The Liz Moody Podcast - You Can Actually HEAL Your Anxiety—Here’s How With Dr. Russell Kennedy

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

Dr. Russell Kennedy shares his unique approach that doesn’t focus on stopping anxiety in acute moments, but in getting to the root cause of your anxiety and where it lives in your body.  his revolutionary approach to not only coping with anxiety, but healing it at its root what’s actually happening in your brain when you feel anxious why we can get addicted to anxiety (+ how to break the cycle) why some people have anxiety and others in the same situation don’t why you’re more resilient than you think (+ how to actually believe that) how childhood trauma impacts anxiety in adult life + how to address it  why children today are more likely to be anxious (+ exactly what to do about it) his honest take on antidepressants  neuroscience-backed ways to deal with anxiety in the moment the best supplements for anxiety and so much more! For more from Dr. Kennedy, head to his website theanxietymd.com, follow him on social media at @theanxietymd, and grab his book Anxiety Rx: A New Prescription for Anxiety Relief from the Doctor Who Created It.  To join the Healthier Together Podcast Club Facebook group, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/healthiertogetherpodcast. This episode is sponsored by: Seed: go to seed.com/lizmoody and use code LIZMOODY for 25% off your first month. Osea: get 10% off your first order at oseamalibu.com with code LIZMOODY10. Kion Aminos: save 20% on monthly deliveries and 10% on one-time purchases by going to getkion.com/LIZMOODY.  AG1: visit AG1.com/healthiertogether and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today.  Healthier Together cover art by Zack. Healthier Together music by Alex Ruimy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Healthier Together podcast. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and long-time journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether we're learning how to hack our brains to be more creative, understanding the neuroscience behind manifestation, or figuring out the best protocol to get the skin and hair of our dreams. And yes, those are all real episodes, so if any of those topics sound good to you, scroll on back in the archives. I have a very interesting episode today. Dr. Russell Kennedy has a different take on anxiety than I have ever heard before.

He believes it's something you can not only cope with, but can really heal. As someone who has struggled with anxiety for as long as I can remember, I was very interested in hearing his perspective. He has a fascinating background too because he's a medical doctor with an additional degree in neuroscience, so he has a deep understanding of what's happening in the body and the brain. He also has a powerful story of healing his own anxiety, which he shares in this. episode. Dr. Kennedy is the author of the best-selling book, Anx, A New Prescription for Anx, a New Prescription for Anx relief from the doctor who created it and helps hundreds of thousands of people on social from his account, The Anxiety MD. On this episode, we get into his

revolutionary approach to not only coping with anxiety, but healing it at its root, what is actually happening in your brain when you feel anxious, why we can get addicted to anxiety and how to break the cycle. I found this absolutely fascinating. Why, Some people have anxiety and others in the same situation don't. Why you are more resilient than you think and how to actually believe that. How childhood trauma impacts anxiety in adult life and how to address it. Why children today are more likely to be anxious and exactly what to do about it. His honest take on antidepressants, neuroscience-backed ways to deal with anxiety in the moment, the best supplements for anxiety, and so much more. We would both love to hear your thoughts and your biggest takeaways as you're listening to the episode. So definitely screenshot and tag me.

I am at Liz Moody and Dr. Kennedy. He is at the Anxiety MD on Instagram. This episode is a total perspective shift on how to deal with anxiety. And as someone who has had anxiety take such a prominent place in my own story, I will make a personal plea for you to share this one with anyone you know who might be dealing with anxiety. If there's even a nugget in here that can help even one person alleviate the discomfort that I have felt, I would be so, so happy. Sharing the podcast is also hands down the best way to support it, and it is so, so appreciated. Also, be sure to stick around until the end of the episode because we have an amazing giveaway with Dr. Kennedy that you are not going to want to miss.

I will share the details of that right after our conversation. Before we get into the episode, I have a very exciting announcement. My book title and cover are officially out in the world, and I am so excited to announce that 100 ways to change your life, the science of leveling up health, happiness, relationships, and success is officially available for pre-order. Oh my gosh, that felt so good to say. I am so thrilled to finally be able to start sharing this book with you all. This podcast and the incredible listeners on here are what inspired me to write it in the first

place. I took all of the wisdom that I've learned over the years of doing this podcast and I compiled it into a hundred action steps that you can take right now to change your life. There are 18 sections covering gut health, finances, longevity, relationship, self-confidence, success, and so much more. You can read the entire thing cover to cover. You can skip to the sections that apply to you. You can do a tip a day as part of a morning routine. It is the perfect book to read when you don't be like you can sit down and tackle like an entire 300, 350 page book because you can just read a tip at a time. It is also so packed with wisdom. I wanted it to feel like 50 books in one and I'm just so excited. Oh my gosh. Also, if you pre-order now, you will be entered to win a thousand

dollar credit to an airline of your choice. So that is pretty cool. Just go to a hundred ways to change your life.com. That's 100, like the number one, zero, zero, and then ways to change your life. Dot com. Oh my gosh. I cannot wait to hear what you think. Okay. Now let's get right into today's episode with Dr. Russell Kennedy. Dr. Russell Kennedy, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It's really nice to talk to you, Liz. It's great to have you here. I was telling you before we got on that I'm very personally invested in this conversation today. Often I'm like, I want to do right by my listeners, by my community, but today I'm like, I have questions I need answered after years of dealing with anxiety. And you have your own personal anxiety story. So maybe

we could just start off by hearing a little bit about your experience of anxiety and with anxiety throughout your life. I grew up with a father who had severe schizophrenia and bipolar. So a lot of my anxiety, I think, started from that. Most people's anxiety, I think, starts in childhood. There is something that happens to us, some sort of traumatic event, and it doesn't have to be hugely traumatic. We're born, typically us anxious people are born sensitive. So if you're born sensitive in a loving, caring, nurturing environment, you're fine. But if you're born sensitive in a challenging environment, that can kind of disregulate your nervous system and wind up giving you this state of alarm in your body that I assume is the ultimate cause of the anxiety. Your anxiety really doesn't start from your mind.

It actually starts from an old program that's lodged in your body of trauma and unresolved wounds and an energy of alarm that's in your system. That's what drives your worries. How did that manifest for you? For me, it was just health anxiety, a lot of health anxiety, which for a doctor is not a great thing. One of the crazy things about being a doctor is like I think I had every illness that was known to man. Medical school syndrome on steroids, all us medical students, we always wind up having some sort of illness. and I had everything. It was just one of those things where I just felt I had everything. I actually

won the Internal Medicine Award at graduation because I knew more diseases than anyone else because I had all those diseases. Like I had them all, you know, Dramatomyocitis, purple eyelid. So I knew all this stuff because I had studied it myself for like four years. Do you still consider yourself a person with anxiety? I know that one of your kind of core tenants is that you can actually heal anxiety rather than cope with it. So how does that fit within your own life? Yeah, I would say that I've healed my anxiety because I used to live in like a 10-hour panic attack every day. Back 10 years ago, I was in this state where I didn't even think life was worth living if I had to live in this anxious pain all day. So I would say that I've healed my

anxiety. Now, I still get alarmed. I'm still a sensitive person. So I still get alarmed. I just don't add thoughts to it. We're talking about practical things. And I think the most practical advice I can give anyone is when you're feeling anxious, and I put that term in quotation marks, you're really alarmed. So really, like, tell yourself, like, it's not that I'm anxious, I'm actually alarmed. My body is alarmed. And there will be a compulsion in your mind to add worries to it. Because as a child, that's the only thing you could do. When you had trauma as a child, you were powerless and helpless. So the only thing you could do was actually go up into your head. And that becomes a pattern.

