#941 - Martha Beck - How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety
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You say anxiety always lies. Always. Why? I say that at the end of the book. Spoiler alert. Sorry about that. Boom! Come at me with the biggest... Now, here's the thing. We have brains that are very prone to anxiety and we have a culture that magnifies our proneness to anxiety.

But anxiety, unlike fear, which is a visceral response to a danger that is present in the physical moment, there's a surge of adrenaline, a surge of activity, and then boom, it's gone. Anxiety comes from the way we perseverate and tell stories to ourselves in our heads about the things that may or may not happen. As Mark Twain said, I'm an old man and I have lived through many troubles, but most of them never happened.

So anxiety is like being haunted. And if you sit with it, you will see that it is never with you in the room. It is never in a form that you can address in the present. It's always saying things about something that's happening somewhere else, somewhere on the line of time. And for that reason, it's never real. It's never present. And it's never true. This interesting cocktail between

our brain's predisposition and our modern society's reinforcement of that, I suppose. Yeah, it's an interesting one talking about anxiety because...

It's become so pattern matched. People have used, I feel uncertain or I am worried. And the term has sort of concept creeped itself out to encompass all of this. So I wonder how much of it is people giving a name which sounds way more pathological to something which is a normal part of the human experience, you know? Well, there is that. No question. We are like over-diagnosing ourselves and over-assigning diagnoses to everything that happens.

But it's also true that even the World Health Organization, looking with fairly objective tests, as objective as you can get, has shown a dramatic rise in the number of people who are suffering crippling clinical levels of anxiety as diagnosed by independent observers. So that went up by 25% during the pandemic and has continued to rise since the pandemic.

The reason for that, as I found when I started to study it, is that anxiety only goes in one direction. It always goes up. It never reverses for reasons very particular to the human brain. Dig into that. What do you mean? Anxiety only ever goes up. It never reverses. Right. So if you've gone over a tire ripper leaving a parking lot and there are these teeth and when you go forward, they get smooshed under your wheels. But if you go back, they'll rip you apart. So it's a one way process. Right.

In our brains, we have two things that make us capable of spinning anxiety up and up and up and largely unable to bring it down, down, down, although that is possible, eminently possible. And the two things are something called the negativity bias.

which I also call the 15 puppies and a cobra syndrome. If you went into a room and noticed 15 puppies and a cobra, where would all your attention go? It would go to the most frightening thing in the room because that's an evolutionary survival adaptation. Yeah.

The problem is that when you see anything in your environment at all, you are likely to interpret it as something dangerous or negative because all brains have that, all mammalian brains have that negativity bias. But in humans, it snags on the other capacity. And that is the ability to tell ourselves stories about what might happen, what could happen, what may have happened elsewhere that are so frightening to us that

that we actually, at a fairly regular rate, certain humans take their own lives rather than face what the story in their heads is telling them about a possible future. So you take the negativity bias, it sees the most negative thing in the room or online. The algorithms are written to give us more of whatever our attention lives on the longest. You know, when we fixate attention, it gears those algorithms to give us similar material, which is...

an externalization of what's going on in our brains. We see something negative, we think it's gone wrong, we smell something, oh, that's strange. Then immediately it's, oh goodness, what if there's a gas leak? Oh my God, I know somebody who died in a gas leak. And that story, instead of being seen as fantasy, which it is, is reinterpreted by the primitive levels of the brain as an actual environment. So when you say, oh my God, the IRS is coming to take everything,

your amygdala responds as if you are actively physically being attacked. And it can stay in that high fight or flight excitation level for literally years while you slowly die of degenerative illness because you were never meant to live in that high state of fear arousal.

So yeah, it's one way. It's what scientists call an unregulated feedback system. It goes in, it feeds on itself. It drives itself higher and higher. And unless you actively defuse it to mix a bunch of metaphors, it's just going to keep going up and up and up. I'm interested in why, and I agree, I think it would have been very maladaptive ancestrally for our

Great, great, great, great, great grandparents to have been stricken with anxiety and been unable to move and unable to think and permanently worried about going outside of the cave. But it does seem so universal to the human experience in the modern world. Yeah.

It almost seems surprising to me to think that we weren't designed to be this way. It almost looks like we were the anxious creature, you know? Yeah, I used to think that too. But I am a sociologist by training. And when I started looking at the difference between a healthy fear response and chronic anxiety,

I saw basically that we have come from a place of anxiety and fear, and we have created institutions, media, and all kinds of other devices that are designed to reflect our obsession with what is dangerous.

Even 300 years ago, you or I might have woken up in a village where we heard mainly wind, water running, trees rustling, each other's voices, birdsong. We would get up and we would do things all day that we had evolved to interact with, animals, plants, each other. And it's interesting that

In the modern society, the things that we do on vacation, hunting, fishing, basket weaving, whatever it is, the reason we enjoy them so much is that they are what we evolved to do and they are highly regulating to our nervous systems. But we don't live that way. We get up into a world that is very, to cite the work of the wonderful Ian McGilchrist, who you may have heard of, brilliant Oxford neurologist and philosopher, he

He says we live in a world created by only the left hemisphere, which loves things it can grasp and things it can build and things it can predict and measure. And it loves to have things. And it's highly anxious. And we never get back, many of us never get back into the environmental situations that are meant to pitch our nervous systems where they really belong. And then we call that normal.

