WHOOP Podcast - How To Manage Anxiety with Dr. Martha Beck

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

This week on the WHOOP Podcast, WHOOP Global Head of Human Performance, Principal Scientist Dr. Kristen Holmes sits down with Dr. Martha Beck, world-renowned sociologist, bestselling author, and life coach, to explore what it means to live in alignment with your true self.Dr. Beck shares what her journey from academia at Harvard to becoming one of the world’s most sought-after life coaches taught her about life's purpose. Together, Dr. Beck and Dr. Holmes discuss how living out of alignment can lead to physical and emotional distress, why the body often knows the truth before the mind, and how reconnecting with your inner self can restore clarity and fulfillment.Dr. Beck’s wisdom will leave you rethinking success, redefining happiness, and inspired to create a life that feels truly your own. Get Off The WHOOP Advanced Labs Waitlist: The first 100 members to tap this link will unlock early access to WHOOP Advanced Labs.**Open the link on the same device as your WHOOP app.(00:48) Dr. Martha Beck: Background in Sociology and the Meaning of Life(03:03) Dr. Beck’s Pivot from Sociologist to Life Coach(05:19) The Need to Drop Illusions: How To Overcome Limitations(08:26) WHOOP Podcast Rapid Fire Questions(09:24) The Physiology of Integrity: Accessing Your True Self(16:06) Signs That You Are Ignoring Your True Self(20:03) How The Loss of Integrity Fuels Addiction(23:37) How to Find Your Life Purpose(25:49) Where To Start: Find Your Truth and Live Your Best Life(33:58) High Achievers: How To Set Healthy Goals(36:37) Raising Future Generations To Be In Line with Their Passions(38:41) The Decision Matrix: Making Decisions That Align With Your True-Self(41:42) Gaining Control of Your Fears and Anxiety(45:47) Importance of Solitude and Self-Awareness in Finding Your Truth(49:13) Finding Solitude in a Technologically Connected World(58:16) Understanding Data and Your Body’s Signals For Your Mental HealthFollow Dr. Martha Beck:InstagramFacebookYouTubeTiktokSupport the showFollow WHOOP: Sign up for WHOOP Advanced Labs Trial WHOOP for Free www.whoop.com Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

When we talk about integrity, I want to be really clear that I don't mean it in a moralizing sense. I mean it as in structural integrity. If you have a car or an airplane that is in structural integrity, all its parts are working in alignment, and it can fly or it can carry people around. If its parts aren't in alignment, if it's out of structural integrity, it breaks down. Not because it's bad, just because that's the physics of it. Same thing with a human being, if we can live a life that is in structural integrity with what we feel most deeply, everything works quite well. And if we are living a life that is not in alignment with what we feel at the deepest level, everything starts to go wrong to alert us that there's a problem so we can look at it and fix it. Dr. Martha Beck. Welcome.

Oh, thank you. It's so good to be here. For people who are watching, they can see the enormous smile on my face, but for folks, listening. I have an enormous smile on my face because I'm with the great Marty Beck, who has contributed so much to the field of sociology and psychology. Tell us a little bit about your background for folks who are new to your work. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can go a number of different directions. I grew up super-doper Mormon in the heart of Mormon country in Utah and then went off at 17 to Harvard, which was not at all like Utah. And got my B.A. M.A. and got my B.A. my PhD there also got married, had three kids, and the middle one had Down syndrome, which was a

really interesting thing to have a child with Down syndrome while getting a PhD from Harvard, especially since he was diagnosed before he was born. Not early, but early enough that I had to make a choice about, wow, not whether or not I wanted a baby, but what kind of baby did I want to have, right? And I really, I believe that everybody's decision is valid. to them and I would never impose my own decision on anyone else. But to me, there I was looking around me at Harvard where I'd been since 17 going, okay, I have this baby who will never achieve in this way. What makes a human life worth living? What constitutes ending on life mercifully or allowing something to have a life even though they won't succeed? And I came to

the conclusion in that moment, that sort of long moment of my life, that the only reason to be alive is to experience joy. Emerson said beauty is its own excuse for being, and I thought joy is its own excuse for being. So whatever we are, if we can have joy, it's worth being alive. So I kept that maybe, and I changed my entire life to focus on the experience of joy rather than achievement or the other things that I valued to that point. I ended up leaving my religion, leaving everything, in order to follow the things that brought me genuine happiness. And that ended up making me a life coach instead of a sociology

professor, which is what I started out to be. How did you decide to make that pivot from sociologist in academia to life coach? Well, first of all, I just wasn't experiencing a lot of joy in academia. I loved learning. I loved my students. Didn't love teaching the same thing over and over. Didn't adore faculty meanings. And for me, it was so pronounced. that I noticed I was, I thought I was bipolar for a while because I'd be very happy on some days and very miserable on other days. And then I realized that the miserable days were always when I was going to campus to my professor job. And the happy days were when I wasn't. And so I went to the dean and I said, I'm quitting. They really needed women at the time to sort of flesh out the diversity

thing. So he tried really hard to talk me into staying. And I said, look, this job depresses me. The only way I could keep doing it is if I went on huge doses of antidepressants. And he said, well, I'm on antidepressants. I was like, yeah, okay, that is kind of my point. So I quit because, well, two things. I wasn't loving academia. And the other thing that was my students kept hiring me to just talk to them about their lives. Based on stuff I would say in class, they would come to my office.

