--:-- Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to a life-changing episode of the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am so happy that you're here because this morning I had a profound breakthrough in happiness. I guess more importantly, I had a breakthrough in the thing that I am doing that is robbing me of happiness. And you're doing this exact same thing too. You probably don't even realize it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Today's conversation is going to be an eye-opener, a game changer. I cannot wait for you to hear it. It is also unfolding live. I literally barreled into work this morning and Amy and Jesse, my colleagues and friends, were sitting here ready to go and I could not contain myself. I had to share this breakthrough with them. What you're going to hear is me coming up the stairs and you're going to listen to that conversation unfold live. This is more than a conversation; we are bringing breakthroughs and matches. We burn things. So let's go.
--:-- [Sound of footsteps on stairs]
--:-- Mel Robbins: Something just happened.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, you guys are in the middle of the meeting.
--:-- Mel Robbins: All right, well, I just had this crazy profound breakthrough around happiness. And I want to try to unpack it in real time with you.
--:-- Amy: Yeah, let's hear it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. So I was laying in bed this morning and I felt this incredible wave of joy.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It was unbelievable. It was just like this warm, glowy, yellowy, orange, peachy, pink kind of feeling. It took over my body. And I'm like, this is amazing. And I knew exactly why I felt that way. Because all three of our kids are home for the holidays. And nothing makes me happier than when Chris and I and our three kids are all together.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And then all of a sudden, that delicious peachy pink wave of happiness got washed away by this black gross tar. This emotional wave gripped me. And I started to feel panic and fear. And I started searching my mind. Like, why am I feeling like this?
--:-- Mel Robbins: And my mind was already racing, you guys. My mind was going, "They're leaving in three days. They're only here for so short a time. You don't live near your kids. You never should have moved from Boston. You're not going to see your kids. If you and Chris don't, they're going to leave and then they're not going to come and you're not going to..." And I just started to make myself miserable.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And it was in that moment that I had this huge realization about happiness. And what I realized is this: You have to fight for your happiness. And I saw very clearly for the first time that I don't fight for my happiness. I fight for misery.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That when I'm not paying attention, my mind so quickly defaults to scanning the world around me and spotting reasons to be upset. It's like I am constantly fighting this battle with myself. And I know what I want. I want to be a happier person. I want to enjoy the time that I have. I want to be content. I want to be present in my life.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I saw very clearly this morning that it's almost like when it comes to happiness, there are two languages. There's sort of that la la la la la, you know, kind of happy joy, laugh, laugh, laugh. And then there's this deeper language of misery: griping, complaining, afraid, anticipating the worst, feeling friction, being annoyed with people. It's like grizzly bear energy.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I had this clear vision of myself this morning that I'm always speaking silently the language of misery. And it's just taking me out of my life. Like I'm so worried about not seeing my kids because they live far away that I'm not even with them mentally when they're here, because I'm thinking about the moment they leave. I'm not present for the holidays because I'm thinking about the wreath that's not hung right.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I think one of the biggest things that we do not talk about when it comes to happiness — and I've been trying and working so hard on being more content and happier and present in my life — is that it's not just "do the things that make you happy, be proactive." You have to do that. The research says that. And I've been doing that. I've been getting out of the house. I've been making new friends. I've been spending time doing activities that make me happy.
--:-- Mel Robbins: But the bigger piece to happiness is this campaign of misery that we all engage in. We literally, even in moments where we should be joyous and happy and content, we reach for the sword. We gut ourselves and we fight for misery.
--:-- Amy: I mean, just think about like your wedding day. Everybody's focused on what goes wrong.
--:-- Mel Robbins: God, yeah. Always.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I think every human being does this. You don't realize that your natural default is misery.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's what keeps you company — this campaign of misery. And it's very active, constantly looking for what is wrong instead of allowing yourself to bask in the moment and to say that things are okay.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So here I am laying in bed. I've had this huge realization of this wave of joy and then ruining it with this black tar campaign of misery. I'm wielding the sword. I'm gutting myself. I'm feeling awful. And I'm not even going to be present for the next three days.
--:-- Mel Robbins: If I allow my mind to do this.
--:-- Amy: Right. You're not present in the bedroom when you're lying in bed.
--:-- Mel Robbins: No. And I will miss these three days with my kids.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Because I will be living in the future of when they leave.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I think everybody has this. Whether you grew up with parents that bitched and complained all the time and everything was always wrong, or you had anxiety like I did as a kid, or you were super sensitive, or you grew up and there's a lot of chaos and you were legitimately not safe and always waiting for the next shoe to drop.
