The Tamsen Show
The Anxiety Scientist: Feeling Overwhelmed? Rewire Your Brain With This Science-Backed Method
07 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What causes anxiety and how does it manifest in our brain?
Well, a few years ago, I was on the air and I had a moment I will never forget. Mid-sentence, my brain literally left me. I couldn't find the word I needed. My thoughts were spinning. It felt like everything was just moving too fast inside my head at once.
And let me tell you, if you have ever been there where your chest starts getting tight after that, your mind starts racing and you're thinking, what is happening to me right now? You know how scary it feels. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us learn to treat anxiety like a problem, like something to shut down or just deal with later. But what if that is actually information?
What if your brain is trying to tell you something, not break you? That question is why I really wanted this conversation to take place. Dr. Wendy Suzuki is a neuroscientist, professor of neuroscience and psychology, and Dean of the College of Arts and Science at NYU and the author of the book, Good Anxiety.
Her work changed how I think about what's happening in my brain when I start to feel overwhelmed or I start to feel that anxious feeling or on edge. She studies how the brain changes, and more importantly, how we can work with it instead of fighting it, which I found out I've been doing for a long time.
So if you've been feeling more anxious than you used to feel, more distracted, or like your brain is not cooperating lately, this conversation is for you. I think it's going to help you in so many ways.
Dr. Wendy Suzuki, welcome to The Tamsen Show. Thank you so much for having me.
It's so nice to see you. You too. It's been a bit since we saw each other, but I follow you avidly and always looking at what you're doing next. So we're going to bring out something shortly, which is going to surprise everybody. But first, I want to ask you, what pulled you into this line of work in particular?
What pulled me into neuroscience was an amazing mentor. I like to call her the Beyonce of neuroscience, who was a professor that I had. And I took her for my very first class of my freshman year. And she was a neuroscientist, the very first female PhD ever given by UC Berkeley in neuroanatomy. I didn't know. I just chose the class by the title, which was called
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Chapter 2: How does chronic stress affect our focus and memory?
the brain and its potential. But she was a pioneering neuroscientist and she was an extraordinary instructor, made us all want to understand every little cell in our brain. That's what she did for me. And ever since that first day, I wanted to become a neuroscientist.
That's incredible. So fast forward to today, where you're going around teaching about it, overseeing thousands of students, making sure people understand And I think there's so much curiosity these days into what our brains are doing, where they're working for us, and where we sometimes maybe feel they're working against us.
Is there something that you're seeing nowadays, or is there some kind of trend? We know social media is a big thing out there. We know AI has a lot going on. Is there some kind of trend you're seeing nowadays in how we are thinking and how anxiety plays a role into all of this in society?
Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the most interesting trends terrible interesting trend is we know how much social media is contributing to the higher levels of anxiety. And then the pandemic happened and that made everything worse. We came out of that, but then came AI. And AI is an incredible tool. It can be very, very valuable.
But in the way that it's been used by particularly young people for social companionship, for every time anxiety might come up or a worry might come up, what am I going to say? And ask AI and create that script, which could be a little bit of a crutch. But if that's all you do, then your AI is creating your own life for you. And that is kind of doubling down on the anxiety caused by social media.
And it is making anxiety overall worse. That's what we're starting to see.
And I can imagine that's something that's pretty new on the horizon. We've seen social media for a while, but how quickly AI has become part of our lives in all of this. So can you define anxiety for us? Because I think that it's a very broad definition. But let's talk about what anxiety is.
Yeah.
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Chapter 3: What role does movement play in calming the brain?
I like a simple definition, and I use a simple definition of anxiety. which is the feeling of fear or worry typically associated with uncertain situations. That's very, very broad. And anxiety is a normal human emotion. Everybody has it. Don't think that, oh, there's some lucky people that don't have anxiety. We all have it. And the thing about anxiety is
is that exists on a very, very wide spectrum from kind of normal everyday anxiety, maybe it went up during the pandemic, and then it goes all the way to clinical levels of anxiety. You can't go about your normal every day. My book, Good Anxiety, was really written for what I like to call everyday anxiety.
