Mel Robbins: This One Hack Will Unlock Your Happier Life | E108

this is freaking genius i've taught it to millions of people it's curing people's anxiety there is nobody like mel robbins there is nobody if i hadn't done what i did that morning my life would have gone in a totally different direction i'd probably be divorced i'd probably be an alcoholic my family would be torn apart no idea what i'd be doing for a living or where i would be i finally had the experience of being in my body and being safe and being okay and i hadn't had that in a really long time um so

you asked me in the beginning kind of what is it that that created all of this insight or this drive to figure it out i think i just figured it out you you just [ __ ] did it [Music] they call her the female tony robbins but she's so much more than that she's one of the most incredibly vulnerable honest introspective wise people i have ever met in my entire life and she's written three best-selling books that offer a very simple solution to have a transformative impact on your entire life i first found out about

mel robbins some seven years ago when i watched a video of her talking about how to motivate yourself every single day and when my team told me that she was coming to london for a short trip i said we have to get her on this podcast there is nobody like mel robbins there is nobody i've never seen mel robbins cry during an interview before but in this podcast it happens again we have an epiphany mel removes her glasses she begins to cry and it's an incredibly touching moment i think for a lot of you this

is going to be the favorite podcast on this channel that you've ever listened to so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the director ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself [Music] before we started recording i said a lot of nice things about you just a few seconds ago and um i talked about how sort of introspective you are how much you've achieved your remarkable ability to speak about ideas and things you've discovered in yourself you really are a standout individual and so whenever i meet

someone that i consider to be a really standout individual it always begs the question to me having a small background in like childhood psychology what is it what was the cauldron in which mel was sculpted that made you the person you are today at the very start of your life i i guess that i'm trying to think about like there's no defining moment because i had great parents who did the best that they could with what they were handed in terms of their own childhoods and patterns and thinking and i grew up in a tiny

little town where nothing really happened but one thing did happen and that was in the fourth grade i was uh at a family kind of ski trip thing and uh in the middle of the night i woke up and one of the kids was on top of me and yeah like on top of me molesting me we're going here like fast so you asked like what was the thing and this was like the first thing that popped into mine and um it was interesting because i didn't remember the experience for a very long time i

did not remember that this had happened until i was in my late 20s and if you look at the spectrum of what can happen to somebody in terms of sexual abuse which unfortunately is very common uh experience for people this was a very mild experience like it wasn't anybody that i knew it was a one-off it was another kid so clearly something was happening to this kid in their life it wasn't scary it was confusing but i was awoken from a state of sleep and i immediately felt and knew that something was wrong and it's

my first experience in my life of what psychologists called disassociating i literally left my body and i rolled over and i don't even remember how it ended because i wasn't in my body to be there and the very next morning i'll never forget this um i hid underneath the sheets because it was a big bunk room and all the kids uh left to go downstairs to get ready to go skiing and i remember waiting until i thought it was quiet i threw the comforter off i went down these steep stairs i turned the corner and

there was my mom and she was cooking breakfast with some of the other moms and she turned around and she said how'd you sleep and i immediately stephen wanted to tell her and out of the corner of my eye i saw the kid and in that moment split second child brain i froze and as much as i wanted to tell my mom and i knew exactly what she do i mean she grew up on a farm she had a spatula in her hand she would have hit that kid in the next week but i didn't

know what the kid was gonna do and in that moment i lied and i said fine and the day went on and nothing happened and i believe whether it is a 30-year long struggle with anxiety or a tendency to disassociate or the fact that i was chronically lying when i was younger in any moment when i felt uncertain i had no idea how that singular moment set me on a course that would last decades before i realized that all of these patterns of behavior that i was struggling with i didn't know why i lied i

didn't know why i felt so uncomfortable if i couldn't predict somebody's reaction i couldn't understand why i would leave my body so many times i couldn't understand why i had very few memories from my childhood it wasn't until i started to understand human behavior the way the brain learns patterns the way that you need and can break patterns and replace patterns and learn new patterns that i began this journey that i've been on for the past 10 years of understanding my own breakdowns my own heartaches my own struggles and sharing what i'm learning with anybody

who will listen how's that for an answer yeah did you ever tell anybody when did you first tell someone about that incident well i never told anybody because it's like i forgot about it in that moment like i just suppressed what had happened and there were lots of times in my life when i was a teenager when i was in college when i was in law school particularly in law school because my anxiety just came to a huge crescendo in law school just completely out of control with my thoughts with how i felt in my

body i had not been diagnosed yet with anxiety or anxiety disorder and had not been medicated did not even know anxiety was a thing so this would have been 1992 through 1994 and um i didn't even remember it and so i didn't even remember this incident until i was 28 years old and i was sitting in like kind of one of these life improvement seminars where you're in a windowless conference room and everyone's got a name tag on and there's a person up front and this woman stands up and she was talking about how she

had been molested when she was younger by a babysitter that her parents hired and the story went on how she had been in therapy for a long time she was starting to deal with the trauma of the experience she had forgiven the babysitter she had forgiven her parents but she could not forgive her sister and the person leading the seminar kind of looked at her and said why what's wrong with your sister and she said well i'm so angry that this babysitter was choosing me and while i'm in this room getting abused my sister is

out there watching tv and when she said that i had an immediate memory and there was this triggering moment where i i was sitting in this windowless conference room at the age of 28 but i was physically in that bunk bed because what i remembered in that moment was oh my god when i woke up in the middle of the night with this kid on top of me i looked to my right my younger brother was sleeping in the bed right there and my immediate thought was i don't want this person to hurt him and

that's why i rolled over and stayed quiet and so it was that it was this woman telling the story about her sister that triggered me to remember it and as soon as i remembered it oh my god i told my brother i told my parents i you know i just started talking about it i think that one of my um one of the things that i'm grateful for is that i process things by talking about it once the dam is open baby like the floodgates are coming like i just and and so i tend to

process things by speaking about it and for me it wasn't the um incident itself that created a lot of grief for me because i know based on the work that i've done as a crisis intervention counselor working with victims of domestic violence the work i did as a criminal defense attorney working for legal aid in new york city and the amount of training that we got and also just the amount of work i've done and studying that i've done on the subject of psychology and human behavior i know that when a kid is doing that

to another kid it's being done to them so i even at the age of 28 i didn't even have any anger toward the person that did this to me my anger was at myself why didn't i remember this why why am i so [ __ ] up why couldn't i have remembered this like the constant self-bashing that is the piece that um i think has been the thing that i've really struggled with why am i so [ __ ] up yeah why am i so [ __ ] up you know there's um there's this incredible

thing about the human design so when you think about human beings and you know as a as a parent so my husband and i have three kids uh one's 23 another one's 21 and then our son is 16. and as a young parent i would often feel this incredible sense of awe like it is remarkable how many babies are born when you think about how many things have to go right i mean in the design of a human being and there is so much elegance and beauty and sophistication and genius to the human design it's

just shocking but there is one fundamental flaw that screws up everybody and that is that when you're a little kid and things happen to you you do not have the life experience and you do not have the support system to be able to process what is happening and it could be anything it could be something as serious as homelessness and poverty and systemic discrimination it could be violence it could be abuse in your home it could be addiction mental illness it could be chaos in your household it could be sexual abuse it could just be

a mother or a father who's so freaking critical or who is passive-aggressive so you wake up as a kid and you have no idea what you're going to wake up to but when something goes wrong or something happens to you as a kid you don't have the life experience or the support structure to basically go whoa this situation is [ __ ] or these adults somebody call the police like this is not okay you don't get to talk to me like no kid does that the fundamental flaw in human design is that when something happens

to you as a kid you don't say what's wrong with that kid or what's wrong with my dad or what's wrong with this situation you say what's wrong with me we aim it back at ourselves and then i think that you know this then starts to build as a thinking pattern that there must be something wrong with me that you aim everything that's happening out there back at yourself and you did that through your early early adulthood right i think everybody does i really do i think that that you know when you're um growing up

i believe that this happens around the age of eight or nine or ten that you know no human being is born and hates themselves we're actually wired for love we're wired for connection um you know if you look at a kid who's two or three or four right and they see a mirror they don't look at it and go ugh my thighs are so fat like i can't you know they look at the mirror and they put their hands up and they twirl and they kiss the mirror and they they love the sight of themselves

and you and i don't remember this but we loved the sight of ourselves too and what happens because that's your natural state that's your wired state in my opinion you are wired for self-love you are wired for self-acceptance you are wired for self-worth you are wired for self-respect you're wired for resilience i mean when you think about a baby none of us remember this but you will literally fall down 77 times an hour and you'll just keep standing back up so this resilience this sense of empowerment the sense of really being proud of yourself of

loving yourself it is part of your design your dna your birthright but life happens and it can happen two ways you know if you grow up in a chaotic household you start to absorb the message that something's wrong and so you go into modes of behavior to protect yourself and these patterns of behavior that you create to protect yourself get locked in your brain but for everybody so if you grew up in a wonderful household like i did if you grew up in a place that you were very safe like i did you still are

