Comedy, Courage, & Calm: Psychedelics & Anxiety

Podcast Highlights

• How psychedelics and studying childhood trauma informed Dr. Kennedy’s perspective on anxiety
• A new theory on anxiety
• The impact of psychedelics on anxiety
• Why so many people struggle with anxiety
• Practices to feel more connected and less anxious
• How to safely bring more awareness to the root causes of anxiety
• Addressing anxiety stemming from preverbal trauma
• Developing the courage to feel
• A physician’s experience as a stand-up comedian
• Dr. Kennedy's current projects and focuses

Show Links

1. The Anxiety MD website
2. Dr. Kennedy on Instagram
3. “Waking The Tiger” by Peter Levine
4. “Letting Go” by David Hawkins
5. NARM
6. (podcast) “Breaking Our Perception”: Healing Mental Illness through Psychedelics

These show links may contain affiliate links. Third Wave receives a small percentage of the product price if you purchase through the above affiliate links.

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Also brought to you by The Coaching Certification Program by Third Wave’s Psychedelic Coaching Institute. To learn more about our flagship 10-month training program for coaches who want to integrate psychedelic modalities into their practice, click here.

Podcast Transcript

0:00:00.2 Paul F. Austin: Hey folks, and welcome back to The Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave, where we explore how the safe and responsible use of psychedelics can catalyze individual and collective transformation. Today I am interviewing Dr. Dr. Russell Kennedy, The Anxiety MD.

0:00:16.3 Dr. Russell Kennedy: I found being a physician, it was really highly pharmaceutically based and it was a lot of treating symptoms. In my history with psychedelics, I really started to go with the root cause of what my anxiety was, which is this state of alarm that's sitting in my body. That state of alarm was showed to me on LSD and to some extent on ayahuasca. And that created this theory that I came up with that anxiety really is more to do with this old alarm that's stored in our body. Than actually the thoughts of our mind.

0:00:52.2 Paul F. Austin: Welcome to The Psychedelic Podcast by Third Wave. Audio mycelium, connecting you to the luminaries and thought leaders of the psychedelic renaissance. We bring you illuminating conversations with scientists, therapists, entrepreneurs, coaches, doctors, and shamanic practitioners, exploring how we can best use psychedelic medicine to accelerate personal healing, peak performance, and collective transformation.

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0:04:25.7 Paul F. Austin: Hey listeners, this is Paul F. Austin, founder and CEO at Third Wave, and welcome back to the show. Today we're bringing you an exploration into psychedelics and anxiety with my guest, Dr. Dr. Russell Kennedy. Dr. Kennedy, also known as the Anxiety MD, is a visionary physician in the field of anxiety disorders with a diverse background in medicine, neuroscience, developmental psychology, yoga, meditation, and stand-up comedy. He has redefined the understanding and treatment of anxiety from both a scientific and humanistic perspective. Much of his work is based on overcoming his own lifelong battle with chronic and crippling worry, creating the award-winning and best-selling book, Anxiety Rx.

0:05:02.4 Paul F. Austin: The Anxiety Rx podcast, and more recently, MBRX, a step-by-step mind-body program designed to permanently heal anxiety, helps to empower individuals from all over the world to overcome anxiety and embrace a life of calm and fulfillment. In our conversation together, Dr. Kennedy shares his personal journey of healing anxiety that stems from his own childhood adversity. We explore the connection between the mind and body. The impact of psychedelics on anxiety and transcending limiting self-beliefs that physiological states of anxiety produce. And Dr. Kennedy also provides practices that we can all do to better center ourselves and overcome anxiety. He offers a neuroscientific overview of anxiety and unpacks the importance of changing the alarm sensation in the body in order to break protective patterns that may stem as far back as early childhood.

0:05:54.7 Paul F. Austin: So before we get into it, just a reminder to follow the Psychedelic Podcast on your favorite app or like and subscribe on YouTube. Also, join us in the community, community.thethirdwave.co. Sign up for our profile, join the conversation. We would love to know what you thought of this episode. All right, that's it for now. Let's get into my conversation with Dr. Dr. Russell Kennedy. Hey listeners, welcome back to the podcast. Today we have Dr. Dr. Russell Kennedy, a physician, neuroscience expert, somatic intuitive, certified yoga instructor, meditation teacher, and probably my favorite one, a professional stand-up comedian who struggled with crippling anxiety for decades and has finally healed that. And we brought Dr. Dr. Russell Kennedy on the show today to tell us about his story, to talk about anxiety, to talk about psychedelics. I wanna hear about stand-up comedy. I hope you're funny. Just kidding.

0:06:53.4 Dr. Russell Kennedy: I hope I am too. I hope I am too.

0:06:54.3 Paul F. Austin: I'm stoked to have you on.

0:06:57.4 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. That's great, Paul. No, it's great. I'm looking forward to getting into this, for sure.

0:07:00.9 Paul F. Austin: Let's start with your path as a physician. And I'd love just to hear a little bit more about why did you choose to become a physician in the first place? What drew you to that line of work? What drew you to that vocation?

0:07:14.6 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Right. So I grew up with a father who had schizophrenia and bipolar. And just to bang right into this, he committed suicide when I was 26. So I always kind of looked after him. You know, as a teenager, I was the oldest son, so I kind of looked after him and that kind of thing. So I got into this habit of actually looking after other people and found I was really good at it in a very codependent kind of way. And so it naturally flew that, you know, followed that I was gonna go into some sort of healing art. My mother's a nurse, my brother's a nurse and I didn't really have a whole lot of confidence in my own intellectual abilities growing up because there's so much trauma around the household. My high school grades were dismal. In fact, there's a great story about me being an attending physician for one of my old teachers that came in and said, Hey, Mr. Colvin, I'm Russ Kennedy.

