211: Get Out Of Your Head And Into Your Body W/ Dr. Russell Kennedy

What is anxiety, really, and why won't it go away no matter how much you overthink it? Sabrina sits down with neuroscientist and anxiety expert Dr. Russ Kennedy (Anxiety MD) to break down anxiety in dating, relationships, and everyday life. They cover why anxiety lives in the body and not just the head, why CBT, EMDR, and medication so often treat the symptoms instead of the root, and how to tell a real alarm from a false one. This one is for anyone who has ever felt anxious, avoidant, or convinced they were fundamentally broken. They also dig into the myth that a new partner will fix your anxiety, why overthinking is really under-feeling, and how inner child work and somatic healing actually move you forward. You will walk away with tangible tools to stop abandoning yourself, get out of your head, and work through anxious attachment, breakups, and the uncertainty of dating. The biggest takeaway is learning to separate the feeling in your body from the thoughts in your mind, because that is where real healing starts. Pre-order Sabrina's book coming out October 2026,⁠ "Why Am I Like This?"⁠ Get your free workbook and access to the companion course after pre-ordering 'Why Am I Like This?' by filling out the form at the bottom of the page at http://sabrinazohar.com/book Take the new and improved dating quiz! sabrinazohar.com/quiz Get Dr. Russ' book, "Anxiety Rx: A Revolutionary New Prescription for Anxiety Relief―from the Doctor Who Created It" Take Dr. Russ' self-paced online anxiety healing program MBRX If you’re ready to slow down, trust your instincts, and break your old dating patterns, the Healthy Relationship Foundations Course walks you through it step-by-step ⁠HERE!⁠ If you’re serious about changing your dating patterns instead of repeating them, the Art of Going Slow course helps you unlearn urgency, regulate your nervous system, and build real connection without rushing, chasing, or abandoning yourself ⁠HERE!⁠ Get Ad free ⁠HERE!⁠ Watch on Spotify. Spotify subscribers get fewer ads on my video. Want to work with Sabrina? ⁠HERE!⁠ Get merch for The Sabrina Zohar Show ⁠HERE!⁠ Don't forget to follow ⁠Sabrina⁠ and ⁠The Sabrina Zohar Show⁠ on Instagram and ⁠Sabrina ⁠on TikTok! Video now available on ⁠YOUTUBE!⁠ Please support our sponsors! Ready to upgrade your eyewear to something functional, fashionable, fun, and affordable? Head to goodr.com/SABRINAZOHAR to claim $10 off your first order. Go to Quince.com/SABRINA for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. Start your new morning ritual & get up to 43% off your @MUDWTR with code SABRINAZOHAR at mudwtr.com/SABRINAZOHAR! #mudwtrpod Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/mlzhc53l Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N. A., pursuant to a license from Visa U. S. A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Cash App Green features, Savings, Direct deposit, Round ups, Overdraft coverage and Discounts provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. ============================= Chapters: 00:00 What Is Anxiety, Really 06:00 Anxiety Lives in the Body 13:30 Why Coping Tools Fall Short 20:20 Overthinking Is Under-Feeling 26:40 Most Damaging Anxiety Advice 33:30 Worry and Inner Child Wounds 41:00 Inner Child Healing Exercise 46:30 Telling a Partner You're Anxious 53:00 Why Feeling Beats Thinking 59:27 Rapid Fire and Biggest Lies Disclaimer: The Sabrina Zohar Show, formerly known as Do The Work, is not affiliated with A. Z & associates LLC in any capacity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Coca-Cola. For the big, for the small, the short, and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers. For the optimists, pessimists. For long distance love. For introverts and extroverts. The thinkers and the doers. For old friends and new. Coca-Cola. For everyone. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset. And new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy to layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon Fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.

• 1:00Sabrina Zohar?

  Do you feel like you're fundamentally broken and nothing that you do is ever going to change that? Or like you're the only person with anxiety? No one else feel this, so you must be fucked up. What if I told you that anxiety was just an alarm for your nervous system? To let you know that there's something that needs your attention doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you because you're not broken, there's nothing to fix. And today, we're going to dive right on into it, baby. Hello, hello, hello. And welcome to another episode of The Sabrina Zohar Show. My name is Sabrina Zohar and I am your host. Hi, my friends. Welcome back to our Friday fun. And today, I have such a special guest who came all the way from fucking Canada just to record with us, Dr. Russ Kennedy. I am obsessed with him. This is going to be one of many times he's going to be back. And he is a brilliant neuroscientist doctor who understands anxiety better than anybody.

• 1:45Sabrina Zohar?

  And so, we talk about it in a broader scope. This isn't just anxious attachment style. This is anxiety living in your body. How do you actually handle it? What do you do? Whether you're dating, you're in a relationship, that doesn't fucking matter. Today, we're going to understand anxiety on a different level. Guys, as always, if you need anything, everything will be at sabrina zohar.com. Don't forget to preorder my book, Why Am I Like This? I will not shut the fuck up about this until the book actually comes out and I still probably won't shut up. And I just want to say thank you. Thank you, guys, for supporting me and being... Being here and tuning in every week and listening. Thank you for commenting, reading the show, reviewing it, sharing it with your friends. It all means more than I think words could ever say. And so I am just so grateful. If you're new here, I curse a lot. I speak fast. It's just the lay of the land. If it's not for you, I totally get it. But everybody is welcome here. It's just not

• 2:27Sabrina Zohar?

  my job to keep you comfortable while you're here. And so we all want to create a community of safety and love, and I hope that you're with me on this journey. Like I said, guys, if you need anything, everything at sabrina-zar.com. You can join one of the courses. We have the Art of Going Slow or the Healthy Dating Foundation course. You could work one-on-one with me, ask a question, download some free guides, take our quiz, whatever you guys need. And yes, there is ad-free. If you like the ads, yay, support our sponsors. They help keep the show free. And if you don't, that's okay. You could get it for four bucks a month and have an ad-free experience. You choose your own adventure, baby. All right. Without further ado, let's get right on into it, shall we? Hey, Russ.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Hey, Sabrina. Great to be here.

• 3:01Sabrina Zohar?

  Welcome to the show!

• 3:03Speaker 03

  Finally!

• 3:03Sabrina Zohar?

  I'm so excited.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, me too.

• 3:05Sabrina Zohar?

  All right. Today's a really, really special episode because it was interesting when I was coming up with what do I want to talk to you about. Ryan and I went back and forth and I was like, no, no, no, we're not pigeonholing this into anxious attachment style because I am so tired of the conversation being one person feels this and nobody else does. So we're going to talk to anybody with anxiety because I think that is the fucking pinnacle of what we're here.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  Like, no one has anxiety now.

• 3:26Sabrina Zohar?

  Right, as if. That's it. Like, nobody, right, though, anybody else besides the anxious attachment doesn't feel that. I'm like, please, I wish. Who told you that? But before we get into all the fun and mean potatoes, could you please tell us a little bit about you so the audience can learn more?

• 3:38Speaker 03

  Sure. So I was born to a schizophrenic father and a neurotic mother. So my dad was psychotic, my mother was neurotic, so my own psyche didn't stand much of a chance. So I learned how to be a people pleaser, how to read my parents. And it makes me a really good doctor because I can read my patients really well. But the thing is, when you get really good at reading other people, you lose the ability to read yourself. So I got a lot of need for external validation. So I became a stand-up comic. I became a yoga teacher. I became a medical doctor. I became an author. And it's only in the last two or three years, it's like, hey, it's slowing the f down, right? Just like, you don't have to do this. You've made it. It's like the rocket, the space shuttle, you know, when the space shuttle goes up, it gets like 6,000 feet and

• 4:21Speaker 03

  the two rocket boosters fall away? The two rocket boosters fell away like 20 years ago, and I'm still going, right? So it's only been in the last couple of years since I wrote the book on anxiety and thought, well, why don't you take some of your own advice, that I finally decided, hey, because I've had anxiety my whole life, and it's only really been in the last five years. I'm never anxiety free, but there is this state of alarm and we'll get into this. It's like, I believe that anxiety of the mind is actually really the state of alarm in the body. And the mind, just through the confirmation bias, just tries to explain what's going on in your body. So if your body feels scared, your mind's going to give you all these scared warnings, what ifs, worst case scenarios. And I love the David Goggins quote that says, and I really, I really love this quote, "Your mind has a tactical advantage over you."

• 5:05Speaker 03

  So when you feel alarmed in your body, your brain is just going to light up with all like LA billboards. It's going to light up with all of the worst, you know, your frequent liars. So I had to figure out a way of healing my own anxiety. And I went through CBT, EMDR, nothing against those things, but none of them really worked for me.

• 5:22Sabrina Zohar?

  Same.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  So finally, you know, I found this sort of body centered thing that I kind of invented myself, but I, I drew from IFS and somatic experiencing and just thought, this is so much better. I've got to let people know about this. Like this really works as opposed to people feeling, I'm damaged, I'm broken. I'm going to, this is a life sentence. I'm never going to get any better. So do I still have alarm? Yeah, but I just don't give the alarm that much credit anymore. And I see the alarm, and we'll get into this, as the younger version of me that didn't get their needs met. That's, that's the short version. That's Dr. Russ Kennedy right there.

• 5:54Sabrina Zohar?