going to experience some kind of trauma because trauma is deeply personal and trauma at its at its simplest form is just a moment when your nervous system gets dysregulated a moment where your whole body turns on an alarm and when your whole body turns on an alarm whether it's uh oh there's the car pulling on the gravel driveway the person that drinks and comes home and is abusive is pulling in or uh oh mom's got that expression on her face i better not say anything it can be small moments big moments but when your nervous

system goes into a state of alarm your brain kicks into let's record everything in hyperspeed so we can remember this so i can protect you in the future and that pattern locks and that's why so many adults continue to stay trapped in patterns from their childhood that they don't even remember why they have them had like any of it but for everybody so that's sort of like if you grow up in a chaotic household which i didn't but i think what happens developmentally is you know there's this moment when we're in elementary school and none

of us remember it at least i don't remember it but it happens to everybody where one day you walk into elementary school and you're like loving yourself and you're happy as a clam and you're just kind of walking up to whomever and you like yourself and you love yourself so you'll go up to anybody you'll sit with anybody in the cafeteria and then i don't know what the hell happens but the next day you walk into that cafeteria you got your little hands on your tray and you start scanning the room for where you're gonna

sit and all of a sudden that brain that is wired for self-love and self-acceptance flips into the sorting hat from harry potter and you all of a sudden see the world in the places that you belong and the places that you don't and that's how it begins and your mind starts to tell you you can't go there you don't look like those kids those are the sports kids they're gonna as a way to protect you but the message that you start to get from your own brain or from society at large or from what's going

on in your household is that who you are is not okay when i was reading about your story we're talking about education then in schools um it seemed that you were quite i don't know disorientated in college when you went to college and you were struggling to figure out who you are and that resulted in quite significant procrastination and oh my god yes um so i you know i'm very open about the fact that i struggled with anxiety for a long time and um what's interesting about anxiety is that you know i'm i'm now talking

to you from the perspective of being 53 years old i was like really [ __ ] up and by [ __ ] up i mean not that i was like stealing cars or breaking laws or doing anything like that but i was not comfortable in my own body and the way that i would describe it is i think from that moment literally that moment in fourth grade that i just shared with you it makes me really sad to think about the fact that i was just a fourth grader that had a traumatic experience i didn't

know but my nervous system remembered and so any time i went to bed i woke up the next morning with the sensation in my body that something was wrong and any pattern of behavior or thinking that you start to repeat becomes a habit habits are just patterns it's all that they are and so i had a life experience because of one incident where i would wake up every single morning and feel like something was wrong and i couldn't put my finger on it and the more that you wake up and think something's wrong the more

your brain is going to find reasons why something might be wrong and so i developed this sort of chronic state of feeling on alert feeling the sense that i got to be aware fight or fly yes yes my you know in in clinical terms my sympathetic nervous system got switched on and i had no idea how to turn it off and if you don't know how to calm your nervous system down to flip off the sympathetic nervous system and flip on the parasympathetic nervous system which is your calm grounded resting nervous system you will forever

struggle with focus with being present with the ability to think clearly and make good decisions you will constantly talk about the fact that you feel anxious and that comes from your nervous system always being on edge and being in fight or flight i didn't know any of this i was just a nervous kid with a nervous stomach every camp that i went to i got sent home because i was too homesick oh yeah i mean i was just i mean you know how homesick you have to be for trained counselors to actually call your parents

and go uh we got a problem here she can't stay here like she is out of her mind when you say out of your mind what are the physical symptoms or verbal symptoms of that oh my gosh um complete disassociation so i would be at camp like literally sixth grade camp so at the end of sixth grade year and i feel i feel bad for little mel robbins i feel bad for her because you know here's this this experience sixth grade camp where the entire school for four nights goes away to a camp just the

sixth grade it's supposed to be the culmination of your sixth grade year and i am so freaked out that something bad is gonna happen that i of course escalate things in my own mind i don't even feel like i'm at camp i feel like i'm walking on a movie set i don't feel like i'm on earth i feel like i'm on a spaceship somewhere looking down all the time i uh feel like i might throw up because my stomach is rattled because when you're anxious and you can't focus your thoughts you tend to not eat

and so that of course upsets your stomach it's not that something bad's gonna happen it's that you're screwing up the chemistry in your stomach by not eating because you're so nervous which only makes it worse and as your mind is scrambling thinking something bad is going to happen and then your stomach is hurting then you start to think oh my god i'm going to throw up and then you start to think well if i throw up something bad's gonna happen and then the kids are gonna laugh like it just becomes this spiral train wreck and

that is the state that i lived in and so um you know you learn how to cope you it becomes your new normal but that was basically my life constantly feeling like something bad was going to happen constantly feeling like i wasn't really present constantly lying or fibbing about how i felt or what i was thinking because i didn't want people to judge me it was awful and then you come through college and you've got to make that choice in life as to which direction you're going to go in it's kind of it seems quite

choice i love the choice yeah yeah well it is well how would you define it um panic panic yeah because i didn't know what i wanted to do yeah because i had only ever lived in survival mode hmm so did you did you not take a pause to decide to sort of listen take a pause who you were and what your your calling was and take a pause when you have anxiety your whole mode of living is if i'm on the move no one can catch me if i am on the run i'm safe and

so what's interesting is that i think the only time in my life that i have actually slowed down was during the pandemic does that sound familiar yeah of course yeah got no choice yeah and one of the hardest things which became one of the greatest realizations is truly coming face to face with myself and realizing that even though i have done all this work to heal trauma even though i have uh done extraordinary things in terms of my own thinking patterns that there was a level to which i was still on the run that i

was darting off to a coffee shop or darting off to target or darting off to an airplane and all of this racing around kept me from having to truly stop and stand with the woman in the mirror and just be still and figure out well what do i really want how do i really want to feel you talk about the topic of distraction and procrastination and it's rarely in this context but it sounds like a form of distraction distracting yourself from the from taking a moment to confront thyself and um yeah to really ask some

of those questions which i guess if you're in a fight or survival state um the answer to some of those questions might be maybe illuminating to a vulnerable you know to to to an extent which will make you feel vulnerable and unsafe because those are pretty like existential questions to ask yourself to look at yourself and say who am i and what do i want and you know how do i get it it's much easier as you say just to be swept by the tide and that's a form of short-term defense it feels like a

short timeist we'll just get to tomorrow you know yeah and some people go through their lives doing that right oh i was you know i was you know i think that there's also sort of layers of healing on issues and so you know when i remembered the sort of initial incident and i started to kind of string together holy cow like all of this is connected in a really interesting way um compounding itself right yeah talking about it is one layer and it's a super important thing to do to give yourself the gift of sitting

down with somebody who is licensed or who has an expertise in helping you unpack what happened because it's only in being able to talk through what happened that you have the ability to start to free yourself from what happened like if you can't reveal it you are definitely not going to heal from it and so i had done the layer of talking about it and then i had gone and done the layer even underneath it of understanding what had happened and understanding how it connected to anxiety and how it connected how trauma connected to that

and understanding the lying piece and i had even gone and done the layer underneath that which was starting to interrupt the old patterns that would get triggered and put in new patterns but it wasn't until recently that i went to the layer that you need to go to to truly heal which is to repair the nervous system and you know what what is uh interesting to me about kind of even the whole journey is that you know i've had layer after layer after layer for me talking about it was very freeing and you know people

always say to me my god you're so relatable like we open up boom right out of the gate i tell you something that normally somebody reveals like an hour in it's because i have a level of freedom around it and i also know it's a shared experience that so many people can relate to on some level um but it wasn't until i understood how it impacts your nervous system and the connection between your mind body and spirit that i began to realize what i think it was michael pollan or tim ferriss on one of his

podcast said which is if you didn't talk yourself into this [ __ ] you're not going to talk yourself out of it like you have to have a corresponding physical intervention if there was something physical that disrupted your body state to begin with and that makes a lot of sense to me it makes a lot of sense to me that if your nervous system or your brain recorded an experience like i can give you a benign example uh for people that don't that have never really kind of thought through what trauma actually means why it's

deeply personal how it's a physical experience not just a mental experience so when i was um god how old was i i guess i was i must have been in high school we were driving to northern michigan it was a huge snowstorm and my mom was behind the wheel and my dad and my brother were in the car in front of us and there was a radio on and um all of a sudden the radio announcer said something about black ice and this truck pulled out to try to pass us and right as he tried

to pass us you could see headlights coming on and my mom said oh my god hold on because the truck started to veer back in so i remembered the words black ice oh my god hold on and the next thing i remember we were in the it was like a suv the car rolled over right several times and the experience of being in that car was like um imagine sitting in a dryer and you're sitting still like but the clothes are tumbling around you right and so like you know the mcdonald's bag went flying past

us and the dog went flying past us and all this stuff and we and i remember even though i don't remember getting tumbled around i remember this unbelievable sound that was like of the car rolling and packing down the snow now we ended up with the car on its side and i was like thrown to the back seat the dog was in the way back but my mom was buckled in at the top we were fine a little shaken up i think my mom might have had a concussion we survived nobody died they flipped the

