Makes Sense - with Dr. JC Doornick - One From The Vault - Overcoming Anxiety with Dr. Russel Kenedy - Episode 49

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

This being one of my all time favorite episodes from the Rise Up with Dragon Podcast.  DO YOU SUFFER FROM ANXIETY? Folks you are in for a treat. As someone that has suffered, come to terms with Terrible Anxiety, and moved on to live my best life, this topic and guest are very exciting for me. This episode can be watched and hear on muliple platforms including Youtube, Spotify and Apple. Join me and my special guest Russel Kennedy, MD, "The Anxiety MD" and author of the 2020 book THE ANXIETY RX as we remove the blindfolds from your mind and create clarity on what Anxiety really is, and as Dr. Russel says "Show you the Way Out". Dr. Russel will share his own battle with anxiety and how he turned his trauma into his triumph, now helping many unlock the shackles that hold them back from living their best life. This episode can be watched and hear on muliple platforms including Youtube, Spotify and Apple. Watch Episode on Youtube: https://youtu.be/uRs-aVzv7v0   Follow Dr. Russel Kennedy: IG: @theanxietymd Book On Amazon: https://amzn.to/47cD3kq Website: https://www.theanxietymd.com Connect WIth Dr. JC Doornick “The Dragon”: https://zez.am/makessense Show Highlights:  0:00 - Intro 1:07 - Welcome Dr. Kenedy (The Anxiety Prescription) - https://amzn.to/47cD3kq 2:43 - The true source of Anxiety? The Back Story 4:41 - Uncovering the source of Anxiety with LSD? 10:36 - Where anxiety lives? Not what you thought. 12:25 - How do you leave the practice of medicine? 15:35 - Anxiety is not a mind thing, its an alarm in your body. 1843 - The Brain is a Meaning Making Makes Sense Machine 24:20 - Break for Sponsor - Makes Sense Academy 26:41 - How does someone become conscious they are having a panic attack? 33:44 - The Alarm Anxiety Cycle Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hmm, make sense. This is your boy Dragon, and I've got a guest here today, and we're really excited about this topic that really, really brings true to me in my experience and all my evolution. And I don't think anybody's interested in this topic, but that's the one of anxiety. So welcome to the Rise Up with Dragon show. Super excited about this. Somehow, I started this journey a long, long time ago. And ironically, what do I call you, Dr. Kennedy or Dr. Russell? Dr. Russ or Russ, anything like that's fine. Wow. And I can already

already jump in and call on you Russ. Yeah, fine. So what's interesting about the Rise Up a Dragon podcast, and we'll talk about it a little bit later, is that it actually was generated from a place where I used this platform as a method by which to battle and handle anxiety. So we'll talk about that another time. Exposure therapy, as my wife would say. So anyway, very excited about this topic. It played such a big role in the manifestation of the dragon. And I found this gold nugget of a guest here. And I love the way I find people,

but I found this guy through the relationship I have with another great friend of mine that I completely met randomly just by happenstance in a casino and heard him yelling and screaming and dancing. And I said, who the fuck is that guy? And I went over there and I met him. And that started, as we said,

this extremely excruciating and exhausting relationship over so many years. But through him, I met Russell. So I love the fact that in some aspect of my mind, I think the universe meant us to meet. But just a little bit about Dr. Russell Kennedy. He's an author, and Dragon has already purchased his book. It's on the way because I'm addicted to his stuff already,

and that's called the Anxiety Prescription. So make sure you check that out. But he's also a neuroscientist. So what's interesting is I'm so fascinated by human behavior, anxiety and neuroscience. He was talking to my wife and I said, I don't play for the other side of the field, but if I did, I might ask this guy on him a date.

So he's a medical doctor, which is interesting. We'll get into that as well because he's not your typical medical doctor, but he's corporate speaker, entertainer, stand-up comedian, which makes me realize why you and Nima get along so well. And he also naturally practices yoga and meditation. So welcome to the Rise Up with Dragon Show, Dr. Russell Kennedy. Thank you. It's really great to be here.

I was talking with Nima this morning. And yeah, it's great how people kind of interact and connect and that kind of thing. I love that. Well, I want to dive into this. And I'd like to start with your backstory because, you know, it's like whenever I see somebody doing extraordinary things and helping people, I always ask, why are they doing that? So I want to get into that. But I pulled this verbiage from an article that I read that you are advertising on your site. And I just think it's so cool.

It was the first thing that, and there's a popular word, this alarm, and we'll get into that. This is what he said in one of his interviews. He says, what if recovering from anxiety? Because anxiety is a big thing. What if recovering from anxiety is more about healing the alarm? Listen to this, the alarm that lives in the body versus the worrisome thoughts that occupy the mind. What if a major source of anxiety sits ignored, like here. we are thinking we're working on something.

