BITESIZE | How to Break the Anxiety Cycle | Dr Russell Kennedy #667

A lot of people are struggling with anxiety at the moment, especially in a world that often feels out of control. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 370 of the podcast with physician and neuroscientist, Dr Russell Kennedy, who previously suffered with crippling anxiety for over 30 years. Russell insists anxiety isn’t a disorder of the mind. Our worries are merely a symptom - and one that keeps us in our heads and away from the real problem. His core message is that it’s often more effective to use the body to calm the mind, than the mind to calm the body. In this clip, he explains why anxiety may have less to do with our thoughts than we realise, and shares practical strategies that could help us begin breaking the anxiety cycle. For Thrive Tour tickets and info visit: https://drchatterjee.com/live/ Join my 21-day energy reset: https://drchatterjee.com/reset Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/370 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com. DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Before we get into this week's episode, I am really excited to share that I am bringing my Thrive Tour Transform Your Health and Happiness to Canada and Europe this September and November. It's a live, interactive, uplifting show that over 20,000 people came to last year across the UK and Australia. I'll be sharing powerful stories, life-changing insights, and simple tools that will inspire you to feel better, think clearer, and live with more intention and joy. To get your tickets right now and see all of the dates and venues, go to drchatterjee.com/live. I really hope that you can join me.

• 0:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 370 of the podcast with physician and neuroscientist Dr Russell Kennedy. Russell's core message is that it's often more effective to use the body to calm the mind than the mind to calm the body. And in this clip, he explains why anxiety may have less to do with our thoughts than we realise, and shares practical strategies that could help us begin breaking the anxiety cycle.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  I feel for you. Like, if you have anxiety, I know what it's like. I know what it's like to feel like this is never going to get better. I'm going to have this for the rest of my life, and I'm here to tell you that it's not. That's not true. For a lot of people, they won't believe that, but it's not true. You don't have to live like this. And I really want to change the way that anxiety is understood and treated. And I think if it sort of starts to overtake your life, like if you're waking up every morning and you're starting to worry, and what I call the three Ws of worry, warnings, what-ifs, and worst-case scenarios, and they kind of accelerate. If you're waking up with it every day, if it's a constant factor in your life, then we've got to do something. Anxiety is a part of human existence. You know, you're gonna get anxious about your money, you're gonna get anxious about your kids. That's just natural.

• 2:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Got it.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  But if it's chronic, you know, if, if your natural response is to get really worried and get into your head and start chewing things up in your brain, I call it chewing on glass. You're just gonna get worse. Your anxiety is just gonna get worse. So it's really a matter of can I ground myself in my body and realize that a bit of anxiety is just part of human existence. But if it's part of your daily, if you wake up with it, that's kind of a sign that there's probably something more there.

• 2:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Now, I think

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  when many of us think about anxiety, we think about one thing.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm feeling anxious right now.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  But you're saying that there are these two components.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think we're addressing the mind, you know, so I have this concept and anxiety that I call the alarm anxiety cycle. So I think there's this state of alarm that's stored in our body and in our mind too, because you can't separate the mind and the body. But it's stored from old traumas that are unresolved. And this alarm is in us and the mind reflects that trauma. Because the mind is a compulsive, meaning-making, makesense machine. So when it feels this old trauma in our body, it's gotta do something with it. So it makes up a what if, a warning, a worst-case scenario to kind of make sense of the angst that we're feeling. And then we believe that trauma, we believe that worry because we made it up. And then that creates more alarm in our body. And then it just gets in this cycle, this alarm anxiety cycle.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  So we're trying to treat the symptom, which is the thoughts, which is the worry, as the cause. If you think better, you will feel better. But it's really difficult to think in opposition to how your body feels. It's just a constant uphill battle.

