Beyond Anxiety - Sounds True

UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.

Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.

I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at soundstruefoundation.org. And in advance, thank you for your support.

In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Martha Beck. Martha Beck is a Harvard-trained sociologist, a New York Times bestselling author, and a world-renowned life coach. She has a unique and powerful way of blending science, spiritual wisdom and humor to inspire and uplift and help us live our most fulfilling, awake, and creative lives. She’s contributed to O, The Oprah Magazine since its inception as well as Oprah Daily. With Sounds True, she’s created the audio program Finding Your North Star. She’s written a novel and nine nonfiction books including a new book, which is what we’ll be talking about: Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose. Marty, welcome.

Martha Beck: Thank you for having me. It’s so great to be here.

TS: Yeah, I’m really fortunate and feel lucky to have this chance to connect with you in this way. Right in the beginning of Beyond Anxiety, you write that you’ve had a relationship with anxiety your whole life and certain breakthroughs in your own life inspired you to write this new book Beyond Anxiety. So here to start, tell us a little bit about your relationship with anxiety and what the inspiration was and the ability to be able to write a book called Beyond Anxiety.

MB: Well, I had one really bad bout with anxiety. It started at birth and went until I was 60. I was an extremely anxious child and extremely anxious. I was just extremely anxious and I thought it was just something I had to live with. As you know, in my adult years I started getting much more focused on spiritual matters. I began meditating. I listened to a lot of Sounds True productions and slowly sort of educated myself to the point where I could sit and after a few hours, at first, a few minutes as the years went by, I could find a place of real stillness and calm, which was wonderful. It was a sanctuary, but I thought high anxiety was just the price of being human. I wrote a book finally called The Way of Integrity, and the premise there is that if you live with all of your parts intact, so your heart, your soul, your mind and your body, if they’re all basically on the same page, you don’t feel any psychological distress.

And people came to me after that and said, well, I’m in complete integrity, but I’m terrified. I’m always terrified. And I thought that’s really interesting because as you probably know, if you sit in meditation with your anxiety, which I had done for decades, you see that it’s lying. You see that it’s always about the future. It’s never about the present moment. You see that most of the things you’re anxious about never happen. You see that it never follows through on its promise of making things feel safe. Anxiety. One of its most devious lies is you will only be safe if you are always looking for danger. So to feel safe, you have to never feel safe. So you see through that after a few years of meditation and the people that were coming to me, they were really, truly thought they were in perfect integrity, but for some reason the fear thing, the anxiety thing wasn’t giving way.

And I looked at the statistics and I saw that anxiety is just skyrocketing all over the world. And I thought there’s something about this one thing anxiety that I don’t know yet. So I decided to research it and I found the neurological underpinnings of anxiety. And then I saw the sociological sort of galvanizes of anxiety, the creators of anxiety, and I could see that both our brains and our culture are pretty much custom made to make us anxious. But there actually is a way out and I found the way out and it was during the pandemic I was doing this and my anxiety went to zero for the first time in my life and stayed there for months on end for the first time in my life. And I thought, I’ve got to write about this. So very long answer, but that’s what brought it about.

TS: You write about how you did a 30 day experiment in the pandemic as a way. Explore this. Tell us about that experiment and what you discovered.

MB: So one of the things that causes intense anxiety is that we get stuck thinking primarily in the style of the left hemisphere of the brain. And even though the whole brain is always working, the fact is that they do have the right and left hemispheres do have very different functions. So if you’re constantly in the left hemisphere of your brain, which is where our culture puts it, even reading, even speech takes place mainly on the left side of the brain. And our particular culture pushes left hemisphere dominance to an extraordinary degree more than evolution had ever had time to account for. So I looked at this and thought if we could get out of the left side of our brains, if we could get the right side to be more dominant, we should have more of things. The right hemisphere does a sense of meaning, a sense of connection, a sense of compassion.

And when I was a student at Harvard, I was a teaching fellow in the studio, art, a class in art. And the professor Will Ryman used to use as textbooks books about how to get into the right side of your brain, the most famous obviously being Betty Edwards book, drawing on the right side of the brain. But there were also great books like Drawing is Forgetting the name of what you See. So I’d practiced this long ago and during the pandemic I thought, I’m going to get up in the morning, gave it the whole month of January, I’m going to get up, I’m going to drop paint, cook plant seeds, do anything creative. And I have to tell you, I have had a lot of anti-anxiety medication now and then in my life, if they could make a drug out of the way, I felt as my right hemisphere became more dominant, everyone would be on. It freed me from anxiety and sent me just into it just it was like being rocket launched into states of intense bliss and enjoyment. It really felt drug-like and it lasted the whole month. It was amazing. And then I couldn’t stop

TS: In engaging with Beyond Anxiety, the big aha moment for me that I feel is the core contribution of the book for me that I had never heard before because I’ve heard a lot and experimented a lot with calming anxiety and working with the body and finding a place of rest. But what you discovered was, and this is a quote from the book, anxiety can’t just be ended, it must be replaced. And you described this toggle effect between anxiety and creative that when we’re engaged in a creative action with our right brain really taking prominence, we’re not feeling anxious. And I think I never thought that there was this replacement function. So this is a big aha.

