If You’re Feeling Uncertain & Anxious, You Need to Hear This | Dr. Julie on The Mel Robbins Podcast

If You’re Feeling Uncertain & Anxious, You Need to Hear This | Dr. Julie on The Mel Robbins Podcast

[Applause] you’re not alone there’s nothing wrong with you just for having a hard time in life life is hard this white rice represents the population of the world okay so one in four people will experience a mental health problem at some point this year right and the wild rice represents that one in four but when you mix them up like that you realize even if you just take one little pinch of people so let’s say that’s the people in your life even if you’re lucky enough not to be struggling at this moment the chances are you’re going to be rushing shoulders with someone who is so you are never alone when you’re struggling someone else will be dealing with something there is such power in being able to recognize that what you’re experiencing is a normal human experience even when you feel like you’re the only one experiencing it at that moment you don’t have to judge yourself as not being enough or not getting this thing could life correct or right when you’re really struggling the best thing you could possibly do is this is wild we are so close to hitting 4 million subscribers on the Mel Robins podcast that number isn’t just a milestone it’s a sign of how many of you show up every week ready to learn grow and take action so if you’ve been listening and watching for a while and you haven’t hit that subscribe button yet Now’s the Time it’s free it helps us reach even more people and I promise to keep making this show better for you every single week hey it’s your friend Mel welcome to the Mel Robins podcast I am so thrilled to be here with you today and it’s always an honor always to spend time with you to be together if you’re a new listener I also want to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family and because you made the time and you decided to hit play on this particular episode here’s what I know about you you’re the kind of person who values your time and you’re also someone who is committed to learning how to become the best version of yourself and getting better at navigating life’s ups and downs and we could all get better at that myself included and if you chose to listen to this because someone shared this with you I think it’s an important thing that I want to acknowledge and point out to you it’s really cool that you have people in your life that care enough about you to send this to you and they sent this to you because they want you to have the experience of learning from The Amazing Dr Julie Smith and they want you to have the toolkit that she’s going to share with you and I personally couldnot be more excited to have Dr Julie in person today she is a world-renowned clinical psychologist a bestselling author of the mega Blockbuster bestseller why has nobody told me this before which has spent 109 weeks on the UK Sunday Times bestseller list she has impacted millions of lives with the content she shares online and now she’s taken all of that wisdom and poured it into her new bestselling book open when it’s a book that you open when things are going wrong it’s a toolkit for life that will help you handle the UPS the downs and everything in between because when life feels chaotic you deserve Clarity when emotions feel overwhelming you deserve tools that work and when you feel stuck you deserve a way forward and today you’re going to get it so without further Ado please help me welcome The Incredible Dr Julie Smith to the Mel Robins podcast Julie Smith is in the house welcome to the Mel Robins podcast thank you I can’t tell you how excited I am to be here I’m I’m a massive fan so thanks for having me well I’m a huge fan of yours and I am grateful that you hopped on a plane and you flew overseas to be here with us and I want to start by telling you your new book open when is absolutely extraordinary I am so proud of you I am so excited for the world to have this book I just before we even dive in I just want to read just even the table of contents because it is literally a Guide to Life I mean I want you to open this book when you compare yourself and come up short when your friends are not your friends when you want to be less awkward around people and these are all bite-sized chapters filled with things to do and ways to change how you think open when your inner voice is your own worst critic when you doubt yourself and want to feel more confident open when you’re overthinking everything when you have done something you regret I needed this book 30 years ago Dr Julie open when your anger erupts too often I mean who hasn’t struggled with these things yeah and that’s really the main idea behind all of the chapter titles came to me at about 5:00 a.m. one morning when I was just churning all of this over you know I was awake too early and I thought there’s just so many scenarios that we all face at some point right that everybody goes through but that none of it comes with any kind of manual or sense of what you should do about it and and all those situations leave you in turmoil you know sort of not knowing which way is up or you know often there’s emotion to deal with and it’s confusing and you’re not sure which way is through and I’m really that the whole idea for this book came from the first one so why has nobody told me this before was my first book which was all these kind of insights from therapy and things that you could spend time practicing to kind of build your resilience so that when stuff happens you’re better equipped right and uh I had these lovely comments coming through um some stories that were told to my mom actually saying we we find the book so helpful we’re keeping it with us so that when we’re in a crisis or a panic we can open the book and and see what it says and that was such a nice thing to hear but I could not get out of my head that I just didn’t write it for those moments you know if you’re if you’re in the thick of it and you’re in a crisis the last thing you need to hear is well you probably should have started practicing mindfulness six months ago because then you’d be equipped now what you need is someone to kind of grab you by the shoulders look you in the eye and say I know a way through follow me and and often that’s just a shift of your attention right it’s focusing on the on the direction that’s going to see you through and out the other side and and you know for me I guess the person that does that in my life for me is probably my husband Matt you know he’ll he probably doesn’t even realize he does it but he says the C no he said the right things that will just kind of shift me back on track and then I’m I’m back on um but even for people that you know lot of people don’t have that person in their life but even for people that do that person isn’t always there at that time and and I was thinking about gosh when my kids grow up and they leave home and you know what what could I send them off with that would see them through those difficult moments when I can’t be there to give them a hug and say I know the way through this um so yeah it’s the kind of it’s the one I want to stick in the suitcases of my kids when they leave home or you know send off to family and friends when when I can’t be there for them well I completely relate because when I read your book I thought I have to give this to all three of my kids because it is a manual for life and let’s face it life is very difficult and what I’m excited for us to do today is to unpack all these little nuggets of wisdom that are life skills yeah that are tools that you can assemble in a toolkit for life because life is stressful right now like if you’re not feeling anxious somebody that you love probably is if you’re not over overwhelmed somebody else is that you care about if you haven’t lost a job or are stressed out about the headlines somebody that you care about is and everything that you’re about to share that you’ve also beautifully written about in this new best-selling book open when are just tools and I love that you said that it’s the kind of thing that you wish everybody knew and that you almost wish people didn’t have to pay for yeah yeah you have been in clinical practice forever decade you have millions of followers who hang on your videos and are so inspired and empowered by them I would love for you to just tell the person listening how do you think about what you’re doing in your role as a clinical psychologist like if you just explained it in just plain speak how would you describe what you do for people yeah I I’ve definitely been swimming against the tide professionally because you’ve got the the the therapeutic stuff and and and the s clinical work but then moving that educational aspect of stuff out of the therapy room because I recognize that it’s not therapy skills it’s life skills and it’s stuff that I was Finding helpful my friends were finding helpful my family were finding helpful and a lot of these people that were coming along for therapy who perhaps weren’t at that more severe end of the scale they they didn’t have any sort of clinical diagnosis or they were just struggling to to deal with whatever life threw at them because they didn’t trust in their ability to be able to deal with the emotion that came along with it and they didn’t necessarily have some of the skills that you need to be able to move through that emotion or to deal with the relationships or moods or whatever it was and and so once people had that information they would just raring to go and and so I wanted to kind of get that out there and um make it more available to people and so that’s really what I’m doing is is is sharing the stuff that it’s it’s the the juicy bits that have come out of all this great and stuff that is used in clinical practice but we should all be using it because whether your problems are big or small it’s still useful and so yeah I’m kind of making sure that everyone is uh armed up to the hillt to deal with life because life is really tough Dr Julie what would you tell someone who feels like they’re the only person in their friend group or their family who’s actually struggling