♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ How many people have you connected with today?

We can reach almost anyone.

Almost anywhere.

Almost instantly, we can message across continents.

We can join communities from our couches.

We can date from our phones.

And yet we are hit over and over by a startling headline.

We are living through a global loneliness epidemic that should strike us as strange.

The public conversation has focused on loneliness and for good reason.

Social connection matters deeply for our mental and physical health.

Research by Doctor Juliana Holt, one STAT, and colleagues, has shown that psychological loneliness and social isolation are as bad for your health as smoking the 15 cigarets a day.

But as an evolutionary biologist who studies relationships, I keep coming back to the paradox of being disconnected today.

How can we be lonely when we have never had more access to more people?

I think we've misdiagnosed the patient.

We aren't just in a loneliness epidemic.

We are in an intimacy crisis.

Loneliness asks.

Am I alone?

Intimacy asks am I known?

Loneliness asked.

Are there people I am connected to?

Intimacy ask to any of these relationships.

Carry meaning, trust, care and vulnerability.

You can be lonely in a crowd or in a marriage.

You can have thousands of followers and no one to call.

When the world falls apart.

The opposite of loneliness is not proximity to others.

It's intimacy.

And intimacy is more than sex or romance.

It is being seen, understood, trusted, chosen.

Remember.

We are a social species.

We didn't survive for millennia by being the biggest, the fastest or the strongest animal.

We survived and thrived because we are an intimate one.

We shared food.

We formed families and alliances.

We cooperatively raised offspring.

We told stories to pass on cultural knowledge.

We observed each other.

We learned who was safe, who was generous, who could be trusted, who would show up when the storms came.

We have always had a need to belong because belonging means survival.

One of the great myths about evolution is that it is simply survival of the fittest, as if nature is just one long, solitary CrossFit competition for social species like ours.

Collective strategy is as important as individual strength.

At the individual level, selfishness can have advantages.

Of course it can.

We all know people who have made a career out of it, but at the level of groups, cooperation, wins and evolutionary models of our world, cooperative groups outperform selfish ones.

Every time humans do extraordinary things because we do them cooperatively, we do them together.

This goes against the I mean, my story of modern culture, my brand, my boundaries, my optimization, my truth.

We're told be independent, be self-sufficient.

Need no one.

Work on yourself first.

Then maybe you'll be worthy of connection.

In fact, in a recent multinational study of young adults, we found that 80% of Gen Z believe they will find true love.

Yet 45% of them say they are not yet ready for a relationship.

We've started to believe we must become before we can belong.

Now, I'm not against self-knowledge.

Therapy can be life changing.

Reflection matters.

Boundaries are important, but too often we wear our independence as armor.

We are protecting ourselves from people rather than with people.

For our ancestors, belonging begat becoming.

And as an intimate adult, we were not built to thrive in isolation.

For most of history, we became who we were through being needed, corrected, loved, teased, protected, challenged.

But our modern moment, well, today we are free to structure our social lives and entirely new ways.

As a result, there are more than 130 million single adults in the United States today, an anthropologically unprecedented number.

Many of these singles report high levels of happiness with their single life.

But in a world characterized by going solo, have our underlying intimacy instincts changed?

We are still in our hearts and in our DNA, a collective species, and we cannot solve belonging as an individual project.

We've convinced ourselves that today more than ever, we can make our own choices.

But what if these patterns of disconnection are how our species is adapting to the world around us?

Our complex nervous systems evolve to detect danger quickly.

A sound in the dark, a shift in posture, an unfamiliar smell, a silence that lasts a little too long.

Before you can explain why your nervous system may already be saying, get out of here.

That is evolutionary intelligence in the body.

When animals detect threat, they don't prioritize social bonding.

They prioritize survival.

We don't stop for a chat in a burning building and in the natural world, gazelle don't mate in front of a lion.

Our choices are guided by the way our evolved bodies perceive our world.

So what happens when threat signals are coming from everywhere?

Today?

That lion is rarely literal.

It's economic uncertainty, political instability, climate anxiety, war, violence, death, illness, job loss, a stare.

Perel calls this a poly crisis.

Your nervous system simply calls it Tuesday.

And in that context, self-protection starts to look adaptive.

Of course, people are cautious.

Of course they lash out, they hesitate.

They keep one hand on the break, one eye on the door.

So what do we do?