--:-- Amy: Oh, yeah. I feel that.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Does any of this resonate?
--:-- Amy: Big time. Big time. Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And if you grew up around somebody that was always miserable, like so many of us are like, "Okay, it's my job to make you happy." It's almost like you adopt a campaign of misery, either to protect yourself or because it's what somebody else was like in the house that you grew up in.
--:-- Mel Robbins: At this point, I don't give a shit how I got this way. I just want it gone. Because for the first time I saw so clearly my own active campaign against happiness. And I call it the Campaign for Misery. I'm labeling it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I am on a mission to be a happier person. And it was very clear to me, having done so much work on myself — in my marriage, in my business, on my nervous system, having been in therapy for so long — that I have been checking all the boxes. And it is working to a point. As my marriage improves, as the business is in better shape, as I remove external friction and bullshit from my life, this campaign inside me has gotten louder and louder and more irrational.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And we all know people like this. We know people that have plenty of money. They have their house and roof over their head. They have a family that loves them.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And all they do is bitch. They just can't get beyond it. I don't want to be that person.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I didn't realize the extent that I did this to myself. That I would pick up the sword and I'd start wielding it against my own happiness.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I can see you getting emotional. What's going on?
--:-- Amy: It was the two languages that you just said. Yeah, you just battle all the time with it. I get it. Mine is probably more of a victimhood and a guilt.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Describe it for me. Like, what do you say to yourself?
--:-- Amy: There's just always guilt or shame. With everything. Or, "Oh, I should have done that. I should have, woulda, coulda." That is very popular in my head. And I hate those words because no one feels good with those words. And I think that comes a lot from my upbringing from one parent in particular who that's her language. So she was a shoulda, coulda, woulda, felt shame, felt guilt, was always the victim. She word vomited that on you. "You should have been around. You should have done that. You weren't there. You could have done that better." That's a lot.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And so now you talk to yourself that way?
--:-- Amy: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And then with that, I think I procrastinate with my personal life because I get stuck in the coulda, woulda, shoulda. The thoughts just spin, spin, spin. And so I'm not present. Just like you said, I'm focused on something that is a made up imaginary thought that probably isn't even going to happen. Instead of being right here, being around Thanksgiving, being with your partners, being with your loved ones, being with your family.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Instead of getting lost in these thoughts that they're not even yours.
--:-- Amy: No, but we're just used to creating them. It's a habit. It's almost like when you left your mom, you took that way of speaking with you and it now keeps you company because she's not living with you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah. That's some deep shit.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah. And I think that's a lot of what we talk about with reparenting ourselves. I realized that once something started going right in my life, I would find something else that was going wrong in my life. And that would be my new thing that I would talk about. And that was my whole life for a long time.
--:-- Jesse: And I realized in this moment that you had, similar to what you had, that my life was a game of whack-a-mole. Every time something good would pop up, I'd take the hammer and hit it back down. Like you're talking about the sword. I would do the same thing. It was just a constant looking for what's wrong. And there's always something that can pop up. If it's not in the physical, like your house or your relationship, then you go inward and you're like, "Well, I shouldn't have done this or I shouldn't have moved," and you just turn it on yourself. No matter how hard I worked on all those checklist things that you're talking about, there was always a limit to my joy.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's why I'm using the word "fight" and "pick up the sword." I'm using this intentionally because I had a freaking wake up call this morning.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I want everybody to have a wake up call because this shit runs on default in my mind. If I'm not paying attention, if I'm not directing my thoughts, if I'm not being mindful about being in the present moment, I pick up the sword. I look for absolutely everything that could be going wrong, or what's bothering me, or who's annoying me, or anything that I might be disappointed about. I don't bark at anybody else, but this is how I talk to myself.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I am so adamant — I had this huge, "Wow, this is the missing piece, Mel. You're actively engaged in your own misery."
--:-- Mel Robbins: You seek it out.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I don't know if I don't think I deserve to be happy. I don't know if I just adopted somebody else's complaining. We learned from Dr. Becky Kennedy about how from zero to five, when you're a little kid and you're in a theta state in your brain and that brain is like a giant sponge absorbing everything around you — you just absorbed positive about life, negative about life.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I don't know if that's it. I don't know why I am this way. But I think every human being is like this.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Once you see it, because you're aware that you do this, now I want to get rid of it. I want to put down the sword. How do I just be? And I don't have time to meditate. I don't think that's going to be the solution either. I feel like this is major reprogramming.
