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If you're in absolute alignment with your own truth, you know, if your body, heart, mind, and soul are all believing the same things, you don't have any psychological suffering.
Hey, everyone. It's Rosie here and welcome back to radio headspace.
So we're living in a time where anxiety feels like it's in the air.
And it's easy to think that if we just meditate harder or read more self -help books, we'll finally fix it.
But what if the problem isn't just inside us?
What if the problem is the world we're living in?
That's why I wanted to talk to Dr. Martha Beck.
She's a Harvard -trained sociologist, best -selling author, and someone whose work has deeply shaped how I think about healing.
Her latest book, Beyond Anxiety, explores how we're living in a society that's literally wired to make us anxious, and what we can do to get free from it.
In this conversation, we talk about the science behind anxiety, how our culture pulls us out of integrity, and how creativity and presence might just be the antidote we've been looking for.
I really hope you enjoy this conversation.
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Radio Headspace.
I am joined by somebody very special today.
Marty, thank you so much for joining us.
I've been so looking forward to this conversation.
Oh, me too, Rosie. I'm so happy to be seeing you again.
I know. I feel like it's been a long time, but also no time at all.
We're in a very precarious time.
It would be nice not to know any history right now.
i mean how are you how are you so how are you doing right now oh so good um because there is a sense that it is perilous and that it is difficult but there's also a sense of something shimmering through it all that we have never seen before but which will be tremendously tremendously positive.
Now, I may have projected this as a defense against nihilism, but I don't think so.
I went to an Anita Franco concert last week.
You know, this protest singer, she says right in the middle of her concert, you know, I just feel incredibly hopeful these days.
And I know that's weird, but it just keeps getting stronger.
And that's affecting me me too.
Yeah. No, I'm into that.
Yeah. No, I, I really do.
Uh, I'm going to say I I'm, I'm buying into this more and more because the opposite just doesn't feel good.
Yeah, that's for sure.
But I do want to backtrack a little bit so that the audience can have a little bit of context, especially with what I'm talking about.
Beyond Anxiety is a book that that.
Martha wrote, highly recommend five out of five Yelp review.
Thank you. Please read it.
How did you even get into the topic of anxiety?
So thank you for that question.
So I wrote a book called The Way of Integrity, where I said, if you're in absolute alignment with your own truth, you know, if your body, heart, mind and soul are all believing the same things, you don't have any psychological suffering.
And I believe that to be true.
And I thought, okay, that's the last self -help book I'll ever write, because it really does fix the problem.
And then people started coming to me and saying, no, I've put myself in total integrity, but I am terrified all the time.
I'm so scared. And look at the evidence for why we should be scared.
The things that are happening to the ecology of the planet, the things that are happening politically, our own absolutely certain mortality, why would I not be afraid?
And I thought, huh, that's so strange, because when I did my many years of meditation where I looked at every thought in my head to see if it was true, every thought that made me anxious proved to be untrue, and I therefore let it go.
But I could see there was something about anxiety and fear themselves.
They're not the same thing.
But inside people's minds and bodies and inside the culture, there was something that was really gluing people to the belief that their fears were true.
Even though anxiety is about something that will happen to you in the future.
sure, you're never as afraid of what's going on now as you are about what's going to happen in five days, five hours, five seconds.
It's always ahead of you in time.
So, it doesn't actually exist while you're afraid of it.
And that sort of makes it not the truth of your reality in the moment.
And I thought this was something everybody else knew, and I just figured it out slowly on my own.
But it turned out when I started doing research that we live in this incredibly, incredibly I will use a fancy word here anxiogenic society.
Oh yeah I can see that hit.
I need a pause for a moment.
Yeah let's just give that give that breathing space.
Anxiogenic. Oh please.
Anxiogenic. Okay yeah.
