I don't get to this until late in the book after explaining myself thoroughly but this is a true thing and you will find it if you look deeply enough anxiety always lies always it always always always lies fear doesn't lie fear will say oh the house is on fire get out or whatever but anxiety lies in bed at night for decades going the house may catch fire at any moment and now I'm not sleeping and now I have stress induced illnesses and I'm forgetting to connect with my friends and so anxiety will always tell you oh you won't be yourself without me but the opposite of anxiety's messages is usually the truth so try on the idea you will be yourself without anxiety any anxious thought you've had I've probably had it I had one really really intense bout of anxiety and it lasted I think from birth until I was 60 is that old yeah and then I and I was like oh my gosh it worked I'm not anxious now I'm 62 and I'm not anxious I'm only anxious in little fleeting wisps and I used to be really dominated by it and I was looking at the brain patterns in anxiety and I suddenly realized they're the opposite of the systems involved in creativity and then I remembered all this research saying that when you get even the slightest bit anxious your creativity dies it's just flat lines and I thought what if the opposite is true what if when you start to rev up your creativity your anxiety flatlines so I I remember it it was so convincing because I I knew enough about the brain that I was looking at it and saying these are mirror images they're opposites and I started trying to just go to a creative place and sure enough my anxiety would just tank it it would it just was nowhere to be found [Music] hey friend I just wanted to thank you so much for stopping by and tuning into the podcast it means the wel to me there are a lot of great podcasts out there so it's truly an honor that you've decided to take the time out of your day to listen to mine I'm really excited to bring on more and more inspirational guests for you but before we get into it I wanted to ask you a huge favor if you're enjoying the show would would you please be so kind as to hit that subscribe button I've noticed that over 98% of the people that watch our videos aren't subscribed and subscribing really helps the algorithm put this episode in front of other people who it could help and be sure to leave a comment sharing what most connects with you so much love Martha hello Beyond anxiety you've done it again congratulations thank you sweetie I am so happy to be here and uh so so glad that that got written oh I can tell reading it how much went into this for you and you probably don't remember but when you were last on the DP easy podcast you mentioned that you were working on a book about anxiety and was like ah I can't wait a well that was true for about five years there was there is a tremendous amount of research that went into the book but actually I really had a blast writing it oh well you know I wanted to ask you first Martha because I've seen your Whirlwind You've Been Everywhere you've been in the UK I saw you in the Today show I love it all how are you and the long answer is okay if there is one like how are you how are you right now right now I well I'm thrilled because I'm here with you and that makes it so much fun and because it it it keeps me really present like when we're doing this and we know we've hit record and I would I would encourage everyone out there to do a live podcast with a friend and just hit record because it means oh I better actually show up right now and the moment we actually show up in any present moment we feel much much better than we would if we were if our minds were wandering around thinking about what else we have to do and all that so just because of this circumstance this red hot second I this is fabulous I mean look at you you're wonderful I've loved coming on before I love being here now oh yeah doesn't get better I mean that's how I feel like truly what a what a gift to have you here to talk about this topic and I love how you start the book you speak about your own anxiety even from a very young age you speak about the mon who you see who had a complete transformation that gave you hope and anxiety Marthur I mean it's such a big topic and a scary one I think for a lot of people what made you want to tackle it what made this the next step for you well I had written a book called The Way of Integrity which um basically postulates that if you're totally aligned with what is truest for you at the deepest level and if your words and your actions reflect that what really matters to you you're going to be happy and that's actually the only way you can be completely happy so a lot of amazing people read this book and they they bought into the premise and they did it and they came back to me and they said I am in total Integrity but I'm afraid all the time I was like huh because for me over years of meditation I'd with my own anxieties and fears and I had seen that they were usually made of nothing it's like Mark Twain said I'm an old man and I've have seen many troubles but most of them never happened so um I was like why why is everyone so scared and then I realized that uh anxiety was skyrocketing worldwide uh it went up a full 25% during the pandemic year but instead of coming down when we sort of relaxed it just kept going up so all these people around me these wonderful people people were freaking out and I thought why and I found my answers in brain science and sociology my favorite places I'm the most exciting person ever yes [Laughter] nerd and what's so interesting to me is you know in in this book you speak about your research there are so many like case studies examples you speak about your own experiment a whole month when all you did was creative work I mean reading this it's just like whoa I mean how much you can get from a book I'm like you know what I did I was traveling so much and I had I'd given myself a long period of time to do the writing like a year and the year kept getting eaten up in travel I went to Australia I went to South Africa and then I realized I had like 60 days before it was due and I was nowhere near finished so I bought 60 bottles of iced tea my favorite kind of iced tea one for each morning and I and sconed myself in my room and my wonderful family said okay we you know our our income depends on this so you go and I would get up at 5 or six every morning and write until noon or 2 in the afternoon-ish and just drink my bottle of tea and go and one bottle of tea at a time I got it all written through why did I tell that story wow because fascinated by myself well I can say the way of Integrity is one of of my all-time favorite books I was so ex I know this isn't a followup but there is a through line and specifically how anxiety is quelled or calmed when we are in purpose and that comes towards the end of the book a bit more but um one thing that really stood out that I think uh a lot of people can relate to in this book is how we don't live natural lives you give you give the example of this high high flying client of yours who's like really impressive on the outside and again I got this from the way of Integrity right cult says and then I love this expression looking wait looking great but feeling weird no oh my gosh what is it looking good by feeling no Feeling Good by Good by looking weird yeah that's it uh I was just I mean it's mindboggling isn't it because we're like well this is how it has to be like we the opposite of um Feeling Good by looking weird is what most of us live which is looking normal by feeling horrible that's how most of us live and so I looked as I said I was I truly found the answer to the anxiety epidemic and it is an epidemic worldwide um in neuroscience and sociology so that the coming from the societal part first uh I was taught you know I gave this example of this lawyer who's super duper successful her whole family was so proud of her and she was this highflying lawyer in Manhattan and she was coming unglued and Incredibly high anxiety levels so she'd gone to all these therapists and things then she came to me and my first observation was of course you're miserable your life is so abnormal and she was like what like she lived in