Communication Secrets for Divided Times & The Anatomy of Anxiety - SYSK Choice
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Today on Something You Should Know, how doing something slower can make your life a whole lot better. Then you've probably noticed that political discussions can get pretty nasty, but they don't have to.

Social science research has shown us that when people on one side are asked to gauge the beliefs on the other, we wildly exaggerate. Both sides believe the other side despises them twice as much as they actually do. Also, if you want to sharpen your memory, go outside. It can really help. And a lot of us struggle with anxiety and mental health.

I don't deny that genetics matters and that meds and psychotherapy can be helpful, but there's more to the story. Our sleep, our nutrition, nature, whether or not we get sunshine and fresh air and pleasure, all of these things are also determinants of our mental health. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. It's kind of a cliche to say that we live in a fast-paced world.

But in fact, we do. But much of the fast pace of our world is because we just do things fast, because that's what we do. And according to Debbie Mandel, author of the book Addicted to Stress, we would be a lot better off if we slowed down some of these things. For example, driving.

A lot of people drive too fast. If you slow down, you'll not only save gas and reduce the odds of an accident or a ticket, you'll actually feel more relaxed when you get to your destination. Talking. When you slow down your speech, you come across as more intelligent and thoughtful.

Now, a lot of people eat too fast. I think I eat too fast. By slowing down, we eat less, have less indigestion, and even absorb more nutrients.

A lot of people work too fast. Rushing or multitasking can bottleneck the brain and can result in more errors and time wasted in the long run. And a lot of us do our chores too fast. Washing the dishes or folding the laundry can actually be therapeutic if you slow down and focus on the task at hand. You'll also do a better job. And that is something you should know. Music

People talk today about how divisive and polarized we are, particularly when it comes to political issues. There was a time when people could be on opposite sides of an issue and still be friends, still be civil to each other. Now that seems less likely. Well, why can't we go back to the old way? Why can't we agree to disagree? Maybe even try to understand the other person's point of view? Well, maybe we can.

Monica Guzman is on a mission to depolarize America. As part of her work, she's written a book called I Never Thought of It That Way, How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. Hi, Monica. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey. Thanks for having me. So explain the problem as you see it. What's the issue that you're on a mission to solve?

We are trying to solve that we are so divided that we're blinded.

There's these factors that have kept us polarized and are keeping us away from each other and are also leading us to judge each other more while engaging each other less. And I argue that when we don't understand other people's perspectives, we don't see the world at all. And the way through it is to really lean on our own curiosity.

Well, it also seems to me that this has gotten really personal, that I could understand that you might have a different point of view than me. But now it's because you do, you're an idiot. And that didn't used to be.

Yeah, it's three things, three assumptions that we make about people that makes it extraordinarily difficult to want to approach them. One is you're an idiot. Another is you're evil. And the third one is you're crazy.

And what I say is anytime in a conversation or even when you're just reading a perspective online that you know many people share, but that is different. If you catch yourself saying to yourself, this person's an idiot, this person is crazy, this person is evil, you're wrong. You can begin by saying, let me question that assumption because that cannot be right. There's more going on here than that.

And to what end? If I think that someone holds a position that really makes no sense to me and, you know, it goes against everything I believe in my values, why should I question the assumption? Why should I not just walk away? Hmm.

Well, it comes back to we're so divided, we're blinded. So social science research has shown us that when people on one side are asked to gauge, estimate the beliefs on the other, we wildly exaggerate.

the extreme beliefs that exist on the other side. We also exaggerate the bad attitudes that we think the other side is sending us. Both sides believe the other side despises them twice as much as they actually do. That animosity is called affective polarization. It's polarization based on how we feel about each other. And you might think, well, whatever. I'm walking around

the planet. I'm fine. I don't want to talk to folks. But the thing is, we are actually living under more anxiety and fear than is probably justified. So when we think, you know, I'm good where I'm at, I don't want to go and explore these other perspectives. We make the assumption that we know all we need to know and we see the world clearly enough, but we actually don't.