And nothing about the world that you and I live in would be normal to a human 100 years ago. And humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years. We are in a wildly aberrant moment. And there are ways you have to deal with that, that we can't wait to evolve to adopt them. Right.

Yeah, that's going to be a slow, a slow, long wait. So the main difference here between healthy fear and anxiety is the duration of it. Partly. I mean, the reality of it. We were just talking before we started recording about how I once tracked up way too close to a rhinoceros. And then really, truly, when I looked up and saw this rhinoceros right in front of me, wild rhinoceros, I was like,

really, truly thought I was going to die. And it came as a wave of clarity and exhilaration and peace, but also acute, intense, sort of visceral knowing that if I did certain things, that if I kept my body soft and slow and low, I would be less likely to be attacked. And I don't know where those deeper things came from. I hadn't been trained to feel them. But I

That kind of clean fear, there's a psychologist named Stephen Hayes who talks about clean pain and dirty pain, and fear goes the same way. Clean pain or clean fear, it's about something that is right there, that is real, that we can work with, and it rises and falls very quickly. When the danger is gone, it goes away. I have watched a lion attack an antelope

and had the antelope speed up to levels the lion wasn't willing to reach. And so the lion stopped, and the antelope stopped on a dime and started grazing, completely relaxed, with the lion still there, because he knew there would be no attack. That's how quickly a fear response is meant to fall. But this ongoing brooding anxiety that we have that makes us, it makes us insane, frankly.

It makes us act, McGilchrist says, like people who've had a massive right hemisphere stroke. We don't know anything to do but to try to ensure our survival and our victory over the oppressors, whatever we see as the oppressor. And the whole time we're just sort of sitting in a chair somewhere.

Yeah, that's not the... So I'm wondering, how do you think our ancestors... Because people would look at the way a gazelle operates and think, well, that's not us. That's our nervous system. So how do you think humans would have dealt with this ancestrally? I think that they knew what they were dealing with much more intimately. So my friend Boyd Vardy, who was with me tracking that rhinoceros and would never have let me get close enough for it to kill me, but I didn't know that.

I've watched him in situations where I was completely freaked out and he is completely relaxed because he grew up in the African bush interacting with all these animals, with weather situations, with fires, with, you know, all manner of natural disasters. And there's a kind of, there's a kind of harmony to them all and you can kind of tune into them, but you can't do it if you're anxious. Right.

I once watched three or four horses that were tied to a post get into a fight. They were all tied to the post and they started to fight and kick each other. And then they started like screaming. Horses can scream very loudly. And one of them kicked another one and fell down. And then they all got tangled and fell down.

There were all these guys, grooms, who were there, whose business it was to watch the horses. And as they spiked this intense adrenaline surge, I watched all these men get very soft and very gentle and very slow. These, you know, tough cowboys, their body language became kind of languorous, and they moved in so gently and so calmly, and they got those horses right.

They knew that if you are actually able to calm your own anxiety, your own fear, you can actually entrain other creatures, including other humans, into a state of calm. That's what I saw Boyd knowing because he grew up surrounded by the environment we evolved to live in. And it does not work in what we call the civilized world.

tension and pressure and anxiety actually drive us to fulfill our society's sort of brief, but it's not good for us. Yeah. Talk about what anxiety does to our abilities in the moment. Oh my gosh. It makes everybody who's ever studied creativity knows that any anxiety at all just shuts it down immediately. Even telling people who are solving a creativity problem that if they do it right, they'll be paid.

creates enough anxiety that they can't think. They just can't think anymore. When we get anxious, we can't relate to other people. We project our fear of danger onto them. And as a coach, I'm often on the receiving end of this. So I had a woman who was criticized by both her parents growing up, very traumatized by it. And at a certain point, we were doing something outside of

And I said, are you an athlete? Because you move really beautifully. It's a pleasure to watch you move. You're so athletic. And she got very silent. And for the rest of the day, she wouldn't talk. She sort of hunkered away from the group. And finally, I said, what? What happened? And she said, well, I was fine until you told me I should have been an athlete.

Like that's how our relationships start to go when we're living in a state of continuous anxiety. It's horrible. And then we go to work and we can't tune into our customers or into the efficient processing of physical objects or into our coworkers. It's just very counterproductive. And yet we see it as a driver of productivity. Yeah, very interesting. It's strange.

It's strange to think about how much anxiety sort of reshapes people over time. If you keep doing that, this way of seeing the world actually becomes your personality. Absolutely. You start to look for it. You start to look for the red car that you just bought, but it's the equivalent intersocially with all the people that are around you. Yeah, yeah. It absolutely, what fires together, wires together in the brain.

So if we're constantly being shunted by the negativity bias into the left hemisphere of the brain where most of the storytelling goes on, the right hemisphere doesn't really use language much, and that story keeps feeding back to our amygdalae, we are living in a fundamentally different brain than if we knew how to let anxiety subside and bring ourselves into a regulated nervous system.

Something else that I think everyone is very common with is getting anxious about your anxiety. Oh, yeah. The story that you tell yourself about how you feel and your frustration at the story that you tell yourself and your...

