Dr. Wendy Suzuki
Appearances
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Exactly.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And if you do do it, really think about how that made you feel. Do you feel that difference? And it's important to keep exploring how different things make you feel. Because maybe you chose just a bum breath technique. It doesn't work for you. And there are those that, you know, just won't hack it for you. So try other things, but stay aware.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And that practice of self-awareness, I think, is so important for the rest of our lives, I think.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Stress very physiologically releases stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol goes through the blood-brain barrier, goes into the brain. And the danger is that there are key brain areas that you want to keep healthy and thriving and growing throughout your life that high levels of consistent cortisol will damage and then eventually kill cells.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And the first brain area I'll focus on is called the hippocampus, critical for memory function. And here we know that long-term stress, for example, people with PTSD, monkeys that have low rank in the pecking order, male monkeys, have tiny little hippocampi because those cells have gotten damaged, and then died. And that is not good.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
We need what I like to call a big, fat, fluffy hippocampus for the rest of our lives. This is the area that first gets attacked in Alzheimer's disease, and you want to keep that beautiful and healthy. The other brain area that is attacked in stress is your prefrontal cortex, critical for decision-making, being able to shift and focus your attention. And so you are starting to damage two key areas.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
You know, I lead 9,000 students. The two brain areas I want to work best in these students are the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. And it kills me that during finals, all that stress that comes up is damaging their ability to show us all the beautiful knowledge that they learn. Of course, not just my students, but all students around the world. How can we...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
How can we de-stress that process and thereby help learning, help recall, help their professors know what they do understand about the topic?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yeah. I mean, it is that everyday stress. It's the anxiety provoked by scary news that we read every single day by social media. And here I'm thinking about younger people, well-known people. how much it damages self-esteem to spend too much time on social media. All these things, we all know these stressors in our lives, but it's actually hard to put the newspaper down.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
It's really hard to put the phone down. But that could be such a game changer. for both adults and children. And you just ask, well, what am I going to do? Have a conversation with the real person, which is what I always try and push people to do. That is such a joy and a privilege in our lives to be able to do.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yeah, I have a morning routine that I've come to love, which is about a 45-minute meditation when I first wake up. So that's the first thing that I do. And I do a tea meditation, which is meditation over the brewing and drinking of tea. Because not teabag tea, but loose leaf tea, where you have to seep it for a certain amount of time or else it doesn't taste its best.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
and then you pour it, and then you drink it, and then you re-seep it. So for me, that ritual really keeps me in meditation. And what do I mean by meditation? I do body scans. I have prayers that I go through every morning, which is, I think, the antithesis of looking at your email. And then I do a 30-minute workout, which is, I do it online. So I do open my computer, but I'm not
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
you know, looking at the newspaper at the same time I'm doing my workout. I'm focused on that workout. And that really prepares me for the day. And if I miss either one of those, I feel it the rest of the day.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I've done the meditation for nine years straight. And I've missed only a few days when I have those 4 a.m. You don't have to get on the cab at 4 a.m., to get to the airport. And exercise I've been doing for even longer. I've gone through lots of habits with my exercise, but having the morning habit and really forcing myself,
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
not forcing, it's a habit, having the habit of even when I only have five minutes, I'll do some sort of, you know, stretch or something for that five minutes every single day and feel good about that. In addition to my good 30-minute cardio strength workout where I really sweat.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
So, I mean, I think we're both talking about the habits that we choose for ourselves that improve our mental health, strengthen our brain. This is what... It's so important to choose for ourselves.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
We have years of knowledge, but there is an enormous amount that we still don't know. There are brain areas we have no idea what they do. Every ping of the phone is anxiety producing, which then launches your stress response and that keeps us stressful for way too much of the day. So many people are appreciating at a higher level stress and anxiety and depression.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
You know, the science shows that exercise improves your mood. It improves your ability to shift and focus your attention. Long-term, it will improve your memory. And so compared to subjects or, you know, animal subjects that don't do exercise, there is better brain function in those people that are exercising. So yes, the science is behind it. And there's beautiful science in meditation too.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
showing that there are brain areas that are enhanced in monks, for example. That's going way—I'm never going to be a monk. But the act of meditation is an act of learning how to focus better so that I could focus on your questions and not be distracted by whatever is going on on the outside. I mean, we have a nice, quiet room, but sometimes, you know, I live in New York. We're
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
When you practice the meditation, you realize how powerful that is for your life, that I could choose to focus on you. That's all I'm focused on. I'm listening to you deeply. I'm thinking about it deeply. And that is an experience that not enough of us are having on a very regular basis. Yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
