Why Are You So Anxious? Transforming Your Anxiety into Passion – with Dr. Martha Beck

Dr. Mindy  

On this episode of The Resetter Podcast, I have brought you Dr. Martha back. If you’re not familiar with her, you’re gonna want to be she is an a prolific author. That’s where I’m gonna start, and one of the reasons I wanted to bring her on was to talk about her new book around anxiety, and we’ll I’ll share the highlights in a moment. She’s a deep thinker. She is a thought leader, if you have not dipped into her other books, she is bringing new thoughts to old questions, and one of the questions we answer is, Why is everybody so anxious? She is a New York Times best selling author. She has degrees from Harvard in social science, and in this conversation, you’re gonna hear her talk about why it’s so important that we are looking at our mental health through the lens of both our left side of our brain, which is our logical brain, and the right side of our brain, which is our creative brain. So in this conversation, not only does she talk about this new environment of anxiety producing environment we are all living in. But she then shares how we have lost access to certain parts of our brain through daily behaviors and and what we prioritize. So if you are looking for the fund or out of anxiety, you’re about to get it. Because instead of telling us all to stop stressing and to do more of something, she’s going to give us all permission to play and permission to create, and she’s going to give you some strategies that you can apply immediately to start to train your brain to see love and see possibility and see connection. And it’s not by diving into the hard things. It’s about embracing the fun things. And so please listen all the way through this conversation, because there’s a couple things I want to tell you. For starters, about midway through, we geeked out on art, and then she asked me what kind of art I did, and I shared with her a new art technique that I am just a student of, and she wanted to see pictures of it. So I brought up my pictures, and you can go and watch this episode so you can understand this type of art that I’m just a student of, I am not a teacher of. If you go to youtube.com/resetter, podcast, it is on my resetter podcast YouTube channel. You can see us geeking out on the type of art that I’ve been using to lower my anxiety. But what I also love about this incredibly brilliant woman is that you’ll hear it at the end, where she takes what may just be a highly entertaining discussion, I hope it’s highly entertaining for you, and she, at the end, sums it up and says what Martha and I did in this conversation is the door out of anxiety, and if You catch where we started off in the logical and where we ended up in the middle, we went into the creative and fun, and then we ended up in a place of compassion and altruism, and even talking about the wisdom of post menopausal women when where we ended up in this conversation matters, and it can show you how, without even knowing, she took me from a place of a brain that could have been anxious, was very intentional about having a logical discussion. Somewhere in the middle, we ended up in random playfulness, and at the end, we settled in to a beautiful heart connection, and that is something we can all do every single day. This is such a beautiful conversation in so many ways. I can’t wait to bring it to you and go check out her new book, because it is ready for pre order. It is teaching us how to undo anxiety from a lens I have never witnessed before. So we will leave links there. But most of all, I hope this brings you as much joy as it brought me. Welcome to the resetter podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again if you have a passion for learning, if you’re looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. Here’s where I want to start this conversation. We definitely have to start it at anxiety. Me, but I, but I really the biggest question I am seeing right now in the culture and the cultural conversation is like, Why does everybody have anxiety? I don’t know if I’ve met a person who doesn’t have anxiety right now. Why is that?

Dr. Martha Beck  

Well, it just to back you up. You are not imagining things. The the documented prevalence of anxiety is absolutely skyrocketing. It the worldwide rate of anxiety is a full blown disorder, increased by a full 25% during the pandemic, and then it didn’t go down again. It keeps going up at an exponential level. And I believe the reason for this is that it’s about the way humans think. Our brains have something called a negativity bias, where if we see two things, a fun puppy and a poisonous Cobra, we’re going to pay more attention to the cobra, because that’s a survival skill. But then we get into this, there’s a part of the brain that grabs that negative impulse and starts to spin it into a story that scares us even more. So we see a snake, we get scared, and then we start thinking, there could be snakes everywhere. So now we’re afraid of snakes that don’t even exist. And this creates what I call an anxiety spiral in the brain, and it goes forward, forward, forward, but it’s like those tire rippers. You drive over, when you leave a parking lot, you can’t back up. I mean, it’s hard to back up. You like have to get out and disassemble the machine a little bit in order to bring the anxiety back down. So what’s happening is individuals who are feeling that way have built an entire global culture that is working that way. And if you look at the news feeds or a lot of social media scrolls and things, it is just another externalized version of the anxiety inside our minds that feeds back into our brains, feeds back out to society. So it’s all these feedback circuits that are getting more and more and more anxiety, and they never come back down again.

Dr. Mindy  

Okay, so you said something in preparation for this interview, I saw I caught a phrase that you used that I was like, Whoa, that’s so true, and I’m gonna mispronounce it, but it was something like an and anxious genic

Dr. Martha Beck  

environment, yeah,

Dr. Mindy  

did you come up with that word?

Dr. Martha Beck  

No, I read that in a, in a, it’s journal, exist.

Dr. Mindy  

Oh, well, then it’s a that it’s a real world. That’s right.

Dr. Martha Beck  

Word you’ve never heard before. You should be fine. That’s right, no anxiety. Agenda just means generating anxiety. And everything around us, culturally generates anxiety. I’m looking out my window at the forest I live in, the forest in Pennsylvania, and I’m looking at these huge trees right outside my window, and just noticing that just the side of that makes my entire nervous system calm down just bit. Yep, think about it, until a few 100 years ago, which is an eye blink. In evolutionary terms, people woke up hearing each other’s voices, bird song, wind, maybe horses going by, no motors running, no electrical devices, no bright lights flashing at them, and that is the environment we evolve to work and live in. But instead, we’re in environments that are they’re geared to get our attention, and the best way to get someone’s attention is to get them a little bit anxious. So the bright lights that fly up flash in our eyes, the images that are everywhere, the things we talk about with each other, that they’re all actually specifically designed to grab our attention in ways that make us less peaceful, more anxious. And it’s just, it’s clicking out of all control. It really is, yeah,