  I love that. Well, and also it makes me feel also really seen because I'm like, oh my God, same, right? Same. I went from, I remember when I first, I didn't know what anxiety was. Like I have people pleasing mother, narcissistic father, similar, like same, same but different, right? Where all of my life, my mom is, she, the other day, my sister and I went to go see No Doubt and she said, "Make sure nobody touches you." And I said, "Mom, what are you talking about?" And she's like, "Because there's drugs on them and they can draw." And I said, "Oh, mom, I, I think we're going to be fine. I don't think anyone's going to touch me." And my sister together, I was like, "We're fine, but thank you." And for a long time I didn't understand. And I genuinely believed, oh, there's just something wrong with me because I was very outward with my anxiety. Text him a million times, have, "Are you sure everything's okay? Wait, wait, are you mad at me? What's going on? Wait, like can't sit still, manic, talk fast, fast, fast."

• 6:37Sabrina Zohar?

  Until, and I did CBT, I did EMDR, I did the therapy, I did da, da, da, da, da, da. And until I found my inner child. When I saw her and was like, "Wait a minute, something's here and listening now." Has that made it go away? No, because I don't believe that you could just turn a switch on or off.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:53Sabrina Zohar?

  But I want to know, before we even like go into all the fun stuff, what is anxiety? If we can like understand it on a clinical level, what the fuck is anxiety?

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Okay. So anxiety isn't one thing, it's two. And this is where most therapies fail. They believe that anxiety is primarily a thinking disorder that feels. I believe that anxiety is primarily a feeling disorder that thinks.

• 7:16Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  So if you're trying to treat the thoughts as they do in cognitive therapy, and the thoughts are just a symptom of this underlying alarm that's been stuck in you since you were five, 10, you know, 15 years old, you're not going to fix anything because you're not actually fixing the root cause of the problem. You're just fixing a symptom. It's like if you have a fever from an infection and you give someone Tylenol, it calms down the fever, but it does nothing for the underlying infection.

• 7:43Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  So, so a lot of these sort of cognitive therapies, you know, using the prefrontal cortex, I saw your episode with Chris and it was amazing. And it's really important to understand that, that your prefrontal cortex, when you're in alarm, your body secretes cortisol, norepinephrine, epinephrine. It paralyzes the prefrontal cortex. Then your emotional brain takes over and as we all know, the emotional brain doesn't have a whole lot of maturity associated with it.

• 8:08Sabrina Zohar?

  No, it doesn't.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  So it takes over and then it starts making these, these worries seem more real. So not only do you make more worries because you have this emotional alarm sitting in your system, but you lose the part of your brain that will actually tell you, these worries aren't really valid. So you get double whammied.

• 8:25Sabrina Zohar?

  Well, in your experience, when we start to look like, what's the place to even start to understand? Because that was one of the number one questions I got when I was asking the audience what they wanted to know. How do you differentiate? How do you actually understand between like, oh, this is a real alarm. There's something I should look at versus a smoke alarm is going off and there's no actual fucking smoke. What have you, at least even personally, I'm curious, what have you found to help?

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Well, I just find, just finding the alarm in my body.

• 8:48Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Like I have this, this thing that I tell my, all my patients called sensation without explanation, which is basically you stay in the sensation of your alarm. You know, you're in your worries, they're not texting you back, you're having a fight, whatever it is. Go into your body. You're not going to figure it out in your head.

• 9:05Sabrina Zohar?

  No.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Your brain is not going to figure out the solution to this. So go into your body. Where do I feel that? I'm going to do this with you in a few minutes.

• 9:12Sabrina Zohar?

  Yay.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Right? And go ahead and put your hand over it, breathe into it, stay with it. And I know sometimes as a medical doctor, I want to have a seizure because it sounds so woo, right?

• 9:20Sabrina Zohar?

  But it's accurate.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  But it worked. It was the only thing that worked. It was the only thing that worked. After maybe forty years of anxiety.

• 9:26Sabrina Zohar?

  I, it's funny. I did all this work. I did all this work. I was that girl. I was that girl. That when I met Ryan, I was like, oh, I, I'm healed. Like, I've done all of this work and sweetie, like.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  And you're from LA.

• 9:37Sabrina Zohar?

  I'm from, I'm from East Coast, right? Like.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you're in LA.

• 9:40Sabrina Zohar?

  In LA now. Well, when I met, I was like, oh, yeah, like, I've, I'm this evolved person. And not like he wasn't, but I was like, well, I can teach you the ropes, right? And I really, when I dated, I believed if I found the broken guy, right? Oh, no, don't worry. I'm the one that's done enough work on myself. I can just get you there. Spoiler alert. That doesn't happen. But weirdly, what changed the game is I remember when I first met him, I started my career, everything's moving, right? On paper, you're going, okay, she has all the things she said she wanted. She's got the partner. Of course, I'm mourning the death of my dog, but like, you know, life happens. And I moved and I'm, my career is blowing up the pie, all of these things. So on paper. And I'll never forget, I was with my girlfriend and I had to buy a new iPad and I started having a panic attack. And I was like, no, no, no, I can't afford it. And she's like, have you, like, do you know where you are?

• 10:24Sabrina Zohar?

  And she was the first person to be like, where are you feeling it in your body? And I was like, the fuck is this sorcery? Like, I had a therapist before, be like, name it and color and shape. But she really sat with me and she was like, no, no, no, I'm not letting you get away from this. And I just started crying. And I remember we were having like a dinner party and Ryan comes in, he's like, what the fuck is going on? And I was like, I'll be right there. And I was just, I remember that was the first time I ever stopped and I was like, whoa, dude, what did you just do to me? And she was like, I just made you feel. And I didn't understand what that meant. And until then, I started practicing and practicing and practicing. Whereas now, like, is it perfect? No. There are moments you wake up and you're like, oh, so everything's over. That's it. It's done. I'm, I'm kaput. And for me personally, it's like, it's something as simple as go for a walk, right? It can just help me like, to get back to like equilibrium.

• 11:08Sabrina Zohar?

  But it was kind of interesting because I, for so long, really, I thought, no, no, it's because I'm anxious and I'm anxious attachment and whatever the fucking narrative that the story that Instagram has taught me was. Until she admitted and she's like, dude, I'm avoiding and I have anxiety. And it blew the lid open. And I was curious, what is the way that you see it manifest differently? Because I think a lot of the people listening think anxiety is just, oh, well, I'm panicking and I'm, I, I can't sit still, so that's just me. But fuck these other people. They don't feel anything. How does it manifest differently in the different types of people?

• 11:36Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's the same. I think the manifestation, like the avoidant versus the anxious, they're just, whatever you learned as a child, you will tend to go in that direction. So if you learned how to be a people pleaser as a child, that will be your go to when you're feeling alarmed. So rather than actually go to the source of the problem, which is where do I feel this alarm in my body? Can I really zone in on it? Can I put my hand over it? Can I breathe into it? Can I stay with it? Stay in sensation without explanation? The mind goes crazy. And the reason why the mind goes crazy is because when you were younger and you're in a situation that you don't have any power or control over, the only place you have left to go is your mind. So you develop this 12 lane superhighway into

• 12:18Speaker 03

  your head, because whenever you sense the initial flutter of alarm in your system, immediately you go into your head. And that's why most people think anxiety is these thoughts of the mind, because that's the obvious manifestation. We are so good at the cognitive explanations of things, because we've learned them since we're toddlers, but we're not so good at feeling. So, and then I find that people with anxiety tend to railroad all their negative feelings, envy, pain, sadness, jealousy, down that anxiety run, because they've been doing it since they've been five years old.

• 12:51Sabrina Zohar?

  It's become baseline.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it, and it does have, it does have an adaptive quality to it. Like it is a coping mechanism to worry. So I have lots of patients that say to me, Dr. Kennedy, you know, I get worried when I'm, when I'm not worrying. I get worried when I'm not worrying, right? And that's because worry has been a way to go into your head and avoid and dissociate from this alarm that's in your body. So if we actually go to the root cause of the anxiety, and to answer your earlier question, anxiety isn't one thing, it's two. It's the alarm in your body and the anxious thoughts of your mind. And each one revs up the other.

• 13:25Sabrina Zohar?

  Circles.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  And people don't realize that they're caught in this loop of anxiety and alarm, alarm in the body, anxiety in the mind. They don't really know that they're caught in the loop. And then they try to use their mind to outthink a problem that's actually stuck in their body. And that's why, that's why common therapies don't work. Now, I don't want to get down on common therapies, because I think that they do work after you've done the work. So after I, I did a lot of cognitive stuff, I learned a lot of stuff in cognitive therapy. Once I, once I healed my body, then all this stuff, it was like putting the icing on the cake. It's like, oh, that's what, that's what all this cognitive stuff was. But cognitive therapy isn't an entry point for anxiety. Somatic, somatic therapy is first.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  And then after that, then you can start layering the icing on, which is how do I cognitively do something different?

• 14:13Sabrina Zohar?

  It's funny, what changed the fucking game for me, for everything that I had done in my life when I started doing work, was understanding two things. One, my feelings aren't facts, right? I am allowed to feel this, but that doesn't mean it is factual. Then, once I allowed myself to say, oh, wait, this isn't a fact, this just is a feeling, then I could understand, okay, where am I feeling this in my body? How old do I feel? And then can I put this on trial? Can I actually sit and challenge the thought after I've maybe gone on a walk? I've done something to like come back to baseline? But it really helped me to understand, there's nothing wrong, I'm not broken, there's nothing to fix. Really what it was, was somewhere along the way, and then as I'm writing my fucking book, and I'm going through these stories, like that was actually one of the, I didn't expect it to be so hard.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:54Sabrina Zohar?

