In this episode, Martha Beck explores how to move beyond anxiety and how curiosity turns fear into fuel. She dives into why anxiety can’t simply be silenced. It has to be replaced with things like creativity, curiosity, and a deep kindness towards ourselves.
Key Takeaways:
- Discussion of anxiety versus fear and their psychological implications.
- Exploration of societal factors contributing to increased anxiety levels.
- Importance of living authentically and in alignment with one’s true self.
- The role of creativity and curiosity in overcoming anxiety.
- Neurological aspects of anxiety and the brain’s functions related to creativity.
- The concept of breakdowns leading to breakthroughs in personal growth.
- Practical techniques for managing anxiety through self-compassion and kindness.
- The significance of sensory experiences in activating creativity and reducing anxiety.
- The idea of a “creativity spiral” versus an “anxiety spiral” in personal development.
- Reflection on the power of imagination and intention in shaping one’s reality and life purpose.
Dr. Martha Beck, PhD, is a New York Times bestselling author, coach, and speaker. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science, and Oprah Winfrey has called her “one of the smartest women I know.” The founder of Wayfinder Life Coach Training, Martha is a passionate and engaging teacher. Her recent book, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self, was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Her latest book, Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose,
was an instant New York Times Best Seller.
Martha Beck: Website | Instagram
If you enjoyed this conversation with Martha Beck, check out these other episodes:
How to Find Peace and Balance in Managing Anxiety with Sarah Wilson
Why Anxiety is Good For You with Tracy Dennis-Tiwary
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Episode Transcript:
Eric Zimmer 00:01:02 Fear is instinctual. It’s like a cobra in a box of kittens. It grabs our attention and it won’t let go. But anxiety, that’s something else. It’s the ghost of fear haunting us long after the danger is passed or before it even occurs. In today’s conversation with Martha Beck, we explore why anxiety can’t simply be silenced. It has to be replaced. Replaced with creativity, curiosity, and a deep kindness towards ourselves. And when we do that, something important begins to happen. Life starts to feel like something we can actually live rather than just survive. I’ll take any opportunity to talk with Martha. I think she’s one of the most gifted and thoughtful teachers we have today. I’m Erik Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Martha. Welcome to the show.
Martha Beck 00:01:55 Oh, Erik, it is so good to be back. I love this podcast.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:59 Oh thank you. I love talking with you. It’s a pleasure to have you on and it’s nice to see you again. We’re going to be discussing at least part of the time, your latest book, which is called Beyond Anxiety curiosity, creativity and Finding Your Life’s Purpose. And I’m sure we’ll veer kind of all over the place, but that may anchor us.
Martha Beck 00:02:18 Right.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:18 But before we get into that, we’ll start the way we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is the good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Martha Beck 00:02:57 It’s everything. I grew up in a very rigid religious system in Mormonism, and was told to follow the rules and only feed any impulse that had been given to me by the religion. And when that happens to you, a lot of people who leave Mormonism don’t go to any other religion because you break free from it so hard that you reject all belief systems.
Martha Beck 00:03:21 When I was around 1718, I went off to Harvard. I started getting different types of thinking, and then it just sort of blew up in my head, and I decided that the only thing I could do to build my life was to find what felt like the truth and what felt like joy, and that I would go toward that no matter what. And if something felt like fear or less joy and less freedom, I would not go there. As life went on, I made my choices based on that, and that’s sort of shaped everything. And I’m so grateful for that metaphor that so many people out there are hearing it now.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:56 Yeah, I think that’s a great way to segue into your book, because what you’re basically saying there is you tended to follow, if I use the subtitle of your book, The Things That Made You curious, the things that made you creative, the things that made you calmer and use those as a guidance versus following the things that made you fearful or anxious.
Martha Beck 00:04:22 I mean, it’s interesting because I’ve had a whole career helping people build their lives based on feeding the good wolf and following your better angels or whatever it is. But I also had very high anxiety and a lot of people that I’ve worked with and people that I’ve known as friends, very creative people, had tremendous amounts of anxiety, and I didn’t see that always as part of the Bad Wolf, because it’s so innocent to be afraid in a world where things go wrong and where we all know we’re the one animal that knows for sure we’re going to die. So I thought anxiety was just part of the human condition. And so I didn’t steer away from it. The way I have learned to. It wasn’t until I started living by this code of absolute integrity. And I wrote a book called The Way of Integrity, because I came to find that if I only did things that felt aligned with all the parts of my being body, heart, mind, soul. If I just always walk the line of truth there, then I wouldn’t feel any psychological pain, which has been true for me.
Martha Beck 00:05:26 But people came up to me after I wrote that book and said, I’m living in total integrity, but I’m afraid all the time. And I thought, okay, so that’s just the human condition. And then I thought, no, no, that’s not the way it works. And so I went and I researched anxiety, and I dug into it and into the brain science and into the social science of it. And what I found is that we live in a society that really encourages high anxiety. And the way we learn and the way we organize our lives is very conducive to high anxiety, but it actually isn’t normal. What’s normal is something that’s not around most of us anymore. That is. Sorry. I’m going on and on. But if you and I had been born 300 years ago, we would have woken up surrounded by nature, by animals, hearing the trees, water, other people’s voices. We would have spent the day and a group of people we mostly knew doing things with our hands, as well as our minds that were deeply meaningful to us.