Dr. Mindy  

it really I feel that because as a creator of information on social media, I’ve been really, really careful to be empowering and hopeful with my words Yeah, and I know that when I do that, I may not get as many clicks and like that

Dr. Martha Beck  

follows that, right? Yeah, wow. And so

Dr. Mindy  

it’s a it’s a conversation we often have where I’m like, I’m not doing the fear mongering anymore. I’m gonna do the word of hope. But to your point, people don’t gravitate to it as much. So

Dr. Martha Beck  

interesting. There’s a wonderful person named Maria ReSSA. She’s a Filipina journalist who did an expose on the government there during a really corrupt government, and the Prime Minister decided, or the president, decided, to attack her in the press and actually with all kinds of physical threats and all all sorts of things. So there was this big hate campaign against Maria ReSSA, and she decided to use it as a chance to do some research, which kept her from getting anxious by the ways we can come back to that. But what they found was that lies spread six times faster than true facts on the internet, six times. There’s only one thing that travels as fast as a scary lie, and that is inspiration. Oh, that’s what I think you’re doing. And yes, you might not get the fear mongering and the hate mongering, but you will get just as much attention and the information will spread just as fast if you can genuinely go to a place where you feel inspired and then share that with others. Oh, I

Dr. Mindy  

love that.

Dr. Martha Beck  

Maybe we could all do that, like everybody listening right to this could, like, find something inspiring today and share it. Put it online, talk to your friends, talk to yourself, put it in a journal, like, start changing the trend that always goes toward more hate, anxiety and fear, and start building some positive energy.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah, so there was something I heard recently about how important, especially in this moment in history, that we’re all sort of experiencing, and we have a worldwide audience, but I think there’s many there’s a lot of political turmoil in a lot of countries right now, and hate is definitely spreading quite fast. And I saw this really interesting post that I really resonated with, which is, create a love line. Our jobs as individuals is to create this line of love that comes out of us, and if we all created love lines, we could start to shift the hate that is being spread like wildfire. And you just gave me the science to back that up with, which is because through love should come inspiration. I would hope,

Dr. Martha Beck  

yeah, yeah, I think so. And the first step is to figure it out in your own brain, because what we’re seeing externalized in the media and everything is simply a reflection of the way we think. So that’s the way most people are being influenced to think. But we can deliberately say, No, I’m going to do what you said. I’m going to become a source of love lines. And there are specific things that you can do to make that happen, because you can’t fake it. You can’t just paste on a happy face and go out in the world and say, I’m going to make everything loving if you’re really panicking inside. I’ve seen 1000 people try it. It does not work. Does? It has to be real. The peace, the joy that the the genuine affection that that you broadcast to the world starts with being incredibly real about getting it into your own system. Yeah, okay,

Dr. Mindy  

so what I what I see then, is we all need to just acknowledge the environment is an anxiety producing environment.

Dr. Martha Beck  

Genic. You heard it here, folks.

Dr. Mindy  

So we acknowledge we live in an anxiogenic environment. Okay, now what do we do? I mean, the love line’s a great idea, but I love what you’re saying. You can’t fake. You can’t fake it till you make it. Is what you like. You have to really find peace. Is what I hear. Yeah,

Dr. Martha Beck  

if you’ve I faked calm for years. It just led to how to work burnout and break down. Yeah, did not work very well. So the first thing you do, you you were telling me, before the recording turned on, about the place where you’re sitting, how you’ve got this beautiful, gorgeous Amethyst behind you, this geode. You’ve got a plant, something alive and calming. Plants have incredible effects on our nervous systems. And then you’ve got these two beautiful paintings you picked up that you really love. So you’ve created this little sanctuary, and in that sanctuary you’ve placed things that are not anxiogenic, that are calming, that are appealing to you, that remind you of things, that lift your spirit. There’s a wonderful polyvagal theorist named Deb Dana who calls these things glimmers. Have you heard of a glimmer? You know? You’ve heard the word trigger, right? Yep. And a trigger is something technically, I mean, it’s broad. They use. Everybody uses it to mean everything now, but what it originally meant was when you experience something really traumatic, like watching the towers go down on 911 like every time I see a television at a certain height, it was the height of my television when I in 2011 I remember that, boom, boom, boom, my brain just picks up that shape and position of a TV and immediately starts replaying those images for me, and this was a long time ago now. So that’s a trigger. A glimmer is something that associates with a positive experience in your life. Yeah. So when you see that, you immediately get a lift into the mood you were in at the time you were, I don’t know, falling in love, getting a new puppy, learning a language that was, you know, beautiful to your ears. So you’ve got glimmers around you. And that’s a really good first step. A sanctuary full of glimmers is a place to start.

Dr. Mindy  

Okay? And so you start, I would think in the your home environment, like, so you’re talking about, like, physically making your your, your environment around you, calm, yeah, because,

Dr. Martha Beck  

as I just said, the physical around, arrangements around most people now are highly abnormal. It is abnormal to sit in a room full of right angles with a bunch of strangers under fluorescent lights for eight hours, doing things that mean nothing to your body, right, right, like the human mind works functions best outside in nature, moving and solving problems that are immediately helpful to the situation that we take Our children, pull them out of that kind of environment and force them to sit in rows solving the same problems at the same time, because schools are made to turn out factory workers. But sorry if I go on too long, just slap no no. In 1968 NASA recruited some psychologists to create a test to detect creative geniuses. They wanted them to work for NASA, so they they created this test, and they found that 2% of adults fit the they tested into the category of creative geniuses. After a while, someone thought to give this test to children, four and five year olds, 98% of them tested as creative geniuses. 98% and the researchers said our society, all the systems we use to socialize our children, are beating the genius out of people, yes, and in order to make them fit for factory and office work, yes, so we live in abnormal circumstances, circumstances that would make any creature nervous. Go to a place that doesn’t make you nervous, just that concept is alien to most people.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah, and it’s so simple, because everybody can do it. Everybody can find that place. I, you know, I do. It does bring up the question that I have, which is, like, I want to be respectful of the fact that some people’s home environment because of relationships, or maybe they don’t have control over it. I, you know, I, I split my time between Northern California and Southern California, and my Northern California home is our family home, and my kids are 24 and 22 and there’s just a ton of people, there’s a ton of love, and there’s a ton of mess, and I can never quite get it organized the way I want, and it can produce anxiety for me, sure. So I do think we have some people who have environments that are hard to clean up. Yes, well,