  But that was one of the hardest things for me because I had a lot of, I normalized a lot of my childhood. I thought that my dad hitting us and using the belt and leaving my dad. I used to ask people, I'm like, your dad doesn't leave in the other night to go to a girlfriend's house? Like, what are you talking about? He doesn't do that? Until I started writing this. And then it was funny because when I, I didn't see my dad for about a year and a half. And then I finally saw him and I felt it in my body. And I was like, whoa, no wonder you were fucking miserable all your life. And then up until recently, we have a very fractured relationship and I'm the black sheep.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  You're the cycle breaker. I would change that word.

• 15:27Sabrina Zohar?

  I'm the cycle breaker. That is a hundred percent. And now I've gotten everybody else in the family to start to understand. And my dad called my brother recently and said, did you hear what your sister said about me on Jay Shetty? And he was like, no, what, what, what this time? And he said, she lied. She said I hit her. And my brother's like, yeah, but I was there, you did. And he was like, no, no, no, but I'm not like an alcoholic. I didn't like get, I didn't get dis- I was reprimanding you guys. I didn't, I'm not an abuser, I didn't do anything wrong. And that's where I, like, this just happened recently. And I remember I just kind of looked at Ryan and I was like, man, this is the first time in my entire fucking life that I've ever said, you know what? He's allowed to have his perspective and I'm allowed to have mine. Because I know my truth. And I was so scared for so long of losing the big bad wolf. That then, when I finally acknowledged and said, you're allowed to lose him.

• 16:11Sabrina Zohar?

  Not only did the anxiety decrease, I stopped worrying about shit I couldn't fucking control, like his opinion of me. And of the situation. Have you ever had anything like that happen to you? Maybe not so specifically, but.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, I grew up with a father with schizophrenia bipolar.

• 16:26Sabrina Zohar?

  Right, yeah.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  So, so he would either go completely depressed and not leave his bed. Or be manic for four days playing the trumpet. I don't know which one was worse.

• 16:37Sabrina Zohar?

  Right, yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  Right? And that I didn't know. So I would constantly read him. Like if he was a little sad, I'd be like, is he going into depression? Or if he's getting a little happy, I think, is he going into a manic phase? So I would really learn how to read him. And I saw that as just normal, because kids do, like whatever. You know, whatever's familiar to you in your childhood, you unconsciously replicate in your adulthood.

• 16:58Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  So that's what I said, you know, when I, when I watch your show and stuff, it's like, you know, if people knew. How to look at their childhood in a way that, how did my mother treat my father? How do I treat my partner the way that they did? Oh, I'm not like them. I'm not like them at all. And then you find different ways. And then you start seeing these patterns that were familiar to you. Because, you know, Freud had it right, and he had a lot of things wrong, but he had a lot of things right too. Right? And that we have these things called repetition compulsions.

• 17:27Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  So what was familiar to you in childhood? Human beings unconsciously equate familiarity with security. So what was familiar to you, being hit, was familiar. So it's one of those things. So you would be more likely to pick a partner that hits you. And you know consciously, because I was a family doctor for 20 years. So I would see these families and I would see these patterns go through families. So they would have an alcoholic parent and they would pick an alcoholic partner and they'd come in and say, what am I doing? It's like, well, consciously, you know, this is not a great idea. But unconsciously, where all our drives are coming from. This is what's running your life. And this, it runs all our lives. The unconscious runs all our lives. And it's the old Jung statements, like until you make the unconscious conscious, it's going to rule your life and you'll just call it fate.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  So getting back to me, so I was just, I got really good at reading my dad. I got really good at reading my mother. My mother was a registered nurse from Scotland, you know, so you weren't told that I love yous, but you had a roof over your head, so you were loved that way.

• 18:23Sabrina Zohar?

  Yep.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  But it is one of the things, and I think we share the fact that we were both born sensitive people. And sensitive people are the ones that are the change break, change breakers in their family. Now, it's painful.

• 18:33Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  But it's also very liberating when you can sort of take control and take ownership of that and say, this was my pattern. I know, I know that I'm seduced into that pattern. I know that if somebody shows up with this kind of pattern, that I'm going to be attracted like a moth to the flame. But I also know that I am centered in me, like I have this acronym I call should. This is what you should have received when you were younger. You should have been seen, should have been heard by your parents, open to, understood, loved and defended.

• 19:04Sabrina Zohar?

  Oh, I love that.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  That's what you should have got.

• 19:06Sabrina Zohar?

  I like that should.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Yes. So exactly. So what you should have got back then is what you should give yourself now. See yourself, hear yourself, open to yourself, understand yourself, love yourself and defend yourself. So that's how, when we get into these fights with our partner, when we get into these places like, why isn't he texting me back? It's like, okay, how can I see, hear, open to, understand, love and defend the child in me? That's afraid that they're not going to text back, or they're afraid that the relationship's not going to work. You know, how do we, how do we connect with ourselves first? Because once we do that, and as cliche, it is like, oh, love yourself, you know, as cliche as that sounds, it's the only thing that worked after 40 years of therapy for me.

• 19:44Sabrina Zohar?

  It comes from a place.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  It does.

• 19:45Sabrina Zohar?

  There's a reason.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:46Sabrina Zohar?

  This episode is sponsored by Gooder. You know, the toddler that comes into school and can't wait to show you their new pair of shoes? That's me with my beachy Gooder sunglasses in hot pink. I went to a store the other day and even the security guard was like, I love those sunglasses. I was like, I know me too. I don't leave the house without them. They are the most comfortable things I've ever put on my body. And my favorite is that Gooder is active eyewear for anyone. So there's no slip. They're constructed with a special grip coated frame to eliminate slippage when sweating. No bounce, so they're nice, like lightweight frame that's comfortable. They're all polarized, so they protect and block 100% of harmful UVA and UVB rays. And they're super fun. The colors are great. I love them. And I just love the affordability of their sunglasses. If you're ready to upgrade your eyewear to something functional, fashionable.

• 20:25Sabrina Zohar?

  Fun and affordable. Head to goodr.com backslash Sabrina Zohar and claim $10 off your first order. I'm going to be doing that right after I do this because I'm going to get all the colors that they have. Again, that's G O O D R dot com slash Sabrina Zohar. If you want to be twins with me, get the B G in hot pink. I promise you, baby, you will not regret it. The biggest myth that I have fucking heard about anxiety that drives me up a wall is that the right person is not going to trigger you and that the right partner won't make you feel anxious. I have never heard a load of shit. Now, the right partner can still trigger you because a trigger could be a neutral action or an action. They're not doing anything intentionally to harm you. But relationships are incredibly triggering, incredibly anxiety inducing.

• 21:06Sabrina Zohar?

  Not that they're not beautiful, but like anything, owning your own business, owning, doing anything that you give a fuck about is going to take a lot out of you. And so I was curious, what is your least favorite myth that you've heard? Because it drives me up a goddamn wall when I hear this like anxiety will go away when you do X, Y, and Z. And it's like, what, shoot me up with whatever you're talking about because I've never heard of this before.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Well, the anxiety is there for a reason and it's pointing you back to yourself. But the problem is that you're staying in your head and you're keeping going over and over and over. You're getting in a loop because when you were a child, the only safe place that you had was your brain, was your dissociation, was your worry. So you're going to naturally go into that. You're going to get really good at it. So this is what I, like, I deal with a lot of smart people, right? Anxiety is a smart person's condition because they, they've been going to the thinking, the overthinking gym since they've been 10 years old, five years old. So they get really good at thinking. So that becomes a pattern that we think instead of feel.

• 22:05Sabrina Zohar?

  What is overthinking? I've heard this like overthinking is under feeling, but what is it actually? Is that what it is?

• 22:11Speaker 03

  In a way, yeah, because you don't want to feel the alarm in your body.

• 22:14Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  So you don't want to feel your, and The brain wants to make sense of the intangible. And this is, I think, such an important point for people. It's just, just understand that feeling uncomfortable is good. Feeling uncomfortable in a relationship is good because it's pointing you. You know, maybe there's 3% of the couples that actually come together and it's like, oh my God, you're the best. And 97% of us, we get triggered by our partners because we're supposed to be triggered. Because that's our chance. Consciousness wants to evolve through us. Yeah. I know I get too philosophical, but the issues with your partner. Now, if someone's abusive, that's Right, yeah, yeah. But if someone triggers you, it's like, that's the, that's the wound. It's pointing you right at the place that you need to go, right? And, and move that.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  And if you can move it together, like one of the things, I was listening to one of your things the other day. It's like, you know, like WhatsApp, it's, it's end to end encrypted. Hmm. So couples get into this thing where they're end to end encrypted. She doesn't understand what you're saying. He doesn't, to go heteronormative, he doesn't understand what she's saying. So it's encrypted on both sides and each one has their own wounds. Yep. And when you light up somebody's wound, they are going to back off. Or they're going to, they're going to charge at you. So how do you, you get a chance to see that in real time. If you're aware of it, if you can stay in your body, if you can stay in the sensation without going into your head, without becoming defensive. There's this great term that Otto Rank, one of the Australian psychoanalysts, contemporary of Freud, called counter will.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  And counter will is when you tell your three year old, put your boots on. They go, no, I'm not putting my boots on. And we get that in relationships all the time because it's like, no, I'm not doing that. Yeah. But it'll come out in different ways. And then couples get into the same debt. So if you're getting into the same fight over and over and over again, one of you has got some sort of childhood pattern or both that they're not willing to look at. And the thing about that is they don't want to look at it. So when you sort of point it out to them, when you start putting the spotlight on it, they're like, I'm not touching that. No, thank you. Yeah, exactly. So, so I'm not touching that. So you have to give them a safe space to be able to do that. So Cynthia, my wife and I, she's also a somatic trauma therapist. We have pictures Each other when we're about eight years old.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  In the kitchen, all over the place. So when I'm fighting with her, when we're fighting, I go and look at that picture because that's who I'm fighting with the eight year old. That's who I'm fighting with. And immediately I soften. And I think every couple should do that. You should have a picture of the younger version of of your partner. Somewhere in the house, at least a couple of them, and then realize that when you're in a fight, that's who you're that's who you're fighting with.