Martha Beck 00:06:24 And that type of scenario is what we evolved to live in. And that’s what puts the nervous system in a state of regulation. And nowadays we live in a profoundly abnormal situation for the animals of our bodies, and we’re anxious because we’re in cages all the time. And some of those cages are physical and some of them are psychological. And in this book, in the research for it, I tried to find my way out of that. And so two thirds of the book are about what happens after you get away from that. And it’s actually really fun. That’s where the curiosity, creativity and finding your life’s purpose come in. There there is my dissertation. Everybody can go to bed now.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:08 Well, I think that, yes, I think we are probably living in a deeply anxiety producing culture. We are living in ways that don’t allow us to soothe ourselves. And we can go back, though, to say the Buddha. And he’s writing about something similar a little bit. Right? He’s going back and he’s saying like, hey, these things that you manufacture in your mind cause you to suffer more than is necessary.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:40 And so I think that it’s just gotten worse. Right? I think that the world that we may have lived in when we were closer to nature had more, maybe natural balms in it than today’s world does. Yeah, it keeps getting amplified. There’s something that you talk about in the book that I’d love to really start with, which is that you talk about fear, which is a natural response. You make examples in the book. I love your Kittens and Cobra’s example. It’s like if you open up a box and there are eight kittens in one cobra, what are you going to pay attention to? Right. The cobra I just think that’s so. It made me laugh when I heard that. But if there was a cobra in this room, I would naturally be fearful. And that is natural. Yeah, but you describe anxiety more as like being haunted. Right. I love that phrase. Tell me what you mean by that.
Martha Beck 00:08:29 Well, fear is like being shot from a cannon. I interviewed a lot of people who’d been through life threatening situations, and they experienced fear in those situations, the way animals probably do.
Martha Beck 00:08:41 And that was an extremely intense bolt of alertness and energy that allowed them to react to the emergency, whether it was a car accident or being mugged or whatever it was. And then the feeling went away. The hormones dropped. It was gone. Once they were safe. Unless they had lingering trauma. And this is where humans can do things in our brains that are not good for us, that most other animals cannot. And that is that the part of the brain that tells stories and thinks in logic and abstraction and time starts to tell a story about how there is danger out there waiting to get us. It’s not in the room anymore, but it could be back any second. And what if this happened? And what if that happened? And just today, looking at my Instagram feed, it was like a thousand terrifying stories. Legitimately terrifying. Yeah. And I was saying, when I got on with you, if I’d known this would be happening when I wrote the book, I may have shaped it slightly differently.
Martha Beck 00:09:38 But you were reminding me that it’s still true. I’m in a completely comfortable room, well fed and housed and healthy. There is nothing for me to be afraid of right now. So looking at my Instagram feed and painting a picture with my mind of a world that is very dangerous, pure anxiety, I just let myself fall into the trap of doing that again. But at least now I know how to get out.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:04 Yeah. So let’s talk about separating these two things, because, yes, you and I were sort of extrapolating on this before we started, which is that for certain people today, let’s say you are an immigrant in the United States right now. It’s a time that I think it’s reasonable to have fear.
Martha Beck 00:10:23 Yes, absolutely. And and well, here’s the thing. That bolt of fear that fills the body with cortisol and adrenaline and everything, that’s only for things that are physically here and now and so that you can fight, flee or do whatever. Then there is alertness and awareness.
Martha Beck 00:10:43 So I said, other animals don’t have anxiety because, you know, if your dog or cat is in a safe room, they relax. They saved their energy. I’ve watched an antelope get charged by a lion and it took off running really fast in. The lion gave up and just stood there and panted, and the antelope stopped immediately and went back to grazing like you don’t waste any energy on that adrenaline response unless you absolutely have to. However, if you are in the African wilderness where I saw that, you’d better be very aware. Yes, if you’re not aware and alert, then danger will come upon you and you might not have time to get away. Once I was with some friends and we were relaxing on this riverbank in Africa, and I put my head down on the sand because I wanted to see if I could hear the footsteps of elephants. And I did, and I was like, you guys, there are elephants. And my friends were like, Marty, there are elephants, get in the damn jeep! And I was like, but I can hear their footsteps.
Martha Beck 00:11:46 That was stupid. That was just plain stupid. I wasn’t afraid when I ran over and got in the Jeep, but I was alert and I was aware and I had a plan. That Jeep was parked there for a reason. We didn’t go far from it for a reason. Like we knew the boundaries in the social science sociology. They say that those who are not prepared to remember the past are doomed to repeat it. I think that’s George Santayana. If we don’t keep our wits about us now, danger could very well come upon us quickly. And yes, it is unfair and horrible that that risk is distributed unequally. Yep. Yeah, it’s a scary time, and it’s a time to not get anxious because if you’re anxious, you fritter away the energy that you could have being alert, prepared, engaging with your life and creatively trying to figure out what to do.
Eric Zimmer 00:12:44 Yes. And I think what you just said there is kind of the key to the game, because I always go back to and I reference it a lot on this show because it’s one of the most foundational teachings I think, that I know of, and it emanates out of the Serenity Prayer.
Eric Zimmer 00:13:01 Right? The courage to change the things you can, the acceptance. But there’s a part of it where Stephen Covey took it for me a step further, and he talked about the circle of influence and the circle of concern. And the thing about it that I come back to again and again with all these situations was his point was, if you spend all of your time out in your circle of concern, worried, frightened, anxious, afraid, your circle of influence shrinks. But the more time that you put in your circle of influence, the more it grows. And I think the corollary of that is what you’re talking about, which is this idea that being anxious doesn’t prepare us better to deal with the world. It exhausts us? Yes. It disheartened us. It discourages us. And so finding a way to work with it skillfully actually makes us safer.
