The First Steps to Reducing Your Anxiety with author Mel Robbins

0:00I love the way you speak. I'm captivated this entire time taking in every word not agreeing with all of them but taking them in let them let them I don't care control freaks breathe easy Mel Robbins is here and she's clearing a space to help us let go of our anxiety and help all of us live our best lives Mel has one of the most popular podcasts in the world and she has a new book called The Let Them Theory which is profound in the impact it's having in people's lives. Mel is a force of nature and one of my favorite guests that I've ever had on the podcast. This is a bit of optimism.

0:46So one of the things that you and I have in common is that it's amazing that we're still around. Who the hell are you calling old son? Given, no, no. Given that, given that the work that we did on TED that sort of helped the world know what we were thinking about the world was many years ago. Yes. Yours 13 years ago. Yeah. Mine 15 years ago. 15. I know. Painful. So you're the dinosaur. I'm the younger one. Yes. At least in TED years. At least in TED years. Did you know that your work would resonate as loud as it has? Are you kidding me? So literally, let me give you the backstory. Okay. So it is 2011, and my husband is in a failing restaurant business.

1:41We have liens on the house, and we're 800 grand in debt. Okay, that sucks. Oh, it sucks, all right. Three kids under the age of 10. Friends and family have invested. Yeah. And I am scrambling to make money however I can to put gas in the tank and groceries on the table. A couple years prior, I had created this little thing that I call the five second rule, which is this technique of counting backwards, five, four, three, two, one, to launch yourself through an excuse or doubt or anxiety or whatever and just do what you need to do. and I invented it to help me get out of bed on those mornings when the anxiety was so crushing that I couldn't get out of bed and so I would five four three two one get out of bed and I started using this little countdown thing to push me through all the excuses and take all the little actions one by one that slowly put my life back on track but I got a phone call from a friend of mine from college who said, hey, there's this person putting on this thing out in San Francisco, and they're looking for somebody who has changed their career a lot.

2:52And she said, I thought of you. She said, they're offering two plane tickets and two nights at the St. Regis. And Simon, when you're$800 ,000 in debt, that sounds like a vacation. And so I said, sure. Now keep in mind, I'd only taken a speaking class, like a public speaking class in high school. I was not a professional speaker. I had never stood on a stage in front of an audience and delivered any kind of keynote, but I wasn't thinking about that because I was thinking about, okay, I'm going to get to San Francisco. Chris and I are going to have a couple of days away from our kids. This is going to be amazing.

3:25I get there and it's like, oh my God, I got to give a speech. I forgot about this part. So when you watch my TEDx talk, you are literally witnessing a 21 minute long panic attack. If you look closely a minute in, you will notice I have this gigantic neck rash that people get when they drink too much or they have anxiety. I'm darting around the stage in and out of the spotlight. And around minute 19, I forgot how to end it. And I couldn't remember how I was supposed to end it. And so I blurred out the five second rule, which I had never shared with anybody except for my husband. And at the end of saying, oh, there's this thing I do.

4:04I call it the five second rule. The moment you have an instinct to act, you got to move within five seconds or your brain kills your motivation to act. Thank you very much. And then I said, and if you have any questions, here's my email address. And I walked off stage. And that was that. And a year went by. And then TEDx put it online. I didn't even know it was online. And another year goes by. So I'm now in my life. We're paying our bills. My marriage is back on track. I'm still using 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 in my own life. And all of a sudden emails start coming in to that email address. And it's from people around the world who were using the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 countdown technique to do amazing things.

4:46And I would stay up late at night after working all day, answering strangers' emails because I felt this obligation to respond to people because they were using something. I never, ever thought that it would be anything other than a couple nights in San Francisco. And I look back on it now, and I think there are these moments in your life when you look backwards, where you say there was something so much bigger happening, and I didn't realize it. And that was one of those moments. Well, it's an amazing thing, because now the five-second rule is a thing. Oh, it's massive. And the thing that I think is wonderful is you've contributed to the zeitgeist, like that people don't even know that it's you.