car back over we climbed him with my dad off we went now here's what's interesting about that experience i was never scared to drive ever i didn't ever really even think about it but it was a traumatic experience because my body remembers it and it remembers it in a certain way i don't ever think about the experience if i'm driving a car that's not a trigger for my body to remember it but if i walk to my mailbox in boston massachusetts after a freshly fallen snow and i step on the snow and it goes i

feel like i'm back in that car because that sound is a trigger for my nervous system to remember now that sound of me stepping on freshly fallen snow my mom does that all day long in michigan and doesn't think about the accident but if somebody ever says the two words black ice around my mom she feels like she's in that car accident because that's her trigger for her nervous system to remember it so the reason why i tell that story is because i didn't understand trauma i thought trauma was like for victims of war that's

what you experience if you you know do a tour of duty somebody who has been the victim of a super violent crime i did not realize that trauma is a disruption in your nervous system that sends your brain into a mode where your brain like holds down the shutter on a camera and is like snap snap snap snap all five senses recording everything it can possibly grab as a way to protect you in the future when i started to understand that oh my god patterns of behavior get triggered by smell they get triggered by sound

they get triggered by music they get triggered by and the same thing with patterns of thinking now i had the missing piece to be able to start to truly reset not only my nervous system but also the default patterns in my mind and i haven't looked back since but that was step one in terms of how i stopped the cascade of the what if this happens and what if that happens and what if this happens and what and what are they thinking and why didn't they invite me here and when and the universal thing that

i started to replace the what if with was what if it all works out what if this is the best thing that ever happened to me what if this is really hard and it does suck that's not easy but it turns out to be the best thing that i ever did it's not easy though is it no it's very simple to do but it's not easy and it's not easy because you love patterns like we don't it doesn't that's not even the right way to say it it's not easy because you're so used to thinking

a certain way and you and as you write about you know one of the things i scribbled down was that you said feelings are made suggestions ones you can ignore but we go through life no one's ever said that to us before we go through nice thinking that our thoughts are ourselves and that that is an instruction from ourselves and that's my voice in my head telling me what to do and i must my job is just to obey so if it says you know this ice means danger then i you know and we accept

our thoughts and when i've sat here with guests you know who have spent a lot of time working on the brain and understanding the difference between thoughts and are they true and it appears to be that you can analyze a thought and accept or reject which is a compelling well the way that i put it or i like to think about it is this you can be two things at once so you can have the feeling of being really frustrated with somebody and that can be true and you can also love them at the same

time you can be jealous of somebody and you can also allow that to inspire you at the same time you can be afraid which is true and you can still find the willpower to push yourself or discipline to push yourself forward you can be deeply in a state of grief having experienced one of the biggest losses or betrayals of your life and still experience a moment of joy as you're standing on the ocean and watching some bird dive into the sea human beings are very complex and when you start to understand you're not just one

thing it gives you freedom to ride the waves of feelings to ride the waves of experience and to kind of go down and go oh [ __ ] this is a terrible thing and know that you will be able to come out the other side of it and so you know i i think that that emotions yeah they are suggestions and that's one way to dismantle it another way to dismantle kind of the way that an emotion can hook you is to keep reminding yourself that it's temporary this wave of pissed offness this wave of

betrayal this wave of fear this wave of grief this wave of frustration this wave of feeling stuck this wave of feeling hopeless it's temporary it will come and it will go and when you realize that emotions are temporary it also gives you perspective right to know that something better is coming and that's going to help you be able to endure whatever it is that you're enduring why should you drink fuel we're going into the fourth quarter of the year diets are dropping off we're becoming lazier and lazier and what tends to happen when our diets

dip and we we start to become less um compelled to go to the gym is yeah we get out of shape we start to feel low energy we start to binge eat bad things and fuel is the antidote it's nutritionally complete so you get everything you need for your diet in a drink you get your 20 grams of proteins you're going to get your 26 vitamins and vitamins and minerals it's low sugar high in fiber it really is the cure to a lot of the health issues that we see in our personal lives but in

wider society if you've never tried it all i'll ask you to do is give it a try and if you like me then you will like the world berry ready to drink you'll like the mac and cheese which is just selling like absolutely crazy unsurprisingly um you like the cinnamon and you like the banana flavor those are my recommendations i know a lot of people love the chocolate flavor let me know try it get yourself healthy and send me a message on instagram tag me on instagram as well on your stories if you do try

it out because i i sometimes upload those tags and let me know which is your favorite flavor from you so that was step one i dug a little deeper on that yeah phase which was that you know the kind of mental work what was step two of your level four overcoming um the the trauma so the first step was combating the thoughts in my head seeing them interrupting them i'm not thinking about that and then you know i went a little bit further and then started to figure out well if i think this i'd rather

be thinking this and so then i started working on replacing the thoughts so that the default became different the next step though was a deeper understanding of anxiety and really studying it because i was tired of being anxious i was tired of taking zoloft and look zoloft saved my life i mean i was on that drug for two and a half decades for crying out loud uh one of my kids takes the loft and it helped them climb out of a hole it is i love medication like i'm not here saying nobody should be on

medication it's the opposite i think that you it's self-harm not to take medication if you're in a hole and that medication can serve as a ladder to help you climb out of it but i was at a point where you know i'm 45 years old i've been on this drug for a long time i've been out teaching the five-second rule i'm interrupting thoughts i'm starting to feel like wow i actually have the ability to not think what i have always thought i actually have the ability to shut that worry down and so as i started

to understand what anxiety really is so anxiety is a really important thing anxiety is an alarm system in your body if you and i hop in a car and we drive off to have dinner and a truck pulls out right and cuts us off and you immediately swerve what do you feel in your body it feels like something rising in my belly yeah making me like a little burst of nervousness yeah yeah yeah your heart races your armpits sweat your hams get clammy jerk the real yeah fight or flight yeah the alarm is sounding the

alarm because there's danger well what happens the second the the truck pulls away in your body well it should go back to a calm state and i should my my respiratory system should start to function as normal my dietary tract should start to engage we should start burning the carbs again in my belly yeah and things should go back to normal exactly from a biological perspective yes exactly and the reason why that happens is because your mind has the vision of the truck pulling away so your mind tells your body threat is over for a

person that experiences anxiety over and over and over like at their default state what's happened is you're standing in your kitchen and all of a sudden you feel that tidal wave that you and i felt when the truck pulled into our lane but there's no threat and so as the rush hits your body your mind starts scrambling looking for what in the kitchen is threatening me and there's nothing there and since you know the science of the body all the blood when you go into fight or flight goes to your major organs it leaves your

digestive tract your stomach starts to gurgle most people think butterflies means they're [ __ ] no butterflies just means the blood left your stomach to go to your heart and now your digestive chemistry has changed that's all that's happening it doesn't mean you're about to die but we misread it because we don't understand it and so then once you go oh i'm [ __ ] my stomach hurts and now i'm feeling now your mind escalates it and your mind starts freaking out and when your mind starts freaking out then your body freaks out more and

that's when the grand panic attack happens which is an emergency break it's it's designed to get you to stop thinking and to just remove yourself and if you've ever seen somebody have a panic attack they dart around a room they can't breathe and they feel like they've gotta leave whatever situation they're in this is how your body's designed to get you out of emergencies the problem with somebody who gets a dysregulated nervous system is you feel like a truck's about to pull in your lane all the time but your brain can't understand why you feel

that way because there is no truck your body just got stuck there and so when i started to understand that i found this really interesting piece of research um from harvard medical school called reframing performance anxiety where researchers wanted to know since you know people really screw up tests when they get nervous right you know you get nervous about a test and then you can't focus and so you blow it because you've got performance anxiety or athletes that really blow it when they get nervous before a game well medically speaking there is no physiological difference

in your body state physiologically speaking between being nervous and being excited zero difference so exactly what you talked about when the truck pulled into the lane in the example that i gave that experience that made you feel nervous when you feel excited the same thing happens your heart races the blood leaves your digestive tract and goes up to your major organs your armpits start to sweat your throat feels tight your hands get clammy exact same physiological experience excitement and nervous the only difference between a situation that makes you excited in a situation that makes you

nervous is what your brain is saying about what's happening so if you're in a situation where you're like oh my god i'm going to screw up this test you know it's going to be terrible and you start working yourself up and i'm so nervous i'm so nervous i'm going to blow this interview i'm so nervous of course you're going to start sweating of course your heart's going to race if you and i are about to go see our favorite musician let's say we have front row tickets adele is going to play right here in london

we are right there oh my god she's about to come on stage my heart's racing my armpits are sweating i'm excited because my brain's going adele's about to be there so the body makes sense in the excitement situation so the researchers at harvard wanted to know well given that physiologically it's the exact same experience is it possible to trick the drain brain in a moment when you're nervous and make your brain think you're excited and if you did trick your brain in a moment when you were nervous to believe that you were actually excited would

it impact your ability to perform and the answer is yes you can trick your brain in a situation where you're nervous to believe that you're actually excited and yes it profoundly impacts your ability to perform and so they put people in control groups in um like karaoke competition a negotiation competition a standardized test and a track meet and there were only uh the only difference between the groups is one group was taught in a situation that made them nervous to simply say as dumb as this sounds i'm so excited i'm so excited to run this

