The Resilient Mind - How To Take Control Of Your Mind & Live A Happier Life - Mel Robbins

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

Mel Robbins is an accomplished author, motivational speaker, former lawyer, and one of the most sought-after self-help experts in America. Her TEDx talk, "How to Stop Yourself Over," has been viewed over 25 million times and has helped millions of people around the world change their lives for the better.Learn More About Mel's training: Make It HappenTake action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠Download Mindset App for free and listen to 5000+ of the World's Greatest Motivational Speakers and Thought Leaders: https://bit.ly/mindsetxTheResilientMind Subscribe to Steven Bartlett for more inspiring videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to how to take control of your mind and live a happier life with Mel Robbins. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. 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. 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 at a family kind of ski trip thing. And 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. You asked like what was the thing, and this was like the first thing that popped into mine.

And 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 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. I hid underneath the sheets because it was a big bunk room and all the kids 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 into next week. But I didn't know what the kid was. But I didn't know what the kid was going to 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. 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 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. 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 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. you know, I just started talking about it. I think that one of my, 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 so I tend to process things by speaking about it. And for me, it wasn't the 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 am I so fucked up? Why couldn't I have remembered this? Like the constant self-bashing, that is the piece that I think has been the thing that I've really struggled with.

You know, there's this incredible. 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, 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. You know what I mean? 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 has happened. 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 fucked. 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. I think that, you know, when you're 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. 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, my thighs are so fat. Like, I can't, you know. They look at the mirror and they put their hands up and they're, twirl and they kiss the mirror and 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're 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, this 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 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, so 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 hyper speed 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, like any of it. But for everybody, so that's sort of like if you grew 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, or 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 you. your little hands on your tray, and you start scanning the room for where you're going to 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 going to, 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.

So I, you know, I'm very open about the fact that I struggled with anxiety for a long time. and what's interesting about anxiety is that, you know, I'm now talking to you from the perspective of being 53 years old. I was like really fucked up. And by fucked 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 anytime 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, 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 flying. Yes, yes. 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, 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.

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 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 going to 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 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 going to 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 going to happen. And then the kids are going to laugh. Like, it just becomes this spiral train wreck. And that is the state that I lived in. And so, you know, you learn how to cope. 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. I mean, it was awful. I didn't know what I wanted to do. Yeah. Because I had only ever lived in survival mode. So did you not take a pause to sort of listen to.

Take a pause. Who you were and what your calling was. 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. 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 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 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. Compounding itself, right? 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 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

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 shit, 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 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, God, how old was I? I guess I was, I must have been in high school. We were driving to Northern Michigan

and 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 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, imagine sitting in a dryer

and you're sitting still like, but the clothes are. or 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 I remember, even though I don't remember getting tumbled around,

I remember this unbelievable sound that was like cron-crum-c-crum-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, backseat, the dog was in the way back, but my mom was buckled in at the top. We were fine, 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 sounds, 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, 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 are they thinking and why didn't they invite me here and what 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. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.