Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Most Replayed Moment: Instantly Calm Your Anxiety - Dr. Martha Beck About this episode Dr. Martha Beck explains how the right hemisphere of the brain, through creative thinking, can be a sanctuary for those struggling with anxiety. While today's fast-paced world often frames creative expression as unproductive, learning to embrace it is crucial for improving mental well-being. In this top moment, discover how creative tools can offer emotional relief, helping you feel more calm, grounded, and connected to your true self.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Steven Bartlett? How would I go about switching into this right hemisphere? If I'm feeling anxious, what would you recommend that I do?
0:07 Speaker 01 It's so easy, it's so amazingly easy. Now, your brain naturally goes toward anxiety because of something called the negativity bias. And I always think of it as 15 puppies and a cobra. If I gave you a box and it had 15 puppies and a cobra in it, what would catch your attention? The snake. And that's because, in evolutionary terms, paying attention to the snake is a good idea. Yeah? But we have such a strong negativity bias in our culture, and we have very little to pull us back into communion with oneness. We don't have nature around us anymore. So, we have to do that. We can trick our brains into doing that.
0:52 Speaker 01 And if you want to play a little with this.
0:54 Steven Bartlett? Sure.
0:54 Speaker 01 Okay.
0:55 Steven Bartlett? Tell me what to do.
0:56 Speaker 01 First, I want you to think of something that makes you feel a bit anxious. Maybe not panicky, but anxious. Something you're willing to, like, tell us what it is.
1:06 Steven Bartlett? Okay. Something that makes me feel a little bit anxious?
1:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:12 Steven Bartlett? This is an interesting one.
1:15 Steven Bartlett? Sounds like a strange thing to say, but when my partner is not happy, and I know she's not happy, but she's not telling me why, and I'm around her and I can tell from her vibe, her face, she's not happy about something, and I have no idea what it is.
1:35 Speaker 01 Okay. I think there will be many people out there who know what this feels like.
1:40 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:41 Speaker 01 You are describing a tiny domestic nightmare that many of us feel. So, think about that. Think about what that feels like, and just notice what it does to your body and to your emotions. What's happening in your body if you're in that situation with your partner?
1:57 Steven Bartlett? My breath is short. Yeah.
1:59 Speaker 01 Right.
2:00 Steven Bartlett? I just feel tense and I I become quite impatient. Because I just need the answer to like really alleviate the anxiety.
2:07 Speaker 01 Yeah. So you've gone to a fight or flight nervous system arousal state. Okay, uh uh, something, something's wrong.
2:13 Steven Bartlett? I'm very focused, yeah.
2:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm very focused and I'm very like I'm anxious, but I'm also a little bit snappish because I'm I'm fleeing on one side, I need to get out of this situation. But I'm fighting on the other side, like, tell me what's wrong. So you've got a full fight or flight thing happening. So you can get into that by imagining the situation. Now I want you to imagine something else, very vividly. And it would probably help if you close your eyes. Have you ever eaten an orange?
2:43 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
2:44 Speaker 01 All right. So imagine that you are holding an orange. It's a nice ripe, heavy, delicious orange at the peak of its ripeness. I can tell you've already smelled it. So you can smell the citrus. You just take a bite of it to break the seal of the of the peeling. And just feel that little spray of citric acid that pops up when you bite the peel and then the bitterness of the rind. And then as you bite in the juice gets in your mouth, it's sweet, it's a little bit tangy. You can feel the filaments of the skin and the stringiness of the insides.
3:27 Speaker 01 And you can pull it back, you pull back the peel. You can feel it under your fingernails. You can smell it.
3:36 Speaker 01 Just put the broken part to your mouth and like squeeze the orange and let some juice get into your mouth and taste it completely and then swallow it. And then enjoy the sensation of tasting, feeling, hearing even this experience.
3:59 Speaker 01 Okay. How's your anxiety?
4:02 Steven Bartlett? My anxiety went away.
4:03 Speaker 01 It's gone?
4:04 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
4:04 Speaker 01 Because I asked you to use sensory imagination. And that's handled by the right hemisphere. It's not in the left. So instead of verbal imagination, which can create horror stories, you were in a sensory experience. And what I don't think people realize is that we're always imagining what's going to happen to us in the next few days, weeks, months, years. But we're imagining it based on what we think is real, which is all the horror stories we're hearing about. Oh, you know, I need to mind my health. I need to, there will be accidents. There will be, you know, my loved ones will die. We have all these stories that we haven't happened yet. They may. They're not lies.
