We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - Life Beyond Anxiety with Martha Beck

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

374. Life Beyond Anxiety with Martha Beck Martha Beck, bestselling author and life coach, returns to discuss anxiety including actionable strategies for quelling it and achieving a state of calm. This episode is part one of two. Come back next time, to hear Martha coach Amanda, Abby and Glennon out of an anxiety spiral.  Discover:  -The one powerful question to ask yourself to start breaking free from anxiety -Martha’s surprising take on the antidote to anxiety -The biggest lie anxiety tells us—and how to uncover the truth -Why nature, creativity, and your senses hold the key to calm Dr. Martha Beck, PhD, is a New York Times bestselling author, coach, and speaker. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science, and Oprah Winfrey has called her “one of the smartest women I know.” Martha is a passionate and engaging teacher, known for her unique combination of science, humor, and spirituality. Her recent book, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self, was an instant New York Times Best Seller and an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Her new book, Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose, is available now. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pod Squad. For a lot of us, our hardest thing is anxiety. Just trying to figure out how to deal with our minds creating stories about the worst thing that could ever happen. And honestly, living in reaction to a scary world and how to find peace, even in the midst of fear and things that could go wrong with ourselves and our world and our people. And so we thought to start 2025, the biggest gift that we could give you, Pod Squad, because we love you so much, is just a few ideas about how to live with less fear and more peace, and how to do that for ourselves, for our one wild and precious life,

and to do it in a way where we become the peace that then spreads to our people, to our community, to our people, to our community, to our world, because that actually is the antidote to living in a fearful culture, is to become the equal and opposite force that then spreads even faster than fear culture does.

So we're gonna do that today. We're gonna dive in with the only person who could possibly help us do this magic trick, who is Dr. Martha Beck. Our friend, scientist, life coach, witch. I honestly don't know what the hell Martha Beck is. I just know she knows everything and I love her deeply. Martha Beck, PhD, is a New York Times bestselling author, coach, and speaker. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science, but honestly, who doesn't?

Martha is a passionate and engaging teacher known for her unique combination of science, humor, and spirituality. Her recent book, The Way of Integrity, Finding the Path to Your True Self, was an instant New York Times bestseller and an Oprah's book club selection. And her new book, Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose is available now. Welcome, Martha Beck. How are you all?

Seriously, how are you feeling? We've had a hell of a year is all I'll say. All three of us have, we've gone through it, the 2024. Yeah. But I feel today, I feel like, you know, when you're at a social gathering, and I can only imagine this in my head, but. She's saying you, Marcella.

Do you know when you're at a social gathering? I also can only imagine this in my head, and it horrifies me, but go on. Like, I imagine that there's moments when people introduce people to each other and it's like so exciting to introduce people to like your smartest friend who's gonna say some really good shit that's gonna like actually help your other friend and that is how I feel when you come on our podcast. It's so sweet and I actually am feeling really jolly because I knew I was gonna talk to the three of you.

And actually I can say I have felt jolly all but a few days of 2024, as bad as it was. Oh wow. Mostly I feel jolly. That's why you have the answers. Yeah. Well, I think maybe it has to do with what you've been talking so much about and writing about

and what's in the new book, Beyond Anxiety, the reason why. Oh well segued. Thank you. Well segued. Oh can I tell you something real quick which the Pod Squad knows? Oh here we go with the words. So since I don't talk to humans and I read obsessively, I always think words are wrong. Like I read words and then I think. So my entire life I've thought that a segue was a little machine that you ride around on a thing. And then until one year ago, Martha, I thought when you were trying to connect one part of the conversation to another, that was called a segue.

A segue, yes. Yeah, and then a segue was a machine. Okay, so I would like to segue us into what we all need more than anything right now. I think that you Martha Beck are a tiny little key, and always have been, that can unlock the actual problem that most of us are in right now, which is rampant anxiety. Yeah. Okay, whether it's about the world or our family or our lives, it's somehow become so like a virus that has just keep spreading and spreading

until everybody is so heightened. Yes. Yes. It's been called the inner pandemic and anxiety is skyrocketing all over the world. During the lockdown year, it went up by a full 25%, which is just in terms of psychological statistics that is unbelievable. And the thing is, as it goes up, it just keeps going up, it never comes back down.

