Change Your Brain Every Day - How To Be More Self-Motivated with Mel Robbins (mini-episode)

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

NY Times bestselling author ‪@melrobbins‬ discusses a positive affirmation in her "High Five Habit" with Dr. Daniel Amen.

Every day you are making your brain better or you are making it worse. Stay with us to learn how you can change your brain for the better every day. The high-five habits started a year ago for me. I looked in the mirror and immediately my thoughts went, I hate my fricking jowls. These look like saddlebags and my eyes and my stripes on my neck and this boob is lower than that one. I started to feel overwhelmed. So I don't know what came. Don't know what came over me, but I just raised my hand and high-five my own reflection.

And I started doing it every day. It is impossible to raise your hand and high-five your own reflection and have a negative thought about yourself. You have spent an entire lifetime high-fiving other people. And when you give somebody with this physical action a high-five, you don't even have to say anything. The action itself communicates, I believe in you, I've got you, I celebrate you, what this is reminding me. is at least I've got myself. I can have my own back. I know for a fact that what's also happening

is that you are fulfilling your own emotional needs of being seen, heard, and being celebrated. So instead of looking around for somebody else to do it, you're giving it to yourself. So interesting. I mean, I think it's breaking the habit loop of negativity, and it's being intentional.

So still in that basal ganglia, prefrontal cortex, celebration increases dopamine, which then wires the feeling into your nervous system. That has also been borne out by the studies, that the celebration and the joining in with you honors your deepest fundamental needs to be seen, to be heard, and be celebrated. And I am on a mission to teach people that you can actually fulfill those for yourself in small ways. one of those ways is by making it a habit to high five yourself every morning in the mirror

as a moment of intentional connection with yourself and tapping into, as you said, that sort of sense of joy, that release that feels good and calming that you've got you. That no matter, even on the mornings where like the ships hit the fan and I got all the stuff I need to do or a really hard conversation to have, there's something about the high five that makes my shoulders drop and makes me go, okay, I can do this, just like a teammate that high-fives you win. It's your turn at the free throw line,

and everything is on your shoulders. It's that belief, that transfer in belief. I think it's so powerful because you've been doing it for everybody else, and your brain remembers that and just applies it to you. Well, the brain works through association. What do you associate to that is joy.

Yeah.