Instead of intimacy, we simulate it.

We swipe too fast.

We filter too aggressively.

Scroll without focus.

We flirt without following through.

We watch other people's lives.

We ghost.

Too much of modern connection is high stimulation, high control, but low vulnerability and low dependance.

We microdose on belonging.

Now that may feel safer in the moment.

You can exit, mute or block.

You can write, delete, rewrite.

Ask AI if you sound chill, but ultimately it leaves us wanting.

At the Kinsey Institute, we study how people date, desire, connect, and make meaning what we see.

It's not that people have stopped wanting love.

Rather, people are moving at a new pace.

Trying to navigate the challenges of modern life, work and technology, and how to simultaneously find and keep the kind of love that they believe is worth wanting through our annual Singles in America study with match.

Over the last 15 years, we found that many singles are aspirational about those romantic desires.

60% of US singles believe in love at first sight, 71% want to discuss core values on just the first few dates, and 73% believe that romantic love can last forever.

As my colleague and friend, the late, great doctor Helen Fisher, would say, we were built to love.

But when we ask singles what they are looking for in a romantic partner, the number one answer in recent years is not status or money or perfect cheekbones.

It is someone they can trust and confide in.

That is our intimacy crisis.

In one sentence, people want someone who makes the world feel less dangerous.

But trust is not something you can fully detect in a few messages or over one drink.

Trust takes time.

Trust is more than chemistry.

It's evidence, and modern dating often asks us to make decisions before that trust has had time to blossom.

A brief profile, a curated photo, a few messages, awkward first messages, even more awkward first date.

We are making high stakes judgments with low context evidence.

And our research?

Over 70% of people say they have fallen in love with someone they knew first was a friend or a colleague.

Nearly half of them say they've fallen in love with someone that they didn't initially think they could.

That tells us something vital about human attraction.

It often grows through getting to know someone with safety.

The slow accumulation of meaning.

Historically, we formed that bond with someone and then we discovered their quirks.

Now we often discover the quirks.

First we purposely search for them in advance the strange laugh, the awkward photo, the utterly intense opinions about all of us.

And because Don't Bond exists yet, the quirks are not charming.

So much is disqualifying, and we have become efficient at avoiding the wrong person.

But the data suggests that we may also be avoiding the very process that makes the right person write.

You can't protect yourself from love and experience love at the same time.

The trouble with that armor?

It keeps out the arrows and the embraces.

Of course, love should not be cruel.

It should not require abandoning yourself or tolerating harm.

Safety always matters, but intimacy involves risk.

To be loved, we have to become knowable and to become knowable, we have to let someone close enough to misunderstand us, to disappoint us, to harm us.

That is, Mother Nature is cost of admission.

What it buys us is depth.

But how do we go deep without risk?

We can't.

Research shows that going deep happens when three needs are met.

First, we have to manage our nervous system, sense of threat.

We do that for better conditions for intimacy.

Cultivate connecting deeply and meaningfully.

Ask questions and give answers that matter.

Focus on the people in our lives who are the relationships that we want to have.

Use technology to bring us closer together and not distract us.

But we have to do more than give lip service a deeper connection, deeper connection.

Host a dinner party, plan a vacation with friends video chat with family.

Often.

Prioritize date nights.

Gather people around the campfire for stories like our ancestors did.

Second, we need to connect while also practicing healthy dependance.

Asking for help before crisis.

Offering help before we're asked.

Lean on others and let others lean on you.

And third, we thrive when we are curious.

Curiosity is attention.

With humility, it says, I don't already know you.

I am willing to discover you.

In fact, one of the clearest red flags early on in a relationship is a lack of curiosity.

Without it, intimacy doesn't stand a chance.

So I want to return to the question I began with.

How many people have you connected with today?

Let's ask that differently.

How deep did that connection go?

Did anyone really see you?

Not your face or your role, or your resume.

Not the version of yourself you've learned to present because it's safer.

How many people know what worries you?

What inspires you?

How many people could you call if you needed someone?

How many others could say they know you?

Trust you can depend on you.

We are a social species living inside a culture that often teaches us to need no one.

Fear everyone and call that strength.

But connection has always been our species greatest strength.

The need to belong is woven into our DNA.

The crisis of our time is not simply loneliness.

It is intimacy.

Which is why humanity's Brandeis gift is a willingness to truly risk it all, to know one another and to be known.

