Lab 038: So Anxious

You know what happened to me this morning? What I looked at my calendar. This is what I do at the beginning of each day. I wake up, look at my calendar and make sure, like I know when all of my Zoom meetings are. And I didn't see anything until ten thirty. It was something I had with you, So I was like, Okay, I get to see my friend. So I'm just walking around the house in my pjs and then I get an email from somebody saying, here's the Zoom link, see you soon, and I panicked. I

Listen, that's stressful for anybody, but I know it's stressful for my friend because you like to plan. The only good part of that story is that you were able to throw on a turtleneck right. Yes, we love turtlenecks.

I have an emergency turtleneck that is right next to my bed, just in.

Case you just turned writing to Steve Jobs. Man, I know you were stressed out. That would be tough evil for me. You know, I'm okay with being last minute, but.

I don't know how you do it.

You don't know what's going on. You just clicking into the zoom. You don't know what you're gonna get.

I don't know who's going to be there. I didn't know what they're about to ask me. I just knew that I had to be there and that I had two minutes to get there.

And I would have had to say I'm sorry, I thought this was spam.

Link only.

I thought you were hacked. I saw your link, but I also saw an email from you about gift cards.

Welcome to Doe Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science, pop culture, and a healthy dose of friendship. You know, we're basically at the holidays, and for a lot of people that means a lot of anxiety. Yes, whether you're cooking for a big group of folks or reconnecting with your family members after a very long time, the holidays just have a way of feeling so challenging, and they can really be filled with all kinds of anxieties from

Let's get into the recitation.

What do we know? Well, I think that anxiety is something that a lot of people deal with, Like, some people don't like to use the term anxiety, but I think everybody at some point in their lives have felt anxious. Yes, it also feels like it's being talked about way more than it used to be. I feel like I see it everywhere, people talking about it, social media sharing about anxiety and tips and tools and tricks. So I do

And I think we also know that manifestation does have some biological underpinnings. I don't know what they are, but I do know that there is something that can happen to your body after a lot of anxiety over and over and over again.

That's a really good point. So what do we want to know?

Has anxiety always been around?

Like?

Is it new? You think the cavemen were anxious?

I mean, I don't know, but it seems like there was plenty to be uncertain about during those times.

Yeah. I just think about Fred Flinstone and I'm like, yeah, he was definitely had an anxiety problem. Another thing I want to know is what parts of our anxiety are healthy? Is there a such thing as healthy anxiety? Is there like little bits of like anxiousness that might help us? Or is it just all bad?

Yeah that's a really good point. And then if it is all bad, what can we do? Yes, help throw me a life jacket, a rope something. How do I exit this program? That's what I want to do. Let's jump into the dissection. Our guest for today's lab is doctor Wendy Suzuki.

Hi.

I'm doctor Wendy Suzuki. I am a professor of neuroscience and psychology. I've been at New York University for twenty three years. So I am an author, a teacher, and a neuroscientist.

Doctor Suzuki's new book is called Good Anxiety, Harnessing the Power of the most Misunderstood Emotion. It's not like a lot of other books out there that provide tips for managing anxiety. With this book, doctor Suzuki goes back to the origins of anxiety, how it's evolved, and why it's such a big problem today. With that groundwork as the basis for our understanding, she introduces a new way to really think about our anxiety, and that way will kind of help us harness its power so that we can

Anxiety is that fear or worry that typically comes with uncertain situations, And so with that definition, you could understand why these days, in our uncertain times, anxiety is really.

Going through the roof.

And I think now's a good time to kind of pause and differentiate between a couple different types of anxiety, because, like you said earlier, TT, anxiety really is a spectrum. So today we're talking about anxiety on the lower end of that spectrum, which not the Suzuki calls every day anxiety, but that's very different from clinical anxiety, which is at the opposite end of the spectrum. Clinical anxiety is a medical disorder characterized by intense, excessive, and persistent worry and fear.

