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

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Neck-up tools help you cope; neck-down work helps you heal

  Mel calls her own tools, like the 5 Second Rule, a 'neck up' approach because they work on thoughts, worry and self-criticism. Dr. Russell Kennedy is an MD with a neuroscience degree, author of Anxiety Rx, and someone who had anxiety for about 30 years. He argues that coping is mostly top-down thinking strategies, while healing means addressing what's going on in the body. He doesn't dismiss talk therapy. He says it's only part of the toolkit.

• 02

  Call it 'alarm', not 'anxiety'

  Patients almost always describe anxiety as a story: my husband, the bus, the grocery store. Kennedy says that story is what the analytical left hemisphere makes up. He asks instead what they feel physically, and renames that sensation 'alarm' so people pay attention to the body. Alarm doesn't always look like worry. Mel's daughter shows it as frustration and anger, and some people go into freeze: withdrawing, losing eye contact, moving stiffly.

• 03

  The feeling comes before the thought

  Kennedy's model is that the amygdala detects a threat outside you or a worry inside you and sends signals down to the brainstem. Heart rate, blood pressure and breathing go up. Then the left brain asks why you're alarmed and starts 'stacking' worries to explain it, which creates more alarm in what he calls the alarm-anxiety cycle. Thoughts can cause anxiety, he says, but treating them as the origin is the mistake. They're mostly a symptom.

• 04

  Background alarm is old emotion stored in the body

  Kennedy describes unresolved childhood emotional pain as 'background alarm' lodged in the body, a framing he shares with Gabor Maté. He's clear it's a construct, since mind and body can't truly be separated, but says it helps people. We live in our heads partly to avoid feeling, he says, because the body is 'where the pain is.'

• 05

  'All anxiety is separation anxiety'

  In Kennedy's view, alarm starts with feeling separate from parents who are supposed to see, hear and love you. It doesn't have to be abuse. A 'parental mismatch,' feeling you just don't connect with a loving parent, can be enough. Children can't blame their parents, so they blame themselves with what he calls JABS (judgment, abandonment, blame and shame), and that's the start of the inner critic.

• 06

  Your alarm may be your younger self asking for attention

  Kennedy asks: if a crying child in a grocery store reached up to you, would you push them away? We comfort others without thinking but tell our own alarm to go away. He believes turning toward the sensation, rather than fleeing into thought, drops the intensity, perhaps from a 9 to a 4 rather than to a 2. Over time the alarm fires less often and less intensely.

• 07

  Regulate the body to settle the mind, not the other way round

  Kennedy says the body is far more likely to relax the mind than the mind is to relax the body, because 'your mind lies to you all the time; your body never can.' Engaging the brain's sensation and movement areas pulls you out of rumination, which is part of why yoga helps. He calls anxiety at its root a mind-body disconnect, and says many people become addicted to worry, so more thinking doesn't fix overthinking.

• 08

  Chronic anxiety and addiction are tightly linked

  Kennedy says he rarely sees chronic anxiety without some addiction. Alcohol, drugs, porn, constant achievement or 'negative stress' can all drown out the alarm. Mel recognized herself: busyness and stress let her outrun her anxiety for decades, which is why a quiet Vermont town with 'no Target to run to' felt so frightening. Kennedy calls this sublimation, channeling the alarm into something useful so you never have to feel it.

• 09

  Anxiety as blocked love

  Kennedy believes anxiety means separation from yourself, and that many anxious people struggle to let love in. That's why saying 'I love you' in the mirror can feel unbearable. Turning toward the alarm and soothing it, he says, is giving yourself love. He shares that when his father's schizophrenia worsened when Kennedy was a young teen, he blocked his love for him because it hurt too much. He says you can't block love from a parent without blocking it everywhere, and jokes that's why he's been married three times.