It's like one of those tire rippers. It only lets you go forward, never back. So animals experience fear, and so do we. A bear comes, we're afraid. We run inside, stab the bear, do whatever we can, and then fear subsides. Animals will run from a predator and when they're safe, within seconds they're back. Calm, calm, calm. But humans, along with healthy fear, which is that, we have the capacity to take a scary experience and then tell ourselves stories about it, how awful it was, how it could have been worse, how it may happen again. It probably will happen again or worse things will happen again. And these thoughts become our inner environment. And so we perceive even bigger monsters instead of knowing that we're safe again. And our fear response goes up, and then we tell stronger

stories. And then the fear goes up and the stories go up and everything spirals upward, or rather inward into this little clenched ball of anxiety. And we get stuck there, but we can get unstuck. And this is why I've been happy almost every day, even during my worst days this last year, because I feel sad, I feel angry sometimes, I feel those negative emotions. I don't feel anxious. I just really don't. It's really weird. It's really weird.

It's because I spent three years doing a bunch of research and figuring out why we're having this inner pandemic. Why does it keep going up and not coming down for so many people all over the world? And what can we do about it? And I found out, and then I did it. And then I'm not anxious anymore. Okay.

So that's what we're gonna do today. And then I'm not anxious anymore. Okay. Okay-dokey. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to do two episodes with the Martha Beck. And the first one is that Martha is going to explain all of this, like her best research about how and why, and we're going to learn about anxiety. And then in the second episode, we're going to go through some Martha Beck coaching. So we're going to, each of us is going to bring to you our particular anxiety spiral. And then we hope that as you talk us through the pod squad while listening, we'll also

be able to learn how to talk themselves out of an anxiety spiral. So that's the goal. And I want to tell you why I'm ready for this Martha Beck. All right. Tell me. Because this year has kicked my ass so thoroughly that I have finally, I am willing to accept the fact that if my anxiety and worry were going to do what I have always thought they were going to do,

which is keep me safe from anything bad happening or anything happening to my family or the world, that I would have done it. I am. You would. I would have. There is nobody who worked harder at anxiety than me. I would be willing to bet it.

Okay. So now I actually, Martha, when your book called Beyond Anxiety, I promise you that I am ready. I think I'm ready to let go of anxiety. I've slowly been doing it. And I thought, I don't know if this book came a year ago, if I would have been. So I am here and the first thing that struck the shit out of me in your newest work, which I would love for you to talk to the Pod Squad about, is this idea that anxiety is our desire to be safe? Makes sense? Sort

of, right? Tied to our desire to be safe? Yeah. Okay. But the way we try to make ourselves safe makes us more anxious, not less anxious. So is it true that it's possible that the anxiety that came from the pandemic was not just because of the threat outside, but because we kept trying to make our spaces smaller and more controlled? Okay. So tell us how the way we try to make ourselves safe is raising our anxiety. Okay.

So the first thing, as I said, fear motivates quick, constructive action, but it's also very clear. If you've ever been in a really physically dangerous spot, it hits, you move, it's actually a calm state. But once you get spinning stories about anxiety, you start to tell yourself a lot of things that aren't necessarily true. Like I am in danger right now, the whole world is burning down around me. I was in meditation during a particularly trying day in November and I was meditating and I thought, how can I expect myself to be calm under these circumstances? And another

part of me said, you mean your bedroom? You asshole, You're always reminding me I'm literally safe in the present moment. Okay. But anxiety spins a lot of stories that aren't true. You're in present danger even if you're not. And the biggest lie it tells us is this. You will be safer if I run the show. The part of the brain that does anxiety is very controlling. It likes to physically control everything.

So we get into that part of our brains and our whole culture teaches us to be in that part of our brains. And so the very effort to stay safe makes us more anxious. But I have for you a question, Glennon Doyle. Here is my question. If God forbid you were in a horrible car accident and broke multiple bones and sustained many injuries and they took you into surgery, would you prefer your surgeon to be in the middle of a panic attack or in a calm, creative, interested state of mind?

Ask me, which would be safer? Which would be safer, Martha, that? Ask me, which would be safer? Which would be safer, Martha, Beth? Having been in a blind panic many times myself, have any of us ever made a really wise decision out of blind panic? Never. No. When we have made our wisest decisions, were we or were we not weirdly calm? Yes.