It feels like a weight around your neck, it feels like a weight on your chest, and even before the pandemic, the stat that blew me away is that ninety percent of Americans before the pandemic raised their hands and said, I experience anxiety ninety percent, So imagine what that number is today. So basically all of us have anxiety, is the bottom line.

Ninety percent is a really high number, and that's before one of the most stressful things that any of us have been through in our lifetime, right, so I can only imagine what the number is now.

One hundred percent. You know, this makes me think back to LAP thirty two with an Helen Peterson where we talked about burnout and all these other things that can kind of trigger or layer multiple different types of anxieties and manifest in different ways. Absolutely, and what this also.

Says to me is that if you're feeling anxious, you are not alone. Look to left and to the right. It's all of us.

Turn to your neighbor alone and say, neighbor, do you have any kind of types of low grade or everyday anxiety? Like how does it show up for you?

Yeah? I think for me, I've always thought of myself as just the overall anxious person, Like I try and not expose people to my anxieties and just try and counterbalance it with like just extreme like positivity as often as I can, but that also makes me even more anxious because it doesn't address the real problem. Like I think, I'm always worrying about every little thing, like, oh my gosh, is this the right decision? Is this the right next step?

I think you know, over the past couple of years, I've either developed more anxiousness or anxiety or just become more aware of it. Right. I think now the things that kind of trigger anxiety for me are big uncertainties. I mean, you know me, I'm generally like, huh, we'll figure it out. Oh this will happen.

You know.

My friend is cool as a cucumber, But big level stuff that could have major rippling effects. I like to kind of know. I like to have those general, large what do you call those like place markets. I like to have those things set in stone, and when I'm not sure, it feels like the scientific mind gone haywire, right, it's just a lot of hypotheses, no conclusions, no conclusions.

I feel that. I feel that. So we all have everyday anxiety, and we've all got our own ways of dealing with it. Then why are we talking about it today?

Well, doctor Suzuki says that even if you and your anxiety have quote unquote an understanding with each other and it's something you've just learned to live with over time, it can still have very real and potentially serious effects on your overall health.

Because anxiety and the underlined stress response, if left unchocked, leads to high levels of chronic stress, high levels of chronic cortisol, that stress hormone.

Cortisol is like your body's built in alarm system, and it does all kinds of important stuff like regulating blood pressure. It can increase blood sugar, keep your inflammation in check. It even can control the sleep wake cycle. So you can imagine if the cortisol levels in your blood are out of whack, it can do a lot of scary things in the body.

I have not heard of cortisol, but I've heard of cortizone.

Are they related closely related? Like if you get a cortizone shot or a hydrocortisone shot. It's converted in the body by an enzyme into cortisol, Okay, And so it can also be used like when you say treating inflammation. If you know somebody got a courtizone shot in their knee or something like that. Yeah, there you have it.

That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense.

And so you can imagine that abnormal levels lead to all kinds of health issues, not just in the digestive system, the heart, or the reproductive system. You can also affect the brain.

Finally, in the brain, it leads to first damage and then death of two key brain areas that I've studied for a long time in my career. The hippocampus, critical for memory, and the prefuntal cortex are executive control function of the brain, helping you make good decisions. Imagine brain cells in those areas being damaged, and particularly in the hippa campus, dying because of high levels of long term

That's scary. But doctor Suzuki's book isn't all doom and gloom. She argues that by really understanding our anxiety, it can actually be a really good thing.

Anxiety is one of our core emotions. It serves something really important. Once we find that thing and we understand that thing that it serves, we can kind of try and focus the energy and the level of that emotion so that it could help us. We're still going to feel those uncomfortable emotions, but we're going to make it work for us in a brand new way.

That's exactly what I'm looking for. Help me figure out how to make anxiety work work for me. Yes, put these nerves to work right. And so I think the starting place is for us to understand why we're having anxiety at all. What's the point.

