Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Why Are You So Anxious? Transforming Your Anxiety into Passion with Dr. Martha Beck

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

Dr. Martha Beck explores the pervasive issue of anxiety in contemporary society and analyzing its cultural roots. This episode illuminates how our modern environment exacerbates anxiety and offers strategies to counteract this. Dr. Martha and Dr. Mindy highlight the importance of creativity and connection in cultivating inner peace, suggesting practices such as creating a sanctuary filled with calming glimmers and engaging in creative activities. They also touch on the wisdom inherent in older women and the potential for societal transformation through nurturing the creative and compassionate sides of the brain. *NOTE: If you want to see Dr. Mindy's artwork, please go to her YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@TheResetterPodcast To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep253 Dr. Martha Beck is a New York Times bestselling author, life coach, and speaker. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science, and Oprah Winfrey has called her "one of the smartest women I know." Martha is a passionate and engaging teacher, known for her unique combination of science, humor, and spirituality. Her recent book, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self, was an instant New York Times Best Seller and an Oprah's Book Club selection. Her next book, Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose, is expected in early 2025. Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.

On this episode of The Resetter Podcast, I have brought you Dr. Martha back. If you're not familiar with her, you're going to want to be. She is a prolific author. That's where I'm going to start. And one of the reasons I wanted to bring her on was to talk about her new book around anxiety. And I'll share the highlights in a moment. She's a deep thinker.

She is a thought leader. if you have not dipped into her other books, she is bringing new thoughts to old questions. And one of the questions we answer is why is everybody so anxious? She is a New York Times bestselling author. She has degrees from Harvard in social science. And in this conversation, you're going to hear her talk about why it's so important that we are looking at our mental health through the lens of both our left side of our brain, which is our logical brain and the right side of our brain, which is our creative brain.

So in this conversation, not only does she talk about this new environment, the anxiety-producing environment we are all living in, but she then shares how we have lost access to certain parts of our brain through daily behaviors and what we prioritize. So if you are looking for the fun door out of anxiety, you're about to get it. Because instead of telling us all to stop stressing and to do more of something, she's going to give us all permission to play and permission to create. And she's going to give you some strategies that you can apply immediately to start to train your brain to see love and see possibility and see connection.

And it's not by diving into the hard things. It's about embracing the fun things. And so please listen all the way through this conversation because there's a couple things I want to tell you. For starters, about midway through, we geeked out on art. And then she asked me what kind of art I did. And I shared with her a new art technique that I am just a step. student of. And she wanted to see pictures of it. So I brought up my pictures. And you can go and watch

this episode so you can understand this type of art that I'm just a student of. I am not a teacher of. If you go to YouTube.com slash resetter podcast, it is on my resetter podcast YouTube channel. You can see us geeking out on the type of art that I've been using to lower my anxiety. but what I also love about this incredibly brilliant woman is that you'll hear it at the end where she takes what may just be a highly entertaining discussion. I hope it's highly entertaining for you. And she at the end sums it up and says, what Martha and I did in this conversation is the door out of anxiety.

And if you catch where we started off, off in the logical. And where we ended up in the middle, we went into the creative and fun. And then we ended up in a place of compassion and altruism and even talking about the wisdom of post-menopausal women. Where we ended up in this conversation matters. And it can show you how, without even knowing, she took me from a place of a brain that could have been anxious, was very intense.

about having a logical discussion. Somewhere in the middle, we ended up in random playfulness. And at the end, we settled into a beautiful heart connection. And that is something we can all do every single day. This is such a beautiful conversation in so many ways. I can't wait to bring it to you. And go check out her new book because it is ready for pre-order. It is teaching us how to undoing.

anxiety from a lens I have never witnessed before. So we'll leave links there. But most of all, I hope this brings you as much joy as it brought me. Welcome to the Resetter podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again. If you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. to start this conversation. We definitely have to start it at anxiety. But I really, the biggest question I am seen right now in the culture, in the cultural conversation is like, why does everybody have anxiety? I don't know if I've met a person who doesn't have anxiety right now. Why is that? Well, just to back you up, you are not imagining things. The documented prevalence of anxiety is

absolutely skyrocketing. The worldwide rate of anxiety is a full-blown disorder, increased by a full 25% during the pandemic, and then it didn't go down again. It keeps going up at an exponential level. And I believe the reason for this is that it's about the way humans think. Our brains have something called a negativity bias, where if we see two things, a fun puppy and a poisonous cobra, we're going to pay more attention to the cobra. Because that's a survival skill. But then we get into this, there's a part of the brain that grabs that negative impulse and starts to spin it into a story that scares us even more.

So we see a snake, we get scared, and then we start thinking there could be snakes everywhere. So now we're afraid of snakes that don't even exist. And this creates what I call an anxiety spiral in the brain. And it goes forward, forward, forward. But it's like those tire rippers you drive over when you leave a parking lot. You can't back up. I mean, it's hard to back up. You like have to get out and disassemble the machine a little bit in order to bring the anxiety back down.

So what's happening is individuals who are feeling that way have built an entire global culture that is working that way. And if you look at the news feeds or a lot of social media scrolls and things, it is just another externalized version of the anxiety inside our minds. that feeds back into our brains, feeds back out to society. So it's all these feedback circuits that are getting more and more and more anxiety and they never come back down again. Okay. So you said something in preparation for this interview, I caught a phrase that you used that I was like, whoa, that's so true.