And it's exciting for me to find out that maybe there's something else that I completely missed, that, you know, that gives me hope, ignored in the feeling realm of the body while the mind receives all the medical attention. Oh, boy, wouldn't that be exhausting for the person that's just spent so much time, energy and trauma? And money. And money and trauma. It's $150 an hour, you know?

So I used to have this joke on stage and stand up. I'd say, you know, if you had a leak in your house and you had a plumber come over and look at that leak every week for an hour. And after five years, that leak wasn't a whole lot better. Would you keep paying that guy? Will you keep hiring him into your house? And I think that's a lot of what therapy is. Like therapy, a lot of cognitive therapy is trying to change your thoughts. And I really maintain that the alarm in our system, which is usually from unprocessed or unresolved

trauma, typically from childhood, not always, but that's the source of the anxiety. We're going to dive right in. And I didn't find that as a medical doctor. I found that as someone who took LSD. Let's start. Because right now, somebody's listening to this, whether it's the recorded cut version or live, and they're like, what did he just say? Let's go back and uncover the kind of the why and the how that we've gotten to this place. So he just mentioned LSD. He's a medical doctor. And let's talk about the space that was created that made you go on this journey and where it took you to this present time where you actually have made some massive breakthroughs. Yeah. Well, I grew up with a dad who had bipolar and schizophrenia, so like what they call

a schizoaffective disorder. And I saw him decline as I got older. And my dad was always very joyful and fun and playful when I was younger, four, five, six, seven, eight, ten years old. And then as I got older into my teens, he got more and more sick with schizophrenia. And eventually he killed himself when I was 26. So I had this experience with my dad of being this son of someone who loved him, cared for him, looked after him, taught him how to play chess, taught him how to hit a ball, taught him how to do all these things. And then I slowly lost him over the course of time. And then I did a lot of studying on bipolar, even when I was a teenager. And I found that there was a huge heritable component to it.

Like you can inherit schizophrenia. And I saw how badly he suffered with schizophrenia and bipolar. And it's like, oh, geez, if I get this, I'm going to just waste a way. way, this is going to be the worst thing in the world. And that's basically what started my anxiety disorder. And I became a doctor ostensibly to help people, but mostly if I look at my unconscious motivation, I think there was always a sense that I really wanted to help my dad, but I couldn't. So that's interesting, because I totally relate to that, whether it was me going back in remembering one of my best friends committed suicide or recognizing a member of my family that struggled like that.

I remember the feeling, especially with my friend committing suicide, where I, you know, I used to wonder if it was going to happen to me. And I remember the anxiety associated with that. So fascinating to do that. And then it makes total sense why maybe the nurturer slash hero or fixer in you maybe went on this journey to like make sure you didn't get go that way and also help others. So what happened next? Like as you started to do your research, I mean, what brought you to medicine and all of that? Yeah.

Well, I think I went into medicine for a couple of reasons. is as a child, as a boy, I never really felt like I was really making a difference in the world. I felt weak, I felt ineffectual, I've always been very sensitive. So I think there was this element of me. If I become a doctor, I'll be important. You know, I'll be important. People will listen to me because I think in my family of origin,

a lot of the energy went into my dad. My mother would pay a lot of attention to my dad because my dad, you know, kind of demanded it as he got sicker and sicker and sicker. So I think there was part of me that really just wanted to be important. And I think it still plays out. It plays out of my Instagram now. I'm aware of it.

I'm aware of my attention-seeking horror part of me. But I also know it's trying to fill a void in me that I can't fill from the outside of me. I have to fill it from the inside. But it's nice to be able to feel like I'm making some progress. I mean, the reason why I do a lot of this anxiety work is I don't want people to have to suffer with anxiety the way that I did. And I also have real compassion for people that suffer emotionally because I saw what my dad went through. So I really feel like this is my niche. I left medicine actually about eight or nine years ago because I just had this crisis of

conscience about treating people with medications that maybe one in four, one in five would get a real benefit from, but most people didn't. So I just really had this consciousness, this lack of consciousness where I felt like I wasn't really doing what I was supposed to do. So I had my own crash. You know, I ruptured my left Achilles tendon. I needed surgery. I left medicine to be 2013. Went through this period of crippling anxiety, like suicidal anxiety. And then I did LSD, ayahuasca, MDMA, all this kind of stuff.

Not to get high so much, but just even from a neuroscience point of view, like what's happening in my mind and my body when I take these things? How is this changing my perception? And how is that change in perception expanding the container that I have for this alarm in my system. How can I allow this alarm to be there without being so reactive to it, I guess? Such a fascinating, complete other topic, just all of this new definition of medicine, whether it's ayahuasca or psilocybin or LSD, it's like I've never seen it be looked at as cool as it is now. It's like, you know, it's actually like a fat, you know, like if you haven't

gone on an ayahuasca trip, you're kind of a loser in this new society. Here's what I'm curious about because Dragon has done his fair share of things like that. I was not seeking my spirit animal at the time that I was doing it, but I'm familiar with what happens when you do these things. But it seems like you learn something about the brain and the body connection from the experience. So if you could just quickly elaborate what you identify, because I kind of felt like what you're saying,

and this will lead us into what you've discovered and now do, it seems like by removing your maybe analytical mind or your programmed mind on this hypothetical trip, it allow you to see something else? Is that what happened? That's exactly what happened. Yeah, that's exactly. I've always been a very academic, the neuroscience part of me is very highly scientifically structured. And then when I took LSD, basically it blew my mind apart. And I didn't have my regular academic intellect to go, and try and explain things. So I had to feel.