--:-- Amy: I think that's true. I think that we all do that about at least one thing, if not all day long and in every way that we can so that it just continues to... I don't know, somehow it feels like home.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, it's familiar. It's natural.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What I loved about what you just said, Amy, is that even if you just do it about one thing — whether it's griping about your relationship, or griping about your family, or griping about your job, or all of the reasons why you couldn't possibly improve your health — that campaign of misery where you pick up the sword and you fight for things that aren't... it's got that kind of energy to it, that edge to it. And you can feel it inside, even if you're doing it in one area.
--:-- Mel Robbins: As I've gone to work to improve the external aspects of my life, the missing thing that I have not truly conquered or had the breakthrough on — that I realized this morning — is the internal language, the dialogue that I have with myself, how I keep myself company.
--:-- Mel Robbins: By creating unnecessary friction.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Searching for what's wrong, inventing things that don't even exist yet. And I'm tired of it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You seem to have had a breakthrough in this, Amy.
--:-- Amy: Yeah. I noticed this in myself for a while ago and I wanted to make sure that I eradicated it, which I haven't yet, but I wanted to work on it and make sure that I could increase my level of happiness every day. Not day by day, but just have a larger capacity for happiness. Because a lot of people seem to have that. And I thought, "Why can't I have that?"
--:-- Mel Robbins: So what did you do?
--:-- Amy: Well, I want to say one quick thing that I did, and then I'll tell you the main thing that I did. The one quick thing that I did was — you talked a little bit about complaining and about griping and about bitching and moaning, which my mom would always complain about other people bitching and moaning, which by the way, it's bitching and moaning, you know, the irony of my childhood.
--:-- Amy: So anyway, what I realized is that one thing that most people complain about that it's okay to complain about, everyone accepts this, is the weather.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, it's true.
--:-- Amy: People bitch and moan about the weather. "Oh, God, it's raining out. Oh, Jesus, it's sunny today. You wouldn't believe the clouds today. Oh, my God. It's snowing." All of that stuff. I realized that that is a common societal communication, right? That's what we do as a society to connect with each other.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah, it's a bonding mechanism.
--:-- Amy: It's a bonding thing, right? It allows us to have some kind of commonality there. I don't want to have commonality on complaining. I want to be like — I have this poem stuck up in my bathroom that says, "Be so focused on bettering yourself that you have no time to complain about other people or other circumstances." And I'm like, "Yeah, let's start with the weather."
--:-- Amy: I will also say that I had a grandmother who never gossiped one day in her life. I know she never said a bad thing about anybody. And she had some pretty nasty characters going on. She never complained. She never gossiped, I would say. Maybe she did complain a little bit. But it was great to have that role model. So I kind of had that vision of her in my head. And I started with the weather.
--:-- Amy: And I realized it is true. It is the default. People will complain. Now that it's in your head, once that's in your head, you will see how people use the weather as an excuse not to do things they should do. I think that probably reveals externally how people's default is to gripe and complain internally. It's a very safe way to notice this in everybody around you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I'm curious to hear, though, what else did you do? Because now that I see this, I don't want to keep doing this to myself. And I feel like I have a split personality at this point. I literally feel like I could be talking to myself. You know what I mean, Jesse? Where I'm like, "Okay, shut up, sad Mel. Happy Mel is now going to talk. Shut up, misery Mel." One on each shoulder. Now we're going to do the magical Mel is going to talk. And everyone's got a sword and we're fighting each other. And I'm like, "Can we just put down the freaking sword of misery? Can I please catch this wiring that is not my own?"
--:-- Mel Robbins: I do not want to gripe. I don't gripe outwardly.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I don't really bitch about the weather typically.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I love that saying that small minds talk about people and big minds talk about ideas. And I'd like to think I have a big mind. I'd like to think that I don't gossip. And yet internally, I keep myself company by talking to myself about what's bothering me or what's wrong. Or making up reasons to be upset.
--:-- Jesse: Oh, yes. Yes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And then you break out the facts. I was like, "Wait a minute. None of that actually happened."
--:-- Mel Robbins: What am I upset about?