0:08:05.4 Dr. Russell Kennedy: I'm your attending physician. And he looked at me like, you are a doctor? Because I just had like C minus, barely made it through. Like, you're a doctor? How the hell did this happen? So, you know, the bottom line is I learned how to read people really well when I was young 'cause I always had to read my dad. I didn't know what kind of mood he was gonna be in. So I got to I use that sort of reading people ability into becoming a physician. But I found being a physician, it was really, really highly pharmaceutically based. And it was a lot of treating symptoms without actually going deep into the root cause. And then in my history with psychedelics, like I really started to go with the root cause of what my anxiety was, which is this state of alarm that's sitting in my body from dealing with my schizophrenic dad all through my childhood. So that state of alarm was showed to me on LSD and to some extent on ayahuasca. And that created this theory that I came up with that anxiety really is more to do with this old alarm that's stored in our body than actually the thoughts of our mind.

0:09:14.4 Paul F. Austin: And so that was a path that led you down to becoming a physician. When you became a physician, then there was a particular focus that you professionally have taken around anxiety. You wrote and published a book about healing anxiety. What was for you so crippling about the anxiety that you experienced? And when did you really start to notice it and observe it and go, there's something here and I really want to address this cause of it?

0:09:43.7 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah, when I was a teenager, like a late teenager, I became obsessed with my health. You know, I had some health anxiety and being a physician with health anxiety is probably not the best thing. It's like being a tree surgeon afraid of sap. You know, it's like one of these things that you just, it's an old joke, but it is one of those things that I think it started off with health anxiety. And then when I got out of medical school, of course, I had medical student disease like crazy. So I assumed I had every possible terminal disease that there was. And that's how it kind of manifested in me. But really, I know now that social anxiety, OCD, anxiety in general, it's just this energy of alarm that's stuck in your body. It manifests in different ways. Some people, it will manifest as depression. Other people, OCD, other people, personality disorders. With me, it manifested as anxiety. So it's like, okay, how do I deal with this? And I went through regular cognitive therapy for 20, 25 years helped a little bit, but didn't really do much. I went through my somatic training as a somatic experiencing practitioner, and that getting into my body really, really helped me get into the root cause of what was creating this anxiety in my mind, 'cause my mind was basically just reflecting this old trauma that was unresolved and still stuck in my body.

0:11:10.6 Paul F. Austin: And so what for you, was there an aha moment? Was there one day you're still struggling with crippling anxiety and the next day it's gone and everything is beautiful? How did that relationship with anxiety sort of change and transform?

0:11:28.5 Dr. Russell Kennedy: It took a long time, actually. I went through a lot of different therapies. I went to India. I lived in India for a while. Tried to study the spiritual aspect of anxiety and that kind of thing. And that didn't really help. So in 2013, I ruptured my left Achilles tendon and I was in bad shape. Like I was thinking that I was gonna go down the same path as my father and just commit suicide because, life wasn't worth living if I was gonna live in a 12 hour panic attack every day. So I had a friend and that friend took me on a little trip with LSD and on LSD, not when I was in it, like when I was in it, like my mind was completely fractured and I couldn't really figure anything else, figure anything out. So it was one of those things when I was coming out of it that it was like, hey, you know what? And I don't know how I got this message, but your anxiety is actually the state of alarm that's stuck in your solar plexus. And it's purple and it's hot and it's about the shape of your fist.

0:12:26.0 Dr. Russell Kennedy: It pushes up into your heart, in the back of your spine. And that's the root cause of your anxiety. So once I had that idea, I thought, okay, well, maybe I'm going at this the wrong way. Maybe I'm trying to fix my thoughts with positive psychology and all that kind of stuff, rather than actually fix the root cause, which is this alarm in my body. And then Dr. Gordon Neufeld, who's kind of like my mentor in developmental psychology, talked about alarm. Not in the same way that I do, but he talks about this state of alarm. And I thought, oh, I wonder if this thing in my solar plexus is this state of alarm. And to this process called interoception, where your mind is constantly reading your body, it read that alarm and the mind, because it's a meaning-making, makes sense machine, read that alarm and made worries that are completely consistent with that feeling of alarm. So because my father had this inescapable illness, that's kind of the sink that my anxiety took. It's like, well, maybe you'll have a terminal illness. Like for a long time, I was paranoid. I was gonna get schizophrenia and bipolar like my dad.

0:13:31.3 Dr. Russell Kennedy: So it was one of those things where I kind of like, okay, maybe I'll develop a new theory of anxiety based on what worked for me, which was like, okay, this is in my body. How do I connect with my body? How do I take some, you know, physiological side, put your hand over it, like localize it, find it, put your hand over it, really feel it and really understand? And this is probably the big kicker that that alarm is really a version of your younger self, that just never got seen, heard, loved, understood, protected the way he needed to, to be able to develop a mentally balanced perspective on life. So it was going back to that feeling of the body grounding in the body. Along with cognitive stuff. I mean, I'm not against cognitive therapy. I just think that it's kind of like fixing the superficial, you know, painting a house that's got a whole lot of problems on the inside. So trying to do both and really that, and that's what the book is about, is basically how I found my way through like LSD and ayahuasca on some level to this theory that anxiety is really the state of alarm that's stuck in your body. And your mind is just reflecting it. And because we worship the mind in this society, we assume the mind is the cause of anxiety when I've come to know that it really isn't. It's just a reflection of this old trauma that's stored in your body.

0:14:55.8 Paul F. Austin: So one of my favorite books about this is Your Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote a lot about somatics, how adverse childhood experiences impact our physiology, what that does in terms of PTSD, depression, addiction, anxiety, these sorts of things. So I love that sense of we think of it so much from the neck up. And when we work with psychedelics, especially when we work with psychedelics, we come to realize, oh, there's no disconnect between the mind and the body, right? They are one. And obviously, for you going to India, that was probably maybe a central aspect or element of Eastern religion and philosophy is this interconnected self, if you will. Can you tell us a little bit more about that trip to India? Like, what teachers did you work with? Where did you explore? I'd love just to hear kind of your, because India in itself is a very anxiety provoking place, right? It's kind of paradoxical.

0:16:00.4 Dr. Russell Kennedy: It really is, yeah. Individual going over...