And I'm going to mispronounce it, but it was something like an anxious genic environment. An angiogenic environment. Yeah. Did you come up with that word? Oh, no. I read that in a, in a peer-redued journal. Enginesicentic.

Oh, well, then it's a real world. That's right. If you can say a big, fancy word you've never heard before, you should be fine. That's right. No, angiagenet just means generating anxiety and everything around us culturally generates anxiety. generates anxiety. I'm looking out my window at the forest. I live in the forest in Pennsylvania.

I'm looking at these huge trees right outside my window. And just noticing that just the sight of that makes my entire nervous system calm down. Just a bit. Yep. Think about it until a few hundred years ago, which is an eye blink in evolutionary terms, people woke up hearing each other's voices, bird song, wind. maybe horses going by, no motors running, no electrical devices, no bright lights flashing at them. And that is the environment we evolved to work and live in.

But instead, we're in environments that are geared to get our attention. And the best way to get someone's attention is to get them a little bit anxious. So the bright lights that flash in our eyes, the images that are everywhere, the things we talk about with each other, they're all actually specifically designed to grab our attention in ways that make us less peaceful, more anxious. And it's just, it's going out of all control. It really is. Yeah. It really, I feel that because as a creator of information on social media, I've been really, really careful to be empowering and hopeful with my words. Yeah. And I know that when I do, that, I may not get as many clicks and likes and follows. Is that right? Wow. And so it's a,

it's a conversation we often have where I'm like, I'm not doing the fear mongering anymore. I'm going to do the word of hope, but to your point, people don't gravitate to it as much. So interesting. There's a wonderful person named Maria Ressa. She's a Filipino journalist who did an expose on the government there during a really corrupt government. And, the prime minister decided, or the president decided to attack her in the press and actually with all kinds of physical threats and all sorts of things. So there was this big hate campaign against Maria Ressa and she decided to use it as a chance to do some research, which kept her from getting anxious, by the ways. We can come back to that. But what they found was that lies

spread six times faster than true facts on the internet. Six times. There's only one thing that travels as fast as a scary lie. And that is inspiration. Oh. So that's what I think you're doing. And yes, you might not get the fear mongering and the hate mongering, but you will get just as much attention

and the information will spread just as fast if you can genuinely go to a place where you feel inspired and then share that with others. Oh, I love that. Maybe we could all do that. Like everybody listening to this could like find something inspiring today and share it. Put it online. Talk to your friends. Talk to yourself.

Put it in a journal. Like start changing the trend that always goes toward more hate, anxiety and fear and start building some positive energy. Yeah, so there was something I heard recently about how important, especially in this moment in history, that we're all sort of experiencing. And we have a worldwide audience, but I think there's many, there's a lot of political turmoil in a lot of countries right now. And hate is definitely spreading quite fast. And I saw this really interesting post that I really resonated with, which is create a love line. Our jobs as individuals is to create this line of love.

love that comes out of us. And if we all created love lines, we could start to shift the hate that is being spread like wildfire. And you just gave me the science to back that up with, which is because through love should come inspiration, I would hope. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And the first step is to figure it out in your own brain, because what we're seeing externalized in the media and everything is simply a reflection of the way we think. So that's the way most people are being influenced to think. But we can deliberately say, no, I'm going to do what you said. I'm going to become a source of love lines. And there are specific things that you can do to make that happen. Because you can't fake it. You can't just paste on a happy face and go out in the world and say,

I'm going to make everything loving. If you're really panicking inside, I've seen a thousand people try it. It does not work. It has to be real. The peace, the joy. the genuine affection that you broadcast to the world starts with being incredibly real about getting it into your own system. Yeah. Okay. So what I see then is we all need to just acknowledge the environment is an anxiety-producing environment.

Anzogenic. You heard it here at first. Folks. So we acknowledge we live in an anxiogenic environment. environment, okay, now what do we do? I mean, the love line's a great idea, but I love what you're saying. You can't fake it till you make it is what I, you like, you have to really find peace is what I hear. Yeah. I faked column for years. It just led to how'd it work? Burn out and breakdown. Yeah. Did not work very well. So the first thing you do, you, you were

telling me before the recording turned on about the place where you're sitting, how you've got this beautiful, gorgeous amethyst behind you, this geode, you've got a plant, something alive and calming. Plants have incredible effects on our nervous systems. And then you've got these two beautiful paintings you picked up that you really love. So you've created this little sanctuary. And in that sanctuary, you've placed things that are not anxiogenic, that are calming, that are appealing to you, that remind you of things that lift your spirit. There's a one beautiful polyvagal theorist named Deb Dana who calls these things glimmers. Have you heard of a glimmer? You know, you've heard the word trigger, right? Yep. And a trigger is something technically, I mean,

it's broad, everybody uses it to mean everything now. But what it originally meant was when you experience something really traumatic, like watching the towers go down on 9-11, like every time I see a television at a certain height. It was the height of my television when I, in 2011, I remember that. Boom, boom, boom. My brain just picks up that shape and position of a TV and immediately starts replaying those images for me. And this was a long time ago now. So that's a trigger. A glimmer is something that associates with a positive experience in your life. So when you see that, you immediately, get a lift into the mood you were in at the time you were, I don't know, falling in love, getting a new puppy, learning a language that was, you know, beautiful to your ears. So you've got

glimmers around you. And that's a really good first step. A sanctuary full of glimmers is a place to start. Okay. And so you start, I would think, in your home environment. Like, so you're talking about like physically making your, your environment around you calm. Yeah, because as I just said, the physical arrangements around most people now are highly abnormal. It is abnormal to sit in a room full of right angles with a bunch of strangers under fluorescent lights for eight hours, doing things that mean nothing to your body, right? Right. Like the human mind works, functions best outside in nature, moving and solving problems that are immediately helpful to the situation.