And the anxieties that we have that are based on perceptions of other people's beliefs and what motivates them. We often assume everyone who disagrees with us on important things is motivated, for example, by hate. Right. But when you go and approach people one on one or you look more curiously at what's behind a belief, you start to see that it's not as scary as you think.

more often than not, it's not as extreme as you think. And so with each of these conversations, the volume gets turned down on the fear and the anxiety that is driving so much, not just the division in our society, but the stress in our own lives. So this is about being less scared. And by the way, when we have less fear, we are more creative.

We can solve more. We can do more. We can see possibilities where we only saw disasters. We can be constructive when before we were resigned. This is the way that we can be more proactive in our lives.

So let's talk about an example that I'd like you to comment on. There are people who believe that there are more than two genders. And there are people who think that is absolutely ridiculous, that biologically that is not possible, that this discussion has never happened for zillions of years. All of a sudden there's multiple genders saying,

That's an extreme position to some people. That seems like an extreme position. So when you say things aren't as extreme, I don't see how you reconcile that. Well, this is where it really helps to connect not with people's arguments, but with their experiences.

I love that you brought up this particular example because it's true. We didn't used to have this debate before. Why is it suddenly all around us? And I think a lot about the dynamics of people and what's going on with gender versus sex. We're trying to get our language to basically explain and begin to describe the experiences of people who don't feel like

adequately represented by this idea of two genders. And so they're challenging all of society to rethink this, which can feel really threatening to people's sense of sort of, man, the last thing a lot of people thought to question was gender. It just seemed like, what? And so I talk a lot about whoever is underrepresented in your life will be overrepresented in your imagination. So for some folks, people

People who are sharing non-binary pronouns and pushing others to do the same, they just feel like the other in the biggest way.

And because, you know, they're threatening a set of customs and habits for seemingly, you know, to them, maybe idiotic or crazy or evil reasons. But again, it's never quite like that. And so because people who are underrepresented in our lives are overrepresented in our imaginations, it's asking other people about their experiences. Oh, so you believe that there's more than two genders. Like, tell me how you came to believe that.

Instead of asking, why do you believe that? Why in the world do you believe that? Don't ask why, ask how. How did you come to believe that? And then what you're asking that person to share with you is a story. And inevitably, when you ask someone to share a story, even if you completely disagree and can never accept the conclusions that that person has drawn,

The story they tell you about how they came to their own perspectives will have things that you resonate with, that you relate to, whether it's pain, a feeling of being left out, of being misunderstood, underrepresented, misrepresented. We all can share those ideas, those feelings. And that leads to understanding, not necessarily agreement, but at least understanding.

Don't you think that underscoring these discussions, these debates on things like, you know, are there more than two genders, that whether consciously or subconsciously, the reason people engage in it is to try to convince the other person to change their mind, to come on over to my side. That seems to be what drives a lot of this. Yeah, that's right. And it's

natural and most of the time extraordinarily unrealistic. So I think that this funny thing has happened thanks to how what the

what the volume of our argumentative discourse now is that happens online. We are conflating opinions with people and we are creating memes and all kinds of clever lines that we're throwing out there. And we tell ourselves,

wow, I just delivered this mic drop moment. I just dropped this reason and everyone who follows me on Twitter sees it and they all see how clever and smart this reason is and we can move on. But because we don't actually see who's listening, we don't see the skeptical looks on their faces. I think we've really come to this place where we think that reasons, the reason that worked for me, the one that convinced me, that changed my mind,

Here it is. I'm holding it in my hand and all I need to do is hand it to you and it will have the same effect on you. This is the illusion we're living under because we don't often see that it doesn't happen. But in reality...

Our perspectives have roots and those roots go down throughout our entire lives. I like to say that we don't see with our eyes, we see with our whole biographies. So for example, my husband is a lifelong Star Wars fan. His parents took him to see the prequels when he was a kid three times in the theater. That's a lot of hours in the movie theater. He has a life-size replica of Yoda in our home that his grandmother got him.

