Dr. Russell Kennedy
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
I think it's uncertainty. Our species has grown in uncertainty, but now we're so distracted by our phones. The wherewithal we would have used to be able to deal with the uncertainty in the past is All our cash is full. We don't have a whole lot of extra room.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
I think what happens is that we have this alarm in our system. So we have this trauma that's too much for us to bear. I don't like using the word trauma too much, but You have this wounding, typically from our childhood, that's too much to bear. Typically, anxious people are sensitive. So there's this wounding, this alarm that lights up in our system that we're not even aware of.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And that's one of the first things that I treat people with anxiety is I say, get out of your head. The worries that are there, the only reason the worries are there is they're trying to pull your attention away from this alarm that's stuck in your body. That is one of the functions of worry.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So the worries tend to have to get worse and worse and worse and more intense to keep up their ability to keep you out of that alarm in your body. And really, once you see that alarm in your body is a version of your younger self. And believe me, as a medical doctor and a neuroscientist, it sounds so woo and I want to have a bit of a seizure when I say this.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
But really, that alarm is this unresolved part of you that didn't get the repair that you needed when you were younger. And that energy is still stuck in you and it's still reverberating through your mind. So anxiety, one more thing. Anxiety is these worries of your mind. and then this alarm in your body, and they link together.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And I think they link together through the default mode network to just sort of put a pin into it. And when we realize that we're in this default mode network, we can separate the thoughts of our mind from the feeling of our body and realize, put your hand over it, feel it, really feel that alarm because that alarm is the younger version of you and it's driving your anxiety.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Yeah, sure. Well, I think anxiety isn't one thing. It's actually two things. And I talk about this in my book. It's basically the state of alarm that's held in your body and this worrisome, the warnings, what ifs, worst case scenario your mind comes up with. So each one energizes the other in something I call the alarm anxiety cycle.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
If you get rid of your worrisome thoughts, you're still going to be worried because you're still going to have this alarm in your system. But if you actually heal the alarm that's in your body, you're healing the root cause of what's creating the worries and the separation from yourself in the first place.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
get ahead of the original fear, the original alarm that you had. So that's why worries tend to get worse and worse and worse and worse because they serve a purpose. They distract you away from the ultimate cause of your anxiety, which is this alarm that's stuck in your body. And then you do that since you were a child because when we're children, we can't escape.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
If we have an abusive parent, if we have an alcoholic parent, if we have a parent who's severely mentally ill, we can't get out of there. So we are trapped in that.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And I think part of us, when we go through these anxious phases, goes through this emotional time travel where the amygdala, which has no sense of time, takes us back to that eight-year-old that's walking home from school wondering if mom's going to be drunk.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And if we realize that this is a feeling issue more than a thinking one, because we're so left hemisphere driven in this society, we think that we can think our way out of a feeling problem and we can't. And Huberman talks about that too. Like you can't fix the mind with the mind. You have to actually use the body to fix the mind, at least the subconscious mind.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So the short version is you had a trauma that's too much for you to bear as a child. It got pushed into your unconscious mind. And because the body is a representation of the unconscious mind, the body keeps the score and that trauma gets stored in your body. And it sort of has this nature of it. And through this process called interoception, the brain is always reading the body.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Because that's the subconscious mind is what's running the show in the first place. So if you get to the root of the problem, you don't have to worry anymore because you've actually solved the root of the problem, which is this unresolved alarm, which is the younger version of you that didn't get the attention and connection and repair that they should have.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Perfect. Yeah. I think that, and what I usually use in this scenario is combat veterans. So combat veterans that go through the same firefight, the ones that will show up with PTSD are the ones that had the childhood trauma most of the time. So it's almost like the seed is set when you're younger.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
If you're younger and you have repair, if you had a stable childhood, when you go through that breakup, you're unlikely to really completely lose it. Or it's going to be time limited. You're going to go through a really difficult time for two weeks or a month or whatever, rather than...