race i'm so excited to take this test i'm so excited to get out there and sing even though they felt nervous i'm so excited and the people that were taught to say i'm so excited outperformed the people who had no tools and the reason can be explained by chemistry and physiology and neurology if you get too nervous and you start to get too worked up and your thoughts start to spin and your body stays in a fight or flight state your brain releases cortisol and cortisol impacts your brain's ability to focus so all your preparation

goes out the window because you just blew it with the cortisol in your brain when you say i'm excited even if you feel nervous your brain buys it and doesn't release cortisol which allows you to focus on what you need to do and so i started experimenting with this because i was deathly afraid of flying and at the age of 45 i'm now all of a sudden because of that tedx talk starting to take off on the speaking circuit and i'm having to board planes and i'm being bombarded with these thoughts of i'm gonna die

i'm never gonna see my kids get married i is my husband gonna remarry you know will i make it and so i said i gotta figure out a better way and so i stumbled into this project and i came up with this strategy and this is freaking genius i've taught it to millions of people it's curing people's anxiety i kid you not therapists are using this around the world it is extraordinary so before you have to do something that makes you nervous come up with uh anything that you can grab onto that makes you excited

about what you're doing so for example with the example of flying before i get on an airplane i mean i'm not afraid to fly at all anymore but back in the day back when i eight years ago before i would get on a plane so i'm flying to london i would think of something i'm excited to do when i get to london and so before i board that plane in boston i would think about coming here and meeting stephen and getting to hang out with him when i get on that plane and we're up in

the air and all of a sudden we start bouncing around like you know something yeah like turbulence in the air and my body goes oh my god i close my eyes and go i am so excited to see steven this is going to be amazing and what happens is that my mind goes hold on hold on she's not nervous she's excited to see stephen and your body literally settles and your mind locks on to this thing that makes sense because i'm going to london i'm going to see you and if i'm going to see you

the plane obviously makes it so there's nothing to worry about and it took me about five or six times of doing it and i stopped having any kind of anxiety whatsoever about flying it's really interesting so many different my brain fizzled off into so many different like flowcharts but um you know a lot of people talk about anxiety being this like concern about the future right and from one perspective i was thinking then as you're saying that what you're actually doing is making the future uh a really nice place so your brain is saying this

plane is going to crash the future is death yeah and you're it sounded like you're hijacking it in fact in fact brain the future is really really pleasant i get to go and see steven yeah which and it's like that's what it sounded like but but i have to i just completely resonate and then anyone that's really listened to to me even in two episodes ago one of the questions i was asked was about imposter syndrome and my response to that was i don't necessarily feel like i've experienced imposter syndrome and the example i give

is when i'm in brazil and i know i'm going up on stage and obama's there for me i i always say this on the podcast i have the same butterflies everyone else's house but my brain is telling me that i'm excited right and it's done that so many times and because i think because it does that and then it goes well it's reinforcing that that is in fact excitement and next time you're you know and it's and it's kept that fear at bay can i unpack what just happened so for most people butterflies in your

stomach is a trigger that makes you believe something bad's about to happen and i have a theory about it the number one fear in kids is throwing up number two is their parents dying but number one according to pediatricians is the fear of throwing up because this is this intense moment of losing control and so tons of little kids have an enormous fear of throwing up and the trigger of your stomach rumbling or butterflies triggers that fear and so i think there's been a lifetime negative association with having butterflies what you did is you took

a very common experience that's a negative trigger for people so the physical sensation of your stomach being upset triggers negative thought patterns uh oh uh oh uh oh i'm in trouble i'm trouble i'm in trouble yeah and then that sticks what you've done is you've hijacked it and you've labeled that feeling in your stomach as something positive i'm really excited 100 but i don't deserve credit for that because it was never it was i've i figured that out in hindsight only from hearing someone that suffers with nerves and then seeing the consequence of the impact

that nerves have when they go up on stage and me being like okay i have that bit i have the feeling but my brain isn't fearful and then it goes well for me and that reinforces me and creates this compounding positive cycle in my life now where i can walk up on stage with obama and yeah i'm feeling it backstage but i'm like i can't wait to get off on stage right and this kind of speaks to a confidence all of these things because once you get stuck in that negative reinforcing downward cycle and i'd

say it the downward cycle goes much faster than the upward cycle like one incident can make that confidence drop and then um it's hard to get out of it's hard to get other you know i guess hijacking it in the way you've described is is a definite solution well you know what i just got really excited about is that let's go back to the fact that your brain learns patterns and even though you may feel stuck even though you may feel hopeless you're not broken you have patterns of thinking and patterns of behavior that are

broken for where you are and where you want to go in life and what's super exciting is that when you start to think about changing your life through the lens of just looking for patterns breaking them and replacing them it becomes less personal and i believe especially after what i've experienced with the high five habit that you know there's a lot of research in in habits obviously about how long it takes a new habit to stick and it's anywhere from according to a lot of people 21 days to 63 days depending upon what you're looking

at in terms of the mind body spirit i personally have a theory that if you don't like the new habit you're never gonna make it stick like i don't like getting out of bed in the morning i've been using the five second rule 54321 for 13 years can we talk about that i feel like we haven't brushed over that little bit so this five second rule uh-huh um you released the book i think 2017 called the five-second rule and it's all about you know well you tell me what it's about where it came from i

know there was a rocket you're watching a rocket on tv and that was a little bit of the initial inspiration but where did this come from and what is it well so you know i think i alluded to earlier that um it seems like my version of personal development requires me to fall into a hole or dig one and then i realize nobody's coming to rescue me and i'm if i want to get out of the hole i'm going to need to build a freaking ladder um and so at the age of 40 i found

myself in a place that i just never envisioned i would be and that is i had my husband and i had three kids under the age of 10 and i was unemployed and my husband had been in the restaurant business with his best friend and the housing crisis hit especially hit in the united states and we found ourselves 800 grand in debt because we had secured the restaurant business like complete morons with our kids college fund and our house and every credit card and the home equity line and the cars and everything and that's great

when your business is working it's absolutely terrifying when it's not and so i would wake up every morning just pinned to the bed with anxiety and i became somebody that i barely recognized i was screaming at crisps i was drinking myself into the ground i the kids were missing the bus every day i didn't have a job i was hiding from my friends i hadn't told my family what was going on and you know the thing that's that's that's interesting about being stuck in life is that the fact is you know what you need to

do that's the easy part and if you don't know what you need to do to improve the situation and google it there's approximately a bazillion videos out there of people like you that have been in the exact same situation they will walk you through how to there are books you can buy their courses the what you need to do is out there it's the how how the [ __ ] do you make yourself do what you need to do when you are scared or overwhelmed or anxious or hopeless or depressed or any of the stuff

that happens to you as a human that's the 100 million dollar question and at the time i didn't have the answer i knew i needed to look for a job i knew i needed to stop streaming at chris i knew i needed to get the kids on the bus i knew i needed to ask for help i wasn't doing any of those things i was stuck in broken patterns and i didn't know any of the things that we're talking about right now but one night you know i was sitting there and i was watching tv

and i was telling myself tomorrow morning it's got to be the new you i've given myself that lame pep talk like mel you've got to stop drinking you have got to be nice to chris you've got to pull your [ __ ] together you got to look for a job and by god woman when that alarm rings you cannot lay there like a human pot roast marinating in fear and staring at the ceiling you have got to get out of bed woman and then all of a sudden this is divine intervention the rocket ship launches

across a television screen stephen and i say that's it that's it tomorrow morning when the alarm goes off mel robbins you're gonna launch yourself out of bed like a rocket ship you're gonna move so fast you're not gonna be in that bed when that anxiety hits now it was either god or bourbon one of those two things gave me the idea because it sounds dumb okay mal you're going to beat anxiety by moving fast that sounds great well the very next morning it was a tuesday in february outside of boston massachusetts in 2008. the alarm

went off and i think a lot about this moment because if i hadn't done what i did that morning my life would have gone in a totally different direction i'd probably be divorced i'd probably be an alcoholic my family would be torn apart no idea what i'd be doing for a living or where i would be and i profoundly believe that you are one decision away from a different life and that happened to me on a february morning in 2008. the alarm rang and as soon as the alarm rang i remembered the idea of launching

myself out of bed and then i did what psychologists call a bias toward thinking and this window opens up when you start to think about what you need to do instead of doing what you need to do it's this window of hesitation that's about five seconds long a window of hesitation that defines your whole life inside this window of hesitation lives anxiety and procrastination and fear and imposter syndrome and overwhelm all patterns of thinking all patterns of feeling all patterns of behavior that get triggered in this five-second window of thinking about what you need to

do because it's in the thinking that you go from being present to all the patterns kicking in and the coping mechanisms that you have and so for whatever reason i started to think about getting up and all the [ __ ] started to come in i don't feel like it how's it going to help i don't want to for whatever reason i just started counting backwards five four three two one and i stood up and i used it the next morning and the next morning and by the third morning i was kind of freaked out