and that we take our children, pull them out of that kind of environment, and force them to sit in rows, solving the same problems at the same time, because schools are made to turn out factory workers. But, sorry, if I go on too long, just slap me out. No, no. In 1968, NASA recruited some psychologists to create a test to detect creative geniuses. They wanted them to work for NASA. So they created this test, and they found that,

2% of adults fit the, they tested into the category of creative geniuses. After a while, someone thought to give this test to children, four and five year olds. 98% of them tested as creative geniuses, 98%. And the researchers said, our society, all the systems we use to socialize our children are beating the genius out of people. Yes. And in order to make them fit for factory and office work. Yes.

So we live in abnormal circumstances. Circumstances that would make any creature nervous. Go to a place that doesn't make you nervous. Just that concept is alien to most people. Yeah. And it's so simple because everybody can do it. Everybody can find that place. You know, I do, it does bring up the question that I have,

which is like I want to be respectful of the fact that some people's home environment because of relationships or maybe they don't have control over it. I, you know, I split my time between Northern California and Southern California. And my Northern California home is our family home. And my kids are 24 and 22. And there's just a ton of people. There's a ton of love. And there's a ton of mess. And I can never quite get it organized the way I want. And it can, produce anxiety for me. Sure. So I do think we have some people who have environments that are hard to clean up. Yes. Well, there are a lot of, yeah. There are a lot of people without the privilege to just have a corner of their own house or apartment. But I have coached and worked with people who found a place

in a corn woman used to go sit in a cornfield. She was a farm wife and they had a tiny little house and she had a bunch of kids and she would go sit in the corn just to think. I have other friends and clients who have gone out to little patches of woods they found near their houses, or even in the winter. One of my friends had, she was caring for someone who was dying of cancer, and she said, thank God they had a dog who needed four walks a day because she'd go out in the freezing cold, but she was with nature and she was with the dog, and those four walks a day were her sanctuary. So, yeah, really good to check her privilege on this one, but don't give up your creativity. you were born to be a creative genius,

and part of your creative genius world can be thinking of some way to create sanctuary for your senses, your physical senses. And that's the first step. And then you go to the psychological stuff. Okay, so that's what I'm going to give me the second step because I think that's a really applicable step

that everybody can do. So thank you for that. I had, I write in my book that's coming out in January about this woman who was going to a psychiatrist because she had high anxiety. and she was living in this Manhattan apartment and she worked at this law firm and he gave her all this medication and everything

and therapy and no one ever mentioned that she was living in a really weird environment that was bad for her body, right? Wow. So all of us need to do that. And then once you have that and what she started doing was bringing in lots of plants,

she started growing an herb garden in her Manhattan townhouse. So, or Manhattan High Rise. So when you go to your, your sanctuary. The second thing is to take care of the animal that is your body. You know, Mary Oliver's poem, you do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. All you have to do is to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. So you go into your sanctuary and you realize that this is a creature.

Your anxiety is an ancient, ancient part of your brain and almost every living creature on earth shares that particular brain structure, like flatworms may not, but any reptile, any animal, any fish, any bird, they all have this part of the brain that gets anxious when they see something unfamiliar. And you don't calm down an anxious animal by trying to fight it or beat it down or redidded.

induce it. If I said to you, Mindy, I'm here to bring you down. I'm here to end you. I'm here to stop you. Like, how would you feel? And yet we say that about our anxiety all the time. I'm here to bring it down and I'm going to end it. Yeah. I would fight back. That's where you get the looping anxious thoughts. Of course. It's going to be terrified and then it's going to fight. Fight or flight. Yeah. So in other words, your anxiety increases when you set out to bring it down. But if you go into a sanctuary and you say to it, okay, little anxiety creature, I call it your anxiety creature. Okay, anxiety creature, I am actually on your side. I know you've been trying to keep me safe and I know how tired you are. So what can I do for you? I'm sitting in my sanctuary. What would help you feel safe?

What if what the answer is, I'd just like to know what's going to, you know, like there's a lot of anxiety in the known. You said it. Like, what if it's like, well, I just need to know this and I need to know this. There's, sometimes we can't know. That's the storytelling part of your brain. So that's, it's actually not, that, that's part of the loop of the anxiety. But the creature itself, the basis of that anxiety really is thinking at an animal level. And so if you can bring your attention into the present moment, into the present circumstance, which is the only thing you will ever have to tolerate is the present moment. If you can say to the runaway mind, okay, you know, I hear you. I hear that many unknown things are there. So let's stick with what's

known. And you look around at your sanctuary and like touch those amethysts and and the plant and smell the leaves and see what they're like. See if the paintings smell like turpentine. I love that smell. Start to come home to your senses. And, when something says, but I need to know everything in order to be safe. That's just a very scared, not particularly bright animal. It thinks if it could know everything, it could control everything. This is one of the bases of parenting and teaching and work and everything. I guess what?

You can't know everything. And even if you could, you couldn't control it at all. Yes. the only thing you can control is what to do in this present moment. Okay. So the first thing is just to look around and see that you're not in imminent physical danger so far as you know. Does that get easier with time? It gets easier with practice.