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
If you did have that track in your system from old unresolved wounds, because I don't want to make everything into trauma because it's not. But if you had that pre-existing kind of discrepancy in your nervous system, you're much more likely to take things harder and you're much more likely to worry longer and worry more intensely than those that had that sort of balance in their childhood.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
But I don't want to make everything into childhood trauma because it's not, you know, it's just, but it's a huge feature in chronic anxiety.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Yeah, I think everybody. I think we are not, as Jordan Peterson says, we're not transparent to ourselves. We have severe blind spots. That's why we need therapists.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
I heard you talk about this too, and that you can do all the meditations and the breath works and all that kind of thing, but if you don't have somebody else there to kind of say, hey, this is kind of a thought, be aware of fleeting thoughts. This is kind of a thought that comes up a lot, and it's kind of your subconscious giving you a little clue.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So if the brain reads this sense of alarm, it's not going to make up stories about cookies and picnics. It's going to make up stories that are your worst fears. And as Goggin says, you know, your mind has a tactical advantage over you.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
But I do believe a lot of quote-unquote anxiety is unresolved grief. Unresolved grief is huge, actually, for anxiety. And it just gets stuck in your body, and it just never really gets processed because every time we go into that feeling of anxiety, or more correctly, alarm, we shoot up into our heads and start to worry because it works, and it works.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
in this sort of short-natured kind of place that doesn't really provide you with any resolution of the alarm. You have to fix the alarm to fix the anxiety. And I think we're in this society where we believe that we can heal everything with cognitive therapy. And that's why I think somatic therapy is so important. Not that you can do one or the other. I think that you need to do both.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
You need to do bottom-up and top-down. And I think in our society, we're so reliant rigid on top down understanding oh if you have the insight as to what happened to you as a child the pieces will just go back together it doesn't work that way in my opinion what way does it work then I think we need both. So we need to allow ourselves to feel that alarm, find it first.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And this is what I do with all my anxiety people is I say, okay, think of something that really troubles you, causes you a lot of anxiety.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Sure. Okay. So I would get you to pick an event in your life that causes you anxiety. Not the worst event of your life, but something that causes you some anxiety.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Doesn't matter.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And you don't have to share it with me, but what I would do is go, okay, see if you can bring that to mind right now. So maybe close your eyes, relax your shoulders, relax your jaw. And just in your mind's eye, see if you can really experience that fear, that anxiety.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So when you get this alarm and something triggers you in your internal or external environment, you're likely to go back into this worst case scenario thing and to try to make sense of it. I think people worry because what worry does is in my opinion, is it makes the uncertain appear more certain. Now, that certainty can be abhorrent. We don't want that certainty.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Now scan your body somewhere between your chin and your pubic bone and see if there's an area that feels like painful or pressure or nausea or hot or cold.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So would that be kind of superficial or deep?
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Deep. Okay. Would it have a temperature? Would it be cool or hot or?
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Is it prickly or is there something that you feel that it just feels odd in that area?
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Tight, okay. So what I would suggest, and I'm shortening this quite a bit, is this sort of deep, hot, red tight is where you hold your alarm. And I would suggest that when you get worried about something, that this area lights up. But because we get so focused on the thoughts, we start trying to fix a feeling problem with a thinking solution.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So what I usually do is get people to put their hand over that area and breathe into it and just stay with it for a second.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Because the woo-woo part of it is that's younger Chris. That's the part of you that had something that wasn't quite resolved when you were younger. And again, not everything is trauma, but you're a sensitive person. Sensitive people often download stuff into their body and it shows up there. And then we get into this illusion that we can solve it by thinking about it.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
No, it's not a thinking problem. It's a feeling problem. So, so often the bottom-up approach is to, can we really allow ourselves to feel that hot red sensation? And notice that our mind is going to go nuts trying to pull us out with worry, trying to start saying, oh, let's do this. Or this could be a reason, that could be a reason.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Because it's a childhood coping mechanism to leave the alarm and go into your mind. A lot of people that I see and have been in therapy for many, many years, they don't even know they have alarm in their body. They just assume it's in their mind and that's the reason why they haven't gotten better because you're treating a symptom. The worries are a symptom. The alarm is the underlying cause.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So we need to start treating the alarm in the system and then the worries just don't have anything to feed them anymore and you break what I call the alarm anxiety cycle because each one worsens the other.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
It'll help. It'll help for sure. There's things that I create for my anxious people and they're called hypno-meditations. So what I do is I take your particular alarm And we feed that to you in a way that we get you into this relaxed state, relax your jaw, you know, feel the surface pushing up on you with equal and opposite force that you're pushing down on it. The surface is supporting you.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
But in our brains, we get that little dopamine hit from, oh, I'm on the right track. This makes sense. If my daughter doesn't come home, oh, did you get hit by a car? That makes sense in your brain. You get a little shot of dopamine.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Now, can you feel that area and allow it to be there? And then often what I will do is I'll take people into the best part of their lives. What was the time that you felt amazing? You felt great. It's like, well, maybe when you first started club promoting or something like that, you really felt like you're on top of the world. Now, there's a feeling sense that goes along with that.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So what I would do with you is I'd say, okay, grab that feeling sense that felt really good. Close your eyes, relax your shoulders, relax your jaw. Just really get into that feeling sense of this is really amazing. I'm really loving this. And then we go back into that place in the solar plexus, that red hot place, and we sort of go back and forth between the two.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So a lot of people say, oh, you have to sit in your pain. It's like, no, you don't. Actually, you can really make yourself worse If you have that sort of mandate for yourself, I've got to just sit in there and deal with it. And really, you need a way out. You need a way to change it.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So often I will get people to breathe into it, to put some pressure over the area, sometimes tapping over it makes a difference. So what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to change the brain's representation of that alarm, which is held in what's called the insular cortex. The insular cortex is a part of the brain that kind of maps the body onto the mind.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So it also links into the default mode network. So if your body has this sense of alarm, it goes up to your brain, enters the right side of the brain first, right insula, and the right insula sends a message to the default mode network, we're in trouble. And then this whole default mode network thing, machinery starts up, and it goes into this loop.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And part of the default mode has this sort of self-appraisal, self-worrying part of it. It's protective, so you get into this loop, and that's why I call it the... And anybody who's dealt with anxiety, and I know you have, and it's stuck around for hours at a time, You're in this kind of autopilot loop that I believe is in the default mode network.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And we need to pull you out of that default mode network. And we do things by improving your anterior cingulate cortex, which I call the Goggins cortex because it's the self-discipline cortex. It's the ability to say, hey, you right now are drowning in worry. And what we need to do is we need to change your focus from internal