And it doesn't help us because if anxiety is a problem of excessive worry and thinking, adding more thinking is not going to help us. So I think it's really important to understand that when you're feeling anxious, look for the alarm in your body. A lot of people feel in their throat or their chest or for me it's in my solar plexus. Put your hand over it. Connect with it. It's a much better use of your energy to connect with the alarm in your body than it is to go up

into your mind because your mind will tell you it has the answer, but all it has is more of the problem. So I tell people when you're feeling anxious or alarmed, I prefer the term alarm, when you're feeling alarmed, look for it in your body and see if you can connect with it, put your hand over it, find it in your body because I do believe if we're going to go deep into the woo-woo part of it. And part of me as a medical doctor and neuroscientist, I want to have a seizure when I talk about this stuff because it sounds so ethereal, but that alarm in your body is your younger self. So if you can connect with it, put your hand over it, find it in your system, it's a much better use of your time than going into your head because your head will

never actually give you the answer. It'll just give you more of the question. Breathe into it. Stay with it rather than submitting to the compulsion of adding worry to it because then it just becomes a runaway train. It's so interesting that as children, we went up into our heads because it was our only recourse of action. I've never made that connection before that like now as adults, you can get a snack. You can move two different. state, you can do all of these different things that are within your power, but as a kid, you don't have any of that power. And that forms a template, that forms a program that, okay, when I'm alarmed, the only recourse that I have is to go into worry. And we do that as a 50-year-old.

We're not children anymore. We do have a lot more agency in our own healing than we believe, but I do believe that we go back into that particular place as a child because the amygdala in your brain has no sense of time. So when you get anxious, you are probably going back to a state where you're four, five, seven, 12 years old again, but you don't realize you've moved into that place. You don't realize you've become a child. And of course you're going to feel alarmed. Of course you're going to feel anxious because as a 12 year old, you had no agency in the world. But as a 35 year old, you certainly do. We just have to show that child in us that we're in charge now. The adult in us is in charge and we will look after that child. So they don't have to feel

alone anymore. And the reason you go into your head is because a lot of the pain is stored in your body. So it's a double whammy. We go into our heads to avoid the pain to dissociate away from the pain, but it just creates more worry. So we never actually deal with the underlying problem. We never actually metabolize that alarm because every time we get alarmed in our body, we go up in our heads and we get caught into worry. That's where it ends. There's no way out of that. I want to dive into childhood trauma in a second. But first, what would you say to somebody who said, no, no, I have actual problems in my head. Like, I'm not feeling this in my body. I have racing thoughts. I'm worried about losing my job. I'm worried about my partner breaking up with me. I'm worried about

all these real things. And I need to sort out solutions cerebrally. And I can't connect that to a body feeling. The problem is that people think we worship the mind in the society. So we think the mind is the ultimate solution of the problem when actually not it's actually the alarm that stored in your body that's creating all this worry that's creating all this negative thought process it's the alarm that's stored in your body from old unresolved wounding and again i know that sounds kind of woo but it's true that's what's creating the problem so it's dealing with the alarm because that's the true root cause of the problem it's like if you have a viral infection and you have a fever i can give you a cedominifine I can give you Tylenol and it will bring your fever down, but it won't do anything for the underlying

virus. So it's the same with worry. Worry is just a symptom of this alarm that's in your system. And then we get caught up and we worship the mind so we believe the worries are the root cause of our problem when it's actually this old sense of alarm that's stored in our body. It's hard for us to get around that in our heads. It's really hard for us to understand because we so worship our mind that we believe that our mind is the root cause of anxiety when really it's just a symptom it's just our mind is the manifestation

of this old alarm energy that's still stored in our body how do we know then if we're disregarding the mind if we're ignoring real threats that we should be addressing and dealing with you said in your book and this really really resonated me that worrying anxiety are a combination of overestimating threats and underestimating our courage to deal with them and I really want to dive into that because I found that absolutely fascinating. So for me, I am always scanning for threat. When we're hiking, I'm like, is there a thunderstorm coming in? And I'm going to get struck by lightning. And there's probably something that's very real there where if you don't take the right precautions, you probably shouldn't be on a mountain top in a thunderstorm, et cetera. But I'm doing that all the

time. If I'm in a car, I'm scanning for threats. If I'm on a plane, I'm scanning for threats. If I'm on a boat, I struggle with hypochondria as well. So I'm always scanning my body. So I'm worried about turning off my mind and missing a threat that would tell me I should take action. I don't know how to right size my estimation of threats. It's regulating your body because if your body is regulated, you won't necessarily feel that compulsive need to constantly protect yourself. You can just live because there's points where you're not feeling anxious. There's points where you're feeling okay. I was talking to a friend of mine this morning and he's getting married and he says sometimes I feel a lot of apprehension about the wedding and sometimes I just feel like this is the greatest thing that's ever

happened to me. And I said, the difference is your body. So look into your body because when you're feeling apprehension about the wedding, I'll bet you that your body's alarmed. I'll bet you your heart rates a little bit up. You may feel a little sweaty or whatever. And when you're feeling good, if you look into your body, I bet your body's feeling good. I hate to be this broken record, but it's actually really true. And it's the reason why people don't heal from anxiety is we're trying constantly to fix the thoughts. George Carlin called them brain droppings. The thoughts will always just come. Now, how much credibility we give to those thoughts is really if we heal or not.

And I think when you first asked me about healing, it's like I don't give a lot of credibility to the thoughts anymore when I feel alarmed or anxious. I go into my body. I breathe into it. I put my hand over the area. For me, it's in my solar plexus. And I ground myself in my body. And that's the root cause of what's causing the anxiety thoughts in the first place.

