Mel Robbins’ 3 KEYS to Attract the Life You Want (Set HEALTHY BOUNDARIES & Protect Your ENERGY!)

0:04Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur, and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

0:29Welcome to this special masterclass. We brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in.

0:47What is the greatest strategies you've discovered in the last couple years of, you know, managing stress, overcoming it, facing it, that some people can start to learn how to implement as well? Okay. So I happen to be, in my opinion, one of the world's leading experts on anxiety because I struggled with it for a long time. And a couple of our kids have had profound bouts with anxiety. And I learned things the hard way. And so everything I'm about to share is not medical advice. It is life-tested wisdom from having to dig myself out of mental holes and messes thanks to what used to be very chronic anxiety.

1:30So first, let me explain what anxiety is. It is an alarm in your body that is designed to agitate you. That's all that anxiety is. It's an alarm in your body that is designed to agitate you, to wake you up, because that alarm wants to get your attention so that you can focus on giving yourself what you need in that moment. Okay? I also want to preface what I'm about to teach everybody and to share with you by saying that a lot of this I have learned recently. And one of my favorite experts on this subject is somebody you should bring on this show. His name is Dr. Russ Kennedy. He wrote a book called Anxiety RX.

2:17And I have, for the past two years, been in talk therapy. And I have been in guided nervous system therapy, like the EMDR. I have also done some of the psychedelic modalities in a therapeutic setting. MDMA and ketamine in terms of my own nervous system. And I've also started adding cold exposure. You're trying it all. I'm trying it all. Whatever it takes. Because I am so sick of living inside a body that feels on edge all the time. And I'm tired of having a mind that basically is on a constant campaign for what's wrong. So I made a decision that I was going to jump all into this space two years ago.

3:14So weekly therapy, EMDR, the ice cold exposure, which is learning how to tolerate basically fight or flight and calm yourself through breathing and through the exposure. I have done the guided psychedelic stuff in terms of smoothing out my nervous system and learning how to truly, I guess, heal and reprogram my body as it relates to past trauma. And I've done traditional talk therapy. And so from Dr. Russ Kennedy, one of the things that I learned recently that is just amazing is that all anxiety comes from one source. What's that? It is when your original alarm went off as a child and you probably don't even remember because it happens even in moments where you're nonverbal.

4:09It's a moment of separation from parent. So the original alarm that you felt, because that's all that anxiety is. Anxiety is an alarm that's designed to wake your up, okay? Because you need something. So if you and I are driving down the street, Louis, and all of a sudden a car swerves in our lane, you will feel a wave of adrenaline and anxiety. That alarm goes off to get you to wake the up and turn the car. To be on alert. Yes. But when that car is no longer on a lane, the alarm disappears. So for people with generalized anxiety, or you feel like you're in a chronic state, what's happening is you have an alarm going off in the background all the time.

4:50That seems exhausting. It is exhausting. And so what's happened for the majority of the population in the past two years, because we are not designed to live with that much sustained uncertainty, is that you right now, I personally believe every human being, unless you are in therapy attacking this, or you have a massive meditation practice, I believe every single human being right now has their alarm turned on internally. Because for months on end, it was sustained uncertainty in the news and a brand new experience with the lockdown. And so of course you went into an alarm state. In fact, for those of you that are working in an office where you're still on Zoom calls from seven in the morning till seven at night, that is a company whose culture is in an alarm state, right?

5:49Everything's an emergency. Everything is on fire. Everything is constantly changing. And so what I've learned is this. And so that original source is separation, okay? Separation meaning you have an experience as a child where you feel separate from the adult and the love that you needed. There is a situation that makes you feel nervous, and then you feel like your parent is not reassuring you. That's how it begins. This is what I learned from Dr. Kennedy that has changed my freaking life. This is actually what our episode is about, the fourth episode. It's like two hours long. We unpack the whole thing.