Thank you.

I do a fun thing on my birthday every year.

Here I am this year.

I'm 45.

Thank you.

I put a dot right in the middle and now I am version 4.5.

I have stopped aging and I just upgrade every single year.

That's right.

And every year I create some space and I say, what are the features and benefits of 4.5 that did not exist in previous versions?

And I think if you open up that space, you can actually create new iterations of yourself that weren't accessible to you before, just by thinking, what would I like to improve?

Like, here's a silly one.

So this is actually what I do for a living.

I'm a professional speaker and version 4.5.

I hired a beauty pageant consultant to help me stand and walk better on stage.

Yeah, she's Miss Missouri.

She's also a captain in the Missouri guard.

And I sent her a video of me doing performances, and I said, I think I could be better at standing and walking.

And she said, also, your hands atrocious.

When do you think about your hand movements while you're speaking to other people?

Never.

But once you see it, you can't unsee it.

I feel like I can feel your piercing eyes on me right now.

I'm crushing it.

Am I not?

Yeah.

Thank you for Coach and watch this.

But she didn't think I could do that.

But I can.

Yeah.

Last year, I spoke to an accounting conference, and they taught me that when they do an audit of a previous year and something is the same in the paperwork as it was last year, they have a phrase for that.

They say, oh, that's the same as last year, but they use an acronym.

They say, that's Sally.

Okay.

And when I heard that, I was like, oh my God, Sally is my arch nemesis, I personified Sally.

I printed her out.

She's on my desk.

She's on my refrigerator.

And I think Sally like whispers in your ear and she's like, hey, congratulations.

You know, on all of our successes, let's grab a blanket and a glass of wine and watch some Netflix.

You know, just relax a little bit.

And Sally is your best friend until she stabs you in the back.

Because the world is not the same as it was last year.

The people you serve are not the same.

Their needs are different and you shouldn't be the same either.

I think this exercise of creating a new version of ourselves and creating space, it's exactly what we need.

Just because we're human doesn't mean we couldn't use an upgrade.

I have a friend named Deborah, and when she was in her 20s, Deborah went to go get a passport and it was the first time that she ever held her birth certificate and found out that her name was not actually Deborah.

Her parents couldn't pick a name at the hospital.

And so they just wrote Girl Miller on the birth certificate, and her parents were supposed to fix it afterwards, and they kind of neglected to do so.

Problem.

And my friend got so excited, she was like, oh my God, I'm going to change my name.

But I could change it to anything.

I could go by Deborah Miller.

That's how far she got.

But she was like, I could have a whole new personality.

I could be anybody.

And I've been thinking about that moment ever since.

Because each of us have the opportunity to embrace a new version of ourselves at any moment.

We do not need a clerical error from 1974 to give us permission to say, I want to be a different version of myself in the coming year.

Now, I was not born this way.

I've been scared and insecure most of my life.

What you may not know about me is that I'm a refugee from the Soviet Union.

I was born and raised there, moved to the United States when I was eight years old.

I didn't speak English.

I ate cow tongue sandwiches for lunch.

You guys, it's not a great way to make friends.

I will tell you.

I was bullied and I was scared and just unsure of who I wanted to be.

And in 2020, when I was pregnant with a little girl, I just wanted to give her, like the one thing I wanted to do as a mother I knew was give her the thing that I lacked the most in the world.

This is what I wore to the hospital, just to set the stage.

You know, first I went and picked up my firstborn son from school, and I actually I brought two costumes with me because I think that giving birth is an endurance event that is underappreciated.

You know?

So I got myself a bib.

This is baby number two.

I got a headband.

The only thing I was missing was the medal, which is really another sight on my part.

We named her Bella.

Brave candor Bella after my grandmother and brave after the one quality that I wanted to give to her as her mom.

And man, did it work.

This little girl is every day.

Every day.

She is fearless.

She is tough and she's constantly saying, I can do this because I'm Bella Brie.

And a few weeks ago somebody said to me, hey, have you ever heard this quote?

She who is brave is free?

And I was like, oh my God, that's my little girl.

It's worked so well.

She has embraced life to the nth degree.

And when I heard that, I was actually just like a little bit jealous, I wanted to be free.

By the way, did you guys know that a lot of immigrants do not have middle names?

It's true.

So version 4.5.

Just a few weeks ago, I legally changed my name to Diana.

Brave candor.