5:29I love that. It is now part of, it is now woven into the vernacular and people recommend it to each other. They say it, they know what it is. And it doesn't matter if your name is attached to it. The point is, is you've made a contribution to people in a way that like the idea that you can mechanically produce something that will tap into the zeitgeist and take off, I think is. false. I don't know if that's possible. And I think the things that your work, my work, they're accidents. They're accidents. You know, looking back, I think we can both say, I understand why it resonates. Because it was born out of reality.

6:08It wasn't born out of a, I read a thing in a magazine, you know. It was born out of something you needed to do something that you were struggling with, that clearly other people were struggling with the same thing. Yes. Which is, how do I motivate? How do I get out of bed? How do I do these things? How do I do the things I know I need to do, but I can't make myself do it. I don't want to do it. Yeah. And it's so obvious. It's kind of like a little kid standing at the deep end going, okay, five, four, three, two, one, and you jump. I mean, it's the same thing. Yes. So the question where I started was, could you have predicted what has happened?

6:37I think you would have to be an arrogant sociopath to think. But looking back, you can understand it. Oh, I understand now. Yeah, yeah. And the reason why it connected is because there is so much information. I personally believe that most people know what they need to do or you're one Google search away from it. But there's not a lot of how. And for me, I'm fascinated by intellectual concepts and philosophy and all this stuff, but I don't know how to apply it. Like I've always been the kind of person that wanted to let things go, but I never can because I feel like if I let it go, I'm admitting defeat.

7:17And so for me, the experience of sharing one simple thing that helped me during one of the hardest moments of my life, it taught me a number of things. Number one, absolutely everyone who is struggling. And at some point everybody struggles, everybody feels stuck, everybody feels lonely. You think you're the only one and you're not. The second thing that it taught me is that in life, when things feel overwhelming and complicated, the more complicated the solution, the less likely it's going to work. You need something obvious and simple because when you're already overwhelmed and stuck, you're missing hope.

7:53And you're also not able to leverage the full capacity of your brain because you're stressed out and you're overwhelmed and you're up in your head. And so the simpler the idea, the more likely you're going to be able to use it. And the third thing that it taught me is the extraordinary power of ignoring how you feel and forcing yourself to do something. All right. Talk about that one more. Cause that that's, I have no problem letting myself down. What do you mean? So, so for example, I know I need to get back in shape. I I need to go to the gym. And I'll wake up in the morning and say, all right, work out.

8:34I got all the workout stuff at home. I don't need to even go anywhere. You're up early. Why don't you work out? And I'll be like, eh. You didn't feel like it. Do the crossword puzzle instead. Yeah. And I don't mind. It doesn't bother me that I let myself down. Like, okay. I don't feel guilt, shame. But if I'm meeting somebody to work out, I will be there 100%. Of course. So do you actually want to solve this? Go on. Yes, of course. Well, because people only change when they feel like it. And this does not, to me, sound like a compelling enough reason in terms of your why. And I don't think you're committed to changing it, so I don't think you're going to do it.

9:09If you really wanted to do it, you're a smart enough person that you would solve this problem. See, I think the issue is - I don't think it's a question of intelligence. No, I don't either. I think it's that you listen to your emotions in the moment and you allow them to dictate what you do. Nah, I think it's routine. Like when you're in a routine, it's hard to get out of it. But do you agree? Like if I'm working out on a regular basis, it's very hard. So when I used to run a lot. Okay. And when I was running a lot, I just loved running. And I was in the routine and I would, it'd be the afternoon.

9:41I'd look at my watch and I'd be like, I don't have a meeting for another hour. I'm going to go for a run. I would just go for a run. Like when I was in the routine, I loved being in the routine. And so I'm in the routine of not working out. That's my routine. So I think it's hard to change routines. True. And I'm in the routine of not doing. See, I believe people only change when they want to. Yeah. And that if you don't feel like doing something, you're not going to. And the truth is that waiting around to feel like doing this or waiting around for you to be motivated or inspired to break your routine, that's not enough.

