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

Do you remember those mornings where you just don't want to get up? Me too. In fact, for most of my life, every morning when I woke up, I just felt this huge sense of dread. I don't know why it was so hard to get out of bed. So I talked to my therapist about it, and she gave me this life-changing technique. And it's unbelievable how it works, especially on those mornings where you just don't feel like getting out of bed. It's called slithering. And today, I'm going to teach it to you. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. I am so thrilled that you tuned in today because we are doing something super cool and extra special. Never done this before. I am laying in my bed right now. I have my eye mask on. I've got my retainer in. You might be able to hear a little bit of a because of the retainer. My cat, Mr. Noodle, is laying with me. Today, I am teaching you a technique that changed my entire life. If you have ever struggled with getting out of bed, if you wake up and you immediately feel dread, or you feel like something's wrong, or your thoughts are just overwhelming you, what I'm going to teach you today and share with you will change your life immediately.

What are we going to talk about? We're going to talk about this technique that my therapist, the extraordinary Anne Daven, taught me during a period where I was going through a really, really hard time. In fact, things were so difficult that I was having trouble getting out of bed. That may surprise you if you're a new listener. By the way, if you're a new listener, welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast family. I think it's super cool that you're choosing to listen to something that can help you change your life. Learning how to get out of on those days where life feels hard or you're overwhelmed or like me, you have this pounding sense of dread in your body. It weighs you down like a gravity blanket, and you just want to stay in bed. It's interesting, isn't it, how hard it can be to get out of bed some mornings? I've certainly been there. What I didn't know is that all of that dread that I was feeling every morning, all of the overwhelm, it actually traced all the way back to an experience that I had had in childhood. We're going to talk about that in a minute.

But I got to share something with you. I have never been the person that likes to get out of bed. I mean, let's just be honest with each other. For anybody that can spring out of bed when the alarm rings, you're a weirdo. For the rest of us normal people who actually wake up and we're like, Can't I just lay here? Why is it so hard to get out of bed? How about hitting that snooze button again and drifting back to sleep in my cozy sheets? That's the person that I've always been. If that's you, if it's somebody that you love, what you're going to learn today is going to blow your mind. You're not only going to learn this technique called slithering, you're going to hear it explained by my therapist, Anne Daven. She is also going to walk you through why this works as what's called a somatic practice. She's going to teach you about the deep origins of the stored tension in your body and why you continue to wake up in the morning and feel this sense of dread or like something's wrong or your thoughts are spinning. This isn't based on just what's happening in your life right now.

This is likely something that you've experienced for a long time in your life. Here's the good news. Using this technique, you can move it out of your body. Yeah, you may have a lot going on, but you can learn how to wake up and not feel that sense of dread. You can learn how to change it so that you wake up in the morning, no matter what's going on, you actually wake up and you feel freedom in your body. It is the coolest thing in the world. I'm going to teach it to you today. I'm so excited that you're here. In fact, I'm going to sit up, get the pillow in place. I think nudes. Get the eye mask off, and settle in. Oh, and you know what I don't have? Is I don't have my glasses. Okay. I don't know about you and mornings, but it has always been the hardest thing in the world for me to start my day. I'm going to describe what it feels like for me on just any given day. But as I'm describing what it feels like for me from the moment that I wake up, I want you to think about what does it feel like for you most mornings when you open your eyes.

I want you to think about the sensation in your body. I got to pull some cat hair out of my mouth first because I've been petting my cat. Okay. Whenever I would wake up, no matter where I was, the first thing I felt was a sensation of heaviness. It's almost like there's always been something standing on my chest, and it goes from that sensation of heaviness, like the bed is a giant magnet, and I'm just a little paper clip that's now stuck to it. The amount of effort that it takes for me to push through that heaviness in my body and that sense of dread, it is like Herculean. Forget about doing resistance training. This is pushing through something at a whole different level. Once I feel that sensation of dread, you know, of course, what happens is then it triggers my mind to start spinning. I start to scan ahead. Even though I'm a very positive person, one of the things that I've been learning about life is that our brains tend to default on the negative. What is it that I immediately start thinking about? Oh, the thing I did wrong yesterday, the things I have to do today that I'm not going to get to or that I'm nervous about, the meeting at work that I'm not prepared for, the fact that the kids have all this stuff going on, the fact that I haven't exercised in four days and now I'm beating myself up, or that maybe I stayed up a little bit too late and watched yet one more episode of that series instead of going to bed.