Martha Beck 00:13:59 Yes, much.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:00 But the thing about anxiety, and you alluded to this in the beginning where you were like, oh, I think it’s not this thing to move away from, is it always convinces us that it’s right.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:09 Yes. Well, yes, I know anxiety is bad and I shouldn’t be anxious, except I really have a reason to be this time. Right.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:18 And it’s not that you don’t. It’s just that it’s a profoundly not useful response.
Martha Beck 00:14:23 And it’s based on such a weird factor of the human brain. And there’s a neuroscientist named Ian Gilchrist who writes brilliantly about this. The left hemisphere of the brain is the one where most of the language and almost all of the anxiety are located. My friend Jill Bolte Taylor, who was a neuro anatomist who had a stroke, a left hemisphere stroke. She said that working only with her right hemisphere when she didn’t have a left hemisphere, effectively, there was no anxiety whatsoever. No time, no fear, just presence. So what Ian Gilchrist and a lot of other neurologists have written about is the part of the brain, the left hemisphere, that generates most or all of our anxiety. It has a characteristic called hemi spatial neglect, which is so weird and I don’t really know the reason for it.
Martha Beck 00:15:14 But people who have lost the right side of the brain, so they’re only working with their left side of the brain. The left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa. So someone only having a left hemisphere not only only works with their right and left leg, they actually don’t believe their left arm and leg belong to them or that they even exist. They don’t shave the left sides of their faces. They don’t look at people who are on their left. It’s this weird thing the left hemisphere has of believing that it is the only thing in existence, and that it is absolutely right and its stories are the only truth. So if you go out online, you can see a lot of left hemispheres screaming at each other. I know the truth and your perspective does not matter. It’s not real. And that was a really amazing thing for me to study, because it describes so much of what I see going on as people anxiously shout at each other. But it’s a very bizarre kind of mental illness, really.
Martha Beck 00:16:14 And in, Gilchrist says, we act like people who have had a right hemisphere stroke. So it’s very weird.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:20 We did a fascinating episode. It’s been several years ago, but we had Jill Bolte Taylor on. We also had a friend of mine. He was originally like a coaching client. And it just over the years I’ve gotten to know him, who did indeed have a right brain injury.
Martha Beck 00:16:36 Really.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:36 And still has a right brain injury. And his recovery has been all about how does he bring that right brain online? Wow. You know, so he’s kind of the opposite of Jill, right? Yeah. He was Jill’s opposite. And I love the way when you talk about this, you do the standard disclaimer that I think is worth doing real quick, which is so that all the neuroscientists can settle down, which is that look, of course, we are all using all parts of our brain. Brains connect. You know, there’s there’s networks. It’s not as simple as saying this part of the brain does that.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:08 Right. And, you know, the split brain experiments and all these different things show us there are very different ways. And I think that some people, I think, get all into like, it’s all should be all the right brains and no.
Eric Zimmer 00:17:21 Whole brain. The problem is that we are oriented in one direction. Yeah, 98% of our time. It’s sort of like when we talk about being present and people are like, what are you supposed to be present all the time? And I’m like, no, try it. Like, let’s try and get the ratio to like 10%. Like, you know, like if I could get to 10% present, I would take it, you know, like, I just need to move in that direction. And I think it’s the same thing. Like we want to move in the direction of wholeness. And I wanted to talk about this because you recently talked about this very eloquently, and it’s going to take me a second, but, well, actually, I’m going to let you do it because you were talking about the idea of break down and a break through, and then you went to talk about the double slit experiment.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:07 So kind of walk me through this because I think this is really important.
Martha Beck 00:18:10 I have no memory of what you’re talking about or what I was smoking, but I’m going to follow that lead and you just tell me where I’m off.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:17 Okay? All right. I’ll fill in the gaps.
Martha Beck 00:18:18 All right. So I think that if you go long enough in a state of anxiety, which is a sort of false fear, you do things. You create things in your psychological life and also around you in relationships and the things you build in the world, whatever you make things that are inherently flawed because they are based on a limited version of reality. So people who go out and sort of build themselves a giant pyramid of power without any meaning in it, they’re creating something out of anxiety that is destined to collapse. And so they will have breakdowns at some point. And I, I had that when I was at Harvard and I had a child with down syndrome, and it broke down my whole like concept of intellectual meritocracy and everything.
Martha Beck 00:19:04 Anyway, you’re going to you’re going to break down if you feed that wolf forever. So what happens then though, is what the left hemisphere sees as fragmentation. And letting go is actually gives space and permission for the meaning systems and the perceptions that we see more with our right hemispheres to come back into consciousness very fully. And if we can contextualize both together, we’ll be living in a really interesting paradox. So when Jill had her stroke, her left brain went on and off for a while, and she was in the shower for part of that, thinking that it would help this horrible headache she had. And she told me that when her left brain was active, she saw her hand against the tiles, and when her left brain went off duty, so to speak, what she saw was not hand and tiles, but two intermingling fields of energy. And both perceptions are accurate. So the double slit experiment pertains to this in that way back in, in like 1923. So it’s been more than 100 years ago, someone designed this experiment where if they shot little photons through a screen that had two slits in it, it would behave like like water.
Martha Beck 00:20:21 If you threw two buckets of water through two slits, they would make a certain pattern where the water would disperse differently, but then come back together after it went through the slits. Then when they tried to observe this process, what happened was completely different. The photons went through the two slits and created two perfectly vertical straight lines, as if you’d shot a number of bullets through a screen. So one interpretation of this, and has been the paradox of of matter for as long as I’ve been alive, is somehow when consciousness is not observing or we’re not measuring what is happening to particles, they’re just waves of energy. What Jill saw with only the right side of her brain, when we’re observing them and controlling them, the probabilities of that energy cloud collapse into a point. And it looks like solid matter. It behaves like solid matter. And we are living in both realities all the time. And I think when you get back to a balanced brain, what you’re talking about, even 10%, if you get back into nature and you integrate, your right brain starts to wake up the way it does when mine does.
