The Toolkit for Healing Anxiety, Part 2

27:44It's like, we feel bad. What do we have to feel bad about? And then we do that stacking that I was talking about the last time we talked about, we start stacking. So every negative thing in your life at that point, oh, my relationship without going, oh, I've got taxes. I've got to do my account. You know, all that stuff stacks on top of each of them. So when it does that, it just keeps you in that negative state. So it's really about, okay, I'm anxious, like we were saying earlier. Okay, where is that in your body? Now you can start when you start finding the anxiety in the alarm in your body, now you're starting actually to get the root cause.

28:17Because in your head, you will never solve it. You will always be caught in your head, you will never get out of your head. You always have to go to your body. It's so true, you will never get out of your head. Dr. Kennedy, we have another question. and it's from a listener named Lena and it's about breaking the chain of anxiety and here's a quick preview of it. Hey Mel, my name is Lena. How can I break this generation cycle of anxiety and uneasiness and start healing? Now, Dr. Kennedy, we have to take a quick break for our sponsors so you can think about her question and when we come back, we will play Lena's full question and then we're gonna tackle whether or not anxiety is genetic and how you can spot it in your parents.

29:03Stay with us.

29:15Welcome back. My name is Mel Robbins. I'm here with the renowned Dr. Russell Kennedy. This is part two of the Anxiety Toolkit. And we are jumping back in with a question from a listener named Lena. Hey, Mel. My name is Lena. My father passed his anxiety to me and the rest of my siblings growing up. I'm trying to not let my children adopt being short-tempered and anxious like many people in my family are. How can I break this generation cycle of anxiety and uneasiness and start healing? So how do you break this cycle of anxiety in a family? Well, first you start breaking the cycle in yourself. So you start realizing that this anxiety I feel is actually this alarm in my body.

30:04I'm going to pay attention to that because that is my younger self. And I have many, many people contact me and say, oh, my 15 year old daughter is so anxious. Can you see her? Can you see her? And it's like, no, what I'm going to do is I'm going to fix you first. It's like Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer. He doesn't fix the dog. He fixed the parent. So that's what I work on with people. As I work on the parent, I show the parent how to heal themselves. And then that energy just seems to translate into the children. They start saying, you know, Hey mom, you seem more connected because she is because she's not in that alarm state where she can actually give love and attention to her kids.

30:40So those kids can get filled up and feel safe. And then that gets handed down from generation to generation. If your mother or father was anxious, which mine was, um, both my parents actually were quite anxious, you will start seeing that and almost be operantly conditioned to create that anxiety because you feel it in them. So a lot of the kids that are people that refer their kids to me are because they are anxious themselves and they feel helpless and powerless to help themselves, let alone help their kids. And then they feel horrible that they've kind of transferred this anxiety gene, quote unquote, to their kids.

31:20And it's really about heal yourself first, and then your kids will come along. Your kids will start feeling that. So for Athena, it would be, okay, how do we find your alarm? How do we start changing that pattern, that automatic pattern of negativity and irritability in you first? And then you're more available to your kids. And when you're more available to your kids, your kids don't feel so alarmed themselves and you start healing that whole generational cycle. Anxiety in a family is not about the kids. It's about the adults. Yes. And you help kids that have anxiety by addressing and healing the anxiety in the adults in that family.

32:0899 % of the time, yeah. so dr kennedy is anxiety genetic no the short answer is no there are there are mental illnesses and i put that in quotation marks that do seem to have a bit more of a genetic component to it like schizophrenia bipolar but anxiety in and of itself is not genetic we haven't really isolated anything that would say this is the anxiety gene or anything what i do think that we have genetically is a tendency to be sensitive. So if you are born sensitive, which everybody I see with anxiety, everybody I've ever consulted with, with anxiety is a sensitive person. You are a sensitive person.