And maybe for the first time in my life, LSD made me feel. And it showed me, you know, after the first, the LSD, when your mind just kind of explodes and goes into a million colors and all that kind of thing. After I started coming out of it, I was told that I don't know where this came from,

but basically it said, look, your anxiety is not in your mind at all. It's actually in your solar plexus. It's this sort of hot, purple, crystalline, sharp pressure or pain that radiates into your back, that's your anxiety. And they didn't really know what to do with that for the first year or so after I came out of it. I've done a lot of work in developmental psychology with Dr. Gordon Newfeld at the Newfield Institute

in Vancouver. And he said something one day. And he said, all anxiety is separation anxiety. And a lot of that anxiety is really this alarm in the system. And I said, well, what if this at that time, I thought, well, what if this solar thing in my solar plexus is actually a state of alarm in my body? That's what's feeding the anxious thoughts. And this evolved over two years.

It wasn't like I did, ala-a-waska, al-alooia, thank you, Lord, I'm healed. It actually blew me apart for a couple of years. So over the course of two or three years, this would be 2015, 2016. I started to see, hey, maybe this would be a great way of healing anxiety from a different way. Because what if the problem isn't the mind? What if the problem, all this time that we're spending in therapy trying to change our thoughts and our mindset isn't actually helping us that much. What if we have to change our body set?

What if we have to go in there and actually find that younger version of ourselves that has these wounds that I did with my father and heal those first? And when you heal the alarm, there's nothing left to feed the anxious thoughts. And that's exactly what I found. Yeah. And logic would say, what if we woke up one day and we know the definition of insanity, yet we still keep trying to do the same thing and get the same. results. I totally resonate with that. And I want to go into the alarm anxiety cycle and stuff like

that because I find that super fascinating. But before, I want to ask you a question. You said before, you said, I left medicine. How do you leave medicine? Like, how do you actually leave? Did you send a letter? Or did you hold up a sign? Yeah, I sent them a letter and I said, look, I'm out. Every year with the College of Physicians and Surgeons in the state or the province, I live in the province of British Columbia and Canada, you have to fill out this form. This says you haven't been charged with a crime, you haven't been, you're no disciplinary action against you, so you maintain your license year after year. So you do send them a letter saying, I'm going to go off on disability, which I did. And they said, okay, well, we'll leave it open for you for two years at that time. And two years went up. It's like, I'm not going back to this because I don't like it. Basically, what I did was I just let it lapse at that point. I talked to them and I said, look, just let it lapse. Don't fill out the form every year or whatever. And at some point in the next few years, they'll just take you off the register. So in 2017, they officially took me off the medical register, so I don't have a medical license

anymore and that kind of thing, which has actually been very liberating. Because I found that medicine was really railroading me down this kind of left brain analytical part of me that there's a huge part of me that's like that. But I didn't really get to expand on the right brain academic artistic side of me. And then I started doing stand-up comedy, but this is a long time ago. in 2004. So I started doing more stand-up and more speaking and that kind of thing. And I just found the farther away I got from seeing 40 patients a day, the more my right brain kind of expanded. And I came up with this alarm anxiety theory. And I started writing the book. And everything seemed to

kind of just start to flow after I left medicine. And I was outside of that regimented kind of seeing 40 patients a day kind of grind. Yeah. I resonate with this idea of unlocking your creative potential and how paralyzing it could be to be kind of like almost imposter syndrome wise playing the role of something else. Even if you're kind of like diversifying and, you know, one thing I saw in your article, I love the fact that sometimes people refer to you as non-conventional if it's Dr. Russell Kennedy's non-conventional approach. And when I hear that, I'm like, well, what the fuck does conventional mean? Like, and like, are we not all waking up right now? and recognizing that anything conventional, anything herd mentality, anything that's coaxing you into

following, you know, the leader. I mean, in any realm of personal growth, health care, or anything, it just seems like a stupid idea. So I think that we're coming in this new reality right now, where I'm hearing people say things like this. They're saying, oh, I love my doctor. I love my coach. I love my whatever because he's non-conventional. So I just think that that's hilarious. So kudos to you for, because that's not easy to do, cost you quite a bit of time and money. And it's kind of like a badge of awesomeness that we rare. It's nice when people can say it's Dr. Russell Kennedy. Yeah. So that's awesome. So let's talk about, I don't know how many people really, really caught that idea that maybe it's not a mind thing.

