The Secret to Why You’re Unhappy & The ONE Thing You Can Do About It | The Mel Robbins Podcast
- Guest
- —
- Read time
- ~4 min
- Uploaded
- 5 Dec 2022
- Duration
- 0:59:05
- Views
- 52.8K
KEYPOINTS
- 01
Joy can be wiped out by anticipating loss
Mel woke up flooded with joy because all three of her kids were home for Thanksgiving. Almost immediately, a second wave of grief washed it away, because they would leave in three or four days. "They just got here." Thinking about their departure meant she wasn't actually experiencing them being there, and the realisation turned into the episode.
- 02
The "campaign of misery" is a hidden habit of fighting your own happiness
Mel's name for the constant search for what's wrong or about to go wrong. On the surface she is grateful and positive. Underneath, she realised, "I pick up the sword, I start wielding it, and I'm fighting for misery." Her husband Chris had long told her she was focused on what was wrong and that it was never enough, and she had always rejected that.
- 03
Put down the sword, pick up the mirror
Her producer Amy pulls an oracle card for her each morning, and that day it was the "Garden of Venus." Amy explained that the sword represents always defending yourself, your judgements and how hard things are. Putting it down and picking up the mirror means seeing your natural state of beauty, peace and love. Mel uses the card as a framework, not as evidence.
- 04
We all learn two languages, the spoken one and the emotional one
Mel says she learned English and also learned from her mother to look for what's wrong. One of her mother's sayings was "holidays are women killers." She stresses compassion: her mother grew up in a hard-working farming family that wasn't loving. Amy and Jesse recognise the same pattern: as children, they agreed with a parent's complaints to keep the peace and feel safe.
- 05
The emotional language is absorbed before you have words
Citing what she learned from Dr. Becky, Mel says that from birth to about age five, children absorb their surroundings in a highly receptive learning state. That's why they pick up languages easily, and also how they take in the emotional tone underneath what's said. Amy adds that this pattern is a default you needed, "not who you are at a soul level."
- 06
Changing it is like becoming fluent in a new language
At 54, Mel says the campaign of misery is "as fluent inside of me as English." Learning a new emotional language takes daily practice, and you'll slip back into your native one. She commits to journaling, talking about it and catching the moment she starts picking up the sword, beginning with being kind to herself and to family members who do the same thing without realising.
- 07
It shows up even in success
As the podcast's downloads kept growing, Mel caught herself thinking "it's temporary, it's luck, you're going to plummet," instead of enjoying the fact that it was resonating. Even during the recording, workers hammering on a shed set off her urge to find something wrong.
- 08
Give your mind a new question
Mel's point is that prayer, meditation, oracle cards and daily devotionals like The Book of Awakening all give your mind a different thought to hold onto. Most minds have the job of finding what's horrible. A new prompt trains your subconscious to look for different answers. The aim isn't to answer it perfectly; it's to retrain where your mind looks.
EXAMPLES
- 01
Amy's burn-and-wash ritual
For a long time, Amy wrote three pages of morning pages every day about her family's "tribal" emotional language, what she hated and loved about it. She tore up the pages, burned them in a Pyrex bowl outside while watching from behind the sliding door, then washed her hands up to the elbows. Mel connects the hand-washing to her father, an orthopaedic surgeon, scrubbing in: surgery to remove the old language.
- 02
The prompt: "How can this be easy?"
Amy writes it at the top of every page and has done so for about five years. Mel's and Jesse's first reaction was resistance: they didn't like the question and worried they couldn't fill three pages, which Amy pointed out was the campaign of misery talking. Her advice: write whatever comes up, even "Amy's a jackass," to get through the crust to the "golden Buddha" underneath.
- 03
Jesse's three pages
Jesse started out crying and unsure. Her mirror habit is telling herself "you look like crap," and her family's emotional language centres on victimhood. She ended with "breathe, be still, be present, hug your husband, hug Myrtle my cat," and decided it's fine to spend her first Thanksgiving in her new home with FaceTime: "Your new tribe starts now."
- 04
Mel's pages: from the cat to "stop gripping"
Mel began by venting about a cat peeing on the floor and scratching the new stair runner, then moved on to grief that her parents wouldn't come for Thanksgiving or Christmas. She ended with: let them be who they are, you're in a five-year experiment in healing, "let go, stop gripping, and just love." She realised the cat was in distress and needed love, not resentment.
OTHER RELEVANT
- 01
Name your sword
First, recognise that you have a campaign of misery and that you can put it down. Amy says to give yourself credit just for noticing, even if you don't act on it for months.
- 02
Try the morning ritual
Write "How can this be easy?" at the top of the page, fill three pages of stream of consciousness, then rip and burn them safely and wash your hands. Expect resistance, expect the floodgates to open once you start, and expect to write similar things for a while.
- 03
Look for the small easy joys
Both Jesse and Amy landed on simple things: breathing, being still, hugging their partners. All three admitted they hadn't hugged their spouses that morning, which is an easy fix.