• 3:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  So let's talk about this anxiety in our minds and alarm in our bodies.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because I think this really gets to the core, I think, of your If your message

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  That it's these two separate things that we conflate together.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yep, that's exactly what it is. And when we conflate the two together and we don't see them as separate entities, it's very hard to treat it. So we can treat it through the alarm. You know, one of the ways is finding the alarm in your body. And me, it's in my solar plexus, putting my hand over it, breathing into it. And just to go right off the top, I believe that that alarm is my younger self, is my wounded self that watched my schizophrenic father just sort of slowly collapse until he eventually committed suicide. And then there's the anxious thoughts of the mind that go along with this feeling of alarm in the body. So if we can separate them into two entities, we have a way of breaking the cycle.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  But if we don't see it as two separate entities and just try and treat the thoughts, the little analogy that I draw is like if you're in a rowboat and there's a hole in the rowboat, it's filling up with water. You can bail water out and drop that water level down a little bit to make yourself feel better. But unless you go under, unless you patch that hole in the hull, which is fixing the alarm in your body, you're always going to be bailing water. So it's really the separate, the anxious thoughts of the mind are different than the alarm in the body, but they energize each other. So if we can learn how to separate the two, see them as two separate entities and attack them both, we can break the cycle. And when we break the cycle, then we start really feeling like we have control over the cycle rather than the cycle controlling us.

• 5:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  So let's take a real life example. Maybe that might be helpful for people to sort of

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 5:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Think their way through or feel their way through

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 5:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Anxiety alarm cycle that you're talking about. So I don't know, let's take, if I think about practice and the sort of patients I've seen over the years. Let's imagine a 42 year old lady

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Who's at work in her office.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  And is feeling really, really anxious about their job role, about the way that their boss is treating them perhaps.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 6:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  And they're struggling to function because of that anxiety. Is it, does that work for you, that example?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 6:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Alright, so let's, for that individual.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 6:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  How would you talk them through this?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  So I would say Try to move into your body, like find the alarm in your body. Because what happens is when we're feeling quote unquote anxious, we tend to attribute the cause to our mind. Our mind goes and our mind is trying to solve it as well. But it's an unsolvable riddle because the reason you're anxious is there is no obvious answer. If there was an obvious answer, you wouldn't be anxious. So go into your body, find where do I feel this? I know I'm feeling anxious right now. Where do I feel that in my body? Rather than going into your head, because as soon as you go into head, you've lost the plot because you're just gonna stay in your head. It's just gonna get worse. It's very rare that all of a sudden your mind just goes, oh, well, here's the solution. I'm not anxious anymore.

• 7:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so I think this is such an important point, right? What, what does that mean? Go into your body and not stay in your head? What, what does staying in your head look like for that individual? Tell me what normally happens when people stay in their head?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  It just gets worse. So when, in your example, my boss is gonna fire me. My boss doesn't like me. My boss's wife doesn't even like me. I mean, I was over there for dinner three weeks ago and they just hated me. So it just, so you see how it just goes like it stacks. It stacks on top of each other, right?

• 7:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  So stories, you know, we're putting meaning on to this.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 7:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  And it's almost running away with itself.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 7:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're saying in that moment, if you can, once you've learned the skill of how to do it, you're saying go into your body. You've already mentioned that you store the alarm in your solar plexus.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  That's where it is for me.

• 7:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I think for a lot of people, they, they don't know what does that mean? It's in my body, right?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Well, they, they've never looked for it. That's, that's the whole premise of my approach and my, is that when we get into our heads and we start worrying, we don't feel the need to go into our body because our mind is telling us that it has the answer when all our mind has is just more of the problem. So what I'm saying by getting into your body is, okay, close my eyes. If I can think about this, this whole thing with my boss, sometimes what I will do, I'll work with people and I'll say, okay, think about your boss walking into your office right now and say, you're fired. That, that job you did on the project was unacceptable and you're fired. Now scan your body. I, I'm speeding this up quite a bit, but basically it's, I put people into this sort of relaxed, semi meditative state. And then I put them into their trauma and I go, okay, scan your body. And they'll say, oh, in my throat, I feel this sort of hot.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  And I'll ask them, is it hot or cold? How big is it? Size of a grape, size of a, a baseball, the size of a watermelon? Like, how big is it? And then, does it have a color? Does it have a texture? Does it have a temperature? The insular cortex, which is part of the limbic brain, it makes an emotional signature of your trauma, and it shows up in your body. And I think your body feels exactly the way now, when you're worried about your boss, that it did when you were 10 years old and your mom came in and said, "What are you doing? You can't do that. You're not good enough to do that." And we make this emotional signature through the insula, through the part of the brain that sort of translates the body to the mind and the mind to the body, which is called the insular cortex. We make an emotional signature,

• 9:25Speaker 01

  and our body feels exactly the same way now as it did back when we were 10 years old, with all the wherewithal we had when we were 10 years old. So of course, we're going to start making up these, you know, stories that a child would kind of make up. Because worrying is very childlike. When you look at it, when you look back on it, you go, "Why did I worry about that? That just seems so ridiculous." One of the other reasons why is because we paralyze the premotor areas and the prefrontal cortex because we move into survival physiology, survival brain, which really isn't all that good at rationally figure things out. And so not only does the alarm create this, like this survival physiology in our brain, which makes us look for more threat, we also paralyze the part of our brain that say, "This is really nothing to worry about." So we get double whammied.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  So, and that's why the brain just keeps going. Because the brain wants to solve the problem, but the problem is really unsolvable at the level that you're looking at it.