The very first thing I feel is heaviness. The very first thoughts aren't like, Oh, let's get out of bed. I'm so grateful I have another day. It's more like, Oh, Just like, and that's what I'm working with. It doesn't matter if I'm on vacation. It doesn't matter if I'm in my house. It doesn't matter if I'm traveling for work. It doesn't matter where I am. That is what I feel. What I've come to learn is that's the way most of us feel, that there's something about going from a state of peace and rest to waking up and having to face the day. If you're somebody who doesn't sleep well at night, holy smokes, let's just add on top that disappointment that yet again, you didn't get another good night's sleep. You're not waking up rested, you're waking up feeling behind. That's the background here. If you're somebody that just springs out of bed, God bless you, but the rest of I just hate you right now because that's not the normal feeling for a lot of us. But I'm here to tell you, by the time you're done listening, you are going to not only understand why you feel that dread and why your thoughts can be really negative and why it can be hard to push yourself out of bed and start the day.

Even better than understanding it, you're going to know exactly what to do on those mornings when you feel it. I will tell you, based on personal experience, using this technique called slithering has changed my flippin life because it has changed what my body feels first thing in the morning, and it has given me this simple, seemingly ridiculous thing to do to help me on those mornings where it truly is hard to get out of bed. I want to go back in time, three or four years and explain what was happening when I was talking to my therapist, the extraordinary Anne Daven, about all of the challenges I was facing. I'm not going to belabor it because then it's going to get too damn depressing. But what We were in the middle of massive life change. Like so many of you, our family had moved, and we moved from Boston, where we had lived for 26 years, up to this tiny little town in Southern Vermont. At the time, we were living with my mother-in-law. Now, I love my mother-in-law, but when you are sleeping at your mother-in-law's house, you're not in your own bed. You are in somebody else's house, and I was sleeping in the bunk room of my mother-in-law's house in Southern Vermont.

We're in the middle of this big move. I have no friends. I have lost my dream job, which at the time was being a daytime talk show host. I just didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I felt like I had made a huge mistake by moving to this tiny town and uprooting our whole life. On top of all of that, I'm waking up in the middle of the desolate winter months in a bunker room in my mother-in-law's house. Let me tell you, I would wake up every morning, and it wasn't just the elephant on my chest. It was like, I don't even want to face the nightmare my life has become. I don't want to get out of bed. If I just roll over, have you ever had a morning where you're like, okay, if I just hit the snooze button and then I drift back to sleep, maybe I will wake up in a totally different life. Maybe this is just some figment of my imagination, this life of mine. This used to happen to me in law school all the time. I would have this fantasy that as I would drift back to sleep, I would wake up and suddenly I wouldn't be in law school anymore.

I'd be 10 years ahead. I would be happy. I would have known what I was doing with my life. I'd have it figured out. Then, of course, I'd drift back to sleep. The alarm would ring. I'd wake back up, I'd be like, Oh, my God, this again? And now I'm late for class? Anyway, I could talk for hours about how hard it has been for me to get out of bed and how awful it is to wake up and the first thought that you have is that you've done something wrong or that someone's mad at you, or that the day is just so overwhelming, you don't know how you're going to get through it. That's not that empowering. That doesn't feel good. I'm going through this really challenging period where I'm like, I don't know what I'm going to do with my life. I'm so stuck. I don't feel like we made the right decision. I don't think I'm going to make it. I'm sobbing to Anne on the phone, and I'm talking about how I just am having such a hard time getting out of bed. And Anne says, Mel, I want you to try something called slithering.

