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, absolutely.
Yeah, that's a great question.
Yeah, yeah. So that is a great question. And the answer that I provide in the book is a multi-spoked kind of strategy. And one strategy that's easy to understand is how do you create more joy in your life to kind of counteract all of these negative things coming out?
And so one of my favorite, this is in the toolbox part of the book where I go through immediate, medium-term and long-term tools that you can use to flip your anxiety from bad to good. And one of my favorite ones is called joy conditioning. Joy conditioning is mining your own memory banks for those joyous moments
funny, pick your favorite positive emotion events in your life and consciously bringing them back up and revivifying them and bringing up those emotions. And my little trick for that is try and find a memory that you love that has an olfactory component to it.
Olfactory. So a particular smell associated with it. Why? Because smells are really evocative of memories. It's very easy to bring up everything associated with that memory if it has a smell. It's okay if it doesn't. But the one that I use is, I love this one because everybody, I might have an example of this. I remember a particular yoga class I went to in New York City, and I was doing so well.
I was, you know, up dog, down dog. I flipped my dog. I was like, yeah, I'm doing really well. And then I was doing the pose that I do the best, which is Shavasana. So I was in Shavasana, feeling really good.
Exactly, exactly. I do that even better than child's pose. I just lay on my back, shavasana. And I was feeling really good about myself, had this great class. And then on top of all of that, the teacher came around and she put some lavender lotion on her hand and she waved it under my nose. And she gave me the most luscious five second neck massage that I've ever had in my life.
Cause you know, I worked out hard, I was feeling really good about myself. And so I literally in my purse out there is a little vial of lavender essence. And when I need a little pick me up of, remember the time I just felt so good. It was just this relaxing feel good moment. I smell that lavender. And that memory, that is my joy conditioning. I'm joy conditioning myself with that memory.
But you can do that with whatever memory you want.
That is Professor Wendy Suzuki's term. And it's based on my 25 years of studying how memory works. I love it. And applying all of my knowledge to addressing anxiety. And it's really a direct antidote to thinking. fear conditioning, which we all experience automatically. So that's my example is my apartment in Washington, DC was robbed.
And I walked around the corner, my door was the only one around the corner. And I still remember walking around the corner and seeing my door crowbarred open, hanging open when it was supposed to be locked. It's like, what's happened? And I walked in, which was not the smartest thing to do. Nobody was there. But every time I walked around that corner for months and months, I felt that.
That is fear conditioning.
So that didn't go away. You had to move. Yeah, I did have to move. It went down slowly. But I, you know, to counteract that with something like joy conditioning is, you know, invite friends over, create wonderful memories, wonderful safe events in that same space. It never went away. And I'll tell you why. Because that is a safety mechanism.
You don't want to, you know, the brain doesn't allow us to obliterate anything. This isn't like that movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Yes. So we can't do that, but we can counteract that very protective mechanism. Actually, I don't want to eliminate that. I want to be wary of areas and situations that were really, really bad for me. You don't want to eliminate it.
I don't want to eliminate it.
of that fear of that trauma yeah to live with ourselves or to live in the environment of a home that we can't leave yet or how do we yeah is it just more joy conditioning are there other things yeah so this is where we get to that boundary between clinical levels and what this addresses so i'm really not addressing You know, I went to Afghanistan. I have, you know, terrible PTSD.
This can help a little bit, but it does not substitute for you need to go to a therapist. And so, yeah, that is not a substitute. However, you can use these in addition to your, you know, therapy approaches.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah. I mean, we already said this, but I think this is one that so many people can use. And it was really inspired by a really good lawyer that I happened to meet at a party one day. And I told her, I'm writing this book about anxiety. And she said, I am the lawyer that I am today because of my anxiety. And I said, oh, tell me about that.
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