified. So that comes from the storytelling part of the mind, feeling that fear impulse, and instead of looking at the present and seeing what's there, concocting a story about how there's danger and we have to control it. And then we start trying to

control each other. And since we're terrified of being controlled, that ruins all our relationships. And one final thing about the left hemisphere of the brain. All of this storytelling is happening only in one side of the brain, the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere also has this weird quality that is not shared by the right hemisphere. And that is that it believes that nothing it can't see actually exists or is real. So it's really weird. There are people who've had a right hemisphere stroke. So now they're working only with their left hemisphere, right?

And the left hemisphere controls the right arm and leg. The right hemisphere controls the right arm and leg. The right hemisphere controls the left arm and leg. So somebody with a right hemisphere stroke will only put makeup on the right side of their face, only acknowledge their right arm and their right leg as belonging to them. They can see perfectly well. It's just that nothing perceived by the right side of the brain actually exists in the reality of the left. So we get caught in what I call the hall of mirrors. There's a fear impulse, then there's a story about fear and control, and then there is absolute resistance to any data that might contradict our stories. And you can see this going nuts in social media

everywhere. People, they get riveted on a story and they will violently attack verbally, emotionally or maybe even physically anyone who says there's a different way of looking at it. And between those three things, the negativity bias, the hall of mirrors and the, that solipsism, the hemispatial neglect that makes the left hemisphere unable to acknowledge any other reality, we just get a spiral of anxiety that spins in the left hemisphere unable to acknowledge any other reality. We just get a spiral of anxiety that spins in the left side of the brain and takes over our lives. And the reason people weren't seeing it, even when they were in their integrity, is

it's very cleverly inbuilt to our neurology. Then we create a society based on sustaining that. And even if you do get calm in meditation, you walk out into a world totally dominated by left hemisphere fearful thinking, and that kicks it all up again. I think the thing that I struggle with the most that I imagine most people listening struggle with too,

because we're all type A people, is the anxiety comes up, and just like you were saying, it's the realization of I'm no longer in control, or I've maybe never had control in the first place, so then I'm going to control more. Can we talk about that cycle that's happening of I'm out of control, so I have to get more control, but of course, control is an illusion. Talk to me about that. Yeah.

Oh, it's such an epidemic. Anxiety has been called the inner pandemic and the way it makes people react to each other is really mentally ill, even for people who are of sound mind. What happens is we get locked into whatever we've decided is the way to stay safe. I don't want to get too political here, but for example, somebody who is at the top of a power structure, say a white male, a male white supremacist patriarchy, would look at the rise of women into all these institutions and into positions of power as a threat to his way of life.

Because it is. It actually is. So, what he can't do, let's take this hypothetical human, what he can't do is see that the way of life where a few powerful people dominate the poor and the weak is causing a lot of misery even for the people at the top. They're not happy people. Maybe if we had a different way of looking at things, maybe if we had a way of nurturing life instead of destroying it as a show of power, we'd all be happier. So you present that argument and instead of saying, well, that's very interesting, you make a solid point.

It's like, how dare you? You're more dangerous than ever, you witch, right? So we really see it in all the isms, sexism, racism, ageism, gender dysphoriaism. They are attacking the weakest and most vulnerable of people because their brains are locked into a fear that they will not have enough even though they may have billions. That is anxiety taken to one of its logical extremes and it goes beyond a nuisance and becomes a threat to everything. Well, and for the average person listening, including myself, I think that the version of that that shows up for us might not be, of course, this immigrant is taking my job, but is a, you know, maybe my partner doesn't love me,

and maybe they're going to leave, maybe I don't have enough money. When is the other shoe going to drop? Am I going to get fired? Like, can we talk about those kind of everyday, quote unquote, everyday worries, but less as the political dictator oligarchy and more for you and I. I was trained as a sociologist, so my brain goes there very easily. No, I mean, we'll talk about that too, because I want to talk about the state of the world and what all of this means, because that's boy oh boy.

But for the everyday average person, that anxiety is still there and still present. Right. Absolutely. So, one of my guilty pleasures is looking at something online called the invisible danger prank. Have you seen this? No. It's just two people will be sitting there and it's usually the woman who pulls the prank and the man who falls for it. All she does is like jump up and go, oh! And the man or whoever, you know, whoever happens to be there, it doesn't have to be gender divided, but the partner goes bananas.