Thank you.

I know a pretty big upgrade.

Got a new haircut, too.

Yeah, I was inspired by my little girl, but I didn't do it for her.

I did it for that eight year old version of myself who just didn't know her way in the world and was just so intimidated by everything outside.

And I wanted to show her that becoming brave isn't something that you wait for.

It's a form that you fill out at the courthouse.

No, no, it's a decision that you get to make today and every single day.

My big at 4.5 is that it's never too late to become the person that younger.

You deserved.

So as you leave here today and you think about your next version, I just want you to ask, what is that one decision I can make that will make future me so proud?

Thank you guys.

In 2020, I found myself in prison.

I'll admit this wasn't on my vision board as a kid, but I was there on business.

I have a PhD in human communication.

I study how we make meaning, how we connect, how we human.

In fact, I went to prison for research, asking two big questions.

How do we explain the presence of gender violence and how do we solve it for answers?

I spent months and months alongside men who had perpetrated violence against their partners.

Listening closely to the stories they told about their childhoods, about relationships, and about being men.

But I didn't find what I expected.

These weren't monsters.

They were just guys.

Guys who'd been taught that winning was key to their manhood.

Or as one guy taught me.

I've learned to win at all costs since I was a kid.

It started, he said, with musical chairs.

I could push.

I could pull.

It was all fair game as long as I won.

And the more I won, he said, the less I cared about others.

That hit me hard.

In that moment, I suddenly remembered my own indoor middle school carnival when I was obsessed with musical chairs.

Do you remember the game?

You walk in a circle of chairs, and when the music stops, you sit.

But there's always one less chair than players.

So each round someone's out until there's one chair left for two people.

If you snag that chair, you win.

As I played my blood pumping, I was determined to.

I grew up in a household where sugar was like gold.

I had to win.

When we were down to that last chair and the music stopped, I yanked that chair toward me, slipped my leg in front through my hip like a jujitsu master, pushed and plopped down.

I've done it.

I was faster, better even.

And while my opponents drooped in disappointment, I claimed my chocolate cake like the winner.

I was.

Had I cheated?

Maybe I didn't have anyone to share that cake with that much I know.

I just sued all my friends out of the way in my own quest to win.

But this brings me back to prison, to the men I studied and interviewed who had perpetrated violence for so many of them.

Masculinity not winning at all cost.

It was part of being a man.

But at what cost?

When relationships become like musical chairs.

Violence is the tool used to secure that seat.

But that violence.

It isn't a monster problem.

It's a meaning problem.

I came to that realization after hours.

Each week in a month long prison intervention group.

In each group, men sitting in a circle surrounded by cameras and barbed wire, I helped facilitate difficult conversations about gender power and accountability.

What I'm sharing today is not surface.

It's from years of research developed through deep, difficult and messy dialog over and over.

I saw these guys just trying to be men as they learned masculinity.

That role required them to win, to be strong, pitiless, decisive, a leader.

But here's the rub.

Winning requires a loser, and there's no finish line in a relationship.

No scoreboard.

When they couldn't reach winning, they would chase the feeling of being right, of getting their way.

Winning became control.

And when that feeling disappeared, something destabilizing happened.

I heard a version of it over and over.

If you make me feel like a loser.

Watch out that losing feels like annihilation.

And for men who've never questioned or been given a language for those feelings, violence fills in the gaps.

It communicates what they feel entitled to.

An act.

I will not be made small.

But how can love survive?

Winners and losers.

Let me tell you the story about one guy, AJ.

AJ grew up watching his macho dad who demanded subservience from AJ's mom and used violence to get it.

AJ he desperately didn't want to be his dad, but his dad was the model for what he was supposed to become.

Because violence allowed AJ's dad to control the outcome.

When AJ's male role models would raise their voice or raise their fist.

They got what they wanted.

Violence worked.

When I asked AJ why he does violence in his own relationships, he said, I don't know why.

It's just I'm the man.

I'm the boss.

Losing isn't an option.

That can't be bad, right?

That last question.

That can't be bad, right?

Isn't rhetorical.

He genuinely didn't know the answer.

The story that AJ had inherited told him that winning was key to his manhood.

It was his birthright.

It was the whole point.

When he was pressed further, well, what does winning look like in a relationship?

What happens if you feel like you're losing?

That perceived threat to masculinity?

What's the most common context for violence?