10:18Yeah. And it's not a matter of will, it's a matter of skill. and it is a skill in life to be able to feel what you feel and then do what you need to do. Now, one of the most famous taglines in the world is Nike, just do it. Sure. What's the most powerful word of those three words? The do. No. The just. Yes. If their tagline had been do it. Oh yeah, you would have hated that. Yeah, of course, because pressure. It's aggressive. It's not only that it's aggressive. If you look at basic brain wiring, that type of pressure doesn't motivate. It actually creates resistance to change because it is an assault on your fundamental need to control yourself.

11:00But the tagline, just do it, appeals to your humanity. It's acknowledging something we all struggle with, which is that moment of hesitation, that moment of self-doubt, that moment where you're standing on the sideline aching to jump in the game, but you are holding yourself back. The just is everything. And that's what the five second rule is. It's acknowledging that we all have this habit of hesitating in the small moments, this bias towards thinking, where we consider how we feel about the thing that we're about to do instead of doing the small thing that we need to do. And for me, it was the moment of hesitation when the alarm rang and I knew I needed to get out of bed.

11:50I knew I needed to get the kids on the bus. I knew I needed to get a job. I knew I needed to not drink so much. I knew I needed to stop screaming at my husband. I knew I needed to ask for help. I wasn't doing any of it because in that moment when that alarm rang and I knew what I needed to do, I stopped and considered how I felt about doing it. And when you stop and consider how you feel, your brain is wired to do what's easy. We naturally move towards it. We are also wired to push away from what feels hard. And the reason why it is so difficult to break patterns is because the patterns that you're in feel easy because you know them.

12:24Lying in bed is easy. That's why we do it. Picking up your phone and scrolling on social media, it's easy. That's why we do it. In order to change anything about your life or to replace any pattern in your life, you have to work against basic wiring in your brain. And you have to develop a skill of being able to ignore how you feel and choose to take action even when you don't want to. And that's what the five second rule taught me. You know, when I look at the success that I've built and the things that I've done since even the TEDx talk or that moment in my life 14 years ago, I don't think I'm particularly special.

13:03I just did what a lot of people won't do. I got up on the mornings when I didn't feel like it. I did the boring ass, tedious, grueling crap that needs to get done every day. And I refused to quit. And it is a skill to learn how to feel what you're feeling and then align your action with the thing that you know you need to do that's good for you. Were you always like this? Were you always A-type in like in school? Like what was your - Oh, I was a walking red flag for a long time. What does that mean? That means that I was like, I struggle with a lot of stuff. I think this is why I'm obsessed with, it's why I'm obsessed with uncovering any kind of shortcut or any kind of knowledge or tool that can help you create a better life or solve a problem.

13:53Because I spent so much of my life hurting myself or hurting other people because I just didn't know. I mean, there's so many examples of this from trauma in your childhood to I had dyslexia and ADHD. I had no fucking clue I had those things. And part of the reason why I had no clue is because when they were researching ADHD in the seventies, they only looked at boys. And we now know that girls have ADHD just as much as boys. They just have the opposite symptoms. And if you're in a classroom and your brain doesn't learn the way that public school or whatever school is asking you to learn, if you don't address dyslexia, dysgraphia, ADHD, what develops on the surface is anxiety.

14:35So there are generations of women, I am one of them, who got diagnosed with anxiety in their late teens and early 20s who were medicated for anxiety. The wrong thing. The I didn't discover that I had ADHD or dyslexia until I was 47 years old. You want to know how I discovered it? I discovered it the same way the majority of women discover it because one of my kids was going through the process of getting evaluated by a neuropsychologist for school. As I looked at his profile, I'm like, well, that looks like me. Then I went through it and lo and behold, it explained everything. I didn't know. And suddenly knowing gave me a completely different vantage point about the things that I struggled with, about the things that I did that I regret, about the opportunities that I squandered.

15:26You know, I recently had on our podcast a really incredible guy by the name of Dr. Stuart Ablon. He's a psychologist that's been practicing at Mass General Brigham for 30 years. And he had this thing that he said just a week ago that I will never forget. He said, people do well when they can. And if you're not doing well, or if somebody in your life is not doing well, it's because they can't right now. There's a, there's a skill. It's not a willpower issue. If somebody is expressing challenging behavior, there's typically some sort of skill that is missing. There's a problem underneath the behavior that hasn't been discovered.