So Anne and I spend one of our sessions talking all about the sensation. And that's why I asked you to think about what do you feel in your body first thing in the morning? Is it heaviness? Is it Is it dread? Is it excitement? Is it an on-edge feeling because you don't quite know what you're going to wake up to? As we started to unpack the sensation and the experience of waking up, she started asking me these questions. When do you remember this first starting? I'm like, I have no idea. She's like, What about when you were in law school? Was it there? I'm like, Mm-hmm, most definitely in law school. What about college? Yep, absolutely. What about high school? Yeah, as a matter of fact, I had a really hard time getting out of bed in high school. I always felt this sensation like something was wrong. We went all the way back in our conversation to this moment that I remembered where I'm going to not go deep into the story because I don't want things to get too heavy. I mean, it's already heavy to get out of bed. But we went all the way back to this experience that I had where I was in fourth grade and my family was away at this ski trip with a bunch of other families, and all the kids were sleeping in this big bunker room.

I remember waking up in the middle of the night. Here I am, a fourth grader, and there is an older kid on top of me, and they are doing something to me. It was a really, I don't know what the right word is, weird and upsetting and confusing situation. Because on one hand, I was really scared because it was pitch dark and I didn't know what was happening. But on the other hand, and this may sound a little weird, it felt like, okay, like good. I was so confused. I was not, as a fourth grader, able to process what was going on. My first ever sexual experience in that setting being woken up. I remember just rolling Running over on my side into this ball shape, and this older kid climbed out and went back. I looked over, and in the bottom bunk next to me was my little brother. I remember thinking, I need to keep really quiet so that this person doesn't do that to him. I knew something was wrong, but as I reflect back on it, it's not the first experience experience was terror or fear, it was more confusion and this deep sense that this was really bad.

But again, my fourth-grade little brain, I didn't know what was happening. I didn't know how to process this in a healthy way. That next morning, when I woke up, what do you think I felt in my body? Heaviness, dread. I felt I had done something wrong. I laid in that bed and pulled the covers over me and just hid there until all the kids had left because I just sensed that I had done something wrong. One of the things that I've learned talking to the extraordinary experts that we've had on this podcast that you and I are together learning from is that when you're really little, there's this flaw. I'm going to call it a flaw. There's a flaw in human design called attribution. I learned this from the amazing psychiatrist at Stanford, Dr. Paul Conti, that when you're little and bad things happen or the adults around you are super mad or frustrated or they're not around at all, a little kid does not have the ability to attribute other people's bad behavior to other people. There's a flaw in the human design that makes little kids attribute other people's bad behavior to a flaw in you.

I I actually thought this was my fault. I thought something was wrong. I thought, if I tell anybody, I am going to get in a lot of trouble, even though I didn't do anything. I was clearly a victim. I'll just state for the record, also, my personal opinion about that other kid is if that other kid is doing something like that to a kid, then clearly somebody is doing that to him. I know that now, but in that moment in my body, my body absorbed that experience. I'm going to tell you something, what I've learned over and over from all these experts that you and I talk to on this podcast and from my own deep experience in therapy and all kinds of different modalities and diving deep into trauma, that there are things that What happened to you when you were little or in your lifetime. What I am learning over and over is that it's actually stored as a sensation in your body. If it is your default to wake up and have negative thoughts, or it's your default to wake up and feel that heaviness the way that I do. It might not be something as scary as what happened to me, but it could just be that you had a parent or a caregiver that you never knew which version of them you were going to get in the morning.