4:47 Speaker 01 But that's in the mind as we make our choices. I need to get more money, that whole thing. When you imagine forward with your senses in a way that brings relaxation, how's your body? When you're in the orange thing, you said it was tense when you were in anxiety. What happens to your physical body when you're completely connected to the experience of this imaginary orange?
5:14 Steven Bartlett? Relaxes, your body relaxes.
5:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, you start breathing more deeply. You stop producing all the cortisol, the glucocorticoids, the adrenaline that you had in the fight-flight state. And now you're starting to produce serotonin and dopamine and what they call the tend and befriend hormones. So you're, say if you, say you could hold that energy and your partner's still tense and running around, but you're staying in this relaxed state. Can you then, instead of being afraid of her, start to be curious about what's going on? Instead of saying, tell me what's going on? It's more like, wow, she's really tense.
6:01 Speaker 01 I wonder what that's about? And you could even ask her, honey? I don't want to step on your toes here, but the vibe I'm getting is that you're not okay. Like, can I help you? So it's a very, very different thing to approach conflict. One of the people I wrote about in this book is Chris Voss, one of the FBI's top hostage negotiators. And when he's dealing with a violent, psychopathic terrorist who has people as hostages he's ready to kill, Chris Voss says, "This is how you deal with him."
6:39 Speaker 01 Gently, with a soft voice, curious about his experience and empathetic about it. And you're just thinking, "What? This is not in the movies." But the human amygdala is a frightened animal most of the time. And we all know that if you run at a frightened animal and say, "Tell me what you want," it doesn't get less frightened.
7:05 Speaker 01 So what you just did was move your nervous system into a state where you can be a field of peace for someone else who's anxious.
7:16 Steven Bartlett? Do you have to do the orange thing the whole time to get into that state?
7:18 Speaker 01 No, no, no, there are many tricks. Do you want to do some more?
7:20 Steven Bartlett? Sure.
7:22 Speaker 01 All right, here's one of my favorites.
7:26 Speaker 01 And I got this from a brilliant artist and professor at Harvard, William Reiman, who I was lucky enough to be his teaching assistant for a few years. And this is one of the things that he used to do to get the students to shut down the left side of their brain. Well, not shut it down, but to use the right side of the brain as well, because the left side of the brain can't draw very well, I have to tell you this. So all I want you to do is put your stylus there over toward the right center of your field and write your first name the way you usually sign it.
8:00 Steven Bartlett? Yep.
8:01 Speaker 01 All right.
8:01 Steven Bartlett? The way I usually sign it or write it?
8:03 Speaker 01 The way I usually sign it.
8:04 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
8:07 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
8:07 Speaker 01 Okay.
8:08 Steven Bartlett? So the way I usually sign it's a bit more complicated.
8:10 Speaker 01 Ooh, that's beautiful. Okay, so now, put your stylist just to the left of the signature. And now replicate the signature, but this time write it in mirror writing backwards. Take as much time as you need.
8:28 Steven Bartlett? Gosh.
8:29 Speaker 01 Take as much time as you need.
8:31 Steven Bartlett? This is so difficult.
8:33 Speaker 01 Just breathe.
8:34 Steven Bartlett? Wait, I've got it wrong already. Can I rub out?
8:37 Speaker 01 Absolutely, have as many tries as you need.
8:41 Speaker 01 Notice how the rhythm of your hand goes when you're signing, moving right. And try to see if you can find that rhythm going the opposite direction.
8:50 Steven Bartlett? I might need pen and paper.
8:52 Speaker 01 Using pencil and paper because they're tactile.
8:55 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
8:55 Speaker 01 Is actually, you're gonna have easier access to it because you're gonna have more access to the right side of your brain.
9:01 Steven Bartlett? This is so difficult. Why is my signature so complicated?
9:05 Speaker 01 You're doing brilliantly.
9:15 Speaker 01 You did it!
9:16 Steven Bartlett? Terrible.
9:17 Speaker 01 Yay! No, not terrible. Now, the torture is not over, Stephen.
9:22 Steven Bartlett? It's terrible.
9:23 Speaker 01 It's beautiful.