I think Star Trek is a far superior show, but there is nothing, there is no reason I could hand my husband that is going to talk him out of lifelong experiences that have built this beautiful meaningfulness to his love of Star Wars. So that's it. It's like we can go in trying to change people's minds, but that's forgetting how people work, you know?

More likely, it's possible that something we say will plant a seed in someone's mind. It's possible that they'll think or say, huh, I never thought of it that way, which is an extraordinarily beautiful thing. But is it going to change their minds? Only if they were already at the cusp of it themselves.

We're talking about having conversations with people on topics where we disagree and how to make those conversations go well. My guest is Monica Guzman, author of the book, I Never Thought of It That Way, How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.

Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show Supernatural.

along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, "He's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type."

With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. So, Monica, here's the thing about the Star Trek, Star Wars comparison there. You can love Star Wars and still like Star Trek.

But you can't take political positions on both sides. You can't be pro-abortion and anti-abortion. You can still like both Star Wars and Star Trek. Yeah, I love that you brought up abortion because the more that I do the work that I do, the more irreconcilable contradictions I detect in my own views.

So to give you an example that ties right to what you brought up, I am pro-choice politically. I do believe that abortion should be legal. I was raised Catholic. My parents are deeply conservative. My mother started the Right to Life Club in my Catholic high school. She also worked at a clinic that counseled women who were thinking of having abortions or who had already had them from a Catholic perspective. So...

I have these very complicated views on abortion, where even though I believe that it ought to be legal, I also really, really listen to the idea that something about it is very wrong and the way that it takes away life is very wrong. And so I see that contradiction in my head and heart. And at some point, I decided that I did not need to pretend to resolve it.

You know, I would imagine a lot of people hold that position. And yet, I think people believe you have to be one way or the other. You can't hold those two positions.

positions that that doesn't work. Right. Exactly. And we don't say it because our society pushes us toward binaries. That's that's what polarization is. That's the definition, right? Polarities. The thing is, with a lot of the perennially wicked, tough issues in our world, if if there's if we see it as a simple A or B, we're not seeing it. You know, we're not seeing it.

These issues are complicated for a reason. And so it is the complexity, it's embracing the complexity that I think can make us more creative because we can begin to see that perhaps, well, maybe we're not as divided as we think on a lot of these issues. When we put it on the table, when we're open and candid, when we ask each other to elaborate on their own vulnerable views, they may not line up.

with what we assumed them to believe or what, you know, the talking points out there would have us think everything boils down to. I think in our heads and hearts, we hold a lot of nuance that we don't share because it doesn't seem to be welcome. But when we don't make room for that nuance, even in our own private conversations, we really miss out on a lot of opportunities to see creative solutions and negotiations

of good values that are put into tension, right? Like that's really ultimately all that as a society can do with these issues. You know, something like abortion puts good values into tension, the value of life with the value of making one's own free choices in their lives. Those two are both good values.

And different people stack them in a different order when they look at abortion. But they're two good values, and they are going to continue to be in tension and wrestling with each other.

Your position on that issue is kind of the definition of ambivalence. And ambivalence doesn't get you anywhere if your job is to advocate. You can't advocate for ambivalence. You have to advocate pro or against. And that, I think, is what gets a lot of people going.

worked up is that they have to take a position that gets them somewhere. We have to protest. We have to fight for this. If you have your view on that, well, there's not much to fight about.

Yeah, that's right. I think that's a very interesting critique because it's true. If you see some good on both sides, you're not going to be as motivated, as mobilized, motivated by the fear of the thing you don't want happening happening, right? You're less likely to go pick up a sign and head out to a protest. I think that's true.

But to complicate what you said, you know, you said you can't advocate for ambivalence. I do think that in this very divided world, we should be advocating for complexity. We should be advocating for the ways in which one side can see the value and the good in the people who hold the opposing beliefs, because otherwise we are going to continue to spin out of control.

And when the two poles of an issue, which you're right, they're the ones most motivated to be activists. That's great. But when they stop hearing each other and when they are not balanced out by a society that has enough glue, right, enough of a network of relationships across difference, that it allows certain perspectives to travel through society in a healthy way. When all we have is the activists and then non-engagement everywhere else, we're in trouble. We're in deep, deep trouble.