Dr. Martha Beck  

there are a lot of yeah, there are a lot of people without the privilege to just have a corner of their own house or apartment. But I have coached and worked with people who found a place in a one woman used to go sit in a cornfield. She was a farm wife, and they had a tiny little house, and she had a bunch of kids, and she would go sit in the corn, just to think I have other friends and clients who have gone out to little patches of woods they found near their houses, or even in the winter, one of my friends had she was caring for someone who was dying of cancer, and she said, Thank God they had a dog who needed four walks a day, because she’d go out in the freezing cold. But she was with nature, and she was with the dog, and those four walks a day were her sanctuary. So yeah, really good to check her privilege on this one. But don’t give up your creativity. You were born to be a creative genius, and part of your creative genius world can be thinking of some way to create sanctuary for your senses, your physical senses, and that’s the first step, and then you go to the psychological stuff. Okay,

Dr. Mindy  

so that’s what I’m gonna give me the second step, because I think that’s a really applicable step that everybody can do. So thank you.

Dr. Martha Beck  

I had I write in my book that’s coming out in January about this woman who was going to a psychiatrist because she had high anxiety, and she was living in this Manhattan apartment, and she went to the she worked at this law firm, and it gave her all this medication and everything and therapy, and no one ever mentioned that she was living in a really weird environment that was bad for her body, right? Wow. So all of us need to do that, and then once you have that, and what she started doing was bringing in lots of plants. She started growing an herb garden in her Manhattan townhouse. So Manhattan high rise. So the when you go to your sanctuary, the second thing is to take care of the animal that is your body. You know Mary Oliver’s, you. Poem, you do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. All you have to do is to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. So you go into your sanctuary and you realize that this is a creature. Your anxiety is an ancient, ancient part of your brain. Almost every living creature on earth shares that particular brain structure, like flatworms may not, but any reptile, any animal, any fish, any bird, they all have this part of the brain that gets anxious when they see something unfamiliar. And you don’t calm down an anxious animal by trying to fight it or beat it down or reduce it. If I said to you, Mindy, I’m here to bring you down. I’m here to end you. I’m here to stop you like how would you feel? And yet, we say that about our anxiety all the time. I’m here to bring it down. If I end it,

Dr. Mindy  

yeah, I would fight back. That’s where you get the looping anxious thoughts.

Dr. Martha Beck  

Of course, it’s going to be terrified, and then it’s going to fight, fight or flight. Yeah. So in other words, your anxiety increases when you set out to bring it down. But if you go into a sanctuary and you say to it, okay, little anxiety creature, I call it your anxiety creature, okay, anxiety creature, I am actually on your side. I know you’ve been trying to keep me safe, and I know how tired you are. So what can I do for you? I’m sitting in my sanctuary. What would help you feel safe?

Dr. Mindy  

What if? What the answer is, I just like to know what’s good, you know, like, there’s a lot of anxiety in the unknown. You You said it like, what if it’s like, well, I just need to know this. And I need to know this. There’s sometimes we can’t know that’s

Dr. Martha Beck  

the storytelling part of your brain. So that’s it’s actually not that that’s part of the loop of the anxiety, but the creature itself, the basis of that anxiety really is thinking at an animal level. And so if you can bring your attention into the present moment, into the present circumstance, which is the only thing you will ever have to tolerate is the present moment, if you can say to the runaway mind, okay, you know I hear you. I hear that many unknown things are there. So let’s stick with what’s known. And you look around your sanctuary and like, touch those Amethysts and and the plant, and smell the leaves and see what they’re like. See if the paintings smell like turpentine. I love that smell. Start to come home to your senses, and when something says but I need to know everything in order to be safe. That’s just a very scared, not particularly bright animal thinks if it could know everything, it could control everything. This is one of the bases of parenting and teaching and, yes, work and everything, I guess what? You can’t know everything. And even if you could, you couldn’t control it at all. Yes, the only thing you can control is what to do in this present moment. Okay, so the first thing look around and see that you’re you’re not in imminent physical danger. So far as you know,

Dr. Mindy  

does that get easier with time? It gets easier

Dr. Martha Beck  

with practice. As my karate teacher used to say, practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent. So every time you take your fantastic, uniquely human neocortex that can imagine things that have never been and you use it to scare yourself that becomes permanent. It happens over and over and over until you think that only the scary stories are real, but they’re no more real than any fantasy of wonderful things that might happen in the future. Yeah, if you think something often with strong emotion, it starts to feel like truth. That’s how we get that. But there’s a deeper sense, which is a sense of peace that only comes when we hear something that resonates with our whole physical and perceptual apparatus. So when I did my book The Way of integrity, I talked about the one question, the one statement that people could make that seems to put them in a state of alignment fastest. Try this right now. In your mind, just repeat the phrase, I am meant to live in peace. I am meant to live in peace. And say it to yourself several times,notice the effect it has inside the body and.

Dr. Mindy  

It’s yeah, you really, you calm.

Dr. Martha Beck  

Is that what’s happening for you?