Where is it? What is it? There are people running around rooms smashing things with brooms and stuff. And all that happened is someone went, that's how infectious fear is. And when we get afraid of the things that surround us and support our lives, we are putting that energy into the things that surround us and support our lives, we are putting that energy into the things that surround us and support our lives. So if we're afraid our partner's gonna leave us,

I've had so many clients who shut down and got angry and miserable and depressed and defensive because they were so sure they were unloved. And their partner took this as a sign that they didn't love their partner anymore, right? Like, you're anxious, shut down and depressed, you don't talk to me. Well, that's because you don't love me anymore. What? You're not letting me love you anymore.

So it creates the invisible danger prank in a very brutal and terrible way. I've seen that destroy a lot of, not destroy, but really damage a lot of couple relationships. It's easily retrievable, folks, don't worry. Same thing with your job. How can you possibly be fruitful, creative, a team player if you're scared that you're going to lose your job or someone's going to dominate you? So fear makes you the least happy version of yourself, the least productive, the least creative. The relationship between creativity and anxiety is so important. And when you're anxious, your creativity disappears, which means that it's hard to make anything good from a meeting to a product. So it just poisons everything. And we don't need it. We need fear, which is what we call on when we actually see a snake.

But to be afraid of everything around us makes us our worst selves. And if you just practice pretending you're not afraid, if you imagine how you'd be towards someone if you had no fear in you, watch what would happen. I mean, that's an experiment I've done. It's not an easy one to pretend you're not afraid when you are, but if you can manage it, if you can get to that place, holy crap, people seem to feel it hundreds of yards away. People open doors for you. Try this, Tori. Go into like a coffee shop one morning and really sit there with your misery and your fear and your anxiety.

And buy the coffee in that state and drink the coffee in that state and leave. The next day, go into the same place at the same time, only this time you're going in pretending to be a person with no fear and no anxiety. People will come up and give you things. People will look at you and smile. People, you would not believe how powerful that energy is, even if you never say a word. So just try pretending you're without anxiety, and you'll start to see the benefits immediately.

And that should give you a little bit of fuel to go on to, you know, generalize this more in all your behavior. We knew this would happen, but wow, did Dr. Beck come and swing in. When we come back, we are talking about the simple phrase Dr. Beck teaches her clients to help them move from states of panic about money to peace, how to find self-compassion for our anxiety and more. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed

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And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash FF pod. Just go to indeed.com slash FF pod right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash FF pod. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. I want to stay in talking about anxiety before we go to the solve. When we're talking about personal finance, financial anxiety, so many statistics say that this is the number one stress for Americans is money. Oh, absolutely. And I know from talking with millions of women that this is the number one stress for them,

is money, lack thereof, again, wondering, am I going to run out of money? So, what is going on psychologically when we're having financial anxiety? Is it different than other anxiety? It is, I think, because what we did is we've monetized everything. I just finished reading Charles Eisenberg's Sacred Economics, and he talks about how what we used to do for love, you know, instead of taking care of each other in a village, everybody moves away. Now you have to hire someone to come bring you food. They're carers. So you've made everything boil down to money.

You want somebody to grow your food for you, you pay for that with money. So you've taken away the direct caring of people in a society and made it into money, which means we can't survive without each other. We evolved to be together, to be supported by one another. And more and more and more, this is what I meant about a very left hemisphere dominated society because this is all very left hemisphere, we have taken all the things that made us safe and happy in the world and we have turned them into things we have to buy for money. So money is like the god of all anxieties, but it's a false god.

I mean, we can talk about this later, but I've had thousands of clients over 30 years of coaching. And I have seen them come out of financial anxiety in one room by doing work inside their heads and then go out and live more prosperously as a result. There's an inner fix that helps allow you to live in peace. And once you're living in peace, the way I put it in the way of integrity is this, if you want to get a little woo-woo. The statement, I am meant to

live in peace, is the most powerfully true thing that I can get people to say. I've tested this with dozens and dozens of people. The statement that feels most true to everyone I've asked is, I am meant to live in peace. So everybody out there listening, try to say that silently and feel how it drops into your heart as the truth. That's really the only access we have to truth is the deep sensation of our entire being. So then, if you think, okay, I'm meant to live in peace, this is the way I see it. Every time you want something, I want more money, I want my true love, I want to be safe and secure forever, the moment you ask for it, it's delivered, bang, by the forces that be.

