A Conversation with Dr. Martha Beck on Anxiety, Creativity & Finding Life’s Purpose.

In this interview, I speak to Dr. Martha Beck, PhD, bestselling author, coach, and speaker. She has spent a lifetime offering powerful, practical, and entertaining teachings that help people improve every aspect of their lives. Martha holds three Harvard degrees in social science, and Oprah Winfrey has called her “one of the smartest women I know.” We discuss anxiety- and the importance of curiosity, creativity & finding our purpose in life.

Martha’s published works include several self-help books and memoirs, including New York Times and international bestsellers Finding Your Own North Star, The Joy Diet, and Expecting Adam. She has also published over 150 magazine articles, including almost two decades of monthly columns for O, The Oprah Magazine. Martha is a passionate and engaging speaker, known for her characteristic blending of science, spirituality, and humour. As “the best-known life coach in America” (NPR, USA Today), she has spoken to audiences around the world on stage and on The Oprah Show, Good Morning America, and many other television programs.

International nature-based retreats are also a big part of Martha’s work. Seminar participants travel from all over the world to attend her annual retreats in South Africa and Costa Rica. The rest of the time she lives in the Pennsylvania woods with her family and other assorted creatures. Her passions include nature, pajamas, and YouTube videos of unlikely animal companions. Martha’s recent book, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self, was an instant New York Times Best Seller and Oprah’s Book Club selection. Her forthcoming non-fiction book, Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose, comes out early 2025.

Q: Why are we all so anxious now?

[Martha Beck]: There are a number of contributing factors. One is that we have such a rapid flow of information, and our brains tend to select the negative, scary things. People are monetising our attention: the more they can capture it, the more money they make. The easiest way to get someone’s attention is to scare them, so there’s a deliberate push in our culture, from many sources, to make us more anxious.

Then there’s the way our brains work. A part of the left hemisphere can take a tiny pulse of anxiety and spin a story around it, making it seem even more frightening. It’s odd, because other animals—when attacked by a bear, for instance—go into fight-or-flight, and once the bear leaves, they return to calm. We, however, stay on high alert. We tell ourselves stories about bears, and the more primitive parts of our brain don’t understand that a story about a bear is not the same as a real bear. We end up reacting as if we’re constantly surrounded by danger, stuck in those stories.

As a result, we have an anxiogenic culture and anxiogenic brains—and between the two, anxiety levels have soared all over the world.

[Vikas: …it seems technology is a major factor?]

[Martha Beck]: It is, but it’s also a symptom of the same disease. The part of the brain that gets anxious—acknowledging I’m generalizing here, since I’m not a neurologist—is often associated with the left hemisphere, where we tell ourselves anxious stories that keep us scared. We just happen to live in the most left-hemisphere-dominated culture in history.

Two or three hundred years ago, you and I would have woken to the sounds of water, wind, birds, other people’s voices, and horses passing by. We wouldn’t have been surrounded by traffic noise, blaring sirens, and artificial lights. We would have risen and gone to bed with the sun, integrated into nature. All of this would have encouraged the whole brain to remain active and balanced.

Today, however, we live in a culture dominated by left-hemisphere creations—artificial things, machines. Iain McGilchrist, my favourite authority on this, says we behave like an entire culture suffering from a severe right-hemisphere brain injury or stroke. It’s almost as if our culture has pulled us into the left hemisphere, where anxiety lives, and refuses to let us return.

Q: What is the difference therefore between fear and anxiety?

[Martha Beck]: Fear is like being shot out of a cannon. Imagine a car has fallen on someone I love—I get this clear, calm, intense bolt of energy. In that heightened state, I could lift the car off them (as has happened before in rare cases). Of course, I’d have to love them very much! That’s fear.

Anxiety, on the other hand, is like being haunted. You never actually see what’s scaring you—it’s just a story in your head that never goes away. It’s relentless, never ending, because there’s nothing real there. Yet your brain believes you’re in danger all the time. Living in that constant state of heightened adrenaline and cortisol—the fight-or-flight hormones—essentially “cooks” your organs. It leads to all kinds of degenerative diseases and, naturally, massive anxiety.

Q: What is the link between purpose and anxiety?

[Martha Beck]: Having a purpose in life—there’s a theologian named Frederick Buechner who said your mission in life is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. When we’re being useful and doing what we love, there’s a sense of bliss. It’s that moment where you say, “This is why I’m alive. This is reason enough to be alive, right here.” To me, that’s a sense of purpose.

I’ve been talking about the part of the brain that generates anxiety, mostly in the left hemisphere. Meanwhile, the right hemisphere does things like connecting different elements into a whole. It brings together ideas, helps us feel connected to other people, fosters compassion, and creates the meaning and context where the left hemisphere can really shine. McGilchrist says the left hemisphere is like a wonderful servant but a terrible master.