As my karate teacher used to say, practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent. So every time you take your fantastic, you know, uniquely human neocortex that can imagine things that have never been and you use it to scare yourself, that becomes permanent. It happens over and over and over until you think that only the scary stories are real, but they're no more real than any fantasy of wonderful things that might happen in the future. Yeah. If you think something often with strong emotion, it starts to feel like truth. That's how we get that.

But there's a deeper sense, which is a sense of peace that only comes when we hear something that resonates with our whole physical and perceptual apparatus. So when I did my book The Way of Integrity, I talked about the one statement that people could make that seems to put them in a state of alignment fastest. Try this right now. In your mind, just repeat the phrase, I am meant to live. live in peace. I am meant to live in peace and say it to yourself several times.

Notice the effect it has inside the body. Yeah, you calm. Is that what's happening for you? My shoulders dropped the first time I said it. I saw that, yeah. Yeah. And your breathing is getting deeper, more regular. And that is not the body's response to happy.

news, that is the body's response to truth. I've seen many people have that response when they heard news that was not good. Like one man said to me, he was talking to me about his childhood and I said, you do realize you were sexually abused, right? And he said, are you just telling me that to make me feel good? And I was like, that's not the first thing I would say to somebody to just make them feel good. It felt peaceful to him because it was the truth. and so he could sink into that and ground in truth.

And that's what happens when we come back into the present moment. Peace is available. You just went into it. Yeah. The story about that man is really interesting because do you think we create more anxiety when we look away from painful situations? No, it depends on why. You know, every night I go to bed and lie in my bed and do some meditation to get my anxieties and whatever's happened to me during the day to let go and allow me to sleep.

I used to have horrible insomnia and don't anymore. So I can detach in that way so that I can rest and be better equipped to fight for justice and happiness the next day, right? But if I turn away from something, if somebody says, look, like if one of my loved ones says, you really hurt my feelings, or someone in a civil rights movement said, you know, you're really like your culture is doing some damage. And I kind of go, no, nah, I don't want to hear that. That creates more anxiety. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

So turning towards something disturbing can be, can create less anxiety in the right circumstances and turning. away from anxiety can be exactly the right thing if you need to rest. Do you think that the best place we can put our brains is in a state of constant curiosity? I've been thinking about the power of that word. Like there's something when I'm curious, and that's what you're saying, I hear a little bit in what you're saying. When I'm curious about something, it stops the brain from trying to say, is it good? Is it bad?

Is it harming me? is it not harming me? If I can go into that curious state, I have found peace there. Yeah. Structurally, I said that all creatures have this part of the brain that when it sees something alarming, it sends out this burst of fear.

Well, there's a part of the brain that immediately grabs that fear, turns it into a story, and starts trying to control everything. We just saw that happening. But on the other side of the brain, on the right side of the brain, that same structure,

if you see something unfamiliar, there's a little boop of arousal, like, whoa, what's that? And on the right side of the brain, what happens is that the first step is not away from whatever alarmed is, but toward it in curiosity. So I call curiosity the secret doorway out of anxiety. So you might not be able to feel a blissful calm. You might not be able to feel happy when you're in a state of anxiety.

but if you get curious, the part of the brain that's scared has to give way to the part of the brain that's curious. And then that starts to learn and it starts to associate things and then to connect things and then to create things. And at that point, you're home free. The opposite of anxiety in the brain is not calm. It's creative. And it all starts with curiosity. You're absolutely right. Yeah, that one years ago, I really obsessed, got like in an obsessive year or two about the

connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. So you know all the words. Yeah, yeah. And I've talked about it here on my podcast and how they just, you flip-flop between the two. Yeah, yeah. And you can't be in one, like you can't, you can't live in both of them. You're either in that highly creative or you're in the highly anxious. Would we help ourselves if we asked a question every time there was something that was felt

threatening to us if we asked a question? Does that immediately pull us into that prefrontal cortex? I think it probably does. And I've been practicing it since I've found it out by reading research. And I've found that it's remarkably powerful. You may have had the experience of going past an accident and it's horrible and you're terrified that somebody was hurt, but you are also really curious. And if you can turn on the curiosity, there is the activist Valerie Corr cites a study where people who saw others that look different. So they were dressed differently. They had different skin color, different customs, whatever. Immediately the amygdala went, whoa, alien, and then the storytelling and the control started. And if they could get people to just

answer this or just ask this one question, I wonder what that person has for dinner. All of those biases and fears would give way. And suddenly they'd be trying to pick up information, thinking about times they'd had ethnic food, the smell of it, the wondering what the family structure was like. And immediately they stopped othering these people nearly as much and became more approachable, more loving, and feeling more safe. And I really want to say this. People who don't feel safe get obstreperous and they get angry. They get into that part of that anxiety spiral that you were just talking about.

And they act from fight or flight, which scares other people who then act from fight or flight, which scares the first people more, which scares, and it just goes back and forth and back and forth. if you can step into anything that's stressful in your life and start asking questions. In fact, Judson Brewer, this great psychologist or psychiatrist who wrote a book about anxiety, he would sometimes address anxiety in his patients just by looking at something and going, hmm, hmm, hmm. And they'd be like, what? Ah, hmm.