Does that come out of a state of quiet? Yeah. So the law of anxiety is you will be safer if you let me run things. That is the left hemisphere part of the brain using its favorite things, control, threat, accumulate, demand, grasp. Those things are functional only if they're couched in the awareness of the other part of the brain. The right side of the brain is in charge of things like context, meaning, connection, relationship, beauty, harmony, all those things. And here's

the interesting point. The left hemisphere of the brain, once it gets in control in its little anxiety spiral, it literally denies that the other things exist. And this is very literal. If people have a right hemisphere stroke and they can't use that integrative, meaningful part of the brain, anything they see to their left, because the right side of the brain sees the left side of the body, they don't acknowledge as real. So these people who've had right hemisphere strokes will say their left arm and leg don't belong to them and shouldn't exist. They'll make up just one half of their faces or shave just one half of their faces.

They can see perfectly well. It's just that only the left hemisphere believes that it deserves to exist in it, that its perceptions deserve to exist. And it's called hemispatial neglect and it's a real thing. And our culture is so saturated with those left hemisphere dominated characteristics that this great neurologist from Oxford, Ian McGillchrist, says, we function as a society like people who have had massive right hemisphere strokes. We are stuck in the left hemisphere of the brain spinning in anxiety and relief. In fact, bliss and transcendence is just right next to that. It's just in the other side of our heads. It's like no distance apart.

We just have to travel that little tiny distance to get the whole brain online and the right hemisphere cooking and everything changes then. Martha, is it like a muscle? Why do we do that? Is it because our culture encourages us to stay left and so we do that, we build up that muscle and the other atrophies. Why isn't there more fluid crossover if we were born with these both two sides? What a wonderful question.

Part of it is because we have an inbuilt negativity bias. So I like to think of it. No, we don't. Yes, we do. And I will prove it. I will control you. I like to think of it as the 15 puppies in a cobra exercise. If I gave you 15 puppies in a cobra, what would get the most attention?

The cobra. That's a negativity bias. It tells us that, oh, that's dangerous. That's dangerous. And then it spins us right into the part of the brain that goes in this little anxiety spiral. But here's the thing. That negativity bias evolved in a state of nature. So just a couple hundred years ago, after 200,000 years of human existence, 200,000 years, what people heard in the morning when they woke up was birdsong, wind, leaves rustling, one another's voices. What they saw was nature all around them. They got up with the sun and went to bed when it got dark. They lived by foraging and interacting with animals and respecting the harmony of nature and all that stuff. I'm not buying into a noble savage myth.

I'm just saying that for the most of our history, humans were smart enough to know that we exist inside a shifting pattern of sub-harmonies, the ecosystems, the social systems with each other. And it's stupid to set fire to a system, like it's stupid to set fire to a boat when you're on it. Right? So there was a balance going on. You'd go into the negativity, oh, there's a cobra. All right, get the 15 puppies to safety. Gonna relax. Now I'm gonna respect the snake. Bye. See you later. And play with the puppies. The interaction with nature levels me out. But we go through days under artificial light surrounded by right angles, which almost don't exist in nature, hearing all these mechanical sounds that have been shown by

mountains of research to cause stress to our nervous systems, forcing ourselves to do stuff like spreadsheets that have nothing to do with nature and they're all left brain focused. So for most of our human history, there's been a balance, but our culture for the last couple of hundred years has just gone way to the left hemisphere and stayed there and that's how it got so much control, this particular cultural mindset, and that's why it's scaring us all senseless. So is it the story making in the wrong hemisphere that is the problem? Actually the right hemisphere can't really invent stories.

It just is present like an animal. Right. So is that the problem with the left? Because the animal when it gets to a cobra or a puppy is scared of shit, runs away, but doesn't then make up a story that snakes are bad and I hate snakes. And this is probably my generational trauma that makes me hate snakes. The snake is gonna get me any second.

It's just around the corner. Is it the story? It's the story we're afraid of. And I've had this precise experience of being in a room in South Africa where there was a cobra and the South Africans who were with me were like, oh, there's a cobra. Don't get too close, they will spit into your eyes. We're going to go get a stick. And then

somebody went and got it and gently pressed on its head and picked it up and tenderly let it go in the brush because they don't want to attack us. They would only bite in self-defense. They have no reason to kill us. How do these people know it? Because they have lived in nature their whole lives and they know that snakes don't do that. Snakes don't just jump at you and bite you for no reason. They don't want to interact with you. So there's a deep, deep wisdom that comes from actually living in a natural environment that makes us so much safer than just watching stuff on TV about how I bite from this cobra can blind you in seconds. That's the story.

