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

Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. You know 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. She gave me this life-changing technique. 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.

[Music fades in and out]

Mel Robbins: 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 lisp because of the retainer. My cat, Mr. Noodle, is laying with me. And 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 will change your life immediately. We're going to talk about this technique that my therapist, the extraordinary Ann Davin, taught me during a period where I was going through a really, really hard time. 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 and learn how to get out of bed 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 kind of weighs you down like a gravity blanket and you just want to stay in bed. It's kind of 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 kind of person that likes to get out of bed. 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 wake up and we're sort of like, "Ah, can 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 kind of person that I've always been.

So 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, Ann Devin. 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. 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, and you actually 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.

[Sound of Mel shifting, sitting up]

Mel Robbins: I'm going to sit up, get the pillow in place. I think Mr. Noodle is... get the eye mask off and settle in. Oh, and I don't have my glasses. Okay.

So 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. 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.

[Sound of Mel clearing throat]

Mel Robbins: 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. 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 it takes for me to push through that heaviness in my body and that sense of dread is Herculean. Forget about doing resistance training. This is pushing through something at a whole different level.

Once I feel that sensation of dread, of course, it triggers my mind to start spinning. I start to scan ahead. Even though I'm a very positive person, one of the things I've been learning about life is that our brains tend to default on the negative. So what do I immediately start thinking about? 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 kind of 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, 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. 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 add on top that disappointment that yet again, you didn't get another good night's sleep. So you're not waking up rested, you're waking up feeling behind.

If you're somebody who just springs out of bed, God bless you, but the rest of us kind of 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.

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. 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 like three or four years and explain what was happening when I was talking to my therapist, the extraordinary Ann Davin, 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 we were in the middle of massive life change. Like so many of you, our family had moved. 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. 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 bunk 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 sort of 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?" 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 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 am just having such a hard time getting out of bed. Anne says, "Mel, I want you to try something called slithering."

Anne and I spend one of our sessions talking all about the sensation. 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 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, "Most definitely in law school." "What about college?" "Yep, absolutely." "What about high school?" "Yeah, 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. I'm not going to 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. All the kids were sleeping in this big bunk 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're doing something to me.

It was a really... I don't know what the right word is... weird and upsetting and confusing situation. 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, kind of 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 over on my side, into this ball shape. This older kid climbed out, 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.

As I reflect back on it, it's not that the first 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 like 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 is that when you're really little, there's this flaw in human design called attribution. I learned this from the amazing psychiatrist at Stanford, Dr. Paul Conti. 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 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, there are things that 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. 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? Are they going to be in a bad mood? Are we going to have food today or 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 out 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. Now it makes perfect sense. Of course, if I have that kind of experience, the act of waking up gets married with the experience, and that sensation got stuck in my body. That's all that was happening.

That's why I'm so excited for you to learn about this. 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. 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 sure there are lots of people that are coming to mind that you know would benefit from hearing this.

Let's take a quick pause. I've got so much more to share with you, to teach you, for you to learn. We're going to hear a short word from our sponsors. Share this episode with someone that you love who would benefit from it. Don't go anywhere because I'm going to be waiting for you. We're going to keep on slithering our way through this episode after a short break. Stay with me.

[Music fades in and out]

Mel Robbins: Welcome back. It's your friend Mel Robbins. Today, you and I are talking about this life-changing somatic technique that my therapist, Ann Davin, taught me to help me get out of bed on those mornings where the dread or the overwhelm or just the ugh was just too much.

I'm talking to Anne and she says, "Mel, we established that this is something that's a pattern. It's a stored sensation from trauma that is in my body. 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. It's this heaviness, this sort of 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. Anne said to me, "I am going to teach you, Mel, how to move this thing out of your body. 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."

I'm like, "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, no. You are going to slither out of bed. You're going to move with the heaviness, Mel. You are going to slither and slide one foot out of that bed. Then you're going to slither and slide the other foot. Then you're going to roll off the bed."

I'm like, "Well, what am I going to do once I roll?"

"Oh, you're going to be on the ground and you're going to move around with this heaviness."

I'm like, "That sounds odd."

Ann 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 Davin, 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. 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.

[Audio clip begins]

Ann Davin: 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 than try to figure our way out.

[Audio clip ends]

Mel Robbins: I want to make sure you heard that last line that Anne said. 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, do 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and push my way out of it. But the next morning it's there again.

What Ann 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 sensations 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.

[Audio clip begins]

Ann Davin: Our work at the time was focused on healing an 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.

[Audio clip ends]

Mel Robbins: Is she not brilliant? I want to be sure that you're tracking because it took me a little while to truly get this. 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. 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's 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.

[Audio clip begins]

Ann Davin: My impulse to suggest this to you now, to slither, came from the dynamic interplay 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.

[Audio clip ends]

Mel Robbins: It took me a while to truly grasp what Anne was teaching me. 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. Anne was linking up that all of these experiences were just locked in my body with nowhere to go. 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.

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. Join with it. 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. Then we're going to bring Anne back. Anne is going to explain why this works. A little later, she's also going to walk you through an exercise with a couple questions so you can start to try out this process yourself.

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. 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 too.

All right, so we're ready to slither. But first, I want to give our sponsors a chance to share a few words. They're absolutely amazing. I want to give you a chance to share this episode with somebody that you love who would benefit from it, which is basically everybody on the planet. When we come back, it's slither time, and I'm going to walk you through it step by step. Stay with me.

[Music fades in and out]

Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your buddy Mel Robbins. I am so thrilled that you're here with me today. I'm introducing you to this life-changing somatic technique that my amazing therapist Ann Davin taught me. Now it's time for you to step-by-step slither out of bed with me. You ready? Good. So am I.

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 — whatever it is 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. 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. I kid you not, the first step for me is you're going to think about just letting the weight of your emotion. For me, dread is really heavy. Imagine you've just got weights on you.

[Sound of Mel moving, sheets rustling]

Mel Robbins: I would literally just drop out of bed. I am... 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.

[Sound of Mel landing on the floor]

Mel Robbins: 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 slithered and slunk 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 kind of start to move. I'm writhing around on the floor, just literally bending my knees and kind of almost like if you're in an exercise class and they're asking you to just kind of move your body in whatever way. All you're doing is you're kind of breaking up the heaviness. When you're laying in bed, what I noticed is that it just kind of sits there. But when you start to move around... I would just roll around.

[Sound of Mel twisting and moving on the floor]

Mel Robbins: Anne said to me, "Mel, just lay on the floor and kind of 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 like a minute or two. 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. Your mind now is like, "What are you doing?"

Mel Robbins: And I'm no longer thinking about the day because I'm thinking about how I'm like on this floor and I want the feeling to get out of my body. And slowly what starts to happen is that frozen kind of dread starts to break apart based on your own movement.

In the beginning, I would be on the floor doing this ridiculous snake slither for a couple of minutes. And then all of a sudden you feel freed from it. But 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.

Ann told me to get on all fours and crawl across the floor to the bathroom. I'll tell you what, when she explained this to me, I thought, are you kidding me? Has it really gotten that bad that I am going to crawl across the floor? But holy cow, does it do wonders.

So 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 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 crawl toward the bathroom.

Ann said you stay on the ground for as long as it takes to start to feel like it's breaking up. Then eventually you're going to roll off the ground and onto all fours, which feels ridiculous. I remember when I was learning this technique and I got up that first morning on my all fours, I'm thinking, am I really going to crawl into the bathroom? Now keep in mind, at this point I'm sleeping in a bunk 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 crawl toward the bathroom. You're going to hear that rug, literally like a dog or a cat. 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.

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. Something magical replaced it — this sense of freedom. By the time I got to the bathroom, I wanted to stand up. I wanted to face the day. I had moved with and through the heaviness, so it was no longer in me. I felt something else, which was empowerment.

It seems ridiculous that crawling across the floor or slithering out of the bed onto 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 Ann 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 you have in life that you remember in your subconscious mind, but it's also remembered in the body. 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 have to drop from the neck down and process it in the body. That's exactly what Ann was guiding me in doing when she taught me how to slither.

I wanted you to have the benefit of hearing Ann 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.

Ann Davin: 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. And when it doesn't, you know how to shift that feeling.

Mel Robbins: So I know you're going to have a lot of questions. Let me cover some of the ones I get all the time. You're probably thinking, when do I use this? Well, I use this technique anytime there's a morning where I just wake up and it feels like too much to bear. Pull out the slither and you're going to feel better.

By the way, you can also use this on the couch. 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 you may have is, 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 — gravity kind of 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 these sensations are so scary is because you don't know what to do with them and they've been there a long time. 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. The more that you do this, the more comfortable you're going to become.

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? No problem. Just get the leg out first and kind of inch so that you're sort of laying there with the leg straight, then 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. 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 chipmunks. 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 follows you while you're crawling down the floor, they're like, "What are you doing?" You don't feel so alone. It actually kind of makes you laugh, 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 dogs 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. It's something you can accomplish 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."

And when you feel ready — and this is the most important part that Ann would say to me — when you feel ready, you can go from crawling to standing up.

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. Honestly, that was a huge victory. The fact that I was ready eight crawls 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 and this heaviness that had held me hostage for so long.

It kept progressing like this. 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 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 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. So I asked Ann for guidance on how you can best set yourself up to get the best benefit from this somatic technique. This is what Ann had to say.

Ann Davin: How can someone who isn't in therapy with a counselor 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 recurring 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 that 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.

Mel Robbins: And you know what else we could use more of? Ann Davin. Ann, I love you. Thank you again for helping me share this life-changing 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 to see your social media posts about this. And 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.

[Sound of Mel laughing]

Mel Robbins: Oh my God, this is hilarious. Is that what you want to name? Yes. Okay, you want me to keep talking now? I do, yeah. See, my stomach's grumbling. Wow. And it won't stop your stomach from grumbling, but it's going to help you get out of bed on those mornings where you just don't feel like you can. Okay, great. I got it. Gotcha.

Okay, ready? Like he needs a... yeah, like a... I don't know if we have insurance for this. I've never opened the show with my retainer in. This is like one of those ASMR things that people listen to. That's not what I intended to do, but we're going to just kind of keep on rolling here.

Okay, you ready? So I'm going to... oh wait, from flight or fright? Fright, fright. It is frightening, isn't it?

Giant disclaimer: Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist. And this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.