Okay so if you and I had been alive 300 years ago or or even 100 years ago, we would have woken up the way humans did for the hundreds of thousands of years before that, we would have woken up in a place that was surrounded by nature, where we could hear sounds like birds and wind and each other's voices and maybe running water, but no machines, no, you know, no traffic jams. And we may have spent the whole day doing things with with people we loved and knew in a sort of village setting.
And that certainly had disadvantages compared to the way we live now.
But my point is we evolved to live in that type of setting.
And now you take us and you blare us awake before our bodies are finished sleeping.
And you drag us into places with strangers where we have to sit and do things that have no connection to our physical and emotional well -being.
they're just all monetized right and it's weird and it's wrong for the brain the brain does not like this the nervous system does not like this and its response is anxiety i'm like the end that is the end i mean that has to be one of the best explanations and all i keep thinking is the opposite of what we experience right yeah you know i live in la there's uh you know helicopters and and sounds, and trash, and blowers, and dogs barking, and people's talk.
You become so desensitized to it.
I guess we don't really see the impact of even just the environment that we're in.
Yeah. I mean, there has been research. In a French study, they took three people and put them in sort of an underground world where they could manipulate everything they heard and saw.
And And they all had they got really calm when they were separated from the hustle and bustle of the day.
And then they introduced traffic noises to see if it would stress them.
And it did. They hated it.
It was horrible to them.
But after a few days, they said, oh, we don't even notice it anymore.
However, there's their physiological indicators, indicators of stress went up and stayed up.
So they did become desensitized in the part of the mind that is like consciously thinking, but their bodies were still exhibiting signs of stress.
On the other side, if you take people who've just all had the same surgery and some of them get a picture, an abstract painting in their recovery room and some get just a picture of a tree, the people who have a picture of a tree will heal faster, have less complications, less post -op depression, just a picture of a tree.
And yeah, we evolved to live in natural settings settings where everything was always connected and communicating and alive.
How, and I've heard of this study as well and the difference between a patient who has a big window in their room opposed to the people that don't.
Why do you think hospitals aren't set up like that?
I mean, it would make sense, right?
Yeah. For the very same reason that our society has created all these other anxiety producing effects.
It has to do with the way we think about how to organize our lives and it has to do with the way our brains work.
So when I started looking for the reasons that we have this huge anxiety epidemic all over the world, anxiety is higher per capita than it's ever been.
It went up 25 % just in the pandemic and it didn't ever go down again.
It kept going up. And the reason for that in the brain is that there are a couple of things that bias us all toward anxiety.
The first thing is something called a negativity bias.
So the brain always chooses whatever scares it most, it looks at most. So if you go into a room where there are 15 puppies and one cobra, where does your attention go?
It goes to the cobra.
That's an evolutionary device to keep you alive.
The problem is that you fixate your attention on that in the world we have now, like the algorithms online are designed to feed us more of whatever we look at most. And we are physiologically designed to look at things that scare us.
And when we look at those things, when we look at the Cobra, we get more Cobras.
We get more Cobras from our attention.
We see things from a darker perspective.
perspective. The internet sends us more signals that repeat the trauma we've had looking at something scary online.
So that happens. Then we're thinking there are cobras everywhere.
Our nervous systems literally believe that.
So now you're in a snake pit.
The anxiety just keeps going up and up.
And then you get afraid of the sensation of anxiety.
Then you get panic attacks, and it just goes completely out of control.
The left hemisphere that does this also built the academic system, the medical system we have now, the corporations we go to.
It's a very sort of slice and dice way of seeing the world.
Everything is mechanical.
Everything is material.
There is no particular meaning.
Just go on and chop things up and treat them like machines.
And so hospitals, which should be the places where we have the most empathy and compassion, have become the place where the medical system can be unbelievably brutal.
I once asked a group of 18 doctors, tell me the worst thing you ever did to your own body in order to become a doctor.
This was at eight in the morning.
I thought we'd just go around the the room, and then we'd move on to do some other stuff.
