If you ever feel anxious, whether that’s a low-level worry, a sudden fear, or full-on panic, can you sense where it’s coming from in your body? Perhaps your chest feels tight, or your gut feels uneasy. Or, perhaps, you have no idea. My guest on this episode believes that understanding where this feeling lives inside your body is the key to treating anxiety – for good.

Dr Russell Kennedy is a medical doctor, neuroscientist, and someone who suffered with crippling anxiety for over 30 years. He wants to make sure that no one else has to go through what he went through. He is the author of Anxiety RX: A New Prescription For Anxiety From The Doctor Who Created It and has recently launched MBRX, his online course to help people permanently heal their anxiety.

Russell insists anxiety isn’t a disorder of the mind. Our worries are merely a symptom – and one that keeps us in our heads and away from the real problem. He favours the term ‘alarm’ and says we need to find where the alarm is in our bodies. This alarm is a physiological pattern that’s been left by events in our past, usually in early childhood. It signals to our brain that we aren’t safe – and so our mind gets to work trying to think us out of danger.

Russell shares his own journey through anxiety. He talks about how growing up with a father who was schizophrenic and bipolar left alarm signals imprinted in his body. And, for over 30 years, he searched for relief from his anxiety. But nothing worked.

In Russell’s view, most treatments for anxiety, including medication and CBT, fail in the long term. And, he thinks this is because they don’t address the root cause.

For Russell, healing starts by finding out where anxiety lives inside your body and during our conversation, Russell walks you through how exactly you can start doing that.

We also discuss the simple things that parents can do to help their kids grow up feeling ‘seen, heard, loved, and protected’. And, we also discuss the value of activities like breathwork, meditation, and yoga, and also some promising therapies such as Internal Family Systems and Somatic Experiencing.

Russell’s core message has the potential to be transformative – that it’s more effective to use the body to calm the mind than the mind to calm the body. Given how prevalent anxiety is now across society, I think this is a profoundly important conversation. I hope you enjoy listening.

Watch the video version of the conversation here:

Watch the conversation on YouTube