Welcome to the Madden America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.

Hello, everyone. This is the Madden America podcast, and my name is Brooks Seam. I am the author of the award-winning memoir, May Cause Side Effects.

Today I have Dr. Ellen Vora, a board-certified psychiatrist, acupuncturist, and yoga teacher.

She's the author of anatomy, of anxiety, and takes a functional medicine approach to mental health.

She considers the whole person and addresses imbalance at the root.

Dr. Vora received her

BA from Yale University and her MD from Columbia University. Ellen, welcome to the show.

Hi, Brooke. Thanks for having me. Hi, it's so good to see you. You know, we just had about two minutes

before we started recording where you asked me how I was doing.

And I said that, you know, on paper, everything's great, but I'm struggling with like this existential thing of being 38 single childless, somehow aware of my own impending death at some point

in the future and purpose, which is something you

mentioned very early on in your book, the anatomy of anxiety, about how there's this idea of

true anxiety and false anxiety, and that our true anxiety really kind of is asking us to

face these existential questions. So I'm going to take just a second

and have a little bit of a five-minute therapy session. Could you just riff on this concept

and talk about how that really falls into your work around anxiety? Yeah. I mean, it exists

so naturally in juxtaposition to false anxiety, which we'll get into

and unpack and talk about where it's like, we think there's some heavy-duty mental

health thing going on when, in fact, we're just inflamed or chronically sleep deprived or

blood sugar is swinging and so on and so forth.

Whereas true anxiety, which I call purposeful

anxiety, it's not what's wrong with us. In many ways, it's what's right with us when we are

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