Dr. Russell Kennedy's tips on handling anxiety
November 08, 2024
UVic Social Sciences grad and bestselling author Dr. Russell Kennedy, BSc ’87, spent years studying anxiety and now offers his own approach to dealing with the “alarm” stored in the body after trauma, which is part of his own backstory.
Dr. Russell Kennedy has a long list of accomplishments. He’s a physician, bestselling author, parent and podcaster—he’s even had success as a stand-up comedian. But he’s also something else: a person who has suffered from and deeply understands the tsunami of distress that anxiety can wash over a life. Once, he also was a frightened boy, who both loved and feared his mentally ill father.
Kennedy has done many brave and bold things: stepping onstage to perform his comedy, writing a book about mental health that gets personal—all while battling anxiety for most of his lifetime. His own experience with anxiety goes back to his childhood, when he was parented by a loving, but mentally ill father—whose schizophrenia and bipolar illness made the household volatile. Kennedy now believes that this experience affected him into adulthood—that the “alarm” from that trauma is stored in his body.
He has harnessed his extensive medical knowledge and his personal experience to support his own approach to anxiety and how to deal with it. This formed the basis for his first book, Anxiety Rx: A New Prescription for Anxiety Relief from the Doctor Who Created It, which he self-published. The sales started slow and snowballed by word of mouth into a top seller, with about 90,000 copies sold.
He has since appeared on more than 250 podcasts talking about different facets of this complicated, pernicious and prevalent condition. He recently launched an updated edition of his book, this time with two major publishers and a global distribution.
What is anxiety?
He connects anxiety back to trauma in the past. When a child is bullied, or is coping with an abusive or addicted parent—that produces alarm energy that stays in the body. “Anxiety is basically your own mind’s compulsion to make sense of what feels unnatural and scary in your body,” he says. “The way I usually explain it to people is, regular anxiety is part of life. People with chronic anxiety who are suffering all the time basically had something in their childhoods that was too much to bear, and they stuffed it down into their bodies, because energy can’t be created nor destroyed only changed and formed into an entity I call alarm.” For highly sensitive people, it may take less trauma to cause this alarm.
He suggests anxiety is a collection of words and sequences the brain uses to make sense of and concretize this feeling of alarm that is sitting in the body. In his view, much of therapy fails to recognize that anxiety is not a problem of thinking, but a problem of feeling, and you have to fix it at a feeling level.
Kennedy strongly believes that anxiety is a somatic state of alarm held in the body and reflected in the mind. Worries are a way to make the uncertain seem more certain. His study of neuroscience literature suggests that during worry, our brain releases “feel good” chemicals such as dopamine, endorphins and enkephalins. This creates a vicious cycle. “When we worry, we actually create these chemicals in the brain that actually reward us. That’s why it’s so hard to stop worrying.”
Finally, worry just feeds on itself, he adds. “I haven’t seen anybody with chronic anxiety, including me, that didn’t come from a victim mentality.” He believes these key features need to be recognized if people are going to heal from anxiety instead of just learning to cope with it, comparable to stopping a leak in a ceiling instead of patching over the damage.
Kennedy was raised in Victoria and started at UVic at age 21, earning a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. “My first grades were terrible. I even failed Calculus 100, so I thought there’s no way I’m going to get into medical school with these grades.” Yet, an inner voice told him he could do it. He persevered and started getting As and A-pluses in second and third year.
“I think a lot of us worriers are like this. We are very strong, because we have to do everything everyone else does, go to the store, raise our kids, but we have to do it with 100 pounds of fear on our backs.”
During his fourth year of study at UVic, Kennedy’s father ended his own life after years of suffering from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Through the grief, guilt and relief over his father’s death, Kennedy still managed to graduate and went on to earn a medical degree from Western University. He served as a family doctor in Victoria and Vancouver for more than a decade—while working evenings as a standup comedian—and trying to help patients with anxiety as best he could in the brief consults the system allowed. He would sometimes see 40 patients a day.