• 24:48Sabrina Zohar?

  I love that. It's funny, too. I think the reality is. If you're saying that you're anxious in dating and you just need the relationship, right? You just need to get into the relationship and you won't feel anxious anymore and you'll be fine. You're fucking lying to yourself because the reality is you're gonna be anxious in dating because they didn't call, they didn't text, where are they? And how long has it been? And they didn't do this. That doesn't just go away. And there's this fallacy as if, oh, if they just tell me everything's fine, I'm not gonna feel this anymore. But then you get into the relationship and maybe they didn't call still, or now they're working late, or they said something you don't love. The anxiety doesn't just magically disappear because you have a partner in a relationship. Yes, you hurt in relationships and you heal in them, but you also have to do the fucking work on yourself so that when you start to date and then you get into the relationship, the same patterns aren't fucking following you.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  There was a thing in the eighties called the roach motel.

• 25:34Sabrina Zohar?

  Tell me more.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  Roaches get in, but they can't get out. So it was it was a roach a roach trap. So once they get in past a certain point, they can't get out. And I think that's what we're like when we get into our old wounds. We fall into the old wounds and then we can't get out. And then we expect our partner to to pull us out. And the other thing about new relationships, especially or the need to get into is you get a tremendous amount of oxytocin and dopamine, but oxytocin, especially for women. In the first three months, six to 12 weeks, and that blankets everything, you know? It's like you could be out going for dinner with him and he's gone through like eight beers while you're having dinner. Now that's a huge red flag, but I'm just gonna ignore that. You know, I'm just gonna so that oxytocin, especially in women and men too, but in women, oxytocin is so powerful.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  And it blankets. So there is this thing in the first flush of a new relationship, everything is great. Your anxiety is gone. Right? Or you think it is. And then, you know, three months later, you don't like the way they chew. You know, it's like, I don't like that part, you know, I don't like that part. And then that becomes and then your confirmation bias gets it and you focus on it. Because you, your, your body is telling you, this isn't right for me, or this aspect of it isn't right for me. How am I going to explain this away? And then you get into your head and you start explaining and explaining. And we can make this house of cards for things. And it's incredibly complex, especially, I noticed this, especially with women. The amount of complexity in, in, in the thought process.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Oh, he's just doing it because of this, or he's just doing, he had a bad child, or you know, just the thought complexity in that, whereas men are like, oh, what's she doing? Right? So the thought complexity that women can come up with, and then that, that is addictive.

• 27:17Sabrina Zohar?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  That level of complexity, because your brain, the female brain thinks, I'm, I'm fucking getting somewhere. I'm getting somewhere with this. And you're not, you're just pulling yourself in a loop up in here. You're not dealing with anything in here. And this will never heal this. This can heal this, but this, it doesn't go the other way.

• 27:34Sabrina Zohar?

  I was curious, what's the most damaging piece of advice that you hear that people just don't have, right, about anxiety that you just hear over and over and over again?

• 27:41Speaker 03

  The change in your thinking is going to change your anxiety. And it will in the short term. It will in the, in the early stages, but it won't heal it in the long term. So it acts as a bit of reassurance and reassurance is like a Band-Aid. It's temporary. And then reassurance can become addictive. So you're only staying in this sort of upper plane of anxiety, where you're not really dealing with the root cause of it. So you can learn thinking strategies that alleviate the anxiety in the short term, but then you go through a breakup or your dog passes away or whatever. And then my mom died like five months ago and my alarm went through the roof. And I noticed the anxiety would come up with it, the thoughts of the mind, the warnings, the what ifs, the worst case scenarios. And it was like, ah, I just don't have to give these any credit anymore. I don't have to give them any credibility.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  And that was an incredibly powerful part of, of my healing was I can feel this alarm and stay with it without adding thoughts to it. And that's, you know, probably one of the best pieces of advice I can give for anybody is this sensation without explanation.

• 28:41Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  Be able to stay in a sensation without compulsively giving it an explanation. Because as soon as you do that, then you're in the loop, then you're gone again.

• 28:49Sabrina Zohar?

  I've noticed even, like, I pick my hair. And that's my, ever since I took Attila Mania for the last 20 years that I can remember. At first it started here and then it would go here. And it was so subtle that I would be in the midst of talking and you're like,

• 29:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:04Sabrina Zohar?

  Oh, there's like seventy hairs by me and I'm like, oh, oh my God. And then it came to the point where Ryan's like, hey, so you've got a spot now that is visible.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 29:12Sabrina Zohar?

  And then, of course, you start to go and you're like, oh, my God, now I'm embarrassed of myself. Oh, now I'm ashamed. Oh, my God, now like do nothing wrong. And then you're constantly fixing yourself. And then all of a sudden I do it again. And it's this fucking cycle in this loop. And sometimes I at least even, being a human, right? I I try to dispel this from the show of the like, oh, my God, I'm this holier than thou healed, evolved. No, kiss the ring. And I'm like, nah, I'm just equally as fucked up, right? I got my shit. We just manage it a little bit differently. And I've noticed even like, and I hate, I hate how woo this has become of like, do breath work. Or, you know, like even five minutes in the morning. Or journal. It's become this like, oh, are you just gonna tell me to journal again? And it's like, yeah, I actually am.

• 29:53Sabrina Zohar?

  Am I gonna tell you to go for a fucking walk? Yes, I am. Am I gonna tell you to do ten jumping jacks to move the anxiety? To push the wall hard? I don't give a fuck. Do what you need to do. But it doesn't actually have to own you. But I've noticed that self-awareness has become with like fetishized it of like, you just need to be self-aware. And you're like, cool, now what?

• 30:11Speaker 03

  Or we need to bypass.

• 30:12Sabrina Zohar?

  Right.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  You know, like breath work is great too. But I see a lot of people and I see a lot of things on Instagram about, oh, try these breath hacks for anxiety.

• 30:21Sabrina Zohar?

  Two minutes.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  They're a Band-Aid.

• 30:22Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  And then you can get addicted to the Band-Aid and never actually have to deal with the underlying issue. Because you're getting very, very good at, you know, and there's nothing wrong with going for walks. There's nothing wrong with breathing. But it's until you decide you're going to see, hear, open to, understand, love and defend that child that lives in you. And the place that they take up in your body, nothing is gonna get fixed long term. You're always gonna be reassuring yourself. You're always gonna be stuck in your head. And for some people, just like you're, you're spinning. There is, there is something in our brains that soothes us. Like you do that because there is a soothing capability. So worry is addictive because it works, because it takes the uncertain.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  And it makes it appear, appear more certain. And if there's anything that anxious people hate, it's uncertainty because of what uncertainty often meant in their childhood. Right? So you don't want to have to go back and visit that same old painful uncertainty. So what you do is you develop a coping strategy. Worry is a coping strategy. Tricky, it's a coping strategy. So there's all these different coping strategies we can use. But we really need to understand, oh, I'm in this again. I'm in worry again. I'm twirling my hair again. What's actually going on with me right now? What is it? Can I stay with it? And sometimes you're not going to have the energy or the wherewithal to do it. But just putting your hand on your chest, just breathing into it, just staying with it. And just saying to yourself, you know, this is in my body. I can stay with this.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  I don't like this feeling like it's uncomfortable. But I can stay with it. And I think that's how we heal is when we, when we can stay with that discomfort. And we don't have to escape into our thoughts anymore. And it's hard because initially, the reason why we built this 12 lane superhighway up into our brain was because it was too painful. But you're not a child anymore. And the last thing I'll tag on to that is that when we get into real anxious phases, I believe that's an age regression. I believe that we go back to the five, nine, 12 year old. And we have all the wherewithal of a 12 year old. We're fighting with our partner. We've become nine years old. Not going to go well.

• 32:26Sabrina Zohar?

  No, they didn't have the tools.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  Well, yeah.

• 32:29Sabrina Zohar?

  This episode is sponsored by Quince. I love Quince, I really do. I have so many things from them. Our house, we have the linen sheets obsessed. I bought my mom, one of the Mongolian cashmere sweaters obsessed. She loves it. It's beautiful red, it looks fabulous in it. And I wore their knit boots the other night to dinner and I loved them. I love it. And that's why I keep coming back to Quince, right? They focus on high quality essentials, right? Let's think about breathable linen, soft organic cottons, washable silk, which is a favorite of mine, especially because I wear my things into the ground, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated, but still easy. And why do I love Quince? Because they've really become a destination for elevated essentials, not just on me, but whether that be the house, bedding, kitchen, all of that.

• 33:12Sabrina Zohar?