do you know we actually did a video on this quite a while ago but we used lots I’m just going to I pull these over here we use lots of uh rice just as this idea of um representing the population of world so let’s say the rice here this white rice represents the population of the world okay so you got all of this and one in four people will experience a mental health problem at some point this year right and the wild rice represents that one in four but when you mix them up like that and you give it a little kind of mix you realize that that one in four is huge number and even if you just take one little pinch of people so let’s say that’s the people in your life even if you’re lucky enough not to be struggling at this moment the chances are you’re going to be rushing shoulders with someone who is so you are never alone when you’re struggling because even though people you know you won’t be able to see it in this visual way that you do with the rice because people don’t often talk about it when they’re struggling but someone else will be dealing with something and so recognizing that we need to be kind to each other all the time Dr Julie why is it important for you to recognize that you’re not the only one like what benefit does it have on you if you are in a moment where you’re struggling there is such power in being able to recognize that what you’re experiencing is a normal human experience m even when you feel like you’re the only one experiencing it at that moment knowing that that doesn’t make you abnormal that it’s a normal part of the human experience that other people might have experienced at some point even if they’re not going through it now means that you don’t have to judge yourself as not being enough or not getting this thing could life correct or right normalizing something helps you to take the Judgment out of it and start looking at it with curiosity the other thing that I love about it and this visual is so helpful is that there are going to be times where I am the wild rice that’s going through something yeah and then there’ll be times that I’m the white rice and things are okay and also understanding that we swap those positions in life I think gives you perspective that where you’re at right now if you’re struggling isn’t where you’re always going to be yeah absolutely that it changes and it’s temporary and those those thoughts are so simple and yet so powerful because if you know that something is changeable and that sometimes you’re okay and sometimes you’re not and that’s a normal human experience then you’re able to accept it and allow it to pass over you in that way and it also gives you the motivation and hope that if you do use the tools that you share with us that you’ll pass through it a little quicker yeah there are absolutely there are so many things you can do to help bring yourself back to to Baseline and and to prevent it from happening so much of the time or to prevent those emotions from being so intense you know lots of skills you can do um that you can learn and get better at that that help you do that well that’s why I’m so glad that you’re here because I think that you know you hear the word mental health and you s think something big and scary but no you can struggle with friendship you can struggle with loneliness you can struggle with not having a direction in your career you can struggle with money there’s so many things in life that cause you to doubt or overthink or feel down about yourself and I’m so excited to dig into the tools Dr Julie as a clinical psychologist you say that everybody deserves to have an emotional toolkit what does that mean there’s loads to that depending on what you’re facing at any given point and I would kind of break it down into there are certain things where where people Struggle No matter what the details of your problem is and what life’s throwing at you a lot of people struggle with okay emotions so people will often come into therapy you know diagnosable or not people will come into therapy and they’ll say you know I’ve got these feelings that I don’t want to have I’m having too much of those and I’m missing a lot of the nice pleasant ones that I used to have more I would like some of those back please so a lot of it is a sort of there’s um some skills around emotion regulation so there are things you can do to uh help you regulate the the negative emotions not make them disappear so that there’s a learning about okay emotion is normal human experience and it’s information it’s not something that’s wrong with you if you experience sadness or anger or you know anxiety it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong with you it’s a normal part of Human Experience so often what we do in therapy is we take the Judgment out of it and we look at it with curiosity instead all emotion is information it has something to tell you usually about what you need or what’s going on around you so there’s this kind of shift around you know um emotion regulation and learning about emotion um but then there’s also stuff about thoughts that people struggle with with thoughts so you know all this stuff online about you know only positive vibes and don’t have negative thoughts and and that really sets people up to feel like they’re failing because inevitably they have negative thoughts they have judgments they have self-critical thoughts and when they have them they then think they’re failing at being a positive person uh whereas often what you would use in in therapy that’s really help and I use this all the time is the idea of kind of thought diffusion where you get yourself a bird ey view of what’s going on in your head and you kind of look at the pattern of okay these thoughts are coming in and those thoughts are coming in and these are all possible perspectives that I can take on this but I have the choice so it’s this idea that your attention is like a spotlight and if all your kind of thoughts were actors on the stage you’ve got control of the spotlight so what most people try to do is scramble up onto the stage and pull actors off the I don’t want to think that and I don’t want to have that thought cuz that’s horrible and I just want to think this and and you can’t control it right but what you do have is the spotlight so all these different thoughts will be coming into your mind and and you can just choose what you’re giving most of your time and attention to and that will impact how you feel um you don’t have to eradicate those other thoughts there are other possible scripts that you could listen to but you get to choose which ones you give the Limelight to well and what’s great about the way that you’re framing this because you’re now talking about teaching us skills around managing emotions and feeling emotions and not being scared of emotions and processing them and Tools around understanding the way that your thoughts are shaping your experience and learning the skill of choosing what you want to think about or how you want to think about things and we’re going to get into those we’re going to take the rice away right now through the magic of editing and then I’m going to jump right into the next question so Dr Julie you’ve been very open about your recent cancer diagnosis can you use that as an example of a situation where life sucks yeah things happen yeah and how you were then using this toolkit that we’re going to unpack for the person that’s with us to navigate through that situation that just happened yeah do you know what I um and I’m generally not that public about my personal life a lot but I the reason I kind of shared about that was because I knew there would be other busy moms and dads like me who were tempted to put their own health on the back burner so you know that’s just something I would say to anyone out there who is listening who has any kind of Health concern and is tempted to wait and put it off until they’re less busy because I did I was six weeks away from handing in the manuscript to open when and discover a lamp in my breast and I thought should I just wait until I got this book off my desk desk before I go and I you know I’d had Lun some months before I knew it wasn’t a great nice process and I thought do I have the mental capacity for this right now and you know lots going on but in the end gave myself a bit of a talking to and thought that’s a stupid idea went and got the tests and time was my greatest tool so um my greatest weapon against this thing and now I’m fine but um so anyone out there who has a kind of Health concern and is tempted to put it off don’t just just do it and um so yeah I I got diagnosed then so I that was about six weeks before I handed the book in then I got diagnosed um I was about a week or two away from handing the book in so I was at that stage where I was kind of reading through editing polishing things up ready for my Editor to see it and I just happened to be reading through the chapter on when fear shows up isn’t life funny oh my goodness and I kind of I read it and I thought this just isn’t the kind of words I need to hear right now it was very gentle and um a lot of people like that approach but I just thought I need something much stronger here so I hit delete and I sat there and then rewrote the whole thing it was very much a shift in language that when when something like that happens and life throws you a massive curveball like that you’re so you’re faced with the prospects of your own mortality the fear is just catastrophic right you I was like a rabbit in headlights that’s what I felt like that I was just stunned and because you don’t find out everything at once either you you don’t sort of find out and then find out what the treatment plan is and what the prospects are you you you find out in bits and pieces so there was so much uncertainty um and I did not want to feel like the prey I I didn’t want to feel like I you know was trying to work out which way to go and and um so I I kind of used the power of that language to write myself you know each chapter begins with a letter from me so I wrote this letter to myself and it’s very much a sense of you cannot control the fact that fear is here right but it can help you to move through this thing it’s now your