a gorgeous apartment in Manhattan she had designer clothes she like she was super fit she was super gorgeous she was rich and I said no no you're living in a horribly abnormal life because we evolved to wake up in the morning surrounded by small groups of people we knew well hearing the wind in the trees the birds the um each other's voices maybe the flow of water or the ocean somewhere these are the stimuli that our nervous systems evolved in so when you don't wake up and hear those things when instead you hear traffic noise or you hear news blaring or you're alarm clock going or your phone whatever most people use but these are not natural sounds and then you get up and you get into one um man who is a Wilderness expert um Liz Gilbert wrote about him in in the book The Last American man he lived outside and he said you live in box world you get up in a box you get into a box on Wheels you drive the box to a different box then you sit in a box and stare at a box box and then you get back in your box and go home to your box and turn on a box and stare at the Box until you go to sleep on your box he said there are no boxes in nature there are circles the circle of the Horizon the circle of my campfire the circle of the seasons we're meant to live in these rounded lives and do you know if you just go out into the trees after being in a city your the your pheromones co-evolved with plants so go going into the forest triples your cancer killing cells within hours and that effect remains but the opposite of it is if you're never around the trees if you're never around animals um if you have to leave your family and loved ones for long periods every single day to go sit in a box next to a stranger who's sitting on a box um the nervous system didn't evolve to handle that and it we get steadily more miserable and we know in our hearts that this is bad for us and that's scary so our without our knowing why con cognitively our whole neurological system is going this is bad this is wrong this has to change and that agitation is what we feel as anxiety and we don't understand what it's trying to tell us and so we're normal this is soothing I mean already this is helpful to know that the way I'm feeling is um it's to be expected and yeah we're not alone in experiencing this yeah and then sorry I got to throw my Neuroscience in there not that I'm a neuroscientist but I read a lot of it um there are two things in our brains that make us hang on to anxiety in a way that no other animal can so anxiety is not fear fear is a healthy defense mechanism that is designed to get you out of physically dangerous situations so a bear comes at you you fight run or high the bear goes away your nervous system settles I've watched lots of predators Chase prey in Africa where I love to go South Africa um and also when I lived in the forest in California I watched animals hunt and the prey animals who were running away would obviously be very upset but if they knew the Predator had been foiled if they gave up you know the Bobcat or the lion gives up and walks away the squirrel or the Impala goes w relaxes that's how fear is supposed to work but in the human brain what happens is we see something unfamiliar if it's unfamiliar we are much more likely to think of it as bad than to think of it as good and the reason is something called the negativity bias we are we are we are predisposed to thinking of things as dangerous so I like to refer to this as the 15 puppies and a cobra syndrome MH if you're in a room with 15 cies puppies in a Cobra you need to pay attention to the the Cobra first and that's just a survival mechanism so that spins us into anxiety anytime something unusual is cited and then we have this ability to turn things into language and then to maintain a story about the scary thing that persists after the scary thing is gone so we lie in bed at night terrified um about how to pay our taxes or what will happen when we die or whatever and we just instead of having a strong impetus act that then moves us into a safer place what we have is this ongoing cycle of anxiety and fear and anxiety and fear that grows on itself and it's called the anxiety spiral or the anxiety cycle a lot of different brain science scientists call it different things and it locks Us in and we're afraid to leave it because one of the things it tells us is you've got to pay attention to me there's a cobra here and only I can save you so keep your attention fixed on every dangerous thing in the world when you came what when we were recording this we in uh February of 2025 and things are going down globally that that make people nervous and make me nervous except that I know how to get out of the anxiety spiral so that I can observe what's happening from a place of calm because I'm not in physical danger myself and whatever I do to work with the difficult situations of the world I'm going to do it better from a place of Peace I've never made a wise decision in panic and I know this yeah and in the book you speak about the creativity spiral and curiosity and so many the as as the Alternatives and I mean oh my gosh Mara there's so much kiss I mean com gosh I could talk about this forever with you you know one question that comes to mind for me is a couple years ago I have this friend who's anxious she has I suppose what what would be called OCD she's always checking things she's nervous and I said to her you know I'm working with this hypnotherapist she's really good she was helping me with like sleeping better and then my friend who's self-aware she was she said you know I I don't know who I'd be without my anxiety like what do you come across that too are you like we like all the the familiarity of it all the time I mean once um I I got to be in a group of people with uh who are working with the spiritual teacher Byron Katie who is not afraid of anything she's had people come up and put a gun in her ribs and say I'm going to kill you and she just looks at them and goes wow I hope you don't do that to yourself because it would really be hard for you if you did that to me so nobody's ever pulled the trigger anyway so I was in this mansion in Beverly Hills I mean I think it it occupied an entire Beverly Hill it was just vast property and all these movie stars had gathered to do this stuff with Byron Katie where you get out of your negative stories and you stop being anxious because you're present where you are instead of of spinning out stories of things that may never happen and there was a comedian or a comedic actor there and um we started doing the work where people would talk about uh how they were upset by a certain thing in the world and Katie would work with their thoughts to let go of the anxiety so that they could become present which is always when you get there a lovely place to be and I say that I've done it during dental surgery um yeah I mean there is evil in the world I'm not going to say there isn't but the present moment is a really good place to be anyway people started cracking their anxieties the we were at the home of this very famous TV producer called Norman leer he ran all these different sitcoms in Forever he passed away at the age of 103 and at the time he was 99 and we were in a room that was it was lined on the sh on all the walls with bookshelves and every bookshelf was crammed with scripts bound scripts so books of things that this man Norman Lear had created that had changed the world a million times over and he was the first one and his his fear his anxiety was I'm just not getting enough done I just like oh you can own an entire Beverly Hill and still think that anyway this one actor whom I will not name up and he said this is [ __ ] I can't lose my an my anxiety I wouldn't be funny without my anxiety and he stomped out of the room and I looked at him go and I thought dude you're not very funny with your anxiety um but I actually think he'd be much funnier without it but it's it's this goes this is a very long answer to the question you asked do people say I wouldn't be myself without my anxiety it's a common belief but just remember I don't get to this until late in the book after explaining myself thoroughly but this is a true thing and you will find it if you look deeply enough anxiety always lies