Dr. Russell Kennedy—known to many as The Anxiety MD—is a physician, neuroscientist, and leading voice on the emotional and physiological roots of anxiety. Drawing on his own lived experience with childhood trauma and years of clinical practice, Kennedy has developed a unique mind–body approach to healing, blending neuroscience, developmental psychology, and somatic therapy. A former stand-up comedian turned award-winning author of Anxiety Rx, he challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that anxiety is not merely a disorder of thought, but a deeply embodied state of alarm—a message from our younger selves asking to be seen, heard, and healed. Through his writing, teaching, and coaching, Kennedy has become one of the most compelling figures in modern mental health, advocating for connection, self-compassion, and the courage to face our inner fires.
Q: What is anxiety?
[Dr. Russell Kennedy]: It’s really a hard thing to define. Because what I’ve found is that anxiety isn’t one thing, it’s actually two things. It’s the warnings, what ifs, worst case scenarios of your mind. And it’s also this state of protective alarm that’s stuck in your body, a state of protective alarm that has probably been there in you since you were a child. Most people with chronic anxiety are highly sensitive people, about 15-20% of the population. And they may have this interruption in their serotonin gene that doesn’t allow them to feel comfortable, to feel safe. As a result, I think what we do as highly sensitive people is go up into our heads to try and make sense of what’s going on around us. The other thing about going up into your head is that you avoid this alarm sensation, this feeling of protection that’s probably sitting in your body. For me, it’s in my solar plexus. Anxiety isn’t one thing, it’s two. It’s the anxieties of the mind, but it’s also this alarm state, this state of constant protective hyper vigilant alarm, physiological activity in the body. And each of them energises the other. We can talk about the alarm anxiety cycle later, but that’s basically what happens: the alarm in your body, typically from old unresolved wounds—although it can be from inherited family trauma and that kind of thing too—activates the worries of your mind, and the worries of your mind activate this alarm in your body. We get caught in this alarm anxiety cycle and never realise that anxiety is actually two things. The bigger part of the anxiety is actually this feeling in our body. So we have to heal the feeling in our body first, and then the thoughts of the mind start to fade away.
Q: What about the connection between mind, body & self?
[Dr. Russell Kennedy]: Yeah. I mean ultimately I think anxiety is a separation within yourself. My mentor in developmental psychology—because 80% of your brain develops before the age of 5—so Gordon Neufeld has been a mentor of mine, showing me how children develop if they get the right substrates and if they get the wrong substrates. Mind, body, and spirit have to come together, and I think when you have early trauma that gets disrupted, your mind gets separated from your body. Your mind becomes this sort of distracted, dissociated place to go when this alarm in your body—if your parents are screaming at each other or your dad’s an alcoholic—there’s only so much a child can take. Basically, that goes into their conscious mind, it’s too much for their conscious mind, so it gets pushed into the unconscious. And as the body is a representation of the unconscious mind, the body keeps the score. So the trauma of, say, an abusive parent initially goes into your conscious mind, then it gets dropped and suppressed or repressed or whatever Freudian term you want to use, into the unconscious mind. And as the body’s a representation of the unconscious mind, it gets offloaded into the body. So we feel it as children. We feel this alarm in our body, but we don’t want to feel it, so we go up in our heads and start creating all these warnings, what ifs, worst case scenarios, because that acts as a temporary salve from this alarm. But the problem is the alarm just keeps growing, it’s like a fire. And this is what I tell people: if you see a fire, you’re going to want to go away from it rather than going towards it. Right? So my little analogy is you get a fire extinguisher—this is you when you’re going to try and heal—you go towards the fire. Initially, when you go towards the fire of your old unresolved wounds, it gets hot. It gets more heated, and you don’t want to do that. Then you start spraying with the fire extinguisher, which initially makes you feel like you’re doing something, but the flames typically get a little bit higher as soon as you aggravate them, so it gets even more intense. We have this negative loop that whenever we get close to this thing we need to heal, the anxiety comes up to try to pull us away as it did when we were a child, and that’s why anxiety is so hard to heal. Because as soon as you get close to it, you want to pull away. It winds up being this sort of never-ending Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill, because when you get close to it you can’t tolerate it. So different IFS, somatic therapies—these allow you to get close to it with a safe person so that you can actually be experiencing that safety that you should have got back when you were a child.
