The TRUTH About ANXIETY And How To HEAL IT! | The Mel Robbins Podcast

okay Dr Kennedy in the house people so let's go back to the basics anxiety 101 all anxiety is separation anxiety what does that mean the reason why you're anxious in the first place is because you block love so when you say I love you the reason why you're anxious is because you block love for yourself yes what I just had a huge breakthrough here holy [ __ ] Russ hey it's Mel and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast okay so today's episode is freaking fire and speaking of fire I Gotta Throw Some amazing celebratory fire

in your direction I gotta say thank you thank you so much for listening for sharing these episodes for being as excited as I am about this thing I started this because I just wanted to connect with you on a deeper level and I wanted to be able for us to inspire and Empower each other to create better lives and baby we are doing it um I also want to say thank you for being a Force for good I love the fact that you're already pouring in topic and guest suggestions please keep them coming because we

are going to create this thing together we are looking at the DMS we're looking at the stuff that you're leaving on the forums on the website this is something we are building together and it is just incredible so thank you thank you thank you okay so today's episode hello game chain danger this is fire people so what are we talking about um anxiety yep we got to talk about anxiety my mission with this episode of the Mel Robbins podcast is to profoundly fundamentally change the way you think about and approach anxiety by the end of

this episode you will be empowered to do way more than just survive your anxiety or try to cope with it okay in just a few minutes you're going to meet an incredible expert on the topic his name is Dr Russ Kennedy he's a medical doctor he has a degree in neuroscience and in my opinion he has written the book on anxiety and so he's going to come on and we're going to talk all about the topic we're going to change the way that you think about it that you approach it and more importantly Dr Kennedy

says you can heal your anxiety once and for all yeah sure you're gonna have moments where anxiety rise up and you know you're going to have stressful situations but in terms of the ongoing overwhelm nervousness on edge feeling he's going to teach you how to heal that his work is life-changing and it has made a huge difference in my life and I cannot wait for you to meet him in a few minutes now the interesting thing about anxiety is that I am considered one of the world's leading experts on anxiety and I'm what you call

a life tested expert because my expertise has been earned the hard way the painful way and that is by living through and struggling with anxiety for almost 45 years the truth is when I really think about my past I don't ever remember a time when I wasn't nervous or feeling on edge or anxious or somewhere other than the room that I was currently standing in I think if you can come out of the womb as a baby having a panic attack that was Mel Robbins and that Panic that I was I think hardwired with in

my nervous system it only grew as I got older in fact you know how you go to those little camps when you're little like with the y or you know maybe you go to Girl Scout camp I was so homesick at every single Camp my parents tried to send me to I would be sent home in fact there is this really Infamous story about me uh in sixth grade so in sixth grade at North Muskegon Elementary School there's this huge Crescendo at the end of the year and the entire sixth grade takes over the Boy

Scout and Girl Scout camp that's like 10 miles away and everybody goes to camp for five days and four nights and it is supposed to be the most amazing thing that happens during Elementary School everybody talks about going to sixth grade camp here's the thing about Mel I was so riddled with anxiety and panic while I was there that I called my parents every single day and begged for them to come and get me I was so out of control that the counselors actually acquiesced and said I could go home now I want you to

stop and think about that how anxious you have to be to get trained counselors to basically go this kid is out of control we can't handle this we got to get her out of get her parents to come pick her up like I I can't deal with this and so I got what my anxiety wanted I got to leave and as I was packing up my cabin my friends came in they're like where are you going Mel tonight's a big scavenger hunt it's the last night why are you leaving I lied to them and said

oh my grandmother's had a heart attack so my parents are coming we gotta go we gotta go see her yep that was sixth grade Mel full of anxiety and it only got worse as I got older in fact before every track meet or tennis match that I had to play as a varsity athlete I had such a nervous stomach that was the term that was used back in the early 80s she has a nervous stomach well you know how I dealt with my nervous stomach I would stand behind like a bush next to the tennis

courts and I would have this blue bottle packed in my backpack it was a blue bottle of melanta this is an antacid medicine that old people drink for for reflux I would chug that stuff it got so bad that my parents would start buying that stuff by the case it was disgusting and chalky but I chugged It Anyway honestly I can't believe I'm admitting this to you right now and here's the thing it only got worse I mean little Elementary School anxiety Mel turned into High School anxiety Mal and then of course I was College

train wreck anxiety Mal I don't even want to admit half the things I did in college when I was anxious like jumping from one relationship to another or waking up every single morning with uh anxiety full of regrets about the night before you know when I started to think about oh my God I feel like I need melanta right now my stomach is starting to be like and I laugh about it but honestly at the time it's sad like I just didn't enjoy College I don't even like to go to college reunions because I did

not like the person that I was back then as my anxiety was just raging out of control well when I got to law school thankfully the anxiety got so unbearable that I got medical help and I was finally diagnosed with anxiety and this would have been in the early 90s and so anxiety was not a word that people threw around casually back then I mean anxiety meant there was something terribly wrong with you people didn't talk about it if you went to therapy you were a freak and so thankfully for me though this diagnosis it

was a godsend because I finally had a word and a doctor validating what I had been struggling with for my entire life for 20 years he prescribed Zoloft it was a complete game changer for me it's almost like that medication acted like a ladder you see the anxiety and all the mental spiraling that it caused that spiraling put me in a very deep hole mentally physically and spiritually and that Zoloft was like a little ladder that allowed me rung by rung to start to climb out of that hole and do the work that you need

to do to start to take control of your life so I took Zoloft for 20 years in fact the only time I didn't take Zoloft was when our first daughter Sawyer she's now 23 years old so when she was born I had been off Zoloft I had to taper off of it because we didn't know if you could like breastfeed or whatever on that medication they know now it's safe to breastfeed with it but when she was born I had such severe postpartum depression the really scary kind where you couldn't be left alone because the

doctors were afraid you were going to hurt yourself or you're going to hurt your baby it was a terrifying eight-week experience in my life and so I'm telling you between the 45 years of dealing with my own anxiety and on top of it Chris and I having kids that have had anxiety that at times were so severe that they slept on the floor of our bedroom I just always thought okay I have anxiety that's the way that it is it's just the way that I'm wired I hate it I hate having anxiety but I just

have to learn to live with it I was wrong you do not have to hate anxiety and you do not have to just learn to live with it you can learn how to understand it and you can learn simple things that will help you take control of it and change how you respond to moments of uncertainty and moments of stress and so in my early 40s the anxiety got so crippling again because there were a lot of things going on in our life that were triggering it that every single morning the alarm would go off

and I would lay in bed for an hour and I would just stare at the ceiling and the anxiety it's almost like it felt like a gravity blanket pinning me to that bed and as I would lay in that bed and think about all my problems time would tip by the kids would miss the bus I became a person I didn't even recognize but I want to just tell you that I know what it's like when anxiety is ruining or running your life because when anxiety was at its worst for me I created this thing

called the five second rule and it was out of sheer desperation and fear that I created this thing what is it it's a brain hack and if you ever feel overwhelmed by anxious thoughts or anxious feelings just count backwards five four three two one and you can interrupt those thoughts and feelings and then physically move and ever since I invented this thing I've been teaching the five second rule on stages around the world and it has changed the lives of millions of people now here's one of the things I want to distinguish before we bring