And they started paying me to just coach them. And I didn't even know it was called coaching. I read that in the paper. In USA Today, I was quoted as a famous life coach. And I was like, what the hell is a life coach? That is so cheesy. But I love it. And cheesy or not, it came my passion and a huge source of joy. So you help folks figure out their purpose in life? Try to, yeah. I think that's a worthy pursuit for sure. And that was so gratifying, right? And every day is different. Absolutely. Everybody's a fascinating novel I haven't read yet. And everybody has all the instructions to their own destiny written inside them. So that makes my job really easy. I just sort of show up and say, you already know what to do

with your life. And people look at you and go, you're right. Now that you put it that way, and then they give me money. So you kind of pull out. what's already inside? It's more like clearing away what's gumming up the engine. My undergraduate degree was in Chinese, actually. I've lived in Asia for a while. And the philosophy, a lot of the Asian philosophies, unlike Western philosophy, don't idealize the addition

of learning and knowledge and skill as you go through life. Instead, they really focus on everyone being born perfect and whole. And then as we grow in counter-socialization, trauma, different things, we acquire illusions about the nature of our own lives. And those illusions cause suffering. So it's the dropping of illusion. There's a saying in my favorite book, The Doubtedging, it says, in the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added.

In the pursuit of awakening, every day something is dropped. So all I do is I help people drop things. That's it. And dropping things is not that difficult. So, yeah, easy, fun job. You make the distinction of letting go. You know, when you say drop, it's funny, I was listening to a conversation you had with someone else. And, you know, those words, like, you need to just let go. You need to just let go. You need to just let go. So tell us why that drives you crazy. Because you have such a beautiful way of thinking about that concept. Well, for example, when I was depressed and anxious, people would say, it's all in your head. And I would be like, granted, help me get it out. And they'd say, well, just let it go. And I thought that is like, that's like I've got a tiger loose in the house. And you're telling me to let it go. I don't have it.

It has me. Like, I would love to let it go. It's hunting me. So I learned that, first of all, sitting with something until you, you know, you can face it without running away, allows you to sort of tame the tiger. It makes it yours. And then you can start to slowly separate your own sense of self from the part that is being attacked by the tiger. And eventually, if you look consistently at any part of yourself until you see it truly, it either stays or it goes. I have a bottle cap here for people who

I don't have video. If I'm holding something that's wrong for me and I let it go, it just falls, right? I just drop the bottle cap and it falls away. But if I'm meant to have it and I let it go, my hand is turned upward. So I don't have to do anything to hold on to it. It just rests there because of gravity. So the more you can learn to let things go, the more the things you don't need drop away. And the things that are always yours stay without effort. And so life becomes less and less and less strenuous and more and more gratifying and easy. I love that. And clear, I suppose. Yeah, really clear. Well, we're going to do a little ice breaker. Although I feel like we've already broken the ice. Yeah, what ice. I see no ice, but let's break it. I know. There's no

ice. I know. So these are just, it's going to be true or false, yes or no questions. Okay. And this will kind of set up like some of the rest of the conversation. All right. True or false. Your body knows the truth before your brain does. True. Yes or no. High performance and peace can exist at the same time. Oh, hell, yes. Okay, I love to hear you say that because I have my doubts. Oh, hell. Yes. All right, we're going to talk more about that. Okay. Yeah. True or false. Living out of alignment can cause real physical symptoms. Absolutely true. So true. Yes or no. Most people are chasing goals that don't actually actually fulfill them. True. True or false. Slowing down is sometimes the fastest way forward. True, true, true. Yeah. Amazing. So we're going to dig in as an entry point. I really want to talk

about the philosophy of integrity. Yay. Because I know. Your book is beautiful. I actually just started to read it, the way of integrity. And you have a new book out, which we'll talk about about anxiety. When did that come out? I have not read that yet. It came out last year. It came out last year. After I wrote the way of integrity, people came to me and said, I'm in total integrity, but I'm still anxious. And I'm like, oh, wow, I have to figure this out. So that's the next book. Amazing. So when you're putting these books together, you're using just all the folks that you're working with. Obviously, you have this robust background in academia, which doesn't always translate, you know, to the real world. To be interesting in any way. Exactly. Which is why

You got out of it probably. But so you're using the folks that you're working with and coaching as kind of your case studies and your own life, I suppose, is that, you know. I mean, it's been 30 years. And I very aggressively seek variety in the people that I coach. So for a long time, I just did it sort of like a therapist would. And then I started actually seeking unusual cases and like going all over the world to try to find people.

because if I'm going to call myself a life coach with this cheesy title, I'd better be able to address life, not just people in my socioeconomic, you know, privileged, whatever, but life anywhere it is. So yeah, I have many, many stories from all over, from the most fascinating people you could look for. Wow. Tell us maybe some folks that you've worked with and how kind of this physiology of integrity, you know, how is that, you know, just this idea of like really accessing your true self. Maybe share some examples of how that's manifested in folks and kind of what you see. Sure. Well, for me, I mean, one of the interesting things about growing up in what's called a life world religion is that religion, in my case, Mormonism, permeates everything

people do. And so I grew up with people who were like aggressively religious. But I don't think all of them actually believed what their religion preached. And so they were continuously pretending. And I became aware very early that especially the women around me were continuously pretending to be happy when, in fact, they were being treated in a way that wouldn't make anybody happy. You know, as I learned social sciences and I looked at that really closely, I did research on it while I was living there for a while. And what I found was that there was a tremendous amount of ill health among people who were keeping up this front. And like at the time I was doing my research, fibromyalgia, which I had, was unbelievably common in that population, as was the use of antidepressants and addiction at the same time.

So Utah, at the time I was doing this research, had the lowest per capita consumption of alcohol of any state. the union because Mormons don't drink, right? It also had the highest number of alcoholics per drinker. In other words, people there were drinking too because they were addicted. They weren't drinking for any other reason. So that kind of grounded me in, okay, if we're pretending things we don't really believe, all these bad things seem to happen. And then I started finding other cultures and saying, all right, if people are pretending to believe, leave things they don't. Do I always see the same issues? And I did. Wherever I saw, for example, colonial cultures imposed on traditional cultures and people in the traditional cultures trying to

figure out which way to live, the people who were adopting ways that didn't feel right, them had exactly the same issues. So I started to see real consistency in wildly diverse populations, like tribal people in South America or Africa who were experiencing the same thing I'd seen growing up in Utah when a foreign culture was imposed on them and they were sort of forced to live that way. So, I mean, there are thousands, but it was so, so consistent. Do you think fiber malaysia, is that a, is that autoimmune? Not really. It's a grab bag diagnosis. In my case, it meant just really, really severe pain in different areas of my body.

