#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety

31:06And that makes the brain balance. And then you can use your left hemisphere for data to make and learn things that only human brains can learn. And that is a joyride. What are your favorite ways? I don't know how to activate my left versus right hemisphere. What are some of the proximate ways for me to try and get that to get started? Well, one thing you can do if you have a pen and paper there is write your name. Unfortunately, I'll let you do that. Oh, I don't have a piece of paper here. Okay, you write your name forward. Then, this is in the book as well. Then you go to the left side of it.

31:51Oh, here's a piece of paper I could use. And you write your name backwards. So, I'm going to do this here. All right, Martha. And then I'll go to the other side. It's not as clear, but I can do it. That's unbelievably impressive. And then, well, it comes from learning to open your right hemisphere. I actually taught in the art department at Harvard under a brilliant professor named Will Ryman. And he did lots of these exercises to help awaken the right side of the brain. And this was one of the things that he did and you can do it upside down. Now as I'm doing this, I'm writing my name upside down and then upside down and backwards.

32:40I'm less able to talk to you because I just lost it completely. You can't talk and do this at the same time because the right hemisphere doesn't talk. As it says in my favorite book, The Doubtaging, The Chinese Doubtaging, that which talks does not know, that which knows does not talk. Very interesting. Okay. So that's one way. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Drawing anything is helpful. Drawing with your non -dominant hand, with your left hand, if you're right -handed. that any kind of motion through nature, tracking that we were talking about earlier, is one of the most powerful ways to wake up your right hemisphere that I have ever experienced.

33:31It's, I had a client once who was, he ran a sports empire and he specialized in what he called the spiritual sports. And these were skiing, surfing, golfing, oddly enough. I know, sailing, rock climbing, things that demand extremely focused attention on the body kinesthetically moving through space. That is, you have to drive hard into your right hemisphere to make that work. Left hemisphere cannot do it. And that's why I don't know if you do any of those things, but if you do, you may have found them almost addictive. Like, like, people just, I've never surfed, but people will, like, they live to surf.

34:18I used to live to ski. Now I live to do so many things because I have a list of activities that turn on the right side of my brain and I can always access one or more of them on any day. See what it is that you do the most. Drawing and painting. Yeah. So this painting behind me is... Very nice. It's a painting of, I went on a walk with some friends through the Cotswolds last October, and that was a real place where we stopped and I took a picture and did a painting. What role do you think courage has when it comes to pursuing your creative purpose in this way? Yeah, just to say I am going to step out and be creative in our cultural context and with the anxiety most of us carry is an active courage.

35:12And most of us have been shamed for trying to do creative things and not doing them well enough. And if we're really good at them, we got praised for them. But as I told you a little while ago, even being praised for doing something creative or being told that you'll be paid for it increases anxiety. So courage, it takes courage to say, I'm going to try this at all. And then it takes courage to know that you will fail to achieve the sort of surrounding culture's definition of what's impressive and that that is not the point. I throw away hundreds of paintings because the point is not the painting.

35:54The point is painting. You don't go to the gym to steal all the equipment. You go to the gym or to lift it up in the air and let it stay there. You lift it and let it fall. You lift it and let it fall again over and over because what you take out of the gym is a different body because it has been engaged in that activity. Anything you do that's creative and everything we do is creative. Getting dressed or buying our clothes is a creative act. It involves aesthetic choices. Making food is a creative act. A conversation can be a creative act, a dinner party. Pretty much everything humans do can be seen as creative.

36:42And if we go into that mode, everything becomes suffused with a sense of beauty and presence and even all, which is why in Zen they say before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water, after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. But the same activities are imbued with a kind of sacred astonishment to the one who has left anxiety behind. This episode is brought to you by Woop. Your body is constantly sending you signals, but without real data, it's easy to over train, under recover and miss your best performance, which is where Wooped Brand New 5 .0 comes in. It is the newest version of the wearable I've trusted for like 2000 nights.

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38:04What if someone doesn't feel very creative or like they have much room for creativity in their life? How do you think about awakening your inner creative if it's something that's been hidden for a long time? The first thing is that most people are exhausted. And the first act of creativity the brain will undertake is returning us to homeostasis to health. So if you are exhausted by years of anxiety and pushing your body to go against its circadian rhythms and its ultraadian rhythms and basically all its rhythms, if you've been robbed of peace and the kind of creativity children engage in, which is without any particular objective, you will first probably need to rest for a long time.

