Show Notes
Most of us treat anxiety as a malfunction to be fixed or medicated away, and the neuroscience points somewhere stranger. There is a narrow band, a razor's edge, where the same emotion stops running you and starts fueling you.
Dr. Wendy Suzuki is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU and the incoming Dean of its College of Arts and Science, a leading authority on neuroplasticity, and the author of Good Anxiety and Healthy Brain, Happy Life. Her TED Talk on exercise and the brain has been viewed more than 55 million times. What makes this one land is that she doesn't teach anxiety from the outside. She has lived with social anxiety since she was a kid at birthday parties, still feels it walking into a cocktail party, and built her science around it.
In this Best Of conversation, you'll explore: The half of your nervous system nobody talks about, and the one lever you can consciously pull to switch it on What to do the morning after a 3 a.m. spiral that converts the worry into forward motion, a practice she picked up from a stranger at a birthday party Why ten minutes of walking lowers anxiety, and the timing detail almost everyone gets wrong How much of your own anxiety you can predict before it arrives, and what becomes possible once you can The form of anxiety you're most embarrassed by, and the thing it has been quietly training you to do for other people
If you've spent years trying to get rid of the feeling, this is an invitation to stop fighting it and start setting the volume.
You can find Dr. Wendy at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript
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