However, the powers that be always send it to your real home address. And as we've just seen, we are meant to live in peace. So in my case, when I finally accessed peace, that's when I stopped having to worry about money. Not because I had tons and tons of it, especially not at first, but because peace became my central focus. And from a place of peace, people started paying me

to do stuff I would have done already for the fun of it. And so I started teaching that premise to people. I know it's been done to death in all the new age stuff, but if you do it truly, if you do it not cynically, but right from the core of yourself, if you get rid of money anxiety, money begins to flow. I promise. I think a lot of this has to start with the acknowledgement or the quiet viewing

of what's happening in our brains and bodies. And I think a lot of people, again, are so busy. We live in a capitalist society. It's so hectic all the time that I can imagine even somebody listening right now is like, okay, all of this sounds great, but I'm still stressed. And it's like, yeah, you can't talk about any of this. You can't talk about managing your anxiety or getting out of fight or flight or, you know, finding peace if you're not first aware of what's happening. So how do we find first that awareness before we go and quote unquote, fix it? Like, how do we just get to the point where we realize this is a problem?

Yeah, that's the gold standard of getting, learning how to be happy in all the many, many cultures I've studied. There has to be a sense of a compassionate witness inside the self. And the way I got to it and the way I would work with someone who is in high anxiety or even panic, you can't say to somebody who's in high anxiety, here's how your brain works, now you know the secret. Believe in good things and everything will be great. Come make a finger painting, you'll feel fabulous. No, no, no.

The first thing you have to do if you're in panic is you have to learn to be kind to yourself. We go to the psychiatrist thinking and speaking as if anxiety is a broken mechanism in our heads. But we are not mechanisms, we are animals. And when you go to fight your anxiety to bring it down, think how you would feel if I told you, I'm here to fight you, I'm here to bring you down. When we try to fight our anxiety to calm down, to do something positive, it just gets more frightening in there.

So the first thing I ask people to do, I can't say to someone, be calm and have them just automatically be able to do that. You can't do that. But I can say to someone who's in a stressed state, be kind. So for example, if you were running from something terrible with other people, you might be stressed to the limit and you might not be able to be calm, but you would know how to be kind. And every one of us is born knowing how to be kind to a vulnerable creature. And that's what your anxiety is.

Picture it as a shivering little puppy or kitten that you find on your doorstep, barely holding itself together, hissing at you. Every human alive knows that if you want that to be your cat, you lower your voice, you slow your movements, you start saying calming things. You'll be okay, buddy. I've got you. You don't move too fast. You don't freak out when the cat scratches at you. You get slower and lower and calmer. And I've had this experience with many, many animals, including wild animals. I tell some of those stories in the book. They feel when a human goes into a calm space. And if we can do that for a kitten, we can do it for the scared part of ourselves.

The part that knows how to calm an animal is the compassionate witness. So every day I sit down to meditate and I see my anxiety. It's always there. I'm like, Hi, how are you this morning? All right, well, I'm here. You'll be okay. It's okay. I got you. And literally just saying kind things to yourself. And the other thing I say is, tell me everything. And it's like, everything's going to hell. Yeah, I hear you. Tell me more. I got it. And pretty soon you run out of things to say. And at that point, the compassionate witness says, what's one thing I could do for you that you would love to have today? Just you want a cup of tea,

you want a warm blanket, you want to call a friend, you want to go outside, let's do something to make you feel happier. I did that this morning. I was sick. I woke up. I missed our favorite show that we're binging as a family last night. And my partner said, why don't you stay in bed and watch it? And I was like, oh, shocking. But then the part of me that didn't want to face the day just

got so happy. And it immediately made me into a much more enjoyable person. Everybody listening, I want you to go back about six minutes and listen to all of that again, because this is also something I do and if I can point to one of the biggest things that has allowed me to grow my business, to show up as like a great friend, a great partner, it's this. And I posted about this a couple months ago. I talk out loud to myself as if I'm parenting a toddler. I do this all the time. So the video I posted was I got up

and I knew I needed to make myself breakfast, but I just didn't want to. And like my inner child was throwing a fucking fit about it. She was like, I don't want to make breakfast. I just want to sit. And I my inner child was throwing a fucking fit about it. She was like, I don't want to make breakfast. I just want to sit. And I was like, okay. So literally out loud, I was like, I know you don't want to make breakfast. You don't want to do that. I know that seems really, really hard right now. So what we're going to do is we're going to get up and we're going to slowly go and we're going to get this breakfast because we know we need it. And if we're going to have a

good day, we're going to make a good breakfast. And I literally said this out loud. And I think it's one of those, like, it feels like embarrassing at first, or it feels stupid, or it feels, it feels kind of nuts or crazy. And let me tell you, it's so important. Like everything you were just doing of, it's okay, it's going to be okay. And when I now have episodes of anxiety, or I'm really stressed stressed, or especially if I don't have anybody around, like my partner's busy, my family's away, I literally sit with my hand on my chest and I go,

it's going to be okay. And I tell myself all of the things I wish somebody was there to tell me. I stole this from Liz Gilbert as well. She journals as both sides of herself. So like, hey, tell me what you need. Oh, everything's a mess and Trump's stupid and the world's falling apart and blah, blah, blah.

