Rowan Mangan:
We’ve got a good episode coming up for the Cahoot today, Marty.

Martha Beck:
I hope so. I like to think so. I spent a few years on it.

Rowan Mangan:
We are talking today about Marty’s new book Beyond Anxiety that I believe you can get at the time that this podcast is being released. So if you suffer from the odd bit of anxiety, we would have no idea what that’s like.

Martha Beck:
Why in the world would you feel anxious these days?

Rowan Mangan:
I can’t think of a single reason, but if you can, and if you do, I hope you’ll stay with us and listen to this episode of Bewildered.

Martha Beck:
Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out like us.

Martha Beck:
Figure everything out. Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So I know I’m trying to figure stuff out, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Yes, and I am too. You know what I’m trying to figure out right now?

Rowan Mangan:
What?

Martha Beck:
Why I can weirdly do things by magic sometimes that I can’t do by logic.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, yes?

Martha Beck:
Yes. Because I was invited, months ago, I was invited to participate in something called a transport—

Rowan Mangan:
Trance porn?

Martha Beck:
A trance porn, yeah. A baggage—I would be honored—but—

Rowan Mangan:
It sounds to me like porn that you would do in a trance. So it would be like—

Martha Beck:
I think we are skirting—

Rowan Mangan:
Really sort of slow porn.

Martha Beck:
I think we’re skirting with some delicate language here.

Rowan Mangan:
I disagree. I don’t think we’ve ever been on more stable ground.

Martha Beck:
I love using the word “skirting.” Anyway.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you?

Martha Beck:
Oh God. It’s just going all these wrong directions. Anyway, I got invited.

Rowan Mangan:
So you went on a walk?

Martha Beck:
I went on a walk. I went on a walk through the woods. No, there weren’t. Well, there were some woods, through the Cotswolds of England on something called a “baggage transport walk,” which I’m now obsessed with. You go to a place like Europe where they have villages that are basically 10 or 15 miles apart and you have lodging in each of these little villages, and every day they lug most of your baggage from village to village, and you walk between the villages with a day pack on your back. And I was going with nine other people, only two of whom I knew, and most of them were really fit, buff young men who didn’t think twice about it. And I’m going, “Uh, all right, I haven’t walked much since my foot surgery or before it.” And as you know, I started training diligently, but I developed all kinds of knee problems.

And I was like, I so nearly wrote to them on a number of occasions and said, “Sorry, I simply can’t do it.” But I had this thing in my head that says, “Ooh, you go!” And when that thing says “You go!”, I go—and it works. And I went and I met the other people and there was one other woman and she was in my age range. And we sort of stood there looking at the long limbs of these young and these young and very appealing men, I must say. And I say that as a lesbian.

Rowan Mangan:
Must have been super appealing, then.

Martha Beck:
They were super appealing. And I took one day off because Adam had a problem and was in the hospital for a day, as you know. But in six days, according to my little step counter on my watch, I walked 75 miles, and it got easier as I went. And all the knee problems and everything were still there. But as I went, they got better, not worse.

Rowan Mangan:
And what do you make of this?

Martha Beck:
I either make that I’m a huge hypochondriac who’s been faking things my whole life and not knowing it—or that something, there are times when I’m able to do things I cannot do. And that honestly feels like the truer answer. And it’s happened over and over and over again. I remember saying, “I cannot get this PhD. No way. I’ve got three little kids. Can’t do it. I’m sick all the time.” I don’t know how it happened. It just did. So my whole takeaway is when logic says no, but the thing in you says, “Oh, go!”—go and see if the magic picks you up. I know that sounds a little earnest, but honest to God, I’m kind of in amazement.

Rowan Mangan:
I had the same thing happen with my PhD.

Martha Beck:
You walked 75 miles?

Rowan Mangan:
No, though, probably if you added it all up. No, I was doing my PhD and I was like, “Listen, I can’t do this.” And all of a sudden this knowing rose up in me that said, “No, you really can’t do this. Drop out.” And I went, “Yes, I will. Thank you, Universe, for this blessed guidance.” And I dropped out, and I am so happy.

Martha Beck:
I heard one of your calls, it was on audio, speakerphone, and I literally just hearing them converse with you almost congealed all my blood into one huge clot. And I became afraid that you would have to keep dealing with them. So when you said, “I don’t feel like I should do this,” I was like, “You stop.”