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
This is what I was saying earlier about why we're in such difficult shape in the world because when we put our focus externally, it feels good when we blame somebody else, but we're just creating more alarm in the long run. So it's really finding this alarm when you're worried. this is coming from your body. It's not coming from your mind. Your mind is a symptom. It's not the underlying cause.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So we can help fix some of those symptoms, but you're never going to heal from anxiety just by fixing your mind.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
that are completely consistent with what you've been scared of in the past.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Absolutely. And that takes practice. The thing that makes anxiety so difficult to recover from is there's nothing that really helps it right away. Like if there was something that helped it right away, we would just do that. But I find breathing exercises, physiological sigh is really great. Going outside, moving your eyes back and forth, it dampens the amygdala response.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Getting into your body, trying to move your attention from internal pain to something external, like you can observe. But again, especially if you've worn this anxious groove for decades sometimes, it's not going to feel better right away.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So that's why I make these meditations for people so that they get into their unconscious mind, their subconscious mind, and we start changing things at a deeper subconscious level, at the level that the anxiety itself is encoded. Because these superficial things, like when I see people on Instagram about, oh, do this breathing technique for anxiety or do this tapping technique.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Now, it works, but in a way, we're kind of dangling people over the gates of hell because we're giving them these instantaneous little bouts of relief. But we're never really dealing with the underlying cause, which is this alarm that's stuck in our systems. That's why, and that's why anxiety is so hard to treat.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
The other way, the reason why it's so hard to treat is because since you're a child, the worry has seemed to be protective for you. The worry, when you go into your head, you don't feel the alarm in your body so much. So you train yourself to worry and it becomes your coping strategy. So when I, when I try and help heal, heal you from anxiety, it sounds like a really, I heal you from anxiety. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
When I help heal anxiety, I'm kind of taking away your special friend because your special friend, when you were a child, worry was all you had. Going into your head and escaping the alarm in your body was all you had. So there's a real resistance for people to actually heal from anxiety. And that's what I find so kind of frustrating. But I tell people when I work with them,
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
You're not going to want to do the meditations. And especially when people start feeling better, they stop doing it. So it's really something you want to do these meditations. You want to do this connection with yourself while you're still feeling okay. When you're impaired by the anxiety and the alarm, the amount of benefit you're going to get
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
from doing these techniques is relatively minimal and then it's going to seem like nothing i do is going to help me because breathing will help you in an acute crisis for sure but it's not really going to take it to the point in five minutes where it's like oh i feel so much better well you don't make battle plans during war right you try to construct some sort of battle plans beforehand yeah one of one of my favorite quotes of yours about uh we're addicted to uncertainty
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And then that goes into the default mode network. Because there's a part of the default mode network called the posterior cingulate cortex. And that's thought to be involved in self-referential thought. So,
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
If your childhood wasn't that great and children tend to blame themselves, they stop loving themselves and they create all sorts of reasons why they're not lovable, that sticks in that posterior cingulate cortex.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And then so when you default into that and then that's your go-to, your unconscious go-to is to tell yourself that you deserve it, you're a piece of crap, nothing's going to happen, you're not worthy. you know, that if that's your default, it's going to be really difficult for you to kind of live a healthy life. And that's the thing with me is I've lived in my default mode network most of my life.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And I've, I really felt like I've wasted so much of my life in this sort of default mode, like sitting in a movie theater, just so anxious that I can't, I can barely keep, keep it together. And so I kind of see my role in the world and is sort of being a trailblazer. It's like, I went, I'm the sacrificial lamb. I figured this out.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
I've used my background in developmental psych and neuroscience and medicine to kind of, I kind of figured this out. It's really stuck in your default mode network, which, you know, here's the funny thing. It's like people say, you know, anxiety or alarm is stuck in your body. Trauma is stuck in your body.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Now it may actually be stuck in the brain's representation of the body, but still for all intents and purposes, it's in the body. So when we realize that This is the true cause. This is the root cause of what anxiety truly is, is this alarm that's in the body. We have to fix this alarm. We have to fix this bottom-up alarm.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
We can do top-down strategies as well because I noticed that after I did a whole whack of somatic therapy and I started being really grounded, all of the stuff that I learned in cognitive therapy made perfect sense to me.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
But until I got out of the lion's den of being in alarm all the time, I wasn't able to have the wherewithal to kind of see what I was doing wrong and the fact that I was so addicted to my own worry. And I think there's biochemical reasons why we get addicted to worry. Dopamine, I think the periaqueductal gray in the brain secretes like endorphins and enkephalins. We get rewarded.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
If we scare the crap out of ourselves, we actually get in the brain. We get rewarded for that. And that's another reason why it's so hard to heal from anxiety. But you can do it. You just have to do it the right way.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Yeah. I think there's a limited amount of benefit you get. I think it's valuable, but I don't think it's going to heal you. It's the same with science-based therapy. When I see science-based therapy anywhere, I think, okay, coping strategy.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Science-based therapy? It's quite common in... Ironically, in the mental health field, CBT is the gold standard, what we're talking about, in anxiety therapy. And CBT, in my practice, doesn't have a whole lot of penetration. It helps. I find it really helpful for victim mentality. CBT is one of the best things for victim mentality.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
But again, unless you go at the alarm, unless you go at this somatically, unless you feel it, unless you allow yourself to go back and visit that time that you were... you know, abused or abandoned or neglected. I have this acronym I call ALARM. I got through med school with acronyms and it's called ALARM.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So if you experienced abuse, physical, emotional, sexual abuse, loss, loss of parents, loss of divorce, abandonment is the A. R is a rejection or bullying. M is anything that made you mature too early. So if you had to become the man of the house or the woman of the house too early, and then the S is for shame. And these things, if they're not repaired, form this state of alarm in your body.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And that alarm in your body is what's actually creating the worries, the what-ifs, the worst-case scenarios in your mind as a way of protecting you from the alarm. So if you go right at the alarm, you're healing the source of the problem. And this is what psychotherapy doesn't really do. Like, how have you found CBT as far as your anxiety?