How do you come to think about the sort of fear of anxiety and the anxiousness is anxiousness? Yeah, I call it the anxiety spiral because ultimately, I mean, what people who have phobias become more afraid of, they may be afraid of going outside, but what they're really afraid of is the panic attack that once got to them outside. So it's this really intense escalated sense of fear in the brain that actually frightens us the most.

As well it should. It's actually the creator of most of our suffering around anxiety. Very little of it is based on actual circumstances. So, yeah, it spirals up and up and up and up until people... Well, the New York Times called it the inner pandemic. It's become so...

Such an egregiously dominant characteristic for people worldwide that that's why I started studying it. And that's why the World Health Organization is saying we should look more closely at it.

How do you come to think about interjecting into that spiral, about putting the brakes on it? Well, there was something I stumbled into once during a very intense panic attack that I had. Because I had...

I had two, well, I had one serious bout of anxiety. It lasted, it started at birth and it lasted until I was about 60. But there were... That's a pretty serious, yeah, that's a pretty serious bout. I was born with a very sensitive nervous system and did not set it up very well. Until I actually started reading, writing this book, I had never actually thought that I could bring it down to zero. Now I believe that we can bring it down to zero. I've experienced that.

and I know that it's reliable. So how do we do it? The first thing is something I call kind internal self-talk. Now, the acronym for that, K-I-S-T, is KISSED, which, you know, I went to Harvard three times. I don't walk around saying, we should all kiss ourselves on the brain. It's really good. But kind internal self-talk is

It's something that I learned by studying the Tibetan Buddhist practice of metta meditation or loving-kindness meditation. Many monks, before they do any other form of meditation, do a year of loving-kindness meditation toward the self. So

All it is, is looking at any part of you that you can observe from the short distance of your mind and saying to any frightened parts of yourself, may you be well, may you be happy, may you be free from suffering, may you feel safe and protected, may you be happy. Or even more, like simply, I've got you, I'm here, you're all right, there's no danger in the room, we're okay, may you be happy, may you be well.

I took myself from a point of maximum anxiety. This was in my early 50s. I used that K-I-S-T technique to bring it down, down, down, down until it only rose periodically.

And then that was my first step away from the spiral of anxiety. And then when I started researching it, I found ways of sort of hooking my thoughts to a very different spiral. And by doing that, I managed to pull myself almost completely out of anxiety at a time when the world was getting increasingly anxious.

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Yeah. What's your advice for people who have a negative inner voice in that way? You have to love that too. So one of the people whose work I cited in this book is Chris Voss. He was a hostage, the head hostage negotiator for the FBI for many years. Brilliant, brilliant negotiator. And he was dealing with like psychopathic terrorists who were holding hostages with guns to their heads. These were not nice people.

And, uh, what he knew was that no matter how crazy the person you're talking to is, especially if it's yourself, you're always at the basis dealing with an overcharged amygdala, an amygdala that sees fear where there is none. And the amygdala is cued to certain ways of reacting to it. So he says, you adopt the late night DJ voice. You're like, hi.

I'm here. And then you start empathizing with it. I see you. I hear you. Tell me everything. I'm right here. He's great at it. So if you have a critical voice and it's saying, you stupid lump of lard, why are you wasting space by existing? I've heard that one many times inside my own head. What you have to do is not say, shut up, but to say to that critical voice,

Tell me everything. I see you. You're okay. I'm right here. You're going to be all right because it's always a frightened self trying to keep you from being destroyed. And it takes anything bad that ever happened to you, projects it into the future and says, I will make you so fearful that you will run from every danger before it even has a chance to get near us. And I will do that by screaming and yelling horrible things at you.

And then you mentioned this KIST, which is loving kindness meditation. How long were your sessions? How frequently were you doing them? How long did you need to do them for? When I was in a panic attack, I did it for, I'd been in absolute, like, take me to the psychiatric hospital panic for like 72 hours. I think I kept it up for like eight hours before I came completely into calm, which

which was pretty amazing because I'd been given drugs that weren't working and hypnosis. Nothing worked until I did the loving kindness meditations. How often do you do it? It's like breath. It gets to the point where every single moment of your day, there's a part of you saying, may you be well. I'm right here. I've got you.

In IFS therapy, they call this self with a capital S. And it's this part of the self that's always compassionate, always curious, always creative, always courageous. And once it starts to gently talk to you, you're out of the woods already.

And then you said you learned how to hook your thoughts to a different type of spiral. So it seems like the first step is to befriend the negative voice. Then it's to try and turn the volume down on that a little bit by putting some other positive voices in a little bit more. And then...

Yeah, and I didn't give you what you very reasonably asked for, which is a practice. Like, you get to the point where loving kindness becomes the way you think. But at first, I would give it...

If you can do it for 10 minutes a day, three times every day, like morning, noon, and night, I think that would give you a really strong contrasting experience of what the rest of your day is like versus the time that you're doing the loving kindness. That's a great motivator to lengthen those and then string them together because you can do it while you're doing anything else. It doesn't take extra time from your day. It's just a change of perspective.