Martha Beck 00:21:32 When I go into nature, you begin to see a vast array of possibilities. In reality, instead of the narrow, tight, circumscribed, nasty little lives that our culture prescribes for us.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:08 In my Zen training, we talk about this in the sense of the relative and the absolute. The relative is a good example would be think of like my hand, my hand. I could just describe it as my hand and it is 100% my hand. And it does things at hands do. And luckily it works well. And it’s all that. That’s the absolute view. It’s the hand. It’s a whole thing. There’s another view that is 100% true at the same time, which is that these are all separate fingers. Yes. And these fingers are not the same as each other. This finger is different from that finger. That’s different from that finger. And so I think what the physics pointed to, what the spiritual traditions have pointed to, is that there are indeed these two views of the world. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:51 One is that everything is one unitary whole thing. And the other is that there’s all this division and separation and fear. And at least what Zen teaches is that the fully realized view is that you can see both at the same time. Yeah. Now, most of us are not fully realized, but what I think we can do, and I’m going to tie this back to breakthrough and break down in a second, is I do think that even if we’re not fully realized enough to see that all at the same time, we can learn to switch back and forth. Yeah, we can go. And we’re looking at it only this way. There’s another way. Let me look over that way. Right. And we can do that. And I think that as we look at the world today or honestly, our lives, at any point we can see all the things that are kind of wrong, the breakdowns that are going to happen, all of that. And we can see that there’s a breakthrough that’s possible and that neither of those things is right or wrong.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:49 To the other. It’s the holding both, or at least, as I said, being able to switch back and forth, at least try to switch back and forth.
Martha Beck 00:23:57 I think you can get to the point where you hold both things at once. I mean, I think that’s where we are, where we’re in flow, that famous psychological condition. It’s a state of bliss. It’s very difficult to sustain, but it’s also fun. Could I use that word? Sure. I started having the experience in meditation. I don’t even know if I should be talking about this, but when I was meditating a lot in the forest, it was quite common. Like every day everything would pixelate and turn into these showers of light and animals would come up to me. And it was very it was very woowoo. And which is why I don’t talk about it much. but hour after hour after hour I would sit in it and try. I knew that the brain is plastic and can be rewired, and I knew that my culture had wired my brain to believe in a very boring existence.
Martha Beck 00:24:47 Life is a bitch and then you die. Like, why not get off now? But I knew that my brain was going outside my culture and even outside its ordinary view of material reality. And I remember going to a meeting with my book agent and an editor during that time, and I was in this Manhattan office looking down at the city, and they were talking about, I said, I just don’t want to kill more trees, man. I don’t think, like, if I’m going to write a book, it has to be worth the trees. And then I actually said something. I don’t know what was being said, but I blurted without knowing I was going to say it. Oh, oh, you guys still think that’s real? And I pointed out at New York City and what I meant was just the buildings. Of course it’s real. But there was a blaze of energy, of the life energy, of consciousness, of millions of humans. And I was like drunk on it. It was so huge.
Martha Beck 00:25:45 I kind of like living that way. And that’s why I had to go back and write Beyond Anxiety. Because after all that meditation, when I’d got to that place, there was no anxiety anymore. I don’t know what you plan to talk about in this podcast, but I’m enjoying.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:59 We’re good. Although you’ve just now I just turned my book into the publisher about a month ago, and now I’m like, is it worth the trees? You’ve set a new bar that I have to clear here.
Martha Beck 00:26:10 Oh, I’m.
Speaker 5 00:26:10 Sure yours is going to be worth the trees, no.
Martha Beck 00:26:13 Question. Yeah, but I think things are breaking down in large ways. You know, you look at climates, ecosystems, and then you look at the human systems all over the world, and you look at our local political systems and, and even things like supply chains and stuff. And the fear is that they will break down. And I think that that’s a very legitimate fear. In fact, I think it’s a near certainty at this point.
Martha Beck 00:26:37 I think we are out in the wilderness where we need to be alert. And I was trying to write about this, Eric, and I was I was reading all these books on economics, and they weren’t tracking because there was no economic policy that matches what we’re seeing today. And I was like, I don’t want to read this. And then something inside me said, read about fungus. And I was.
Speaker 5 00:27:00 Like.
Martha Beck 00:27:01 Whoa. And I started reading about the mycelial networks that exist under every forest ecosystem. They’re made of fungi and roots and mosses and algae. And they are constantly conveying chemistry to each other. Coordination, communication, water. And the whole forest knows itself through this mycelial network. And I believe that there is something similar coming up. It’s like a city has been shattered and through the stones of the fallen buildings, a forest is rising that is made of a new way of living and allows us to be a new kind of human. And I think that’s pretty cool.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:45 Yes, I think there is both those things.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:48 Like you said, there is breakdown and it’s the sort of old back, the cliche of the, you know, Chinese symbol of crisis and opportunity.
Martha Beck 00:27:55 Right.
Eric Zimmer 00:27:56 Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this. And I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self control. Things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at one uEFI eBook and take the first step towards getting back on track. So let’s redirect here a little bit to specific ways of working with anxiety for people who have anxiety, because it’s a topic that always does well on the podcast, right? So let’s start with this phrase here, which you say anxiety can’t just be ended.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:01 It must be replaced. Yeah. What does that mean?
