What To Do If You’re Having a BAD DAY And Don’t Feel Like YOURSELF | The Mel Robbins Podcast
- Guest
- —
- Read time
- ~5 min
- Uploaded
- 24 Oct 2022
- Duration
- 1:03:04
- Views
- 38.7K
KEYPOINTS
- 01
This episode started as an unplanned conversation about a bad mood
Mel asked her friend and colleague Amy how she was, and Amy, who is almost always upbeat, said she felt 'below the line' and close to tears. Amy agreed to record on audio only. Her struggle was twofold: she disliked the feeling, and she didn't know how to sit in a bad mood and let it pass, especially when people kept noticing and asking what was wrong.
- 02
Anxiety can hit in the middle of a perfect stretch
Mel had just finished 14 days on the road where everything went right: a great speech in Montreal, a surprise hangout with Jay Shetty six floors above her at the Four Seasons, a family wedding in Montana, a spectacular New England fall drive, a new puppy and news of half a million downloads in one week. Walking into her new Vermont house to see Chris and friends, she felt a massive wave of anxiety and felt herself 'leaving her body.'
- 03
Your mind will invent a convenient explanation
Mel noticed herself doing what Dr. Russell Kennedy described on an earlier episode: jumping into her head to ask 'what's wrong with me?' and scanning for a cause. She settled on sadness that her daughters, in LA and Boston, couldn't be there for the puppy, but sensed that wasn't the real reason.
- 04
Locate the feeling in your body and give it a shape
In a therapy session that morning, her therapist Anne Davin had her close her eyes and find where the feeling lived. Mel described a brass corset around her lower ribs, like something from House of the Dragon. Amy, trying it live, felt an oily, viscous slick in her upper chest and the back of her neck. Next, imagine it floating out in front of you, then let it take the form of a younger you.
- 05
Seasonal transitions can trigger stored memories
Mel realized fall, despite being her favorite season, had been the most acute time for her anxiety: junior and senior year of high school, every fall at Dartmouth, a fall overseas, three falls in law school. Anne explained that seasons are processed through the limbic brain and circadian rhythm, so shorter days and fall smells can trigger memories of hard transitions marked by self-hatred, drinking and dissociation. Mel dreads the clocks going back, when it's dark at 3 p.m.
- 06
You have two states: the divine self and the injured self
Anne described a part of you that taps into flow, awe, creativity and connection, and an injured part from childhood that learned to cope. Mel had strengthened the first in public: on stage, with fans, with friends. But that work wasn't complete in private moments, so when the excitement stopped, the injured part 'looked for a place to plug in.'
- 07
The injured self reaches for whatever protected you as a child
Examples include pulling back if parents weren't affectionate, staying quiet to avoid fights, or keeping the peace for approval. For Mel, it's leaving her body and spiraling into worry; for Amy, shame and sadness. Many of these patterns were formed before age five, so your body remembers what your mind has no story for, a point Mel credits to Dr. Becky.
- 08
'The rattle': getting off the roller coaster leaves you shaky
Anne's analogy: after a thrilling ride, you step onto the platform and feel unsteady until you find your footing. That shakiness is the injured self saying 'remember me?' Mel visualizes herself standing on the platform rather than stuck at the bottom of the ride. Amy recognized her own fear that 'the other shoe has to drop' when life is very good.
- 09
Not feeling like yourself can be a good sign
Mel's reframe: if you've done the healing work, feeling off is noticeable precisely because you now know another way of being. She contrasts this with Eckhart Tolle's 'pain body,' living in your own pain all day, which she says she did for decades.
- 10
Fire up a different memory circuit on purpose
Anne told Mel that injured experiences are encoded in the amygdala, while memories of deep connection and flow use different circuitry. Recalling a specific peak moment, feeling where it sits in your body and toggling back to the heavy spot strengthens the positive pathway. When Amy did this, she rated the oily feeling in her neck as noticeably lower.
EXAMPLES
- 01
The Dante's Inferno assignment
When Mel pictured her corset as a younger self, she recalled senior year English: students wrote cantos sending a classmate to hell and read them aloud. The first six or seven were about her. She left school and didn't return for days. She admits she was insecure and condescending then, and hadn't yet remembered being molested.
- 02
Amy's childhood as the non-golden child
Amy's feeling took the shape of a left-out kid. Her brother, the golden child, had cancer for two years and died at 12 when she was 10. 'You can't compete with somebody who isn't even here,' she said, adding that the narcissism episode helped her see new layers.
- 03
Kendall singing under a full moon
Mel's peak memory: on parents' weekend in LA, Kendall and her pop music program friends joined an impromptu open mic on a peeling porch. Because of COVID, Mel had seen her perform live only once in four years. Kendall covered Ariana Grande's 'Love Me Harder' as phones went up and a full moon rose; Mel felt it below her belly button and took the lyric as a message to love herself harder.
- 04
Amy's errand game with her daughter Jane
Amy put her youngest in charge of a 10 a.m.-to-noon errand list: paint store, TJ Maxx, Price Chopper, a bookstore and more, with Jane calling time ('Mom, you have two minutes'). Both said it was a peak experience, and Amy felt it in her solar plexus.
- 05
Buckbeak on the boots
Mid-recording, Kendall called from a boot store. Mel joked about Buckbeak from Harry Potter, her therapy protection image, and the boots turned out to have a winged design that looked like him. Mel calls these coincidences signs and says noticing them builds circuitry for flow.
OTHER RELEVANT
- 01
What Mel does when the wave hits
Put a hand on your heart and reassure the younger you ('you're okay, I love you'). Say the feeling out loud instead of thinking about it. Ask for a hug; she hugged Chris and said she felt anxious without knowing why. Then let yourself rest; she chose a movie on the couch. She notes research suggesting an emotion typically passes in about 90 seconds if you don't resist or grip it.
- 02
Get curious instead of numbing
Both women admit the instinct is to have a drink, joke it away or get busy. Mel's practice is to notice 'there it is,' avoid making up a story and let the feeling move through.
- 03
Look for hearts and call out signs
From The High 5 Habit: look for naturally occurring hearts, like clouds, stones, a stain or the puppy's heart-shaped freckle. When you find one, tell yourself it was put there for you, pick it up or photograph it, and train your brain to notice things going right.