What Our Anxiety Tells Us (Ellen Vora, M.D.)

“I think we're due for a cultural rebranding around crying. I think that crying, you know, if we start to cry, we inevitably apologize or invariably apologize. We sort of suck it back in and make it as small as it can be. Like the way someone would pinch back a sneeze, we’re like holding the tears back, making it smaller, collecting ourselves. And you know, if you know, somebody who's crying frequently or you're like, they're in a bad place. And I think that we really need to see crying as this deep wisdom from our body saying, you need a release right now, let's have of one. And when you get an opportunity to cry, dive into it and let it be big, let it be complete rather than smaller. Like let it be bigger.” So says Dr. Ellen Vora, a Columbia University-trained psychiatrist who takes a functional and holistic approach to mental health—namely, she treats the whole system, looking for where states like anxiety and depression might be rooted in the body, whether it’s less-than-ideal nutrition and an out-of-whack gut, or poor sleep and breathing.

In her just-launched book—THE ANATOMY OF ANXIETY—she tackles this state that is ever-present for many of us. In fact, it’s easy to argue that if you aren’t feeling anxious, you aren’t really alive in this complex, difficult rollercoaster of time. But in Ellen’s model, she differentiates between true and false anxiety—both are very real and valid concerns. For false anxiety, typically there’s an imminently treatable physical root that can be addressed until the body comes back into balance and the mind calms. True anxiety, on the other hand, is an alarm clock that something is not right—that you’re out of alignment, or integrity, in some way. In today’s episode we talk about both, including the overwhelming load that we’re all carrying and how important it is to cry. We also explore psychedelics and what it means to really heal. OK, let’s get to our conversation.