9:23 Steven Bartlett? You said you wouldn't lie.
9:25 Speaker 01 I just meant your first name, anyway.
9:27 Steven Bartlett? Oh, yours is good.
9:28 Speaker 01 Now, while you were doing that, you might have felt intense frustration and a sense of, huh, but when you're anxious about it, you actually can't do it. You have to become engrossed with it in order to do it. Because your brain is creating new neuron synapses that have never existed before. You've never done this before. So you are fundamentally changing your brain, teaching it a skill it has never had. And this is what children are going through when they learn to write for the first time. But what you just did was connect. Two parts of the brain that are in the right side. So this is why we used to make these poor students do this.
10:11 Speaker 01 Because once they could, we had another book we worked with called Drawing is Forgetting the Name of What You See. As long as you call it a cup, you can't draw it. You draw your image of a cup. But when you forget to call it anything, it just becomes a shape. Like your signature had to just become a shape. And shapes are on the right hemisphere. So what you just did was, it's like powerlifting. You forced your brain to create synapses that were brand new, that were taking you into a state of learning, deep learning. Similar to what happens to children if you let them run around in nature.
10:56 Speaker 01 So there was a study done at NASA in the 60s to identify creative geniuses. And they found that 2% of the adults they sought out, like college graduates, were creative geniuses. After a while, a few years, they decided to try giving it to four and five-year-olds. 98% of them were creative geniuses. And I think that probably the other 2% were just having a bad day. What happens between the moment you're four years old, a full-on creative genius, learning new things the way you just did, day in, day out, and adulthood where your genius has mainly gone dark?
11:40 Speaker 01 It's because you stop trying things that are brand new like that. You're put in the factory line in school and taught to learn in a completely different way that's based on shame and fear and artificial skills that don't mean much to you. And right and wrong answers. Yeah. Everything's right or wrong. Everything's very judgmental. In nature, nothing's judgmental. One of the things I've done with groups of clients is take them into a forest and with the help of my... Another coach who's a great woodsman. We have them, we give them the tools to make fire with sticks and rocks. But they have to work as a team.
12:24 Speaker 01 And then we say, make fire, but you can't talk about it. Because language is in the left hemisphere. And sometimes they're out there for four hours. And the whole time, it's like, ah, what are we doing? They try all these different things. And then, I've never had a group that didn't do it. They figure it out. And you end up with a little flame in your hands. And you feed it a few bits of dried moss or whatever. And you blow into it. And it starts to smoke. And then smoke heavily. And then suddenly, it just bursts into flame. And there's this feeling, there's this Promethean feeling. Oh, my God, we can do anything.
13:07 Speaker 01 And the fact that that's how we're built to learn. And there's joy in it. There's a kind of, it's an achievement. But nature's not saying, wrong, right. You get a, you get an F, you get an A, you get higher levels. No, you get fire or you don't get fired. No judgment.
13:28 Steven Bartlett? So what does this mean for me on a day to day basis? If I understand the power of this, does this mean that I should draw my name a lot? Or is there something that I, that we can all be doing to alleviate our anxiety? And to get us into the right hemisphere of our brain?
13:43 Speaker 01 Well, there's, to me, there's a three step process. And there are three sections in the book. The first one, I use it with the acronym CAT. Calm, Art and Transcendence. This is how it works. The first third of the book is just how to calm your brain. It's been taught to be anxious. It is biologically pre-programmed to be anxious. So to calm it down, most people will say, they'll come in and tell me, I want to fight my anxiety. I want to get it, I want to end it. I want to bring it down. I want it gone. Because they think it's a broken machine, but it's not a broken machine. It's a frightened animal. And if, if you came in and I said to you, okay, I want to end you. I want to bring you down.
14:27 Speaker 01 I'm going to fight you till you're gone. Would you be less afraid or more afraid? So they're attacking the part of themselves that's anxious and it makes it more anxious. So, and that's what we're taught to do. End it, force it to calm down with chemicals. One of the most ghastly things that ever happened in psychiatry was that they used to literally take people who had, you know, inexorable anxiety and literally put a screwdriver through the eye socket and up into the brain and just mix it around. That's how mechanistic we are about our own minds.