Anxiety at its core is protective for us. It's actually essential for our survival. And the best way to understand this is to kind of travel back in your mind two point five million years ago and imagine there's a woman two point five million years ago. She just has a little baby, and she's gathering berries at the edge of a lake, and suddenly she hears a twig crack, and that could be danger. That could be a lion, that could be a tiger, that could be something that

And the stress response is what many of us know as fight or flight mechanism. Through a series of really complex interactions in our brain and body, it enables us to respond almost instantly to a perceived threat of danger.

And what I illustrate in the book is that in fact, we use that same exact system in a similar way. If there is a noise by the window, then you have that stress response, that anxiety response what is is it a robber and works in the same way. But the problem is that in this day and age, it's the equivalent of hearing those twigs crack five times a second.

So what doctor Suzuki is saying is that we're all in the forest picking berries and we're constantly surrounded by lions. Everything that's happening is making this think is that a lion? Is that a lion? Is that a lion? Over and over and over again.

What kind of life is this?

Okay, I might be exaggering a little bit, so maybe it's not as immediately threatening as a lion, But that's what so many things that are.

Stressing us out. Do youar At the very beginning of the pandemic, That's what it felt like. I felt like every single person was a lion with coronavirus and they were just ah in my face, and I was going to get sick or pass it on to somebody else. Everything felt that anxious. Going to the grocery store, Oh, that was the most I would be in the grocery store, sweating through my clothes because I was so nervous about everything,

And so when you think about something like that collectively that we're all going through. But then people can have their own personal issue, so like the everyday stress of their job or relationships, and then there's the bigger global issues like climate change or political insurrection. That's a lot of twigs. Those are some of those are branches. So those are trees falling tree a tree.

Okay, it ain't no branch, it's a tree falling on your neck. Yeah.

And then even if you're in your home insulated from all those things, it's coming right through your cell phone, it's coming right up on your TV alerts. At the bottom. You know, information about what's happening in the world is constantly going right to your eyeballs no matter where you look.

I have never thought about that, how the information age has introduced levels of stress into our lives that weren't there previously. Yeah, that's such a good point, Zee, but I don't want to live in this professional anxious state that's not actually helping protect against any of the threats, and as doctor Suzuki explained earlier, it can actually be really unhealthy in the long term. It's not making us feel protected at all. System it feels like it's kind of broken.

And my answer is it's not broken. The volume is just turned way too high and we've lost that protective aspect of this emotion.

First things first, I never thought of anxiety as an emotion before. I don't think I really have either. I've just looked at it as a deficiency. Yeah, I mean, it makes total sense, and it actually helps put it in perspective because emotions pass. Anxiety is not forever. And if we think of it, like she said, as something that's turned up too high, maybe we can be aware of these things when we just need to turn the volume down.

A little bit more.

The first step of that is turning the volume down so that we don't have so many twigs cracking all the time and just launching us into this stress and anxiety cycle. The best first way is my favorite way, because it is deep breathing. You might say, oh, I've heard that before, but did you know that deep breathing is actually activating a natural stress reduction center of our nervous system.

Okay, so we gotta pause right there. I did not know that we had a stress reduction center in our nervous system.

Nobody taught me that.

I thought I had to purchase that on Amazon sage. What is it? Lavender? They put lavender at everything to tell you relax. I didn't know that I had built in lavender.

How come everybody knows about fight or flight and nobody knows about rest and digest?

Rest and digests? We need that on the T shirt.

Ste preach.

Yes, the neuroscientists among us also know this as the parasympathetic nervous system.

That sounds very fond.

See, I like rest and digest better, and.

So the best way we have conscious control of kind of getting that process going is deep breathing. I can't consciously decrease my heart rate, but I can slow my breathing down.

And another way to turn down the volume on our anxiety is through exercise, even just ten minutes of walking. Oh, I know, I know you don't like it.

I know you don't like it. Can we give this part? But tit?

I'm telling you. Doctor Suzuki talks about doing this experiment and having people just walk at the end, and people report it, you know, feeling less stress. Now, whether it's just in the mind or not. I want to feel less stressed, and so I will be taking a ten minute walk because I need that positive effect.

