Zibby chats with sociologist and bestselling author Martha Beck about her fascinating, groundbreaking new book, BEYOND ANXIETY: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose. Martha shares her transformative tools, explaining how simple practices—like kind self-talk and “sense drenching”—can calm anxiety and unlock creativity. Together, they discuss the brain’s left-right balance, the science of flow state, and the life-changing power of creative expression. Filled with humor and practical advice, this episode is a must-listen for anyone seeking calm, joy, and meaning in a chaotic world.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Martha. Thank you so much for coming on Mom's Don't Have to Read Books. So excited to have you here. 

Martha: Thanks for having me, Zibby. It's great to be here.

Zibby: Thank you. Okay, beyond anxiety, curiosity, creativity, and finding your life's purpose, I mean, what else do we need? This is like the ultimate handle. 

Martha: Yeah. Yeah, you're done. I will write no more forever. Yeah, it's pretty topical I think right now, you know, when I started writing it three or four years ago. I thought, you know, it was right after the pandemic, I thought people are really, really anxious.

I wonder if anything else

Zibby: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Do you mind if I read just a paragraph from your introduction that I thought was so funny? Okay, good. Okay. My own funny feeling. I've been studying anxiety all my life because I have it, have had it, have had it in white, hot volcanic eruptions and foul sky darkening billows. Have had it for years on end for richer and for poorer In sickness and in health, I remember being knotted up with anxiety on the eve of one birthday, worried sick because time was passing so fast, and I had yet to accomplish anything significant.

I was turning four. Things only got worse once I started school, and you said, I'll just read this one paragraph. The first time I was assigned to write a poem, my fear of inadequacy kept me awake for five consecutive hallucinatory days and nights until my pediatrician, my pediatrician, put me on a short, blessed course of Valium.

In high school, when I joined the debate team and stood up to speak in front of a judge, I passed out. Cold. And then you just said all of this anxiety was one of the reasons I gravitated toward the social sciences. If I could understand the mind, my own mind, then maybe someday I could free myself from constant unease.

So how did that go for you? 

Martha: You know, it was a long ride, but it has gone surprisingly well. I have to say, you know, I, I dug into this to researching anxiety during the pandemic because it was such a major issue. Anxiety worldwide went up by a full 25 percent during the, in 2022, 2020, sorry. So I like jumped in and read all this brain science that's been done and read widely. I'm a sociologist by training. So I read all the things that add anxiety to the culture. And I kind of figured out how to make my anxiety go away. And it hasn't been back. I mean, it starts, it starts to rise sometimes. And then I'm like, Oh, I know how to fix this. And I stop it. Wow. I'm like, this is too good to be true.

But I really have not felt anxiety since I started using the steps I describe in this book. 

Zibby: Wow. That is, I mean, there's no more powerful advertisement than that. 

Martha: Oh, I'm sold. 

Zibby: Yeah, yeah, exactly. 

Martha: Sign me up! 

Zibby: Well, you start the book by telling us, of course, the difference between fear and anxiety and your encounter with the leopard.

And now that was, uh, quickly showed you that real fear is, of course, quite different than the hauntedness. of anxiety. Tell me about that and how you can identify the two. 

Martha: So we desperately need our fear. Without it, we'd all be dead, right? So when something dangerous is actually in our physical presence, we have this highly evolved instinct that makes us immediately go into very strong concerted action to avoid a danger or run away from it, fight it, whatever.

And then once the coast is clear, the fear goes away. Wild animals, they get afraid. I mean, they can be in the jaws of a leopard and get away and just give themselves a shake and they're sort of back at baseline within seconds. We, humans, are the only animals who can make stories in our minds about things that might happen in the future.

Like, we got away from that leopard, but oh my god, what was it like? Remember every detail. Tell our friends, think about how much worse it's going to be next time. And so we spin these stories that keep triggering our fear impulse until it's just a spiral of non stop dread, and that is called anxiety. And it's not about anything clear and present in the room, it's in our own sad little heads.

Zibby: So you outline so many different really effective strategies in the book. If you could pick one and say, okay, this is the beginners, this is your first step, right? You're massively anxious. Where can you start? Which would be the, which would be the step? 