--:-- Mel Robbins: And we're going to get to the end of our lives and have missed a huge part of it because we can't get over it. Can't get out of our head. Can't get out of our heads. Can't get over ourselves. Can't get through our bullshit. And I'm just so done with myself. I'm sick of this part of me.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, let me tell you what I started doing once I saw all the complaining that I was doing.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay, cool. But we do have to pause for sponsors. When we come back, Amy, you better walk me through this.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay, welcome back. So I'm sitting here with Amy and Jesse and you, and we've been talking about happiness. You were about to tell us something you've been doing, Amy, that you say is making a big difference. Because this is a gut job. You've got to rewire your mind because the default — I'm just sick of my mind going here.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I've felt that. I call it my tribe language — how my parents talk about the big things like money and relationships and big life events, how they view them. I noticed years ago that if I'm going to live the life that I want, I need to leave this tribe, not speak this language anymore. And I did a lot of research around that. Like, how do I do this? Because it's painful to extract yourself from your family.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Do you think that's what you experience, even though you may love your family deeply? That there is still this sort of mismatch when you all get together because you're at different states of evolving? We all speak this language with words, but we are all engaged in learning a new language at a subconscious emotional level.
--:-- Amy: Yes. We've all moved on in some way. But we have our family roles, we have our common language, we have our tribal — and I say tribal in the sense that any group of three people that get together create a culture.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh yeah. That's the Seth Godin research, right?
--:-- Amy: Right. Exactly. So, yeah, I decided I don't want to do this anymore. I am grateful for it. Thank you for the lessons I've learned. And I'm moving on here. I'm making a conscious decision to move on.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So what are some of the practices? Because you're a little bit further ahead on the road. You represent what I refer to often on this podcast: you're a light on the path. So what are some of the practices that you have?
--:-- Amy: Yeah. I think number one, just recognizing that there is a sword and that it can be put down — just like what you're saying right now. Pat yourself on the back. And I'm not kidding. Do it right now, pat yourself on the back for knowing that this is a good development for you. And even if you walk away from it for three months, three years, at least this knowing is the start of something really awesome in your life.
--:-- Amy: Journaling was a very big part of my practice. I would journal every day about this. I would for a very long time, then I would burn it. I would literally put it outside in a Pyrex bowl and burn it. And then I would watch it burn. It didn't take that long.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So will you walk us through this?
--:-- Amy: I would burn it. So I would do my morning pages — three pages of stream of consciousness — but I would purposely think about this tribal thinking and just write everything that I hated about it, everything I loved about it, everything that was happening in my life. For three pages, I would write about it. I would crumple it up or rip it. I would put it in this Pyrex bowl so I didn't explode it. And I would put it outside.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So would you walk out to your front porch or were you on the back deck?
--:-- Amy: And just put it out there and I would burn it. And I would close the sliding glass door and I would watch it burn. Sometimes the wind would take it and I would be like, "Good, see ya. Bye." Every molecule of that paper that burned was one breath of that old language leaving me.
--:-- Amy: And then what I would do next was the most powerful thing for me. I would go to the sink and I would wash my hands up to my elbows every day. And that act of cleansing myself from whatever I didn't want that just came out of me.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. You know the image I just got?
--:-- Mel Robbins: My dad's an orthopedic surgeon.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I think about the way in which a doctor washes their hands before and after surgery.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I just got this image of my dad washing his hands all the way up to the elbows.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And the ceremonial and scientific nature of cleansing like that.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And then it had this direct reference for me since he's a surgeon of the sword.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And surgery. And actually deliberately doing surgery to extract at a subconscious level.
--:-- Amy: Yes. That was my intention — to extract that and not have that be a part of me.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I'm going to do this. Love it. I feel like enough. Enough.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Can I just ask one more question for those of us that don't have a practice of writing three pages?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Can we come up with a prompt so as I go to do this tomorrow morning?
--:-- Amy: I got a great prompt for me.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What is the prompt?
--:-- Amy: I write on the top of every page every morning. This will change your life. "How can this be easy?"
--:-- Mel Robbins: How can this be easy?
--:-- Amy: I write that on the top.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What is this? Is that my day? Is that everything?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Because with the sword, everything is hard. It is so hard. We make our lives so hard. You wake up, you have joy. Let's not do that. Let's not do that emotion. Let's make it hard.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What is coming up for you, Jesse? With your gorgeous blue eyes. What is coming up?
--:-- Jesse: You're right. Everything is so hard.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Give us an example of how you made your life hard already today. What were the disgusting thoughts? The campaign of misery? How did you pick up the sword against yourself?
--:-- Jesse: Oh, as soon as I get in the mirror.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Like what do you do?
--:-- Jesse: "You look like shit. Good luck today." Not even "good luck." Just...
--:-- Mel Robbins: Really?
--:-- Mel Robbins: What else did you say to yourself?