[vocalization]

0:16:05.7 Dr. Russell Kennedy: You know, there's cows in the street. Everybody's going. There's no traffic lights. It's all roundabouts and everybody's in their own sort of, their own little world in a way. So India for me was kind of like, we're mind, body, and spirit. And as a physician and a neuroscientist, I understand a lot about the mind and the body. But I didn't really understand a lot about the spirit. So I thought, okay, well, maybe that's the... And this is all just intuition. This isn't really scientific. It's like, maybe there's something in this spirit thing. So I went to India. I stayed at a temple there. And we did prayer and the typical kind of India stuff. And it didn't really help me. Like it didn't, I came back in August of 2013 after I'd ruptured my Achilles tendon and had surgery, all that stuff.

0:16:57.6 Dr. Russell Kennedy: And I came back just really disappointed. And that's what kind of led me into psychedelics was, okay, that didn't work. You know, that was a number of things that didn't work. That was another thing, very expensive, mentally and physically tasking trip that didn't really give me a whole lot of insights. There was a little period where I felt this sense of enlightenment, where I was one with everything, kind of like the same feeling when you're having a pleasant psychedelic journey, which I haven't had many of. So there is this sense of, okay, I'm kind of connected to everything, 'cause the thing about psychedelics is it kind of dissolves the separation between self and other and conscious and unconscious.

0:17:40.5 Dr. Russell Kennedy: So you're just flowing in this state. And if you look at the way that the brain works, especially this default mode network that we have in the brain, it's the place that our brain goes when we're not actively doing something. So if you're not actively solving a task or whatever, you go into this default network. And this default network may be kind of the home of this inner critic, ego, whatever you wanna call it, that kind of tells you about yourself, self-referential thinking. So all the negative, oh, you're too fat, you're too smart, you're too skinny, you're too whatever, you know, two things you're too much of is in this self-referential part of our brain called the default mode network. So when psychedelics come along, they paralyze specifically. If you look at fMRI scanners, they paralyze the default mode network specifically.

0:18:29.0 Dr. Russell Kennedy: So all this chatter goes away and you kind of experience yourself in this sort of more pure state. And I think when you see it, it's kind of like MDMA. MDMA isn't a psychedelic, but you just feel love for everything. You feel connected to everything. You feel love for everything. And on the psychedelics there is like, you see your essence, you see that there is no birth, there is no death. You're all, it's all part of everything. It's all this ego generated self referential stuff that causes a tremendous amount of pain for us. So I think it allows you not to believe everything you think about yourself when you paralyze that self-referential aspect of your brain, you feel who you are at your essence. And then once you've been there, once you've seen it, once you've felt it, the other stuff seems just so almost comical that you know that.

0:19:30.3 Dr. Russell Kennedy: But then you fall back into, we all do, we fall back into our daily dopamine driven lives, and that sense of self comes back again. So I think it's just one of those things where when you see things, you don't necessarily have to be them anymore. So when you see your default mode network, when you see that inner critic, when you see that chatter that goes off in your mind, and you've actually experienced that, it isn't really who you are. Once you see that, once you've seen the other side, it's very hard to go back and start believing everything you think again.

0:20:05.9 Paul F. Austin: And what impact does that have then on anxiety, when you don't necessarily believe everything that you think?

0:20:10.9 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Well, a lot of... Yeah, a lot of anxiety is negative referential. There's a stigma to like, why am I anxious? Why is everyone else seem to be enjoying life? There's a stigma that's associated, and there's this alarm that gets perpetuated, I believe, partly through the default mode network. And then you find your worst qualities. I'm a worrier, so it's like I fixate on that. It's like and I flagellate myself for that or I could be doing more or I left medicine, that was a big thing. I wasn't a doctor anymore. That was a thing that I beat myself with for a long time. So I think it's just this when we feel negatively, when we have alarm in our system, we have trauma in our backgrounds, our brain in this confirmation bias looks for a reason.

0:21:01.5 Dr. Russell Kennedy: You can always find a reason why you don't like an aspect of yourself, and then you can focus on that aspect preferentially. And then you don't see all the good things about yourself. This default mode network just gets you to sort of lock into this what you don't like. And because our brains do have this fear bias, we are more likely to look at things that we don't like about ourselves and give them way more credibility than the things we actually do like about ourselves. So I think that's one of the things about psychedelics in a way, is that it allows you to see your pureness. It allows you to see your innocence. Maybe that's the best way of putting it. You can see your innocence. And when you see your innocence, you realize that a lot of these negative things that you have towards yourself or other people or whatever, are basically just ego created illusions and it's a confirmation bias. You believe more of what you already think. So if you believe the world is an unsafe place, you will just find reasons to believe that the world is an unsafe place, and you will ignore signs and cues of safety and pay so much more attention to signs and cues of danger. And your brain is this meaning making machine. And if you look for something, you will find it.

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0:22:54.6 Paul F. Austin: So, a few months ago I did my first Vipassana, a 10-day Vipassana, silent meditation retreat. And a lot of what you're communicating here is what I notice and observe that the first day, two, three days, there's a lot of thoughts coming. There's a lot of thoughts that I'm like, why are you even... Why are you coming up? What's the use of this? And then eventually, as the practice deepens, and this is also true of retreats with ayahuasca, whatever it might be, there's this sort of stillness that comes in and what I've noticed is there's just... It's easier to then notice, oh, that's a thought, and that thought is going away. And we sort of can observe it that way. So that basic kind of mindfulness meditation and when we work with psychedelics, they often almost act as like they help to create a clean slate.

0:23:46.0 Paul F. Austin: You mentioned this sort of feeling of innocence that we're returned to almost like the Garden of Eden is the sort of metaphor that some folks may use to describe it, that we can just be fully in our power and sovereignty, trusting ourselves, believing in ourselves, having a lot of confidence in ourselves. Now, I set all that up to say the Vipassana is obviously a very contained experience. When you go and you drink ayahuasca in Costa Rica, it's a very contained experience. Generally speaking, our world is quite prone to anxiety. And you wrote and published this book, Anxiety Rx has over 750 reviews on Amazon. You clearly struck a really important chord, and I'm just curious to hear some of your high level thoughts, and then we'll go a little bit deeper as to why is anxiety so prevalent? In our everyday life, why is it seemingly everywhere for everyone? And that's obviously hyperbole and an exaggeration, but...