That sounds so hard. Exactly, I love the question at the end too. Like, what is one thing that I can give to you today? Because I think that that, and then it feels like a treat. It does, it feels like you're giving a child candy or a hug or an episode of SpongeBob. Like, that's so lovely. Everybody listening, just like, again, put a peg in what Tori just said. Go back and listen to that because

here's the thing. We are trained by our culture to think that when we have a hundred million dollars, we'll be able to feel like we can have a treat. When we have the perfect love relationship, we'll be able to feel safe in the world. When we have all these things. When I'm skinny, I can wear the bikini and take those beach photos. Exactly. And I've coached so many people who've done all of that, you know, achieved everything, and they're still scared, they're still miserable. But if I can get them to put a hand on the heart and say, oh, that sounds awful. Oh, I get it. No wonder you feel it. And not in a patronizing or condescending way, but an actual true like, oh man, that sucks.

I'm so sorry. It does. I have two partners. One of my partners is Australian and she taught me the Australian therapy. And this is Australian therapy. Sucks, mate. It's just, aw, sucks, mate. And she's like, just stop it, sucks, mate. That's all I want to hear. It's so simple to treat ourselves the way we would treat a small creature. Because if you kind of look at the whole universe, we are small creatures. When I have listened to you on other podcasts, when I've read about your work, one of the things that just blew my mind is how we work through anxiety. I was really, really anxious a couple years ago. I was getting her first 100K. It was growing really fast.

I was launching a book and I was in a really dark place in my life. And the anxiety would come up and I had the response that I think everybody thinks they should have, which is like, okay, I'm nervous so I need to go sit quietly and I need to go meditate. And that's how I'm going to get through my anxiety. And instead, it was just like, my brain screaming at me and total quiet. And one of the awful like not a solve at all. Not a fix at all. That's another thing. Don't do the no lie thing for a year and don't do the meditate for hours in anxiety. Don't do anything I've done. Well, and one of the things that you've said is like, the activity.

I saw you on the Today Show and you're like, the activity, you have to do an activity. Talk to me about the activity when we're anxious. Right. So if you're just exhausted and depressed and need to climb into bed, you give yourself that. But eventually, if you treat yourself kindly, it is the nature of a human brain to be constantly generating something. We are always generating things. And what we mostly generate in our culture are stories about how we don't have enough and we need to be afraid.

But if you can just be consistently kind, what happens is that you move over into the mirror on the other side of the brain. The right hemisphere is responsible for things like connection, courage, compassion, a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose, loving other people, finding yourself, being enraptured by art, all these things. The ability to be happy is housed largely in the right hemisphere. And unlike the left hemisphere, it doesn't cut everything else off. If you turn it on, it still hears the left hemisphere of the brain. Ian McGilchrist, my favorite neurologist, says, the left hemisphere

is a wonderful servant and a terrible master. As you become kind, you will automatically move into the connecting, curious, compassionate parts of the right hemisphere and then the generative part of your brain goes, ooh, I can make something. I could make a book. I could make a podcast. I could make a clay pot. I could make a sandwich. This is what I mean. I use the acronym CAT, K-A-T. This is my shortcut for how to be happy when you're anxious. Kindness first, that's the K. And then activity or art, but I don't mean drawing. I mean anything you make.

Tory is making art right now. And when you got dressed this morning and put together an outfit, that's art. If you push the creative side of your life so that it occupies a bigger chunk of your attention, even if you don't have a lot of time to give it, if you put your attention on it, you'll begin to experience the T in cat, which is transcendence. The transcendence of worry. One psychologist calls it flow, this state of making something that is almost actually too hard for you, but you're engrossed by it and enthralled by it. There's a kind of bliss that comes with that, even when we're working hard,

that I believe we're meant to feel instead of anxiety. Well, and it sounds like two things are happening. One, your brain and your body we're working hard that I believe we're meant to feel instead of anxiety. Well, and it sounds like two things are happening. One, your brain and your body has something to do, so the energy has somewhere to go. My theater background, right, is like we talk about how much energy is being built up in our body and it has to get released in some way, right? And a lot of us with anxiety, especially if you're just then, okay, I'm going to go sit on the floor and meditate, your energy isn't going anywhere.