So if I'm looking at the root cause and I'm dealing with the root cause, the rest of the stuff just sort of fades away. So you're always going to be kind of a planner. You're always going to have that. And I think it's just realizing that you're not all of a sudden if you're grounded in your body going to stop looking at the weather when you're hiking or whatever. It's just not going to be a compulsion anymore. Is the idea that if your friend was indeed marrying the wrong person, that those thoughts

wouldn't show up as anxiety, they would take a different form. Like, how do we know when our thoughts are telling us something that actually we should be listening to? Once you start developing this sense that you are connected to your body, you understand what's an apprehension and what's an obsession. You get to know that after a while, but your head won't be able to discern that. Your head won't be able to tell you. And that's why people with anxiety have a hard time with decisions because they don't have the grounding part of their body that would tell them, hey, this is good for me or this is not. We're so used to dealing with things in a cognitive fashion. And yeah, cognition is brilliant. It's amazing. It's got us to the moon. It's got us to all these things in our lives. But I think

we give cognition way too much weight in our lives and we lose that sense of our body. And once you gain that sense of your body back, then your intuition comes back. Because your intuition doesn't come from your head. It comes from your body. Okay. So it's more like if your friend was in touch with his body, he would know intuitively whether or not the marriage was the right decision rather than being like, am I anxious about it at this moment? Am I feeling good about it at this moment? Yeah. And that's the whole ethereal part of healing. I have a degree in neuroscience as well. So I look at the neuroscientific pathways like the mesolimbic cortical system. And there's only so much science can do for healing. We can understand how dopamine works. We can understand how serotonin works

to a certain extent. But there's only so much in the healing realm that science can give us. Healing is not a thinking. You don't think your way of anxiety. You feel your way out. Interesting. Other than putting your hand on the area where you're feeling it, for me it is always my chest. Other than doing that, is there any other tips that people could use to begin to get in

touch with their body, to ground in their body? Get in touch with your breath. When you focus on your breath, it naturally kind of slows. and there's a little gap between the inhalation and the exhalation. So as you breathe out, and just before you breathe in again, there's a tiny little gap. And as you breathe in, just before you breathe out again, there's a tiny little gap. So I'll often get people to focus on that, even when they're not feeling anxious. So when they're just sort of sitting in the car or whatever, like just focus on that little gap.

See if you can expand that little gap a little bit because that's a sense of your body. and it gives you a sense of grounding because again there's no grounding in your mind your mind will always take you to the worst case scenario if you tend to be anxious that's where your mind's going to go and the only real way of getting away from that is to completely leave your mind and go into the grounded present moment sensation of your body because sensation brings us into the present moment we have these huge somatosensory strips in our brain and the most realistic in our brain is for our hands and our face. So this is why tapping is one of those things that helps people because your hand and

your face are the two biggest areas of sensation in your brain. So if you're using both of them at the same time, you can't ignore that. It will bring you into the present moment. And when you come into the present moment in a sensation-based way, you pull yourself out of those compulsive thoughts because your thoughts will just keep winding you up and creating more and more thoughts. It's so hard. Even as you're listening, I'm like, that makes sense.

that makes sense, that makes sense, but I need to solve this issue in my brain. Like it's so hard to let go of the narrative that you need to solve some sort of cerebral problem. And that's the child in you. That was their only option back then, was to go cognitive. But you're not a child anymore, right? You do have this other option that you probably aren't allowing yourself to see because the child thinks the only safety is in my thoughts. The only safety is in my worry. The only safety is in hypervigilant. So if I start telling you that we need to move you away from this, what you perceive is protective,

it's going to cause some alarm in your system. So that's why it's so hard to heal from anxiety because as you start to feel better, your overprotective ego that believes that you have to be hypervigilant and worry and keep compulsive all the time, I'm telling you you don't need that anymore. And the child in you perceives that as a friend. So if I'm taking away your overprotective friend, it's going to leave you a bit naked in a way, at least initially. And then you start realizing, hey, you know what? I actually don't need this worry.

I can actually stay in my breath. I can actually stay in my body. And we do that for longer and longer and longer periods. And then you start realizing, I don't need to worry. That's a real transition point. That's what makes healing from anxiety so difficult for so many people is because when you start to feel better, when you start to not worry, that whole feeling that we have is like, I'm worried when I'm not worrying. That's a child's protective reflex.

So what I'm doing is I'm trying to show the adult you that child you doesn't have to worry anymore, but child you, you know, survived on worry. So I'm kind of taking away an old friend in a way because that's how we heal. And that's why it's so hard to heal from anxiety because when we start healing, we get anxious and it just forms a block. We have to push through that. I've created a mind-body program for that that I just released a couple of weeks ago

that is really designed to attach your mind and your body back together and your adult self and your child self back together because we have to heal at this unconscious level because if we don't heal at the unconscious level, we're constantly just going to be using our thoughts to try and save us. And it will work for a little bit, but it doesn't provide us with any long-term relief, which is why I believe worry is addictive.

Worry fires, up dopamine in your system. What worry does is it makes the uncertain, which we hate, children that have had trauma, hate uncertainty more than almost anything else. But what worry does is it makes the uncertain a little more certain. If you worry that you have cancer, well, it's like, at least now I know what it is. It's cancer, right? But then you think, well, it's cancer. So you get in this loop of believing that your worry is going to help you. And for a second in your brain, the worry makes the uncertain a little more certain, so you feel a little better. And then you realize, oh well that's not making me feel better at all and that's the definition of addiction is like doing

something over and over that's not helpful that just gets you worse and worse and worse but in the short term it feels like it helps you so you get that little dopamine hit from worry and that's why people get addicted to worry because we do get a little dopamine hit from it but we believe the worries and then the alarm just gets worse and over the course of time we just make ourselves worse you're the first person that i heard that from in your book that worry releases dopamine and that we get a to worry. And I think that is worth dwelling on because it is a fascinating take on it. I was looking at some of the research after I read that. And I was like, oh my gosh, there are so many studies that literally show that we can get addicted to our own anxiety, which blew my mind

open a little bit. Yeah. And it becomes familiar too. Like the thing about human beings is that we equate familiarity with security as children. So if you had a father that yelled at you, you might pick a partner that's abusive because even though it's harmful to you, it was familiar to you as a child. As a family doctor, I would see people picking the same type of person over and over again that sort of shared the same dysfunction as their family of origin. So if you grew up with a tuned attached parents, great, that's your template. But if you grew up with a parent who was narcissistic or abandoning or whatever, unconsciously, you will start gravitating towards those people. as partners in your adult life because you're replicating what was familiar to you in childhood because your brain assumes what was familiar was safe. And that's why trauma can be so insidious

because we just keep repeating. My friend Nima calls it different haircut, same person. That's why people pick the same type of person over and over again. And a lot of it's unconscious. But if we're aware of it, at least we can do something about it. At least we know, okay, well, this is my pattern. And that's what I tell people. What were you familiar with as a child? What was the pattern in your family that was familiar? And how are you repeating that in your adult life? I'm genuinely confused how masterclass gets literally the absolute top people in every single field to teach every single one of their classes. I use it when I want to learn things directly like the cooking class from Thomas Keller has all of the wisdom that you would normally have to go to culinary school for. But also, I'm being honest,

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Does the dopamine thing mean, and this might not be true at all, but this is where my brain went, does it mean that when we're doing other sort of dopamine inbalancing activities, like being on our phones a lot or being addicted to sugar or alcohol or substances, is that increasing our anxiety because it's increasing our dopamine imbalance? And on the flip side, if we're doing dopamine balancing activities like walks in nature, cold showers or things like that, will that decrease our anxiety because it's balancing

our dopamine levels? Over time, yeah. But initially, if I tell people to meditate, which I don't typically do with anxiety, because anxiety is a problem with overthinking. So if I all of a sudden make your mind quiet, that can be very destabilizing for people. So I don't actually recommend meditation for people with anxiety initially. If you have a meditation practice, great. But it is one of those things that can actually make your anxiety worse. So it's really learning to slow your system down. So, Yes, as we become more dopamine dependent, more dependent on external gratification, immediate gratification, we're kind of teaching our brains to stay out of our body. We're looking for something in our mind over and over and over again. When you're in your mind, if you have old trauma that's trapped in your body, you don't want to go down there. You don't want to go down in the feeling town because that's uncomfortable. But that's where you have to go to truly heal.