You're not required to go to a medical professional for your level of anxiety, which is approximately 80% of the population that experiences anxiety but would like to decrease it. That's why I wrote Good Anxiety.
Can you explain what is happening to our brain when we're dealing with anxiety or we're anxious?
Let me start evolutionarily because anxiety is, again, a normal human emotion. Everybody has it. I like to say that over and over and over. And if it was truly detrimental, it would have evolved out of us. So you have to ask yourself, why do I still have that anxiety? Why do we all still have it? Maybe you might think, oh, it's just a mistake. Evolution made a mistake.
But the reason why it is there and that it has survived all this time is that it is protective. anxiety is protecting us against something that might happen. You were just talking about, you know, you couldn't think of a word. That is worrisome. You know, maybe it's very scary. And it is priming you to say, okay, this is something unusual. It hasn't happened before.
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Chapter 4: How can sleep impact our emotional regulation and anxiety levels?
I need to do something about it. So that was good anxiety in some ways, right? Yes, it was. It was. And at its core, anxiety is protective. And I think the best way to think about it is if you are a female 2.5 million years ago when anxiety was first evolving, anxiety came up when you were searching for food and you heard a crack of a twig.
And that could be just nothing or it could be a lion that's going to eat you. That caused emotion of anxiety. And it stimulated your fight or flight system to either get ready to fight or to run. That's great. That is why you and I are sitting here today talking about anxiety. Fast forward 2.5 million years. We still have that same anxiety emotion that stimulates our fight or flight.
But there are so many more things that stimulate our anxiety. Just scrolling on the social media, especially these days, you can't open up the newspaper or any news outlet without anxiety. really being so scared and depressed and just sad about everything going on. And everything from that to, you know, how am I going to get a job is causing more higher levels of anxiety. So you think, well...
Your explanation, Wendy, doesn't help at all. It does because it's about reframing that feeling of anxiety from, oh, it's just a weight around my head. It's come to get me to, oh, what is it telling me? As you were just saying, what is it telling me about what I should pay attention to? Something that's a little bit unusual going on. Lots of things in the news right now might be going on.
It is warning you towards what you might be paying attention to. But the thing that I want everybody to understand is that your anxiety really points you towards those things that you hold dear. Do you hold safety dear? Safety of your family? Safety of your country?
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Chapter 5: What are some practical tools to manage anxiety in daily life?
Your country men and women? If you do, then it's normal that you get anxious when there are events that scare us in that realm. And everything from that to more mundane things like paycheck. Everybody's worried about money. I don't care who you are, how much money you have, you're worried about money. Of course.
And that is because you're worried about your well-being and the well-being of your family. That's the beautiful side of the worry around money. Everything, every anxiety can be flipped on its other side to reveal that what you hold dear, and that's something beautiful to actually appreciate.
How do you do that to where you're not constantly feeling, you go from anxiety to so anxious that it's like it's debilitating, right? And I think that we see that oftentimes. Is it you have to close that part out or you have to understand what's going on?
Again, I use from the book, you'll read a lot about my own anxiety. There are usually not new anxieties coming up to me. find you. These are very old, established anxieties. And part of it is an exercise of reflecting what causes you anxiety. Sometimes it's those things that are in your life. Difficult co-worker at work every single day that cause anxiety. Family members, very, very common.
Relationships, when they go bad, the cause of huge anxiety. And if you can identify those and then you know, do that flip before it happens. It's like, ah, that anxiety about my mom. It's been there for years and years and years. It's going to come up. Oh, it's the holidays. I'm going to see her.
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Chapter 6: How does social media contribute to increased anxiety?
Can I preview that for myself and remind myself before I get into the situation, you know, My mom is always like this. I have this response. Maybe that response is because you want to have a better relationship. You don't. What is that story? Can you explore it before you get there? And the other thing that can help is that probably if we got into it, you and I have very, very similar stories.
anxieties. Can you find friends and help talk that through? Because sometimes your best friends are the best mirrors to show you some of the things, and especially the beautiful things that are on the other side of your anxiety.