16:02And so what I've found in my life is that I have struggled silently. I have felt very stuck in patterns of behavior that I didn't feel like equipped to be able to replace or understand, which only leads you to feel worse about yourself. Like, how can I keep doing this to myself? How can I keep making the same mistakes? Why am I so damn hard on myself? And so when you don't know what's going on or you don't understand kind of the trap that you're in, then you have no ability to get out of it. And so for me, it was a revelation to understand that simply counting 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, it allowed me to not be ruled by emotion.

16:49It allowed me to not let the patterns of my past dictate the person I was in the present. And when you start to gain that kind of control over yourself, it's liberating. So no, I wasn't always that person at all. But were you sort of, did you have always have a lot of grit, sort of work hard at school? Yeah. Because I was like super competitive in like a lot of people. I got a lot of positive attention when I got great grades or when the track team won or when I was elected president of whatever. And so, yeah. So it was not that you had the skill of grit and motivation and you lost it. And the 50321 helped you.

17:31See, I don't think it's an issue of motivation. Go on. I don't. Because I think motivation is complete garbage. It's never there when you need it. And that's the paradox of it is that we're all sitting there waiting to feel motivated. Yeah. And it's not coming. Yeah. Because basic wiring of the brain is that you will always default to what's easy. and you always push against what's hard. And if motivation were available on demand, we'd all have a million dollars in six pack abs. And so sitting around waiting for motivation is the kiss of death because it's in the action that you dissipate the emotion.

18:06And it's in the action that you actually prove to yourself through the action because you see yourself operating differently, that you are a different person, that you are not defined by your emotions. I mean, emotions are just chemical reactions that explode within six seconds. And the research shows that if you can learn how to let them rise and fall like a wave, most emotion dissipates in 90 seconds. Instead, what we do is we feel it and then we think the emotion needs to guide our response to it. And it's actually the opposite. You can choose your response if you understand what emotions are.

18:40And I felt trapped and I was a hostage to my emotions all the time. And you can either be sunny and you can be a storm cloud. You get to choose. And for a large part of my life, I was violently oscillating between those two things. And learning how to be in control of the actions that you take and learning that you do have agency and that you don't have to wait to feel like it, that you're not going to sit around and wait for motivation, that you're the kind of person that is building the skill of doing what needs to get done. and that's an incredible thing. But do you allow yourself then to feel sad?

19:19Of course, absolutely, absolutely. But I get to choose how I sit with it. So give me an example. So, you know, like if you're sad, like being sad is a mentally healthy response to situations in life. Yeah. And the thing about it is that there's gonna become an amount of time that being in your sadness is helping you process grief or helping you process heartbreak or helping you process disappointment. Like for me, the thing that comes to mind is when we moved, so we lived outside of Boston for 26 years. And then about four years ago, we moved to Southern Vermont. And so at the age of 52, all of a sudden I'm in this tiny little town and I don't know anybody.

20:04I don't have any friends. I was very sad. I was very lonely. And I sat with it for quite a while. And I think that I over-indexed on sadness for probably six months too long. And at some point, there's this tipping point with your emotions where you go from needing to process something to truly drowning in it. And that's when I think you need to do something. Where do other people factor into all this? The idea of asking for help or having a support network. I hear everything you're saying, and it's true and inspiring. But where do other people fit into this? Other people are everything. Because we're social animals, and none of this works in a vacuum.

20:54Correct. So even in your story, at what points would this not have been possible if there wasn't another person involved? I mean, there's only so many times you can say 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. So 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 changes your relationship to yourself. Right. You asked me, like, what's the reason you want to be in shape? Yes. Right? And service is the greatest motivator of all. Your family, your friends, whatever it is, the greater good. And I said, I'm okay letting myself down, but I don't want to let other people. I won't let other people down. And I also know that my ability to deal with stress skyrockets if I have at least one person in my life who says, you got this.

21:33They don't have to go on the journey with me. Right. But if I can call them at the end of the day and be like, I'm not so sure. They're like, yeah, I believe in you. And if it all goes south, I'm still going to love you. And then all of a sudden, I'm golden. Of course. Where is the person sitting next to you? You were there for your husband who was going through this debt with you. It's his restaurant. I just want to know the role that other people play or need to play. They're everything. But here's the thing. So that changed my relationship with myself. Yeah. And it made me acutely aware that I'm responsible for creating what I want in life.