Martha: The first step, gosh, I'm tempted to go one further, but the first one is something I call KIST, K I S T, which sounds, it stands for kind internal self talk, sounds so goofy, but all it is, is just telling yourself the things that you would say, to soothe a frightened baby or baby animal, because you are a frightened baby animal. And you just say things like, it's fine, I've got you, it's okay, gonna be all right, you're okay, you're okay. These things that we instinctively would do if we found like a trembling half dead kitten on the porch and we wanted to make it feel better, we all have the instincts to self soothe, but we don't use them, we're not trained to use them culturally. So that's the big first thing where I always have to go. And then if you want a really interesting, fun trick, there's something I call sense drenching. And this is, so I'm gonna ask you to do it right now. Okay. 

Zibby: Okay. Okay. 

Martha: Okay, so first, think of something that makes you a little bit anxious, so you can get that in your body.

Zibby: Okay. 

Martha: Let's just say the world, because that's enough to make anybody anxious. Now what I want you to do is tell me one thing you love to smell. 

Zibby: Okay. 

Martha: What is it? 

Zibby: Warm chocolate chip cookies. 

Martha: Okay, warm chocolate chip cookies. One thing you love to hear. 

Zibby: My kids talking. 

Martha: Okay, one thing you love to see. 

Zibby: Uh, one thing I'd love to see the ocean.

Martha: Okay. 

Zibby: One thing you love to touch with your fingers or your skin. 

Martha: Just something super soft, like really fuzzy soft sweater or something. Blanket. 

Zibby: Okay. 

Martha: And one thing besides chocolate chip cookies that you love to eat, you love to taste. 

Zibby: Maybe like spaghetti with butter. 

Martha: Okay. So here's the scenario, and I want you to envision this very clearly.

You can close your eyes if you want to, and everybody out there can play along. You are sitting with your children, listening to them laugh and talk at the beach, and it's a gorgeous day. You can hear the ocean rolling in out there. There's a tray of Warm cookies that's just been pulled out of the oven.

It's wafting to your nose as you eat. Was it spaghetti? 

Zibby: Yeah, maybe not the best beach snack. 

Martha: No, it's fabulous. Delicious beach spaghetti. And let's see if I left anything. Oh, and you're wearing the absolute softest cashmere sweater you've ever even conceived of. And think of all these components, every sense.

Being in that scenario. Can you do it? 

Zibby: Mm hmm. 

Martha: How's your anxiety? 

Zibby: Well, now I just feel sad because, ha ha ha, that I'm not with my kids, like, in this idyllic moment at the beach. 

Martha: Now that is something you can do something about. You can plan to get together. A lot of times these sense drenching exercises really help my clients know what to do to feel happier.

But when you were holding those sensory images in your mind, how anxious were you? I was not. Yeah, you can't do it, because the part of the brain that does anxiety, which is mostly on the left hemisphere, can't stay active when we really, really, Think into things that the right hemisphere preferentially uses and things like being sensing things and imagining things and putting things together in our imaginations.

Those are all functions of the creative right hemisphere. So, and they toggle, you can't, there's tons of research showing that anxiety kills creativity. What I found is that if we can get ourselves to be creative the way you just did in any way, it turns off anxiety. Thank you. And then there are scary things happening in the world, but are you in a better position to solve those problems when you're in a panic attack or when you are creative and calm?

Zibby: Creative and calm. Yes. 

Martha: There you go. We're done here. 

Zibby: Okay, great. Well, that was easy. Thank you for the session. Wow. And that was just the first step. My goodness. And creativity, though, comes from a place where It's not just that you're not anxious, right? Feeling that urge to create, that you're putting something in the world that doesn't exist.

That, that is a little bit more, like, it's, it's more than the absence of anxiety, isn't it? 

Martha: Yes. And that's why this book is called Beyond Anxiety because there, a third of the book is about we're all anxious and it helps, you know, it gives lots of different tools for calming down. But that's when the really good part starts.

starts. We don't end with calm. If we're going to activate the structures on the right, in the right hemisphere that are actually the, the mirror image of the anxiety structures, we have to go into creativity. We have to start connecting things. People get scared even of the word creativity, because when they're in an anxious place, they think that means, oh my god, They're gonna make me draw something and compare it to somebody else.

Ugh, I can't sing, I can't dance. Peace, kind, internal self talk, and just know, Zibi just did an amazing creative thing by imagining a delicious scene that has not yet been made. taken place. So all you have to do to become creative, you could pick up a Kleenex and like wad it up and see if you can mold it into an animal.

You can, you can get up and do a little dance around the room and it does not have to be good. Anything you do, and there's a lot of research on this too, anything having to do with the The arts, but also things like cooking and gardening and creating social events. All of these use those creative structures.