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Because what was the uncertainty in your childhood? You were bullied. That was one. So when we go back to that place, the thing is the amygdala in our brains has no sense of time. So when we hear someone being bullied, we may go into this bodily state that was the same as the bodily state we had when we were eight years old and we were being bullied.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Yeah. And again, I think it's really about this default mode network. I've done a ton of research on this, going to AI and saying, okay, how does the habenula react with the default mode network? Habenula, Huberman talks about too, like the disappointment nucleus, right? So it knocks off, it slows down the serotonin and the dopamine in your brain. So dopamine is involved in movement.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
You don't have dopamine, you have Parkinson's. So when you don't have movement, when you don't have dopamine, you lose your motivation and you also freeze, like physically freeze. So when you're in your bed and you can't move and you can't get out, and I've heard you talk about this too, that's the habenula. It's freezing you in this state that you can't move and then freeze.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And then you're kind of pinned to the bed with all these negative thoughts.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Totally. And then being able to say, like, for me, what's really, really helped me is going, OK, I'm frozen right now. It might be my habenula. You know, it's nice.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
But it's fun because, you know, and this is what I talk about because a lot of what I talk about is kind of healing from the spirit side. I mean, I know a lot about neuroscience. I know a lot about the default mode network, the insular cortex. And I think the insular cortex is going to play a huge role in healing anxiety as we go through life. That we're not really even...
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
tip the scale on how big the insular cortex is. The insular cortex is basically what maps the body onto the brain. And the posterior part of it deals a lot with physical pain. The anterior part of it deals with a lot of emotional pain. It also has a direct link into the default mode and the amygdala. So it kind of gets you into this. If you feel this alarm, this is what I'm saying.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
If you feel this alarm in your system, this insula through interoception picks it up, says, okay, we're in danger. Let's shut everything down. So it shuts everything down through the default mode network. And then you stay in that default mode network. And then you loop in the posterior cingulate part of the thing. I don't want to get too complicated, but I love this stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And then that alarm comes up in our system, paralyzes our prefrontal cortex. So we start thinking emotionally rather than rationally. So not only do we make more worries when we're lit up, but the rational part of our brain that would tell you, hey, those worries, they're never going to happen. That gets shut off. So we get double whammied.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
It starts feeding you all this negative shit about yourself. And then you get trapped in there. So this is why things like the anterior cingulate, gratitude, meditation, doing the hard things, you know, the Goggins nucleus, the ACC, anterior cingulate. The anterior cingulate can actually recognize, hey, you are stuck in the default mode right now. You need to get out and go for a walk.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
You need to do something differently.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
It takes you right out of default mode. As soon as you connect, and this is one of the other things that I say, and this is a little more woo, is that anxiety, all anxiety is separation anxiety. And it's mostly separation from yourself. It's separation of your adult self from your child self. The adult doesn't want to go back and visit the child because the child holds all the pain.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And it's a separation of your mind from your body. So you wind up living life neck up. You're living your life in the default mode network, which is not fun. So it's understanding that when you can connect with that younger version of you, you connect with the part of you that's alarmed.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And when you heal the alarm, you actually heal the underlying cause of the anxiety so that the worries aren't there so much anymore. Or in my case, they still come, but I just don't give them any credibility anymore. And I think that's one of the things about healing anxiety that most people programs, most university programs, they're almost all cognitive.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
There's very little about the somatic part of it because it's very difficult to reduce the somatic part of it, the emotional somatic part of it, into something that can be reproduced and studied.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Well, it depends. I mean, some people do very well on medication. Some people don't. A lot of people get side effects. So I've prescribed antidepressants thousands of times. And, you know, I wasn't so concerned about them when they didn't work. It's when they did work. Because a lot of people will just stay on the medication. I have nothing against medication.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
But I think in this environment, as a medical doctor... We're not trained in trauma. We're not trained in psycho. And we don't have the time for it either. So it's more likely, my uncle is Scottish and he calls it the order of the rotating pen.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So when uncertainty comes up, and anxiety can sometimes be described as uncertainty intolerance, because so many of us as children, if you had trauma, if you had wounding, if you had stuff that was unrepaired, that uncertainty becomes unbearable. So rather than just sort of sit in uncertainty, we worry about it.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So if you go into your doctor's office with complaints of anxiety or depression or what sound like that, you're probably going to walk out of there with a prescription. And I don't know if there's much totally wrong with that, but The medical profession doesn't have the time and they don't have the training or the inclination to really go into the deeper parts of it.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
I had this patient when I was in Vancouver, downtown Vancouver, who came in with recurrent urinary tract infections. And my spidey sense has told me that she had significant sexual abuse in her past. So energetically, she's more predisposed to getting these chronic... Now, I can't bring that up in a 15-minute interview.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So the thing about uncertainty there, I think, is just that uncertainty is one of those things that triggers us emotionally. And if you didn't get repair when you were younger, so if you're in an environment where your parents fight or whatever, and they come back and they say, you know, mom and dad had a fight, it just happens that way.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
