Start Strong: Do This Every Morning to Get Out of Bed, Beat Anxiety, and Feel Incredible All Day

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Mel recorded this from bed to teach 'slithering'

  In her eye mask and retainer, with her cat Mr. Noodle beside her, Mel shares a technique her therapist Anne Davin taught her. She describes waking for most of her life to dread: heaviness like an elephant on her chest, the bed a magnet and her a paper clip. Then her mind spins to yesterday's mistakes, unprepared meetings, the kids, skipped workouts. It happened on vacation, at home or traveling.

• 02

  It started during one of the hardest periods of her life

  Three or four years earlier, the family had moved from Boston after 26 years to a tiny southern Vermont town and were living with her mother-in-law. Mel slept in a bunk room in the dead of winter, had no friends, had lost her dream job as a daytime talk show host, and felt she'd made a huge mistake. She'd fantasize, as she did in law school, about falling back asleep and waking up to a different life.

• 03

  Morning dread can trace back to childhood

  Anne asked when the feeling started: law school, college, high school, earlier? They traced it to fourth grade, on a ski trip with other families, when Mel woke in a bunk room to an older child sexually abusing her. Confused, she curled up, stayed quiet to protect her little brother in the next bunk, and the next morning hid under the covers until everyone left, feeling she had done something wrong. Waking became fused with that sensation.

• 04

  Kids blame themselves for what others do

  Mel cites Stanford psychiatrist Dr. Paul Conti on a 'flaw' in human design called attribution: young children can't attribute adults' or others' bad behavior to them, so they conclude something is wrong with themselves. She also notes her view that a child who does this to another child is likely being abused too.

• 05

  Your body stores experiences as sensations

  Mel's takeaway from therapy and the show's experts: it needn't be something as severe as abuse. A parent whose mood you could never predict, uncertainty about food, bullying or an undiagnosed learning disability can leave you bracing, freezing or in fight-or-flight. She later linked a second memory: waking in high school to her mother crying in her arms because a family friend's son had been killed by a drunk driver.

• 06

  Talking and pushing through hadn't removed the feeling

  Her 5 Second Rule got her out of bed, but the dread returned the next morning. Anne's line: 'Sometimes it's better to feel our way through rather than try to figure our way out.' Anne explains slithering isn't a formal taught method but an example of somatic inquiry, letting the body 'speak its mind' through movement.

• 07

  Anne's explanation: the dread was 'somatic residue'

  In a voice memo, Anne, a psychologist of over 30 years with a PhD in depth psychology, says the child Mel had to wake and face what happened the night before without inner or outer resources. The adult dread was residue of that unresolved trauma, causing her to freeze. Joining with the symptom, turning toward and even amplifying it, shifted it from frozen to thawing to fluid, and her nervous system from distress to neutral to calm.

• 08

  Move with the heaviness instead of against it

  Anne told Mel not to push herself out of bed but to imagine how the dread would move if it could, and let it lead. Slither one foot out, then the other, drip down the side of the bed and roll onto the floor. Lie there and slowly twist, bend your knees and roll until you feel the heaviness break apart. Then get on all fours and crawl toward the bathroom; don't stand until you feel ready.

• 09

  It felt absurd, but it worked from day one

  Mel worried her kids or mother-in-law would see her crawling down the hall to the bathroom. By the time she got there, the heaviness was gone and replaced by freedom and a desire to stand up and face the day. While she was moving, her mind was busy with 'what are you doing?' instead of the day's worries.