And when they are active, the anxious mind is off. The interesting thing is that the anxious mind is also the time part that tracks time. So that's why you can get into something and it feels like, oh my gosh, no time passed and it's been three hours. The anxious part of the brain will truly believe that that time didn't exist.

It will say, I've always been anxious. No, I've never had any breaks in my anxiety. What are you talking about? Because it doesn't access These are other sensations. So anxious brain doesn't even know about creative brain But creative brain can you can use all the information in anxious brain to solve problems just by Imagining anything. 

Zibby: Wow, this is very powerful, right?

What is it? What are some how did it how then? So this is the explanation for flow state, right? Okay. How do we then apply that for kids and make things that kids are interested in? What if they don't have, like, how do, does it apply any differently for children? 

Martha: It does. And they are way ahead of us. So, uh, in the 1960s, NASA had a study done to identify creative geniuses so they could hire them.

And it turned out that 2 percent of adults rated as creative geniuses. And they kept using this test for a while. And then someone thought to give it to 4 and 5 year olds. How many of them do you think rated as creative geniuses? All of them? Pretty much. 98%. And I think probably the 2 percent just hadn't slept well.

So I think all children are born creative geniuses. And the people who did that study to explain how 98%, 96 percent of their people were losing their genius by the time they became adults. They said, it's the school system. It teaches us not to be creative. It likes us to be formulaic, to follow instructions, to give predictable answers, to keep.

A track of time and all the things and read and write and do arithmetic, all of which is very left hemisphere dominated. So that makes us anxious. Even reading, which I love, forces us to tighten the focus of our eyes, which is a fight flight response. And like when a, an animal sees something scary is like, really gets intense.

So it triggers the whole fight flight phenomenon when we just. read. So what I would do if, and I happen to be raising a four year old, helping raise a four year old right now. I wish I'd known this when my older kids were younger. Don't. Require them to come out of their creative genius. Encourage them, give them time to mess around, break all the rules, give them stuff to just fool around with, and by the way, don't praise them for doing it well, because that makes them anxious because now they think they're being scored.

Just praise them for being amazing and creative and wow, who could even imagine what you'll do next? Just So, yeah, let them be who they are and praise them for being it, but not for being good at it, which ties people in knots. 

Zibby: Excellent. Wow. And then how does all of this tie into the purpose of life?

Martha: Because as you follow, so there's two spirals. And he sends us into a tight, nasty little corner, like a phobia will advance. Someone's afraid of going to the store, then they're afraid of going outside, then they're afraid of going outside the bedroom. It closes in. That's agoraphobia, of course. Weirdly, you know, when people were locked in during COVID, A lot of people developed that just because we were closed in.

Anyway, so it has this tiny tightening effect. On the other side, creativity also spirals, but it spirals outward and it connects us with more and more and more things and it connects things. The, even the, the, Two sides of the brain are a slightly different color because the right brain has more of these long neurons that are insulated with this white substance called myelin, so that it can create what are called far transfers, where it will link two things that seem very different, that have never been linked before, and then, wow, the whole, the whole brain lights up.

But it needs. These long white colored nerves. So the right side of your brain is actually paler than your left hemisphere. So, yeah. And as you get connected to more and more and more things, it never ends. Ultimately you mentioned flow state, flow state happens when you're creating something at the very edge of your skill level and you're completely invested.

It doesn't mean you're just sitting on the beach drinking margaritas. It means you're actually creating, um, You're doing stuff that's not easy for you, but it's joyful and it's meaningful. Then you connect and connect and connect, and there comes a moment when you disappear, and there is just the creation.

And that, so the book's divided into thirds, the creature who's frightened, the creative, Who thinks about things the way most humans do when they're in creativity, and then the creation, when you can actually just disappear into this blissful process that seems to be happening somehow through you, and that is one of the best reasons to be a human being, I have to say.

Zibby: Do you feel that's where you are? 

Martha: A lot of the time, yeah, man. I, I, I, I get up every morning, I turn on a big bright light and I start drawing. Not, and then I, when I finished a picture, I stick it in a closet somewhere and forget that it exists. I did that first as an experiment to see what would happen if I really pushed the right side of my brain.

It made me so happy. I was going to do it for a month, and it was like I did it. Discovered some kind of incredible drug or something. I was just, like, thrilled to be alive and completely non tracking my calendar. People had to come tell me what to do, when, but it's a good feeling to live without anxiety.

It is so freaking good. 

Zibby: Wow. It seems so simple. Just get more engaged creatively and trick your brain to stop using the side that it's been so used to using. 