Your energy is coursing through your body and staying there. So like any sort of movement or activity, your brain and body are moving the energy through. But it also, and you probably know the science of this, it also sounds like then your brain's able to process what's going on, but in the background, not right here, right at the front of your brain. It doesn't have to be conscious. One of my friends is named David Brescelli.

He travels the world helping people who've been traumatized by allowing them to shake. And one of the things that I recommend in the Beyond Anxiety book is, if you feel shaky, lean into it, shake hard. Animals after a trauma like escape from a predator will always shake. And humans who allow themselves to shake and cry after a trauma are much less likely to get PTSD than people who hold it together. Which is, I think it's so scary that we tell especially men that they have to be stoical and hold it together because that means they're coursing with that energy, with adrenaline and cortisol. And when it explodes, and it's usually when not if, it can be very, very dangerous.

So run around the room, shake as hard as you want, laughugh and cry. Turn upside down. Do what you would do if you were a child because the kids know it. They inherited this. And then we put them in school and told them to sit quietly through all their anxiety. And in doing so, we made them victims of an anxiety initiative that is kind of ruling the world right now. Well, and we've had a previous guest on the show who's a friend of mine who's like a somatic teacher, right? Talking about like, you need to move your, yeah, you need to move the energy throughout your body so it doesn't stay stuck because that causes the autoimmune diseases and the discomfort and the chronic pain.

Yeah, and you're right. It's like, yeah, when we've all seen an ASPCA commercial, it's all the shaking dogs and cats and they're like sitting there shaking. And it's like, that's the stuff that we need to do in order to move the energy through our bodies. And by the way, I had 12 years before my No-Lie Challenge, I had 12 years of being pretty much bedridden by autoimmune diseases, all of which are considered incurable and none of which I have symptoms of anymore. So for those of us who are out there, I'm not saying you're supposed to think yourself well, but I was living in a way that made me terribly anxious and not doing anything

kind for myself. And the result was that my body correctly identified me as its own worst enemy and sort of threw me to the mat with all kinds of diseases and symptoms. If you need to right now, take a shake break like Dr. Beck just talked about, or put our episode with the workout witch in your podcast queue to listen next. Because when we come back, we're getting into what you can do once you begin to move beyond your anxiety, especially when we balance a society that not only works to exacerbate your stress, as well as why being authentic to yourself might be the most important thing you can do

to build a life you love. Stay tuned. It is time for vacations. It can't come soon enough. I'm just so excited. And I'm literally about to spend basically all of May in sunny weather. I am going with my partner to Hawaii.

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You highlighted earlier that a lot of the ways in which we live our lives are very unnatural. This like left brain dominated world is not the way things have always been. So how do you balance the need for resources and material well-being with the need for passion and spiritual fulfillment? It's so interesting the place we're in. As I said, I was trained in sociology and one thing I know for sure is that the radical changes we're seeing in technology and culture are only going to speed up. And what that means is that we have at our disposal tools that are by the standards of

even a generation ago, let alone say a couple hundred years ago, these things are magic. Like here I was in my 20s. I had three kids under four. I had all these autoimmune diseases, couldn't move my hands, didn't know what, like was trying to work and do all these things. And I was able to not only survive, but in the end thrive because computers had been invented. And I was able from my bed, lying on my back,

Liz Gilbert laughed at me one day, she was staying with us, and she came in and I was writing, lying down with my computer on my knees. And she's like, you have no respect for your writing. And I'm like, I have respect for back problems. She always gets formally dressed and sits up at her desk to show up for writing. And I'm like, I don't care, writing's my bitch, I'm going to hang with her. So because there are ways, and then I've spent the rest of my life helping people devise

ways to live their passion and find a way to monetize it. And you've done the same thing. The way you think is like that. There is a way of thought. I've had so many people and so many audiences say, there are no other options for me. This is the only thing that I can do. Like this one woman said, I can only be in the armed services. I hate it, but it's the only thing I can do.

And I said, well, how many people here agree that that's the only thing she could do? The whole crowd raised their hands. And then I said, how many of you are making a living? They all raised their hands. How many of you are in the armed services? Practically nobody but this one woman. And I'm not speaking out against the armed services.

They're great for a lot of people, but for her it wasn't great. And everyone in the room knew other ways of making a living, but they fully accepted that there was no other way for her. If you just crack open your mind, which is what the right hemisphere does better than anything, it opens the mind. And then we are in an economic and technological time where your creativity can be used to create things that are monetizable, that will suit your passions.