15:10 Speaker 01 We can fix it with a screwdriver. That's a very left hemisphere way to think and it's literally attacking ourselves. But we're all, we're all born with the intrinsic knowledge of how to calm a frightened animal. So if you found a terrified puppy on your stoop one morning and you decided to try to help it, you would instinctively know that how to do that. What, what would you do?
15:38 Steven Bartlett? Um, I would approach it slowly or not approach it at all. And I would get down.
15:44 Speaker 01 Yes.
15:45 Steven Bartlett? And I'd be very gentle and say hello and I'd ask it to come to me.
15:47 Speaker 01 Yeah. And if it didn't, you'd give it space. You'd give it time. It's there with it.
15:53 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
15:54 Speaker 01 And just the way your energy just changed now, you'd get down, you'd begin to smile in a very sweet way. And I could feel the tolerance and the gentleness and the space that you would give this creature. We've got to learn to be gentle to ourselves. We are taught to be violent to ourselves. Biohack that, make, you know, make yourself eat this and do that. And, and instead, if we could just go to the anxious part, like say you're with your partner and she's acting weird and you're feeling anxious. Generally, what we do is we try to control the situation. What can I do? Can I make her happy? I'll bring her flowers. I'll do whatever, right? Have an argument.
16:40 Speaker 01 Instead of trying to control her, the best approach is go inside, find the part of yourself that's afraid. So if you're in that situation and she's nervous and you just start to observe your own anxiety, like, okay, what does that feel like? Who is that in there? Who's the anxious part of me? And just notice. I mean, try it right now if you don't mind. She's upset. She's tense. She's not telling you the problem. Notice the anxiety. Where is it in your body exactly?
17:15 Steven Bartlett? It's like here, in my chest.
17:17 Speaker 01 Okay, in your chest. So allow that. And say to it, I'm gonna give you space. I'm here. I'm gonna be here with you. I know she's scaring you, but I've got you. It's okay. She's not gonna hurt us. I can go in the other room with you if you need. And sit with it. And say, let me know. What? What are you feeling? Tell me everything. You get to feel exactly the way you feel.
17:48 Speaker 01 And I'm here to listen to anything you want to tell me. And I will not hurt you. And I will not try to stifle you or make you go away.
17:59 Speaker 01 So how does that change anything?
18:03 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, for some reason, it just, um, the volume went down. So I can't describe it. It's just like the volume has went down. And it made me wonder if, just because just by you saying that, it made me wonder if, if in those moments, I should be writing it out?
18:17 Speaker 01 That can be really helpful. There's a psychologist named James Pennebaker who found that if he just had students, he just did this experiment once as a graduate student. He had students write for 15 minutes about something that was upsetting to them. And many of them came out of the experiment in tears. It really upset them for an hour or two. He had other students just write what they did last summer or whatever. So there was this brief period where the ones who had stirred up some turmoil felt unsettled. But they, in the, in the weeks and even the years subsequent to that experiment, they had fewer doctor's visits, they had less anxiety, they had better relationships,
18:59 Speaker 01 they had better everything. So he, for his whole career, just did these writing exercises where he would have people just express themselves, not to show anyone, not even to reread, just to express. The parts of us that are frightened need, need to be heard. The parts of society that are hurting need to be heard. I'm astonished by the truth and reconciliation councils held in South Africa after Nelson Mandela became president. These people who had been through absolute atrocities. And they were just heard. They were allowed to tell their stories to the people who had hurt them
19:44 Speaker 01 and other people who were on their side. And the telling of it avoided, you know, what everyone thought would be a bloodbath. And it, it of course didn't fix all the problems, but it unburdened, to a large extent, people who had been through things that I can't even imagine. So yes, write it, write it down. So she's in the other room, she's acting weird. Something might come up about, like, how old is that anxious part? Maybe it's young, maybe it's not.
20:19 Steven Bartlett? You said something at the start. You said that anxiety is like driving over a metal spike in those police, like, chases. That's what I was thinking about, like, the police chases, whether they throw out the metal spikes and the car falls over. Why, why did you use that analogy? What are you, what are you saying there about the nature of anxiety?
20:36 Speaker 01 That's what it's like if you get stuck in what's called the anxiety spiral in the brain, the anxiety cycle, some people call it. So what you have to do in that situation is, to extend the metaphor, get out of the car, disarm the mechanism, get that mechanism out of the way, you know, the tire ripping thing, and then you can back out. But the stopping and getting out, that's the calming step of anxiety, and that's what you're doing here. As weird as it sounds, when you write your name backwards and you come into a state of physiological calm, you are getting rid of the tire rippers. You're building pathways that go into the calmer parts of the brain.
