When you implement the five second rule in your life, everything will change. You will become unstoppable. You will realise all the obstacles that you put in your way. Everyone has the desire to act — to be happy, to go to the gym, to get out of bed on time, to clean the house, to take the next step toward success — but so few can make themselves do it. It all comes down to the decisions that you make.

Photo by Veri Ivanova on Unsplash

Mel Robbins wakes up one morning, her alarm goes off and she counts down from five: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. She stands up and gets out of bed and she stands in the dark on that cold winter morning in Boston and realises that for the first time in three months she hadn’t hit snooze. She had beaten her bad habit. The same thing happened the next day.

Who knew that some as simple as counting backwards could break a habit so easily! It wasn’t just waking up either, she applied this five second rule to almost everything. Cooking, cleaning, starting work, exercise, even stopping herself from continuing things like drinking and scrolling.

The science behind this, in simple terms, is that habits are automatic, they use a different part of the brain called the Basal Ganglia. When we do things without thinking the Basal Ganglia is at work so to stop ourselves from doing these things we need to use a different part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for logic such as counting backwards. And so you interrupt your habit loop and start forming a new habit with new neural pathways.

I challenge you to start implementing this rule in your life, even if it’s just a few small things, and you will see the difference.

Thanks for reading and feel free to follow! It helps out a bunch!