And Tori, what you're doing now is nothing but an example of that. I appreciate it. This was not, again, not the plan, but I stumbled into it because I, Donald Trump got elected and I realized what I wanted to do. And it was, you know, my skill sets in storytelling and theater and marketing that really have, I've taken those that I learned in school and learned through internships and all of that and other jobs and then applied them here. But yeah, it wasn't, again, it was not part of the plan. And no one sat down with me at career day when I was 14 and was like, okay, so influencer, podcast host, in addition to nurse and carpenter and, you know, whatever. That's how fast all of this is changing. My job did not exist maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago, but definitely not 10 years ago in the same way.

Absolutely. And it's getting more and more and more. And in the meantime, the jobs that used to exist are being made redundant. And so people are terrified of AI because it's going to take a bunch of jobs. And it will, and I feel bad for those people. And I also have clients that are using AI to make their lives much, much more productive and easier. It's all about the mindset with which you approach something,

whether it's financial management or being happy with what the world is given to you. Like if you go the way of your nature instead of what culture is presenting you and teaching you to think, if you shake that off, that's what I got that from that year of not lying. I broke all the cultural rules. And the rules are probably what it meant to be a woman as well. Yes! Oh my God, yes! Good heavens, I realized I was gay, you know? Like, I was married and had three kids. And yeah, I broke every single rule that did not go with my true nature. And I didn't, along the way, I think a lot of people would say I abandoned them, but actually I wasn't in those relationships really. I was lying to be in them and that's not showing up in a relationship. So other

than that, nothing that I did harmed anyone. And what happened next is I started teaching business school. I was teaching career development and I would say to the students, let's get creative about this. Let's think of a way for you to use everything you've been given, like art school, drama school, you danced as a kid in contests or something. Whatever you've done, put it in a pile. Let's find what you love and we'll find the place where as Frederick Boeigner said,

your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. In that space, you will make a wonderful living. Well, and I've learned from women like you and Liz Gilbert and Glennon Doyle and Oprah and all these incredible women that like, anytime you are making a decision that protects somebody else's peace at the expense of your own, that is not a worthy decision. And I think we walk through all of our lives, especially as women, making other people comfortable at the expense of our own comfort. And yeah, it's going to piss people off when you stop doing that.

And yeah, it's going to rock the boat and you might lose some relationships in your life. But to your point, are those relationships really genuine anyway if you cannot be the fullest version of you? Yeah. When you betray yourself to keep the peace, you start a war within yourself. There's no getting around it. So it is, it's a scary, hard world, and we're best prepared to face it, I think, with integrity and then the knowledge that most of our anxiety, not fear, if a car is coming at you, your fear will give you a strong jolt of adrenaline to get out of the way. But anxiety is a fear response when there is no danger in the room.

And that, if you can get past fear, even in a time when it seems really scary, and it does, the way to be safe in a scary environment is to stay calm and alert, not fretting and panicky. I spend about a month a year in the African bush and we have picnics there in a place where we've often had to move out of the way for herds of elephants, prides of lions hunting, in one case killer bees, we all climbed a tree together,

it was awesome. And we were never anxious because that would make us vulnerable. I mean, I know the people that are throwing the party actually have lived out there and know how to do this better than I do. But I'm also aware that there are alarm calls, there are signs that predators are coming. And I'm calm and happy and enjoying this beautiful place, knowing that to be alert and calm is to be able to move quickly when things are dangerous. And it's dangerous, folks. Let's be honest, it's dangerous these days.

So be calm and be alert and you'll be okay. When we do talk about the big stressful time that we're living in now, pandemic, the government or lack thereof. Dismantling democracy, losing rights. Like you mentioned calm, I think that's very important. But how do... Maybe I'm asking the question I've already asked,

but I really want to drill down to like, how do you get calm when you're already so stressed? Like, again, if I'm listening, I'm like, okay, Martha and Tori want me to be calm. How the fuck am I going to do that? Like politely, how the fuck am I going to do that? Well, first of all, remember that I would never ever say be calm. I would say be kind. Right.

Good point. Start by being kind. Be kind, be kind, be kind until you can get calm and you will get calm and your fear will tell you all the things. You write them down, all the things that your anxiety is telling you. And say to the part that's doing the writing, I totally get it. I so understand this. You feel exactly the way you are feeling right now until you're done with it.