Is mom or dad going to be in a good mood? They're going to be in a bad mood. We're going to have food today? Are we not going to have food today? Am I going to have a good day at school or am I going to get bullied like I normally do? Am I going to be able to do what I need to do in this classroom? Or am I going to sit there because I have a learning disability that nobody's figured and so I feel like the dummy in the classroom, and I'm constantly in trouble. All of these experiences create sensations in your body where you're bracing or you are freezing or you're in fight or flight. I didn't know any of this. I just felt like there was something wrong with me because I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. Why is it? If I have an okay life, I'm not happy when I get out of bed? I understand cortisol drops and all this other stuff, but why does it have to feel so heavy? I'm having this conversation with my amazing therapist, and I'm crying like crazy, and we trace it all the way back, and now it makes perfect sense.

Of course, if I have that experience, that the act of waking up gets married with the experience, and that sensation got stuck in my body. That's all that was happening. And that's why I'm so excited for you to learn about this, because using this technique, I have been able to really move this heaviness out of my body. I've been able to get the elephant off my chest. I have also been able to nurture and support myself in those mornings where the thoughts start spinning and it's super negative. I guarantee you, if you try this, this will help you, and it's going to help people that you love. I really want you to share this with everybody that you care about because you have no idea how somebody else feels when they wake up. I'm talking to Anne, and she says, Mel, we established that this is something that's a pattern. It's a storage sensation from trauma that is in my body, that this is super normal, it's super common, and there is something you can do. She asked me, just like I asked you, to think about where in my body is this thing stored and what does it feel like?

As I've described to you, it always is this sensation in my chest, and it's this heaviness, this dark cloud thing, like tar, that is right in there stuck in my chest. I want you to think about where is it in your body? It might be in your ankles. It might be on your back. It might be up in your head. It could be anywhere in your body that you feel this sensation. Then Anne said to me, I am going to teach you, Mel, how to move this thing out of your body. She said, I don't want you to push yourself out of bed. That's what I was trying to do. I was trying to force myself through the heaviness. She said, We're going to do the opposite. We're going to move with the heaviness. This is not going to be the heaviness. What do you mean? Am I just going to melt into the bed? Because that's what it feels like. I'm supposed to just disintegrate into the sheets. It's so heavy. She's like, Oh, no, no, no. You are going to slither out of bed. You're going to move with the heaviness, Mel, and you are going to slither and slide one foot out of that bed, and then you're going to slither and slide the other foot, and then you're going to roll off the bed.

Then I'm like, Well, what am I going to do once I roll out. You're going to be on the ground, and you're going to move around with this heaviness. I'm like, That sounds odd. Anne has this amazing way of being so compelling that I tried it. I'm going to walk you through it. It is unbelievable how this thing works. What I wanted to do to make sure that you really understood this is I reached out to Anne and I said, Hey, Anne, would you be willing to just send me a voice memo to really help me explain this technique and how you came up with this and why this works? I'm absolutely honored to be able to introduce you to my therapist, Anne Daven, and to Have you get to experience her wisdom as she is going to explain to you exactly what slithering is. Anne is extraordinary. She has been a psychologist for over 30 years. She has a PhD in-depth psychology, a master's in clinical psychology. All of her work focuses on the unconscious mind and how it impacts the human experience. I have had the honor of working with Anne for over four years now, and she's changed me from the inside out.

I also just want to take a moment and thank you, Anne, because what you're going to share today is truly going to help people's lives. I just know it, so thank you. Here's a clip that she recorded for you to explain what slithering is.

Slithering isn't a formal technique that is taught. You won't find it in someone's lecture or course book. It's an example of somatic inquiry. The beauty of somatic inquiry is that it bypasses trying to make sense of what we're feeling. Rather, we let the body speak its mind through movement. Sometimes it's better to feel our way through rather rather than try to figure our way out.