always it always always always lies fear doesn't lie fear will say oh the house is on fire get out or whatever but anxiety lies in bed at night for decades going the house may catch fire at any moment and now I'm not sleeping and now I have stress induced illnesses and I'm forgetting to connect with my friends and so anxiety will always tell you oh you won't be yourself without me but the opposite of anxiety's messages is usually the truth so try on the idea you will be yourself without anxiety you won't be yourself with anxiety you'll just be this boring repetition of anxi anxious thoughts about things that will probably never happen like Mark Twain said ex exactly most of them never happen Will Rogers said a similar thing he said I know worrying works because nothing I worry about ever happens it's funny Martha I used to think that too I think unless I have this undercurrent of anxiety I'm going to get too chilled out and uh I gosh you know the world will just comerse like what will H you know I I also heard a woman say once oh I have to always be anxious about what I eat or I'll get fat right and I'm like huh interesting so why would we let go of that really self-serving awesome thing that gets us what we want so to speak if that's what we're believing about it yeah if we're believing that that works I've tried all those things any anxious thought you've had I've probably had it I had one really really intense bout of anxiety and it lasted I think from birth until I was 60 is that all yeah and then I wrote this book and I was like oh my gosh oh I it worked I'm not anxious now I'm 62 and I'm not anxious I'm only anxious in little fleeting wisps and I used to be really dominated by it um but I didn't realize that my problem in in approaching it was that I was always trying to calm it down well two things one thing is we fight our anxiety I wasn't much of a fighter but I was a Soother you got to soothe it which is it works a lot better um but people who say I'm going to fight my anxiety they're like I hate it I want it gone because they think of it as a broken machine in their heads actually what it is is a frightened little animal in the head it's actually in neurological terms it's using very ancient brain structures that are there in animals and if you say to an animal I hate you I want to end you I'm G to fight you as hard as I can until you're gone it doesn't calm people down that no I know you say on page 37 anxious human beings aren't broken mechanisms we're frightened creatures yeah we are frightened creatures so um when you're using anxiety to Dy to try to drive you and you're fighting anxiety at the same time because it has miserable side effects you're just a mess of self-inflicted conflict it's just really really painful so I'd been trying to get to zero anxiety but I I didn't realize until I did the research for this was that there is a mirror opposite of anxiety in the brain and it toggles that is when one is on the other is off so few years before I started doing this research on anxiety by the way it made me so anxious to research anxiety because even reading the word anxiety over and over escalates it so uh and I was also being super analytical which tends to escalate it too so so I had done research on the brain mechanisms involved in creativity because I did this course on creativity and I had learned how it all works and where the brain gets its information what it does with it and I was looking at the brain patterns and anxiety and I suddenly realized they're the opposite of the systems involved in creativity and then I remembered all this research saying that when you get even the slightest bit anxious your creativity dies it's just flatlines and I thought what if the opposite is true what if when you start to rev up your creativity your anxiety flat lines so I I remember it it was so convincing because I I knew enough about the brain that I was looking at it and saying these are mirror images they're opposites and I started trying to just go to a creative place and sure enough my anxiety would just tank it it was it just was nowhere to be found and I started practicing this with people online it was during the pandemic right so you're right I did a whole month of just creativity and my anxiety went away completely after 60 years um and then I would get online and I'd say to people let's do some creativity exercises first tell me on a scale from 1 to 10 how anxious you are why don't we do it now so that people can hear this and it's not just yes yes yes yes I love it and you by the way the book is so practical there is I've got I've written it when you've left lines to fill things in Martha they are full I tell you thank you oh this is good so you're wonderful all right so think of something that makes you slightly anxious let's not work on world politics just yet let's talk about um something that doesn't freak our listeners out completely so everybody out there listening to this play along think of something that makes you a bit anxious so what what is it for you uh I would say the only anxiety I have Martha is like something happen to my husband I know that sounds dramatic that might be a bit no so many people have that I just love him so much and I'm like what if something happens and he dies and I'm on my own and like it'd be the wor most tragic awful thing ever and then if he's late I'm worried and I I actually track his phone I am not surprised that is I mean I have done similar things with my loved ones because one of the primordial fears that we all have is death but even more the loss of loved ones because we are we are social primates and we need need each other to survive so you you should be very very kind to the part of you that's worried about this so the the very first thing that happened is you started criticizing your own anxious self right it's just a scared little animal how would you like if you were to choose a little animal to represent your anxiety what does it feel like uh like a shaking like a bunny like a puppy like a duckling yeah I have a little dog so I think of her I mean she's tiny I just imagine like shaking and unsure and looking around and needing needing so there's a little dog and she's afraid of losing something she loves do you just like slap her around and say get over it can you imagine no like or take enough medication to be catatonic I'm all for anti-anxiety medication I think it's great please use it but the fact is the brain tends to work around it and go back to anxiety even when we do take those meds so your little puppy is going to be a bit scared okay now let's do something that requires you to use more of the creativity related parts of the brain the right hemisphere mainly so first think of something you love to taste oh um smoothies that I make in the morning well like a green smoothie or a bananas strawberries mangoes yeah fruit smoothies fantastic a fruit smoothie okay um think of something that isn't food that you love to smell uh my perfume collection I love them okay think of something you love to see uh my water view okay you have all these things so great think of something you love to hear uh anything Sabrina centa right now okay and what what do you love to touch with your skin um I just bought a very luxurious lovely blanket that I I I could just wear it it's divine cool so I actually have a blanket that is a onesie like a little kids on that I put on every day it's fantastic anyway um usually I would have people think of two or three things that they love with each of the sentences but um we'll just use the one thing for Simplicity here so imagine very vividly right now that you um have this astonishing blanket wrapped around you and you're looking out at your view and you're drinking your smoothie your doggy's on your lap um did I ask you what you love to hear oh right the music that you love is on and like go into that moment like imagine it so vividly that it's almost as if you're sensing all those things at the same moment right now and then check how your anxiety is when you're deeply in that moment you don't look stressed I have to say this moment is nice yeah isn't it wonderful and here's the thing um people will say yeah but I just dreamed that up and I don't want to focus on that