So that's why I think we have become this sort of dopamine-driven immediate gratifications. society because a lot of us have pain. As the society gets more troubled, the parents are more troubled, and that gets put down into the children. So we're creating the society of more trauma, and one of the ways of escaping trauma is dissociating, is going into that dopaminergic system, but we can bleed it out. I see this a lot with kids going off to college or university. They've been handling their anxiety kind of okay up until then using their phone but once they get away to a you know three thousand miles away in a different place their phone doesn't work anymore and they kind of collapse because they've never really learned that ability to stay quiet and present with themselves because they've always

had this phone they've always had this sort of distraction so we're getting into this sort of immediate gratification which does work in the short term but eventually it stops working and then we keep hammering away at it like it's going to help us and it does It just makes it worse. So again, it's an addiction. I want to go back to the second part of that phrase you said in your book that anxiety is a combination of overestimating threats and underestimating our courage to deal with them. Because I think it's such a powerful way to put it. Is there a way that we can begin to have more faith in our ability to deal with threats to know that if we did have a medical ailment, we'd be able to deal with it.

if we were an emergency situation, we're equipped to handle that. Well, the thing is, we are. People who are anxious have been practicing the worst case scenario for so long that what I see with people is when crappy things happen to people who are anxious, they all of a sudden go into this kind of almost Zen state where they think they're going to freak out. They think they're going to lose it. But when they're actually faced with something real as opposed to what's been in their mind the whole time, they handle it actually really, really well most of the time.

So that's what I mean about, you know, we underestimate our ability to handle it because there's part of our brain called the prefrontal cortex and the premotor area, which is in the very front part of our brain, that allows us to kind of look at things objectively. Now, unfortunately, when we get into survival physiology, we secrete noraphyan and dopamine and all these other sort of energizing chemicals, we paralyze that rational part of our brain. So not only do we make more threats, more worries in our mind, but we lose the part of our brain that would actually say, hey, this is nothing to worry about. So we make more threats and then we believe the threats. This is why we underestimate our ability to deal with it because the part of our brain that would

help us deal with it has actually been shut off by the survival physiology that we've put ourselves into. So it's the fault of our human wiring in a way that our rational mind leaves us when we need it the most. And that's why people underestimate their ability because the part of your brain that would help you deal with it has been shut off by the survival chemicals of anxiety. So of course you're going to feel like you can't deal with something. And then once your body comes back online and you're relaxed,

you kind of go three hours later, you go, why did I get so upset about that? Like that wasn't such a big deal. But if you look back on it, like the wedding thing, is that your body was so hyped up with sympathetic overdrive and high blood pressure, high heart rate, all that kind of stuff, that you lost the ability to rationally look at the situation. And then when your body comes back online, you look back and you go, why don't I freak out about that? That's really not such a big deal.

Is there anything that we can do to either prepare for that moment so that in general we have more faith in our ability to deal with stuff or that we can do directly in that moment to kind of talk us down and maybe even change ourselves neurochemically? I think it's practice too. One of the things that I tell people is if I told you in three months, I'm going to take you to the basketball court and I'm going to get you to shoot 10 free throws. And if you make three of them, I'm going to give you $5 million. Now, are you going to start practicing the day before? No, you're going to start practicing every single day.

So that's what I mean about just sort of sitting in your body every day and doing some breath work, doing some touch work with yourself. And a lot of my programs talk about how you do this. and developing that resilience, that strength within you so that when you do face something, because life goes crappy on us sometimes, when we do face that, we've developed this resilience, this capacity in our nervous system to handle it. But if we're just going to do deep breathing when we're faced with a threat, that's not going to work very well. So it's a practice.

It really is a practice about getting back into your body, learning how to stay out of your head when you're alarmed. like learning how this is not going to help me by going into my head. My brain will tell me I have the answer. It's more thinking. I have the answer. But you have to really get into your own system and go, you know what? I'm going to be much better off if I go into my sensation, if I go into my breath, if I stay grounded, if I feel my butt in the chair, if I relax my jaw.

And I learn that as a practice. And you don't have to go into full meditation or anything like that. But what you do is every day is you take like five minutes where you put your phone down and you do breathe. You do put your hand on your chest or you do go for a walk in nature. And when you're walking in nature, you're not looking at your phone. You're looking up. That's the other thing too is you look up because when we get stressed, we look down. And looking down kind of tells our brain there's a threat.

And that's why when we look into a water horizon, we feel relaxed because our eyes are looking up and there's nothing to focus on. immediate threat coming at us. So I think it's really important to understand if you move your eyes from side to side, it's been shown to calm the activity in the amygdala. And the amygdala is one of those places in our brain that really mediates just about every threat, fear response that we have. So when you move your eyes side to side like that, and I think this is one of the bases of EMDR, it does calm the amygdala. And when the amygdala gets calm, it does send that message to our body that we're okay. There's a bunch of things we can do, but again, it's practice. For the moving your eyes side to side thing, would that be in the context of like EMDR therapy,

or would that just be even activated if you're taking a walk and like looking at things on both sides of the street? Yeah, I mean, we do that automatically when we're walking. Is it just unconsciously, we will sort of scan side to side. But when you make a conscious effort at doing it, there's something about moving your eyes, not up and down, but side to side. And when I do it, I really sort of do it slowly. I really focus on what I can see. And there is something that does actually calm your amygdala when you move your eyes from side to side. The other thing that I think is really important is just sort of getting out into a place where you're not in a box. You can actually look out over horizon or something like that, because that does tend to give us this sense of peace. And

and calm in our nervous system and our brain as well. So it's really important to understand that these are physiological things. These are things we can do. But because we anxious people are so used to being hypervigilant, we will resist doing those things because we assume that we're going to let down our guard, like you were saying before. And if I let down my guard, what's going to happen, which is basically a very childlike way of looking at the world,

when actually when you do do these practices and you learn them, you're teaching yourself over time how to heal. as opposed to just how to cope. I love having a neuroscientific explanation for why going for a walk makes me feel better. That's very cool. Let's go back to the childhood trauma thing for a second. From a neuroscience perspective, what is happening that makes our childhood trauma show up as anxiety today? Well, I think what happens is we get into a state of alarm when we're a child.