I want to make sure you heard that last line that Anne said, that sometimes it is better for you to feel your way through a sensation rather than trying to figure your way out of it. Let me tell you something. I've spent my entire lifetime trying to figure out how to deal with the heaviness and the negativity and the overwhelm that I feel when I wake up. Talking about it hasn't worked. Pushing through it has gotten me out of bed 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. But it doesn't remove that feeling every morning. I would wake up with that feeling in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and push my way out of it. But the next morning, it's there again. What Anne was teaching me and what she's offering in this type of, as she called it, somatic inquiry, it's a big word, but we're going to unpack that for you, is that when these conversations and experiences are stored in your body, no amount of talking is going to get them out of your body. You need to use the magic and the intelligence of your body to move it out of your body so it doesn't live there anymore.

Let's continue learning from Anne as she explains why this technique works and why we were using this right now.

Our work at the time was focused on healing and early early childhood trauma associated with waking up in the morning. As that victimized child, you had to wake up and get out of bed and confront the reality of what had just happened to you the night before without the inner or outer resources to do so. The dread that you felt upon waking as an adult was a somatic residue of this unresolved trauma.

Is she not brilliant? I want to be sure that you're tracking because it took me a little to truly get this, that it's important to talk about your feelings. It's important to talk about what happened. But there's a deeper way to heal the experiences in your life that got stored in your body, whether it's experiences of racism or bias or it's trauma or it's just chaos in your family or uncertainty, ironically for me, another experience that we ended up linking to this one is that there was a friend of mine that was killed in a drunk driving accident when I was in high school, and I was sound asleep when the accident happened. My mom came into the bedroom and I woke up in her arms to her crying. She was explaining that this family friend, that the son had died. That was another experience of being asleep and then waking up to really scary news. These experiences, you don't just shrug them off. They stay with you. The opportunity here in learning how to move the sensation out of your body is a way that you can heal this. It goes way beyond just waking up and feeling better and waking up and not having the dread.

My impulse to suggest this to you now, to slither, came from the dynamic interplay delay of my intuitive witnessing of your unconscious as it expressed itself in the feeling of dread each morning when you woke up. The dread for you caused you to freeze, to be immobilized, unable to move into your day with a sense of safety and well-being.

It took me a while to truly grasp what Anne was teaching me, and so I want to try to simplify this and bottom line it for you. You have all of these experiences that have happened in your life that are now stored in your subconscious mind and in the sensations in your body. You don't ever really get rid of it until you truly process it. And Anne was linking up that all of these experiences were just locked in my body with nowhere to go. And so the dread that I was feeling, the overwhelm, the negative thoughts, the sense that something was wrong, these are things that were happening on the surface that told Anne that there was something much deeper going on. There was a stuck sensation or experience that needed to be moved out of my body. And her strategy was instead of trying to push through it and soldier forward and just keep moving on, Mel, it's time to move toward it, to join with it, and to truly push it out of your body. That's exactly what you're going to learn how to do today. I want to explain in detail the process of slithering right now.

I'm going to break the whole thing down, and then we're going to bring Anne back, and Anne is going to explain why this works. Then a little later, she's also going to walk you through an exercise with a couple of questions so you can start to try out this process yourself. Now, giant disclaimer, I'm not a therapist. I am just a person that has had a lot of screwed up things happen, and I'm doing my best to heal them, and I'm sharing what worked for me. Anne is not your therapist. This is a resource and a suggestion that is there for you to try. And for me, this was life-changing. I'm pretty sure if you lean into what she's saying and offering to you, it'll be pretty life-changing for you and the people that you love to. I'm going to walk you through slithering. As you're listening to this, you're going to hear all kinds of sounds. The most important thing for you to remember is instead of pushing through the sensation, and whatever it for you, whether it's on edge or heaviness or dread or overwhelm, you're just going to join with it, move with it.