In his view, traditional medicine is drug-driven out of necessity. He believes psychiatric drugs are a crucial part of medicine, but overprescribed. He was horribly frustrated and almost suicidal over his own mental health because traditional medical therapies were not helping him. So, he travelled to India to try to find an alternative path, eventually going on an LSD journey. That experience with psychedelics widened his perception and set him on his current course.
These days, he refers to himself as a clinical neuroscientist and sees a few patients to help them with anxiety. He devotes most of his work hours to writing about and connecting with people about anxiety, hoping to help others find relief. He does not run a research lab, but reads widely about neuroscience.
Kennedy’s updated book, Anxiety Rx: A Revolutionary New Prescription for Anxiety Relief―from the Doctor Who Created It, was published in September of this year. The solid sales of his first edition prompted strong interest from traditional publishers, and he earned a solid six-figure advance for the updated book.
He no longer practises family medicine, which allows him time for yoga, writing, podcasts and his family, including his wife, daughter and two grandchildren, not to mention his beloved pair of dogs. Kennedy’s work contains some theories that he recognizes may be controversial to his fellow physicians—including a belief that the profession leans too heavily on pharmacology and that Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a limited solution.
He insists he does not wish to cause controversy with his physician peers—he supports traditional medicine for many ailments. But, in his view, CBT and medications do not get to the heart of anxiety, which he believes is the state of alarm in the body.
Overestimating threat, underestimating agency
“I often say anxiety results from a mind/body disconnect. You’re living in your head, you’re not living in the present moment sensation of your body, you’re living in the constant worries in your mind,” he says.
The key is being curious and analytical about your anxiety, he says. “‘Oh, I wonder why I think I’m going to die of cancer, I wonder why I think I’m going to fail this exam?’”
He says with one degree of separation, going into curiosity mode, you can see your worries with more clarity—and engage the rational part of your brain that the survival physiology has shut off. One of the things that anxiety does is make you overestimate threat and underestimate your ability to deal with it, he notes. If you stay in your house and worry, things never get better, but if you push yourself out of comfort zone, you start seeing “I can do this.”
The key is to stop using worrying as a coping strategy. “This is one of the things that potentiates our victim mentality and keeps us in the chronic state of ‘we can’t do it.’ But every day we’re showing ourselves that we can.”
In his current life on Vancouver Island, he has to pay attention to his own physical alarm, which manifests as a feeling in his solar plexus. His father would go into a horrible deep, dark depression or be manic and awake for days at a stretch. Kennedy says he believes that “program,” or trauma, is still running within him like a background operating system.
These days, when he feels calm, he knows cognitively that nothing bad is going to happen to him, but sometimes his body needs more reassurance. So, he does breathwork and focuses on looking forward to enjoyable tasks that lie ahead for the day, such as appearing on a podcast, or having a gym workout.
Now in his early sixties, he is able to enjoy a more peaceful life, including outings with his grandson spent golfing and eating ice cream. Both he and his wife Cynthia are certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioners (SEPs) and they have been together 11 years. He is also a certified yoga instructor and meditation teacher, and these practices form part of his wellbeing. He hasn’t performed as a comedian recently, but he used to love performing at Heckler’s in Victoria. He enjoys the way comedy highlights the ridiculousness of the human condition—a way to laugh together through our shared struggle.
—Jenny Manzer, BA ’97
ABC approach to anxiety
Dr. Kennedy has an ABC acronym he uses in his approach to anxiety.
A is awareness. Be aware of what it feels like in your body when you feel alarmed and anxious.
B is go deep into your body and breath, get out of your head. “You’re not going to find the solution in your head, you’re just going to find more worry.” Put your hand where you feel the alarm and get into your body.
C is to have a compassionate connection to the child in you who was abandoned, who was neglected, who was bullied, who had to mature too early. That’s the root cause of the alarm in the first place.
Watch Dr. Russell Kennedy's webinar "A New Approach to Handling Stress and Anxiety," which was part of the UVic Alumni Guest Speaker Series.
This article appears in the UVic Torch alumni magazine.
For more Torch stories, go to the UVic Torch alumni magazine page.