Martha Beck 00:29:04 That was the big.
Speaker 5 00:29:05 Like.
Martha Beck 00:29:06 Smashing gong moment for me doing the research, because I was trying to learn a little about the neurobiology of anxiety and how it works. So I was looking at the left hemisphere and how the very ancient structures sound, the alert, and then the storytelling structures that are more recently evolved. Tell a story about it that feeds back into the more primitive structures. Okay. So there’s this anxiety spiral. But it started ringing a bell in my mind because a few years earlier I had done a course on creativity and I had studied the neurobiology of creativity, and I realized that the sort of spiral I was seeing on the left hemisphere when we’re anxious, is what’s happening in the right hemisphere when we’re creative. And I knew from a huge amount of research that when we get anxious, it flatlines our creativity. And I thought, where’s the research that says when we’re creative, it flatlines anxiety and there was none. But I started to think these two things may toggle that when our anxiety is up, our creativity is down and vice versa.
Martha Beck 00:30:09 This was during the pandemic, and I did experiments on myself to see if I could change my anxiety levels by turning on my creativity, the right side of my brain deliberately. And oh my goodness, it worked like the best drug you can imagine. I would get up in the morning and just do things that I knew would activate the right hemisphere of my brain, and I went into absolute and total delight. It was like being a little kid again. I can’t even describe the joy I felt, the liberation. So I thought I got something going on here. So I started working with people on zoom calls, you know, 100 people, 300, sometimes a thousand. And I would have them put in a number to represent their anxiety score, which was usually high because we were in lockdown. And then I’d have them do like mental exercises that forced them to open up the right hemisphere of the brain into that creative mode. And then I’d say, now put in your anxiety scores again and it would be 00000.
Martha Beck 00:31:11 So I realized that it’s not enough to calm down your anxiety and make it go away. If you don’t turn on the creativity systems, the anxiety will creep back in and culture will force it at you. And you know the Cobra kitten paradox or tendency that’ll send you into anxiety. But if you are in a creative space, if you’re going through this sort of spiral that starts with curiosity and turns into connection and then into courage, compassion, a sense of meaning, all these different things open up when you’re creative, and there is simply no space to be anxious. And I have to tell you that since that time, my life has been almost deliriously happy. It actually works.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:58 Yeah, when I read that line, anxiety can’t just be ended. It must be replaced. The first thing that came to mind was addiction. You know, my history as a as a recovering heroin addict. And that’s a deep belief I have about addiction. You can’t just yank whatever substances out of somebody’s life and expect it to work.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:16 It’s fulfilling a purpose in there. Exactly. Now, it’s not doing its job very well anymore, right? You know, it’s it’s actually wrecking the entire system, but you can’t just yank it out, it has to be replaced. And when we look at behavior change, it’s the exact same thing. If you’re trying to get somebody to change a habit, there’s a habit loop. And what you want to do is change the behavior in the middle. You can’t just get rid of it. And so I thought a lot about that. And I certainly know that, you know, in my own life, the ability to be curious about something changes something from, as A.J. Jacobs said to me once, which he got from Quincy Jones. You reframe it from a problem to a puzzle. Yeah, right. You stop saying, I have problems, I have puzzles, and immediately there’s your shift. There’s another thing that you do, though, before we get to creativity. And I think this is an important one, which is that you talk about the creature.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:09 So talk to me about what you mean by creature and why that’s even like sort of a preliminary step, even to the creativity side.
Martha Beck 00:33:16 Yeah. Because if I go to somebody who’s super anxious and I say creativity will fix that, you know, sing a song, no, it’s.
Speaker 5 00:33:23 Not going to work.
Martha Beck 00:33:24 That’s bullshit. Excuse my language. Yeah, but here’s the thing. In our very left hemisphere dominated society, we see our brains as machines. And so an anxious brain is a broken machine. And you take chemistry and you take analysis, which is like analysis literally means to chop something up to see how it works. And you, by God, fix that machine. But the anxious human brain is not a machine. It’s a frightened animal. And if you approach an animal and say, I’m going to chop you up or numb you with chemicals or bring you down, I want to end you. This is the way people talk about their anxiety and they don’t know they’re threatening a frightened animal.
Martha Beck 00:34:02 And so here’s the interesting thing as well psychiatrists. And I love that they’ve studied this and that. There are meds that can be helpful. And I’m a big fan of all of that. But it’s such elitist knowledge. It’s so rare. But every single one of us, from little babies to old people and everyone in between, male or female, Every gender knows inherently how to approach a frightened animal. We don’t have to learn that in graduate school. The calming of anxiety is such an important survival skill that we are born with it all through our DNA. So I’ve asked so many people this and they always give the same response. So if you were to open the door and find a puppy, a bedraggled, tiny, freezing, shaking, grubby little puppy on your doorstep, and you made up your mind that you were going to help this animal, how would you approach it? Physically, how would you actually approach the animal?
Eric Zimmer 00:35:05 Very slowly. Very calmly. Little bit by little bit and quietly.
Martha Beck 00:35:11 Yeah. Making reassuring sounds and all of that. That calms the amygdala. And I was so struck by this when I read a book by an FBI hostage negotiator named Chris Voss. Boss, brilliant, brilliant hostage negotiator who went out and dealt with, you know, sociopathic terrorists. Murderers. And how did he do it exactly the way you just described. Soft, low voice reflecting their experience. So they know that they’ve been seen. You know that he calls it the late night DJ voice, like, yeah, okay, here’s what I think you’re saying. And the calling is like, yeah, I hear you. So he even says Study Oprah because she can do that. So the first thing you do with your own anxiety is to realize that it is that frightened animal, whether it’s a tiny little puppy or a big scared horse, it’s frightened. And the only way it’s going to calm down is if you approach it with compassion and with gentleness and with kindness. In fact, I came to see the Dalai Lama has said, my religion is kindness.