And that alarm isn't regulated. I used to play this game with my daughter when I was in med school called Sea Monster. And Leander would run into the room and she would yell out Sea Monster. And then I would jump up and chase her around the house like, ah! And she'd scream and yell. And then we'd have a little cuddle on the couch. So I didn't know it at the time, but what I was doing was I was teaching her autonomic nervous system. I can fire you into fight or flight.

I can fire you right up into the highest level of sympathetic fighter flight. But within five minutes, I can bring you right back down into that parasympathetic, that relaxation stage. Now as children, we don't have that because if we have an alcoholic parent or a parent who's abusive or whatever, we don't have that ability to calm down. So we don't learn that we can go up into high sympathetic activity, fight or flight, and then come back down again. So we stay in this kind of higher level of vigilance. And when you're in that vigilant level, your brain, which is a meaning making makes sense machine, it says, okay, well, my body is really active. What's the threat? because that's what it's going to look for, especially the left hemisphere, because it has to find a reason.

It has to know. So it will develop all these sort of threats that will keep you in that high sympathetic tone state. So one of the things that trauma does to us, it puts us into this hypervigilant sort of leaning towards the fight or flight side of our nervous system rather than the parasympathetic rest and digest. I think that we anxious people have a set point towards the sympathetic, towards the fighter flight. And I think we have to learn, we have to teach ourselves to move that set point down towards the parasympathetic. And I think we only do that by breathwork, going out for walks in nature, connecting with

ourselves, allowing our breath to kind of just bring our nervous system into a state of relaxation because our natural inclination is to stay vigilant because we assume, and this is a very childlike thing, that if we're vigilant, we're safe. you're aware your entire system by constantly being on the lookout for threat. So you never allow yourself to feel safe. And then chapter 62 in my book is when it's not safe to feel safe. So a lot of us as children would go through these periods. I see this a lot with my patients who had alcoholism in their family.

So often there be a huge like binge and a blowout and a lot of yelling and screaming. And then there be an apology and then everything would be calm and quiet for a while. In fact, maybe the alcoholic parent would be like, we'll get ice cream, we'll get this, you know, I'm sorry, we'll never do it again. And then two weeks later, the whole thing just blows up again. So after a while in a child's mind and body, it's like, well, there's no point in me kind of relaxing and letting my guard down. And in fact, when I do let my guard down, when I do feel a period of quiet, I know unconsciously that everything's going to blow up. And they take that into adulthood. So they get into a relationship. So they get into a

relationship and they're so used to things blowing up that they're always vigilantly waiting for the next blowout. So they don't feel safe, feeling safe. They don't feel safe, feeling quiet because the quiet was always followed by some sort of disaster when they were younger. So when you don't feel safe, feeling safe, it's almost impossible to heal. So you have to train yourself that safety is okay. You know, one of the ways of doing that is breathwork and taking walks and meditating or whatever you need to do. But you have to train your nervous system to move out of that kind of set point of high fight or flight and move towards that it is safe to feel safe. And your nervous system has to do this gradually.

You can't do this all of a sudden because it will resist. The exact thing is it will resist safety because of what safety meant for you as a child. So that's, again, why it's so hard for me to help people heal from anxiety because when I start feeling safe, it's like, well, when I felt safe as a child, everything blew up. So I have to keep vigilant. It's repetition. It's just constant practice. And then over the course of time, things start to ease off.

And then you start really seeing, hey, my life is so much better if I just let things calm down. If I accept the possibility that things could go bad. But I know that I'll be resilient if I allow myself to rest in between. If I don't allow myself to rest in between when things happen, things tend to go bad. This is a weird question, but do you think everybody is resilient? Like for the person listening who's like, well, I'm actually not resilient. What would you say to them? Anxious people underestimate how resilient they are.

They really do. Because if you look at the stuff that you've had to handle, right? You've done it. We underestimate this ability to deal with things when we're a lot more resilient than what we believe because anxious people have to do everything that everybody else does. Raise our kids, go to school, go to work, go to the kids, go to the kids, grocery store, but we do it with 100 pounds of fear in our back. So we get pretty resilient over time, but it does tend to wear us out over time. And that's the dichotomy. That's the back

and forth between it. And that's why it's so important to start, you know, connecting with your body. I have a lot of people that see me that have been in therapy for 20 years and they're not a a whole lot better from their anxiety because we're trying to fix the mind and the mind isn't the root cause of the problem. It's this fact that your body is hypervigilant and we have to move you away into a place where you're calmer in your body and then naturally your mind will become more calm. The fly in the ointment of this whole thing is when you start becoming more calm and healing, you don't trust it because the child in you believes that you have to maintain this hypervigilance and this worry to stay safe when it's actually the opposite. Do you think that getting into your body

is the key to dealing with the root cause of anxiety or do you think you also or perhaps instead of that addressing your childhood trauma is going to be getting at the root cause of anxiety. I think you do both at the same time. One of the things that I do with people is I find the alarm in their body. So when they're feeling anxious, I say, okay, let's just relax your shoulders, relax your jaw, feel your butt in the chair, feel the earth, you know, supporting you. And let's go into, you know, your mom yelling at you, you know, or you've gained a little bit of weight and your mom's like, you know, I see you're gaining weight.

You've got to stop doing that. it's like okay where in your body do you feel that and they'll say well there's this sort of pressure in my throat it's like okay well let's stay with that if you're okay with that it's not too much it's like no it's okay so how big is it grape golf ball baseball can'telope it's like um maybe a baseball whatever does it have a temperature hot cold warm it's like kind of hot and is it a pressure or a pain it's like a pressure does it have a color to it it may not have a color it's like yeah it's it's blue it's like really intense blue or gray so i get them to find their alarm and then put their hand over the alarm and like breathe into it and stay with it and often that helps automatically a

lot of people it'll bring tears up because they really haven't found the child in them for so long and then i'll say you know just relax for a second how old are you and i said just give me your immediate answer. It's like, I'm six. It's like, okay. You know, what happened when you were six? Well, when I was six, I was riding my bike and I came around the corner and I saw a for sale sign on my lawn, which I knew my parents were getting divorced. So we go into that sense of alarm and we go back and we find that six-year-old. We find that child and we show them that they're seeing heard, loved, and protected. And that starts their healing. So I think we get into this idea that anxiety is something. in our mind that we have to sort of fix our thoughts. And really, again, it's just a symptom.

The underlying root cause is this old state of alarm that's still locked inside of us in our body. And if we can find that alarm and see it as our younger self, after 35 plus years of my own therapies of every type that didn't work, this was the only thing that really helped me. So finding this alarm and then teaching people about their alarm and showing them the true root cause of their anxiety is this alarm, which is their younger self locked inside of their body. It doesn't have to be a massive trauma. A lot of people say, you know, my parents were great. And then I'll find out that, you know, when they were three months old, they were in an incubator for a month or their mother went into a hospital for six weeks and they were separated.