6:31It's just one mind-blowing thing after another. So I, for years, Lewis, chronic anxiety, I would attack it in my thoughts. I would interrupt thoughts. I would reprogram thoughts, and it works. It works to attack the worries, but it doesn't get to the source. So it's limited. It's like a surface level working. It's part of the toolkit. Yeah, it's part of the toolkit, right? And so, you know, I'd get worried about something, I'd be like five, four, three, two, one, and then I'd think about something else. Or I'd reprogram it and I'd come back. But of course it comes back because you will always have moments in your daily life that give you a wave of alarm.

7:08And by the way, anxiety is not just like feeling on edge. Anxiety is anger. Anxiety can be withdrawal. Anxiety can be any friction in your body. it manifests differently for different people. And so it's like when you go from a state of peace and calm to a state of being in hyper alert, that's what anxiety is. And it's this alarm that's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, pay attention. Now, most of us are afraid of it or we don't like it. And so we try to ignore it by drinking or ignore it by being busy or suppress it by just at people, but it's like this alarm in you that something's up, something's up, something's up.

7:49Like I don't like that. Like something is trying to wake your up. So what does chronic anxiety feel like? It feels like having, it feels like you're a car that's at a intersection and the light goes green and your feet are on the gas and the brakes simultaneously. Oh, man. So like you're revved inside. For anybody that has childhood trauma, it can be an experience, Lewis, and I'm sure you can relate to this, of like being on edge waiting for the next shoe to drop. Having your thoughts be five or six steps ahead. Never being in the room that you're in because you're thinking about what's next. It's very, very common to have very few memories from childhood or from your 20s or your 30s if you have chronic anxiety or you have some sort of trauma that you haven't addressed.

8:41Because if you're constantly on what's next, anticipating what's coming, you're never in the room where you are to make those memories. And also when your nervous system is in a state of alert, the cognitive functioning of your brain is impaired. And so you're busy looking for what could be wrong. Right. And you might be thinking about the meeting with your boss tomorrow instead of being in the room that you're in. Yeah, and it's really hard to create from a stress state. You can't. It's very challenging to be creative and flow from stress. Yes, yes. Now look, it's challenging because it also fuels busyness and drive.

9:24And being worried about something can be very motivating. And so it was for a very long time hardwired into my success. And it kept getting rewarded and rewarded and rewarded. Because you're getting results. Yes. In the external world. But in the internal world, you're still feeling anxious and stressed. Always. That's why it's never enough. Because I'm not even here to enjoy this conversation. I'm already thinking about the thing I need to do at 2 o 'clock. I mean, I'm currently not doing that, but that was my lived reality for a long time due to childhood trauma, due to these feelings of being separate.

9:55And so here's the huge aha moment. So number one, anxiety is an alarm. Number two, your anxiety is from a moment where you feel separate. Okay. You could feel separate from yourself. You could be walking into a huge presentation at a venture capital firm and you feel separate from the people that are now going to watch the presentation. So you start to feel that wave and that on edge, that alarm go off. Right. And the alarm is designed to get you to wake up because you need something in that moment. Here's the kicker. I always thought that anxiety was about what's wrong. Okay. Anxiety is the little Lewis saying, hey, I need a little reassurance right now.

10:55Hey, I need a little love right now. That's all that it is. And when you can teach yourself in moments where the alarm goes off, Lewis, to not race up to your head and start negotiating, it's going to be fine. These venture capital people are going to love you. That helps on some level to be like, no, I'm excited to do this. I got this to coach yourself through it. But if you really want to transform your experience of life, go from the shoulders down. notice that there's an alarm going off then i want you to realize it's the little you saying i feel a little nervous right now could you just tell me i'm going to be okay and i've gotten to the point where i can just put my hand right here find the spot that feels right for you and literally give yourself a little love as stupid as that sounds.

