The 5-Second Rule That Can Change Your Entire Life! | Mel Robbins

The thing that's interesting about being stuck in life is that you know what you need to do. How do you make yourself do what you need to do when you are scared or overwhelmed or anxious or hopeless or depressed or any of the stuff that happens to you as a human? That's the hundred million dollar question. You have no idea right now how much time and energy is being wasted or drained because of other people's behavior or your expectations about how you wish things would go. I had great parents who did the best that they could with what they were handed in terms of their own childhoods and patterns and thinking and I grew up in a tiny little town where nothing really happened but one thing did happen and that was in the fourth grade. I was at a family kind of ski trip thing and in the middle of the night I woke up and one of the kids was on top of me and yeah like on top of me molesting me. It was interesting because I didn't remember the experience for a very long time. I did not remember that this had happened until I was in my late 20s and if you look at the spectrum of what can happen to somebody in terms of sexual abuse, which unfortunately is very common experience for people, this was a very mild experience. Like it wasn't anybody that I knew, it was a one-off, it was another kid, so clearly something was happening to this kid in their life. It wasn't scary, it was confusing but I was awoken from a state of sleep and I immediately felt and knew that something was wrong and it's my first experience in my life of what psychologists call disassociating. I literally left my body and I rolled over and I don't even remember how it ended because I wasn't in my body to be there and the very next morning, I'll never forget this, I hid underneath the sheets because it was a big bunk room and all the kids left to go downstairs to get ready to go skiing and I remember waiting until I thought it was quiet. I threw the comforter off, I went down these steep stairs, I turned the corner and there was my mom and she was cooking breakfast with some of the other moms and she turned around and she said, how'd you sleep? And I immediately, Stephen wanted to tell her and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the kid and in that moment, split second child brain, I froze and as much as I wanted to tell my mom and I knew exactly what she'd do, I mean she grew up on a farm, she had a spatula in her hand, she would have hit that kid in the next week, but I didn't know what the kid was going to do and in that moment, I lied and I said fine and the day went on and nothing happened and I believe whether it is a 30-year-long struggle with anxiety or a tendency to disassociate or the fact that I was chronically lying when I was younger, in any moment when I felt uncertain, I had no idea how that singular moment set me on a course that would last decades before I realized that all of these patterns of behavior that I was struggling with, I didn't know why I lied, I didn't know why I felt so uncomfortable if I couldn't predict somebody's reaction, I couldn't understand why I would leave my body so many times, I couldn't understand why I had very few memories from my childhood, it wasn't until I started to understand human behavior, the way the brain learns patterns, the way that you need and can break patterns and replace patterns and learn new patterns that I began this journey that I've been on for the past 10 years of understanding my own breakdowns, my own heartaches, my own struggles and sharing what I'm learning with anybody who will listen. There is one fundamental flaw that screws up everybody and that is that when you're a little kid and things happen to you, you do not have the life experience and you do not have the support system to be able to process what is happening and it could be anything, it could be something as serious as homelessness and poverty and systemic discrimination, it could be violence, it could be abuse in your home, it could be addiction, mental illness, it could be chaos in your household, it could be sexual abuse, it could just be a mother or a father who's so freaking critical or who is passive-aggressive so you wake up as a kid and you have no idea what you're gonna wake up to, but when something goes wrong or something happens to you as a kid, you don't have the life experience or the support structure to basically go, whoa, this situation is fucked or these adults, somebody call the police, this is not okay, you don't get to talk to me, like no kid does that. The fundamental flaw in human design is that when something happens to you as a kid, you don't say, what's wrong with that kid or what's wrong with my dad or what's wrong with this situation, you say, what's wrong with me? We aim it back at ourselves and then I think that this then starts to build as a thinking pattern that there must be something wrong with me, that you aim everything that's happening out there back at yourself. I found myself in a place that I just never envisioned I would be and that is I had my husband and I had three kids under the age of 10 and I was unemployed and my husband had been in the restaurant business with his best friend and the housing crisis hit, especially hit in the United States and we found ourselves 800 grand in debt because we had secured the restaurant business like complete morons with our