Martha Beck 00:36:24 And I thought, oh, what a nice thing to say. Oh, I think that is a statement of incredible power. Kindness to the self is the balm that starts to soothe those jagged edges that we have inside us, that we need medication or drugs or whatever. We’re trying. We’re trying to soothe the pain. And the best soother for that pain is gentle, loving, compassionate energy. Giving that to yourself.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:56 I think it took me years to come to similar conclusions. CBT and even a lot of the Buddhist enquiry methods, all these ways of working with our thoughts have been an enormous gift that we have. And my experience is when the emotional level rises above a certain point, none of that works at all. It doesn’t work. And so the first step is and the analogy I use, you’re using frightened animal. But I think of like a child, like once a three year old has gone into full tilt, you can’t reason with a three year old at that point. You can’t be like, now look, it’s good to share our toys.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:35 You know, you’ve got to get the kid to calm down. Then you have a chance of working with the stories. And I think it’s the same with us. Like if we can’t calm down, no amount of trying to come up with the right thoughts or the rational thoughts or the helpful thoughts. And like you said, kindness is kind of the way to do that. Because when we’re not kind to ourselves, we just keep turning the emotional temperature up. I mean, that’s what that’s what harsh self-criticism does, is it just keeps turning the emotional temperature up. You’re going in the wrong direction. And so you get to it with the creativity. Creativity is a great way of redirecting the brain Towards a learning different capability, but it can’t do it when it’s boiling.
Martha Beck 00:38:25 Yes, the soothing of the parts of ourselves that are in legitimate pain is so important. And I’ve done the same thing you did where I sat in meditation and I thought, okay, well, I can go past my fear and my sorrow and everything into no thinness, right? And I did.
Martha Beck 00:38:39 I had a lot of mystical experiences. But I also realized, and partly being a mom does this for you, teaches you this. It’s something that Jack Kornfield, the great meditation teacher, talks about. He talked about teaching someone who broke down and started sobbing midway through this long meditation session, and the other students were really angry that he was disturbing things and everything, and he had been unable to sit still and hold at bay the memory of burying his seven year old daughter, who had died. The grief had hit him so hard, and so the other students didn’t know this and they were like, shut him up! And the meditation teacher came and took him to a different place and just sat there with his arm around the guy’s shoulders and let him cry. And then that man became a meditation teacher, and he said, Now I’m the one who takes people out of the group and holds them while they cry. And that is, I think, the most sacred work that any human being can do.
Martha Beck 00:39:42 And it is absolutely necessary to come out of our fear.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:46 So what are some techniques for soothing the creature?
Martha Beck 00:39:52 So it’s very physical. Okay. I mean, it’s so interesting reading Chris Voss’s work because you realize that even when somebody’s got a gun to someone else’s head, there’s an unregulated three year old inside them, and they will respond to certain physical triggers, like being spoken to softly being held. So if you put a blanket around yourself, if you’re alone, if you have someone that you love around you, you can ask for a hug that will help, but you put a blanket around yourself and then you start to do something that I call kind internal self-talk. So it’s kist or kissed, which is a silly name, but I don’t mind it anymore. I used to be embarrassed by it, but all you need to do is just make those kind sounds that you would offer to a three year old, or to a puppy, or a man who was grieving an inconceivable loss. You just say things like, I’ve got you.
Martha Beck 00:40:45 You’re right here. You can feel exactly the way you’re feeling. That’s a really important thing. If you’re anxious, don’t say, calm down, everything’s fine. You stop and say, are you afraid? I get it? I’ve been there. I’m here, I love you. Go ahead and feel it. There are no limits here. You’re not wrong. You’re not broken. You’re not bad. I’m here for you, I love you. Just pour kindness out of the part of yourself that can access compassion. There’s a line from Nissar Maharaj that I love that says the mind is interested in what happens, while awareness is interested in the mind itself. The child is after the toy, but the mother watches the child, not the toy. So when you’re in grief, you’re holding an object the way a child would hold something painful and it’s agonizing. And you can get lost in that. But if you can access awareness simply by saying to yourself, I’m here for you, I’ve got you. We’re all right in this moment.
Martha Beck 00:41:50 We’re just here together. You become the awareness that is the mother force, watching the mind in its agony. And you can start to locate yourself in the compassion instead of in the anguish. And that is a massive crossroads in your whole life.
Eric Zimmer 00:42:10 I know that a lot of people report that they find this very difficult after a lifetime with a really strong inner critic is just continuing to try and do your best. The path forward here.
Martha Beck 00:42:24 I would piggyback on other people’s experience. Thank God. When I was in my 20s, I had group therapy because I was completely numb to my own pain. But when I saw other people in pain, my heart opened and I could see that there was nothing bad about them and that they deserved and needed comfort. I felt the impulse to offer it to them. That’s why I became a self-help author. So what I would do is like these phones we have that feed us all the doomscrolling. They also feed us things like stories. I love things that just are images of compassion.