  And Quince works directly with ethical factories. So they cut out the middleman. You're paying for quality. You're not paying for brand markup. Elevate your summer wardrobe now. Go to quince.com/sabrina for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q U I N C E dot com slash Sabrina for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash Sabrina. This episode is sponsored by Mudwater. You ever been curious about getting off coffee or just cutting back on caffeine? Cause I have been there. I used to drink so many espressos, I couldn't sit still. It was really, really messing with like how I was feeling in my body and the physiology of the anxiety. And that's why I love Mudwater. I discovered them years ago, but it's the same morning ritual.

• 33:56Sabrina Zohar?

  You have coffee, chai or matcha, but with functional mushrooms and adaptogens instead of a full caffeine hit. So it's steady energy and no spiral. Mudwater is a coffee alternative. So it's made with mushrooms and adaptogens and about a seventh of the caffeine of coffee. So you get the focus and energy without the jitters, crash or anxiety. And they have four flavors. They have OG, which is the original chai chocolate blend, which is delicious. They have coffee, matcha and turmeric. So if you're a coffee person, a matcha person, a chai person, anywhere in between, there's something for you. Babes, are you ready to make the switch to cleaner energy? Go to mudwtr.com slash Sabrina Zohar and grab the starter kit. Use code Sabrina Zohar and you'll get 43% off. The frother alone is worth it, babes.

• 34:38Sabrina Zohar?

  That's right, up to 43% off with code Sabrina Zohar at M U D W T R dot com. After your purchase, they'll ask how you found them. Please show your support and let them know we sent you. I, what's interesting for me is like, how old do I feel and where did I learn this from? How to become baseline? But it's always funny because I have like a free guide on my website, it's just regulating techniques, right? And the amount of people that are like, okay, I did that and I'm still anxious. And I'm like, oh, oh, okay. Let me manage your expectations. This isn't TikTok university, right? This isn't Amazon where like, look, see, I pulled on my ear and I held this for three seconds. I reset my nervous system. It's like, if it were that easy, we would be bajillionaires. To me, I'm like, no, no, no.

• 35:17Sabrina Zohar?

  When I gave you the regulation, the walk of this, I'm like, that's literally even, that's just you getting to the first step. You can't even start to climb the mountain unless we at least get you the equipment that you need. I'm like, if you're trying to come into this, especially when we're talking, whether it be dating or in a relationship, right? Whether you're new and you have the unknown of it, or you're in something and it's unknown, right? There's a lot of fucking unknown. The one thing that I've really practiced, I want to know your thoughts on tangible, tangible, tangible things that we could do. What really helped me was a couple of things. One, acknowledging and saying like, okay, what's the worst thing that can happen, right? I lose everything. And I'm like, okay, you're right, that could happen, right? I stopped gaslighting myself into being like, that'll

• 35:58Sabrina Zohar?

  never happen. You're like, no, no, no, it's a possibility, right? Then I start to look and go, okay, yeah, where do I feel that? Like, that feels really uncomfortable. And I'm like, okay, who is that, right? You start to do all the work and the process. And you're like, oh, okay, I feel that here. Oh, that's little sap. She's really scared that like, if she says this, she's gonna lose everything because dad used to leave. And then we didn't have any money and we didn't know what we were gonna do. Okay, cool. So I'm scared that, wow, okay, cool. As I said that to you, that all just clicked for me that like, why am I scared to speak my truth? Because growing up, I thought I'd lose everything if I did. Thank you. Thanks for this conversation. That really just shed light for me. But then I go into like, okay, but I think what the missing link for a lot of this healing work is like, this process I'm explaining has taken me nine years to be able to get to within a quick minute, right? Being able to talk to you because I'm self-aware, I

• 36:43Sabrina Zohar?

  understand my body, I've done all this. But if I didn't choose every fucking day to wake up at 5:00 AM to go to the gym, I don't go to the gym just for vanity, of course, right? I do it so that when I'm like, oh, that's my glute. So that when I can acknowledge and go, where am I in my body? How I feel that, I understand it. It's tangible, there's a texture to it. Prior to that, you would ask me, where do you feel that? I'd be like, I don't know. I don't know. And a lot of that was my ego, right? My ego really not wanting to be seen. My ego being like, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're gonna figure this out. You don't need any help. You don't need to do any of this. Let's stay away from the wound and let's go to everything else. Let's start asking why they don't like you instead of understanding how that makes you feel. And that was really game changing for me. But I think the biggest thing that I wish, I wish we could fucking delete from the internet is this act as if all of this could just be instant, or you can just get rid of it.

• 37:27Sabrina Zohar?

  I am 36, as of a couple of weeks ago. It took me 36 years to get here, as if it's gonna happen like that. But I wanted to ask, because you and I talked offline about ego. How does that play in? Because I see that a lot, especially with the breakups of like, they moved on quicker. And you're like, baby, this has nothing to do with them and everything to do with you. What the fuck is, you know, my ego is not my amigo, but I don't know that I agree with that statement.

• 37:47Speaker 03

  Well, we need our ego.

• 37:48Sabrina Zohar?

  Right?

• 37:49Speaker 03

  You know, we need, our ego is what made me write a book. It made me become a stand-up comic. It made me do all these things, but within a certain framework. So if you You have some sort of overview of what your ego is doing, you're way better than if you just act ego unconsciously and just automatically do something. So the ego is there to protect you. It's, you know, it's been there since you were born, maybe even earlier. And it is one of those things that if you get into a negative situation, your ego says, we are never doing that again. We are never doing that again. Now, if that's putting your hand on a hot stove, excellent. But if that's falling in love, probably not the best way of going through life. Because, you know, I believe that the reason why we're anxious is because we can't give ourselves the love that we need.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  And again, I'm starting as the MD. I want to have a seizure because it just sounds so woo. But it really, that's what it comes down to. It's like we are separated from love. And when we said, and we separate ourselves from love too, when we, when we push love away. We think that it's helping because that's what we had to do as children because it was just too vulnerable to love and then be heard. But then we extrapolate that out to everybody. And then we get into this new relationship, oxytocin goes through the roof, they're amazing, they're amazing, you know, smitten kitten. And everything goes away, the anxiety goes away for about, you know, six to 12 weeks. And then it just starts to creep back in again, right? So it's like, how do we, how do we say that?

• 39:15Speaker 03

  And how do we make friends with the younger version of ourselves that didn't get that? Because anxiety is really a separation of your mind from your body. Right? We go in our heads, we leave our body because our body is too painful. It's a separation of our adult self from our child self. Because the adult doesn't want to go back and visit the child because the child holds all their pain. And the child's looking at the adult in us after 36 years going, where are you?

• 39:41Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah, you're in charge?

• 39:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:42Sabrina Zohar?

  Fuck.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, but the thing is, 36 year old you actually has so many more skills than five year old you. But when we age regress into anxiety, we don't see that. We don't see our skills. So that's why we have to make it rote. That's why we have to sort of see here, open to understand, love and defend that. How do I do that to that child? And it gets pretty annoying because it's like, oh, I gotta do this shit again. It's like, okay, I gotta do this again. So, but you do it. Over and over again, and that becomes your safety instead of your worries becoming your safety. Because the worries act to make the uncertain appear more certain. We don't like certainty. People with anxiety, we don't like it. So we will take worries over the feeling of uncertainty. I'm saying,

• 40:22Speaker 03

  can you embrace this and not just accept, I can accept, I can accept. No, embrace the uncertainty. When you're looking at a menu, it's like, okay, am I going to have the tacos or the enchiladas? Embrace even little tiny little bits of uncertainty and tell yourself, this is uncertain and I love that. That's from Kyle C. You know, it's like, this is uncertain and I love that. And just start to embrace uncertainty because every, if you get every little whiff of uncertainty fires you into your alarm, which fires you into anxiety, life is not going to be comfortable for you.

• 40:52Sabrina Zohar?

  Burnout city coming, one way ticket.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 40:54Sabrina Zohar?

  What changed my dating life was when I finally started to acknowledge and listen to myself about the fears. Right? Oh, okay. What if he doesn't like me? All right. And he doesn't like you, right? And that really changed the game for me when I was supposed to be on Shark Tank, uh, three and a half years ago. And I remember being like, no, no, I, this has to be it. I put everything in like, this has to be it. And I remember my, my therapist saying, so that's called anticipatory anxiety. You're starting to freak out and have all these thoughts and these thoughts, these thoughts. Sure enough, what happens? I'm on set. I'm ready. Like this is it, Zohar. You're next. Get your speech ready. It's fucking nine months of prep. Like you, this is it. And in my head, I was like, this is going to save me. And what happens? Thirty minutes go by for, and I'm like, fuck, what's going on? And they come in after and say, I'm so sorry, we couldn't fit you on today.

• 41:38Sabrina Zohar?

  You know, but like, you know, try again next year.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:40Sabrina Zohar?

  And I went home and I completely crumbled.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:44Sabrina Zohar?

  And I remember it took me a few months. This did not happen overnight. But I remember my therapist saying, okay, and where are we? And I was like, so it happened. Like the biggest fear I had was that I wasn't going to get this and it didn't change my life happened. And that was the moment where I was like, okay, cool. So what I need to learn is to let go of the outcome. Because if I'm so beholden to like, this has to be it, then the out, then I'm anxiety city. Everything is let me chess peace and figure out how to get this person to like me, how to get them to do what I want, how to get them to say how I want it to be, because I can't sit in the fact that this can't work out. And now even when I'll do things of like, I auditioned. For a show, of course I want it more than anything. But then I'll say I'm like, and if it doesn't happen, cool. What was that going to make me feel? That would be shitty. You're right. That would be shitty. A hundred percent. Does that have to mean anything about me?