And it doesn't actually turn down the volume. It doesn't smother or reduce your anxiety. It befriends it. Always think of your anxiety as an animal because that is literally what it is. In our culture, we treat an anxious brain as though it's a broken machine. That's how we treat our bodies. But it's not a broken machine. It's a frightened animal. And it's so interesting to me

Everyone I've ever met, if you found a really bedraggled, scared, shivering puppy or horse or whatever, and it was very afraid, and you decided to calm it, you know how. Like, we learn all these advanced therapies and stuff, but all of us are born knowing how to calm a frightened animal.

And Chris Voss just made it a profession, right? So like, what would you do if you found a grungy little puppy that was terrified and you decided it was on your doorstep and you decided to like take pity on it? How would you approach it? Slowly, softly, gently. Yep. Yep. You're off. You can go like that into the energy that changes anxiety into calm. And it's not turning down the volume. It's more like satisfying a thirst.

The anxious part of us is desperate to be told it can take a break, it can take a rest. And then there's this huge, huge sense of relief when it starts to let go. And then you can start to move from initial sensation going into fear, which is the left hemisphere reaction, to an amygdala reaction that moves you toward curiosity.

That's the first step that is really going to take you away from anxiety completely.

And it's closely linked. It's like, do you ever, have you ever rubbernecked at an accident site you drive by? I try not to. We all try not to, but we all want to. And, you know, and we're, we watch so many murders. The average American child by the time they go to college has watched 16,000 murder shows of one kind or another. Murder mysteries, movies about it, stories about it.

Everything, we're fixated on things that make us afraid. And the reason for that is evolutionary. Again, I was once in a field where a bobcat was hunting, and he caught a ground squirrel, killed it, and ran up a tree. And from all around the field, deer came bounding onto the field and ran to the base of the tree and just stood there looking up.

like riveted on the bobcat eating this ground squirrel. And I learned that's a very common prey animal reaction. They're studying the scenario so they can try to avoid it later. Oh, wow. And that's curiosity. And when you start to get curious...

There's a great psychiatrist named Judson Brewer who takes anxious patients out into the, he takes them on hikes, get them in nature. It helps the nervous system. But then he'll stop at a certain place and say, hmm. And sometimes he even has another doctor go with him and they both look in the same direction and go, hmm.

And immediately, the depressed, anxious people with them go, what? What? What? What? And there's a palpable mood shift away from anxiety and into curiosity. And he said he writes about doing this with an athletic team, an Olympic team. And they were training to bring down their anxiety. And when it would start to go up, they would all just say, huh, okay.

And then immediately it would trigger a curiosity reaction and they could get away. They could get some distance from the anxiety. And that's the first step toward what I call the creativity spiral, which I see as the antithesis of the anxiety spiral. Yeah. Talk to me about this tension between creativity and anxiety. Yeah. Here's the thing. The left hemisphere has this strange tendency

tendency known as hemispatial neglect. And what that means is that it doesn't believe that anything except itself is real, itself and its own perceptions. So if someone has a right hemisphere stroke and they only are working with their left hemisphere, that's the part that runs the right side of the body, right hand and leg and side of the face. And they may

shave or put makeup on only that side of their face. They ignore everybody who is on their left. The only things that matter are on their right. If you ask them to draw a clock, they'll fill in all the numbers on the right and leave the rest blank. It's very bizarre. Oliver Sacks, the great writer and psychiatrist, once went into a hospital where there was a man who

who'd woken up and had a right hemisphere stroke in his sleep, and he was screaming that the nurses had put a severed leg into bed with him as a kind of sick joke. And he was screaming and yelling and pointing at his own left leg.

And Oliver Sacks came in and the guy picked up his own leg and threw it out of the bed. He said, if nobody will get rid of this thing, I will. How do you throw your own leg out of the bed? Well, it turns out you're attached. So he's lying there going, oh, my God, it's attached to me. Get it off. Get it off. And Oliver Sacks said, well, if that's not your leg, where is your left leg?

And he just stopped and he looked around and went, it's completely gone. It's nowhere to be seen. Total irrationality. The right side of the brain does not have this capacity. Where the left hemisphere excludes things, the right hemisphere includes things. So when the whole brain is working or when the right brain is dominant, it's fully aware of all the data brought in by the left hemisphere. It can track the dangers and measure the things and know the words and

but it's grounded in something more present, more meaningful, more in self, capital S. It's basically in the right sides of our brains. So it's able to contextualize everything. If we're stuck in anxiety, we truly believe that nothing else exists. But when you get out of anxiety, you see so much more, but you also see the part of you that's anxious and you can include it in a sort of circle of compassion.

And that makes the brain balance. And then you can use your left hemisphere for data to make and learn things that only human brains can learn. And that is a joy ride. What are your favorite ways? I don't know how to activate my left versus right hemisphere. What are some of the proximate ways for me to try and get that to get started? Well, one thing you can do if you have a pen and paper there is write your name.

And then, unfortunately, I don't have a piece of paper here. OK, you write your name forward. Then this is in the book as well. Then you go to the left side of it. Oh, here's a piece of paper I could use. And you write your name backwards. So I'm going to do this here. All right, Martha. And then I'll go to the other side. It's not as it's not as clear, but I can do it.

