Start Strong: Do This Every Morning to Get Out of Bed, Beat Anxiety, and Feel Incredible All Day

Do you ever have those mornings where you just don't want to get up? Me too. You know, in fact, for most of my life, every morning when I woke up, I just felt this huge sense of dread. I mean, I don't know why it was so hard to get out of bed. So I talked to my therapist about it, and she gave me this life-changing technique, and it's unbelievable how it works, especially on those mornings where you just don't feel like getting out of bed. It's called slithering, and today, I'm gonna teach it to you. (clock ticking) Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am so thrilled that you tuned in today because we are doing something super cool and extra special, never done this before. I am laying in my bed right now. I have my eye mask on. I've got my retainer in. You might be able to kinda hear a little bit of a (makes noise) because of the retainer. My cat, Mr. Noodle, is laying with me, and today I am teaching you a technique that changed my entire life. If you have ever struggled with getting out of bed, if you wake up and you immediately feel dread, or you feel like something's wrong, or your thoughts are- are- are just overwhelming you, what I'm going to teach you today and share with you will change your life immediately. And what are we gonna talk about? We're gonna talk about this technique that my therapist, the extraordinary Ann Davin, taught me during a period where I was going through a really, really hard time, and in fact, things were so difficult that I was having trouble getting out of bed. And that may surprise you if you're a new listener. By the way, if you're a new listener, welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast family. I think it's super cool that you're choosing to listen to something that can help you change your life. And learning how to get out of bed on those days where life feels hard or you're overwhelmed, or like me, you have this pounding sense of dread in your body. It kinda weighs you down like a gravity blanket, and you just want to stay in bed. It's kind of interesting, isn't it, how hard it can be to get out of bed some mornings? I've certainly been there. And what I didn't know is that all of that dread that I was feeling every morning, all of the overwhelm, it actually traced all the way back to an experience that I had had in childhood, and we're gonna talk about that in a minute. But I gotta share something with you. I have never been the kinda person that likes to get out of bed. I mean, let's just be honest with each other. For anybody that can spring out of bed when the alarm rings, you're a weirdo. For the rest of us normal people who actually wake up and were sorta like, "Ugh, can't I just lay here? Why is it so hard to get out of bed? How about hitting that snooze button again and drifting back to sleep in my cozy sheets?" Like, that's the kinda person that I've always been. And so if that's you, if it's somebody that you love, what you're going to learn today is going to blow your mind. You're not only gonna learn this technique called slithering, you're going to hear it explained by my therapist, Ann Davin. She is also going to walk you through why this works as what's called a somatic practice. She's going to teach you about the deep origins of the stored tension in your body and why you continue to wake up in the morning and feel this sense of dread or like something's wrong or your thoughts are spinning. This isn't based on just what's happening in your life right now. This is likely something that you've experienced for a long time in your life, and here's the good news. Using this technique, you can move it out of your body. And yeah, you may have a lot going on, but you can learn how to wake up and not feel that sense of dread. You can learn how to change it so that you wake up in the morning, no matter what's going on, you actually wake up and you feel freedom in your body. It is the coolest thing in the world. I'm gonna teach it to you today. I'm so excited that you're here. In fact, I'm gonna sit up, get the pillow in place, what do you think Noods, get the eye mask off, and settle in. Oh, and you know what I don't have is I don't have my glasses. Okay. (pen clicks) So I don't know about you and mornings, but it has always been the hardest thing in the world for me to start my day. And I'm gonna describe what it feels like for me on just any given day, but as I'm describing what it feels like for me from the moment that I wake up, I want you to think about, what does it feel like for you most mornings when you open your eyes? I want you to think about the sensation in your body. And I gotta (spits) pull some cat hair out of my mouth first 'cause (spits) I've been petting my cat. Okay. Whenever I would wake up, no matter where I was, the first thing I felt was a sensation of heaviness. It's almost like there's always been something standing on my chest, and it goes from that sensation of heaviness, like the