One o 'clock the next morning, we finally got around the room.
There was so much trauma inflicted on these doctors by the medical system so that they in turn became brutal and sort of nerveless.
Yeah, it was a great example of how we have built ourselves a culture that is, it's hostile to our nervous systems. And yet we cling to it and we honor that way of thinking and we live in it and we do not see that it is a human creation.
We just think it's reality.
Yeah. I mean, it's such a great example of how we perpetuate a thought and how we can hold on to that thought, create a story.
I feel like I want to go back to the seeing of the things that scare us the most, because I feel like at an intellectual level, level, I understand this, right?
I know that I'm going to pay more attention to the things that scare me.
You know, if there's many snakes in the backyard and I have dogs, I want to make sure that I'm constantly on alert and make sure that, you know, I'm scanning and checking, et cetera.
What about the intangible things like, you know, thinking I'm going to get fired or my My partner's cheating on me or I'm sick of doing what I'm doing or I don't know what my purpose is, you know, those kinds of things.
Yeah, all these sort of a miasma of anxiety topics that sort of lurks around everybody, like everything's falling apart.
And then you're absolutely correct.
Correct. We generate more of it, not just because we're looking for it, but because the way we behave when we're anxious about something actually makes the people around us anxious and they're more likely to become – we're all in fight or flight.
So they're more likely to either run, which feels like abandonment, or fight, which feels like attack.
And so we live in relationships that are so hypercharged by everyone being in this fight or flight state.
state. It's a little bit different from what I just said.
It's called a defense cascade that starts in the nervous system when we're alarmed.
And it's fight, flight, but also freeze, flop, and fawn.
These are just physiological things that happen to us when we see something that scares us.
So we're ready to run away from people or fight them or both.
We also may just go completely limp and lose our will to live.
Or for social primates like us, we may start flattering and obeying in order to keep the danger from hitting us.
People try to ingratiate themselves with the horrible boss or the domestic abuse partner.
And that's physiological.
You can't stop it from happening if you're in that kind of traumatizing situation.
Well, once you get get away from it.
You have to look away.
You have to undo the spell that says this situation, because it harmed me and I'm afraid of it, is now going to perpetuate forever.
And that's, you have to break that to go beyond anxiety.
Yeah. Yeah. Can you tell us the relationship between integrity and anxiety?
Because I know that there's also vulnerability attached to how they all come together.
I believe that to be in structural integrity as a human is to hold a belief system that is aligned with your real experience, both inwardly and outwardly.
So if you believe something like I'm not good enough, that is going to be out of alignment with the core truth of your being, which is everyone is good enough.
Yeah. And if you believe things from your culture that pull you off your nature, culture and nature are like two sides that are pulling on you.
And by culture, I mean any group of people, your family, your friends, the people who socialize, the country you're in, the religion, whatever.
So if you absorb beliefs and adopt beliefs from your social group that are, again, are not in harmony with your own deepest sense of truth, things start to break.
Your life can't fly.
It can't take off. It crashes.
Well, one of the ways that it crashes is that you feel emotional disharmony.
So the first thing that happens usually is people lose their sense of purpose when they're slightly out of integrity.
If it keeps going, we get emotionally disturbed.
And this is where anxiety comes in, so does depression.
Then your body will start to give in because it, too, wants the truth.
And it will start to send up signal flares and get sick if you aren't living according to your.
And then people, their relationships go wonky, their careers go wonky.
And finally, they may turn to some kind of addiction.
Those were the six signs that you're off track in your life.
And anxiety belongs as in the number two position.
You don't feel good emotionally.
And then it sort of echoes into all the other parts of your system.
I really believe on the other side of that is not only a happy life, but an awakened life.
Yeah, I really love that.
But I think what's really interesting to me is if I'm having anxiety and if I'm anxious just about my safety, like how do I move beyond that?
How do I move beyond, yeah, I just lost my job and I don't know what I'm going to do.