That's why you're scared. If you knew snakes, they'd be much less scary. Yeah, that was, I saw this thing the other day that fear is a learned trait because they put these children on the ground and they put snakes all around these kids. And the kids were just like so curious. These little infants were just curious of these snakes.

And I thought, wow, that is something. Who the hell were those parents? Yeah. I mean, they were- Strong disclaimer. They were non-harmful snakes. Okay, well then, fine. Snakes are amazing.

As long as you can keep a safe distance. They're very, they're sweet. They don't want to hurt you. And by the way, those little kids, there was a very famous case of a woman having a left hemisphere stroke and she had had a lifetime phobia of snakes. After her stroke, she had no fear of anything, but was absolutely obsessed with snakes. She wanted to hold them, she wanted to play with them. Because on the right side of the brain, instead of taking us into fear, a little jolt of attention doesn't go,

oh my God, control everything, be afraid. On the right side, it says, oh, curious, what's that? And it goes toward it. Now, have you ever rubbernecked at an accident? Yes. And in your head you're going, I'm being so ghoulish. I should have hurt my eyes. These people are having a private experience. Yes.

Yes. But you can't help wanting to look. And that's the seesaw, the middle of the seesaw for the brain because part of it is going, oh my God, I'm scared of that. I want to get away. And part of it is saying, pay close attention. Knowing what happened here can keep you safe later. So learn, learn, learn. And that's what the right side of the brain is always doing. Oh, there, I can see where it skidded out. Now I'm connecting what must have happened.

I'm figuring out that, oh, that's what that car must have been doing. And you're starting to get into the opposite of what happens on the left hemisphere into a spiral that mirrors it on the right hemisphere, but I call it the creativity spiral. It takes us from curiosity to connection, to creativity, and then to imagination.

And it makes us much safer. If the doctor operating on you has always been fascinated with the way the human body works and he's curious and confident that he will learn more as he works on you or she, she's gonna do a better job than if she's nervous and panicky. I'm really curious about the neuroscience around

what anxiety is doing chemically in our brains. What neurotransmitters are like coming online because it feels like there's gotta be some sort of chemical connection to the way we experience anxiety. Do you know that? Oh yeah, absolutely. All the stress hormones, so adrenaline, cortisol,

glucocorticoids, they're all like firing crazily when we're afraid, the fight flight thing. It's when we get to the right side of the brain that we get things like dopamine and serotonin that make us feel happy. What is it that you secrete when you're breastfeeding? That one, oxytocin. All of that stuff happens on the right side. So what we've been doing so far, because we have a mechanistic culture that sees everything as a solid machine that could be chopped up and put back together like a clock. So if the brain is troubled, what do we do with it? We bash it with chemicals to try to get those anxiety levels down,

quash those hormones. Trigger alert, this horrible thing that was done during the 20th century. They literally would take people with severe crippling mental illness, stick a screwdriver through their eye socket and just swirl it around in their frontal lobes. It's called a lobotomy. We've all heard it said. And it would often make people get kind of blank, so they weren't apparently suffering as much. But that's how mechanical we are about this. But here is the thing, a frightened, anxious human being is not a broken machine. It is a terrified animal.

And you do not make an animal feel better by approaching it with a screwdriver or even by force feeding it a bunch of calming tranquilizers. We all instinctively know how to make ourselves feel better. We all know how to calm a terrified animal. We're born with that. If you guys open the door and there was a terrified, frightened kitten or bunny or whatever on your doorstep and you decided to care for it, how would you approach it? Would you run toward it screaming and grab it with both hands?

What would you do? You get down on its level, make yourself as close to its side, put your hand out so it could approach, and then you would just cuddle it and keep it cozy. And can you hear how Amanda's voice is just like, always okay. I got you. I got you. And now you might be having a very anxious day, but if you're down there trying to help that kitten or that bunny, all your instincts are going to say, move slowly, be reassuring,

be kind, be gentle. Be gentle with this little animal. And we try so hard to get out of anxiety, but we're not gentle with our anxiety. We say things like, I'm gonna fight my anxiety. I'm gonna bring it down, I'm gonna end it. And if I said to you, like from coaching you, Glenda and I say, I'm gonna bring you down,

I'm gonna end you. Would that make you feel calmer? Right. So it's when we say to our anxious selves, oh, sweetheart, I'm gonna move slowly here. I'm gonna gently take you to a warm place. I'm gonna give you a drink of something warm or cold. And I'm going to listen to you and I'm going to just allow you to be as frightened as you are in a space of loving stillness because I know eventually all those hormones exhaust you and you're going to want to let go and relax. And it works. It works with people, just like it works with animals, because people are animals. Yeah.