because it's not true and I'll say well you had been walking around with a story that says my husband is about to be horribly lost to me and some you know something bad's going to happen to my husband and that was also fictional but when we vividly imagine things in the brain it reads to the the more primitive parts of the brain that that's actually what's happening so when you're worried oh my God what if something happened to him it literally in your brain becomes a felt scenario of something bad happening to him it becomes a truth for you but if you switch to something as simple as sensing what you love and really allow yourself to bring those images up vividly and always use by the way if you're doing this folks always use your senses instead of your thoughts so get into a sensory memory because that is a creative act where a thought memory or a thought construction like what will happen if the market goes south you know on Wednesday what will happen to Pork Belly futures or whatever that won't calm you down but bringing your senses into the the full circle of your attention makes it impossible for you to bring anxiety in with it the brain just won't do it and the way to hold that so you you don't just I I do actually sit and meditate on things that are beautiful for hours at a time but if you want to just anchor your brain into that make something get to that happy place and instead of what should I do what can I do think what should I make what can I make so I don't know what you like to make what do you like to make Susie well luckily I love my work so much I feel like it's joy and pleasure I can't believe I get paid so well to do it right I love I love all the content I create I love making things in the kitchen I I like writing handwritten letters too oh my goodness can't you just feel everybody I mean as you talk about it I literally feel a lifting sensation in my chest and my whole body actually and when you are in a non-anxious space you feel that very vividly one of the reasons I wrote this um and then I looked into the brain hemisphere issues so closely was that I um I have a friend named Jill bolty Taylor I don't know if she's ever been on the show I absolutely love her story and especially the whale is it a whale analogy so much an I guess it is an analogy she said that she felt like she was going through the ocean like an all like yeah let let me lay the groundwork for folks um she was a Harvard neuroanatomist at 37 age 37 and she had this massive stroke that only affected her left hemisphere so this is the part of the brain that talks that c that tracks time that counts does all the math and it also tends to be the locus of anxiety so and it's what speaks language so anytime we're using language it we are sort of in the area of the brain that makes us anxious well as her left hemisphere shut down she experienced reality very differently she was at one point she was in the shower and she looked at her hand on the tiles and then her left hemisphere went offline for a while it sort of went off and on and off and on it was like sputtering before it went out and when the left hemisphere would go offline Jill would see not a handon tiles but two clouds of energy that were inter interpenetrating each other that they weren't bounded by matter they were Just Energy clouds and she herself said she felt this incredible connection with everything and she said I felt like a great whale uh swimming through a vast sea of universal Beauty something like that it's not an exact quote but she did compare herself to not just a whale though but to she told me in conversation something so vast that it Incorporated the entire universe and it was beautiful and it was she was filled with awe she wasn't worried at all it was only because her left hemisphere came back on and she made a quick phone call that they even came and stopped her stroke from killing her but she spent eight years rebuilding the left hemisphere and when she did she left out anxiety and she changed her life right her life was completely after this yeah wow yeah she was very competitive very very Harvard that's where I was for a long time too yes and when I met her she was living on a houseboat on a lake in a Wilderness somewhere in America that she won't disclose I love it because she said and and she spent her time doing science halftime and then making art because she knew that using the right hemisphere to do paintings and sculptures and stained glass windows was part of anchoring herself and by the way you don't have to do Visual Arts to do this you can use cooking as you you can use podcasting you can use making a party or um thinking of knitting a sweater for your dog whatever anything you do that is creative that is making something is going to pull you right out of anxiety moment you stop using the right hemisphere the moment you stop making things you can pop right back in and when you do the left hemisphere will tell you oh that was nothing don't even pay any attention to that that that hardly that didn't even take any time because the right hemisphere doesn't know that time is passing wow so if you get deeply into something and you don't even realize that hours have gone by you are using your right hemisphere almost um preferentially to the left even though with those of us who haven't had Strokes there's both of them are awake all the time but um if you get deeply into creativity and lose time and go into what they call Flow that I believe is the way we're meant to feel any time except when there is a literal physical danger right there wow and that's I mean once or twice in your life if you're unlucky I mean what do you think about the Rarity of that versus every day how we're walk don't notice I mean I I had a friend who was petrified to get on a plane because there were two crashes um I remember that in the book yeah yeah and there were and people focus so much on that and not on the millions and millions and millions of people who travel by air every day without getting hurt um you turn on you know nature shows and I don't know if they still have this but they used to have shark week and oh they have that still yeah yeah and and things called fangs fangs and Claws Naked and Afraid and it's because negativity is very attention getting because of the 15 puppies and a cobra rule right but how many shark attacks are there on humans on eight billion human beings like you are in Far More danger of being eaten by your own poodles then you are being attacked by a shark when you go into the water does it happen yeah does it happen often no it really doesn't so yeah you can live obsessed with the one shark attack a year or you can live thinking eight billion people didn't get attacked by sharks maybe that's yeah I can deal with that and also interesting Martha is uh you know the logic The Logical way of thinking of course it's like the the probabilities when you rationalize it's low and yet um the senses how you engage it separately it's not like okay let's think think our way through it it's like feeling one part of your book that I loved I filled it out you asked you speak about glimmers maybe you can tell us what that is and I wrote down my 10 glimmers and I was at the beach at the time and I was like the palm trees the water the I I'm thinking what page was this on I should have okay you find it I'll tell them what a glimmer is yeah yeah tell us what the glimmer is are please so uh attribution to a psychologist named Deb Dana who studies poly vagel Theory she's really a beautiful book called anchoring or anchored um can't remember which but you should look up her book what she uses as one of the ways to calm her clients is something she calls glimmers most of us know that a trigger is any any physical thing that we associate with danger so if our brains are incredibly good at creating these links so if you have a fender bender right after you see someone with a red balloon later if you see a red balloon it might trigger the fear you felt or the trauma you felt in the fender bender you know a small accident or a big one um and what Deb uses is the opposite of a trigger a glimmer is a physical object that you associate with something really wonderful and you use it to create the sense of well-being instead