But I have this innate desire to move beyond it.
Like, where do I start?
I refer with great humility and respect to a book called Left to Tell by a woman named Immacule Ilibagiza.
She was a Tutsi woman living in Rwanda when the genocide started.
And her whole family was killed.
And she ran to the home of a Hutu preacher who agreed to, well, he basically just shoved her into this extra bathroom that he had, this secret bathroom with, I think, four other women.
And they were there for three months holding perfectly still while they were hunted aggressively by their neighbors who had killed their families.
and she said she went in there and she nearly went mad with fear with anger with despair and then she thought well i'm going to figure my way out of this and she began to meditate and to go inward and to do spiritual work because she was that was sort of her nature and after a month she lost all fear and after another month she had lost all anger not lost but transmuted used it it as the raw material for something incandescent and transcendent.
And then she spent the last month learning English from one book that had been thrown into the bathroom.
And it is the most, I thought, oh, my God, this book is going to be so depressing.
It is one of the most uplifting accounts you have ever heard. And if she could do that under those circumstances, I mean, there's been some recent political things there have been happening and i was meditating one morning recently and and i thought to myself something has said how could i be calm under these circumstances and then this other voice inside me said you mean your bedroom because that's really my only circumstance at that moment so you have to get what happens is you have to go into the present moment deeply, deeply, deeply.
And that means inhabiting the infinite reaches of innerness that each of us possesses.
If you are really genuinely in a frightening situation, and you learn to not be afraid in that situation, it's by being incredibly present.
And, you know, years ago, when I had my brain mapped, I had very bad anxiety disorder.
order. And they didn't know much about how the technology worked.
And they just put all these things on my head, little sensors glued to my head.
And then they said, sit in front of this computer.
And here are the lines that show your brain activity.
Make that line go down, that one.
And I said, how? And they said, we have no idea.
Just do it. You'll figure it out.
And so it's like asking someone, how do you ride a bike?
They said, people just sit here long enough, they learn.
So there I sat and I could not make that line go down.
I meditated. It stayed high.
I mean, other parts of my brain calmed down, but not that, not the anxiety part.
And then finally, I started thinking about a speech I had to give.
And I was very nervous, had huge performance anxiety and my anxiety dropped.
And I was like, that's really weird. So I started thinking about other things that scared me.
And what brought me the most peace was remembering skiing in a blizzard with virtually no visibility along the edge of a cliff.
And when I remembered that, I went to zero anxiety.
And I was like, what?
I started to realize that in places where there really is danger, I become incredibly present in the moment, incredibly aware in my body.
And suddenly, it's not anxiety.
It's bliss. It's flow.
It's total loss of ego identity and engagement with the all.
It's beautiful. It's so great.
And I love that you said, how could I deal?
And this is awful. I don't know how to stand it.
And you're like, from my bedroom.
I can't stand my bedroom anymore.
It was very comfortable a minute ago, but then i thought about the news yeah but it's so true i i think oftentimes we've we we forget to come back into that present moment state i'm curious you you spoke about the functions of the left side of the brain and yeah this more linear thinking can you speak to the right side of the brain and sure what happens in there yeah okay so there's been such great work done on this But I got started thinking about it when I made friends with a woman named Jill Bolte -Taylor, who did an amazing – you know her?
I don't – I wish. Are you kidding?
I will wind you up.
You're the biggest celebrity I know.
No, you're the biggest celebrity you know.
Okay, so she did the first TED Talk that ever went viral.
And it was called My Stroke of Insight, and it was about her experience as a 37 -year -old neuroanatomist at Harvard. She had a brain bleed that took – it was from a genetic vein clot in her brain or something.
Anyway, she lost most of the function in her left brain hemisphere, and she was able to watch this as a neuroanatomist and remember it later.
And she managed to get help and survive, but it took eight years for her to rebuild the left hemisphere of her brain.