Rowan Mangan:
I just didn’t want to be the only one in our house who didn’t have “Dr.” as an option when we booked our flights, you know?

Martha Beck:
We could legally change your name to “Doctor.”

Rowan Mangan:
My first name could become “Doctor.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
That’d be cool, oh, that’s brilliant. Solved. See? There’s always an easier way.

Martha Beck:
And all y’all out there who are using that hint? Yeah. Just tell the people at the office there where you change your name that you got it from us, doctor. Yeah. So what are you trying to figure out for reals?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, first of all, I’m very impressed with you.

Martha Beck:
Thank you.

Rowan Mangan:
And your walking. Second of all, who said you’d be able to do it from day one?

Martha Beck:
You.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you. Third of all, here’s what I’m trying to figure out. I’m a middle-aged lesbian.

Martha Beck:
You just figured that out.

Rowan Mangan:
No, I’m still trying. No, it’s not the lesbian I’m trying to figure out, it’s the middle-aged, honestly. But no, so I’m just giving context for the listeners. I dunno, I’ve got a certain look to me.

Martha Beck:
You do.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve got a certain—

Martha Beck:
Gracious badger.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I’ve got the gracious badger, and I’ve been looking for the pants that were kind of the gracious badger pants. And what pants would a gracious badger wear? And anyway, I found these pants and I really liked them.

Martha Beck:
You found badger pants?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in a manner of speaking.

Martha Beck:
Well, show us. Are you wearing the badger pants?

Rowan Mangan:
No, I’m not. And this is a word picture. Okay. So I was pleased with it. I felt like they’re—okay, I’ll just tell you the kind of pants they are. They’re the kind of pants that you wouldn’t expect to see being worn by a lesbian who works behind a desk. It looks—they’re the kind of pants that should have a hammer hanging from them. And actually it’s equipped…They’re equipped for your tools.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And I really like that. And I walk around feeling like, “Yeah, don’t fuck with me ’cause I know how to wield a hammer.” And I do because I hung a painting recently.

Martha Beck:
Oh my God, you’re so butch.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I know, right?

Martha Beck:
Oh, I’m so attracted to you right now.

Rowan Mangan:
You should be. You’d done the painting. So I was walking through life loving myself in my really butch pants. They were styling, they rocked, and they had a bit of a pinstripe. I’m not ashamed to say it, but yeah. So whenever I was wearing them, I was always thinking, yeah, people see that and they think, “She’s tough. She knows how to do stuff. She might’ve hung a painting or two in her time.” And then I went to the hairdresser, and my wonderful hairdresser Bianca has come up before in our conversations because she’s one of the few people I see in my life. And she said to me, “I like your pants.” And I was like, “Oh my God, thank you so much. I love them.” And she said, and this is very painful for me to recount, so please give me a moment (trigger warning) to hold it. As I tell you that what she said was, “Yeah, I really like them. They look like cute little train driver pants.”

Martha Beck:
Oh.

Rowan Mangan:
And, I mean…

Martha Beck:
I’m so sorry.

Rowan Mangan:
I can’t even. And I feel like the words were seared into my brain: “Cute little train driver pants.” And so all that time I thought I was so legit and I was like, I don’t know, the fat controller from Thomas the Tank Engine.

Martha Beck:
Are you sure that you didn’t accidentally get Lila’s pants? Because she often looks like and dresses like a cute little train driver.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, you’re right. She went through a really strong phase when she was a baby, where we were convinced that she spoke in a cockney accent. She didn’t speak at all, but if she did, she would speak in a cockney accent. And mostly what she’d say is, “All right, governor!”

Martha Beck:
“Good morning governor!” Because that’s just how she looked when we’d get her up in the morning. She just had this funny little face and she’d put her arms down by her sides and wiggle around and say, we just couldn’t tell.

Rowan Mangan:
“Hello, governor. Hello, governor. Top of the mornin’ to ya.”

Martha Beck:
We’ve got to teach her to talk like that.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. There’s so much to do.

Martha Beck:
And then not let her talk any other way.

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s take this one offline, Marty Moo.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
If you are enjoying Bewildered, there are a few ways you can express your support for us. You can subscribe to the pod, or follow it, depending on your app. It’s a great way to get us in front of more people. And as always, we love a little rate-and-review action, especially when the reviews are kind and the ratings are high, strangely. And finally, if you really want to go to the next level with Bewildered, check out our online community, wildercommunity.com. We’ll see you there.