The message of that violence was, now I'll force you to understand what I can't find another way to say in order to get my way.

But AJ, he isn't unique.

And he didn't invent the language of violence comes from somewhere, from parents and role models, from movies and politicians, from every unquestioned cultural story that says real men win.

They dominate.

They don't compromise.

When we assume the traits of men are the traits of winners, and winners are who we give power to, who we respect.

Losing is high stakes.

All of us is more than just a cake.

But this is more than a prison story, or even a men's only story, because the language of violence is pervasive.

It spreads across relationship types from our daily commute and into the workplace.

Anyone can use the language of violence, though women, transgender, expansive folks are much more likely to experience the lethal and devastating consequences of that violence.

I want to be clear about that.

Any of us can perpetuate harm.

But I'm going to be honest with you.

When I first stepped into prison, that was something I resisted.

Me perpetuate harm?

No.

No way.

I mean, look at these guys.

Compared to them.

I'm looking pretty good.

That distance between here and there.

It felt like safety.

It created a comparison, a shield of rationalization.

Pass the blame.

Move the buck.

Comparison allows us to create distance by leveling up and pointing down.

It stops us from asking hard questions about how I perpetuate harm in my own life.

How I silence or dominate, how I choose.

Being right over being connected.

Comparison allows us to avoid looking at ourselves by pointing somewhere else to our coworkers, to our partners, to the monsters.

The men I study did this to.

They'd point to their neighbors in prison and say, well, I would never do what he did.

I'm not that bad.

They'd point backward in time to their partners also and say, well, they started it, or she's done way worse than I have.

Comparison allows us to feel like winners without ever changing our behavior or questioning our destructiveness.

It's sleight of fist.

Well, yeah, I hit her.

But look over there.

That comparison protects me.

But accountability can transform us.

You know, when AJ first went into prison, he thought he'd do his time and be done.

He went in knowing what he'd always known.

That weakness is dangerous and that if someone makes you feel like a loser, you remember they better watch out.

That's not a monster talking.

That's a man who learned his lines really, really well.

Near the end of our time together.

AJ became terrified and not of the other men or prison necessarily.

He was afraid of something much harder, trying to live a different way.

Because to do so require.

He looked at all of the behaviors he once called strength and asked, have these destroyed everything?

I love?

Are these the tools of destruction?

That's where accountability actually starts.

Not.

I had a bad day or I stopped.

Accountability says we have to change the rules of the game entirely because this isn't working.

And that's what AJ did slowly, vulnerably over time with everyone else in that group.

He told the bad stories about himself, where his actions harmed someone, and then he made plans to do better.

When I asked him what it felt like to share and to listen to everyone in that room, he said powerful.

It's powerful to have the courage to do that.

Now here's where I come in.

And you do too, because I told you I went to prison as a researcher.

What I didn't tell you is that prison came home with me week after week, listening to these men decode their need to win.

I started hearing myself.

Not their stories, exactly, but some of the same reflects that hot, tight feeling when my husband and I are arguing and I stopped trying to understand him and start trying to defeat him.

The stonewalling, the passive aggression, the look diminishing him without ever raising my voice and then telling myself I didn't do anything wrong because, well, I'm not like them or him or whoever.

That strategy protected me for a long time.

It also kept me from changing and kept us from growing.

Instead, I had to tell the bad stories about myself, ones where I wasn't a feminist researcher studying harm from a safe distance.

I was in it, contributing to it in different ways, with different impacts.

Yes, but with some of that same logic, the same scoreboard, the same desperate need not to feel like a loser.

I had to ask if I had the courage, like AJ to name it, to change it together.

That's the opportunity.

But I won't lie to you.

Accountability requires courage, but accountability is our way out of this.

Not always.

By focusing out, but by also starting to focus in.

So here's three things that you can start today.

First, tell a bad story about yourself out loud to someone where your actions harm someone else and not for sympathy.

For accountability.

Accountability says these were my behaviors.

My actions had an impact.

And here's how I'm going to communicate differently.

Not well.

I already apologized, or I feel bad enough.

It says, here's how I'm going to change and then practice changing.

I'm not asking you to live in the bad forever or stay there.

And if you don't know how to move forward, ask.

Be curious.

Communicate.

How can I do better?

Second.

Get ahead of the scoreboard.

Don't wait.

Reflect with me right now and ask.

When does the need to win show up in me?

When you're interrupted.

Or if we dig deeper.

Are you like me?

Is it when you feel unsupported or like you're too much?

You can't stop a reflex if you can't recognize it.

The men I study, they weren't unfeeling.

They were drowning in feelings that they didn't have a language for.

When that reflex shows up and it will breathe.

And ask yourself, what am I feeling?

Where does this come from?

And what's that about?

It's not when you have the reflex.

It's what you do in the 10s before you act in a way that you can't take back.

And third, practice perspective taking to care about others in the world.

We have to understand our impact on them.

How might they be feeling?

How might my actions impact her?

Perspective taking moves us from a language of violence to a language of connection and understanding.

There's just one more thing.

This isn't just personal work.

This is cultural work.

We need something stronger than any one of us as individuals can achieve alone.

And we need something stronger than punishment.

We need prevention in our homes, our schools, in the resources we provide.

We need to change what winning looks like and for who.

By questioning the cultural stories we tell and the expectations they enact.

And we need to believe survivors not when it's convenient, but as a practice.

Because we're everywhere.

In what was crystal clear in my research, is that this violence exists, and not just out there, where we can point to behind prison walls.

It's here with us culturally and our desire to win and dominate and in using harm to get our way.

That winning it protects me.

But accountability can transform all of us.

And it starts awkwardly, imperfectly, by learning from one bad story at a time.

There's hope in the bad stories.

Humanity, even the courage to tell a bad story, our bad story and change it.

That's how we stop this.

It's how we stop playing musical chairs with our lives.

Thank you.

At my house, I have a very sensitive smoke alarm.

It goes off for burnt toast.

If I open the bathroom door after a long, hot shower.

And in theory, if there's an actual fire, the same alarm.

Very different causes.

If I respond to each alarm the same way, sometimes I'm going to miss the mark.

If steam is setting it off, unplugging the toaster won't fix it.

Anxiety is like that too.

It's an alarm meant to protect you, but when your response doesn't match, what's triggering it, it keeps going off.

And over time, you may start to feel like something is wrong with the alarm or with you.

40 million adults a year are diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

About a third of us will struggle with one at some point in our lifetime.

We have more awareness than ever.

More treatments.

More tools.

And yet, rates keep rising.

I'm a therapist specializing in anxiety, and for years I wondered, what are we missing?

After thousands of sessions in years studying anxiety.

Here's one answer I've come to.

We keep treating anxiety like it's one thing.

It's not.

In my practice, I found that anxiety organizes around three distinct patterns, each with its own logic, fuel, way of resisting change, and solutions.

Now, today I'm talking about anxiety as a human experience.

The patterns many people live with daily, sometimes silently.

Not a diagnosis.

The three types catastrophizing, control, distorted beliefs.

Let's consider three people.

Loop A is a mother of two who hasn't slept well in years because her mind is always auditioning.

Worst case scenarios.

Headache.

What if it's a brain tumor?

Her son doesn't text back after ten minutes.

What if he was in an accident?

Loopy knows these thoughts are irrational.

Everyone has told her so.

It helps for a few seconds, and then the worry is back.

Ellen is the most capable person in any room.

She runs the household, the career, the social calendar.

She cannot sit down until the list is done.

And it's never done.

She won't stop because she's afraid something will fall through the cracks.

She doesn't think of herself as anxious, just responsible.

But she's exhausted and vaguely resentful of people who seem to find rest easy.

Tom is a senior executive, successful by every external measure.

The privately, he's convinced he's fooled everyone and terrified he'll be exposed as a fake.

Now, many people feel like an impostor now and then, but for Tom, it isn't passing to him.

It feels like he's standing on ground that could give way at any moment.

Three different lives.

Three kinds of suffering.

All of it.

Anxiety.

The same alarm.

Different causes requiring different responses.

Now, of course, anxiety is complex and many factors shape it.

But recognizing the pattern gives you a place to start.

So let's start with loop.

Her mind races to worst case scenarios, as if they are likely.

They almost always begin with two words.

What if and everything after what if is a story?

The mind often catastrophize is because it mistakes uncertainty for danger.

If it can imagine every terrible outcome, it believes it can protect you.

It's an alarm going off just in case.

Now there's no reassuring a catastrophize or the need to feel protected from uncertainty has a ready answer, but it could happen.

What helps is learning to distinguish fact from story.