And they'd start looking around. and he and a colleague did this with a whole team of athletes they were working with. And after that, the whole team, whenever they got anxious or needed to cheer up, they just start going, hmm, hmm, hmm. And just saying that, just making that noise, makes you sort of want to poke around. And you're into that, the whole part of the brain that does the connection and creativity. And you're right, it toggles with anxiety. And anxiety is not there anymore.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. This is so good. Okay. So we've got our sanctuary we're creating. And then we have our questions that we are asking in the anxious moment. Anything else we can do, other tools we can do to sort of move ourselves out of that state. Yeah. You go into your sanctuary. You settle in among your glimmers. You really physically touch them, taste them. You notice where there's anxiety. You're kind. to the creature that is scared inside you. I call this kissed, K-I-S-T for kind internal self-talk. And you just say, may you be well, little creature, may you be happy, I'm here for you, I love you. Now, what are you curious about? And whatever it's curious about, it's like working with a little kid now, you give it what it wants. I started doing this, I was writing during the pandemic.

I was right, you know, finding all this out, and I decided to test it on myself. And I would get up in the morning, I'd say to my anxiety creature, does anything make you curious? Well, it wanted to draw. So I was like, okay, you can draw for a month. And my brain changed, like the experience of my inner life changed completely during that month. It was like being on the best drugs you can imagine. And you just drew all day? I just drew and painted. I thought, well, I'll go on to other things, but I never did.

I just wanted to draw and paint. And we had a two-year-old in the house. And so she and I would go out in the woods, and I would take pictures of her with my camera, and then I'd come back and draw and paint pictures of her. And I realized that I was really focused on her because the part of me that was drawing was also a toddler. And had that kind of, you know, toddlers supposedly laugh. 400 times a day and adults 15 times a day, I was in full toddler mode and just having a blast

and no anxiety whatsoever. Like it was the least anxious time of my life and I intend to replicate it. Yeah. Oh, that's so brilliant. And that falls under the pattern I think of giving ourselves permission to have fun. Yeah. So what would it be for you? Yeah. Well, so it's interesting because I just, well, just full transparency, you know, I'm 54 years old. I'm postmenopausal. My kids are grown. My career is in a really beautiful place. I'm like you, just thinking up in cool thoughts and writing books about them and having great conversations like this. So on paper, everything is beautiful. And yet there are moments where my brain kicks in and says, you're not safe, you should be doing more, stop relaxing.

Like, I think it's an interesting piece for women because you get to this point where everything that got you to this level of life actually now has to be shed because it no longer serves you. And so I started doing, I like to walk. I'm a walk and listen to podcasts is one of the things. In nature, will absolutely calm me. An art technique that if you don't know about,

a friend taught me called neurographic art. Do you know about this? Martha, you'll have, this is, we'll be right up your alley. So it's a friend showed me, you can go Google it on YouTube. She showed me how to do neurographic art, which is a bunch of, it looks like doodling, but the way you do it is you set an intention and then you create these, you have to use, draw a bunch of lines on a piece of paper, and then anywhere that two linear lines intersect, you have to curve them. And so that everything on the paper is curved because now it looks like neurons in your brain. Oh, cool. It relaxes you because it's like seeing like. It is the coolest. You can find it all over you. Yeah. But to your point that there was something that it took my thoughts

to a place that stopped the looping. And that's, I'm wondering, do we have like art movement sometimes I find conversations with healing people, people who have big hearts, you know, doing things like this. Like I'm not anxious in this moment. Right, right, right. But then I can get off this moment and then the anxiety hits in. Yeah. So. Yeah, there are all kinds of things.

And I love the work of a great psychiatrist and philosopher named Ian McGill-Christ from Oxford. And he wrote this book called The Master and its emissary about how the whole culture that we've developed is dominated by functions that primarily occupy the left hemisphere of the brain. And yes, that's an oversimplification. The whole brain is working together all the time. But he says, we are actually building a society that is functioning like a person

who has had a massive stroke on the right hemisphere and is losing that. Whereas, on the other hand, people who have left hemisphere strokes are able to do creative, connected, artistic, inventive things like what you're talking about,

with the painting or even a conversation. So what he says, in McGilchrist says, the data collection part of the mind is not supposed to be in charge. It's supposed to work for the meaning maker, the context builder, the purpose finder. And that is what we light up when we start to draw, when we let ourselves be relaxed,

when we're moving, when we're dancing. They found that people, older people who dance, have more brain benefits than people who are playing tennis or golf because there's that liberation and expressiveness. So anything that brings in all those right hemisphere functions, proprio reception, color, light, taste, cooking, being with our people, guess what, this is the way people used to live. Yes. Cooking together, gardening, hunting, fishing, dancing, telling stories.

We evolved to do these things. And when we start to do them, our whole brains light up. up. It's not like we shift to the right side of the brain. Our whole brains light up. If you read Jill Boltey-Taylor's whole brain living, we should have her on the show. She's amazing. Yeah, I should. Yeah. Harvard, Neuroan anatomist who had a massive left hemisphere stroke and came back to the world with this message. Use the whole thing. And she's so great because she was at Harvard, but after her stroke and her recovery. Now, she called me from where she lives in the summer on a houseboat in the middle of a lake somewhere in the Midwest. Nobody knows where. And she was doing, she was making sculptures

and stained glass windows and doing science. Oh my gosh. Like that type of lifestyle is considered unusual to us. Okay. Right. But we need to light up our brains, our whole brains. And you just did it with that painting. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. I got it so addicted to it after somebody showed me how to do it that I was like, anytime I, that anxious brain kicked in, I just grabbed a pad of paper and I just started doing the processes that they taught me of it. So I like being a student. Well, the whole point is, my goodness, we all, as soon as I see that, your creativity lights me up, my anxiety's gone. I'm drawn into your art and the explanation and the joy of it. And that's how we're supposed to live. And we can. We can. We just did it. You and me. Right. That's so cool. We started out with the list of

things we had to talk about. The anxiogenic. We have to learn that word. We have to impress people. Oh, no. I want to do a doodle and just show each other colors. So that's fair. Well, actually, what we could have done is we could have both been painting and having a conversation. Hello. Let's see. I'm in my studio right now. These are all paintings that I've done. You did. They're gorgeous. Yeah, there's the Buna one.