Martha Beck 00:42:59 Like there’s a guy who goes and plays a pink guitar to different animals and you know, the horses. He plays to them and they come and they kiss him on the face while he’s playing. I saw a video of a cat giving birth behind a water heater in some city street, and while she was giving birth, a pigeon built a nest around her to keep her safe. By the time she was nursing five kittens, there was a nest and this little pigeon running back and forth like that cat would have killed him. He didn’t care. He was offering kindness. And when I see the kindness of the one consciousness that I think animates it all, it breaks through some of that human calcification in me and opens my heart a little wider. It’s worth looking for those things.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:03 In the sort of calming the creature aspect. You talk about using our senses. Yes. Give us a practice there.
Martha Beck 00:44:12 All right. Let’s do it in real time. And I love doing this with large groups on zoom because I have them put things in the chat.
Martha Beck 00:44:20 So we’re going to list a few items and I’m going to write them down so I don’t forget them. And then I’m going to ask you to use the right hemisphere of your brain to activate sensations in your memory and create a story. So tell me two things you love to taste.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:38 Oh, boy. I’ve been eating a very particular diet lately, so, Pizza.
Martha Beck 00:44:45 Okay.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:47 I’m not sure this is going to be helpful. What else? This may cause grief. Dark chocolate.
Martha Beck 00:44:54 Okay.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:54 Dark. I can’t have dark chocolate.
Martha Beck 00:44:56 Okay. Two things you love to hear.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:01 Oh, boy. The sound of me playing my guitar.
Martha Beck 00:45:04 Okay. The guitar. What’s another one?
Eric Zimmer 00:45:07 Birds.
Martha Beck 00:45:08 All right, so imagine yourself in a place where you can hear a lot of birds singing. You’re playing your guitar. You got this delicious pizza with some dark chocolate there that you’re munching on between songs. Now tell me two things you love to touch with your skin.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:25 My dog. And I guess my partner.
Martha Beck 00:45:32 Wonderful. So let’s say your partner is leaning against you lovingly while you play the guitar. Your dog is right there on your feet. Maybe you got the chocolate. You got the pizza, you got the guitar, you got the birds. Now tell me two things that are not food that you love to smell.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:49 This is quite an experience I’m having here. Let’s see. What do I love to smell? I guess roses and coconut shampoo.
Martha Beck 00:46:02 Ooh. Okay, so let’s say your partner’s just had a shampoo with the coconut shampoo, and you smell that wonderful scent drifting off clean hair and you’ve got your dog and you’ve got roses all around you. There’s just a rose garden around you. And the birds are singing. Your guitar is going, you got the chocolate, you got the pizza. Now tell me two things you love to see. But you haven’t mentioned yet.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:26 Two things that I love to see that I haven’t mentioned yet. Well, any kind of tree, really. Trees are. I’m a big fan of trees and pictures of my son.
Martha Beck 00:46:36 Okay, so there are pictures of you. Wouldn’t it be better to just have your son there?
Eric Zimmer 00:46:41 Well you didn’t.
Martha Beck 00:46:42 Or do you just like the pictures?
Eric Zimmer 00:46:43 Well, no, I’d rather have him there. But that you were just asking me.
Martha Beck 00:46:46 Like to see your son?
Eric Zimmer 00:46:48 I love to see my son. Okay.
Martha Beck 00:46:49 Even though there’s no limits on this.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:51 All right?
Martha Beck 00:46:51 No limits. So your son is there. He’s sharing the pizza and the chocolate. He’s smiling. He’s singing along with the guitar. Your partner’s there with the coconut hair. You got your dog, you got the trees, you got the roses. You’ve got all these things at once. Now really picture it. The taste of the pizza. Taste it. The chocolate here. The guitar. Hear the birds. Feel the weight of your dog’s head on your feet. Feel the weight of your partner’s shoulder against yours. Like really, really vividly create this scene. And now tell me how anxious you are when you’re doing all that with your brain.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:27 Not anxious.
Martha Beck 00:47:28 You can’t be. You literally can’t do it because all those sensory things are handled on the right hemisphere. And that’s what I meant about we’re in this abnormal environment because when we’re out moving among plants, animals and one another, people we know all of that is activating our right hemispheres. It’s not a chance in hell that we’re going to go off into just left hemisphere thinking, but put us in an office under fluorescent lights, with a boss glaring at us and money to be made and all that stuff is gone, and we’re living in a prison.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:03 And the point of the exercise, though, is that even if I can’t manifest all those things around me imagining them. Yes, I am able to shift the state of my brain.
Martha Beck 00:48:16 Yes, and we’re always imagining things. And those are always shifting. The state of our brains. So most of us think, okay, this is going to go on the way it has or this is going to get worse. We tend to remember our worst heartbreaks and injuries because we want to guard against trauma.
Martha Beck 00:48:33 So we’re continuously projecting an image of a world that is very dangerous and very cold and very harsh. That’s an imagined reality for most of us in most moments of time. Most of us are pretty much okay most of the time, but we’re not in the okay. We’re in the imagined terror. When you just did that, you weren’t imagining something as opposed to letting go of real life. You were simply replacing what you usually imagined with what I was telling you to imagine. Yeah, they’re equally valid, and I prefer the the one that makes us feel better. I prefer to feed that wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:08 Yeah. Well, I think about that all the time. This idea that we are a fair portion of what we would call our reality. We are making up.
Martha Beck 00:49:18 Oh, my God, I would. I believe almost all of it. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:21 I mean, a lot of it. And so I always think about this idea like, well, if I am sort of co-creating so much of reality, whether that’s what I’m imagining, whether that’s the stories I’m telling, whether it’s the meaning I’m giving things, then which version of that is most useful to me? You know which version is most useful if back to the double slit experiment, light is both a particle and a wave, which it is.