Q: How can we diffuse our anxiety?
[Dr. Russell Kennedy]: I think the thing that I tell everybody, like newbies, people that are just learning how to deal with their anxiety, is learn how to do a few rounds of the physiological side. It’s basically 2 or 3 quick sniffs in, fill up your lungs as much as you can, spread your shoulders out with your breath, and slowly breathe out through your teeth, making kind of a hissing sound. And when you make that hissing sound, imagine an overinflated tyre just decompressing. I get this: when I used to do blood pressure, when people had high blood pressure, I would get them to do a few rounds of this first. We would do a pressure first and it was like 160/90, then they would do 3 or 4 rounds of this and some of it’s like 130/90. It’s amazing. In some people, with white coat syndrome, where their sympathetic nervous system is so high that when they get their blood pressure taken and they know they have high blood pressure, their blood pressure of course goes up. So I would get them to do these physiological sigh exercises. Two quick sniffs in, then slow breathe out. I can’t do too many rounds of it because if I do, I’ll start to zone out. You know?
The next thing is this mantra I call ‘sensation without explanation’. It’s a little more dry. I invented it for myself, which is feel the sensation of the alarm in your system. Get out of your head, get into your body. Because that’s where the root cause of it is. That’s where the fire is. Once we do that and start seeing, hey, I actually can approach the fire, I can actually gain some confidence in approaching the fire, then the fire loses a lot of its magic. It’s like The Wizard of Oz: you pull the curtain on the magician holding all the ropes and levers, and then just try and separate the feeling. Stay with the sensation even if it’s uncomfortable—actually, especially if it’s uncomfortable—stay with the sensation. Put your hand over it, breathe into it, stay with it. And I know this sounds kind of woo, but it’s the only thing that really worked for me: going into the root cause. Because a lot of people will say, oh, just think pleasant thoughts, go to your happy place. The thing about anxiety is, it’s rooted in your body. It’s not rooted in your mind. So you’re not going to be able to fix it with your mind. Anxiety is a feeling problem, and basically, you need to speak to that feeling problem with a feeling solution. You can’t fix a feeling problem with a thinking solution, which is, I think, why most traditional therapies fail. They try and talk you out of a feeling, which never works.
[Vikas: it seems often that it’s when you’re on your own that anxiety can be the worst, is this the same way you would diffuse it then?]
[Dr. Russell Kennedy]: In the short term, yeah. So in the longer term, there’s something in our brains called the default mode network. The default mode network was figured out around 2000—they would put people in functional MRI machines and give them issues to solve like a math problem or vocabulary, like they would have to define a word. As soon as they got into the task positive network, as soon as they started getting into this place where, okay, I have to use my brain in a forward nature, they would go into this sort of framework where they would solve the problem. But when the problem disappeared off the screen, they noticed that all these people were going to a very repeatable kind of sense of brain activity that they labelled the default mode network. Now the default mode network—names don’t bother me, but I’m a bit of a nerd this way so I put it up—precuneus and angular gyrus, medial prefrontal cortex, and the posterior cingulate cortex, these are the parts of the default mode network. The posterior cingulate cortex, which we can kind of say is involved in self-referential thinking—what we think about ourselves—is in the posterior cingulate cortex.
Now, if you had a parent who told you, that you weren’t good enough, you were never going to get there, who neglected you, or you had tremendous loss when you were a child, we develop this narrative as children that we are a certain thing. You are not attractive, you are not intelligent, you can’t do this. And that sticks in the posterior cingulate cortex. I’m getting to this. That gets reflected when our minds aren’t doing anything. So when you’re on a train and your mind’s kind of daydreaming—it’s the daydreaming state of the brain that we default into, this groove that we go into over and over. Now, if we go into this groove hundreds of times, maybe thousands of times a day—you’re not good enough, you can’t do this, you won’t survive—how do you think your brain’s going to develop?