21:20 Speaker 01 So the same thing when you were imagining eating an orange, you're calming yourself and it allows you to reverse. It allows you to leave, finally. But our culture tends to not allow you to leave. It's always telling you horror stories. So then, once you get really calm and you've taken care of that part of yourself, I said the acronym is C A T, CAT.
21:49 Speaker 01 Once you get to calm, then, very paradoxically, it blew me away when I realized this, then you need art. And I don't mean drawing, I mean making things. Making things in three dimensions, making events happen, making a podcast. Like, what was the fire in you that made you make things? And how did it feel when you were in the making?
22:17 Steven Bartlett? In the making, it usually feels great.
22:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:20 Steven Bartlett? Like, in the process of making. Actually, me and my partner went and did, last weekend, we went and made some art. And I was stressed and stuff. And so when we went and did this art, I'd never painted in my life.
22:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:32 Steven Bartlett? So we went to this random loft, and there was this guy there, and he had these massive two pieces of cardboard and loads of spray cans and paint and stuff. And we just painted for maybe three hours or something. And I was totally lost in it. I mean, that's the way people describe it. They describe it as being lost in it, right?
22:47 Speaker 01 Yeah. And do you know that if people have been through a trauma and they're allowed to draw about it, even if they can't draw, you know, professionally? They have an 80% lower chance of developing PTSD. There's something about creating stuff. And it could be a company, or it could be a spray paint on a cardboard. My partner started making bead bracelets a while ago. She's very busy. She doesn't have time for this, but it makes her so content. And we were talking about how if you go into a tomb in Egypt from 5,000 years ago, what are you going to find? Among other things, beaded bracelets.
23:30 Speaker 01 If you go to the Amazon rainforest and contact an uncontacted tribe, what might you find? Beaded bracelets. People are making beaded bracelets all the time, and they serve no function. They are precious, pointless things, she said, that we make. And all cultures, we make music. I mean, I think about the cultures in Jamaica. One of the worst slavery colonies in the history of the world. It was just, it made what was happening on the mainland look gentle by comparison. And out of that, you get these incredible art forms, reggae, dance. I mean, like, in the middle of being crushed, having literally everything taken from them,
24:13 Speaker 01 people were still making art. This is a part of the human spirit that is just, it's indomitable. And our culture pushes it to the fringes. Okay, Stephen, you can do that on a weekend. That's nice. But did you really make any money? You know?
24:32 Steven Bartlett? Get a real job?
24:33 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:34 Steven Bartlett? How does this link, again, back to the brain? So if I'm creating, I'm making some art. I was doing that spray paint thing with the paint and the... I'll show you a picture of it after. I actually think that's not bad.
24:42 Speaker 01 Cool, I want to see it.
24:44 Steven Bartlett? But how is that helping me to calm my anxiety?
24:48 Speaker 01 It's because of the way the structures on the left side, they're obsessed with grasping material objects, acquiring, controlling other people, always thinking about fear. And...
25:02 Speaker 01 There does seem to be this toggle effect that anxiety and creativity just can't work at the same time. So the moment you begin to create, like when you said, "I could write this," that's expressive writing, that's artistic writing. And all of a sudden, the toggle switches off in anxiety and on in creativity. So I believe that there's another spiral on the right side of the brain, but instead of spiraling tightly into fear, it spirals outward. And ultimately, you get to the final thing. There's calming, there's artistry, and then there's transcendence or awakening. When you're there,
25:46 Speaker 01 sometimes we call it flow. Chiksel Nehai, the psychologist who named it flow, really looked into this. And it's a state of creating and performing at a level so difficult, we almost can't do it. Exactly the way you were writing your name. It's like, "Ah, oof." And you can have what's called the rage to master, where you're just like, "I can't." But when you get it, and I'm sure you've had this with many things you've created in your life, it's like flying, it's heaven. And there's a time in the process of creating where the sense of self falls away and the sense of control isn't necessary. And what you feel
26:31 Speaker 01 is creation itself sort of moving with you and through you. And it's blissful. And I believe that is the state in which we are meant to spend almost all our time. And I think that would transform our consciousness.
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