Martha: It would be really simple except for one thing. Our entire culture is built on the premises that are present in that anxiety spiral in the left hemisphere of our brains.

That part of our brains believes that There is no meaning in life. There is only grabbing stuff. Can you get enough stuff, money, power, fame, get stuff, get stuff. And productivity is everything. Why? So you can die having done the most tasks. It has we have all these anxiety based rules in the culture, in our workplaces, in our schools.

And the second you engage with that, you're going to be socially pressured to spin into anxiety again. So the spin in the brain is mirrored by the spin in the culture and in order to get really resilient to that, you kind of have to practice moving your brain from anxiety to creativity because the brain is malleable.

We can change it and what fires together wires together. So if every day you have a practice, and I obviously talk about this in the book, if you have a practice that moves, You out of anxiety and into creativity, you're going to develop like a muscle that resists the pull on and push of the culture as it tries to make us anxious.

Zibby: I like it. Yes. Now I see why when I have 8 million things to do, I have to like go into Canva and start making a new visual and move things around, you know, because I'm like,.

Martha: Look at those books behind you. If that is not an act of enormous creativity, I don't know what is. But collards, I'm just like, ah, I just could stare at your bookshelves all day.

Zibby: That is what I did during COVID, by the way. I took all these books. 

Martha: Is that right? 

Zibby: Back to your locked in theory. So, you know. 

Martha: And you're creating a podcast and you're just, you're actively making stuff. That's one thing I tell people is, A quick trick is to say to yourself, if something bad happens, instead of saying, Oh my God, what do we do now?

What do I do? Say, Oh my God, what should we make now? What can I make now? Because making stuff, the moment you're making something, You can't stay anxious. 

Zibby: Hm. You're explaining a lot of my behavior. I am liking this very much. Thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Wow. 

Martha: Oh, thank you. 

Zibby: Yeah, this is so great.

Amazing. Okay, well, what is one thing, just as a last question, that you feel you're able to do now, free of anxiety, that you never, ever would have believed that you could have done before? 

Martha: Oh my God, you would not believe how many things. I had, for example, I had, I've had chronic pain for a lot of my life.

During my 20s, I was pretty much bedridden. So from 18 to 30, I was, Really in tremendous amounts of chronic pain. And then I, I left that behind. I found ways of living that made my stress levels go down. And that really helped with my symptoms, which is part of the reason I developed. I became a coach with a coaching system.

I was trying to find things that showed up in my body as more capability, but I always thought of my body as sort of frail. And then I broke my foot. Five years ago, and it didn't heal well. I was in the African bush, so I didn't see a doctor. And then I had to have surgery on it. And I just, it was really a massive surgery for me, like it was months and months and months without being able to touch that foot to the ground.

And so I walked away with kind of a lot of anxiety about, I don't want to try too hard. Then I get invited to do this, this long, week long walk in England with nine other people, only two of whom I'd met. And we were going to walk. 10 to 15 miles every day for a week and I there's no way there's just no way for 10 years I had barely walked and I thought I couldn't but Everything in my body when I looked at the email inviting me said absolutely go do it.

So I said, okay I'll be there. And I started walking and realized that much of my fear was related to something called, uh, psychogenic fear, psychogenic pain, which is when you remember the brain remembers the pain even after the tissues have healed and it reproduces the pain even when the tissues are fine.

I felt like I was having my foot sawed open and I just kept walking and realized that had been an anxiety pattern, not tissue damage. And. I went to England and walked 75 miles in, in six days. I skipped today because my son was sick, but I said, what? I got rid of my anxiety and suddenly I can walk 10 miles a day.

I'm 62. Like that was, that's not supposed to happen when you're 62. I see better. My health is better. My relationships are better. It's thing. Yeah. As I say in the book, when you get to that third part, the transcendent. It feels like you're experiencing miracles on a daily basis. Oh, yeah. I, I'm going to make that claim.

I know it's bold. Try it. Hear me now. Understand me later. 

Zibby: Wow. This is so inspiring. Thank you so much. What a way to reframe life and deal with our worries and deal with what is outside of our control. Now there is something, there is a tool you've put in my toolbox that was not there before. So thank you so much.

Martha: Thank you and keep arranging books. It's really working. 

Zibby: . Thank you. Okay. You keep writing them and I'll keep arranging them. 

Martha: Thank you so much. 

All right. 

Zibby: Thank you. Take care. Thanks so much. 

Martha: Bye. 

Zibby: Bye-Bye.