Dr Kennedy on in just a second a lot of the tools that I am known for and that I teach and the things that I've been researching that help with anxiety that help with mindset that help with mental health I call these tools a neck up approach because they attack your mindset they focus on your thoughts they help you change the patterns of thought in your mind and the default thinking and the self-criticism and the worry and the procrastination and the perfectionism that can take hold on today's episode though we're gonna go in a different

direction we're going to talk about a whole body of tools that you need that I would classify as a neck down approach to anxiety we are going to focus on the body we're going to focus on your nervous system we're going to focus on thinking about anxiety as something happening in your body first because the fact is that if you only attack from the neck up with talk therapy or using my tools yeah it's going to help yes they are an essential part of the toolkit that you need for coping and yes it will make

a huge difference but what Dr Kennedy is going to explain to you today is game changer because he's going to teach you that you can actually heal your anxiety but you have to attack it from the neck down you have to stop running away from the anxiety and address what's going on in your body and that's exactly what we're going to talk about today and we're also going to talk about how the heck do you do this this is going to be packed with takeaways because I'm going to just make sure that it is so

Dr Kennedy he is the best selling author of the book anxiety RX his work is changing the lives of people around the world he is helping people heal their anxiety in his clinical practice and you're going to want to bookmark this episode because you're going to learn so many takeaways that you're going to absolutely want to come back to this again and again and you definitely are going to want to share this with your friends and family in fact you'll be trying his tools as you listen to this episode he has a degree in Neuroscience

he's a medical doctor and perhaps most importantly like me and maybe you he struggled with anxiety for decades but using what you're about to learn in this episode he has cured himself so let's get him on the line hey hey Mel Robbins my God how are you good good awesome is this thing going guys we're good with the recording okay awesome I am so excited my favorite episodes are ones where I feel like I'm getting a personal therapy session that the world can listen on on so how deep you want to go well I have

a feeling that we are going to have you back over and over and over again okay and so I want to focus our conversation today on um just kind of some anxiety 101 because one of the things that I was so excited to [Music] um be able to talk to you about is the difference between a neck up thinking approach to anxiety versus a neck down body approach to anxiety and I want to focus our conversation on truly getting people to have a wake-up call about the way that they think about what anxiety is and

isn't about what's going on in your body when you have anxiety and almost like getting somebody to go holy [ __ ] like I got a completely upend how I've been thinking and attacking this does that make sense yeah that's what I'm good at I I know you are so I've been following you for a while and every time you post something I go oh my God oh my God yes yes yes yes yes and so first of all thank you thank you thank you Dr Kennedy I know you prefer to be called Russ but

I just gotta say dude you gotta you're an MD and you have a degree in neuroscience and like me you struggled with anxiety for 30 years and so I could not be more excited to uh basically get a personal therapy session with you sure happy to do it okay happy to do it Mel so the first thing that I would love to ask you is when a patient comes to you and I how do you describe what anxiety is well usually they come to me with anxiety already so you know I'll go into you know

what are you feeling what's going on what happens to you and usually almost universally they'll describe a thinking process my husband's driving me nuts I can't drive I can't go past this I can't go into grocery stores I can't go on the bus and usually what I'll say is you know that's all in your head like that's all the story that your left hemisphere your analytical left hemisphere is making up now what do you feel in your body in your physiology when you say you feel anxiety and when I the first almost the first thing

I can get people to do is say I'm going to change the word anxiety to alarm because words have Consciousness to them anxiety doesn't have a lot of Consciousness to it a lot of people don't even understand what anxiety is well I agree I feel like it's thrown around all the time and we think that anxiety is like a nervous stomach and a lot of worry in your head about what's going to happen and I love that you're saying that we want to start talking about the alarm that goes off in your body and before

we even talk about what that means one other thing that I would love for you to address is what are ways in which anxiety expresses itself and I'm going to give you an example so I'm your classic textbook type a hyper Vigilant sure always worried anxiety type uh panic attacks shortness of breath you know you can you can literally feel the the the alarm vibrating through my skin but our daughter who is 23 when she's feeling anxious or the alarm is going off in her body she doesn't emit worry or tension she emits frustration and

anger sure so what are the various ways in which anxiety gets expressed in people because I think there's a lot of people that quote struggle with anxiety that don't realize that it's anxiety that they're struggling with yeah well um I think what happens what you're describing with Sawyer is that is that her autonomic nervous system kind of goes into a sympathetic you know fight or flight response and for her the only acceptable response inside of her is frustration or anger because that's that's how it gets expressed now other people will shut down they'll go into

freeze right so sympathetic nervous system is fight flight and freeze and font to but freeze mostly in that particular situation so some people will go into this like withdrawal they'll stop moving their eye contact disappears they their body stops kind of moving in in a fluid kind of way and it's really people display anxiety or alarm as I should say using my own little terminology in very different ways and I think it's really becoming aware of it because I have many people that send me messages saying I didn't even know I had anxiety until I

read your book it's like well I don't know if I'm doing any favors there but you know it really is it really does manifest because when I was 20 I didn't know what anxiety was I just knew that I had this impending doom the sense of impending doom and I didn't even know what it was and I don't think a lot of people do I agree with you so let's go back to the basics anxiety 101. okay when you say we're going to now talk about anxiety is an alarm system in your body and what

describe the alarm system to me okay so there's a structure in our brain it's called the amygdala and the amygdala is often called The Fear center of the brain it's it's okay you know description but it's it's not the best but basically the amygdala is involved in just about every fear reaction that we have so the amygdala will recognize something in your external environment or your internal environment AKA worries that alarms it so the amygdala has a super highway down to the brain stem which controls your body so your blood pressure increases your heart rate

increases your respiration increases everything seems to go along with that so we get this physiological change motivated mostly by the amygdala but other other factors in the brain as well and that brings us into this state of alarm and then what the left hemisphere does is it goes we're alarmed why do we have to be alarmed about and then you start stacking and I've heard you say this I think it was in in the five second rule about I gotta get up you know this looks this this is bad that's bad when your boobs is

bigger you know all this kind of stuff that's what I call stacking so as soon as your body feels the sense of alarm your left hemisphere has to do something with it so it has to make up worries and thoughts that are completely consistent with that painful sense of alarm in your system so we start stacking up these worries and of course that just creates more alarm which creates more worries which creates more alarm when we get caught in this alarm anxiety cycle so let me see if I can unpack this okay because I think

this is a huge wake-up call for people to learn this that anxiety does not start typically with your thoughts totally anxiety starts with a physical response to some some kind of situation that then triggers a physiological reaction in your body designed to agitate you and designed as an alarm to get you to suddenly pay attention because your body is physically trying to get you to basically wake up from from whatever you're doing and pay attention to some sort of threat or some sort of change or some sort of something and the second thing that happens

when your heart when that physical thing happens is then your mind goes holy cow what am I what what what is around me right now that I need to pay attention to or be worried about is that am I getting this right so it begins in the body as an alarm system and then the thoughts climb on I think that that that's that's an explanation that's very simple and and and very accurate I think is that we have this thing that I described in my book called background alarm which is basically kind of old unresolved

emotional issues that are stuck in your body you know my colleague Gabor mate talks about this too emotions being stuck in the body which is a construct you can't separate the Mind from the body of course but it's a construct and it helps people it really helps them understand that hey this is actually starting from my body and because we're so versed at speaking in words and communicating to ourselves and to each other with words we don't get into the feeling so if I ask you hey Mel uh what does it feel like when you