So what we do is we need to take you out of the default mode network, because that’s your natural groove and also why anxiety is so hard to treat—because we go into this natural negative protective self-referential thought automatically, and we do this thousands of times a day. This is why anxiety becomes very difficult to treat. When we start teaching ourselves to move into the task positive network, one of the things we do is go on the physiological side. Let’s go, okay, I’m going to do some breathing stuff right now. You’ve taken yourself out of that daydreaming site, you’re goal-directed into this physiological side, and you’re also goal-directed into feeling something in your body. So you’ve taken yourself out of that default state of anxiety that so many of us get stuck in, including me.
I learned the more I can use the task positive network and direct myself into something specific, the more I move out of this. And one of the best things to direct yourself into is a breathing technique or a self-touch. Or I have lots of people running around with—this might be a bit woo—but essential oils that they like. Lavender. The thing about it is it goes into the rhinencephalon, which is the most primitive part of our brain, and it has direct connection to the thalamus. Initially, when you smell something pleasant or calming, the thalamus, which is like the big switchboard of the brain, says you’re okay. And if that says you’re okay, immediately your anxiety is going to drop and then you’re going to start seeing things more accurately.
Q: Do you think we can build real resilience to anxiety?
[Dr. Russell Kennedy]: The thing about anxiety is a lot of it is self-created. So if a lot of it is self-created, then we can give ourselves the template and the substrate to move away from it. We’re never going to have an anxiety-free life—in fact, we’re probably highly sensitive people to start with—so we’re always going to have this element of anxiety. For me, I still get anxious. It just doesn’t bother me anymore. I don’t give it credibility. I don’t allow my thoughts to start taking over. I go into my body. I focus on my body. I pull myself out of the default mode network by focusing on my body. And if you do that many, many, many times, you start creating this neural pathway where, oh, I’m starting to go into my thoughts, I’m starting to ruminate, I’m going to go into my body and breathe.
And this sounds kind of woo, I agree. But it’s the only thing that’s really made a difference for me. So the thing about anxiety for me is that I feel like I’m in control of the anxiety as opposed to the anxiety controlling me. The worst part of anxiety for me was always I never knew when it was going to let me go. I never knew it was going to end. This is my thing: sometimes I would have patients come in with panic attacks, and I would give them a couple of tablets of benzodiazepine—not enough to be able to get addicted to it—but they would have their panic attack, take their Xanax or lorazepam or whatever it was, it would heal it, it would resolve their panic, and all they had to do at that point was have a tablet on them, in their wallet, in their purse or whatever, and they knew that if they needed it, it was there. The fact that they knew it could end allowed them just to stay with it and move through it.
So it’s really interesting to see how much power we actually have over this anxiety, because this anxiety began when we were children. I do think we go into this regressive, childlike state when we’re anxious, and we’re not a 38-year-old man anymore—we’re now a 6-year-old who’s watching their father go psychotic, in my case. Right? So we regress, but we don’t realise that we’ve regressed into this. All anxiety is typically an age regression. All bad anxiety is almost always an age regression. So it’s bringing yourself—and how you heal, which was your first question—is we connect to that child again.
And this sounds kind of woo, but I have this acronym called SHOULD. You have to see that child, hear that child, open to that child, understand that child, love and defend that child. Because you probably didn’t get that when you were younger. This is kind of the woo part of it—this is why I like to talk about neuroscience, the default mode network, and the basal ganglion and all this kind of stuff. But there is also this spiritual component to connecting to that child and showing that child they are safe. We do that through the language of feeling. And that’s the only real way of healing. You can’t heal a thinking problem, a problem of overthinking, with more thinking. It doesn’t work.
Q: How do we know which trauma to work with to resolve our anxiety?
[Dr. Russell Kennedy]: It’s the feeling. It’s the feeling in your body. In my MBRX program, I have a specific meditation that helps people find the trauma in their body. For me, it’s in my solar plexus—it’s hot, it’s sharp, it’s crystal, and it’s purple. It pushes up into my spine, it pushes into my heart. This is where I hold this trauma. If you look at the brain again, there’s a part of the brain called the insular cortex. The insular cortex is very in tune with the body. So if the body is alarmed, the insular cortex gets alarmed and has a switch into the default mode. It says, hey, we’re in danger, let’s go to this default mode from when we were children. I believe your body feels the exact same way now as it did back at the original time you were going through the trauma.