Because again, we are exaggerating the evil on the other side. We're not seeing where there might be common ground. And that means we're not seeing where we can collaborate. What is your advice? If you want to engage in a conversation with someone who holds an opposing view, how do you enter that conversation together?

So that it remains a civil conversation and not turn into a fight and where nobody gets anywhere. What's your approach?

Be curious. The great thing about curiosity, it is a mental mode. It is a muscle that you can exercise. It's a practice. I don't believe that some people are naturally more curious than others. No, they just might be more practiced and anyone can begin to practice this. When you approach someone with curiosity, judgment truly falls away and you can become fascinated.

And, you know, one of the benefits of that is we all want to be seen and understood. So when people ask us questions and there's enough trust there, how did you come to believe what you believe? Tell me about your path and your story. I really am curious about this. And when we don't sneak in some accusation or judgment into that, when it's pure curiosity, it can really be, it can even be joyful.

And I know how extreme that must sound. So it really comes down to your intention. Why are you having this conversation? Why are you entering into it? Is it

Is it to try to change someone's mind and explain to them why they're wrong, which likely isn't going to go very well? Or are you actually curious as to how they came to believe what they believe? Because if you're just going to argue the facts, then it's like a tug-of-war.

That's right. And it becomes a tug of war, I think, often because we really do get wrapped up in reasons. We want to ask about other people's reasons. We want to share the facts from the headlines. Facts are great. Facts are important. We need to get them right. And so we think, well, this other person doesn't know about the issue. And then we can think one of a number of things. We can think they are not qualified to have an opinion. We can think they are not worthy of standing in my way.

We can think they will be easy pickings for changing their mind. I just have to educate them. I just have to inform them. All of these things are missing a really key element, which is this. When we think that all of these issues just come down to an intellectual, rational, logical balancing of a bunch of arguments, we miss that underneath all of this, at the very heart of politics, is concerns.

It's about what we are concerned about. It's about what we hope for. And so sometimes when somebody is taking the package deal and they are, you know, siding with whatever the liberal side is, whatever the conservative side is, out of a sense of group identity, there's a deep concern around belonging. And if you don't touch that concern, if you don't get to the level of that concern, then everything you try to tell that person is just going to fall on deaf ears. It's just not even going to

it's not going to really matter because you're not really talking about what matters to them. So I work with a nonprofit called Braver Angels, and we do these really fabulous workshops where people who are red and blue and everything else come together and work to understand each other. And so many times at the end, we ask, you know, what did you take away from this? And so many people say, you know, I didn't ever really stop and think about what I believe.

I didn't do it. And this is one of the consequences of a divided world. When we are so divided, we are blinded too because we are not opening ourselves to challenges, to good skeptical questions about our beliefs. So when we stop putting ourselves into those situations and conversations where friction can be added to our thinking, we stop needing to think. We actually stop thinking. Because why? Everyone agrees with us.

We don't have to think. It can just remain a feeling, right? So there's this concerns matter and reason matters. And we need to make sure that those two are checking each other all the time. But we're going to have to go out of our way in a world that's set up like this to build that web for ourselves.

Well, I for one sure think it would be nice if we could go back to talking about things without having to, you know, dance around the issue or avoid it or worry about offending everybody and just be able to talk. I think, I don't think anything bad can come from that. Monica Guzman's been my guest and the name of her book is I Never Thought of It That Way, How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.

And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Monica. Cool. Okay. Thank you so much, Mike. This has been an awesome conversation. Sure seems like there's a lot of anxiety today. People are anxious about their health, the state of the world, their finances, their relationships. Anxiety seems to abound everywhere.

Some people seem to handle anxiety pretty well, but for others, their anxiety keeps them up at night, worrying, catastrophizing, what-if-ing.