So tell us about the anxiety circle and the unregulated feedback cycle, because what I wanna ask you about is, I heard you talking about that we have a natural desire to keep ourselves safe, and we start perceiving things as threats. And then we make our lives smaller to protect ourselves from those threats.

And then we think that's gonna make us feel safer because our life gets smaller. But actually the opposite is true. And it made me very much think about when I lived in a very interesting city in Florida. OK? And Martha, everything was gated communities for no reason. OK? It was just you had to get, there was no,

I don't know who we were. Probably the Cobras. The Cobras. And then the yards were extremely fenced off inside the gated community. And then you would start seeing signs on the gates that said, we don't call 911, and it would just have a gun shooting at your face.

Okay? And I was never more anxious than when I lived in that place. I felt like we were trying so hard to protect ourselves from something that everybody was a ticking time bomb. Like it was see something, shoot something, culture. Everybody's anxiety was through the roof. I felt more anxious all the time.

I got paranoid about my neighbors. I isolated. We now live in a town where people are walking all the time. I have no yard. Like I don't have any, we have no prop. I don't know what. I can touch my neighbor's house with my arm out my window. People are in the middle of the night sitting on our wall.

There's no, truly no private property. And I feel so much less anxious. Yeah. So why? So I misspoke if I told you we have a desire to keep ourselves safe. Actually, it has nothing to do with desire. Desire is a positive thing. We have a desire to enjoy, but the thing that makes us want to keep ourselves safe is we have a fear that something might hurt us. And those two things are really different. Desire and fear are not the same. And we usually let anxiety, fear drive us. And what it does exactly, as you said, it makes our circles smaller and smaller. I spoke to a person, a very wealthy person recently who had

gone to a seminar about how to stay safe and make the world a better place given everything that's happening with climate change and politics and everything. And he was waiting for his list of instructions about how to change the world. And about halfway through the seminar, he realized all the other wealthy people with him, their biggest question was, what do we do when our guards turn on us because there's no one else to rob? He was like, these people are living in a literal nightmare. They feel that they're being attacked all the time and it's just stories. But when we tell those stories and we put up the structures that reflect those stories, it reinforces it and reinforces it. So now make that spiral a flywheel where if you kick it, it accelerates and it just keeps accelerating and getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

That is a product of being stuck in only part of the brain and we did not evolve to live that way. We evolved to live in smallish communities and the sense of being surrounded by community is the single thing that is most important to us to establish a sense of safety. Other animals like a horse, if you threaten it, will look for a safe place. Primates, including us, if we're under threat, we look for a safe other, a safe person, because we know that in community we're much, much stronger and safer than alone.

And I actually, when the election got started and Biden was still running and I thought, okay, we're in for another dose of four years at least of fear-led politics, fear-based politics. So my partner Ro and I created this online community for people to come be creative and to support people in their creativity. We called it Wilder because in the wild people gathered together and you know what they did? They didn't spend all their time hunting and foraging though they spent maybe four hours a day doing that. The rest of the time they were talking to each other, they were shooting the time, they were talking to each other,

they were shooting the shit, they were playing musical instruments, they were making musical instruments, they were making beaded necklaces, what we call pointless precious things. They were singing to each other, telling stories, acting out jokes. This makes us safe.

Community makes us safe. And could I just shout out to anybody who's nervous right now? Find your community. Do whatever it takes. You have many ways to do it, like bricks and clicks. Find it online. Find it in your neighborhood. Put people on your wall.

Most people are good. Most people, when they're not frightened, are extremely loving and creative. That makes us safe. And if we solve the problems that the world is in now, it will be because small groups of creative people gathered and supported each other in creating solutions, which is what y'all do. I think that's what makes me so intrigued

by everything you're talking about right now, because for some reason to me, it feels so counterintuitive. Like the more scared I get, the more, you know, I go to a social thing and somebody talks about something that makes me upset and I decide, my story is this is what happens, this is why I can't go out.

And then I protect myself from that thing. Isn't it like intuitive to make your world smaller when you're scared? And so your message of continuing to reach out, making you more safe is tricky. But you said when you're scared, and this is the truth. Now, so remember the acronym, CAT. Think of the kitten on your porch.