My friend b bike in thirty miles. A ten minute walk ain't nothing, but for me, that is a hike.

Listen, I need it.

Every single time you move your body, you are stimulating a whole wide range of neurochemicals to be released in your brain. I like to give the image of a neurochemical bubble back that you're giving yourself every time you move your body. And what is in this bubble bass things that you have heard of, dopamine, serotonin, neu adrenaline, and growth factors. It is clear that long term exercise can help protect the brain from aging and neurodegeneral disease states.

Once we turn the volume down on our anxiety, we can then take the next important step, which is to interpret it. Focus in on those uncomfortable feelings of anxiety and ask ourselves, what's making me so anxious and why am I feeling so anxious? This introspection can tell you a lot about yourself and what's important to you.

I know, for me, my dad used to always say, if you're not nervous, it just means you're not taking it serious enough. I don't know if I still agree with this, it means you care school thought. But I think wanting to do well, wanting to show up, those are the things that can make me anxious because I don't want to not do those things. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that there are lots of groups of people that feel like they have to do that all the time and that can be exhausted. Show up and be perfect.

I had to give up perfectly a long time ago, girl, I mean, just show up a little bit. But I think once we start asking ourselves those questions TT it really is is kind of harnessing that power. And I want to get to the part where not Thissuszuki can't help me make it work for me in a positive way.

Actually, one of the things that I learned that was most surprising that I learned from writing the book is I found myself making friends with my own anxiety. Why because I started to appreciate how valuable these uncomfortable emotions were. They're there to say, hey, this is important. It's a threat detection system. This is important that you do well here. It means a lot to you.

So it sounds like your dad wasn't wrong. Okay, oh I know.

I hope he doesn't hold the curtains.

You weren't wrong. I'm here to say it. I'll send you a text message later. Being stressed out can me you care about something because you really want to do well, and this is really helpful. I feel like quieting the noise with a deep breath and then asking important questions. Making observations about our anxiety are already so helpful.

Yeah, I think it's it's so important to first acknowledge and then slow the pace down a little bit and say it's not a lion. It's not a lion. That's way better already than just I'm gonna power through this or I'm gonna shove these feelings down.

Doctor Suzuki says, we can even take it one step further. Once we understand and observe our anxiety, we can actually see it for the gift that it is, and we'll talk about that right after the break. We're back and we want to tell you all about next week's lab. One thing I'm really stressed out about is thinking about Christmas shopping.

Oh that makes me excited for next week's lab though.

Yes, because we're talking all about the shipping issues that have been going on since the pandemic started in this whole trucker shortage that the kid knew about that no clue what's going on, and.

We're talking about it just in time for Black Friday.

M hm. Okay, so let's get back into the dissection. We're talking to doctor Wendy Suzuki about her new book Good Anxiety, and before.

We dig any deeper, we just want to level set and remind everybody that we're talking about day to day anxiety. If you're experiencing severe anxiety that interferes with your ability to do day to day activities, we really encourage you to seek help from a medical professional, and we've also included some resources on our show notes at dope lavspodcast dot com.

We've already talked about how to turn down the volume on our anxiety and observe it, and just doing that can be helpful.

But doctor Suzuki.

Says that once we're able to quiet the noise and listen to our anxiety, we can actually use it to our advantage.

So let's take an example. What's one of the most common things that you do as a result of your anxiety, and how can you make it work for you. Doctor Suzuki mentions the what if list.

My what if list hits right before I'm going to go to sleep, and you know sleep is coming, is going to feel so good, and then sudden, what if I didn't send that email? Or what if I did send the email and you know my wording was wrong.

I think we've all been there. I will wake up in the middle of the night and mean, like, oh man, what if I didn't turn off the stove, or did I lock the front door, or oh my goodness, I forgot to update that document from my boss, and so now I'm scrambling.