And then it started corroding my organs and being given different labels, interstitial cystitis, granuloma annullary. I had all these different conditions, but they were all considered autoimmune, poorly understood, progressive and incurable. I don't have any symptoms anymore. And I haven't for a long time because what I found is that as I brought my life into coherence with my true deep inner beliefs, all the symptoms, went away. And I think my body was just fighting me. Yeah. I mean, you think about, if you were just

to throw out an estimate, how many people in the world do you think are actually living in true alignment? Wow. That's such a good question. A percentage. You know, just. I would say it's a pretty low number, like, five to ten percent. Because we're all born completely coherent with our, like, we don't have any false beliefs. But the social starts from birth. And by the time we're five or six months old, we already know they like me better when I don't cry. They like me better whenever my family approves of in a baby. I know how to get smiles and hugs instead of slaps and the scowls. And I will sell out my true nature hard to get approval because it's, you know, my life depends upon being supported by these

adults. So almost everyone loses track of their true natural preferences based on their socialization. What's up, folks, if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health, performance, fitness, you may really enjoy getting a whoop. That's right. You can check out whoop at whoop.com. It measures everything around sleep, recovery, strain. And you can now sign up for free for 30 days. So you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free. You get to try it for 30 days, see whether you want to be a member. And that is just at whoop.com. Back to the guests. What are the signs that you're ignoring your true self? So I'm glad you asked that when I wrote the way of integrity. I mean, other than you talk just the physiological manifestations of

living out of alignment is, you know, the pain and the, you know, the stomach issues. I mean, you think about all the problems folks have headaches. Everything. I mean, when they do, they did a study once where they just asked a group of people not to lie for, I think it was three weeks or something. And then they had another group of people that didn't make that promise. They didn't even police it. They just said, go try not to lie as much. The people who came back after having attempted not to lie as much, had fewer doctor visits, fewer help problems of all kinds, fewer arguments, fewer arguments with their loved ones, like their entire lives improved just by saying, I think I won't lie for a few weeks. By the way, when we talk about integrity, I want to be really clear that I don't mean it

in a moralizing sense. I grew up in religion. I don't need any more of that. I mean it as in structural integrity. So if you have a car or an airplane that is in structural integrity, all its parts are working in alignment and it can fly or it can carry people around. If its parts aren't in alignment, if it's out of structural integrity, it breaks down. Not because it's bad, just because that's the physics of it. Same thing with a human being. If we can live a life that is in structural integrity with what we feel most deeply, everything works quite well. And if we are living a life that is not in alignment with what we feel at the deepest level, everything starts to go wrong to alert us that there's a problem so we can look at it and fix it. Sorry, that was a bit of a

deviation. That's great context for listeners to understand how you think about integrity because people probably conjure up all sorts of different ways of thinking about it. So that's beautiful and perfect. Okay, so they weren't telling lies to other folks. What about lying to yourself? Yep. Actually, most of the lies we tell are very, very innocuous. We tell things. Actually, they found that most men who lie, and most of us lie at least three times within 10 minutes of meeting another person, we lie to them three times. Men tend to lie to make themselves look better. Women tend to lie to make the other person feel better. And that's not because women are better. Just that's what we're socialized to do.

You ask, what are the signs that you're out of integrity? So I did want to address that. And the first one is just a sense of losing one's purpose, of not knowing why you're even alive. I really looked at why do people come to me? Why do people seek coaching? And that's the first when you think that something like financial need or ill health would top that. The loss of purpose is so devastating to people. And that's the number one thing is I don't even know why I'm alive anymore.

Second thing is you start to have negative moods. So you have depression or anxiety or anger, depending on what your particular psychology is, but your moods go wrong. Then you start to see the physical symptoms, low energy, just general joie de vivre, general health. Whatever the weakest link is for your body, it breaks. After that happens, then you get breakdowns in relationship. You can't seem to connect with people. You're not open with them. You don't feel satisfied in your relationships. then your career will suffer, and it doesn't have to necessarily go in the same order, but this is the order that you show up in most often with people I see.

So career starts to tank. You might sabotage yourself. And then I think the last one is addiction. You are so unhappy that you try to self-medicate to tolerate just living, and that turns into addiction. Yeah, well, maybe let's talk a little bit more about addiction, because pretty much everyone knows someone who is addicted to something right um and you know i i i think when you talk about you know integrity and you know living your purpose you know addiction obviously gets in the way of that in and in ways that can be devastating you know for you know and have second

thorough effects you know not just the individual but you know to the family as well or you know anyone around them so how do you how do you think about addiction and integrity. I think you come at it from a really compassionate lens, which I appreciate and I think people need to hear. So I'd love for you to maybe start there. Sure. Well, my understanding of addiction was very strongly influenced by a study that has been called the most important study that never got any attention. And it was a psychologist whose name was Bruce Alexander. He was a soldier in the Vietnam War, and like a lot of young soldiers over there, in the golden triangle of drug use, he did a lot of heroin, he did a lot of cocaine, he did a lot of drugs

while he was a soldier. Then he came back, and like most of his buddies, he just stopped using drugs. And then he became a psychologist and found that these drugs, especially heroin, were incredibly addictive. And he saw that in all the rat studies, studies done on rats, which have a surprisingly similar physiology to humans. And then he noticed something that nobody else, he was like, why was I able to just stop? My buddies and I, some of them became addicts and they're like homeless on the streets and others.