Maybe it's another thing. And I just want to quickly share my personal experience to add to it. Because I didn't know about this alarm anxiety cycle before. I was just this guy that out of nowhere, the most confident person, of course I have unresolved childhood trauma. I mean, like, you know, I've got a bag of that. But I went from being the most confident, go get her, put me out on stage in front of a million people, and I'll just take a nap.

And then all of a sudden I felt it for the first time. I didn't know what caused it or anything. So for anybody that experiences anxiety, and I still to this day feel that feeling, it can be paralyzing. So what I figured out, because what I learned, and I'd love you to elaborate a little bit on this, too, the way I saw it is you have two choices when you're experiencing anxiety. One is to run from the perceived thing that's causing it. Two would be to some sort of fight it or fix it. So I would assume that we're kind of in the realm of two when we get into this work that you're doing.

So I chose to fight it, which allowed me to be productive, but at the same time, it sucked. You know, it's like, I remember as soon as I would find out that I had some sort of big responsibility to speak on a big stage or something, I would just ensue this three-month cycle of just building this complete fantasy in my head that I was going to die, up until the second I did it. And then after I would feel better and I would say, oh, look, through experience, you know that everything's going to be all right, but I would still be in the cycle all the time. So I read an article that changed my life a long time ago, and I speak about this in my book, and I'm definitely going to take some of your stuff and put it in my book because it's almost done.

Of course, I'll get permission and let you know. But I read an article and it showed me the brain maps of two brains. one was having an anxiety attack and the other one was just excited about like a wedding and they look at the scene. So what I did was I just rewired my brain in how I perceived anxiety and I just started saying like so now when I walk on on stage and I feel like I'm going to die, I go, this is really exciting. So that was that was me. So I'm excited to do this new work. But how do you kind of digest and elaborate a little bit on this inflection point that the person is at, that is experiencing anxiety. They're either running from it, right, fight or flight or dealing

with it. What's the first step for that person? I think it's awareness. Like, I really do think it's awareness. It's like being aware of that sensation. It's like when I see people with panic attacks, first couple panic attacks people have, they just feel like I felt kind of dizzy. I felt a little light, I felt a little weird, a little flushed. I looked around, like, this is weird. And then what happens after they had two or three of those is they start thinking, I wonder if I'm having a stroke. I wonder if I'm having a heart attack.

Now, that's the point where everything snowballs. Because at that point, the brain is a meaning-making, makes sense machine. So if your body's undergoing this tremendous feeling of up-evil, your brain is going to say, hey, this might be happening to you. You might be having a heart attack. You might be having a stroke. Now, that feeds, again, the alarm in the body. It's like, oh my God, I'm having a heart attack. I'm having a stroke, which of course drives you deeper and deeper into survival physiology. So you start

secreting more cortisol, more adrenaline, epinephrine, which makes the whole thing worse until the point where the body can't take it anymore. The adrenaline drops and then the panic attack subsides. Now, what I used to do with people is I would often give them a tablet of Alprazolam, Xanax, or Larazepam, Ativan, something like that. So that when they had the panic attack, they would take this, they'd put it under their tongue or they'd take it. And in about 10, 15 minutes or so, they'd feel calm. So after that, all they needed to do was carry around one of these tablets in their purse or their wallet, and they were fine. Because they knew it was going to end. That's the thing about anxiety.

when you know it's going to end, you can endure just about anything. But the worst part of anxiety is that you don't know when it's going to end, plus that survival physiology that the alarm has put you in has taken away your rational ability to think. So we're trying to figure out rationally

and trying to solve the problem rationally when the rational parts of our brain have been shut off because as an evolutionary perspective, when you're in survival physiology, you preferentially look for threat and the part of your brain, the rational part of your brain, gets shut off in favor of this ability to emotionally deal with what's going on. So you can't actually deal with an acute alarm attack by thinking about it because the part that thinks has been shut off.

So you have to deal with it at the emotional realm, which is the realm of the body. So what you do when you start feeling anxious or alarmed or panic is you go into your body, put your hand on your chest, breathe, into it, like get into the sensation and really focus on the intention that you're going to focus on your body. Because if you do that, it takes, it diverts that energy that your mind would do to start digging you deeper into this horrible hole and then you can actually ground yourself in your body. That's the short version of how we deal with anxiety properly, as opposed to trying to, you know, this thought isn't real, this isn't reality, whatever. You don't have your rational brain. So why are you trying to use your rational brain to make you feel better?