0:24:50.1 Dr. Russell Kennedy: No, I get it.

0:24:51.8 Paul F. Austin: It just seems like everyone I know at some point has struggled with anxiety.

0:24:52.7 Dr. Russell Kennedy: I get it. Another thing that Dr. Neufeld said was that all anxiety is separation anxiety. And I believe that's true. And then I add that on top of that, I say, yeah, and it's mostly separation from yourself. So I believe that the root of anxiety is a separation of your mind and your body, and a separation of your adult self from your child self, especially if you had trauma. So if you had trauma as a child, your adult self doesn't really want to go back and visit that child because that child holds all their pain and the child looks at the adult in us like, why are you leaving me alone? Why are you abandoning me? So the split gets wider and wider and wider as you get older and older. And that's the root cause of what creates this alarm that gets stored in our body.

0:25:40.7 Dr. Russell Kennedy: And I agree, you can't separate the body and the mind, it could just be that the alarm that I feel in my solar plexus is actually stored in the representation in my brain. It's not actually stored in my body itself, but we get into sort of a philosophical kind of argument at that point. So it is really about understanding that this alarm is really the root cause of what creates this anxiety, separation is at the root of all the alarm. And we just went through a huge separation with COVID. We go through separations all the time, and we're not meant to be separate. We're meant to be connected to each other. And I think... I really think that the currency of being human is dropping. We're in this state where we're feeling, and I was saying this to a friend of mine yesterday, when you get a call from the scammers and they're trying to tell you that your computer's gone offline and you have to send them a gift card from Best Buy or whatever it is.

0:26:50.7 Dr. Russell Kennedy: All day we get these texts like your bank, the TD Bank says that your... Or Chase, that bank says that you've had some fraud on your account. It's like, well, I don't have an account with them. So I know that's a scam, but it's just this kind of thing that we're bathed in all the time. We're bathed in that the world is a dangerous place. And when we didn't have... Being hooked into the internet all the time, we didn't have that sense that the world was a dangerous place because we lived in our own little bubble, and that was fine. But now with globalization, we feel everything. And I think that there is this sense that the world is in a safe place.

0:27:32.6 Dr. Russell Kennedy: And I think Einstein said that too. You have to make the decision as to whether or not you see the world as a safe place or not. And I think more and more, because we have this inherent fear bias, as human beings to start with, when you start getting more and more fear, a lot of people are resilient to it, that's fine. But there's a lot of people that are kind of, that were kind of treading water before COVID and then COVID just knocked them over the edge and now they're into like anxiety, depression, OCD, all these eating disorders, all this kind of stuff that they probably wouldn't have gotten into, had COVID not come along. Eventually, they probably would've started to suffer on some level, but COVID really supercharged everybody. And they shoved our faces in a separation. And even when you have a mask on your face, it's still a sense, there's a sense of separation there.

0:28:21.9 Dr. Russell Kennedy: There's a sense that you're not connected and it's from you're... You get this unconscious reminder constantly that you're not connected and, we can consciously tell ourselves, yes, I have my family, I have this, I have that. But if unconsciously, as you walk through the world you feel separate. You're a sitting duck for anxiety, especially if you had some kind of trauma in your childhood that wasn't resolved.

0:28:51.8 Paul F. Austin: What are your practices that you rely on most, maybe three to four to five, that help you to be reminded of this connection to sort of see through the illusion of separation?

0:29:04.0 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah, a lot of the times what I'll do is I'll just put my hand over this place in my alarm. And I talked about the solar plexus there. I'll just put my hand there because, like I said, I think that alarm is a representation of my wounded younger self. So when I touch that place in my body, and this is what I tell people about their anxiety, and they said, what's the best tip you can give me about my anxiety? I tell them, it's not in your mind, it's actually in your body. And we get so used to getting sucked into the worries of our mind. We don't even look to our body. We don't even look down there to see where this might be. So I find it in my body and I get my patients to do the same thing. Some people, it's in their throat, some people it's in their heart, some people it's in their belly, it can be anywhere, but usually it's in the midline of the body between your chin and your pubic bone.

0:29:48.1 Dr. Russell Kennedy: And I said, just put your hand over that area, or both hands over that area and kind of breathe into it and kind of feel your butt in the chair, feel your feet on the ground, like ground yourself. Just feel and allow yourself to feel the feeling, even if it's uncomfortable, because why I believe that we worry so much is that we're trying to escape this pain in our body by distracting up into our minds. And when we... And it works to some extent, because what worry does is it makes the uncertain seem a little more certain. And when we do that, we get a little shot of dopamine in our brain, when we worry and it's painful, we get a little shot of endorphin and enkephalin from our periaqueductal gray in our brainstem, which is kind of like a natural pain reliever.

0:30:32.0 Dr. Russell Kennedy: So worry can become addictive based on the dopamine and the endogenous morphine that we get from it. So, people think, oh, worry's terrible, worry's bad, but worry, we can actually get addicted to. The problem with worry is it's just going to keep that alarm in suspended animation, or it's gonna make it worse. So, worry by definition, doesn't allow that alarm your body to heal, and it's the alarm in your body that's the root cause of the anxiety in the first place. So you can do all the positive psychology you want, but unless you actually fix that root cause of alarm in your body that was probably there from unresolved trauma when you were younger, you're always gonna be anxious on some level.

0:31:17.5 Paul F. Austin: And so let's say some folks are listening to this and they have struggled with anxiety, maybe they struggle with worry. How do they even go about identifying or bringing awareness to that alarm? Because I would imagine it is a bit of a process, even understanding, well, how is that alarm showing up? In what context is that showing up? What does it feel like, where, you mentioned already it's in the midline of the body between the chin and the pubic bone, but.