32:50How do you know if you're a sensitive person? Well, because you feel everything. And then the other part about feeling everything as a sensitive person is to survive. You have to start shutting off your connection because it's just too much. When you're born sensitive, you learn ways of protecting yourself because your home life doesn't give you the love and attention that you need. Now you could have good parents who are loving and caring, but just because we are more sensitive, we just need more love. I need more love than my brother. He's not as sensitive as I am. So your parents could have been fine in a way, but if you are sensitive and you need more love, if you don't get it, you have to start really giving that compassion, love, and attention to yourself.

33:38Well, it's like learning to feed yourself, for crying out loud. Like it's that basic. It is. What are signs of adult anxiety, particularly for that generation of our parents who never talked about this? Prozac was not even invented yet. That was not a generation of expressing feelings. that was the be seen and not heard generation, shut up and pull up your big girl panties. I'll give you something to cry about. Yeah. I'll give you something to cry about. No, I'm dead serious because my mom recently said to me, you know, never even occurred to me that I had anxiety because maybe I didn't want to feel all that stuff.

34:25Maybe I'm afraid to, to like, go talk to a therapist and open that all up. Like we didn't talk about our feelings. Nobody was going to do shit about it anyway. And so it didn't occur to me until recently that gosh, you know, my mom clearly had a lot of trauma in her childhood and felt invisible. And I've never looked at her and been like, the woman has anxiety. so what are the surprising signs that your parents may be dealing with anxiety alcoholism that's a big one because they didn't have the open dialogue that we have now so it wasn't okay you know mental illness had a tremendous stigma and it still does it's it still really does so There's this resistance to actually admitting you have a problem because that child in you or in them that is loud and painful, it's easier in a way to just keep stuffing that child down because it's not talked about.

35:33I don't want to be different than anyone else. We just accept our nervous system as this is what we're stuck with and this is the way it's going to go. It's been like this for 10 or 15 years. I've been like so many people that say I've been in therapy for like five, 10, 15 years. And yeah, I mean, I feel a little bit better, but I'm not really getting there. When you look at therapy costing$150 an hour, you know, it's pretty frustrating for people. It's pretty out of reach for people. So alcoholism was one. What are the other signs? Irritability. People, parents that are chronically irritable, not connected, just not feeling connected to a parent.

36:12My mother is very warm and caring at points and very cold and distant at others. I think that's kind of like the British way in a lot of ways. And so for a child, it's like, hey, sometimes you're rubbing my back and we're feeling connected. And other times you're cold as ice. So in a way, that's almost worse than being consistently one or the other. If she was consistently cold, I would learn how to protect myself from that. If she was consistently warm, I wouldn't need protection in the first place. So a lot of us kids had emotional dysregulation in our parents that we didn't recognize. So sometimes they'd be nice and connected and other times they'd be off the deep end.

36:52And I think irritability is one way of doing that. Hyper vigilance, hyper organization. These things that show up in our parents because they didn't have a way of expressing it. They didn't know or they went to therapy. And a lot of people go to therapy and they've been in there for five years and they feel terrible because it's like it helped me at first. And and but now I'm just feeling just as bad as I always have. And I'm just spent, you know, forty thousand dollars on 10 years of therapy. And it's because, you know, they're they're not addressing the root cause. And I think hypervigilance shows up.

37:30I think irritability, drug abuse. And I'm not talking like, you know, cocaine or whatever. It's, you know, prescription drugs, that kind of stuff that the people need to kind of cope. Because like I said, when we go into survival mode, we become very inaccessible both to ourselves and to other people. And when we're warm and connected to ourselves, we can extend that out to other people. A lot of people are more connected to their pets than they are to their spouse because they see their pet as safe. They don't see their spouse as safe because their spouse reflects some of the crimes of the parent in a way.

