Train Your Brain To CONTROL Anxiety | Dr. Wendy Suzuki

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0:41It 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 were 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 and to the people closest to me.

1:22Like 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 from 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 you know I'm healthy or whatever it may be I have a roof yeah so just focusing on anything and I do that every night where I think it's about three things to be grateful for that brings me like another level of peace and then I think about what am I going to do tomorrow to help people?

1:54How am I going to serve?

1:56Dr. Wendy Suzuki: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. Same anxiety.

2:34Dr. Wendy Suzuki: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. I stand there.

3:11Dr. Wendy Suzuki: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 others of our minds. And what if you turn that around and you do what you do and say, how can I help somebody else in this way that I know I've struggled, but I also know what can help?

3:58How 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?

4:08Dr. Wendy Suzuki: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. Really? 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, a delta variant instead.

4:47Dr. Wendy Suzuki:And 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, a classic example of long-term stress, your whole temporal lobe gets smaller. Why?

5:29Dr. Wendy Suzuki:Because you first start to degrade the size of your individual brain cells and then you start to kill them off. Memory 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.

6:33I have a brand new book called Make Money Easy. And if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life, you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life, but you wanna make it easier, you wanna make it flow, you wanna feel abundant, then make sure to go to makemoneyeasybook.com right now and get yourself a copy. I really think this is gonna help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward. We have some big guests and content coming up. Make sure you're following and stay tuned to this episode of The Daily Motivation Show.

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8:04Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.

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