THE 5-SECOND RULE

Is your past littered with forgotten resolutions? Make this year different with one simple mind trick

This simple trick will help you live your best life

“YOU HAVE TO INTERRUPT SELF-DOUBT”

So, last New Year, what did you promise you’d change? Maybe you were one of the third of people who, according to one study, swore to exercise more, the third who aimed to lose weight, or the third who wanted to eat more healthily? Or maybe you didn’t bother making a resolution because you were already heartily sick of those good intentions fading to nothing in February.

Why the hell do most of us break our January promises? (If you didn’t, massive props to you.) So, the big question is, if we have chosen a resolution that is in line with what our body or mind needs, then why can’t we do it?

It’s because our brains and habits are fighting against us, according to Mel Robbins, author of global bestseller

The 5 Second Rule. “We have a habit of stopping to think before we make a decision or take the action to change. That moment of hesitation is a killer.” Because in that crucial pause you start thinking, and this creates a chain reaction in your head… and the next thing you know you’ve talked yourself out of the run or fitness DVD or meditation, or you’ve poured that glass of wine or raided the fridge or lit another cigarette.

Enter ‘The 5 Second Rule’, as invented by Robbins. She calls it a brain hack, a cheat code that “turns off the part of the brain that’s fighting you”, that allows you to tap into your inner courage. “One of the things that’s going to happen to everybody who wants to start a new self-care habit, they’re going to have to interrupt procrastination, hesitation and self-doubt.” The Rule does this by bridging the gap between your thoughts and actions.

Doing it is laughably simple. Every time you find yourself in a moment of choice or decision, have an instinct to act on a goal – perhaps whether to get out of bed to go for a run – and count down in your head: five-four-three-two-one and physically move. Faced with the rest of the tin of Quality Street vs a handful of almonds? Five-four-three-two-one and grab the almonds. Know you should open Headspace but tempted by spending a few minutes on Instagram? Five-four-three-two-one, now press the Headspace app.

And that, in a nutshell, is it. Counting down from five will prompt you to make the healthy, self-care choice. “You will feel something shifting in your head as you are counting,” says Robbins. It will give you the ability to go from wanting to doing. “There is no self-care without selfawareness and self-monitoring – the ability to hear what your needs are and the ability to manage

your habits and your behaviour and your impulses, so you fulfil those things.”

With her book high on Amazon’s bestseller list globally, over 250,000 people have contacted Robbins to share their stories of how it’s helped them: in relationships, in business, in health. “And I can’t believe the number of people who have tattooed the numbers five, four, three, two, one on their arms!” she says.

WHAT IS INCREDIBLE ABOUT THE RULE IS THAT ROBBINS INVENTED IT BY MISTAKE, AND THEN SHARED IT BY ACCIDENT.

After working as a criminal attorney, Robbins launched a coaching business, then made the move to TV and radio. But in 2009, aged 41, after a TV pilot didn’t get picked up, she was left with no work and feeling a failure. At the same time, her husband, Chris, had a pizza franchise that expanded too fast and crashed. She says she spent her days in dread, drank too much and bitched about friends who didn’t have to work. “My problems seemed so big that it was a struggle each morning just to get out of bed. That’s actually how the Rule began – I invented it to help me break my habit of hitting the snooze button.” She didn’t just hit it once, but again and again, so her kids were always late for school and mornings were a “train wreck”. “My self-confidence was in a death spiral,” admits Robbins. One day, she saw a TV ad of a rocket launch, and the next morning, she decided to launch herself out of bed. She began to use the Rule in other ways; to face her financial situation, to reach out to previous coaching clients, to go to interviews as a radio host.

“I used it in secret for two years,” she says. Then, during a TEDX talk in San Francisco entitled How To

Stop Screwing Yourself Over, she shared the Rule as an afterthought. “The emails started rolling in, and the volume started picking up.” (Now, seven years later, that TEDX talk has been viewed almost 11 million times.)

Because the reaction to the rule was so huge, Robbins began to research the science of why it works. She discovered it’s a powerful example of a ‘starting ritual’, a positive trigger to act. Counting down activates the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain in charge of focus and deliberate action. Learning about the science of behaviour was the start of Robbins’ current business, researching human habits and how people can use that science. This year, she’ll be launching live coaching sessions on Amazon and Audible. “I don’t view myself as an expert but as somebody that’s made a lot of mistakes in my life,” says Robbins. “And that, by the age of 40-whatever, I started to finally figure some things out and figure myself out. And I’m sharing what I’m learning, because it really fulfils me to know I can save people the same headaches and heartaches I suffered.”

THE MOST POWERFUL APPLICATION OF ALL,

says Robbins, is using the Rule to change your thoughts. She used it to get rid of a 20-year habit of anxious thinking. Imagine what would happen, she says, if we were to “put a speaker on our head and broadcast the garbage that we say to ourselves!”. Instead, count down and consciously replace an unhelpful thought – of dread, anxiety, or one that’s ruining your day – with a constructive thought. “Personally, I think the best self-care that you can do is to go to war against selfdoubt and the mental patterns we all have where we beat ourselves up.” A life in which our thoughts don’t sabotage us? Wouldn’t that make for a happy and healthy 2018?