38:08So it's really, it's very interesting to see how anxiety shows up, how childhood trauma shows up in people. And it's usually emotional dysregulation of some kind where they can't connect. And another way of connecting that doesn't look like it is the people pleaser is the mom who's doing making cookies for everybody and doing all this stuff. and, and appear so connected because we're very good. Like anxious people are very smart. We know how to present an image that appears connected, but really isn't, but people can feel it. People can feel your authenticity when you're connected. Um, the point that really struck me there was, uh, somebody who is just so loving and kind with an animal and cold with other people.

38:59yeah because they didn't trust their parents their parents didn't didn't establish that people are safe my dad didn't establish that he was even though my dad was really kind and loving and playful and great uh at many many times in fact most of the time that i spent with him was good but it's like when you get that one bad experience with a dog it takes a thousand good experiences to kind of erase it a little bit so it's really important again our brains we have a fear bias We are evolutionarily programmed to focus on fear. And another thing that I got from one of your podcasts recently is, you know, and I said this a lot, is whatever you focus on, you get more of.

39:38So if you focus on your anxiety, you'll get more anxiety. If you focus on gratitude, you get more gratitude. That's basically what it comes down to. I love that tool. Instead of focusing on anxiety, try to switch your focus to what you're grateful for. Let's switch gears and go to another question from a listener named Becky. How do we like calm that anxiety and get it all to slow down? You get so anxious, you can't stop thinking about the worst that's going to happen. And sometimes it's not even realistic things, but you just get anxious and you can't get it to stop. What are some tools? We need those.

40:17Go into your body. Get out of your head. You're not going to find a solution in your head. it's not there. You know, stop looking for peanut butter at the hardware store. You're not going to find it there. You're not going to find the solution in your head. But now whatever you focus on, you get more of. So if you start focusing on your thoughts, of course, you're just going to get more thoughts and that's just going to be an endless self-fulfilling cycle. So consciously you have to realize what happens to me when I feel anxious, where do I feel this anxiety? And can I train myself to go, oh, there's that pain in my chest again.

40:51There's that pressure. There's that lump in my throat. That's a sign that I'm starting to go into alarm. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my body. And this is one of the other times where I, you know, I get people to draw on the best times of their life, you know, change that feeling state. Can I ask you a question real quick? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. I want to go right to the moment that the thoughts are spiraling and you realize you're trapped in this worst case loop? Should somebody do the psychological side? Physiological side. Exactly. Yes. Just do that to stop. To start. Okay.

41:32Yeah. You got it. You got to break the cycle, right? So that's a great way of breaking the cycle. Use the five second rule, five, four, three, two, one to just stop the cycle. Yeah. Is there another one to stop that spinning of thoughts? Breathing is probably the most effective. Okay. You know, we don't realize that we're in anxiety. We can sit in anxiety for hours and not realize that we're in it. So if you don't realize you're in it, you just feel it. You just feel this terrible feeling. You can't change it. So you develop this awareness. Okay, this is my alarm coming up. That's your first thing.

42:05So at that point, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, get out of the house, put my shoes on, go to the house, go to the gym, go somewhere, do something. Like do something to break that cycle. Because if you don't break that cycle, you're going to sit there and ruminate and ruminate and ruminate. And rumination has tremendous inertia to it. Like once you start getting into negative thoughts, you don't feel like doing anything. It's like when Warren passed away and you didn't want to go anywhere. You didn't want to do anything. Physiologically, we go into the vagus nerve shutdown and that shuts us down. We need something outside of ourselves.

42:375, 4, 3, 2, 1 is awesome, by the way, because it just, it really, it's like, okay, after you've done it a bunch of times, you go, okay, you have to change your state. And one of the best ways of changing your state is changing your body. And one of the best ways of changing your body is starting to fricking move. Yes. So, you know, I can sit there and I remember being in med school with the covers up to my chin. Like I can't get into school today. And I always did, but it was like, you just wake up and you're in this panic. Like I can't get in there today. And I didn't have five, four, three, two, one back then, but it was just like, okay, I have to move.