Most of us just stopped. It was like I had a cold for a week. I was fine. Well, he noticed looking at all these rat studies that all the rats were in cages. So he made something called rat park, which had, it was this big enclosure with like, grassy meadow and a place to hang out with other rats and places to mate and places to

raise pups and he took all these heroin-addicted rats and he put them into rat park and then he offered them clear water or water laced with heroin and they all switched to clear water and then he put sugar in with the heroin because rats love sugar they still wouldn't drink the heroin laced water they did not want to be high then he put them back at the cages they went right back to heroin. In other words, they were coping with the enormous stress of being caged by taking a drug that numbed them. And human beings who are living in outside of their integrity to please others, in jobs they don't want to make the right kind of money, whatever their reason, if you cage yourself, you will be unhappy. And the tendency, if you're unhappy and

miserable over a long period is to desperately need to feel better. So you may use a substance or an activity that alters your consciousness because it hurts. And another psychologist I admire said, you know, most people who are addicts, it's like they're standing on a nail and trying to take enough heroin to stop it from hurting. He said the solution to that is to take out the nail. So that's my whole thing is I look what are the nails in people's lives what are the cages I take them out of those contexts it's a lot easier to stop using substance and how do you help people you know find their purpose oh they we have it all along and the you one of the questions you ask was does the body know the truth before the mind I absolutely believe that's true what we call the mind which is mostly

the verbal and logical mind is very recently evolved and full of user errors and bugs, right? But the physiological parts of our bodies have been evolving much longer, and they've had a lot more time to be perfected. I'm sure you talk about this all the time. And what that means is that if something is wrong for you, your verbal mind, which is social, may agree to it based on wanting to fit in with a group, but your gut will twist because it knows you're in danger now. Anybody who leaves their life purpose will experience these unpleasant side effects. And before we started recording, you said a lot of succeeding has to do with just tolerating discomfort. In our culture, to succeed means usually not doing what you want.

doing what other people say you should want, which is not fun. So it's people who can ignore their bodies longest who go furthest toward addiction, but also toward achievement, weirdly. Yeah. So I've worked with Olympic gold medalists who say the worst moment of their lives. Two people told me that the worst moment of my life was standing on that podium, getting a gold medal at the Olympics, because I wasn't happy. And that's what was supposed to make me happy.

My whole life was about that moment. And I wasn't happy. So where did that leave me? And they had to stop thinking of the gold medal as their life purpose and find what was there underneath the whole time. And I remember one of them found that in surfing. He just wanted to be with the ocean all the time. And the other one went off and started studying animals in the wild. Like they just had really different interests.

But they'd been pursuing the gold medal and blocking all that out. Yeah. I mean, I think it, to your point, you know, we're socialized from a really, young age to just block all that out, you know, are there any kind of prompts or, you know, obviously not everyone has the wonderful benefit of working directly with you. So, you know, for people listening, you know, where do they maybe start to try to investigate? I mean, I guess folks probably know if they think about it for a second, they kind of examine their life. Wow. Yeah. I'm out of alignment. You know, I'm not living my truth. But people have

circumstances they have you know i think about my mom you know she had kids at a very young age she was trapped you know my dad traveled every single you know he was traveling all week long was home on the weekends but she was left yeah left to raise us and you know she drank and drank and you know and it was just her it was just the reality right so you know how do you where do you start to lift yourself out of a situation right you know and i know it's complicated but, you know, how do people even, where do they even begin? So the first place I start with people is in a very quiet and intimate way. So the first thing I would say is find some time, and I was a young mom.

You know, I had my first kid at 23, and then I had three under five, and it was a lot. And sometimes the only time I had at all was when the kids were asleep and I could go into the bathroom. The bathroom is like the sacred place for so many people. and go in there and drop all your socialization for a minute and just ask yourself the question, am I happy? Am I happy? I remember when I got the phone call that told me that my son had Down syndrome, I was six months pregnant,

and I get this phone call, and it was the strangest thing. The nurse at the Harvard Health Clinic said, Martha, I have some not-so-good news for you. And I heard a voice in this empty room say, don't be afraid. And then I said, so what is it? And she said, well, the fetus you're carrying has Down syndrome. And I was just stunned. And then this voice said, Martha, are you happy?

And it was such a strange question. I said, what? And the nurse thought I was talking to her. And she said, you know, Down syndrome tries on me 21. I was like, no, no, not you. I was rude because I was very, very stunned by this strange, disembodied voice. And then I said, I think I heard that people with Down syndrome can be happy. And the voice said, that is right.

And the nurse said, I don't think so. And that was the first moment I had ever asked myself the question, am I happy? And it was such a strange moment, and it changed everything for me. So I asked people to just give themselves five minutes where it doesn't have to have any consequences. is I just want you to know, I just want you to know who you are and what you feel. So go into the bathroom, close the door, and for five minutes, just allow yourself to know whether you're happy or not. So then, if you find out you're not, it's like, hmm, what do I do now? And that's what happened to me when I wasn't particularly happy with those three little kids

and a husband who traveled continuously. And I was like, okay, what do I do? Where am I happy? So this is the other thing I would ask people to do. First of all, think about a time when you were relatively miserable. So if I ask you right now, Dr. Holmes, if you go back to a time in your life when, I don't know, you may have been sick or you had a job you didn't like or you were in a bad relationship or something was wrong. And you remember that and then scan your body and remember what your body felt like at the worst. time so if you were to sum that up right now for us what would what would be your answer just completely disconnected so where would that show up just numbness i think so like just a lack of feeling through your in the body okay great i mean not great but you know that and the feeling of numbness

is actually very very unpleasant it's actually less pleasant than pain numbness oh i did that for like age six to 18, I am not going back there. I will feel any amount of pain rather than go numb. You know what I'm talking about. Okay. So now go to a time when you were as happy as you've ever been. So it could have just been a great day. It could have been a moment in your childhood or a wonderful trip you took once or something. Scan your body and see how that feels. What's that like? I think it's that it's connected. You know, I feel. I feel. I feel, like I can feel, I feel powerful in my own body. And your whole body energy changed.

You started moving around. Your facial expression changed. Your posture changed. Your body gave me really strong signals that said, this is joy. So now we're going to take the worst numb feeling. Whatever, if you're listening out there, whatever you felt at the worst time in your life, that gets a negative tan on the joy meter, okay? The best you ever felt, give that a positive tan on the joy meter.