38:53Not that long. Four days. That's what it takes usually when someone's totally exhausted. Four days of absolutely no agenda. Like lie on the couch eating ice cream and watching, you know, reruns of the white lotus or whatever. And on the third day, there will be a return of a flicker of hope. The first two days, you're just like, I'm a waste of space and I hate myself. The third day, you're like, oh, I remember life. It wasn't that bad. And on the fourth day, you'll think, ah, maybe there's something I could do. I want to make, I want to like build to make pottery after watching the great pottery throw down like you start to get spontaneously creative after four days of rest.

39:45Right, so you are, it's a battle of attrition of boredom to give yourself so little to do that you've got nothing, no other choice than to become creative. Is that what we're doing here? No, no, no, I think a bit more is filling the well. You want to consume pleasures. And we're so resistant to this, especially, you know, you're the kind of person who works out hard and performs high levels and everything he does. And everything in the culture says, that's the right way to do it. But you will destroy yourself if you do nothing else. And for all that effort you put out, you have to drink in what is around you, in nature, but also what's created by the creativity of other people, which has sort of a profound frequency of peace, delight, mariment, the right hemisphere only uses language for songs, poems, and jokes.

40:41You know, if you sat and watched, I remember when Boyd Barney, I thought he was very sorry to name you, Boyd, but I met him at a time when he was completely physically and mentally exhausted and he came to see me in the US and I made him lie down and watch Eddie Isard, routines, the comedian Eddie Isard for three days and he was like, and I brought him ice cream in his sister were there and I brought them ice cream and told them, no more comedy, more comedy. You haven't done your comedy today. Wow. And they talk about that as a kind of turning point because no one ever told them that was okay and I was telling them no, it's required.

41:23What else is there to say about interventions that you found successful for the perennially anxious person? Sometimes it can help to plug into the energy or the presence of someone who's already gotten over the hurdle of conformity to the culture. So if you can be with someone who is a great meditation teacher or a poet or a musician and if you can be with them in this field of, you can actually experience almost tangibly a field of stillness. And again, this phenomenon of entrainment, it may be partly because we have mirror neurons in our brains. We reflect each other's brain patterns. So when I look at you and you look at me, our brains are actually moving to be more alike.

42:13So if you're with someone who's profoundly calm, it can really help you in train. But I actually think it's more than the mirror neurons. I think it's probably something to do with electromagnetism. We have electrical systems made of meat, our nervous systems. And we all know that electrical things can communicate without wires. So you feel things. You pick up things. and you become much more intuitive in those spaces as well, which makes it extra fun. Okay, so you're using the social pressure of being around people who appear to have already done that work to help you to do yours? No, no. I would prefer that you be in a small room on the, you know, with a door closed and the person, the enlightened person in the other room doing something.

43:07And you just get to eat ice cream. It is not about in one way of looking at things nature is the opposite of culture. And so bringing culture in always because we have an anxious culture, it's always going to spur that anxiety, which is the way it immediately turns into, oh, now I've got social pressure. No, there's no pressure whatsoever. It is like falling when you are in the field of someone who's profoundly without anxiety. It actually can be disorienting and give you a bit of vertigo, but it's so delicious because your nervous system is finding its place again, probably after years of being jacked up and anxious.

43:53Yeah, I think my joke version of social pressure was talking about the way that mirror neurons work. If you hang around with happy people, you tend to be a little bit happier. If you hang around with sad people, you tend to be a little bit more sad. But yeah, whatever you want to call it, be reneural and social consistency bias, just the vibe of the room, all of those things. So one thing I've got, I think about this quite a lot. I wonder whether mastering anxiety is a game of control or a game of acceptance. and... Oh, fingers for a cent acceptance. It does seem to be the more that you fight it, the worse that it gets.

44:35Oh, yeah. That's where that anxiety spiral, the anxiety cycle comes in. Yeah. We call it the fight flight system for a reason, although it's fight flight, faint freeze, flop, fall on. Now they have all these other F words. But yeah, as long... If you go into fight mode to get rid of your fight or flight arousal, it's going to exacerbate your flight arousal. Yeah, that's why they say fighting for peace is like fornicating for virginity.

45:07Yeah, I didn't know that you had autoimmune issues for such a long time. Can you tell the story of that? Oh my goodness, they started when I was 18. I was running about a hundred miles a week. I was running marathons finishing my freshman year at Harvard and I got hit by car and it just dinged me on the hip and threw me into a snow bank and then I ran 11 miles home. But the next day I was in a lot of pain, went to a doctor and the doctor said, well, we're going to immobilize you until the pain goes away. And it was 12 years later that the pain went away. It just not only did it not get better, it got much worse and it started traveling.