You know, I think part of that is our lives have been focused on getting pulled in 10 different directions at the same time. We get used to that. And so, no, I can't focus on you for a whole hour because I have 30 other things that I usually get pulled into. And that becomes your habit. If that is your habit, I think you need to rethink that. And it's a muscle that you build.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I remember my undergraduate advisor, the woman who made me want to become a neuroscientist, she used to say that new learning, this is a new habit that you're learning, will hurt. It'll make your brain hurt because it's those dendrites that are growing and stretching out and making new connections. It's not an easy thing. It's a metabolic load. It is an effort to build new pathways.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
But that's what we're doing when we're trying to focus and connect for longer periods of time than we were used to.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's supposed to hurt.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yes.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yes.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Well, yes. I think at a certain point of the journey, that is absolutely the case. But at a different point of the journey, when you've cut down those trees with your machete, it feels glorious to be able to have these deep conversations with your friends and build that habit with your friends and your loved ones. And Build that habit of first thing in the morning, no phone and meditation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And you know how much better you're going to feel. And that is the part of the gratitude. Yes, I have a gratitude practice. It is that. It's like being grateful for all those good habits that I have been forming and throwing those away that I don't and being grateful that I threw that away.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
A little bit of that is actually good for the brain. You want to live a long, healthy, energized life. Start paying attention to all the things you need to do to make your brain work beautifully. It defines everything that we do and everything that we are.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
That's such a great question. I think that it is part of the effort that goes into something new, the novelty of praying on a single bead and, and, and kind of fighting away that instinct like, oh, I didn't get through 100 beads. I'm a failure. That's a lot of cognitive noise.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And I always say for exercise and meditation, those two things that could immediately decrease your stress and anxiety levels, it's great. In fact, I tell you, I tell everybody to start small. 10 minutes of walking. Don't even have to change your clothes or your shoes. Just a minute walking.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
of deep breathing, just put your phone on, you know, just the clock and just so you know how much that minute is. And just doing that is good enough. And the effort comes in batting away all those feelings of failure and the difference between your one minute and 10 hours that you really wanted to do.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yeah. So anxiety is a normal human emotion. Everybody has anxiety. I think it's been kind of clinicalized. Oh, I have anxiety. Yeah, everybody has anxiety. But anxiety exists on a very, very large spectrum. So we all have anxiety.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And yes, the highest levels of anxiety that prevent you from doing the everyday things that you need to do in your life and having a job and having relationships and going out and doing things. That's clinical. And it is just...
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
kind of going down that rabbit hole of anxiety and needing more help, clinical help to get you out with cognitive behavioral therapy, so many different techniques that you could use. So it's all part of a spectrum, which, you know, I hope that makes people feel better because you can come back. Everybody has it. Let's just pull you back from that highest level. And
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Let you take advantage of, I think one of the things I love the most from my book, Good Anxiety, is that it's not about anxiety is so bad. Let me just tell you the tools to get rid of it in your life. It is the acknowledgement that anxiety is a protective mechanism. My invitation is, can I invite you to try and use your anxiety to help protect you, to actually give you some gifts or superpowers?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Because there's a lot that we can learn from our anxiety and all our uncomfortable emotions.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yeah, yeah. So I start with, I think, the easiest to implement. So this one is the superpower of productivity that comes from A very common form of anxiety that everybody has, which is the to-do list that comes up at inopportune times. It's like, oh, you get overwhelmed. For me, it comes up right before I'm going to go to sleep. And so it prevents me from going to sleep. So annoying.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And so the flip for that. is to take the to-do list. And first, I want you to notice that all of these things are things that you care about doing well. They're usually about your job or your relationship or money, money things. All good to be concerned about them. The trick is to take that list what-if list and turn it into a to-do list. And so for me, I don't do it in the middle of the night.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I wait till the next morning. But I've trained myself that I'm going to take care of each one of those worries and do something active. If there is an issue at work, I'm going to talk to three people about it and try and get input for that. There's something active that you can do for every single one of your worries.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And the more people you talk to about it, you realize that very productive people are already doing this. So take advantage of that trick.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Oh, thank you.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Right. I love that because you've just created a new superpower of anxiety, which is the love of learning. So can you turn your anxieties into the next learning project that you have and then get better at small talk or whatever you're anxious about? I love that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Absolutely. I mean, those anxieties are really... Telling you what you hold dear in your life. You think, wow, that sounds good. I want to know what I hold dear in my life. Because the flip side of your anxiety and the flip side of grief is deep love.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