So you never push yourself out of that anxiety space. But then when you get calm and you start giving yourself small kindnesses, the way it works, after the kindness comes the activity. And it's not something you have to force. It's a spontaneous movement of play. One of the sets of studies that I mentioned in the book that just blew me away, NASA did a study to look for creative geniuses in the 1960s so they could hire people, and 2% of the adults they tested scored as creative geniuses. A little while later, somebody thought to give this test to four and five-year-olds, and 98% of them scored as

creative geniuses. We've had it beaten out of us. And when we bring kindness back into the picture, we are makers of things. That's what humans are. So that's the A, the activity, the art, the architecture, the artifice, the things that we make. It will come as play, the way you played as a happy child. And then the next step is also automatic. If you let yourself play enough, you will reach something that I call transcendence. When you connect with something so overwhelmingly peaceful and so real that everything you've been afraid of seems flimsy and artificial by comparison.

And if you can find that space and return to it, which is the overall object of meditation, I think, for me, even the horrors we are seeing now cannot shake that level of peace. And you can act politically, you can act in your own financial welfare, you can do anything you want. If you do it from that place of peace, there will be a lot of joy in your life and whatever you do will flow with this genius that we can't really connect with any other way. I want to walk through very quickly some of the things we do in response to anxiety that

are not productive. So I was talking about the like sit and meditate, right? Like that's what everybody tells you, is just like quiet your mind. And I'm like, how am I going to do that right now? What are some of those other things that, or the pitfalls that you see people fall into when facing anxiety? Using substances as a way to numb the feeling of anxiety rather than going for the core of anxiety,

which is that we're stuck in a hall of mirrors in our brains. I am a big fan of anti-anxiety medication. And I would send someone who's really anxious, say, please go talk to your doctor, talk to a psychiatrist about this. Then, when they're on something that helps them be calm, we talk about methods of being kind to themselves that would reinforce over and over, you're with a safe adult, me.

I'm talking to my inner child, right? I'm gonna be, you're a safe adult, and I'm taking Valium or whatever it is, and because I'm here to take care of you. And if you can get off the medication when you get calmer, great, that would be even better. But even if you can't, even if you want to use that substance, don't do it to numb your anxiety.

Do it to give yourself breathing room to start changing your brain. And this is even more important when it comes to things like alcohol and gambling and dangerous, anonymous sexual encounters. I've seen people use almost any very highly dopamine rewarding activity as an addiction. Yeah, and one psychiatrist told me, if you've stepped on a nail and it's sticking through your foot, the solution is not to take enough morphine to not feel the nail. The solution is to get the nail out of your foot. And in this case, you know, there's a lot going wrong in the world, and we need to be able to make choices that keep ourselves and our loved ones safe, and we need to subtly,

in our very not masculine way, start to change the system. Women don't think in pyramids of power the way the masculine brain typically thinks. Sorry if I'm hurting anyone's gender identity. But here's the thing, history has been written by accounts of what dude, what country killed the most people on any given day. And it never ever mentions that every single one of those people had to be cared for, for years and years and years. Fed, loved, held, housed, clothed. And that's the power that has been sort of shunted onto women as history making people

go on to kill more people, right? The madness of the society we live in is balanced by the task of the feminine principle, which is present in men as well. But we have to access that for ourselves first and then to change the community around us and potentially to spread that to the whole world. You have worked with thousands of people, including folks like Oprah. What do successful people like Oprah know or do

that the rest of us don't? I know it's mean jumping in after that question. And trust me, you're going to want to hear our answer. That and more after this break from our incredible sponsors who keep this show free for you. The future is very unpredictable right now. And it's especially unpredictable if you run a business between talks of a recession and tariffs and stock market craziness, it's really hard to figure out what's coming next. And until someone invents a crystal ball, over 41,000 businesses have future proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle. It's the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, all into one fluid platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data,

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slash FF pod. That's 15% off at Masterclass.com slash Ffpod. Masterclass.com slash ffpod. They know that failure is not failure. The biggest difference between the really successful people that I know and the unsuccessful people, people who would say they're unsuccessful, is that the successful people have far more failures. They have a record of failures that would go all the way down your body and down the block. I mean, they have failed at so many things, but they just keep trying like little energizer bunnies. And every failure gives them instruction and learning

that they bring to the next effort. And once in a while something hits and we say, oh my God, she's been mad madly successful her whole life. You have not seen the days of discouragement and failure and disappointment, but I promise you they're there. And I think too, one of the things that we've talked about on the show a lot is that it sounds like they don't take the failure personally, because I think a lot of women fail or don't achieve their goal, and so then they think, I am a failure. It becomes an identity thing, rather than just saying, you know what, that didn't work out.