For me, the sensation is dread, so it's this heaviness. That's why it's hard to launch myself out of bed some mornings, or it used to be. I'm starting laying down. Imagine I've now got one foot on the floor. Now I've got another foot that is coming out of the bed. My body is still on the bed, but now I am dripping down the side of the bed. No joke. Oh, my God. I'm getting on the floor, and now my full body is on the floor. When I first started doing this, I would literally land. By the time I slid and slank out of bed, I would just lay on my stomach on the floor. I really took Anne's words to heart. That instead of truly fighting the heaviness, embrace it. Let the heaviness just consume you and allow it to have you roll out of bed. Then I would just start to move and I'm writhing around on the floor, just literally bending my knees. Almost like if you're in an exercise class and they're asking you to just move your body in whatever way. All you're doing is you're breaking up the heaviness. When you're laying in bed, what I noticed is that it just sits there.

But when you start to move around, and then I would just roll around. And Anne said to me, Mel, just lay on the floor and twist and turn and move your body in whatever shape you want until you start to feel that heaviness break apart. I'm literally laying on the floor right now and I'm twisting. Because so much of what's stored in your body first comes to you as a sensation, you feel on edge or you feel heavy or you feel like something's up, that sensation is what we're moving through. For the first couple of mornings, I would literally lay here on the floor, as pathetic as it sounds, for a minute or two. Then at some point, what Anne was saying is that you'll start to feel the heaviness break apart. The slow movement is what starts to break apart the sensation that had been pinning you in bed. As you move your body, and you probably hear me on the floor, strange things start to happen. Like, your mind now is like, What are you doing? I'm no longer thinking about the day because I'm thinking about how I'm on this floor and I want the feeling to get out of my body.

And slowly, what starts to happen is that frozen dread starts to break apart based on your own movement. In the beginning, I would be on the floor in doing this ridiculous snake slither for a couple of minutes. And then all of a sudden, you feel freed from it. You're not done yet. You're not done yet. What you're going to feel is this ability to actually either sit up or roll over, and you're not going to stand up yet. That's not allowed yet. Because the point is to move through this. And Anne told me to get on all fours and crawl across the floor to the bathroom. I'll tell you what, I thought when she explained this to me? Are you kidding me? It's really gotten that bad that I am going to crawl across the floor? But holy cow, does it do wonders? I'm going to walk you through why this works. You're going to roll and slither out of bed like a snake. You're going to hit the floor and get your whole body on the floor. Then you're going to move your body around in whatever motion you want in a slow way, and you'll start to notice the feeling and sensation breaking apart.

When you feel ready, which for me in the beginning was like a couple of minutes of laying on the floor, slithering around, shaking this feeling up, then you're going to roll onto all fours and you're going to crawl toward the bathroom. So Anne said, you stay on the ground for as long as it takes to start to feel like it's breaking up. And then eventually, you're going to roll off the ground and onto all fours, which feels ridiculous, honestly. I remember when I was learning this technique and I got up that first morning on my all fours and I'm thinking, am I really going to crawl to the bathroom? Now, keep in mind, at this point, I'm sleeping in a bunker room and the bathroom is down the hall. So you get on all fours. And the point is, you're going to slowly start to, and you're going to hear that rug, literally like a dog or a cat, you're just going to crawl toward the bathroom, which for me is not only hard on the knees, but it means I'm risking being seen by my children, or even worse, my mother-in-law. Just crawl to the bathroom.

And I'll tell you what, though, from the very first time I tried this, by the time I got to the bathroom, all that heaviness was gone. And something magical replaced it. This sense of freedom. By the time I got to the bathroom, that I wanted to stand up, I wanted to face the day. I had moved with and through the heaviness, that it was no longer in me, and I felt something else, which was empowerment. And it seems ridiculous that crawling across the floor or slithering out of the bed and on to the floor like a snake and moving through it would have this impact. But I did this every single morning for six weeks. And I kid you not, slithering not only got me out of bed on those mornings, It did something way more miraculous. See, what Anne was teaching me, and what you're now learning about, is something called a somatic technique. Somatic is a fancy word that means of the body. There are experiences that you have in life that you remember in your subconscious mind, but it's also remembered in the body. And remember earlier how we were talking about the fact that I could talk all I wanted about the things that had happened to me and how I feel, but it wasn't getting rid of the feeling in the body.

In order to move trauma through your body or to get rid of these negative and heavy sensations, you got to drop from the neck down and process it in the body. And that's exactly what Anne was guiding me in doing when she taught me how to slither. I wanted you to have the benefit of hearing Anne explain exactly why she taught me this technique and how it was working to break apart all the frozen and stuck experiences in my body and set me free. Let's take a listen.

The best way to work with a symptom, a somatic symptom like this, is to join with it, turn towards it, amplify it. When you did so, the residue shifted from frozen to thawing, to fluidity. Your nervous system shifted from a state of distress to neutral and then to calm. I prompted you to join with the feeling of dread and imagine if it could move, how would it move? Would it slither? Let your body slither out of bed onto the floor. Move slowly. Notice how the dread wants to move. Let the dread lead the movement. Slithering is the tool you use to transform the trauma residue. Your body now is more likely to associate a sense of well-being and safety when awakening to a new day. When it doesn't, you know how to shift that feeling.

I know you're going to have a lot of questions. Let me just cover some of the ones I get all the time. You're probably thinking, When do How do I use this? Well, I use this technique anytime there's a morning where I just wake up and it just feels like too much to bear. Pull out the slither and you're going to feel better. And by the way, you can also use this on the couch. So if you're sitting on the couch and you feel that heaviness hit and you can't seem to get yourself off the couch, just slide right off, slither on the floor, crawl to the doorway of that room, and trust me, you will break apart that feeling. It's pretty unreal how this works. Another question that you may have is related to what if you have a really hard time actually feeling what you're feeling and dropping into your body? I can relate to this, especially since I've spent decades running away from this heaviness and this sensation. It can be really scary. But here's what I have found. The second that you literally just start small, just slide your leg down and out underneath the sheets, and gravity takes over.

What you'll find, if you're willing to just try this, is that you do have more power than you think. The reason why these sensations are so scary is because you don't know what to do with them. They've been there a long time, and And so part of my fear was, is this really what my life is? Is this what every morning is going to be? Because this is what it's always felt like. And you'll quickly realize as you're writhing around on the ground and rolling around, and then you roll up to your hands and your knees, whoa, this feeling is shifting. It's weird, but it's shifting. And the more that you do this, the more comfortable you're going to become. And look, I was really scared at this point in my life. I didn't want to feel this way. I didn't want to wake up on edge and so anxious. The thing that shocked me is simply trying this made me feel so empowered. It made me feel like these sensations were no longer going to rule my life, and they don't. Another thing that comes up a lot What if you're in a bed that's really high up or you don't want to risk falling out of the bed because it's high on the floor?

No problem. Just get the leg out first and just inch so that you're laying there and the leg is straight, and Then you get the other leg out. You can go from a half sit to a lying down to using your arm. It's okay. There's no right way to do this. Just get yourself eventually on the floor so that you're laying down on the floor. That's the important part. Then the feeling your whole body on the floor and starting to move and roll around, that starts to shake up this heaviness. It's super cool. What if you have a dog? Mr. Noodle is still sitting here on the bed, sleeping next to me. He does not care if I'm slithering or crawling because he had a late night out hunting chipminks, so he's just sleeping. A dog? Fantastic. Because what happens is as you're on the floor, if your dog comes over and starts licking you and then they follow you and you're crawling down the floor and they're like, What are you doing? You don't feel so alone. It actually makes you laugh a little, and the laughter and the added fun of an animal being there shakes up all this sensation even faster.