0:31:47.1 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah, it's getting people to look deeper. It's getting people to look, because the reason why they're stuck in worry in the first place is they're trying to avoid this pain in their body. So I'm telling you, Hey, you gotta go back into this pain. And they're going, screw that. I'm not gonna go back into this pain. I'm gonna stay with my worries. So it's just getting people in the quieter moments when you're stuck into worry, it's like, okay, can I just scan my body and see if there's an energy there that feels more intense than somewhere else? Especially in the midline. Is there, like, is it hot? Is it cold? Is it superficial? Is it deep? Does it radiate somewhere? Like the more we can feel this alarm in our system, the more we can connect to that younger version of ourselves, because I believe that that younger version of ourselves is the source of the alarm. So it's really convincing people to go back to their pain, you gotta feel as a healer, kinda thing, and that's hard.

0:32:35.5 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Sometimes we need help. Sometimes we really need help to connect with that, to be in the presence of someone else while we're talking about what changed us or what we blame ourselves for, or what hurts. That really helps. And that comes back to the whole separation thing. If you don't have anybody that you can share this with, of course, your alarm's gonna get worse. Of course, your anxiety's gonna get worse. So what I tell people to do is, in your quieter moments, when you feel anxious, scan your body, get out of your head. You're not gonna find peanut butter in a tree, you're not gonna find it in the hardware store. Look into your body, find it in your body, put your hand over it, connect with it, breathe into it.

0:33:26.5 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Then you're actually getting at the root cause of what's causing your anxiety in the first place. Now it still hurts. It's not like you're gonna feel the alarm in your body, put your hand over it, and it's gonna go away immediately. It won't actually, and it may actually get worse because that alarm is what you've been trying to avoid by worrying. So as soon as you feel the alarm, your natural response, probably since childhood, is to go into your head and distract and escape from it. So the natural inclination you have is to go away from that alarm. But what I'm saying is, if you're ever gonna heal it, you have to sit there with it. You have to allow it to be there. Now, you can get sucked into that. So what I usually say is, is there a place in your body that actually feels good right now or feels neutral?

0:34:10.6 Dr. Russell Kennedy: And it's like, is there a time in your life? What was the best time in your life? It's like, well, I was foreseeing my partner and we went on this hike somewhere. It's like, okay, can you bring yourself into the felt sense of that, the view at the top of the hike, and being with this new person and the excitement of it, and just really having this sense that this person's really gonna be something for me in my life. This is gonna be great. And it's like, okay, now, can we go back to that place of alarm in your solar plexus or your heart or whatever? And can we go back between the two of them in somatic experiencing, in somatic experiencing we call it pendulation, where we go back and we go into the alarm and then we go into something pleasant or neutral, and then we go back into the alarm and pleasant or neutral.

0:34:56.7 Dr. Russell Kennedy: And what that tells the unconscious mind is, Hey, this trauma that I experienced when I was young isn't all of me. It doesn't take me over completely because I can't actually go into this other place that's pleasant or at least neutral. And that's one of the ways that I sort of start bringing people out of this sense of alarm. What I do see is I see people spending thousands and thousands of dollars on psychotherapy and cognitive therapy, which will work for about three to six months. And then you'll kind of... Your ego will kind of slide you back into the same old place that you were before if we don't actually fix the root cause of the issue. So I think that's a lot of it. It's just learning that your alarm is what's causing your anxiety, and you have to get out of your head and into your body.

0:35:47.9 Paul F. Austin: Peter Levine, who I'm sure you're super familiar with, Waking up the Tiger. That he talks a lot about how as even animals, these sort of repressed energies, they have to be released. They have to... They kinda have to be experienced, they have to be opened up. David Hawkins as well, who wrote this fantastic book called Letting Go. Talks about the necessity of allowing for repressed or suppressed emotions to really come to the surface. And one thing that you mentioned, which I wanted to circle back on that came up as a question, is you had quite a bit of awareness about, okay, this is the alarm in my body, and even more so than that, this is what it's from. You mentioned your relationship with your Dad and you had those challenges. My question is do we need to know the why in order to heal the anxiety? In other words, does someone need to understand their story quite well in order to... Or this is why I'm having this anxiety because of my relationship with my Mom, or relationship with my Dad, or this traumatic experience, or is simply the experience of attuning to the body enough to heal the anxiety? Does that question make sense?

0:37:01.7 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah, I don't think... Yeah, it does perfectly. I don't think we need to. We're cognitive beings. We wanna know, we wanna know why. Part of that is a trap. I mean, part of that is the reason why you're anxious in the first place is your compulsive need to be cognitive and to know why. So a lot of people will have their trauma before the age of seven years old before they're really all that verbally adept. So being able to explain it to yourself or explain to someone else, isn't that necessary for people who've had what we call pre-verbal trauma. And in fact, that's all we have a lot of times. And I think there's a real frustration with people who had trauma when they were two years old or three years old, and there's a psychotherapist there trying to get them to explain why.

0:37:51.7 Dr. Russell Kennedy: It's like, well, I can't explain it because I didn't have language back then. I don't really know what's going on right now. But we do have this sense in our body. There is this part of our brain, deep, deep in our brain called the insula or insular cortex, and it kind of mediates mind to body and body to mind, what they call top down and bottom up. The insula kind of creates this physical sensation in your body. Now that I believe is exactly the same as it was when your father was yelling at you, or your mother was hitting you. Or somebody was being abused in your family.

0:38:26.0 Dr. Russell Kennedy: I believe that we create this sensation in our body through the insula. The amygdala has something to do with it too. It kind of, they all work together in concert, but it creates this emotional signature of pain and alarm. So if we know the emotional signature, if we can feel it in our system, and I get people to explain it when they start, it's like, well, it feels like maybe a little tingly or whatever. The more they explain it, after I get them into it for 20 or 30 minutes, they're like, yeah. And it feels like an ice pick. It feels like an ice pick, like chipping, like they really, once they open it up, they start, it usually starts expanding and expanding and expanding, or there's so much repression around it that they don't want to go into it at all.

0:39:07.3 Dr. Russell Kennedy: And that's a kind of a different story, but a lot of people can really, really drill down into the nuances of what their alarm is. And I believe, again, that's the insular cortex. And I also believe that when we change the sensation, we change the mental coupling that goes along with it. So if we change that sensation, and the way... The analogy that I draw is I have three dogs, Buddha, Riley and Ellie. Buddha's like 14 now. Riley's about seven, Ellie's about three. Riley doesn't like other dogs. So when we're walking, I see him. And what he will do is his head drops a little bit and his tail comes up just this tiny bit. And I know that this is the preamble, his brain and his body are kind of fixating into this when this freaking dog gets here, I'm gonna let him have it.

