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The Mel Robbins PodcastStart Strong: Do This Every Morning to Get Out of Bed, Beat Anxiety, and Feel Incredible All Day
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Morning ‘Slither’ Technique Transforms Dread Into Energy And Emotional Freedom
- Mel Robbins shares a somatic technique, taught by her therapist Dr. Anne Davin, to help people who wake up with heaviness, dread, and anxiety get out of bed and feel better throughout the day. The method, called “slithering,” involves physically moving with, rather than fighting against, the heavy sensations by literally sliding out of bed, writhing on the floor, and crawling until the feeling breaks up. Anne explains how early experiences and trauma get stored as sensations in the body and why talk-based approaches alone often don’t resolve them. By using movement inquiry to let the body ‘speak,’ people can shift their nervous system from distress to calm and re-associate mornings with safety and empowerment.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasMove with the heaviness instead of fighting it.
Instead of forcing yourself to ‘power through’ dread and anxiety, the slithering technique has you join the sensation—letting it pull you out of bed and onto the floor—so you can work with your body rather than against it.
Use slow, intuitive movement to ‘break up’ stuck feelings.
Once on the floor, you slowly twist, roll, and writhe in any way that feels natural until you notice the heavy, frozen sensation starting to loosen and shift, signaling your nervous system moving toward calm.
Crawl before you stand to reinforce a sense of safety and agency.
After the heaviness softens, you move onto all fours and crawl—often to the bathroom—only standing when you genuinely feel ready, which trains your body to associate waking with safety, choice, and readiness.
Recognize that morning dread often has deeper roots in past experiences.
Childhood events, inconsistent caregivers, bullying, or trauma can become ‘somatic residue’ that resurfaces on waking; understanding this helps reframe morning dread as an old pattern stored in the body, not a character flaw.
Talking isn’t always enough; some patterns need body-based processing.
Mel emphasizes that years of talking about her feelings did not remove the heaviness; somatic practices accessed the non-verbal, bodily memory of trauma and created lasting change in how her mornings feel.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesSometimes it's better to feel our way through rather than try to figure our way out.
— Dr. Anne Davin
The dread that you felt upon waking as an adult was a somatic residue of this unresolved trauma.
— Dr. Anne Davin
Instead of trying to push through it and soldier forward, Mel, it's time to move toward it, to join with it, and to truly push it out of your body.
— Dr. Anne Davin (as recounted by Mel Robbins)
No amount of talking is going to get them out of your body. You need to use the magic and the intelligence of your body to move it out.
— Mel Robbins
Slithering not only got me out of bed on those mornings, it did something way more miraculous.
— Mel Robbins
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