That is such a great question. We have hours and semesters and years of knowledge that we have gained about the brain since we've seriously been studying it. But there is an enormous amount that we still don't know. There are brain areas we have no idea what they do. My favorite is called the claustrum. Somebody asked me, what's the most mysterious brain area that you know, Wendy?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And so I think that all of these more difficult emotions, when seen in that light, can be embraced in a new way instead of trying to kick them out the door and never experience them again. That is not a full life if you don't have... because it suggests you didn't have that deep love that turns into grief when something goes away.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Not that I'm wishing people grief, but that helped me so much in my periods of grief to realize that that grief would never be so deep that I could never even imagine it before it happened unless the love for those people were so deep in the first place. And it's like, wow, I... I loved them more than I even realized, which was a gift to realize that and pulled me out of my grief.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
So that realization really, really defined the way I wrote this book, Good Anxiety, because I started the book before these events. And it was going to be a neuroscience-based book on anxiety. And I was going to explain the science of it so everybody could understand. And it was going forward in an He had dementia and he had a sudden heart attack. And it was just so, so sad.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And I remember being so grateful that my brother did the eulogy because that has been my biggest fear in life to have to do a eulogy and have to stand up and talk about somebody who's just passed without crying uncontrollably. He did such a beautiful job. But the next tragedy was that three months later, my brother, who's two years younger, also passed away of a heart attack.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
He was the most fit person that you would ever know. And that was... devastating to lose both of them of the same thing within three months. And I was trying to go through it and I stopped writing the book because I couldn't because I was grieving. Then I realized I had to do his eulogy because there was nobody else left. It was only me. And so a lot of soul searching. What am I going to say?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
How am I going to get through this? And it was in that search that I realized that that grief was coming from a good place. And it actually was inspired by a workout that I was doing where the instructor said, and trying to get us to work out harder, she said, with great pain comes great wisdom. And I was like, oh my God, that's what I need to know right at this moment.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
What is the wisdom that's coming from this huge pain that I've never felt before? And I realized that the wisdom was that the deep grief was showing me how much I loved them. And so it was still hardest thing I've ever done to write this eulogy and stand up. But I basically invited everybody to cry along with me at the one point that was hardest to get through. And I got through it that way.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
But it allowed me to approach grief in a very different way. And I want to say I'm almost thankful for that experience because it made me search for the beauty that comes from the pain in our lives in a brand new way.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
This is a brain area that connects to everything, cortically, subcortically. It should be integrating something critical. We have no idea what it does. We have little idea of how consciousness works. We know a lot about vision. So it is a beautiful bag of information and mystery that our brain represents.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I learned that my brain was more resilient than I thought it was. I expanded the range of my emotions that I had experienced in my life, which is a good thing. I think that relativism is beautiful. That dark feeling of deep grief helps me appreciate the joyous moments And I think about that a lot after this has happened. That was part of the gift that I got.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yes, and it changed the way I looked at, because then I did the eulogy. I came out of it. I was feeling better. Okay, I have to go back to this book on anxiety, but I couldn't write it in the same way anymore.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I had to find the gifts or the superpowers that came from anxiety, which I've already shared that with you, but that's the reason why I never would have, like, I don't know what the gifts are. Well, I did learn, not trick- I learned that lesson through that experience. And I applied it to the emotion of anxiety. And I think it changed the book. Well, I know it changed the book.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I wrote it in a completely different way. And I've used those lessons in a different way in my life since that experience.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yeah. As a nerdy neuroscientist, I know all about the mechanisms and the receptors involved in stress. And not that I studied grief per se, but grief is one that gives you a lot of stress when you have grief. I think my whole life has helped me bring my more academic study of neuroscience to life.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
There is the lessons that I could teach and that I do teach to students about what we know about the stress system, the memory system, your prefrontal cortex, decision-making, all these fascinating topics. But then there is life that comes in. And I think that what I've been doing more recently in my career, I did a very traditional academic career up to a certain point.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And then I started to try and apply kind of life's lessons to neuroscience. And so what does that mean? That means going off book and thinking about other ways to convey anxiety, not just the clinical part. but the useful part for your life. So that's how I would describe it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yeah, so, you know, emotional trauma also, there's a relatively simple formula with what happens, which is going back to the stress hormone cortisol. Depending on the actual stressor and the duration of that, it is going to first kind of alert your brain. It's like, I don't want this to happen again. It's like, this will not happen again. And that's what it was supposed to do.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
It's supposed to heighten your senses so you can escape from the burning building. However, in these other life circumstances, a breakup or death that, you know, the emotional effects linger for a long time, they might actually cause what's called fear memories. to develop.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
These are memories dependent on a structure called the amygdala that, again, are trying to protect you, like don't have this happen again, and steer you away from events. So I might have been steered away from eulogies or speaking in front of crowds, which I do all the time, but yeah, I would have been steered away from eulogies. When you have these