0:39:58.5 Dr. Russell Kennedy: So all I do is I tap his tail down and that breaks the pattern, and then he's fine, and then he's okay. Like the dog can just walk right by. But if I let him sit in that little pattern where his head's down and his tail's up, and the dog gets closer and closer and closer, he will lock into that thing. I've gotta attack this dog. But if I just tap his tail, just like... Just a tiny little thing, that's enough to break him up. And that's the analogy that I use because that's what I'm trying to do with human beings too, is like, can I just tap you out of that alarm sensation that you have? Can I just change it a little bit? And if I change it a little bit, we don't get locked into that same old worry, obsession, whatever it is.

0:40:39.0 Dr. Russell Kennedy: So your body has a tremendous amount to do with what your mind does. You will think how your body feels much more than you will you the opposite. So it's really understanding, how can I change this feeling that you have of alarm? Because when I change the feeling at many different levels and using many different techniques, then I start actually opening up this area that you're really resistant to go into. And I think this is what psychedelics do, they kind of hit you with a bit of a sledgehammer that way, is that you go into this area and at least you have a chance to move it around. And I think that there's pros and cons to psychedelics. I've seen it make people worse, and I've also seen miraculous things with them as well. So it's kind of this thing where we're just... We're changing the felt sense of what it feels like to have trauma. And then tapping your tail down, we're breaking that little mold that you've created for so many years.

0:41:39.1 Paul F. Austin: There's like a little bit of a pattern interruption, essentially. And this even goes back to what you're talking about with the default mode network, the interruption of the default mode network. We kind of break up the self-referential thinking, psychedelics can help to do this. And a lot of what we talk about in the podcast as well is not only high doses of psychedelics like ayahuasca or high doses of mushrooms. But we also talk quite a bit about low doses, microdosing. I've told this story a few times, but I did about six months of therapy, a type of therapy called NeuroAffective Relational Modelling, which was helping me to identify where emotions were in my body. And I took about 200 milligrams of psilocybin before each one of those therapeutic sessions. My therapist knew it.

0:42:24.1 Paul F. Austin: She was well-versed in plant medicine and all of that. And I just noticed that I was just able to, it's better like attuned to tap into the emotion. I was more even courageous, I would say, and just allowing myself to confront it. It kind of comes back to what you were saying with sometimes the courage. We need to have the courage to go into these deep dark places, 'cause it's sticky, it's uncomfortable. It doesn't feel good. And these lower doses and higher doses of psychedelics can be very, very helpful for that.

0:42:57.6 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. I think we get these protective patterns that we form from childhood.

0:43:03.4 Paul F. Austin: Interesting.

0:43:03.9 Dr. Russell Kennedy: And we don't allow ourselves to go, and I think this is the basis of addiction a lot of times is that, when you don't trust love, when love wasn't safe for you as a child, when you couldn't trust your parents, either by omission or commission, your mother or your parents were either abusive or neglectful or whatever, or you just weren't able to connect with them. There is this sense that there's this protective thing that love isn't trustable, feeling good isn't safe because Dad's gonna get drunk and everything's gonna explode again. So there's like waiting for the other shoe to drop. So there is this sense that we keep ourselves in this suspended animation of fear because that's better than allowing ourselves to relax and then getting smashed in the face.

0:43:48.1 Dr. Russell Kennedy: So there's this kind of thing that I have with a lot of my anxiety patients where it's not safe to feel safe or they get worried when they're not worrying. So it's just this horrible way, of this sort of overprotective reflex that our ego does to us. Self-referential thinking as well, that keeps us in this kind of negative place because it's familiar. And children equate familiarity with security. So this is Freud's repetition, compulsion, what was normal for you in childhood. You'll unconsciously replicate in adulthood. If you had an abusive parent, you'll likely pick an abusive spouse. It's just... We just, we go back to what's familiar because we equate familiarity with security. So if you know that and you know that you can move out of it.

0:44:34.3 Dr. Russell Kennedy: You can move into your body and it's safe to move into your body even if it hurts. Like that's what I say to people, it's much better to move into your body and feel that discomfort, feel that alarm than it is to go into your mind and start to worry. Because worrying is never ending. It's never gonna fix the problem. It's just a distraction. Now, like you said, it does take courage to actually stay in your pain. Without a doubt it does. But that's the only way to heal. Like, the only way out is through.

0:45:05.8 Paul F. Austin: That's really well said. So in my intro for you today, I'll just revisit it again 'cause it's...

0:45:14.1 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Sure.

0:45:14.4 Paul F. Austin: It's extensive. Physician, neuroscience, somatic, yoga, meditation, professional, standup comedian. All right.

0:45:23.1 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Sure.

0:45:23.4 Paul F. Austin: So that's... I do wanna make sure we talk a little bit about that.

0:45:26.9 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah, sure.

0:45:27.7 Paul F. Austin: What got you into standup comedy, how has that experience been for you? And I'm particularly with your relationship with anxiety, right? How did you navigate that? 'Cause I can only imagine that, getting up and standing in front of people and...

[vocalization]

0:45:42.0 Paul F. Austin: That would provoke a lot of anxiety in basically everyone, basically.

0:45:47.8 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. It's weird though. My anxiety before I go on stage for standup is very different than my anxiety in general from my old wounds, from my old childhood wounds. Yeah. So they're... They feel different. They're in different parts of my body. So it was like I was burning out of medicine. I got tired of basically just treating symptoms, giving people medications, day after day after day, and just really feeling like there's a root cause here that I'm not even touching. So I'm just basically giving you medication to kind of plaster over it. And so I started, one of my friends was a drug rep, like a pharmaceutical rep, and he actually was the MC of the local comedy club. And I would host like, medical functions and that kind of thing. So I was kind of like the doctor comedian of the community that I worked and lived in. So he saw me and he said, you should come down at the comedy club and do a set at the comedy club. And it's like, no freaking way, there's no way I'm gonna be able to do that.