CAT, C stands for calm. You cannot get out of anxiety if you haven't been soothed. So what I was saying about soothing a little kitten, I call it kind internal self-talk, which the acronym is KISSED. I'm very into that. And I like it KISSED. You say to yourself something kind. You're okay. Be well. Be happy. I've got you. Look around. We're safe right now. Remember what happened earlier today? That was a good thing, wasn't it?

Just the way you cheered up your little kids when they were sad or scared. So you get yourself to a space where you're calmer. Like when that inner voice said, you mean your bedroom, I immediately started to laugh. And then my breathing opened up. I was in reality again. The right hemisphere doesn't track time. It is in the real present moment. And at that point, you're ready. You're out of C. Now you're ready for A. And A is for art. And it doesn't have to be painting, dancing. You do not have to be good at it, writing, whatever. You just have to make something. You have to, like a garden

or a party or whatever it is that you like making a stew or something. As you start to make things, you shift, you have to shift into the creative part of the brain. So after that experience, if you're all tensed up, instead of saying, oh, what should I do now? If you calm yourself, then ask this question, what should I make now? Oh.

And you three have spent your whole lives looking at horrifying situations and asking what can we make now? And you make me feel a thousand times safer in this world because you are out there doing, as the saying goes, really hard things, and you just keep doing them no matter how much ammo gets fired at you. So you are making and making and making these things. And if you can come back from a sting like that and immediately go into making things, you're in the art.

And that activates the right side of your brain. It doesn't ignore the information from the left side. Only the left side ignores information. Instead, it includes it and transcends it. So as you make things, the spiral becomes more creative, more connected, more compassionate, and it actually goes out from you until you're in a field of compassion and connection.

And then you get to the T part of cat, which stands for transcendence. And it's a place where you stop fearing that you are this little vulnerable mortal self. You forget that. You actually forget that you're just a little self in a meat suit. And you become, it's in flow. You're in flow state. And the intelligence of nature or the divine or whatever you want to call it is moving through you and doing things through you.

And that is a state of bliss. And my friend Jill Balty Taylor, who lived there for years after she had a left hemisphere stroke, she was in awe and beauty. She couldn't talk or tell time, but she was in awe and beauty and peace. And as she rebuilt the left hemisphere of her brain, she made sure she never again got out of balance. And we can all do that without having to have strokes. We just need to go away from anxiety.

Yeah. Rowan talks a lot about when things get stressful, she goes to imagining daydreaming about living in a van. Okay? Like, it sounds silly, but it doesn't sound silly to me. I totally get it. I do that. Is that enough of a making a thing is what I want to ask. Like for my, ever the pod squadders who are not wanting to make a thing, you can go into

your mind and make a scenario, right? Yeah, get a van, decorate it the way you want to drive at the places you want to. It's like anything that puts you in a sensory experience is going to pull you out of anxiety and put you in the right hemisphere. So if you're daydreaming, so think about like the very best breakfast you could ever eat and you're driving and you've got each other and you've got maybe a couple of pets along and the wind is whistling through your hair and you smell rain in the desert outside and whatever floats your particular boat, picture that vividly. I mean vividly right now. I'm asking you to

do it now. Smell the air? Yeah, I have a breakfast burrito too. Do you have a breakfast burrito? Oh no, I'm just crushing pancakes. Okay. Okay, but like totally experience it. And then tell me, what happened to your anxiety? Just non-existent in the moment. Yeah, there's a ton of evidence that shows that the moment we get anxious,

it slams down our creativity, it cuts it off. But I started to think when I was researching this, doesn't that possibly mean that creativity slams shut anxiety? So I started doing experiments on myself, experiments on people that I loved, experiments on crowds online to put people in a creative brain state. And I would have them put in a number, how anxious are you? And it would be like seven, 10, eight, whatever.

And then we do exercises that get people into their senses, into their bodies, into the present moment, like the one we just did, super simple. And then I'd say, okay, put in the number of your anxiety and it would just come up zero, zero, zero, zero. And it wasn't a controlled study, but I did it over and over again and it always works. So I thought, well, we could just do this deliberately

and then what fires together in the brain wires together So, I thought, well, we could just do this deliberately. And then what fires together in the brain wires together. And all those circuits we have wired up for anxiety would start going the other way toward creativity and joy. And it works. Can I ask you a question about that? Because is it the creativity is the piece that is the difference? Because I just as likely could be like, which I do 14 times

a day, okay, close your eyes and imagine the worst possible thing that could happen right now. Like put it all to, and I can see that just as vividly. So when I'm imagining the worst case scenario, am I not actually being creative in that? Because I feel pretty creative about it. I can go like generations in advance. What a good point. The imagination of the left hemisphere is in telling the stories that frighten us and make us want to control.