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
broader realizations about what's going on, you could actually learn in a deeper way from them. And instead of being steered away, instead of developing a fear memory that is very strong and hard to get rid of, you can have a deeper learning that sharing those very personal, very deep, very difficult emotions to feel. Talk about new synapses forming.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yes.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
is a deeply cathartic process that brought me closer to my family and to everybody that was there, including all my brother's friends, many of whom I didn't know. So yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yes.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I think that the answer to that is so many people are appreciating at a higher level their stress and anxiety and depression. A little bit of that is actually good for the brain. chronic all the time, can't get out from under the cloud or the big rock around your neck that anxiety can feel like, that is not good for your brain.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yeah, I think I wouldn't recommend that everybody goes out to try and prepare for trauma, but everybody has some form of trauma. And I think... going back to your superpower of anxiety and learning, learning from that. And also realizing, this was another big realization for me, you're not going to get rid of that deep negative emotion.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
It's there for a reason to warn you against, this is a bad time. If you didn't have this warning, you would be walking in the middle of the freeway with no care in the world. So you're not going to get rid of that. But to focus yourself on the learning that comes out of it and that, yes, it might take some time and to give yourself that time.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Maybe what I'm trying to get at is the self-compassion that can come from any trauma that you have and learning to apply that to yourself, I think, is a really good thing that you can do. Prepare.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Well, if I could answer that, that would be the $64 million question. And actually part of the answer is the brain evolved to help us remember things those lessons around dangerous situations that we have. So we don't go in that direction anymore. Yes, we might forget, but actually our brain has evolved to make those kinds of fear memories or difficulty memories the hardest to get rid of.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
That is why PTSD is so hard to get rid of. And those you don't want to be carrying around. So I would ask a flip question, which is, How come we don't relive our most glorious memories more often in our lives? And in fact, I think of that because that is my favorite brain hack from good anxiety, which are tools that you can use to decrease your anxiety. And this tool is called joy conditioning.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
High levels of stress overall will start to first damage and then kill some neurons in your brain. That is not good. So if you are at that level, that is not good for your brain.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And it is designed specifically to counter fear conditioning dependent on the amygdala. Joy conditioning is dependent on another structure called the hippocampus, which allows us to formally retain our everyday memories for events. And so joy conditioning is simply using all the tools that we know about neuroscience that make those kinds of memories stick, which is reliving them.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I just went on a beautiful week-long yoga breath work. It was actually not yoga, breath work retreat. And I completely unplugged. And so what I'm practicing my joy conditioning on is what it felt to be in that circle every day, every morning, every afternoon. I remember that the ocean was so loud. We were right by the sea. The heat was so hot.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
The food or the fruits were so amazing, just the flavor of the fruits. And those are the things that revivification of the what, where, why, when, the taste, the smells, the sounds, that's what strengthens the memory. I am strengthening this joyous memory. And I do that consciously. And I invite everybody to do this, to kind of counteract all those negative memories that are hard to get rid of.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Let's fill our brains with all the most joyous, funny, fun memories of our lives.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Wow.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I would say I said that a lot to myself. And when I sat down to write my second book, Good Anxiety, I realized how much stress and anxiety that I was dealing with in my life. And also, I think the key was there were simple tools that one could use to address not all forms of your stress and anxiety, but a lot of those forms of stress and anxiety. And so the first step is awareness.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I think it depends on how you talk about your anxiety. And I think Again, going back to this learning process, can you talk about your anxiety as... what it brings you, what you learned from either the fantastic way you handled your anxiety or the non-optimal way. And then think about, well, how will I do that differently the next time? That is the classic growth mindset.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And if we can learn how to talk about our fear, our anxiety that way, that is beautiful. In my meditation this morning, actually, it was an auditory, you know, I was listening to a guided meditation. They asked me to think about four things, and I just loved it. I didn't know this was coming up. It was, what do you fear? What scares you? What brings you joy? And what brings you hope?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And I thought, wow, what great things to ponder. And it really kind of brought things into focus for me. The first thing that came to mind, what do I fear? Who do I fear losing more people? What am I scared of? And there it was, you know... I get scared of people's opinions about myself. What brings me joy? All the friends that bring me joy.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And what do I hope for when I want to build in this world? So it's about approaching. And there's anxiety in that list that everybody will do if they choose to do those four things. But again, anxiety is pointing you towards what you hold dear. And all of those questions point out what you hold dear and what your aspirations are.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
