According to neuroscientists and psychiatrists, healing begins with awareness and compassionate connection.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Wendy Suzuki, and Dr. James Doty explain how trauma and anxiety are processed through both the brain and body: trauma isn’t just what happens to us, but how our nervous system holds onto it, disrupting our ability to feel safe, connect with others, and think clearly. 

Often a feeling people want to avoid, anxiety actually functions to motivate action and can be leveraged as a tool for focus and productivity. Through breathwork, mindfulness, and reshaping negative internal dialogue, we can begin to retrain the brain, regulate the body, and support lasting emotional recovery.

We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: An experience enters into your ears, into your eyes. The first thing is a somatic response. 

Is this dangerous or is this safe?

WENDY SUZUKI:  You hear the word anxiety, you think, "Oh God, it's a thing I wanna kick out the door. It's a disease. I have it. I don't know how to get rid of it."

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: The problem with trauma is that it starts off with something that happens to us, but that's not where it stops because it changes your brain.

Your body contains the will of it.

JAMES DOTY: This negative internal dialogue isn't who you really are at all. The wonderful thing is you can actually change the dialogue.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: The trauma is not the event that happens. The trauma is how you respond to it.

WENDY SUZUKI: We can use neuroscience and tools from psychology to flip the script on our whole mindset around anxiety.

JAMES DOTY: When you take the time to tame the mind, it's really quite extraordinary the possibilities.

One of the greatest challenges of people in the West is they have this negative internal dialogue, and I use the term a DJ.

It is a collection of events, experiences, commentaries from your environment that oftentimes you allow to define you and not necessarily in a positive way.

And as a result, you have an emotional response when you're listening to these voices, or this dialogue, or the DJ, if you will.

WENDY SUZUKI: "Oh my God, this person hates me. I'm never gonna get the job. I'm never going to lose the weight that I wanna lose."

All these things become part of the big stone of anxiety, dragging it along with you.

Anxiety is the feeling of fear or worry typically associated with situations of uncertainty.

The amygdala is a brain structure that is automatically activated when you hear that bump in the night that launches your anxiety.

And the brain area that could help that calming in that situation is the prefrontal cortex, the area that's involved in executive function.

But unfortunately, in situations of high stress, high anxiety, what happens is not only is your amygdala activated, but your prefrontal cortex gets shut down too, so that makes the situation even worse.

Cognitive flexibility is the idea that we are able to look at and approach situations in lots of different ways.

What is it about my anxiety that is difficult?

Can I bring a superpower or a gift from that?

If there is a realization there are other ways to approach it, you have the ability to do just that.

First one is a superpower of productivity, that what if list. What if you didn't do that? Or what if you did that and you didn't do it right?

And so here is the trick.

Anxiety evolved to have us put an action on it. 2.5 million years ago, it was either you fight or you run away from it. The way to transform it is to turn that what if list into a to do list.

Put an action on each one of them. Tick through them one by one.

That is how you get productivity from your anxiety.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: People usually think about the military when they talk about trauma, but trauma is actually extremely common.

Basically, trauma is something that happens to you that makes you so upset that it overwhelms you.

There is nothing you can do to stave off the inevitable.

You basically collapse in a state of confusion, maybe rage, because you are unable to function in the face of this particular threat. And what may be traumatic for you may not be traumatic for me, depending on our personality and our prior experiences.

Much of the imprint of trauma is in a very primitive survival part of your brain. It just picks up what's dangerous and what's safe. And when you're traumatized, that little part of your brain, which is usually very quiet, continues to just send messages, "I'm in danger. I'm not safe."

The problem then becomes that you are not able to engage, or to learn, or to see other people's point of view, or to coordinate your feelings with your thinking.

That event itself is over, but your body keeps mobilizing itself to fight.

You have all kind of immunological abnormalities and endocrine abnormalities, and that really devastates your physical health also.

JAMES DOTY: I get asked this question of, "Geez, I haven't meditated. How do I get started?"

The first thing is to simply breathe in and out.

Consciously think about the air going through your nose and exhaling through your mouth. And once you've done that for a period of time, then you suddenly realize the very nature of that action and the consistency of that, you're no longer having that same emotional response or you're not starting to listen to that dialogue.

So when you stop the DJ and then change the dialogue to one that is nurturing, supportive of yourself, your physiology changes, and then the manner in which you react or interact with other people becomes completely different.

BESSEL VAN DER KOLK: One of the largest mitigating factors against getting traumatized is who is there for you at that particular time.

When as a kid you get bitten by a dog, it's really very scary and very nasty. But if your parents pick you up and say, "Oh, I see that you're really in bad shape, let me help you," that dog bite doesn't become a big issue because the foundation of your safety has not been destroyed.

WENDY SUZUKI: Think about that anxiety that is most familiar to you.

You know what it feels like. You know what it looks like.

All you have to do is notice when others might be suffering from that same form of anxiety.

And here's your superpower. All you have to do is give a kind word, a simple helping hand in that situation.

JAMES DOTY: And it changes not only that other person, it changes the entire environment around you.