when you bite into an apple it's like well I don't know I mean so I say what does it taste like well it's sweet or it's sour it's crunchy it's like we're so good at describing things in words but if I how do you feel when you bite into that Apple that's a brand new landscape like like we're not used to feeling we're in a society that values that worships the mind and very very rarely actually says hey get into your body feel your body and a lot of us don't want to feel our body

because that's where the freaking pain is right into our heads because it's an Escape from this old alarm that's been trapped in your body probably since childhood so you say that all anxiety has the exact same beginning I was I was really this really surprised me that that anxiety is all triggered by the same thing yeah all anxiety comes from the singular Source what is that separation all anxiety is separation anxiety what does that mean well if you drill it down it's it's separation typically from yourself but it starts with separation from your parents on

some level if you feel separate from your parents the people that are supposed to love you care see you hear you and love you if you feel separate from them it creates this alarm in our system and then when we get this alarm in our system our brain has to do something about that so what we tend to do as children is first of all blame ourselves we can't blame our parents for what's going on in our childhood environment so we blame ourselves and then we start taking Jabs at ourselves what I call Jabs which

is basically judgment abandonment blame and shame this is what we do to ourselves this is the the birth of the inner critic so can you give me an example so so I find and one of the things I want to do with this show is to take like a lot of the stuff that sounds intellectual and make it really digestible and understandable so when you say separate you're separate from your parents can you give us a few scenarios that you know aren't all horrific abuse situations that that anybody can identify with when you say separate

from your parents yeah so there's something as simple as a parental mismatch what does that mean well it's kind of a term I don't know if I heard it or I made it up but it's basically I I see a lot most of my patients clients whatever you want to call them are female and a lot of them have issues with their mom so it's they felt separate they felt this mismatch from their mother they felt like you know we're not connected I love my mother she loves me but you know I like Bach and

she likes you know punk rock you know and and just in different parts of our Lives they're very different and that parental mismatch I think it might be a Nicole a para term actually this parental mismatch causes a tremendous amount of alarm in a child's system because you want to belong to a parent you really want to feel like you're connected to your parent and if you don't have that internal sense of attachment it's very alarming to our system and that alarm gets lodged in our body and then that's what usually mediates the worries as

we get older it also mediates that thing I call Jabs which is Judgment abandonment blame and shame we do that to ourselves so when we're listening to our own thing it's like okay well how am I judging myself here you wake up in the morning as you say in in high five habit you wake up in the morning with anxiety or alarm as I like to call it and then you start thinking you start stacking all these negative scenarios on top of yourself to make sense of it when really what you should do and and

take this is out of your book is I'm feeling anxious 54321 into my body into my body find a place in my body find a place in my breath find a place that feels safe in my body and some people don't feel safe in their body and we do something with that first but really breath everybody's pretty much safe in their breath go 54321 into my body out of my head because what that does is it gives a sense of control it it takes energy away from those rumination ruminating thoughts and it puts it where

it belongs because maybe that alarm is your younger self that's asking for your attention and as a medical doctor and neuroscientist I kind of want to have a seizure sometimes when I talk about the Ethereal nature of this but really from a practical sense when you're anxious find the alarm in your body okay so how do you do that so let's so let's just take a scenario right now let's just say um and you know it could be anything sure it could be that you are sitting in the pickup line at school and you see

somebody that you have beef with and you start to feel like this wave hit you because you don't want to talk to that person or that person makes you nervous right situation we can all relate to totally in that moment sitting in the front seat of your car and you feel the alarm go off how do you locate the damn thing because it's everywhere at this point well sometimes it's everywhere I mean it feels like it's everywhere I think and as I was saying earlier we're so used to communicating with ourselves in words we don't

really think to look at the alarm in our body right so what I would say is as you look at this person that kind of triggers you a little bit you know feel your butt in the in the car seat you know relax your shoulders relax your jaw you know if you're not driving like close your eyes for a second just take a breath in and and like a nice slow breath out and go where in my physiology do I sense this you know imagine this person it's like okay well I feel this sort of

you know kind of ache in my upper chest and it's you know maybe it's the size of an apple or whatever and it feels like it's a pressure it feels like it's radiating up to my neck that's your alarm so put your hand over your life like in the high five habit high five your heart high five that part of your alarm because or jumping right into it I believe that that is your younger self asking for your attention and typically what we do is we push it away we go into our heads right so

go into your body feel it see if you can put your hand over that area what if I don't want to what if I'm literally like I don't like this feeling so you know I'm I'm sitting here listening to you and and I would and I really love your work because you are trying to get us all to go to the source of what's triggering mental health issues which is stored experiences and the alarm in your body and your inability to tolerate or understand what's happening when it goes off and so I have recently had

this experience where I'm waking up and I get these waves of anxiety and what's interesting is that this is not new for me I mean I've struggled with anxiety for 30 years but we have just recently had a number of huge changes in our life and I now live in a different state in a very small town and when I wake up in the morning in the middle of all this change my alarm is not on the nightstand next to me it begins in my ankles and it's like a hot lava wave that goes from

my ankles up my legs all the way up my stomach and then it solidifies in my chest and as soon as I feel this wave my immediate thought is not oh I want to feel the alarm it's [ __ ] why am I feeling this I don't want to feel dread and then I do and then I feel like I just want to hide from it or like try to fall asleep and I know that it's just my body reacting to all this change like it's some sort of stored experience that is coming up and

I've been working so hard on not freaking out when I feel it right but turning toward it and as a medical doctor and a neuroscientist and somebody who who has struggled with anxiety for 30 years why is turning toward this alarm the answer in that moment like what would happen like tell me what happens when you turn toward it and you put your hands on your chest or you go oh thank you you're just trying to protect me because you're scared to death that you now live in Vermont and you have no friends and uh

you're very far away for your kids and you're going to live alone here on this mountain and be even more lonely like I get through this whole like catastrophizing which only make it worse versus ah welcome this [ __ ] in like I don't want to like I just don't want it to be there Russ yeah I get it I get it what if it's not [ __ ] though Mel what if it's what if it's little Mel did you have a nickname when you were when you were a little girl this really is becoming

therapy isn't it well I'll give it a try yeah when you started talking about the mismatch with the mom I'm like I hope my mother doesn't listen to this episode because I even feel guilty for admitting that we are kind of a mismatch or are a mismatch um yeah well my sometimes my mom calls me Meli and friends of mine call me Meli and um yeah friends of mine called me Nelly is there a name that you relate to as a child a nickname that you relate to you know in many ways I think Mel

because I still feel very much like a child at times and I still feel like that vulnerable kid and I still feel like the um person that's on the outside looking at I feel separate like that word separate makes a lot of sense for me um like there's a feeling that I have in life that I'm observing what's happening but I'm not a part of it yeah and you know just because you've kind of given me permission here I mean you've spent a lot of your life outrunning your anxiety right and it's worked for you