45:51I started having very, very high levels of inflammation in all different areas of my body, different organ systems. By the end of 12 years, I'd largely given up on medical treatments because they all told me we don't know what's wrong with you. But I was diagnosed with three measurable, observable autoimmune conditions, all of which they told me were poorly understood and incurable and progressive. Yeah, I actually, they gave me a pamphlet for one of the things, interstitial cystitis, all you IC people out there, three cheers, constant internal pain, and they gave me a pamphlet when I was diagnosed and I opened it randomly and it said at the top of this one page, to keep yourself from committing suicide, remind yourself of your religious beliefs.

46:47If that's your treatment. Yeah, it was gnarly. Was that because of the impact? Was that because of the treatment? Was it because of being sedentary? All of the above. Yeah. What I had was, I think now, I would probably call it attention myofacial syndrome, but it did reach levels in my organs where it caused other disease. But it's basically just a spasmodic tightening of different muscular systems in the body. They don't really know. But it actually, I finally got that diagnosis when I was 31. I was 18 when I got hit in 31. A doctor went out and came back with one of his med school books. He was just a newly fledged doctor and he goes through this huge book.

47:36He said, I think you have this. And it said, the only treatments they had were vacations and exercise. And I said, can I have a note to that effect? Oh, and massage, yes. And I went directly from there to the gym. And I was so weak I couldn't lift a two pound leg extension weight, leg extension I couldn't lift two pounds. And it was excruciating, but I had learned it probably wasn't a herming tissue. And so I found that exercise was actually a magic bullet for me. As long as I also stayed very relaxed as I could, and this is the key. Only did things I enjoyed. Why? Because anything else, you know, the reason lie detectors work is that when we say things that we know aren't true, everything in the body reacts against that.

48:40our muscles tighten, our perspiration increases, our blink rate, our, you know, hand sweat, they can measure immediately all these things happen when we lie. And they can pick that up on a machine. Well, when you do something you don't enjoy and you show up without protest, you're kind of lying with your life, you're lying with your actions. And little kids won't do that. They will scream their lungs out if they're taken to a place they hate. And we just beat it out of the well, don't beat them anymore, but a lot of people have been beaten for it. And it's ironic because what they're doing is they're following an evolutionary imperative to find what's right for them by following a sense of enjoyment.

49:28It's that simple. But the culture we live in does not really teach us to do that. This episode is brought to you by Function. If you've been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, your focus and your performance, but most people have no idea what there are or what to do if something's off, which is why I partnered with Function because I wanted a smarter, more comprehensive way to understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, there were lab tests that monitor over a hundred biomarkers and their team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actual advice to actually improve your health and lifespan.

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50:36What would be your advice to someone that's going through a protracted period of chronic illness? I mean, you were bed bound for a very long time. Like, 12 years, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's a special kind of living hell with even less happening. So it's like pouring hell. Yeah, what how do you get through that stuff? And in retrospect, what do you wish that someone had told you sort of during that period of your life? The first thing is that please direct compassion to the parts of yourself that are in pain. I was at war with with my own pain. I was so angry at it for keeping me because I was highly active before that.

51:22And I directed hatred and violence at it internally. When I learned to meditate, which is, that's another thing that I would really, really advise. The one thing I decided I could do in that situation, the one thing I could learn was meditation. And so I started and I sort of got into it before the general public sort of adopted it in the United States. I'm really grateful that I did. What I would say to another person and that was first, be kind, be kind, be kind to the parts of you that are hurting. And secondly, realize that there is the capacity to increase your life's value and experience by going outward for experience.

52:06And then there is also the capacity to go infinitely inward. And when you are forced to go infinitely inward, You find that the inner space is as vast and interesting and full of information and experience as the outer world in which your body lives. It can be quite trippy and it's worth doing. So you learn to meditate. What about when it comes to a don't rail, don't sort of fight, don't have violence against the parts of you that are the ones that are struggling. or the ones that are falling behind. What else, have you come to reflect on about that period? I want to tweak that a tiny bit. So love the parts of your body that are hurting and also love the part of you that hates it.

53:01The part of you that hates the pain, that hates the restriction. Say, I get it, I'm here. I hear you, tell me everything. And just allow yourself to... I poured it all out in journals when my hands worked, which wasn't always. And self -expression is another way that has been shown very effectively to reduce levels of stress and anxiety, especially when you're in a tough situation. Does that answer the question? Self -expression is in journaling just being able to get your words out in a relatively judgment freeway. Yeah. And you don't even have to use words. words, you could draw pictures, you could use music, play songs that help convey your emotions.