I did really anxious one time, but this is one of the forest. Wow, look how beautiful your artist. So I do more realistic. This one I hear is the place where I have to send my garbage out. Anyway, so I do more realistic art, but it doesn't matter. We are both sitting among things that we have done artistically. Yeah. And we artificially ignore them so that we can do the right kind of podcast.

Yeah. It's so true. It's so true. Oh my God. I love this. Because you know what it does is I hope conversations like this really give us permission to go back to that child spirit, you know. And I think, you know, you can look at someone like,

and be like, well, you're a serious author. And here you are, like, doing things that, you know, serious authors might not show up to do. But how fun is this? And how fun is it to hear people having fun? Yes. It's so bonding. It can get you past all kinds of divisions. It can get you past neuroses. It can, it just sets you free in the field of creation. So that's the book I wrote talks about the creature being very scared and then the creative is the artistic self. And if you start to live that way, I mean, how often do you paint? Well, here's the thing. I should tell you daily because that's what I'd want to do, but I don't give myself permission to do it. I do it at the end of the day, like, oh, the work is over, now I'm going to do this. So maybe a couple times a week. Maybe I wrote about my art

month and how hard it was to stop. And I actually called a therapist and said, please help me stop painting. And she was like, why? I'm like, because I'm doing it all day and I've got real things to do. And she's like, well, full confession, I just started a painting class and I can't stop either. Then I send my manuscript in it's like, oh, it was so hard to stop painting after that month. And she writes in the margin, why did you? And I was like, oh, I have to be a normal person. She's like, I don't get it. And so I talked to my family and I got official permission to get up every morning and paint and draw first. I get to do that until like 9 o'clock in the morning. I'll get up at 5.

I paint 4 hours. I'm such a happy character. And I'm getting more real work done because I'm so full of joy. And so, I mean, maybe you should paint first. Maybe you should paint. I know. I'm going to. So then that actually brings me.

to back to this idea of right brain left brain. Yeah. So what I'm hearing you say is that we are really working within this logical part of our brain. And the more we, you know, what we know is the whatever you use the most in your brain gets stronger and stronger and stronger. Bires together, wires together, yeah. Yeah. And so then the creative side of the brain just starts to fall away. And what you're talking about is by starting the day, by really nourishing that part of the brain let you also be able to express words probably differently in your writing. Absolutely. At first, it's so funny, because after I've been painting, I'll try to do, yeah, I'll get on the phone with some business person and I'm like, uh, big, big tree. I can't talk at all. It's really, really

distressing. I have to go read poetry for a while to get going again. The right side of the brain we'll do poetry songs and jokes. So that's, those are other ways. If you want to, the boundary, go to poetry songs and jokes, and you'll be golden. Yeah, but it's, it really is amazing when you bring the whole brain to the table. It's so enriched by the pleasures and the joys of creativity. And it's not just three-dimensional art. It's music. It's, as I said, poetry. It's anything creative. It's building, you know, it's cooking. It's building a swing set for your child. It's thinking of a conversation you could have later or calling someone and trying to cheer them up. There are all kinds of things that bring the whole brain into full use. And it does,

those circuits that have withered, you can actually feel them reestablishing themselves. And it is magical. Amazing. So that brings me to another theory that I've been studying and thinking about recently, and that is aging and how anti-aging obsessed our culture is. And I think I actually would like to change that because I think that we can't, we shouldn't be against aging. We should flow with it. Right. And it led me to a feminist philosopher who wrote a book called In a Different Voice. Oh, Barbara, what was her name? Carol, Carol Gilligan. I love her. I was at Harvard the same time she was. I love her. I bet you were. So here's what her theory is that somewhere around 12 and 13, women, girls, start to adapt their voice to please the patriarch. And what I know from a hormonal standpoint,

well, that makes perfect sense because your hormones are coming in. And so now you're thinking through a hormonal lens. Well, then I started thinking, well, what happens at the backside when we go into menopause? And the hormones come out. Is that the moment that we are actually primed to come back to our authentic thoughts? Fabulous. Right? That is really interesting. Yeah, I think it's interesting because only two kinds of animal that they know of have females that live long beyond reproductive years, humans and elephants.