Today, dear Cahoot, we are going to talk to you about anxiety.

Martha Beck:
Wait a second. Do they know who the Cahoot is?

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, they do. That’s them. The Cahoot. You are the Cahoot. And the Cahoot is you.

Martha Beck:
We do everything in cahoots.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. We move as a Cahoot.

Martha Beck:
We move as a Cahoot at dawn. And you just said we’re going to talk about what?

Rowan Mangan:
Anxiety. Anxiety. Anxiety.

Martha Beck:
Oh, what a coincidence. I just wrote a book about it.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, no way. No way. Well, you are uniquely qualified to talk to me about it today then.

Martha Beck:
Apparently so. Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. It’s going to go very well. Marty, why am I so anxious, please? Why is everyone so anxious? Why? What is going on? Why is it getting worse? Help me. For the love of God, help me. Over to you.

Martha Beck:
Okay then. First of all, you are anxious because we live in a world of slings and arrows and outrageous misfortunes and then we die.

Rowan Mangan:
Gotcha. Cool.

Martha Beck:
So that, just as a basic baseline, makes everybody anxious all the time. And then through history, things have happened to make people even more anxious. There have been plagues even worse than the pandemic. There have been tyrannies and famines and all kinds of things. Bad things happen. Bad things happen. So a lot of people will just look around them at the environment and say it would be insane not to be anxious right now. But actually we need to look at that because anxiety is very debilitating. It is now the leading mental health problem for people worldwide. Hundreds of millions of people have diagnosed anxiety disorders and that is going to way outnumber the people who aren’t getting diagnosed who have high anxiety.

Rowan Mangan:
Going to be outnumbered by the people who aren’t getting diagnosed, yeah.

Martha Beck:
So like 374 million was the last number I saw, I think. And triple that and you probably have, they’re like a billion people who have clinical-level anxiety disorder.

Rowan Mangan:
Why?

Martha Beck:
Because—it’s not because of the environment. You’d think it would be, but it’s not. And here is why. I put it to you. Most animals are not anxious most of the time. I said this in my speech in Toronto, we always anthropomorphize animals into having our qualities. And there’s a Disney movie called Bears, which features some incredible photography. And they have spun this story of a bear, a mother bear named Sky. And Sky comes out of hibernation with two cubs and it’s the springtime. And she comes out and she eats a bunch of berries and the cubs are out and she lies down on a sunny bank and she sunbathes while the kids—the cubs, that is— suckle away, which we both know causes oxytocin to flow through your bloodstream and makes you feel like you’re on huge amounts of ecstasy or something. And the narrator says, “Things are fine for now, but Sky is worried about her milk supply.” No, no.

Rowan Mangan:
Probably not.

Martha Beck:
You nickel-plated idiot. Sorry. She is not worrying about her damn milk supply because bears can’t think that way. Bears and wildebeest and turtles all live in a world where they should be anxious about things, but they aren’t because they don’t have the imagination to think about anything but what’s actually around them. Humans have anxiety because of one thing: language. We take language. We encounter things that frighten us. There’s a little spurt of fear at the very center of our brain in this incredibly ancient part of the brain that all animals have. And most animals, it just makes them go to a different part of the river or whatever. Go eat a trout, your milk supply will be fine.

Rowan Mangan:
If I had a dollar for every time you said that to me when I was worried about my milk supply.

Martha Beck:
Have you checked the fridge? I’m worried about our milk supply. Anyway, the left hemisphere of our brain takes this little spurt of fear that comes from this ancient, ancient structure that all animals have and pops it into storytelling. And with the upper levels of our brains, we humans say things like, “I am afraid because the temperature is rising steadily and the planet’s climate is under serious deconstruction.” Or “I’m anxious because I got my heart broken once and it could happen again.” Or “I’m anxious because I hear a dog barking downstairs and I’m afraid people can hear him on the podcast.” Can you hear him?

Rowan Mangan:
I can, but not through my headphones.

Martha Beck:
Thank God. Yeah. He’s a very—

Rowan Mangan:
He’s an exception to the rule of “Animals don’t get anxious.”

Martha Beck:
Well, he’s around a lot– actually, it’s interesting, Eckhart Tolle, who is not a specialist in zoology or anything but—

Rowan Mangan:
Well known zoologist, Eckhart Tolle.