So let's dig down into the topic of anxiety, what it is and how best to handle it with Dr. Ellen Vora. She is a psychiatrist and author of the book, The Anatomy of Anxiety, Understanding and Overcoming the Body's Fear Response. Hi, Ellen. Thanks for coming. Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for having me here. I imagine just about everyone has felt that sensation, that feeling, that fear feeling, that anxious feeling.

And you divide anxiety into basically two groups. There's true anxiety and false anxiety. So explain the difference. The way I see it is that false anxiety is avoidable anxiety. It's a physically based anxiety. When our body gets into a stress response and that tracks up to the brain and tells our brain, feel anxious. We're not okay. We're in a state of imbalance.

And then true anxiety is purposeful anxiety. It's not something that we can medicate away or heal our gut or get off coffee or gluten-free away. It's really just an inner compass here to tell us something is not okay in our lives, in the world around us. And it's asking us to slow down, pay attention and translate that feeling of uneasiness into

into purposeful action. Well, I've always thought of anxiety as that feeling of uneasiness because we're afraid of something that might happen. That's exactly right. Anticipation of something happening in the future, something that we're afraid of, which often boils down into the ultimate worst case scenarios of losing our own life or losing somebody that we love. And that's really at the heart of anxiety.

Well, but also I've heard and have, I've experienced this, that a lot of the things you worry about, that you're anxious about, never happen. I mean, and maybe that's you thinking that by worrying about it, you somehow fix the problem or I don't know what. But so much of the worry and anxiety that we have are things that never seem to do us any harm.

Absolutely. And this is something hardwired in our DNA as human beings is that the ability to anticipate potential negative consequences, the ability to kind of overthink and be vigilant and think about what might go wrong so that we can make preparations and try to avoid it. It's part of why we're the product of successful ancestors. It's why we're here today. But it's just a question of how much airtime that should get. And sometimes what we stumble into is where we're living

living in such a state of preventing a potential negative outcome that we've actually missed out on the opportunity to enjoy what we're trying to protect. So how do you determine if you have true or false anxiety? Is what you're worrying about worth worrying about?

I always encourage my patients to start with an inventory of possible causes of false anxiety. That's the low hanging fruit. That's the easier place to start. So in my book, I put up inventory because when we're in that moment of anxiety, it's really hard to have the presence of mind.

to be thinking, oh, am I hungry or am I sleep deprived or am I due for my next dose of medication right now? And so it's helpful to have it referenced somewhere. And you can just glance at that when you're in a moment of peak anxiety and it can remind you, it can cue you. And then you can realize, oh yeah, I did have an extra cup of coffee or I did have a couple glasses of wine last night and I didn't sleep very well. And it can just help take some of the charge out of that feeling of anxiety in the moment

And it gives us a straightforward path out of it. It helps us understand why we might be anxious. So once we've reviewed

potential causes of false anxiety, if we've addressed them and we kind of know that now we're in a state of physical balance, that reveals what's underneath that, which is our true anxiety. And then it's not a call to action to make diet and lifestyle changes. It's really a call to action to slow down and tune in to what that anxiety is here to tell us. But do you think though that there are some people who are just more anxious than others? That's just kind of the way they are.

Yeah, absolutely. I think of some people as more sensitive and really sensitive in every sense of that word. So we might be more sensitive to the effects of caffeine, to inflammatory components in the modern diet, more attuned to the feelings of those around us. And I really think of the sensitive folks as the canaries in the coal mine of modern life. And what gets them out of balance is probably not good for any of us, but they're here almost in a prophetic capacity.

capacity to tell us something is poisonous in the air right now. And I think that if you are on that end of the spectrum, more sensitive, it's that much more imperative that you identify the physiologic causes of imbalance in your body, because it's for many people causing a lot of unnecessary suffering. Well, you've mentioned a few, but what are some of the likely physiological causes of that imbalance?

What I see commonly in my practice is blood sugar issues. I'll see people that have a proneness to when their blood sugar crashes that induces a stress response in the body, which feels exactly like anxiety. For some people, it's even just caffeine sensitivity or the effects of alcohol. For other people, it might be that their gut is out of balance. They might have

inflammation in their digestive tract or an imbalance of gut flora. Some people are systemically inflamed. Their whole body's in a state of chronic low-grade inflammation, and that's sending a signal up to the brain that the body is under threat, and that can leave us feeling really uneasy.