of using triggers to create trauma and recreate so what it's like an it's like an interrupt too like it's like a yes so I wrote here you you write on page 67 it is 10 glimmers that are near me right here right now so here am I my hus my hubby reading so he was reading um palm trees swaying ice coffee Blue Sky swimming pool uh chill cool music um soft something bed touchy I guess suned um no meetings no rush warm sun um something in the shade some something nice in the shade I know what it meant at the time how soothing it is and I can actually in my head I can hear a bunch of people who are in a cold climate at work right now listening to this and going must be nice suie I live in Miami so yeah yes you're right though it's like snow it's traffic it's Sirens yes right so if you you happen to make that list of glimmers at a time when everything was really sweet yes so I'm going to ask you right now in the room where you're sitting it's not quite as fabulous your husband's not there there's no palm trees probably well there's a palm tree behind you so there you go um intentional you see glimmers add the glimmers yes yes so this is like let's I have this fabulous paintbrush it's called a mop I didn't know that when I started painting again it works amazingly this thing makes me happy do you have one in the room with you now uh right now I have my Marcus orelus statue which makes me happy oh nice gives me some peace you know some stoicism right here I have my lip gloss that always feels nice and smells great oh yeah that's fantastic nice room temperature water very good for you oh excellent not everyone has access I'm I'm I remind myself the gr like to have clean water at home that's not true for everybody I know what a miracle right yeah and when you start thinking oh my gosh I have running water and and just and deeply appreciating that you can go so I have another friend um Anita morjani who basically died of cancer and then came back she's been on the podcast too I love her so actually she's amazing like she was riddled with cancer she's in her final coma um they're keeping her alive artificially so her brother can say goodbye and she's an 85 pound skeleton with lemon sized tumors all over it she dies or has a death experience and well people can go look up near-death experiences because they're very similar so she ends up in this place that feels unbelievably glorious and beautiful and her father who had passed away before came and said to her um now you know that the universe is really like this and you don't need to be afraid you should go back and you've got things to do and she was like in what body and I may be getting this slightly wrong but he said you know that'll be fine your body will be fine so she went back got into her body woke up in three days her tumors were half the size they had been and in nine days she was cancer free so and she had been a tremendously anxious person yes anyway um she talks about how even if you're in a bad situation there are five steps and she just told this to me I don't know if she's written them down so I like to disseminate them so people can benefit from her wisdom um the first thing is if you can get from misery to acceptance of wherever you are like all right my back hurts today I'm going to stop fighting that and just let it be what it is you know whatever happens even if you're in a dark place acceptance even if you're depressed and anxious accepting that you're depressed and anxious is a way to stop that fight that keeps anxiety going so you accept the part of you that's anxious you accept the part of you that's miserable and Afraid and then from acceptance you can get to um Peace if you fully accept everything that's happening to you can stop fighting and be in peace okay now from peace you can reach AE iation so you can say I'm in peace I'm looking for example at my reading glasses how wonderful to live at a time when we have reading glasses how wonderful that I don't I'm not blind from cataracts because they also have cataract surgery wow I am really privileged I'm I appreci I'm appreciate the fact that I can see wow that's pretty awesome and then from appreciation you can get to grab attitude I am so grateful for these reading glasses I am so grateful for this paintbrush I am so grateful for you Susy and the technology that's allowing us to talk across oh my God it starts to get really big and then gratitude becomes Joy so that's her Five Steps From Misery and anxiety to continuous joy and earlier I said I get these wisps of anxiety and then just immediately I'm like okay come back to Center accept that you're feeling scared relax find peace from peace find so acceptance to peace to appreciation to gratitude to Joy and it works it works pretty much every time and I know you shed Martha too your experience of having mammograms and how they used to freak you out and how it was just and and then how you manag to go through an unpleasant like if we're real right it's not like oh great tomorrow's the day like yeah it's like it's a thing that's uncomfortable but now you've you can tolerate it it's yeah and that also if you have undergone traumas my my fear of mammograms was largely based on being 25 and having a ton of medical tests done while I was pregnant all of which culminated in them telling me that my unborn child had Down syndrome and I should end the pregnancy anyway it's another book expecting Adam yes I did not end the pregnancy even though I'm very much pro-choice and um Adam is a magical being and that's what I'll say about that well what were we talking about oh okay so anytime I had a medical test I was afraid yeah I was going to show cancer and it was going to hurt and it was I just totally catastrophized the whole thing and when you're that traumatized um and a lot of people have been through things much worse than I was I went through the brain develops A Primitive connection between that trigger and the trauma so instead of just imagining you're on the beach with Susie sipping a p colada or whatever with her husband yes um instead of that what you have to do is be very very accepting of the fear that this little animal in your brain has of that situation of course you're scared of medical testing that was a really hard time but let's see what I can do to make you more comfortable let's see can we get a friend to go with us all right we'll get a friend um can we tell the doctor we have this special or the nurse who does the exam um I have a lot of trauma around medical testing and then they they're very kind and you go through the same experience uh but the healing of trauma happens when you recreate the circumstances and give it a different ending so the more I soften the experience of medical testing for myself by bringing friends by telling people what was going on by wearing fuzzy onesies but whatever it takes right giving myself a big reward for being brave enough to do it like you would with a 2-year-old um it gradually lost the association with trauma and now I don't faint during mammograms I just um um thump my feet a lot for you survive and then it's over yeah oh my gosh you know Martha uh when you spoke about Anita recently one thing that she said went during our interview which kind of ties into something else I wanted to speak to you about today uh was when she completely changed her life she went from being a pleaser in a more traditional role uh to radically changing it and and living her living in her Integrity right as you would say uh she she said that eventually people came around and S people who knew her in her former life saying my life sucks how do how do you like you got this gorgeous life like she's traveling she's speaking she's making this gorgeous impact and what was one thing that I loved in the book I sent it to my friend who doesn't love his job uh when you speak about curiosity creativity and being in alignment with yourself how that makes such a difference I was like huh it never even occurred to me that that yeah to be in a line and I don't mean like throw caution to the wind and give everything up today and make it but we limit ourselves right we go that's not possible what actually on a coaching call I did recently someone said can't be authentic I'll be broke and I'm like this