[laughter]

0:46:45.2 Dr. Russell Kennedy: So I went down one night and I had about five shots of tequila and I went up and I didn't do great, but I didn't do badly. And it's like, and I got hooked at that point. So, and I started doing it more and more. And then as Brad, he'd go away for weeks or months at a time. So I would take over the hosting duties. So I became sort of the host MC along with him. So that was something that really energized me because medicine is very left brain analytical. There's very little art artistry in medicine, but in standup there's a tremendous amount of artistry. And there's a... As a doctor you're pretty safe. You're trained well, you pretty much see the same thing pretty close to every day. But in standup, you never know what's gonna happen.

0:47:32.2 Dr. Russell Kennedy: So there's two different wings in my personality. There's one that just like, let's go for it, let's do it. And there's other scaredy squirrel part of me that just is, gets afraid of everything. And it depends on how I feel. If I'm going through a period of, of alarm, I don't want to go on stage. I mean, I do, and it winds up being fine and fun and stuff like that. But it's just amazing how that feeling in your body just dictates everything. It's how it just takes everything over. So standup for me was just this fun kind of thing I could do. And then I rose up in the ranks fairly quickly, which was nice. 'Cause you get stage time. And then I moved to Vancouver actually to do standup, which was really fun.

0:48:13.1 Paul F. Austin: Wow.

0:48:13.7 Dr. Russell Kennedy: And then I would tour, I toured with Yuk Yuk's. We went to Calgary and Edmonton and Toronto and all that. And that was really fun. So I would do these gigs where I would talk at medical functions. And then that night, if they had a comedy club in town, like in Montreal or whatever, I'd call them up and I'd say, Hey, can I do a guest spot? So often they'd give me like 10 or 15 minutes. And I remember doing a guest spot in Ottawa once, and when you do guest spots, you don't get paid. But in Ottawa, at the Ottawa Yuk Yuk's, they pay you $15 to do a guest spot. [chuckle] So it was kind of like, and I had that check for like four years. I just kept it up on my wall just for fun.

0:48:51.6 Dr. Russell Kennedy: It was just like, okay. So it's just, I think it's just an outlet that allows me to be artistic and creative as opposed to... And break out of the doctor mold a little bit too because we are, you know, doctors are upstanding citizens in society. Not that, you know, my act was particularly raunchy or anything like that. It certainly wasn't, but it was just atypical for a doctor to go out there and do standup comedy. So, like I said, we'd go to these conferences and usually you'd finish your after dinner talk or wear your keynote by 7:00 PM and the show, comedy show wouldn't start till 9:30. And I'd just take a cab to wherever it was and hang out with comics after that. And yeah, it was just... It was a really, really nice kind of now...

0:49:34.8 Paul F. Austin: Probably a little more fun too. Yeah.

0:49:34.9 Dr. Russell Kennedy: It was oh, it was. For sure.

0:49:35.6 Paul F. Austin: Like stuck in medical conference versus...

0:49:38.2 Dr. Russell Kennedy: It was. For sure. But even though, but the thing about doctors is they do love to laugh, but you have to earn it. You really have to earn it. So a lot of times I would talk to doctors about burnout and what I would have to do is make them laugh for like 10 minutes, solid. And then they would believe just about everything I said. But if I went up there and just started talking about the science of burnout and what happens in your brain and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis and the basal ganglia and the anterior cingulate cortex and all this sort of stuff, I'd lose them. But if I made them laugh for 10 minutes, I could pretty much tell them anything after that. And they would incorporate it into their lives.

0:50:11.6 Dr. Russell Kennedy: And I still have doctors that send me messages from my talks that I did in the early 2000s saying that, that really changed my life.

0:50:19.0 Paul F. Austin: Oh.

0:50:19.9 Dr. Russell Kennedy: It changed the way that I practiced and it changed the way that I looked at myself. So I think that that's, you know, that's something that I'm really quite proud of. But it was really fun to be able to do both of those things. And I still really enjoy doing it. I don't do it so much anymore, but I'm looking forward to kind of getting back into it once I finish the book.

0:50:40.6 Paul F. Austin: Yeah. For me, I've never done standup. I don't consider myself to be, I'm, yeah, I have a good sense of humor and whatnot, but just the fact of getting upstage, trying jokes, seeing what lands, seeing what doesn't land falling on your face... I'm kind of like, I get enough of that with entrepreneurship.

0:50:54.9 Dr. Russell Kennedy: For sure.

0:50:56.4 Paul F. Austin: And at some point I think it would be a really fun and interesting challenge to step into. So kudos to you for making a very honest and...

0:51:05.5 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. Thanks Paul.

0:51:06.4 Paul F. Austin: And thorough effort of it. Yeah.

0:51:08.6 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Well, I think people they say, oh, you're a comedian, tell me a joke. And I usually will say, you know there's a lot more to stand up comedy than just telling a joke. It's making...

0:51:17.4 Paul F. Austin: For sure.

0:51:17.5 Dr. Russell Kennedy: It's developing a relationship with the audience. And there was a rule that we said that you make when you're MC when you host, you make the audience clap together three times before you even tell your first joke. So it's a way of pulling people together.

0:51:33.5 Paul F. Austin: Oh, interesting.

0:51:35.8 Dr. Russell Kennedy: So it's a lot about your personality, it's a lot about how they view you if they feel safe laughing with you. It's really, there's a real science to stand up. It's not just telling jokes. And that's why when people, I rarely tell people that I do stand up comedy 'cause they, "Oh, tell me a joke."

0:51:53.1 Dr. Russell Kennedy: And the other thing is we don't tell jokes. Like jokes are usually based on the rule of three. It's like, oh, someone went in there, then a horse went in there, then a dog went in there, and then a rabbit went in there. Oh my God, that's hilarious. But that takes about 90 seconds to two minutes. If you don't get a laugh for 90 seconds or two minutes on stage, that's a freaking eternity, man. So it's more about telling stories that are funny and then putting punchlines in the stories themselves. And then lilting your voice, changing your voice, slowing it down, speeding it up. There's a lot of things involved in standup that really have nothing to do with jokes.

