‘Slithering’ technique to get out of bed when you don’t want to

November 20, 2024

If you can’t be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, you can still slither out of bed like a hapless reptile or drunk noodle and crawl toward the promise of a better morning.

Best-selling author, personal development coach, and motivational speaker Mel Robbins has taken to TikTok to share her therapist-recommended hack for getting out of bed when feelings of doom and anxiety make moving the covers seem impossible.

“For most of my life, every morning when I woke up, I just felt this huge sense of dread,” Robbins admitted.

Wisely, she sought the advice of her therapist, who gave her a “life-changing technique” known as slithering.

Robbins demonstrated the technique in her video, beginning by laying down before slowly dragging her body towards the floor. She advised her followers to “embrace” the heaviness they feel, allowing it to consume them to the point that they have no choice but to roll out of bed.

“You’re gonna think about just letting the weight of your emotion just drop you out of bed. Now I am dripping down the side of the bed. No joke, I’m getting on the floor.”

When you reach the floor, Robbins suggested twisting the body into various shapes, including a cat/cow yoga move. Writhe, she said, “until you start to feel that heaviness break apart.”

Robbins admitted that in her first trials with the slither technique, she would lie on the floor for minutes. Eventually, she promised, “what starts to happen is that frozen kind of dread starts to break apart based on your own movement and then all of a sudden what you’re gonna feel is this ability to either sit up or rollover.”

She explained that while you might feel like you can stand, don’t, as the point is to move through the feeling.

And moving through the feeling looks like getting on all fours and crawling across the floor like a house pet or sleepy exotic dancer: “Slowly, like a dog or a cat, you’re just going to crawl toward the bathroom.”

Robbins admitted that doing this under the watchful eyes of children, roommates, or partners can be embarrassing at best, but the crawl is well worth the reward.

“From the first time I tried this, by the time I got to the bathroom, all that heaviness was gone, and something magical replaced it, this sense of freedom.”

While she understands that the slither/crawl technique might seem suspect to the uninitiated, practicing it every morning for six weeks proved life-changing.

“I wanted to stand up, I wanted to face the day.I had moved with and through the heaviness that it was no longer in me, and I felt something else, which was empowerment.”

She called the “miraculous” slither/crawl combo a somatic technique, a therapeutic approach that aims to heal trauma by focusing on sensation and stored experiences, essentially using physicality to process and release emotional pain.

“There are experiences in life that you remember in your subconscious mind, but they’re also remembered in the body…to get rid of these negative and heavy sensations, you gotta drop from the neck down and process them in the body,” she explained.

An advocate of healing hacks, Robbins previously shared a simple move to transform chronic procrastinators into models of productivity.