So to summarize, mindset is so critical as we are living, even as we're talking about our bad day, our bad parking experience or driving experience. Is it to learn Or is it to commiserate or just to, you know, or you're not realizing you are focusing too much on a negative thing? Mindset and awareness.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yeah, yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yeah. So I think that something that has really helped me is to pay attention to who you are talking to. Who is... feeding you information in your life. And if it's too negative and if it, you know, you know this person is the best complainer
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
in the world and you join in because it feels good to complain, you know, with a friend about something, step back and instead choose somebody who has that growth mindset that can open up other possible ways to think about that. Do it yourself. Think, okay, you know, you can do an exercise. Do the complainer mindset on yourself, by yourself, and then do the growth mindset.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And ask yourself, how does that feel? What does it feel if I just go down the road of the complainer versus what if like, oh, I actually like that idea. What if I do that next time? Can you inspire yourself? So many different routes and coaches, therapists, they're experts at doing this as well. So that's another route to go. But podcasts are another route. This is a common topic in coaching.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
in podcast world these days.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I must say, I'm more of an expert, not on healing from trauma, but on growth, in the positive direction. And so here's what growth can look like based on the things that we've already talked about. So we talked about the fact that moving your body can have an immediate positive effect on your anxiety, also on your depression, decrease your stress response. What's happening there?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Every single time you move your body, you're releasing a whole bunch of neurochemicals in your brain. I like to call it a neurochemical bubble bath for your brain. I love that. And so you're giving yourself this bubble bath. What's in that bubble bath? Well, you've heard some of these neurochemicals before. Dopamine, I know you love talking about dopamine.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
You and so many other people talk about dopamine in such interesting ways. Serotonin, noradrenaline, endorphins, that's what's being released in this bubble bath. And so, not surprisingly, you feel better after you walk. That is why you're feeling better. But the other thing that gets released is growth factors.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
growth factors get released and they go to the hippocampus and they actually build new brain cells in the hippocampus. They help new brain cells grow in the hippocampus. Now you want as many shiny new hippocampal brain cells as you can get, which means that, and they don't pop up like mushrooms. It takes a while. You need to keep up that physical activity.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And for that, the best way to get high levels of growth factors in your bubble bath is to do an aerobic workout. any workout that increases your heart rate. Now, this gives you lots of options. You like to dance, go dance. Like to take your dog for a walk, go take your dog for a power walk. Like to walk, go for a walk.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I think, well, I live in New York City. People like to wear a badge of stress. Oh, you know, every time you answer, how are you? Oh, so stressed out. So much to do. It's like a badge of honor. So I think that that has become part of our individualistic society. And that's not good. I mean, what you should be able to say at least a good chunk of the time is actually, I'm doing well. I feel good.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Anything that gets your heart rate up, I don't care what it is, will help with this. But keep it up. And it's like, I picture a watering can with growth factors going on your left and your right hippocampus, making it big and fat and fluffy. And that is one of the harbingers to great brain growth. The other brain area, which I'm sure is huge in you, is your prefrontal cortex.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Living a life of a monk and doing that deep practice of focusing your attention, keeping it there, makes your area 10, which is right behind your forehead, enhanced, enriched, not because of new neurons, but likely because of new synapses.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And so basically what a healed brain looks like is a bigger, fatter, fluffier brain that is kind of flush with good neurochemicals and is building new synaptic connections. That is kind of the beautiful picture of what I call positive brain plasticity.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I feel energized. And you don't hear that response all too often. And that's not just in New York, but I think all over the country and all over the world.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Well, you know, I think that sometimes it's hard to appreciate what's going on. It could be that you're not moving quite in the same way. I think it's easy to get in a habit of moving. And so sometimes you need to push yourself a little bit more. If you're doing 10 minutes of walking, maybe try 15 minutes. And it's, you know, there are some pillars that not just me, but so many neuroscientists
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
have shown are so important for brain plasticity, which is actually what my undergraduate advisor discovered as she was a young neuroscientist in the 1960s at UC Berkeley, Marion Diamond. And so exercise was one of the pillars. Stress reduction that comes from meditation. Social interaction. We are social beings. I'm sorry, social media does not count person-to-person interaction.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
That is what humans were evolved to do. Sleep, which we haven't talked about, but is so critically important. And the fifth pillar is good nutrition. Social interaction, sorry, I need to add that social interaction doesn't mean just eating conversations. I include love there.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Having love in your life is something that neuroscientists don't often talk about, but it is absolutely critical for the health of your brain.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Well, so you can study the neurobiology of love and compare the brain areas that get active when you look at the picture of an acquaintance versus the picture of somebody that you might have just- What would you see? You would see reward areas lighting up. But other areas, social interaction areas as well.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And one of the most interesting findings that I love from that neurobiology of love, fMRI study of love literature, is that they've also started to look at How does the brain response to your loved one change from the first throes of romantic love when you can't get enough of each other to a relationship that has evolved to something stable but very, very loving?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And what happens is it goes from just... lots of dopamine and lots of reward areas and kind of a suppression of the amygdala and kind of the fear. You're fearless when you are first in love. And I know, you know, I felt fearless. I don't know if in a good way, but we feel fearless.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And it starts to evolve into a pattern that looks like the maternal or paternal pattern that is that protective element. And we can't see everything from fMRI, but I thought, I thought that's such a beautiful pattern to think about. That, yes, I can't sustain that first flush of love for the rest of my life.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
But that deep love that you do feel for a child, that is what comes with long-term commitment. Wow.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yes, yes. Not in every single, you know, morsel. But when you look at the relationships that you admire, you know, those long-term relationships, there is the devotion that is there. That, of course, you see for, you know, protection for your young child. It's not identical. But that devotion is beautiful. That's what's moving about those kinds of relationships. Yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Absolutely. And I immediately think of the university. And that is a natural place of gathering. In-person universities, you're gathering every single day, multiple times a day. But sometimes I see the stress and the worry of, do I, you know, am I smart enough, you know, in this room? Pushes people apart and then they go and they go on their phone and it's more comfortable to do that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
That is what I'm trying to shift so that we take full advantage of this person-to-person relationship. place of gathering at our university that they feel connected to each other. They feel like they belong there for whatever thing that you want to promote. I as dean want to promote the joy of learning. That is what I want to teach them. That is what I want them to feel like.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And so, yes, all of you university professors out there, you have this power to make your place of gathering One of these places where people are talking and interacting. And of course we all try that. It's harder because of the pandemic and we're not used to being together as much in society or, you know, in our growing up. So the answer to your question is yes.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
It's our responsibility to do that. How can we do that more?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Right. I've noticed that as well. I've noticed that in myself and my colleagues. And it's about stepping back and realizing, you know, I think one of the most profound pieces of advice that somebody gave me early on is making me realize that how important and how complex my brain was. It defines everything that we do and everything that we are. And making that work well should be high on our list.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yeah, yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
It's real. Yeah. Absolutely. And so how do I prioritize it? I just make it a priority and I decide the actions that I'm going to do to get to that goal. So, for example, I am literally strategizing about how I can get in front of As many of those 9,000 students that I have, multiple times during their four years with us, I see them all. Every single first-year student, I see.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Every single one graduating, I see. There's a lot of time between that. What can I do to have a meaningful... Should I go on tour just like you do, but talk to the first years, the second years, the third years? I loved my college experience because I was imbued with the love of learning. And so I do that through the coursework that I provide for my students.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Actually, I'm trying to develop it right now. It is an online class, but with an in-person component so that I could kind of get up to scale. The first time I did it, it's called the Fluffy Brain course. So I want to give all the students in this course a fluffy brain, teaching them a lot about what we've just spent the last hour talking about.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
But there's always going to be an in-person component. And the goal of this class is to inspire them to do personal, not inspire them. It's part of the class. That's a great thing about a class. I could assign things to you. So your assignment is to do a personal experiment about exercise. How are you going to up your your exercise for the next week.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
But first, you're going to just notice your mood, your regular mood state, so that self-awareness. And the next week, you are going to propose something, do it, increase your exercise, and then self-reflect about that. And we will explore that and talk about it together.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
They have to do it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
So I start with the official greeting of the College of Arts and Science, which is, Jay, you have a beautiful brain. And so I invite all the students when they see me on the street to come up and say, you have a beautiful brain. And of course, I will say it back to them. And I love starting from there because that is the truth, the neurobiological truth that every single one of us
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
The brains of my students is beautiful. Your brain is beautiful. My brain is beautiful. And no matter what your motivation for being in this space with me, it has a beautiful brain. And from there, we go from, which hopefully provides a sense of belonging, we go to, let's share.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Let's share what you have to give from your beautiful brain because your brain has something to give that is different than what my brain. And let's just provide a situation and an environment that's open to all of that sharing. Talk about the fact that, no, it's not about competition. It's not about getting the highest mark. It's learning the deepest for whatever class you are.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And I know these are hard priorities, but I'm building them over the last two and a half years. And it's really a joy to be able to do that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Chronic stress and buying into that I'm busy all the time culture is not conducive. to brain health. So you want to live a long, healthy, energized life. Start paying attention to all the things you need to do to make your brain work beautifully.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Absolutely. I mean, there are studies showing that if you take a group of people and have them do positive affirmations, not just saying them a certain number of times every day versus people that don't do those positive affirmations, their affect is better. It's higher, you know, less negative affect and more positive affect. Yes, it does have an effect. Which makes sense.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Our brain takes in everything that's happening to us. So, you know, this is why we talked about looking at the people that you are, that's feeding you information. Are they cynical? Are they negative? Or are they giving you a growth mindset? Are they giving you interesting new possibilities to go to? Very important to ask yourself that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Why does that exist? Yeah. So, sorry to say, but our memory does not work very well, generally. We think, oh, I'm young. I have a great memory. No, our memory is not great. And so the reason why... two people at the same event remember different things is that we are focused on these different things. And let me just go over the four things that makes memory stick.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
This works at all ages based on the neurophysiology and biology of this hippocampus that we talked about, critical for forming and retaining new long-term memories. So what makes memory stick? Repetition. So you and I might be at the same event and you're focused on one thing and it's the same event, but event is big. I'm focused on something else.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
So you're repeating something that I never saw and I'm seeing something that you never saw. Repetition. Association. We remember things better when they're associated with other things that are in our long-term memory. So We might be easier to remember a friend of a friend that we know really, really well. And they introduce us versus somebody that you don't know at all.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And you're trying to remember them from anybody. association. Novelty. If it's really novel, you've never experienced this in your life, it tends to be more memorable because our brains are focused on novelty. It's a danger kind of, you know, we have to pay attention to novelty.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
They are intertwined in a really complex way. So physiologically, the stress response is enacted by the sympathetic nervous system, and it's all those feelings that we are very familiar with. Increased heart rate, increased respiration rate, our eyes dilate.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And maybe there are things at the event that were really novel to you that like I've seen a million times and my brain just completely ignores them. And the fourth thing that makes memory stick is emotional resonance. So we remember the happiest and the saddest points in our life. That's what this structure, the amygdala helps with. It kind of helps those really emotional memories stick better.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And again, at this same event, you might be moved by something that either I didn't see or just I wasn't moved by because that wasn't in my life experience. So there's lots of different reasons why two different people will have sometimes very different memories of the same event.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
You know, memory is also, there's a lot of variability, right? And I remember I met somebody with something called highly superior autobiographical memory. I don't know if you've heard of this. They did this great show on 60 Minutes about people. It was actually discovered by colleagues of mine, neuroscientists at UC Irvine. And these are people that have extraordinary memory for detail.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
So they could remember when they were eight years old, what was on TV at 7 p.m., 7.30, 8 p.m., and this incredible memory. It gets in the way, but there's on one end that form of memory, and then all the way to there's actually particularly poor memory in that same vein.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I'm not sure if two years ago, memories don't stick as long as the person can, you know, live their lives and they have, you know, regular memory for the things they need to live their lives for. But there, yeah, there's a wide variety of memory levels that can exist in the world.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
How old are they?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
They're young. Yeah. So many people have this fear of dementia. I have dementia in my family. It's our memories also. Here's a tip for everybody. They get worse as we age because we know and we've experienced more in our life. It's called interference. So I didn't know anything when I was in high school. My memory was better because I had nothing to interfere. Now I have so much to keep track of.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I give myself some slack when I don't remember certain things. That's why I have an assistant to tell me what I really need to remember. But I'm not worried because there is a lot of interference in my life, and I take that into account.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Yeah. So strengthening your memory is all about being present to what you really want to remember using those four techniques. Now, you can't make something emotionally resonant. Unless you try and make it funny. So that's actually one technique that I've used. If I really want to try and remember somebody's name or something, I try and create a funny image about it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
There's an upset stomach because actually blood is rushing away from our digestion and reproductive systems towards our muscles because the response is to get us ready to run away, to physically flee. Now, anxiety is the emotion of fearing something that is coming up in the future that could, that we don't like, that could harm us. In its essence, it is protective.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
But sorry, repetition, repetition, repetition will help your memory. No problem. Association can help. So if you can associate this person or this name or this concept with something that it reminds you of to help those kind of recall moments, lines that you can have to this memory that can help as well. You can't make something novel if it's not completely novel.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
But it's not, unfortunately, a magic bullet.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Your brain defines who you are. Take care of it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Put your head down and work as hard as you can until you reach your goal. I'm the one that told me that, that bad advice.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I would love to discover how to enhance joyous memories more easily.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Oh, well, we used to think back in the early 1960s that the adult brain had no capacity to change or grow. And my whole neuroscience career has been showing how that could happen. How do you make it happen more? And what are those activities that you can bring into your life to do that beautifully? Why did we believe that?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
It came from the... At the point in time we were in neuroscience, there was just no evidence that there were overt changes. We didn't have deep enough microscopes to see the molecular changes, even the structural changes that we can now see very easily with our more powerful tools. Understandably, they said, oh, I see no evidence for change. Once you reach adulthood, I see no change.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And so, of course, that was the dogma until somebody said, hey, I think let's look at this in a different way. And, of course, that wasn't believed at first. But then with effort, that was the concept of brain plasticity. And now we know that so much can change in the brain.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
You know, yes, for certain things, language, there's a language change. I think it is, don't quote me on this, around 10 years old. It's good to learn the languages before that. That could be a little bit on the low side. Also, vision. It's really important to get bilateral good vision. And so if you have amblyopia, it changes your vision. So those are things that change with age.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
You must make at least five deep friendships in your life.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
So, you know, a woman 3.5 million years ago trying to protect her baby wanted to use those feelings of anxiety to keep that baby safe from those physical dangers that were there. The problem is that in today's world, every ping of the phone is anxiety producing, which then launches your stress response. And that keeps us stressful for way too much of the day. So the key, I think, is learning how
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I would love to. Thank you so much, Jay. Thank you very much.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
to turn the volume down on those anxiety cues that then launch stress. And learning what they are for yourself, but also using the tools of science to turn that volume down. It's a simple first step that everybody can take. How do we do that? So the first thing that you can do is first realize, you said, how do we know we're stressed? Self-reflect for a moment.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Am I telling everybody I'm stressed all the time? Do I not sleep well because of stress? When you do that, there are my number one and number two tools that I immediately go to. And I know you've talked about this so many times on your show. Number one, because it is immediate stress. is deep breathing, breath work. Why?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Because breath work activates the equal and opposite part of that sympathetic fight or flight system, the parasympathetic system. I told you all the things that stress activates, heart rate raise, respiration raise, you know, your blood rushing. I can't control where my blood rushes and I can't really control my heart rate, but I can control exactly how deep and profound and deep
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
frequent my breathing is. So that's why just deep breathing, just two or three times can, you know, try it out. It can really calm you down. And if you practice it, it gets even more powerful. That's my tool, go-to number one. And it's number one, because if I'm getting anxious about this interview, I could actually do this in the background. You don't even know.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And I can calm myself down even in the heat of a, this is not a stressful, conversation at all, but I'm pretending that, you know, it could be. Number two is moving your body. And so 10 minutes of walking outside or anywhere up and down the stairs, down the hallway has been shown to decrease your anxiety and stress levels.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
You know, the easiest is just deep, you know, for three or four counts in, three or four counts out. But I like box breathing, which I know you know about. Deep breath in for four counts, hold at the top for four counts. Deep breath out for four counts. Hold it at the bottom for four counts. It's funny.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Every time I even say that, and I often say that in these kinds of interviews, I feel myself de-stressing as I do that because the muscle memory of when I do do that comes back.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
I think to get closer to your cues, the easiest answer is breathing. to spend time in open awareness of your own cues. And just as you said, and it's the same for me, they don't suddenly appear on a list in front of you. You have to go and seek them out because for you, it was in your head, it was in your body. I'll never forget multiple times I've had the
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
experience of deep tissue massage in certain places that triggered just crying in me. And I'm so sorry, what's happening? They said, no, I've just touched a point in your body that you store a lot of stress.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
actual physical crying. I couldn't help it. It's happened just twice, but that was my very clear cue that I also store a lot of stress and anxiety in my own body. You have to go and look for that, and you have to notice it, and you have to remind yourself when you've been covering up. your own stress and anxiety, which I am also a master of. It takes a little exploration.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And I think that listening to others and actually asking a friend, do you notice times when you think I'm more stressed than others? And sometimes you might be surprised. That might be a really good moment of realization. And so then your second question was, once you realize you're in this moment, how do you remind yourself to breathe? And that's a hard one.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
And I think the best way is don't wait until, say, oh, I'm anxious. I need to breathe. But never having any practice with this breathing. It is wonderful to take... to take a class time and go to a breath meditation class. You learn so much because there is literally thousands of years of breath work technique to learn. And I've been exploring that as well. But you don't have to get super fancy.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Sometimes it's just about, you said you like the inhale and exhale for a longer time. That is a very basic but powerful one. Explore that on YouTube. There are thousands of free meditations you can do that. I always send people there. Practice it. See which ones you like. Sometimes it's too long of a hold for people and you have to find the one that you like. Practice it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Wendy Suzuki: 2 Powerful Tools To Use When You Feel Stressed Out (This Will Lower Your Anxiety in 1 Minute)
Get it comfortable with yourself. And then it'll be easier to call it up when you do notice that moment coming up.