Train Your Brain To CONTROL Anxiety | Dr. Wendy Suzuki EP 456

0:28I am so grateful for you. community. All you have to do is go to lewishouse.com slash giveaway. And that's where you'll get all the details about how you can be a winner. And again, we're choosing winners every single day for 10 straight days. 10 days of greatness is my way of saying thank you for a decade of greatness. So what are you waiting for? Head to lewishouse.com slash giveaway and enter the giveaway right now. Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

1:08It used to be extremely difficult for me to sleep until I hit about 30, 31 years old. And what I've learned, there's three things that I've learned that have helped me go to sleep extremely fast. One is going through a transition of fully sharing and starting to heal the process of my shame. Finding a therapist and talking about what I'm shameful about. And really revealing parts of myself that I never wanted anyone to know about me. There's so many things that I didn't like about myself that I was ashamed of or felt insecure around. And it made me feel like a prisoner to my own thoughts. Because I felt like I was, in a sense, hiding myself to the world.

1:47And to the people closest to me. Like certain people didn't even know who I was. And when I started to open up about those things, I felt inner peace. Number two was I started to focus on everything at night when I was grateful for it for the day. I was like, okay, if there was anything good today, what was it? Even if it was all bad, there had to be something. I'm alive. You know, I'm healthy or whatever it may be. I have a roof. So just focusing on anything. And I do that every night where I think about three things to be grateful for. That brings me to another level of peace. And then I think about what am I going to do tomorrow to help people?

2:21How am I going to serve? Healing the shame, focusing on gratitude, and thinking about how am I going to serve? I love thinking about something you're going to do for somebody else tomorrow coming from this practice of healing your own shame. One of the superpowers in good anxiety that comes from your own anxiety, this is a beautiful example that you just told me, is the superpower of empathy. For yourself or others? First for yourself and recognizing it in yourself and then giving it out to others. Because just as you described your journey, a lot of our own anxieties have been with us since we were little.

2:59Same anxiety. They stay for decades. For your lifetime sometimes. What was yours? So I have many, but the one that I talk about here is shyness and kind of social anxiety. So I realized that that has become my superpower as a teacher. Why is that? Because when I'm standing at the front of the classroom, there are always those students that say, Oh, I know the answer. I know the answer. And I know that there's many more that want to talk to me, that want to show me what they know, want to have that interaction, but can't do that. And so what do I do? I make sure that I am there 15 minutes before.

3:37I stand there. I talk to the students before. I stay after class. anybody that wants to come up for a casual conversation where you don't have to be the one raising your hand. And I didn't even realize it until I wrote this book, that that is a superpower of in-class empathy. And I have that particular form of empathy because of my particular form of anxiety, my social anxiety. And so imagine the 90 % of people that have their particular form of anxiety. They know what it feels like. They know what's going through many of others of our minds. And what if you turn that around and you do what you do and say, how can I, how can I help somebody else in this way that I know I've struggled, but I also know what can help.

4:24How do we know how to turn anxiety into something good? If we're constantly in a state of anxiety, what does it do to the brain? What does it do to our immune system and to our body and our emotions? Yeah. Yeah. So that's a great question. The answer is long-term anxiety will have terrible effects on all of the physiological systems that are being activated. So what's happening when you have a stress response? Your heart rate is going up. Your respiration is going up. So long-term effects of anxiety and stress are heart disease. The other thing that's happening when you're in a constant state of stress is that blood is being shunted from your digestive and reproductive systems to your muscles because you're supposed to be running away from the lion and you're sitting there worrying about your taxes instead or whatever, the Delta variant instead.

5:14And so long-term effects, ulcers, long-term reproductive problems with long-term anxiety. And that's just the body. So now we get to my favorite body area, the brain. Yes. And so long-term stress will literally start to first kill off the dendrites of your neurons, the input structures of your brain cells, in two key brain areas. The hippocampus, critical for long-term memory in the temporal lobe, and the prefrontal cortex, critical for decision-making, focus, and attention. And so, for example, if you have PTSD, classic example of long-term stress, your whole temporal lobe gets smaller. Why? Because you first start to degrade the size of your individual brain cells, and then you start to kill them off.

6:03Memory problems ensue. So long-term stress, long-term anxiety is chronic anxiety and stress. Exactly. I should say that this book, Good Anxiety, is not addressing clinical anxiety. That is a different animal. For clinical anxiety, just as you would do if you had a broken leg, you need medical treatment. This is not a medical treatment for somebody that has chronic anxiety. This is the 90 % of people that say, yeah, I have some anxiety every day. I call it everyday anxiety. So these are some of the approaches and mindsets that you can use to start to shift that negative effect of anxiety and shift it in to the basic brain activation that it is and start to help motivate yourself to address the things that you're afraid of.

6:57Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

7:52Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.