A lot of people are walking around with a dietary intolerance or hormonal imbalance or just being chronically sleep deprived, which is really common in modern life, whether that's from bad habits or doom scrolling at night or just having too much to do. And there's just not enough hours in the day to get enough sleep all the way to sleep apnea, which is incredibly common and underdiagnosed.

And so what's a person to do? Because that's a big, long list of things. And, you know, a lot of people wouldn't even know what, well, how would I know if my blood sugar is out of whack? Or how would I know if a lot of the things you just mentioned, how would I know what to do?

Yeah, the way I approach this with patients and with readers is to create somewhat of a buffet. Like, here's all these different things to consider, things that might indicate this could be you. And my intention is that if something resonates, if something feels a little familiar, then that's what you're going to go deep into. And you're going to investigate, is this causing a state of imbalance? One thing I hear a lot is that technology, social media,

that this drives a lot of anxiety because we're always comparing ourselves to all the other people we see on social media. So we're in such an interesting experiment right now. We're living in the attention economy where our attention is the commodity that very smart companies are competing for.

And they've done their homework. They know their neuroscience and their behavioral psychology. And they know that if they instill some degree of fear or uncertainty or doubt or controversy, we'll rubberneck. We will give an increasingly large share of our attention and they'll get more ads and more clicks and our mental health will be the collateral damage.

So we really need to navigate the information landscape with our eyes wide open, making very conscious choices. And one strategy that I found has helped a lot of my patients is to simply not bring the phone into the bedroom at night. It doesn't solve all of the FOMO or all the comparisonitis or the doom scrolling. We can still have plenty of opportunity for that during the day, and that's another project. But at the very least, when we don't bring our phone into the bedroom at night,

Then we are not getting exposure to the blue spectrum light on our phone screens right before bed, which can suppress our melatonin and disrupt our circadian rhythm. And then the fact that the phone doesn't have a natural stopping point when we scroll endlessly, it keeps us up inappropriately late. We don't get those cues to put the phone down and go to bed. And so if we don't bring the phone into the bedroom, it prevents those different ways of

altering our mood right before sleep and impacting our sleep quality and quantity. Do you find that people who are overly anxious or falsely anxious know it?

Yes, I do find that. I'm sure that there are many people who have some subtle signs of anxiety that they don't subjectively identify as anxiety. But I'm not really in the business of catching people that are anxious who didn't realize they were anxious. And I don't think it's necessarily helpful to label people with diagnoses that they weren't identifying with. But what I see in my practice and

on my various social media platforms and when I speak to audiences, I see a lot of people connecting with this term anxiety. That seems to be the tone right now of how so many people are subjectively identifying how they feel. Yeah, well I imagine that if you spend a lot of your life in that anxious state, that if you're not in it, if you somehow are able to relax and get out of it, that you feel like, wait, something's wrong.

That absolutely can happen. That can happen for a number of different reasons. But anybody who spent a long time struggling with their mental health, if they ever do get to a place where they feel well and things feel good and they're calm, it can feel a little bit like when is the other shoe going to drop? Because they've been demoralized and somewhat traumatized from the feeling of being stuck in a state of not feeling well. And so it becomes difficult to trust feeling good. And there are many people who grew up in

settings like in a chaotic home where calm was not a state that you could trust and really just relax into that calm was almost always the calm before the storm when there was going to be an anger outburst or some kind of state of chaos in their childhood home. So a lot of people don't feel at ease when things are calm. And I really take a stance of helping people see that this is a different approach to mental health.

And even if you might have had windows in the past where you felt better, but it was followed up by times when you had a relapse and you felt bad again, this is a different strategy. We know why we're achieving a state of better well-being. It's from approaching anxiety from a physical perspective where we get the physical body into balance.

