The Real Work with Maggie Sterling

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I dealt with anxiety for 20 years. I tried every modality, every therapist, every supplement, every hack. Nothing worked long-term. In this video, I'm sharing what finally healed my anxiety — and why it was the scariest, most counterintuitive option I could have chosen.
I talk about what sensitization actually is (and how it's different from regular anxiety), why the "fix it" approach kept me stuck for two decades, and how letting go — slowly, imperfectly — gave me my life back.

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If your nervous system is sensitized, the things you instinctively want to do are probably making it worse.In this video, I'm sharing 5 things I would stop doing immediately if I were in the thick of sensitization — and I know because I did all of them for years. This is stabilization work. The goal isn't optimization — it's to stop making things worse so your system can do what it already knows how to do.

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Your exhaustion isn't laziness—it's your nervous system running survival operations 24/7. In this video, I explain the two hidden energy drains keeping you depleted and why the beginning of healing feels the hardest (even though it gets easier). For years, I believed I was just a low-energy person. I needed 2-3 hour naps every day and could barely make it to dinner without collapsing. I thought something was fundamentally wrong with me. But the real problem wasn't my energy—it was where that energy was going.

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You didn't develop chronic anxiety from one traumatic event. You got stuck in a sensitization loop—where your nervous system learned to stay vigilant even when the threat was gone. In this episode, I break down what sensitization actually is, how it happens gradually (not dramatically), and why understanding this changes everything about how you heal. This isn't about finding the "root cause" or reliving your past. It's about seeing how your nervous system learned this pattern—and why acceptance, not fixing, is what helps you get unstuck.

In this episode, Dr. Brad Fanestil—a medical doctor with 30 years of experience—explains how chronic pain and anxiety can actually be healed, not just managed. If you've been told you just need to "learn to live with it," this conversation will challenge everything you thought you knew about healing.

About Dr. Brad Fanestil Dr. Brad Fanestil is a board-certified Internal Medicine doctor with 30 years of primary care and hospital experience. Throughout his career he saw patients come into his exam room and into his hospital with problems that didn't always respond to medications and procedures. 'In 2018 he started reading about the new neuroscience and discovered that anxiety, chronic pain and many other hard-to-treat medical conditions are nothing more than learned behaviors in the nervous system - habit loops in the neural circuitry of the brain.' Most of his patients have seen dozens of doctors and other healthcare practitioners without relief. Now, using the tools of Mind Body Medicine, Dr. Fanestil offers online and in-person classes to teach people how to rewire the neural circuitry of anxiety and chronic pain.

Connect with Dr. Brad Fanestil: https://www.bouldermindbodymedicine.com

YouTube - ‪ @Dr.Fanestil  ‬

TEDx Talk: https://youtu.be/Nv-Ol3l4QX4?si=ljn_bXPN2Cer14kJ