is this is the world we live in this is why more than half the human population is experiencing chronic anxiety which is just it's not it's not normal to be anxious it's not innately the way we're meant to feel but so many people feel that way because we've created a social system and a physical environment that goes right back to what we I said at the beginning it goes against what we evolved to experience and how are we kept in these so so our we live in this very materialistic culture that is obsessed with productivity and wealth and because of that um the Industrial Revolution was when this really kicked in and they found we could create tremendous amounts of material wealth if we could just get people to sit in factories and be like cogs in the machine and have no feelings and just keep replicating physical actions so Henry Ford's uh early car factories were like this now it makes tremendous amounts of money but the turnover in Henry Ford's um factories was 90% per month 90% of the people he hired quit within a month through his whole career he had to hire 54,000 people a year to fill up a 14,000 person uh Factory but that's the way we want to do it we take all our kids we put them in rows we tell them to learn things that don't matter to them um to get rewards and punishments or avoid punishment and get reward even though we know that children learn best in a mix of people people moving around in an outside environment solving problems that are applicable to them at the moment that's how we should educ that's how children should be educated but our education system is training us to be Factory cogs and that is profoundly unnatural and it makes us anxious because I believe there's a part of us that knows what our lives are meant to be and that part is always like poking us if we're in a job we hate in a relationship that's not working whatever it'll be like no fix this go don't do this do something different and it it agitates and the agitation feels like anxiety so but we're we're hypnotized by the society into thinking it's normal to be in this type of a life and it's normal to feel anxious about it that's just how you have to live get used to it one of the people I quoted in the book is uh Jeff Bezos one of the richest in the world he runs Amazon and he tells his um shareholders and puts it in the corporate uh reports every year that he tells every Amazon employee to wake up every morning terrified and to stay terrified all day because that's how you beat the competition now most Amazon employees are just barely getting by so what he's saying is get up and be afraid every day of your life life your one wild and precious life spent every day afraid so that I a person with hundreds of billions of dollars can have more that's crazy talk the whole system is crazy and yet the poor Amazon employees is like I'm not only and I'm terrified I couldn't live without this terrifying job it's fascinating little by little start moving toward things that feel better yes and that's also what I learned from the way of Integrity the one degree shifts the slight shift the the powerful nature of that but I think it's so easy for us to give up before we begin plus I think that fomo or even just social media addiction makes this worse because we see people who get all this praise and credit oh I did this I got a promotion oh the and that's what we praise if I was like guys I'm going to the woods for a couple of weeks to just you know connect cool like that wouldn't get any I mean no one would be pumped you know go on go online and say I feel good and accept most people like that is not headline news yeah not only does um the internet magnify our social bias but it it actually because it rewards things that get the most attention and the Cobra is going to get more attention than the puppies the algorithms are calculated to feed us more of whatever we pay attention to and we pay if we pay more attention to things that frighten us or upset at us or make us competitive or make us feel bad or make us aspire to have more stuff um it's it feeds the algorithm and the algorithm in turn shapes the wiring of the brain to be more focused on the negative so when they put like little artificial intelligences out there and just say go and be happy and and let's see what the internet does um to the personality of this little artificial intelligence uh they tried this and within 16 hours they had to shut it down because the little artificial intelligence was starting to um support genocide racism hatred of all kinds our society is focused on things that are very dark and very dangerous and if you hate your job or your life and you're staying in it thinking but I've got to do this because it's normal don't listen normal for for you is what gets you out of anxiety and into creativity and when you go to creativity you can make a life the the last third of the book is about how you can remake your world starting just with your little self and then Rippling out from you you can create anything from that place of joy and uh infinite resourcefulness that is the human imagination when it's not frightened do you ever think because this came up yesterday too in our community that sometimes choosing yourself and choosing what's real and right for you you just you know you feel it in your body do you think that there's sometimes ever a bit of a loneliness with it because it's not what everyone else is thinking and doing like you're not going to get high five no one's going to freak out with joy they'll freak out of your new car right or your oh what you're going to Sant TR or whatever but it's like oh you know I'm just I'm really connecting with myself and I'm loving my long walks right now do you though there are all these little uh Tiny Worlds online and we are aware of the world that we've wandered into and the algorithm has taken us into sounds like your algorithm takes you into I am LLY successful admire me but like I I have an online community called Wilder because the whole idea is be less like the society and be more like the wild self um so my partner row and I made this community and um the people there go in and they say look I found a hummingbird nest on my walk this morning and everyone goes nuts like there are a few hundred people in there we we get to choose this is what I mean about creating any world we want find out what really really brings you to Joy and then find a place online or create row and I said we need to create a community online that goes nuts when we have a great cup of tea yes or we read a snippet of poetry that just makes our whole body resonate and so we go seeking folks go seeking places online and in the real world where you can have a community that rejoices in things that are not anxiety producing and that are not abnormal artificial yeah find it Susie you'll find people who will just be like you were reading a book on the beach and your husband was there in the rep damn that is a day and isn't it fascinating too Martha because our ego I think will have us believe the community you're in the church you're in the school system you're in like the the the uh the industry you're in and your peers that's it like oh that's it like oh yeah don't ruffle any feathers like o oh my gosh yeah so people go down internet rabbit and believe conspiracy theories and they really think the whole world is different we are so limited in our ability to imagine especially when we're trapped in anxiety oh yeah and one of the ways out of anxiety is to imagine what would make you joyful imagine what would make you peaceful and I mean simple things like you did the exercise at the beginning if you start actually seeking those things in real life and pay conscious attention to Bringing bringing more of it into your life you'll also choose it online and you'll end up in a place where your particular form of resonance connects with other people and this is something I didn't say in either book actually the next book I'm going to write has to do with Community because um my response in in life has been move away from things that don't work for me and you know keep away from that that's in my integrity and also keep away from it you know find a place of peace and joy and not anxiety by yourself but I've realized