The imagination of the right hemisphere isn't as verbal, but it's more sensory. So I just asked you to do something with your imagination that was about your senses. Most of the things that scare us are in words. The left hemisphere uses words and numbers, where the right hemisphere uses presence, the senses, the proprio receptive feeling of our body moving through space. So you make such an excellent point because the fact is all of us are always imagining our future. It's just that we have been trained from childhood to always imagine the worst thing that

could happen and never allow ourselves to go into daydreaming that opens up our sensory experience and allows us to imagine something wonderful. So we think that a life is just going by and it happens to be full of shit. Yes, we do, Martha. We are imagining that before it happens and just calling it hard cold reality. But it's no more real than you driving a van

with your pancakes and your dog in lavender fields. Nothing in the future is real. You can imagine it into being, and then you will automatically start steering in the direction of what you imagine. You just don't know right now that you're doing that because they told you the fear stories were real, but that's a lie.

And also the stories, Martha, when you're talking the story making, the fair-based story making, actually is it true that that's never kept this safe? Isn't it, even if we're out in the wilderness or our town or at night and we're scared, isn't it always our senses that keep us safer? Like a story I have about a person on the street does not at all help me and in fact might get me in trouble.

But what I can see and hear and smell around me is probably the information I need to keep me safe. Well, actually what Ian McGillchrist says, he wrote a book called The Master and His Emissary. And he says that the left side of the brain is useful, but only as a fact finder who is serving the whole brain. And the right side of the brain is useful, but only as a fact finder who is serving the whole brain. And the right side of the brain is what he calls the master because it knows what gives our lives meaning and purpose and joy and all those things. And so basically the left hemisphere

can go out on fact finding missions, bring them back and say, here's the deal. For example, when we get a tornado warning here in Northern Pennsylvania where there have never been tornado warnings before, my family, we get these alarms on our watches and our phones. We go down to the basement. We make sure that the kids have something to play with, and then we calm down because running around in tight circles in the basement is not going to keep us any safer than relaxing down there. So yes, we can use these incredible information gatherers that exist in our left hemispheres.

We can go to the doctor and have them say, we have diagnosed this terrible disease because of the machines we made. It's wonderful that we have those things. But if we then spin off into stories about the horrors that await us, we're not letting the left hemisphere just be a servant. And what Miguel Cris says is it's a wonderful servant and a terrible master. So take the information, oh, here's what climate change is doing. Here's what it will do in 20 years if nothing changes. Okay, that's horrifying. Register it. Then calm down.

Find joy. Explore what you can make. What can I make now? And there are people all over this planet who are making ways to reverse climate change that would work if we could get out of our panic long enough to actually get behind them and use them. So I have great hope for the future because of this creative capacity. But the left hemisphere, when it's given total control, it destroys everything and finally it destroys itself. So is it true that the left side then is just a bucket full of widgets? All the facts are just little widgets in there, but to get anything new, we have to go to the right side because that's what I hear you saying. We can take those widgets and we can assemble them and make them into something on the right

side, but on the left side, we're just holding widgets. Well, brain scientists who are listening to this no doubt have steam coming out of their ears right now because I am not a neurobiologist and I am grossly oversimplifying everything that I'm saying. But it still stands that the two hemispheres are very different. And it's not the whole hemisphere. It's in a little tight area. But what happens with the two sides is that they're both brilliant, brilliant at picking up information. both brilliant, brilliant at picking up information. The left side just happens to pick it up in a very orderly, logical, numerical,

time-based, word-based way. But it can be a very calm and loving servant if most of the time you're firing and wiring your brain to go to a place of curiosity and then connection and then creativity, and you can use every bit of information you get from your left hemisphere to become part of your solution. The Wright brothers looked at birds. They said, heavier than air flight is possible, and we're going to figure it out.

And they just crashed plane after plane and then figured it out with their left hemispheres and then went out with the optimism of birds and crashed another plane until they got one that flew. That's how we're going to save the world. I want to talk about just the little love bugs who are not even thinking about saving the world. They're just trying to get through their day and their anxiety is enough just in their house and with their in-laws and with their PTA and all the things. So tell us a story about the king and the leather streets. Everybody on the internet should know this story.