MB: It was for me. I was looking at the neurology of anxiety and by the way, just researching anxiety, reading the word anxiety over and over, I was getting extremely anxious again. But I looked at the neurological dynamics of how anxiety gets caught in a sort of spin inside the left hemisphere. And then because I had taught a course in creativity a few years ago, I had looked at the neurology of creativity as well, and what I saw was a mirror. I saw that the structures of creativity mirrored the structures of anxiety. Now there’s a ton of evidence showing that when anxiety wakes up, creativity dies. If somebody’s in a creative mode and you introduce the slightest bit of anxiety, their creativity collapses, which happens to a lot of artists who try to work for money. It’s like they sell their art and suddenly when it becomes money, there’s no inspiration anymore.

But nobody had done any research to see if the opposite was true. So anxiety levels, creativity does creativity level anxiety. And I tried it out on myself and then I just started trying it out on clients. Then I started trying it out with groups of hundreds of people online. It’s actually quite simple, the things you can do to get into the right side of your brain and have them score their anxiety from one to 10, they’d give me an initial score, then we’d do a little exercise that would wake up the right side of the brain. Then I’d say, what’s your anxiety now? And it would just come up 0, 0, 0, 0. So this is not hard science, but as a sociology, as someone taught who was trained to be a sociologist, it is highly, highly significant. And I remember when I saw that mirror image, I was alone in my bedroom and I just put both arms up in the air. Of course it makes total sense and it does, it actually works.

TS: Now I want to pick up on something you said said that when you were doing research on anxiety and reading so much about it, it made you anxious because I noticed I started feeling extraordinarily anxious as I was preparing to interview you about going beyond anxiety. And I got, I’m so suggestible and I did another, I’ve done a couple of interviews over the years on anxiety, and each time I’ve gone into a near state of apoplexy. So help me understand that.

MB: Well, the brain is incredibly suggestible to what the left hemisphere is speaking. So if you’re reading something, it’s like your brain is speaking it inside yourself. There’s a very primitive part that just reacts with alarm to anything scary. And the interesting thing about humans is that because we can imagine, because we can verbalize potential futures, we can create internal images of terrors that don’t really exist, but the primitive parts of the brain, if you think of a bear, they react as if there’s really a bear in the room. So that’s what, when we’re just reading the word anxiety, anxiety, anxiety, the primitive parts of the brain are just hearing fear. Be afraid, be afraid, be afraid. So I actually had to take a break from that in order to reorient myself. I was not in a lot of anxiety, but the more research I did, the worse it got. And there’s a study that’s not specifically on anxiety, it’s on aging, but it’s a good case in point. They had a bunch of college students, they usually experiment on college students come in and do word jumbles, whether you get a bunch of letters and you have to jumble the word and then they would give them a candy bar or whatever.

What the subjects of the study didn’t know was that some of the jumbled words referred to age. So one group got jumbled words that they jumbled that said things like weak gray, sad, slow, all these things that we associate with aging. The other group just had things like popsicle or whatever. The interesting thing was not how they jumbled the words. The interesting thing was they filmed them getting up and walking away from the experiment. And the students who had had the aging words, slow, weak grave, whatever, they moved much more slowly. Their posture was more stooped and their facial expressions were sadder than the other group just from jumbling words. So it taught me, be careful what you read. If you read about anxiety, make sure, and this is what I love about what you’ve done with this brilliant career, Tami, you’ve given so much to the world because you’ll produce things that have to do with fear or sorrow or anger. But you always give us the escape hatch into deeper levels of spirituality, which is the ultimate use of the right brains powers. And yeah, it’s interesting that you noticed that. And it’s great that you mentioned it because it’s affecting us all,

TS: Which is why we’re going to emphasize in our conversation our right brain creative genius capacities because that’s where we’re going. But there is one thing that you talk about about our left brain anxiety spiral that I want to understand more because you talk about two functions of the brain that contribute to this spiral. And one, I was very familiar with the negativity bias and always looking for what’s wrong because I want to make sure I’m safe and protected. I’m always scanning and I get that. But then you talked about something that you called the hall of mirrors that happens in the left brain. And I’m familiar on the inside with the hall of mirrors. I mean, unfortunately I spend more time in a terrible hall of mirrors of distortion than I would like my wife calls it putting on ogly booley glasses. Like I’ll just start talking. And she’s like, you have ogly booley glasses on. And I mean, I know I’m seeing every, but tell me what’s going on inside the brain and how I get stuck in that. And we all get stuck in this hall of mirrors. And then we’re going to talk about our escape hatch here.