bed is a giant magnet and I'm just a little paper clip that's now stuck to it. The amount of effort that it takes for me to push through that heaviness in my body and that sense of dread, it is like Herculean. Forget about doing resistance training. Like, this is- this is pushing through something at a whole different level. And once I feel that sensation of dread, you know of course what happens, is then ping, it triggers my mind to start spinning.And I start to scan ahead, and you know, even though I'm a very positive person, one of the things that I've been learning about life is that our brains tend to default on the negative. So, what is it that I immediately start thinking about? Oh, the thing I did wrong yesterday, the things I have to do today that I'm not gonna get to, or that I'm nervous about, the meeting at work that I'm not prepared for. The fact that the kids have all this stuff going on. The fact that I haven't exercised in four days, and now I'm kind of beating myself up, or that maybe I stayed up a little bit too late and watched yet one more episode of that series instead of going to bed. And so the very first thing I feel is heaviness. The very first thoughts aren't like, "Ah, let's get out of bed. I'm so grateful I have another day." It's more like, ugh. Just like, ugh. And that's what I'm working with, and it doesn't matter if I'm on vacation. It doesn't matter if I'm in my house. It doesn't matter if I'm traveling for work. It doesn't matter where I am. That is what I feel, and what I've come to learn is, that's the way most of us feel. That there's something about going from a state of peace and rest to waking up and having to face the day. And if you're somebody who doesn't sleep well at night, holy smokes, let's just add on top that kind of disappointment that yet again, you didn't get another good night's sleep. So you're not waking up rested. You're waking up feeling behind. And so that's the background here, and if you're somebody who just springs out of bed, like God bless you, but the rest of us kind of hate you right now because that's not the normal feeling for a lot of us. But I am here to tell you by the time you're done listening, you are going to not only understand why you feel that dread and why your thoughts can be really negative and why it can be hard to push yourself out of bed and start the day. Even better than understanding it, you're gonna know exactly what to do on those mornings when you feel it. And I will tell you based on personal experience, using this technique called slithering has changed my flippin' life, because it has changed what my body feels first thing in the morning, and it has given me this simple, seemingly ridiculous thing to do to help me on those mornings where it truly is hard to get out of bed. So, I wanna go back in time, like three or four years, and explain what was happening when I was talking to my therapist, the extraordinary Ann Davin, about all of the challenges I was facing. And I'm not gonna belabor it because then it's gonna get too damn depressing, but we were in the middle of massive life change. Like so many of you, our family had moved and we moved from Boston, where we had lived for 26 years, up to this tiny little town in southern Vermont. And at the time, we were living with my mother-in-law. Now, I love my mother-in-law, but you know, when you are sleeping at your mother-in-law's house, you're not in your own bed. You are in somebody else's house and I was sleeping in the bunk room of my mother-in-law's house in southern Vermont. And we're in the middle of this big move. I have no friends. I have lost my dream job, which at the time was being a daytime talk show host, and I just didn't know what I was gonna do with my life. I felt like I had made a huge mistake by moving to this tiny town and uprooting our whole life. And on top of all of that, I'm waking up in the middle of the desolate winter months in a bunk room in my mother-in-law's house. And let me tell you, I would wake up every morning and it wasn't just the elephant on my chest. It was like, ugh, I don't even wanna face the nightmare my life has become. I don't wanna get out of bed. If I just roll over... Have you ever had a morning where you're like, okay, if I just hit the snooze button and then I drift back to sleep, maybe I will wake up in a totally different life? Maybe this is like just some sort of figment of my imagination, this life of mine. This used to happen to me in law school all the time. I would have this fantasy that as I would drift back to sleep, I would wake up and suddenly I wouldn't be in law school anymore. I'd be 10 years ahead. I would be happy. I would have known what I was doing with my life. I'd have it figured out and then of course, I'd drift back to sleep. The alarm would ring. I'd wake back up. I'd be like, ugh, oh my God, this again? And now I'm late for class? Like, it just... Anyway, I could talk for hours about how hard it has been for me to get out of bed and how awful it is to wake up and the first