• 42:28Sabrina Zohar?

  That's where then the work starts to come in of let me get curious about what this is becoming about me.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  And can you talk to little Sab and say, hey, sweetie? You know, I know we really, we really got our hopes up about this. We really thought this was going to be it. You know, and see if you could see her eyes, see what she's wearing, like, close your eyes just for a second, just for a second, close your eyes now. Imagine little Sab at whatever age. Can you see her eyes? What's she wearing?

• 42:55Sabrina Zohar?

  She's got a little bow T-shirt on. I used to wear all the time. It's a little white shirt with a pink bow.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  And how do you feel towards her?

• 43:03Sabrina Zohar?

  I just love her so much and I'm so sorry that anybody ever hurt her the way they did.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  And where do you feel her in your body?

• 43:09Sabrina Zohar?

  She's always right here.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  Okay, like right in the center of your chest.

• 43:11Sabrina Zohar?

  Right in the center of that sternum place.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Is it kind of like superficial on the sternum or is it deep?

• 43:15Sabrina Zohar?

  It's deep.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 43:16Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  So would it have a shape?

• 43:19Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah, it used to be a black spiky ball when I get anxious, but when I think of her now, there's like a string. I feel like this just connection with her that it just, it's, it's almost like a string that goes through, that's why it felt so deep. It goes through like every layer of my body because I feel so connected to her. Cause for so long I wasn't.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. And put your hand right over her and just breathe into that hand and just feel the warmth and the pressure of your hand. Just the connection that you have with her. Can you still see her eyes?

• 43:51Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  And it's really, that's really so much of like, when someone doesn't text you back, when you're like, oh, you know, is this going to work? Is this relationship going to work? We've been in it five, five years. We're not getting married. Like, can you find this place in your body and get out of your fucking head? My, my, my daughter travels with me a lot when we do these things and she says, don't swear, don't swear. You're a doctor. You're not supposed to swear.

• 44:13Sabrina Zohar?

  Not on this show.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  No, I know. It's like Sabrina, like I just can't, because there's part of me, you know, that goes, I used to, you know, I used to play ice hockey was pretty, was pretty heavy duty intense, you know, it's like, so I, I said, I know I'm going to say it, Lee. I know I'm going to say it. I know it's going to come out. I'm going to wait. I'm going to save it, but it's going to come out. So it's like, find the fucking child in you. That's how you heal your anxiety. It's not thinking better, although you will think better. Once you find her, the body will heal the mind. The mind doesn't heal the body. It's like when you get stressed out, just saying to yourself, hey, relax.

• 44:46Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  It doesn't work.

• 44:47Sabrina Zohar?

  In what world?

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Or someone else says to you, hey, just calm down. You know, someone without anxiety. Cause there's a lot of people that that don't understand what anxiety is. They've never had it. They never felt it. I do believe actually that men and women have anxiety in equal amounts. I believe that women are so much more emotionally literate that they can describe it. Men, it comes out in irritability and anger and frustration, but it's there. And I think it's really important to understand that men have relationship anxiety just as much as women do. And maybe even worse, I think men are a little weaker as far as the species goes. We die earlier, you know? There's, there's just so much to being a boy. So when we're born, there's a hundred and two boys that are born for every hundred girls.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  Because those two boys, two of them will do something stupid and die. So after eighteen, then women outnumber men. Because those two boys do the stupid things. And men, we're supposed to do stupid things. We're supposed to, that's how the, the species kind of expands itself by, by men just kind of going out and doing weird stuff. Right? And then we sort of learn from that. But now we're in the society where we've got everything. Like we have, there's, there's.

• 45:57Sabrina Zohar?

  Right here?

• 45:58Speaker 03

  We have everything. So like now, because we have everything, now it's like, oh my God, what's going on with my relationship? What's going on? You know, we don't have to forage for food anymore. You know, we, we have nice, comfortable lives, but then we just look for things that are going wrong. And women are much more likely to look for things that are going wrong. Men are much more likely to internalize and, and just stuff it down. Just keep stuffing it down.

• 46:22Sabrina Zohar?

  You're funny. I have predominantly male clients. I have predominantly male clients and I, it's funny, I'll see the clickbait on the internet of like, avoidant men don't feel, and they don't deserve love, and they're this. And I wish for a fucking second that they understood the other side of it, that when these guys are coming to me saying, I tried to open up to the girl I'm dating and she told me I was a pussy and to shut up, or I told this girl I liked her and she ghosted me, I feel like shit, or I can't stop thinking about my ex and I feel so anxious but I have to be the strong one and just put myself out there and so I stuff it away. I wish people understood, and this isn't gendered as in heterosexual norms of a relationship, this is just talking about people. I wish people understood anxious people are also avoidant, avoidant people are also anxious. Anxious people avoid getting deeper. Anxious people focus on you.

• 47:07Sabrina Zohar?

  You tell me it's okay, you tell me I'm gonna be okay, you, you, you, you, you. Instead, you need to change, right? The fucking people that love to tell me, you should speak slower, I would listen more. It's like, go fuck yourself. How about you find another show where you fucking slow it down? This episode is brought to you by Cash App. I am always scared that like my identity is gonna be stolen, someone's gonna take all of my money, and I'm so grateful that Cash App exists because if you weren't up to speed already, Cash App is way more than just a safe way to send and receive money. With the Cash App card, you unlock a ton of perks without all of the hidden fees. Enjoy benefits like exclusive early access to nationwide concert pre-sales, Kendrick Lamar and Sabrina Carpenter to name a couple of recent examples, plus discounts on everyday purchases and popular brands you're already spending money on.

• 47:49Sabrina Zohar?

  Add your card to your digital wallet to make your money move easier. Cash App also adds security to your money by declining suspicious card transactions and sending you a notification to make sure the payment is really you. If your card is ever lost or stolen, you can lock it with just one tap right in the app. Spend with confidence with the Cash App card today. New Cash App customers can earn $10 if they use code CASHAPP10 in their profile at signup and send $5 to a friend within 14 days. Terms apply. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partners. Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC. Cash App Visa, debit flex cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, and the Bancorp Bank, N.A. Pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Cash App green feature, savings, direct deposits, roundups, overdraft, coverage, and discounts

• 48:34Sabrina Zohar?

  provided by Cash App. A block, Inc., rand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. So, we had an audience, we had a few audience questions I really wanted to get to. This one was interesting to me because I have my own thoughts on it, but I'm curious yours. How do you share your anxiety with the person that you're dating or in a relationship with?

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I would say that I tend to have a bit of a nervous personality. That's what I say, you know, to people because anxiety ruined every relationship. I mean, I, my joke is I've been married for 16 years, five with the first one, two, one with the second one, and 10 with the last one. Anxiety ruined every relationship because it makes you go inward, right? It makes you go inward. You lose the social engagement system, which is eye contact, tone of voice, prosody of voice, body language, facial expression. When you get alarmed, those things shut off. So your partner thinks they're not connected because we're not, we're not connected to you. And this is why I think a lot of women see men, and men are in alarm, as you say,

• 49:32Speaker 03

  and they've lost that eye contact, tone of voice, prosody of voice, body language. So women think he's, he's separating from me, he's separating from me. And that's the big thing. Thing about a relationship is that on one hand, you're afraid to be abandoned. And on the other hand, you're afraid to be engulfed. Yeah. Right? So there's the two, the two things come up. So it's really understanding that, that this anxiety that you feel is a mark of your sensitivity, which is a superpower and a curse. Whereas a blessing and a curse. Right? So it's just explaining it like I tend to overthink things. That's what I do. You know, I tend to go into, into my head rather than feeling things in my body. So depending on how deep this relationship, you know, is, it's like, you know, can I share with you what's going on in my body?

• 50:16Speaker 03

  Because typically, if you notice me starting to worry, if you help ground me in my stomach, in my chest, or whatever, I'm much more likely to get grounded again. Whereas just sort of saying, hey, you know, calm down, what's wrong, whatever, just really reinforced to me that I just need to go into my body and take a second and connect. So when you tell someone about your anxiety, you know, it used to be kind of an uncommon thing, but now it's just so common. It's just, it's basically being honest and just saying, you know, this is, I'm sensitive. I would frame it up in that way. Like, I, I tend to be quite sensitive. I tend to overthink things. I may sort of, sort of overthink in your presence. If I do that, please feel free to kind of say, hey, I think that you're kind of getting away,

• 51:01Speaker 03

  losing the pause a little bit, like thinking too much on this. Can you just sort of ground yourself for a second? Not in a sort of like you have to do this kind of way, but just as a pleasant reminder. Like you don't do this on a first date, but just as you're getting in, it's like this is, this is what's going on with you. This is how I feel and I want to be close to you. That's the thing. I want to be close to you, but sometimes I tend to withdraw because I get into this thing. If you see me withdrawing, it's not because of you typically. It's because that something in me has started to get afraid. And I just, now I start to overthink to escape that feeling and now I lose myself. So if you could help me bring me back to myself, I would love that.

• 51:36Sabrina Zohar?