What do I know to be true right now?

What is not?

What if for loop her son hasn't texted back?

That's the fact.

Everything else is a story.

The practice is noticing when you've crossed from fact into fiction and coming back not to feel calm all the time, but to watch the spiral begin and choose not to follow it all the way down.

It's to notice that in this moment you are safe.

Ellen's anxiety doesn't feel like fear.

It feels like productivity.

People admire and reward it.

Its logic is simple.

If I stay on top of everything, nothing will go wrong.

If nothing goes wrong, I'll be okay.

It's an attempt to keep the alarm from ever going off.

The problem is, this makes your well-being dependent on what happens out there.

And out there is where you have the least control.

And the harder you try to control things, the more suffocating it all becomes.

Until there's little room left for pleasure.

The antidote for the need to control is internal trust.

Knowing that whatever happens out there, you have everything you need to handle it.

In here.

But building that kind of trust requires something very uncomfortable.

Letting go.

Doing less.

Choosing good enough over perfect.

And discovering the world doesn't fall apart when you do.

In real life, this looks like leaving dishes in the sink to do something for pleasure.

Delegating a task and allowing it to be done their way.

Not yours.

Or closing the laptop on a tick tock you've rewritten 11 times and deciding it's done.

But this is hard because people with control base anxiety often believe their success comes from their anxious behaviors.

Letting go teaches them it comes from who they are, not what they do.

Tom's anxiety is the quietest and in some ways the most corrosive, distorted beliefs.

Our convictions about who you are.

That feel completely true.

But aren't things like I'm unlovable?

I'm a failure.

I don't belong.

These aren't passing thoughts.

They're operating systems.

It's like the alarm going off because the wiring got crossed.

There's a line I love that captures where these beliefs often begin.

Children are keen observers and terrible interpreters.

Something happens.

A parent's absence, a cruel comment.

And the child draws a conclusion.

They don't yet have the tools to question.

Not.

My parent was struggling, but I'm not enough.

What makes treating distorted beliefs so challenging is how aggressively they defend themselves.

Tom's colleagues call him brilliant.

His results speak for themselves.

He deflects every piece of evidence.

They don't really know me.

Anyone could do that.

I got lucky.

What helps?

Requires courage.

Stop deflecting.

When someone gives you a compliment.

What if you just say thank you?

And really let it land?

It means, considering that you might be looking at yourself through a funhouse mirror, and that what others see might be more accurate.

Self-compassion is the other piece.

Speaking to yourself the way you would speak to someone you love.

Most people would.

Distorted beliefs would never say to a friend, but they say to themselves.

That gap is where the work lives.

I am intimately familiar with all three anxiety types, not just as a therapist, but as a mother.

A couple of years ago, my son was told an injury that was expected to heal wouldn't for an act of 23 year old.

This was devastating.

The details are not mine to tell, but what it brought up in me is.

And suddenly every alarm was going off.

I did plenty of catastrophizing, filling the uncertainty with dark stories, and when he was in his own fear, spirals, it was easy to get pulled along to until I anchored myself in what was true right now, which was never as scary as the imagined fears.

Control became my favorite researching, scheduling, suggesting how he should cope.

I'm a therapist.

I have plenty of ideas.

And it wasn't helpful for all my efforts to fix it.

Here's what I didn't do.

I didn't trust my son, who was doing his own research.

Scheduling his own appointments.

Finding his own way.

Guess which approach was more helpful?

His or mine?

And sometimes distorted beliefs showed up, my afraid.

Here I was about to publish a book on anxiety, questioning if I could practice what I preach.

In those moments when I remembered to be gentle with myself, the feelings passed or easily.

We are getting through it not because fear disappeared or the circumstances got easier, and certainly not because I managed everything perfectly, but because we are responding to the fears as they arise based on what they need.

And that's what I want for you.

That freedom from anxiety, but freedom within it.

To pause when the alarm sounds and ask, is this catastrophizing an attempt to control a belief that was never true?

Our lives are complicated and tender.

Our anxiety is no less so.

But that willingness to pause, to name, to respond wisely.

That is love turned inward.

And while you're there, can you take it one step further and meet yourself exactly where you are?

Not as a problem to solve, but with the same care you would show someone you love on their hardest day.

We all deserve that.

And it's how real change begins.

Thank you.

And that is the end of our show tonight.

Please go be human together.