Now, during that time, she couldn't talk or understand language or tell time or count.
All the things that we consider sort of academic knowledge, totally unavailable to her because they're all processed mainly on the left side of the brain.
Instead, though, what she was feeling was this awe and beauty and bliss and connection with everything and love, unimaginable, indescribable love.
love, she was basically in paradise.
So she came back and she rebuilt that part of her brain, but she deliberately left out of her personality, some of the things that had defined her before being extremely competitive, being an elite intellectual.
She instead started doing things that as a neuroanatomist, she knew would galvanize the right side of her brain.
So when I met her, she was living on a boat in an unknown lake somewhere.
She doesn't give people the address.
She said, I just want to be out here with God.
And she does science, but she also makes stained glass windows and paintings and sculptures.
And she paddles around the lake every day.
I mean, she's just the most amazing human being.
And that's when I thought, oh, so all the anxiety left her when she lost that left side of her brain.
And what's waiting on the other side is this experience of transcendence that I think so many of us would love to have. And so I started looking at brain anatomy and seeing what happens when we deliberately move away from the left hemisphere and into the right hemisphere.
atmosphere so let me ask you this if you opened your door one morning and there was a beautiful but bedraggled kitten on your steps your front porch and it looked at you plaintively and it was terrified and shivering and shaking and you decided you wanted to help it how would you you approach it?
Calmly, carefully, without trying to scare it away.
Yeah. And you'd probably murmur or talk to it in a soft voice.
This is what calms an anxious brain.
The amygdala that's part of the brain in the cat is almost exactly the same as ours.
And we know how to calm down a frightened frightened amygdala.
We all know that that's how to calm down a frightened animal.
I've had big strong men interview me, and I've said this to them, they all give the same example you did.
So it's not gender based, it is universal among humans to know how to calm a frightened animal, and yet we don't do it for ourselves.
And that's the first step out of anxiety to stop being angry your anxiety or trying to end it.
Like people always tell me, Oh, I really want to get rid of my anxiety.
I want it. I want to bring it down.
I want it to go. And if I came in to coach you and I said, look, I want to bring you down.
I want to end you. I want you out.
Would you calm down?
Well, it's like that thing where people say, calm down.
It's never worked when somebody said like, what is the point of that?
But yes, I hear you.
I'm with you. Yeah, so we attack this frightened creature inside us when we know full well that that is how to make a frightened creature more frightened.
But if we approach it the way you just described approaching a kitten, there's an anxious part of myself.
Like in my room when I was like, I can't handle this.
I didn't just scold myself and say, you're in your bedroom, you know, wake up.
I said, oh, you're so you're so worried.
I get it. I totally get it.
I'm right here. You can be as worried as you want to be.
It's all right. I've got you.
And you just allow the anxious animal to be as anxious as it wants.
And to paraphrase, there's this beautiful phrase in a poem by Hafiz, who was a Persian poet.
It just goes, troubled, then stay with me for I am not.
And if you can offer that to the frightened part of yourself, things start to change radically and quickly.
I feel like this is a big practice in self -compassion.
Totally. Yeah. The worst panic attack I ever had, it lasted like 72 hours.
They gave me medication.
I talked to therapists.
Nothing was helping and it was bad.
And then I just thought I'm going to start saying Tibetan loving kindness meditation phrases to myself.
So I just started saying, may you be well, may you be happy and doing the kitten thing.
You're OK. We're all right in this moment.
May you be happy, may you be filled with peace, may you feel safe and protected.
All of which I'd read in books on Tibetan loving kindness meditation.
And this evolved into something I called KISSED, which is the acronym for Kind Internal Self -Talk.
And it was a secret I kept for years because it sounds so stupid, but it works.
It totally freaking works.
So that's the first step if you're feeling anxious out there, listeners.
Start with this. Start with just speak kindness to yourself for 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5.
and see if things start to shift. I'm sure people that have experienced panic or anxiety before have had those moments where they feel like nothing works.