53:46It's almost as if getting the experience of all the difficulty of human life into a state where it can be communicated is not only a really, really positive way to get out of suffering, but also an incentive to connect with the world and other people in a deeply authentic way, which again, we're not taught to do. And unless we're in a lot of suffering, most of us never even think of doing it. So I'm really grateful for that horrible experience. Yeah. What are the, for the people, whether they're sick or not, what are the most common limiting beliefs that the people who you work with tend to have?

54:31I think a lot of the time when We look at our inner landscape as kind of like a personal curse or blessing in some way, but no matter what we think of it as unique to us, and upon hearing the way that other people think or feel, you realize that this is probably much more of a feature of being a sensitive human than it is a bug of being broken and do you. So I'm just interested in what those common self limiting beliefs are. The first one is I'm not good enough. There's something wrong with me. I'm not enough. I'm too much. It's about the quality of the being you essentially are being maladapted to the world and unacceptable.

55:15That is universal. And I think it's because you have these, we're born with really, really active brains. I mean, we have so much going on inside our brains when we're just born. And if we're cared for by people who are really tuned into our needs, that is great for us. And we develop brains that trust the world. But the moment the person we are inside starts to run into contradiction or social pressure. For example, they don't like it when I cry all the time. When we get that socialized pressure, we instantly sell out our true nature and do what people want us to do. And then there's something called the just world hypothesis, which almost all children have, which is being misunderstood by adults who frankly don't even know how to connect with you because you can't talk or make, it's a ridiculous fail -fail situation.

56:16The parents can't win, the baby can't win, it's bizarre. But the baby has this conception of the world that says, well, these people that are supporting me are absolutely necessary to my well -being. So if I've got a problem with them, the world is full of demons and I cannot bear to exist. So what must be going on here is that I'm not good enough for them. I did something wrong. There's something bad about me. I need too much. I'm not giving enough. And, you know, the twig gets bent in the first months of life. And then we all bump into various small and large traumas along the way and internalize all of those into our self -concept.

56:57It's always this shame -based feeling of the essential self that I am is somehow just wrong. How do you advise... I mean, this seems like such a basic assumption that people have about themselves, so much so that it's not even an assumption, it's more like the physics of their system. You know, the thermodynamics at the inside of their mind. What sort of wormhole do you need to break through in order to change that? It's funny that you use the term physics because I wrote a book called The Way of Integrity where I said you have to be in the truth, the truth of your own experience. And integrity was not meant in a moral sense, but in a structural sense of playing that's structural integrity can fly.

57:47A plane that's not an integrity often can't fly or will crash or whatever. So what happens, I think, is that you start to look at, and I said in the book, it's not morality, it's just physics. So here you have a worldview and a set of beliefs. And if it's in perfect integrity, that is all your sense of what is true at all levels of your body, mind, heart, soul. If they're If you have psychological suffering, if there's anything wrong with your mood, your relationship, your career, anything, the physics are off. And in there somewhere is something that's out of true. And that will always 100 % of the time, sometimes it trauma, an internalized trauma that happens at a very physical level.

58:36But most of the time it's a story held in the brain very deeply and it gives us a message that we're not safe and things are not okay. And that's out of alignment with the truth. It may be absolutely in accord with what we're taught in our culture in school. You know, a kid is dyslexic and he's failing and everything. The school will say, yeah, you're wrong. something's if they don't know he has dyslexia you're not trying enough you're not working up to potential and he internalizes that as the self hatred and shame but it's wrong so that the physics won't work so he can't move forward he can't feel at peace he can't be settled he can't and it will not leave us alone any failure of integrity causes structural issues that make our lives unable to work well.

59:31So if you have something that's wrong, go in and find the physics of belief, find the belief that you are holding. It is not in accordance with what you feel to be true at the very deepest level. An anxiety is one of the things that is most often out of truth, especially in our culture. Yeah, it's strange thinking about digging a little bit deeper and working out sort of who you truly are, what integrity looks like. Because I think it's very easy to distract, swipe, dopamine your way out of hearing that. That voice in the back of your mind, I did a lot of therapy last year. And one of the best things that my therapist taught me was pay attention to fleeting thoughts.