43:09Like I have to move. And giving myself a reward to move like, okay, I'm going to get a nice, cool glass of water. Now, wasn't that appealing, but it was just something. It was something to break that cycle. Because if you don't break that cycle of rumination, it will just run roughshod over you. What is it like to live without anxiety? And the reason why I ask this question is I think so many of us have lived in a alarm state for so long, we don't know what it's like to be able to turn it off. So what is available to everybody if they start to do the work in their bodies? A direct access to a repeatable process where you can find peace.

43:53Maybe not right away. Maybe it takes you five minutes. Maybe it takes you 10 minutes, but at least you're on the right track. At least you're not, you know, I used to feel like I was, you know, a bubble in an ocean because whatever the ocean went, wherever my emotion went, I was taken with it. And the thing about starting to find that peace in your body is you kind of go down below the surface of the waves and you kind of look up. This is the image that I get anyway. I look up and I can kind of see, you know, kind of hazy blue when you're under the water and you're looking up, I can see the waves there.

44:27And it's, you can create this sense of separateness, ironically, from the alarm, where this isn't all of me. Because when you were a child, it was all of you. Like when you were in your trauma as a child, there was no way out. There wasn't, you'd look everywhere and there was no way out. But as an adult, you can look and you can start seeing, you know what? I, I feel you alarm. Like I feel you there. And I know that you were my younger self, but I can see that there's, there is a sense of separateness there that I don't have to completely be taken over by this. Now, at the same time, the paradox is that alarm is your younger self.

45:06So you want to be attached to it. So can you see the alarm with this sense of curiosity? Because when you look at something with curiosity, you take a lot of the emotion out of it. It's like, hmm, that's really interesting that I've got this sense of alarm in my solar plexus, that it feels heavy and sharp and purple. Wow, that's really interesting. Because when you look at it with curiosity, you're changing your sort of psychological mindset towards it. And when you start changing it in any way, it starts making that cycle easier to break. So when you get caught at rumination and thought, you can start going into your body, even if it hurts initially, because you are on the right track.

45:48And your ventral tegmental area, the part of your brain that secretes dopamine, will start telling you, you're on the right track. And I think that's when we start healing. We start getting this sense of power over the alarm because we have been prisoners of it for so long. And in a way, we are prisoners of our younger child. If we don't pay attention to them, they will make us this ripple together. So when you start paying attention to that and you start knowing, hey, I'm on the right track, like dopamine starts going in your brain. When you're on the right track with something, you get all these sort of feel-good chemicals.

46:20and then you have a sense that you are no longer this passive bubble in the ocean anymore. You have something that you can tap into that's in all of us. This power, and we see this a lot with people that have had spontaneous remissions from cancers and from horrible diseases and stuff. They feel this power in them that they didn't know was there, but they just feel it. They just feel that power. And I think what happens when we have trauma as children is we lose faith in that power. We lose sight of that power. So when you connect with your younger self again, you can have access to that power that's in all of us.

47:01And you get into that state. And when you start healing from anxiety and you start realizing, hey, it is actually safe to feel safe. There's a tremendous feeling of rush of, man, I suffered from this for so long. Why did I wait so long to do this? Well, I know for me personally, it happened a lot faster than I expected it to. And the experience for me is emotional peace. Like there's a level of steadiness. There's a calmness, confidence, like it's all available to you. but most adults are incapable of handling the feelings and the sensations that are rising up in their bodies, which is why they act in ways that feel very toxic or abusive or confusing.

47:56And it's why we do that and then regret it. And the whole solution to all of this is this three-layered approach we've been talking about today is first, you got to become aware. that you have this alarm that it's getting triggered in your adult life and that there's shit that went down when you were a kid that needs your attention and needs your healing. And then there is the coping with it. Therapy is amazing if you can afford it. And all the modalities are incredible in and help you to cope and breathing and meditation and yoga and walks in the woods and lots of things that, you know, both Dr.

