I want to ask you about one final area of thought, because we were talking about it before, and I think a lot of our community does. I have to ask it because I just wrote a book called 8 Rules of Love, which is out next year. I talk about this in one of the chapters, so I'd love to hear your perspective on it. But the idea where you've been married for 26 years, right? Congratulations. That's incredible, and that's beautiful. In that time, you and your partner are going to go through different stages of personal growth, personal evolution, collective growth, collective evolution. Sometimes you're going to feel ahead, they're going to feel behind. Sometimes they're going to feel ahead, you're going to feel behind. Sometimes it's not even about ahead or behind. The question I have is, if someone Someone's listening and their partner, or even if they're not in a relationship, their friend. I was just speaking to someone the other day and they were saying, Yeah, my friend is a bit envious that I just landed in my dream job. I'm just meeting the guy that I... We always feel ahead or behind of the people that we're closest to, even if we love them and we want them to win, there's that feeling.

If someone's in a relationship, someone's got a friend that's feeling behind, or maybe they're the person who's feeling behind someone else, what do we do in that scenario? How do we support ourselves, support others? How can we think through that? Because I think feeling ahead or behind is never fun. Even feeling ahead is not fun.

When you feel behind, that's your insecurity. Putting a lid on what you believe is possible for you. So that's number one. Recognize that that's insecurity blocking you. And you can use that as a sign that, Oh, all I have to do is start walking toward things. The second thing I want to share with everybody is that it is normal to feel envious or even be somewhat of a jerk when somebody that you care about changes, and I want to tell a story to explain why. And the story, I'm the villain, okay? Which is basically the role I've played in my marriage. Poor Chris.

Chris is wonderful.

Yes, Chris is amazing. So Chris, a couple of years ago, decided he was going to completely stop drinking. And he went on this deep spiritual journey, and he was going to stop drinking for a couple of years. And he became a Buddhist meditation instructor and a yoga instructor and started his men's retreat business. I'll never forget. The first night that he was not drinking, I open up a bottle of rosé, I'm pouring a glass of rosé. Everything's great because I'm cooking. Great. The second night, as I'm opening up a bottle of rosé and Chris is cracking open, I don't know, like a Saint Croix, I'm starting to feel agitation. I'm starting to feel the campaign, the complaining, the this and the that. And I notice it, and I'm like, Don't say anything. The third day is when Mel, the villain, showed up. And I'm not proud to admit this, but I want everybody to hear this so you understand what's actually happening inside of your relationship. I crack open the rosé. I'm pouring my glass of wine, and I turn to Chris and I'm like, Come on. You want to have a glass of rosé with me?

And he says, No. I'm good. I said, It's like juice. It's like a jerk.

Give it to a four-year-old.

There he goes. Mel, I do not want a glass of wine. Stop asking me. I said, Okay, I'm sorry. It's just that it makes me feel bad. And this is when he said something that just... He said, Nobody cares what's in your glass but you. And if what I'm putting in my glass makes you question what you're putting in yours, then maybe you have some work to do. And it is easier, everybody, to question somebody else's change and even sabotage it because their change in growth creates a change in energy and ripples and changes in patterns that make you wake up and start realizing that maybe some of the things you do don't work for you. So when that friend of yours stays in to write a business plan, how many of us on a Saturday night are like, Oh, come on, you work on it tomorrow. Do you have to go to the gym today? Stay in bed with me. That's that same behavior Of dragging somebody to join in with you and pour what's in your cup. And so I want you to understand this is normal, and it's a really good sign because it means that your behavior is not only changing you, but is sending waves at somebody else that has just given them a wake-up call.

And most of us push against those wake-up calls. And that's what they're doing because you're very safe to do it with. And so that's something that's really important to understand. And I find that the best way to support somebody, because we all know we can't change somebody else, is you keep a laser focus on what you're Because the bigger the change becomes and the happier you become, the more difficult it's going to be for your friend or your family to ignore it. And the more it's going to stir up more things and eventually inspiration. And the best thing that you can do is ask leading questions. Do not tell somebody what to do. That is the worst thing you can do in a relationship or friendship or as a parent. Instead, literally, Hey, you don't seem happy. Is there anything that I can do to help? You don't seem like yourself. Is something going on? Do you need support in something? My favorite sentence on the planet as a parent and as a wife is, Do you need me to listen? Or would you like to know what I'm thinking? And nine times out of 10, my kids, my husband, the folks that work for me, they just want me to listen.

And so I think when you create an opening for somebody to to stop engaging in their own self doubt and their own very active and painful reasons why they can't join you at the gym or reasons why they're not going to meditate, or reasons why they're not going to join you in dry January, or whatever it may be, or the reasons why they can't... We all have a friend, I can't look for a job. I'm never going to find anybody. That's not true, and you know it. So create the space. You be the light on the path ahead. And when you hold your light high, earlier, eventually that jealousy and those excuses, it actually allows it to disappear, and you become part of the force that pulls them forward. And the other thing you have to understand is that there are going to be legs of your journey in life. And this is one of the hardest things, where people are going to pull off and take a different route. That's okay. They may come back at another time. That's okay. And the final thing that I wanted to say about this is it's a very simple exercise that you can do with somebody.

And this helps somebody who is either struggling with happiness and doesn't know how to get started or is struggling with confidence and is not able to take action or who is resisting the changes that you are doing and you would love to see them do. We did this with our daughter who is now 23, and last summer when she graduated from college, really unhappy. I mean, two years of college had been imploded, and she was extremely depressed and basically just drank her way through it and Graduated and was not happy. Big life change. Nothing was going according to plan. She had planned this huge trip to go to Cambodia and do a big service trip for four months. That wasn't going to happen. Just lost. And so Chris and I sat with her for a couple of hours, and then I said... And she's like, I don't know what to do. I'm 22. I'm stuck. I'm miserable. I don't even know how to start. And I said, I actually think you do. I think you're just scared. Take out a blank piece of paper. Draw a line down the center. On the left-hand side, I want you to write Happy Me.

Now, close your eyes and think about a time that you remember being happy or more confident or alive. It could be any word you want, right? And you might have to go back to childhood. Our daughter closed her eyes and she said it was senior year in high school. And I said, Okay, so write down All of the things that you were doing in a week of your life, senior year in high school. Just describe your life for me. I got up and do it in detail, everybody. I got up at 07:00 AM or 06:30. I was leaving I was in the house by 07:00. I was with my friends all day. I was looking forward to going to college. I was playing varsity lacrosse. I was exercising six days a week. I was only parting with friends twice a week. I was in a healthy dating relationship. I ate four dinners a night at home. Like, just great. Write down what your life looks like now. I sleep till 1:00. I drink every day. I feel like I don't see my friends because everybody's scattered now that we graduate. I don't have anything to look forward to.

My trip to Cambodia is canceled. I'm not exercising. Okay, compare the two. Your own life experience offers the map. And we want to overcomplicate these big words like happiness, I know I did for decades, or confidence. It's actually found in the little things. If you do this simple exercise of drawing a line down a piece of paper and you write down what life looked like in great detail. When did you wake up? When did you go to bed? How often were you friends, family? What were you doing for work, exercise? What were you eating? If you then compare that to what life looks like now, you now know what to do. And the fact is your whole life is the little things. It's when you wake up, it's the first thing you look at, it's what you do with your body, it's how you greet your spouse, It's how you talk to yourself. It's what you say to yourself when you look in the mirror. It's the mood that you walk in to work with intentionally. It's how you greet your animals or your roommate when you end the day. It's the tone of voice that you use.

That's your whole life. And if you were to just take the time and intentionally write down a few simple things that you do when you're happy in life, and you were to focus for the next seven days on just adding one of those in a day, you would be very surprised how getting some of the little things right actually starts to turn your life in a completely different direction.

So powerful. Mel, it's been an absolute pleasure having you back on the show. The Miles Robbins podcast is out right now. You can go and listen, subscribe, share. Please, please, please go and do that. Mel, I love sitting down with you. Today was that perfect balance as I was talking about of playing tennis, going back and forth, and at the same time, just getting some really practical, insightful advice from you on step by step, strategic, systematic breakdown of how to do things. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for being a dear friend to me and Radhi. I hope me, you, Chris, all of us get to spend lots more time together, genuinely, or even if it's not lots more time, but it's deep time together. That would make me very happy And I wish you all the best on defeating the campaigns of misery for yourself and everyone else in the world through your show, through your books on Audible, through your book in the 5 Second Rule, and also for helping me Start working on my campaigns of misery as well. So thank you so much, Mallet. Deeply appreciate you.

Very grateful to you.

I love you, Jay, and I can't wait to see you acting.

Yeah, now I have to... Now I have accountability.

So I want to offer another I've made, and I've made this with both Chris and with our daughter, Kendall. Chris, as he is running Soul Degree, which is Men's Retreat, and our daughter, Kendall, as she's writing music. One of the best things that you can do to help create momentum is to call out the teeny steps you're taking. I made a mistake with our daughter for a long time where I kept talking about the big stuff. Or I kept saying, But you're not writing songs, or this would make a great song, or play me something new. And she would go, Stop talking about this. Stop telling me what to do. Because when somebody loves you, they respect your opinion. And trust me, they know when they're not doing what they need to do every day. So you will support somebody more when you say, I'm really proud of you for the fact that you're very relaxed about this. I'm really proud of you for the fact that you're not beating yourself up, that it's not happened sooner. I'm really proud of you for marching to your own drum. I'm really proud of you for writing a song today and playing it.

That's freaking awesome. It Anecology the little stuff is incredibly powerful because the person has to push through so much of their own stuff that if you go, Oh, and you should do it this way, or, Oh, have you tried that? Oh, it'd be great if you do this. You're not actually building momentum. You're pointing out what wasn't done. And that was something I was guilty of for a long time, catching myself and trying to look for, Oh, what are they doing? And giving them that pat on the back, that hug, that high five, that verbal acknowledgement of the effort done, or even the fact that they haven't done anything, but they're thinking about it, that is worth it, too.

And the reason we do that, you know this, is because we don't give ourselves a pat on the back for doing something small. So we don't even acknowledge when we do something small, we're waiting and we're saying to ourselves, Oh, well, all you did today was go to the gym. All you did this week was go to the gym twice. That's not enough. And because we talk to ourselves like that, when someone in our life does it, it triggers us by going, Yeah, they only went to the gym twice a week, too. That's terrible. I couldn't agree with you more. I think I've had to be my own cheerleader for so much of my life and notice the little things that I've done and the little progress that with Radhi, I've definitely seen that, and she appreciates it where I'll just notice those smaller things. But I realize that any time I get triggered by someone's lack of growth, it's because I'm triggered by my own lack of growth. And I'm just reflecting that back onto them. I'm upset with myself for not going to the gym more times this week. And because they haven't, I'm now releasing that on them.

And that's been such a great way of going, okay, well, I need to be kinder to myself, too, for the little wins. Yes, it took you two years to launch this podcast, but there were things in those two years that you learned about getting to where you are now that you made so many steps of progress.

And that's why it's been so well. And also there are so many little steps about completing things so that you can create room. Yes. One of the other things I want to offer, too, is, yes, that tendency for us to jump in and be like, Oh, do you try this? Or do this? Or, Oh, and create this snowball. It does come from the fact that a lot of us are not encouraging of ourselves, but it also comes from a really altruistic loving space because you love this person so much, you want it so much for them that as soon as you see a tiny step forward, you're like, Let's do this, and you want to join in with them. And so it can come from both a place of your own lack of support for yourself as a default, unintentionally. But it also comes from a really good place because you're just so excited and you then amplify things and then they feel crushed Yeah. Because what they did do doesn't now feel like enough.

Absolutely. I love that clarification. I agree this both.

How do I use this energy exchange and my intuition to spot the things that are draining me dry and to let them go, push them off the branches, get them out of my life, thank them for their purpose and their service, but then get out of here because you need to make room for something new and better and energizing. Doesn't that sound good? Yeah, you better believe it sounds good. So let's do it. And one of the reasons why I want you to really focus on energy is because your energy doesn't lie. Just for a second with me, just take a second, whether you're out there walking the dog, or you're driving around in your car, or you're working from home, or you're busy doing a bunch of stuff, I want you to just stop for a second. And I want you to assess right now. What's your energy level? Think about a fuel gage in a car. Empty to full. Empty in a human being means you feel depleted, you feel burnt out, you feel checked out, you feel like your whole life is basically pouring energy into everything else. Full in a human being basically means that you're energized, you're excited.

You feel like the things that you're pouring yourself into you, your habits, your routine, the people you're surrounded with, the projects you're working on. It may be difficult, but it's bringing energy back into your life, too. Your energy never lies. We are energetic human beings, and I know that sounds woo- woo. We can get into the neuroscience on that on a totally different episode, but let me prove it to you. Have you ever walked into, say, a coffee shop, and the person that is behind the counter is having the world's worst day They are super grumpy. It doesn't matter how big your smile is. It doesn't matter how nice you are. They are like,. That energy actually impacts you, just like your positive energy can impact somebody else. Energy is contagious. And most importantly, when you hang out with your friend Mel Robbins, I'm going to teach you to start to pay attention to it, and I'm going to teach you to trust it. Because Energy is also tied to intuition. And we're going to get into this tool of how do you assess, is something giving me positive energy? Is something giving me negative energy?

Is this a relationship that is one way? Or is this something that gives me something in return? That is the tool we're going to talk about today. And what if the very next morning, you walk into the coffee shop and you're having a bad day? Like one of your pets is really sick and it just is really bumming you out, you're feeling really low. And the person behind the counter is just the nicest person on the planet. And they look you in the eyes and they give you a big smile, and they are really cheery and they compliment you. And they maybe even ask you, Hey, how are you doing? You're like, I'm not doing so great. Oh, I'm really sorry. Coffee's on me. How do you feel? You feel better because they poured their positive energy into you, and that lifted you up. Energy is contagious. It also always tells the truth. It's like a compass. In fact, a compass runs on magnetic energy. That's why a compass always points true north. It never lies. Your energy doesn't lie either. It's why you feel off around certain people. It's why if somebody texts you and you don't like them, you're like, Egh.

But if you like the person, you're like, Oh, yeah, cool. Energy never lies. So let's talk about how we're going to use it, okay? So I'm going to break the topic of letting go into two different types of situations. And in each one, I'm going to explain how to use energy and paying attention to the energy inside you, both that you're giving, that you're feeling, and that you're receiving back, in order to know when it's time to let go. So situation number one is super easy. And this is typically when it has to do with things or projects or a job or somebody who's really, really engaging in toxic behavior. This is the easy stuff. This is when you have a flood of negativity around something. I'm going to give you a bunch of examples of this, okay? So we all have a pair of pants that we're holding onto from high school or before we were pregnant or whenever that we can't freaking fit into. When you stare at those things, you're reminded that you can't fit in them. When you try to wiggle them on, especially after a shower, you feel terrible about yourself.

That is something that is an example. You need to let go of that. That job that you walk into where there is a pit in your stomach and you gripe about it to your friends, and you spend all this energy pouring into why you hate it and resist it. You need to find another job. That friend that does nothing but gossip and roll their eyes and drag you down and and literally is such a bad influence on you, you need to let them go. And what does that mean? Well, that depends on you. Donate the pants for sure. Start redirecting your energy from complaining about your job to directing energy to looking for a new one. I mean, just imagine. That's the other thing about this. Do you know how much energy and time and effort you waste, focusing on resistance and complaining? If you were to just What if you stopped complaining for a day about something that gives you negative energy, like your job, or your parents, or your boyfriend, or your girlfriend, or your roommates? What if you stopped complaining? Because that's negative energy pouring out, and you directed that same effort towards something positive, like fixing it or letting it go and creating something new that makes you feel good.

I relate to that because I think I've spent a lot of my life pouring negative energy at things that I didn't really like, instead of realizing, I needed to complete this. I needed to let this go. The roommate served a purpose two years ago. Not a fit right now, and that's okay. Time to kick the leaves off the branches. You know what I'm saying? Time to save myself instead of pouring everything into either another person or my energy into being upset and frustrated and disappointed. So when If you have things that are for sure 100% zapping your energy, or you find yourself complaining, griping, resisting, let go. And you can do that in two ways. Obviously, donate, throw out, delete is one. The other one is take all that negative resistance that you feel in you that churns and pour it into something positive. If you can't quit your job, for example, because you need to pay the bills, no problem. Instead of complaining, instead of feeling resistant, spend 30 minutes every morning before you go to work looking for a new one. Or spend 30 minutes every morning pouring positive energy into a hobby or a project or a side hustle that brings you positive energy.

And when you start to do that, you start to lift yourself up because you are now getting this reciprocal exchange by pouring energy and attention into something new and in something positive. And that's going to lift you up. And by the way, that will also change your experience of that current job that you hate. I know this because I've done it. I remember being right out of, let's see, how old was I? I was 30 years old. I was pregnant with our daughter, who's now 23. And we had moved to Boston from New York City, where I had been a public defender, and I love that job working for legal aid. And so we moved to Boston. I do not have a license to practice in Massachusetts, so I could not work for the public defender's office. I have to take the bar, but I've got bills to pay, so I get a job in this huge law firm. Working in a law firm is the exact opposite of being a public defender. When I worked in New York City for legal aid, I was in court five days a week from 8:00 in the morning till 5:00 in the afternoon.

That was my job. I was on my feet. I was negotiating plea deals. I was talking to witnesses and police officers and judges, going to clients, going to Rikers, All of it. When you get a job in a large law firm, you literally go into a high rise and sit in an office and write all day. It was the exact opposite of what I am wired to do. I knew the moment I got that job that I was going to hate it. For a year, I would get on the commuter rail, and I would commute in for 45 minutes, and then I would get off the commuter rail, and I would clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp, over to the building, and And then I would get in the elevator, and then I would take the elevator up to whatever, the 23rd floor, and then I'd clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp. I'd go into my office and shut the door. And from the moment I woke up every morning, I felt depleted. The closer I got to that office, as that train, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, down the tracks towards Boston, the more resistance I felt. I got nothing in return from that job.

Yes, I got a paycheck, and I needed it, so it served a purpose, but I was getting nothing of value back. Because when I looked at the partners in the law firm, I knew damn well that's not the life I wanted. I knew that this was not a fit for me. But I'll tell you, I made the mistake that everybody makes. Instead of recognizing that that's how I felt, instead of channeling all of that angst and resistance and uch into looking for something else, I I sat there miserable, and I felt depleted, and I felt awful. I'm going to confess this to you. I didn't even take the advice then. You know what happened to me? I got pregnant, and I had a baby, and I went on maternity leave. When I was on maternity leave, that's when, with distance from it, I was like, Okay, there is no way I'm going back there. No way. Now that I have escaped, there is no way I'm going back. And we've all had exes like that, right? Where you're in it for so long, you finally let it go and break off. And they're like, What the hell was I thinking now that I'm on the other side and I'm away from that energy suck?

I don't want to go back to the energy sucker vampire thing. What the hell? But when you're in it, that negativity vortex can keep you spinning and stuck. You convince yourself, But I need the money, but I can't do this, but I don't have it. And then you're so depleted from your complaining and the outpouring of energy and the wrong thing that you're just stuck, stuck. That was me. I get pregnant, I go on maternity leave. Holy cow, I I am free from the vortex of negativity. I've been let go, but now I got to go back. And so my husband Chris says to me, Look, I know you don't want to go back, but here's the problem, Mel. We have a mortgage, and we have a baby, and you will go crazy being home. And so here's the thing. You need to find a job. Your maternity leave ends in exactly three months. So that means you have 12 weeks to find a job, and you have to make $60,000 a year. That's it. And you know what's interesting? If you give a human being a problem to solve, we get pretty creative. And I'll tell you what, the night before my maternity leave, I not only landed a job, it wasn't for 60 grand, it was for 55, but that was enough.

And I walked in the next day and I let go. What do you say? I guess I quit, but they didn't let me go. I quit. But so what I'm trying to say is do not make the mistake that 30-year-old Mel Robbins made. Do not do that to yourself. Do not waste a year of your life spinning in that negativity energy vortex. Your body knows. Your spirit knows. Get rid of those pants. Push that project to the side that you don't feel inspired to work on anymore. Let it go because it is sucking your vitality dry. And I want to just remind you that we're talking about reciprocal energy exchange. That's why these situations of the pants that don't fit and the friend that's engaging in toxic behavior or the job that sucks your soul dry. There is nothing that you're getting in return. Nothing. In fact, what you're getting in return is more negativity. Those jeans in your closet make you feel bad about yourself. It's bringing you negative energy. That job that you're complaining about, that you go to day to day convincing yourself you can't leave, you can't find some la da da da da da da da da da.

It's bringing negative energy into your life. And so these situations are super easy to spot because there's no reciprocal value to the relationship. Relationship, or the pants, or the project, period. Now what I want to talk about is the more complicated situations. Those situations where it's not clear, where you feel guilty, where maybe you're in a more complicated situation. Those situations where it's not clear, where you feel guilty, where maybe you're in a more complicated situation. Taking care of an agent parent or a child that's struggling with mental health stuff, and it is depleting as hell. Or maybe you are really struggling with friendship or in relationships because you have old patterns of behavior that you don't realize or interfering with this free-flowing, reciprocal, give-and-take that really brings amazing things into your life. I'd just love to hear what did it feel like to write three pages, how can I make this easy? I feel like I just flushed a toilet. It's not a very profound way to put it, but it just Good riddance. Spiritual flush, man. Spiritual flush. Good riddance. I feel lighter. How do you feel, Jessie?

I feel like I just went through my own little therapy session. I mean, I started off really crying, writing it. Not really afraid, not knowing what to write. And then you ended it with like... I don't know. 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.

Are you comfortable reading the first sentence?

Yeah. I said, breathe, be still, be present. Hug your husband, hug Myrtle, my cat. Relax. Trust your gut.

Why does that make you emotional?

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. Do them more... Do them as often, I don't want to say as I should, because I need to stop saying I should. Yeah, there's that. But just being still and being present.

It's so profound, isn't it? Yeah. And that was- It's just the little things that we're not even present to because we're busy. Should have done this, should have done that, that we're not hugging the people we love. We're not greeting the cat.

We're running out the door. We're onto the next. I feel that, too. Just even as you said that, I didn't really hug my husband as I left this morning.

Yeah, I didn't either. Shit, I didn't either.

Yeah.

And that's an easy change.

Yeah.

But it was, I started with that with like, literal handshaking, 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. Right now to be present with this pen and paper.

How did you end it?

I ended it very confident.

Wow.

I want to hear that. Yeah. If I can read just like, all the last- Whatever you're comfortable with.

I want to hear it.

We're around the holidays, even though I know you said, Don't read your papers.

Yeah, I don't. But that's- Before you burn them.

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. Oh my god. Jessie.

Wow. And- Wow.

That is I don't... 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 I'm really 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.

That's what most of us are trained to do.

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. Now it's changed that language. Only present the 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.

It's beautiful. Yeah.

That is really moving that you start off in one place and that you end in another, and you end with the Jessie that you want to talk to.

What would you say?

Well, it's really funny, is I had a very similar theme to Jessie.

Relax.

Just relax. Just be in the moment and relax yourself. I don't know. Yeah, it was a little bit about breathing, too. I mean, it's a really similar idea. Are you laughing?

What about the end?

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... What did you call it?

Spiritual dump?

I've got this, and I can do this. I ended in the same spot about a totally different topic, but I ended in the same spot. I can do this. Wow. Yeah.

Well, I started obviously with, I don't know, screw you, Amy. I wrote, The cat is He's fishing me off. He feels hard. He's peeing in the bathroom. He's peeing on the floor of the locker room. He's scratching the new runner on the stairs. He's needy and loud in the middle of the fucking night. He draws a homey, our puppy, over, leans in to sniff him as if he loves him, then fucking swats at him like, What a dick. Easy. So I go on and on, bitching about the cat. Yeah. And then by the end of it, similar stuff about the holidays, because 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. It just makes me so sad. And so 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 myself, 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.

Oh, holy shit, Mel.

Oh, yes. That's incredible. That's beautiful. 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 got to 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 going to kill him. 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. Well, I'll tell you what I know from doing this, and this is just my experience, is 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 just the floodgates open.

Yeah, I think this is an act of... I think about this like, reprogram your mind. I think one of the reasons why so many of us love prayer or meditation or oracle cards or reading a book, the Book of Awakening that gives you a daily devotional, is that it gives you a new thought to anchor onto 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 else do I have to complain about? Yeah.

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, 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?

Well, and here's the thing. I don't think this is the wake-up call, everybody. You didn't realize It's 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 this 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. That's what I'm going to do. Let's go burn this shit.

Let's go burn it. You already crumpled yours up, which is great. I'm going to actually rip mine up because I just feel like that gets out a little extra emotion. Yeah, Jessie's feeling it.

See you. I just felt something like... I feel like a rip. Rip it up. Rip it up.

Wow. Look at how that just landed. This be easy on top.

All right.

So sometimes that happens, too. Sometimes you really get a message even in that. So then I just Light it. Take a match. I light Jessie's for her. And sometimes it's more difficult than...

Do you mean a hold your mic? Oh, thanks.

Wow.

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 gone. What do you do when it stops burning?

Like, I'm now worried about yours.

Mine? Yeah, I know. Sometimes that happens because mine's not lighting.

You know, it's funny. That crumpled, ashy remain is what that black tar wave of misery actually felt like.

You're right.

That I felt this morning. Wow. Like that physical burnt paper that's left in that pyrex dish looks like misery. Yes. 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. Yeah.

Oh, yours is smoking.

I know. I'm having some difficulty with mine.

Not really. It's just taking some Just taking a little time. Amy's burning hers. What are you feeling, Jessie?

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 is this. And it was easy.

Isn't that incredible?

It's easy. It's easy. And I feel so much better. If I do this again tomorrow, will I write most 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.

Chris will be out here in his ice barrel doing the cold flunge, and I will be doing the fire ceremony.

Yeah.

With my thoughts.

Yeah.

Putting the sword down. What do you think, Mel?

Yeah. What were your thoughts?

Seeing the physically burnt paper is very helpful for me because now I have 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. And the only reason that I'm not is because of this battle that I engage in. Right. And so that almost honestly looks like a burnt sword. It just put it down. And I felt the same thing you did, too, Jessie, that 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. That energy, it's a lot. And it was pretty easy to let it go once I made a decision to.

What is so heavy, and it's the heavy thoughts, Like you said, Mel, but it's really not. It's just that. They're just thoughts.

Yeah. Awesome.

That was really cool.

Well, Amy, thank you. I struggled with anxiety for 25 years, and I thought it was in the rear view mirror. I haven't had a panic attack about of anxiety, anything, really, for about five years. And boy, I woke up this morning, and there it was. And I think the fact that I woke up feeling so anxious, first of all, is really scary. For me, anxiety would always come in the morning, and it feels like dread, and then it immediately, for me, feels like, I can't do this. I can't do this. And the this that I'm referring to is everything. So I want to talk a little bit about what I'm doing to handle my anxiety and about the importance of emotional flexibility. So as you can see, I am up here in Vermont. It's absolutely stunning. No reason to feel anxious up here. And that's another thing about anxiety, is we make ourselves wrong when we feel anxious, and I just did that. So here's why I'm feeling anxious. I came I'm up here with my family because we've been quarantining outside of Boston for five weeks, and thankfully, everybody's safe and healthy. And we came up to my husband's family's house up here in Vermont, a place that I love because we thought a change of scenery would be super helpful for our psyche.

And we've been here for two nights, and I woke up this morning and I felt so far away from my normal life, that it scared the hell out of me. I'm physically far away, and it was a reminder of just how far away, emotionally, I feel from it and how much I actually am struggling, how I'm struggling to stay focused, how I'm struggling to work on my own, how I'm struggling to work remote, how I'm struggling to not be around so many people. And I think all of that came together and hit me this morning in the form of anxiety. Now, for me, anxiety is really suffocating. It causes me to panic. It makes me want to run. And so here are some things that I've been doing this morning to work through it. First of all, there's two ways I'm going to talk about emotional flexibility. One is being flexible with yourself so that when you feel something that's uncomfortable, that you're flexible enough to give yourself space to feel it, because pushing it down, denying it, making yourself wrong, it's only going to make that negative feeling grow. It's going to make that anxiety eat you alive.

And so I recognize that it was there. And what I do is I immediately say something. So my husband was next to me, and I said something to Chris, and he just listened. And he demonstrated emotional flexibility because he didn't make me He didn't try to fix it. He just let me have my reality, even though it's not what he's feeling. The next thing I did is I just got out a computer, and I just started writing and writing, and writing, and writing, and writing, and dumping, and something. And that helped a little bit. And so then I texted three friends. I texted Lisa and Gretchen and Mindy and said, I am really anxious right now and I'm struggling. And saying that and going back and forth on text with them was a little helpful. And then I started to pace around the house because that's what anxiety makes me do. I start to feel like a caged animal. And Chris said, We should go for a hike. And honestly, the thought of climbing a mountain right now makes me want to die. So I said, No. I I didn't want to exert anything. I just know I need to move.

And so instead, I'm going to go walk down the valley and do this five-mile loop that I really don't feel like doing. But I know I need to because I know that anxiety gets stored in my nervous system. It's triggered by my nervous system that everything right now feels far away from the life that I was living and the life that you were living. And that's why I'm so anxious right now. And so I'm going to move my body and move it out of my body. And then I am going to just practice having emotional flexibility and allowing the feelings to rise and fall and not do anything about it. So if you're experiencing anxiety for the first time, or if your normal anxiety has been jacked way or if it's coming back like it is for me, please be patient with yourself. Take deep breaths, get outside and walk, and by all means, be talking to your friends and family about what you're feeling. Because stored in here, it'll eat you alive. But when you start to speak about it and you start to move it through your body, you will move it out of your body and you will feel better.

I know in an hour and a half, when I'm done with this walk, I will feel a hundred times better. And I know if you pick up the phone and call somebody, or you start journaling, or you put on an exercise video and you move, You will move this through your nervous system, and you will feel back in control. I promise. I promise, I promise. I can't promise that it won't come back, but I can promise that you can make It disappear by taking those steps. When you look at the research around happiness, researchers have put happiness into two big categories. One is hedonic happiness. And hedonic happiness is, am I having fun right now? It's the moment to moment fluctuating experiences that you have. And let's go back to the metaphor. It's like the waves in the ocean. They come and they go. You can jump in, you can play, you can have fun, and then it's over. And then there is the deeper happiness, the eudemonic happiness, which is the sense of your life having meaning, of you feeling fulfilled and thriving in that life of yours. And it's important for you to understand that happiness has these two buckets, because I think what happens for a lot of us, and this gets to Andrea's question, is that maybe you have one type of happiness.

Maybe you're having a lot of fun on the surface, but life doesn't feel very meaningful, or maybe you're deep in it, but you're not having any fun. And so I really want to unpack the difference between these two things and why you need both before we jump into the three different ways that you can increase happiness in your life. And so let's go to another question from a listener named Rachel.

Hey, Mel. I have I truly love your podcast and all of your work. I have a very loaded question, and I know a one-size-fits-all answer might not exist, but I wanted to ask anyway. How can I truly be happy? How do I cultivate happiness? I read so many self-help books, read a lot about the effects of childhood trauma. I journal. I try to be conscious of my habitual thoughts and patterns and work to reframe them. I exercise. I'm always listening to inspiring and transformational content like you. I feel like I do all the things, but I still struggle just to be happy and to feel happy. And I feel very stuck in the same emotions. And I really want to change. I really want to enjoy my life. Do you have any advice?

Rachel, I so relate to you. And I want to just pass the mic to you listening right now. When Rachel said, I just want to enjoy my life. Didn't you get the chills? Didn't you nod along and say, Yeah, I just want to enjoy my life, too? This is really on my mind because I think that's the point of life, right? To really try to enjoy it. And one of the things that I notice can happen when you are in a period in your life where you're trying to heal, you're investing in yourself, in your personal growth. You mentioned that you're working on trauma. You're trying to dig out of some of the holes maybe that you feel like you fell into. You're trying to change your mindset. That's serious work. That was me for years, too. Here's the problem with having a big healing journey. You're not having any fun. I think about periods of my life when I was going through a lot of change, and I was working on myself, and I was doing everything that you're doing. Every book I picked up was self-help. Everything that I listened to was self-improvement.

I couldn't even remember the last time I read a fiction novel, or I went to a concert, or I went to a party. Everything got so serious because my focus became so serious, and my focus was about improving my life, improving my life, improving my life. And doing the work to change your life, it's important. Doing the work to identify toxic patterns that you have or bad thinking patterns that make you feel like shit. That's super important. But you must also double down on the fun while you're doing the deeper work. And so the first thing that I want you to do is I want you to set an intention that your number one goal this year is to have more fun, to invest in that first category hedonic happiness that researchers say is so important because yes, it's meaningful. Yes, it's fulfilling to do the hard work to change your life for the better, but changing your life for the better also means that you need more moments of fun in your life. I worry a lot about this based on what we've all experienced in the past three years. We've all become hermets.

It's hard enough to get yourself out of your house. But the other thing that's happened is if you're not going into work, if you're still working from home, you're also missing out on all All of the spontaneous stuff that happens when you bump into people when you're out and about. In fact, I can tell you a story. Just the other night, it was Sunday night. And as a bit of background, my husband and I had gotten some really awful news last week that a very, very close friend of ours suddenly died. Age 47, heart attack, gone. And I had been hauled up in my house ever since hearing the news. I was super sad, feeling down, and I hadn't left the house in days. And so on Sunday, Chris says to me, Mel, I made a 4:30 reservation at the Padel Tennis Courts, which is a form of almost like ping-pong that you can play, like pickle ball in the middle of the winter on these tennis courts outside with some friends. It was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to just curl up on the couch and suck my thumb and feel sad.

And We got into the car and the entire ride over, I was sitting there thinking, Should I tell Chris I'm pissed that he made this date with this couple to go play paddle? Should I tell him this is the last thing that I want to do? I kept saying to myself, Should I say this? Should I not say it? And then I would say, Don't shit on his parade. Just suck it up. It's going to be okay. We pull up. The sun's starting to go down. It's freezing. I've got a hat on and mittons on, and I'm grumpy, and I don't really want to be there. And then I see our friends, and I felt a little lighter. Do you know it took about five seconds of hitting that ball around for me to feel totally different? The truth is, I needed the fun. I needed the laughter. I needed to not be thinking about something so heavy. I needed to see people that I really like. I needed to do something that wasn't that serious, like working on myself or feeling sad or grieving. I needed fun. And getting out on that paddle court, it was fun.

And there's a part of me that is sitting here going, Mel, are we really having a conversation right now on this podcast about the obvious? That we need to schedule time to have fun? That we need to force ourselves out of our houses? That we need to break this habit of being isolated and lonely? Yeah, we do have to have this conversation, because I don't think you and I have truly grasped the extent to which our day to day lives and our happiness has been impacted by these past three years. I mean, even those of us who really enjoyed that period of lockdown, where we were trapped inside with our families. This new normal, this part of it, where we're back to normal, but we're not, but we're coping, but this situation, the loneliness and isolation, it feels like it's become everybody's new lifestyle. It's our new default. But this isn't just obvious, it's well-researched. Researchers have proven that the difference between people who are happy and those of us who aren't is that happy people prioritize doing things that make them happy. I know, it's so dumb, but I need the reminder, too. So now let's go back to my analogy about the ocean and the beach and waves and happiness.

And I want you to just imagine that you're sitting on the beach and those waves are rolling in and they're rolling out and there's a boogie board sitting next to you. At some point, you have to get off the towel and you got to run into that ocean, and you got to go play. And the fact is, it just takes one person to get everybody else to go. There's always that one person in a group of people at a beach who stands up first and grabs the boogie board and says, Let's go body surfing. Come on, guys. Let's go into the waves. And thankfully, this past Sunday night, for me, it was Chris. He was that one person. And look, being intentional about enjoying your life, about having fun, particularly during those periods of time where you're grieving, where you are going through Where's something difficult, where life feels heavy? Prioritizing fun is critical. But that's just one of the three things that you and I are going to discuss when it comes to getting intentional and amplifying up the 40% of happiness that is within your control right now. And if you're sitting there scratching your head going, Oh, my God, this is so me.

But Mel, I think I forgot how to have fun. Don't worry about it. I've got an entire episode that we did a while called How to Have More Fun, and I will link to that along with all the studies that we're talking about in the show notes. And so now that you and I have been playing in the waves and you understand that dragging yourself out of the house, to the beach, off the towel, into the ocean and forcing yourself to do things that are fun, that that is part of happiness that we cannot escape, you and I are now going to go deeper into the ocean. And we're going to talk about the two other elements that you can tap into to create more happiness in your life right now. And we're going to do that using more questions from fellow listeners of the podcast when we come back. Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins, and you and I are talking about what research says about creating more happiness in your life. We've already talked about the fact that researchers have identified two types of happiness, hedonic happiness and eudemonic happiness, both of which are critical to your overall feelings of happiness.

And we've talked about why getting intentional about having more fun is critical to you feeling happier now. Now we're going to jump into the deeper part of happiness, and that is the eudemonic happiness, whether or not your life has meaning. Because when you go through periods of life where life is monotonous, it just feels blah, you're on autopilot, you're not going to feel that happy. Just ask Jenna. Hey, Mel. My name is Jenna, and my question for you is, how do you truly find happiness in everyday ordinary life? I'm a mom of two boys, and I struggle most days with being as joyful as I was when they were very little. As a mother of three kids who are now young adults, I can relate to what you were saying about how you were joyful when they were little. I love that you use the word joyful because I want to go back to that metaphor that I introduced at the very beginning of an ocean and thinking about an ocean when you think about happiness. To me, when you go to the beach and it's a very, very calm day. There are no waves.

There might not even be a cloud in the sky. Boy, it sure is beautiful. Happiness is like a still ocean on those days. It's your ability to stand in that ocean and feel this state of presence and connectedness and gratitude to simply being in the ocean. I want to come back to something that you also said that I absolutely loved. You used the word ordinary. The reason why I think it's important for us to focus in on the word ordinary is we often make the mistake of thinking that happiness happiness is this big thing, this big burst, the big wave. And when it comes to the eudemonic happiness, the deeper meaning in your life that creates the sense of happiness and fulfillment for you, I want to flip this perspective. Because true happiness comes from finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. That's right. True happiness is actually pretty ordinary. And researchers have identified the number one factor in you living a happy life. And it is the most ordinary thing on the planet, which is why most of us miss it. And that's the quality and depth of your relationships. So let's unpack this. The Harvard Study of Adult Development is the longest in-depth longitudinal study study of human life that's ever been done.

I mean, this has been going on for 84 years and counting. And for those of you super geeks like me out there, this used to be called the Harvard Men's Study. So when you hear people talking about the Harvard Study of Adult Development, that's the new name for this. And it now includes three generations of people that they've been studying. The original 724 participants now include 1,300 descendants. How cool is that? And here's the thing about this study. This study followed people through their life, asking them all kinds of questions as people aged. And one of the reasons why this study is so profound is because it tracked people as they lived. Most studies have people looking backwards, which means when you look backwards, you often change the details. That's why the Harvard study of Adult Development is so exciting and so accurate, and the most accurate and important study of happiness that's ever been done. Not only because they have so much data and brain imaging scans, but they've also been studying people in real-time, tracking them forward as they're living their lives. Dr. Robert Walden Oetlinger is the fourth director of the study, and he and past study leaders have published these amazing findings that you and I can apply to our lives.

These results from the Harvard Men's Study, they've been replicated in five other huge huge global studies. I'm telling you all this because there's one singular conclusion from all of this data, all of this research, all of these fancy institutions, and it's this: good relationships Good relationships keep you happier and healthier. Good relationships make you happier and healthier. The single best decision you can make to improve your health and happiness is to cultivate what researchers call warm relationships. I know what you're thinking, Mel, what the hell are warm relationships? Well, from a clinical standpoint, warm relationships are relationships that don't cause conflict, and you feel positive emotions around the people that you have a warm relationship with. Said in a normal person's way, it's basically people that make you feel warm and fuzzy. That's what warm relationships are. I want you to stop and think right now. Let's apply the science. If you think about people in your life, I just want you to put two columns in your mind. Who would you put under the column labeled warm? They give you the warm and fuzzies. You get a text from them, you're like, Oh, yeah, okay.

You're excited to see them. You feel energized when you make plans. Now there's the cold column. These are people that put you on edge. These are people that drain your energy. These are the people that when they call or I text you, you're like, briefing for something. I can boil 84 years of research down to one takeaway. You want to be happier? Put all your energy into warm relationships, building them, strengthening them, spending time with those people in the warm column. You do that, you will be a happier you right now. And the second way that you can do that, by the way, prioritizing the warm, is spend less time with people in the cold column. You either need to stop hanging out with them because they're sucking your energy dry, or you got to put some effort into warming them up by forgiving them, or reframing how you see them, or working on your boundaries so that you're not triggered by them, and their negativity doesn't impact your happiness. So keep that visual of a warm and a cold column. And as you meet people in your life, you can immediately feel what they're like.

Are they warm? Are they bringing out Are you feeling the fuzzies? Or are you feeling on edge? Because when it comes to happiness, your happiness right now, not the I'll be when happy, the happiness that truly matters, standing in that deep end of the ocean, the quality of your relationship is truly the most important thing that matters. And I can explain why at an even deeper level. The reason why this matters so much, it is the number one indicator of a happy life. Good warm relationships, floating in that ocean with your warm buddies keeping you boiant. The reason why is evolution. See, positive or warm interactions with people. You know what that does, that warm, fuzzy feeling? Those people in your warm column, they make you feel safe. When you're around those people, you're not on edge, so your body feels safe. And the opposite is true when you're around people that you would put in the cold column, because when you're around negativity, when When people trigger you, when they put you on edge, when you feel like you can't be yourself, you're now in a stress response of fight, flight, or freeze. And this response to other people, it's wired in you.

Early Homo sapiens survived because their bodies and their brains, they not only encouraged connection, but they also signaled when somebody might be unsafe. You and I survived because we're social beings. So this is hardwired into us. And here's where it gets interesting. When you feel loneliness, your brain perceives that as life-threatening. And loneliness is not just about physical separation from other people. You can feel very lonely in a crowded room. You can feel lonely in a bad marriage. You can feel lonely in a toxic friendship. And if you're nodding your head right now thinking, Wow, maybe it's It's not unhappiness. Maybe the core issue for me is I'm lonely. Well, 75% of adults feel moderate to high levels of loneliness. And loneliness is about the quality of your relationships. I want to tie this back to evolution. Loneliness feels threatening because you're meant to survive In a tribe of people, you're meant to be connected with people that make you feel safe and warm. It's not only part of happiness, this goes down to your mind and body needing protection. And they've even proven that when life is really hard, when it can come at you in full on attack mode, when you're in survival mode, warm connected relationships protect you from the stress of life.

So how do you do this? How do you tap into relationships? It sounds simple, but again, make the column warm and cold, and then call your friends, text them, Arrange time to meet them. So when you feel a pang of loneliness, I want you to understand it's an alarm, just like anxiety. It's a signal that you're missing connection. Please do not ignore it. You may be surprised to hear that I felt this way for a very long time. I kept saying out loud, I'm not happy. I don't feel fulfilled. But when I dug deep into what was really going on for me, the core issue was loneliness. I was having fun. I was really busy. I was doing meaningful work. But deep down inside, I was really lonely. It may also surprise you to hear that it was during one of the most successful stretches in my career. I was on the road all the time. I was booked nonstop to give speeches. I was working on all kinds of projects with Audible. The business was booming. I was making lots of money. And I have never been unhappier because I was lonely. I was traveling so much, chasing success, chasing achievement, going for the next thing, Staying busy that I never saw my friends.

I barely saw Chris. I missed out on a ton of time with our daughters while they were in high school. It was just go, go, go. Now, I had a lot of fun on the business trips. I would laugh a lot. I was always traveling with colleagues, so I wasn't alone, and I was having fun in the waves of life. But when you talk about floating in the deep end of the ocean, I was profoundly lonely, and that meant I was profoundly unhappy. It can be powerful when you admit this to yourself, because when you realize what you're dealing with is loneliness, that helps you identify the issue you need to improve, which is you need to start reaching out to people. We underestimate the impact that simply Simply getting an unexpected text from an old friend can have on you. I mean, think about how amazing it is when you have a birthday and everybody on social media that gets the notification that it's your birthday, they come out of nowhere and they wish you happy birthday. It's like, that's unbelievable. It feels so good. You haven't talked to that person since high school, but it feels good to have somebody just give you a quick comment on your birthday.

And So if you're sitting around saying, I'm really lonely, but you're not reaching out, you're not calling people, you're not the one making plans or inviting people over for dinner, guess what? You're going to stay lonely. Because when I really looked in the mirror and said, I'm lonely. I need to do something about this. I never get invited anywhere. I don't see anybody. Well, I wasn't inviting anybody over. I wasn't making any plans. It starts with you. And look, it could be anybody. It could be friends, Friends, family, coworkers. All you need to do is identify old relationships or cold relationships or warm relationships where you haven't seen somebody in a long time and reach out. And by the way, it could be old relationships. It could be people you haven't seen in a long time. Just anybody at all that makes you feel warm. Start putting energy into talking, texting, commenting, and making plans to see them. And be careful of the cold people, because research shows that spending time with the people in the cold column, it can actually make you feel more lonely, and it even worsens your health to be around people like that.

And so you've got your friend Mel Robin's permission to stop putting energy into draining relationships, because that's only going to make you feel more lonely and spend more time with warm relationships. And And that brings me back to Jenna's question, because she mentioned, did you notice that she felt happier when her kids were little? I suspect that when your kids were little, you were probably part of mom groups. You saw young moms all the time, at drop off, at pick up, at playgroup, and you felt like you were part of something. You had more warm relationships in your life. That's a sign that you're just missing connection. I know I said it already, but I can't highlight enough how profound of a difference it can make to simply admit to yourself that you're lonely. That was the turning point for me when I realized a couple of years ago, holy cow, I'm unhappy because I'm profoundly lonely. I don't see Chris enough, so I'm lonely in my marriage. I am lonely in my family because I'm not around. I'm working all the time. I never see friends. And so once I said it was loneliness, that was the cause of my unhappiness.

I could do something about it. And you want to know the first decision I made? I made a decision that I was going to change my work life, that I was going to get off the road, that Oakley being in high school was like a melting ice cube. And once the time was gone, I was not going to get it back. And so I reorganized my entire career, my entire business, Instead of sitting on a plane, I'm now sitting above my garage talking to you in a microphone so that I can be home. And it took a lot of work, but I'll tell you what, realizing that traveling that much for work was making it hard to cultivate those warm relationships, that was a huge wake-up call. Because on the surface, it looked like I was having a great time. I was in waves. But I sure as hell wasn't when it came to the deeper stuff. I know what you're thinking. Well, Mel, at least you have friends to go back to. What if I don't have any friends or many friends? Well, I would say this. Here's where you can start. Part of warm relationships and happiness is also cultivated by social interactions, the tiny ones you have every single day.

Just talk to strangers. This is a great thing to do, by the way. There's a study that was done by the University of Chicago that you have no clue how happy a random social interaction with a stranger can make you. You inflate in your mind that it's going to be messy to talk to other people, but you underestimate the actual benefits of talking to other people. People who talk to strangers on a train or on a plane or at a bus stop or just at a coffee shop, they're much happier after they talk to the stranger, even if they don't think beforehand that they will be. You know who's great at this? My mother. I was just visiting my mom down in Florida, and when I was little, I used to think it was so annoying, but I now admire this about her. Absolutely everywhere we go, my mom talks to everybody. She talks to everybody about everything. She's constantly commenting on, Oh, I like that sweatshirt, or, Hey, how are you doing? Or, Nice day. And people stop, and they talk. And next thing you know, they've made a connection, or they're talking about a restaurant recommendation.

It's just amazing. And the energy is immediately boosted. And if you're not good at this, here's a great tip. Always compliment somebody's nails. If somebody is waiting on you or standing in front of you in line or you're sitting next to them, just compliment their nails. If you see somebody reading, ask them what they're reading and if they like it. That's a simple way to compliment somebody, to open up the dialog, and it always boosts the energy. And one of the things that I'm really concerned about, and I've talked a lot about this on the podcast, and I know the researchers at Harvard are concerned about this, too, and that's remote work. Everybody being at home. When we're at home, we miss out on these tiny social interactions with coworkers, with the barista, with the lady at the checkout counter, with the guy that you always see at the grocery store, with the customers that you're used to seeing come into the store. These tiny social interactions go a long way to making you feel warm. So bottom line, relationships, relationships, relationships. Talk to that stranger in line. Push yourself to reach out to people.

Text somebody every single day. And don't forget your family. You put family on the back burner, don't you? Because you think they're always going to be there. Make an effort. There's a lot of people in your family, maybe even cousins you haven't seen in a while, that you have a warm relationship with. I'm prioritizing happiness, which means I'm prioritizing the relationships in my life. But you got to push yourself. Okay? Let's make ourselves a promise that we're both going to do this because you got the research and you now know why it matters.

I was having a conversation unrelated to clutter. I was chatting with one of my girlfriends about another one of my friends who's going through a hard time in her life. And we were just talking about when you start, you start to take comfort. And I talk about this also with people with clutter. But so whether it's clutter or an unhappy marriage or whatever your dysfunctional workplace or whatever it is, sometimes we take comfort in this chaos that's in our world in that specific fill in the blank. And we We just almost feel like it's easier to stay in that, whether we tell ourselves that we don't deserve it or it's easier to just pooh-pooh it. Because then if you do say, I'm going to try it, then the scary part is what happens if it works? What happens if the change then does happen? If your identity is tied to feeling like the hot mess, or your identity is I'm the one that's always struggling on this, and you become that negative identity, the thought of change can be scary because It's the devil you don't know versus the devil you do.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

So I'm just saying, what do you say? What do you say to that person?

I would say it in a different way because I think I'm bitchier than you are.

Oh, I don't think so. Dawn has me clean it up for the show better. But no, I don't think you are at all.

But go ahead. The reason why change is scary is because your brain likes patterns.

Yeah.

That's it.

I love it.

I wrote it down when you said it. I like to take this into the lane of patterns, because I believe one of things that makes it very difficult for people to change is the problems feel so personal, the issues seem so big, The obstacle in your way seems insurroundable. And so you have this gigantic emotional reaction to simply trying new patterns. And I am trying to simplify it by saying, you're not broken. You have patterns of behavior that are broken. The pattern of behavior of not looking at your bills is a broken pattern. That pattern makes you feel broken. And so if you don't fix broken patterns by replacing them with new patterns, those old broken patterns will continue to repeat. I don't believe you are a hot mess. I believe you are trapped in a broken pattern that makes you feel like one. And I also don't believe that you're scared of being something else. See, I believe that But you deeply yearn to become who you're meant to be. I don't think people fear change at all. I think they are longing for it. And what you don't understand is that these patterns that you have from childhood or that you've repeated for whatever reason, these patterns are broken, but you're not.

And if you can identify patterns of behavior, whether it's You're not paying your bills or you are ignoring your intuition, and you keep dating and sleeping with people that you know you shouldn't, or whether that pattern is to go silent When somebody seems like they might get disappointed in you. If you can identify those broken patterns that are keeping you trapped, and then you go to work and fix them and replace them with patterns that align with your values, patterns that align with what you want, you will literally set yourself free. You see, I don't think people fear change at Well, they long for it, but they don't know how to do it because we have spent all of our energy saying, I'm broken. I'm a bad person. I'm a failure. Instead of talking about the patterns, this pattern of This behavior is broken. This pattern of behavior makes me feel like a failure. This pattern of thinking makes me believe I failed. I need to get rid of this broken pattern, and I need to start practicing a new pattern. When you focus on the patterns, you are now free to change your life.

When you continue to focus on labeling, criticizing, and victimizing yourself, you lock yourself yourself in a cage.

Well, you aren't your behavior. And I think a lot of times people identify themselves and full snaps for everything that you just said. And I think it's so true. I mean, obviously, I'm a big fan of your work. And I think there's so much value because I look at... There's a big theme of shame that I talk about that I see with people, specifically in the space of of clutter an organization. But you can apply it to anything, weight, finances, all the things, anything. But in my lane of clutter an organization, there's so much shame that I see people have that is just the power is on the stuff or the power is what they don't have, or the power is not measuring up, or whatever it is, fill in the blank. And trying to get people to see past that and how reclaim control over their space of their stuff, of their time, whatever it is. And the exhaustion that I see from people because they are struggling with calendar clutter because they are such ask people that they overcommit to everything. And so then they're not putting on their own oxygen mask or they're yelling at their kids because they're so busy being a million different directions that they have no margin for their kids.

And that may or may not have been me 15 years ago. And so you do all of these things or you buy all of these things or whatever it is to get all of this acceptance, or you think you're going to see this big reward at the end, and then you come up empty. I love that it just starts primitively with just that acknowledgement.

Hey, it's Mel. Thank you so much for being here. If you enjoyed that video, by God, please subscribe because I don't want you to miss a thing. Thank you so much for being here. We've got so much amazing stuff coming. Thank you so much for sending this stuff to your friends and your family. I love you. We create these videos for you, so make sure you subscribe.