Dr. Russell Kennedy on Healing Anxiety, Part 2: Nighttime Worry, Generational Cycles and Getting Out of Your Head

High-Level Overview

In the second part of her anxiety toolkit, Mel Robbins brings back Dr. Russell Kennedy, a medical doctor and neuroscientist who has lived with anxiety himself, to answer three listener questions: how to stop waking up at night with worry, how to break a family cycle of anxiety, and how to slow down spiraling thoughts. Mel recaps the core ideas from Part 1: Dr. Kennedy describes anxiety as an "alarm" in the body, set off first in childhood by moments of feeling separate or unsafe, and triggered more and more in adulthood whenever we feel separate from a group, a partner or friends.

The tone is warm, earnest and practical, with both host and guest sharing personal stories, from Dr. Kennedy's childhood with a father who had episodes of mania and psychosis to Mel's grief after her uncle's sudden death. The conversation moves between neuroscience explanations, personal stories and concrete tools listeners can use right away.

The Discussion Explores:

• Why anxiety shows up at bedtime and in the middle of the night, and what to do in that moment
• The difference between coping with anxiety and healing it, and what talk therapy often misses
• How the body's state drives the mind's thoughts, and why you can't think your way out
• Breaking generational anxiety by healing the parent first
• Whether anxiety is genetic, and the role of being a sensitive person
• Surprising signs of anxiety in parents who never talked about feelings
• Tools for spiraling thoughts: breathing, moving, curiosity, play and the ABC process

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Anxiety at night: habits and the child who went to bed

Listener Jason asks why he gets anxious before bed and wakes in the night worrying. Dr. Kennedy recommends a two-pronged approach. On the practical side: no screens for an hour before bed, because the reticular activating system in the brainstem stays active if you're scrolling Instagram right up to sleep, and avoiding blue light. But he calls these coping mechanisms. The deeper question is what going to bed was like for you as a child. For him, evenings carried unease: his mother, a nurse, worked shifts, leaving him with a father whose mental illness made home "a little touch and go." He suggests people may also carry memories such as bedwetting and the chaos that followed in the morning.

He's careful to say not everything is childhood trauma, but so much chronic anxiety is unresolved fear and wounding, and it is fixable. He has nothing against cognitive therapy, but argues that most therapy in North America misses the role of the body and old trauma stored there, assuming that insight and talking will fix problems. Waking in the night, he says, is absolutely a sign of anxiety: the sympathetic nervous system isn't shutting off. He sees this in patients raised by alcoholic parents, where calm periods ended in blow-ups, teaching the child's nervous system never to relax. He shares that he sometimes left a relaxing massage and had a panic attack, because as a child being relaxed was exactly when things fell apart.

"Am I safe in this moment?"

For the 3 a.m. moment itself, Dr. Kennedy coaches Jason directly: connect with the feeling in your body, put your hand over it, breathe into it, and ask, "Am I safe in this moment?" You may have a dentist appointment next week, but lying in bed right now, you are safe. Then feel that safety, because healing and new neural pathways come from connecting the feeling with the thinking. Some people prefer saying it as a statement.

This works because "anxiety is always about the future." Sensation brings you into the present: touching your chest, breathing, smelling an essential oil, humming or singing. "We heal in the present moment sensation of our body," he says. He adds the physiological sigh, two sniffs in and a long, slow exhale, which moves you toward the parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) state quickly and interrupts the chain reaction of feeling and thought. Mel recaps the two branches of the autonomic nervous system: the sympathetic state they call alarm (fight, flight or freeze) and the parasympathetic state of rest and calm.

The body leads, the mind follows

A recurring theme is that "the state of your body determines how your mind thinks." Dr. Kennedy reminds Mel how, after her uncle Warnie died suddenly, she froze and didn't want to go to a planned paddle tennis double date; getting into her body changed her state, and her thoughts changed with it. "You will think exactly the way your body feels," he says. Trying to tell yourself you're happy while anxious is like pushing a rock uphill, though gratitude does begin to shift brain chemistry, and he suggests pairing gratitude with Mel's 5-4-3-2-1 countdown to get moving. Staying frozen tells the brain there's danger; leaning into what scares you produces dopamine and a sense of being on the right track.

He explains why: the deeper brain structures such as the amygdala and brainstem have no concept of words; the body's language is feeling. Sensations travel up through these wordless areas and are then interpreted by the thinking brain. "Your mind is a compulsive meaning-making makes sense machine," he says, especially the analytical left hemisphere, so when the body feels alarm it finds painful things to explain it, stacking worries about relationships, taxes and appointments. Changing your thinking helps you cope, but not heal, because trauma stored in the body must be changed through feeling. He also notes that emotional and physical pain use similar pathways, which is why a cold plunge, where you stay with discomfort and breathe, is good practice for sitting with the alarm.

Mel's own shift, and staying with the hurting child

Mel shares that she became very good at talking about her anxiety, which built awareness and coping tools like yoga, medication and therapy, but didn't heal the root cause. Things changed once she stopped only talking and got "below the neck," learning to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, soothe herself and show self-compassion. She says it happened much faster than she expected. The order matters: start with awareness in the mind, then move into the body.

Dr. Kennedy describes healing as meeting the alarm, which he sees as your younger self, and telling that child you'll stay: "This hurts us, but I'm going to stay with you." The child may need to hear that many times after decades of being ignored. He cites Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score in saying the goal isn't getting rid of the alarm but learning to acclimatize to it, so you don't compulsively run to your head for a solution you'll never find there.

Breaking the generational cycle

Listener Lena says her father passed his anxiety and short temper to her and her siblings and wants to spare her children. Dr. Kennedy's answer: start with yourself. When parents ask him to see their anxious 15-year-old, he works on the parent instead, comparing it to how Cesar Millan fixes the owner rather than the dog. When a parent is out of alarm, they can give real love and attention, the kids feel safe, and the cycle breaks. Mel sums it up: anxiety in a family "is not about the kids," it's about the adults, and he agrees that's true 99% of the time.

Is anxiety genetic? His short answer is no. Some conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder appear to have more of a genetic component, but no anxiety gene has been isolated. What does seem inherited is sensitivity. Everyone he has seen with anxiety is a sensitive person who feels everything and learns to shut off connection to survive. Even loving parents may not meet a sensitive child's greater need for love, so that person must learn to give compassion to themselves, which he compares to learning to feed yourself.

Hidden signs of anxiety in our parents

Mel notes her parents' generation didn't talk about feelings; her own mother recently realized she'd never considered she had anxiety. Dr. Kennedy lists signs: alcoholism, chronic irritability, prescription drug use to cope, hypervigilance, hyper-organization, and a parent who is warm one moment and cold the next, which he says can be worse for a child than consistent coldness. People-pleasing, like the mom baking cookies for everyone, can also be an anxious performance of connection that others can sense isn't real. Some people are more connected to their pets than their spouses because the pet feels safe.

He also points out the brain's fear bias: one bad experience with a dog can take a thousand good ones to erase. And he agrees with an idea he picked up from Mel's show: whatever you focus on, you get more of, so focusing on anxiety brings more anxiety and focusing on gratitude brings more gratitude. He also mentions long-term therapy frustration: people spending years and tens of thousands of dollars and feeling no better because the root cause isn't addressed.

Stopping the spiral

Listener Becky asks how to calm racing, worst-case thoughts. Dr. Kennedy's answer is blunt: go into your body and get out of your head. "Stop looking for peanut butter at the hardware store." First build awareness of your personal signals, such as chest pain, pressure or a lump in the throat, so you know alarm is rising. Then break the cycle: use the five-second rule, breathe, put on your shoes, leave the house, go to the gym, because rumination has tremendous inertia. He recalls lying in bed in med school, covers to his chin, dreading the day, and bribing himself to move with something as small as a cool glass of water.

He also recommends viewing the alarm with curiosity, noticing it might feel "heavy and sharp and purple," since curiosity takes emotion out of it. He describes healing as going from a bubble tossed by the ocean to being able to look up at the waves from below, feeling some separateness from the alarm while still caring for it. When people realize "it is actually safe to feel safe," he says, they often wonder why they waited so long.

Coping tools, healing tools and play

Dr. Kennedy lists coping strategies that access the deeper brain: breathwork, grounding (feeling your seat and your feet), touch, temperature extremes, and scent, since smell is the only sense that bypasses the thalamus and goes straight to the emotional brain (he suggests carrying lavender or chamomile oil). Moving the eyes side to side, the basis of EMDR, can reduce amygdala activity. But to heal, you must find your younger self, regain faith lost to trauma, and even be grateful for the alarm as a beacon pointing you to that child.

Play is another key: it regulates the autonomic nervous system, and "loneliness is killing us." He suggests returning to what you enjoyed as a teenager, ideally something without winners and losers, and credits his mentor Gordon Neufeld on play for its own sake. For parents, he recommends a dinner-table game of guessing feelings from facial expressions to develop children's social engagement systems. He closes with his ABC process: Awareness of how alarm feels in your body; Body and breath, including the physiological sigh; and Compassionate connection with yourself, especially your younger self.

Seeing the child in your partner

Mel ends with a story about her husband Chris: as a fourth-grader in a baseball uniform, locked out of his house, he climbed a trellis covered in bees, found his parents' bedroom doors locked, punched through the glass and dripped blood across newly refinished floors. Picturing that child helps her respond with more compassion when he's irritable. Dr. Kennedy recommends that couples keep a photo of their partner at seven, eight or nine around the house, because "that's who you're dealing with." Kids who learn to be overly self-reliant, what he calls an "alpha child," don't let love in and carry that alarm into adulthood.

Conclusion

Dr. Kennedy's central message is that anxiety is an alarm in the body rooted in the child who once felt unsafe, and that you can't think your way out of it. Coping tools such as screen curfews, therapy, breathing, scent and cold exposure help, but healing means going into the body, locating the alarm, and giving your younger self the safety and compassion they missed. For nighttime worry, ask whether you're safe right now; for spirals, move and breathe instead of ruminating; for anxious kids, heal the parent first. His ABC process of Awareness, Body and breath, and Compassionate connection gives listeners a simple, repeatable path from managing anxiety toward healing it.

This is a summary of "The Toolkit for Healing Anxiety, Part 2" from The Mel Robbins Podcast, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.