because i'm like okay this is working this is weird and i said mel i made myself a promise if at any moment you know what you need to do but you don't feel like it just count backwards and let's just see what happens and so i started using it steve in this little count backwards technique 54321 no idea why it's working by the way um in any moment i'd see chris i'd want to kill him 54321 all of a sudden i'm calm i can speak to him from a more supportive place kids are irritating five

four three two one take a breath and now i can be the mom that i know i want to be 54321 i'm going out the door to exercise five four three two one i'm picking up the phone and i'm networking five or three two one i'm picking up the phone and calling my parents and asking for help and slowly but surely one decision at a time using the five second rule and the five second rule is very simple the moment you have an instinct to move you got to do it within five seconds or your

brain will kill it and counting backwards is critical i now know why it works when you count backwards 54321 you interrupt habit loops stored in your basal ganglia and the counting backwards requires focus so it awakens this sucker right here your prefrontal cortex it's referred to as a starting ritual in habit research a cheat code for your brain and um basically i used it in secret for three years because i mean what am i going to do tell people you can count to five and you change your life i mean it sounds ridiculous plus i

was just trying to survive i'm trying to like find a job and save my marriage and help my husband and make sure my kids are okay and start to pay our bills make the ends meet and that's what i was doing and one thing led to another and um word got out about it and people started to write to me about it and um it has now gone on to change the lives of millions of people we know of 111 people who have stopped themselves from attempting suicide by counting backwards 54321 when i had a

daytime talk show an entire wing of nurses from an inpatient unit at a psychiatric hospital in philadelphia came to my talk show and explained to me after the show that of all the tools that they have when they discharge somebody from an inpatient commitment that the five-second rule is the most effective thing that they have except for medication obviously but it's the most effective thing that they have because it's simple and you can remember it and anybody can use it and it works and i think we make a huge mistake in life we make the

mistake of believing that because our problems are big or because our dreams are so big that somehow the solution to achieving those dreams or to solving those problems must be enormous too when in truth it's the opposite the larger the problem the smaller the solution the bigger the dream the smaller the actions are that you need to start taking super compelling because that also has a lot of similarities with your with your new book the high five habit it does yeah so i'd love to hear the story of um of how this was born and

i imagine you know that that came out of as you said a low point in your life where you were you were looking for what you thought would probably be a complex solution to a set of complex sort of problems and dynamics in your life but um the high five habit is more centered around gratitude and um i guess like self-appreciation is that an accurate description of that yeah yeah like it's um you know even knowing what i know about the five second rule i believe the high five habit is a thousand times more powerful

and the reason why i say that is because the five second rule will help you break patterns of behavior it'll help you push through fear it'll help you take action it'll help you interrupt thoughts it will help you walk away from things define boundaries um it's very action oriented overcome procrastination yeah overcome procrastination the high five habit works at a much deeper level it solves what i believe is everybody's core issue and problem and that is the issue and the habit of hating yourself of criticizing yourself of not liking yourself of beating yourself up and

as successful as i've become and as much as i've accomplished it wasn't until i stumbled into the high five habit that i truly confronted the fact that in spite of all that success i still didn't like myself i still judge the woman in the mirror i was still in many ways betting against myself by constantly beating the hell out of myself and it was a habit and you know we talked in the very beginning about how we go from being children that are wired to love ourselves to the ways in which life can make you

start to feel what's wrong with me and the ways in which your brain starts to turn and filter the world in a way where you see everything that you're not and all the ways that you don't fit in and all the things that aren't working out and that was exactly my experience and i think it's every single human being's experience i don't care how successful you are and so the high five habit is very very simple and first i'll tell you what it is and then i'll explain the story so i'm on a mission to

get every single human being on the planet to add high fiving themselves in the mirror to their morning routine that right after you brush your teeth as ubiquitous as it is for people to brush their teeth in the morning let's get rid of the skanky breath so you don't drag it through your day i want you to literally wipe clean your mind body and spirit so you don't drag generational gunk and patterns into your day and it's that simple put down the toothbrush look at yourself in the mirror raise your hand and send yourself into

your day knowing that you have your own back knowing that no matter what happens today you will be here there to support you and encourage you no matter what because you haven't been and the way i discovered it was um in april of 2020 and you know the backdrop doesn't even matter i mean what was happening is a universal experience i was just at a moment where i was overwhelmed by my life there was a lot of [ __ ] going on in my business there was a lot of stuff going on in the world

a couple of my kids were really in a state of being anxious and upset about things and i just woke up morning after morning feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders feeling like if one more thing happened i just can't cope and i think that that's something that we all feel at times in our life whether somebody just breaks up with you or you lose a job or you don't get the funding you wanted or you lose an election you went for or you just feel lost in your life or maybe your parents

are sick just this feeling of i just can't take it i just don't know how i'm going to deal with the demands of my life and that was me and so one morning i'm standing in my bathroom and i'm brushing my teeth and i'm there in my underwear and i look at myself in the mirror and my first thought is oh my god you look like hell and then i immediately out of habit start picking my appearance apart i mean look at the dark circles in your gray hair and your saggy neck and god one

boob is lower than the other you look like [ __ ] mel and the second your mind goes negative you already alluded to this it's like you know more negative thoughts climb on and so then i drift into my day and it's not like yes it's like why did i get up so late you got a zoom call in eight minutes oh my god i haven't even walked the dog yet and oh i forgot to text steven back and just the beat down begins and i believe that my experience that morning is everybody's experience and

i know based on research that it is that we talk a big game about gratitude and and meditation and morning routines but we've skipped this one thing that's happening in everybody's morning routine and it's a habit of self rejection of self-criticism and every human being has it i kid you not and standing there that morning overwhelmed by life giving myself the morning just kind of beat down and you know negativity i couldn't think of anything to say to myself and i wouldn't have believed it anyway because i felt overwhelmed and as pathetic as it sounds

i don't know what came over me but for whatever reason again i think it was probably divine intervention i just dog at my feet on underwear on no bra i just raised my hand and i gave the woman in the mirror a high five because she looked like she needed one that very first one a couple things happened i actually laughed because it was so cheesy i now know that the reason why i laughed is because your brain drips dopamine when you give somebody a high five and then i felt like a switch flip and

it wasn't like i was like yes but i just felt myself go from this very low state i didn't even think any words but energetically i felt myself go from feeling defeated to sort of a like come on now you got a roof over your head it's not that bad get your ass out like it was kind of like that kind of tough coach kind of mustering of an energy but stephen it was the second morning when everything broke wide open so i wake up same problem same kind of energetic depleted overwhelm 54321 i get

out of bed i make my bed um and as i'm walking to the bathroom i'm not even to the bathroom yet and then it freaking hits me i realize i'm experiencing something i've never felt in my entire adult life and what i'm experiencing is this when you go and you're about to meet somebody at a cafe that you really love and you're about to walk in the door what are you feeling uh excitement positive anticipation um yeah yeah yeah i felt that about seeing myself now i've felt excited to see an outfit or haircut i

don't ever recall as an adult feeling excited to see the human being mel robbins why were you excited i was excited because the experience of high-fiving yourself is more than a gesture it creates partnership and there's a sense that you're returning home the same way that a neighbor waves to you and sees you i knew that i would have that experience with myself as soon as i rounded the corner and walked into that bathroom because what i realized that second morning as i ran at the corner and walked into the bathroom is that there's actually

two human beings in the bathroom every morning there's you and there's a human being in the mirror and that human being is trying and they've been there a long time and they've been waiting for you to wake up and to see them they're tired of your constant negativity they're tired of you beating them down they need you to be more encouraging they need you to be more celebratory they need your support and when you finally wake up and create a moment with yourself every single morning where you look yourself in the eye and you see

yourself and you forgive yourself and you honor yourself and you say i believe with this gesture in you it is this remarkably deep and spiritual feeling of connection that you've been longing for for a very long time and so that second morning you know i'm realizing holy cow it's like this sort of it's sort of like when you first realize that the voice in your head isn't you and you have this whole paradigm shift when you allow yourself to understand the depth of what i'm trying to teach you there will be a paradigm shift that

will fundamentally change how you live your life the hardest part is looking at yourself 50 of men and women cannot or will not look at themselves in the mirror because they are either disgusted or disappointed with where they are in life and if you cannot look at yourself in the mirror that is an act of self-rejection that is an act of self-criticism that is an act of self-hatred that's not just a casual thing you're doing the rest of us that can look at ourselves what we do when we look at ourselves as we focus on

the things we need to fix for most women putting on makeup is not additive it's not a creative expression it's covering something up that you don't like it's changing something that you think is wrong that action that intention behind it is self-rejection it is self-criticism it is self-hatred and for so many men if it's not about your appearance it's about where you are in life what you've provided how much you've made what car you drive where you stand in your career what you've built what you haven't the mistakes that you've made so you stand in