But I was able over the course of time to say, hey, you should look into something there. There might be something in your past that's causing maybe some weakness in this area. And she never did. But it is one of those things that For me, what was difficult about being a medical doctor is constantly just masking symptoms, giving people something for their acid reflux.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
When I could see that so much of their physical issues were emotionally driven, and that's being a family doctor. You see the same kind of illnesses, fibromyalgia, migraine headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, run through families. And there is this thing called visceral hypersensitivity. I think Dr. K talked about this too when you had him on.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And there are people, and I think through the insula, I know I'm going on here. Through the insula, I think that some people just feel their bodies more. And they just feel the pain in their body. And they feel the alarm more. And they're much more likely to develop anxiety, depression, eating disorders, OCD, all this sort of stuff because they just feel more. Sorry, I just babbled there.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
The children are probably going to have a better, more resilient and more capable nervous system than children that don't have any trauma, that don't have any wounding. It's not so much the trauma, it's the fact that it wasn't repaired. And if it's repaired, the child learns, oh, shit can go down in the hood, but I'm still okay. My nervous system is still okay.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
It's almost like, you know, those hypnosis shows where you see people go and then the guy takes up, the hypnotist takes up 30 people and eventually winds up with 10 people. Some people are just more subcortically or unconsciously amenable to movement. Some people are more rigid in their patterns, and some people can surprisingly be moved. But we have to try.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
We can't just do this from a cognitive lens. All the therapy, the talk therapy in the world, doesn't really get at these deeper, subcortical, unconscious movements.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
programs that have been in there since we were younger so it's all about doing the right thing and this is one of the reasons why I get really on my soapbox is that traditional therapy for anxiety helps you cope but it really doesn't help you heal and we really have to show people how they heal themselves and they heal themselves by reconnecting adult self to child self and mind to body that's how we heal
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And I think there's a tremendous amount of healing that can occur with that. I've seen people with crippling anxiety, crippling health anxiety. They'll never be fully rid of it, but their lives are so much more livable now. They're not constantly being tortured all the time. And I think you have to go at it the right way.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And that's kind of why I was so excited to talk to you is that I think we're going at it the wrong way. We're believing that if we worship the mind, we can change the mind with the mind. And it doesn't really work that way. We need to actually get in there and start moving the subconscious mind around. And some people are much more amenable to that than others, but we have to try.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
We have to get in there and give them a chance. And this is where I believe psychedelics play a role as well, in that we are actually getting into these below-the-cortex, nonverbal,
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
areas of the brain that we can start changing because this is this is basically what psychedelics do is they paralyze the default mode network so if your default mode network is telling you you're a piece of shit and you take this you know psilocybin or whatever it is and all of a sudden that voice is gone oh my God, this is a brave new world in here. It's like the movie The Sixth Sense.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Once you've seen it once, you can't see it again because you know that he's dead all the way through it. Sorry, spoiler alert for a 30-year-old movie. But it's really important that we're not doing the right therapy for people. Talk therapy is valuable, no question about it.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
But unless you go and get the alarm in the system, that's truly what's causing the anxiety in your mind is this alarm, this old unresolved wounding that's stuck in your system, in your body, or your brain's representation of your body. This is the core. And if we don't treat this, we're just basically coping for the rest of our lives. And people feel like they're broken.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
People feel like this is a life sentence. I'm never getting out of this anxiety. So once you start showing them that there is a way out and they start gaining some agency, they may still be anxious for another year or so, but at least they know they're on the right track.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
That's kind of like the Joe Dispenza thing. It's like, there's no past. We just change the future, right? I think like everything, there's a combination of both. I think it's coming to terms with the self-reproach that we hold for that child who was abused, abandoned, neglected, whatever, because There is this sense in us that it was our fault.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And if that child's at fault, we're going to blame that child. We're going to separate from that child. And how do you think that child, if that child is in charge of the alarm, how do you think they're going to react? They're going to get more alarmed. So it's really treating the younger version of you. And then once you show the younger version of you, that you, adult you, is there to help them.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And you start seeing some progress in that and some connection in that because all anxiety is separation anxiety. So if we have that connection within ourselves and we start feeling like, oh, I may not be perfect right now. I still go through anxious periods, but I'm on the right track.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Yeah, and I think, you know, looking also at you, when I've listened to you talk many times, and you have this people-pleasing thing for women, the white knight syndrome, right? And I think that comes from a very deep-rooted sense of abandonment, fear of abandonment. Because what we try and do, and I think what people-pleasing comes from as children, is we don't get our needs met by our parents.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Like I know I'm not just sort of going to therapy for an hour a week and trying to, I used to have this joke when I did stand up about, you know, if you had a leak in your house. And you had a plumber come by every week. And five years later, that leak was still going. Would you still keep paying that guy? So it's really about doing the right type of therapy. I'm not against cognitive therapy.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