But to answer your question, you don’t need to know what the trauma was—you just need to know the feeling of it in your body. That feeling becomes the conduit, the direct conduit. You can emotionally time travel with that feeling to go back and see, hear, open to, love, and defend that child. And as woo as that sounds, that’s been the best thing that has allowed me to create the sense of peace in my own life. Because anxiety’s all separation. All anxiety is separation anxiety, right? As you connect your adult self with your child self, your mind, body, and spirit come back together—at least as best we can. Sometimes traumas are so great that it’s very difficult to pull ourselves back together in a total sense. But even a small inroad to that, even developing confidence that you can connect to yourself—you can, as much as this thing makes me crawl a little bit, “love yourself,” because I still have an issue with that.
But for a lot of people, there is only fear and love. Anxiety is fear. If you have love, you have no anxiety. If you have fear, you have no love. Each of them is mutually exclusive. It’s learning how to live in that place where you might not love yourself initially, because there’s a big block in there—which is why you became anxious in the first place. A lot of anxiety is because you block love for yourself. If you can connect with that part of yourself and say, hey, I know you’re not too crazy about adult me, because adult me has left child you for so long—because you hold all of my pain—now I can make that rapprochement. I can make that connection again. It’s slow. It’s going towards the fire. Initially, that child is going to light up, and it’s going to be uncomfortable to go back and get into that fire and get into that connection with that child.
But that’s the only thing that’s allowed me to heal from anxiety and to actually, in a very perverse way, enjoy anxiety now. I enjoy the sense of alarm, because really that sense of alarm is the child in me saying, hey, I need some attention. That’s really what it’s from. As woo as that gets, I think that’s why people don’t heal from anxiety. They are so opposed to going back to visit that child.
Q: How do we get confident in ourselves, and why is that important to help with anxiety?
[Dr. Russell Kennedy]: When you grow up with love and connection from parents, and it doesn’t have to be a huge amount, but it has to be a significant amount to be able to develop this nervous system that’s grounded in connection. But a lot of us didn’t get that because our parents weren’t grounded in connection. So our nervous system becomes grounded in protection. It’s either protection or connection. And my nervous system was grounded in protection.
So it’s really finding that child who believes they have to protect themselves and slowly making inroads. You’re not going to love your child immediately. You’re not going to love yourself immediately. But as you make inroads—like I said, as you go with that fire extinguisher, as you get close to that fire and start doing this—there will be resistance because that child has not trusted adult you, since you’ve left them alone for maybe decades. And the adult doesn’t really want to go back to the child, because we’ve been stuffing that down for so long. We encourage that separation because there’s a survival benefit to that separation—because it hurts to go back there. But again, you’re just kicking the can down the road. You’re never actually dealing with the root cause of anxiety.
And when you start dealing with it, yeah, it can get a little worse—absolutely. But I tell people it’s important to understand that’s the child resisting you. You have to look at that child as a child coming up to you in, say, a grocery store—they’ve got their hands up and they’re crying, they’ve lost their parent. Do you just shove the child away, like “no, see you later”? No. You pick that child up and you connect with them.
I think that’s really, really difficult to do on your own because there’s so much resistance to the way back and feeling those old feelings. This is where a therapist really helps you, especially a somatic therapist, because they can help you find this feeling in your body—which is the younger version of you. That alarm is the younger version of you. Being able to see them, hear them, open to them, love them, and defend them—that way they start developing this sense like, oh, I am actually safe.
But it’s a slow process. When you’re in it, you have some agency. For me, it was like I finally know how to heal my anxiety. I’m not healed yet—in fact, it’s getting a little bit worse—but I know I’m on the right path.
[Vikas: So it must also be important for us to really feel pain, rather than ignore it?]
[Dr. Russell Kennedy]: Yeah, if you don’t allow yourself to feel it, it’ll just build up—it’s kicking the can down the road. If you don’t allow yourself to feel sadness, the sadness will slowly build up. It’s not that it goes away; energy can’t be created or destroyed, only changed in form. So as that sadness builds in you, if you don’t address it, the fire will grow. As that grief. So much of anxiety is unresolved grief—just for me, it’s not having a dad that I really could feel safe in. And so much of anxiety is also unresolved anger as well, because a lot of times we will take anger away from children. So you can’t be angry. And if you take anger away from a child, you leave them defenceless.