judgment and what is so groundbreaking about the act of being where you are in life even with all that judgment or that weight or that shame or that regret or whatever it may be that you carry into the bathroom with you based on your life when you raise your hand to high five the human being you see in the mirror your brain has neural association with that physical action the physical action in and of itself is a positive trigger for every human being on the planet even if you are in a culture where people do

not high-five each other you have seen sports teams do it you have seen viral videos with it your brain knows exactly what a high five is just like everybody's brain knows exactly what this is you don't even have to say a word because all of the positive programming is already hardwired into your basal ganglia and the physical action alone triggers it you know you've never high-fived somebody and thought i hate you you suck you've blown your life i hope you lose the game [ __ ] off you've never ever done it it is neurologically impossible

to stand in front of the mirror and actually think something negative as your hand is reaching the mirror because your brain's not programmed to do that so when you high-five somebody what are what does the high five communicate well done acceptance congratulations you did it you can do it let's do it um yeah well done it's collaboration it's partnership it's union mm-hmm yeah if somebody's going through a challenge let's shake it off you got this keep going it is so many things but it's all in belief and celebration and being seen all of which are

your fundamental emotional needs and so the thing that's super exciting about this is that we're taking programming that is already stored in your mind body and spirit and we're just going to aim it right back at you and the layers upon layers upon layers of psychological proof of research of all kinds of evidence for why this works goes so deep it's extraordinary so for example the physical action of high fiving your brain has already always given you a drip of dopamine that's why you will immediately feel a boost in your mood it's why a lot

of people laugh the other thing that happens is you are also tapping into wiring in your nervous system that's celebratory so when you cross a finish line for example or when your favorite team scores what do you instinctively do celebrate yeah you raise your arms shout surprise you raise your arms when you say hello you raise your arms when you go to high-five somebody you raise your arms so even on your lowest morning when you go to raise your arm to high-five yourself your nervous system taps into that celebratory energy that we all so desperately

need in life the other thing that happens that i love about this is you don't need to say a word because for many people who feel extraordinarily stuck and beaten down and full of shame or regret you wouldn't believe any positive mantras anyway because you've got so much evidence for why you're a screw-up why things aren't working but when you go to raise your hand the gesture does all the communicating and it also taps into behavioral activation therapy which says at its most simple form act like the person you want to become that's not fake

it till you make it by the way this is intentional intentionally act like the person you want to become because when you intentionally act like the person you want to become your brain sees you taking those actions so your brain starts to change the way it relates to you when your brain sees you high-fiving yourself in the mirror it starts to go oh wait a minute stephen loves himself steven's cheering for himself we don't beat stephen up do you see a difference when you between doing it with yourself and doing it with someone else oh

it's not well it's night and day in that you've been cheering for everybody else your whole life and when somebody else high-fives you it feels amazing because you're getting affirmed as a human being connection as well it's connection yeah but i believe you can create that same connection with yourself and what's happened for me is profound i mean i you know used to look in the mirror and on default pick myself apart it was never enough didn't matter how many millions of dollars i made it was never enough i was no no no and i

realize now like so many entrepreneurs i had married achievement with being worthy of love that as long as i was achieving something then i was worthy of love and that's also why we all tend to chase achievement because the second that you get the first million in the bank okay now i got to do more because if you're not doing something then who are you and in practicing the high five habit for now more than a year and researching it for more than a year in having hundreds of thousands of people go through this thing

that we call the high five challenge we've released it to the public now for 34 days we've had 136 000 people complete it from 91 countries not a single person because we're tracking all the data on it has said it didn't work not a single person we have people writing to us about the breakthroughs they're having with depression with anxiety with suicidal ideation with self-worth with senses of failure because it's the physical action and the programming that exists within you that go to work against the patterns that are making you feel so dark and stuck

and that's why this is powerful and so after a year of doing this what's amazing is i don't even see my face anymore i just see a person that i love you know being a parent it's pretty extraordinary um you have this experience when when you become a parent or even a pet owner right where you love this thing so much even when the dog poops on the ground you're angry but you don't stop loving the dog when your kids screw up you might be annoyed or regret what they did but you don't stop loving

them but somehow we never figured out how to do that for ourselves that when we screw up we stop loving ourselves and we stand in judgment instead and i think that's why life is hard i think that's why people don't feel inspired and motivated you want to fix imposter syndrome and people pleasing learn how to stand in front of the mirror give yourself a high five demonstrate that you like yourself demonstrate that you accept yourself because if you like yourself you don't go out in the world and look for other people to like you because

you don't need it it's wonderful if they do but the fantastic thing is if you actually like yourself if you just accept where you are you stop judging yourself you accept yourself with some compassion what's extraordinarily powerful about it stephen is that when you go out in the world if somebody else disrespects you it doesn't change the fact that you respect yourself if somebody else doesn't like you or love you yeah it stings it sucks but it doesn't change the fact that you like or love yourself that's your first foundation that's your first foundation and

this high-five habit of standing in partnership with yourself demonstrating through a physical action that you see yourself you support yourself you got you you got your own back you like yourself you know you deserve to be treated this way it changes how you show up in life quick one as you probably know by now i'm trying to make my life a little bit more sustainable and i consider myself to be on a bit of a sustainability journey in the same way that i'm on a health journey and it's a privilege to be able to share

that with all of you and you you'll know if you've listened to the last podcast that i traded in my range over sport in for an electric bicycle which is now my only vehicle and next year hopefully i'll have my electric car too if tesla hurry up with a cyber truck and that's where my energy comes into my life and my sort of sustainability journey it makes your life if you are on that sustainability journey 10 times easier this is one of their if you can't see this i'm holding in my hand if you're listening

on spotify or apple this is one of their renewable energy products if you're watching on youtube you'll you'll see this this is called the harvey it's this very clever little device that allows the zappy and the eddie which i've talked about before on this podcast to be installed into your home without hard wiring or without batteries or without those um god-awful transformers that a lot of people have in their house it's basically a tiny device that's going to save you both time and money and for someone like me who doesn't have loads of time on

our hands it's a real life saver if you're looking to make a conscious switch and you need a quick fix that's going to save you a load of time then head over to myenergy.com to see this product and many many more a lot of self-help advice tends to advise like looking in the mirror and just like saying nice [ __ ] to yourself like i am strong and capable and i will be a millionaire and then like crack on with you if that worked we'd all be millionaires yeah but so that doesn't work because there's

a lot of people wait isn't that how you made your millions didn't you just stand in front of a mirror and say i'm a billionaire i'm gonna be a millionaire i would have been like and then i went back to bed there's a lot of like that narrative in society and this is like it's [ __ ] it's interlinked with the manifestation piece which is from what i've a lot of the fluffy stuff that i read is like you just gotta think about in fact i had this argument with this girl one day in new

york where she was like steve all you got to do is think about it and it will happen so you don't believe there's any work involved nope just think about it and i was like i don't that sounds like somebody with a trust fund and the the analogy i often give is like if i just did the sat nav in my car and didn't put the the key in and press the accelerator i would just be in my garage all day like i understand the importance of knowing where you're going which is the sat nav

but i also have to drive or else we're not going to move yeah so um couple things positive mantras don't work and they don't work because people pick positive mantras that they don't believe so if you are in a studio apartment eating rice and beans barely able to pay your bills standing in front of a mirror and saying i'm a millionaire i'm going to be a millionaire someday what happens based on research is your brain's like uh actually have you seen where you live like have you seen that you've quit every job that you've had

have you seen and heard your negative self-talk i don't i don't think that's gonna like your brain's like uh-uh your brain has a great [ __ ] detector and so the mistake people make is they pick a mantra that is the exact opposite of the way they treat themselves is it like so the way that i've come to be maybe even in the last two months is my brain actually needs evidence yes right yes like so and you know what evidence at once it wants [ __ ] action right oh yeah prove it to me

behavioral activation therapy act like the person you say you want to be and then maybe i'll believe you yeah now should you still interrupt the beat down absolutely absolutely you should what i'm saying is you gotta stop beating the hell out of yourself but you can't jump immediately to and it's going to all magically disappear and i'm going to love my body after beating myself up and hating myself for 20 years it's not going to happen that fast so you know if you want to do mantras do a more pathetic mantra you know do something

that's like a little bit like more achievable like you know instead of uh you know i love my body after trashing your body for 20 years say i deserve to be healthy even if you hate your body anybody and any brain can get behind yeah you do that's right i'm glad you're waking up you do deserve to be healthy now now prove it let's take some actions that show you that so no monitors don't work if you're picking a mantra you don't believe and if you're picking a mantra that is the opposite of the way

you treat yourself and the actions you take so that's number one number two manifesting everybody has been sold a bill of goods about manifesting if you make a vision board with your uh house on the ocean or you at the stock exchange ringing the bell and that's all that you have on it science says that that vision board will become a source of profound discouragement because over time as you sit there and stare at your dream house or you ringing the bell at nasdaq and nothing in your life changes you start to feel further and

further and further away from what you want which makes you feel further and further discouraged which means you're less and less motivated to even begin working on it like the hardest part for everybody is to start and the reason why is not only the patterns of procrastination and anxiety and stuff that you get trapped in but it's also because your goals feel so far away that you don't believe that just starting is going to even chip away at it and so number one because it sounds like i just contradicted myself yes you need to have