We need it. We have these huge prefrontal cortices. But unless we come at it from bottom up as well, which isn't rewarded in academia, which really isn't understood by science, we're not actually helping people heal. We're helping them cope. But again, helping them cope sometimes is dangling over the gates of hell because you're not really showing them how you actually get out of this.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
You're just showing you how to deal with it while you're in it.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Men, as I said earlier, often it will show up as irritability. In women, it's usually rumination. Women usually get into this real rumination. They really have this negative self-view. They echo their, if they had a parent who criticized them in some way, that goes on loop over and over. Women are notorious for replaying conversations over and over and over from 20 years ago.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Men, it shows up more with irritability. It shows up with the inability to really feel. And Lisa Feldman Barrett wrote this great book called How Emotions Are Made. And in that book, she says, the more emotion words you know, the more emotionally literate you are, and the more balanced your psyche is. And I think there's some truth to that. Men don't know a whole lot of emotion words.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Women know a ton of emotion words. So as Dr. K was saying, we have to get men into their bodies. We have to get them into the feeling part of it. And the other thing that I think is really valuable for men is to start embracing tears as alarming as that's going to be. I mean, you don't have to do it in front of your woman, for sure. I have this thing I call car screaming.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So I try and have some tears about every six months. And it just doesn't come. Like it's really hard for me to get into some tears. So I will watch sad dog videos. Or the other thing I'll do is what I call car screaming. So I go into my car and I go to a remote area and I just start screaming. And I don't cry out of sadness, I will cry out of frustration.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Like if I'm really frustrated, and I think a lot of men are like this, is that when you get to that frustration point and you've been pushing it down and pushing it down and pushing it down, You really have to release it through your body. And it's got to be something that you feel like you have some agency or some control over.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
It's usually stacked up. It's usually, it's like one frustrating thing is that, but once you get three or four in there, that's usually what tips them over. And the thing about tears is they're adaptive in the brain. The reason why I think this is like a hard truth. The reason why I think men kill themselves much more often than women do is women have tears. So your dog is still died.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
You're still getting a divorce. But for some reason, those tears change your perception, your subjective perception of what you're going through and make it easier on you. And if you can't have that, I think it just bubbles up to the point where it just overwhelms your brain completely. And the only way out you see is suicide. And suicide isn't so much about wanting to die.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Our parents, for some reason... They're busy with other stuff. They have their own issues. My dad was severely mentally ill. So we find a way to get our needs met by getting our parents' needs met. So if I meet my parent need and they throw me some crumbs, then I get this sort of imbued sense of, oh, you know, I am worthwhile. But it comes at a cost. It comes at a real cost.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
It's basically trying to do anything you can to escape the pain.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
I remember when you were saying that. Well, as Jordan Peterson says, I think the only way out is through. I really do think that you have to get to know yourself and allow yourself to feel because so much of anxiety basically is not allowing yourself to feel. There's a little meme that says, you know, overthinking is under feeling.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So if you can't feel yourself, and this is consistent with my theory of alarm, if you can't feel yourself, you're going to have to do something to just try and discharge that energy. And that comes typically from overthinking and rumination, which gives you the illusion that you are hiding from this alarm, but you're not.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
It is one of those things that just you're dangling yourself over the gates of hell. And it's understanding that you really have to allow yourself to feel this stuff. And this is why therapy is so important, especially for men, and especially in men's groups, where you can feel this through your body and see other men feeling the same thing. Because the crisis with men now is so massive.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And then it just gets stuffed down and stuffed down. And there's so much self-reproach and there's so much negativity towards men that men use the internet to sort of hurt themselves because there's just so much negativity out there about men. And if you don't have a way of releasing that, either through play, sports is great.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Play is another great way of releasing trauma because when you're traumatized as a child, you activate both your parasympathetic, your shutdown nervous system, and your activated nervous system at the same time. And there's not really a whole lot of other ways in the world that that happens. So when you go into play, you're doing the same thing. You're doing that same co-activation.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
The sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system are both active at the same time. And you get a chance to sort of reprocess that old sort of slush fund of stuff that never got processed. So play, tears, being emotionally open. Here's another thing that I've heard on the podcast. Your thinking brain, your writing brain, and your speaking brain are three different brains.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So if you can journal, if you can say it out loud, and you can think it, you're kind of spreading out the trouble into different areas. And a lot of what happens is that these disparate parts of our brains... start running the show. So the more links you can get between these two, all these things, the more sort of a buffer that you have. So journaling, I think is great. I think speaking is great.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