The strange thing is that the left hemisphere can shut off awareness of information coming from the right side, but the right hemisphere never shuts anything off. It includes the left side; it includes everything. That sense of inclusion—of everything—is what we need to find a sense of purpose in our lives.

Q: Do you think we’ve lost purpose with our society being so focussed on domain expertise?

[Martha Beck]: Not only are we losing it, we’re having it beaten out of us. In the 1960s, NASA commissioned a study to identify creative geniuses for hiring, and found that 2% of the adults they tested fit the bill. A few years later, someone thought to give the same test to four- and five-year-olds—and 98% of them qualified as creative geniuses. The researchers blamed the school system.

Think about how you and I were educated. I don’t know how it was for you, but for me, we were lined up in rows with kids the same age and size, forced to learn piles of information that had nothing to do with our own well-being. If we got things wrong, we were shamed; if we got them right, we were rewarded. But humans learn best outdoors, using all five senses, moving and creating, solving problems that directly affect our own well-being. You couldn’t design a situation more hostile to human learning than a typical school. We learn not to be creative, because everything is about turning us into good factory workers. That’s why these systems were created: to make us into factory workers who produce more stuff, more money, more stuff, more money. And the left hemisphere is obsessed with stuff and money.

Q: How can we access our creativity meaningfully?

[Martha Beck]: So, if you’re like most of us, and you were pushed into a factory-like way of operating from early childhood, you were also exposed to other left-hemisphere products: shame, blame, judgment, and an obsession with money. Can you sell it? Can you do it professionally? Where are you going to earn your living? “That’s stupid. Why are you making birds? That’s ridiculous.” Unless someone says, “Oh, you could sell that,” then suddenly it’s respectable.

But think about it: as far back as we know, humans have spent a lot of energy making what I call “pointless, precious things.” Archaeologists recently uncovered a life-size sculpture of a bison, 14,000 years old, in a cave in France. That must have taken real effort by people likely living a Palaeolithic lifestyle. And I just heard about a tomb found in Peru beneath a garbage dump—what did they discover in it? Jewellery.

My partner makes beaded bracelets, and we’ve talked about how if we went back in time to people hunting woolly mammoths, what would they do in their spare time? They’d make beaded bracelets. Everyone would be wearing them. Go find an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon—they’re all wearing bracelets. No one has ever needed a bracelet. I’m not talking about high art; I’m talking about how we, as a species, create pointless, precious things. That’s part of why we’ve been so dominant on this planet. That should be at the centre of our lives, not pushed to the margins like our culture does now.

During lockdown, I decided to experiment by spending a month doing only right-hemisphere activities. I’d get up in the morning, start drawing and painting, telling myself I’d move on to “important” tasks later. But I never moved on. I just drew and painted. Most of the paintings were hideous, and I’d think, “Oh, that’s not very good”—that’s the left hemisphere judging. Then I’d remind myself: it’s not about the painting, it’s about painting. I’m here not to produce something (left hemisphere), but to be creative (right hemisphere). I’m here to move out of anxiety and into the bliss of creativity—and it is blissful once you’re in it.

So just recognize that you’ve been conditioned to hate yourself and your creativity for the sake of a culture that does not care about you. Start doing things not for the end product, but for the impact on your heart, your brain, your life, and your health. There’s a ton of research showing that any creative activity is so much better for our health. That’s how I think we should approach it. And remember, you never have to show anyone until you feel good about it.

Q: Can you talk us through the concept of a sanity quilt?

[Martha Beck]: Okay, first let me define “sanity quilt,” because nobody knows what it means—I made it up. Quilters sometimes create something called a crazy quilt when they have a bunch of scraps that won’t form a structured pattern. They start with a beautiful piece of fabric, then sew another beautiful piece to it randomly, making a kind of spiral shape. They keep picking beautiful pieces and sewing them together until the quilt is large enough to trim and finish. It doesn’t have a pattern, it’s just built on beauty. But I don’t think that’s crazy at all.

I think what’s crazy is living by rigid patterns—pushing ourselves to the brink. Look at Jeff Bezos telling his 1.5 million employees to “wake up every morning terrified and stay terrified all day.” They’re not getting rich; they’re barely scraping by. Yet he wants them living in terror so he can get even richer. He’s one of the richest men in the world. Now that’s crazy. That’s a crazy society and a crazy life.

A sanity quilt is the opposite: you take something you love, put it in the centre, and start stitching other things you love onto it. Do we have time for this? Of course not. We’re slammed with work and family obligations. The culture is hostile to people raising children or caring for the elderly or sick. We’re always working, terrified, so the rich get richer. That’s insane.