Martha Beck:
Being super not anxious, he’s a genius at that. He’s a genius in a lot of ways. And he talks about how dogs have been bred by humans to actually depend on human society and human company. And because of that, they’re extremely sensitive to our emotions. And so when we get anxious, they get anxious. So there are a lot of anxious dogs. I know a very anxious person who adopted this dog who is so sweet and so mellow. And within a week of starting to live with her, he became a very anxious animal. So yeah, there are exceptions, but Sky the grizzly bear is not out there having anxiety attacks.

Rowan Mangan:
But isn’t it true that, so we’ve had, humans have had language for a long time, right? But today our capacity to be anxious is kind of stoked by our circumstances. I mean, I feel like it’s sped up at the very least.

Martha Beck:
It has. And here’s the thing. The thing that’s interesting is your amygdala, that ancient thing, is always responsive to things that look threatening in the environment. But the stories told by the other part of the left hemisphere read back to the amygdala as if they are the environment. So if I say—

Rowan Mangan:
Say that more clearly, yeah.

Martha Beck:
All right, so if I’m sitting here warm and dry and I’m thinking, “I have a terrible fear of water, I could drown someday,” my brain actually starts picturing me being trapped underwater and my lungs filling with water and all the things I’ve read about drowning. And I can actually go into quite a panic. I don’t have this particular fear, but if I start to think about it vividly, what it would be like to drown, I can feel myself getting anxious thinking about that. And the weird thing is my brain can see and hear and feel what I think it would be like to drown. And it’s coming across to my amygdala as a real and present threat as if I’m trapped in a car that’s sinking or something.

Rowan Mangan:
And so by the same token, if I was happily scrolling away, meme to meme, and I came across a video of a flood, I wouldn’t even have to go to the effort. Like the labor that you just went to think up the drowning scenario, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So we’re constantly repeating fears about what might happen based on what may have happened to us in the past, or what happened to somebody else in the past, or what may at some point happen to somebody. And what it does is it forms this feedback loop in the left hemisphere of our brains where the amygdala is feeding fear to the neocortex. And the neocortex is turning the fear into stories and insisting that it needs to control the environment, which reads to the amygdala as an increased need to project fear. So what you get is fear feeding stories that feed fear feeding stories… And it just spins up in this unregulated feedback cycle is the scientific term for it. I call it the “anxiety spiral.” People sometimes call it a thinking loop or something. But we get stuck in that and we are stuck in that as a society. So I’m not a brain scientist, I was trained as a social scientist. And what we’ve created as a population is a massive all-terrain version of the fear cycle, the anxiety spiral that spins in our left hemispheres. So you don’t go through the day without seeing horrible things that are happening to people all over the world or being told to worry.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, and that’s what I was going to get at is that it’s not accidental. It’s not like that you innocently happen to see. It’s that the technological media environment, and I include social media, is engagement driven. And what gets our attention is things that—you know, if something sparks our amygdala, it’s got our attention. And so I feel like it’s not just that we happen to have this situation, it’s that without too early in the podcast jumping into the “capitalism, poor me”—but you can see it, right? I’m, I’m not drawing too—

Martha Beck:
Oh, they’re directly linked. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
And so it’s in the interest of the people making money off you that you stay scared. And given that what you’re describing in the anxiety cycle is something that always revs up. I think that goes some way to explain the billion people in pretty serious strife right now. But tell me just how do you describe, you mentioned the small kernel of fear. How do you differentiate anxiety from fear?

Martha Beck:
Okay, so fear. I heard a story about Londolozi where we like to go, where I go every year and you come too, so we can run seminars there. It’s a game preserve in northern South Africa. And I was just thinking about a story about how a game ranger and his girlfriend were walking after, they were walking at night, which you’re not supposed to do and guests aren’t allowed to do. And they got charged by a Cape buffalo. Cape buffaloes are huge, gigantic muscle cubes with massive horns on them. I mean the things are, and they’re very, very dangerous. They’re not as fancy looking as a lion, but they’re actually more dangerous. So this park ranger grabbed his girlfriend under one arm, like a sack of wheat or something, and with his other arm as the buffalo charged, he planted his hand in the center of the horns as they came together as the buffalo was trying to gore him. And he started screaming curse words at it, “No, you don’t, you sonofa—” He got pushed backward because the thing weighs like 2000 pounds. They got pushed backward right into a building actually. And I think they had somebody come running out and help scare the buffalo away. What he did was very brave, you might say, but it was also probably completely unplanned. Real fear immediately says, “There is danger, here’s what you do. Do it!” That’s why mothers can lift cars off their children and stuff. Maybe that’s how I walked 75 miles. I was terrified. But yeah, so that’s fear. And I always say it’s like being shot out of a cannon. It says, “Do this! Now!” But actually if you talk to people who’ve been in these really high volatility, dangerous situations, they often say that things got very clear for them and very sort of weirdly calm. And yet they were moving at the speed of light, and their bodies knew what to do. That’s real fear.