It's just a fable about a king who said, I really, I don't want to hurt my feet. There are sharp rocks out there. I want all the streets paved in leather. And they kept running out of cows and whatnot. And finally somebody said, you know, we could just take one cow, make enough leather to cover your feet and boom, anywhere you go, you've got protection. So as you're going into maybe interactions with neighbors, friends, family, where there's a potential for some very volatile emotional experiences.

I'm really right there with you. One thing I would really do is ground in with a community of like mind before you do that. So like the four of us could get together and do something I call dysfunctional family bingo where you write down in bingo squares the horrible things your family is going to do and say, and then you scramble them up and then you go to your gathering and when they do it, you get to mark off bingo. So when they're getting close to it, like somebody says, well, at least I'm glad Roe versus Wade was overturned.

Instead of wanting to stab them, you've got your bingo card and you're going, yeah, yeah, say more, please. And then first person that gets bingo gets a free lunch from everybody else. So root into the community in a way that says we are together now and we will be together again. And we will tell stories not as horror stories but as adventure stories.

I went in with the monsters and there was combat and I emerged wounded but victorious. And tell each other the stories. And suddenly you're a hero instead of a victim. And I know it sounds facile. I know how painful this is. I left my own family when I was 29 years old. It was incredibly painful.

It was like having many, many limbs ripped off. And still it wasn't actually as bad as having to go to you. If y'all are going back to deal with families, my hat's off to you because I couldn't do it. But I know I can tell you things that will help you stay safe and you can come back to the pod squad and these three are going to be here and you can trust them and you can tell your horror stories as adventures and knowing that you can do that makes you a hero for life. You're just having a series of... I love this idea. We have to stop now because we're going to fix ourselves in the next episode but but it is the reason we do that is also

so that we continue to go out, to go out, to go out, because the exploring is the antidote to the anxiety in a way, right? It's like, the more we stay small and don't venture out, I heard you once say that we actually stay safer by going out to learn what's actually danger. Can you tell us that? Like how do we actually, it's not eliminating discomfort, it's becoming more tolerant of discomfort so you can have a big life. Yeah. So the human brain likes to ask three questions over and over.

One, am I safe? If you're in your left hemisphere, it will say no. If you're in your right hemisphere, it will usually say yes. So am I safe? Yes. Am I loved? And that can mean self-love. If you're willing to treat yourself the way you would treat a kitten, yes. The third question is, what can I learn?

And this is a strong comp Yes. The third question is, what can I learn? And this is a strong compulsion to go out and explore like scientists experimenting with physical things, seeing what happens. In the 1960s, NASA had a study commission to identify creative geniuses, right? To hire them. So it found out that 2% of adults are creative geniuses, according to this test. After a while, some people thought to give it to four and five-year-olds. 98% of them scored as creative geniuses. And the studies, the people who are running it, they blamed the school system because it says we are systematically taught to sit cowering while an authority figure who already knows the answers makes us do things with our

left hemispheres and doesn't give us the experience of roaming around with our bodies. Because if you went out in a state of childlikeness, naiveté, you wouldn't go into that spiral. And I can tell you, Glennon, that you would never do that because with all the hits you've taken in your life, you still go out. You still go out to help the suffering. And you all three do. That is what you do every single time on this podcast. You go out to help the people who are suffering. And that is using your left hemisphere as the emissary and using that beautiful connecting power of the right hemisphere as your master or mistress. And you're living examples of people who are walking a creative hero's path. And guess what? You could drop almost all your anxiety

and things would just get more interesting. You would produce even more wonderfulness, but you don't need to. Just be nice to yourself. Calm, then art, make things, then transcendence. You can live your whole life. Calm, then make things, then transcendence. Got it, Pod Squad? Calm, then make things, then transcendence. Okay, we are going to end now, and we're gonna come back, and we're gonna walk through

what this might actually look like in our lives, so you all can learn how to walk yourself through it. Martha Beck, we love you. Thank you. I love you so much. See you next time. If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us. If you'd be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things.

First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you'll never miss an episode and it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And then just tap the plus sign in the upper right hand corner or click on follow. This is the most important thing for the pod. While you're there, if you'd be willing to give us a five-star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey. Our executive producer is Jenna Wise-Berman,

and the show is produced by Lauren Legrasso, Alison Schott, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Schultz. You