And if you don't feel anything, it's zero. Then just think about something you have to do later today. So what are you doing later today? I have a 4 o'clock call with a really cool character that I'm excited about. Awesome. Yeah. So sit there and imagine that and then notice how your body responds. Is it more toward the happy?

Is it like a plus 10 or a plus 5? is a negative three? Is it zero? What comes up for you? Yeah, that's like a plus five, plus six. Okay. Now think of something that you're doing, something you're doing tomorrow. Anything. Okay. Could be brushing your teeth. It could be anything. Yeah. The first thing came to mind is I'm going to lift weights tomorrow. So that's rewarding. Think about that and see how your body responds as if it's an animal you're watching. Like your dog. Is it jumping up and down with excitement? or is it like pushing away and shaking and putting its tail between its legs? It's kind of like a anticipatory feeling. You know, like I'm kind of like anticipating.

Like I'm kind of... Where is it on the happy, on the joy meter? What is it positive or negative? It's positive, yeah, definitely positive. Oh, wonderful then. So you start to see what makes your body respond. Well, think of your body as a beloved animal. Like if you had a horse you loved or a dog you loved or a cat or a monkey for that,

matter, and see how it responds to things and to people and to activities and start to treasure your body's reactions to things it loves. Let it choose. Our culture, it's all about, as Dr. Ken Robinson says, we see the body as a mechanism that takes our heads to meetings, you know, like it's all cerebral and logical and all based on maximizing material wealth. and all that stuff. Look at the animal of your body, what Mary Oliver calls the soft animal of your body. Let it choose. Because it is, contrary to what our conventional wisdom says, it is wiser than your verbal mind. I truly believe that. Let it choose. It's hard to tap into that. Yeah. Especially in Western culture. Yeah, you have to practice. You actually have to practice

just getting in touch with yourself. Do you think this is why a lot of high achievers are so miserable? Yes. Yeah. And I've worked with lots of high achievers. And let me tell you, as a group, they are not a happy camper group. Yeah. And do you think, you know, for folks who I'm personally kind of, I got away from goals

for all the reasons that you've kind of been talking about because I just, I would achieve them and I still wasn't happy. So I'm like, okay, I need to find my purpose and really lean into that. But, you know, I think we are socialized to make a goal and achieve a goal. And then we move on to the next goal. And can that be healthy? And if not, like, what's the better path? Oh, it absolutely can be healthy. It's wonderful if you're setting goals based on what is true for you, on what you really want. For example, I'm in the middle of a house move. I'm moving to a place in upstate New York that's in the woods and has all kinds of

animals there. And the goal is, I want to move there. And we're right in the middle of it right now. And it's been a tremendous amount of work. And it's brought me enormous joy because the goal was set by my true self. It's been a long time since I had a goal that wasn't set by my true self. Those were torture. And I made them happen. I mean, I really pushed. I made stuff happen by hook or by hook. I was in miserable health. And I hated what I was doing. But I, by God, succeeded at it. until I realized how stupid that was. So I know offense. But to continuously fight to achieve goals that don't make you happy.

At a certain point, that is just your socialization. And the soft animal of your body will say, honey, come home. Come home. Be happy. How do you think about self-worth? I think that it comes from what we've been talking about. let's say you had someone taking care of you who constantly forced you, somebody who was like a butler,

like Batman had a butler that did everything for him, right? And picked out your clothes for you and picked out your activities for you and took full responsibility, did everything for you, but never asked you what you wanted. You'd have full service and no joy. But if you have someone who can't really, who's just an ordinary person, but who will sit down with you and say,

tell me everything, tell me what's on your heart. Tell me what you dream about. Tell me what's made you happy. Can we find that again together? That can breathe life into everything. And the world still isn't an easy place. But when you become the person who sits down and says, tell me everything, what do you love?

What can we do that will get you more of what you love? When you are that person for yourself, that's self-worth. I love that. At what age do you think that starts to come into focus? Oh, it's very different for different people, but I think it's supposed to be there from the beginning. I know. That's, I don't think that happens. Not very often. For a majority of people. Yeah, sure. I think I totally agree with you. But I do think that parents who are in alignment with their own joy automatically raise their kids to be aligned with their own joy. I mean, think of it as dog owners. If you get a a dog and you have rigid expectations about what that dog is meant to do and you're going to

train them to do a certain number of things, you'll impose that on the dog. If you get a puppy and say, I wonder what this puppy loves and you play with the puppy and go with the puppy's interests, you're going to be more adaptable to that young creature. Multiply that by a thousand when it comes to your children. That was the thing about having a son with Down syndrome. People were telling me, you know, if you really work with him, he can achieve things. He can, he can learn to be an intellectual. He can, it just depends on you working hard enough with him to.

And I thought, you know, why? I'm an intellectual and I hate it. I came to think of it like people were telling me, you went to the pet store, you wanted a puppy, you came home with a kitten. If you work hard enough, you can get. the kitten to wag its tail. If you really work with it, maybe you can get it to fetch. But, you know, at the end of the day, if you do that, the cat's going to look up at you 10 years later and say, meow, like, that's all it's going to do. So I really noticed with my children

and then, of course, with my clients, like, let's play until we find out what you love. And let's cater to that. I'm not saying I did a good job, but I was very aware of it. And most parents don't have that privilege. Yeah. You said you work with a lot of kind of high performance, high achieving folks. Talk a little bit about how you help them think about decision making. Because we make a gazillion decisions over the course of a day. And some are high stakes and they're happening in high stress environments. I think our ability to make good decisions in high stress environments is impacted by obviously a lot of factors.