• 10:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so if you stay stuck in the mind with more thoughts, with more stories, it's very hard, you're saying, to actually change things?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  You can't. I mean, you can change it. You can start saying, you know, "My boss likes me. He's given me this really great job evaluation only a week ago." You can go into that. But again, you're just kind of bailing water. You know, I would prefer that when you get in, when you're sitting at your desk and you're freaking out, it's like, "Okay, I feel this in my throat. Okay, can I put my hand over my throat? Can I breathe into it?" There's, um, Andrew Huberman talks about this, the physiological sigh. Two sniffs in, and a long exhale.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  And with me, with my anxiety people, the anxiety people I work with, I do this sort of modified version of it. I do it three times, really deep, expanding my chest. Hold for about two or three seconds and then close my teeth and breathe out through my teeth.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  And really elongate that exhale. And as I hear that hissing sound that I'm making myself, I imagine a tire, an overinflated tire, just relaxing. So it looks like this. So I'm stressed, I'm sitting at my desk, I'm freaking out. It's like, hold.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Relaxing my shoulder, relaxing my jaw as I breathe out, elongating my exhalation. And I can't do it too many times or I'll start zoning myself out because this is what I do to calm myself down. And that's a much better use of your time and energy than trying to figure it out through your head. You're never going to solve it through your mind.

• 11:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  So if someone does that breathing practice, number one, what is it doing to the body when you do that? And I guess following on from that, is that something people can do in the moment when they're feeling that alarm in their body?

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And if you practice it when you're not, this is the big thing with people. This is the people, difference between the people that heal and the people that just manage. If you practice it when you're not feeling anxious, if you start getting into a practice of even five minutes a day doing that.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  When you're driving or just when you're sitting, just feeling your butt in the chair, feeling your, feeling your shoulders relaxed, feeling your jaw relaxed, giving yourself a felt sense that you're okay and training that. So when you, when you actually go into the game, when you go into that stressful situation, you've taught your autonomic nervous system this process that will relax it.

• 12:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  When you tell yourself things are okay, you want to believe it. You want to go into that feeling because it feels so much better. But it's much more effective to use the body to calm the mind than it is to use the mind to try and calm the body. So, and that's a big premise of the book too, is like, how do we find? It's like you're numbing the symptoms, but the root cause, this sort of childhood pain, you know, not to sound like a broken record, is still there. Can we move the body? Can we change the body? And in some way, that that woman sitting at her chair, at her desk, if she puts her hand on her chest or finds the alarm in her system and breathes into it, she's changing her body reaction. So when we change that, we break the spell a little bit of the alarm.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  And when we break the spell of the alarm and we're out of our heads because we're not in our worry anymore, because we're now in our body, it really breaks that sort of automatic cycle that we were in before that we didn't even know we were in.

• 13:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  What you are advocating for is something that actually is quite alien to much of Western culture.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 13:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, I see it with my kids now at school. You know, everything is about the mind and thoughts and thinking. That's been me for much of my life.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 14:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  You know, which is, which is why I'm so drawn to silence and stillness and time without listening to stuff or looking at stuff, right? It's been something that I think I've only managed to do or experience, I would say, over the past few years.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  After doing therapy and working through various states, right? Because it's not easy when you're used to thinking all the time.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's very hard to just sit there and try and be still.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Because thinking becomes a way of avoiding. Here's, here's the way I think what happens is that we develop this state of alarm in our body. We don't want to, we don't want to live there. We don't want to feel bad. So what we do instead is we go up into the worries of our mind. People say that worry doesn't do anything. It absolutely does do something. It takes us away from this pain, typically childhood, that's, that's stuck in our body. And then we're ruminating up in our heads because the more we can stay in our heads and dissociate into our heads, the less we have to go down and experience that old alarm that we don't even realize is there most of the time.