That's unbelievably impressive. And then, well, it comes from learning to open your right hemisphere. I actually taught in the art department at Harvard under a brilliant professor named Will Ryman, and he did lots of these exercises to help awaken the right side of the brain. And this was one of the things that he did. And you can do it upside down. Now, as I'm doing this,

I'm writing my name upside down and then upside down and backwards. I am less able to talk to you because I just lost it completely. You can't talk and do this at the same time because the right hemisphere doesn't talk. As it says in my favorite book, the Tao Te Ching, the Chinese Tao Te Ching, that which talks does not know. That which knows does not talk. Very interesting. Okay. So...

So that's one way. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Drawing anything is helpful. Drawing with your non-dominant hand, with your left hand, if you're right-handed. Any kind of motion through nature. Tracking that we were talking about earlier is one of the most powerful ways to wake up your right hemisphere that I have ever experienced. I had a client once who ran a sports empire and he specialized in what he called the spiritual sports empire.

And these were skiing, surfing, golfing, oddly enough. I know, sailing, rock climbing, things that demand extremely focused attention on the body kinesthetically moving through space. That is, you have to drive hard into your right hemisphere to make that work. Left hemisphere cannot do it.

And that's why I don't know if you do any of those things, but if you do, you may have found them almost addictive. Like people just, I've never surfed, but people will, like they live to surf. I used to live to ski. Now I live to do so many things because I have a list of activities that turn on the right side of my brain and I can always access one or more of them on any day. What are the ones that you do the most? Drawing and painting. Yeah.

So this painting behind me is just, it's a painting of, I went on a walk with some friends through the Cotswolds last October. And that was a real place where we stopped and I took a picture and did a painting. What role do you think courage has when it comes to pursuing your creative purpose in this way? Yeah.

Just to say, I am going to step out and be creative in our cultural context and with the anxiety most of us carry is an act of courage. And most of us have been shamed for trying to do creative things and not doing them well enough. And if we're really good at them, we got praised for them. But as I told you a little while ago, even being praised for doing something creative or being told that you'll be paid for it increases anxiety.

So courage, it takes courage to say, I'm going to try this at all. And then it takes courage to know that you will fail to achieve the sort of surrounding culture's definition of what's impressive. And that that is not the point. I throw away hundreds of paintings because the point is not the painting. The point is painting. You don't go to the gym to steal all the equipment.

You go to the gym or to lift it up in the air and let it stay there. You lift it and let it fall. You lift it and let it fall again over and over because what you take out of the gym is a different body because it has been engaged in that activity. Anything you do that's creative is

And everything we do is creative. Getting dressed or buying our clothes is a creative act. It involves aesthetic choices. Making food is a creative act. A conversation can be a creative act. A dinner party. Pretty much everything humans do can be seen as creative. And if we go into that mode...

Everything becomes suffused with a sense of beauty and presence and even awe, which is why in Zen they say, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. But the same activities are imbued with a kind of sacred astonishment to the one who has left anxiety behind.

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Whoop 5.0 by going to the link in the description below or heading to join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. What if someone doesn't feel very creative or like they have much room for creativity in their life? How do you think about awakening your inner creative if it's something that's been hidden for a long time? The first thing is that most people are exhausted.

And the first act of creativity the brain will undertake is returning us to homeostasis, to health. So if you are exhausted by years of anxiety and pushing your body to go against its circadian rhythms and its ultradian rhythms and basically all its rhythms,

If you've been robbed of peace and the kind of creativity children engage in, which is without any particular objective, you will first probably need to rest for a long time. Not that long. Four days. That's what it takes usually when someone's totally exhausted. Four days of absolutely no agenda. Like,

lie on the couch eating ice cream and watching reruns of The White Lotus or whatever. And on the third day, there will be a return of a flicker of hope. The first two days, you're just like, I'm a waste of space and I hate myself. The third day, you're like, oh, I remember life. It wasn't that bad. And on the fourth day, you'll think, huh, maybe there's something I could do. I want to make, I want to like,

build to make pottery after watching the great pottery throwdown. Like you start to get spontaneously creative after four days of rest. Right. So,

You are, it's a battle of attrition, of boredom to give yourself so little to do that you've got nothing, no other choice than to become creative. Is that what we're doing here? No, no, no. I think of it more as filling the well. You want to consume pleasures. And we're so resistant to this, especially, you know, you're the kind of person who works out hard and performs at high levels in everything he does. And everything in the culture says that's the right way to do it.

but you will destroy yourself if you do nothing else. And for all that effort you put out, you have to drink in what is around you in nature, but also what's created by the creativity of other people, which has sort of a profound frequency of peace, delight, merriment. The right hemisphere only uses language for songs, poems, and jokes. You know, if you sat and watched, I remember

Boyd Vardy. I thought he was very... Sorry to name you Boyd. But I met him at a time when he was completely physically and mentally exhausted. And he came to see me in the U.S.,

And I made him lie down and watch Eddie Izzard routines, the comedian Eddie Izzard, for three days. And he was like, and I brought him ice cream. He and his sister were there. And I brought them ice cream and told them, no, more comedy, more comedy. You haven't done your comedy today. Wow. And they talk about that as a kind of turning point because no one ever told him that was okay. And I was telling him, no, it's required. Right.

What else is there to say about interventions that you found successful for the perennially anxious person? Sometimes it can help to plug into the energy or the presence of someone who's already gotten over the hurdle of conformity to the culture.