You know, there's a lot of things that create anxiety in a human being and create alarm in a human being. And then the mind kind of after the fact reads this alarm in our body and has to make sense of it. It brings up worries. And we get a dopamine hit from that because it makes sense to us. But the things that we make up, the worries that we make up may make sense to us, but they may not be the actual cause of the problem. The cause of the problem is this old unresolved sense of alarm that's still inside of you. And that's what we have to heal. That's the root cause. If we can heal the root cause, the anxiety just goes away. You say that once you're sort of identifying that child in the root of your alarm and your

body, you're going to make them feel seeing heard safe, protected. How do we actually do that? I have a process called Yoga Nidra that I use in some of my programs that actually get you into that sense of that child. Close your eyes, relax your shoulder, relax your jaw, feel the support. can you see the eyes of your child? Most people can. And what are they wearing? How old are they? Can you find that child? Because that's the root cause of your anxiety. And so that's a lot of what I'll do is either through like a meditative process, I make these things called hypnomeditations, which have binoral beats behind them

and my voice that kind of directs you into finding this younger version of yourself. And once you connect with that, younger version of yourself and they feel seen heard loved and protected, a lot of that alarm that they carry kind of falls away because they've been looking for you their whole lives. Like their whole child life, they've been looking for someone who acts as a parent who will look after them, see them, hear them, love them, and protect them. And once you start giving them that, they may not accept it right away because they've been so used to just sort of living on their own in their own little world of threat and fear. But once you start showing them this a different way, I find most people will find that different way and will start gravitating toward this internal connection.

Once you start connecting those two together, mind and body and adult and child self, then you really start to heal the root cause of the issue. I've done the meditations where you look at pictures of your childhood self or you try to talk kindly to them. And I'm always like, I feel a little fake or silly and I'm always like, is this working? Absolutely. It does feel very, very destabilizing at first. That's where the persistence comes in. You have to be consistent because one of the things that child didn't get was consistency. They won't trust the odd like, hey, throw them a little bone here.

You have to be consistent with them because that's what they didn't get when they were a child. They didn't get a consistent parent. Even like five or ten minutes a day, even two minutes a couple times a day. just finding the alarm in your body, put your hand over it, connecting with it. It does feel initially quite disingenuous because I think the childness, just like, I don't know if I trust this. I don't know if I trust adult you because you've been ignoring me for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. I don't know if I can trust you now. And that's where the consistency comes in. Does the process work if your anxiety is rooted in something that happened as an adult,

like you had a traumatic medical event or you experienced violence or anything like that? Yeah, it's a good question. A lot of the research is showing 80% of your brain development is in the first five years of your life. So if you had a loving, caring, attuned environment in the first five years of your life, you seem to be quite resilient to adult problems. So they look at combat PTSD in veterans is 20 times more likely, something like that, in soldiers who had childhood trauma than those that didn't. What I see a lot with people is they'll be treading water as a child.

They had some trauma. It wasn't huge. Their parents were okay or whatever. And then they'll get some sort of event, car accident, divorce or whatever, and that will fire them into anxiety. But if I look back, I will find something in their childhood that kind of set the stage for this. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energy,

to recover well, to stay strong as you get older. What do you think that actually comes from? Most people say working out or good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline and what I've learned has genuinely shifted how I think about my own health. Every single movement that your body makes every step, every workout, every muscle contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria. Here's the thing that nobody tells you, certainly nobody told me, starting around age 30, our mitochondria naturally become less efficient.

More get damaged, more become sluggish, and over time that impacts your energy, your strength, your recovery, and your resilience. Most of us respond by pushing more. We're like noticing these things and we're adding in more protein. We're trying to fix it with more supplements. We're trying to do harder workouts, and those things do help. But Timelines research suggests that we also need to be supporting the cellular machinery underneath, and that is exactly what their supplement mitopure does. It contains urolithin A, which helps your body clear out damage mitochondria and support healthier ones so that your cells can produce energy more efficiently. Because this is happening to your cells, it's going to impact your entire body, your immune system, your muscles. One study

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We're using this for literally everything. And it works so well. Everything gets so clean. And I know that I'm protecting myself from all of those long-term issues too. And I'm protecting my kittens who are much tinier than me. So anything they're exposed to has a much greater impact on their little tiny systems. And they're running around on their little paws and then they're licking them. So I'm protecting them too.

Branch Basics is now available at Target, Target.com, Amazon, and branchbasics.com, so it's easier than ever to make the switch. And if you want to grab their premium starter kit, you can use code Liz Moody for 15% off at branchbasics.com. That's code Liz Moody for 15% off the premium starter kit at branchbasics.com. And when they ask you where you heard about us, please make sure to mention the show. That is branchbasics.com and use code Liz Moody. I also think that there's guilt sometimes in acknowledging your childhood trauma. Like for me, there were other people involved who I feel got it worse, essentially. So when I admit like this was traumatic to me, I feel like I'm discounting, disregarding,

or not giving credence to their situation. And so I do think that it's a really tricky thing to navigate. I didn't admit for a really long time that I had childhood trauma because I felt so guilty about the other people involved to experience it worse? Yeah. We can all sort of compare our traumas. I think every child is traumatized to some extent. It just depends on how good your parenting was.

Because if your parenting is good and you're bullied at school or you experience a health thing, but your parents are there for you, you resolve that trauma at the time it happens. But if your parents aren't that good, you can have a relatively minor, and I put that in quotation mark, trauma, but because you're a sensitive person to start with,

a trauma that really affects you may not affect the less sensitive person. And I think everybody I see with chronic anxiety was born a sensitive person. You don't need a huge trauma as a sensitive person to wind up having it lodged in your body and create anxiety in your adulthood. As a family doctor, I would see children who came from loving, caring families who say lost an uncle, like the died in a car accident or whatever. three years on, they're okay. You know, it still hurts them, but they're okay.

And then I see other families that lose a goldfish or something like that, like something relatively trivial, and they're still traumatized five years on because the family carries this trauma as well. And that's a whole other topic is inherited family trauma. So I think that we're born with this inherent sensitivity, for one, and we can also be born with the trauma of our family as well. So it's a combination of things. So when people get into, you know, well, that's a problem.

person was sexually abused, I didn't have it that bad. It's like, well, your nervous system is really sensitive. So it takes much less, quote-unquote, trauma to lodge in your body as alarm that creates a long-term problem for you. Yeah. My parents were the ones that I'm always like, they had it worse. So they're the ones that I feel the guilt about, which is its own complicated dynamic. When you say we're born more sensitive or not more sensitive, I think there's a huge discourse in the mental health world about what component is genetic, what component is a brain chemistry issue. What is your stance on all of that? Good question. I think that sensitivity is kind of genetic and temperament is kind of genetic. Some kids are just kind of happy go lucky. Some kids are vigilant. They're like hyper. As the society gets more

stressed, I think our children feel it. I think more kids are born sensitive today than in the 1950s, just because of the environment. More kids are sensitive. More kids are anxious. Now, part of that is their screens as well because they're so used to going to something to distract them from their pain. Whereas when I was younger, if you were bored, you were bored, there was no Instagram. You had to deal with it, right?