Anxiety is not like being shot from a cannon. It’s like being haunted. So always, always, always, there’s fear sort of lingering around, and you don’t even really remember why you’re afraid. And then you remember, oh, why am I so afraid? And then you’ll think of a story about something you haven’t done that you should do or something you did do that you shouldn’t have done and maybe things that will happen and you’ll think, “Oh, that’s why I’m afraid.” And then you’ll have a whole inner environment of torment again and you’ll go right into another spiral, another turn of the anxiety spiral. And it’s very unlike actual fear, which all animals have and which keeps us alive. Anxiety actually kills us, mostly of degenerative diseases.

Rowan Mangan:
Am I right in saying that it’s like a weird flaw or feature, unfortunate feature, of our brain that it is reading as fear something that shouldn’t be read as fear?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it’s a thought form. There’s a thought form in your brain: “Be very afraid.” Well, there are all kinds of thought forms in my brain. Look, I can change them around at will. No, no focus on this one thought form and be literally physically afraid. Turn your whole fight-or-flight system on, bake yourself in stress hormones, and cause those degenerative diseases because you’re afraid of things that will probably never happen.

Rowan Mangan:
So I think that for Bewildered listeners, the correlation between how we talk about culture and these sort of anxiety-producing circumstances and outer that we encounter has a lot to do with culture, with how we talk about culture with the cultural forces. So that, I think, is quite clear. What I want to get you to talk about now is so, got it. Anxiety: bad So what can we do about it? We still have to live in this society. Tell me, you’ve written this book that’s called Beyond Anxiety. Is there something beyond anxiety, please?

Martha Beck:
Yes. And I first started thinking about it when I was talking to Jill Bolte Taylor, who famously had a left-hemisphere stroke when she was 37 and she was a neuroanatomist at Harvard. Our time there crisscrossed, go ahead and drink water. But I got to know her and she would talk about the time without her left-hemisphere as being completely nonverbal. She had to relearn language and numbers and all of that, and it was horribly hard. But she was in an emotional and psychological and even spiritual state of awe and compassion and incredible gratitude. And she believes that that is how the right side of the brain functions in the real world without the left side. She rebuilt the left side of her brain knowing that it was now going to teach her stories that would cause her to freak out potentially. But she’d had this experience that there was another way to see the world.

So when I met her, she was living what some might consider a very unusual life. She was living on a boat in a lake somewhere in the Midwest in the middle of a beautiful forest, and she would jetski to shore with her pet dog and they would buy groceries and art supplies because she is constantly interacting with nature and making different kinds of art because it keeps the right side of her brain really, really active. And that balances what’s going on in the left side, which helps—it keeps her from becoming anxious because, let me just backtrack a tiny bit. There are two features of that anxiety thing in your left hemisphere that make it really, really demonic. The first one is you’ve got a built-in bias to see things that are scary to you because it helps you avoid danger. That’s legitimate. But you’re going to notice dangerous things or even potentially dangerous things much faster than you will safe things. I call it “15 puppies and a cobra.” Which one are you going to spend most of your focus on? So that’s the first thing, the negativity bias. And then there’s this weird thing that I do think is just an evolutionary glitch. I don’t understand why it’s there, but if somebody loses the right side of their brain and they’re stuck in just the left hemisphere, they actually don’t believe that anything to their left is real, including their own arms, legs, and the left side of their faces.

Rowan Mangan:
Amazing.

