Getting Unstuck: How to Change Your Life in 5 Seconds

There are a lot of people who know what they want in life, but they never get it.

Why?

Some people get stuck in the decision-making stages because we are wired to resist change and uncertainty. In Part 4 of the Getting Unstuck series, I gave a couple of solutions to this problem: Making change our default decision and thinking about whether change will be any easier later can help push us towards deciding to make a change.  

Deciding to change is an important first step. If we really want to change our lives, we need to know what we want. But knowing what we want is not enough to get us there. We need to move from decision to action.

How do we do that? Once we decide to change, what do we do next? How do we get ourselves to act?

The 5 Second Rule

Mel Robbins, author and CNN commentator, has a really simple tool to help get you to act: Countdown. That’s right. Countdown in your head “5-4-3-2-1” and then move.

It was during a period of her life where she really felt stuck that Robbins first started using the Five Second Rule. Her marriage was falling apart, they were on the brink of bankruptcy, and she had lost all self-confidence. She was having a hard time just getting out of bed to face the day. So, one morning when her alarm went off, she counted down from five and before she got to one, she got out of bed. And she did it the next day. And the next. Instead of hitting snooze and telling herself she’d get up on time the next day, she would just get out of bed. The Five Second Rule helped her start showing up for her life.

Counting down sounds silly, but there is actually a reason why this works.

Once we know what we should do, we no longer have a knowledge problem. We don’t have to think about it anymore. Now our problem is resistance. We want to achieve some larger goal, but we don’t really want to do the little steps necessary to get there.

We want to get in shape, but we don’t really feel like working out right now. We want to have more productive mornings, but we’re tired and we really don’t want to get out of our nice warm bed when the alarm rings. We want to get a better job or a better relationship, but we don’t want to send out our resume or speak up in our meeting or go on that blind date. We worry we’re not good enough. We’re scared we might get embarrassed or rejected.   

The reason the 5 Second rule works is that if our minds are busy counting, then we can’t engage in the negative self-talk and rationalizations that cause us to hesitate and talk ourselves out of acting.

Our brains are really good at rationalizing if we give them the chance. I know this because as an ethicist, I have spent a lot of time researching one of the things we rationalize the most: morality.

In study after study, researchers have found that when people are given the chance, they will often try to appear moral without actually doing what’s moral. However, our moral shirking is not always caused by not thinking enough; it’s sometimes caused by thinking too much.

The problem is that we are not always objective reasoners; we are often motivated reasoners. Instead of equally weighing the reasons on all sides, we focus on the reasons that support what we want to do. Since our thinking is lopsided, the more thinking we do, the more reasons we will come up with to do what we want to do rather than what we know we should do.

We don’t do this because we’re devious people who don’t care about morality. We actually rationalize our bad behavior in part because we care about morality. If we didn’t care about morality, then we would just do what we want without trying to justify it. But, since we want to be able to think of ourselves as good people, we need to find a way to rationalize our bad behavior.   

We do the same thing with our actions that only affect ourselves. Just as we don’t want to think of ourselves as immoral, we also don’t want to think of ourselves as lazy or weak or fearful. So, when we know that we should workout and eat healthy but we really want to sit on the couch and eat chocolate cake, we feel a need to rationalize. And we can come up with all kinds of reasons why we can’t or don’t need to work out or eat healthy right now. We had a hard day. We’re tired. We’ll do it tomorrow.

The problem is that these rationalizations add up. As Robbins says, “In the scheme of life hitting the snooze button is not that big of a deal but here is the thing about life; none of us wake up and say, ‘Today is the day I destroy my life.’ What we do is we kind of check out because it feels overwhelming or we check out because we’re afraid or we check out because we start listening to self-doubt and then we make these teeny-tiny decisions all day long and we don’t even realize it.”

Changing our lives requires us to continually show up and do things we don’t feel like doing. If we can block the rationalizations we make that keep us stuck, then we can change our lives five seconds at a time.

So, let’s start changing our lives. Before we talk ourselves out of it.  

---

This is Post #5 in our Getting Unstuck Series. Check out the rest of the series here:

• Getting Unstuck: How to Prioritize Your Life
• Getting Unstuck: How to Follow Through on Your Priorities
• Getting Unstuck: How to Achieve Work-Life Balance
• Getting Unstuck: How to Change When Change Is Hard

---

---

Also published on Medium.