Mel you're very successful you know you it's work for you I see this with a lot of very intelligent people they can intellectually kind of outrun their anxiety what does that even mean it means that you keep yourself so busy that you don't get a chance to sit with that alarm in your body I don't want to sit with it that's why exactly why do you think moving to Vermont where there's nothing to do is so [ __ ] terrifying like there I can't run to Target to make my anxiety go away right like I

feel like I'm addicted to negative stress and this addiction to negative stress is what I've done to numb my anxiety well it's sublimating it is a big word what is something sure sorry um you've taken this energy and you found a way to make it work for you so I've taken the negative alarm or the alarm in my body and I have channeled it in a Direction so I don't have to feel it yes and when you said what if the alarm is trying to help you yeah what the hell did you mean by that

what if it's what if it's little Mel you know what if it's what if it's the younger version of you saying hey I need some attention and then when you say you know [ __ ] off I don't want to feel you literally what if you had a child come up to you in a grocery store and they were crying and their hands up in the air to pick them up would you push them away would you go see ya [ __ ] off you know no you wouldn't you'd pick that damn child up but

we won't do it for ourselves God that's so true yeah we won't do it for ourselves we'll do it for us yeah you're right you're absolutely right like if I if somebody if you if somebody else had an alarm going off in their body yep and they were like freaking out or worried or sad or upset or needing attention or reassurance you would give that to them but without hesitation I'm sure with Sawyer and Oakley you do that all the time all the time yeah but you don't do it for yourself no and I think

that this is the singular biggest like mistake that Society has made around understanding anxiety I just had a huge breakthrough here holy [ __ ] Russ um okay so let me just see if I can give this back to everybody listening sure so it's the fact that you're scared of the alarm or you can't tolerate it and you don't understand what it's trying to ask of you that makes it worse yes and if you were to realize that any tension or fear or kind of scary feeling in your body is an alarm system from your

inner child or asking you for reassurance or love or attention and you just gave yourself that reassurance or love or attention the alarm would turn off is that what you're saying slowly yeah because it's been an adaptation for you too you got to remember that the ego thinks it's protecting you by fighting I don't understand what the ego is that's too intellectual for me so so I will have you back to talk about the ego but the second anybody says ego I'm like oh this is somebody who's way smarter than me I don't want to

try to figure out what the hell an ego is like so so so so so and we will have you back because we all need to know what the ego is however I just want to stay on this because I think this is a groundbreaking idea that I want everybody who either has some level of situational or generalized anxiety or love somebody who has situational or generalized anxiety and at that at this moment in time that would be every human being on the planet and I want you to understand that we have been taught that

we're supposed to attack it from the neck up with the thinking first and that's one of the things you need to do to cope but the real heart of healing your anxiety which you claim you've done and I want to hear about that yeah that the and I don't I don't mean to use the word claim like I don't believe you I claim that I have gotten so much better but yeah well you're a medical doctor so you can say that I feel like I understand anxiety I still hate it and I need to have

a different relationship with it and I need to and everybody needs for the sake of your kids the people that you love for yourself you need to understand this alarm system in your body and the fact that it does desperately needs you and you need to take a neck down approach to listening to the alarm and diffusing it in a way that wow so over time if you do this the alarm doesn't go off as much uh no yeah that's true uh it's not as intense and you're not compulsively running up into your head when

you feel the alarm so if I had a motorcycle in my front yard I used to work emerge as a dock and it's like I don't you know does emerge mean emergency oh emergency yeah okay so you used to work in the emergency room as a doctor I delivered babies I did kind of the whole kind of General thing okay now uh if I had a motorcycle in my farm yeah that's why I bring up motorcycles just because I used to see bad accidents with motorcycles I don't condone motorcycles I think they're fun but they're

dangerous anyway sidetrack so if I had a motorcycle in my front I've never ridden one before so if I had a motorcycle in my front driveway and I had 50 books on how to how to you know drive a motorcycle ride a motorcycle and then I go out to the I go to the motorcycle I sit on it and I go no you know what I gotta go back and I gotta read a little more about how the brakes work and then I'm gonna until you get on that freaking motorcycle and ride it around and

maybe fall off a few times which is the same thing with the emotion as soon as you get on the alarm you start actually feeling better like when you said about that thing about the person in the the school drop off as soon as you put your hand over that place of alarm you will feel instantly better I'm not saying it's gonna you know take it from a nine to a two but it's going to take it from a nine to a four because you're actually from a Consciousness perspective you're actually going at the root

source of the problem which is This Little Child in you that says I don't like this person and it's not this person it's basically I don't like someone from my past that this person reminds me of or I don't like the feeling that I have in my body when I see this person and this is a familiar feeling from my past yeah so for example if you had like a chaotic parent or an unpredictable parent or a mentally ill parent or an absent parent that is this goes back to your original point when you have

a parent that you can't either connect with or that is unpredictable or that makes you feel invisible or not safe that alarm system in your body develops as a child and that is what you're saying when you say all anxiety has resulted because of separation anxiety as a child when you feel separate or unsafe or unseen or not heard or not loved or invisible in your home that original experience that you probably don't remember yeah that encoded your body when you were tiny yeah and any time then from that point forward anytime you again felt

invisible or you felt attacked or you felt unloved that alarm got even stronger and so now it's like this automatic response in your body to those situations where you feel separate am I getting this yeah totally yeah and what happens is when we feel the alarm we go up into our heads to escape it because we feel this alarm in our body it's like I don't want to feel this so we go up into our heads and we try and think well you know what could this be you know we analyze we go into this

we we have this like just fixation this left hemispheric fixation on figuring stuff out which basically just creates more of a problem you know I talk about my in my book about you know Ulysses and the siren Island you know so Ulysses again you're way smarter than me so you got to tell me the story okay so it's basically it's like a Greek myth class that I I skipped in college okay it's that English stuff I and I'd much rather write a physics exam than an English exam but anyway so it's basically siren Island so

there's these beautiful women on this island and what the sailors will do when they hear these beautiful women singing is they'll run their ships aground and then they'll try and swim to these sirens and the sirens turn into monsters and kill them pack them apart whatever they want to do so so it basically that's your thoughts your thoughts are like siren Island your thoughts are trying to suck you into going hey we have the answer we have the answer when all they have is more problem you're not going to solve anxiety which is basically a

problem of overthinking with more freaking thinking it's not gonna work okay so can I ask you a question why the hell if there is an alarm system wired in her body why is our brain not able to go it's just an alarm system just give yourself a hug and take a deep breath thank it for trying to protect you next why do we not just automatically say that why do we kill ourselves in our own minds with our thoughts because we don't understand it's there in the first place we don't understand the alarm yeah we

don't understand that it's our younger self asking for our attention so we feel pain in like any organism we withdraw from Pain and when we it's like that the motorcycle that is on the front if I don't get on that motorcycle and ride it around maybe fall off a couple of times I'm never really going to learn how to acclimatize to that emotion that alarm Bessel Vandercook talks about that and the body keeps the score we're not teaching people how to get rid of their anxiety we're teaching them how to acclimatize to it and then