And when I've been around wild elephants in South Africa, the matriarch is always the wisest. the calmest of the post-menopausal elephants and all the bowls and everything is sort of governed by that wisdom. And they all just accept that. And I love the idea that the leader is chosen from the is female, first of all, and then post-manapausal second. That's right. And if we could think about that, I always say, I want to be an elder, but I don't want to be elderly. I want to be an elder. I want to be an elder, not an older, you know? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So we can get L'd. Let's get L'd. We need to get L'd. But here's the thing that I've been thinking about, Martha, is like, what if every menopausal woman understood where she was going, that in your post-menopausal

years, you have this phenomenal brain, you get to come back to your authentic self so you can undo what the patriarch told you that you needed to do. And this is actually the time in which the amygdala no longer is searching for fight or flight, it's more geared towards empathy. And we know that from Lisa Mascone's research. So what if these postmenopausal years are actually our greatest years? We just have to look at this from a very different lens. And maybe it's doing what you're saying, we've got to bring the right side of that brain back online and be highly creative to find our authentic voice. I totally agree. And it reminds me of when my, son was born, he has Down syndrome. They told me little girls with Down syndrome are much more

verbal typically because females use more of the whole brain and there's more crossover between right brain, left brain, so they have more to draw on for speech. And I believe that continues throughout life that we're using our whole brain. Like when the fighter flight instinct is studied in women, because it wasn't studied in women for many, many years, they found that in men it threat triggers fight or flight hormones. In women, it triggers fight, flight, and all the tendon-refriend hormones like oxytocin, right? Oh, yeah. Which means that when under threat, a man will fight or run, a woman will fight, run, and make sure everyone has a sweater and a sandwich. There's more going on there. And I do believe that's why many ancient people got their wisdom from

older women. Yeah. So that, so you know what that leads me to? Is a question or back of curiosity. Oh, good. What does,

what does wisdom look like? How would I see wisdom on somebody's face, on somebody's essence? How do I measure that? I love that question. I think the word that comes up for me is radiance. And I have seen certain women, like I was there,

I got to be in the audience when Oprah did her very last, show. And I'd been on the show before and I'd seen her many times and she has tremendous, she has huge energy, just massively powerful, sort of energetic field that surrounds her. But when she came on that stage and she had, and I, the night before I heard her say, she'd gotten up early, she'd meditated for hours, she'd written every word of the script herself. and she was in total peace. In fact, one of her assistants told me she was worried, Oprah's not nervous enough.

And she was embodying the full ancient divine feminine. And when that curtain opened and she walked out, there was like there were lights on her, but there was a radiance coming from inside her that you couldn't deny. And I've seen that in people who are dying. I've seen it in people who have suddenly been given permission to have the life.

that their soul knows that they wanted. Seen in people getting out of a marriage, getting into a marriage. People glow when women glow when they are in a space of wisdom. Yeah. So the last stage in my book is called the creation. And it's where even the creative self dissolves

into the intelligence of nature and becomes part of the force. And ego disappears. And it's like, here is a body. What does the force want to do with it? And it starts to shine. And then those people start to be wise, give wisdom. I don't know the mechanism.

It's part of the mystery, but it works. Right. Wow. Wow. So then what, you know, ultimately, I've also been thinking about the words patriarch and matriarch. And I spent some time really researching, well, what is a matriarchal society look like? Because, you know, I don't think it's meant to be that there's like men rule or women rule.

I feel like patriarch is structure and it's a system. And so here's the definition I found. And something that I think really ties into everything that you're talking about. Patriarch is power over. and matriarch is power within. Yeah, I love that. And when we're stuck in a brain that is constantly looping the logical and constantly searching for safety, there is a power over us. And what you're talking about is coming back to this other side of the brain that is actually giving a stronger amplifier of this power within.

Yeah. And it's, that is exactly what everybody. and I think needs to know. So I'd like to bronze those words, please. You can have them. Thank you. Just remember how simple, you know, that's such a mighty goal. But all you have to do is go to a place you like, say kind things to yourself,

and give yourself permission to make something. And it all begins to happen on its own. That's the interesting thing about it. I do believe we're at a point where the patriarchy in the format has taken since Rome, basically, which is all about hierarchies and pyramids and power over. I do believe it's starting to fall apart. And my doctor was in sociology, so I've been looking at it from a massive social level. And what you see is that patriarchies to dominate that way, you can't have free flow of information, for example.

When I was in China studying in the 80s and the communists had really, clamped down on China. It was illegal to own a X-Rox machine because replicating information undermines this power structure of the people at the very top of the pyramid. So now, with everybody sharing information everywhere, it's undermining that source of control that the people at the top of the pyramid used to have in very much the way the brain can take control of all our more nurturing empathic creative functions. We have too much information to stay in the control of rigid hierarchies. So the patriarchy is going to, I think, there's not going to be a revolution.

There will be a dissolution. Yes. I illustrated this once by making a pyramid out of sugar cubes, and I put it in a pan, and then I poured water in the pan. The sugar cubes represented rigid structure. and the water represented, so the left hemisphere, the water represented the fluid, the absorbing, the adaptable, and it dissolved the pyramid from the bottom upward.

And the top sugar cubes were totally dry, almost until they collapsed into the water. But at the end of about five minutes, there was just a pool of clear water. No one had been kicked out. Nothing had been excluded. Everything had been included into something that was just more fluid, less rigid, sweeter. Yeah.

