Modern Wisdom
#951 - Dr Russell Kennedy - How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry
Sat, 07 Jun 2025
Dr. Russell Kennedy is a neuroscientist specializing in anxiety treatment, physician, and an author. Why is anxiety so common now? It once helped us survive, like when we were being chased by lions. But today, we feel it even when there's no real threat. So what's going on? What does science say about this ancient emotion, and how can we manage it in the modern world? Expect to learn why anxiety is so common nowadays, the neuroscience of why we worry, the big differences between anxiety and worry, the biggest triggers of anxiety and how to manage them better, how to undo-chronic anxiety and how anxiety shows up differently for men and women, if it is it a blessing or a curse to feel things deeply, where people pleasing come from neurologically and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 15% off any Saily data plan at https://saily.com/modernwisdom Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get 15% off any Saily data plan at https://saily.com/modernwisdom Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is anxiety so common in the modern world?
Why is anxiety so common in the modern world? Of all of the different emotions, even all of the negative ones, why does this seem to be the one that people are zeroing in on?
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.
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.
Talk to me about why uncertainty is a fuel, a potent fuel for anxiety.
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.
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.
Hmm. I'm trying to draw the link between what anxiety is, what its function is, and uncertainty. Can you try and sort of fold these things together for me?
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: What role does uncertainty play in anxiety?
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.
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.
So worry becomes addictive. You're collapsing the potential options of what could have happened by coming up with small windows of potential certainty in your mind.
that are completely consistent with what you've been scared of in the past.
That's interesting. There's a ChatGPT screenshot. I follow a few ChatGPT Instagram accounts. These are people getting interesting insights from ChatGPT. This one was, give me one truly deep, novel, out of distribution, and mind-blowingly simple insight about humans that only very few or none of us are aware of. It cannot be generic, vague, be flashy, or slop corporate stuff.
That's a pretty good prompt. As engineering goes, that's pretty good. Sure. Humans never genuinely pursue happiness. They only pursue relief from uncertainty. Happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct whenever uncertainty briefly disappears. I haven't been able to stop thinking about that. It's so funny that you said uncertainty as one of the key drivers.
I haven't been able to stop thinking about that.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: How do childhood experiences affect anxiety in adulthood?
And over a period of time, when the dogs realized that they couldn't do anything about it, Uh, they just curled up in the corner and allowed the shocks to be there, even though in future they were able to do things that could stop it from happening. So they had this sort of externalized locus of control. I can't enact any change in my environment. And this was used to be ported across onto humans.
I think they did it with rats and stuff too. Turns out that's not true. Turns out that humans have... You come into the world being hopeless and you have learned hopefulness as opposed to learned helplessness. And Scott's position is, look, if you feel like... Getting yourself into a positive sum, optimistic, I can do this mindset is always an uphill battle.
That's not some personal failing of yours. This isn't some individual curse that's been bestowed only on you. This is a built-in feature of being a sensitive human being. And it's... a permanent battle for the rest of your life for you to learn hopefulness, but learned helplessness is something that it seems to not be so true.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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Chapter 4: What is the difference between anxiety and worry?
Doesn't matter.
Okay.
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.
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.
Is there sort of a place between your chin and your pubic bone that feels kind of intense? And where is that? So kind of solar plexus area.
So would that be kind of superficial or deep?
Deep, I'd say.
Deep. Okay. Would it have a temperature? Would it be cool or hot or?
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Chapter 5: How can we manage the alarm in our bodies related to anxiety?
Hot.
How about a color? May not have a color, but first impression. Does there a color there? Red. And is there a sensation that comes along with it?
Is it prickly or is there something that you feel that it just feels odd in that area?
Tight, like a twisting.
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.
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.
And see if it provides you with some comfort just putting your hand over it.
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: What techniques can help alleviate anxiety?
Chapter 7: How does unresolved grief relate to anxiety?
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.
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.
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?
We haven't been working on anxiety all that much. I'm actually now doing ACT therapy as well, which is interesting. I certainly like the fact that it feels practically applicable. One of the issues that I had with twice-weekly psychotherapy for a year was I left feeling like I had lots of insights but also lots of open loops and no kind of direction for how to move forward.
The problem with CBT was is that it is a fucking ton of homework. A lot of work. Bro, it is... Anybody that thinks... If you think that you've been consistent with your training in the gym, and you've been training for a decade or so, three, four, five days a week, push-pull, leg split, try and do a month of CBT and see if you stay compliant. Because the sessions are shorter, but it is...
Like when I looked at the reminders on my phone, I had this absolute cathedral of like an orchestra of bullshit going on. Most of it, you know, not bullshit, like it's good and important and I had to do it. But you end up looking at your day as being this sort of series of... bits of cognitive interjections that you're having to do to yourself.
And this may be the price that you need to pay the brain is a slippery, negatively predisposed bastard. And perhaps this is the volume of effort and consistency and work that you need to put in. But... Holy fuck. Like, yeah, if you're going through, it's like, I'm going through a bit of a tough time. I would really like to alleviate that.
It's like, hey, here's 15 things you need to do every single day. It's tough. So I'm still on with it, pivoted slightly from CBT to ACT, but I'm on with it.
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.
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Chapter 8: What is the importance of healing the body to resolve anxiety?
How effective is medication?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, dude, it's fascinating. This is a fucking seminar I've got going on. It's lovely. In other news, you might have heard me say that hold luggage is a psyop meant to keep you poor and late. And while that's true, it turns out that when a brand puts hundreds of hours into design and organization and durability, suddenly checking a bag doesn't feel quite so much like a trap. It actually feels...
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