So if you can be with someone who is a great meditation teacher or a poet or a musician, and if you can be with them in this field of, you can actually experience almost tangibly a field of stillness.

And again, this phenomenon of entrainment, it may be partly because we have mirror neurons in our brains. We reflect each other's brain patterns. So when I look at you and you look at me, our brains are actually moving to be more alike. So if you're with someone who's profoundly calm, it can really help you entrain.

But I actually think it's more than the mirror neurons. I think it's probably something to do with electromagnetism. We have electrical systems made of meat, our nervous systems. And we all know that electrical things can communicate without wires.

So you feel things, you pick up things, and you become much more intuitive in those spaces as well, which makes it extra fun. Okay, so you're using the social pressure of being around people who appear to have already done that work to help you to do yours. No!

No, I would prefer that you be in a small room with a door closed and the enlightened person's in the other room doing something and you just get to eat ice cream. It is not about – in one way of looking at things, nature is the opposite of culture. Yeah.

And so bringing culture in always, because we have an anxious culture, it's always going to spur that anxiety, which is the way it immediately turns into, oh, now I've got social pressure. No, there's no pressure whatsoever. It is like falling down.

when you are in the field of someone who's profoundly without anxiety. It actually can be disorienting and give you a bit of vertigo, but it's so delicious because your nervous system is finding its place again.

probably after years of being jacked up and anxious. Yeah, I think my joke version of social pressure was talking about the way that mirror neurons work. If you hang around with happy people, you tend to be a little bit happier. If you hang out with sad people, you tend to be a little bit more sad. But yeah, whatever you want to call it, mirror neurons, social consistency bias, just...

The vibe of the room. All of those things are... One thing I've got, I think about this quite a lot. I wonder whether mastering anxiety is a game of control or a game of acceptance. 100% acceptance. It does seem to be...

The more that you fight it, the worse that it gets. That's where that anxiety spiral, the anxiety cycle comes in. Yeah. We call it the fight-flight system for a reason, although it's fight-flight, faint-freeze-flop-on. Now they have all these other F words. But yeah, if you go into fight mode to get rid of your fight or flight arousal, it's going to exacerbate your flight arousal. Yeah. That's why they say fighting for peace is like,

fornicating for virginity.

Yeah. I didn't know that you'd had autoimmune issues for such a long time. Can you tell the story of that? Oh, my goodness. They started when I was 18. I was running about 100 miles a week. I was running marathons, finishing my freshman year at Harvard, and I got hit by a car. And it just dinged me on the hip and threw me into a snowbank. And then I ran 11 miles home. But the next day, I was in a lot of pain.

went to a doctor and the doctor said, well, we're going to immobilize you until the pain goes away. And it was 12 years later that the pain went away. It just, not only did it not get better, it got much worse and it started traveling. I started having very, very high levels of inflammation in all different areas of my body, different organ systems. And

By the end of 12 years, I'd largely given up on medical treatments because they all told me, we don't know what's wrong with you. But I was diagnosed with three measurable, observable symptoms.

autoimmune conditions, all of which they told me were poorly understood and incurable and progressive. Thanks, guys. Yay! Yeah, actually, they gave me a pamphlet for one of the things, interstitial cystitis. All you icy people out there, three cheers. Constant internal pain. And they gave me a pamphlet when I was diagnosed, and I opened it randomly, and it said at the top of this one page,

to keep yourself from committing suicide, remind yourself of your religious beliefs. And I was like, that's your treatment? Yeah, it was gnarly. Was that...

Because of the impact? Was that because of the treatment? Was it because of being sedentary? All of the above. Yeah. What I had was, I think now I would probably call it tension myofascial syndrome, but it did reach levels in my organs where it caused other disease. But it's basically just a spasmodic tightening of different muscular systems in the body. They don't really know, but...

Actually, I finally got that diagnosis when I was 31. I was 18 when I got hit. In 31, a doctor went out and came back with one of his med school books. He was just a newly fledged doctor, and he goes through this huge book. He said, I think you have this. And it said the only treatments they had were vacations and exercise. And I said, can I have a note to that effect?

Oh, and massage. Yes. And I went directly from there to the gym. And I was so weak, I couldn't lift a two-pound leg extension weight. Leg extension, I couldn't lift two pounds. And it was excruciating, but I had learned it probably wasn't harming tissue. And so I found that exercise was actually a magic bullet for me, as long as I also

Why?

Everything in the body reacts against that. Our muscles tighten, our perspiration increases, our blink rate, our hand sweat. They can measure immediately. All these things happen when we lie. And they can pick that up on a machine. Well, when you do something you don't enjoy and you show up without protest, you're kind of lying with your life. You're lying with your actions.

And little kids won't do that. They will scream their lungs out if they're taken to a place they hate. And we just beat it out of them. Well, don't beat them anymore, but a lot of people have been beaten for it. And it's ironic because what they're doing is they're following an evolutionary imperative to find what's right for them by following a sense of enjoyment. It's that simple. But the culture we live in does not really teach us to do that.

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That's functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom. What would be your advice to someone that's going through a protracted period of chronic illness? I mean, you were bedbound for a very long time. Like 12 years now. Yeah, I mean, that's a special kind of living hell with even less happening. So it's like boring hell. Yeah, how do you get through that stuff? And in retrospect, what's...

