In a world that’s constantly demanding more, learning how to quiet anxiety and reconnect with your purpose has never been more important.
In today’s episode, I sat down with Dr. Martha Beck—bestselling author and speaker who Oprah calls “the smartest woman she knows”—to talk about something that affects so many of us: anxiety. But not just how it shows up in our lives—more importantly, how to understand it, move through it with kindness, and use it as a compass toward discovering your true purpose.
Dr. Beck drops wisdom on the neuroscience of anxiety, the traps of our left-brain-dominated society, and how small acts of kindness (toward ourselves!) can lead to massive transformation. From her radical year of living without lies to the science of shaking out stress, this episode is filled with both aha moments and practical tools to move from panic to peace.
Key takeaways:
Anxiety is not a malfunction—it’s a misdirection of energy.
Dr. Beck explains how the amygdala (our brain’s fear center) is wired to detect danger, even when none exists. This evolutionary response spirals into anxiety, especially in a society that reinforces fear through storytelling, control, and disconnection from presence.
The left brain creates the “hall of mirrors” effect.
According to Dr. Beck, anxiety often stems from the left hemisphere of the brain, which loops fear-based narratives and rejects contrary evidence. The antidote? Engaging the right brain—creativity, connection, and compassion—to break the loop and tap into your purpose.
Kindness is the first step toward calm.
Dr. Beck emphasizes that you can’t force yourself to be calm when you’re in panic—but you can be kind. Treat your anxiety like a scared puppy on your doorstep: respond with gentleness, curiosity, and compassion. From there, calm will naturally begin to emerge.
To move beyond anxiety, engage in creative activity.
She introduces the acronym KAT—Kindness, Activity, and Transcendence—as a framework for healing. Creating something (a meal, a drawing, a podcast, even a cozy morning ritual) can shift you out of fear and into flow, which is where peace and purpose live.
Our purpose is found when we live in integrity.
Drawing from her book “The Way of Integrity,” Dr. Beck shares that finding your purpose starts with living in truth. That doesn’t mean radically blowing up your life overnight—but making small, daily decisions that are more aligned with who you really are.
Success doesn’t mean freedom from anxiety—but learning to navigate it with self-compassion.
Even high-profile clients like Oprah feel fear. What sets them apart is that they treat failure as neutral—not personal, not permanent, not pervasive—and keep showing up with curiosity and persistence.
Notable quotes
“When you betray yourself to keep the peace, you start a war within yourself. There’s no getting around it.”
“You can’t fight your anxiety to make it go away—but you can be kind. And kindness is what creates the safety your nervous system is begging for.”
“The left brain is a wonderful servant and a terrible master. We have to move into the right hemisphere to find connection, courage, and meaning.”
“Fear makes us our least creative, least productive, least kind selves. And we don’t need it—not in the way we’ve been conditioned to carry it.”
Episode-at-a-glance
≫ 04:08 First Money Memory: A Lesson in Passion
≫ 05:56 The Year Without Lying: A Radical Experiment
≫ 09:37 The Brain and Anxiety: Understanding the Mechanisms
≫ 22:43 Financial Anxiety: The Number One Stressor
≫ 27:45 Self-Compassion: The Key to Managing Anxiety
≫ 33:08 Cultural Conditioning and Personal Fulfillment
≫ 34:13 Managing Anxiety Through Activity
≫ 35:17 The Right Hemisphere’s Role in Happiness
≫ 36:38 The KAT Method for Anxiety Relief
≫ 38:26 The Importance of Movement and Shaking
≫ 41:09 Balancing Passion and Material Wellbeing
≫ 55:54 Embracing Failure and Persistence
Dr. Beck’s Links:
Book: “Beyond Anxiety”
Beyond Anxiety Exercises & Toolkit
Beyond Anxiety Deep Dive 12 month course
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Meet Dr. Beck
Dr. Martha Beck, PhD, is a New York Times bestselling author, coach, and speaker. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science, and Oprah Winfrey has called her “one of the smartest women I know.” The founder of Wayfinder Life Coach Training, Martha is a passionate and engaging teacher. Her recent book, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self, was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Her latest book, Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose, was an instant New York Times Best Seller.
Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
Anxiety is something that so many of us are familiar with, whether it’s clinically diagnosed or not, and the world we live in isn’t making it much better. Today, we’re breaking down exactly what anxiety is and how we can find peace. Dr. Martha Beck is a New York Times bestselling author, speaker, and coach. She holds three Harvard degrees in social sciences and Oprah Winfrey called her, “One of the smartest women I know.”
Dr. Beck:
When you betray yourself to keep the peace, you start a war within yourself. There’s no getting around it.
Tori Dunlap:
Her latest book, Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose was an instant New York Times bestseller.
Dr. Beck:
I can’t say to someone, be calm and have them just automatically be able to do that. You can’t do that. But I can say to someone who’s in a stressed state, be kind.
Tori Dunlap:
We sat down with Dr. Beck to talk about her work in the way of integrity, where a practice of cultivating authenticity upended her life in ways she couldn’t have imagined.
Dr. Beck:
When we try to fight our anxiety to calm down, to do something positive, it just gets more frightening in there.
Tori Dunlap:
But what we really wanted to talk to Dr. Beck about is her new book, Beyond Anxiety, the ways we can find more peace in our lives to overcome stress, both personal and money related, and the practices that have changed her and her client’s lives for good.
Dr. Beck:
Anxiety has been called the Inner Pandemic, and the way it makes people react to each other is really mentally ill. Even for people who are of sound mind.
Tori Dunlap:
Today, Dr. Beck is sharing how anxiety actually works in our brains. Why punishing ourselves is actually the least effective form of treatment we can do when it comes to working through anxiety and fear. And I also asked her what her incredible clients like Oprah know about success that the average person doesn’t. Dr. Beck is an incredible teacher and a total delight to listen to. You’re not going to want to miss this episode. But first a word from our sponsors.
Dr. Beck:
I like to ask people, what’s your definition of victory for this particular podcast, this episode?
Tori Dunlap:
That’s a great question. I think it’s really actionable advice, and I think it’s having everybody listening feel very seen and heard, but then they also have a path forward.
Dr. Beck:
Great.
Tori Dunlap:
So how do we make them feel seen and heard, and then how do we give them the next steps after this episode to go out and change their lives, make a positive impact.
Dr. Beck:
A worthy challenge. Let’s do it.
Tori Dunlap:
Amazing. And I feel like that’s the perfect transition into the actual episode because I feel like that’s the mission of your entire work is to give people the tools to be able to create their best lives and their best selves. So, tell me why is this work so important to you and why is this something that you started doing years and years and years ago?