Martha Beck:
It’s called hemispatial neglect. And it happens when people have a right-hemisphere stroke, but it also happens when people get stuck in stories of fear. There’s something about the left hemisphere that makes it believe that it is correct, no matter what, and nothing it doesn’t observe or decide or adjudicate—none of that matters. None of it is real. The left hemisphere is very into physical things and above all, control. So you mentioned capitalism a minute ago. When people got really into the sort of left -hemisphere thinking that dominated the scientific method in Europe during the 17th century and after that, those were the people who went out all over the globe and just imposed their way of living on everybody else and did it in the name of science and the queen or whatever. And it never occurred to them, it seems, to say, “Maybe other people are correct, maybe we aren’t the only correct—this isn’t the only correct way to think.”

Rowan Mangan:
And so we can see the left hemisphere’s kind of dominance in our society going back.

Martha Beck:
Oh, all over the planet. All over the planet. So you asked what to do about it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Can I completely eradicate my own anxiety ever? Is there a pill I can take? I mean obviously, there’s pills.

Martha Beck:
They have so many pills.

Rowan Mangan:
Can you eradicate anxiety forever in yourself?

Martha Beck:
“Eradicate” is a strong word. I’ve met people who I believe are never anxious. And I think that they do it, they create this reality, by continuously operating their entire brains.

So you don’t move out of the left-hemisphere thinking and into right-hemisphere thinking because they’re different. Left-hemisphere thinking is exclusionary. It locks out everything else. Right-hemisphere thinking is inclusionary. It includes everything. So you cannot move into pure right-brain thinking without also accepting the left side of your brain. So it’s a self-acceptance that happens when you get into more of a balanced state. That said, most of us are so left-hemisphere-dominant that some social anthropologists have said our brains are literally different from our ancestors, not because of evolution—there’s not been time for that—but because of continuous socialization into the kinds of thinking that cause anxiety. So here we are and there’s a way out.

Rowan Mangan:
So in the same way that we’re constantly getting the negative cultural messages that keep us in anxiety, we have to, with the same consistency and ritual and regularity, be working on the things that will bring us out as a way of life. And so what does that look like for me, for you, for our listeners?

Martha Beck:
I first encountered it on zooming conversations with Jill from her boat on the lake as she showed me her artwork and is still a scientist. So I was like, “Oh, this is a different way of living.” And it’s more like the way we evolved to live than the way most of us actually experience the world. We live, most of us, in isolation from nature. We live with artificial lighting, we go to sleep and wake up based on the clock rather than the sunlight or fatigue in our bodies. We are actually not living normal lives. And we have to then actively, you said, give it equal time. I think we’re given constant reinforcement to our anxiety from everything around us. So I would say that a near-continuous effort to move more activity into the right sides of our brains is the only way to really conquer anxiety. And I believe our brains can actually, they actually mold themselves to be different when we do that. And the way out of it surprised me.

Rowan Mangan:
Go on. I was just going to say, so give us some examples of moving into the right brain day to day.

Martha Beck:
I thought, “How do you get to calm? How do you get to soothing? How do you get to the opposite of anxiety?” But it turns out that the opposite of anxiety for a human is not calm. It’s creativity. It’s making things. It’s art in the broadest sense of the word. Art and artifice. It’s about building things, it’s about inventing things, it’s about sharing things. It’s about our ability to use everything that’s pouring into the left hemisphere as part of an ongoing effort to experience and communicate more love, essentially, compassion. And so instead of control, the stronger drive there in the right side of the brain, similar structures but a different effect, where the deep part of the amygdala in the left hemisphere goes, “Aaah!” and it sends it off to make scary stories and try to control the world, on the right side, it’s going, “Whoa, what’s that?” But then it gets curious.

So the first step away from anxiety is actually curiosity. And here’s the way, a good way to sort of check that with yourself. Have you ever rubber-necked at an accident? Have you ever driven past something—and I’m asking our listeners too—have you driven past something that looked really horrible and slowed your car down or craned your neck to try to see what the heck happened?

Rowan Mangan:
I have.

Martha Beck:
I have too. And I think, “Oh, I must not,” like, oh, it’s so voyeuristic to try to see if somebody got hurt, what am I doing? Another thing we do is we watch endless televised accounts of murder. Real murders, fake murders. The American Children’s Psychiatric Association says that by the time a child in America reaches adulthood, they’ve seen 16,000 murders because we’re obsessed with things that will help us avoid danger.

Rowan Mangan:
That these antiquated, throwback parts of our brain believe will help keep us safe. Right?

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah. But the throwback parts are going control, control, control.

Rowan Mangan:
They’re going, “There’s murder everywhere. Everywhere I look, there’s true crime.”