Dr. Mindy  

My shoulders dropped the first time I said

Dr. Martha Beck 

I saw that, yeah, yeah. And your breathing is getting deeper, more regular. And that is not the body’s response to to happy news. That is the body’s response to truth. Yeah, I’ve seen many people have that response when they heard news that was not good. Like one man said to me, he was talking to me about his childhood, and I said, You do realize you were sexually abused, right? And he said, Are you just telling me that to make me feel good? And I was like, that’s not the first thing I would say to somebody to just make them feel good. It felt peaceful to him, because it was the truth, and so he could sink into that and ground in truth. And that’s what happens when we come back into the present moment. Peace is available. It’s you just went into it. Yeah? Yeah.

Dr. Mindy  

The story about that man is really interesting, because do you think we create more anxiety when we look away from painful situations?

Dr. Martha Beck  

Now, it depends on why it you know, every night I go to bed and lie in my bed and do some meditation to get my anxieties and whatever’s happened to me during the day, to let go and allow me to sleep. I used to have horrible insomnia, and don’t anymore, so I can detach in that way, so that I can rest and be better equipped to fight for justice and happiness the next day, right? But if I turn away from something, if somebody says, Look, I like, if one of my loved ones says, You really hurt my feelings, or someone in a Civil Rights Movement said, you know, you’re really like, your culture is doing some damage, and I kind of go, I don’t want to hear that, that creates more anxiety, right? Yeah, yeah. So turning towards something disturbing can be can create less anxiety, if in the right circumstances, and turning away from anxiety can be exactly the right thing if you need to rest. Do you? Do

Dr. Mindy  

you think that the best place we can put our brains is in a state of constant curiosity. I’ve been, I’ve been thinking about the power of that word, like, there’s something when I’m curious, and that’s what you’re saying, you know, I hear a little bit what you’re saying when I’m curious about something, it stops the brain from trying to say, is it good? Is it bad? Is it harming me? Is it not harming me? If I, if I can go into that curious state, I have found peace there.

Dr. Martha Beck  

Yeah, structurally, I said there’s that all creatures have this part of the brain that when it sees something alarming, it sends out this burst of fear. Well, there’s a part of the brain that immediately grabs that fear, turns it into a story and starts trying to control everything. We just saw that happening. But on the other side of the brain, on the right side of the brain, that same structure, if we if you see something unfamiliar, there’s a little book of arousal like, whoa, what’s that? And on the right side of the brain, what happens is that the first step is not away from whatever alarm is, but toward it in curiosity. So the I call curiosity the secret doorway out of anxiety. So you might not be able to feel a blissful calm, you might not be able to feel happy when you’re in a state of anxiety, but if you get curious, the part of the brain that’s scared has to give way to the part of the brain that’s curious, and then that starts to learn, and it starts to associate things, and then to connect things, and then to create things, and at that point, you’re home free. The opposite of anxiety in the brain is not calm, it’s creative, and it all starts with curiosity. You’re absolutely right.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah, that one years ago I really obsessed got, like, in an obsessive year or two about the connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.

Dr. Martha Beck  

Ah, so you know all the words, yeah, yeah. And I’ve

Dr. Mindy  

talked about it here on my podcast, and how they just you flip flop between the two, yeah, yeah. And you can’t be in, you can’t be in one like you can’t, you can’t live in both of them. You’re either in that highly creative or you’re in the highly anxious it. Would it Bennett? Would we Bennett? Help ourselves? If we asked a question every time there was something that was felt threatening to us if we asked a question, does that immediately pull us into that prefrontal cortex? I think it

Dr. Martha Beck  

probably does, and I’ve been practicing it since I’ve Yeah, found it out in by reading research, and I’ve found that it’s remarkably powerful. You may have had the experience of going past an accident, and it’s. Terrible, and you’re terrified that somebody was hurt, but you are also really curious, you know, if you and if you can turn on the curiosity. There is the activist Valerie. Valerie core cites a study where people who saw others that look different so they were dressed differently, they had different skin color, different customs, whatever, immediately the amygdala went, Whoa, alien. And then the storytelling and the control started. And if they could get people to just answer this or just ask this one question, I wonder what that person has for dinner, all of those biases and fears would give way, and suddenly they’d be trying to pick up information, thinking about times they’d had ethnic food, the smell of it, that wondering what the family structure was like. And immediately they stopped othering these people nearly as much, and became more approachable, more loving and feeling more safe. And I really want to say this, people who don’t feel safe get obstreperous, and they get angry, they get into that part of the that anxiety spiral that you were just talking about, and they act from fight or flight, which scares other people, who then act from fight or flight, which scares the first people more, which scares the and it just goes back and forth and back and forth. If you can step into anything that’s stressful in your life and start asking questions. In fact, Judson Brewer, this great psychologist or psychiatrist who wrote a book about anxiety, he would sometimes address anxiety in his patience just by looking at something and going, hmm, and they’d be like, what they’d start looking around. And a colleague did this with a whole team of athletes they were working with. And after that, the whole team, whenever they got anxious or needed to cheer up, they just start going and just saying that just making that noise makes you sort of want to poke around. And you’re into that. The whole part of the brain that does the connection and creativity, and you’re right, it toggles with anxiety, and anxiety is not there anymore? Yeah,

Dr. Mindy  

oh my gosh, this is so good. Okay, so we’ve got our sanctuary we’re creating, and then we have our questions that we are asking in the anxious moment. Anything else we can do, other tools we can do to sort of move ourselves out of that state? Yeah,

Dr. Martha Beck  

you go into your sanctuary. You settle in among your glimmers. You really physically touch them, taste them. You notice where there’s anxiety. You’re kind to the creature that is scared inside you. I call this kissed K. I s t for kind internal self talk. And you just say, may you be Well, little creature, may you be happy. I’m here for you. I love you. Now, what are you curious about? And whatever it’s curious about, it’s like working with a little kid. Now, you give it what it wants. I started doing this. I was writing during the pandemic. I was right, you know, finding all this out, and I decided to test it on myself, and I would get up in the morning, I’d say to my anxiety, creature, Does anything make you curious? Well, I wanted to draw, so I was like, Okay, you can draw for a month. And my brain changed, like the experience of my inner life changed completely during that month. It was like being on The Best drugs you can imagine, and

Dr. Mindy  

just, you just drew all day.