Dr. Beck:
It’s important to me because I think I am a bit neurodivergent on the sensitive side and had a lot of emotional, psychological struggle to overcome. I had a lot of sadness, I had a lot of anxiety, I had a lot of anger. Like every negative thing you could feel seems to have gone through my system at one time or another. And I remember walking around when I was about 18 and just shouting a line from a play I’d heard, which was, “Teach me how to be happy.”
By the time I was 19, I’d really decided that it was the only reason for me to stay alive. I hope that’s not a trigger for anybody out there, but I really couldn’t see any point in just living to achieve and then die with a lot of money. It was like, if I can’t help people come home, if I can’t help people feel joy and love and warmth and protection and happiness, I have no reason to be here. And my life’s been pretty one focused since then. It looks weird. I scattered around and did a lot of weird career things, a lot of weird family things. But you’re absolutely right, it’s like an arrow pointing to that target, help people learn to be happy.
Tori Dunlap:
One of the questions we like asking guests is their first money memory. And I think that actually might be very interesting to ask you to dictate the rest of your work. So, do you remember the first time you remember thinking about money?
Dr. Beck:
I do. I was probably six or seven and I was absolutely obsessed with art. I drew and painted all the time colored. I did not like crayons, they lie, crayons do, they look these beautiful intense colors, but then you put them on the page and they are ridiculously lame. So I found out about oil paint and I thought, how long would it take me to buy four tubes of oil paint, red, yellow, blue and white, which is what you need, and a small canvas and a brush. And I was making 10 cents a week by doing my chores around the house, and I figured out how much it would take, and I saved for about a year. And then God bless them, my siblings found out what I was doing and they bought me the paint and the brush and the canvas. And ever since then it’s been like follow your heart, do what you long for, save up your money and then expect miracles, because it’s always happened that way.
Tori Dunlap:
I don’t know if you know this, I also have an artistic background, but in performing arts, so theater, music-
Dr. Beck:
I did not know that.
Tori Dunlap:
This was not the plan, Martha to be a financial expert. This was not the plan, but this was the journey, but…
Dr. Beck:
It wasn’t I’d be a freaking life coach, hello?
Tori Dunlap:
There you go. These are the fun things. You get older and you realize, “Oh, I actually am interested in that.” Okay. So before we get into your new book, I want to take a little bit of time to talk about your previous one, which is called The Way of Integrity, which in so many ways feels like a precursor to the book now. You talk about the sort of awakening you had by practicing the principle of no longer telling lies. Can you take our listeners through some of that story of your year without lying?
Dr. Beck:
Yeah. Oh, yes. So, I’m very serious when I said I would do anything to feel better. And by the time I was 29, I was struggling with a lot of things. I just had a child with a disability with down syndrome. I was exhausted trying to fulfill the roles that my Mormon background had given me, and then also my Harvard education, which things do not go together may I say. And neither one of them was really made for women. So, I completely forgot the question now I got so excited telling you that.
Tori Dunlap:
No, that’s great. What was the year without lying like? What did you discover?
Dr. Beck:
Oh, yes. So I kept looking and looking and looking for instructions. And one thing I found in all these wisdom traditions was the idea that the truth will set you free. So I thought to myself, “All right, I’m just going to take that literally, I’m going to not tell any lie for any reason at all for at least a year.”
Tori Dunlap:
Wow.
Dr. Beck:
It was the year I turned 29, and I made that resolution at a New Year’s Eve party, and everyone there went pale and said, “Don’t do it, you will blow up your life.” And I did. I found that I wasn’t telling many lies about, I wasn’t doing tax evasion or anything like that. I was lying the way women are taught to lie, which is… And there’s research on this, to make other people happy. That was one of my major ways I thought that I would help make other people happy. And now I was in this truth thing and I started… People would say, I miss you. And I would say, “Okay.” I couldn’t lie. And sometimes it was hard at first to figure out what to say.
So anyway, I came out and told the truth about what I really felt new and believed. And since I was doing this in the context of a very Mormon family and community, part of that meant I left my religion. Part of that meant I left my family of origin behind. I was an assistant professor at the time, but I realized I didn’t like academia. So, job and career went into the hopper. Yeah. I just about abandoned [inaudible 00:08:11]. I had to move because we really couldn’t live in the area where we were living given my notorious actions. When I left the Mormon church, it was top story on the news. This was not a small thing for me to have done, right? I like to say, burn every bridge, but love. I kept everything that was absolutely true to me, and that meant that I was free and it was a really horrific experience and it wasn’t nearly as bad as if I hadn’t done it. Does that make sense?
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Would you recommend it to people listening?
Dr. Beck:
No.
Tori Dunlap:
Because even I’m having the thought too where I’m like, “Jesus Christ, that sounds awful.”
Dr. Beck:
Oh, hell no. It was radical. It was trying to get a tan by jumping into a volcano. Don’t do it. Don’t anyone out there do this. It was bad. But I would say, and I say in the way of integrity, try to take one degree turns in the direction of your integrity every day. Every day, do something you love that you might’ve not given yourself just a little bit. Don’t praise that narcissistic person at work quite as much as you did yesterday. Just a little turn. It’s like turning an airplane one degree north every half hour. You don’t even know it’s turning, but you end up in a completely different place.
Tori Dunlap:
How do you see this conversation about integrity aligning within your conversations and your awakenings about anxiety?
Dr. Beck:
Okay, so here I was meditating away. I mean, I really practice what I preach. So I’d been using every method that I’ve written in every book, every article. And by the time I was getting to my late ’50s, I was meditating for hours every day. I’d reached a place where I could bring myself to real stillness. And what I saw in that place, if you sit for hours in meditation, what you see is that anxiety arises, and there’s nothing scary around you, and the anxiety keeps worrying and it can be almost unbearable, almost unbearable. I had so much anxiety. And for months, I would sit for an hour, an hour and a half at a time and just watch it get bigger.
And then I started to see that it was doing this in the absence of any stimulus whatsoever. And I started to realize I am at peace in this moment. And then I started to come home to presence, and then all my anxiety sort of collapsed like a bad soufflé. So I wrote The Way of Integrity thinking people would have this same experience. But after I wrote it, so many people said to me, “I’m in my integrity. I don’t tell any lies, but I am so scared. Have you checked out the world?” It’s scary and we’re all going to die. And I thought, “Oh, there’s something about anxiety that makes it so convincing that even with the absolute best of intention and attention, we can still be falsely frightened.” And I wanted to know what did that, and I went looking and I found it in the brain and I found it in our society. Two inbuilt or… Well, one’s inbuilt when we are born, the other one surrounds us from birth. And between them, they cause anxiety to arise and then to spiral upward without ever going down.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay, when we talk about anxiety, can we talk about, you just mentioned two types. Let’s talk about the first, how did humans even come to have anxiety in the first place?