You've lost blood flow to the part of your brain that would actually allow the rational ability to fix the problem in the first place. So get out of your head, get into your body, ground yourself in your body, because that's where your wisdom is. That's where you're grounding. There's no real grounding in your mind. The grounding is all in your body. Once you ground yourself in your body and you get some reassurance somewhat, once you're

on stage and once you're in the flow of things, your body just relaxes. And then everything, and then you get your prefrontal cortex back, and then you can speak. And then you can, same with me in standup. It was exactly the same thing. time I would go on stage, we're like, this could go horribly, this could go terribly. And then five minutes into the set, it's going well. And you're like, you know, your body's relaxed. You're okay. And I think we have this compulsion to worship the mind in our society. And the mind is wonderful in a lot of respects. But the mind is not going to save you with anxiety. And in fact,

the smarter you are, the more you're probably going to suffer from anxiety. Because your imagination is greater. You start thinking about all these different things. And when you do think of something that might reassure you, your mind thinks of a hundred things that won't, that make it worse. So it's like you've got to get out of your mind. And I love Byron Katie's work and that kind of thing about, is this true. Do I know this is true? This kind of thing. But what you have to do first is have the awareness. What does my body feel like when I get into a alarm? Now I'm going to take a right turn into my body as opposed to a left turn up into my head. And I'm going to get into my body. I'm going to ground my body. And after you do this a number of times, you start training your

unconscious mind that, hey, when I get anxious, I don't go in my head. I actually go into my body. And that's when you start to heal from anxiety. But it takes a little while. I love that. It takes a little while. It does. You mean, I can't fix this. We're actually retraining your unconscious, right? Consciously, we know that the worries aren't real and that they're fabrications of our mind and stuff. But we believe that. And then that keeps us in our mind. And the other reason we stay in our mind is because we have this alarm in our body. So we don't want to go back down into that visit. We don't want to visit that child who is abused and neglected, abandoned, bullied, whatever. We don't want to go back there. So what we do

is we go into our head. And the Mesolimbic dopamine system keeps us in our head because it's like, oh, okay, if I think these things, I can keep my mind busy so that I don't have to go back down into Feeling Town where that child is. But unless you go back and rescue that child, you're always going to live in that alarm and you're always going to be bailing water. There's one little thing. I know I'm talking a lot, but I want to say one more thing. It's like being in a rowboat and there's a hole in the rowboat. Now, the water starts coming up, starts getting very uncomfortable because the water's coming up in the boat. Now you can bail water out of that boat and it'll make you feel better as the water goes down. And that's kind of like cognitive therapies. But if you're going to

heal, you've got to go under, you got to go deep, you got to find that child in you and you got to fix the hole in the hole of the boat. That's what fixes the problem. Otherwise, we're just bailing water. When you're going to psychotherapy once a week and that sort of stuff, in my opinion, you're just bail on water and you're going to be doing that for the rest of your life. Let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsor. The Make Sense podcast is sponsored by the Make Sense Academy, co-created by both myself, Meeker, aka The Chicken and The Dragon, the Make Sense Academy is a live interactive community where like-minded, solution-focused, curious seekers of expansion, gather daily in a mastermind setting,

both Chicken and Dragon, where they have access to premium content, online courses, and powerful collaboration and networking, all for $24 a month. The Make Sense Academy and its members are solely responsible for funding the Make Sense podcast. So feel free to reach out to us at www. riseup with dragon.com and check out the Make Sense Academy, risk-free, with a money-back guarantee. Now, back to the Make Sense podcast. here's a couple of things I just pulled from that. First of all, the brain is probably the least grounded thing that we have. I was thinking about the idea of being in the pattern of taking a pill that would calm me down from anxiety

and all of a sudden realizing I didn't have the pill and just assuming I'm going to die. I actually got anxiety about thinking about that. But yeah, it's really, really interesting. And I would say, you know, and this is a lot of the work that I do, I'm very fascinated in the response system. That's what my work and my book is about is just that, I call it the eye of the storm, that moment where you develop the ability,

you said take a left instead of a right or look down to the body rather than the mind. It's that moment where I think it starts with recognizing that you have this program, need your express response system that you're used to and it happens unconsciously in that subconscious mind. So it's that moment of being able to, It's like one thing to teach somebody cognitive distancing and back up from something and say,

hmm, which is what I'm a big fan of. But it's that ability to recognize this is the time to look to the body because I think a lot of people would say, and I'd love you to maybe give a little advice on this. A lot of people would say, Dr. Russell, I get it, but when I get an anxiety attack, I'm not thinking rationally and I can't capture that moment and do something else. What's a technique or something that you would say to that person so that they can take action there? Yeah. It's kind of like when women take self-defense courses.

So if a woman takes a self-defense course, if they're attacked, they're 99 times more likely to be able to respond to that and do it in the heat of the moment. So it's really about practice. It's really about how does your body feel when your body feels good? Like how can you get into the centered nature of your body when you feel good? And at that point go, okay, when things go, when I start feeling this flush feeling, when I start feeling like whatever your anxiety, your early anxiety sensations are, for me, I get a tension in the back of my throat, there's kind of a pressure in my solar plexus.