When you leave them defenceless, eventually they will develop a victim mentality, and that victim mentality completely feeds anxiety. And you can’t heal from anxiety if you go through the world with a victim mentality. It does not work. It cannot work.
Q: What is the danger of identifying too much as ‘anxious’?
[Dr. Russell Kennedy]: … what I usually say to those people who say, I have an anxious child who lives with me, right, and I can see that child. I know that child isn’t me. I know I’ve gone into an emotional age regression. When I’m completely wrapped up in anxiety—or if people have depression or OCD or eating disorders, whatever it is—they have a child in them that has that. You as an adult don’t have that. You can see that. It’s like the Michael Singer quote: you are not your thoughts. You are the one who observes your thoughts. So you are not that child. You’re the one who observes that child.
And it depends what you do, and if you meld with that child the wrong way, you become this “I am anxious person,” and it’s like, no. You have an anxious child that lives in you, and you can treat that child with compassion and connection so that you don’t have an anxious child that lives within you anymore. Or you can start enjoying that anxious child, because that anxious child comes from a sense of a part of you, and the best parts of us come from the child part of us. We tend to push that away, but we don’t realise that my intelligence and my sense of humour—all of that comes from Rusty—all of that comes from the younger version of me.
So when people say, “I am an anxious person,” I say, no, you have an anxious child that lives in you, and it’s your responsibility to connect with that child. Because that separates you in a way but is also benevolent towards that child. It’s like, I am going to help you, child, because I know that you’re not me. I know I can observe you, I can observe that feeling that is you, and connect with that feeling that is you, and see and become the benevolent parent now that I so wish I had back then.
Q: For men in particular, talking about mental health is much harder, what would be your message to men going through anxiety?
[Dr. Russell Kennedy]: So what I tell most men is find a picture of yourself, or pictures of yourself, when you were a child. Sit with them and connect with them. Because 70% of our brain is devoted to our visual system. When we see something like that—when we see a picture—I think this is why human beings are so captivated by photographs, because it takes us back to a particular place. Now that place can be very painful, and it can also make us really sad or really angry, and it’s important to be able to get in touch with those feelings. Sometimes we need someone else to do that. I think as men we kind of depend on our women to do that, but more and more I think we need other men to be able to express, because I don’t think women really understand what we go through. So it’s really critical.
And then put that picture up on your bathroom mirror—of the younger version of you—and just connect with it. I’m going in for a pee. It doesn’t have to be anything major. Just connect with that picture, because by process of time, you connect more with that child. The other thing—I think the reason why men commit suicide at a higher rate than women—is we took tears away from boys. Tears are an adaptive mechanism in the brain, and I’m telling you as a neuroscientist. Your dog has just died, you’re getting a divorce, your external situation has not changed, but tears create this perceptual change in us so it doesn’t seem as bad.
Now we’ve taken tears away from boys, so the reason I believe men kill themselves at a higher rate—one of the reasons, and it’s not the whole thing—is that we took this highly adaptive mechanism away from them. I’m not saying cry in front of your woman. Some relationships are really, really strong, but I think from a primal point of view, I don’t think our females like seeing us cry. I think they can handle it. I used to say maybe once every two to three years you can cry in front of your spouse. You get one ticket at it—if your mother dies or whatever, they’ll give you a pass.
But one of the things that I do with men is I say I’d like you to go car screaming. Basically, you go into your car, drive to a fairly remote area, and just start screaming. I access tears through frustration much more than I do sadness. So if I get frustrated about something—and I tell men, when you get frustrated about something, just really feel that frustration and allow it to come out of you—that’s the time to get in your car, roll up the windows, and just start screaming. Because it has to express itself on some level. If you don’t express it, it’s just like the fire gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And then we try and push it down more and more.
As we push it down, we become more and more separate from ourselves, which causes more anxiety, depression, alcohol addiction—all this kind of stuff. The more we stuff down, the more it comes out. Energy can’t be created nor destroyed, only changed in form. So we have to be able to change that form, and tears are one of the ways we change that form—or just screaming. What’ll happen with me is sometimes, if I’m feeling really frustrated or really anxious at points, I will go car screaming. It screws up my voice, but for a few days after that there is this peace and calm, and also this sense of like, hey, you went and looked after yourself.