I add on to that and stop adding thoughts to it because as soon as you add thoughts to the alarm a you're getting out of the problem and B you're just making it worse so you know go ahead please so basically we get in this thing what I call the alarm anxiety cycle so something triggers us say we're say we're in that lineup we see this person that we don't like and then we go oh I don't really like this person I should really I should really try and make an effort you know I should

really and it's like well no no she did this or he did that don't make eye contact get on the phone make a fake phone call avoid avoid turn shoulder turn shoulder holy [ __ ] are they closer like I'm like what run away yeah run away you know to quote a Monty Python thing so so basically what we're doing is we're trying to intellectualize the alarm that we're feeling in our body and it the the it's not the solution isn't in our minds the Solutions in our body which is why so many people have

a hard time healing from anxiety because we're trying to use more thoughts to combat overthinking my big takeaway right now so far is that all the thinking that we reflexively do about the feelings in our body makes the alarm louder and that we have to learn to stop going above the neck and thinking about what's going on and we need to train ourselves to go below the neck into our bodies and turn toward the alarm and give ourselves the reassurance and the soothing or whatever it is that the alarm is asking for in that moment

yeah and then if you do that you are now taking step one on the path of truly what do you what would you call it dealing calming uh curing your anxiety getting it the root cause getting at the root cause that's exactly what it is you're getting at the root cause which is the alarm the thoughts are not the cause the thoughts are a symptom so the thoughts are just the byproduct of this alarm that's stuck in your body now thoughts do cause you know anxiety there's no two ways about that but I think we

where we where the mismanage is where the where the mistake is is that we believe the thoughts originate before the feeling and I'm saying the feeling starts before the thought the feeling starts before the thought because every one of us knows a kid that can work themselves up into a panic attack because they think they're going to throw up sure and what I now realize after years of having kids with anxiety and reading so many books about this subject that I should have a PhD and being in years of therapy myself is that if a

child like let's take my son so our son Oakley when he was little he was constantly picked on at school so of course he felt nervous in the morning before he had to head into school sure plus the kid had dyslexia and ADHD all of which was not diagnosed so he's heading into a full day in a classroom where he physiologically neurologically is incapable of doing what is going to be asked of him and so his body before entering that situation sounds an alarm and when the alarm sounds and the physiological changes happen guess what

physiological feeling he has his stomach starts to rumble because as the physiology of the alarm changes and the chemistry in his digestive tract changes he starts getting butterflies that feel like pterodactyls and then all of a sudden instead of just giving himself a hug and going it's going to be okay today's going to be an okay day I can face this instead of reassuring himself he goes into his head and says oh my God my stomach I think I'm going to puke I can't go to school and he ramps himself we were dealing with panic

attacks with this kid where he would literally bang his head on the kitchen island I don't want to go to school crying he would force himself to three he would get so worked up he would actually throw up I mean it was horrible and I now can see that all of the interventions that were being done with this kid with therapists which were all about just change the channel upstairs and then he would turn to them and say but sometimes when I change the channel it takes me to a channel I don't want to watch

so what if I change the channel of my thoughts and I get another bad thought like even he was reacting against it but nobody taught us that what the kid needed was a hug validation reassurance in that moment physically to get the alarm to quiet yeah yeah you nailed it so you know I think that's that's part of it is that especially with kids especially with children you know it's so important that they feel you that they feel seen heard and loved touch is such a valuable thing with kids it's just so amazing my wife

Cynthia is a somatic trauma therapist she deals mostly with people that have pre-verbal trauma before the age of seven years old so they don't have a story about it right wow how do they know they have trauma before the age of seven because they feel in their body because they feel alarmed every day and they don't know why because they haven't encoded it to a point where they can see the amygdala never forgets the amygdala encodes everything birth trauma everything it encodes everything but we don't have the retrieval mechanism to pull it back up so

we think we have no childhood memories which is a bit of a semantic thing because we do have childhood memories we just can't retrieve them that's the problem and there's a whole reason for that that I put on Instagram about how the hippocampus gets paralyzed but I don't want to get too much into that but basically with Oakley like it's it's getting him into his body into a safe place so you practice with him you know putting your this is what I do with I know he's older now but but this is what I do

with Paris is I get put your hand on your child's heart then put your other hand on their back about the same level as your as your front hand and just sit there with them and just allow their nervous system to regulate and just allow them to feel it and create this safe place in your body because this is the next place that I'd like to go with this little interview that we're doing yeah is finding us like people say I don't want to go to my body it's like I understand that so how can

we do that well we find a place in our body that's either uh safe you know with me it's my kind of my breath around my nose because I used to do a lot of meditation um and then what we do is we feel the alarm and then we go into this safe place and then we go back into the alarm Okay so hold on let's let's walk through this so yours you just reached up and for those of you listening we put uncut episodes of our podcast in long form up on our YouTube channel

youtube.com Mel Robbins you'll be able to watch him do this but he just put his hands kind of uh right kind of like if you wore a pair of glasses you'd put your hands kind of under where your glasses are along your cheeks and so when you said the way that you could practice this so here's a takeaway for how you could practice this you just got what I would call the love sandwich hands on the heart hands on the back and just hold somebody yeah when they are having an alarm go off in their

body until you can feel them slowly start to have the alarm turn off and the clinical word being their nervous system starts to regulate again they're in their body they're in their safe space but you also talked about the second tool where you locate a safe place in your body and for you it was sort of right here alongside your nose I was trying to think of another one other than the heart like there have been times where I've like kind of tucked my hands under my armpits it's almost like a mini hug almost like

I don't know what it is uh that like I I suppose that it's or like I could put my arms I could give myself a hug kind of thing but so you could pick anywhere in your body your stomach for some people like deep breathing what are some other places that patients of yours have selected in the past oh it's all over it's all but basically I get the where's where's a safe place in your body and a lot of them will say I don't feel safe and I'll say well where's a neutral place it's

like well my right knee feels like there's there's no feeling in my right knee it's like okay let's go into this pain of your heart you know from this recent breakup that you've gone through now let's let's go and just bring our attention into that right knee and then go back into this I'm doing this quite a bit faster than I know but when you when you say bring your attention to your right knee yep if I'm doing this exercise with you does that mean that I've got kind of my eyes closed and I'm mentally

working my way down to my knee so you're mentally kind of locating your attention at your knee okay got it yeah because that feels either safe or neutral right yeah so what we're doing is we're basically training your unconscious mind that this pain that you're feeling in your heart is not all of you because what will happen is the amygdala has no sense of time so when you get triggered you will go back you will turn into that 11 year old and then basically what we need to do is train your amygdala like no I'm

not back there I'm not 11 years old anymore I'm actually my age that I am now you go into that you know right knee that's neutral or if there's for me I go in on the sinuses right so when I get alarm I wake up with an alarm every day right but I don't give it that much credibility anymore and then I go into this place in my sinuses you actually touch it or do you just feel it I touch it yeah I touch it and I could do it a little bit now I might

get a little Zony when I do this but basically and what I do is I can I can locate the alarm in my solar plexus I talk about this in the book where are the solar plexes oh it's right where your ribs meet right where the bottom part of the sternum oh gotcha okay so that's where that's where I have my alarm from growing up with my schizophrenic dad so I will go into that alarm I will try and intentionally give it love and attention and then I will go up into my sinus area that

feels safe and then I will go back into that place that feels uncomfortable so the thing is there's a theory that says when you experience a trauma as a child part of you stays locked at that age for the rest of your life part of you right so what I'm sometimes I feel like all of me yeah and it can be very overwhelming because it's unconscious now like like it's it's not something that we consciously feel we actually get transported through the amygdala to that time and through the insula the insulin is kind of like

the the place in our brain that kind of translates the body into the mind and the mind into the body it's kind of like the way station so I believe that we actually create this body memory and I think the insula has something to do with this and then we feel exactly the same way in our bodies now as we did when the trauma was occurring which of course brings up all sorts of old memories all sorts of old panic and then we want to make sense of that stories all of it you're right I

want to I want to take another scenario sure so I have a really good friend that is in in the middle of a massive like kind of venture capital pitch okay and she is doing presentation after presentation to raise a ton of capital for this uh you know super cool thing she's launching and she is a ball of knots she has the alarm going off all the time the stakes feel high and I realize part of Creative Energy part of being successful part of the kind of motivation that can drive somebody during a very successful