And that's very protective against having another episode of anxiety. And so people can trust, I know why I'm feeling well right now and it's sturdy, it's stable. And it's also useful to have learnings where we then make a change, like say we were sensitive to caffeine, we reduced our caffeine, we became less anxious. And then we have these teachable moments where we do have more coffee one day and we feel more anxious.

And even though it's somewhat defeating in the moment, it's not fun to be more anxious. And certainly it's really empowering to see that and to recognize, okay, there's a straightforward relationship between my caffeine consumption and my anxiety. And I can make strategic choices around that next time. Do you think it's helpful to like force yourself to relax, whether it's meditation or whatever it is that that will help? Or does that really not deal with the problem?

Yeah, great question. I mean, that word force is almost never going to be therapeutic in an anxiety context. So we always need to approach things gently. But what I find is that when we do any kind of regular practice that helps tip our nervous system from a sympathetic or stress response,

into a parasympathetic or relaxation response. And that can be meditation, breathing exercises, Reiki, craniosacral therapy, a body scan, something called progressive muscle relaxation, so many different techniques for this. But I think of it as like a daily multivitamin. And if we just take that approach a little bit every day, I think of it as changing the threshold for tipping into a state of stress and anxiety.

And we're basically making it harder for our body to be tipped over into a stress response. So it's not really a forcing and it certainly doesn't really work once we're at what I call the point of no return with anxiety. Like if you're already in a moment of peak anxiety or if you're in a panic attack, the last thing that's going to be helpful is forcing yourself to do something like a breathing exercise. You're too far at that point. But to do it prophylactically a little bit every day can be very powerful.

Well, what about those times when you do have a panic attack, like you're, you know, afraid of flying and you get on a plane and you're up in the air and you have a panic attack? Well, what can you do? Yeah, I'll be the first to admit my strength, my forte is in preventing that from happening in the first place. And once it's happened, I'm not as helpful. But I do think that there are always things that we can do. And one is to make sure that we're bringing an attitude of surrender rather than resistance.

Panic is basically this very uncomfortable state and it's understandable, it's natural that our instinct is to resist it. And the problem with that is that it actually just pours gas on the fire of panic. And what we want to do instead is release into it and say, okay, this is a panic attack. This is really uncomfortable. This is not my body dying. This is actually my body working.

I can feel my heart rate increasing. I can feel my heart pumping faster. I can feel myself getting dizzy and lightheaded. I feel my palms sweating. This is my body in a stress response, and it's an indication that it's working. And to be able to just release into it, trusting that it's going to be uncomfortable, but then it's going to peak, and then it's going to resolve on its own,

actually changes our relationship to the panic. And the less we resist it, the easier we move through it. And it's really in the resistance that the panic doubles down. Yeah, I've always thought that. I mean, I've never had a real panic attack, but I've certainly gotten myself worked up about something enough that I realize that I'm more upset that I'm worked up than I am about really what I got worked up in the first place about.

Yeah, it's interesting how much our thoughts about the anxiety are a powerful agent of our anxiety as well. And I think that's always really powerful medicine is an awareness of the role that our thoughts play. With anxiety often, especially with false anxiety, what's happening there is that let's say we're sleep deprived or we drank more coffee or we're hungover or our blood sugar just crashed and our body gets tripped into a stress response.

that stress response creates a set of symptoms in our body. Our heart rate is faster. Our heart is pumping. We feel that feeling of anxiety. And in that moment, that's a critical juncture where our brain always loves to swoop in and tell us a story to explain those physical sensations. And it tells us, you know, oh, I'm anxious about work. I'm anxious about this relationship. I'm anxious about the world. And none of those things are untrue. They're all founded in reality.

But what's actually happening in that moment is something that is first physical, and then second, it becomes a story. And we have an opportunity in that moment to recognize this is my body in a stress response. It was actually precipitated by something purely physical. And this is just my brain trying to make meaning of the sensations. So we can soothe those thoughts ever so slightly, focus on the physical basis for the anxiety,

do our best to address it and then that can really help give us a smoother path out. How do you handle anxious thoughts as they just come up as they are inclined to do? It's not like you're trying to call them up or that you're even trying to not call them up and suppress them. They just pop up and then what do you do?