48:40Kennedy and I recommend. And it will help you cope and it will help the anxiety dissipate. But if you really want to dismantle the alarm, you got to go a layer deeper, which is in your body, finding the source of the alarm, repairing yourself and that little person inside of you that felt alarmed and then taking care of yourself by staying in your body and becoming aware of when the alarm goes off. It's remarkably powerful what you're talking about, Dr. Kennedy. And I think that that's really, you can kind of hit the nail on the head. I mean, there's superficial things we can do, you know, physiological sigh, breath work, grounding, just feeling your butt in the chair, feeling your feet on the ground.

49:29Like there is something psychologically about being grounded. It does help us for sure. Touch, you know, touching yourself, touching other people, you know, temperature, feeling, you know, going through those extremes of temperature, cold, heat, whatever. Temperature is one of those ways that we can access the deeper structures in our brain too. Smell, you know, if you have an essential oil that you love, like lavender or chamomile, carry it with you. If you're struggling, smell is one of those things that it's the only sense that doesn't get processed by the thalamus. The thalamus is kind of like this central switchboard of the brain.

50:03Smell goes right into our emotional brain. So if you have something that smells good, it will change your state right away. There is this thing also about moving your eyes back and or side to side, sort of the basis of EMDR. And it does show that if you move your eyes back and forth, back and forth, not up and down, but back and forth, it does decrease the activity in the amygdala. Now, all those things are coping strategies. To heal, you've got to find the alarm. You've got to find the trauma. You've got to find your younger self. You have to have faith in yourself because I think it's trauma.

50:35When we get traumatized as children, we lose faith in the world. And when we lose faith in the world, we start believing everything is up to me. And if you're a seven-year-old and you think everything's up to you, life's going to be very anxious. You're not going to. And finding that power inside of you, there's this power inside all of us that we lose with trauma. Finding that again, it's really important. Having gratitude for the pain. Having gratitude for the alarm because that's your conduit to your healing is that alarm. So as much as you bemoan having it, it's actually a beacon to your younger self.

51:08be grateful for that sense of alarm because you have a pathway now to find that child. And play. It's so important to adopt play because when you play, you start changing that autonomic nervous system and that autonomic nervous system runs your life. So the more you can play, the more you can regulate that autonomic nervous system, that sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system, the easier life is going to be, the more connected you're going to be to yourself and maybe more importantly to others because we need others because loneliness is killing us. Separation is killing us. Give me your top three recommendations for play that you give to your patients.

51:47Well, I often ask people like, what did you do when you were a teenager? You know, some people say I rode my bike. I played chess. I did this. So things that you liked when you were a kid, chances are you'll still like now. So that's kind of, there's no sort of global thing that I suggest to people. Ideally, it would be something that's fun, that doesn't really have a winner and a loser kind of thing. That, you know, and Gordon Neufeld, who's my sort of mentor in developmental psychology talks about that with kids. It's so important to have play just for play's sake. There is no winner, there is no loser.

52:21There's no, there's nothing there. And one of the things that I really recommend for parents is playing around the dinner table with facial expressions. Like, how am I feeling when I make this face? How am I feeling? Because then you're actually maturing their social engagement system. You're maturing the part of their brain, you know, facial expression, body language, eye contact, you're improving the part of their brain that allows them to soothe others and soothe themselves. So it's important to do this in a playful way, you know? And that's really, once we start really adopting play in our day-to-day life, then we start regulating our nervous system in a way that you don't have to academically go back and find the trauma.

53:03Amazing. Dr. Kennedy, anything else? I think it's really being compassionate for yourself. I have this process called ABC. So A is awareness. As you say, be aware what anxiety or alarm feels like in your body. B is for body and breath. So go into your body, go into your breath, physiological size, great, getting grounded in your body, and then see this compassionate connection for yourself. And specifically that younger version of yourself. So if you do that, each time that you have anxiety or alarm, you will start training your nervous system to focus on something that will heal you, instead of focusing on your thoughts, which are only going to make you worse.