  Well, that you said the magic word, not on the first date. And I think that's, I've had this where I've had my girls be like, oh, and told them I have anxious attachment on my first date. And they used to text me and I'm like, okay. I don't care how avoidant or secure that person, there's not, most people aren't going to be like, oh, you're pretty much trauma dumping on me right now, telling me all these issues that you have and that I'm supposed to just always be there for you. Because what that person's also hearing is like, do you have any emotional regulation? Are you going to outsource this on to me? Because like here's the spoiler alert. If you're anxious and you don't think other people can pick up on that, you're kidding yourself. Cause I thought for a long time I hid it and Ryan's like, babe, the minute you opened your mouth, I could fucking see, right? And it's not like I'm hiding it so well. Like people meet me and they're like, you run anxious. Usually what I'll do is I'm like, hey, I talk really fast. I curse a lot.

• 52:19Sabrina Zohar?

  I get if that's not for everybody, but I just like to show up authentically. If that's a problem for the other person, do the fucking Lou, don't waste my goddamn time. But I really am glad that you specified because it's not, you don't need to tell somebody early in dating, you need to text me. First of all, that's not a fucking need. You need to text me all the time or you have to do this is not a need, that is a request. And that is usually because your anxious ass needs to learn how to sit in some discomfort. Which leads me to my question for you. Practically, right? Maybe that could be our tool of the week before I get into some rapid fire. Sitting in the discomfort.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 52:50Sabrina Zohar?

  I have my own ways, but I think to me that was the two things that changed anxiety for me was one, pausing. Oh, my fucking god. Pausing and allowing myself to say, you don't have to answer it right this second. Give yourself even thirty seconds. Let the wave of heat rush over that like I have to attack like, no, baby, you are not a bulldog. There is no fucking tiger. Just relax internally. Then the second thing was being able to say, I can sit in this. I'm allowed to sit in the discomfort. I can be uncomfortable, and that's what I think we've lost nowadays. God forbid you're fucking late. God forbid someone doesn't text you in the time that you deem. God forbid something doesn't happen exactly how you want it. That's it. It's the end of the fucking world. But I'd love to say for tool of the week, what is a tool maybe that they could use or anybody to be able to

• 53:36Sabrina Zohar?

  sit in some discomfort to understand yourself and not run away from yourself?

• 53:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's just that sensation without explanation, just repeating. I say that to myself probably fifty times a day. This sensation without explanation, staying in your body instead of going into your head. Because the more you worry, the more you're going to worry. The more you start teaching yourself to stay in sensation. Now, sometimes the sensation can be very overpowering.

• 53:58Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  So sometimes what I'll do is, okay, can you stay in the sensation? Okay, now I want you to go to your right knee. You know, because typically our right knee, like what's going on in your right knee right now?

• 54:07Sabrina Zohar?

  Not much.

• 54:08Speaker 03

  Right? But can you sense your right knee?

• 54:11Sabrina Zohar?

  When you say I can. Like, once you say it, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's that's there.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then go back to the alarm. Go back to that place in the center of your chest.

• 54:19Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 03

  Right? And then what was the best time in your life, Sab?

• 54:23Sabrina Zohar?

  Best? Isn't it really sad that there's nothing that comes to mind?

• 54:26Speaker 03

  Same, same, same. I know.

• 54:27Sabrina Zohar?

  My sister and I had that talk. We were like very little joy in our life.

• 54:30Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 54:31Sabrina Zohar?

  Honestly, the best time of my life outside of where I'm at now was something very simple was when I used to just walk my dog. It was just a moment where I would get really excited to leave the house at seven in the morning, take him on a two-hour walk, put my music on and just get lost. It was my time and my permission to not have to be anything. And to me, that just even that one moment of like, hold Holding him, kissing him, like that was my object permanence. He taught me what safety is. He taught me what love is. He taught me what unconditional looked like, that I could be a mess and he would still come over and love me. And he really taught me that I can't rely on something else to make me happy. Because when I did and he died, I lost myself. I didn't know who the fuck I was and I couldn't function. As you know, you've experienced loss.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:16Sabrina Zohar?

  And now on the other side of it being like, I have to have me because I can't rely on something else for that. But that to me is a very long-winded answer of telling you that was the happy time of my life.

• 55:25Speaker 03

  Great answer. So when you think of cuddling him and snuggling with him,

• 55:30Speaker 03

  where do you feel that?

• 55:31Sabrina Zohar?

  Like almost in my shoulders.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 55:33Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  So.

• 55:34Sabrina Zohar?

  They could relax.

• 55:35Speaker 03

  Does it, is there, it's like a descriptive word. Is it tingling? Is it, is there, is it a pressure? What, like, what is the sensation?

• 55:42Sabrina Zohar?

  I think the sensation is like heavy or almost where like it was weighted down.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 55:45Sabrina Zohar?

  And then I get a little ping in my chest of that sadness that like the,

• 55:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:50Sabrina Zohar?

  Just almost like someone poked you. We're like, oh, hi, okay. Hi, good morning.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So what I would do is I would bring you into that place. I know you don't like to slow down.

• 56:00Sabrina Zohar?

  Sometimes.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  Or maybe you do.

• 56:01Sabrina Zohar?

  Sometimes I really do.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  Maybe you do. Just, just finding that the pure joy of the love that you had for him. And then I'm speeding this up a lot. So, and then we go back into that old alarm, right? So what I'm doing is I'm taking you to a place that's neutral in your body, like your right knee or your elbow. Going into that sensation, then going into the alarm sensation, putting your hand over it, breathing into it, staying with it. And then like, what was one of the, because I can think of some of the best times in my life. It's like, oh, I kind of feel that up in here. Now, can you go back and forth between the two? Because what you're doing is you're teaching yourself that that alarm isn't all of you. Because when you were five or eight or whatever, that alarm was all of you.

• 56:42Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 56:43Speaker 03

  There was no escape. So the only place you could do is associate in your thoughts. But now we're reverse engineering the whole process and going, instead of going from body escaping into mind, now we're taking our mind and going consciously, sensation without explanation, I'm going into my body. I am choosing, I am embracing this alarm because this alarm is little sap. This is the younger version of me. This is how we heal. It's not a cognitive process. It's not thinking clear. It's not positive psychology. It's finding that little girl, feeling her pain and being able to stay with her. And if it gets uncomfortable, go to a place that, you know, you love or you loved. And then go to a neutral place and then go back to the alarm. Because that gives the alarm a little bit of a lobotomy in a way.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  Like it kind of goes in there because that alarm has probably been the same. Cause I believe that when we get alarmed and stressed and anxious, we feel the same way in our body now that we did back then.

• 57:39Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  And we will revert back to the same old coping strategy, which is going into our head. So if we learn, okay, first of all, I can tolerate this sensation. I can actually embrace this sensation, even though it's uncomfortable, especially if it's uncomfortable. I can embrace it. I can stay with it. And then when you do that, when you teach yourself, you know what, I can stay. That's the worst case scenario. I can stay with this. And then you no longer have to escape. So as soon as you go into that feeling and you can tolerate it, it hurts. And when you first start doing this, it's very difficult to stay out of your head because your head's going to start beaking at you and screaming at you like, we need the thing, we need to worry. But really, if you can learn how to stay with it, that's how you heal. You heal because you stay with it, you acclimatize to it. It doesn't scare you anymore and it doesn't scare you into your head anymore.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  And then you, and then there's this tremendous sense of power like, oh, because the worst thing about anxiety is you don't know when it's going to end.

• 58:30Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  Right? You're going through, you're doing your shopping. Grocery shopping used to be horrible for me.

• 58:35Sabrina Zohar?

  Really?

• 58:36Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, it was one of the worst things because that was, you know, grocery shopping with my mom. My mom was stressed out. Uh, my dad may or may not have been in the hospital or at home, you know, smoking up a storm. He smoked three packs a day. So growing grocery shopping was very stressful. So even today, when I go grocery shopping, my wife doesn't like, I don't like going with her. But what I will have to do is I will start being silly and stupid when I go in the store, because that changes my state.

• 59:00Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  Right? So it's really, you know, can you tolerate this state? Can you get to this point where it's like, okay, I don't like this feeling. This hurts. But man, I'm gonna stay with it. I'm gonna embrace it and I'm gonna stay with it because that is the younger version of me. If I can stay with the younger version of me like this and show them that I can see here, open to understand, love and defend this little boy that's in me and feel his pain and stay with him, then I can heal. And one thing I'll tag on to that too is, is tears, I think, are really, really important. I think one of the reasons why men kill themselves more often than women is because we took tears away from them as younger, because tears are adaptations in the brain. Your dog has still died, you're still getting a divorce. The external version of your life has not changed.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  But after tears, for some reason, and no one knows how to explain this, you feel better. Because I think you've actually experienced the pain and you've moved through it. You've moved past it. Instead of just being stuck in it and then going into your head to escape all the time.

• 59:59Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 59:59Speaker 03

  So when you're stressed about your relationship, find it in your body and stay with it. Learn how to stay with it, because then you're staying with yourself and not abandoning and leaving yourself. That was a bit of a rant, but.

• 1:00:10Sabrina Zohar?

  No, but that was a game changer. All right, ready to go some rapid fire?

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  Let's go.

• 1:00:13Sabrina Zohar?

  Okay, is the spark always a good sign?

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  No, because the spark sometimes is a reflection that that person that you're attracted to has the same dysfunctional strategy as your parent.

• 1:00:23Sabrina Zohar?

  The spark can be the trauma tingles.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  It can be.

• 1:00:26Sabrina Zohar?

  Okay, can you think your way out of anxiety?