That's not my personal identity. Yeah. Personal, permanent, and pervasive. That when people are going to be really trapped and crushed by life, they believe that a failure is permanent, that they're never going to experience anything else. It's personal, it's all about me, and I'm bad, and it's pervasive. Nothing I do ever works. But flip that and the successful people that I've seen, and I've seen some amazingly successful people, failure is impersonal. It's just, it's like this story of a man who goes out on the river and he sees, he's rowing away and he sees

another boat coming toward him and he hails the guy and it's like, hi, how are you doing? And then the boat keeps coming right at him and then he's like, hi, how are you doing? And then the boat keeps coming right at him. And then he's like, wait, you're going to bump into me. He started screaming at him and then bang, collision. And then he looks into the other boat and realizes it's empty. It's just a boat. Like all that emotion goes out. That's how successful people view their failures.

It was just an empty boat. It's impersonal. It's not pervasive. It's how successful people view their failures. It was just an empty boat. It's impersonal. It's not pervasive. It's particular to that situation. And it's definitely not permanent. Every moment is a new day, right? Every 10 minutes is another chance to adjust and go forward again.

And that persistence, one of my clients called it a mad dog persistence toward what he dreamed of. And that is, one of my clients called it a mad dog persistence toward what he dreamed of. And that is, I don't think that people achieve success any other way, frankly. Any parting words, any last pieces of advice when we're dealing with anxiety, when we're dealing with our own brains. I liked what you said. I want to reiterate that because I just think I could talk about this forever, and I have, doing podcasts,

promoting the book, but people keep missing the kindness piece. They talk about getting creative and transcendent and it all rests on the step of kindness. And self-kindness, the way you described it, is I think the most powerful thing that I use. So I'm going to underline it. If you're feeling anxious right now, put your hand over your heart and say, tell me everything. Tell me why you're frightened. And then say, of course you feel that way. I'm right here. I hear you.

Say more. What can I do that would make you feel a little bit better? And that was Liz Gilbert, right? Crying on the bathroom floor. Yep. Not wanting to be married. bit better. And that was Liz Gilbert, right, crying on the bathroom floor, not wanting to be married. And then finally, at the beginning of Eat, Pray, Love, she finally cries herself out and a voice just says, go back to bed, Liz. And that kindness, that one little kindness, led very directly to a life of being one of

the hundred most influential people in the world. Yeah. Yeah, and I think we're just, this is a love letter to Liz Gilbert now at this point. But I've seen her speak many times and one of the things she talks about is like mercy as well. And we often don't feel like we're deserving of mercy, but we'd give it to anybody else. We'd give it to anybody else. And again, the shaking puppy on our doorstep, we would give it to that puppy. Why don't we feel deserving of it? And one of the things that I love that she said when I saw her speak is like, how actually narcissist is that?

That you believe of all of the people and all the creatures in the entire world, only uniquely you are not deserving of kindness and mercy and compassion. So yeah, it might feel stupid at first, it might feel stupid at first. It might feel weird because you've never done it before. Everything kind of feels weird and stupid and embarrassing when you've never done it before. I call mine kind, internal self-talk, and the acronym for that is KISSED. And I had that as a thing I used in my head for decades before I dared say it out loud because it's so corny and people think it's stupid.

And now I respectfully do not care. Yeah. For me, it's Tori now. And it's, you know, I talk to seven-year-old Tori all the time. And she talks back to me, which is the coolest thing, because I have a lot to learn from her. And so, like, it's just, for me, it's two versions of myself. And like, how cool that all of this can come from ourselves. It's not a guru, it's not someone else who has a degree that we don't have. Like, you have everything inside of you to soothe yourself

because you know yourself better than anybody else. You were born a genius at creating the life, the circumstances that will make you happiest. You've been tricked by your culture out of using that genius. Get it back. Beg you get it back. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your work. Plug away, my friend. Thank you. Thank you for your work. I love that you're out there doing this. I hope to see you again soon. That would be lovely. Okay, books. Plug away. Where can we find them? Where can we get them? Oh, plug. That kind of plug. Yes. I don't care. No, don't plug me. Plug you. Is book. Is right book. I did. So, buy on things. Is stores and online.

Book buy. Yes. Beyond Anxiety, yeah. And check out my online community, Wilder, where we're all like using the, we're doing a deep dive on it so we can all apply it to our lives, at wildercommunity.com. Is that pluggy enough? That's pluggy enough, that's beautiful.

Thank you, thank you for being here. Great, thank you. Thank you to Dr. Beck for joining us. This was such an important conversation, so powerful. You can find her book Beyond Anxiety wherever you get your books, or you can go to markthebeck.com to learn more. Thank you for being here. As always, Financial Feminist, thank you for supporting this show and Feminist Media.

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