Is the viral 'let them' theory really that simple?

Vox

10-03-2025

is a culture writer interested in reality TV, movies, pop music, Black media, and celebrity culture. Previously, she wrote for the Daily Beast and contributed to several publications, including Vulture, W Magazine, and Bitch Media.
Sometimes the best advice is the most straightforward. This assumption seems to summarize the appeal of TikTok's favorite armchair psychologist at the moment, Mel Robbins. Her extremely basic tips for tackling life and 'getting anything you want' have made her the go-to self-help queen in our increasingly stressful times.
The motivational speaker, author, and podcast host has become an A-lister in the virtual advice landscape thanks to her practical approach to productivity and relationships. Even if you haven't listened to The Mel Robbins Podcast, or bought one of Robbins's books, you've probably been exposed to her work online. She's the person getting women on social media to make their beds every morning and high-five themselves in the mirror. Most popular is her viral two-word phrase, 'let them.'
The advice is as simple as it sounds: Your teenager wants to dye their hair? Let them. Your spouse is wearing a shirt you don't like? Let them. You think your co-workers are gossiping about you? Let them.
'Let them' theory has quickly become Robbins's calling card. It's the premise of her latest book — The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About, released this past December— and frequently invoked and (sometimes parodied) by her fans on social media.
This catchphrase has won the attention of Oprah, TikTok influencers, and regular people posting about their relationship to the concept online.
Not everyone is buying what she's selling, however. To some critics, an empire built on obvious and overly generic advice, from a woman without a social work or psychology degree, reads as another self-help scam, and the mantra like a gimmick.
While Robbins has largely managed to evade the cynicism and scandals that emerge when a new self-styled expert blows up online, it's hard not to notice that her guidance falls into a familiar self-help trap.
A burnt-out lawyer with a knack for public speaking
Like many self-designated experts on life, Robbins has performed a plethora of impressive jobs and leadership roles outside the realm of psychology. After graduating from Boston College Law School in 1994, she worked as a criminal defense attorney for the Legal Aid Society in New York City, and at a large firm in Boston. She's led life-coaching programs at big corporations. She's launched (and sold) her own businesses and hosted a call-in radio show. In 2013, she was a legal analyst for CNN during the George Zimmerman trial.
But back in 2009, at the age of 41, Robbins felt she had 'failed at life,' as she tells it in The Let Them Theory. In the midst of a recession, she and her husband were unemployed and operating a failing business, respectively. She was drowning in debt — $800,000, she claims — and facing house liens, while avoiding her problems with alcohol. As Robbins would repeat again and again when recounting her come-up story, she was so anxious and overwhelmed that she couldn't get out of bed in the morning.
It was during this time, watching a NASA launch on TV, that Robbins came up with her 'five-second rule,' which would later become the premise and title of her 2017 book. The mental exercise is as rudimentary as it sounds: count down from 5 — as if you're a rocket — to launch yourself into whatever action you need to complete, whether that's paying your bills, going to the gym, or, in Robbins's case, simply getting out of bed. 'Using 5-4-3-2-1, I pushed through the excuses, the anxiety, the overwhelm, and the fear,' she writes in The Let Them Theory. 'Step by step, day by day, week by week, I slowly took the actions that put my life and career back on track.'
Sheinelle Jones, Jenna Bush Hager, and Mel Robbins on the Today show on September 27, 2023. Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images
In 2010, Robbins published her first book, Stop Saying You're Fine: The No-BS Guide to Getting What You Want. The next year, the non-profit TED invited her to give a lecture at one of their first-ever TEDx conferences in San Francisco. The talk, titled 'How To Stop Screwing Yourself Over,' became an early hit for the platform, and currently has 33 million views. In the video, she uses ideas from her book to help audience members overcome complacency. She spreads her notably uncomplicated concepts over 20 minutes, filling the time with hypothetical scenarios, funny anecdotes about her family, and a dose of scientific research. More than any piece of advice, Robbins's public speaking skills and affable, Midwestern persona stand out. She's magnetic and motivating, rallying her audience out of feeling stuck, able to balance a sense of comfort with tough love.
For Robbins, this down-home practicality is the point. 'There is an obsession with being smart, I think, in the thought leadership space,' Robbins told the New York Times last year. 'And I would rather be useful.'
So is the playbook for Robbins's career. While she has a knack for sharing relatable, amusing anecdotes about her own life, she's largely a messenger of other people's well-tested ideas and wisdom. In Time, she describes herself more like an advice curator: 'I am on a mission to find as many stories and pieces of science and research and tools that a person can use to make their life a little better.'