something like a beach house or the nasdaq bell or the business you're starting or the love affair of your life or the family you've always envisioned or the health that you've always dreamt about absolutely swing for the fences what do you want it to look like 10 years from now but when it comes to manifesting based on science i want you to think as manifesting as a bridge manifesting is a bridge that's made of bricks between you and the thing that you dream about and what you do when you manifest is you don't manifest where

the bridge is going you manifest the bricks so a great example is a marathon so let's say that you've never run a day in your life but your bucket list is to complete the london marathon yes you can put on your vision board a photograph of a runner crossing the london marathon you can even put the dream that you have in terms of the the number that you want the time to be okay but you better put a runner in the rain up there you better put an alarm clock that says 4 30 in the

morning because that's what time you're gonna have to get up in order to get your training runs in you better put a runner that's gripping their leg like this when they get a muscle cramp you better put up uh you know a vision of you at mile 13 and your earbuds run out and you still got two more miles to go visualization is the bricks and so what i want you to do when you visualize is instead of visualizing ah the marathon i did it i was amazing and then you open up you're like okay

and i still have not even bought a pair of sneakers that's not happening but that was a fun little exercise no what you do is you literally visualize walk into the store and get sneakers call your friend who runs and ask for advice oh my god that's me on my first training run i've only gone 30 seconds and i'm out of breath oh there i am running three miles in the rain and i feel proud of myself because i've actually gone out in the rain oh there i am saying uh no to my friends i

can't go out tonight because i didn't get my run in but i'm gonna go on my big run alone that like you visualize the annoying irritating amazing things i'm sure people look at you all the time with your extraordinary success stephen and are like how'd you do it how'd you do it and like do you know how many things i missed out on do you know how many like how like the amount of work that nobody wants to do because they're not thinking about it is extraordinary that's the bridge anybody is capable of achieving anything

i actually believe that because i think human beings are designed to change you're capable of breaking any pattern you're capable of getting control of your health you're capable of launching a business you're capable of making millions of dollars you're capable of healing your trauma of finding love of doing absolutely anything that you put your mind to as long as you are willing to do the work for it and as long as you give up your timeline because i do believe that people who put in the work get rewarded but you just might not get rewarded

when you think you're going to be and it might not be the reward that you thought you were going to get is that the case in your life it's always the case and that's why i always have big dreams because i have learned time and time and time and time again especially in entrepreneurial ventures that you put this huge flag out there you write the business plan you set the goals and then you put your [ __ ] head down and you put in the work and you ride the wave and you have the disappointments

and you spend the late nights and you have the heartbreak and the heartache and then things change and then you think [ __ ] this didn't work out and i got betrayed and why didn't they recognize me and damn it i've worked hard and now i got to start all over and you have all of that but if you keep going and you keep going eventually you will look up one day and be like holy [ __ ] this is exactly what i was meant to do and what i was meant to discover yeah my

business plan said i was supposed to go over here and i ended up over here because this is what i was supposed to do but without this business plan i never would have gotten started the business plan was but a dot on the map of my life connecting me to where i meant to go you know i think one of the most extraordinary things that has happened to me in this past year especially now that i have this real partnership with myself where i have a level of trust that through my attitude through my actions

through a sense of faith that it's gonna turn out that even when things are really hard i still believe deep in my core that through my attitude and my actions it's gonna be okay that i have within me the power to ride the ups and downs and to come out on the other side of it and you know i think that we've all had the experience stephen of being able to look backwards and say whoa you know i wouldn't ever wish the experience that i had back in fourth grade on anybody but without that experience

i would not be able to help the amount of people that i help i would not be able to understand trauma as a lived experience and inside and out and at a layer that's so deep because it is an experience that i had in my life without 25 years of struggling with anxiety without having two kids that have struggled with anxiety i would not know what i know about anxiety and be able to help people including my own children uh i would not without having made mistakes with my kids and their anxiety be able to

tell parents do not do this because i did this and it made my kids anxiety worse and i didn't even know and so i can see you know i can see how everything from you know working as a public defender to being a legal commentator from cnn to the number of stages that i've been on to the number of people that i've helped i can see how all of that comes together to help me do what i need to do in this moment and i think one of the most powerful things that you can cultivate

when you cultivate partnership with yourself is being able every single day to have a level of trust in your life in the magic of things in yourself to know that this moment right now is also a dot on the map of your life and 5 10 20 years from now you will look back on this moment and you will know exactly why this happened and why it happened is it was preparing you for something it was giving you a skill or an experience or some wisdom or a relationship that you're gonna need for something extraordinary

that's coming and when you believe that it gives you the strength to face absolutely anything when you look back on the person you are now and the tremendous wisdom that you've just demonstrated just speaking to me just then do you recognize the male that was couldn't get out of bed was feeling depressed couldn't find you know described herself as you as you did as being lazy do you recognize that person and what's at the very essence in the engine room that drove that change was it passion was it finding your calling um because i know

you weren't this per and you couldn't have been this person dude it's also been 31 years i mean come on i've had i've like basically been changing for as long as you've been alive for crying out loud and also human beings are designed to grow but not everybody seems to because you have because they don't understand being stuck yeah interesting see being stuck is one of the most universal feelings of the human experience and nobody understands what it is what is it oh it's amazing when you hear this it's like so remember how we've talked

about how uh the human beings have this crazy amount of natural intelligence wired into us and inside your body we've talked about one of the signals anxiety anxiety is a signal that means pay attention that's why you go into fight or flight you're in an alert mode okay that's all it is it's a signal an alarm system and your body has a sophisticated uh system of signals and alarms and they're all tied to fundamental needs anxiety is tied to your fundamental need for safety that's why it's a signal let's talk about your most important fundamental

needs let's go right back to psychology 101 maslow's hierarchy of needs uh you need food or else you die so when you need food what is the signal that your body sends you hunger when you need water what is the signal when you need um uh air yeah you catching your breath when you need rest what do you feel that's right when you need connection what do you feel lonely human beings are designed to grow when you stop growing what do you feel stuck yeah i was gonna say stagnant but i guess stuck is you

know we're stagnant we're still trapped i guess yeah feeling stuck is a signal that you've stopped growing that's it and when most people feel stuck since they don't understand that it's tied to a fundamental need for growth we believe it's an existential crisis and we blow up our lives for most human beings what actually will get you feeling like you're not stuck is having something in the future that you're looking forward to or taking a class where you're learning something or changing a routine so that you try a new class at the gym learning anything

gets you back in touch with a fundamental need it makes you start to feel like things are moving and from that place of feeling a little bit more empowered you'll be able to make better decisions about what big things need to change in your life and is that you would also describe that as a moment where your life has like an absence of purpose i think about i think about various examples olympians that come back from the olympics and they they're like 80 chance of depression after they've you know you know and then i think

about people who have yeah lost purpose in their lives for whatever reason been fired from their jobs or whatever all people that are in jobs that are you know absent of purpose completely that feeling of being stuck and and then you said we talked also about the importance of goals and ambitions going forward when humans don't have that forward ambition or that thing to look forward to in the future and their current situation lacks purpose they become very um psychologically disorientated the way i describe it um i act i have a different take on purpose

um i think everybody's purpose is exactly the same what is that i think your purpose is to share your true self to be fully seen and for the olympian when you are training and you're in that arena that is an experience of being seen and for most people that are lacking purpose they feel profoundly invisible and being seen fundamentally comes back to whether or not you even see yourself and when you start to feel empowered and you start to see yourself and meet you where you are what happens is every day that you're able to

stand with yourself to accept where you are to give yourself the compassion to give yourself the support and the love and the respect and the worthiness that you deserve you're going to go out into the world and share more of yourself that olympic athlete is sharing more of themselves and so i think our purpose in life is to come back home to ourselves to reconnect with ourselves and to empower ourselves to go back out into the world and share our stories and share our experiences and share our full selves with the rest of the world

from a prehistoric standpoint let's say you know because i always try and like check things against the caveman of my you know my ancestral beings the the idea of being seen when i was you know my ancestors 10 000 years ago what kind of role does that play in from a survival perspective well i i mean i'm freestyling here so okay my suspicion is if you were not within your mom's eye view your ass was going to get eaten and so i think that uh you know if you wandered off as a kid you were

in danger if you weren't hunting with the pack you were in danger and so being seen means safety and that's why when you look at psychological safety there are three fundamental needs the need to be seen the need to be heard and they need to be celebrated for the unique person that you are those are your three fundamental emotional needs when it comes to feeling safe and whole as a human being and most people's experience by the time they are done with childhood as they feel invisible they feel like nobody gets them and they feel

completely disconnected and unloved or not celebrated it makes a ton of sense yeah so i did okay on that answer yeah it's a really really remarkable refraining we have a new tradition on the diary of a ceo which is in the diary the famous diary of a ceo the previous guest always writes a question for the next guest that's coming and they don't know who they are okay and these guests they're so diverse it's always so fascinating and they never know who they're writing it for which is also interesting the previous guest wrote what is

