Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Do This Every Morning to Stop Procrastination | Mel Robbins #351

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 220 of the podcast with the motivational speaker Mel Robbins. In this clip, she describes a simple, highly effective habit that you can do to stop negative thoughts and procrastination, which will help you take action straight away. What do you think is the main reason why people, despite knowing what they should be doing, struggle? They procrastinate. They have these negative thoughts that get in the way of them taking action. What do you think the reason is? Well, I think knowing what to do is really simple.

Starting point is 00:02:26 Well, I think knowing what to do is really simple. I'm serious. Like if you, in any area of your life where you feel stuck, you know what you need to do to move the needle, to improve the situation at work, to change your career, to improve your health, to make yourself happier, to work on your marriage. The information is everywhere. The what is easy. The issue is how. How do you make yourself take actions when you're afraid, when you're scared, when you're overwhelmed? How do you break bad habits? How do you break the negative thinking that is causing you to feel paralyzed? See, the problem for most of us is we think about what we need to do, but thinking won't change your life. The only way you're going to change your life or change your career or change your health is to take action. And so the reason why so many people get stopped by procrastination and stopped by fear and stopped by anxiety is because they never get past the part of just thinking about it. And I believe that we all have a habit that I call the habit of hesitation. And in psychology, psychologists and researchers say there's basically two types of people, right? There's people that have a bias towards action.

Starting point is 00:03:32 And those are the kinds of folks that when inspiration strikes or when confidence strikes or when courage strikes or when opportunity strikes, they tend to lean toward it and to take action. And based on research, those folks tend to be happier, healthier, more successful, more fulfilled in life. And then there's the rest of us. And those of us that have what psychologists call a bias towards thinking, which means in a moment of uncertainty, a moment of opportunity, a moment where you need courage or confidence, instead of leaning toward it, you lean away from it and you start thinking, what should I do? And it's that habit of hesitating in moments of change

Starting point is 00:04:12 that is keeping you stuck. We call it procrastination. We call it overthinking. We call it a lot of things, but it's just a habit of pausing. And then you trip into patterns of thinking and patterns of behavior that have been holding you back for years. And then you trip into patterns of thinking and patterns of behavior that have been holding you back for years. I mean, people say information is power. And based upon what you're saying there, and I actually agree with this, information is not everything, is it? Like we can have the information, we can have the knowledge, you know, knowledge is power. It is, but it's not everything, you can have the knowledge and not take action. I know a lot of really smart people that are miserable.

Starting point is 00:04:48 Yeah. I know a ton of people that do nothing but read self-help books or watch videos on YouTube about inspiration and do nothing. Yeah. And the reason why is they gather information as a way to feel like you're working on something. Gather information as a way to feel like you're working on something. And learning is a really important thing to do. Like understanding, becoming more self-aware, it's critical to you improving your life.

Starting point is 00:05:15 It's critical to you being happier and more fulfilled. If you don't understand yourself and you don't understand the patterns of thinking, the patterns of behavior that are keeping you stuck, you'll never be able to break them and replace them. of behavior that are keeping you stuck, you'll never be able to break them and replace them. But you can get yourself comfortable with learning and duping yourself into thinking that somehow being smarter about what you need to do to be healthy will make you healthy. That's not true. Just like reading about launching a business doesn't launch a business. And so what's so elegant and simple and empowering about the five-second rule or all the other simplistic stuff that I tend to share with the world, because that's the stuff that works for me,

Starting point is 00:05:55 is that these are all tools that cut through the bullshit that's holding you back. And it just so happens that your nerdy friend Mel has done all the research to be able to explain to you why science and research and decades of psychological academic work actually is encapsulated by counting backwards 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Like this is powerful stuff. backwards, five, four, three, two, one. This is powerful stuff. When I invented the five-second rule and this little technique, I was simply a woman who was 40 years old with three kids under the age of 10 who was unemployed, $800,000 in debt because my husband and his best friend went into the restaurant business. It was fabulous for a while. And then it was the restaurant business. Yeah. And like complete morons, we had secured everything with everything we owned.