53:44Dr. Kennedy, you are such a gift. Thank Thank you for giving us so much time and so many tactics and just pouring into us. And one thing I wanted to just say is that when we were talking about the younger self, I had this image of my husband and he tells the story about how he had asked somebody had forgotten his mitt and it was a game day. And so we had to book at home because nobody was at the game. And he gets home and here he is in his baseball uniform and he can't get in the house. Nobody's left it on lock form. And so he has to go around the side of the house and climb up this trellis so he can get onto the balcony outside of his parents' bedroom.

54:37And the trellis is full of bees because the trellis is covered with flowers. So he's climbing up this thing and he's getting stung and then he gets onto the kind of porch on the second floor and he goes up to the French doors in his parents' bedroom and he goes to open them up and they're locked. so he ends up punching through one of the panes of glass and cutting his hand and then dripping blood across the hardwood floors that had just been refinished as he's walking in his cleats Right. And I have this image of him because there's a particular image of him in this blue and white baseball uniform.

55:30He's probably in the fourth grade. He's got kind of long blonde curls. and it's very useful to me to look at the man I've been married to for 26 years in those moments where I get really pissed off or irritated or annoyed and visualize that kid in the baseball uniform just trying to do his best and feeling like nobody's there to support him. that was really helpful. I think that's really going to help me show up. I recommend that for couples to like have a picture of your partner when they were like seven, eight or nine around the house. And then when they started going off for what you think is a seemingly trivial matter, look at that picture because that's who you're dealing with.

56:30You know, and I feel bad for Chris because I know he was a latchkey kid and didn't feel supported. So that must have been a very difficult situation for him because I think he would learn to be overly self-reliant. Yes. When you're overly self-reliant, you don't allow love in, you know, you, you become an alpha child, what I call an alpha child. And you think that everything is up to you. And again, if you're a child and you think everything is up to you and you know, because you're a child that you don't have the ability to deal with this stuff, it's going to be tremendously alarming. and it's going to stick in your body.

57:04Wow. There is so much more we're going to talk about. Every three months, Mel, we'll have a check-in. I'll write you a prescription. I will see you again in three months. Please do. Love you, Mel. You're amazing. You're amazing, Dr. Kennedy. Thank you so much for being here and for helping us bring everybody all of these tools and resources at zero cost. And I also want to highlight something else that's available to you. In addition to all of the resources in the show notes, I just launched a free three-part training that is video-based. It has a workbook. I do this every single spring for all of our followers online and now for you, our podcast listeners.

57:44This one is called Take Control with Mel Robbins. More than a quarter of a million people have signed up from around the world. We have people represented from over 200 countries in this training. You're going to love it. And it will help you step by step by step apply not only what you just learned from Dr. Kennedy, but it will go even deeper into helping you figure out your next move and simple science-backed mindset tools that you can use to start moving forward on them. Again, you can find that at Take Control with Mel Robbins, which is melrobbins.com slash take control, or just check the link in the show notes.

58:22Dr. Kennedy, thank you. Absolutely. And thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing this. This is one of those toolkit episodes that I know is going to just explode online. And please share this with people. If you don't know how to explain what your anxiety feels like, this podcast episode can be that surrogate to help other people in your life understand what you're feeling and going through and to better support you. If you've got somebody that's really struggling that won't listen to you, maybe they'll listen to Dr. Kennedy. Send them this toolkit. When you do that, you are part of a wave of positive change around the world.

59:00And you have no idea how just one podcast episode can change the trajectory of somebody's life. So thank you in advance for sharing this generously. Thank you for being here and spending your time with me. And in case nobody else tells you, I want to tell you that I love you. I believe in you. And I do this because I not only believe in your ability to create a better life, I know you can do it. And I know you deserve to. And I hope every time you listen to one of these episodes and you do something with it, you start to believe it too. All righty. I'll see you in a few days.

59:43Oh, one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional.