Transcript of Mel Robbins’ Advice On Conquering Dread When Life Gets Heavy | Mel Robbins Clips

I've got one here that is about having a husband that is negative. My husband generally only tells me bad news about his job and his day. He's not making nearly as much money as I do. I encourage him to listen to self-improvement books and podcasts, but he refuses. How do I navigate this negativity but still be supportive? How do I keep my love for him when I feel dread talking to him? Oh, boy. Okay. So can Can you imagine? I think we've all... I've been in periods of my marriage, and I've certainly been in relationships where I dread the person that I'm with walking through the door. Sure. Yeah. It's a terrible place to be. And so you're racing for the negativity. I'm going to tell you to do something opposite. You ready? First of all, live in uncertainty. Maybe he'll be in a bad mood today, maybe he won't. And you have to use the let them theory. You have to. You have to let him be in a bad mood And you can also start... What I know based on the research is her trying to tell him to be positive actually just makes him negative.

Because what I know about the research is that trying to change someone else doesn't work. So if you try to make him positive, it's just going to make him more negative. If you try to make him listen to self-improvement, it's only going to make him more resistant to it. Here's what I want you to understand. Everything that we've talked about, you have the ability to shift this in yourself. Part of the dynamic is you bracing and your mindset going and your nervous system going. And so I would recommend that you do the box breathing, I would recommend you start to talk about uncertainty, and I'm going to give you one tool from the Let Them Theory Book. Ask your husband, how do you feel about your attitude about your life? Or I've noticed that you're really down. How are you feeling about things? So instead of just getting a report, just ask him an open-ended question because it gets him to start to talk about the conflict that he's feeling versus just complaining about it. I write about this extensively in the book. It's a technique that gets somebody out of their negative state, because what's What's happening with your husband, if he hates his job that much, he dreads going.

He wakes up every morning in a state of dread, which what? Makes his mindset negative, which makes his body brace, which makes the entire day at work negative, which then makes him come home and talk to you about it. Until he stops embracing and he recognizes that he wants something different, nothing's changing. Because people only change when they feel like changing. One of the things that this conversation is revealing is that dread is something that is a natural instinct in us that can hijack your experience of life. I think a lot of people dread going to work. But what you don't understand when you're the one dreading it is that you have power. This isn't the only job on the planet. The more you stay stuck in this state of dread, the more likely you're going to stay in this job, which is ironic. That the dread keeps you locked there. So your openness, your shifting, your ability to create space for him to figure this out for himself will also help him shift it. Mel, so we're setting the clocks back. The seasons are changing. We're getting a lot of questions about dealing with seasonal depression, dread getting up in the morning because of it.

Oh, I relate. I hate turning the clocks back. If I ran for president of any country or city This would be my number one thing. In high school or middle school, people are like, more ice cream in the cafeteria. One of my initiatives would be no daylight savings. I hate it. But here's the thing. Dreading the darkness and dreading the winter months and dreading the cold. Is that helping? No. Why? Because what have we learned about dread? It actually locks you in a state that it is going to be horrible. Here's what I want you to understand. Through your own actions and attitude, you can make it better. I'm not saying that seasonal depression isn't a thing because it is a very real thing. I absolutely struggle with that dip in the mood and looking outside at 4:30 PM in Vermont, and it's already almost dark, and just thinking, I can't live here another winter. I'm not doing this to myself again. But there are things you can do. There are things you can do. Instead of locking in on dread, winter is coming, right? Game of Thrones, Winter is coming. I want you to loosen, and I want you to start to think about what can you do?

What can your routine look like? How can you shift the time you go to bed, the time that you wake up, the The things that you do during your day, the things that you do at night? How can you map out a new plan for this season so that it's not just the, Drag the light box out. Here we go. Let's brace for the long winter, everybody. It doesn't have to be that way. You can focus on your thoughts, your actions, creating a new routine, doing a little bit of research. If you have the ability to create a plan, to get away and go visit friend that lives in a nicer place and go on a road trip, do it. These things help. Another thing that I think can help a lot is if you've ever wanted to take a painting class or you've ever wanted to learn a new skill, sign up for a class at night. Get yourself out of the house. These sorts of things help. But the more you say, I dread it, the more you're going to feel locked into negativity and the less power you're going to feel that you have.

And you do have power, even if this is a diagnosis diagnosis that you're dealing with, you still have power. I do want to end on this question from Nora about dreading getting out of bed and dreading starting the day. And can you talk more about how we can talk ourselves into getting up immediately when we feel like crap and are dreading our day? So there's two things I want to cover in this, and this is why I want to end on this. The first part of this, dreading starting your day, is the tactics. And there is no better tactic for solving this problem than using my five-second rule and counting backwards the moment the alarm rings, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and moving and getting out of bed and just starting the day. You can wake up and feel dread and embracing and anxiety and overwhelm, and you can still start your day, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Two things can be true. You cannot feel like doing it, and you can 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, do it. And the reason why this matters is because movement shifts your emotions and getting going helps you keep going.

And lying in bed and lying in the dread and lying in the overwhelm, which is something that I am very familiar with. It's something that I struggled with profoundly lonely, especially as somebody that has had a lot of anxiety in the past. And the five-second rule in counting backwards, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, was something I created precisely to help me when the alarm rang and I felt dread and it pinned me into the bed, and I would just lay there and rot in my negative thoughts and my emotions. So 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, boom. Just like they say, nothing good happens at a bar after midnight. Nothing good happens at a nightclub after midnight. Nothing good happens when you're lying there in bed consumed in dread. Okay? 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, get up. That's the tactic. And that is going to help you. And you may need to use that every morning of your life for 15 years, like I have. I still use that to get out of bed. I had to use it this morning to get out of bed because we had a huge work day and a lot of exciting news, and I was so emotionally drained.

And plus, I ate a double stack hamburger with cheese fries, and then I had an ice cream cone and a and tonic, and then I went to bed. So talk about bed rot. I got it. When I woke up, I was like, Oh, I got to use my own stuff, 5, 4, 3, 2, and get up because I got to go talk to Phil about dread. That's the tactic. But here's the bigger thing I want to say to you. If you dread your day, that's an opportunity to take a look at your life. You were not put on this planet to wake up and dread your day. There are things about your life you need to change. It might mean that you need to take your mental health and your physical health more seriously. It might mean that you need to take sleep more seriously. And my simple rule for better sleep is if you want eight hours of sleep, spend nine hours in bed, just not an hour of it in the morning, dreading your day. Takes time to fall asleep. Might mean that you got to change your job. Might mean that you got to have a hard conversation that you've been avoiding.

Why? Because you dread it. Might mean that you got to make some changes to your morning routine. Might mean that you have to ask your family to step up a little bit so everything's not on your shoulders. And I guarantee you, if you go through your day and you list all of the things that you dread about your day, you'll notice that there's lots of places where you have braced in small ways and where you have negative opinions and where you think this is just what it is, and there's nothing you can do about it, which is why we brace which is what you've learned during this conversation, and it's how you lose your power. The truth is, you're not stuck anywhere. You're not stuck in a relationship. You are not stuck in a dynamic with your family. You are not stuck in a job. You are not stuck with the current state of your health. You are not stuck with your mindset. You are not stuck with your current morning routine. You, as a human being, are hardwired to change. But if you continue to dread all these small things, you are keeping yourself locked in something that doesn't work.

I think that moment where you wake up and dread the day you're waking up into is one of the greatest gifts that your life can give you. Because it's a gigantic wake up call that there are things that are not working. It is time that you wake the hell up, metaphorically, physically, mentally, spiritually, and you start doing the work to change it. My husband and I went away. We went all the way to Bali. We're flying back. All of a sudden, the plane starts, I'm now convincing myself we're about to die. The captain's like, Can the attendance please take your seats? My husband was sitting there like a Buddhist statue as I'm having a full-blown, I'm about to die moment in my seat.