--:-- Jesse: I get super stressed and emotional with holidays because my family's never really cared about them. And I'm trying to change that. So that's also like, "How can I create my own language for my holiday in my new house with my new husband?" All these things that I can start fresh. How do I do that with nothing? From scratch? What does that even mean? What does it look like? Jim asked me that too. "What does it look like to have a tradition? What tradition? We can do it. Name it." And I'm like, "I don't know. I don't have any."
--:-- Mel Robbins: Is it like a certain dish? Is it a certain wreath that we hang?
--:-- Jesse: That makes it hard.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How could it be easy?
--:-- Jesse: I just got what this means. And it goes back to the campaign of misery, but mine comes from a victimhood — if that's even a word.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I know. That's a big campaign.
--:-- Jesse: Of course. My second language that I've been nurtured in. Bathed in. Of like, "Oh, you're a victim. You're a victim, victim, victim." Not me, but that's what I will be like. "Oh, yeah, mom, you are. You are a victim. Of course. You're the only one." So that is under the umbrella of the campaign of misery. But you're right. Everything can be easy. I've never thought of it that way. Because it's always like, "Oh God, I have to do this, this, this, this. Make sure that gets done."
--:-- Mel Robbins: No, it doesn't.
--:-- Jesse: Right. It doesn't.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It's so funny that we're talking about this. What did you get? What are you getting?
--:-- Mel Robbins: I was yesterday running around like a fricking lunatic. And it's lunatic season.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Because we're in a new house.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I feel the same way. Like, "What are my traditions?"
--:-- Mel Robbins: I'm the same. And we had plenty growing up. I just like, "Well, what are mine?"
--:-- Mel Robbins: Right. And so then I'm buying faux whatever the hell, things that go across your fireplace. And then I'm buying the little white trees that light up. I'm like, "Do I even like these?" I put them up on the thing and I'm like, "I don't know what to do." And then it's just garbage.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So I'm like, "Why?" And then I said, I'm sitting there today and I'm like, "We need a wreath. We need a big wreath."
--:-- Jesse: Yeah. The big wreath thing.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So the tradition is stress and worry and getting it right enough and never being satisfied.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's an awesome tradition. But I invite you to just bake cookies instead.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to keep coming back to these two languages. Because the language that might have been spoken was joyous and happy and all this other stuff. Whereas emotionally, the language was, "This is hard." The emotional language. "This has to be perfect. Everything is always hard. This is stressful. Families are a pain in the ass. You deal with yours. I'll deal with mine. Holidays are women killers." I'll set you up for success all day long with that statement and all the other ones too.
--:-- Mel Robbins: "How can this be easy?"
--:-- Amy: But I don't have an answer.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah, but what if your answer is "it can't"? Listen, it's not about answering that question. It's about training your subconscious mind to look for a different answer to a different question. When you are working on the subconscious level, you have to have a different thought. You have to introduce a different thought into your being. That's why you like Oracle cards. That's why people like guided meditation, people like prayer, people like devotionals — because it introduces a different thought.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And so when you are working on this level and you're realizing this is ingrained in me, this is not just a quick fix. I can't go to a seminar. I've been to a bunch of workshops. Is the 33rd workshop going to be the answer? I don't know.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Because you sit and listen and you have an epiphany, but you don't do the work to encode. You don't do the surgery to cut out this shit.
--:-- Mel Robbins: The thing is, when you write this — I have written this on the top of my journal for five years maybe — when you started... You know what's funny? The campaign of misery inside me is already coming up going, "I don't like the question." And I look at that and I'm like, "That's hard. To fill up three pages? I don't know if I can do it."
--:-- Amy: You know what we're going to do? Super easy. I think we should ask Jesse to just silently write it. And then when she's done, we're going to burn it and we're going to see how it feels.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Are you down?
--:-- Jesse: I'm so happy. I'm so down if you're okay if I just have some crocodile tears.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Good. It doesn't have any of the holiday shit in it yet because you know what? I've made it hard. That is starting yet.
--:-- Mel Robbins: All right. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to give Jessie a notebook.
--:-- Amy: Okay. Here's another question about this prompt too.
--:-- Amy: She doesn't like it either.
--:-- Amy: Well, it's stressing me out because I'm like, "Oh, do I just need to make a to-do list? If I have to do this, how can I make it easy? I still have to do this to-do list. But do you just shorten the to-do list instead of 10 things, combine it into three? Or is it... Am I focusing this around Thanksgiving? What is this? I still don't know what this is. Do we make it work? Is it personal? Is it today being Wednesday? Is it just... focus on the weather? I don't know."