11:51And that alarm goes off. It's freaking nuts. It's learning how to parent yourself, the wounded child inside of you, you being the adult in the room. It is. And the big game changer though, is that it's about needing love from yourself. Because if you're experiencing anxiety, you are not, you're also blocking yourself from love and from assurance and from the that you need and you might not have gotten as a kid what happens if you put your need to be loved on someone or something else then you lose control of it because it's always depending on do they accept me do they like me do they invest in me yeah did they invest me they hire me how do i do like is my podcast rating high like every day you are going to experience moments where that alarm goes off because every single day in life, there is something that will trigger insecurity or feeling separate.

12:49You know, one example I can give you that's really simple is I was invited to a little like party in my new community. And it may be odd to people to hear this, but even though I'm extroverted, I still get nervous when I walk into any kind of networking meeting or any kind of room with a lot of people in it where I'm going to have to introduce myself, there is an experience of feeling separate from everybody. And so even walking into a small gathering at somebody's house where I know everybody, the point of which is for me to get to know people better, walking in, I could feel the alarm going off.

13:33And having just learned what What I learned, I was like, oh, that's interesting. I'm feeling this noticeable separation and all I need to do is be like, oh, you got this. Like it's okay that you feel a little nervous. You can take a breath. You can walk in there when you're ready. It's going to be good. Like giving myself exactly what I needed, which was a little love and reassurance, it completely went away. Right. It's powerful. It's really powerful because I think most of us that experience waves of anxiety hate it. I hate it. I'm like, I hate this. Like, get rid of this. Why do I have to be out?

14:08I'm going to have anxiety forever. And the truth is that when I, yes, you need talk therapy. Yes, you need to use the five second rule and interrupt the habit of worrying. And yes, you need to reprogram a different way of talking to yourself. And yes, you need to go and high five the mirror, which by the way is also neck up because you're taking a physical action that then triggers new programming up here. But it all begins with an alarm in the body. So if you want to heal this, you have to start to go neck down. You need to start to learn how to, in those moments, not be annoyed or scared of the alarm, but to actually turn toward it.

14:52So that's number one. Go toward the alarm. know that it's a call from the little you needing a moment of reassurance or love and you'll start to spot it all the time now and not needing the reassurance from others no yourself from yourself because if you only rely on others and they don't give it to you when you need it you're going to feel anxious yeah well think about this if i were to start to cry right now and tell you that i'm super anxious and something's happened and na na na na na What would you do? I would support you and comfort you and give you a hug. Yes. And how would that make me feel amazing?

15:29But we don't do it to ourselves. Well, if you're alone and you don't have that person with you, how do you handle it on your own? You hug yourself. Literally take a towel and go like this. It feels like a freaking hug. Put your hands on your heart and take a couple deep breaths and tell yourself what you would tell somebody else. and the alarm disappears because it's not trying to tell you that something's wrong. The alarm of anxiety is telling you that there is something missing right now for you. And what's missing is a feeling of safety and a feeling of like deep connection with self. That's all that's missing.

16:10And so when you reframe it as a way to let love in, and that it is a way to let love in from yourself, you start to change the way that your body experiences moments that trigger you from childhood. And so like, I think so much of what I am trying to put out into the world is this notion that everything needs to start with addressing these feelings that we have. Like for me, you want to change your life. There is a very simple formula that's not easy to do. You need to take action before you feel like it. You need to take the actions that the person that has what you really want and deserve in your life, you need to take the same type of actions before you feel like that person.

17:00You must act first, period. That's how you change. When it comes to healing your body and when it comes to anxiety, you have to, instead of running away from it or numbing it because the anxiety feeling is triggering you to grab the alcohol. It's triggering you to get very busy and start running errands or it's triggering you to turn on the TV or hit the vape pen or hit the joint or whatever. And that feeling could be boredom. It could be a sense of overwhelm. It could be insecurity. Like, because think about what happens. Let's take the example of your dating and somebody hasn't texted you in a day, they left you on read, you know, like you start to get that wave, the alarm goes off.