Instead of just pushing it away or grabbing a drink or whatever, you actually sat with it like a man. That’s what it is—your dad says to you when you’re younger, take it like a man. We can turn that around, that phrase, and go take the emotion like a man. Take it. Feel it. Allow it to process. Allow it to go through you. Because when you allow it to go through you, it passes through. If you stop it, it stays and becomes more sticky, and you become more stuck in it. Then your default mode network gets to see it as who you are, and this becomes the echo chamber you live your life in.
Irritability. Men don’t show rage nearly as much as irritability. Irritability is one of the biggest hallmark signs of anxiety in men. I see that and hear that from wives of my friends—he’s so irritable these days—and it’s like, yeah, because he’s trying to stuff it down. It’s got to come out some way.
Q: For so many going through anxiety, it can feel all consuming, what would be your message to people to remind them that it can and will get better?
[Dr. Russell Kennedy]: The human brain has a tendency called recency bias, where the way I feel now seems like it will last forever. Every person experiences this; it’s simply how our brains work. When you’re caught in a moment, you project that feeling into the future indefinitely. For those struggling with anxiety, depression, or similar challenges, this can feel like a trap, eroding your sense of hope. You can’t see a way out. I’ve been there myself, even feeling suicidal at one point. Back then, I couldn’t see a path forward, though I’m living proof now that one exists. The way out is there—you just can’t always see it. That realization is so crucial.
Connection is also vital. As men, we’re often raised in environments that breed constant competition with one another. Growing up, it’s always about being the best, the strongest. Then, in our 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond, we’re suddenly expected to shift gears—to open up, be vulnerable, and share what’s really going on inside. This is tough when vulnerability was seen as weakness in our younger years. This conditioning can make men more susceptible to mental health struggles. I believe mental illness affects men and women equally, but men are far more likely to turn to self-medication—alcohol, drugs, or other escapes.
To counter this, we need to find ways to truly connect with ourselves. Tears can be one path; they release something deep within. Music is another, unifying our spirit through its energy. Sad songs, in particular, are so powerful because they give us permission to feel our sadness. That coherence allows emotions to process. If we keep blocking those feelings, suppressing them, the inner turmoil only grows stronger, like a fire that keeps building.
[Vikas: So you have to realise it’s just a part of life’s experience?]
[Dr. Russell Kennedy]: When you were a child and you were experiencing… my father was schizophrenic and bipolar, so when he started to go psychotic, as a child I was helpless and powerless. There was nothing I could do about this situation. So there was this sense in me of futility, of pain, of grief, and that was all of me because I had no way out of that as a child. Now as an adult, I know I have a way out of it, but I think we regress into this childlike physiology and psychology. We age regress, and then the 6-year-old doesn’t see any way out of the situation he was in back then, and he extrapolates that out to how he’s feeling now. It’s like, there is no way out. The adult in you does have a way out. The child didn’t.
So it’s a matter of, can I go back and find that child and say, hey, you know what? I know that we’re feeling depressed right now, I know that we’re feeling anxious right now, I know there’s no immediate relief to this. But just finding it in your body, putting your hand over it, breathing into it, staying with it, and saying, okay, let’s handle this pain together. I have this depressed child in me. I have this anxious child in me. I have a picture of that anxious, depressed child—can I connect with that picture, and can I get some help in processing that feeling? Can I bring that picture into my therapist? Can I bring that picture to a men’s group and have all of the guys in the men’s group bring pictures of themselves and just sort of say, “This is what happened to me when I was a kid. This is the child that still feels that”?
And I think the way that men are going to heal is through other men. I don’t think it’s going to be through therapists, which are mostly female—and I have nothing against female therapists. It’s just that the male experience is very different than the female experience, and I think it’s really important. And I have nothing against female therapists. I just think that men’s groups, for men, are going to be the way out of this. I don’t think it’s going to be like going to a therapist. Although there’s nothing wrong with that—that’s a nice adjunct. But really, it’s men taking other men, dropping the competition, saying, I feel this way—it’s like, I feel the same frickin’ way, man.