• 15:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  One lady, I was reading it on your Instagram this morning, was saying that was one of the most profound things she's ever learned, that in that situation of anxiety, to feel the alarm, and I think she was saying, and I didn't get this in your book, but she was saying, I think she heard you talk about it on a reel, she put her hands on where the alarm was, one hand, the other hand she put on her leg.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  And she said, she has never had anxiety to the same level since then, right? So I'm fascinated by you and your approach because you're a formally trained medical doctor, you're a trained neuroscientist, and you're someone who's suffered.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Badly.

• 15:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  When you say a sense of awareness was one of the most powerful tools, perhaps we could relate that to your ABC framework. What does that mean and why was it so powerful?

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Mostly awareness of the alarm. It's the alarm in your body that's causing the thoughts of your mind. The thoughts of your mind aren't the originator of your anxiety.

• 16:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so A for awareness.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Yep. So you're aware of, like, how does your alarm feel? Just get really into the nuances of it.

• 16:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  And then go into B, which is body and breath. So go into your body, go into your breath, you know, and then touch as well, like if you can do that. So body and breath is B. And then C is a compassionate connection to that child, you know? So A is awareness, hey, I'm starting to feel that feeling in my thighs, or whatever it is, that alarm in my system, go into my body, go into my breath, connect with that alarm. And then in that connection, which that alarm is your younger self, in that connection, you can feel that younger version of you.

• 16:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  And then that's where you heal. That's when you make a healing shot at your anxiety, as opposed to just coping with it.

• 16:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  This actually goes beyond anxiety.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 16:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Of course, because we could, as you mentioned, if we practice those ABCs, that will help you if you have phone addiction, right? Smartphone addiction, social media scrolling addiction. It could be that as you develop this awareness, you can catch it before you know it, you're stuck in Instagram for two hours.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  You could tune in and realize that you're actually feeling lonely, and that you feel it in one part of your body, and go through that ABC process.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 17:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  It could be before you start.

• 17:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Binge eating sugar, right? If you can build up that awareness and just that little pause to really go, what am I feeling here? Is it physical hunger? Is it emotional hunger? Where is it coming from? Where is it in my body? It's so universal, what you're saying. You've mentioned lots of tools in our conversation today.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  And for that person who is struggling with anxiety, who feels that everything they've tried so far has only had a limited use.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:03Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is there one thing you'd recommend that they think about doing? Is there one practice you'd say, this is where you need to start?

• 18:09Speaker 01

  This is the one tip that, because Leandra, my daughter, has gone through some anxious periods in her life. And this is the one tip that she said, look, Dad, when you get on on Dr. Chatter's podcast, you have to tell people this. It's like, okay, Lee, I'm glad that we got it. So it's basically when you're feeling anxious, just saying to yourself, and this is the middle of the day, the middle of the night, am I safe in this moment? Am I in this moment that I'm in right now? Like, I don't, I may have the dentist in four hours, or I may have an exam or whatever. But in this moment that I'm in right now, am I safe? Because anxiety is always about the future. Worry is always about the future and trauma is always about the past. So if you can say, I'm safe in this moment, and just really feel the safety in the moment.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  That, for her, was the biggest tip that I've ever given her as far as her anxiety goes. It is a bit of a cognitive thing, I agree. But it is something that's really helped her. And she said, Dad, you have to tell them this. You have to say, and this is especially good for in the middle of the night, when you wake up and you're panicked about something. It's like, I know I'm worried about this, this and this. But in this moment that I'm in right now, when I'm looking around at the walls of my room, am I safe? And you could also phrase it in the form of a statement, I am safe in this moment. So that is what I would leave people with is because you can, if you live in this, in the present moment, there's no anxiety in the present moment. Anxiety is, is your mental interpretation and your body's interpretation of anxiety and fear. If you can bring yourself into the present moment,

• 19:37Speaker 01

  then because anxiety is always about the future or past trauma, when you bring yourself into the present moment and assure yourself that you're safe, then you're safe.

• 19:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the original full conversation with my guest. If you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five, and each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles of books that I'm reading, quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're gonna love it. The goal is for it to be a small, yet powerful dose of feel-good to get you

• 20:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it free of charge at drchatgy.com/fridayfive. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe, and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday, and the latest episode of Bite Size next Friday.