When I start feeling that, it's like now I know that I have to go into my body. I have to go into breathing. I have to practice that too. I have to practice that skill just like the women practice the martial arts or the self-defense behaviors so that when shit goes down in the hood, that you have this ability that you've practiced that you can keep doing. It's like, I tell people, okay, say at the end of, like right now, we're at the end of August, say at the end of December, I'm going to take you to the basketball court, I'm going to get you to shoot 10 foul shots. If you make three of them, I'm going to give you a million

dollars. Are you going to start practicing the week before? It's like, no, you're going to practice shooting foul shots every day so that when you come to that moment where you have to make three out of ten, you've done this so often, it's done this so regularly, you've practiced it so much, that it becomes the go-to. It becomes the automatic behavior. And when it becomes, when that sort of body response becomes your automatic behavior, then you actually start healing from anxiety rather than just coping with it and managing it. So fascinating. You just gave me an insight into a different way of looking at the feelings associated with anxiety rather than looking at them. Because typically what you'd say is, oh, like, this is fucking inconvenient right now.

You know, like, I'm about to do this show with Dr. Russell and I have it all planned out, but now all of a sudden the devil has showed up. Rather than looking at it that way, almost looking at it, it's kind of like the obstacles the way, the stoic thing. It's kind of like saying, oh, this is the cue. This is the thing that means it's time to go in the body. body work. And then I would assume that some of the work that you do, because it's related to improving your life, starts to be something you look forward to. So it's like, I know this sounds crazy, but I am crazy. And I love the idea of having an anxiety attack and saying, awesome, you know, I'm going to go do some bodywork. Yeah. And it gets to be that way. It takes a while

because it's so abhorred to us to go through that anxiety. But here's the thing. I believe that that anxiety is really alarm. And oftentimes, especially if we've had trauma as children, it's that child in us that's asking for our attention. And if you had a child come up to you who was distressed in the grocery store and they, you know, like a two-year-old, the three-year-old, and they put their hands up for you to pick them up, of course you would pick them up. But we don't do that for ourselves because we don't want to go back and visit that child because that child holds a lot of our pain. But that's exactly what we have to do to heal it at source, like I said, you can cope with anxiety. You know, you can do cognitive behavior therapy

and those sort of, and they work and they help you cope with anxiety. But to actually heal with anxiety, you have to find that child in you. You have to see them, hear them, and love them, and go back and find it. And this is where the medical doctor part of me wants to have a seizure because we're never trained in this kind of stuff. And it sounds really weird. But this is how you heal from anxiety because the root cause of anxiety is that alarm. And the alarm comes from the child. So what I believe happens is when we're children, if we get exposed to overwhelming circumstances, like tremendous loss, abuse, neglect, abandonment, emotional, physical, sexual abuse, that kind of stuff overwhelms the child mind. We can't deal with it. So we suppress it or repress it

down into the unconscious. And a lot of the old philosophers and psychologists used to say that the body is a representation of the unconscious mind. And this is true with the body keeps the score, Bessel van der Kolk's book. So that energy, that a large, energy that overwhelms us as children gets stuffed into our body. In me, it goes into my solar plexus. A lot of people goes into their heart. A lot of people goes into their throat. People that had to become the leader of their family as children very young, often will feel it across their shoulders. So when I say, where do you feel your alarm if I'm dealing with a patient or a client or whatever you want to call them these days? I'll say, what do you feel it?

I say, oh, I get it right across my shoulders. It's like, the first thing I'll ask them is like, did you have to become the man of the house or the woman in the house too soon? And always they'll say yes. So that alarm sometimes tells me. Yeah, that alarm tells me. Or I'll see a woman who had a narcissistic mom and they'll say, oh, I feel my alarm in my throat. It's like, what couldn't you say? What couldn't you say to your mother? That's why their alarm is stuck in their throat. So the next thing I get them to do on top of that is, okay, we found the alarm in your body. Put your hand over it. Connect with it. Because that's the child in you with their hands up, asking you to connect with them. typically what we do is we feel the alarm and go, oh, no, no, no, no, no, see you later.

Like that kid comes up to us in the store. We're like, nope, see ya. So what do you think that kid's going to do? That kid's going to freak out or it's going to go into freeze, which is basically what we do. And we go into freeze or dissociation because we can't stand the pain of not connecting with that younger version of ourselves. So we use zombie scroll Instagram or go to porn or go to shopping or anything that distracts from this pain. So to heal, the ultimate healing is to go back, as painful as it is, visit that

child, realize that that child contains the best parts of you, even though you've been judging, abandoning, blaming, and shaming that child for your whole life, that child contains the best part of you. That sensitive child is what is asking for your help. That's what the alarm is, and that's where anxiety starts. So I'm going to drop the mic at that point. Amazing, man. One of the things that I picked up from reading, and you've just elaborated on a lot the elements of it. But could you just explain, because this helped me rationalize, like the first time I heard, maybe it's not in your mind, maybe it's in your body, the way I received that, because I'm open, and as I said, okay, you know, tell me more. And then as I dove deeper, when I got

to the part where you were talking about the cycle, that's where it hit home to me, because whether I thought it was a mind thing over a body or a body over a mind, it was when I started to realized that it was traveling to the mind and the body and things like that. That's when I all of a sudden took value in saying there is a body component outside of just this fact that, yeah, I feel a little tightness in my chest. By the way, when you were going over all those throat shoulder chest, I'm like, yep, yep, yep. So I get them all, man, you know?