Dr. Beck:
Cool. So the first thing is that we all have this very primitive brain structure called an amygdala. Actually there’s two, one on the left and one on the right. And all animals who have spines have some version of an amygdala because it’s so good for survival, it basically has the job of looking for unfamiliar things and telling you that’s scary.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. So the bear is coming, it’s going to eat you. You need to start running.
Dr. Beck:
Yeah, yeah. Stay alert, look there. And because of that, we have something in our brains called the Negativity Bias. I call this the 15 puppies in a cobra bias. If you walk into a room that has 15 puppies and one cobra in it, where does your attention go? It goes to the cobra because that’s going to kill you all if you don’t pay attention to it.
Tori Dunlap:
My entire body just flooded in sweat. We’re just hypothetically talking.
Dr. Beck:
I know.
Tori Dunlap:
And I was like, “Nope, Cobra in the corner. I am leaving and I’m saving the puppies if I can on the way out.”
Dr. Beck:
You just did a perfect example of how the human brain works with the negativity bias. So for an animal, it would be like, “Snake.” And then it would say, “Oh, it’s not moving. It’s just a rope.” And they’d lie down on it and go to sleep. But humans, no, we’re like, “Okay, maybe it’s not a snake, but there could be a snake, there could be snakes everywhere.” In fact, I am flooded with stress hormones just hearing the word snake. So, immediately we go into a fear state that an animal who couldn’t talk or imagine would literally not be able to sustain. We could lie in bed at night with the dog snoring cheerfully next to us and think about the various snakes in the world, what could happen to your health, to your finances, to your marriage, to whatever it is. In the absence of all danger, we can still be terrified.
So, that comes from the storytelling part of the mind, feeling that fear impulse, and instead of looking at the present and seeing what’s there concocting a story about how there’s danger and we have to control it, and then we start trying to control each other. And since we’re terrified of being controlled, that ruins all our relationships. And one final thing about the left hemisphere of the brain, all of this storytelling is happening only in one side of the brain, the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere also has this weird quality that is not shared by the right hemisphere, and that is that it believes that nothing it can’t see actually exists or is real. So it’s really weird. There are people who’ve had a right hemisphere stroke, so now they’re working only with their left hemisphere, right? And the left hemisphere controls the right arm and leg, the right hemisphere controls the left arm and leg. So somebody with a right hemisphere stroke will only put makeup on the right side of their face, only acknowledge their right arm and their right leg as belonging to them.
They can see perfectly well, it’s just that nothing perceived by the right side of the brain actually exists in the reality of the left. So we get caught in what I call the hall of mirrors. There’s a fear impulse, then there’s a story about fear and control, and then there is absolute resistance to any data that might contradict our stories. And you can see this going nuts in social media everywhere. People, they get riveted on a story and they will violently attack, verbally, emotionally, or maybe even physically, anyone who says there’s a different way of looking at it.
And between those three things, the negativity bias, the hall of mirrors, and that solipsism, the hemispatial neglect that makes the left hemisphere unable to acknowledge any other reality. We just get a spiral of anxiety that spins in the left side of the brain and takes over our lives. And the reason people weren’t seeing it, even when they were in their integrity, is it’s very cleverly inbuilt to our neurology. Then we create a society based on sustaining that. And even if you do get calm in meditation, you walk out into a world totally dominated by left hemisphere, fearful thinking, and that kicks it all up.
Tori Dunlap:
Again. I think the thing that I struggle with the most that I imagine most people listening struggle with too, because we’re all type A people, is the anxiety comes up and just like you were saying, it’s the realization of I’m no longer in control, or I’ve maybe never had control in the first place, so then I’m going to control more. Can we talk about that cycle that’s happening of, I’m out of control, so I have to get more control? But of course, control is an illusion. Talk to me about that.
Dr. Beck:
Yeah. It’s such an epidemic. Anxiety’s been called the inner pandemic, and the way it makes people react to each other is really mentally ill. Even for people who are of sound mind. What happens is we get locked into whatever we’ve decided is the way to stay safe. I don’t want to get too political here, but for example, somebody who is at the top of a power structure, say white male, white supremacist patriarchy, would look at the rise of women into all these institutions and into positions of power as a threat to his way of life because it is, it actually is.
Let’s take this hypothetical human. What he can’t do is see that the way of life where a few powerful people dominate, the poor and the weak is causing a lot of misery, even for the people at the top, they’re not happy people. Maybe if we had a different way of looking at things, maybe if we had a way of nurturing life instead of destroying it as a show of power, we’d all be happier. So, you present that argument. And instead of saying, “Well, that’s very interesting, you make a solid point.” It’s like, “How dare you? You’re more dangerous than ever, you witch,” right? So, we really see it in all the isms, sexism, racism, ageism, gender dysphoriaism, like they are attacking the weakest and most vulnerable of people because their brains are locked into a fear that they will not have enough even though they may have billions. That is anxiety taken to one of its logical extremes, and it goes beyond a nuisance and becomes a threat to everything.
Tori Dunlap:
And for the average person listening, including myself, I think that the version of that that shows up for us might not be, of course, this immigrant is taking my job, but is maybe my partner doesn’t love me and maybe they’re going to leave. Maybe I don’t have enough money. When is the other shoe going to drop? Am I going to get fired? Can we talk about those everyday, “Everyday worries,” but less as the political dictator oligarchy and more for you and I?
Dr. Beck:
I was trained as a sociologist, so my brain goes there very easily, but-
Tori Dunlap:
No. I mean, we’ll talk about that too because I want to talk about the state of the world and what all of this means because that’s boy, oh boy. But for the everyday average person, that anxiety is still there and still present.
Dr. Beck:
Right, absolutely. So one of my guilty pleasures is looking at something online called the Invisible Danger Prank. Have you seen this?
Tori Dunlap:
No.
Dr. Beck:
It’s just two people will be sitting there, and it’s usually the woman who pulls the prank and the man who falls for it. And all she does is like jump up and go, “Oh,” and the man or whoever happens to be there. It doesn’t have to be gender divided, but the partner goes, bananas, “Where is it? What is it?” There are people running around rooms, smashing things with brooms and stuff. And all that happened is someone went, “Oh.” That’s how infectious fear is, right? And when we get afraid of the things that surround us and support our lives, we are putting that energy into the things that surround us and support our lives.
So if we’re afraid our partner is going to leave us… I’ve had so many clients who shut down and got angry and miserable and depressed and defensive because they were so sure they were unloved, and their partner took this as a sign that they didn’t love their partner anymore, right? “Like, you’re anxious, shut down and depressed, you don’t talk to me. Well, that’s because you don’t love me anymore. What? You’re not letting me love you anymore.” So it creates the invisible danger prank in a very brutal and terrible way.
I’ve seen that destroy a lot of… Not destroy, but really damage a lot of couple relationships. It’s easily retrievable folks, don’t worry. Same thing with your job. How can you possibly be fruitful, creative, a team player if you’re scared that you’re going to lose your job or someone’s going to dominate you? So fear makes you the least happy version of yourself, the least productive, the least creative. The relationship between creativity and anxiety is so important. And when you’re anxious, your creativity disappears, which means that it’s hard to make anything good from a meeting to a product. So, it just poisons everything and we don’t need it. We need fear, which is what we call on when we actually see a snake. But to be afraid of everything around us makes us our worst selves. And if you just practice pretending you’re not afraid, if you imagine how you’d be towards someone if you had no fear in you, watch what would happen.
I mean, that’s an experiment I’ve done. It’s not an easy one to pretend you’re not afraid when you are, but if you can manage it, if you can get to that place, holy crap, people seem to feel it hundreds of yards away. People open doors for you. Try this Tori, go into like a coffee shop one morning and really sit there with your misery and your fear and your anxiety, and buy the coffee in that state and drink the coffee in that state and leave. The next day going to the same place at the same time, only this time you’re going in pretending to be a person with no fear and no anxiety. People will come up and give you things. People will look at you and smile. You would not believe how powerful that energy is, even if you never say a word. So just try pretending you’re without anxiety and you’ll start to see the benefits immediately, and that should give you a little bit of fuel to go on to generalize this more in all your behavior.
Tori Dunlap:
We knew this would happen. Wow, did Dr. Beck come in swinging. When we come back, we are talking about the simple phrase Dr. Beck teaches her clients to help them move from states of panic, about money to peace, how to find self-compassion for our anxiety and more. I want to stay in talking about anxiety before we go to the solve. When we’re talking about personal finance, financial anxiety. So many statistics say that this is the number one stress for Americans is money.
Dr. Beck:
Oh, absolutely.
Tori Dunlap:
And I know from talking with millions of women that this is the number one stress for them is money lack thereof. Again, wondering, am I going to run out of money? So, what is going on psychologically when we’re having financial anxiety? Is it different than other anxiety?
Dr. Beck:
It is, I think because what we did is we’ve monetized everything. I just finished reading Charles Eisenberg’s Sacred Economics, and he talks about what we used to do for love, instead of taking care of each other in a village, everybody moves away. Now, you have to hire someone to come bring you food. They’re carers. So you’ve made everything boil down to money. You want somebody to grow your food for you, you pay for that with money. So you’ve taken away the direct caring of people in a society and made it into money, which means we can’t survive without each other.
We evolved to be together, to be supported by one another, and more and more and more. This is what I meant about a very left hemisphere dominated society because this is all very left hemisphere. We have taken all the things that made us safe and happy in the world, and we have turned them into things we have to buy for money. So money is like the God of all anxieties, but it’s a false God. I mean, we can talk about this later, but I’ve had thousands of clients over 30 years of coaching, and I’ve seen them come out of financial anxiety in one room by doing work inside their heads and then go out and live more prosperously as a result. There’s an inner fix that helps allow you to live in peace. And once you’re living in peace, the way I put it in the way of integrity is this, if you want to get a little woo woo. The statement I am meant to live in peace is the most powerfully true thing that I can get people to say. I’ve tested this with dozens and dozens of people.
The statement that feels most true to everyone I’ve asked is, I am meant to live in peace. So everybody out there listening, try just saying that silently and feel how it drops into your heart as the truth. That’s really the only access we have to truth is the deep sensation of our entire being. So then if you think, “Okay, I’m meant to live in peace. This is the way I see it.” Every time you want something, I want more money. I want my true love. I want to be safe and secure forever. The moment you ask for it, it’s delivered, bang, by the forces that be.
However, the powers that be, always send it to your real home address. And as we’ve just seen, we are meant to live in peace. So in my case, when I finally accessed peace, that’s when I stopped having to worry about money. Not because I had tons and tons of it, especially not at first, but because peace became my central focus. And from a place of peace, people started paying me to do stuff I would have done already for the fun of it. And so, I started teaching that premise to people. I know it’s been done to death in all the new age stuff, but if you do it truly, if you do it not cynically, but right from the core of yourself, if you get rid of money anxiety, money begins to flow. I promise.
Tori Dunlap:
I think a lot of this has to start with the acknowledgement or the quiet viewing of what’s happening in our brains and bodies. And I think a lot of people, again, are so busy. We live in a capitalist society. It’s so hectic all the time that I can imagine… Even somebody listening right now is like, okay, all of this sounds great, but I’m still stressed. And it’s like, yeah, you can’t talk about any of this. You can’t talk about managing your anxiety or getting out of fight or flight or finding peace if you’re not first aware of what’s happening.
Dr. Beck:
Absolutely.
Tori Dunlap:
So how do we find first that awareness before we go and “Fix it?” How do we just get to the point where we realize this is a problem?
Dr. Beck:
Yeah, that’s the gold standard of learning how to be happy. In all the many, many cultures I’ve studied, there has to be a sense of a compassionate witness inside the self. And the way I got to it and the way I would work with someone who is in high anxiety or even panic. You can’t say to somebody who’s in high anxiety, “Here’s how your brain works. Now you know the secret. Believe in good things and everything will be great. Come make a finger painting, you’ll feel fabulous.” No, no, no. The first thing you have to do if you’re in panic is you have to learn to be kind to yourself. We go to the psychiatrist thinking and speaking as if anxiety is a broken mechanism in our heads. But we are not mechanisms, we are animals.
And when you go to fight your anxiety to bring it down, think how you would feel if I told you, “I’m here to fight you. I’m here to bring you down.” When we try to fight our anxiety to calm down, to do something positive, it just gets more frightening in there. So the first thing I ask people to do, I can’t say to someone, be calm, and have them just automatically be able to do that. You can’t do that. But I can say to someone who’s in a stressed state, be kind. So for example, if you were running from something terrible with other people, you might be stressed to the limit and you might not be able to be calm, but you would know how to be kind.
And every one of us is born knowing how to be kind to a vulnerable creature, and that’s what your anxiety is. Picture it as a shivering little puppy or kitten that you find on your doorstep barely holding itself together, hissing at you. Every human alive knows that if you want that to be your cat, you lower your voice, you slow your movements, you start saying calming things, “You’ll be okay, buddy. I got you, I’ve got you.” Don’t move too fast. You don’t freak out when the cat scratches at you, you get slower and lower and calmer. And I’ve had this experience with many, many animals including wild animals. I tell some of those stories in the book. They feel when a human goes into a calm space. And if we can do that for a kitten, we can do it for the scared part of ourselves. The part that knows how to calm an animal is the compassionate witness. So every day I sit down to meditate and I see my anxiety. It’s always there.
I’m like, “Hi, how are you this morning? All right, well, I’m here. You’ll be okay. It’s okay. I got you.” Literally just saying kind things to yourself. And the other thing I say is, “Tell me everything.” And it’s like, “Everything’s going to hell. Yeah, I hear you. Tell me more. [inaudible 00:30:11]. I got it.”
And pretty soon you run out of things to say, and at that point, the compassionate witness says, “What’s one thing I could do for you that you would love to have today? You want a cup of tea, you want a warm blanket, you want to call a friend, you want to go outside? Let’s do something to make you feel happier.” I did that this morning. I was kind of sick. I woke up, I missed our favorite show that we’re binging as a family last night, and my partner said, “Why don’t you stay in bed and watch it?” And I was like, “Oh, shocking.” But then the part of me that didn’t want to face the day just got so happy, and it immediately made me into a much more enjoyable person.
Tori Dunlap:
Everybody listening, I want you to go back about six minutes and listen to all of that again, because this is also something I do. And if I can point to one of the biggest things that has allowed me to grow my business to show up as a great friend, a great partner, it’s this. And I posted about this a couple of months ago. I talk out loud to myself as if I’m parenting a toddler. I do this all the time. So the video I posted was I got up and I knew I needed to make myself breakfast, but I just didn’t want to. And my inner child was throwing a fucking fit about it.
She was like, “I don’t want to make breakfast, I just want to sit.” I was like, “Okay.” So literally out loud, I was like, “I know you don’t want to make breakfast and you don’t want to do that. I know that seems really, really hard right now. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to get up and we’re going to slowly go and we’re going to get this breakfast because we know we need it. And if we’re going to have a good day, we’re going to make a good breakfast.” And I literally said this out loud, and I think it’s one of those, like it feels embarrassing at first or it feels stupid or it feels nuts or crazy. And let me tell you, it’s so important. Everything you were just doing of, “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
And when I now have episodes of anxiety or I’m really stressed, or… Especially, if I don’t have anybody around, my partner’s busy, my family’s away, I literally sit with my hand on my chest and I go, “It’s going to be okay.” And I tell myself all of the things I wish somebody was there to tell me. I saw this from Liz Gilbert as well. She journals as both sides of herself. So like, “Hey, tell me what you need. Oh, everything’s a mess and Trump’s stupid and the world’s falling apart and blah, blah. That sounds so hard. Exactly.” I love the question at the end too. What is one thing that I can give to you today? And then it feels like a treat. It does, it feels like you’re giving a child candy or a hug or an episode of SpongeBob. Like that’s so lovely.
Dr. Beck:
Everybody listening, just like again, put a peg in what Tori just said. Go back and listen to that because here’s the thing, we are trained by our culture to think that when we have a hundred million dollars, we’ll be able to feel like we can have a treat. When we have the perfect love relationship, we’ll be able to feel safe in the world. When we have all these things-
Tori Dunlap:
When I’m skinny, I can wear the bikini and take those beach photos.
Dr. Beck:
Exactly.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Dr. Beck:
I’ve coached so many people who’ve done all of that, achieved everything, and they’re still scared. They’re still miserable. But if I can get them to put a hand on the heart and say, “Oh, that sounds awful. Oh, I get it. No wonder [inaudible 00:33:40].”
Tori Dunlap:
And not in a patronizing or condescending way-
Dr. Beck:
Not at all.
Tori Dunlap:
… but an actual true like, “Oh man, that sucks. I’m so sorry.”
Dr. Beck:
It does. I have two partners. One of my partners is Australian, and she taught me the Australian therapy, and this is Australian therapy, “Sucks, mate.” It’s just like, “Oh, it sucks, mate.” And she’s like, “Just stop it sucks, mate. That’s all I want to hear.” It’s so simple to treat ourselves the way we would treat a small creature. Because if you look at the whole universe, we are small creatures.
Tori Dunlap:
When I have listened to you on other podcasts, when I’ve read about your work, one of the things that just blew my mind is how we work through anxiety. I was really, really anxious a couple of years ago. I was getting her first a 100K, it was growing really fast. I was launching a book and I was in a really dark place in my life. And the anxiety would come up and I had the response that I think everybody thinks they should have, which is like, “Okay, I’m nervous, so I need to go sit quietly and I need to go meditate, and that’s how I’m going to get through my anxiety.” And instead, it was just like my brain screaming at me in total quiet.
Dr. Beck:
Horrible.
Tori Dunlap:
Awful, not a solve at all, not a fix at all.
Dr. Beck:
That’s another thing, don’t do the no lie thing for a year and don’t do the meditate for hours in anxiety. Don’t do anything I’ve done.
Tori Dunlap:
And one of the things that you’ve said is like, the activity. I saw you on the Today Show and you’re like, “The activity. You have to do an activity.” Talk to me about the activity when we’re anxious.
Dr. Beck:
Right. So if you’re just exhausted and depressed and you need to climb into bed, you give yourself that.
Tori Dunlap:
Sure.
Dr. Beck:
But eventually, if you treat yourself kindly, it is the nature of a human brain to be constantly generating something. We are always generating things. And what we mostly generate in our culture are stories about how we don’t have enough and we need to be afraid, okay? But if you can just be consistently kind, what happens is that you move over into the mirror on the other side of the brain. The right hemisphere is responsible for things like connection, courage, compassion, a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose, loving other people, finding yourself… Being enraptured by art, all these things, the ability to be happy is housed largely in the right hemisphere. And unlike the left hemisphere, it doesn’t cut everything else off. If you turn it on, it still hears the left hemisphere of the brain.
Iain McGilchrist, my favorite neurologist, says, “The left hemisphere is a wonderful servant and a terrible master.” As you become kind, you will automatically move into the connecting, curious, compassionate parts of the right hemisphere. And then the generative part of your brain goes, “Ooh, I could make something. I could make a book, I could make a podcast. I could make a clay pot. I could make a sandwich.” I use the acronym KAT K-A-T to this is my shortcut for how to be happy when you’re anxious, kindness first, that’s the K, and then activity or art, but I don’t mean drawing. I mean anything you make. Tori is making art right now, yeah?
And when you got dressed this morning and put together an outfit, that’s art. If you push the creative side of your life so that it occupies a bigger chunk of your attention. Even if you don’t have a lot of time to give it, if you put your attention on it, you’ll begin to experience the T in KAT, which is transcendence. The transcendence of worry, one psychologist calls it flow, this state of making something that is almost actually too hard for you, but you’re engrossed by it and enthralled by it. There’s a bliss that comes with that, even when we’re working hard that I believe we’re meant to feel instead of anxiety.
Tori Dunlap:
And it sounds like two things are happening. One, your brain and your body has something to do. So the energy has somewhere to go. My theater background is like, we talk about how much energy is being built up in our body and it has to get released in some way, right?
Dr. Beck:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
And a lot of us with anxiety, especially if you’re just then, “Okay, I’m going to go sit on the floor and meditate,” your energy isn’t going anywhere.
Dr. Beck:
Nope.
Tori Dunlap:
Your energy is coursing through your body and staying there. So any sort of movement or activity, your brain and body are moving the energy through. And you probably know the science of this, it also sounds like, then your brain’s able to process what’s going on, but in the background, not right here, right at the front of your brain.
Dr. Beck:
Yeah. Yeah, it doesn’t have to be conscious. One of my friends is named David Burcelli. He travels the world helping people who’ve been traumatized by allowing them to shake. And one of the things that I recommend in the Beyond Anxiety book is if you feel shaky, lean into it, shake hard. Animals after a trauma like escape from a predator will always shake. And humans who allow themselves to shake and cry after a trauma are much less likely to get PTSD than people who hold it together. Which is, I think it’s so scary that we tell, especially men, that they have to be stoical and hold it together because that means they’re coursing with that energy, with adrenaline and cortisol.
And when it explodes, and it’s usually when not if, it can be very, very dangerous. So run around the room, shake as hard as you want, laugh and cry, turn upside down. Do what you would do if you were a child because the kids know it. They inherited this, and then we put them in school and told them to sit quietly through all their anxiety. And in doing so, we made them victims of an anxiety initiative that is ruling the world right now.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and we’ve had a previous guest on the show who’s a friend of mine who’s like a somatic teacher, right?
Dr. Beck:
Yeah.
Tori Dunlap:
Talking about you need to move the energy throughout your body so it doesn’t stay stuck, because that causes the autoimmune diseases and the discomfort and the chronic pain. Yeah. And you’re right, it’s like, yeah, we’ve all seen an ASPCA commercial, it’s all the shaking dogs and cats, and they’re like sitting there shaking. And it’s like, that’s the stuff that we need to do in order to move the energy through our bodies.
Dr. Beck:
And by the way, before my no lie challenge, I had 12 years of being pretty much bedridden by autoimmune diseases, all of which are considered incurable and none of which I have symptoms of anymore. So for those of us who are out there, I’m not saying you’re supposed to think yourself well-
Tori Dunlap:
Sure.
Dr. Beck:
… but I was living in a way that made me terribly anxious and not doing anything kind for myself. And the result was that my body correctly identified me as its own worst enemy, and sort of threw me to the mat with all kinds of diseases and symptoms.
Tori Dunlap:
If you need to right now, take a shake break like Dr. Beck just talked about, or put our episode with The Workout Witch in your podcast queue to listen next, because when we come back, we’re getting into what you can do once you begin to move beyond your anxiety, especially when we balance a society that not only works to exacerbate your stress as well as why being authentic to yourself might be the most important thing you can do to build a life you love. Stay tuned. You highlighted earlier that a lot of the ways in which we live our lives are very unnatural. This left brain dominated world is not the way things have always been. So, how do you balance the need for resources and material wellbeing with the need for passion and spiritual fulfillment?
Dr. Beck:
It’s so interesting. As I said, I was trained in sociology, and one thing I know for sure is that the radical changes we’re seeing in technology and culture are only going to speed up. And what that means is that we have at our disposal tools that are by the standards of even a generation ago, let alone say, a couple of hundred years ago, these things are magic. Like here I was in my 20s, I had three kids under four, I had all these autoimmune diseases, couldn’t move my hands, didn’t know what… I was trying to work and do all these things. And I was able to not only survive, but in the end thrive because computers had been invented. And I was able, from my bed, lying on my back. Liz Gilbert laughed at me one day, she was staying with us, and she came in and I was writing lying down with my computer on my knees.
And she’s like, “You have no respect for your writing.” And I’m like, “I have respect for back problems.” She always gets formally dressed and sits up at her desk to show up for writing. And I’m like, “I don’t care. Writing’s my bitch. I’m going to hang with her.” And then I’ve spent the rest of my life helping people devise ways to live their passion and find a way to monetize it. And you’ve done the same thing. The way you think is like that. There is a way of thought. I’ve had so many people and so many audiences say, “There are no other options for me. This is the only thing that I can do.” Like this one woman said, “I can only be in the armed services. I hate it, but it’s the only thing I can do.”
And I said, “Well, how many people here agree that that’s the only thing she could do?” The whole crowd raised their hands. And then I said, how many of you are making a living? They all raised their hands. How many of you are in the armed services? Practically nobody but this one woman. And I’m not speaking out against the armed services, they’re great for a lot of people, but for her it wasn’t great. And everyone in the room knew other ways of making a living, but they fully accepted that there was no other way for her. If you just crack open your mind, which is what the right hemisphere does better than anything, it opens the mind. And then we are in an economic and technological time where your creativity can be used to create things that are monetizable, that will suit your passions. And Tori, what you’re doing now is nothing but an example of that.
Tori Dunlap:
I appreciate it. This was not, again, not the plan, but I stumbled into it because Donald Trump got elected and I realized what I wanted to do, and it was my skill sets in storytelling and theater and marketing that really have… I’ve taken those that I’ve learned in school and learned through internships and all of that and other jobs, and then applied them here. But yeah, again, it was not part of the plan. And no one sat down with me at career day when I was 14 and was like, okay, so influencer, podcast host, in addition to nurse and carpenter, and whatever.
Dr. Beck:
No.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s how fast all of this is changing. Is like, my job did not exist. I mean, maybe 10 years ago, 15 years ago, but definitely not 10 years ago in the same way.
Dr. Beck:
Absolutely. And it’s getting more and more and more. And in the meantime, the jobs that used to exist are being made redundant. And so, people are terrified of AI because it’s going to take a bunch of jobs and it will, and I feel bad for those people. And I also have clients that are using AI to make their lives much, much more productive and easier. It’s all about the mindset with which you approach something, whether it’s financial management or being happy with what the world has given to you. If you go the way of your nature instead of what culture is presenting you and teaching you to think. If you shake that off… That’s what I got that from that year of not lying. I broke all the cultural rules. I did think-
Tori Dunlap:
And the rules are probably what it meant to be a woman as well.
Dr. Beck:
Yes. Oh my God, yes. But heavens, I realized I was gay. I was married and I had three kids, and yeah, I broke every single rule that did not go with my true nature. Along the way, I think a lot of people would say, I abandoned them, but actually I wasn’t in those relationships really. I was lying to be in them, and that’s not showing up in a relationship. So other than that, nothing that I did harmed anyone. And what happened next is I started teaching business school. I was teaching career development, and I would say to the students, let’s get creative about this. Let’s think of a way for you to use everything you’ve been given, like art school, drama school, you danced as a kid in contests or something, whatever you’ve done, put it in a pile. Let’s find what you love. And we’ll find the place where as Frederick Buechner said, “Your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” In that space, you will make a wonderful living.
Tori Dunlap:
Well. And I’ve learned from women like you and Liz Gilbert and Glennon Doyle and Oprah and all these incredible women that anytime you are making a decision that protects somebody else’s peace at the expense of your own, that is not a worthy decision. And I think we walk through all of our lives, especially as women, making other people comfortable at the expense of our own comfort. And yeah, it’s going to piss people off when you stop doing that. And yeah, it’s going to rock the boat and you might lose some relationships in your life. But to your point, are those relationships really genuine anyway if you cannot be the fullest version of you?
Dr. Beck:
Yep. When you betray yourself to keep the peace, you start a war within yourself. There’s no getting around it. So it is, it’s a scary hard world and we’re best prepared to face it, I think with integrity and then the knowledge that most of our anxiety, not fear. If a car is coming at you, your fear will give you a strong jolt of adrenaline to get out of the way. But anxiety is a fear response when there is no danger in the room. And that if you can get past fear even in a time when it seems really scary and it does, the way to be safe in a scary environment is to stay calm and alert, not fretting and panicky.
I spend about a month a year in the African bush, and we have picnics there in a place where we’ve often had to move out of the way for herds of elephants, prides of lions hunting.
Tori Dunlap:
Wow.
Dr. Beck:
In one case, killer bees. We all climbed a tree together, it was awesome. And we’re never anxious because that would make us vulnerable. I mean, I know the people that are throwing a party actually have lived out there and know how to do this better than I do. But I’m also aware that there are alarm calls, there are signs that predators are coming, and I’m calm and happy and enjoying this beautiful place knowing that to be alert and calm is to be able to move quickly when things are dangerous. And it’s dangerous, folks, let’s be honest. It’s dangerous these days. So be calm and be alert and you’ll be okay.
Tori Dunlap:
When we do talk about the big stressful time that we’re living in now, pandemic, the government or lack thereof, dismantling democracy, losing rights, like you mentioned, calm. I think that’s very important. Maybe I’m asking the question I’ve already asked, but I really want to drill down to, how do you get calm when you’re already so stressed? Again, if I’m listening, I’m like, “Okay, Martha and Tori want me to be calm. How the fuck am I going to do that? Politely, how the fuck am I going to do that?”
Dr. Beck:
Well, first of all, remember that I would never ever say be calm. I would say be kind.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. Good point, good point. That’s the first thing.
Dr. Beck:
Start by being kind, be kind, be kind, be kind until you can get calm and you will get calm, and your fear will tell you all the things. You write them down, all the things that your anxiety is telling you and say it to the part that’s doing the writing. I totally get it. I so understand this. You feel exactly the way you are feeling right now until you’re done with it. So you never push yourself out of that anxiety space. But then when you get calm and you start giving yourself small kindnesses, the way it works after the kindness comes the activity, and it’s not something you have to force. It’s a spontaneous movement of play. One of the sets of studies that I mentioned in the book that just blew me away, NASA did a study to look for creative geniuses in the 1960s so they could hire people. And 2% of the adults they tested, scored as creative geniuses. A little while later, somebody thought to give this test to four and five year olds, and 98% of them scored as creative geniuses. We’ve had it beaten out of us.
And when we bring kindness back into the picture, we are makers of things. That’s what humans are. So that’s the A, the activity, the art, the architecture, the artifice, the things that we make. It will come as play the way you play as a happy child. And then the next step is also automatic. If you let yourself play enough, you’ll reach something that I call transcendence. When you connect with something so overwhelmingly peaceful and so real that everything you’ve been afraid of seems flimsy and artificial by comparison. And if you can find that space and return to it, which is the overall objective of meditation, I think for me, even the horrors we are seeing now cannot shake that level of peace. And you can act politically, you can act in your own financial welfare, you can do anything you want, if you do it from that place of peace, there will be a lot of joy in your life, and whatever you do will flow with this genius that we can’t really connect with any other way.
Tori Dunlap:
I want to walk through very quickly some of the things we do in response to anxiety that are not productive. So, I was talking about the sit and meditate, right? That’s what everybody tells you. It’s just like, “Quiet your mind.” And I’m like, “How am I going to do that right now?” What are some of those other things or the pitfalls that you see people fall into when facing anxiety?
Dr. Beck:
Using substances as a way to numb the feeling of anxiety rather than going for the core of anxiety, which is that we’re stuck in a hall of mirrors in our brains. I am a big fan of antianxiety medication, but the thing… And I would send someone who’s really anxious to say, “Please go talk to a psychiatrist about this.” Then when they’re on something that helps them be calm, we talk about methods of being kind to themselves that would reinforce over and over. You’re with a safe adult, me. I’m talking to my inner child, right? I’m going to be your safe adult and I’m taking Valium or whatever it is, because I’m here to take care of you. And if you can get off the medication when you get calmer, great. That would be even better.
But even if you can’t, even if you want to use that substance, don’t do it to numb your anxiety, do it to give yourself breathing room to start changing your brain. And this is even more important when it comes to things like alcohol and gambling and dangerous, anonymous sexual encounters. I’ve seen people use almost any very highly dopamine rewarding activity as an addiction. Yeah. And one psychiatrist told me, if you’ve stepped on a nail and it’s sticking through your foot, the solution is not to take enough morphine to not feel the nail. The solution is to get the nail out of your foot. And in this case, there’s a lot going wrong in the world, and we need to be able to make choices that keep ourselves and our loved ones safe, and we need to subtly in our very not masculine way, start to change the system.
Women don’t think in pyramids of power the way the masculine brain typically thinks. Sorry, if I’m hurting anyone’s gender identity but here’s the thing. History has been written by accounts of what, dude, what country killed the most people on any given day. And it never ever mentions that every single one of those people had to be cared for years and years and years. Fed, loved, held, housed, clothed, and that’s the power that has been sort of shunted onto women as history making people go on to kill more people, right? The madness of the society we live in is balanced by the task of the feminine principle, which is present in men as well. But we have to access that for ourselves first and then to change the community around us and potentially to spread that to the whole world.
Tori Dunlap:
You have worked with thousands of people, including folks like Oprah. What do successful people like Oprah know or do that the rest of us don’t? I know it’s mean jumping in after that question, and trust me, you’re going to want to hear her answer. That and more after this break from our incredible sponsors who keep this show free for you.
Dr. Beck:
They know that failure is not failure. The biggest difference between the really successful people that I know and the unsuccessful people, people who would say they’re unsuccessful, is that the successful people have far more failures. They have a record of failures that would go all the way down your body and down the block. I mean, they have failed at so many things, but they just keep trying like little energizer bunnies, and every failure gives them instruction and learning that they bring to the next effort. And once in a while, something hits and we say, “Oh my God, she’s been madly successful her whole life.” You have not seen the days of discouragement and failure and disappointment, but I promise you they’re there.
Tori Dunlap:
And I think too, one of the things that we’ve talked about on the show a lot is that it sounds like they don’t take the failure personally, because I think a lot of women fail or don’t achieve their goal, and so then they think, I am a failure. It becomes an identity thing. Rather than just saying, “You know what? That didn’t work out.” That’s not my personal identity.
Dr. Beck:
Yeah, personal, permanent, and pervasive. That when people are going to be really trapped and crushed by life, they believe that a failure is permanent, that they’re never going to experience anything else. It’s personal, it’s all about me, and I’m bad and it’s pervasive. Nothing I do ever works. But flip that, and the successful people that I’ve seen, and I’ve seen some amazingly successful people, failure is impersonal. It’s like this story of a man who goes out on the river and he’s rowing away and he sees another boat coming toward him and he hails the guy and it’s like, “Hi, how are you doing?” And then the boat keeps coming right at him. And then he’s like, “Wait, you’re going to bump into me.” He starts screaming at him, and then bang collision.
And then he looks into the other boat and realizes it’s empty. It’s just a boat. Like all that emotion goes out. That’s how successful people view their failures. It was just an empty boat. It’s impersonal. It’s not pervasive. It’s particular to that situation. And it’s definitely not permanent. Every moment is a new day, right? Every 10 minutes is another chance to adjust and go forward again, and that persistence. One of my clients called it a mad dog persistence toward what he dreamed of. I don’t think that people achieve success any other way, frankly.
Tori Dunlap:
Any parting words, any last pieces of advice when we’re dealing with anxiety and when we’re dealing with our own brains?
Dr. Beck:
I liked what you said. I want to reiterate that because I just think I could talk about this forever and I have doing podcasts promoting the book, but people keep missing the kindness piece. They talk about getting creative and transcendent, and it all rests on the step of kindness. And self-kindness the way you described it is I think the most powerful thing that I use. So, I’m going to underline it. If you’re feeling anxious right now, put your hand over your heart and say, “Tell me everything. Tell me why you’re frightened.” And then say, “Of course, you feel that way. I’m right here. I hear you, say more. What can I do that would make you feel a little bit better?” And that was Liz Gilbert, right? Crying on the bathroom floor, not wanting to be married. And then finally, at the beginning of Eat, Pray, Love, she finally cries herself out and a voice just says, “Go back to bed, Liz.” And that one little kindness led very directly to a life of being one of the hundred most influential people in the world.
Tori Dunlap:
Yep. Yeah. And I think this is a love letter to Liz Gilbert now at this point. But I’ve seen her speak many times, and one of the things she talks about is mercy as well. And we often don’t feel like we’re deserving of mercy, but we’d give it to anybody else. We’d give it to everybody else.
Dr. Beck:
Exactly.
Tori Dunlap:
And again, the shaking puppy on our doorstep, we would give it to that puppy, why don’t we feel deserving of it? And one of the things that I love that she said when I saw her speak is like, “How actually narcissist is that?”
Dr. Beck:
Right?
Tori Dunlap:
That you believe of all of the people in all the creatures in the entire world, only uniquely you are not deserving of kindness and mercy and compassion. So yeah, it might feel stupid at first. It might feel weird because you’ve never done it before. Everything feels weird and stupid and embarrassing when you’ve never done it before.
Dr. Beck:
I call mine Kind Internal Self-talk, and the acronym for that is KIS. And I had that as a thing I used in my head for decades before I dared say it out loud because it’s so corny and people think it’s stupid. And now, I respectfully do not care.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. For me, it’s Tori Now. I talk to seven-year-old Tori all the time, and she talks back to me, which is the coolest thing because I have a lot to learn from her. For me, it’s two versions of myself. And how cool that all of this can come from ourselves. It’s not a guru, it’s not someone else who has a degree that we don’t have. You have everything inside of you to soothe yourself because you know yourself better than anybody else.
Dr. Beck:
You were born a genius at creating the life, the circumstances that will make you happiest. You’ve been tricked by your culture out of using that genius. Get it back.
Tori Dunlap:
I beg you, get it back. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your work. Plug away my friend.
Dr. Beck:
Oh, thank you. Thank you for your work. I love that you’re out there doing this. I hope to see you again soon.
Tori Dunlap:
That would be lovely. Okay. Books, plug away, where can we find them, where can we get them?
Dr. Beck:
Oh, plug that kind of plug.
Tori Dunlap:
Plug. Yes.
Dr. Beck:
I don’t care.
Tori Dunlap:
No, don’t plug me, plug you.
Dr. Beck:
Is book, is right book, I did. So, buy on things is stores and online book buy. Yes. Beyond Anxiety. Yeah. And check out my online community Wilder, where we’re all like using the… We’re doing a deep dive on it so we can all apply it to our lives at wildercommunity.com. Is that pluggy enough?
Tori Dunlap:
That’s pluggy enough. That’s beautiful. Thank you. Thank you for being here.
Dr. Beck:
Great. Thank you.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you to Dr. Beck for joining us. This was such an important conversation, so powerful. You can find her book Beyond Anxiety, wherever you get your books, or you can go to marthabeck.com to learn more. Thank you for being here. As always, Financial Feminist, thank you for supporting this show. And Feminist Media thank you for subscribing and sharing this episode with your friends and family who could really use it. We’ll see you back here very soon.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First 100K Podcast. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First 100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