That's her methodology on The Mel Robbins Podcast, launched three years ago, where she talks to a wide range of experts and people who inspire her about how to tackle life's hurdles and reach their goals. It's also where she debuted her now signature theory for handling other people. Per a 2022 episode, 'let them' was originally uttered to Robbins by her daughter after Robbins tried to micro-manage her son's prom experience. Now, Robbins instructs her followers to stop wasting time trying to control other people by repeating the pithy saying.
Controversially, the phrase has been met with plagiarism allegations. In an interview in the Substack newsletter Sage Words, writer Cassie Phillips accused Robbins of cribbing and capitalizing off of her viral 2022 'Let Them' poem, which preaches the same idea of radical acceptance.
An illusion of freedom and simplicity for stressed-out women
In the self-help guru space, it's hard to be entirely new. There are only so many ways to empower people. Robbins's patchwork philosophy feels like a cross between the more emotion-based work of professor Brené Brown and Tony Robbins's more spiritually macho leadership advice. What this gives her, though, is a platform designed for women who know that they can't have it all — but are still willing to try.
Robbins's target audience is markedly goal-oriented, career-minded women, including mothers, trying to optimize every part of their lives. There's an assumption that her listeners have the time and privilege to keep adding self-improvement rituals, like running a marathon or adopting a perfect sleep schedule, to their plate. She often assures her followers that it's okay if they occasionally fail at their goals. But the message is that they should constantly be wanting more for themselves, whether it's more friends, more money, or a fitter body.
Author Virginia Sole-Smith compared Robbins's teachings to diet culture on a recent episode of her Burnt Toast podcast. She says that, like most diet plans, Robbins doesn't seem to anticipate her followers ever reaching a slow-down stage where they aren't working as hard.
'There's no profit in [Robbins's] followers achieving stasis,' says Sole-Smith. 'That's what it comes down to, in diet culture, in perfection culture. Mel Robbins is never going to give you permission to reach stasis because then why would you buy her next book?'
Rae Jones, a therapist at New York-based The Expansive Group, says that the self-help industry as a whole relies on consumers constantly feeling inadequate in order to make a profit. 'The industry profits off of people feeling poorly about themselves and believing they need to change or fix themselves in some way, and therefore will absolutely encourage the very type of thinking that keeps the self-help industry in business and making millions,' they said.
Still, Robbins's advice thrives under the guise of simplicity and accessibility. It makes sense that Robbins's nuggets have penetrated short-video platforms, like Instagram and TikTok, where she has 8.4 million and 3.9 million followers, respectively. TikTok is overflowing with so-called 'hacks' that all too often make whatever you're trying to do even more stressful and complicated. Compared to the grueling workout challenges and elaborate morning routines that can easily flood one's feed, Robbins telling women to high-five their bathroom mirror and make their beds every morning may feel like some sort of reprieve. But she hardly seems to be advocating a stress-free, content life.
While 'let them' has become her trademark, achieving radical nonchalance certainly isn't the core of her ideology. Scroll through her Instagram, and you're inundated with an onslaught of tips and life hacks on bettering oneself — often presented in small numbers ('3 Simple Ways to Get The Love You Want'; '4 Nighttime Habits To Feel Energized') to give the impression that they're not as overwhelming. She encourages people to control, regiment, and perfect virtually every aspect of their own lives. As Robbins's profile has grown, so has the range of topics she's eager to discuss. In addition to her usual motivational fodder, she has podcast episodes dedicated to boosting your metabolism, decreasing alcohol consumption, and intermittent fasting.
'As an upper-middle class, suburban, white mom, I understand why she's speaking to my people,' says Sole-Smith. 'We've been trained that the way we uphold all of that privilege is to keep going, going, going, achieve, achieve, achieve — and not actually look around and question the systems that are forcing us into all of these toxic standards.'
To keep Robbins's utility at the top of viewers' minds and feeds, she has to find more hypothetical problems to fix and areas of her followers' lives to address. This quickly becomes repetitive, especially on her podcast, where she'll platform numerous experts and approaches on the same issues.
This might be the conflicting mindset of an over-achiever whose hard work didn't prevent them from collecting tons of debt and having to rebuild their life. While she preaches indifference regarding other people, she can't help but perpetuate the core principles of hustle culture.