the one regret you have if you have any at all um it's a it's a tricky question because i'm one of these people that doesn't want to go back and change anything i think everybody is according to the science we had a mogada sit here from google he talked about the eraser test he said even people that have gone through profound trauma when asked the question if they were to raise the trauma 99 said no because of the domino effect you don't know you know it's an interesting one yeah um you know like any behavior

that hurt somebody else you know anything that i did whether it was light or cheating or you know just being an [ __ ] when i was just trying to survive that unintentionally hurt somebody else yeah i wish that that wasn't part of my story um but you know i wouldn't i wouldn't understand at a profound level that really well-meaning good people do really shitty things when they feel shitty about themselves and you know if i hadn't done shitty things when i felt shitty about myself i wouldn't fully believe that and you might do that

again i guess had you not done it once yeah yeah or twice or three times or four times like first you gotta wake up you know and then there's all the things that i did that i don't realize hurt somebody else but you know i know in my heart that i was still a good person i was just in a really bad place which is you know why you do bad things your relationship with yourself is the foundation for everything in life and if you believe you're a bad person you will tend to do bad

things and the opposite is also true if you believe that you are a good person who is worthy of good things you tend to do good things unbelievably true my last question for you is one that i tend to always ask people i meet that i find uh to be incredibly wise and very good at helping others i mean you help hundreds of millions of people um combined um which is do you still struggle with all of the [ __ ] you talk about oh my god like yes that's why i'm so [ __ ]

relatable i do not have this stuff figured out i am shoulder to shoulder with everybody um whether it's issues going on with one of my kids issues going on with one of me you know with look you know just the other night uh i mean i'm this is what happened i self-published the audiobook okay and um which is amazing because i'm a smart [ __ ] i own my rights and you should to this book oh no no this one i did a joint venture on the publishing but i own all of the audio amazing

and um because the five-second rule is self-published and it's the number one selling self-published audiobook in the history of audiobooks the book is self-publishing and um which is why i need to get into nfts because my i don't like it when somebody else has control i as an artist want to own what i do as a businesswoman nothing pisses me off more than getting into a dumb deal and then i resent the people that i'm in the deal with because i didn't negotiate properly and if you believe in what you're doing you better own your

work you better understand the long tail payoff of your work because nobody will market your work better than you and you will be profoundly pissed off when somebody else is making their money a hundred years from now and for every author that's that's listening make sure you look at amazon because the uh relatives of uh what's his face who wrote the seven habits of highly effective whatever they're the ones collecting checks on that because that book is still hitting so you want to be like mariah carey she laughs all the way to the bank whenever

christmas rolls around because of that song and so you know i uh self-publish the audiobook i have a tremendous partnership with audible where we create a lot of original content for them behind their paywall and i self-published this book and we destroyed it in sales the month of october the number one selling audiobook period hands down of any book that was published period ap reported it everybody reported it and then the new york times comes out um in november and they rank the top 10 audiobooks of the month of october and they deliberately left me

off and when that happened i punched the wall i drank a gin martini i lit up a joint i called a couple friends and bitched and i immediately got triggered because i went right back to the experience of being a ninth grader on the tennis team and having the seniors throw a party and i was the only ninth grader who wasn't involved and so it triggered a very old pattern that i thought i had [ __ ] gotten rid of which is i'm an outsider nobody likes me i'm always having to sneak in why am

i never invited why am i not part of the cool kids why am i not for you know like it's that old stupid-ass story that got triggered and so of course this [ __ ] happens it happens all the time and i just happen to talk about it because i don't like feeling these things and i find that just trying to shove it down makes the next time it happens get even bigger and so i share this stuff because i think holding it in is what's creating a lot of anxiety and regret and upset and

stuckness for people we are all so the same and the more that you know i kind of share the ups and downs i think the more people listen to the things that are working and try them out and tweak them for their own life and look if i can save anybody the heartache and the headaches that cause myself that's a life well lived you know if i can laugh at myself along the way if i can punch a wall and drink a gin martini and then share with you like okay this and then get out

because how i got out of that because i could have been in that cycle the old male would have been there for a month everybody's out to get me i never get recognized why even bother it doesn't matter and it allows me to share in real time that i feel all the [ __ ] but i don't like to stay there and this is not toxic positivity it is important when you're disappointed to allow yourself to feel disappointed it is important when you lose something to give yourself the grace to grieve for as long as

you need to it is important to have a good cry to have a good scream to draw it's important to feel the highs and the lows you're meant to feel it all but you can shorten the length of time you stay down and what always helps me it's something that you know i i developed when the high five the five second rule launch was coming off the rails as i just kept saying what i what i've said a couple times during this i i say to myself i refuse to believe that if i'm a good

person and that if i'm working hard i refuse to believe that this doesn't work out i refuse to believe that i'm not going to be okay like i know that this moment's going to pass and i know that i will look back on this moment five years from now and i'll see exactly what i was meant to learn and what i was meant to learn i already know is that i have got to once and for all stop looking for validation in old institutions if i truly want to be an artist on my own terms

don't even pay attention to that [ __ ] because it doesn't matter in the world that we're living in now it doesn't matter if you really want to make impact because the person that's struggling is the person that you want to reach not the person that's deciding who gets on some stupid list that's printed in a paper and redirecting your focus to what actually matters and the fact that you believe in your heart that you got the mindset you got the work ethic you got the ability to figure this [ __ ] out and to

keep going and that eventually if you do what's meant for you is gonna find you you will be rewarded for all this in the way that you're meant to be rewarded that's amazing it's an amazing feeling because you can pick yourself up no matter what happens well thank god you do share it because you know you're a very special human being and there's very few in the world that have the the genius of the skill stack where it's kind of how i see it that you have where they're able to go through things in life

analyze them understand them from a psychological a scientific perspective from a sort of intrinsic internal perspective and then be a masterful orator in sharing that in a relatable honest way that helps others to change their lives and find find the peace they're looking for find the outcomes they're searching for there's very few that can do that with such genius so that's a that's a beautiful compliment and thank you for saying that i really appreciate it and i can hear it for the first time in my life i can hear it and you've also given me

this like extraordinary insight that i just got um so you asked me in the beginning kind of what is it that that created all of this insight or this drive to figure it out i think i just figured it out you you just [ __ ] did it i just figured it out i spent so long being dysregulated having a nervous system that was constantly on edge like what it felt like to be me any moment in my life whether i was sitting in a classroom or i was sitting at that law firm bait stamping

or i'm sitting as a young mom with postpartum depression or i'm sitting in yet another job i don't like is it felt like being in a car at a stoplight that had a green signal and the emergency brake was on and the gas was floored and i was going nowhere like just the engine revved and the sense that i needed to go but not being able to go and when i finally started to get control of my own thinking when i finally started to understand anxiety and how to quiet it in my mind and then

how to quiet it my body when i finally got serious about understanding trauma and healing it in my nervous system first through emdr through therapy through guided mdma sessions i finally had the experience of being in my body and being safe and being okay and i hadn't had that in a really long time and um i'm so aware of when i'm not in my body now i'm so aware of when my nervous system starts to go on edge that my tolerance for staying there is zero because i live for far too long feeling on edge

anxious dysregulated self-loathing that when i dip into that space and everybody you dip into that space once a day if not like i used to live there and so when i start to dip into that dysregulated anxious on-edge intense space it's like get this out of my body we got to get back into my new default which is grounded centered in control of what i'm thinking what i'm going to do next and it's a fluid situation but you just gave me the insight as to why it's so quick for me now because i've made a

commitment to myself that after spending 30 years that way 40 almost that i don't want to live another year that way another week that way another full day that way now do i have things that happen in my life that are tough that that put me into a mode where i'm anxious and on edge and of course do i disassociate when i get really awful of course but i now have the tools to bring myself back into my body to give myself the encouragement the assurance the support that i need so that i can face

whatever's happening and know that i'm not only gonna be okay i'm actually gonna be awesome eventually that's beautiful and um yeah i've got a little bit emotional there too i am i'd also assert that you figured that out um and you're also helping a lot of other people figure that out in themselves which is a remarkable i mean it's the highest service i think any one human being could do for society is to do what you're doing at the moment and yeah i you know if only there were more forces in the world like you

i really i was thinking as you were speaking i was thinking this this woman really is a force in the world and i don't nothing can stop you i really believe that i was thinking nothing is you've got too much too strong too much too much intrinsic drive that's coming from a lot of the sort of traumas and experiences you've described nothing can stop you no inclusion on any list is going to stop you probably only add to the to the the coal fire inside that's uh everything better just get out the way thank you

so much for the time the honesty the openness the inspiration for many a year i've seen you going way back in to the viral video days on facebook where you'd come up all the time in my feed and i'd say who's this person and what's this thing she's talking about jumping out of bed and isaac [ __ ] you know and then i was trying you know trying it myself and it was working for me so it's such a huge honor and that's what i use sparingly but in this case it's perfectly adequate to sit

here with you and to um spend some time with you and it's time i won't forget so thank you thank you [Music] you