thought that you have is that you've done something wrong or that someone's mad at you or that the day is just so overwhelming you don't know how you're gonna get through it. That's not that empowering. That doesn't feel good. And so, you know, I'm going through this really challenging period where I'm like, "I don't know what I'm gonna do with my life. I'm so stuck. I don't feel like we made the right decision. I don't think I'm gonna make any..." And I'm sobbing to Ann on the phone and I'm talking about how I just am having such a hard time getting out of bed. And Ann says, "Mel, I want you to try something called slithering." So Ann and I spend one of our sessions talking all about the sensation, and that's why I asked you to think about, what do you feel in your body first thing in the morning? Is it heaviness? Is it dread? Is it excitement? Is it like an on-edge feeling 'cause you don't quite know what you're gonna wake up to? And so as we started to unpack the sensation and the experience of waking up, she started asking me these questions. "When do you remember this first starting?" And I'm like, "I have no idea." She's like, "What about when you were in law school? Was it there?" I'm like, "Mm-hmm. Most definitely in law school." "What about college?" "Yep, absolutely." "What about high school?" "Yeah. Yeah." As a matter of fact, I had a really hard time getting out of bed in high school. I always felt this sensation like something was wrong, and we went all the way back in our conversation.... to this moment that I remembered where, I'm gonna not go deep into the story 'cause I don't want things to get too heavy. I mean, it's already heavy to get out of bed. But we went all the way back to this experience that I had where I was in fourth grade and my family was away at this ski trip with a bunch of other families, and all the kids were sleeping in this big bunk room. And I remember waking up in the middle of the night. Here I am, a fourth grader, and there is an older kid on top of me, and they are doing something to me. And it was a really, I don't know what the right word is, weird and upsetting and confusing situation, because it's, like on one hand, I was really scared 'cause it was pitch dark and I didn't know what was happening. But on the other hand, and this may sound a little weird, like it felt like okay, like kinda good. I was so confused, I was not, as a fourth grader, able to process what was going on. Like, my first ever sexual experience in that setting, being woken up. And I remember just rolling over on my side, like into this ball shape, and this older kid, you know, climbed out and went back. And I looked over, and in the bottom bunk next to me was my little brother, and I remember thinking, "I need to keep really quiet so that this person doesn't do that to him." Like, I knew something was wrong, but as I reflect back on it, it's not that the first experience was terror or fear, it was more confusion, and this deep sense that this was really bad. But again, like my fourth grade little brain, I- I- I didn't know, like what was hap- I couldn't, didn't know how to process this in a healthy way. And so that next morning, when I woke up, what do you think I felt in my body? Heaviness, dread. I felt like I had done something wrong, and I laid in that bed and pulled the covers over me and just hid there until all the kids had left because I just sensed that I had done something wrong. And one of the things that I've learned talking to the extraordinary experts that we've had on this podcast that you and I are together learning from is that when you're really little, there's this flaw. I'm gonna call it a flaw. There's a flaw in human design called attribution. I learned this from the amazing psychiatrist at Stanford, Dr. Paul Conti, that when you're little and bad things happen or the adults around you are super mad or frustrated or they're not around at all, a little kid does not have the ability to attribute other people's bad behavior to other people. There's a flaw in the human design that makes little kids attribute other people's bad behavior to a flaw in you. And so I actually thought this was my fault. I thought something was wrong, and I thought, "If I tell anybody, I am going to get in a lot of trouble," even though I didn't do anything. I was clearly a victim. And I'll just state for the record also, my personal opinion about that other kid is if that other kid is doing something like that to a kid, then clearly somebody is doing that to him. And so I know that now, but in that moment, in my body, my body absorbed that experience, and I'm gonna tell you something. What I've learned over and over from all these experts that you and I talk to on this podcast, and from my own deep experience in therapy and all kinds of different modalities and diving deep into trauma, that there are things that happened to you when you were little or in your lifetime, and what I am learning over and over is that it's actually stored as a sensation in your body. And if it