And I feel like these tools are really great, but oftentimes we reach for them when we need them.
Is there anything that we can do to sort of preemptively strike so that it's not something that we reach for when we're in crisis.
Such a good point. Yeah, that loving self -talk in parts of the world where a lot of youth are sent to do a sort of tour of duty as a monk or a nun.
In Tibet, I believe, or I've read that you do a full year of loving kindness toward yourself before you even have to move on.
And so you just build it in.
There's a man named named Yonge Mingur Rinpoche, who was raised that way, meditating, his father was a lama, he's a lama.
So, but he also had panic disorder, bad panic disorder as a child, huge anxiety.
And he set out to sit with his anxiety and offer it this kind of loving kindness.
And he got so good at it, that years later, when some scientists at the University of Wisconsin and brought some Tibetan lamas in and wired them up the way I'd been wired up and they said go into a meditative state or a state of compassion his brain went so crazy with compassion and peace that they thought the instruments had broken.
They started calling him the happiest man in the world and the reason was he had intense anxiety plus years of loving kindness toward himself And what that does is it builds resiliency.
It builds durability.
It builds even a kind of unflappable acceptance of the future, as well as the past and the present.
So here's this man just going from terrified to the happiest man in the world just by loving himself and others.
It seems pretty simple, but try it for five minutes.
Try it for just five minutes, y 'all.
It's very strong medicine.
I feel like there's going to be a lot of people that will listen to this and they're nodding along and they're feeling connected to everything that you're saying and they're finding great value in the metaphors and the tools, but they still will feel like they can't do something right.
Like they can't, they, it just, this doesn't apply to them.
What can we say to those people Well, the first thing is you, you never have to do anything alone.
You can use anything and anyone that you can access through the internet, through books, through anything.
There's actually a kind of resonance in the voices and the words and the written words of people who have managed to transcend not just anxiety, but the overall haunting fear that characterizes much of the human race.
And those people can actually entrain your brain.
They can pull you into a state where the brain is at peace because they got there.
Have you seen online the invisible danger pranks?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
When they like pretend like something's happening and then the partner's like, what's happening?
Oh, my God. People freak out when somebody near them acts frightened because anxiety is contagious.
But so is peace. peace and when you're in a field an energy field with someone who has found peace it's like you're being pulled into alignment with that and you can you can hold on to that and pretty soon you can take little jaunts off by yourself it's like you're being reparented and it's very very sweet and then you get to the good part like the a third of this book is about how to deal with with your anxiety, two -thirds of the book deal with the wonderful, wonderful way the world evolves and unfurls itself before you once you're not scared anymore.
Well, give us a little insight.
Tell us what happens when we're not afraid anymore.
I knew one thing. I knew that anxiety nukes creativity.
The most creative people in the the world.
If you make them anxious enough, they can't be creative.
So I'm looking at the brain anatomy of anxiety and how it works.
And I remember that a few years ago, I also studied the brain anatomy for creativity.
And I thought, wait a second, these two things are mirrors.
There's something I call an anxiety spiral going on in the left hemisphere of the brain.
But in the right hemisphere, that same spiral creates the state that we call creativity.
So I realized calm isn't the opposite of anxiety.
It's a doorway. What's really the opposite of anxiety is creativity.
And everything you think anxiety will do for you that's positive can be done much better by your creativity.
So if the world is crazy and things are really bad, and if somebody out there is listening from a hard point in their their lives.
I get it. But if you were hit by a car and smushed and a team of surgeons came in to work on you, would you want them panicked and shrieking at each other?
Or would you want them calm, curious, and creative?
That's the miracle that people get through that medical training and can still come out of it with some degree of compassion.
And when you're in creative, of curious compassion, you can heal, you can practice medicine and make it work.
And by the same token, any problem we have that we're trying to solve with panic can be solved much better from a state of calm, alert creativity.
