Dr. Wendy Suzuki
speaker
915 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 7 Jan
Dr. Wendy Suzuki’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yes.
Well, yes. I think at a certain point of the journey, that is absolutely the case. But at a different point of the journey, when you've cut down those trees with your machete, it feels glorious to be able to have these deep conversations with your friends and build that habit with your friends and your loved ones. And Build that habit of first thing in the morning, no phone and meditation.
And you know how much better you're going to feel. And that is the part of the gratitude. Yes, I have a gratitude practice. It is that. It's like being grateful for all those good habits that I have been forming and throwing those away that I don't and being grateful that I threw that away.
That's such a great question. I think that it is part of the effort that goes into something new, the novelty of praying on a single bead and, and, and kind of fighting away that instinct like, oh, I didn't get through 100 beads. I'm a failure. That's a lot of cognitive noise.
And I always say for exercise and meditation, those two things that could immediately decrease your stress and anxiety levels, it's great. In fact, I tell you, I tell everybody to start small. 10 minutes of walking. Don't even have to change your clothes or your shoes. Just a minute walking.
of deep breathing, just put your phone on, you know, just the clock and just so you know how much that minute is. And just doing that is good enough. And the effort comes in batting away all those feelings of failure and the difference between your one minute and 10 hours that you really wanted to do.
Yeah. So anxiety is a normal human emotion. Everybody has anxiety. I think it's been kind of clinicalized. Oh, I have anxiety. Yeah, everybody has anxiety. But anxiety exists on a very, very large spectrum. So we all have anxiety.
And yes, the highest levels of anxiety that prevent you from doing the everyday things that you need to do in your life and having a job and having relationships and going out and doing things. That's clinical. And it is just...
kind of going down that rabbit hole of anxiety and needing more help, clinical help to get you out with cognitive behavioral therapy, so many different techniques that you could use. So it's all part of a spectrum, which, you know, I hope that makes people feel better because you can come back. Everybody has it. Let's just pull you back from that highest level. And
Let you take advantage of, I think one of the things I love the most from my book, Good Anxiety, is that it's not about anxiety is so bad. Let me just tell you the tools to get rid of it in your life. It is the acknowledgement that anxiety is a protective mechanism. My invitation is, can I invite you to try and use your anxiety to help protect you, to actually give you some gifts or superpowers?
Because there's a lot that we can learn from our anxiety and all our uncomfortable emotions.
Yeah, yeah. So I start with, I think, the easiest to implement. So this one is the superpower of productivity that comes from A very common form of anxiety that everybody has, which is the to-do list that comes up at inopportune times. It's like, oh, you get overwhelmed. For me, it comes up right before I'm going to go to sleep. And so it prevents me from going to sleep. So annoying.
And so the flip for that. is to take the to-do list. And first, I want you to notice that all of these things are things that you care about doing well. They're usually about your job or your relationship or money, money things. All good to be concerned about them. The trick is to take that list what-if list and turn it into a to-do list. And so for me, I don't do it in the middle of the night.
I wait till the next morning. But I've trained myself that I'm going to take care of each one of those worries and do something active. If there is an issue at work, I'm going to talk to three people about it and try and get input for that. There's something active that you can do for every single one of your worries.
And the more people you talk to about it, you realize that very productive people are already doing this. So take advantage of that trick.
Right. I love that because you've just created a new superpower of anxiety, which is the love of learning. So can you turn your anxieties into the next learning project that you have and then get better at small talk or whatever you're anxious about? I love that.
Absolutely. I mean, those anxieties are really... Telling you what you hold dear in your life. You think, wow, that sounds good. I want to know what I hold dear in my life. Because the flip side of your anxiety and the flip side of grief is deep love.
And so I think that all of these more difficult emotions, when seen in that light, can be embraced in a new way instead of trying to kick them out the door and never experience them again. That is not a full life if you don't have... because it suggests you didn't have that deep love that turns into grief when something goes away.
Not that I'm wishing people grief, but that helped me so much in my periods of grief to realize that that grief would never be so deep that I could never even imagine it before it happened unless the love for those people were so deep in the first place. And it's like, wow, I... I loved them more than I even realized, which was a gift to realize that and pulled me out of my grief.
So that realization really, really defined the way I wrote this book, Good Anxiety, because I started the book before these events. And it was going to be a neuroscience-based book on anxiety. And I was going to explain the science of it so everybody could understand. And it was going forward in an He had dementia and he had a sudden heart attack. And it was just so, so sad.
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