kids college fund in our house and every credit card and the home equity line and the cars and everything and that's great when your business is working, it's absolutely terrifying when it's not and so I would wake up every morning just pinned to the bed with anxiety and I became somebody that I barely recognized, I was screaming at Chris, I was drinking myself into the ground, the kids were missing the bus every day, I didn't have a job, I was hiding from my friends, I hadn't told my family what was going on and you know the thing that's interesting about being stuck in life is that the fact is you know what you need to do, that's the easy part and if you don't know what you need to do to improve the situation then google it, there's approximately a bazillion videos out there of people like you that have been in the exact same situation, they will walk you through how to, there are books you can buy, there are courses, the what you need to do is out there, it's the how, how the **** do you make yourself do what you need to do when you are scared or overwhelmed or anxious or hopeless or depressed or any of the stuff that happens to you as a human, that's the 100 million dollar question and at the time I didn't have the answer, I knew I needed to look for a job, I knew I needed to stop streaming at Chris, I knew I needed to get the kids on the bus, I knew I needed to ask for help, I wasn't doing any of those things, I was stuck in broken patterns and I didn't know any of the things that we're talking about right now, but one night you know I was sitting there and I was watching tv and I was telling myself tomorrow morning it's got to be the new you, I was giving myself that lame pep talk like Mel you've got to stop drinking, you have got to be nice to Chris, you've got to pull your ---- together, you got to look for a job and by god woman when that alarm rings you cannot lay there like a human pot roast marinating in fear and staring at the ceiling, you have got to get out of bed woman and then all of a sudden this is divine intervention, the rocket ship launches across the television screen Stephen and I say that's it, that's it, tomorrow morning when the alarm goes off Mel Robbins you're going to launch yourself out of bed like a rocket ship, you're going to move so fast you're not going to be in that bed when that anxiety hits, now it was either god or bourbon, one of those two things gave me the idea because it sounds dumb, okay Mel you're going to beat anxiety by moving fast that sounds great, well the very next morning it was a Tuesday in February outside of Boston Massachusetts in 2008 the alarm went off and I think a lot about this moment because if I hadn't done what I did that morning my life would have gone in a totally different direction, I'd probably be divorced, I'd probably be an alcoholic, my family would be torn apart, no idea what I'd be doing for a living or where I would be and I profoundly believe that you are one decision away from a different life and that happened to me on a February morning in 2008, the alarm rang and as soon as the alarm rang I remembered the idea of launching myself out of bed and then I did what psychologists call a bias toward thinking and this window opens up when you start to think about what you need to do instead of doing what you need to do, it's this window of hesitation that's about five seconds long, a window of hesitation that defines your whole life, inside this window of hesitation lives anxiety and procrastination and fear and imposter syndrome and overwhelm, all patterns of thinking, all patterns of feeling, all patterns of behavior that get triggered in this five second window of thinking about what you need to do because it's in the thinking that you go from being present to all the patterns kicking in and the coping mechanisms that you have and so for whatever reason I started to think about getting up and all the ---- started to come in, I don't feel like it, how's it going to help, I don't want to, for whatever reason I just started counting backwards five, four, three, two, one and I stood up. You have no idea right now how much time and energy is being wasted or drained because of other people's behavior or your expectations about how you wish things would go and once you start noticing all of these little moments all day long, it's like a death by a thousand cuts, you want to know why you're too tired, you want to know why you're overwhelmed, you want to know why you're stressed out, you want to know why you have no time for yourself, it's because of the power you give to other people's opinions, their emotions, their immature behavior, it's the ways in which you are turning people into a problem in your life and here's the sad fact, the sad fact is other people should be the greatest source of happiness and connection and inspiration but if you don't truly learn this skill that we're going to talk about today of focusing on what you can control and letting people be who they are, letting things play out as they're playing out and then bringing the power back in house and really focusing on how you respond to it, if you embrace this skill, you're going to be shocked, you're going to be shocked by how much time you've wasted, I'm not kidding and you're going to be shocked Jay by the fact that you've allowed stupid things and people's drama to drain you and that's why I also think we're so susceptible to distraction.