Martha Beck 00:49:48 Well, everything is all matter is both particle and wave.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:51 Yeah. If that’s the reality then in any given moment, which interpretation is most useful for me? And obviously I think we can say that it’s probably more useful if I’m going to be living in an imaginary world, to be living in an imaginary world that calms me and soothes me and makes me better able to function in the world I’m going to then be in.
Martha Beck 00:50:14 Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And it gets even better than that, because what you imagine you tend to create and you can believe in the New Age manifestation thing, or you can just believe in directed attention. You’re not going to create something you’ve never imagined. So by going into those parts of imagined reality that feel positive, you actually come up with the ideas that will allow you to make the best life you can have to make amazing, fabulous things instead of just repeating what you’ve been taught to imagine by your culture. So yeah, it’s not just a useful thing to go into it.
Martha Beck 00:50:51 It is fundamentally formative of the rest of your life. That’s what I mean by creativity. It’s not about painting, singing, dancing those are all wonderful, but it is the creation of your life itself that your whole brain wants you to focus on. That’s what I believe. And there’s no anxiety when you’re doing it.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:14 So we’ve talked about anxiety. We’ve talked about curiosity. We’ve talked about creativity. And then the last part of your subtitle is and finding your life’s purpose. So that seems like a big last thing to tag on the end there. Not that you haven’t been talking about life purpose for a long, long time. And we are at the, you know, the last several minutes of this conversation. But why did life’s purpose come into the end of your search for how to work with anxiety?
Martha Beck 00:51:45 It’s inevitable. So if you look at the two spirals that I was that I talk about in the book, The anxiety Spiral on the left side of the brain, it makes your life tighter and tinier.
Martha Beck 00:51:55 It makes you avoid more and more things. It pulls you inward and captures you on the right side when you go through a creativity spiral. It starts with curiosity and then it goes to connection, and then it goes to a whole new types of synergies, putting together information in new ways. And then it goes back to curiosity and into more connection. And it creates a spiral of creativity that opens you up instead of shutting you down. So the more you know, I mean, look at what you’re doing now, like this concept of feeding the right wolf and the healing you’ve done in your life. You couldn’t help wanting to reach other people who were also potentially suffering the way you’ve suffered. So it was part of your creativity spiral to start to create this in order to fulfill your own longings, your own desires, your own joy. Frederick McNair, the theologian, said, your mission in life is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. And you can’t help wanting to feed the hungry.
Martha Beck 00:53:05 When there’s this fullness of joy that is generated inside you. And the more you help other people, the more it feeds the joy. So you end up in a cycle similar to the one that has people trapped in their rooms shaking and trembling, only the opposite effect. It’s like a mirror opposite in the brain, and it has exactly the opposite effect. And if you keep pursuing that, if you keep creating on a day to day basis, what can I make with today? Doesn’t it have to be art? It could be a conversation. Could be getting dressed in the morning. Whatever you create, that becomes your right life. As it gets bigger and bigger and bigger it becomes. It morphs into your life’s ultimate purpose. And you don’t have to go looking for it. It shows itself.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:50 Say that question again. What can I make today or with today?
Martha Beck 00:53:54 Yeah. Once you’ve calmed yourself down, if you’re anxious, you’ve been kind and you’ve calmed yourself down. Just look around and think.
Martha Beck 00:54:01 What can I make? Ache instead of oh my God, what are we going to do now? What are we going to make now? And that little shift between do and make is the difference between flight and creativity. So every moment of your day is something you can potentially make. And meditation is so beneficial for that because it shows you you are making things in your mind without moving at all, all the time.
Eric Zimmer 00:54:29 You literally can’t not do it without extensive training. Yeah, and even then, I don’t think you realize that your brain stops. You just relate to it completely differently.
Martha Beck 00:54:39 Yeah. And even so, you’re making a different brain. And the ancients knew that that’s what they were doing, even though they didn’t use that language. Now we’ve been able to observe it with instruments, but they were creating with incredible intensity just sitting there.
Eric Zimmer 00:54:54 Yeah, yeah. Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn’t quite match the person you wanted to be.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:04 Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that’s exactly why I created the Six Saboteurs of Self Control. It’s a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you’re ready to take back control and start making lasting changes. Download your copy now at one Your Feed ebook. Let’s make those shifts happen. Starting today one you feed e-book. I love that idea to where you say that essentially what you’re doing is you’re you aren’t going out and necessarily tracking down your life’s purpose. Nah, you are living your way into it. Yes. As I would say is that book is largely about little by little. You live your way towards what that purpose is.
Martha Beck 00:56:01 And every moment that you free yourself from unnecessary fear and anxiety and come back into the present moment and think, What can I make now? Every moment you do that, your life’s purpose is emerging like a spring that’s been held down by a lot of rock.
Martha Beck 00:56:20 And every little bit you pull away, there’s more flowing outward. It starts to water a whole garden that you can’t even imagine. It’s a function of nature. And in the end, as with all flow, you’re just riding along, going, oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening through my life, through my body, because I’m not really doing it on purpose anymore than I’m making rainbows appear in the sky. It’s worth going for.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:49 Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation where I want to ask you about what a sanity quilt is and who the kind detective is. Oh, yeah. All right. So, listeners, if you’d like access to that post-show conversation as well as ad free episodes, a special episode I do for you each week where I share a teaching, a song I love and a poem I love. You can go to one. You feed, join and become part of the community.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:19 Martha. Thank you as always. It’s it’s a real pleasure to have you.
Martha Beck 00:57:23 It’s an honor. Thank you so much.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:25 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.y.
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