is your default to wake up and have negative thoughts or it's your default to wake up and feel that heaviness the way that I do, it might not be something as, like, scary as what happened to me, but it could just be that you had a parent or a caregiver that you never knew which version of them you were gonna get in the morning. Like, is Mom or Dad gonna be in a good mood? They gonna be in a bad mood? Are we gonna have food today, or are we not gonna have food today? Am I gonna have a good day at school or am I gonna get bullied like I normally do? Am I gonna be able to do what I need to do in this classroom or am I gonna sit there because I have a learning disability that nobody's figured out and so I feel like the dummy in the classroom and I'm constantly in trouble? And all of these experiences create sensations in your body where you're bracing or you are freezing or you're in fight or flight. And so I didn't know any of this. I just felt like there was something wrong with me because I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. Why is it if I have an okay life, I'm not happy when I get out of bed? I understand cortisol drops and all this other stuff, but why does it have to feel so heavy? And so I'm having this conversation with my amazing therapist, Anne, I'm crying like crazy and we trace it all the way back and now, psssh, it makes perfect sense. Of course if I have that kind of experience, that the act of waking up gets married with the experience, and that sensation got stuck in my body. That's all that was happening. And that's why I'm so excited for you to learn about this, because using this technique, I have been able to really move this heaviness out of my body. I've been able to get the elephant off my chest, and I have also been able to nurture and support myself in those mornings where the thoughts start spinning and it's super negative, and I guarantee you, if you try this, this will help you.... and it's gonna help people that you love. And so I really want you to share this with everybody that you care about, because you have no idea how somebody else feels when they wake up. So, I'm talking to Anne and she says, "Mel, we established that this is something that's a pattern. It's a stored sensation from trauma that is in my body, that this is super normal, it's super common, and there is something you can do." And so she asked me, just like I asked you, to think about, where in my body is this thing stored and what does it feel like? And as I've described to you, it always is this sensation in my chest, and it's this heaviness, this sort of, like, dark cloud thing, like tar that is, like, right in there, stuck in my chest. "And I want you to think about, where is it in your body? It might be in your ankles, might be on your back. It might be up in your head. Like, it could be anywhere in your body that you feel this sensation." And then Anne said to me, "I am going to teach you, Mel, how to move this thing out of your body." And she said, "I don't want you push yourself out of bed." That's what I was trying to do, I was trying to force myself through the heaviness. She said, "We're gonna do the opposite. We're gonna move with the heaviness." I'm like, "What do you mean? Am I just gonna, like, melt into the bed?" 'Cause that's what it feels like. I'm supposed to just, like, disintegrate into the sheets, it's so heavy. She's like, "Oh, no, no, no, no. You are going to slither out of bed. You're gonna move with the heaviness, Mel, and you are going to slither and slide one foot out of that bed, and then you're gonna slither and slide the other foot, and then you're gonna roll off the bed." And then I'm like, "Well, what- what am I gonna do once I roll out-" "Your, oh, you're gonna be on the ground and you're gonna move around with this heaviness." And I'm like, "That sounds odd." And Anne has this amazing way of being so compelling that I tried it, and I'm gonna walk you through it. It is unbelievable how this thing works. So, what I wanted to do to make sure that you really understood this, is I- I reached out to Anne and I said, "Hey, Anne, um, would you be willing to just send me a voice memo to really help me explain this technique and how you came up with this, and why this works?" And so I'm absolutely honored to be able to introduce you to my therapist, Anne Devon, and to have you get to experience her wisdom as she is going to explain to you exactly what slithering is. Anne is extraordinary. She has been a, uh, psychologist for over 30 years. She has a PhD in depth psychology, a master's in clinical psychology. All of her work focuses on the unconscious mind and how it impacts the human experience. And I have had the honor of working with Anne for over four years now, and she's changed me from the inside out. And I also just wanna take a moment and thank you, Anne. Because what you're gonna share today is truly going to help people's lives. I just know it. So, thank you. And so, here's a clip that she recorded for you to explain what slithering is.