Dr. Martha Beck  

I just drew and painted. I thought, well, I’ll go on to other things, but I never did. I just wanted to draw and paint. And we had a two year old in the house, and so she and I would go out in the woods, and I would take pictures of her with my camera, and then I’d come back and draw and paint pictures of her. And I realized that I was really focused on her, because the part of me that was drawing was also a toddler, and was had that kind of you know, toddlers supposedly laugh 400 times a day. In adults, 15 times a day. I was in full toddler mode, yeah, and just having a blast, and no anxiety whatsoever, like it was, yeah, it was the least anxious time of my life, and I intend to replicate it,

Dr. Mindy  

yeah. Oh, that’s so brilliant. It’s and that falls under the pattern I think, of giving ourselves permission, yes, to have fun, yeah, for you, yeah. Well, so it’s interesting because I just, well, just full transparency, you know, I’m 54, years old. I’m postmenopausal. My kids are grown. My career is in a really beautiful place. I’m I’m like, you just thinking up in cool thoughts and writing books. About them and having great conversations like this. So on paper, everything is beautiful, and yet there are moments where my brain kicks in and says, You’re not safe. You should be doing more. Stop relaxing. Like, like, I think it’s an interesting piece for women, because you there, you get to this point where everything that got you to this level of life actually now has to be shed because it no longer serves you. And so I started doing I like to walk and walk and listen to podcasts. Is one of the things in nature will absolutely calm me. An art technique that, if you don’t know about a friend taught me called neurographic art. Do you know about, oh, Martha, you have this is, will be right up your alley. So it’s a friend showed me, you can go Google it on YouTube. She showed me how to do neurographic art, which is a bunch of it looks like doodling, but the way you do it is you set an intention, and then you create these you have to use draw a bunch of lines on a piece of paper, and then anywhere that two linear lines intersect, you have to curve them. Everything on the paper is curved because it now it looks like neurons in your brain cool. It relaxes you, because it’s like seeing like it is the coolest you can find it all, yeah, but to your point that there was something that it took my thoughts to a place that stopped the looping, and that’s I’m wondering, do we have, like art movement? Sometimes I find conversations with healing people, people who have big hearts, you know, doing things like this, like I’m not anxious in this moment, right, right? But then I can get off this moment, and then the anxiety hits in Yeah. So,

Dr. Martha Beck  

yeah, there are all kinds of things. And I love the work of a great psychiatrist and philosopher named Ian McGill Crist from Oxford, and he wrote this book called The Master and its emissary, about how the whole culture that we’ve developed is dominated by functions that primarily occupy the left hemisphere of the brain. And yes, that’s an oversimplification, the whole brain is working together all the time. But if you he says, we are actually building a society that is functioning like a person who has had a massive stroke on the right hemisphere and is losing whereas, on the other hand, people who have left hemisphere strokes are able to do creative, connected, artistic, inventive things like what you’re talking about With the painting or even a conversation. So what he says? Ian McGilchrist says that the data collection part of the mind is not supposed to be in charge. It’s supposed to work for the meaning maker, the context builder, the purpose finder, and that is what we light up when we start to draw, when we let ourselves be relaxed, when we’re moving, when we’re dancing. They found that people, older people who dance, have more brain benefits than people who are playing tennis or golf, because there’s that liberation and expressiveness. So as it brings in all those right hemisphere functions, proprio, reception, color, light, taste, cooking, being with our people. Guess what? This is the way people used to live. Yes, cooking, together, gardening, hunting, fishing, dancing, telling stories. We evolved to do these things, and when we start to do them, our whole brains light up. It’s not like we shift to the right side of the brain, our whole brains light up. If you read Jill Bolte Taylor’s whole brain living. You should have her on the show. She’s amazing. Yeah, I should, yeah. Harvard neuroanatomist who had a massive left hemisphere stroke and came back to the world with this message, used the whole thing. And she’s, she’s so great because she she was at Harvard, but after her stroke and her recovery now, she called me from where she lives in the summer, on a houseboat in the middle of a lake somewhere in the Midwest. Nobody knows where, and she was doing, she was making sculptures and stained glass windows and doing science. So my gosh, like that type of lifestyle is considered unusual to us. Okay, right? We need to light up our brains, our whole brains, and you just did it with that painting. Oh, my god, yeah, cool.

Dr. Mindy  

I got it so addicted to it, after somebody showed me how to do it that I was like, anytime I that anxious brain kicked in, I just grabbed a pad of paper and I just started doing the the processes that they taught me, yeah, student,

Dr. Martha Beck  

well, the whole point is, my goodness, we all as soon as I see that your creativity lights me up, my anxiety is gone. I’m. Drawn into your art and the explanation and the joy of it, and that’s how we’re supposed to live, and we can, we? Can we just did it? You and me, right?

Dr. Mindy  

That’s so cool. We

Dr. Martha Beck  

started out with a list of things. We had to talk about, the anxiogenic. We have to learn that word. We have to impress people. Oh, no, I want to do a doodle and just show each other colors.

