Some people arrive and your nervous system exhales. That’s how it felt the first day I met Dr. Ellen Vora—psychiatrist, acupuncturist, yoga teacher, and author of The Anatomy of Anxiety. Her presence is grounded, medicinal, and deeply embodied. In our latest Embodied episode, we explored how anxiety is less a problem to “fix” in the mind and more a whole-body message asking to be felt, honored, and translated.

Medicine that starts in the body

Ellen’s work gently challenges the old story that anxiety and depression live only “from the neck up.” She invites us to see anxiety as the body’s stress response—often modifiable—rather than a fixed destiny. Sleep deprivation, blood sugar crashes, inflammation, hormone shifts, gut imbalance, alcohol, and even mouth-breathing can create what she calls false anxiety: avoidable suffering rooted in physiology. Sometimes a small, compassionate intervention (yes, even a spoonful of almond butter before the commute) steadies the system enough to chang...