But I'd love to hear kind of what is that foundation that you see that really helps a person make decisions that are aligned with their true self? I have read, I don't know this for sure, that torpedoes, guided missiles work by sort of starting out randomly and then correcting their course depending on how far they're veering off their target. So they're given a target and they'll go a bit to the left. and then correct and go to the right, and then they'll correct, they'll go a bit up and correct down. So they're always correcting until as they get closer to the target, the corrections get more

and more subtle. And boom, they can hit a bullseye. Your decision-making matrix every day is going to a thousand times. You're going to go off course for your true self. If you're not aware what makes you happy, you won't notice. Your guidance system is inbuilt, and it is very simple. It is, I mean, it's very sophisticated, but it's as simple as saying, good feeling, bad feeling. Am I getting warmer? I get him colder. So every time your body responds with resistance and rejection, that's a tiny decision you've made that's a bit off course. If you keep ignoring the signals and making more and more decisions in that direction, you won't get anywhere near your target. If you just start with the measurement of joy and go toward whatever brings you the most joy, you'll end up creating a life you want. in a high-stakes environment, it really helps to pre-envision that. So I do a lot of things with people where I just say, you know, it's five years from today. There's an exercise I call the ideal day where you just imagine you're waking up five years from today in your perfect life on a typical day and tell me what happens on that day. From the moment you wake up in immaculate detail, like what color are the walls in your bedroom?

If you're in a bedroom, you may wake up outside, I don't know. And you just envision a perfect ordinary day if your life were filled with meaning, purpose, and joy. And that becomes a kind of target. So then you have the feeling of joy and not joy, and you have the vision of the target. And those two are very, very powerful in combination. and the decision matrix becomes very powerfully oriented toward what will make you happy. I love that. That's so good. Is that where you mentioned, I think we were talking offline, you were talking about the way of integrity, the book that you wrote, and then kind of this last book you wrote about anxiety.

You kind of, you're like, people are like, okay, I'm aligned with my true self, but I'm still anxious. Yeah. What was happening there? What was happening there is that the brain is incredibly convincing at telling you that things you're afraid of are real. So for me, you know, going in the bathroom and saying, am I happy for five minutes turned into many years of meditation where I sit very, very quietly and watch more and more immaculate detail about what's making me happy and what isn't making me happy. I have had a lot of anxiety as I've sat in meditation.

And if you don't move, if you sit there and look at your fears, like it happened today when I was in meditation. I don't have a house right now. I sold the house that I was living in, having closed on the other house. So I was like, I don't have a place to live. That felt like the truth. But as I sat meditating and immediately fell apart.

Like, I'm sitting here. Of course I have a place to live. I'm in this place. I'm in a chair. I don't need anything but this chair. so the anxiety went away. But our culture, which is very focused on the material world as being the only truth and the acquisition of material things as being the only way to happiness and having the right relationship, having a certain social model of what should make you

happy. We get really riveted on that. And we also really believe that if we don't have everything we think we want, we are in jeopardy. We are in day. and we should worry about the future and we should be thinking, you know, about our investment portfolios in 30 years from a place of anxiety. Like I was, I got to go to a little party with Oprah right before the night before her very last broadcast of her famous TV show. Yeah, and she'd gotten up at 5 that morning. She'd written her whole script herself.

She'd gotten up to pray and meditate and do her stuff and she was completely calm. And she was talking about it. And then later on at the party, I heard two of her advisors saying, we've got to make her afraid. She's not going to perform well. She doesn't have fear driving her. And they really, really believe that. That is the cultural norm. Oprah knew better.

She did an amazing job, by the way. But there were actually people strategizing to get her to a state of anxiety because they truly believed it was the only way she'd perform. form well. That is so pervasive in our culture that people thought they were in integrity, even though they believed something that was making them terrified, they could not see through it. And part of that had to do with the neurology of it. And I had great fun researching it and writing a book about that. That is like the deepest lie of our culture that you should be afraid. Or angry. Yeah, anything negative. You know, you should be feeling negative emotion it's the only thing that will drive you forward really have you ever been in love

did you ever go to meet with someone you were in love what gave you the energy how angry and afraid did you have to be to go meet with the person you love not love is the motivator yeah i love you're invited to join the wait list for whoop advanced labs advanced labs delivers clinician reviewed lab results right into your whoop app for the most complete view of your biomarkers and biometrics and the most comprehensive understanding of your health. Unlike other tests, WOOP integrates your lab results with your WOOP data. See how your habits and behaviors influence your biomarkers and get clear guidance on what to change to improve your results.

To join the wait list, visit our website or the health tab in the WOOP app. You know, you've said a few things that maybe think of this. And, you know, number one, meditation, which is a solitary end up. usually you're sitting by yourself. Yeah. There can be other people in the room, of course. But the idea is that you're tapping into the inside. What does the role of kind of solitude and silence play in self-awareness and being able to find your inner truth and, you know, kind of understanding the role of anxiety and where it's helping you and where it might be hurting you? What's your take on that? Well, we are such social beings.

beings that if someone else is in the room, part of us is going to be plugged into that other person. And in fact, that's literally true with mirror neurons, as you know. I mean, the people who discovered that in an Italian lab, they had these monkeys wired up to look at their brains. And when they had lunch and someone ate a banana, the monkey's brains lit up as if they were eating a banana. So we are highly socially aware. And before you can really find your own course in life, I think you have to go off by yourself sometimes. And even if that means like being in a room with other people, but you're quiet and you're sort of inward focus, just as you said. And if you can do that enough to know what you want, even if someone else doesn't want you to want

it, then you've gone a long way toward being able to make yourself happy and alleviate your anxiety. one of the things I used to do when I would give speeches, usually in like hotel ballrooms with people around tables, like 100 people or thousands, I would stop right in the middle and say, is everybody comfortable? Before I go on, is everyone comfortable? And everyone would sort of look at each other and they'd be like, yeah? And I'd say, no, seriously, are you comfortable? And they'd say, yes, like, go on with the speech. What is wrong with you? And then I'd say, I'd say, how many of you if you were home alone right now would be a, in the position you're sitting in right at this moment, no hands would go up because they weren't very comfortable. And I would say, okay, so why would you be in a different position? And they'd sit there thinking, like hundreds of people like, hmm, brilliant people going, I don't know. And then someone would finally say, oh, I'm not really that comfortable right now.