When you get these things out, I think you had a guest on there too saying, I think it was Paul Conti. Like when you get it out, it's, it's out. But if you can get it out and you can write it out and you can think it out, you're sort of hedging your bets and getting the most sort of objectivity on the thing that's really troubling you as opposed to just trying to go at it with speaking.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
I would go to traumahealing.org and look at somatic therapy specifically. I use a version of somatic therapy and some internal family systems work. I'd like to work a little more with psychedelics, but it's not legal yet, so that's an issue. But this sort of talk therapy thing, you're not broken. You basically just don't have the right therapy. And
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So we start learning how to read our parents really, really well. And that translates to reading other people really well. So if they're not doing well, neither are we. So we're so afraid of them leaving us that we try to make them feel better. And in trying to make them feel better, we're actually trying to make ourselves feel better. But it's a loop that never closes.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
The environment, the society is telling you that, oh, go to therapy, go to therapy, it's going to help you. Well, talk therapy probably isn't going to help you that much. It'll help you cope, but it's not going to help you heal. So it's finding something that gets into that somatic route. If you're a man, see if you can find a men's club. There's all sorts of men's retreats that go out.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And often for men, that's a better introduction to expressing your feelings than going to a typically female therapist. Because there's a lot that gets lost in translation there. And men don't have the verbal acuity to talk about emotions the way that women do. So they feel like they're playing basketball without arms. And I've heard that there too.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So it's really, if someone's listening and go, yeah, this anxiety, actually, yes, it is my body. It is the alarm in my body. We have to address that alarm in your body. So... I have a course that I created. I make it $97. My business people say you should charge a ton of money. And I don't want to because, like you, I don't have a lot of material desires.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
I want to get my work out to as many people as possible because I think this alarm anxiety cycle is at the root of 90% of anxiety out there. And if people are just getting therapy for the anxiety part, the mind part, they're just kind of dangling themselves over the gates of hell and they're not really getting at the root cause.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And of course they're going to feel like they're broken and they're never getting it fixed because you're not actually getting at the root cause of the problem. You're treating a symptom. So if you have an infection and you have a fever, you can treat the fever with Tylenol, but it's not going to do anything for the underlying infection, which is kind of the analogy that they draw with this.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
is that you really have to go in there and allow yourself to feel the old trauma. You don't have to go in and dissect it completely. And this is what people ask me. It's like, well, do I have to know where my trauma comes from? Do I have to talk about it? It's like, no, you don't.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
But you do have to have a sense, like what I was talking to you about before with that sort of the red, deep, tight place in your chest. We do have to come in to bear with that. We do have to feel that. And when we feel that, we can get, connected with the part of us that got the wounding in the first place. And I've got one more thing. I have this acronym that I call SHOULD.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So this is what you should have got when you were younger. So you should have been seen. You should have been heard by your parents. You should have been open to. Your parents should open to you and make it okay to express your needs and to see that their needs are expressed. Should have been understood, loved, and defended. So seen, heard, open to, understood, loved, and defended.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
This is what you should have got when you were younger. You can give that to yourself now. If you find your alarm, you're actually finding the younger version of yourself. So see them, hear that child, open to them, understand them, love them, defend them.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
If your parents didn't show an interest in knowing you and understanding you, you probably won't have a big interest in knowing and understanding yourself. And then you're so at risk of codependency because you never really got to know who you were. What you did was you got to give other people what you perceived they needed and you probably got pretty good at it too.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And then you get rewarded for that.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Absolutely. Codependency. Absolutely. And that codependency makes you lose even more of yourself, separate even more from yourself. The alarm goes up even more. And then you kind of redouble your efforts at trying to help other people when you're really need that connect with yourself. If you don't connect with yourself, you're not going to heal from anxiety. Just period.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Yeah, my website, theanxietymd.com. That's my Instagram as well, at theanxietymd.com. Everything is the anxiety, not the anxiety doctor, but the anxiety MD. And it's really about trying to look at anxiety in a completely different way because the way we're doing it now isn't working.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And the new book came out, yeah. So that new book came out in September 17th. So AnxietyRx sold over 100,000 copies so far, which is pretty happy about that. highest rated anxiety book on amazon.com. As far as I know, when I checked about a month ago, I think it has an 82% five-star rating, which for a self-help book, it's pretty good.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And it just gives people a very different idea of what their anxiety is so that they have some sense that they're not fighting this indomitable giant and not making any progress at all. And anxiety makes us feel weak. And that
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
goes into the default mode network as well it just sort of works you're weak you're never going to get out of this and it's like no you're actually not weak you're actually pretty strong you have to do everything that everyone else does you know raise your kids go to school but you got to do it with 100 pounds of fear on your back and you know you need to give yourself a lot more credit and connect with yourself because that's really what soothes the alarm and it's the alarm that causes the anxiety we're in this society that we believe that that it's the anxiety is the thoughts
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
