Welcome to episode 330 of Live Happy Now.

Anxiety is at an all-time high these days, but today's guest says that might not be such a bad thing.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm happy to be joined by Dr. Wendy Suzuki,

professor of neural science and psychology in the Center for Neural

Science at New York University. Her new book, Good Anxiety, Harnessing the Power of the Most

Misunderstood Emotion, looks at anxiety in a whole new way and explains how we can use the gift of

anxiety to improve our focus, productivity, communication skills, and so much more.

Let's find out how.

Wendy, welcome back to Live Happy Now.

Thank you so much.

It's great to be back.

This is such an important topic because we talk about anxiety all the time, but not like

you're talking about it.

So I cannot wait to have this conversation.

You know, anxiety is something that we just automatically think of as being bad.

So to start this, I wanted to find out what made you begin to study it from a completely different perspective.

So the original inspiration to study it was really just the

observation of all the students that I had and all of the incredibly high levels of anxiety

that I saw them go through multiple times during the semester, particularly at finals,

but it wasn't just the students. It was my faculty

colleagues. It was my friends. It was myself. And this was before our COVID adventure.

And so I just started thinking about, you know, what, what is it? Why are we having this kind of

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