I do feel like I've seen community more of a calming response than anything else as the older I get. You have your own personal story that you have shared. Can we talk about that? Sure. Talk about your story and what happened with regard to anxiety and your brain.
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I started writing Good Anxiety first because I noticed, this was before the pandemic, how much more anxious the students that I teach were. That's interesting. And this was, you know, 2015, 2016. But then if I was really honest, it wasn't just the students. It was me. It was my friends and I, my colleagues. Everybody was getting more anxious.
go back so much beautiful research on social media, and there were political, we almost forget what was happening in 2015. So many things that were causing anxiety. So I set about to write this book, and I wanted to focus on the protective aspect of anxiety. But something happened in the middle of writing this book that really shifted the way that I looked at it. And it
caused the book to be the book that it was.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of brain plasticity in managing anxiety?
And that was something that was not anxiety, it was true grief. So in the middle of writing the book, my father passed away. He had Alzheimer's. He passed away, thank you, of a heart attack. So sudden, he was getting worse and we were caring for him, but it was just sudden and so devastating. But then just three months later, my younger brother had a heart attack and he passed away.
And I had to stop writing the book. I couldn't write a book on anxiety. I was grieving so terribly. And so naturally, like so many others have unimaginable. Yes. And so I was coming out of it. I was using all the techniques that I was, you know, halfway writing in the book, exercise, you know, meditation, trying all this. And one morning, I was working out on my video workout.
And the instructor said, with respect to exercise, you know, with great pain comes great knowledge. She was talking about your body. You really work out, you get better knowledge of yourself. But that somehow was exactly what I needed to hear because I was going through great pain. And I asked myself, what knowledge is coming of this? What can I learn from this grief? And what I learned was that
On the other side, the flip side of that deep grief was a deep love that I had for my brother and my father. And yes, did I love my father? Of course I would. I would have said, yeah, of course I loved him. It came out in such a deep way, of course, when they were gone.
And once I made that realization that I couldn't feel this great grief without that deep love that I hadn't even realized existed, it helped me understand it in such... I just exhaled. It's just like, oh, okay, that's a... Beautiful way to understand the grieving process.
Profound way to like just also remember them and understand how you felt about them on another level.
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Chapter 8: How can community and social connections alleviate feelings of loneliness?
Yes.
And it helped me go through those feelings because, of course, you want to just, I just want to get over those feelings. No, it almost made me want to, not that I could help it, kind of really feel into that because that was showing the depth of my love for them. And once I went through that grieving process a little bit more, I became obsessed with finding the flip sides.
All difficult emotions. Turns out I was in the middle of writing a book about anxiety, a difficult emotion. And so I became obsessed with understanding that flip side. What could it do for us? Because I needed to understand that about grief. And so I pushed all that effort into my desire to understand that about anxiety. And it made me reevaluate my own anxiety in a new way.
I needed to find something good. What came out of it? And that evaluation really let me come up with the superpowers of anxiety. What was it giving me? I didn't even realize it. And had that horrible thing not happened, it would have been a very different book.
First of all, the fact that that one sentence while you were doing that changed everything for you is incredible. But also the fact that you were writing it in the middle in such two tragedies back to back about what you've been able to do to help so many people heal and see those things and see anxiety and maybe understand it better for themselves.
What's happening in the brain when we feel that anxiousness?
There are a wide range of brain structures involved in feeling the emotion of anxiety. One famous brain structure called the amygdala is involved, but it's not the only structure. We think that many cortical areas are involved in feeling this emotion of anxiety. And then what happens is that feeling of anxiety will stimulate
the hypothalamus to stimulate the fight or flight response, which is, I think we all know that too well, that feeling of your heart rate goes up, your breathing gets shallow, you get ready, your body's getting ready to either fight the lion or run away. I love to, at this moment in time,
Remind everybody that on the flip side of the fight or flight system is the rest and digest system that every single one of us also has. This is the automatic system that comes online when you have a free weekend and you have nothing to do that glorious weekend where everything is just you have a free 48 hours and your heart rate goes down.
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