17:46Because what do you need? You need some love and reassurance. But what we do instead is, you know, you see that you're still on read and you grab the vape pen. That is you dealing with your anxiety in a destructive way. What do you do? You like start scrolling through social media, which makes you insecure. That is you trying to distract yourself or numb or whatever, this uncomfortable feeling that you don't know how to deal with. When really that feeling requires one action, love. Love from self. But why is it so hard for so many people to love and accept themselves? Because when you were a child, love was transactional.

18:28You were taught that if you're doing what I want, I love you. We all do it. I did it to my kids too. I didn't mean to. Like we all parent, we try to parent through connection, but we tend to correct our kids a lot. And so you learn that if I'm not doing what you want me to do, then you don't like me right now. You don't love me. And we learn that if we are getting into the right school or we're getting good grades or our team is doing well in sports or we are interested in medicine because dad's interested in medicine, that that's how you earn love. And it's very hard to, with day-to-day life, not do something that fucks your kids up.

19:20Yeah. Even if you're being conscious and healthy and all the right things. Of course, because you can't read your mind. You can't. You don't know what they're perceiving and how they take your conversation and what you said, what you didn't say. Yep, yep, yep. And they are learning by observing and absorbing. And so that means that there are going to be moments where they deeply need a hug and they need a quieter tone of voice. And you've just slammed your laptop shut and you've just yelled out something because of somebody being like a jerk to you at work. And your kid was standing behind you and needed something.

19:55And so I think that that's why we don't actually know how to love ourselves. You have a way that you deal with pain. Because when you feel disappointed, that is a form of pain. And a lot of us either withdraw from it or we try to expel it in some way. Yes. Or you try to outrun it. Yeah. Another thing I was thinking about as you're saying this is kind of like figuring out what your main currency is in a relationship, why you want to have a relationship, and your main currency in life. For me, at this season of my life, my main currency is peace, wanting to create and experience peace within me and within my relationship.

20:46Because the world is going to have challenges and disasters and adversities. and my business. There's going to be things already thrown at me in my life. But in my relationship, I want peace. So that was, and she wants, you know, adventure and exploration and fun and all these things. But she wants peace as well. And so I'm like, okay, cool. I'm cool with all that as long as it's peaceful too. You know? Well, one of the things that I'm working on right now, and I don't have the answer to this, is I, you know, obviously I know I married an introvert, right? And Chris is the definition of peace.

21:19I mean, the guy is a Buddhist meditation instructor. He is getting a master's in transpersonal psychology right now. He leads men's retreats. He's a yoga instructor. He works for hospice. He's about to get a certificate to be a death doula. When you talk about somebody that is deeply spiritual, grounded, introverted person who really connects with people one-on-one, that's my husband. And so the thing that I'm really trying to figure out in this next chapter of our marriage, because I feel like in many ways, we are in the beginning of a second marriage because we have done so much work on ourselves and our kids are now grown up.

22:06And there's this opportunity after 28 years to really look at each other with fresh eyes, right? It's so beautiful. And so I, instead of, there's two things that I want to share that have really helped me. One is instead of focusing on the things that I don't like about Chris, right? And there are plenty of things he does not like about me, but if he could wave a magic wand, I would change this about my wife, Mel. Um, one of the things that I've done is to say, well, what is like describe two moments where you just felt that like, oh my God, this is my person. And so there are two moments and this is a great exercise to do.

22:53Like just think, what are those two moments that really encapsulate like just that flood of peace and love and safety and connection. And one of them for me with Chris is this. We had just met and we were meeting to go out to dinner after work in New York City. And I was standing in front of that Flatiron building on 23rd. And I looked up Fifth Ave and I could see Chris coming. And he was wearing a suit and he had a messenger bag slung over his shoulders. He had Ray-Bans on and he was rollerblading and weaving in and out of traffic because he grew up as a ski racer and he's like a big adventurer.

23:41And he had this huge smile on his face and it was like strength at play, right? That was what I felt. And then the second thing that came to mind is that when we first got together, we almost like a couple months after knowing each other, we went out to Utah to meet his best friend who was already married. And Jeff and Darce live in Idaho. And like, they're basically pioneers. You know, they hunt, they fish, they like live in a log cabin, built their own house. Like they're freaking amazing. And so we went fishing and there was a freak snowstorm that night. And so literally it started snowing as we're cooking dinner, like in June, dude.