--:-- Mel Robbins: I get that. It seems very overwhelming when you look at this because this is very confronting. It's not how we were raised. It is not our natural language. "How can this be easy?" That is a very difficult question. And if it is, it's time to dig in.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Here's what I will tell you. "How can this be easy?" Notice how your mind searches for "This is wrong. I can't do this. I won't do this well enough. I don't have the right resources, the instructions." All of that.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Notice how your mind is searching.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's it. Just notice that. You can write three pages of "Amy's a complete jackass. She has no idea what she's talking about. I don't know what..." Write all of that. That is what I invite you to write. That stream of consciousness is really helpful. It still gets your mind thinking about how this can be easy. Get out all the crap.
--:-- Amy: You've got like a golden Buddha underneath a foot of hardened shit on the outside. So we're getting through that hardened shit and getting to the golden Buddha. The hardened shit is what you're writing on the page.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Or the golden Buddha.
--:-- Amy: Or the golden Buddha. It could be. I find more golden Buddha now, nowadays, after doing this practice. But it's okay to get the shit on the page. It's okay to not get it right. It's okay to not understand it. It's okay to just be in that in-between. But your courage and your bravery to be in the in-between gets you closer to creating a new language for yourself. A love language, a language of acceptance, a language of possibility, a language of inspiration. That is all what I was searching for when I was doing this. And I will tell you, it has brought me there.
--:-- Amy: And there is even more. There is no finish line here. It's just this glorious marathon where everybody's high-fiving you all day long. You know what I mean?
--:-- Amy: Like, it's just fantastic. It will bring you there, but you have to be willing to stay in that space of "this isn't going to work, I don't know if this is going to work" because that will keep you grounded, at least in the possibility that it might work.
--:-- Amy: And I think it's overwhelming. The more I just listened to it, the more I'm like, actually, you're going to fill that shit up real fast.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It's scary though, of like what could come out.
--:-- Amy: It's totally scary. And that's why you burn it.
--:-- Amy: That's why you're like, you know what? I'm glad I don't have to keep that down there. That's what my sword is laying on top of. We don't touch it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yep. And no one looks at that. Nobody goes that direction. And that's okay. And nobody will. And that's fine. You're doing this for you.
--:-- Amy: Right? I love this. And Mel, you got to do this for you, too.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What? Like right now?
--:-- Amy: You know you do.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yes. Let's go.
--:-- Amy: All right. And Jesse.
--:-- Jesse: All right. I'll take the challenge, everybody. Let's do this.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So you're going to write on top of the paper: "How can this be easy?" Question mark. And because you're asking yourself a question: "How can this be easy?" I just wrote, "I don't know."
--:-- Amy: Good. That's a great start. That's an awesome start. If you want to write like, "Screw you, Amy. This is a dumbass question," write that.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Screw you, Amy.
--:-- Amy: Yeah. "I don't want it to be easy." Beautiful. "I'm so used to it being hard." Love it. "What if life were easy?" Oh, shit. Yes. Keep going. Oh my God.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. I'm going to keep going. I'm going to keep going. Jesse's going to keep going.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You get your pen out, get your paper out and you answer the question for yourself: "How can this be easy?" And when we come back, we will meet you out on the back deck with our Pyrex bowl. I'll get the matches. We're going to burn this thing.
--:-- Amy: Oh my God. It suddenly feels hard.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yes. And now a word from our sponsors.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. So before we go downstairs, I'd just love to hear: what did it feel like to write three pages of "How can I make this easy?"
--:-- Amy: I feel like I just flushed a toilet. That was not a very profound way to put it, but it just like a spiritual flush, man. Spiritual flush. Good riddance.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah. I feel lighter. How do you feel, Jesse?
--:-- Jesse: I feel like I just went through my own little therapy session. I mean, I started off really crying, writing it, like really afraid, not knowing what to write. And then I ended it with like, I don't know. Just the, it's night and day with my first sentence, my first two sentences versus my last two, which is really cool. I hit every emotion in that, which I did not expect.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Are you comfortable reading the first sentence?
--:-- Jesse: Yeah. I said, "Breathe, be still, be present, hug your husband, hug Myrtle, my cat, relax, trust your gut."
--:-- Mel Robbins: Why does that make you emotional?
--:-- Jesse: Because I need to say it more often. That's what I need to do. And just breathe, be still, be present, hug my husband, hug my cat. Those little joys I probably don't do them enough. I don't want to say "as I should" because I need to stop saying "I should," but just being still and being present.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It's so profound, isn't it?
--:-- Mel Robbins: And that was just the little things that we're not even present to because we're busy "should have done this, should have done that." We're not hugging the people we love. We're not greeting the cat. We're running out the door, on to the next.