1:00:18Oh, I love that. Yeah, it's gorgeous. And I don't think she means fleeting is in flimsy or as in fickle, but fleeting is in quiet, but typically repetitive, right? It's the same thing that you've heard a few times over and over again. I love that. Yeah, it's great. Pay attention to fleeting thoughts, but the problem is, and I noticed this, you know, as I was heavily caffeinated in a car, just having finished an episode, you know, on Slack, I've taken a call at the same time. And then I'd get in and there's just this huge deceleration. and okay, now I'm on the cushion and let's see what happens for 50 minutes and it would be, you know, the first 20 minute kind of like meditation.

1:01:04Almost all of the overhead that you're paying is getting into the process of meditation, which is one of the disadvantages of only doing 10 minute sessions or 15 minute sessions. Pay all of the overhead to get into it and none of the sort of profit of being in it. And then yeah, after a little while, fleeting thoughts would be a little bit louder, but it just that comparison between how I was when I was going in and how I was in those first there and how I was toward the end of the session. Before I got, I tended to sort of run out of gas. It's so funny, you think you look at 50 minutes, you think I can't achieve anything in 50 minutes.

1:01:39And if you're 45 minutes into a therapy session, you actually think, yeah, I'm ready to be done. Right. typically. So it is it is a good length. But yeah, just that that quiet voice in the back of your mind isn't able to shout all that loud. And I get the sense that if you have got to the stage where it is shouting quite loud, it was quiet for a much longer time before that. And you could have learned this lesson probably half a decade ago. Yeah, I learned that from no less than Oprah herself. She talks I was like, how she says, first something comes to you as a whisper. Like, you might want to do this, but you very rarely do we hear that.

1:02:19Then it starts to be a message where it's like something tapping us on the head, going, hello, hello, you may want to do this. You may want to like fireproof your house or something. Then if you don't listen to the message, you get a lesson. Oops. Something set fire to the drapes. Okay. Lesson. If you don't pay attention to the lesson, you get a problem. and if you don't pay attention to the problem, you get a crisis. And if you don't pay attention to the crisis, you're dead. So yeah, and I noticed when you're talking about the fleeting thoughts, repeatedly you've brought your right hand up and gestured toward the back right side of your head.

1:02:57And that is a physiological communication that anyone would understand in any culture because it comes from the right sides of our brains. and you're sort of indicating the area where the fleeting thoughts are connecting with the rest of your cognition. And it's a lot like I used to, once I moved to California in my 50s and I had this craving to do long meditations. So I'd go into the forest and cover myself with bird seed. And then I would just sit there unmoving for hours to see what was come. It was awesome. Why were you covered in bird seed? Do I track animals, of course? But, and, well, I don't understand, is that a performance enhancer?

1:03:41Oh, my goodness. No, it's, to have a bird land in your hand, to have chipmunks. I had two chipmunks, these little soft, warm, furry things, have an actual territorial battle in my hands, like two tiny little sumo wrestlers. See for me, that, it's like Emerson said, duty is its own excuse for being. two chipmunks wrestling in your hands. That is its own excuse for existing. That is just fun. That is pure fun. I figured as long as I'm holding perfectly still, why not get through to think of me as a source of nourishment? And what happened was I could feel the energy of an animal coming in that very part of my, not just my brain, but my whole right backside would sort of tingle.

1:04:30And I could actually tell what sort of animal was approaching me before it reached me. And what kind of birds were planning to stop and they just fall on you. And now when I'm looking for creative thoughts or ideas about how to cope with a disaster or personality clash or anything, I remember that how the energy sort of tickled the field of my awareness as a fleeting thought. And I learned to be more and more still. They didn't come and climb on me for weeks. I had to be there every day perfectly still. And I had to keep myself from getting excited when they actually decided to come visit because they couldn't tell when your adrenaline goes out.

1:05:15They don't want any part of that. And I now I do the same thing with my whole life. And it really is that the brilliant ideas and the loves and the experiences that are waiting to light you up, they come as those fleeting thoughts. And if you hold very still and allow them, they will come to stay. Heck yeah, Martha Beck, ladies and gentlemen, Martha let's bring this one into line. That was so beautiful. Where should people go? They want to keep up today. Oh. What's the stuff you're doing? Just Martha Beck .com. I also run an online community called Wilder community .com. So if If you want to like hang out with people who think like this.

1:05:59It's fun, it's weird, but it's fun. Our motto is Feeling Good by Looking Weird. Okay, yeah, good. I like that. That's cool. Martha, I really appreciate you. Until next time. Thank you so much. Take care.