that when you walk out of the Trap of anxiety and become creative one of the things your brain does and my brain did it after a few months of just painting and drawing and calling that creativity it began to connect with other people and to want to create a village a community a society where people are genuinely thrilled that you found a hummingbird nest on your walk and that's why I made the community and so the next book is about that and I want to say to readers of Beyond anxiety it really really works and it's going to take you to your people Martha Marth the oh my go oh wow I could dis I have so many like I could keep you forever truly I mean I know you've got to run no I don't actually I you know I wanted to say and you don't have to put this I hope you edit this I mean I I do edit but I also just love the flow of condo yeah I I mean I I feel like I don't know there's part of me that just goes hang in here for 10 minutes there are people who need to hear more I don't know I mean I go I do everything by Instinct good and it's say you know give this let's give this till the quarter hour or something yes okay one I I mean yes please thank you thank you thank you so if someone right now I think that U we Bond over anxieties too don't we Martha we're like oh oh well you know that my kids doing better that sucks that politicians I mean it's almost like this this is why we need your next book on community do you feel as if um when it comes to making these changes becoming aware reading a book like Beyond anxiety which is so epic do you think that these shifts we feel are instantaneous or do you think it's a journey I mean are you still on a journey are you like I'm anxiety free I'm good I'm like oh I'm I'm I've recovered I I think it was Jonathan singer who wrote um if you're wondering whether you've completed your mission in life here's a good test if you're alive you're not finished yes so I actually the way I see the world the way it appears to me after years of meditation and thought is that um that the primary living thing or the primary constituent of the universe is consciousness and that we happen to be Consciousness in a particular kind of form and that form disappears but Consciousness does not this is just how I feel after 30 years of studying this and one near-death experience um so I have once again forgotten the question is it immediate is it immed are be like okay that's it I'm I'm free I wow and they have an anxious thought again it isn't I remember when I realized that creativity was a toggle switch that shut down anxiety I was sitting in my bedroom and when the perfect symmetry of that occurred to me I just raised both my fists as high as I could above my head like oh my God I think I figured it out I think I've got it I think I've got it and I started right then thinking okay let me do something creative I hadn't I always Drew as a kid but I hadn't been doing a lot of drawing as an adult and so I said okay I'm going to draw I know that requires I used to help teach a course at Harvard in the art department and we used the book drawing on the right side of the brain which I highly recommend um and we did it to make people better artists but it also made people calm and happy and um I remembered that so I started drawing and immediately I started having periods with no anxiety whatsoever so I spent a month just working on the right side of my brain getting up every morning and doing creative things mostly drawing and painting but remember you don't have to draw and paint um a lot of people who have been shamed for not drawing or painting well enough don't they it's a trigger it's a trigger same with music same with everything but the moment anxiety came up I could go from acceptance to now I'm going to do something creative oh my gosh now it's 5 hours later and I have had no anxiety and it so is it over instantly yes the instant you realize what's going on you can close it down and it will come up again you still have the same brain with the same Tendencies and you live in the same culture that's spinning you into anxiety but when you're aware of it you can then shut it down again so I don't love the way American politics is going and I've experienced a lot of grief and a certain amount of anger about it but weirdly enough through the whole thing where I'm really genuinely thinking we could see a collapse of democracy in the world you know in the western world uh we could see the end of American democracy which is very dear to my heart there's no anxiety there just isn't I I can feel sad I can feel angry but I don't get scared unless there's something in the room and you you allude to this or you outline in the book too how when we even see a problem it's not like our anxiety is helping solve the problem but a calm brain actually connects us to these creative like these reserves where we can actually go okay so what could my contribution be or is it a donation do I join a group do I could you speak to that for a moment because I think that people are so certain that feeling anxious is the driver of yeah ideas and resolutions and solving conflict ironically yeah it's that guy stomping out of the room going I need my anxiety my I I would fail without it and we all knew he would do better without it we can see it in other people almost right exactly yeah um and it is a really common cultural belief so nobody says that's ridiculous why would you say that um one way I put it is okay if you were in if you fell out of a window and you broke several bones and banged up your internal organs and you needed like acutely you needed surgery so you have a serious problem undeniable would you want the surgeons working on you to be in a state of panic or would you like it better if they were in a state of calm creativity because no two injuries are ever alike and they're always alert to what can I do with this particular damaged body it's a form of cre creativity all great science is a form of creativity so would you like genius creative surgeons working on you or surgeons in a state of panic and the argument is well if they weren't in a if they weren't anxious they would never operate on anyone which is a big fat lie they do it the vast majority of Physicians do it to help people do it out of kindness out of out of the goodness of their hearts not because they're terrified now there are a lot of people who try to get into medical school and because they're terrified of their parents or they're ter they're desperate to look good and those people have bad experiences as doctors I've had many as clients doctors were one of the main subcategories of people who came looking for life coaching for years when I started out but um back to the bottom line which is are they operating out of panic and anxiety or are they doing it out of calm creative connected compassionate curiosity which is what arises in us when anxiety is gone it's far more of a powerful driver of actor of action than anxiety ever could be and Matha to relate this to you I've SE I saw your two Today Show Clips love them right so with h so I think I forgot I know it was Hoda and um Jenna but prior to that I think it was Savannah and Hoda yeah but uh are you nervous or or anxious are you if you're like okay National TV millions of people are you like this is good I'll just like but up my top and walk straight out I don't care or are you like a lot what's your Vibe I was happy happy I was just happy happy I wore yellow socks because I felt happy that day and I love Hoda and I hadn't met the other two but they were wonderful and yeah I mean I used to have really bad performance anxiety and I just don't anymore I'm telling you I'm telling you this is this actually worked for me wow so to have the opportunity to get up and say to people to millions of people who I know are mainly anxious try is it it really freaking works it filled me with gratitude filled me with joy and I just don't go to the places that get anxious anymore wow because that's really also like laying aside the ego how am I going to perform how is this going right it's like I've got something to say that's useful and I really I'd like people to know about that but you know it was actually the thing is it's so weird my whole brain is different and it's much