responsibility to cultivate that courage to to move through and out the other side and um and there was lots of language around becoming the Predator instead of the prey and there’s this fundamental difference between those two right so that prey is darting around just avoiding threats and pitfalls and trying to survive it whereas a predator is H you know has a goal has something in its sides and it’s on the front foot and and uses you know all that drive and that action to make something happen and so I thought right yeah this cancer isn’t coming after me I’m coming after it you better watch out and I felt fundamentally the situation was the same but I felt fundamentally different in terms of how I was dealing with that I wanted to be on the front foot and I wanted to be act and actually the the quote at the beginning of the book it was never going to be in the book but it um I I had to put it in in the end because it was so fundamental to my experience was get busy with life’s purpose toss aside empty hopes get active in your own rescue if you care for yourself at all and do it while you can and it it kind of makes me emotional just um even saying it there because it takes me back to that moment of I had it on a Post-It night that was on my desk and every time I read it I felt that drive that kind of Fire in my belly to do something that was active in my own rescue so and I feel like it reflects everything this whole journey and all those people I was with in therapy who felt that they were at the mercy of their emotional experience even you know not it doesn’t have to be those kind of extreme experiences but normal emotional ups and downs relationship ups and downs you know they can feel so just chaotic can’t they and often that chaos is I don’t trust myself to be able to cope with whatever comes up and that’s what fundamentally changes when you change the language and you you choose to focus that Spotlight of your attention where it is going to be most helpful to you so that you can have this vision of as I move through this and as I get out the other side I want to look back and be so proud of how I dealt with it and have that as your vision for how you’re going to move forward rather than the darting of the you know the rabbit in the headlights ah which way is left which way is right you know I I wanted to have that absolute focus and um and it really worked for me well Dr Julie I think it’s a unbelievably relatable story and you know I’m thinking right now of friends of mine who are sitting in a hospital and they have a loved one who is waiting heart surgery and you know it’s just like every day holding on to hope and even thinking of friends who just lost their job and that whole flip from feeling like the prey yeah where something’s coming after you and you have nothing that you can do versus that flip to no I’m going to be the Predator yeah I’m going after it that that is an example of the kind of tools that you are so brilliant at giving to people in your private practice to giving to All of Us online and I can see how that’s already going to help somebody whether they’re dealing with a breakup or they’re dealing with like just that sense of helplessness no that’s what a prey feels like we’re going to think like a predator and I think the key there is that the fear is still there right we’re not we’re not eradicating the fear we’re not making you feel like everything’s fine but it was a way that helped me to get through it the idea that I could use fear to my advantage I didn’t have to make sure it had disappeared before I did something useful um that could help me move forward it just changed every it felt fundamentally different well it is because I think we’ve all heard the like use the fear and do it anyway or like let the fear fuel your and like what does that even mean but if you then turn it into a tool and say no no no no you’re either the prey or the the Predator yeah choose yeah and that helps you process the fear which is a mentally healthy response to a cancer diagnosis or to a breakup or to a job loss but it helps you process it and then use it to your advantage yeah which I I just absolutely love for somebody who’s feeling extremely overwhelmed right now with a situation in life or maybe they’re grieving something a relationship that’s over or they’ve lost somebody do you have any other tools that you would recommend for what processing those emotion mean in that context yeah yeah because I think it’s key here that I I’ve never wanted to give the impression that I then didn’t have some pretty dark moments in that right that I’m human just like everybody else and so so dealing with something um in that way uh doesn’t mean that you you don’t feel overwhelmed at time so you know I had those moments and the way that I deal with those sort of big emotions and that overwhelm was to allow it to be there and to recogn you know I’ve sat in so many rooms with people and just helped contain those feelings and helped people through them not to eradicate them but to sort of hold their hand as they experience it so I I talk about that in the book actually this idea that your inner world is a bit like a saer there are benefits to being there but only if you don’t stay too long so you know when you’re really struggling the best thing you could possibly do is reach out to a human being that you trust and connect in that moment because they will help you to kind of regulate that emotion um but if you don’t have someone there in that moment being uh being sort of in a position where you’re not trying to numb it you’re not trying to push it away You’re Just allowing it to wash over you then that’s exactly what it will do and I I did a video ages ago about the idea that um if if you stand in the ocean up to your waist right and the waves are coming and when when the wave comes they kind of it lifts you off your feet a bit so imagine if you try to hold back one of those waves you’re going to end up taking a tumble and mouthful of water and it’s not going to be pretty but if you accept that those waves are coming and then you do something different right so maybe you turn to the side or you brace yourself and B your knees so that when you do come off your feet you’re going to land again and in the acceptance of that sort of emotional wave coming you’re better prepared to then deal with what it does to you and it will naturally pass without causing you too many problems and that’s really what emotion does if you can kind of soothe your way through it knowing that it’s temporary knowing that it will even if it goes away and it comes back again you can do that again and again and on repeat and uh and and listen to what it says you know at that point when I felt that overwhelmed it was telling me I was scared about what was going to happen to my children um and what was going to happen to me and what the future held and and how sick I might become and all those kind of things and uh I didn’t have the answers to those things at that in that moment and so the fear was there and that was okay and um and then we focused on okay what’s the next step that I need to take in order to move keep moving through it so that’s almost an example of another tool is visualizing yourself in an ocean yeah and understanding that when the emotion Rises of overwhelm or grief or anger or sadness or fear of whatever yeah just let it rise yeah and visualize yourself kind of letting it fall yeah you know another thing that you write about in open when is just kind of chronic comparison and we look around at the world around us and then we tell ourselves I’m less than I’m never going to make that money I’m never going to be this I’m never going to be that nothing ever do is right and you’re using comparison as a a way to beat yourself down and you have this quote in the book that I freaking love resentment is not a reflection of what the world owes you it is a sign of what you need to work on what does that mean so for a lot of people when when they feel resentment the the tendency is to look at the person who you feel is making you feel that way right that that they’re doing something wrong or they’re overstepping the Mark or they’re breaching your boundaries and and again for me that’s very prey rather than Predator right that’s the sense of you know it’s being done to me and and therefore uh I don’t have control of that feeling and resentment will just destroy your relationship if you allow it to continue and the only real way to kind of respond to resentment is looking at what it’s telling you and it’s often that you’ve not been putting healthy boundaries in place to to prevent that or maybe it’s a gratitude problem so another sort of real great remedy for for resentment is gratitude and looking at you know maybe maybe you’re being hard on the other person and maybe you’re you’re taking them for granted and maybe there’s other things to feel grateful for in that relationship but often it’s that sense of you’ve allowed certain barriers to be breached or certain healthy boundaries to be breached and walked over and then you’re going to be bitter about it as opposed to taking responsibility for holding them up and and doing the really difficult thing but the thing that’s going to create that kind of healthy experience in your relationship again based on the millions of people that follow you and your own private practice can you give me an example of how that works like something that people write in are really struggling about comparison or whether it’s their body to somebody else or that they’re not married yet or just something that you’re seeing a lot of so that we can ground that advice and an example do you know what something I see um a lot of not necessarily in therapy anymore but just in real life um is when people start to compare themselves to the wrong people so when you start to compare yourself to your friends and it just destroys the Friendship because you set yourself up where you could have been a team and and the two people that walk through life together and support each other suddenly you put a scoreboard between you which means that their victories mean some sort of loss for you and uh and vice versa then you can’t share