time in the adrenaline that shoots through you that's part of what happens when things are high stakes how do these tools help you be more successful in those moments where you're at bat and this is a big game you're playing and that kind of adrenaline rush and alarm in your body is going off all the time how do you use these tools in those moments well you practice them first there's a little thing that that I talk to people about all the time if I said hey Mel Robbins uh December the 1st I'm going to

take you to the basketball court and I'm going to give you 10 foul shots and if you make three of them I'm going to give you five million dollars now would you start practicing foul shots the day before no no you'd start shooting foul shots every day right so that's what I mean it's like okay so what I would do with her uh the short version is I probably find her alarm and work on that first but what I would do with her is I would say okay where is this alarm in your body you

know I find it can you put your hand over it can you breathe into it can you do this can you practice this a number of times a day so that when you need it when you're going into that boardroom you know you can do a two minute thing in the bathroom where you put your hand over your alarm you breathe into it you regulate your body you relax your shoulders you relax your jaw close your eyes you go into this place that you've practiced a number of times and then you can come back out

in a regulated State now from from a scientific standpoint from what's going on in your mind why does this matter well because you want to be able to train yourself to regulate your own nervous system is basically what it comes down to and people with anxiety don't didn't have a parent that regulated their own nervous system so they have to do it themselves and nobody's coming to save you like I think I see that with people all the time no one's coming to save you like you have to do this for yourself and therapists can

help doctors can help whatever but unless you do it for yourself it's not coming from a place that's really going to dissipate that alarm and I see this with a lot of people it's like they have this unco I think we have this unconscious belief when we have parents that didn't quite meet our needs that eventually that parent's going to come back I keep waiting look after us right we don't do it for ourselves we don't do self-care for ourselves because we assume that parent is going to come back this isn't conscious this is all

unconscious we assume that parent's going to come back and take care of us so why do we have to do it and I'm sure that's what we said to ourselves at the time why do I have to do this and it's it that's that's a lot of it is it you've got to start taking responsibility for your own body your own alarm and realize that it's up to you it's that child in you that wants you back it wants to connect with you and if you are pushing it away all the time that child is

either going to shut down and you're going to go into depression or it's gonna go into this fight flight mode where you're always anxious and with you melt bringing it back to you is this is how you you would on you know outrun the anxiety and every success that you would have would kind of put a little you know an anesthetic on that anxiety well part of the reason too is that you get a lot of positive attention when you're achieving and I started marrying achievement with worthiness and being safe and being connected and so

when I would be still there was like every like achievement means that your worth is attached to something outside of you totally and when whenever I wasn't doing something or going after something or being really busy I didn't feel worthy I the alarms were going off you know one of the other things I've got a couple like rapid fire things that I want to get in here because I'm addicted to your Instagram account and you can follow Russ at the anxiety MD but one of the re one of the couple things that I wanna I

wanna ask you about number one what is the difference between coping with your anxiety and healing it okay so coping with your anxiety is mostly a a top-down thinking process you know you learn thinking strategies that help you deal with it this anxiety isn't real I'm over exaggerating whatever that is healing it is going back to that child that that's in you that alarm child in you and giving them the ability to be seen heard and loved by you by adult you now child U is going to resist that because child you has been ignored

by adult you for a very long time so it takes a while before you start building that bridge back together again so that's how you heal you heal by finding that child in you uh with you it's the 11 year old you know that with that sleepover it's like going back to her talking to her sitting beside her and saying look that must have been really hard for you it must have been awful for you and then see what she says she may not talk back to you for a month or two months or six

months but eventually she will and then when you develop that bridge that conduit to her that's when you heal and you're not just sort of you know and and the analogy that I draw is that you're in a rowboat there's a hole in the row boat and it's filling up with water now you can do cognitive therapies and I have nothing against cognitive therapies I think they're helpful but you can but it's basically like bailing water out of that boat right so what you really need to do is go underneath patch the hole in the

hull which I believe is the old alarm which is the old wounded version of you as a child find that child show them that they are seen heard and loved by you high-five them in the mirror whatever you need to do like find that child and heal them and then you heal at the root cause of it you're not just bailing Water by trying to change your thoughts you're actually getting to the root cause of what's causing your anxiety which is really a state of alarm yeah and the inability to understand it or to tolerate

it or soothe it you also had this post that I was like oh that's interesting where you said that you rarely see anyone with chronic anxiety who is not addicted to something yes and that there is a tight connection between anxiety and addictive behavior can you explain that and help us understand that sure so I'm going to mention the e word here and I hope you don't shut off ego I won't even understand it can you explain it without the ego what's it your ego is kind of like an overprotective mother okay like it doesn't

want you to go and play on the swings because you might fall off it doesn't want you to talk in front of people because when you did that when you're in grade six people laughed at you is the ego the same thing as the alarm it's related to it through the amygdala as well see I'm already confused yeah I know so I'm not going to get into too much Neuroscience okay so your ego is hooked into the amygdala and your amygdala says we're never doing that again because that hurt us you know whatever was and

the amygdala never forgets so it's basically getting into that that getting bypassing that ego because the ego is so overprotective that it will not let you go back into your old alarm so the ego is thinking yeah more or less yeah it is something that that it talks to us with things yeah okay okay so but let's talk about the connection between anxiety and addiction okay so basically we need we need something to [Music] help us through the same this is this alarm wait a minute I think I just got it hold on let me

let me see if this is the answer you ready is addiction typically somebody's coping mechanism for the alarm so for example you reach for alcohol because it drowns out the alarm you reach for porn or drugs or stress or whatever because it's achievement yeah got it okay I got it so if somebody is struggling with addictive behavior whether it is alcohol or cigarettes or vaping or it is any of that stuff you are more than likely not addressing the root issue which is the anxiety and alarm that's continuing to go off in the background yeah

and on top of that basically the ego is very powerful it doesn't want to let you go back into that so the only way that you can feel love connection whatever is alcohol is codeine is cocaine whatever you're addicted to so wait but you feel the connection to the alcohol or the coding that's what you're saying like like so so this is why I get confused with you because I'm like I don't give a [ __ ] about the ego let's like the alarm and then what makes sense to me is that addiction mutes the

alarm totally and that the you become bonded and connected to for me it was stress for my husband it was a daily we'd habit you know like for what that and and that addiction is what's muting the alarm this is really cool so where does mindset come in because you know you you there is so much out there about mindset and mental wellness and and it's interesting because this conversation with you makes me desperate for a different word than mental health because even the word mental health makes me go neck up makes me think thoughts

makes me go to just what's going on in my mind and what you've taught me today is a game changer because what you've taught us all is that no no no no no all mental health issues start in the body and they start with this kind of reaction that happens in your body to stored trauma or to a threat or to uncertainty and then that signals our minds and our minds then start spinning thoughts and if we don't address this alarm system in our body which has a purpose which is there to protect us which

is supposed to agitate you but we exacerbate it we try to mute it if we don't learn how to turn inward and heal all of this in our body and turn toward this alarm and soothe ourselves and love ourselves and give ourselves the reassurance and the support or whatever it is that we didn't get in childhood or what we need in that moment that that's that is actually the beginning of all healing that's what I'm getting from you yeah and that's exactly what it is so why do we call it mental health then like what

isn't there can we come up with a different word that would actually signal you that when you're struggling with depression or you're struggling with anxiety or you're struggling with any like addiction issues that it's not a mental health issue it is a body something like I don't even know how to describe this because it's the exact opposite of the way that we think about things right now it is the opposite and it and you know I I love you know to come up with a better term than body set what is that that feels like