Dr. Mindy  

Well, actually, what we could, we could have done, is we could have both been painting and having a conversation. Hello, and

Dr. Martha Beck  

let’s see that. Yeah, that is my studio right now. These are all paintings that I’ve done and I did. They’re gorgeous. Yeah, there’s, there’s the Buddha one I do, really just one time, but this is one of the four. Oh, look how beautiful your artist. So I do more realistic this is the this one I hear is the place where I have to send my garbage out anyway. So I do more realistic art. But it doesn’t matter we are. We are both sitting among things that we have done artistically, yeah, and we artificially ignore them so that we can do the right kind of podcast. So

Dr. Mindy  

true. It’s so true. Oh, my God, I love this, because you know what it does is, I hope conversations like this really give us permission to go back to that child spirit, you know. And I think you know, you can look at someone like you and be like, Well, you’re a serious author, and here you are, like, doing things that you know serious authors might not show up to do. But How fun is this and how fun is it to hear people having fun. Yes,

Dr. Martha Beck  

it’s so bonding. It can get you past all kinds of divisions. It can get you past neuroses. It can it just sets you free in the field of creation. So that’s the book I wrote. Talks about the creature being very scared, and then the creative is the artistic self, and if you start to live that way, if I mean, how often do you paint?

Dr. Mindy  

Well, here’s the thing I should tell you daily, because that’s what I’d want to do. But I do. I don’t give myself permission to do it. I do it at the end of the day, like, oh, the work is over. Now I’m gonna do this. So maybe a couple times a week. Mindy,

Dr. Martha Beck  

I wrote about my my art month, and how hard it was to stop, and I actually called a therapist and said, Please help me stop painting. And she was like, why I’m like, because I’m doing it all day and I’ve got real things to do. And she’s like, well, full confession, I just started a painting class, and I can’t stop either. Then I send my my manuscript. Pianist, like, oh, it was so hard to stop painting after that month, and she writes in the margin, why did you? And I was like, Oh, I have to be a normal person. She’s like, I don’t get it. And so I talked to my family, and I got official permission to get up every morning and paint and draw first. I get to do that until like nine o’clock in the morning. I’ll get up at five I paint four hours. Such a happy character, and I’m getting more real work done because I’m so full of joy and so I mean, maybe you should paint first. Maybe you should paint I know

Dr. Mindy  

I’m going to so then that actually brings me to back to this idea of right brain, left brain, yeah. So what I’m hearing you say is that we are really working within this logical part of our brain. And the more we you know, what we know is the whatever you use the most in your brain gets stronger and stronger. Together, wires together, yeah, yeah. And so then the creative side of the brain just starts to fall away. And what you’re talking about is by starting the day by by really nourishing that part of the brain, let you also be able to express words, probably differently in your writing. Absolutely, at first, it’s so funny,

Dr. Martha Beck  

because after I’ve been painting, I’ll try to do, yeah, I’ll get on the phone with some business person, and I’m like, uh, big, big tree. I can’t talk at all. It’s really, really distressing. I have to go read poetry for a while to get going again. The right side of the brain will do poetry, songs and jokes. So that’s those are other ways, if you want to cross the boundary, go to poetry, songs and jokes, and you’ll be golden. Yeah, but it’s, it really is amazing when you bring the whole brain to the table there, it’s so enriched by the pleasures and the joys of creativity. And it’s not just three dimensional art, it’s music. It’s, as I said, poetry, it’s anything creative. It’s building, you know, it’s cooking. It’s building a swing set for your child. It’s thinking of a conversation you could have later, or calling someone and trying to cheer them up. There are all kinds of things that bring the. Whole brain into full use, and it does those circuits that have withered, you can actually feel them reestablishing themselves. And it is magical, amazing.

Dr. Mindy  

So that brings me to another theory that I’ve been studying and thinking about recently, and that is aging and how anti aging obsessed our culture is. And I think I actually would like to change that, because I think that we can’t, we shouldn’t be against aging. We should flow with it, right? And it led me to a feminist philosopher who wrote a book called, in a different voice, oh, Barbara, what?

Dr. Martha Beck  

What was her name?

Dr. Mindy  

Carol, Carol. Carol

Dr. Martha Beck  

Gillingham, I love her. I was at Harvard same time she was

Dr. Mindy  

I love her. I bet you were. So here’s what her theory is, that somewhere around 12 and 13 women girls start to adapt their voice to please the patriarch, right? And what I know from a hormonal standpoint, well, that makes perfect sense, because your hormones are coming in, and so now you’re you’re thinking through a hormonal lens. Well, then I started thinking, Well, what happens at the backside when we go into menopause and the hormones come out, is that the moment that we are actually primed to come back to our authentic thought, fabulous,

Dr. Martha Beck  

right? That’s really interesting. Yeah, I think it’s interesting because only two kinds of animal that they know of have females that live long beyond reproductive years, humans and elephants. And when I’ve been around wild elephants in South Africa, the matriarch is always the wisest and the calmest of the post menopausal elephants, and all the bowls and everything is sort of governed by that wisdom, and they all just accept that. And I love the idea that the leader is chosen from the postman is female, first of all, and then postmenopausal second, that’s right. And if we could think about that, I always say, I want to be an elder, but I don’t want to be elderly. I want to be an elder, not an older, you know, yeah, oh, yeah. So we can get L, let’s get L. We need to get L, but,

Dr. Mindy  

but here’s the thing that I’ve been thinking about Martha is like, What if every menopausal woman understood where she was going? That in your post menopausal years, you have this phenomenal brain, you get to come back to your authentic self, so you can undo what the patriarch told you that you needed to do, and this is actually the time in which the amygdala no longer is searching for fight or flight. It’s more geared towards empathy, and we know that from Lisa moscones research. So what if these postmenopausal years are actually our greatest years? We just have to look at this from a very different lens, and maybe it’s doing what you’re saying. We’ve got to bring the right side of that brain back online and be highly creative to find our authentic voice.

Dr. Martha Beck  

I totally agree, and it reminds me of when my son was born. He has Down syndrome. They told me, little girls with Down syndrome are much more verbal typically, because females use more of the whole brain, and there’s more crossover between right brain left brain, so they have more to draw on for speech and maybe, and I believe that continues throughout life, that we’re using our whole brain like when, when the fight or flight, the instinct is studied in women, because it wasn’t studied in women for many, many years, they found that in men, it threat triggers fight or flight hormones. In women, it triggers fight flight, and all the tend and befriend hormones like oxytocin, right? Oh, yeah, which means that when under threat, a man will fight or run, a woman will fight run and make sure everyone has a sweater and a sandwich. There’s more going on there, and I do believe that’s why many ancient people got their wisdom from older women.