your personal victories because they see it as a threat and so then your conversations are censored between you there’s things you can’t say there’s you know or even when you’re telling them about um something that’s gone wrong for you or something hard that you’re dealing with they then you know that’s a bid for connection right a bid for support but they they’ll come back with oh well I had something worse you know and and so suddenly you’re in this competition with with the person who you’re supposed to support and they’re supposed to support you back and so anytime that you compare yourself to someone that you’re in a decent relationship with is bad news and and that’s a lot often what I talk about in the book about the social comparison stuff is online people would tell you just stop comparing yourself to other people and that is impossible right because we’re human beings often the problem is not that you’re comparing it’s that you’re making the wrong comparisons that’s going to lead you down the wrong path how do you stop yourself from doing it so if comparison’s normal and you say because I was really intrigued like you’re making the wrong comparisons who are the right comparisons too so let’s say uh you you want to um get better at something right so let’s say you you know you want to do better at tennis then comparing yourself to you know one of the greats is when you’re just starting out it’s probably really unhelpful but also what you want to do is compare yourself to someone who is going to help you get to where you need to go so let’s say you want to improve your backhand and there’s someone at the local Club who does that really well and they might be a few steps ahead of you in your in their Journey but what you can do there is is you can look at that and learn from that what they do well so youve got to be really concrete it’s got to be very separate so not comparing personalities or types or self-worth you’re comparing something that is actually going to be helpful for you in your path with what you want to do well at so you can see how that could be a great learning experience of course and I love that you said be specific because if you’re saying who’s somebody that’s a couple steps ahead and there’s a specific thing that I want to get better at yeah and when you compare to somebody like that in that narrow framing yeah now it becomes a tool instead of it becoming torturous to you when we can use that sort of ability to compare in a way that’s really constructive then it can really go places and and your life starts to shift in this really positive way so Dr Julie when you have somebody come into your practice or write into you online and they’re having trouble just being with other people very shocked very introverted like feel very awkward around other people what are some tools and strategies that you recommend this is kind of um quite a personal one for me really because I remember I was such a shy child right you know I said about it read a lot it was mostly because I was the shy quiet one in the corner nobody would ever have dreamt that I would do stuff like this including me and I even remember when I got to clinical training and I’m sat in a room with someone and I’m being assessed doing an assessment of that person s oh and I remember thinking in that moment why why have I chosen this career I I hate talking to people hate being looked at by other people and here I am doing both at the same time and then the idea of putting stuff out there publicly only started because it felt like a nice thing to do never imagined it would turn into something where I was doing live TV or radio and I was terrified of doing that stuff and in all honesty I had to keep doing it because I felt that I had to practice what I preach about how if you if you struggle with with being around people or talking to people or public speaking or whatever it is you have to spend time doing it you know if you want your confidence to grow you have to be able to go where you have none and to be able to sit there for a while and be willing to be the beginner and stick with it and look after yourself when it doesn’t go well that was key I think with the uh going on live TV and things like that the only way I was really willing to do that was if I fully committed to myself that I would have my own back if it all went wrong you know if I tripped over and flashed my underwear to the nation whatever I was not going to kick myself when I was down you know I I was quite a sort of academically and things like that I guess I was always quite hard on myself and you know that highly self-critical stuff was probably quite there when I was younger but I had to say there was no way I can do this and be this vulnerable if I’m going to speak to myself like that just not a chance uh so I had to be fully committed to being in my own head being like a coach so someone who would uh have the absolute my best interests at heart the whole time not speak to me like I was you know a piece of and and and treat myself in a way that you know a coach would treat an elite athlete to say you know when you’re down this is how we get back up and we move forward you have this quote it’s not so much that the socially confident have worked out how to awkward moments it’s simply that they barely focus on trying to avoid them at all sometimes focusing only on what you’re trying to avoid leads you straight to it yeah and so if you have somebody that is listening right now and this is really like an issue like I feel awkward around other people I’m not good in big groups I don’t like to like put myself out there what assignment or what would you tell them if they were sitting across from you because that person might be listening right now what do they actually need to do yeah well I guess there there two things here that one is that you take your time you don’t start with the scariest thing any type of fear that you’re tackling what we would do in therapy we create um a scale so we would list all the things all the different situations that are scary with the least scary at the bottom so maybe if it’s a social anxiety thing maybe the idea of saying hello to that person at the local store when I pick up my paper or whatever ever fills me with anxiety but I know I could do it if I really tried uh that would go at the bottom and there may be a sort of 100% worst case scenario is I’ve got a speak at a friend’s wedding or something like that and there’s loads of scenarios in between that are all slightly tweaked and slightly different that you might think are more or less scary and you don’t start at the top you start at the bottom so you start with a thing that feels kind of manageable but a challenge and and you repeat it as much as you Poss possibly can because what you do is is everything that’s new and novel you will get this hike in your stress response so your brain is saying we’re not sure about this Anything could happen so we’re going to increase your level of alertness so that you’re ready for anything and that’s really what it is that’s what’s happening you’re getting that level of alertness so that you can cope with it but you experience that as stress so it’s uncomfortable and so if you’re tackling those scenarios what we often get people to do in uh when they’re in it is focus on that idea that your attention is a spotlight and you have control of that okay so I’ve now pushed myself to go to this networking meeting I did not want to go I hate small talk I’m feeling awkward I’m now standing in that semicircle yeah with like four people I’m keep staring at people’s shoes and I’m thinking this is horrible I don’t know what to say like so the how do I use the spotlight tool right now so when you’re when you’re socially anxious your focus will be inward it will be on how are other people perceiving me am I standing funny am I fidgeting am I saying stuff right how am I coming across and it will be all this kind of inner turmoil stuff that just keeps triggering more and more anxiety whereas someone who is confident and not socially anxious will not be focused inwards on themselves they will be focused on the other person and trying to get to know them or find stuff out about them and actually I’ve sat in rooms with people um who’ve really struggled with um anxiety and paranoia and and we’ve had to have kind of big care meetings with all their different professionals and I remember sitting with someone and getting them to take notes about what the plan was and so all that was was a a focus of that Spotlight of attention so rather than thinking who’s who’s looking at me who’s thinking what it was um who’s just said something that is part of the plan let me write it down and you just take control of that Spotlight of attention and then what you do is you get this experience that it can go well it can go okay and I can I can practice where I focus my attention and it influences how I feel and that is the superpower starting to really open up this idea that I can take control of this one thing in this scenario and it influences the feeling or it makes that feeling slightly more manageable so it doesn’t take it away it still might always be a little bit awkward a little bit uncomfortable the self doubt might always be there in a little way but you know what to do with it and and that’s the key is you’re not trying to take it all away You’re just showing yourself proving to yourself through action that you can do something with it you know what I love about that reframe is that you literally just so skillfully said if you’re focused inward you’re going to feel anxious yeah but you can take the spotlight and focus on what are the other people saying yeah am I listening what are they wearing can I give a compliment and now of a sudden you’re using this tool to be able to navigate the situation and when you end it it might not be incredible but you got yourself through it yeah and that’s the cool thing yeah and every time you get yourself through it your brain clocks another bit of evidence that you can that even when it doesn’t go really really well you survive it anyway yeah and that’s what you need is your brain Lars through evidence of action so you’ve got to kind of um build up as many of those experiences as you can and then you know confidence is a sort of byproduct of doing that on repeat as as much as possible um you know one section of your book open when is when you’re really hard on yourself and you’ve done things that you regret and we’ve all been there but you cannot like you’re really struggling to forgive yourself what are some tools and strategies that you recommend when you have a real when you’re just really hard on yourself yeah I think looking at your relationship with failure is huge and and a a real game changer actually you when I talked about this idea of you know going on live TV and it being terrifying and and that I needed to commit to looking after myself it was really that was a shift in my relationship with failure that I committed to looking after myself in the face of setbacks and humiliation and failure that might happen uh that if you’re if the inside of your head is not a safe place to be how are you ever going to take risks how are you ever going to move forward if you know I talked some one of the things I used to talk about in therapy when people were highly self-critical is is this idea that imagine if I was going to lock you in a room for a whole year so 247 for a whole year you couldn’t come out and in there I was going to put your high school bully the worst person you can think of from from your early days and you’re going to live with them 24/7 for a year how might you feel when you came out horrid you beaten down scared like I like my first thing that I thought was my God I guess I better figure out how to be friends with this person or else they’re going to destroy me yeah yeah so someone who just hammers you all the time all the time you’re never going to come out of that feeling at your best right but imagine now if I said okay I’m going to lock you in that room for the year but you get to say your best friend how would you feel different when you came out I’d feel fantastic like I’m actually going away to Camp yeah like a holiday right you would have a great time and you would feel uh encouraged about what you going to do next and and happy and and and really that idea of being in that room with a person is you inside your own head the way that you speak to yourself can either be a really good friend or a bully and and because you’re with yourself 247 it will have the same impact you know with as that scenario of you know am I am I spending time with someone who’s having a positive impact on me or someone who’s having a negative impact on me but the the great news is that you have control of that and and you can begin to shift how you speak to yourself how do you begin to talk to yourself as a friend if you actually believe that you’re a bad person or that you look in the past and you see lots of evidence of the mistakes that you’ve made yeah well I think if you’re looking back and you’re seeing how hard you are on yourself the fact that you can recognize it is a sign of progress right you know when I when I look back on my my early videos that I put out into the internet and I think oh my goodness I can barely watch it I just can barely look and my response then is always that’s a sign of progress if we weren’t doing better videos now I wouldn’t be so uh cringy when I when I watch the old ones right so it’s a sign that you’re learning and you’re progressing and so when you look back and there’s something you regret or you think how can I be so stupid how can I get that so wrong right that’s the sign that you’re not there now and uh you know and you I love this idea of elite athletes employ coaches with so much thought and precision right they don’t employ that high school bully to to get them through you know really difficult competitions or help them improve their game or anything like that they employ someone who has their back has their best interest at heart believes that they have huge potential and need to do some hard work to get there and someone who’s always going to be honest with them but is going to bring that Honesty with kindness and compassion and forward thinking and so when we think of that kind of idea of you know people employ coaches like that because it works and because it helps them to bring their best but you apply that to normal life and we all want to bring our best right we all want to keep progressing and learning and and bringing out the best in ourselves and so what you need is to be the coach for yourself no one else is there 247 not even our family but if we can have that idea you know it’s not so much exactly what you say every time you know what are the words I need to say to myself it’s an idea of what would a coach say to me right now you know how would how would a coach help me to get back up when I’ve fallen down or I’ve really messed up what would they be saying they wouldn’t be calling me names because that wouldn’t help they would you know and so it’s just giving yourself this idea of this concept of what is the voice that I need to hear right now that’s going to help me through and and that’s where the idea with the book came where each uh chapter begins with a letter from me it’s idea that often in those moments you just need someone to bring the right words that helps to shift your attention in the right direction and give you that sort of Drive in your belly that’s just going to get you back up and pushing through this difficult moment um so you know it’s really hard to do that for ourselves in the moment it takes time and training and practice and I think often we learn that from hearing it and so if we don’t have anyone our in our lives that seems to bring the right words that we need to hear then we can get it from a book right yes you can and you can get it from podcasts and from social media clips and what I loved about what you just said though because I really want to highlight this is that a recognizing that you kind of have engaged in regrettable or despicable or hurtful or painful Behavior yeah even just recognizing it I love this reframe that that’s a really great sign of progress that you have the ick factor with yourself and and that’s different than holding it over your head and so if you can recognize it is there any trick to reframing then like how you actually talk to yourself moving forward like when you can’t think of anything else is there something that you give to the the clients that you work with that is kind of universal that helps them shake off the hold that being hard on yourself can have a line that’s often used in therapeutic work when we’re helping someone build and and train in kind of self-compassion is I did the best that I knew how with what I had at the time and I have new insight now and new skills now that I didn’t have before and we were talking earlier about the kind of idea of uh where you focus your attention and what causes anxiety if your attention is focused on the past too much you will get depressed and you will get miserable if your attention is always focused on the future and things that might happen but haven’t happened yet you’re going to get anxious and if you’re focused on the present moment there’s much less to be depressed or anxious about it’s just the present moment it’s just me and you and here and and that’s that’s mindfulness really that’s the idea of choosing where you focus your attention and so being able to like you say say something like I did the best I knew how with what I had at the time even if I had very little at the time in terms of skill and now I’m going to bring myself back to here and I can figure out how to do better you know you mentioned the future and Dr Julie I would love to know how you help a client who feels a lot of uncertainty about the future and right now I think it’s at an all-time high when you look at the headlines and when you look at the reports around the spike in anxiety and stress that people are feeling around the world so what are tools that you can use to manage the uncertainty when you look out to the Future yeah I think when when everything’s uncertain a lot of the distress that that causes is when we’re trying to control it you know it’s it’s a bit like your work isn’t it with the let them right it’s the allow life to be uncertain every move in life is is uncertain nothing is given nothing is fully controllable and so it’s probably one of life’s most important skills to be able to tolerate that uncertainty and to know that when everything becomes really stressful I’m really uncertain narrowing your focus is probably the most helpful sort of real time tool to just focus on the next couple of steps ahead what am I doing that’s keeping me moving forward even in times of you know great uncertainty or stress or uh you know all sorts of problems that might be uphead and uh and certainly that’s for for me when I talk about the whole you know cancer experience is something that does to you that takes a I mean you always I think everyone probably worries about you know will I get this or that when I’m older and when will that stuff like that happen but when it does happen you realize you had a certain degree of safety this idea that happens to other people mostly yes even if you’re a bit worried about it there’s a kind of distance that you have and I remember thinking I don’t want to be in this club I don’t want to be in this club I did not want I did not sign up for this and and I think that was the sense of anything can happen like right now it feels more possible than it ever did and so you’re even once you’re okay and out the other side of treatment when so many people survive it and you know it’s just fantastic that you people are you know having successful treatment but it leaves with you this sense of anything can happen and probably the most fundamental way that I deal with that is saying yes that’s why I have to live as if I have a future because otherwise I’m back to Rabbit and headlights Anything could happen so I can’t live I can’t carry on I’m glad that you said that because I think when people hear you have to allow the uncertainty you have to allow like the fact that these they’re things out of your control whether it’s the headlines or the fact that you’re now single again yeah and you didn’t want to be or that you just had a miscarriage and you didn’t want it or you just got the cancer diagnosis or somebody that you love is going in for surgery and it’s all un certain or AI feels like it’s taking over the world and will it take over your job and so that sense of like oh my gosh I just have to let them I have to allow this because I can’t control it I’m so happy you reminded us that that’s not where it ends because you brought it right back to the prey versus The Predator which is there are small things that I can do to put the foot forward and get ahead of this thing or just focus on what is important to me and there was a tool in there which is believing that you have a future believing that things are better why does that why is that important because if you don’t you have nothing right you you you have to live as if you have a future because otherwise you start dropping into this sense of Doom that everything is pointless if you if you feel that you don’t have a future and and so you have to live with that meaning and purpose and because if you don’t act as if you have a future and then you do then you you mess up your future uh so a lot of it is about sort of bearing that kind of suffering side of it and moving forward anyway and uh and then things you know you get these little pockets of time where things feel a bit better or things you know you open up the possibility of experiencing kind of pleasure or meaning or purpose throughout You know despite the fact that the world is often scary and uncertain and and in some ways it’s always been that way it’s true yeah it’s true so in your private practice and with your online audience what are you seeing that people are struggling the most with right now um I think there’s this kind of mix between the emotional stuff so understanding that there is a way to deal with emotion and that when you experience a bunch of negative or painful emotions that that doesn’t mean something is wrong with you um linked with relationships what are the big struggles in relationships I think it’s a mix of dealing with my emotion in the relationship and dealing with someone else’s emotion in the relationship and I think we are lied to especially on social media now about this idea that you know you hear all this stuff about you’ve got to be healed before you get into relationship God like when are you healed I mean if I had followed that rule I would never have married mat we’ve been together 20 years you know and and it’s this idea that you’ve got to become this sort of perfect idea of human being and the other person’s got have done the same work so that when you get together you have this perfect fairy tale relationship and it’s never hard and it’s just utter rubbish you know it’s just not true whatsoever and so when people then struggle in relationships because you’re both dealing with emotion and stress and all the ups and downs of life people then think that it’s not the right relationship or you’re getting it wrong and and actually that is the process of a relationship is building that together and going through those things and learning about each other in the process and forgiving each other for when you bring your worse to each other and and you just bring build so much strength through that so I think there’s this combination of what on Earth is emotional about and how do I deal with it but also then what do I do with that in in a relationship when the relationship shows me up to to not be my perfect self and I’m not being my best self what does that mean you know it’s the so yeah some sort of combination between those two I think and what is your like what’s the most important thing that you think we need to know to make our relationships better no relationship is perfect but that doesn’t mean you have to give up on it that I think the strongest relationships have often been through the most together right because you feel safety when you’ve been through stuff together and it’s pulled you together and not apart I think um this whole misconception that that everything’s got to be perfect otherwise it’s not the right person or it’s not the right relationship so Dr Julie what if you’re in a relationship with somebody who doesn’t want to deal with their emotions they don’t want to look inward they don’t want to have these kinds of conversations with you like what what advice do you give to your clients when they come in and they talk about the fact that I’m trying to connect I’m trying to get them to process their emotion they’re not opening up yeah in some ways I would I would ask why why they’re trying to get them to open up and what you know what’s going on there because we can only change ourselves and we can only improve ourselves and again it’s that focus on uh what am I bringing to the relationship because it’s it’s an okay way to be if if you’re not a talker and you don’t really talk about emotions that much that’s okay for some people that works and we don’t all have to be really insightful or psychologically minded or anything like that for stuff to work and um and sometimes I think that’s okay I mean like Matt and I for example I’m I’m well into this you know I’m full on psychology nerd constantly reading about stuff um you know I’m therapist so always reflecting on things and and he’s probably the opposite to me in that sense but that means we have different strengths and we even each other out I go go can you imagine how we talk for hours if we were both psychologist oh my God it would be awful I would want you at a dinner party like not those two yeah God and actually you know you look online about some of these sort of apparently ideal ways to you know repair an argument or those kind of things actually for us probably a lot of the time we just use humor and we know each other so well now that we can kind of go oh you’re doing that thing again and then we both have a laugh about it and then we’re back in and and it’s okay for it to be that way we don’t all have to be you know kind of therapists to have what could be an ideal relationship you know since so many people are either struggling with anxiety or they have someone in their life who is what is the advice that you give your clients when you’re working with them through a period where they feel anxious yeah I think probably one of the first bits is the idea that anxiety isn’t something that’s wrong in your brain it’s not a problem that is uh a fault of yours it’s not something that’s wrong with you it’s an experience and and often what happens in therapy is this process of someone kind of says you know I’m feeling this or this is coming up for me and and and then what follows is a judgment you know that uh that means I’m weak or I’m not I’m not coping and everyone else can do this and what we do is we kind of go oh notice that judgment notice how you just judged yourself how you’re feeling right now uh or you know comparing apparently everyone else has it together then no one else feels this way and let’s just drop the judgment and turn back to that feeling with curiosity isn’t that interesting that you feel that way what’s going on that makes you vulnerable to that feeling at this point let’s say I don’t know uh a new mom for example who finds themselves totally isolated has no idea what to do and how best to look after this baby and you know husband’s gone back to work all you know and and the anxiety is just huge and I remember thinking when I first had a baby I don’t know if I can handle this this degree of fear about how am I going to get it right for this little human being for forever more I don’t know if I can deal with and and so a lot of it is this kind of this idea that if you turn towards that feeling with curiosity you can hear what it has to say and often it has something to tell you about what you need at the time and so for example in that kind of new mom scenario usually that’s around I need human connection I need some reassurance I need adult conversation or I need you know I need to feel safe in this situation and and and so the answers start to appear when you’re just willing to look at the emotion and ask what are you telling me what is this and and sometimes it has a lot to say and other times it might not have a lot to say and that’s okay too because um what we teach in kind of emotion regulation work is to to feel an emotion look at it and say is this warranted and is it proportionate to the situation because you know sometimes if I haven’t had enough sleep or uh I’m dehydrated or I’ve had too much coffee or I might have a really extreme reaction to something that I would normally have a small reaction to so that would be disproportionate to the situation because of those other factors that made me vulnerable to that so if you’re willing to kind of look at okay what’s going on here then the answers start to appear but because so many of us are not willing to look at it with curiosity we just judge ourselves the fact we’ve had the feeling and then we try to numb it and push it away and then we’re in a battle you know that’s something that I actually worry about because I feel like it’s a super positive thing that there’s so much conversation about mental health and about the things that people struggle with and normalizing it so you don’t feel alone and so that you seek out support yeah but I do worry about how it’s easy to opt out of the things that you need to do because it’s quote bad for your mental health yeah how do you know the difference between whether or not it’s actually really something you should opt out of or whether or not you just don’t want to do the thing yeah that you probably need to be doing yeah but it just feels hard and I think that probably brings us to the the one tool that I probably use the most in the most formal way from therapy because it’s just so helpful is is the values stuff so it’s just working out what matters most to me at this point in my life because that changes and fluctuates right okay and so every few months or sometimes when I just feel a bit out of sorts and I feel like life’s every you know everything’s upside down I will just get a piece of paper and I’ll split it into different boxes and I’ll have you know all the different aspects of my life so that’ll be parenting uh marriage friendships health education career whatever you name it put them all out and then in each box I’ll just ask myself what matters most to me in this area of my life so not what I want to happen to me but how I want to show up in good times and bad so what I want to kind of represent in that part of my life so I might have a few words or a few sentences and then I’ll rate that just a crudely kind of out of 10 how important are those values to me in this area of my life so zero not at all 10 at 10 is Max and then you rate it again and this time how much I feel I’m living in line with these values in the last couple of weeks so then what you get is you know zero is not at all 10 out of 10 is definitely and then you get all of these kind of different boxes and these different scores and where it’s not a tool for self-criticism it’s a tool for uh finding where you need to Focus your attention next cuz you’ll get this idea of okay well if something over here is 10 out of 10 important to me but I’ve just rated it as two out of 10 in terms of how I’m living in line with that at the moment then that deserves my attention and it’s and it’s not because you’re failing it’s because life pulls Us in different directions right you can’t fill all of those at the same time so um you know I might be busy with a project trying to finish a book or something and so I haven’t been taking the kids to their clubs recently someone else has done it for me and and I just notice that pull that I’m not being the present parent I want to be and so then I’ll you know say no to a few things at work so that I can do that and so there’s this constant kind of Shifting and um moving between things but going back to your question when when you understand and you have that Clarity in terms of what matters most to you at that point in your life then it’s much easier to make the decisions about what you should and shouldn’t be doing because our tendency is to go I I’m only going to do things that feel good and I’m not going to do the stuff that makes me feel bad or you know um the or uncomfortable but if you if you make decisions based on comfort and discomfort it’s not going to lead you anywhere meaningful your life just going to shrink whereas if you if you make the choices based on your values and what matters to you that will inevitably involve you doing things that make you feel terrible sometimes right so I know having children was really really important to me but my goodness you know those night shifts where every cell in my body wanted to stay in bed and be comfortable and warm and not get up to the crying baby who was desperate for me at that point but I did the uncomfortable thing because it mattered most to me at that point well I asked you this because I one of our producers just said well you know I used to have a lot of anxiety about flying but I don’t have I’m not anxious anymore because I don’t fly yeah and it’s kind of funny but it made me wonder Dr Julie what happened if you keep avoiding the things that make you anxious so avoidance of the thing that you fear it lies to us so it tells us that we are uh making everything better but it makes fear worse over time right so let’s I mean I I talked about this in one of my videos with this kind of rainbow thing and let me explain for the person who’s not watching this on YouTube she has this like Child’s Play toy which is like this big wooden rainbow in front of her and it’s got all the color of the red the orange the yellow the green the blue the purple and it’s about 6 in high Dr Julie has a rainbow made of wood in front of her well I used to draw this out in therapy actually with rings so I would kind of have you know you in the center of the page and then lots of rings that represent the different layers of your life but of your life but this is the you know the rainbow represents the the different layers of your life so let’s say suddenly something um let’s go with rather than flying let’s go with something thing that kind of has that different layer so maybe the the social anxiety stuff again right so let’s say suddenly going to really crowded places with lots of people you don’t know starts to fill you with anxiety and you’re not sure why but it just does right it just doesn’t feel comfortable anymore so you decide well I’m not going to do that anymore then I’m going to take that out of my life so you now no longer go to any situations where there’s big crowds which means when your you know friend is getting married next week and they’re having 200 people at the wedding you’re not going to go to that either that so you take that bit out of your life and then being on a crowded train or bus or boat suddenly becomes anxiety for foking so you take that out of your life so you can’t travel and then being in a crowded restaurant even with friends suddenly becomes fearful so you you stop doing that too and what happens is every time that something Falls outside of your comfort zone and fills you with fear you the natural instinct is to avoid it right and and when even the moment you decide to avoid it you get this relief this oh few I don’t have to deal with that today so it’s quite addictive but what happens is over time when you keep doing that when you live by that rule your life shrinks and suddenly there’s so much stuff that you can’t do because your life is is sort of focused on and all of your decisions are based on that rule that I cannot do things that cause me anxiety or fear and with each piece of the rainbow Dr Julie that you remove the actual Arch is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and when anxiety or grief or nerves or depression or sadness or heartbreak starts to creep in we do have the tendency to just withdraw and and so often when people by the time people come to therapy they’ve got rid of a lot of these layers and and they feel that you know life is depressing because it’s so much smaller than they ever imagined it would be and a lot of those layers include things that mattered to them right so you know your best friend’s wedding or traveling across the world to visit family or whatever so it puts all of these different things out of bounds so it becomes so difficult to live in line with your own values it’s so sad when you see how small it’s gotten and it actually reminds me of times in my life where either my anxiety was so bad or my postpartum depression was so bad or one of my kids was strg Ling with anxiety and they just stopped doing things that they used to enjoy because they just felt like it was too hard and as they stopped doing sleepovers or they stopped wanting to do fun things on the weekend or they stopped wanting to try out for sports or they stopped wanting to go to the party it’s just like that rainbow every single thing that they stopped doing or were scared to do was an example of the way that their life just got smaller and smaller and smaller and it is so sad and it’s easy for it to kind of creep up on you I think the visual is so powerful because you actually see what’s happening when in reality when you’re going through it it just sort of slowly feels like it’s happening until all of a sudden you’re just in a really small life thank you for showing us this visual because as much as it’s sad there’s also this flip side to it where it’s really compelling because you actually see the solution if your life feels very small there are things that you can start adding back in even if it feels overwhelming or scary to try to do it that will actually immediately start to make your life feel bigger and Fuller again what is the first step other than recognizing this yeah to start to put the pieces back in place yeah that you didn’t even realize that you took away I think the key is you don’t have to do it all at once okay I would get clarity you know do that values exercise I think it’s in both my books actually because it’s so helpful with with so many different scenarios but really simple you know do that pen and paper bit and look at what Mo what matters most to me at this point in my life because that makes all the decisions at the direction you want to go in much easier because why face your fears if it doesn’t matter to you and that’s key you don’t have to you know if you have no inclination to ever travel then don’t worry about going on planes right but I think most of the time you know you’re silently giving up on a part of your life I think most times like I choose to believe that we all want to thrive we all want to be happy we all want to feel the full possibility of our lives and that when we are self-sabotaging or avoiding or shrinking or holding ourselves back and limiting that we know yeah and how do you recognize though when you’re doing that you know what I’m saying because I think you can get so used to being small yeah well I think sometimes it’s triggered by things like having children or getting into a relationship because then doing certain things matters to them so I always had a fear of heights right growing up and and I was totally just allowed to avoid that it was just I was scared of so J doesn’t have to do that high ride or whatever it was and once I had children and I knew all this kind of stuff from therapy that it was changeable there’s no way I want to pass this on because it holds you back and so at no point do I I mean we don’t live in a big city so I’m never really exposed to you know high buildings or balconies that kind of thing but every time we go away and we do stuff as a family I will never allow myself to avoid doing something that is high based on that fear because I don’t want the children so the children then become the key to uh I don’t want them to suffer the consequences of this even though I might have had consequences myself so if you don’t have kids how do you find that anchor for yourself yeah and could you build it back up since you’ve taken some of the rainbow Stripes off to show us how you can like let’s just say the person listening feels very small let’s say they went through divorce yeah and it was shattering and life-changing and they’re still alone and they’re Partners moved on and the friend groups have changed and you’ve had to reinvent yourself and you recognize that there are just ways in which you’re holding yourself back yeah and you have justifiable and very normal fears about getting hurt again or putting yourself out there or the negativity that you tell yourself that nobody’s going to find whatever it may be yeah you’re now listening to you Dr Julie and you’re going that’s me or you’re listening you’re going that’s my mother yeah my mother is stuck like that and her life has become very small yeah if you’ve had that Epiphany how do you start building back in yeah those pieces of your life that you’ve been avoiding because it just feels new or uncomfortable or like I didn’t sign up for this or it’s going to be hard yeah and I think if you imagine that kind of it’s you stood on this little island that’s surrounded by water that’s scary then all you do is you just dip your toe in so you’re just stepping out of the comfort zone just enough that it creates a challenge for you but one that’s doable so you’re not diving in and then struggling to swim you’re dipping your toe in you’re paddling in the water and then you’re stepping back and you’re repeating it repeating it and every time you repeat it you gain a little bit of land back you know you get so that’s where these kind of um these parts of the rainbow comeback so you work on one layer just one thing that feels a challenge and you repeat it as much as you possibly can and what happens is when you do that and you spend time in that place that feels a bit vulnerable it starts to become your comfort zone the thing that you do every day becomes your comfort zone and so then your life expands a little bit and then you have to the kit the tree the trick here is to keep going so you then have to dip your toe in again well I remember I’ll share an example because I think it would be helpful and then maybe you have one that you can share based on some issues that have come up with clients or that you’re seeing online I remember when we moved to a brand new place and I was uh early 50s and I felt like it was the biggest mistake in the world I had no friends I was super super lonely and I started to swirl in all the self-doubt and the sadness and the loneliness around this massive life transition moving from where we had been for 26 years and I recognized after about 6 months the wallowing that my life had gotten very small and the very first step I took was I told myself I had to leave the house yeah once a day even just to go to the grocery store or to get a cup of coffee yeah and then the next thing became I had to go to the coffee shop and sit there for a half an hour and read a book and then the next thing became I had to go to the coffee shop and sit there for a half an hour and read a book and I had to actually talk to people yeah and that was an example of a period of my life where I was avoiding the very thing yeah that would have solved the issue of loneliness and acclimating to a new community but do you have another example that might give somebody an idea of what you’re talking about like let’s use the issue of heartbreak like if somebody has had their heart broken and deep down they know that they would love to fall in love and have a partner and have a new chapter but they’ve been holding themselves back yeah what are some simple steps that feel like you may not even realize you’ve been avoiding it yeah so then it becomes that because on that first day if if you had said I’m going to go out and talk to somebody you wouldn’t have done it so you got escap it right back to you know what I’m just going to go out with a friend not even uh with the you know the idea of kind of meeting new people or anything like that I’m just going to practice being out there so that might be taking back another layer practicing being out there even with the person you trust the most you know your closest friends not even trying to date again and then maybe I’m going to allow myself to go out with friends when there are other people there that I don’t know yet and then maybe a few sort of events in maybe I’m going I’m going to speak to someone that I don’t know and I’m going to introduce myself and then but it’s really about doing it at your own pace but when you do that you’re much less likely to give up because if you if you go for it and you know and and you expect too much of yourself in one go then you’re much more likely to just you know if things go wrong then you Retreat again and then you’re you know having to start from scratch again so it’s it’s making it manageable and not expecting it to be you know oh gosh you know nature takes its time so why shouldn’t we right the it still happens but you have to give yourself that time to do it layer by layer you know go to the coffee shop first then speak to someone when you’re comfortable in the coffee shop and then you know whatever comes next so Dr Julie um you have shared so much and I think my kids are going to get so sick and tired of me telling them are you the prey or you the Predator you want to be the prey you want to be the Predator if the person listening took just one lesson or tool away from this conversation what do you think is the most important thing I think it has always been the knowledge that you do not have to be at the mercy of your own emotional experience that there are so many things you can do to influence it and and that’s one of the first things I teach people in therapy this idea that emotion is influenced by so many things so we can’t necessarily wake up and go I I I want to choose to feel love and pleasure today right we can’t kind of choose it and then make it happen but we know that emotion and emotional experience is influenced by what we do what we say who we’re around what we eat how we move and whether we move and the work that we do all of those things so those are the things that we can influence and control and when we do our emotional experience starts to change as well so that just knowing that that I have a degree of agency in how I feel as I go forward then that’s everything because without that sense of having any kind of sense of agency you just don’t try Dr Julie Smith what are your parting words my parting words oh my goodness that you’re not alone you’re not there’s nothing wrong with you just for having a hard time in life it is because life is hard and there’s this ask of tools that are often hid hidden behind therapy room door but we’re making them available we’re getting them out there so you know just keep learning because they are so helpful and they are changing lives so there’s no reason why you can’t learn a few yourself and and change the game for yourself well Dr Julie Smith you’re changing lives you are helpful thank you thank you thank you for showing up every day for the World online thank you for in this incredible instant bestseller open when which is truly exactly as you envisioned it is a guide to life because life is hard but you don’t have to be so hard on yourself and there are simple things that you can do to put your arm around yourself and help you get yourself through it so thank you thanks for having me of course and I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to something that will help you get yourself through the ups and downs in life I am thrilled that you spent the time listening to this I can’t wait for you to share this with people that you love and in case no one else tells you I want to be sure to tell you that I love you I believe in you I believe in your ability to create a better life and I know that everything that Dr Julie shared with you today is going to help you do that all righty I’ll talk to you in a few days I’ll be waiting to welcome you into the next episode the moment you hit play I’ll see you there

Order your copy of The Let Them Theory 👉 https://melrob.co/let-them-theory 👈 The #1 Best Selling Book of 2025 🔥 Discover how much power you truly have. It all begins with two simple words. Let Them.
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Life is hard. Struggles are inevitable for you and for the people you love. But even when things feel overwhelming, there’s always something you can do.

And in today’s episode, you’re getting a toolkit – a companion guide to all of life’s twists and turns.

When life feels chaotic, you deserve clarity.
When emotions feel overwhelming, you deserve tools that work.
And when you feel stuck, you deserve a way forward.

That’s all in today’s conversation with world-renowned clinical psychologist Dr. Julie Smith. Dr. Julie is here to share the essential strategies that will help you navigate stress, anxiety, and life’s toughest moments with confidence. This episode will change the way you approach your emotions and mental strength forever.

You’ll learn:
-How to handle difficult emotions in the moment
-The biggest mistakes you make when dealing with stress & anxiety
-How to stop overthinking and regain control of your mind
-Practical tools to build resilience and mental strength
-Why you are so much stronger than you realize—and how to tap into your strength

This is one of those conversations you’re not only going to love, you’re going to want to share it with everyone you care about.

For more resources related to today’s episode, click here for the podcast episode page: https://www.melrobbins.com/podcasts/episode-271

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I’m just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist, and this podcast is NOT intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I’ll see you in the next episode.

In this episode:
00:00 Welcome
02:36 Science-Backed Strategies for Navigating Hard Times
07:48 Simple Tools to Help You Feel Better
13:58 The Key to Managing Your Emotions
17:27 How to Take Control When Life Feels Impossible
25:00 Process Overwhelm and Grief in a Healthy Way
33:46 A Psychologist’s Best Tips for Building Confidence
41:33 Stop Being So Hard on Yourself
45:13 Train Your Mind to Support You
49:27 How to Navigate Uncertainty, Stress, and Relationships
58:32 Simple Strategies to Overcome Anxiety
01:05:49 Push Past Fear and Step Outside Your Comfort Zone

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