MB: So there’s this brilliant British neuroscientist philosopher named Ian McGilchrist. I was introduced to his work by Jill Bolte Taylor, who has done work with you. I think she had this terrible, she was a Harvard neuroanatomist who had a terrible left hemisphere stroke when she was 37 and lost the ability to speak, remember, think, identify people everything. But without the left side of her brain, she was in a state of perpetual bliss and absolute presence and awe. It was extraordinarily wonderful for her. And I asked her, was there any anxiety? And she said, no, because there’s no time. The left hemisphere takes care of time without time, no future, without future, no fear. And she recommended in mcg Gilchrist’s books, and he says that the right side of the brain has the ability to establish the meaning of life, our purpose in life. Then it can get data from the world by sending out the organs of perception and the interpreters of perception, which are located on the left hemisphere.

But he says, it’s like the Disney movie, the sorcerer’s apprentice, the sorcerer goes away. Mickey Mouse is pictured as the sorcerer’s apprentice, and he enchant a broom to do his work for him, but he can’t stop it. And when he tries to stop it, he doubles it. And when he tries to stop it again, he doubles it again. So he gets in this exponential growth where all these brooms are dancing around and it becomes a horror show until the sorcerer comes back. Well, what Ian Meris says, he calls the right hemisphere, the master and the left hemisphere, the emissary. And he says, the left hemisphere is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. And what happens is that we, because we have the negativity bias, we go on into the, I call it the 15 puppies and a cobra problem. If you walk into a room that has 15 puppies and a cobra, where’s your attention going to go?

Has to go to the snake to keep you alive. However, if someone takes the snake away, you can get stuck in the hall of mirrors because the left hemisphere says, oh my goodness, I have to control everything. There was one snake, there will be other snakes, there will be snakes. I will see snakes. I need to think about snakes all the time. I don’t know, don’t talk to me about the purpose of life. I’m worried about keeping us alive. So this goes to the storytelling part of the brain and it tells stories like there are snakes everywhere.

And only by controlling the environment can you be safe. And you can only control the environment if you stay with me and don’t go like lollygagging off into a state of bliss and presence. We’ve got to stay on the alert for danger. And you can see this all over the internet right now, but always and all over public discourse, the intense fear and control efforts that are just rising everywhere. And because it, wait, there’s one other peculiar thing about the left hemisphere that I just have to mention. It’s called hemispatial neglect. The right hemisphere is always aware of what’s being perceived by both halves of the brain. The left hemisphere does not count what happens, what’s observed by the right hemisphere. So literally, if people have a right hemisphere stroke and they’re only using their left hemisphere, they will literally disown half their bodies and say, that’s an alien leg, an alien arm.

It doesn’t belong to me. So it literally, the hall of mirrors happens when the left hemisphere gets into its little control, fear, negativity, vibe, and then it forgets that the right hemisphere exists, that we exist in a state of connection to one another, that there are avenues toward joy that are not about control. It forgets it all. And then that is very heavily reinforced by our culture. And because of that, we spin around, around and around in this warped version of the world as completely terrifying. And we never get free unless we do something very deliberate.

TS: And I want to talk to you about that and how you see the relationship between calming that some people might refer to it as an amygdala hijack our left brain, we’re hijacked, we’re in the hall of mirrors, we can’t get out. We can calm that down or replace with creativity. How do you see those two things related to each other?

MB: It actually has to be both. It has to be calming first and creativity. Once you’re calm, if you were in a panic attack and I said, let’s finger paint, it would not help you. Okay. But what would help you is acknowledging that the anxious part of you is a primitive kind of creature. It’s a little animal. So a lot of people come to me as a coach and say, I want to get rid of my anxiety. I am so angry at it, I want it never to come back. I want to attack my anxiety with everything I’ve got. Well, if somebody came to you and said, I hate you, I want you to go away. I am going to continue battering you into you’re dead. Would that cause you to feel less anxious? Obviously not. So when we attack our anxiety, the little terrified animal in us freaks out and responds with more anxiety.

It can’t go into a creative state when it’s being attacked. So what I tell people is not even to calm themselves, because again, if you were in a panic attack and I said, Tami, be calm. How we say to our kids, stop it. Stop crying, stop feeling. It’s such violence to people’s hearts and souls. But if I said, Tami, I know you’re scared, but be kind that you could actually do. So if you’re scared, anybody out there listening to this, if you’re anxious, the first thing to do is stop fighting your anxiety and turn toward it the energy of absolutely loving acceptance. And if you can’t do that, pretend to be kind. So I like to use Tibetan loving kindness meditations and derivations thereof where you just wish yourself well.

TS: Can you demonstrate for us how you would do that?

MB: Yeah, sure. And this is the only way I get out of a panicky place. I just start with, may you be, well, I learned these a long time ago, the first three, may you be well, may you be happy. May you be free from all inner and outer harm. And then I just keep adding things. May you feel at ease? May you have joy, may you always know you are loved. May you always be in awe of creation. May you feel safe, may you feel protected, may you feel held. And you just go and go and go with this. And even now as I do this, I can feel the slight anxiety that comes with being interviewed just going down. So if you did nothing other than that, if somebody just got that out of this book, I would be overjoyed. If you can just learn to be kind to yourself. Everything else seems to take care of itself, which I think is why so many ancient texts tell us that love conquers everything, not by defeating it, not by killing it, but by calming it into resonance with itself, at which point there is no conflict.

TS: You talk about this being an anxiety whisperer, saying these kind things to ourself and that it can be helpful to have an image of ourselves like a scared little animal if we relate to that, whether that’s like a little lamb or a little piglet or whatever it might be. And I found that really helpful, seeing, seeing myself as a scared little animal because it helped me think how would I be with the kind of kindness that I would offer?

MB: And that’s brilliant because in what was your…

TS: Brilliant suggestion, which I really liked.

MB: Well, the way you took it is brilliant because people come to me, they’re spinning, they don’t know it’s complex. What’s going on in my brain, these parts of my brain. I don’t know what you’re saying when I get scared people, they can’t hear the science or even the logic, but if I say to them, pretend you find yourself as a terrified little puppy on the doorstep covered with mud, shivering, hungry, every single human being has an instinctive biological knowledge of how to treat that animal. If you want it to be happy, you bring down the volume, the pitch, and the speed of your voice. So you get calmer and softer, and then you start wishing it well and you make little murmuring sounds. You can talk to it. You can say, you’re okay, buddy. I got you. Doesn’t matter what sounds you make. It’s the resonance of a calm human voice.

We evolved to know that frequency. Every creature evolved to know that frequency. I tell a story in the book about a blue jay that hurt its wing in our backyard and how I was driving it to the wildlife refuge and it was in a box on the passenger seat, and I’m driving along and I kept hearing these scrambling sounds inside the box. It was very unnerving. And I’m on the freeway in the freezing cold going 70 miles an hour and thinking, it’s okay. He can’t get out. He can’t get out. He can’t. Oh my God. He got out and I looked over and here’s this bird standing on top of a box in the passenger seat. And I thought, he’s never been in a car. He doesn’t know what glass is. He’s going to try to get out. He is going to freak out. And I had all these nightmarish anxieties about what was about to happen.

And so because I had trained to do this, I dropped in to comforting my own internal animal. You’ll be okay. It’s all right. Everything’s fine. And as I reached a state of calm, the bird hopped off his box and walked across the center console and walked into my lap and lay down and just went into a very relaxed, he almost went to sleep. I think he was probably really tired from being out in the cold all night. And I petted his feathers and I thought, holy crap. There’s a magic that happens that evolved in each of us that we can manifest. This sounds very new age, but we can actually bring calm to other beings, all other beings, other people to ourselves. There’s one great love and it’s shared by everything. When we tap into it just to be calm ourselves, we affect everything.

TS: Now, this powerful forward moving trajectory of beyond anxiety is once we’ve calmed ourself and been kind to ourself, this notion that we can now activate our creative genius. And I had a question about this. When it’s three in the morning, this is when my hall of mirrors seems to take over the most, is when I wake up, can’t go back to sleep, okay, I’m being kind to myself, but how could I shift into a right brain creative state and stay lying in bed?

MB: I wouldn’t do it at three in the morning. Once I started cranking up the creativity, I could barely sleep because I was filled with this overwhelming joy at creation, and I would just bounce out of bed at three or four in the morning and I couldn’t go back to sleep. So what I finally learned to do is duplicate the calming effect that I know I can use with my own person. And audio books are my favorite way stuff from Sounds true. I said, I feel like I’ve had sounds true as a life partner for the last many decades. I get my little phone, I put on a book, very often a Sounds True book. I slow it down to half speed. So you have to slow down to listen to it. And I just put on something that’s comforting and meditative. I love Pam Children. I love shinzen young stuff that you recorded, and I leave that on very softly by my pillow. They have a timer thing so you can turn it off. That to me is absolute gold. The other thing you could do is a series of self-care measures like wrapping yourself very tightly in a blanket, giving yourself lots.

TS: You’re not hopping out of bed and starting to draw and write at three in the morning and like, okay, I’ve got this energy. I’m going to replace it. I’m going to go, let’s go.

MB: Well, after a while, that gets really, I do actually, I had to calm myself down when I first brought drawing and painting back into my life because I always used to love that when I was a kid. And when I let myself draw and paint all day, which is, I really have to say, this is not about being an artist. Your creativity could be like flipping houses or planting flowers or making a new kind of sandwich or a perfect cup of coffee. Anything we make, if you get calm, if you’re anxious and you can calm yourself down that you then say, what could I make? But one of the things that our culture has really disrupted is our sleep cycle. Because without electric lights now I have a whole system where I put on amber colored glasses two hours before I’m ready to sleep, and I put a bright light on in the morning right near my face because my circadian rhythm was a mess After going through graduate school while having three kids, and there are electric lights around.

There are all these very, very unexpected to our nervous systems, all these things that we have from modern society that we didn’t evolve to handle. So be very super gentle with yourselves, everybody out there around sleep and try to err on the side of more sleep rather than less. And if you can only lie awake and listen to Tami Simon’s wonderful voice say Sounds True presents, it gives you a loving mother right there next to you rocking the cradle. And after all the times you’ve been yanked out of bed by alarm clocks and other people’s schedules, you deserve that. That would be my answer.

TS: When you wake up in the middle of the night before you put the audio on, I’m curious what it feels like inside your body and how you distinguish between the negative feeling of anxiety and a kind of upward flow of just life force, the inner fountain life is happening, and how you sort of sort that out for yourself.

MB: First of all, I earlier stated that I had anxiety until I was 60. I’m 62 now, and that’s pretty much true. But I also am on an integrity cleanse. So I have to say, I sometimes feel anxiety when I wake up at night, and then I call myself using the methods I’ve just described, but it’s more frequent by far. Now, my first thought when I wake up is, oh, bed good, warm bed, like a golden retriever. I like bed. And then I’m like, okay, have to get up to pee. Go and do that. Come back, get back in. Oh, bad. I mean, it’s very primitive, Tami, because the right hemisphere is grounded in the body. And the more we do these techniques that take us away from the negativity bias and take us into positive, joyful, creative action, the more we rewire the brain, because I’m sure you’ve done a million programs talking about neuroplasticity and what fires together, wires together, and we are taught to wire up our brains for anxiety. I am always amazed that Jeff Bezos frequently says that he tells all Amazon employees to wake up terrified. That’s his phrase. And stay terrified all day because that’s how you succeed. And these people are not working for much money, but he’s literally saying thousands, maybe millions of people should live in constant fear so that I can have more money. And everyone in the culture goes, well, that sounds like a good idea. I mean, that’s insane. So I can’t even remember the question anymore. I get so into this.

TS: What’s it like when you wake up and you’re checking in with your inner, the inner sense inside of you? Yeah,

MB: Yeah. I literally say to myself, what can I do for you? What’s the nicest thing I could say to you? What is the nicest? Could I get a really furry blanket and put it next to my face? Could I tell you how wonderful your life is? I do all this positive self-talk and all these small acts of kindness. One of my dear friends, Liz Gilbert, if people out there have read, eat, pray, love, there’s this scene where she opens the book when she’s in complete massive anxiety and depression. At the end of sobbing out her heart on the bathroom floor, she feels or hears a voice. And she later came to believe that it was the voice of God. And it simply said, go back to bed, Liz.

And she said, that’s why I knew it was God, because it didn’t do a decree. It just said, sweetheart, get back in bed. I try to tune into that energy. It’s so simple. And when your brain starts to wire for it, Liz now does this thing called two-Way Prayer where she talks to God every day and God talks back and she says, it may just be the best part of me. I don’t care. The fact is it works. So yeah, just to find the kindest part of yourself and ask it to do its stuff. Yeah, that’s it.

TS: Okay. I have a curiosity here, which is we’re talking about replacing our anxiety with right-brained creative action. But as I opened Beyond Anxiety and started reading, even before I read that as your thesis of the book, I thought, I wonder why so many creative people are also anxious people. And of course, I was thinking of myself as someone who’s been an anxious and creative person my whole life, but I was also just thinking of so many people I know who seem to be both and so many comedians who seem to have a lot of anxiety.

MB: Oh, absolutely.

TS: So I’m wondering what your thoughts are about that.

MB: I go at it two ways. I don’t have any data about it, but I do believe this is probably right. The first thing is that highly sensitive people tend to be very creative and highly sensitive. People tend to be highly anxious. So that just comes with a highly sensitive brain. However, I also think there’s a causal link where people who are highly anxious stumble across a creative activity and without noticing it or articulating it, they notice that their anxiety goes down. And so they repeat the activity. Simple operant conditioning, they would’ve called it when I was at Harvard. It feels good. So you do it again. And it was so interesting. I interviewed a lot of very, very creative people when I was sending this theory out there to do it stuff. And I said to them, how’s your anxiety level? And they’d say, it’s off the charts.

I’m anxious all day every day. And I’d say, well, what about when you’re creating, when you’re writing, when you’re composing, when you’re drawing, what is it? And they’d say, oh, you’re right. It’s totally absent. But the part of the brain that’s talking to me, partly because it’s the part of the brain that talks doesn’t remember that within the creative process, there is no anxiety because it doesn’t think it’s important, is that hemi space neglect. The left side of the brain doesn’t think that what the right side does. Peace, bliss, creativity is worth anything. And again, we have a culture that mirrors this, that puts making cold hard cash into the center of everyone’s lives and practically filling the day. And then maybe on the weekends or in the evenings, you can have a hobby where you get to be creative, but it’s not important. Meanwhile, we’re all living in things that were made by creative people. We’re all watching TV shows that lift our spirits, we’re entertain us. We are desperate for the products of creativity, and we totally discount the making of it as ripy. It’s an anxious culture.

TS: Here you are a world-class coach, and I’m sure you’ve heard the main reasons again and again and again, why people don’t activate their creativity, what the biggest blocks are. So I’m curious if you could summarize for us what the biggest blocks are and how we’re going to move through that.

MB: And I used to call it the aisle of Yeah, but they’re ready to go out and sail the season, have their life adventures. But there’s an island called. Yeah. And they all get stuck on it. So I could say to someone, you really, really enjoy hiking. Why don’t you go hiking once a week? Yeah, that would be good. But I have to stay in case somebody needs me. I have to stay around the house. Speaking of Liz Gilbert, I heard some people talking once and they said, well, if I were going to go around the world the way she did, I would have to divorce my husband and sell my house. And the other person said, she did. That’s exactly what she did. But, but they can’t imagine anything but what they’ve got, and the moment you start to do something different, anything unfamiliar is immediately shunted into the negativity bias and defined as potentially dangerous.

And it’s all kinds of things, logistical things I couldn’t do. The big one is, but I couldn’t make enough money. Big secondary one is, but the people around me need me to take care of them, and I can only do it in one way. Another one is I can’t imagine doing anything different. One study I thought was really interesting was a study of lottery winners who had kept their jobs and they didn’t keep their jobs because they loved them. They kept their jobs because they couldn’t imagine life without going to a job. They couldn’t imagine what they would do if they were free, even though they had no financial constraints anymore. So yeah, everybody uses the excuse of money and caretaking primarily. Those are very, very popular in our culture. And everybody will say, oh, yes, that’s true. You can’t do the thing because money, because your kids, because your parents. And the discussion stops there, imagination stops, anxiety takes over, and it’s another kind of anxious day.

TS: And someone’s listening and saying, yeah, but those yeah, buts are true for me financially. I can’t do it. And what are you going to say to them, Marty?

MB: When my older children were little, there was a Sesame Street had a little thing to teach people prepositions, and it was a goldfish swimming in a bowl around a little plastic shipwreck. And it said that the fish went over and under, around and through the wreck of the good ship, Mary Lou. So when people come to me with a life that’s not working, I say, your life is the good ship, Mary Lou, you can go over or under, around and through. There are so many ways to achieve whatever it is you really want. Back before I started coaching, when I was teaching business school, I would do this stuff with kids that were older than I was with business school students. And I would say, what do you want? How do you get it? So I was teaching career development. And so I remember this one kid said, I want to go around the world, but I can’t think of a way to, I want to grow up own my own company, get enough money to go traveling the world.

And then the other 90 students in that class, every single one of them found a way. I said, everybody has to think of a way that he could do this without any additional money. And they thought he could go off and teach English. He could. In Japan where I lived, he could, this was 30 years ago, I don’t even remember what they said, but they came up with dozens of ways he could have left that day if he’d been willing to disrupt his life. And we are not willing to disrupt our lives. And that’s the bottom line. That change feels scary to us. And we obey that fear at the cost of our creativity instead of calming it down and saying, yes, sweetheart, I know you’re scared. Now what can I make when you go into that place? What can I make? We have Apple computers and people on the have footprints on the moon, we can do anything.

TS: You tell a great story in Beyond Anxiety. It’s a really simple story, but it stuck with me about a woman and her therapy dog, Griffin and the squirrels. I wonder if you can share that.

MB: I should have put pictures of this because people took pictures of this. You would not have believed it if you hadn’t been there. Okay, so I’m teaching this seminar with a fellow coach, and we have people come up during the day and sit on the stage and we work with their anxiety. And we were doing basic sort of Byron Katie style question, your frightening thoughts. And this woman came up the third day of the seminar, and as she came, I saw that she was accompanied by a dog. I did not know this dog was, there was, I think it was an Australian shepherd, good sized dog, absolutely silent. And it came up with her and she sat down in the chair and she told us that she had chemical sensitivities so severe that she could die of an asthma attack within seconds minutes of coming into contact with a substance that she was allergic to.

And her dog, whom I will call Griffin because I’ve anonymized him, he was there to smell the substance that could kill her and alert her and potentially even drag her away if she lost consciousness. I mean, this is a woman who had a really good excuse to be anxious, but we were there to try to be in a place of joy. So I said, what are you most? And I said, your dog is so disciplined. She came up, he sat down at one side of her chair, like the sphinx, absolutely like symmetrical, looking straight ahead, not right, not left. He’s the most disciplined animal I’d ever seen. And she said, yeah, he’s a good dog, but he loves squirrels. If he sees a squirrel, he is all over. He’s going to chase that squirrel. And no matter what we do to train him, that’s just a problem.

So then we started talking about her and I said, what’s the thought that you have that keeps you scared all the time? And it was, danger is everywhere. Danger is everywhere. Totally true for all of us. There’s danger everywhere, but do we stay safe by continuously worrying about it? No, we stay miserable all the time when we’re anxious. So I started poking around and saying, could the opposite of that, the thought be true? And we came up with a turnaround, which was, happiness is everywhere. Joy is everywhere. We just started putting different words in there. Playfulness is everywhere, delight is everywhere. And I don’t remember the exact sequence that I wrote in the book, but at some point she said, well, that maybe could be true. And I said, okay, so say it out loud. Joy is everywhere. And she started to talk about it and she chuckled and the dog’s head just whipped around and stared into her face with the whites of his eyes showing.

And she started to laugh and I said, maybe that’s what he is been trying to tell you with squirrels, that there’s joy everywhere. And that dog went berserk. He leaped into her lap. He licked her whole face. He went round and round her chair, then he leaped into my lap and licked my whole face. And then my colleague, he was absolutely out of his mind with joy, and there’s his mistress laughing and laughing, and it’s as if he had had one thing he wanted to convey. I’ll keep you safe in body, but please get this one thing into your mind. There are squirrels everywhere, and it’s when we stop thinking dangerous everywhere, and we start looking for whatever is a squirrel to us that we realize joy is everywhere. It’s far more common than the things that hurt us. There’s so much keeping us safe. There’s so much to enjoy, so much more than there is to be afraid of.

TS: The last thing, Marty, that I want to talk to you about, and you reference it towards the end of Beyond Anxiety, is how our ability, if you will, to go back to the goldfish, swimming through the wreckage to get through or around to the other side of the Yes but island, how to do that. How we have to develop, this is my language, a certain kind of confidence to go through the difficulties, the challenges, the impasses, the seeming obstacles. And I want to talk about this here at the end of our conversation because I think in our collective right now, people look around and they just see impasse everywhere. This is unsolvable. We’re not going to be able to get through this. Yay for the magical goldfish where it’s over. And I wonder if you can help us understand the capacity we have when we bounce off and we think there’s nowhere to go. Actually, that’s not the end of the story.

MB: In fact, there’s a process in the right side of the brain by which we come into an understanding of something we never knew before. And it’s very different from the textbook learning we do on the left side of the brain. The right side of the brain takes in all the things that are troubling us, all the things we’ve heard, all the horrors we see on the news or online. And if you just put it all in your brain and then go for a walk or go with your dog and watch and chase squirrels or go look at a river or be in nature, that’s the absolute gold standard is if you can find a place in nature, be with people you love, play silly games with children, whatever, because the right hemisphere of the brain works best when we’re actually present in our physical environments and not thinking about solutions.