Martha Beck:
Be very, very careful. And this is fascinating.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
But when you turn on a true-crime story—and we know our beloved Karen—

Rowan Mangan:
God love her.

Martha Beck:
She’s a very anxious person. So why does she watch murders every day, all day? The whole “It always starts out like any other day.” Never have a day that starts out like every other day because it will end in carnage.

Rowan Mangan:
And never be someone who lights up a room just by walking in because you are—it’s not gonna end well for you.

Martha Beck:
Never be a family that looks picture perfect because one of y’all is going down. And so Karen sits there and watches not just fake murders, but—

Rowan Mangan:
She commits them regularly just to keep herself entertained. She’s just, you don’t want to be our neighbors and our friends. They just come over to drop off some cup of sugar, and she’s at them with a chainsaw.

Martha Beck:
People in America are always dropping off cups of sugar.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, all right. I want us to get back on track. I want to know how to live. We don’t have a huge amount of time left. So I want us to understand what can I do to nurture the non-anxiety part of my brain in my real life?

Martha Beck:
So you can start with the curiosity, even if it’s that kind of prurient, murderer-style curiosity. And you can, one really good psychiatrist, brilliant guy called Judson Brewer, he suggests just saying, “Hmm, hmm.” Look at something intensely and go “hmm” in a room full of people and they will all be like, “What? What? Where? What?” And just keep saying “hmm” and it will drive them nuts with curiosity, but immediately their anxiety will abate and their mood will elevate.

Rowan Mangan:
So cool. I love that. I just love that.

Martha Beck:
Isn’t that cool? He just takes people out, his patients out into the mountains with a friend, doctor friend of his, and then this highly anxious group of Olympic athletes will be standing around, and both doctors at once go, “Hmm” and everything changes.

Rowan Mangan:
It’d be really fun to just cultivate a few of those, like, “Huh? You don’t see that every day.” Or “What the—?”

Martha Beck:
That’s a good one. “What the—?” I think Australian does really well with this. “What the bloody—?”

Rowan Mangan:
What in the blazes?

Martha Beck:
Okay, so let me drill down. Once you can get curious about anything, including your own anxiety, like “Why am I so messed up in the head?” This is why I went and found out about it. I was like, why is this bothering me so much? Once you get to curiosity, then the right hemisphere, instead of telling you a story and wanting to control things, pulls you toward investigation and starts to connect things. So the right side of your brain is actually a slightly different color than the left side.

Rowan Mangan:
No way.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, the left side has lots of little gray cells and they’re all kind of lined up in little short circuits. The right side has these long, long, long nerves that connect things that aren’t usually connected and connect ’em over a further distance. And those nerves, because they’re so long, have to be wrapped in a lot more of this substance called myelin, which is like the wrapping around an electrical cord. It actually is the wrapping around an electrical cord. And so these long white myelin sheaths actually mean that the right side of your brain is paler than your left side. And so when it starts to connect things, when you’re watching, if you’re watching a really good event series show and there is a mystery, or you’re reading a really good mystery book and there’s murder and there are things to pull you in with anxiety, but then it becomes curiosity. And the detective is always so obsessed with the case that he cannot stand to be pulled off it, even though it’s just sort of random. Anyway, he’s so curious, he owns that thing. And he starts to investigate and he begins to connect clues. And when that starts to happen, he’s making a theory. And when we have to assemble things in order to make them, whether it’s intellectual, physical, social, anything, when we start to connect and we start to join things together that we haven’t joined together in our heads before, we go all the way into a kind of transport into the place that some psychologists, Csikszentmihalyi, labeled flow. It’s a place where we’re pushing the limits of our knowledge out of a basic curiosity and then a love for what we can create when we connect unusual things. And that is the origin of human art. And everywhere there has ever been a human population, no matter how oppressed they were, no matter how impoverished they were, they’re making art like there’s no going home.

Rowan Mangan:
So what happens between “Why am I so messed up in the head?” and the masterpiece oil painting?

Martha Beck:
It’s where you say, for example, “I’m so messed up in the head and I think it’s because of the chaos around me.” But I really, I see someone else over there who also looks very stressed and suddenly I’m curious about why that person is stressed. And for just a moment, I get out of my control strategy obsession that only I exist. And I think if I can somehow communicate to that other person how I’m feeling, I might feel less alone. And you start to think of ways to represent your inner state. And that could be, it can be in something like a conversation. Everything we do is creative: making a meal, talking to a friend.