weight lifting well no well it's it's like mindset body set like oh what is what is the place in your body can you can you regulate your body because if you regulate your body your mind will get regulated if you regulate your mind your body might get regulated so what I'm saying is that if you go in through the body your body is much more likely to to relax your mind than your mind is to relax your body because you can say hey relax whoa whoa whoa did you guys hear that that was a wake-up

call for me right there you were just dropping freaking knowledge Russ okay hold on I'm Gonna State this again I I and now I have menopause brain and so I've just forgotten what I said you said something like your body if you regulate your body it will regulate your mind but if you regulate your mind right it'll so you you say it because you're you're the one who said it yeah it's much more effective to regulate your body first which will automatically regulate your mind then to try and regulate your mind to to regulate your

body because your your mind lies to you all the time your body never can is this why exercising is such an effective thing to do when it comes to anxiety and focus partly but there is there's something Beyond uh exercise there's there's something within the somatosensory cortex or the the part of the brain that controls our our movement and our sensation when we activate that we start getting into the sense of the body and out of the the rumination of the mind so by activating that is that what you're saying you can activate that part

by doing the exercises you've already talked about in terms of locating where the alarm is and then finding a neutral part in your body breathing into it you know just that's why yoga is so that's why yoga is so effective because it brings you into your body you know anxiety at its root is really a mind-body disconnect right we go up into our heads and we stay in our heads because we don't want to go down in our body because that's where that's where the pain is so we don't want to go into feeling town

down in our body we want to stay up in our thoughts and that's another addiction so we get addicted to worry and and that's and that's why it's so hard to treat anxiety just by trying to fix thoughts because we're addicted to thinking already we don't need any more thinking we need a lot more feeling but we don't want to feel because that's where the freaking pain is wow so I've gotten a couple huge things in this um that first of all all anxiety results from a separation of anxiety that has some kind of Separation

experience or feeling separate from other in childhood and self and self but what you just said too was really interesting which is our response to that alarm or that feeling of being separate from self or separate from others or attacked by others or whatever is that we actually do separate from ourselves anxiety and the alarm system the way that most of us respond to it is to separate from our bodies go up in our heads and the way to quiet the alarm and ultimately turn it off is to come back and join in with yourself

and come back to where the alarm is sounding off in your body and then find a neutral or safe space in your body where you can draw your attention and breathe into back and forth and back and forth and that when you quiet the alarm and when you go toward it and soothe your own body that is the step that you need to take if you want to heal this and that the thinking is part of the toolkit like what would you recommend as a as as some sentence that we could say if we're trying

the tools we go into our body we're soothing ourselves is there something that people could say or repeat to themselves that you find is effective with the more neck down approach absolutely what do you say basically this am I safe in this moment am I safe in this moment I know I've got a presentation to do on Friday I know I've got a big tax bill I don't know how I'm going to pay for it my mom is sick but am I safe in this moment why a question because I like saying I am safe

I'm okay I find that people with anxiety though this is the thing about saying I love you in the mirror is that people don't allow that in the reason why you're anxious in the first place is because you block love so when you say I love you the reason why you're anxious is because you block love or yourself yes what you're separated from yourself that's exactly what it comes down to that's what anxiety our alarm really is it's a separation and this is what I do this is my little we didn't get into my little

intuitive thing here we're going to in a minute hold on okay we're gonna we save the best for last but hold on I got okay keep talking about the fact that when you have this alarm going off yeah you are blocking like just say it again I I I like I'm processing hyper processing now I'm just like oh my God I think I got it I think I got it I think I got it that literally your alarm is asking for love and reinsurance absolutely and when you go into your head you block yourself from

receiving it yes when you go into your body and you breathe into the alarm and soothe yourself you are actually giving yourself love yes holy [ __ ] and a lot of people with anxiety just they're uncomfortable with love in the first place I'll give you a very quick example for my own life so my dad before I was 10 years old was this wonderful guy like he was so uh you know connected to me and nurturing taught me how to hit a ball play chess all this kind of stuff very very connected to him

and I love them greatly and then as I got to be a young teen and the schizophrenia got worse and worse and worse and it became suicidal and a bunch of other things I withdrew from him because to see him in in in horrible Depression was just too painful for me so I blocked my love for him because it was just too painful to feel it and that you can't block love from a parent without blocking love on some level to everyone so there's a reason why I've been married three times so so this is

one of the things so when you find the blocks that you have to loving yourself this is how you heal and this is basically my little intuitive gift is I can tell people where their blocks are to loving themselves and then when you remove those blocks the anxiety the alarm just kind of Fades away so this is this is really going at the root cause protocol as opposed to just trying to make you think better wow so how do you help people find that place where they've blocked love well I go through their body you

know like what I believe the short version of what I believe happens to you is as a child you experience an overwhelming stress too much for your conscious mind to handle so you stuff it down Freud would call it repression you stuff it into the unconscious and the body keeps the score just like vessel vanicoke says so because the body is a representation of the unconscious mind and the unconscious mind is where these old you know damaging programs are stored they'll show up in the body so I will find in your body where you feel

that alarm and reverse engineer it to get into the same room with those unconscious programs and then I can change them wow that's pretty cool I think my biggest takeaway and I keep saying this because clearly every 10 minutes I have a life-changing takeaway from this conversation but my biggest takeaway is the connection between the alarm that goes off and the love that you're not allowing yourself to receive totally and that it's beautiful to think that loving yourself is the way you cure anxiety and what a beautiful thing and it reminds me of something um

pretty amazing that my son Oakley shared with me um I said to him the other day I was like dude you know one of the things I love about you is that you more than almost anybody I have ever met are just so comfortable with yourself like you really seem to like yourself and now you know I should preface this by saying that you know this is a kid that really struggled three different schools before he was done with eighth grade severe dyslexia got so severely bullied at a camp that we had to pull him

out of it and the director wrote a long letter apologizing for everything like it was this kid has been through the ringer and he said to me well Mom he said I realized just and he said this happened during quarantine during quarantine when I got to hang out with you and Dad and you know my two older sisters all four people who love me I just started to realize just because other people pick on me or hate me doesn't mean I have to hate myself like I could actually just like myself like I could really

just allow myself to love myself and I gotta be honest with you from that moment I can really almost pinpoint that during the pandemic like this kid's chronic anxiety was gone he developed this very positive attitude and it All Began from this Insight around hey if the world is not giving me the acceptance and the love that we all are seeking Maybe I can just give it to myself yeah that's incredible it's absolutely incredible I never thought about meeting the alarm of anxiety with acts of self-love yeah and that's you know it's counterintuitive on some

level because when you're anxious you don't feel loving you know basically your social engagement system is shut off you're in survival mode so when you're in survival mode in survival physiology you go into the emotional part of your brain which is you know evolutionarily programmed to look for threat and if there's no threat in your environment if you're just lying there in bed with your the sheets up to your neck you will find threat because you can make it with your big prefrontal cortex you can make worries well not anymore because we now know that

the second you feel the alarm go off not go upstairs you go downstairs you go downstairs now so I love to leave people in action obviously everybody there will be links not only to uh Russ's book anxiety RX there will be links to his social media accounts you will find all kinds of resources in the show notes but I want to leave people in action so you know this is one of those incredible conversations that really changes how somebody thinks about a massively overwhelming topic like anxiety and mental health now what I want to do