At least that's what I found when my dog's homie and Yolo, would come and crawl along with me to the bathroom. You may be wondering, is this something you can teach your kids? Absolutely. It's a fantastic technique to teach to a child who has anxiety, who has trouble getting out of bed, who may have a lot going on that they're nervous about, and they They wake up and don't want to get out of bed because it's something that you can do. You can accomplish this, even on the mornings when things just feel really hard. The best part about this is you're not correcting your kid. You're not pushing them. You are helping them move with the feeling, and you can do it with them. You can climb into bed and be like, Let's slither out of bed today. Let's take that heaviness that you feel, which validates it, by the way, and let's use our bodies to move through it and shake it up, and we're going to crawl together. When you feel ready, and this is the most important part that Anne would say to me, when you feel ready, you can go from crawling to standing up.

I said that I used this for six weeks straight, and it just broke apart everything that was in my body. But it only took me about a week or two to get to the point where I could crawl three or four crawl steps. I don't even know what the technical word is for it when you're on your hands and knees. And I was ready. I was ready to stand up and walk down the hall to the bathroom. And honestly, that was a huge victory. The fact that I was ready eight craws before I had been the week before was evidence that this was working, and I was slowly but surely chipping away at this tar sensation sensation and this heaviness that had held me hostage for so long. It kept progressing like this, that eventually all I needed to do was roll on the floor, and then I was standing up. Eventually, all I needed to do was put a leg out. Did I need to slide down? Not really. As I was sliding, I'm like, Oh, I feel free. I can do it. You'll see that this works in magical ways because your body is designed to do this for you.

One more thing, don't get back in bed. No matter what, don't get back in bed. In fact, one of my habits is as soon as I get out of the bed, as long as I'm not slithering and crawling, I make the bed right away. That's an important thing because once you get up and you get going and you move through this, you can keep going, and it's going to help you move forward in your life. If you're disabled in any way, and physically, this This is an impossibility. I'd highly recommend that you take this information to your physical therapist or to a nurse or doctor or somebody that is supporting you and ask them how you can use a somatic technique, which is simply joining in with the heavy feeling instead of avoiding it and moving with it. I am certain that there are ways that this technique can be adapted no matter what you're facing or what limitations your disability may create in terms of the physical nature of sliding out of a bed. I really wanted to leave you empowered, and so I asked Anne for guidance on how you can best set yourself up to get the best benefit from this somatic technique, and this is what Anne had to say.

Now, how can someone who isn't in therapy with a counselor who is trained in somatic inquiry benefit from this approach to healing? You can Incorporate it into your self-care routine. Ask yourself, Where am I feeling friction right now in my life? Is this a reoccurring feeling? Turn towards the feeling by closing your eyes and notice what it feels like and where you feel it in your body. Then ask yourself, If this feeling could move, how would it move? For the next few minutes, allow the feeling to move you. You can do this in a quiet space or turn on music will inspire your movement. When you're complete, check back in with your body and notice what has shifted. The benefits of the movement practice help us to free the body from stress that often we don't realize we are carrying. Less stress leads to greater physical vitality and wellness, and we could certainly all use more of that.

You know what else we could use more of? Anne Daven. Anne, I love you. Thank you again for helping me share this life-changing challenging somatic technique. And to you, I want to be sure to tell you, in case no one else does, I love you and I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to create a better life. Sometimes that means you and I need to try some weird stuff like slithering out of the bed and crawling down the floor so that we can get our power back. You deserve that. I cannot wait to hear what you experience when you try this. I can't wait see your social media posts about this. You know what else I can't wait for? I cannot wait to be together with you again in the very next episode. I'll see you soon. You know what else? I cannot wait to see you in the very next video. Thank you so much for being here with me on YouTube. I love that you made it all the way to the end, and so did Mr. Noodle. We knocked him out for crying out loud. He is down for the count.

There's one thing that I would love to ask of you. I know you're the person that likes supporting the people that support you, and a way that you could support me is hit the subscribe button. It's how I know and our team knows that you love these videos that we're creating for you every single day. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for trying this technique. Thank you for sharing this technique with people that you love because it'll make a huge difference for them. And I know you're wondering, okay, Mel, this was amazing. What should I watch next? You should check out this video next. You're going to love it.