But look at other cultures. In graduate school, I taught a class on Caribbean societies. Some of these islands were once among the most brutal slave colonies in history—absolute nightmares. And yet reggae came out of Jamaica. In the American South, under slavery, came joyful music, art, quilting—everything. These people had nothing. They didn’t even own their own time, according to the ruling powers. Yet they made art, I think, to survive psychologically.

I saw an interview with an Indigenous Australian painter living in the bush who creates amazing works. People asked, “Don’t you struggle to survive?” He said, “Not really.” The myth of hunter-gatherers always being on the edge of starvation isn’t accurate. They worked about four hours a day. When asked what inspired him to paint, he basically said, “Do you know how boring life would be out here if I didn’t paint?”

That’s the thing: we have minds born to create, to build, to make—anything. Make a house out of sticks, mud pies, throw a party for your friends. Just make stuff. That’s what we evolved to do, and our health improves dramatically when we do it. There’s your left-hemisphere advantage.

Q: How can leaders apply these tools?

[Martha Beck]: Some of the most successful businesses in the world give their employees one day a week just to be brilliant, crazy, and make things. I’ll have to check on that—it might have been another company. Many high-tech firms embrace play, because they know it fosters creativity, and they trust that.

One effect of anxiety is that it makes us extremely controlling. Leaders who feel anxious try to dictate every moment of their employees’ lives—their schedules, their tasks—everything. That’s terrible for business. Henry Ford tried that in his factories, and do you know what the turnover rate was? Ninety percent per month! People couldn’t stand having every second controlled.

A great leader is one who finds a way out of anxiety and can relax enough to watch and trust their people. When you provide a warm, accepting environment that encourages creativity, you see productivity and morale rise, just as Apple has experienced. They’re incredibly successful, in part because their leaders let employees create, even if they can’t monetize every idea. It’s that willingness to let people be who they are—whether or not it benefits the company—that sets them free to work together and actually enjoy each other’s company as they create.

[Vikas: And for leaders, what about the anxiety that comes with the weight of expectations?]

[Martha Beck]: After a month of experimenting with purely right-hemisphere activities, I felt incredibly joyful. I’d jump out of bed after very little sleep, excited just to create—so happy to be alive. I’ve been on antidepressants before, but for me, this was better, more powerful than any drug, simply because I had something creative to look forward to each day.

Then something surprising happened: my productivity soared, but I stopped caring about it. It was the strangest thing. People would ask, “How’s your book going to do?” and for the first time in my life, I’d say, “I don’t care.” Don’t get me wrong—I still want things to go well, I’m still a perfectionist. But I no longer feel attached to the outcome. There’s a concept in Asia called non-attachment, and Asian philosophers have long histories of helping people achieve it. I think it’s a shift away from the left hemisphere of the brain and into the right, into the whole brain.

Practices like meditation, and the creative exercises I tried—many of which I put in this book—help remove the pressure of judgment. Sure, judgment is still there; you know it exists, and you hope you have enough money and so on. But now, I’m so busy enjoying life that I’m not clinging to anything. It’s like watching an Olympic ice skater who just relaxes and loves what they’re doing, instead of obsessing over the medal. That kind of joy and fluidity can enhance performance beyond belief. If you trust that, you realize the method works and will produce plenty. And yet, respectfully, I simply do not care.

Q: What is the relationship between anxiety and the need for us to get into nature?

[Martha Beck]: Yeah, I mean one way is to scare you into it: your health declines the more you’re cut off from natural environments. When you go out among the trees, the cancer-killing cells in your body triple and stay that way for a few weeks. All indicators of health improve the moment you’re in a natural environment. So, sure, do it to stay healthy.

But what if you’re in a city? Studies show that even having a single plant can help. After heart surgery, some patients were given a plant, and others were given a teddy bear. The patients with plants recovered faster, had fewer complications, fewer complaints, and less depression. They’ve even found that putting people in a room with a picture of a tree helps them recover faster than if they look at an abstract painting. The abstract art actually made them recover more slowly.

My favourite thing is to use my online algorithm as a nature silo. I only like and share pictures of animals. Yesterday, I saw a goose found shivering in the snow. When it was rescued, they discovered it had curled itself around a freezing puppy. They saved them both. I saw a dolphin bring a turtle with its head stuck in plastic up to a boat, and people freed the turtle. The dolphin then brought them a sponge. Animals are amazing. And I love landscape photography too. I avoid other media, so my algorithm stays focused on nature. When I’m rushed and miserable, I spend 10-12 minutes looking at this stuff. It really helps.