--:-- Amy: I feel that too. Like just even as you said that, I didn't really hug my husband as I left this morning.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah. I didn't either. Shit.
--:-- Amy: I didn't either.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah. And that's an easy change. But you started with that with like literal hand shaking just because I didn't know how to start this, where to start. What is easy? It's easy to breathe. It's easy to be still and right now to be present with this pen and paper. How did you end it?
--:-- Jesse: I ended it very confident.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. I want to hear that.
--:-- Jesse: Yeah. If I can read just like, yeah, whatever you're comfortable with. I want to hear it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You know, around the holidays, even though I know you said don't read your papers.
--:-- Amy: Yeah, I don't, but that's before you burn them.
--:-- Mel Robbins: But since it's holidays, there's a lot of stress around holidays, just being with family. We don't live near our family and they've never been a tradition. So I just said, "It's okay to not be with family for Thanksgiving. It's okay to spend my first Thanksgiving in our new home together with FaceTime. It's all okay. How it is!" Exclamation point. "Stop putting pressure to make others happy. Are you happy? Yes. Be thankful for you and your language. Your new tribe starts now."
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. That is... I don't like, there's anger in here. There was frustration in here. There was doubt and it just comes out of like, "No, you're fucking happy. It's okay to be happy and not be pulling in the dark side because everyone else does it or it's easy to relate on the dark or that's all you know." That's all you've been trained to do and communicate that way.
--:-- Jesse: Yeah. I can relate to my mom so easy off of guilt and off of bad news. What if I don't have any? I find it. And that's what I will talk to her about. So now it's just, it's changed that language. Only present the good that I have a lot of that I don't give love to, whether it is my husband and my cat or it is just being thankful for myself.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It's beautiful. That is really moving that you start off in one place and that you end in another. And you end with the Jesse that you want to talk to.
--:-- Amy: What do you say?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, what's really funny is I had a very similar theme to Jesse. "Relax, just relax. Just be in the moment and relax yourself." A little bit about breathing too. I mean, it's a really similar idea.
--:-- Amy: Are you laughing? What about the end?
--:-- Mel Robbins: But the end is, as I often find the end to be when I do this practice, is like, "All right, I can do this." Now that I took my emotional, my, what did you call it? Spiritual dump.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I've got this and I can do this. And that is, I ended in the same spot about a totally different topic, but I ended in the same spot: "I can do this."
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah. Well, I started obviously with "I don't know, screw you Amy, the cat is pissing me off, this feels hard, he's peeing in the bathroom, he's peeing, he's scratching the new runner on the stairs, he's needy and loud in the middle of the fucking night, he draws Homer or Puppy over, leans in to sniff him as if he loves him, then fucking swats at him like, what a dick. Easy." Like, so I go on and on bitching about the cat.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And then by the end of it, similar stuff about the holidays. Cause I always deeply miss my family around the holidays. And yet I asked my folks to come and they said no, they wanted to be in Florida. And I asked them to come for Christmas and they said no. And it just makes me so sad. And so I wrote, "How can this be easy? Open the door, let love in, let them be exactly who they are and who they aren't. Just figure out what makes me happy and do those things. Take a breath. Tell yourself you're in a five-year experiment right now of healing, of happiness, and of creating a spiritual home base for yourself, Mel. How can this be easy? Let go. Stop gripping and just love."
--:-- Amy: Oh, holy shit, Mel. Oh, yes. That's incredible. That's beautiful.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Same thing was true about the cat because I realized I'm so pissed off at him and I need to come from love because he's clearly in distress. Something's up. He can't fix this himself. So I gotta rise above all of this resentment and anger that I feel and just shower him with love and help him figure it out. Because otherwise Chris is gonna kill him. I mean, he keeps peeing in the house. That was really cool. And again, I didn't think I could fill up three pages, but it just kept going. Once you really get into it, flush the toilet, flush the toilet.
--:-- Amy: Well, I'll tell you what I know from doing this. And this is just my experience. A lot of times you don't want to do it. There's resistance. You don't think you can do it. You can't fill a page. You don't want to talk about it. Whatever it is. And then once you get going, it's like the floodgates open.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I think about this like reprogram your mind. I think that it gives you a new thought to anchor on to when your old one sucks. And this prompt, "How can this be easy," forces you to have a new thought to anchor on instead of the old one, which for all of us, I'm going to say, is "What's wrong? What's not working? What's hard? What's the problem? What do I have to complain about?"
--:-- Amy: You know how people say happiness is a choice?
--:-- Amy: I always used to be like, "Go fuck yourself." Come on. But when I woke up this morning and I saw the two mouths, the happy, feel the joy, be content in your life, let love in. And then I saw myself pick up the sword and gut myself the misery. That made me realize at a deep level, yeah, on some level it is a choice.
--:-- Amy: You may not realize that you're speaking this misery language because it's buried in your subconscious and it's not really yours. It's probably from your family or whatever. But you can choose to change it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah. That's what I think the huge opportunity is here. We've talked a lot on this podcast about doing things that make you happy, prioritizing fun and joy. This is so much deeper because we're talking about choosing to reprogram your mind for happiness, choosing to rewrite the neuropathways. And by writing every day and then burning this shit.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Give your mind a different job. Your mind right now has a job of looking for what's horrible, cutting it down to make it the worst ever, like not accepting joy, not accepting happiness. That's the job that most of us give our mind. That's the job that I realized I gave my mind all the time. "How can this be even worse?" What's that getting me?
--:-- Amy: Well, and here's the thing. I don't think this is the wake up call, everybody. You didn't realize that your mind was doing this job. It's been doing it for so long. It just runs on repeat. So now it's time for us to take control. Put down the damn sword. Stop the campaign of misery. Pick up the fucking pen and write a new chapter for real. Train your brain to spot how things can be easy. Train your brain: "How can this be easy? How can this make me happy? How can I let love in?" Start writing a whole new way to think.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's what I'm going to do. Let's go burn this shit.
--:-- Amy: Let's go burn it.
--:-- [Sound of movement, footsteps]
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. So here we are on the front porch. Tell us what we do, Amy.
--:-- Amy: Okay. So you already crumpled yours up, which is great. I'm going to actually rip mine up because I just feel like that kind of gets out a little bit extra emotion.
--:-- Jesse: Yeah. [Ripping sound] See ya. See ya.
--:-- Amy: Yeah. I feel like a rip. Rip it up. Rip it up. So then I just light it, take a match. And then I just have a habit of standing back from it and watching it burn. And just saying to myself, "Let it all go. Just let all that complaining shit you don't need and the stuff you don't want. Let it be going out."
--:-- Mel Robbins: You know, it's funny. That kind of crumpled, ashy remain is what that black tar wave of misery actually felt like. That I felt this morning.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That physical burnt paper that's left in that Pyrex dish looks like misery.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's what I feel when I think, for example, about the kids all leaving instead of being present in the moment. It's sad. What are you feeling, Jesse?
--:-- Jesse: Very satisfied. I don't know why that happened so fast. And there's so much hesitation to write it. "How do I start it? How do I do this? This, this, this, this." And it was easy. Isn't that incredible?
--:-- Amy: That's right. It's easy. It's easy.
--:-- Jesse: And I feel so much better. If I do this again tomorrow, will I write most of the same stuff? Of course. I think a lot of it will be the same right now. But again, you keep burning it. Keep getting rid of it. It was easy.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What do you think, Mel? Yeah, what were your thoughts?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Seeing the physically burnt paper is very helpful for me because now I have like this image to attach to the thoughts and the feelings. So I can separate from it. Because I just want to be happier in my life. It's a lot of work to carry this shit around. And it's a lot of work, even though it's subconscious, to be griping and complaining and present to what's wrong and everything's hard. And that energy, it just, it's a lot. And it was pretty easy to let it go once I made a decision to.
--:-- Amy: It's the heavy thoughts, like you said, Mel, but it's really not. It's just that. They're just thoughts.
--:-- Jesse: Awesome. That was really cool.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, Amy, thank you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want you to do this exercise. And if you want to see the burning ceremony, we put up full unabridged episodes on YouTube. Just go to youtube.com slash Mel Robbins and you can watch what we just did on the front porch up here in southern Vermont where my kids will never visit. I'm just kidding. That was a joke. That was a joke, everybody. See? Put down the sword, picked up the pen. Mel Robbins is writing jokes, laughter, and happiness.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And look, I hope today was a wake up call for you. I hope that you saw where you pick up the sword and you fight for misery instead of the happiness that you deserve. And I hope that you not only got a wake up call, but that you got handed a pen and that you're going to write not only new neural pathways, but a whole new experience of your life being happier. And in case nobody else tells you, we will tell you. We love you. We do love you. We love you so much. I believe in you and I believe in your ability to put down the sword, pick up the pen and truly, truly experience the happiness that you deserve.
--:-- [Closing music fades in]
--:-- Announcer: Stitcher.
