Your Anxiety Isn't All in Your Head

Ellen Vora, MD, is a psychiatrist, a yoga instructor, an acupuncturist, and a witch—and she’s on a mission to radically change the way we approach mental illness. Her groundbreaking new book is The Anatomy of Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming the Body’s Fear Response.

- By Stephen Kiesling. Illustration by Jess Polanshek

You took a winding path to become a psychiatrist.

Yes, a winding path indeed. The way we always look back on these things is to make it a hero’s journey, to ascribe some meaning to this struggle. But at many points along the way, it was truly just a mess. [Laughs] I was in medical school at Columbia and in crisis. I was out of balance physically and out of balance mentally. I was going to see various conventional doctors and saying, “This hurts! Something’s not right here.”

But I would always have healthy, normal labs. So, they would say, “Nope, you’re fine,” which is truly invalidating when you don’t feel fine. I was also in crisis in terms of the tools that I was being taught to use to help my patients. I saw my patients get more and more heavily medicated, but they were not thriving. So, I was really in crisis in terms of my identity as a healer, and at various points I thought about quitting.

What helped?

A variety of interventions were recommended, but one outclassed them all: yoga. I was always racing zero to 60—full overwhelm all the time. Just being on the mat and coming back to my breath enabled me to retain a through line to mental equanimity in the face of challenge. Yoga taught me that I could breathe through any crisis.

My yoga practice also gave me the space to allow my real questions to become clear: How do I have autonomy? And how can I have my day-to-day life and work deeply embedded in the human condition? My right answer wasn’t going to be something like nephrology or dermatology.