Starting point is 00:06:51 And so when the things get bad in 2008 and the market turns and the housing crisis happens and the restaurants start to go under, the liens hit our house. We lost everything. I mean, we didn't go bankrupt. I mean, just by the grace of God, I had such crushing anxiety despite the Zoloft. I couldn't get out of bed. And so the five second rule, whether you call it an act of desperation or divine intervention, I think it's divine intervention because it sounds stupid. I mean, the idea was simply when I wake up, that anxiety is so dark and I would lay in the bed and I would stare at the ceiling and I would think we're going to lose the house and I'm a failure and I hate my

Starting point is 00:07:36 husband and nobody can find out and what am I going to do? And just like, how did my life end up like this? And just on and on and on and on. And the more I thought, the deeper the hole was. I had this idea that, God, maybe if I move fast enough when the alarm rang, if I got out of the bed fast enough, maybe I'd beat the anxiety. Maybe I wouldn't be in the bed. So I decided I'd launch myself out of bed like a rocket. That's where the counting backwards came. Little did I know that when you count backwards, you interrupt the habit loops in your basal ganglia and you draw your focus to your prefrontal cortex. Little did I know this would become one of the most powerful starting rituals in habit research on the planet. Little did I know that this little brain hack is a form of metacognition

Starting point is 00:08:26 that allows you to interrupt any thinking or behavior pattern and give you a moment of what psychologists call objectivity so you can choose what you do next. And so the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 becomes a how. It's the tool you need to cut through the noise and the fear and the anxiety and grab just a moment where you can take control. And that's why it works. That's why therapists use it around the world. That's why it works with reframing triggers associated with PCSD. I mean, it's just unbelievable. It is such a great tool. In fact, I was telling my son about it last night. He's only 11. And yeah, I often talk to the kids about the podcast. In fact, I was telling my son about it last night. He's only 11. And yeah, I often talk to the kids about the podcast. I said, Daddy, I hear you talking to

Starting point is 00:09:09 tomorrow. I said, well, I'm talking to someone called Mel Robbins. And then I told him about this 5-4-3-2-1 rule. And this morning over breakfast, he says, Daddy, it actually works. I was really tired. And you had to get it for school. So I said, 5-4-3-2-1, got out of bed. Yeah. 5-4-3-2-1, put my school uniform on. And I was like, this is so cool. It's really cool. Yeah, but it's great. Adults use it, grown, responsible adults, young kids are using it as well. You can use it in any language, any age, any education, any situation where you're thinking about what you need to do and you've got to five, four, three, two, one, push yourself to do it. And, um, you know, I love that you shared it

Starting point is 00:09:52 with him. I love also, this is the other thing that I love about the stuff that, that, that whatever I've created is that your son can now stick it in his back pocket. Yeah. And if he's sitting in class and he wants to share, but he starts to doubt himself, five, four, three, two, one. Like what he's doing is he's now breaking the habit and the bias of thinking. And he's moving across that spectrum toward having a bias of action. And of course, what we know about confidence

Starting point is 00:10:23 is that confidence does not begin with believing in yourself. Confidence begins with the willingness to try. And so the five-second rule is so powerful for developing confidence because it's a tool you use to push yourself to try when you're full of doubt. And when you try and you raise your hand in class, or you speak up more at work, or you ask ask for the raise or you hit send on the email, when you try, you might fail, but you gain a little competency. And that competency makes you a little bit more willing to try next time. And so that's where this competence, competency habit loop comes in. And the linchpin to it is now you've got a tool, five, four, three, two, one, to push yourself to say, all right, I'm in, I'm going to try, I'm bad on myself. And it sounds dumb. You know, like it's not like, and here's the other thing. And you and I were

Starting point is 00:11:14 just talking about this. I think that, that, that life is so freaking overwhelming. Yeah. And when your problems seem overwhelming or when that dream job seems impossibly far away, we all make this fundamental mistake of believing that because your problems are so big, the solution must be big or because the dream is so far away that the way that you're going to get there is so enormous. The fact is it's the exact opposite, the exact opposite, everybody. That when your problems are enormous, it is the littlest thing that moves you in a different direction and starts to chip away at it. When your dream is enormous, it's the littlest thing that gets you moving. And when you understand that you can get started towards something by doing the smallest little thing

Starting point is 00:12:05 and it'll crack open something inside you and let some light back in. That's powerful. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Byte Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Do This Every Morning to Stop Procrastination | Mel Robbins #351

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