And I mean, everything can be solved with that.
Wow, that is so it's so powerful.
It's so powerful, Marty.
It's such a huge key because it makes total sense.
It makes sense that you're, in a way, you're transmuting the energy or you're transforming the energy into something that's going to serve you in a better way.
Yeah, creativity gets nuked by anxiety, as I just said.
But anxiety gets nuked by creativity as well.
So if you can choose, be kind to yourself, give yourself the loving kindness, and then move into making something, anything, your creative like fireworks will begin and you will find that anxiety simply disappears.
You won't even think about it.
Your mouth to the divine's ears.
Well, try it right now.
Well, try something for me, Rosie.
Yeah, let's do it. Okay, well, I'm going to ask you things that will light up the right side of your brain a little bit.
It's really simple.
We may even have done it before together.
everybody out there play along.
Tell me two things you love to taste.
Chocolate and apples.
Okay. Tell me two things that you love to see.
Hummingbirds and dogs.
Okay. Imagine you're eating apples and chocolate and you're surrounded by puppies and hummingbirds.
What are two things you love to hear?
The sound of birds.
Okay. So there are birds singing.
What What else? Waterfall sounds.
There's a waterfall there.
There are birds, not just the hummingbirds, but songbirds.
And you've got the chocolate and the apples.
Tell me two things you love to touch. Can I say dogs again?
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, dogs.
And I love touching rose petals.
So you've got some rose petals in your hand.
No thorns, just rose.
and you've got your dog who's just had a shampoo, and he's very touchy and silky.
And then two things that are not food that you love to smell.
I like the smell of wet dirt.
Oh, yeah, petrichor, that's called.
Petrichor. Okay. The scent of the earth after water.
Yes. And the smell of roses.
Okay, so now dive into this.
You're sitting by a waterfall.
There are roses all around you.
You can smell them.
You've got chocolate and apples.
Your dogs are leaning up against you.
You've got hummingbirds buzzing around your head, and the chocolate is amazing, and it's just, ah!
Okay, where's your anxiety now?
Oh, yeah. She's not here.
Gone. asleep maybe, or just resting in that field with you, you know, resting near the waterfall with you.
That what you did, I mean, I tell people this and they say, I'm not creative.
Will I always be anxious?
You are so creative.
What you just did there, Rosie, is pure creativity, pure imagination, pure, you know, conjuring.
It's magic that you could go to this place that's never existed and find that you can literally be happy there because you created that environment inside your head, just the way we create environments that are full of cobras.
Why not choose to tell stories that make us happy instead of anxious?
Yeah. Oh, I love that.
And I think I really, just to bring it back to what we said at the beginning, I do feel hopeful, and I am optimistic, and I am so grateful that there are people like you in the world having these conversations and writing about this and just reminding us of how powerful we are.
Yeah, powerful and creative and compassionate and kind.
And it starts with kindness to self.
Yeah. Where can people go to connect with you?
My website, MarthaBeck .com.
I also have an online community called Wilder Community, which is like pulling away from culture and finding what's true for us.
Yeah, and books and stuff.
I have a podcast. Oh, yeah.
I have a podcast called Bewildered and one called The Gathering Room.
Oh, yeah, they're all things.
I like making this stuff.
But the problem is when I get creative and not anxious, I turn into a two -year -old and I'm just like, I made a picture.
Would you like to see?
Are you aware of it?
Do I have a podcast?
I think I do. Yeah.
I get really weird. No, it's good.
And I love it. And I'm the same, and I can so relate to that.
I love creating things.
I love putting things out there in the the world.
And I feel like ultimately, we share the same thing.
We're transforming anxiety into a creative endeavor.
And I feel like everybody here can do the same.
Absolutely. Thank you, Dr. Martha Beck, everyone.
Thank you so much for joining us.
And we hope to see you back soon.
Thank you so much.
