In Your Right Mind with Monique Rhodes

You left the job, or the friendship, because of how you were treated, and now the same thing is starting again somewhere new. That isn't fate and it isn't something you deserve. Almost everybody has one situation that keeps repeating, and changing your circumstances doesn't stop it, because you're the one thing that comes with you to every new place. I explain why the pattern follows you and what...

You're waiting to hear about something important, and not knowing how it'll turn out is keeping you awake at night. Nothing's wrong with you for finding this hard. Most of us were never taught what to do with the feeling of not knowing, so we check our phones, make plans for every outcome and ask everyone what they think. The relief lasts a few minutes, and then the feeling comes back stronger. I...

Everything written about burnout assumes you can stop. Take a sabbatical, book the trip, step back for a while. And you're reading it at ten at night with people depending on you and no version of your life where that's available. This is the useful version, and it turns out a week away was never what would have fixed it. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there...

You said yes again to someone, and you didn't want to say yes. You knew it while you were saying it. This one is about what happens on the rare occasions you do say no, and the guilt that arrives afterwards, because that guilt is what keeps the whole pattern going. It turns out to be measuring something quite different from what you assume. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resona...

You sat down with a book last night, got through about three pages, and then your hand went to your phone. You weren't bored. You just couldn't stay. A lot of people have started to worry that their memory is going or their mind is slipping, and that's almost never what this is. This one explains what's actually happening, and what you can do about it. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this ep...

Somebody says something and you feel yourself close. Your face goes still, something in your chest shuts, and what comes out afterwards is polite and about ten degrees colder. This one is about what the hardening is protecting, what it costs you rather than them, and why the practice of peace starts a great deal closer to home than most of us think. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episo...

The children are settled, nobody's ill, you've got the weekend free, and there's still something in your chest that won't settle down. Most people treat that feeling as a sign that something needs fixing. This episode is about why it isn't, and why getting used to it might be one of the most useful things a person ever learns. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you,...

You're awake before you've decided to be, and the thinking has already started, and it isn't kind. Sometimes it's about today. Often it's much older. A student asked why this happens every morning and then follows her around all day, and most of the answer turns out to be physical. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, there's something you   need   to try next… 👉...

You're in the supermarket queue and a woman speaks sharply to her little boy, and the verdict is there before you've finished looking at her. You didn't decide to think it. This episode is about why it happens that fast, what all that judging is quietly costing you rather than her, and one question you might try that takes about ten seconds. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode reson...

You have one. The move to the coast, the leaving of the job, the if I could just get the weight off. Whatever goes wrong this week, that same thought arrives and offers itself as the answer, and you've had it several thousand times without ever making a single phone call about it. This episode is about what that thought is actually doing, and a two week test that shows you what's underneath it. Re...

You dropped something this morning, and you heard what you said to yourself. It was quick and flat and it barely registered, and you've been saying versions of it for about forty years. This episode isn't about being nicer to yourself, because you've heard that already. It's about a question somebody once put to the Dalai Lama that he couldn't understand, and what that reveals about the one relati...

There's a person. You didn't have to think about it, they just arrived. And somebody once told you to forgive them, and you wanted to put a chair through a window. That reaction is intelligent and this episode defends it. Then it gives you what works instead, which isn't forgiveness and doesn't involve deciding it wasn't that bad. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with y...

You've never actually felt most of your feelings. You've had positions about them instead. If you can be in real distress at a dinner party and still get up and clear the plates while nobody notices a thing, this episode explains what you learned to do, what it's been costing you, and the one word you'll have to stop using. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonated with you, the...

There's a kind of terror that isn't about the bad news. It's about not knowing yet. If you're standing in your own life waiting for somebody to walk in and tell you what happens next, this one's for you. Your body finds the not knowing more expensive than the bad news, and once you know that, there's somewhere different to put your effort. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode resonat...

Somebody asked how you were this week and you said fine, and you said it beautifully, because you've had a lot of practice. Then later something hot and resentful came up in you, pointed straight at them for not knowing. This episode is about that loop, including the half of it nobody ever admits, and the one sentence that quietly breaks it. Ready to break the cycle for good? If this episode reson...

You heard your own voice come out sharper than the situation deserved, and you've been quietly worried ever since that this is who you're becoming. It isn't. Irritability is the first thing to go when there's no space left in your life, and in this episode we look at what your temper is actually telling you, why it always lands on the people closest to you, and the one minute experiment that chang...

You know the people who walk into a room and everyone in it sits up a little straighter, and somewhere along the way you decided you're just not one of them. This episode takes that decision apart. Dolly Parton spent sixty years making people feel bigger rather than smaller, and when you look closely at how she actually did it, it isn't a personality at all. It's a handful of small refusals, and e...

There is a woman who has never once said "I love you." Not to her daughter, not to her granddaughter.  If you have someone like that, you've almost certainly stopped expecting the words, and you've probably landed on one of two conclusions. Either they don't feel it, or you're the reason. Neither is usually true. People who can't say it are rarely withholding it. They just never had the words made...

You've had the same argument with your sister forty times and never once out loud.  This usually gets filed under overthinking, and you've probably concluded you're anxious, or dramatic, or that you can't let things go. You're none of those. You're doing something extremely reasonable and completely impossible, and nobody has ever named it for you.  You're looking for the sentence that guarantees...

You wake at three in the morning and your mind is already mid-sentence. Not a crisis. A conversation.  You've probably decided this is insomnia, or that something is wrong with your sleep, or that you're bad at switching off. None of those are what's happening. You surfaced the way everyone surfaces several times a night. The difference is that something was waiting there for you, and it had been...

You've tried the apps. The breathing. Probably the medication. And you're still here. "I've tried everything and nothing works" usually gets treated as a mood to be talked out of. It isn't. It's an accurate report about a very specific kind of failure, and the moment you can name that failure, what you do next changes completely. I explain what everything you've tried has in common, why nobody has...

There are moments when meditation will make your anxiety worse, and almost nobody in my field will say that out loud. If you've ever sat down to meditate while genuinely anxious and got up feeling worse than when you started, you didn't fail at it and you're not bad at this. You were using the right tool at the wrong moment, and nobody told you there was a difference. I explain exactly why it back...

Your mind was fine all day. Then you lie down, the light goes off, and it starts. If that's your eleven o'clock, this isn't a sleep problem and it isn't a discipline problem. There's a reason it begins at that exact moment and not twenty minutes earlier, and once you understand it, the whole thing stops feeling like something going wrong with you. I explain what your mind is actually doing when it...

You'd drive across a city at ten at night for someone you love, without a second's deliberation. Now try asking yourself for twenty minutes and watch how long that takes. This episode takes apart the belief that looking after yourself is something you have to earn, and offers a different definition entirely. Not a treat. Not an indulgence. Something much more useful, and much harder to argue with....

You've gotten so good at looking fine that people don't just believe you any more. They've stopped checking. This episode is about the exhausting second job of performing okay, why hiding your burnout doesn't protect anyone, and what the research says happens to your body and your relationships while you hold that face still. Plus one small experiment involving one person, one sentence, and one de...