How To Fix Your Brain’s Addiction To Anxiety & Worry - Dr Russell Kennedy - #951

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Why is anxiety so common in the modern world? Of all of the different emotions, even all of the negative ones, why does this seem to be the one that people are zeroing in on?

**Russell Kennedy** (0:10)
I think it's uncertainty.
Our species has grown in uncertainty, but now we're so distracted by our phones. The wherewithal we would have used to be able to deal with the uncertainty in the past, all our cash is full. We don't have a whole lot of extra room. So when uncertainty comes up, and anxiety can sometimes be described as uncertainty intolerance, because so many of us as children, if you had trauma, if you had wounding, if you had stuff that was unrepared, that uncertainty becomes unbearable. So rather than just sort of sit in uncertainty, we worry about it.

**Chris Williamson** (0:49)
Talk to me about why uncertainty is a fuel, a potent fuel for anxiety.

**Russell Kennedy** (0:56)
Well, I think there was a lot of uncertainty in our childhoods, especially with my dad. Like I grew up with a dad who had schizophrenia and bipolar, and he was never abusive or violent, but he would lose his mind. And for a young boy and a young teenager, seeing your father lose his mind, and my dad was the one of the two of us that was really kind of loving and connected when he wasn't psychotic. You know, my little joke is my mother was neurotic and my father was psychotic, so my own psyche didn't stand a chance, right? So, I think it's just understanding that, you know, uncertainty is something that we don't tolerate well as people, especially if you had a lot of uncertainty in your childhood.

**Chris Williamson** (1:40)
I'm trying to draw the link between what anxiety is, what its function is, and uncertainty. Can you try and sort of fold these things together for me?

**Russell Kennedy** (1:52)
Yeah, sure. Well, I think anxiety isn't one thing. It's actually two things. And I talk about this in my book. It's basically the state of alarm that's held in your body, and this worrisome, the warnings, what ifs, worst-case scenario your mind comes up with. So each one energizes the other in something I call the alarm anxiety cycle. So the short version is you had a trauma that's too much for you to bear as a child. It got pushed into your unconscious mind. And because the body is a representation of the unconscious mind, the body keeps the score and that trauma gets stored in your body. And it sort of has this sort of nature of it. And through this process called interoception, the brain is always reading the body. So if the brain reads this sense of alarm, it's not going to make up stories about cookies and picnics. It's going to make up stories that are your worst fears. And as Goggins says, your mind has a tactical advantage over you. So when you get this alarm and something triggers you in your internal or external environment, you're likely to go back into this worst-case scenario thing and to try to make sense of it. I think people worry because what worry does, in my opinion, is it makes the uncertain appear more certain. Now that certainty can be abhorrent. We don't want that certainty. But in our brains, we get that little dopamine hit from, oh, I'm on the right track. This makes sense. If my daughter doesn't come home, oh, did you get hit by a car? That makes sense in your brain. You get a little shot of dopamine.

**Chris Williamson** (3:21)
So you're collapsing the potential options of what could have happened by coming up with small windows of potential certainty in your mind.

**Russell Kennedy** (3:33)
That are completely consistent with what you've been scared of in the past.

**Chris Williamson** (3:38)
That's interesting. There's a ChatGPT screenshot. I follow a few ChatGPT Instagram accounts. These are people getting interesting insights from ChatGPT. This one was, give me one truly deep novel out of distribution and mind-blowingly simple insight about humans that only very few or none of us are aware of. It cannot be generic, vague, be flashy or slop corporate stuff. That's a pretty good prompt. As prompt engineering goes, that's pretty good.

**Russell Kennedy** (4:06)
Sure.

**Chris Williamson** (4:07)
Humans never genuinely pursue happiness. They only pursue relief from uncertainty. Happiness emerges momentarily as a by-product whenever uncertainty briefly disappears. I haven't been able to stop thinking about that. It's so funny that you said uncertainty as one of the key drivers. I haven't been able to stop thinking about that.

**Russell Kennedy** (4:24)
Because what was the uncertainty in your childhood? You were bullied. That was one. So when we go back to that place, the thing is the amygdala in our brains has no sense of time. So when we hear someone being bullied, we may go into this bodily state that was the same as the bodily state we had when we were eight years old and we were being bullied. And then that alarm comes up in our system, paralyzes our prefrontal cortex. So we start thinking emotionally rather than rationally. So not only do we make more worries when we're lit up, but the rational part of our brain that would tell you, hey, those worries, they're never going to happen. That gets shut off. So we get double whammy. So the thing about uncertainty there, I think is just that uncertainty is one of those things that triggers us emotionally. And if you didn't get repair when you were younger, so if you're in an environment where your parents fight or whatever and they come back and they say, you know, mom and dad had a fight, it just happens that way, the children are probably going to have a better, more resilient and more capable nervous system than children that don't have any trauma, that don't have any wounding. It's not so much the trauma, it's the fact that it wasn't repaired. And if it's repaired, the child learns, oh, shit can go down in the hood, but I'm still okay.