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  No, because it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse. You have to feel your way out.

• 1:00:31Sabrina Zohar?

  Okay, finish the sentence. Anxious people are attracted to avoidant people because?

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  Because they're afraid of not giving to themselves and they're afraid of this person not giving to them as well. So the thing about anxious people is they abandon themselves all the time. So they desperately want to find a partner who doesn't abandon them. But paradoxically, they usually pick people that do abandon them.

• 1:00:57Sabrina Zohar?

  They end up doing that. The biggest lie anxiety tells you about dating and relationships is?

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  That a new person is gonna fix your anxiety. Because you will get that oxytocin rust, absolutely. When you first start seeing someone and the butterflies are there and it dampens down the norepinephrine, all the, all the sort of stress chemicals, it sort of dampens them down. But six to 12 weeks later, the oxytocin goes down and then you're left with your anxiety.

• 1:01:21Sabrina Zohar?

  Okay, my last one. If someone takes one thing, only one thing from this episode.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:01:25Sabrina Zohar?

  What do you want that to be?

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  Learn how to separate the feeling in your body from the thoughts in your mind. Because that's how you heal. We don't heal by thinking better. We heal by feeling better. Because when we feel and we allow ourselves to feel the sadness, the grief, the pain, the envy, allow yourself to feel it and stay with it because then you start teaching yourself some resilience and capacity in your nervous system that, oh, I can go through this. I went through this before and now I'm okay. Whereas if you just run from your thoughts all the time, you're never going to heal it. You're always going to be sort of trying to reassure yourself over and over and over again.

• 1:02:00Sabrina Zohar?

  Could not agree more. I remember the one thing that changed it a lot for me was like, you're not going to feel better unless you allow yourself to feel. So if we want to actually start to move this and I, if I hear one more time of like, how can I get over this quick? How do I feel better quick? I don't want to feel this anymore. It's like what you resist is going to persist. Instead, face it. Get fucking curious for one second. It's not going to kill you. Trust me. We have been there before. We have all tried. But do something at least that scares you a little bit, which could even be just getting curious about what's coming up for you.

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, and curiosity is so, especially when you're having a fight with your partner. Like, can you be curious? And I want, this is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. And I'm glad that you brought that up because it's like, I'm curious as to what's going on with you right now. Like if they're yelling and throwing stuff, it's like, hey, see, you're upset. I'm really curious as to what's going on with you. This is really hard because you're probably triggered too. So it takes a, it takes a real leap of faith. And one of the things that I love to hear from my couples that I work with, I don't work with a lot of them, but, but I do, but they'll say, this is the first time that I've done that. You know, he started throwing things and I asked him, like, hey, you know, clearly something's going on with you. And in my mind, I'm going like, I can't take it. Like he's,

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  but I went out there and said, I'm really curious right now. What, like, what's going on with you? Because that kills a lot of the counter will that, that forms in relationships where this, this automatic gainsaying of what the other person says. Cause then you get into this dance and couples get Into this dance over and over and over again. And if you're, if you're fighting about the same thing over and over again, one or both of you has an old pattern, probably from childhood that just keeps getting reignited.

• 1:03:36Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  And neither of you are willing to actually open that up and say, hey, I need your help. This is what's happening for me. When you go out to play golf with your buddies or whatever it is, I, I want you to go. I want you to have a good time, but there's a part of me that just feels like I'm a five year old. I'm sitting on the stairs and I'm waiting for my dad to come and he doesn't show up.

• 1:03:56Sabrina Zohar?

  Oh, Russ, I could talk to you for another fucking six hours. Thank you for coming on the show. Could you share where could people find you, plug it all?

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, at the anxiety M D.

• 1:04:06Sabrina Zohar?

  Cool.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  That's Instagram. Uh, we're opening up a new app fairly soon called anxiety.

• 1:04:11Sabrina Zohar?

  Cute.

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  Anxiety. Yeah. So the great thing about the app is that it helps you in the acute phase of anxiety, but it also helps you heal anxiety chronically. So there's meditations there. There's ways of, of making you understand like one of my anxious patterns. And it's not a lot of work. We've made it so that it's kind of fun in a way to go into your own patterns, to recognize them. Cause I wanted to create an app, not just to sort of help you feel better in the moment, but to actually allow you to heal your anxiety. So there's a acute wing and there's a chronic wing. And, you know, it's really easy to stay in the acute stuff, stay in the breath, stay in the sort of the sensations, that kind of thing. But if you really want to heal, you have to do this sort of to get to the unconscious, the sub core. We didn't talk about neuroscience very much, which is, which is great.

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  Because I think science is getting less and less able to treat emotional dysregulation. And I think we're going into this, oh, science based therapy. You know, this is a science based thing. Science, whenever I see something science based, and this is coming from a neuroscientist, I always think coping strategy.

• 1:05:10Sabrina Zohar?

  It has a place, but not.

• 1:05:11Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:05:12Sabrina Zohar?

  The place.

• 1:05:12Speaker 03

  And I think, I think people, we're losing so much of our rules and regulations in the world. Like everything's kind of collapsing that we're going, well, science is going to help us with emotional dysreg- We don't understand emotion in the brain at all.

• 1:05:24Sabrina Zohar?

  I said, the brain, we're like, what, like 3%? We understand if that.

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, if that. And it's just, you know, we don't really understand where emotion comes from. Yeah, I make the list of both the fear response, that kind of thing too. But there's so many other pathways in there. So there's these science-based, and there's nothing wrong with science-based therapy. But again, it's kind of the icing on the cake. Once you've done your own like healing work, seeing, hearing, opening to understanding, loving and defending that child that's in you, then the science-based therapies can kind of add the icing on the cake. But they're not an entry strategy. They're not going to heal you. And I think that's the biggest lie that I think that we see from the science community, from the mental health community, and I'm a medical doctor. Science has the tools to heal you. Most medical doctors treat with medication.

• 1:06:07Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  They don't have the time, they don't have the training, they don't have the, even the empathy these days. All the doctors are burned out that I talk, all my friends who are still in the game, they're all burned out. They don't have a lot of the empathy to really help people with their emotional dysregulation. So why are we relying on medicine to heal us when all they're going to give us is medication? And I'm not against, I'm not against medication at all. I just think that that's the only tool, because only like 50, according to Psychology Today, only 15% of psychologists, psychiatrists are actually doing 60-minute offices anymore.

• 1:06:40Sabrina Zohar?

  Oh, I had, I was so hopped up on medications. It was like two minutes where she would come in, you want higher dose? Okay, cool, I'll hire your dose. And meanwhile, I'm a zombie walking down the street.

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course, of course. So we didn't even get into medication, but that's what you're going to get. You know, don't, you don't look for peanut butter in the, in the hardware store. You're not going to find it, right?

• 1:06:57Sabrina Zohar?

  It's all right, we'll just have you back on to talk about this.

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  If you go to your, if you go to your medical doctor, you're going to get a medication, right? And the thing about medical doctors is that they don't refer out to somatic therapy because they don't understand it. And they're also seeing that it actually helps people. So as a medical doctor, if I see something that's helping other people that I know nothing about, it's like, nope, we're not even touching that. That's going to be witchcraft. So I think doctors really need to start embracing the fact that other modalities of therapy, somatic experiencing, internal family systems, these therapies have real merit. And rather than just giving someone a prescription, which is the easy way to end a, uh, interview, is just give someone a prescription, because doctors don't have anything else.

• 1:07:37Sabrina Zohar?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  Like, we don't have the ability, even psychiatrists aren't doing therapy anymore. So it's just medication after medication after medication. And it, it numbs you. But it doesn't actually, you know, one of the things that I don't like about medication is not when it works so much or when it doesn't work. It's when it works, because then people just stop doing the connection with themselves because they feel okay and they go on. It's like that Jerry Seinfeld joke about the helmets. Like, why did we invent the helmet? Well, we were participating in a lot of activities that were cracking our heads. We looked at the situation. We chose not to avoid these activities, but just like make little plastic hats so we can carry on with our head cracking lifestyles. So I really like that joke, like head cracking lifestyles. So it's really, I think it's really important that we allow ourselves to feel it can be

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  overwhelming. If it's really overwhelming, then get some help. Go to somebody who does somatic experiencing or internal family systems therapy. Your medical doctor is going to give you a medication. They don't know how to do therapy. So find someone who knows how to do therapy, especially when there's a somatic focus to it, because that's what's actually going to help you in the long run. That's going to help you heal it as a rather, rather than just cope with it.

• 1:08:44Sabrina Zohar?

  All right. Well, we'll have you back on next time you guys check in and we'll talk more neuroscience. We'll talk more about the nitty gritty of it and what works, what doesn't. I'm so excited.

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  Thanks, Sabrina. It's been great.

• 1:08:53Sabrina Zohar?

  Thanks for being here, Russ.

• 1:09:02Speaker 00

  Coca-Cola. For the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers. For the optimists, pessimists. For long distance love. For introverts and extroverts. The thinkers and the doers. For old friends and new. Coca-Cola. For everyone. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  When fall comes back around, there's a sense of a reset and new pieces from Lululemon's fall drop are an inspiration to push your goals and elevate your routines. As your calendar fills, easy to layer styles meet the demands of your day. And as you challenge yourself to try even more, versatile sets transition with you. The Lululemon fall lineup brings new levels of comfort and confidence, whether you're starting something fresh or starting something over. Check out the latest arrivals in store and on lululemon.com now.