There's also something in our system called the social engagement system, which is basically eye contact, tone of voice, prosity of voice, body language, and facial expression. So those things as children mature our brains. So when we're playing with other kids, which we used to do when we were younger, we would see, you know, a kid get hurt and see their face or we would see them score the winning goal and be elated. So we would learn through mirror neurons and other things that this is how our brains interact. And this is how we learn how to soothe other people and also how we learn to sue themselves. But because kids are so linked into their screens now, they're not. getting that face-to-face interaction. They're not maturing that social engagement system.

So they're not able to soothe themselves. They're not able to sue others. Empathy is also dropping with kids. In a digital world, we're losing this face-to-face brain maturation that we need to become functional human beings, which is one of the reasons why I think our kids have so much more anxiety. But also, I think that the world is just more of a tense place. And I think we're energetically, the kids now are born into a more stressful world. If they're born in the 1950s with this sensitivity, they probably would have been fine. But now there's just so much more sensitivity. And on top of that, there's all these screens that don't allow them to mature themselves, mature their brains, that our society is kind of suffering for that.

How do you feel about the notion that there's a chemical imbalance in your brain and it can only be corrected with prescription chemicals? And that's just the root you have to take. Yeah, it's a really tough one. There's a lot of things in our brain. There's serotonin. There's also neuropeptides, smaller chain stuff that affects our brains as well. And the thing about what I would find when I would prescribe antidepressants for people is in about 20% of people, it actually made a real difference. And in about 20% of people, it made a bit of a difference in the other 60. It either didn't work or causes such horrendous side effects that they couldn't do it. But there were people that really benefited from it. And if you look at the serotonin receptor system,

There's 12 serotonin receptors. I think the people that have the serotonin receptors that are attuned to the antidepressant, say number one and number two out of the 12, if you have an antidepressant that hipes up those particular receptors and you have a lot of those receptors in your brain, you'll probably respond fairly well to an antidepressant. But if you don't have a lot of type 1 and type 2, say you have a lot of type 11, type 12,

you can take all the Prozac you want. and because you don't have a preponderance of that particular serotonin receptor that is reactive to that particular chemical, it's not going to help you. So I think antidepressants do help a subset of people because I experience that as a clinician. So I'm not like anti-antidpressant by any means at all. But as far as saying it's a chemical imbalance, I mean, yeah, we can say sadness is a chemical imbalance at the immediate time that you feel it. Sure, there's some sort of chemical going on there.

But is it a chronic chemical imbalance? Is it something that is fixable? And the thing about the brain is, if you start giving the brain a whack of dopamine, it will go the opposite way. So the brain is always evolving. So when you give it something, the brain will always change itself to adapt to whatever. That's why people need more and more of the antidepressant over the course of time. So whatever you do one thing to the brain, it reacts in a different way. And everybody's a little bit different.

So it's really hard to say, you know, is it a chemical imbalance? Yeah, kind of. In the short term, sure it is. But in the longer term, something we can predict and control and say this is the problem. No, I don't think we can say that. I'm going to do a speed round in a second, but first I'd love to get your thoughts specifically on two things. One, if you have any tips specifically for hypochondria, it's something that I really struggle

with. And also as I've gotten older, I've had more friends actually get cancer or have medical issues or things like that. And so it feels like I can't talk myself. down for a bit in the same way. I know you're going to be like, well, that's because you're trying to talk yourself down, like, mentally. That is true because health anxiety, social anxiety, it's all anxiety. Like, it all comes from the same route. There's that rational stuff where you go, well, this is irrational. But the thing is, if there's a one and a thousand chance,

your mind is still going to hook into that one. Using your mind is not really going to be all that helpful. So it's really about going at the root cause. It's healing the alarm place. Anything that I give you cognitively in your mind is going to be temporary and your mind is going to find a work around to still allow you to be anxious about your health. So it's going back into your body? Yeah, because you perceive, like at some level, we perceive that the health anxiety, even though it's very painful, is somehow familiar and protective. So that's why we do it.

So I'm keeping myself vigilant because if I keep myself vigilant, I won't get cancer. I won't get heart disease. Now, that's not the issue. If I give you a cognitive solution to it, your mind will find a workaround to be able to keep you in that what you perceive is a protective mechanism. So really, we have to go with the underlying root causeable. I'm sorry there isn't a quick fix, you know, but it's a form of anxiety. And really, all anxiety comes from separation.

And it's typically separation from you and yourself and you and your child's self. I think it's helpful even to be like, oh, so you don't need a cerebral fix for. For each individual anxiety, they're all going to come back to going into the alarm in your body and then connecting to your childhood self. Yeah, absolutely. Would you say that's true for existential anxiety as well? Like fear of death, fear that you're not living the right life, that type of fear. Yeah. It's fundamentally a disconnect.

You're living in your head. When you live in your body, when you live in your senses, even though that those senses can be uncomfortable sometimes, it's a much better place to live. and you actually feel like you're living. When you live in your head, 10 years will go by and you're like, I don't really felt like I've been living in the last 10 years. You've been living in your head. Your amygdala has no sense of time.

And not that everybody can live in their body all the time, but just make an effort to live in your body a little more often, you'll mark time a lot more. And a lot of people that have a fear of death are basically just living in their head because it's a mind-based fear more than anything else. to go with the root cause of that, living in your body, even if it's uncomfortable. It's tolerating that sense, taking all comers in life, like taking the pain, you know,

a breakup, you know, but also feeling the elation of having a child or whatever. Like you feel both. And I think a lot of us with anxiety kind of live life between a four and a six, you know, if zero is the worst and 10 is the best you've ever felt, a lot of people with anxiety will push themselves into this narrow range where they don't feel too good, but they don't feel too bad either. It's not a way to live. You're living outside of, you're living in a neck up world and there's no real peace or grounding in your head, in your brain. I feel called out. I feel seen. I feel seen. Okay, let's do a quick fire. These are just various hacks from TikTok

and from the internet. And I want to give your take on if there's any science behind them. Let's start with smelling citrus, particularly orange. Sure. Well, any smell, because if you look at the Ryan encephalon, which is kind of like the fancy neuroscience name for the smell brain, it goes immediately into the emotional part of our brain. So smell is one of those things that doesn't get processed by a nucleus in our brain called the thalamus. And the thalamus is kind of like a central switchboard of the brain. So touch, sight, all that stuff gets kind of pre-processed through the thalamus. But smell doesn't get pre-processed. So it goes immediately into the emotional part of our brain. So yeah, essential oil, find an essential oil that you like, lavender, camomile, whatever.

and when you feel stressed, absolutely breathe that in. It helps. Oh, interesting. So it's less about the specific compounds of the essential oil and more just the act of smelling makes your brain work in this different way. And something you like, too, that calms you. There's no point in smelling citrus if you had a bad experience where you got hit in the face with an orange as a teenager and citrus fires you into alarm. Like, that's not going to help you. But finding a smell that you like. Typically, chamomile and lavender are the two that are the most calming that I find for people in general. Giving your anxiety a name and personality.