24:28And so I'm thinking, what have I gotten myself into? So I go back to the tent and I'm rummaging around for a sweatshirt of some kind. And I noticed my sleeping bag is warm and I flip the bag open. And Chris has filled up one of those Nalgene bottles with hot water he had boiled on a campfire and stuck it in there like a hot pocket. That's pretty nice. Right? Very thoughtful. Yes. And so those are two memories. And so I came up with this. He's doing an act of service for you. Because that's what he wants. So he's doing the thing he wants. No kidding. And meanwhile, I'm ignoring him and telling him he's so amazing.

25:07And he can't even hear it because he wants acts of service. And so because his parents were at right growing up so he um so I developed an avatar for the behavior in Chris that I love I call it my trip leader because when we're out hiking when we're on an adventure Chris is in charge he has strength at play he is a caretaker he's 55 steps ahead of me I'm the yard sale in the back, like that is when he shines. And so it has been super helpful for me to remind myself that he's a trip leader because it makes me take a step back and it allows him to take a step forward into his power. So that's one thing that I've been working on.

25:57And the second thing that I'm working on is this sense, you called it peace. And we've talked about this sort of mismatch and the mismatch being that you might speak different love languages, you might have different values or different lifestyle, extrovert, introvert, all that kind of stuff. That if you are going to work to close that gap somehow without changing one another, realize that your marriage doesn't have to be everything and it shouldn't be. And so for a while, I started to get nervous because Chris is very introverted. I mean, we live in Southern Vermont on the side of a mountain now.

26:37And I started to realize I'm actually sad here all the time. Like a part of me needs this spaciousness, but I have to be around people. Me too. I have to have the buzz. I need to go walk somewhere and grab a coffee and see people. Yes, I need to go do something. Not every day. Yeah. And so I started to realize, well, wait a minute. I don't have to turn Chris into like the party guy. I can have my friends be that. I can have work be that. Like I can fill that in different areas instead of being frustrated that this one person isn't filling everything. And so really recognizing, I think, what somebody's capacity is, allowing them to step forward in certain roles, but allowing them to be themselves and step back in others and not punishing them for it.

27:28100%. That is something that I've been, Chris is better at it than I am. Like he's way more forgiving. He's way kinder. He's more patient. Sure. And he's probably creating boundaries just like you are. Oh, yeah. Which is key. Yeah. You know what we've spent the last three therapy sessions talking about? Boundaries? Nope. What? A new puppy. Getting a new puppy? One of you wants one, one of you doesn't? The whole family wants a puppy. But you don't? Chris doesn't. He doesn't. Yes. Do you know why? Because he knows he's going to have to do all the work. Yes. He's like, I don't want this. I'm already doing all the work.

28:02Yeah, for the dog that we got two and a half years ago. Exactly. He's already like two hours of my day is going towards the dog activities. Uh-huh. working and doing this and running your lives. It's a lot of big responsibility. Well, because the puppy is an example of bigger themes. And he doesn't want to abandon himself to please others. Yes. And that's probably what he's done for 26 years. Not with everything. I'm sure it's not all like that. But this is what I had to learn in the last two years of therapy too, is just like, okay, I was always trying to make someone else happy because they were never happy with who I was.

28:38They never accepted me, so they always wanted to change me. And so I would change who I am to try to please them. And then after months and months and years, you're like, I'm just abandoning who my real nature is for one human being and dimming my light. And I'm not trying to blame anyone here. This is all my responsibility by choosing and staying in relationships. So it's not their fault. It's my responsibility to exit or to know this when it happens and have a conscious conversation calmly and take responsibility and say, no, I'm not gonna do this. Are you okay with who I am? But I think creating those boundaries and not abandoning yourself is such a key element to healthy relationships.