And then this is not, this comfort is not the problem. The problem is that people, when they had looked me in the eyes, when I asked them if they were comfortable and they lied to me while knowing they were lying, but not knowing that they knew they were lying. So they knew in their bodies that they were uncomfortable. But their social minds were so tapped into what they were expected to do in that moment, especially with me, the speaker on the state, that they totally sold out their truth and claimed to be comfortable

because it was the socially expedient thing. You have to be able to sit in their own. room and say, I'm not very comfortable, but I'm going to sit here because I want to hear this speaker. Now you're talking. You don't have to skip the event. You just have to know how you really feel. And then you can start to guide your life. And that's really the benefit of going inward and solitude is you just can connect to your body in ways that it's hard to do in a social situation, to your point. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's, modernity makes it really hard. to actually sit in solitude and not be scrolling on your phone, for example, or, you know.

Yes. I'd be interested. I have two children. So, you know, this is a constant conversation. Right. You know, it's just like, hey, I think that to really, I think, live a joyful, peaceful life, you need to spend time alone with your thoughts, you know. But that has just become increasingly rare, I think, in our society to find those moments because we're always tethered to. something technologically. And it just, in my heart, I feel like that comes at a cost.

Huge cost, yeah. And I'd love to hear your perspective on what that cost is. And, you know, if you can maybe motivate our listeners to try to carve out time, I go to this, it's called the Norman Bird sanctuary and there's no Wi-Fi. It's just SOS. You know, like I literally can't use my phone. And, you know, that whole kind of section of like Rhode Island, it's like an hour from my house. But there's just no service so I kind of go there knowing like I don't have service like I you know but it's a place where I can really I just find that inner piece I feel so happy so joyful you know and I know that's what I need to be able to show up my family you know so but I'd love to just get your perspective on that and and hopefully motivate listeners to to try to carve out that time because

I feel like it's it's really degrading our society in ways that are right yeah it is and I'm sure you know there's a ton of research that shows that the constant irritations and the constant pull on our attention. It's really, really impacting our mental and physical help negatively. So we think about how we evolved to exist up until, say, 300 years ago. If you and I were talking 300 years ago, we wouldn't have medical science. We wouldn't have a lot of things, but we would wake up every day in a place where the sounds we heard were wind, bird song, each other's voices, water flowing, not that much sound. We would spend the whole day with people we knew. We wouldn't go off to a workplace somewhere with a bunch of people we'd never met before.

We wouldn't be surrounded by traffic sounds. We wouldn't have the same poles on our attention. We wouldn't even have clocks that, you know, there would be a town clock, but we wouldn't wear one. So we evolved to exist in a natural setting. And when you go to the bird sanctuary or when I, like, I was lucky enough, I am lucky enough to spend time in South Africa every year. And this year I had a real treat because I was almost by myself for like two and a half weeks in the very environment where humans first evolved. And I just put everything away. And boy, when you feel your body regulate, your nervous system regulating in response to your environment, you really start to understand how far away from your natural state you usually

are. I mean, if you go into the trees, within a few hours, your cancer killing cells triple because of the pheromones of the trees. We evolved to trade chemistry with plants and animals and water and earth, and we are pulled off of it. Go anywhere you can to connect with the way humans lived before modern technology and feel what it does. And then you can start to seek that natural regulation, nervous system regulation in different ways and in different environments. And you can get really good at reestablishing that, even in really scary, hostile environments. But I think you almost have to go back to the plants and the earth and the animals and the insects first. I mean, we spend 93% of our time indoors. Wow.

Yeah, I know. For a month and a half when I was in South Africa this year, the widows were open at night. It were screens to keep the leopards out and whatnot. But there wasn't a single moment when I was cut off from the outside. It was amazing. Yeah. Earlier you were talking about just how that feels in your body. And I think that's the motivation that keeps you coming back is you want to try to feel that again.

Oh, God. That connection and that piece. Yeah. I think so, too. Yeah, I just worry about the disconnection to nature specifically, you know, and just... I agree. I'm with you there. Another study show that even patients who are recovering from a heart surgery in a hospital,

they got better, faster, and had fewer complications. If they just had a picture of a tree as opposed to an artist, you know, modern art painting, it's phenomenal how dear we are to nature. Yeah, yeah. having a visual of just the outdoors. To your point, you know, yeah, it changes the chemistry in your body, which is wild. So if we think about building kind of this authentic, resilient life, you've mentioned lots of different ways to think about that. You know, are there any other tools that we might have missed or just ways of thinking about our life that you think would be really helpful?

Sure. And as I'm listening to this, I'm thinking a lot about my own privilege and how most people don't have the kind of privilege that I have. You know, in part, I was born to it. In part, I struggled for it. And in part, I was able to steer toward it because I've had this philosophy my whole life. But there are a lot of people out there listening. You can't just go off to South Africa for a month and a half, right? Or even to the Rhode Island bird sanctuary. So what I wanted to say is, you are also nature. And if you can start to find a stillness within yourself, there were researchers at the Princeton Research Institute who wired up people's brains and they were looking for what caused the state of synchronous alpha waves, which accompanied deep relaxation

and meditation and so on. And what they found is that if people ask themselves some strange questions like, can I imagine the distance between my eyes? And they directed their attention in this way. You can go into a state that is similar to what happens in nature. Another way is to soft focus your eyes. So if you right now are looking at me on the screen or whoever's out there listening if you're looking at something, see if you can look at the space between yourself and the thing you're looking at. And see if you can broaden the focus of your eyes to take in everything around you

as to the edges of your peripheral vision and make it all equal in importance. This is the way animals see. And it's the way we are meant to see in nature. and the tight focus of the eyes is associated with fight, flight, arousal. If you can just soften your eyes, if you're in prison, if you're in a job, you hate, if you have kids, you can still soft focus your eyes. And there have been a lot of times in my life when I was completely captive because of chronic pain, lots of little kids, financial need, all these really, you know, my whole family,

disown me. I mean, it's just, it got really gnarly. But I could always do two things. I could go inside myself and treasure whatever was essentially me. And I could focus on the world in the way an animal does and return to nature by doing that. I know it sounds very strange, but every wisdom tradition on this planet that I've ever heard of, and I've researched a few, recommend some form of inner stillness and soft focus to return to the true self. And that you can do anywhere, anytime for free. Yeah. On the bus, walking between class, like just any scenario.