So, you know, that would be another session. But just go over the alarm anxiety cycle because I thought that was fantastic. Yeah. So I think, you know, this is what I'm saying is when you're a child or, you know, at any age, like PTSD as an adult, this alarm gets put into your body somewhere because it's too much for your mind to handle. So your mind stuffs it into the unconscious. The unconscious is a representation of the body. The body is a representation of the unconscious mind. The body keeps the score. It gets offloaded into your body. So we can find that alarm in your system. And this is what I'll often do with people is I'll take the back to, for me, I go back into watching my dad. go into the ambulance for an admission of the psych hospital or when I visit them in the psych hospital. And I can really feel it in my chest. It's like, okay, I locate this alarm in my chest. And what that alarm does is it goes up to your mind in this process called interoception. So your mind is constantly reading your internal and external environment.

So when it reads your internal environment and it detects this what I call background alarm because the alarm comes from the background events of your life. With me, it was my dad being schizophrenic. With other people, it's they were abused or abandoned as a child. But that alarm is the root cause of what we call anxiety. So when the mind reads that alarm in the body, it creates a story that's completely consistent with that uncomfortable, painful feeling of alarm.

So it'll start coming up with what I call the three Ws of worries, warnings, what ifs, and worst case scenarios. So it comes up with this stuff. then your mind comes up with this worst-case scenario, which of course now energizes the alarm in your body because, of course, your body reacts to a thought in a very similar way it does to something actually happening. So the alarm gets exacerbated.

Now, when the alarm gets exacerbated, we go into survival physiology. And when we go into survival physiology, we create cortisol and epinephrine, which basically puts us into a survival framework in our brain, evolutionarily, and in survival, that survival physiology, we preferentially look for threats.

So if we're in our bed, or we're just hanging out or we're about to go on stage or whatever, if there's no threat immediately, physical threat in front of us, we will make up threats. So what are made up threats? Well, they're worries.

It's like, this is going to go terribly. They're going to hate me. This test is going to be cancer. The mind is a compulsive meaning-making, makes sense machine. It hates uncertainty, especially if you had uncertainty in childhood. If you had uncertainty in childhood,

especially we hate uncertainty. So what we will do, what the mind will do, is it will pick a worry that may be painful, but at least it makes sense of the pain in our system. And because it makes sense of the pain in our system, we keep doing it. So the alarm gets worse, we go into survival physiology, and on top of that, we're unable,

now that we're in survival brain, we're unable to actually see that these worries are just false. And I asked people, I said, you know, the worries that you have, like when you're feeling good and you think that same word, you give it any credibility, it's like, no, it's like ridiculous. But when you're alarmed, it seems like the worst thing in the world because the alarm has removed your rational prefrontal cortex that would tell you, this is ridiculous. This is not going to happen. But that part of your brain isn't there anymore. So all you're dealing with is the emotional child in you. And you get transported back to where you were as a child. I believe that. So if you

had trauma at seven years old, you become a seven-year-old. I've had fights with Cynthia, and we're like, I'm an eight-year-old, she's a seven-year-old, and we're fighting with each other, and we're expecting that we're going to somehow resolve this. So this is basically the alarm anxiety cycle. The alarm comes from this old trauma that's still stored in our body, goes up to the mind through interoception. The mind makes up all these freaky worries, which of course makes the alarm worse, which of course makes the worries seem more real, which creates this whole cycle. And we can't get out of that. Typically, with typical therapy, we have to go in there and start discharging the alarm, connecting with that alarm, resolving that

alarm, because that's the root cause. Once you start resolving the root cause, then the thoughts just fade away. So why are we trying to fix the thoughts when the thoughts really are just a byproduct? They're just a symptom. They're not the underlying cause. Although, when we have a thought, and then all of a sudden you feel this alarm, you assume, which we all do, that the the thought caused the alarm. And I would say, no, you were probably alarmed in your system before you even had the thought. To me, this makes total sense because, I mean, I refer to the entire body as my virtual reality suit that's been programmed to sense and perceive and receive. So this is the work that I do. But, you know, what you've done is you've just reminded me that when I'm feeling

that thing called anxiety, I'm perceiving it up here. And I'm addressing it here with my completely screwed up programmed mind, right? Which is a real good idea. But where is it coming from? And I love that idea. So, you know, what I would pose to everybody as we come to the end is just take a hypothetical look at this and just say, how would your life improve? Like, what would life be like?

