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
And I remember being so grateful that my brother did the eulogy because that has been my biggest fear in life to have to do a eulogy and have to stand up and talk about somebody who's just passed without crying uncontrollably. He did such a beautiful job. But the next tragedy was that three months later, my brother, who's two years younger, also passed away of a heart attack.
He was the most fit person that you would ever know. And that was... devastating to lose both of them of the same thing within three months. And I was trying to go through it and I stopped writing the book because I couldn't because I was grieving. Then I realized I had to do his eulogy because there was nobody else left. It was only me. And so a lot of soul searching. What am I going to say?
How am I going to get through this? And it was in that search that I realized that that grief was coming from a good place. And it actually was inspired by a workout that I was doing where the instructor said, and trying to get us to work out harder, she said, with great pain comes great wisdom. And I was like, oh my God, that's what I need to know right at this moment.
What is the wisdom that's coming from this huge pain that I've never felt before? And I realized that the wisdom was that the deep grief was showing me how much I loved them. And so it was still hardest thing I've ever done to write this eulogy and stand up. But I basically invited everybody to cry along with me at the one point that was hardest to get through. And I got through it that way.
But it allowed me to approach grief in a very different way. And I want to say I'm almost thankful for that experience because it made me search for the beauty that comes from the pain in our lives in a brand new way.
I learned that my brain was more resilient than I thought it was. I expanded the range of my emotions that I had experienced in my life, which is a good thing. I think that relativism is beautiful. That dark feeling of deep grief helps me appreciate the joyous moments And I think about that a lot after this has happened. That was part of the gift that I got.
Yes, and it changed the way I looked at, because then I did the eulogy. I came out of it. I was feeling better. Okay, I have to go back to this book on anxiety, but I couldn't write it in the same way anymore.
I had to find the gifts or the superpowers that came from anxiety, which I've already shared that with you, but that's the reason why I never would have, like, I don't know what the gifts are. Well, I did learn, not trick- I learned that lesson through that experience. And I applied it to the emotion of anxiety. And I think it changed the book. Well, I know it changed the book.
I wrote it in a completely different way. And I've used those lessons in a different way in my life since that experience.
Yeah. As a nerdy neuroscientist, I know all about the mechanisms and the receptors involved in stress. And not that I studied grief per se, but grief is one that gives you a lot of stress when you have grief. I think my whole life has helped me bring my more academic study of neuroscience to life.
There is the lessons that I could teach and that I do teach to students about what we know about the stress system, the memory system, your prefrontal cortex, decision-making, all these fascinating topics. But then there is life that comes in. And I think that what I've been doing more recently in my career, I did a very traditional academic career up to a certain point.
And then I started to try and apply kind of life's lessons to neuroscience. And so what does that mean? That means going off book and thinking about other ways to convey anxiety, not just the clinical part. but the useful part for your life. So that's how I would describe it.
Yeah, so, you know, emotional trauma also, there's a relatively simple formula with what happens, which is going back to the stress hormone cortisol. Depending on the actual stressor and the duration of that, it is going to first kind of alert your brain. It's like, I don't want this to happen again. It's like, this will not happen again. And that's what it was supposed to do.
It's supposed to heighten your senses so you can escape from the burning building. However, in these other life circumstances, a breakup or death that, you know, the emotional effects linger for a long time, they might actually cause what's called fear memories. to develop.
These are memories dependent on a structure called the amygdala that, again, are trying to protect you, like don't have this happen again, and steer you away from events. So I might have been steered away from eulogies or speaking in front of crowds, which I do all the time, but yeah, I would have been steered away from eulogies. When you have these
broader realizations about what's going on, you could actually learn in a deeper way from them. And instead of being steered away, instead of developing a fear memory that is very strong and hard to get rid of, you can have a deeper learning that sharing those very personal, very deep, very difficult emotions to feel. Talk about new synapses forming.
is a deeply cathartic process that brought me closer to my family and to everybody that was there, including all my brother's friends, many of whom I didn't know. So yeah.
Yeah, I think I wouldn't recommend that everybody goes out to try and prepare for trauma, but everybody has some form of trauma. And I think... going back to your superpower of anxiety and learning, learning from that. And also realizing, this was another big realization for me, you're not going to get rid of that deep negative emotion.
It's there for a reason to warn you against, this is a bad time. If you didn't have this warning, you would be walking in the middle of the freeway with no care in the world. So you're not going to get rid of that. But to focus yourself on the learning that comes out of it and that, yes, it might take some time and to give yourself that time.
Maybe what I'm trying to get at is the self-compassion that can come from any trauma that you have and learning to apply that to yourself, I think, is a really good thing that you can do. Prepare.
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