is leave people in action with one simple new practice or habit that I want everyone to try every day for the next seven days and what is the exercise that you want each one of us to practice for the next seven days so that we can start to use the tools that you have been researching and changing lives with what's the one thing you want us to do can I do two yes as long as it doesn't involve the ego okay fair enough fair enough oh okay well that's it that's the end of that all

right so the first thing that I would say is what I said earlier am I safe in this moment or I am safe in this moment because this moment is all we ever have right thing about anxiety is it always projects you into the future so if you bring yourself back to the moment and this works this has worked for me it saved my ass a number of times in the middle of the night when all my defenses are down and I think the world is horrible okay I am safe in this moment I am

say and really feel it too like I am safe in this moment is there anything we should do with our hands or with our do you want us to close our eyes do you want us to you can do the high five your heart if you want okay which is putting your heart right in the center of your chest take a deep breath I'm safe if you find yeah okay what else could you do if you find your alarm if you know where your alarm is if you know track the alarm when you feel anxious

go into your body and say Where am I feeling this is this in my belly is this in my chest is it in my in my throat put your hand over the place where you feel your alarm Okay breathe into that okay there is a little thing too uh that I've kind of taken from Andrew huberman about the physiological side physiological Psy is something that the humans do and animals do it too to calm themselves and it's usually uh two or one quick sniff through your nose and then another one and then a long slow

breath out through your mouth now with my anxiety people I modify that so basically this is this is the process that I do when I get into alarm is I take three breaths through my nose really quickly at the top I hold it for about three to five seconds which shows me that I'm in actually controlling my breath my breath isn't controlling me then I I close my teeth and I breathe out through my teeth and make a hissing sound like ready and as I do that I imagine a tire that's over inflated just deflating

in front of me that's my mental image all right let me try this hold on a second we're gonna all do I think we should do this one I I we're gonna do two so everybody number one is one time a day if you notice an alarm in your body and that could be tension it could be frustration it could be anger it could be anxiety it could be that worries starting to grip you I want you to find where that alarm is I want you to put your hand where the alarm is and I

want you to breathe into it okay and then you can add I'm safe in this moment so that's number one that you're going to practice anytime you feel the gripping the tension the frustration the overwhelm the alarm is signaling remember that's an alarm asking for love yep and you're the one that is going to provide the love and reassurance that you need so that's number one the second one is let's try this breathing thing okay if you want to see it go to our YouTube channel because we have video episodes uncut of these podcast interviews

that are that are amazing because they're a lot longer and they're behind the scenes but you should see Russ's face when he does it he looks like he's about to rage on somebody and he's actually deflating like a tire and taking control of things and now I'm gonna look completely ridiculous as I ins I I I breathe in three times and then I clench my teeth and hiss out like a tire ready okay let me do it for let me do it first again because there's a few parts to it so the first thing is

three breaths in through your nose so quickly and then at the top of that you hold your breath for about three to five seconds and then you close your teeth and as you exhale slowly exhale you make a hissing sound and as you make that hissing sound you imagine a tire deflating okay I'm gonna do this you ready ready okay and I want you long I want you to elongate that so the whole thing about the physiological side is that you're creating a long exhale that's what really relaxes us is the long exhale so when

people say take a deep breath really what you need to do is just take a long exhale so again it's like three breaths in hold and then I'm gonna try it again feel your lungs up now like really fill them up okay here we go wow what's interesting about that is it requires so much Focus that you can't really think about anything else totally that's one of the other things that it takes you off your worries exactly and you do feel this sort of relaxing and collapsing feeling inside you yeah wow okay let your shoulders

relax your jaw like there's there's stuff to it I mean I'll make like a YouTube video or about this or whatever or put I'll put it on my Instagram awesome quickly basically it's really about expanding your lungs because when you expand your lungs you send a message up to your brain that you're okay because when you get stressed the stress starts breathing you you aren't breathing for yourself the stress will start breathing you so it's really important that you do the three breaths in hold and then breathe out with its and really elongate that exhale

so the the higher the more Breath You Take in when with the Snips the easier it is to have that nice long exhale wow well thank you so much for my personal therapy session for everybody listening I hope you got a lot out of it I I this has been a game changer the alarm love connection is blowing my freaking mind it is chain it's going to change instantaneously how I approach moments of alarm in myself or the people around me I think it's going to bring a greater level of compassion and for sure you

made me smarter today and so I feel more equipped to really help myself and help other people that I deeply care about through these moments where life knocks you down or the fear takes over and I can't thank you enough thank you thank you melon thank you like you know the five second rule and the high five habit you know those are books that I've listened to over the last year and and I love them I I really I think that they're really something that that helps me and then when I get helped I am

able to sort of you know turn my little brain on and help other people as well so it's a ripple effect Mel you help me I help you awesome awesome all right we're gonna have you back thank you Dr Kennedy in the house people holy cow so full disclosure I had never talked to that guy ever like I just knew from his Instagram account that he had knowledge to share and that even though he and I agree on so many things like I I've I too have called anxiety an alarm for the last five years

I understand uh somatic therapy I have experienced the power of it I teach it uh it's Incorporated in all the work that I'm doing however I had never heard that all anxiety is the result from separation as a child wow but the thing that really blew my mind is understanding that this is really about love and loving yourself that when that alarm goes off in your body and you feel the grip or the tension or the overwhelm that alarm is not a signal to run away or to numb or to be scared It's actually an

alarm from a part of you that needs reassurance and love right now that's it and no one else is going to come and give that to you and one of the most beautiful things about hearing from Dr Kennedy is that you have within you the power to love and soothe yourself and like any skill or any muscle or any habit it gets easier and easier and easier the more you practice it and so I really mean it when I say I want you to practice what we talked about for the next seven days in particular

I want you to pay attention to when that alarm sounds in your own body this week and again it doesn't have to feel like the rattled tidal wave that I feel in the mornings it might feel more like anger gripping you or frustration overtaking you or perfectionism getting its Stranglehold any time that you start to feel that grip that's the alarm and then you're just going to notice it and instead of freaking out or reaching for numbing it or don't go up into your thoughts I want you to go to where the alarm is I

want you to put your hands there I want you to take a deep breath that's all I want you to do this week you have within you the ability to turn toward this thing and to give yourself exactly what that alarm is trying to get from you that alarm is designed to agitate you because the stress of your life demands more love from you it demands more compassion and this is an opportunity for you to turn toward yourself to create a deeper connection with yourself and to feel more empowered to help people around you that

are also struggling I cannot wait to hear your comments and your thoughts about this episode please please share this with anybody that you think would benefit from hearing this life-changing information remember it comes down to loving yourself that's what this is about that was the huge takeaway for me that holy cow I have spent 50 years trying to run away from the fact that all I needed was more love for myself I hope that in some small way this will save you the heartache that I cause myself for those 50 years now that you have

the understanding and tools that I didn't have until now alrighty thank you thank you thank you for being here um and you know in case nobody else tells you today I want to tell you that I love you I believe in you and your ability to create a better life for yourself and I love being a part of your life with the Mel Robbins podcast alrighty until next time [Music] hey it's Mel thank you so much for being here if you enjoyed that video bye God please subscribe because I don't want you to miss a

thing thank you so much for being here we've got so much amazing stuff coming thank you so much for sending this stuff to your friends and your family I love you we create these videos for you so make sure you subscribe