Dr. Mindy  

Yeah, all so that. So you know, what that leads me to is a question. We’re back at curiosity. Oh, good. What, what is? What does wisdom look like? How would I see wisdom on somebody’s face, on somebody’s essence?

Dr. Martha Beck  

Oh, I mentioned that question. I think the word that comes up for me is radiance. And I have seen certain like I was there. I got to be in the audience when Oprah did her very last show. And I’d been on the show before, and I’d seen her many times, and she has tremendous she has huge energy, just massively powerful, sort of energetic field that surrounds her. Yeah, but when she came on that stage, and she had and I the night before, I heard her say she’d gotten up early, she’d meditated for hours, she’d written every word of the script herself, and she was in total peace. In fact, one of her assistants told me she was worried Oprah’s not nervous enough, and she was embodying the full ancient divine feminine. And when that curtain opened and she walked out, there was it was like there were lights on her, but there was a radiance coming from inside her that you couldn’t deny. And I’ve seen that in people who are dying. I’ve seen it in people who have suddenly been given permission to have the life that their soul knows that they wanted seen it in people getting out of a marriage, getting into a marriage, people glow when women glow when they are in a space of wisdom. Yeah. So the last stage of my book is called the creation, and it’s where even the creative self dissolves into the the intelligence of nature and becomes part of the force, and ego disappears. And it’s like, here is a body. What does the force want to do with it? And it starts to shine. And then those people start to be wise, give wisdom. I don’t know what the mechanism, it’s part of the mystery, but it works,

Dr. Mindy  

right? Wow,

Dr. Martha Beck  

wow.

Dr. Mindy  

So then what you know, ultimately, I’ve also been thinking about the the words patriarch and matriarch, and I spent some time really researching, well, what is a matriarchal society look like? Because, you know, may it’s not it. I don’t think it’s meant to be that there’s like men rule or women rule, right? I feel like patriarch is structure and it’s a system. And so here’s the definition I found, and something that I think really ties into everything that you’re talking about, patriarch is power over and matriarch is power within. Yeah, I love and when we’re when we’re stuck in a brain that is constantly looping the logical and constantly searching for safety, there is a power over us, yeah, and what you’re talking about is coming back to this other side of the brain that is actually giving a stronger amplifier of this power within

Dr. Martha Beck  

Yeah, and it’s, it’s, that is exactly what everyone, I think needs to know. So I’d like to bronze those words, please.

Dr. Mindy  

You can have them.

Dr. Martha Beck  

Thank you. Just remember how simple you know that’s that’s such a mighty goal. But all you have to do is go to a place you like, say kind things to yourself, and give yourself permission to make something and yeah, it all begins to happen on its own, that’s the interesting thing about it this. I do believe we’re at a point where the patriarchy in the format has taken since Rome, basically, which is all about hierarchies and pyramids and power over I do believe it’s starting to fall apart. And my doctorate was in sociology, so I’ve been looking at it from a massive social level. And what you see is that patriarchy is to dominate that way you can’t have free flow of information. For example, when I was in China studying in the 80s, and the communists had really clamped down on China, it was illegal to own a Xerox machine, because replicating information undermines this power structure of the people at the very top of the pyramid. So now, with everybody sharing information everywhere, it’s undermining that source of control that the people at the top of the pyramid used to have in very much the way the brain can take control of all our more nurturing, empathic, creative functions, we have too much information to stay in the control of rigid hierarchies. Ooh, so the patriarchy is going to, I think not. There’s not going to be a revolution. There will be a dissolution. Yes, there will. I illustrated this once by making a pyramid out of sugar cubes, and I put it in a pan, and then I poured water in the pan. The sugar cubes represented rigid structure and the water represented so the left hemisphere, the water represented the fluid, the absorbing, the adaptable, and it dissolved. The pyramid from the bottom upward and the top sugar cubes were totally dry, almost until they collapsed into the water. But at the end of about five minutes, there was just a pool of clear water. No one had been kicked out. Nothing had been excluded. It. Everything had been included into something that was just more fluid, less rigid, sweeter,

Dr. Mindy  

yeah, turn to sugar water that we could all drink, that yeah, it had, it

Dr. Martha Beck  

had the power to nourish and do all kinds of fancy things. I think that’s going to happen in our time, and I think it’s going to come from older women up to the grassroots. Nobody expects that the water is going to dissolve the pyramid. It’s just yeah at home, making sandwiches and loving people. Yeah, that’s the power that dissolves hierarchy, right there.

Dr. Mindy  

You know, you just gave a positive reframe of social media, yeah, you know, if because, you know, everybody’s distant on social media with good reason, but what I heard you say is so much information is coming at us that there’s not one master control of it, and that begins to dissolve this. So then would the thing we could do right now to not only bring peace to ourself, but to bring love to the universe, to to create a more matriarchal energy, would be accessing this right side of our brain. Yes,

Dr. Martha Beck  

if you come out of anxiety, what happens is, you can’t help becoming creative. If people want to watch this podcast as a model of how it happens, we get started. There’s a way to do this stuff. There’s a way we greet each other. We have titles. We have, you know, degrees, whatever, we have, this stiff little conversation. Then we start relaxing and asking each other questions and then showing each other our creativity. And it starts to be fun and joyful. And then it ends up sort of sliding sideways into spirituality, though not a not religion, and it becomes a vision for the future of the world. We just modeled what has to happen inside each of us and then between all of us. And I think it wants to happen. I don’t think it’s a blind force. I think it’s a consciousness, and it Yes, wants to love us. It wants us to be whole. It wants us to heal the planet for ourselves. And I don’t think if it really wants that. I don’t think I can stop it in my own life or in any friendship, or, yeah, in the world. I just have to sort of go, all right, I’m too old to resist take me, yeah, right.