Rowan Mangan:
Well not everything we do, though, because some things are adding up numbers. That’s what their left hemisphere is there for, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, yeah, that’s true. We do a lot. I ean, making a spreadsheet that you don’t really want to make is not so much a right-hemisphere activity. But knowing what it means is a right-hemisphere activity. All the stuff I quoted Jeff Bezos in my book because he often says, and he wrote in his letter to stockholders, “I tell every Amazon employee to wake up terrified every morning and stay scared all day because that leads to productivity.” And what is productivity? It is more wealth, more material wealth for a few people at the top of the pyramid. That’s productivity. That’s the left hemisphere’s perspective, and that’s what it creates. But when the right hemisphere starts to create, it builds things that cause, at the outside of it, you start to lose language because the left side of the brain handles language. So as you start to create something, even if it’s something social or something like engineering, as you get into the part where you’re truly generating something new, language falls away.

The idea of time and the feeling of time passing falls away. All anxiety falls away. And we get wrapped up in flow. And our brains, instead of producing a huge amount of adrenaline and cortisol and everything are now producing dopamine and serotonin. And without even really knowing it, we begin to create things that connect other people to our experiences. And it starts to become another cycle. But it’s a cycle that begins with curiosity, goes into creativity, and then ends with connection, which then feeds back into more curiosity about more things, more connection. It’s the thing that sends people out traveling to learn about each other or, you know.

Rowan Mangan:
I love that. The idea that I, curious of you, right? Here, I, curious of you, so I create a thing to represent of me. Like “Here is what it’s like to be me. Are you too curious of me?”

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Right? And then we are making these things that are there to say, “This is what it’s like to be a me.” And I’ve never thought that all art is that, but of course it is. And I love it. And you know what I always think about—I’ve still got this dog barking downstairs. And I always think of two dogs on each side of a fence, like in suburban backyards, and one’s going, “I’m a dog, a dog, a dog!” And the other one’s like, “I too am a dog! We’re both dogs! Yeah!” And maybe that’s, like, I love it. That’s how we get out of anxiety is we just create something in three dimensions or two dimensions, which says, “I’m a dog!” on some level, like in a more complex way than that. Right? And I just want to say on the connection thing, given that to live is to be curious about others is to forge connection. And to represent ourselves to each other as connection and in the interest of connection—for the Cahoot, that is our space to do that together is called Wilder Community. And you can find it at wildercommunity.com. We also have weekly connection points, like live connections. We have an Arty Friday Hang where we come together and make art together and connect in our right hemispheres and for our right hemispheres. And it’s a really good anxiety diminisher.

Martha Beck:
Yes, it is. And we did it because we wanted, you cannot have human interaction without creating culture. And we wanted some place where people could be counter-cultural in a way that would take them out of anxiety and into connection, out of fear and into love. And it’s just a little fledgling of a thing, but oh my God, the people are amazing.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s truly wonderful.

Martha Beck:
It works. It does. It’s like, I remember when I thought, “I think this will work.” And then I decided I was going to push my brain to only use right hemisphere. By the way, the right hemisphere uses language for three things: poems, songs, and jokes. Otherwise it’s left hemisphere, working with words. But I thought, I’m going to just really see if it works. I’m going to push my brain that hard to the right. I’m going to draw, I’m going to write, I’m going to tell jokes. I’m going to do things that are all about self-expression and connection with other people and empathy. And my anxiety dropped through the floor, even as things got worse and worse and worse in the world around us, which they really have. They really have.

Rowan Mangan:
It works, and we can do it and we can do it together. And Martha’s book is called Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose. In our next podcast, we might come back to where finding your life’s purpose comes into all of this.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, there’s a lot more to say about that. The one thing I want to leave people with is, yes, there are a lot of problems that could legitimately be seen as fear-making, but the way to encounter a problem, a real problem effectively, is to go at it with creativity. Create your way to a solution. Fear won’t help you do that. Anxiety won’t help you do that. Curiosity, connection, love, and self-expression will help us solve the problems that make us so anxious everywhere.

Rowan Mangan:
Amazing. Thanks, Marty. And when as we do that together, we will be sure to….

Martha Beck:
Stay wild!

Rowan Mangan:
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word ‘WILD’ to 570-873-0144.

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For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.