0:52:29.8 Paul F. Austin: Right. It's like playing with the room, reading the energy, knowing the right timing. Like there's probably even a lot of intuitive or emergent stuff that comes up where you're like, I didn't prepare for this, but we here we are and...

0:52:41.3 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Crowd work. Yep. Yeah.

0:52:43.0 Paul F. Austin: Crowd work. It's all those sorts of things.

0:52:45.9 Dr. Russell Kennedy: And I like that because as a physician, left brain physician, it was pretty dull, it was pretty mundane. Every day was kind of like the same, but in standup, you never knew what you were gonna get.

0:53:00.4 Paul F. Austin: So as we wrap up, I'd love just to hear, spend a few minutes on like, you're a man of many talents and many projects and many hobbies and interests. For you right now, we're recording this February, 2024, for you right now. What's exciting? What's enlivening? What are you inspired by? What are you working on? Yeah. What's alive for you right now?

0:53:23.4 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. My first book came out in a October of 2020 and it's sold 80,000 copies so far, which I'm really happy about. It's called Anxiety Rx.

0:53:33.7 Paul F. Austin: Wow. Congratulations.

0:53:33.9 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. Thanks.

0:53:34.9 Paul F. Austin: That's fantastic.

0:53:36.6 Dr. Russell Kennedy: And then, a publisher in the UK has approached me and a publisher in the US has approached me to do a second edition of that book. So I am just finishing the second edition of Anxiety Rx. And it's funny, the first edition, 'cause I look at the first edition to change it and it's like I changed so much of it. I've been on about 150 podcasts in the last two or three years, and I've learned how to explain this so much more succinctly now. And I look at the original writing, it's like, the writing is in my first book is, it's okay. It's not particularly good, but the information is amazing. So in the second edition, the writing is actually much better because it's been three years that I've been practicing writing and the information is so much better too.

0:54:23.4 Dr. Russell Kennedy: So I'm really excited about how this book comes. And I'm also excited that it will go out to a mass audience. So even though it's sold 80,000 copies as a self-published, this will go through like a major publisher. So we'll really get a chance to put my work into the world. And how do people get some relief from anxiety? Because I think that the traditional therapies, they don't really work. They help in the short term, but they don't really help you in the long term. So things like psychedelics, things like somatic therapy, internal family systems, like stuff that's, it's thinking differently about anxiety, that's what really changes it because just understanding anxiety, like what you were saying earlier, understanding the cognitive aspect of why you're anxious doesn't really help you. Unless you have that body-based component. Once you have that body-based component and you have a fertile ground, then a lot of the cognitive stuff have a place to root. But if you're just changing your mind and the problem is actually stored in your body, you're always gonna be chasing your tail.

0:55:26.8 Paul F. Austin: Again, 80,000 copies as a self-published book, I self published a book on...

0:55:30.0 Dr. Russell Kennedy: It's pretty amazing.

0:55:32.0 Paul F. Austin: On microdosing. We've had a... That's incredible.

0:55:33.3 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah.

0:55:34.9 Paul F. Austin: So yeah, that's something else. Russell like, kudos to you. And picking up a publisher for it, getting wider distribution. And I think what I'm hearing even is, really what you're focused on and what we talked about quite a bit in the episode today is, what are the cutting edge modalities for anxiety that we know work? That are effective at addressing the root cause and aren't just this sort of bandaid solution to anxiety.

0:56:02.8 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Right. Totally. Totally. Because we are mind, body, spirit, and I think medicine's good at mind and body, but so much of healing is that spiritual component. And science can't reduce that down. I love Huberman Lab. I love Andrew Huberman podcast. I love that stuff, but there's only so much science can do. Science can help you cope. And I'm a scientist, I'm a medical doctor and a scientist. Science can help you cope, but it's not gonna help you heal. And that's my little catchphrase in there. Like, science will help you understand and cope a little better, but it's really that spiritual component, that connection to other people, that connection with yourself spiritually, that's what actually allows you to heal in the long term. And all the medications and the breathing techniques and all that kind of stuff, that will help. But unless you really connect that adult self with that child self and your mind and your body, you're always gonna be anxious.

0:56:58.9 Paul F. Austin: Oh, hence the poster behind you, connecting the adult self to the child self.

0:57:04.8 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. Absolutely.

0:57:05.6 Paul F. Austin: I love that. I just noticed that, that's a beautiful, beautiful way to cap this off. Well, Dr. Dr. Russell Kennedy, if you wanna learn more about Dr. Russ, you can go to theanxietymd.com is your personal website, I believe.

0:57:20.1 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. Yep.

0:57:21.6 Paul F. Austin: And then Anxiety RX is on Amazon. Any other assets or resources you'd love to amplify all of that?

0:57:29.0 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. Instagram... Instagram, all my stuff is The Anxiety MD, yeah. It's not The Anxiety Doctor, The Anxiety MD. And if you just Google that you'll find all my stuff. I have an online course now that has like 3000 people in it, that I put out back in May. And that's amazing. It's really affordable. My whole thing is to try and get the information out to as many people as possible. So it's called MBRX. Your Mind Body Prescription for permanent anxiety healing. And that's doing extremely well because I think there's a market for looking at anxiety healing in a brand new way.

[music]

0:58:06.8 Paul F. Austin: I love it. Well, I appreciate you making the time joining us for this episode today. I think a lot of really great tips on and deeper understanding of where anxiety comes from, how we can work with anxiety, how we can heal anxiety. So yeah, just much... Many thanks and deep appreciation for joining us for the podcast today.

0:58:26.3 Dr. Russell Kennedy: Yeah. Thanks, Paul. I really appreciate being here.

[music]

0:58:28.2 Paul F. Austin: Hey, listeners, Paul here. I hope you enjoyed our episode today with Dr. Dr. Russell Kennedy. If you want to go deeper into this episode with full show notes, transcripts, and all of the links that we mentioned in this conversation, just follow the link in the description, let us know what you thought of the show, and if you got something out of it, please share it with someone in your life. Thank you for joining us on the Psychedelic Podcast. We'll see you next week.