Dr. Mindy  

And then, but, and then that’s where the magic happens, because you fully, fully let go and the right sides like, thank you. I’d like to talk now. I have some things I would like you to engage in that are sticky and feel great. I you know, I have to add this in. I just have been obsessing on Julia Louis Dreyfus podcast wiser than me, and I was listening to one she did with Isabel Allende. And one of the things, yeah, Isabel said is, to be in relationship with me, you have to know that I’m always writing a book in my mind. I always have a story going. And I think now, in light of this conversation, what she was really saying is to be in relationship with me, is to be in relationship with both sides. Yes, my brain with creation,

Dr. Martha Beck  

with creation, because she’s using words, but they are poetry. Oh, my God, can that woman? Yes,

Dr. Mindy  

absolutely, absolutely.

Dr. Martha Beck  

We kind of, we have a head start us who are born with female identified and then pulled away from the structures of work in order to care for people. Often care for the younger, care for the older, care for the ill. We were somebody was telling me, in Europe, these countries have these systems to take care of the sick and the elderly. In America, we have women, you know? So yeah, that can be incredibly stressful. I did a lot of research on women who were just ripped apart by the employment versus caring for their families. But what it does is it forces us to use both sides of our brain. It forces us to keep the things that are ignored alive and vibrant. And then we get older and say, Well, you’re not useful anymore. And we say, Yes, but I have some things I’ve been thinking, Yes,

Dr. Mindy  

I have some things I’ve been holding back for, like, years. I’m ready to tell you now,

Dr. Martha Beck  

and I’ve laughed something in the last few years, and that is that even young men will listen to old women, yes, this is why.

Dr. Mindy  

This is why I think we are going to save the planet. I think

Dr. Martha Beck  

don’t tell anyone we’re not supposed to. Nobody knows.

Dr. Mindy  

Nobody knows, because we’re just doing our thing and speaking our truth and using both sides of our brain. And when you get into those pictures, yeah, and when you get those post menopausal years, the amygdala starts to slow down, and words start to come out that feel really authentic, amazing. Oh my gosh, I could, I could talk to you forever, and I just, I love melding minds with you. So, yeah, so

Dr. Martha Beck  

great. And that’s, here’s what we. Do for the revolution. People get a piece of paper. Draw some lines, make them curved at the intersections. Don’t tell choose the colors that make your heart sing. Keep it to yourself. I love this. You will bring down the patriarchy, and they won’t even know it.

Dr. Mindy  

I That’s they’ll be lining up with their ready to fight. And we’re drawing curves on paper. You want to draw some curves. They’ll

Dr. Martha Beck  

start and then they’ll forget all about their weaponry.

Dr. Mindy  

Oh, gosh, so good. Well, you know Desmond Tutu, one of my favorite quotes is, how we create peace in the world, is we let the women lead. And if we really come at it from that angle, what he’s saying is we need to bring some people online here who are using both sides of their brain, which is exactly what your book is now, teaching us how to do

Dr. Martha Beck  

great to mind meld, isn’t it? And that’s a beautiful, infinite variation and the same love in everyone. Yeah,

Dr. Mindy  

agreed. Okay, well, I have to ask you my partying question. Oh, okay, yeah. So we got to go back to the left side of the brain for a hot moment, although happily, let’s see. Let’s see who answers this, what is, what is your definition of health, and how do you know you are healthy?

Dr. Martha Beck  

Hmm, my definition of health is, and I wrote a book about this, is integrity. And by that, I don’t mean a moral judgment. I mean like structural integrity, like a plane, if all the pieces are in the right place. They’re interacting with each other, they’re aligned with each other. And I like, I just got over a spell of pneumonia, but when I woke up sick, I sat in my bed. I thought I could get up and do things, but it didn’t feel peaceful. So I dropped in and found my truth, which is, oh, I’m really not well. I’m I’m gonna lie here in bed. And I drew in bed, of course, but, but everything aligned. When I said, No, what I need to do for my body is lie here and let it become fully vigorous again. So I would say, even when you’re sick, if you’re aligned, if you’re in truth, your own truth, that is ultimately a source of help, and you can keep that no matter what, that’s what I think that is. You know,

Dr. Mindy  

it’s interesting. The reason I always ask this question is because so many people are chasing health, but we don’t. We don’t have a clear definition. And what I’ve learned from asking all my guests is that’s because it’s a personal definition. Yeah, true that, and that’s what I just heard in you so amazing. Well, how do people get the new book? I know it’s, I don’t know when we’ll put this podcast out, but yeah,

Dr. Martha Beck  

it’s coming out in January 2025, you can pre order it anytime on Amazon or wherever you buy your books, and you can find it through my website. I’m sure, though, frankly, I never look at my website,

Dr. Mindy  

right, wrong side of the brain. Yeah, and

Dr. Martha Beck  

I’m pretty sure it’s there. It’s there.

Dr. Mindy  

That’s what I would say when people ask me a logical question. I’m like, I have a team that probably knows

Dr. Martha Beck  

logistics. Look this feature I drew of my own neurons. Yeah, right.

Dr. Mindy  

Amazing. Well, thank you for giving me an hour of your of your neurons and letting me walk, Dr Coronel highway, for

Dr. Martha Beck  

your wonderful work in the world. I appreciate it so much. Yeah, appreciate you. I

Dr. Mindy  

look forward to connecting one day live and just giving you a big hug. Oh, absolutely.

Dr. Martha Beck  

Let’s make it a plan.

Dr. Mindy  

I’m sure it will happen. So thank you all right. Thank you so much for joining me in today’s episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we’d love to know about it, so please leave us a review. Share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai