Healing Anxiety by Living Your Truth, with Martha Beck

If you're in absolute alignment with your own truth, you know, if your body, heart, mind, and soul are all believing the same things, you don't have any psychological suffering. Hey everyone, it's Rosie here, and welcome back to "Radio Headspace." So we're living in a time where anxiety feels like it's in the air. And it's easy to think that if we just meditate harder or read more self-help books, we'll finally fix it. But what if the problem isn't just inside us? What if the problem is the world we're living in? That's why I wanted to talk to Dr. Martha Beck. She's a Harvard-trained sociologist, bestselling author, and someone whose work has deeply shaped how I think about healing. Her latest book "Beyond Anxiety" explores how we're living in a society that's literally wired to make us anxious and what we can do to get free from it. In this conversation, we talk about the science behind anxiety, how our culture pulls us out of integrity, and how creativity and present might just be the antidotes we've been looking for. I really hope you enjoy this conversation. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to "Radio Headspace." I am joined by somebody very special today. Marty, thank you so much for joining us. I've been so looking forward to this conversation. Oh, me too, Rosie. I'm so happy to be seeing you again. I know. I feel like it's been a long time, but also no time at all. We're in a very, very precarious time. Yeah, yeah. It would be nice not to know any history right now. (laughs) I mean, how are you? So good. How are you doing right now? Oh, so good. Because there is a sense that it is perilous and that it is difficult, but there's also a sense of something shimmering through it all that we have never seen before, but which will be tremendously positive. Now, I may have projected this as a defense against nihilism but I don't think so. (laughs) I went to an Ani DiFranco concert last week, you know, this protest singer, she says right in the middle of her concert, "You know, I just feel incredibly hopeful these days, and I know that's weird, but it just keeps getting stronger." And that's affecting me too. Yeah. Oh, no, I'm into that. You too? Yeah, no, I really do. I'm gonna say, I'm buying into this more and more because the opposite just doesn't feel good. Yeah, that's for sure. But I do wanna backtrack a little bit so that the audience can have a little bit of context, especially with what I'm talking about, "Beyond Anxiety" is a book that Martha wrote, highly recommend, 5 outta 5 Yelp review. Oh, thank you. Please read it. How did you even get into the topic of anxiety? So, thank you for that question. So I wrote a book called "The Way of Integrity," where I said if you're in absolute alignment with...