I think about Tony Morrison, like, writing at four in the morning and then going to her job on the bus with that mighty mind going with her. but all the images and imagination she was bringing to her life as she wrote, like people have found ways into the true self and into their life's purpose, even under really harsh circumstances. And she won a Nobel Prize, you know, could do worse. Yeah, yeah. I think there's there's so much just peace inside us if we can just learn to tap into it, you know, and not feel as though we need special circumstances.

that it's just it's there waiting for us whenever we want to access it. So many ways in. It's actually really fascinating to find new ways in, yeah. And hopeful. Yes, always possible. Yeah. From a physiological standpoint, you know, you talk so much about signals and helping people connect to their body in deeper ways.

What's your, just the role of data, obviously, you know, as if someone who works for a wearable technology company. and has access to millions and millions of physiological data sets. I look at physiology all the time in relationship to psychological processes and kind of looking at these interrelationships. I'm so curious, what is the role of just physiological data in terms of learning about your body and yourself and making some of these connections that you're talking about? It's so intricate.

And if you start, I mean, I loved way back when they were first starting to do brain mapping. I paid a ridiculous amount of money. my brain mapped. And they said, just sit in front of this screen and you'll get all kinds of information. We have no idea what it means, but you'll figure it out. And they left me there for like 40 hours. I would go back to this clinic. And one of the things that I did is they said, this line here, these little beta waves represent your anxiety. And I thought, okay, I'm going to bring down my anxiety. I can bring down the beta waves. And the fact that I had that biological indicator, that

feedback, yeah. And I went into a state of meditation and my anxiety did not drop. at all. My theta waves went up. So I was sleepier. I was like, what? So then I just sat there for hours going, what brings that number down? What brings the beta waves down? And I started to think about coaching, and it went down. And then I thought, what about group coaching? It went down. What about speaking to a group? Went down. Large group. Down. Live on the Oprah show, flatline. No anxiety. And I was like, what? And then I found other things skiing. If I imagine skiing on the edge of a cliff in a blizzard, my anxiety would go to zero.

And I was like, what the hell? And I finally realized that in moments when I know that I have to be present and I have to be single focused on this moment, I have no anxiety. Wow. That would have, I never would have known that without the physiological. data coming back at me. I would never have discovered that. So all this, the, the, the band you sell and like all the data that you're gathering, it's incredibly useful, especially when we're in a culture that's pulled us away from our physiological roots. Yeah. Yeah. I find that, I find that too. And of course, you know, I drink the Kool-Aid, but, you know, but I, but I do find that it's

made me closer to my body and just help me understand my body. I think to your point, you know, that, you know, make me anxious and just kind of see that reflected in my physiology in profound ways, you know, we just published a paper in emotion that looked at perceptions of threat and challenge. Wow. So we looked at, you know, it's 18,000 folks. So it's a really big data set. Yeah. And we just asked them, you know, how do they, how do you perceive your day at the beginning of the day? And then, you know, how did your day go at the end of the day? And, you know, we kind of bucketed it into, you know, did you view this threatening? Do you views a challenging. And of course, there are kind of cardiovascular, you know, implications to

being in Threatened Challenge. But what was really interesting is that people who view their day is threatening didn't drop into deeper stages of sleep relative to folks who perceive their day as challenging, right? So your perception just kind of shapes your world. My statistics nerd is going crazy with joy. This is amazing. It says, you know, but it's interesting because I think how you translate that and generalize those findings to the greater population. like, gosh, you know, like how you perceive your world is going to impact things like sleep, you know, your ability to kind of get quality of restful sleep. So how do we reframe our thinking to kind of get ourselves into the challenging a little bit more? You know, what might be

keeping us from getting into the challenging, you know, where are these sources of threat in our life? And where do we need to show up our resources, you know? So yeah, it's, it's really fun to kind of look at these interactions, you know. Yeah. And I would, man, now I want to give everybody one of the bands so I can say, look at your quality of sleep to measure your quality of life. Let's find out what gives you good sleep. Part of it may be challenged. Part of it may be something else. I mean, that number there alone would be incredibly powerful. I know, just kind of seeing, like, how do I back into this state of peace, you know, where I can kind of show up and be my best self? Of course, we know sleep is related to that. Oh, my gosh. It's so, so important.

Yeah. Well, Marty, thank you so much. This is going to blast. Thank you so much for inviting me. I appreciate your time. Good luck with your move. Where can folks find you? What's the best place? It's just Marthabeck.com. And I think the Martha Beck on Instagram. And you have a beautiful following. I post a fair amount. I have people helping me with it. And I also have an online community where I'm going there. As soon as we get off of this, I'm going to go mozy over there and hang out with people. Oh, I love it. Oh, that's so good. Yeah, okay. You can just Google me and figure it out. And then also just literally Google Dr. Martha Beck and all of her beautiful nine books will pop up.

And the most recent one on anxiety and the previous one was Way of Integrity. So it was the last couple books. Thank you for. Thank you so much. Yeah. All you've done. Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode of the WooP podcast, please leave a rating or review.

Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. if you have a question what's he answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at whoop.com. Call us 508-443-9552. If you think about joining whoop, you can visit whoop.com. Sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. New members can use the code will, W-I-L-L, to get a $60 credit on Woop accessories when you enter the code at checkout. That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the WOOP podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green. Thank you.