Can Anxiety Be a Super-Power? Science Says Yes…ish. | Dr. Wendy Suzuki

About this episode

Most of us treat anxiety as a malfunction to be fixed or medicated away, and the neuroscience points somewhere stranger. There is a narrow band, a razor's edge, where the same emotion stops running you and starts fueling you. Dr. Wendy Suzuki is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU and the incoming Dean of its College of Arts and Science, a leading authority on neuroplasticity, and the author of Good Anxiety and Healthy Brain, Happy Life. Her TED Talk on exercise and the brain has been viewed more than 55 million times. What makes this one land is that she doesn't teach anxiety from the outside. She has lived with social anxiety since she was a kid at birthday parties, still feels it walking into a cocktail party, and built her science around it. In this Best Of conversation, you'll explore: • The half of your nervous system nobody talks about, and the one lever you can consciously pull to switch it on • What to do the morning after a 3 a.m. spiral that converts the worry into forward motion, a practice she picked up from a stranger at a birthday party • Why ten minutes of walking lowers anxiety, and the timing detail almost everyone gets wrong • How much of you