more like the brain of a dog yeah curious I feel like a dog I'm like hold it caught me like I love you hi I love you it's like dogs are like that right hi I love you I was hiding under the house because I love you like oh you I love you that's kind of how my brain works these days it's like you're blissed out it's like you're in the state of appreciation um it's more kind of bouncy than that it's not so much Bliss hello like enthusiasm I would call it enthusiasm that I am mainly filled with enthusiasm and that's like being with Spirit right that's the root word of enthusiasm to be the real you yeah the god the Divine part of the self the the god or goddess within and I yeah it's weird it's wonderful to go 60 years being anxious virtually all the time and then two years being anxious virtually none of the time even though bad things happen it's been a strange and wonderful and beautiful gift wow and you're sharing it with us oh my go I want everyone I cannot imagine though I love trying to imagine what the world would be like if half the people all the people who are anxious right now like clinically anxious if all of them went to this place enthusiasm and um Delight Delight I feel delighted well you can imagine the lack of conflict that would occur because we're not lashing out like oh the fear the anxiety trigger comes how can I cut you down so I feel a little bit more safe just that's one of the biggest things when somebody comes at me in anger or something I don't feel anxious about it and I'm like tell me I'm listening because I know that behind every angry face is a terrified little animal so if I scream back at them what's that going to do that's not going to do any good but if I just see the frightened animal there as long as I'm physically safe I don't have to get anxious about it what's your intention for this book when you're going out into the world I know it's already a bestselling book everyone's talking about it Beyond anxiety Beyond anxiet I mean what a gift truly Matha thank you for being you thank you Susie as this goes out and more and more people read it cu I've got a feeling you know this in my experience really great books of course they have their initial Surge and yours has but I feel like they're just perennial like they are just they are like on the shelves they're like you need this book you need this book like this is I've recommended it to my book club uh my book club to the lady in London um what what do you want people to when they get this in their hands you know they listen to you and you're also so funny can I just say like too I think to intersperse humor I'm not sure if it's intentional or I think it's just you but this heavy topic it's like you end up laughing and you're like what I should be stressed out reading about this because this is serious like you they ifuse all this like this levity what's your intention oh I love I love the levity I want it I want everyone to laugh more that's one thing toddlers laugh 400 times a day adults laugh about 15 times a day I would love a world where the adults were laughing as much as the toddlers um now that you speak of it but what I really really want I actually no one's ever asked me that question and I'd never thought about it before I want people to find each other I want everyone who has found who needs to be free from anxiety or who has found away I I hope it's it's like a breadcrumb that gets people to start connecting in real ways like you said your book club so it could be an online book club or it could be a your neighborhood or whatever but we desperately need to resuscitate the normaly of the the village of the people who are together calming together calming each other creating things together that right there is this powerful Bond I was reading about how um they did experiments trying to recreate the relative lack of racism there was in the American armed services after they started integrating it and they found that if you just get communities together to have meetings it doesn't work as well because people who are doing military exercises need each other to achieve tasks to achieve objectives and that connection starts to override all our fears and our hatreds and it just teaches us all how human and how safe we can be with other humans and that's something that I'm learning um again at the tender young age of 62 that I didn't know would happen to me when I did this anti- anxiety program I didn't realize it would it would throw me back into the pool of human beings and say now connect connect connect but I hope everyone who's anxious now finds loving excited enthusiastic peaceful wonderful human beings to connect with that I think will change the world oh Martha and also tell us about your community tell us about I'm not sure if it's always open or if you open you can go in um it's like a dollar a day you can join for a month and see if you don't like it you can get out again um we didn't want to trap anyone but what it is we didn't know what it was at first it was just a bunch of people who sort of think same thoughts but almost immediately Susie almost immediately after we started it without any intention it became a sort of artists colony because and it doesn't mean that everybody's making great art people started fooling around with stuff the way we do when we're little kids so there were in the book I mentioned these two uh groups who were studied by NASA the space agency they were looking for Creative Geniuses and when they tested yeah adults they found 2% were creative geniuses then they tested four and fiveyear olds and 98% of them were creative Geniuses what happened in that Community where nobody felt like they were going to be judged we would just start hanging out we we started doing something we call the Arty Friday hang bring your knitting is our motto and it was just people bringing something so we could be online with each other kind of chatting about a topic the group chooses well we make stuff and everybody's like holding up the stuff they're making and it went then it went from artists Community to a kind of philosophical forum and I felt like I was in in ancient Athens with people having really interesting conversations about what Society should be like but not in a yucky schoolly way right yeah like people who just wanted to celebrate their hummingbird nest and it would turn into oh that how we could fix part of the world so it went random group getting away from misery artists Colony philosophical group Healers of the of our little part of the world and I do believe we are designed so that when we're free from anxiety that is where our destiny takes us in community into creation into the healing of the world and it feels so expansive like it feels so delicious like even just hear and you talk about it so Martha where does everyone go to I mean Beyond anxiety a must read my friends look there are no excuses we have to be responsible for how we feel and if you're anxious there are solutions Martha spent her life like this is you know I mean you have many pieces of work a big body of work but Martha spent her life creating something like this that we can just pick up and read over the course of a week or so depending on how fast you read there are no excuses for not feeling better and it's Our obligation to take care of ourselves so so beyond beyond anxiety a mustre where else do we get find out all things Martha I know you've got quite a few cool things always bre online it's Martha beck.com and if you want to go to the community I think you can link from um the Martha beck.com webbsite but you can also just put in Wilder community.com and it'll take you right to it we would love to see you we have so much fun we do meditations together we it just is it's an incredible group of individuals I just I am falling in love with the world Susie I mean look at you look at you I mean my day was already perfect and then you came in like holy crap how good can things get I feel that way too I feel so lucky Martha be thank you I hope you'll come back I can't wait for the next book and the next and then may you live forever you do and try and stop me I will be back thank you so so so much Martha Beck Beyond anxiety a must read my friend and until tomorrow so much love and eats