Turn to sugar water that we could all drink. Yeah, it had the power to nourish and do all kinds of fancy things. I think that's going to happen in our time. And I think it's going to come from older women. Up through the grassroots. Nobody expects that the water is going to dissolve the pyramid. It's just at home making sandwiches and loving people. But that's the purpose.

power that dissolves hierarchy. That right there. You know, you just gave a positive reframe of social media. Yeah. You know, if because, you know, everybody's dissing on social media with good reason, but what I heard you say is so much information is coming at us that there's not one master control of it and that begins to dissolve this. So then would the thing we could do right now to not only bring peace to ourself, but to bring love

to the universe, to. create a more matriarchal energy would be accessing this right side of our brain. Yes. If you come out of anxiety, what happens is you can't help becoming creative. If people want to watch this podcast as a model of how it happens, we get started. There's a way to do this stuff. There's a way we greet each other. We have titles. We have, you know, degrees, whatever. We have this stiff little conversation. Then we start relaxing and asking each other questions and then showing each other our creativity, and it starts to be fun and joyful. And then it ends up sort of sliding sideways into

spirituality, though not a, not religion. And it becomes a vision for the future of the world. Oh. We just modeled what has to happen inside each of us and then between all of us. And I think it wants to happen. I don't think it's a blind force. I think it's a consciousness. And it wants to love us. It wants us to be whole. It wants us to heal the planet for ourselves. And I don't think, if it really wants that, I don't think I can stop it in my own life or in any friendship or in the world. I just have to sort of go, all right, I'm too old to resist. Take me. Yeah. Right. And then then that's where the magic happens because you fully fully let go and the right side's like, thank you. I'd like to talk now. I have some things I would like you to engage in that are

sticky and feel great. You know, I have to add this in. I just have been obsessing on Julia Louis Dreyfus's podcast Wiser Than Me. And I was listening to one she did with Isabel Iyende. And one of the things, yeah, Isabel said is to be in relationship with me, you have to know that I'm always writing a book in my mind. I always have a story going. And I think now, in light of this conversation, what she was really saying is to be in relationship with me is to be in relationship with both sides of my brain. With creation. Yeah. With creation.

Because she's using words, but they are poetry. Oh, my God. Can that woman write? Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. We kind of, we have a head start, us who were born with female identified and then pulled away from the structures of work in order to care. for people often.

Care for the younger, care for the older, care for the ill. Somebody was telling me in Europe, these countries have these systems to take care of the sick and the elderly.

In America, we have women. Yes. So that can be incredibly stressful. I did a lot of research on women who were just ripped apart by the employment versus caring for their families. But what it does is it forces

us to use both sides of our brain. It forces us to keep the things that are ignored, alive and vibrant. And then we get older and say, well, you're not useful anymore. And we say, yes, but I have some things I've been thinking. Yes. I have some things I've been holding back for like three years.

I'm ready to tell you now. And I've learned something in the last few years. And that is that even young men will listen to old women. Yes. This is why I think we are going to save the planet. I think it's the... Don't tell anyone we're not supposed to do. Nobody knows.

Nobody knows because we're just doing our thing and speaking our truth and using both sides of our brain and when you get to those post... And making pictures. Yeah. And when you get those post-menopausal years, the amygdala starts to slow down and words start to come out that feel really authentic. Amazing. Oh my gosh.

I can talk to you forever and I just, I love melding minds with you. Yeah, it's so great. And that's, you know, here's what we do for the revolution, people. Get a piece of paper, draw some lines, make them curved at the intersection. Shh, don't tell. Don't tell. Choose the colors that make your heart sing. Keep it to yourself. I love this.

You will bring down the patriarchy. And they won't even know it. They'll be lighting up with their ready to fight and we're drawing curves on paper. Gossip curbs. And then they'll start and then they'll forget all about their weaponry. Oh my gosh. So good. Well, you know, Desmond Tutu, one of my favorite quotes is how we create peace in the world is we let the women lead. And if we really come at it from that angle, what he's saying is we need to bring some people online here who are using both sides of their brain, which is exactly what your book is now teaching us how to do. great to mind meld isn't it and uh beautiful infinite variation and the same love in everyone yeah agreed okay well i have to ask you my parting question oh okay yeah so we got to go back to the left side of the brain

for a hot moment although happily let's see let's see who answers this what is what what is your definition of health and how do you know you are healthy hmm my definition of health is that i wrote a book about this is integrity. And by that I don't mean a moral judgment. I mean like structural integrity, like a plane. If all the pieces are in the right place, they're interacting with each other. They're aligned with each other. And I, like, I just got over a spell of pneumonia. But when I woke up sick, I sat in my bed. I thought I could get up and do things. But it didn't feel peaceful. So I dropped in and found my truth, which is, oh, I'm really not well. I'm in a lie. here in bed, and I drew in bed, of course. But everything aligned when I said, no, what I need to do

for my body is lie here and let it become fully vigorous again. So I would say even when you're sick, if you're aligned, if you're in truth, your own truth, that is ultimately a source of help. And you can keep that no matter what. That's what I think healthy is. You know, it's interesting. The reason I always ask this question is because so many people are chasing health. but we don't have a clear definition. And what I've learned from asking all my guess is that's because it's a personal definition. Yeah, true that.

And that's what I just heard in you. So amazing. Well, how do people get the new book? I don't know when we'll put this podcast out, but I know it's coming out. It's coming on in January 2025. You can pre-order it any time on Amazon or wherever you buy your books.

And you can find it through my website. I'm sure, though. frankly, I never look at my website. Right. Right. I'm right side of the brain. But I'm pretty sure it's there. It's there.

That's what I would say when people ask me a logical question. I'm like, I have a team that probably knows. Yeah, right. Logistics. Look, this picture I drew of my own neurons. Yeah. Right. Amazing.

Well, thank you for giving me an hour of your neurons and letting me walk your neurone, highway. For your wonderful work in the world. I appreciate it so much. Yeah, appreciate you. I look forward to connecting one day live and just giving you a big hug. Oh, absolutely. Let's make it a plan. I'm sure it will happen. So thank you. All right. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about. We'd love to know about it so please leave us a review share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is