The thoughts are just a symptom. They're just, and they're the obvious, they're the tip of the iceberg. So we can see the thoughts quite clearly, but we don't see the alarm that's underneath it, that's feeding it.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
I appreciate you.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Well, I think there is a lot of uncertainty in our childhoods, especially with my dad. I grew up with a dad who had schizophrenia and bipolar, and he was never abusive or violent, but he would lose his mind. And for a young boy, and a young teenager, seeing your father lose his mind. And my dad was the one of the two of us that was really kind of loving and connected when he wasn't psychotic.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And if you're not okay, I'm not okay.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And it becomes a pattern too. And there's that Freudian repetition compulsion as well. So what was familiar to you in your childhood, human beings equate familiarity with security. So what was familiar to you in childhood, you will unconsciously reproduce in your adulthood. So I would see this when I was a family doctor. I would see people who had alcoholic parents pick alcoholic partners.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And they knew consciously, what am I doing? What am I doing? I had this one woman who is, I write about it in the book, she's really brilliantly attractive and had all these attention from men, but she would only pick the effusive alcoholics. And then she would come in and she would say, I did it again. I picked another one.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And it's just that repetition compulsion, I think, really runs our lives, especially if you grow up in uncertainty. You know, you look for certainty, you look for safety. And that feeling of alarm that's in your system, the confirmation bias that your brain has, it's always looking for a reason. And it will always find one.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Like Brene Brown says that, don't go looking through the world for reasons why you don't belong because you'll always find them.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
I think hypervigilance. Hypervigilance in women and irritability in men.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
So hypervigilance is all the possible permutations. What could happen? What could happen? This could happen. More of a female response than a male response, but there's both. So women tend to start looking at all the different possibilities. Men tend to, and this is a gross generalization, they tend to get activated. And often with men, anxiety, uncertainty, intolerance shows up as irritability.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And Because irritability is so much more accepted in our society than anger or rage, that becomes the path of least resistance for a lot of men is they just become these irritable people. And I hear that from wives all the time of the guys that I work with who are anxious. It's like, he's always cranky. He's always irritable. And it's like, well, that's his pathway out.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
That's his way of trying to discharge energy out. And the same with blame. And I think one of the reasons why our society is suffering so much these days is because blame actually feels good.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
If you look at the neuroscience of blame, you're taking yourself out of the default mode network, this sort of constant negative self-appraisal, negative self-evaluation, and you're putting it out onto somebody else. And when you do that, your amygdala drops in energy, your HPA axis drops, your cortisol drops. You just feel better.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And then so you get this thing in the States where the Democrats hate the Republicans and both go back and forth. But it feels better than just staying in your own default mode network, which is likely lit up by the uncertainty.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
You know, my little joke is my mother was neurotic and my father was psychotic, so my own psyche didn't stand much of a chance, right? So I think it's just understanding that, you know, uncertainty is something that we don't tolerate well as people, especially if you had a lot of uncertainty in your childhood.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Well, and I think what it shows up with in humans is victim mentality. Because I haven't met anybody with a significant anxiety disorder that didn't have an underlying victim mentality. They'll deny it, but if you look at their behavior, if you look at the way they look at the world, and that victim mentality kind of paralyzes us. And I think it's also involved with this default mode network.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
This is what I do every day as I read about two hours of study, two hours of neuroscience. And I'm putting together this theory of anxiety that it really is this default mode network that's at the hub of all of it.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And when you're locked in that default mode network, which is basically what your brain does, like in a daydreaming state or when you're not in the central executive network, when you're not actually focused on a task, your brain will default into this repetitive, reproducible kind of self-awareness. But the self-awareness is typically negative.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
There's part of the development known network that really looks at how negatively you look at yourself. And it's like the inner critic is part of this default mode network. So if you're not actively involved in something and you're going and you're just driving somewhere and your brain is going into default mode, it may go into like, you're not a very good person. You can't do this.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Why are you trying to do this? You're never going to succeed. And while we stay in that default mode network, we kind of live our lives. And I lived my life like this for many, many years in this sort of default autopilot state. I would go to movies. I would go to social events. I was anxious as hell. I could fake it. And a lot of anxious people are really good at faking it.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
But we're stuck in this kind of default loop where we can't get out of it. So I'm learning more ways now. that we actually become aware that we're in this default loop because there is a feeling to it. There is an alarm feeling to it. And how do we get ourselves out of it?
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And on top of that, we have to actually spend some time in the default mode network where we learn all these negative things about ourselves or we can actually change it. We have to accept that default mode network. We have to accept that that's what happened to us and it keeps getting replayed like a broken record in our heads so that we can actually feel it and stay with it and then process it.
Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
And once we process it, we're not locked into it anymore. There was a lot there.