Yeah, you're making it more cognitive in a way, and you're kind of taking yourself away from the overall healing. These short-term solutions kind of keep us away from the long-term healing. And that's one of the things. Like, I'm all for short-term solutions, but you actually have to do the body work as well. You have to do that connection with yourself work as well, because what some people will do because we don't want to go into the body, because that's where all our old pain is, is that we'll develop all these coping strategies and we'll use these coping strategy, even breath. So we use these coping strategies because they allow us to tread water and they help us cope, but they don't help us heal. Okay. So the coping is good as long as we're also doing

the deeper healing. Provided you're doing the long-term work as well. What about ice? There's a lot of talk about you can dunk your face in ice. You can put ice on your chest. You can put ice in your hands. I think they're supposed to all regulate the vagus nerve. Is there validity to that? Yeah, there is. It evokes the mammalian diving reflex. So it lowers your heart rate. It lowers your blood pressure. It sends a message to your brain stem, the bottom part of your brain, that you're safe. Even though the cold is there.

As you drop your heart rate, you drop your blood pressure, it sends an internal body message that you're okay. You're safe. Okay. That's a nice in the moment hack. Yeah. It's a coping strategy. It's helpful in the short term, but you know, you have to do the long term work as well.

What about things that you consume different supplements, magnesium glycinate, There's Ashwaganda, people talk about Kava. What do you think about those types of things? I think if it works for you, great. Thienine is another one that's helpful. Magnolia bark. There's a bunch of supplements that people take that seem to help them. It helps you cope for sure, but you have to do the inner work too.

The downside of supplements is they can be kind of expensive. Theanin can be kind of expensive. Do you have any favorite ones if somebody wanted to experiment with a supplement in their coping part to get them in the place where they can do that deeper work? Starting with magnesium is probably a good one, but be careful you're taking too much of it because it'll activate your gut and you'll get diarrhea if you take too much of it. It can calm people. Like magnesium is one of those ones that helps. For some people, magnesium will help them and other people won't do a darn thing.

So it's just trial and error. Magnesium's actually having sort of like a calming impact on the electrical impulses of your brain, isn't it? Theoretically, yeah. It's a two plus ion. So, you know, theoretically. What about jumping up and down because the idea is, your fight or flight response wants you to mobilize. So when you're sitting still, you're not mobilizing.

Yes, absolutely. A lot of anxiety is freeze. So we don't want to move because a lot of times when we were younger, we were kind of frozen in a situation we didn't want to be in. So when we move, we actually create that mind-body connection again. So yeah, jumping up and down, dancing, whatever it takes. But move your mind, get your mind and your body active, get them back together again. Do you have any other easy ways that we can begin to facilitate that mind-body connection in our lives?

Yeah, I think the physiological sigh is helpful. Two sniffs in and then a long, slow exhale. I think that's really helpful, like do a bunch of rounds of that. Probably the most effective short-term solution for acute anxiety is that physiological side. That's what I would do. Can you leave us with just one homework assignment? If somebody listening to this is like, I'm on board. I want to heal my anxiety.

I want to start this process. What can I do today? What's one thing they could do as soon as they turn off this podcast? When you're feeling anxious, look into your body. Don't look into your mind. So if you're worried about your kids or your relationship or whatever, it's like, where am I feeling this in my body? And a lot of times it'll be in the midline, like throat, heart, solar plexes, that kind of

stuff. And if you feel it, put your hand over it and just sort of connect with it because I do believe that that is your younger self. asking for your attention, and that's why you're anxious in the first place. So just get out of your head. You're not going to find the solution in your mind. As much as your mind will tell you that worrying will help you, it will not. And it just go into your body instead of your mind. Because when you go into your body, the sensation of your body brings you in at the present moment. And the energy that you previously directed into all the worries of your mind is now directed into the sensation of your body

in the present moment, which is the only place that we can heal. And all you're doing, at the beginning for this first step is just feeling it. You don't need to try to push it away. You don't need to try to accept it. You're just feeling it. Yep. And then I have programs. If you go to the anxiety MD, I have a mind-body program. I have my book that explains a very different way of looking at anxiety that actually allowed me to heal after 35 years. Do you want to take a second to just tell people where they can find all of your work and what they will find there? Instagram is probably the best at the anxiety MD. My website is the

anxiety MD. Everything is the anxiety MD. But it really is about creating a sense of peace inside of yourself. And that's what my book does. That's what the program does. And I make the program really accessible for people like, I think it's like $100 and cheaper than one therapy session. And it will save people literally thousands and thousands of dollars in therapy because it'll give you an understanding of what your anxiety really is and how you really fix it as opposed to a lot of the stuff that's out there that will tell you that they'll fix your anxiety in seven days, which is impossible. I love that.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today and for sharing all of this incredible information. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Liz. It's been really nice talking with you. Thank you so much. You can kind of hear me having a hard time getting my head around Dr. Kennedy's tips at the beginning, and then it was so interesting to have him identify the part of me that

was resisting his message and how that was very much a product of my childhood and my anxious brain. I have been thinking a ton about our conversations since we chatted, especially the idea that I need to practice showing up for myself day after day, even when it feels silly, even when I don't believe it, because I don't have that trust foundation from my childhood. I've actually been feeling anxious a lot lately, and I've used the opportunity to try to feel into my body and get out of my brain, and I do think that it's helping. I hope that you got a ton out of this episode. And if you know someone that you think would benefit, please send them a link. I am so happy that anxiety is being talked about more and more openly. And this episode could be a

great conversation starter for you and someone you love. Text them, mention it the next time you see them, send them an email. It is the best way to start these conversations, to help the people that you love, and to support the podcast. If you're new here, if you're the recipient of one of those links, welcome to the family. I am so glad that you're here. Make sure that you are following the podcast. on whatever platform you like to listen on. Just go to the main podcast page. It's the one that lists all of the healthier together episodes. And you'll see the word follow under the logo on Spotify.

And then there's a little follow with a plus sign button on the top right of that same page on Apple Podcasts. That way, all of the new episodes will show up in your feed so you will never miss out on one. And you are definitely going to want to be following along because we have some amazing episodes coming up, including when outlining everything that you need to know about I envision health and an episode all about the choice to be. be child-free. So make sure that you are following so you do not miss out. And before I let you go, let's talk giveaway. Dr. Kennedy so generously offered to give away access to his mind-body prescription program that he mentioned in the episode to two winners. The online course will help you gain a new understanding of anxiety, address the real cause of it, including

underlying unresolved trauma, and address your anxiety at the root in your mind and your body. You will get lifetime access to the material so you can go at your own pace. It's so that So valuable. All you need to do to enter is to follow me at Liz Moody and Dr. Kennedy. He is at the Anxiety MD on Instagram and comment on any of my recent post, something that you loved or learned from this conversation. It does not need to be a post about this episode. Just be sure to mention something from the episode so I know which giveaway you are entering. Also, do not forget to go check out my book, A Hundred Ways to Change Your Life.com.

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