And I'm going to give you permission to explore this idea, those of you like I used to be that don't think this is possible. But what would your life be like if you had a better understanding? understanding of what anxiety was, a better response system to when it was triggered and an actual structure and a strategy on how to handle that would actually start improving. And hopefully one day, rather than cope with it, because that's what I do really well, I'm amazing at coping with anxiety, but start to work on healing it. What would your life be like and how it be improved? So Russ, one thing, final, just one last thing,

I like to ask this question on the Rise Up with Dragon Show, and that is, what is Russell Kennedy afraid of? I'm afraid of just not getting my message out to the world because a lot of my life, I think I spend in pain. If you'd ask me, did you have a good life? Like if I died tomorrow and went up to whatever pearly gates or whatever, and someone said, did you have a good life? I'd say, I don't know if I had a good life.

I'd say I had a challenging life. And I think out of that challenge, especially with my dad, I think I made the best of it. And I think actually, once I was able to heal myself and helped other people heal and a lot of other people heal, it really left a legacy. And in that legacy, I feel like, yeah, I had a good life. So that's kind of the way I would go at it.

What scares me is just having all this knowledge. You know, like I lived at a temple in India. I became a stand-up comic. I have a degree in neuroscience. I have a doctorate in medicine. I've done all sorts of MDMA, LSD, you know, ayahuasca. There is so many aspects of anxiety that I have learned to understand. And I just want to get it out there.

Because I think the way that we're dealing with anxiety right now, I think is just a band-aid. I think CBT is helpful. It helps you cope, but it doesn't help you heal. And I think, you know, I kind of go against the mainstream here because CBT is the gold standard

in treating anxiety, and it does help you cope. But who wants to cope when you can heal? And that's what scares me is that we're going down this road of treating the mind like the mind has all the answers. And it doesn't.

Like your mind lies to you constantly, constantly, whereas your body never can. So that's what scares me is just leaving too soon. Like I'm really feeling now like I'm really getting some traction with this theory and mainstream people are starting to pay attention to me. And I get messages every day saying this is the first time someone has actually explained to me in a way that I can understand what is actually going on. So I understand I'm not a freak.

And I understand that I'm not a failure because CBT didn't help me. So that's what hurts me is when I see people really suffering. I know there's something I can do about it and I just can't seem to reach them. So shows like this, Dragon are amazing. They're fantastic because I get a chance to just sort of expand this.

That's why I love doing this because I really do feel that I have been given this task. All this pain that I went through is pain for a purpose. It's pain that allowed me to kind of sublimated into something that really helps people en masse. And if I can do that, that's really what I want.

And I'm afraid of not doing that. Wade Dyer used to talk about the idea of dying with your song still in you. Yeah. So that's what I, yeah, that's awesome. Well, I can tell you something. I'm not in control of anyone else. I mean, I tried my best to be in control of the controllables in my life.

And I can tell you that you have delivered your message and attracted my attention. So you've done a good job with me. And I've got a big fucking mouth. So I'll tell everybody about it. So I'm going to join forces with you and let you know. And I see that my wife, Mika, is Lacedaic and she's in mental health. And I just can't wait to have our next quarrel or argument and do it from the standpoint of ages. Like, I love that idea.

I have a picture of Cynthia at like eight-year-old versus the seven-year-old. And I look at that when we're fighting. It's like, this is who I'm fighting with. Yeah, that's even better. I'll hold the picture up. You get a popsicle stick and you hold the picture up and you show who you're representing. So whether it's somebody that is experiencing anxiety and resonates, with this, whether they're watching this

through the channels or a podcast or maybe even a professional that wants to engage and work with you. How would you recommend somebody approaches you that wants to like start looking into doing work? Sure. I mean, the anxiety MD. That's basically my brand, The Anxiety MD.

You can find my website. It's The Anxiety MD. My Instagram at the AnxietyMD. Twitter at the Anxite. Everything is The Anxiety MD. and my book, Anxiety RX, which is interesting because if you go outside of North America, we know that RX stands for prescription, but they don't. So it's really funny when I get notes from people from Australia going,

what is this prescription, this RX? Because it doesn't mean that here. And if I known that, I might have changed the topic of the book. But the Anxiety MD is the best way to find me. Typically, Instagram, I look at my Instagram comments and my messages every day and that kind of thing. that's a great way to find me and connect with me. Send me a DM on Instagram. That's an easy way of finding me.

Awesome. Dude, so cool. I can't wait to learn more. I can't wait to read your book. I can't wait to hear the positive feedback. And I really think you're on to something. And I will say to everybody, if you're just finding out about Dr. Russell now,

I came across him a long time ago through this friend of ours. And I thought it was spectacular. But what I've noticed, and I want to just tell you what I've noticed is that, just like you said, I've noticed that it's coming into the space of consciousness more right now, you know, whether it's your following it and the questions and the engagement. So keep going, man, because the world needs you. So thanks so much for being on the Rise Up with Dragon Show.

What an amazing episode. And this will definitely be one for the vault. So everybody having a wonderful day. Makes sense.