Mel Robbins shares a mantra: "I don't need to solve this right now." She uses it to stop treating every anxious thought as an emergency. When her husband seemed upset, she waited until morning instead of spiraling, and discovered the problem had nothing to do with her.
Chapters
Now the third thing I want you to say yourself: I don't need to solve this right now. Nope. I don't need to solve this right now. And the reason why you're going to tell yourself is, I don't need to solve this right now. I can deal with this tomorrow, right? Is that you're teaching your brain that every thought is not an emergency. Every thought does not need to be acted on. Thoughts are just things that pop up, but it doesn't mean you have to actually do anything about it. In fact, you know, just yesterday, my husband Chris, he was just not himself. He is normally like got the most zen energy and there was just something so just sort of intense about him. And I asked him at one point, I said, have I done something? Like, are you okay? Like, do you need to talk? And you know what he said to me? He said, I can't talk to you about this right now. And that immediately made me go, ooh. Oh, I'm in trouble. I'm in trouble. And he then jumped into leading this, like, online retreat that he leads called The Huddle. And I cleaned the kitchen and, you know, did the dishes and kind of put the dogs away. And then I went into bed and I started to read because that's kind of one of my routines. And then I laid down and turned off the lights. And then all of a sudden, there's the hamster wheel. And I'm like, oh my God, what is he mad about? What did I do? I don't know. I did— I do something wrong? Did I? And I'm I'm going through and then I was like, you know what, Mel? You don't need to solve this right now. You need rest. You can talk about it in the morning. And you want to know the craziest thing? I did go into Chris's office this morning because he gets up way earlier than me. And, you know, he's writing first thing in the morning on this book he's working on. And I walk in, he's like, oh, hi, honey. And I come up behind him and I put my arms around him. I was like, so, um, You know, you seemed a little off yesterday. Is everything okay? Like, what did I, what did I do? You want to talk about it? He's like, what are you talking about? I was like, well, what do you mean? What am I talking about? What did I do? Like you said, you can't talk about it. He's like, well, it had nothing to do with you. It was an issue related to one of our kids that he was really upset about. And, and yet I was going to allow that to interfere with being able to get rest. Because I was going to let all— but nope, because I have these things to say to myself. I don't need to solve this right now. You get to tell your brain what to focus on. You get to tell your brain, not now.