Honey, at least you are waking up when I tell you I cannot go to sleep if I am anxious about things, or if I am what if this and this? What does that mean? Why did they say that? I should have said this? It's just ongoing. And then I look at my Apple Watch and it's like four fifty seven am.

No oh, no, friend, that sounds awful.

So how do we turn that into a gift? What's the magic spell?

The gift that comes. It's a gift of productivity, and that gift is switching your what if list into a to do list.

I said, okay, that's okay.

I'm going to note all those things down and I'm going to take action on them tomorrow. And why does that help? It helps because anxiety and the threat response evolved for us to take action in terms of the fighting or running away. That is a physical action, and so you can relieve some of that pressure by taking a cognitive action sending an email, which is kind of

To do list.

You know what, I really like this and I hadn't thought about it, but I use this journaling app, and so if I'm up late and I'm feeling like that, I write all those feelings down and I can make little bullet point lists in there about things I should do blah blah blah blah blah, and sometimes that helps. Is this the same thing that makes.

A lot of sense. It's kind of like redirecting your energy. Like instead of just letting those things roll around in your head and so you're tossing and turned into the bed, you push that energy into that journal and be done with it and you don't have to worry about like what if I forget right? And it's great because you're not surrendering to your anxiety and giving up the sleep that you need to be able to be productive the next day.

Yeah, so you kind of get to prioritize rest and you get to say, Okay, anxiety and all the stuff is tied to I'll deal with y'all tomorrow, rest and digest. But I think all of this really lives in this like delicate balance though tt If you give too little attention to your anxiety, you're going to drop a bunch of balls or things that you need to get done and then You're gonna be anxious about that. If you give it too much attention, you're gonna spiral into you know,

Yes, activation energy comes from focus, it comes from attention. It comes from that nervous energy that is really equivalent to anxiety. As that goes up, your performance goes up. As your focus productivity, and in fact anxiety goes up, your performance goes up up to a peak.

You know what this makes me think about what procrastination? I work best under some pressure?

Can you say this all the time? I am the opposite. When the pressure is on, my nerves get so bad that I feel like I am going to mess this up. I mean, it usually turns out okay if I like accidentally procrastinate, but oh my gosh, I feel like a lot of people feel this way. Where putting it off the last minute and all of those juices are flowing and your anxieties hitting the right spot, all the good things come together.

Yeah, it's like putting fuel and answer in the gas than you know, because I'm the exact opposite. I don't want to be stressed out about something that's not coming right away right because I'm like, please move that out of my view. You're blocking the picture. But it also feels like I'm just idling. It's just burning gas for something that's not really a go. And because of the type of person I am, I can give it as much time as is available. So I prefer if we

I remember when I was packing for a trip, and if it's a big trip where I'm going to be even the country, I like to start packing like three weeks prior to take off. I feel like I need that time to be able to say, okay, let me make sure I have these things. I make a list of all the things that I want to take my friend. It never fails. The night before one am like, what are you doing? Oh? Packing for my international trip tomorrow for today in a few hours, And I'm like, oh

They'll sell me another one. And our last trip together, you didn't have toothpaste and I had it, got my toothpaste, you see how that works. And she had it, and she gave me the whole tube.

She said, just take it. I had to.

I just feel like, you know, that's also what happens when you packed last minute. Just I don't know if I put that in there. Another one. I think we need to rebrand procrastination because maybe it's a life hack, you know, maybe it's my best self.

I think depending on who you are, it can be.

But you also got to tell the truth because sometimes I don't hit the mark, but we won't get into that.

But then it can go over so too much activation, too much nervous energy, too much anxiety, and decreasing performance if it goes too high.

Is that how you feel like it gets too high too close.

To the end. Yeah, but the runway for it being too high is big for me, Like if it's a week before that's when I'm like, okay, I'm in trouble,

Well, hopefully you can find that window of when you're just like really focused, really productive, and just on it, because I know I miss mine sometimes. Yeah, And I think it's about too close to the mark.

I think it's about also being patient with yourself so you can figure out what your sweet spot is. Like I don't think I'm going to be able to figure it out today, but maybe over the next you know, a few weeks or months, I can try some things out and see what feels good. Yeah.