22:12And I'm also responsible for doing the work to make it happen. So self-reliance. Yeah. And the thing that changed everything when it comes to relationships for me is what I discovered two years ago, which I call the let them theory. The let them theory... flipped absolutely everything on its head about the way that I approach relationships. I've been married for almost 30 years. I have three adult children. I have now a great friend group. And I realize looking backwards on my life before the let them theory that I was approaching relationships and approaching other people in the exact opposite way that I should have been.

23:00And I think most people are. For example. Well, I think that most of us waste too much time and energy worrying about managing and trying to control other people and change them. When you learn to let other people be and you learn to love people as they are, and when you learn to let people heal when they're ready, and when you learn that people are who they are and people change when they're ready to change and do the work to change, and when you understand that the best way to love somebody is to not try to change them, but to actually see them as they are and see them as they aren't. And then instead of pouring all the time and energy into trying to fix, manage, worry, change them, you just let them and you detach from the control.

23:48And then you say the second part, which is let me. Let me, instead of controlling them, let me focus on what's within my control, which is there's only three things that you can control. You can control what you think in response to something, control what you do or don't do, and you can control what you are going to do with your emotions. That's it. That's it. And ultimately, as you know, we all have a very hardwired need for control. And when we don't feel in control, we feel unsafe. And every person that you know has the same need for control. What happens is that in our need to be in charge and in control and to feel safe, we end up trying to control things that are not controllable.

24:29And number one on the list is trying to control what other people think, trying to control people's emotions, trying to make sure everybody's not disappointed or let down by you. We pour so much energy into that, that we are giving power to other people and we are creating friction for ourselves and stress for ourselves. And we're creating friction and frustration in relationships and you don't have to live like that. And so I used to be somebody that was micromanaging my kids, trying to control everything that they did. I had massive opinions about what people should be doing. I bent over backwards to try to make sure people weren't disappointed or not letting people down or that I matched everybody's expectations.

25:13It's absolutely exhausting. And not only that, you actually will never be able to control the thought that somebody is having in their mind. You are never going to be able to control the emotions that somebody feels in response to what you do. And it is not your job to do that. And so learning to allow people to be who they are, learning to allow adults to be adults, has created a set of boundaries. and it has also created space for true connection, love, and mutual exchange to happen. What happened that you came to this theory? So I was at, I can't believe this is where it happened, but I was at a high school prom.

25:59And I had gone, now I discover all this life-changing stuff, and this is the single most important thing I've ever discovered. By far, this is the legacy I will leave on this planet. I'm at a high school prom. I have had, mind you, two daughters who have gone through high school prom. So we have done the dramatic five months of bullshit, picking out the dresses, the spray tans, the limos, like the craziness. So I figure, okay, we got this on lock. I know what's going to happen. I thought Oak was going to be a breeze. It was the worst because he didn't know if he was going to go. He was really nonchalant.

26:29So I couldn't get, like, I didn't know what was happening. And then 48 hours before prom, it's like, I'm going, I'm like, oh my God, where are we going to find a tux in Vermont? Like you want those tennis shoes? Like it was a last minute scramble. And so we get to the night of prom, we go to the party where we're taking all the photos before prom and everything is different in Vermont than it was in Boston. So I'm starting to be like, what do you mean? Like you're driving, like you're driving. Isn't there a bus? Like what? And all of a sudden out of nowhere, it starts to pour rain. Like the storms roll in, it's pouring rain.

27:04Now all the parents are kind of milling about. What are you guys doing for dinner? I'm like, you don't have dinner reservations? What do you mean? And Oakley's like, well, I think we're just going to the taco stand. And for me, that was just like the end of it. Like I'm like taco stand, rainstorm, you're not going, you're going to ruin their, and I start to just lose it. And my daughter was home from college and she reaches over and grabs my arm. She's like, mom, you're annoying. Stop it. And I'm like, but, but, but they're going to get soaked. And she's like, let them. And I'm like, but the restaurant's not bad.