I see it so often that it's basically whenever we have an unstructured moment, that's when our unconscious swoops in and says, well, you know, you didn't give me much airtime. I didn't have an opportunity to tell you I'm worried about this, this, this, and this. And for some people, it's right when they wake up. For many of my patients, it's right as their head hits the pillow at night. And they're like, okay, it's time to finally surrender into sleep after such a long, stressful day. And then the ruminations and racing thoughts begin. And it's like,

off to the races. And so what I find is that if you can build a little bit of time into every day where you give your unconscious mind an opportunity to air out what it's worried about, then it doesn't necessarily encroach upon those restful moments like right before bed or right as we're waking up.

And for many of my patients, what that looks like is just keeping a pen and paper on their bedside table. And right before they're about to fall asleep, they jot down what their mind is juggling. You know, it's I have to remember to pick up milk and I have to remember to make this doctor's appointment. And I forgot to respond to that text.

And if there's something you're feeling uneasy about, you can jot that there as well. And then the unconscious mind has this experience that it outsourced these concerns to the piece of paper. It doesn't feel like it has to juggle them and it feels heard. And so then when we try to relax, we actually have a little more spaciousness. Just because you wrote it down. Yeah. And that's actually, this is validated by my medical research. So this is, it's a really beautiful practice that works well.

Mostly, we've been talking about false anxiety, and rightfully so, because that's where I guess most of the problem is. But what about true anxiety? I mean, we all get anxious, and sometimes it's warranted that we're anxious.

With true anxiety, I really honor it. It's not something to pathologize. It's not something to try to eradicate. It's really something where we want to be able to slow down and get still and listen to it and then trust it and see if we can convert it into purposeful action. I think true anxiety always has a call to action baked into it. It's usually asking us to

recognize where in our lives we can be of service, we can make a contribution, we have a unique insight or perspective that can add value, or there's someone in our life where we are really in the position to show up for them.

And what I find is many people don't slow down to listen to their true anxiety. So they really just wallow in it. And that can feel helpless. You just feel mired in all of this anxiety. And it feels like things are not okay in our personal lives, in our communities, in the world at large. But we're not really doing anything about that. And so it's in the slowing down and listening for here's what's being asked of me and converting that into action. That's when we actually translate that.

That worry into purposeful action, and it transmutes the feeling from one of anxiety to a feeling of purpose. Well, it certainly seems to me that people are more anxious today than ever for lots of reasons. Some of them may be genetic. Some of them may be just the times we live in.

We've been taught it's a genetically determined chemical imbalance and that the treatment is meds and psychotherapy. And I don't deny that genetics matters and that meds and psychotherapy can be helpful, but there's more to the story.

And our sleep, our nutrition, our gut health, our state of inflammation, whether or not we're connected to community, nature, a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, whether or not we get sunshine and fresh air and movement and play and pleasure, all of these things are also determinants of our mental health. And a lot of them are things that we can change for ourselves, usually in a pretty affordable and accessible way.

And that's what I want people to recognize is that even if they're waiting months to get in to see the local psychiatrist, there's a lot we can do for ourselves today that's safe, that can have a huge impact on how much we're suffering.

Well, that's a comforting and I think a hopeful message. I've been speaking with Ellen Vora. She is a psychiatrist and the name of her book is The Anatomy of Anxiety. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Ellen. Appreciate you being here. Thank you so much. If you want to improve your memory, go for a walk.

Researchers at the University of Michigan found that taking a walk can actually help your memory. But if you're in the city, you probably want to make it a really long walk, like long enough to get to the country. In a study, volunteers took a short-term memory test, and the ones who walked in natural surroundings had a 20% increase in recall over those who walked on city streets. Even gazing at pictures of nature helped.

The theory is that nature's wonders capture your attention without requiring much thought. And that gives your busy brain a rest, so that afterwards it works better. And that is something you should know. You know, leaving a rating and review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen only takes a minute, but does us a world of good. It's a great way to support this podcast and

And really, it just takes a second. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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