And I cannot tell you how much I have felt like this in my life. When I was in my twenties and thirties, had so many autoimmune diseases I could barely move. I had three little kids under four, one with Down syndrome. I was trying to get my doctorate at Harvard and teach, and I was a complete wreck. I mean, I was just impasse after impasse seemed to come up in my life. And then many, many years later, I’m reading about the way the right hemisphere works. It loves an impasse. If you can think your way around something, it doesn’t give the right side of the brain the chance to give you something revolutionary, something that will absolutely blow your mind. And when it does, the right hemisphere is even a different color from the left hemisphere. It’s paler because it has these long myelinated nerves that do something called a far transfer.

They bring information from these different parts of our lives. And you can kind of feel it sometimes as a simmering, but you can’t grab it with words. But there will be a time when you have this eureka moment. The eureka effect is actually what psychologists named this. You put a bunch of data into your right hemisphere, you do something fun, relaxing and enjoyable, and you allow the right hemisphere to work its magic and then bang into your minds comes something completely different. I know you’ve done a lot of meditation, and I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with Koans, these statements that meditation masters will give their students, and you can’t come up with a solution. What did you look like before your mother and father were born? What is the sound of one hand clapping? It’s meant to confuse the left side of the brain and to galvanize a new way of seeing reality, which can only happen on the right.

And when that bang of realization comes, it could be called satori. In Japanese, it could be called awakening in another, you could be awake to some particular part of your life or to your life as a whole. They would take trainees and have them sit in the charnel houses and watch bodies decay. This is where you’re going now, what are you going to make of that? And instead of going into deep anxiety and avoidance, when we sit calmly with very, very unnerving feedback, and believe me, the world is very unnerving to me right now. And when I sit with it and I allow the right side of my brain to do its magic, these little, that is when I make these breakthroughs myself, where my heart comes to a new level of understanding about what I am. And one thing that I have come to looking at a very, very dangerous world is the part of me that is in danger is not my true self.

And the more dangerous the world looks, the more I’m reminded that my true self is not caught knit, that it’s watching from some other places. Walt Whitman said, apart from the hauling and pulling stands what I am, and watching a half in half out of the game and watching and wondering at it, your brain won’t take you there unless you hit an impasse. And when the impasse leads to a breakthrough, I think it’s the most delicious experience a human being can have. And I think that is the gift of this horrific anxiety that so many people are feeling all over the world.

TS: Just to ask you a specific question about that being in a difficult conundrum, if you will, in my life, what I notice is challenging is I really want to know the outcome and I want to know it’s going to be good. And because I’m very determined to know that it’s going to be good and I can’t see it, it’s unknown. I can’t see it. That pushes me back into the left hemisphere of I want to figure it out. I’ve looked at all the options. None of them make sense. What am I going to do? They’re all bad. What do I do? I have to rest in the unknown. I can’t stand it. What would you say? I’m supposed to develop trust or something? Well, okay, it’s minor league trust.

MB: I would say, well, of course you hate uncertainty. Oh my God, anything could happen. Tell me everything. Tell me how it feels. Tell me how much. Tell me much. It sucks. It’s awful being a human who can project horrors but not know the future. This is terrible. Yeah, tell me everything and then come sit with me and we’re going to wrap you up in this blanket. And look around this. Look at the beautiful room you’re in. Oh my gosh, those frames on the wall, the beautiful colors, the flowers there. Can we appreciate it for a minute? I think at the times you were uncertain before and how everything worked out. Here you are. And maybe it was hard or maybe it was easy. Maybe something wonderful happened, maybe something terrible happened. But here we are and we can still love the color of that paint and the smell of pine trees and the ability to look into each other’s faces through a technology that is incredibly phenomenally magical.

And you just start gradually edging your way into sense, appreciation of the present moment, and then heart appreciation of the present moment. And then I don’t think the spirit ever separates from that, but touching the spirit that is always present in the moment and it wraps you up, which is what it’s been waiting to do. And if you can surrender to it, it says, oh my darling, I’m so glad you came back. I’ve always been here, but I love it when you can feel my arms around you. That’s where this takes us. That’s why I said I have a three letter mnemonic device, cat spelled with a K, kindness, then art or creativity, and finally, transcendence, transcendence of the perceived frailty that makes us so afraid to be in this world when we transcend that we can be still in the midst of the greatest havoc and be a force for peace at a time when peace seems very hard to come by.

TS: Martha Beck, author of the new book Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose. Wow, lots of heart appreciation and a huge hug here with you.

MB: Thank you.

TS: And all of our listeners, thank you so much. Thank you.

MB: Thanks again for your entire creative life. It’s bettered my world more than I can possibly say.

TS: And the sense I get is that we’re both just starting in this moment. Who knows what’s ahead. Yeah, much love, Marty. Wonderful. Thank you so much. So much

MB: Love to you.

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