Doctor Suzuki says that with more practice, people can learn how to get in the zone more consistently and use the energy from their anxiety to propel them forward.

It is really valuable to appreciate that there is an optimum level of focus and anxiety, so that focus can increase with anxiety, but too high and you start decreasing your performance level. And part of the kind of the goal of the book is to make people aware that they've already experienced this, and can they get their kind of use their own awareness of this to kind of push their own focus and anxiety to that optimum.

Level so we can leverage our anxiety and unlock our inner superhero. And that sounds so much better than just you know, stuff and down. Yes, my superhero power is last minute Larry. Okay, you need something done at the last minute, You're like, I only have fifteen minutes.

Can you review these slots?

Absolutely? Okay. My superhero is planned Patty. Okay, she has lists, she's got everything organized, and she's gonna make sure that in advance, you know what's expected, all right, So we really want to know what you identify as. Are you a plan Patty or a last minute Larry? Look in your Spotify app right now. There should be a poll that pops up and let us know who you identify with me Planned Patty. Where's the key a last minute Larry?

All right, it's time for one thing t t what's

I knew my dad really wanted those videos. So I used eye Memories and we got all those videos back and it was amazing to watch with my family and see what we were like in the early nineties. It felt like it was yesterday and a million years ago. It was a lot of fun.

So you can just watch them on your phone.

You can watch them on your phone. You can download them and put them onto your computer. So I was able to download all of them and put them into the cloud so that all of my family can see it. I've been texting like my uncles and my cousins different clips and stuff like that.

That's wow, because I didn't receive any Oh you said you shared them with Wow. You said all your family though, right, Oh.

Yes, you're let me you know what some of these things, you know, my phone be acting up.

I would hope that's what it is. Yeah, that's what it is. Okay, okay, what's your one thing? My one thing has been on television this week. I have really jumped into BMF, which is a TV show about the Flinnery Brothers from Detroit. Now, I know we just talked about anxiety. Let me tell you what they were doing, which is illegally hustling. That would cause a lot of anxiety. But it's really interesting to see the origins of BMF. I know of BMF from a really different perspective, which

When I what does a BMF stand for?

Black Mafia Family?

Okay, so say that out loud. Did something happen to us?

Do we not know? That only happens if you say jabrin in the you have to say it three times. We're to be, you know, an issue. But yeah, So that's what I've been watching and I just caught up. I'm on episode six. It is so good.

I'm gonna have to check that out.

Yes, that's it for Lab thirty eight. We want to know your thoughts. Do you have any secrets to making anxiety.

Work for you?

Please tell us? Call us at two o two five six seven seven zero two eight and leave a message, or you can give us an idea for a lab we should do this semester we want to hear from you. That's two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight. And don't forget, Semester four is going to be exclusive to Spotify for free starting December sixteenth, So if you already listen to us on Spotify, keep doing what you're doing, and don't forget to follow Dope Labs and tap the

And don't forget there's so much more to dig into on our website. There'll be a cheap cheat for today's lab, additional links and resources in the show notes. Plus you can sign up for our newsletter, so check it out at Dope Labs podcast dot com. Special thanks today's guest expert, Doctor Wendseysuzu. Her book Good Anxiety, Harnessing the Power of the Most misunderstoody Motion is out now from Atria Books.

You can find more about Doctor Suzuki at Wendy Suzuki dot com.

Dope Labs is a Spotify original production from Mega Owned Media Group.

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Editing and sound designed by Rob Smerciak.

Mixing by Hannes Brown.

Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugier from Spotify.

Our executive producer is Gina Delvack, and creative producers are Baron Farmer and Candace Manriquez Wrinn.

Special thanks to Shirley Ramos Yasmin of Fifi, Camu Elolia, Till krat Key and Brian Marquis. Executive producers from Mega Ownmedia Group are us T t Show Dia and Zakiah Wattley.