What do you wish that someone had told you sort of during that period of your life? The first thing is that please direct compassion to the parts of yourself that are in pain. I was at war with my own pain. I was so angry at it for keeping me, because I was highly active before that. And I directed hatred and violence at it internally. And

When I learned to meditate, which that's another thing that I would really, really advise, the one thing I decided I could do in that situation, the one thing I could learn was meditation. And so I started. And I sort of got into it before the general public sort of adopted it in the United States. And I'm really grateful that I did. What I would say to another person, though, is first, be kind, be kind, be kind to the parts of you that are hurting. And secondly...

realize that there is the capacity to increase your life's value and experience by going outward for experience. And then there is also the capacity to go infinitely inward. And when you are forced to go infinitely inward, you find that the inner space is as vast and interesting and full of information and experience as the outer space.

world in which your body lives it can be quite trippy and it's worth doing so you learn to meditate what about when it comes to uh don't uh rail don't sort of fight don't have violence against the parts of you that are the ones that are struggling or the ones that are falling behind what else what else sort of have you come to reflect on about that period

I want to tweak that a tiny bit. So love the parts of your body that are hurting and also love the part of you that hates it. The part of you that hates the pain, that hates the restriction. Say, I get it. I'm here. I hear you. Tell me everything.

and just allow yourself to, I poured it all out in journals when my hands worked, which wasn't always. And self-expression is another way that has been shown very effectively to reduce levels of stress and anxiety, especially when you're in a tough situation. Just

Does that answer the question? Self-expression as in journaling, just being able to get your words out in a relatively judgment-free way. Yeah, and you don't even have to use words. You could draw pictures. You could use music, play songs that help convey your emotions. It's almost as if getting the experience of all the difficulty of human life into a state where it can be communicated is...

Not only a really, really positive way to get out of suffering, but also an incentive to connect with the world and other people in a deeply authentic way, which, again, we're not taught to do.

And unless we're in a lot of suffering, most of us never even think of doing it. So I'm really grateful for that horrible experience. Yeah. What are the, for the people, whether they're sick or not, what are the most common limiting beliefs that the people who you work with tend to have? I think a lot of the time when we look at our

inner landscape is kind of like a personal curse or blessing in some way, but no matter what, we think of it as unique to us. And upon hearing the way that other people think or feel, you realize that this is probably much more of a feature of being a sensitive human than it is a bug of being broken and you. So I'm just interested in what those common self-limiting beliefs are. The first one is I'm not good enough.

There's something wrong with me. I'm not enough. I'm too much. It's about the quality of the being you essentially are being maladapted to the world and unacceptable. That is universal. And I think it's because you have these, we're born with really, really active brains. I mean, we have so much going on inside our brains when we're just born and we're

If we're cared for by people who are really tuned into our needs, that is great for us. And we develop brains that trust the world. But the moment the person we are inside starts to run into contradiction or social pressure, for example, they don't like it when I cry all the time. When we get that socialized pressure, we instantly sell out our true nature and do what people want us to do.

And then there's something called the just world hypothesis, which almost all children have, which is being misunderstood by adults who, frankly, don't even know how to connect with you because you can't talk or make, you know, it's a ridiculous fail-fail situation. The parents can't win. The baby can't win. It's bizarre.

But the baby has this conception of the world that says, well, these people that are supporting me are absolutely necessary to my well-being. So if I've got a problem with them, the world is full of demons and I cannot bear to exist. So what must be going on here is that I'm not good enough for them. I did something wrong. There's something bad about me. I need too much. I'm not giving enough. And

The twig gets bent in the first months of life. And then we all bump into various small and large traumas along the way and internalize all of those into our self-concept. It's always this shame-based feeling of the essential self that I am is somehow just wrong. How do you advise? I mean, this seems like such a...

a basic assumption that people have about themselves. So, so much so that it's, it's not even an assumption. It's more like the physics of their system. Um, you know, the thermodynamics of the inside of their mind, uh,

What sort of wormhole do you need to break through in order to change that? It's funny that you use the term physics because I wrote a book called The Way of Integrity where I said you have to be in the truth, the truth of your own experience. And integrity was not meant in a moral sense, but in a structural sense. A plane that's in structural integrity can fly.

A plane that's not in integrity often can't fly or will crash or whatever. So what happens, I think, is that you start to look at, and I said in the book, it's not morality, it's just physics. So here you have a worldview and a set of beliefs. And if it's in perfect integrity, that is all your sense of what is true at all levels of your body, mind, heart, soul, if they're all in alignment, there is no psychological suffering.

If you have psychological suffering, if there's anything wrong with your mood, your relationships, your career, anything, the physics are off.

And in there somewhere is something that's out of true. And that will always, 100% of the time, sometimes it's a trauma, an internalized trauma that happens at a very physical level. But most of the time, it's a story held in the brain very deeply. And it gives us a message that we're not safe and things are not okay. And that's out of alignment with the truth.

It may be absolutely in accord with what we're taught in our culture in school. You know, a kid is dyslexic and he's failing at everything. The school will say, yeah, you're wrong. If they don't know he has dyslexia, you're not trying enough, you're not working up to potential.

And he internalizes that as self-hatred and shame. But it's wrong. So the physics won't work. So he can't move forward. He can't feel at peace. He can't be settled. And it will not leave us alone. Any failure of integrity causes structural issues that make our lives unable to work well. So if you have something that's wrong,

Go in and find the physics of belief. Find the belief that you are holding that is not in accordance with what you feel to be true at the very deepest level. And anxiety is one of the things that is most often out of true, especially in our culture. Yeah, it's strange thinking about digging a little bit deeper and working out sort of

who you truly are, what integrity looks like. Because I think it's very easy to distract, swipe,

dopamine your way out of hearing that that voice in the back of your mind i did a lot of therapy last year and one of the best things that my therapist taught me was pay attention to fleeting thoughts oh i love that yeah it's gorgeous and um i don't think she means fleeting as in flimsy or as in fickle but fleeting is in quiet uh but typically repetitive right it's the same thing that you've heard a few times over and over again yeah it's great um

pay attention to fleeting thoughts. But the problem is, and I noticed this, you know, as I was heavily caffeinated in a car, just having finished an episode, you know, I'm on Slack, but I've taken a call at the same time. And then I'd get in and there's just this huge deceleration. Okay, now I'm on the cushion and I'm

let's see what happens for 50 minutes. And it would be, you know, there would be the first 20 minutes, kind of like meditation. Yes. Almost all of the overhead that you're paying is getting into the process of meditation, which is one of the disadvantages of only doing 10-minute sessions or 15-minute sessions. Right. You pay all of the overhead to get into it and none of the sort of profit of being in it. And then, yeah, after a little while,

fleeting thoughts would be a little bit louder, but it just, that comparison between how I was when I was going in and how I was when I was first there and how I was toward the end of the session before I got, I tended to sort of run out of gas. It's so funny. You think you look at 50 minutes and you think I can't achieve anything in 50 minutes. And if you're 45 minutes into a therapy session, you actually think, yeah, I'm ready to be done now, typically. So it is, it is a good length. But yeah, just that,

That quiet voice in the back of your mind isn't able to shout all that loud. And I get the sense that if you have got to the stage where it is shouting quite loud, it was quiet for a much longer time before that. And you could have learned this lesson probably half a decade ago. Yeah.

Yep. I learned that from no less than Oprah herself. She talks about how she says, first, something comes to you as a whisper, like you might want to do this, but very rarely do we hear that. Then it starts to be a message where it's like something tapping us on the head going, hello, hello, you may want to do this. You may want to like fireproof your house or something. Then if you don't listen to the message, you get a lesson. Oops, something set fire to the drapes. Okay, lesson. And then you get a lesson.

If you don't pay attention to the lesson, you get a problem. And if you don't pay attention to the problem, you get a crisis. And if you don't pay attention to the crisis, you're dead. So, yeah. And I notice when you're talking about the fleeting thoughts, repeatedly you've brought your right hand up and gestured toward the back right side of your head. And that is a physiological communication that anyone would understand in any situation.

culture because it comes from the right sides of our brains. And you're sort of indicating the area where the fleeting thoughts are connecting with the rest of your cognition.

And it's a lot like I used to, once I moved to California in my 50s and I had this craving to do long meditations. So I'd go into the forest and cover myself with bird seed. And then I would just sit there unmoving for hours to see what would come. It was awesome. Why were you covered in bird seed? To attract animals, of course. But why?

Well, I don't understand. Is that a performance enhancer? Oh, my goodness. No, it's to have a bird land in your hand, to have chipmunks. I had two chipmunks, these little soft, warm, furry things, have an actual territorial battle in my hands, like two tiny little sumo wrestlers. See, for me, that, it's like Emerson said, beauty is its own excuse for being.

Two chipmunks wrestling in your hands. That is its own excuse for existing. That is just fun. That is pure fun. I figured as long as I'm holding perfectly still, why not get them to think of me as a source of nourishment? And they did. And what happened was I could feel the energy of an animal coming in that very part of my, not just my brain, but my whole right backside would sort of tingle.

And I could actually tell what sort of animal was approaching me before it reached me and what kind of birds were planning to stop and they just fall on you. And now when I'm looking for creative thoughts or ideas about how to cope with a disaster or a personality clash or anything, I remember that, how the energy sort of tickled the field of my awareness as a fleeting thought.

And I learned to be more and more still. They didn't come and climb on me for weeks. I had to be there every day, perfectly still. And I had to keep myself from getting excited when they actually decided to come visit because they couldn't tell when your adrenaline goes up. They don't want any part of that. And now I do the same thing with my whole life. And it really is that the brilliant ideas and the loves and the experiences that are waiting to happen

to like light you up, they come as those fleeting thoughts. And if you hold very still and allow them, they will come to stay.

Heck yeah. Martha Beck, ladies and gentlemen. Martha, let's bring this one into land. That was so beautiful. Where should people go? Do you want to keep up to date with all the stuff you're doing? Just marthabeck.com. I also run an online community called wildercommunity.com. So if you want to hang out with people who think like this. It's fun. It's weird, but it's fun. Our motto is feeling good by looking weird.

Okay. Yeah, good. I like that. That's cool. Martha, I really appreciate you. Until next time. Thank you so much. Take care.